I Will Take Away Those Kudos
Casey:
John, I have a question for you.
Casey:
When you were perhaps younger or just generally in the days before, did you have any strong corporate allegiances?
Casey:
So what got me thinking about this was, obviously, you know, I have a strong affinity for Apple, even though sometimes it may not sound like it, but...
Casey:
I was thinking, you know, there was a time when I felt probably as strongly in favor of BMW as I do about Apple, which now sounds bananas.
Casey:
But there was a time when I was extremely enthusiastic about BMW.
Casey:
You know, Marco and I flew halfway across the planet in order to visit more BMW.
Casey:
And I was also thinking about like when I was a kid.
Casey:
I had very little actual possessions, but a strong affinity for Sony stuff.
Casey:
And, you know, we've all talked about, especially us old men, about how Sony used to be great, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And actually, coincidentally, we're going to be talking about Sony again later.
Casey:
But I was curious for both of you, but particularly, John, were there any other corporations that you felt like you did or perhaps still do have a really strong affinity for?
John:
Sure, and just like with you and BMW and all the things we're talking about, it comes down to the products.
John:
Unlike sports teams, which you're born into, or religion or whatever, or just geography, for tech products or even any kind of products, or companies, it's based on the products they put out.
John:
So I also had an affinity...
John:
For Sony stuff that was based on both the Walkman, which was a new piece of technology when I was a kid, and that really, you know, knocked my socks off.
John:
And a little bit later, the Trinitron display, because I always liked good display technology and the Trinitron only curved in one direction instead of two.
John:
And that's, you know...
John:
50% to being entirely flat.
John:
And then, of course, Apple used Trinitron monitors, so there was a connection there.
John:
Nintendo, why?
John:
Oh, the NES.
John:
The NES was another thing that came out in my day, right?
John:
Because of the NES, I became devoted to Nintendo and the games they put out.
John:
You know, Legend of Zelda and Mario, that made me devoted to Nintendo.
John:
So every time Nintendo did a thing, I was into it.
John:
Um, those are probably the big ones.
John:
Maybe you could say like Ferrari and Porsche, but like I only saw pictures of those things.
John:
So, you know, who really knows what they're actually like?
John:
Um, but yeah, I think it's the same amount of, uh, I wouldn't call it corporate allegiance.
John:
I would call it, um, identifying and being interested in the output of companies that were doing things that I found cool.
Casey:
What about OXO?
Casey:
Like, isn't a lot of your kitchen stuff OXO?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like that's, I, I don't, it's not quite the same thing as those other companies because a lot of OXO stuff is hit or miss, but they're in my group of brands that I trust.
John:
Like all cloud is another one.
John:
Like you kind of know what you're getting with them.
John:
I bought enough of their products that I have some confidence in what they're going to give, but the, those things don't go into the top tiers because it's,
John:
I feel like their taste is not entirely aligned with mine or not aligned with mine as much as, say, a Nintendo or an Apple is.
John:
So I really have to just sort of pick and choose from those companies.
John:
So, yeah, I like them, but sometimes the things they make don't agree with my taste.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
Marco, other than your incorrect opinions about Sega, anything for you?
Marco:
I was just thinking about Sega when you were in drama stuff and all that.
Marco:
But yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, you know, like when I was young, like, you know, we didn't have a lot of money and I didn't have like the breadth of knowledge or product availability to me or internet searching.
Marco:
So like I only knew what we had.
Marco:
And all we had, we'd get one of everything.
Marco:
So we'd have one TV, one VCR.
Marco:
We had one game system, the Sega Genesis, for most of my childhood.
Marco:
So it wouldn't be so much like an allegiance as this is the only one that we have.
Marco:
So it's the only one that I have any experience with.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
see i don't know i mean like we had toyota cars because we bought them and drove them forever oh yeah i should have listed honda which was a later life thing the first honda that my family had was i think it was like a teenager by then but obviously very quickly i i developed an affinity for that brand and this is the only car i've ever bought it's just a series of hondas so put that in the loyalty column for sure
Casey:
It's funny to me that early on, before I put something to the order of $10,000 or $15,000 worth of repairs into my 3 Series, I would have said early on that money notwithstanding, because it's a big issue with a BMW, I would probably drive BMWs forever more.
Casey:
Because when my 335 worked, holy crap, that was a great car.
Casey:
It really, really, really was.
Casey:
But the problem is it never worked.
Casey:
And coincidentally, I ran out to do some takeout for dinner.
Casey:
And when I was out, I noticed coming out onto the road I was driving on, so perpendicular to me, was one of the new either three or four series with the huge...
Casey:
humongous, ridiculous kidneys that we had talked about many shows ago now.
Casey:
And that might be the first time I've seen them in person.
Casey:
And they are uglier in person than I think they are on paper.
Casey:
And that is saying something because they are truly awful on paper.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
So yeah, just, you know, fast forward a couple of years and genuinely, I mean, I could not say enough good things about the trip that me, Aaron, Marco, and Tiff went on and about, you know, going to BMW Welt and going to do European delivery and taking this, you know, even just being a passenger in Marco's ridiculous BMW and taking it around the Nürburgring on like April 4th or something when there was snow on the sides of the road.
Casey:
Like everything about that trip really on paper was kind of dumb and wrong and
Casey:
bad but i loved it i loved every moment of it and and to go from that to me saying today it is unlikely that i would ever really even strongly consider a bmw again is surprising and and i feel similarly although not exactly the same with sony
Casey:
You know, like I loved Sony so much as a kid.
Casey:
And now I'm just like, eh, it's a thing.
Casey:
Maybe I'd get a camera sometime, maybe.
Casey:
And again, we'll be talking about this later.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's just wild to me how such a strong allegiance can just evaporate into thin air like that.
John:
Just wait until Declan wants a PlayStation.
Marco:
I think a lot of it was like, you know, in that era of like, you know, 80s, 90s, like that, the time that we grew up, well, Casey and I grew up.
Marco:
Things were a lot less based on software and ecosystems and services and everything.
Marco:
And they were a lot more just like, which of these like consumer electronic companies can make really nice hardware?
Marco:
And the hardware could be really delightful and really well made.
Marco:
And it was...
Marco:
because there was not much software dependence at the time and for almost any category of device i think more companies were able to become entrants in those fields so like you had more companies being able to make really good tvs and really good vcrs and really good game systems and everything and and now i feel like not only do we use fewer things like human back then you might have had you know you might have had like an early computer from whoever made that um you you
Marco:
Definitely would have had TV, VCR, later on DVD player.
Marco:
You would have had game systems, at least one usually growing up.
Marco:
And you also would have had things like a Discman, as we said, or a Walkman.
Marco:
Maybe later in the late 90s, you might have had a PDA or something.
Marco:
You would have had more things.
Marco:
Whereas now, a lot of those hardware products...
Marco:
are not necessary anymore.
Marco:
Now, to get hardware that we actually need or want to use, it basically has to be either a phone or a computer.
Marco:
And that's about it.
Marco:
And not a lot of people are able to make competitive phones or computers these days because they're so complex and so reliant on software and ecosystems.
Marco:
And so it's harder for somebody like a Sony, for example.
Marco:
Sony has always been miserably bad at software, but really pretty good at the hardware side.
Marco:
And now Sony, the direction the world has moved, with the exception of things like the camera division, but the rest of Sony, the world has moved in places that Sony mostly can't do very well.
Marco:
Now Sony does not have a PC or mobile operating system.
Marco:
They don't make most of the hardware that would be in a PC or mobile, with the exception of they do make a ton of the camera sensors, which is pretty good.
Marco:
That's a pretty good business to be in, isn't it?
Marco:
The camera modules on smartphones, that's a pretty good business.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I feel like there's less room for somebody like 90s Sony to just make a really nice VCR.
Marco:
There's less room for that in what we use today because what we use today requires massive investments and massive established ecosystems in areas Sony has not ever been really able to do.
Marco:
So I do kind of miss that.
Marco:
A couple years back, I got this little tiny Sony audio recorder and it was about the size of an iPod Shuffle.
Marco:
and it was this full-blown audio recorder it was so delightful and i used it like three or four times maybe and i i just haven't used it and i looked for it the other day and i couldn't find it but like it was so delightful to have this thing and hold it in my hands it's like this is
Marco:
A modern Sony device that had, you know, it looked, and it looked just like an old Sony device.
Marco:
You know, this black plastic casing, really well made, big buttons, nice big record button, nice big display.
Marco:
It had like a black and white OLED for the displays, but it looked really nice.
Marco:
Like, it was a beautiful little device.
Marco:
But I just don't have a ton of use for this kind of thing anymore.
Marco:
Because so often, either our phones can do that, and we don't need to do it anymore.
Marco:
Or things that are about physical media, we almost never need anymore.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
It seems like there's been whole massive categories of...
Marco:
things that we could become big fans of or really respect certain companies for.
Marco:
And that whole category doesn't really exist anymore.
Marco:
Or it only exists in very specialized areas and only pros in a certain area need it.
John:
Speaking of outdated stuff, TiVo, another brand that I had tremendous loyalty for until the bad times.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should start with some follow-up and we have some neutral follow-up.
Casey:
I'm sorry if this is not your cup of tea.
Casey:
This is why chapters exist.
Casey:
Thank you, Germany.
Casey:
To begin, somebody on Twitter found that there were official renders of the Model S and Model X interiors with a traditional, round, barbarically ancient and yet so delightful steering wheel.
Casey:
And I was extremely pleased to see this, and I hope it's a thing.
John:
I don't know if it's renders.
John:
It might be a photo.
John:
Presumably it's for the countries where it's illegal to have the steering yoke, the non-wheel wheel.
John:
Apparently that's against certain laws in certain places.
John:
So they're probably going to have to make a round wheel anyway.
John:
And this was an official picture on their site.
John:
So there it is.
John:
It's a wheel.
John:
And I would say because Tesla makes that part, it would be easier for people to buy the aftermarket.
John:
But then I remember that Tesla doesn't exactly make it easy to buy parts, period.
Marco:
My best guess is that if they don't enable that wheel option for everybody up front, I think they will probably enable it at some point, like maybe within the next year.
Marco:
I think enough people will want it and they'll lose enough sales to not having it that they'll probably relent and start offering that as an option.
Marco:
But I could be wrong.
Marco:
I mean, they never offered functional door handles.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Fix those for all those years, even this gen.
John:
Speaking of controls, at least one person on Twitter said that the touch controls on the wheel are supposedly force touch, like you actually have to press them hard.
John:
So I speculated about that last show.
John:
I'm not sure where this information is coming from.
John:
That would make a little bit more sense than them being capacitive, but it doesn't make any sense to me why they are apparently on a completely smooth featureless service without any kind of outline or indent or bulge to indicate where the things are.
Marco:
Yeah, like if I want to like dust off my steering wheel, am I going to accidentally honk the horn?
John:
I mean, not unless you press.
John:
But the reason I think it's weird that it's just a smooth surface is you'll just have to memorize which parts of the smooth surface to press.
John:
It's like the Apple TV remote all over again, right?
John:
And if you don't know exactly where it is and you just put your finger onto this completely smooth surface and you press real hard and your blinker doesn't turn on, then you just move your thumb like a millimeter and press and move your thumb a millimeter and press.
John:
Then you look down to see the little glowing symbol.
John:
Oh, that's where it is.
John:
Like this is just...
John:
There is no scenario in which a smooth surface with places on it that you can press is better than a stock for turn signals.
John:
And I don't understand why they're doing this.
John:
But at least, supposedly, they're not capacitive, which would be the real worst case.
Marco:
you know as a model s driver for like the last six years or whatever it's been i've never once thought this car has too many physical controls like i've always thought it had like either exactly the right amount or slightly too few but very close to the right amount like i'm very happy with the physical controls with what is physical and what is on the touch screen i'm very happy with that overall and so for them to go mess with it i'm again this might be really cool but i i'm wary especially because of this next point
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So Elon tweeted, no more stalks.
Casey:
The car will guess drive direction based on what obstacles it sees, context, and the navigation map.
Casey:
You can override on the touchscreen.
Casey:
So let me back up a half step.
Casey:
So in order to control, if you're going in forward or reverse, that's a stalk on the Model S, right, Marco, the way it is today?
Marco:
Right side, yep.
Casey:
And, you know, that's the way it is on some like column shifted, you know, traditional cars.
Casey:
But apparently the Model S and the Model X will just figure it out by magic.
Casey:
And that's how it's going to work.
Casey:
Or if you don't trust it, you can use the touchscreen.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
I have a group chat with a couple of friends of mine that we talk nominally about cars pretty much all day, every day.
Casey:
And it's not John and Marco, surprisingly.
Casey:
But anyways, one of the things we were talking about just earlier today is, you know, whether or not it's appropriate for cars to be putting so much stuff behind a touchscreen.
Casey:
And because we're all old, we, of course, say, no, not everything should be back there.
Casey:
And, you know, I can make arguments about what could and could not be in a touchscreen.
Casey:
So, for example, on Aaron's Volvo, to adjust the temperature that's on the touchscreen.
Casey:
Now, they do it in the most convenient, most reasonable way possible, but I would still prefer to have a little dial that you could spin or what have you.
Casey:
To put gear selection on the touchscreen, that is... Well, either I'm extremely old, which I guess is true, or that is the most preposterous, ridiculous... Like, you want to talk about courage?
Casey:
That's frickin' courage.
Casey:
Like, come on!
Casey:
No, just no.
John:
Well, it's not that it's putting it on the touchscreen, because if that's what we were talking about, that would be one thing, and we can have that conversation.
John:
But as you just read...
John:
The key part of this is that it's a lot like the driver assistance things that the car does for you to try to help you drive or the autopilot or whatever, is that it chooses for you.
John:
So if it was on a touchscreen, it would be like, well, you must go into drive before you can drive.
John:
But in this car, according to Elon's description, no, you don't have to go to the touchscreen and press drive.
John:
You just need to get into the car.
John:
And the car will pick, based on, you know, context clues, whether you want to go forward or backwards.
John:
Now, if the car has made the wrong choice, of course, you can use the touchscreen to change the gear.
John:
But the thing is, you don't have to use the touchscreen if the car guessed right.
John:
And this is exactly like the autopilot, you know, anti-pattern where...
John:
If the car guesses right enough, if autopilot is good enough to keep you in the lane 99.9% of the time, it will form a habit where you just get in your car and press the accelerator pedal because, hey, the car just picks for you.
John:
I don't have to steer when I'm in the lane because the thing stays in the lane for me, except for that one time it doesn't and then I die.
John:
Well, you're supposed to be ready to take over at any second if you depart from the lane.
John:
Well, you're always supposed to check the touchscreen to see if it's in the right gear.
John:
It says right here in the manual, oh, yeah, we'll pick the right gear for you.
John:
But if we pick the wrong one, just use the touchscreen.
John:
But it's training you not to do that.
John:
So, I mean, this is much less dangerous because what's going to happen is people are going to get in fender benders, right, where they're just going to assume the car has correctly picked forward or reverse or whichever gear they think it's supposed to be in.
John:
They're going to hit the accelerator and bump into a wall, bump into a cone, bump into a tree, whatever it is they're going to bump into.
John:
If the car guesses incorrectly, the car will have long since trained you to never bother overriding it because the guess is right almost every single time.
John:
So this is another example of a non-human centered feature.
John:
It's not, you know, the touchscreen, having the gear selector on the touchscreen, that's one thing.
John:
And I think that's an interesting evolution of gear selection because in the olden days, Casey mentioned column shifting, there was a physical connection between either the column or a big lever.
John:
to trigger something in your automatic transmission to go into the right gear, setting aside manuals for a second, right?
John:
And over the years, as transmissions have gotten more and more complicated, they've kept in a skeuomorphic way, again, a truly skeuomorphic way, a big giant lever in a car that you can move from P, R, N, D, L, you know, like...
John:
Just a huge lever as if you're still moving mechanically something inside the transmission.
John:
When in reality, over the past, you know, the recent several years, what you're actually doing is moving a giant electronic switch that's telling the transmission to change gears.
John:
More recently, in like the past couple car generations, lots of car manufacturers have switched from having a gigantic handle that takes up the entire center console to having buttons.
John:
In fact, most Hondas do this now.
John:
And I started this, you know, maybe five, seven years ago.
John:
But a lot of cars have buttons for park reverse neutral, including clever buttons like where reverse you pull up on the button like a window lifter and, you know, drive you press down to try to, you know, sort of make it have make it make it have more physical sense about whether you're going forward or backwards, because there's no need for a lever because all you're doing is activating a button.
John:
So they had physical buttons.
John:
Touchscreen buttons are just an evolution of that.
John:
And that's where you get into the debate we've had all the time, physical buttons versus touchscreen buttons.
John:
But it still is just a button.
John:
It's a recognition of the fact that you're not actually shifting a transmission into gear by moving a lever that presses a thing that moves a physical male gear to mesh with a different gear.
John:
You're not doing that.
John:
You're doing an electronic switch, right?
John:
So I think touchscreen for gear selection of all the things that you have to do
John:
it's probably not the worst sin.
John:
I would challenge people to make what people call a K-turn, but I always call a three-point turn while trying to use a touchscreen to change gears.
John:
But then again, I'm a stick shift driver.
John:
I don't have to look at anything when I make a K-turn because everything is at hand and I never have to look anywhere.
John:
But I know lots of people have to grab their thing and look at their dashboard indicator to see that they're going from D into R and they haven't actually accidentally switched into N or low gear or whatever.
John:
People do that.
John:
And a touchscreen, I feel like, is a slight downgrade there.
John:
But that's an entirely separate matter that we can debate.
John:
I think what's not debatable is if this works how Elon says it does, and if it is remotely good at guessing, it will train people not to bother looking at the touchscreen and just assume the car has guessed correctly, and then they're just going to hit their bumpers into things.
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's the most likely outcome here.
Marco:
Because when my car tries to guess what I want to do, it is sometimes right.
Marco:
I'd say it's even often right.
Marco:
When my car tries to drive itself, it is often doing the correct things.
Marco:
But not always.
Marco:
It isn't 100% of the time.
Marco:
Also, the more things that get put on the touchscreen, the more things I don't have access to the two or three times a year I have to reboot the car while I'm driving it.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Because Tesla can't make a reliable car computer.
Marco:
They can't.
Marco:
They haven't.
Marco:
As far as they can tell, they can't.
Marco:
And while their computers don't need to be rebooted as often as they used to, they still do occasionally need to be rebooted, occasionally while you're driving them.
Marco:
And today, in the outgoing Model S, you hold down the two steering wheel, little scroll wheel things for a little while, and the computer reboots.
Marco:
Today, when you reboot the computer, you can do so while driving.
Marco:
And the only things that you lose access to that really matter a lot are climate control and turn signals.
Marco:
Everything else continues to work just fine with those computers off and rebooting.
Marco:
And they take a good probably 90 seconds.
Marco:
It takes a while for them to reboot.
Marco:
It's not like an instant thing.
John:
The fact that the turn signals are connected to the computer is terrible because those are an important driver thing and there is no reason they need to be connected to the computer.
Marco:
To be clear, I'm actually not entirely sure that they don't function, but you don't have any indication that they're functioning.
Marco:
They might still be on the outside.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
And in fact, there was actually just today, I think, or yesterday, there was a recall announced that basically like the whatever it is, a group, the organization from the government.
Marco:
NHTSA.
John:
National Highway Traffic and Safety Organization.
Marco:
So I learned from working at Car Talk from my first job.
Marco:
and need to be upgraded or replaced or whatever.
Marco:
And it's such a safety hazard when the computer dies because, I think, of term signals and stuff like that, and climate control, which you can imagine if you're relying on the defroster, for instance, that's kind of a big deal.
Marco:
So, right now, already, even with the latest Model S, with the latest software as of two months ago, that car still needs to reboot its computer while driving at least once or twice a year.
Marco:
And so to have things move into the touch screen, like the reverse or drive selector, that to me is scary because they're designing the car as if, well, first of all, they're designing the car as if it already drives itself a hundred percent of the time.
Marco:
And that's not true and probably won't be true for at least another few years, if probably not more, you know?
Marco:
Um, so it's already not driving itself full time.
Marco:
So you need to drive it yourself manually quite often.
Marco:
Most of the time I'd argue and
Marco:
And then also, to put something as critical as the drive mode on the touchscreen, which makes it so you can't then operate that during these critical times when you have to reboot the car computer, that is scary to me.
Marco:
And I just think, like, the one time it guesses wrong...
Marco:
is going to make it not worth it.
Marco:
That one time... You're lucky if you just bump some bumper or back into your garage door or something.
Marco:
You're lucky if that's all that gets done.
Marco:
You could hit somebody.
Marco:
You could hit a pet.
Marco:
You could hit a kid.
Marco:
It could be way worse than just bumping someone's fender.
Marco:
To have any part of that be unreliable...
Marco:
is so dangerous and so bad that it doesn't seem worth it to have the car try to guess based on conditions that are not going to be 100% of the time correct.
John:
I mean, I feel the argument is exactly the argument they keep making for self-driving, which has not held for their self-driving and probably won't hold for this, which is people guess wrong sometimes, too.
John:
And as long as the computer can guess right more often than the computer does, more often than people do, then it's a win for the computer.
John:
Right.
John:
So we don't have to be perfect.
John:
We just have to be better than people.
John:
And, you know, as we know, people do occasionally go in the wrong gear and bump into somebody and run over a pet or a kid.
John:
Right.
John:
That happens.
John:
Right.
John:
So they're just trying to beat humans.
John:
But I don't particularly like that because I am not an amorphous smear of statistical human being.
John:
I'm one specific human being.
John:
So if I am the person who is constantly going into reverse and running over my dog, I love this feature because it's going to improve my average.
John:
But if I'm someone who has never selected the wrong gear, this is going to decrease my average.
John:
So individuals buy cars, not just humans.
John:
And I know writ large, there's the effect on society.
John:
As long as we're better than the average, if we put the Tesla into everyone's hands somehow because they all get $70,000, then we will be increasing safety.
John:
But...
John:
I don't think based on their, you know, they said the same thing about self-driving.
John:
We don't have to be perfect.
John:
We just do better than humans.
John:
And we think we are.
John:
But and even if they are like, it's the it's the agency problem of like, well, you would have saved this bad driver, but you killed this good driver.
John:
Or even just the things we've talked about is like when when you make a mistake, you feel like, well, it's on me.
John:
Like I'm I drove badly and I got in an accident.
John:
My fault.
John:
Right.
John:
But when the car makes a mistake, people feel powerless because they're like, well, I didn't even have a choice.
John:
The car decided to do this and it made the wrong choice and got into an accident.
John:
And now I'm angry about it.
John:
So I don't want to get into the self-driving stuff again.
John:
But I feel like this is the same category of stuff.
John:
Like we could ask, as we do with a lot of Apple products, what problem were they trying to solve with this?
John:
And I think the answer would be, well, people pick the wrong gear sometimes, too.
John:
So we're just trying to be better than that.
Casey:
I think one of the things that Model 3 owners hate the most is when one of us says, you can't adjust the cruise control with the steering wheel.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
This is my fault.
Casey:
I knew this, too, because we've been yelled at many times before about this, and I knew this, and I didn't think to correct you at the time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We got corrections.
Casey:
So yes, all three of us are aware that you can use... I had forgotten.
John:
I wasn't aware because I've never driven a Model 3.
John:
And if I had, I would have corrected Marco in real time.
John:
I let everyone down.
John:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
What I think has happened... So what I think happened was the very first version of the Model 3 release, like with its first software version, I think didn't support this.
Marco:
And then I think they fairly quickly added it in a software update because everyone wanted it.
Marco:
And I just forgot about that.
Marco:
So sorry.
Marco:
You actually can adjust the cruise control speed from the steering wheel, little jog dial thing.
Marco:
on the Model 3.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
We were lamenting and laughing about the Siri announcements of messages.
Casey:
And did you know you could reply?
Casey:
And Enrico Sassatio writes, you can adjust announced messages with Siri to announce messages from favorites only so that messages from your bank, for example, won't be announced.
Casey:
And this is
Casey:
somewhere in settings in messages i believe um where you can switch this and it gives you the options of announce messages from favorites recents contacts or everyone which i may have known at one point but certainly forgot so that was a good tip uh hey how do you tell the apple tube to stop talking to john
John:
Yeah, my story from last week about how I couldn't get Siri to disengage with me and kept interacting and I couldn't get it to stop was mostly an example of the things I know how to do not working.
John:
Like I was trying all the things that I knew.
John:
Lots of people wrote in to tell me the things that they use that do work.
John:
These are all the things that I was trying that were failing.
John:
Some suggestions where you can say, go away, goodbye, shut up.
John:
I think stop also works.
John:
There's all sorts of things that you can say after hailing your dingus to make it stop doing what it's doing.
John:
What was novel about the situation was that none of those things were working.
John:
And in fact, they would be interpreted as either my failure to answer whatever query I was being engaged on or an affirmative answer for a next step.
John:
And it was just like, I just wanted to unplug the thing.
John:
But for people who don't know, most voice assistant cylinder thingies have a bunch of things that you can say to it to make it stop whatever interaction you're in the middle of.
John:
So if you don't know that, pick one and go with it.
John:
I would suggest...
John:
not picking an angry one don't pick shut up don't pick f off there's lots of things you can say to them that will work but that's not nice and i know it's an inanimate object and it doesn't matter but in general being angry at inanimate objects doesn't make you feel better so i would suggest saying goodbye or i mean stop is pretty good too but anyway sometimes uh these things just are like a dog with a bone and they just want you to answer a question and they won't go away
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the two of you presumably got an email today from Apple about your fancy, not quite Mac mini Mac minis.
John:
Apple thinks it takes us several weeks to find the box that this thing came in.
John:
They're like, hey, we're just emailing you just so you know, you should probably go look for like the box that this thing came in because in a few weeks we're going to email you to tell you how to return it.
John:
It's like, how long do you think it takes me to find the box?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, yeah, they sent an email.
John:
So I was wondering the other day, actually, when Apple was going to ask for the DTKs back.
John:
For people who don't know the acronym, that's the Developer Transition Kit.
John:
It was the little Mac Mini with like an iPad Pro inside it that you could use to develop and test ARM Mac software before the ARM Macs had been released.
John:
And you...
John:
rented it from apple for what was like 500 bucks or something yep and with the knowledge that you were always going to have to return it the last time they did this uh what did they give people that you got like a pentium 4 and a in an old cheese grater case and then when you returned it you got a sweetheart deal on i think an imac right or was it yeah like the white the white intel imax
John:
So we were wondering, hey, when they ask for these DTKs back, what are we going to get in return?
John:
And the answer is, in Apple's not exactly clear language, is you'll receive a one-time use code for $200 to use towards the purchase of a Mac with M1.
John:
Now, all right, so $200, that's clear.
John:
Can you only buy an M1 Mac with it?
John:
Or is it just an Apple Store gift certificate?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Good question.
Marco:
That matters a lot.
Marco:
And also, did you see there was an expiration date?
John:
Yeah, May 31st.
John:
You've got May 30th.
John:
So sometime between, like, in a few weeks, Apple is going to email us and say, hey, here's how you return it.
John:
because we don't know how to return it yet.
John:
We just know we're supposed to find the box, right?
John:
But in a few weeks, they're going to email us and say, here's how you return it.
John:
And then upon confirmed return of the DDK, you will get the 200 bucks.
John:
Then the clock starts and you've got to use that or lose it before May 31st.
John:
yeah so you basically have you're gonna end up having like a month to use it like by the time i mean there's plenty of time like whatever like we don't expect to hold on to it forever um i don't know if you have to buy an m1 with it but just to calibrate what is 200 worth that's how much apple charges for an additional eight gigs of ram
John:
So you're wondering, oh, should I get the 8 to the 16?
John:
Well, don't worry.
John:
Apple gave you $200 off, and that $200 is exactly how much it costs you to upgrade from 8 to 16.
John:
So it's not like you're getting a Mac for free or whatever.
John:
Anyway, it's fine.
John:
It's better than nothing.
John:
It's better than just renting it for $500 and getting nothing in return.
John:
But now I have – now suddenly I feel like Marco R. Casey was like, oh, no.
John:
Why do I have these – I normally don't have any questions about what Macs I want to buy.
John:
But now suddenly I have this money burning a hole in my pocket, which if I don't use it, presumably I just lose it, and that's bad.
John:
But if I do use it, that's not particularly economical because –
John:
great so i have 200 off but then i pay all the rest of the price of the computer so i don't know what i'm going to do i was pricing out mac minis mostly just because my dtk is sitting like there's a place in my little computer area for the mac mini that is the dtk and i would love to just swap that out with an actual m1 mac mini and then i can actually use it i could host my plex stuff on it i could do all sorts of stuff with it you know i have a place for a mouse and a keyboard over there it's like nestled into my life but
John:
Who knows?
John:
So I have to, I have to start thinking about this.
John:
And sometime before May 31st, I will either buy something with this $200 and buy something with, I would buy something and use this $200 to help get more RAM on it.
John:
Or I would just let that $200 evaporate and feel sad.
Marco:
Hope you get a non-Bluetooth mouse to use with your Mac Mini.
Marco:
Because the Bluetooth range on this Mac Mini sucks.
John:
I've been using... I've actually been using my wife's old... It's a Logitech mouse and it's got the little, you know, USB plug-in dongle thingy.
Marco:
Oh, good, good, good.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, so this DTK thing...
Marco:
You know, when we all got these last summer, it was only $500.
Marco:
And I thought, well, that's a lot less than the old DTKs back in the Intel days.
Marco:
Those were like $1,500, I believe.
Marco:
Something like that, right?
Marco:
So I was like, oh, well, that's not a bad deal.
Marco:
And I knew it was a temporary, you know, basically leasing this thing for a few months.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
At the time, I thought...
Marco:
modern apple you know they don't need to work that hard for to get developer favor people are going to get people are going to want these things and i i was assuming they were going to give us nothing for them i was assuming there'd be some kind of you know recall for them at the end of the year or whatever it was and they would they would say all right thanks program's over and that'd be it and they'd give us nothing
Marco:
And that's not to say that that's what they should have done, but that's what I expected.
Marco:
Based on modern Apple, they're not big on giving people free hardware or discounted hardware.
Marco:
They really don't do that anymore.
Marco:
So I figured that was it.
Marco:
We'd get nothing.
Marco:
So the fact that we are getting more than nothing is welcome, but the number of asterisks on this is so high.
Marco:
It's like, okay, well, asterisk number one, it's only $200, which, as you said, doesn't get you very far with Mac hardware.
Marco:
Asterisk number two, it seems like you have to use it specifically on an M1 Mac, so that's only three computers right now, and asterisk number three, you'll basically have to use it between, like, April...
Marco:
And April and June.
Marco:
And so you're going to have this narrow window to use it.
Marco:
And the M1 Macs launched in November.
Marco:
Yeah, they could have told us they were going to do this.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Most people who need this for their development have already bought an M1 Mac.
Marco:
At least one Mac.
Marco:
And so to do this, it's kind of a crappy way to do it and all those answers.
Marco:
I think if Apple, if they needed to get their stuff together and they were super busy and they were behind schedule or whatever, okay, fine.
Marco:
Then make the discount code a little more flexible.
Marco:
Maybe give us a year to use it and let it apply to anything in the store or something like that.
Marco:
Or at least any Mac for the next year.
Marco:
Something.
Marco:
Just make it a little bit more...
Marco:
A little bit further from what it seems like now, which is like one of those scammy mail-in rebates that have so many conditions that they want people to disqualify themselves for.
Marco:
They don't have to pay the rebate.
Marco:
It feels kind of like that, where it's like we have such an error window, and it allegedly only applies to M1 Max, which have existed now for like three months, and most of us already have one if we need it that badly to have a DTK.
Marco:
So it's kind of weak sauce.
Marco:
At the end of the day, it is more than I was expecting to get from this.
John:
Yeah, and paying $500 to be able to develop on an ARM Mac, like I did actually, especially after I banished Big Sur betas from my main computer, I was doing all my ARM and Big Sur development on the DTK.
John:
And I got that computer for $500.
John:
So as far as I'm concerned, even if I got $0 back, it was definitely worth it for me in terms of development and also having a machine that I could use Big Sur on without poisoning my computer or any of the other computers that I cared about.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, John, if you really are going to let that $200 just go poof and turn into smoke, then I call dibs and I'll use it for a Mac Mini that I probably shouldn't buy.
John:
I'm sure Apple's real flexible about me transitioning that $200 over to you.
Casey:
That'll be fine.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
Marco:
If you can use more than one code in an order, that could be interesting.
Casey:
Oh, that would be interesting.
Casey:
I'm sure you cannot, but that would be interesting.
Marco:
all right that's okay yeah i'm sorry guys but yeah this is what you get for living on the bleeding edge no and again this is more than i expected so i'm you know on one hand i'm like okay that's nice but on the other hand now i do feel the same pressure as john i'm like well now that now that i'm going to get a 200 credit of sorts it would be kind of you know wasteful to just let it go but at the same time i don't need any more m1 max i'm very happy with the two that i already have
Marco:
Two is already probably one more than I actually needed.
Marco:
And they're wonderful.
Marco:
I love them so much, but I don't need a third one for anything.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So one of the things we always talk about come June-ish is typically we'll do a public service announcement wherein we remind everyone, do not go on an iOS beta.
Casey:
It's just not worth it for 99% of the world.
Casey:
Just no, don't do it.
Casey:
And I, generally speaking, do not jump on the iOS betas until late in the cycle, until, you know, August-ish.
Casey:
And I haven't jumped on any of the kind of point-release betas, but oh boy, I'm thinking about it because iOS 14.5 had support for unlocking your phone with Apple Watch while you're wearing a face mask.
Casey:
And that sounds delightful.
Casey:
Now, the good news is, since I never go anywhere, I don't wear a mask that often because I'm never leaving my house.
Casey:
Now, when I leave my house, of course, I have a mask on.
Casey:
And yes, this would be deeply convenient.
Casey:
But ultimately, when you don't go anywhere, when all your grocery shopping is done by plopping it in your trunk...
Casey:
But in doing curbside and whatnot, this isn't something that I need often, but golly, it sounds great for when I do need it.
Casey:
And so I can't help but ask, especially Marco, who has found a new love for his Apple Watch.
Casey:
Have you tried this yet?
Marco:
uh yes i have i mean unfortunately i'm currently under a lot of snow and so i haven't had the reason to go out much in the world and when i do go out currently i'm usually pretty heavily bundled up so taking my phone in and out of my pocket is not something i'm doing a lot of right now but i did unlock it a few times to try and see how it worked and there was one time later in the day where i actually kind of legitimately needed it like instead of just artificially doing it in my house
Marco:
And it does work as advertised most of the time.
Marco:
I think I did four or five unlocks total and it failed at one of them.
Marco:
It just didn't do it, didn't offer it.
Marco:
But it does seem to work most of the way.
Marco:
It's a little slow because the workflow is like you pick up the phone and you point it at your face.
Marco:
I think first it tries an actual face ID unlock.
Marco:
Then it figures, oh, I think that's a mask.
Marco:
Then I think it asks your watch, hey, unlock the phone, and then it communicates.
Marco:
So it's a slower process than regular face ID would be, but it's faster than typing in a passcode.
Marco:
Although, honestly, it's not a ton faster if you've gotten really good at typing your passcode in this last year.
Marco:
But it's a very nice feature, and I'm very glad they added it.
Marco:
And Gruber posted a couple things basically suggesting that it's non-trivial.
Marco:
It was non-trivial to get this done because you have to be damn careful if you're adding a way for something else to unlock your phone.
Marco:
Because that's a really massive potential for security problems if you do anything wrong.
Marco:
If there's any holes in that process and there's a way for some external thing to unlock your phone, that's a big deal.
Marco:
And so I'm surprised that they did this at all, honestly.
Marco:
It kind of seems like maybe it wouldn't have been worth the risk.
John:
Well, they had to do it because in the grand tradition, we talked about it on last week's ATP.
John:
And then once we talk about it on the show, it comes into being magically.
John:
It was actually, wasn't it an Ask ATP question last week?
John:
Oh, yeah, right.
John:
Someone asked, hey, what about unlocking your phone with your watch?
John:
And then we were saying, well, you can already unlock your watch with your phone.
John:
So there's a little bit of a chicken egg thing and they have to be very careful about how that works because you can't have them both be able to unlock each other in all scenarios because that's security.
John:
Right.
John:
But they worked out the issues.
John:
Right.
John:
So.
John:
You know, you can't if you're if your watch is locked and you have your phone and you unlock your phone using traditional means without the watch, then that can be set up to unlock your watch.
John:
And once you've unlocked your watch, that can be and it's on your wrist that can be used to unlock your phone if you were to relock your phone and all their methods of unlocking of the phone.
John:
failed and i what marco described is exactly what i read that it will try face id first and then maybe see if you have a mask and then unlock with the watch but i do wonder about the logic of that like if if it can i don't maybe just doesn't know this but if it was able to know
John:
that you are wearing a watch and that it's nearby i would say try that first like why bother with the face id stuff because the watch unlock doesn't care what the camera sees presumably it's like well whatever i'm using the watch to unlock but maybe there it doesn't actually know that the watch is nearby and it takes some time to figure that out so it
John:
makes more sense to try face id first i don't know but either way it's one more option for people who wear masks so it gets a thumbs up although this is like you said it's a beta and what is it like 14.5 beta one what what beta number are they on one yeah so not going to be in regular people's hands for a while and as casey said i would not recommend running beta one of ios
Marco:
honestly it's been fine for me so far but you know i usually like the the point releases like this usually aren't as risky as like the you know the big dot zero beta one for you know in the summertime wbc so it's not too bad but uh yeah still it's still certainly like a risk
Casey:
And to go back a step, John, to what you were saying about, you know, why not just go to the watch immediately?
Casey:
I would suspect that the idea is trust the most trustworthy thing first.
Casey:
So the camera that is trained to look at your face, that is, it is very, very difficult to fool.
Casey:
Whereas it is comparatively easier to fool the phone into thinking the watch is unlocked and nearby.
Casey:
Not to say it's easy, but compared to the thing that's internal, I would imagine it is easier.
John:
But if the watch works, it doesn't matter.
John:
You're not adding any security by trying the more secure one first.
John:
If the less secure one is going to work...
John:
who cares what order tries it in because if someone if someone was going to break in and they had the watch you know i mean it's like i think it's probably because it doesn't actually know that the watch is nearby and has to do a thing to make that determination doing that thing takes time so it's probably still faster to face eddie but we'll see this is still just a beta when when 14.5 final comes out marco can retest and or you can as well and see if see if you can really tell whether it's actually reading your face first and then trying the watch
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I am excited to try this when the time comes.
Casey:
I'm trying to resist going on the beta because, again, I never go anywhere.
Casey:
But it's tempting.
Marco:
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John:
uh john i heard you got a uh late birthday present earlier today yeah uh someone at apple is going through someone a bunch of people at apple are going through old uh radars slash feedbacks and closing them out because i saw a whole bunch of tweets from other people saying hey my super old bug was closed or whatever and that happened to me too this was a nine and a half year old radar that i had filed
John:
Part of the response, which I'll read now, was, thanks for your patience and your feedback.
John:
It has been noted.
John:
We do not plan to address this issue further because so much has changed since this was filed.
John:
And as I tweeted, indeed, so much has changed.
John:
Like, yeah, if you wait nine and a half years, probably the thing is irrelevant.
John:
This specific bug...
John:
was you know not not a very important one it was i filed it shortly after i had posted my review of uh magos 10.7 lion to ars technica that's how long ago this was and in my review i had linked to a tech note on apple's website that described the hfs plus volume format and
John:
And the day I posted this, I posted it the day Lion came out.
John:
So the day I posted this review, which was the launch day for Lion, Apple removed that documentation, that tech note.
John:
And I had a link to it in six different places.
John:
And of course, everyone's trying to follow the links and saying, hey, your link is broken, blah, blah, blah.
John:
The link was live the day before.
John:
in the day of publication because you know how they they do like a documentation shuffle very often to coincide with the release of a mac os at least they used to anyway they still kind of do i guess um they broke that link and so in between frantically trying to either remove the link or find i think i ended up linking it maybe to a google cache or an archive.org page i forget what i did but i also said you know what apple this was a little bit of stress that i didn't need and by the way you should never remove that tech note because
John:
It was good historical information, right?
John:
Or whatever, HOS Plus volume format.
John:
It had lots of technical details about it.
John:
It was pretty good.
John:
It was TN1150.
John:
So that's what this bug was about.
John:
And of course, you know, it was only really relevant to my life during the first week that my review had been published or the first day or so when I had to deal with that link.
John:
And I had long since forgotten about it.
John:
Of course, Apple never did anything about it.
John:
So they came by here and, you know, closed it with a slow, this is, you know,
John:
We don't plan to address this, blah, blah, blah, right?
John:
Whatever.
John:
I mean, I think it's good.
John:
It's good that Apple is going through their old bug backlog and, you know, bring things to some kind of resolution.
John:
Even if it's unsatisfying resolution, some resolution is better than none.
John:
So kudos to Apple for that.
John:
But I will take away those kudos because in this particular case, the very first thing that I did was say, you know what?
John:
What is the deal with this bug now?
John:
Just out of curiosity, not that I care anymore because dead links in my line review are not particularly important in my life right now, but hey, you know, what did they end up doing with that anyway?
John:
Like, is that tech note still gone?
John:
So out of curiosity, I went to the link that was reported as broken.
John:
And wouldn't you know it, it redirects to an archived version of that tech note.
John:
So at some point during the last nine and a half years, Apple essentially fixed this problem.
John:
The old URL redirects to the new, they have like a new archive section for like old outdated documentation.
John:
The old URL redirects to the new place.
John:
When did that happen?
John:
During this 9.5 years?
John:
I don't know, but some point it did.
John:
When someone did that redirect, they could have closed this bug as closed, fixed.
John:
This bug was successfully fixed.
John:
I have no idea when, but then when the reviewer came to like, get rid of this old crusty bug, they didn't even do the simplest thing, which is, Hey, let's just click this link that they say is broken.
John:
Cause if they had done that, they would have said, we do not plan to address them.
John:
I said, Oh, we fixed this.
John:
I don't know when we fixed it, but we totally fixed it.
John:
You're welcome.
John:
But they didn't even do that.
John:
So I continue to be disappointed with the level of interaction that the people who are updating bugs have with those very bugs, whether it's not telling me whether they ran a sample project, not telling me whether they're able to reproduce a problem or not doing something as simple as, hey, this thing says I have a broken link.
John:
Is that link actually broken?
John:
Click.
John:
Nope, it's totally not broken.
John:
Close.
John:
Fixed.
John:
Instead, they just said, we're not going to do anything about this.
John:
Oh, and by the way, you can close it yourself.
John:
They didn't even close it.
John:
They didn't even change the status.
John:
You can just close this yourself.
John:
So I closed it as resolved because guess what?
John:
It's resolved.
John:
When was it resolved?
John:
I don't know.
John:
So, you know, it's fine in the grand scheme of things.
John:
It's not a big deal, but it's frustrating for me.
John:
It makes me think that a computer did it and not a human.
John:
Or maybe the human who did it was...
John:
overworked and harried and did not have time doesn't have time to actually read each of these radars and engage with it but i feel like if you're if you're closing old bugs don't you have to read the bug a little bit to know like what to say it's i don't think it's entirely computer because the other people who are tweeting like here's what my old bug said the wording is different like they said slightly different things for different bugs
John:
It's really, it's really just, I don't understand what's going on at the other end of this pipeline.
John:
I don't know if it's just like a bird pecking on a keyboard or like a random number generator or just, I don't know.
Casey:
It's one of those little birdies that just pecks over and over again.
John:
It's like Snowpiercer.
John:
You just go up to the front and pull up the floorboards and I don't want to, I don't want to ruin the movie.
John:
Sorry, I've been watching the TV series.
John:
That's why it's on my brain.
John:
No spoilers, no spoilers.
Casey:
For the record, I was trying poorly to make a Simpsons reference and it didn't land, but that was my own fault.
Casey:
That's okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
We have some talk that we've been promising this episode about Sony cameras, of all things.
Casey:
I know nothing about what it is you would like to talk about, John.
Casey:
So what's going on?
John:
This is just a quick item.
John:
Sony continues to roll out new cameras.
John:
I haven't been following the rumors for their top-of-the-line stuff, so I don't know if this was rumors, but it was a surprise to me because what I had been expecting was new iterations of all the cameras Sony already makes.
John:
I think we talked about it on the show a while ago when they came out with the new version of the A7R.
John:
and how they hadn't come out with a new version of the a7 yet and they came out with the surprise a7c which is like a full frame camera in like a small body like mine my little tiny a6300 this new camera is the a1 which is a bold naming statement for a camera that is extremely capable it's their flagship camera
John:
It is fairly amazing.
John:
It costs a huge amount of money.
John:
I think it's the most expensive camera Sony has ever made, or at least the most expensive consumer camera they ever made.
John:
It's $6,500 just for the buy.
John:
Oh, good grief.
John:
It really hurts.
John:
Right?
John:
But, you know, hey, it's A1.
John:
It's the top of the line, A number one.
John:
So here are the specs.
John:
50 megapixel sensor.
John:
It will shoot 8K video at 30 frames per second.
John:
And that 8K is down sampled from a larger than 8K region on the sensor, which is cool.
John:
It will do 4K 120 frames per second.
John:
But one of the most important and most relevant specs is it will do 30 frames per second from the photo part of the camera.
John:
Not 30 frames per second video.
John:
It will take photographs, 50 megapixel photographs at 30 frames per second.
John:
It will do 20 photos per second in lossless RAW.
John:
my goodness and the mechanical shutter is a mere 10 frames per second right so it's doing 20 and 30 with the electronic shutter now everyone doesn't like electronic shutters if you've ever used them because especially with large sensors you get all sorts of rolling shutter artifacts and all sorts of weird stuff um but all of this all the specs that i read you are relevant to a thing that has come up in a bunch of the reviews and has got me thinking about it and we've talked about in this program as well which is
John:
On our phone cameras, they have tiny, crappy sensors, but they take amazing photographs because of the magic of the computers inside them.
John:
And we haven't gotten into too many gory details, or if we have, we haven't really connected the dots to why that's possible.
John:
One reason is, of course, you know, they're done by computer companies, and those computer companies have very clever people who work for them, who know how to do all the clever algorithms to take a very noisy, crappy...
John:
set of bits from a sensor in a phone and make a good picture out of it that's very difficult to do it's a very big software problem as marco talked about before of like it's really hard to do software sony can make really good camera sensors but do they have a team they can do what we call computational photography as well as apple or you know google or any of these other companies
John:
that make good smartphone cameras.
John:
It's actually a very hard problem.
John:
But there is a second thing, a second factor in why a big camera like this, like a quote-unquote real camera, a full-frame camera with a huge sensor, hasn't been able to do what our phone cameras do.
John:
One of the things our phone cameras do, well, speaking of electronic shutter, for one, none of us hear a shutter sound.
John:
Well, maybe you do if you have the audio you want, but honestly, you should turn that off.
John:
There's no shutter as in a physical thing that goes in front of the sensor and then reveals a sensor and then goes in front of it again in our phone cameras.
John:
they all use what we call an electronic shutter the sensor is just constantly exposed to light light comes in it's just hitting the sensor constantly and then the phone just decides okay i'm going to read the lights hitting the sensor now and that's when i'm going to take my picture that's called an electronic shutter but on big cameras it's difficult to do that because big cameras have big sensors as in like i don't know how big is a full frame sensor like the size of 35 millimeters
John:
I was going to say a 50 cent piece, but people don't know what that is.
John:
No one knows what 35 millimeters is either.
Marco:
It's about the size of an iPod screen, a little smaller, I think.
Marco:
Maybe like an iPod nano screen.
John:
It's smaller than a business card, but it's larger than a postage stamp, depending on the size of your sensor, right?
John:
Bigger than a bread box, John.
Marco:
It's like if you see those larger than usual postage stamps, it's like that size.
John:
Right.
John:
But if you think about the sensor in your phone camera, it's smaller than your pinky nail.
John:
Like it's really, really tiny in your phone.
John:
The sensors are very, very small.
John:
But the sensors in quote unquote real cameras, especially expensive ones, are very large.
John:
And the problem has been readout.
John:
How long does it take to ask sensor, hey, sensor, what is hitting you right now?
John:
you can get all of the information from a tiny little phone size you know pinky nail size sensor pretty quickly right it doesn't have as many many megapixels it's not as big and the camera sensors it isn't exactly as simple as you think it is in terms of just having red green and blue sensors there's all sorts of details and how they're read out and demosaic and all that stuff right
John:
So it's easier to do that in a small sensor.
John:
And the second thing for, and by the way, if you don't, if you have slow readout speed and use electronic shutter, it could be that you read the top pixels at one moment.
John:
And then by the time you get down to reading the bottom pixels, you've moved the camera and now you have a slanty picture, right?
John:
And you can see this with electronic shutter on older cameras.
John:
If you, you know, whip the camera around in a circle and take a picture of the electronic shutter, everything's all wavy in it because it didn't, it read the sensor from top to bottom or left to right or whatever.
John:
and it read one pixel at a different time than it read the other pixel because it takes a long time to read out 50 megapixels, whatever, from a sensor, right?
John:
As evidenced in this Sony camera that it can shoot 30 frames per second from this giant sensor or 20 frames per second in lossless, this sensor is actually allowed to read, able to read out all of its picture, all of its pixels very, very quickly in 1 30th of a second.
John:
That's amazing and important.
John:
So let's use an electronic shutter because, you know, you could have a shutter speed at 1 30th of a second.
John:
It's a reasonable shutter speed in many scenarios.
John:
You can get every single pixel in that one exposure, just like you would if it was a piece of film or another sensor where you lifted the mechanical shutter, expose everything, and then close the mechanical shutter, right?
John:
The second thing that makes this sensor's readout speed interesting is that one of the ways our phones take better pictures is not just by getting the pixels from the sensor and then doing smart things with them.
John:
Our phones, especially when you're in the camera app or whatever, are constantly taking pictures.
John:
They're just not saving them.
John:
It's a rolling buffer of pictures.
John:
I don't know how many are in there.
John:
Maybe Marco knows.
John:
I don't.
John:
it's let's just say it's like 10 20 or 30 pictures i can tell you it's exactly enough to kick overcast out of ram every time right when when you're in the camera app and you're just looking around it is constantly taking picture after picture after picture after picture in this one big rolling buffer and when that buffer fills up the the the oldest picture gets kicked out and the new one comes in
John:
It's constantly doing that.
John:
And when you hit the shutter button, what it's doing then is not taking the picture.
John:
It is saying, OK, of all the frames that are currently in the rolling buffer, take the one, two, three, four, 10.
John:
I don't even know how many frames around the time that button was pressed and combine them all to make one really good photo.
John:
So it's not just taking one readout of the sensor very often.
John:
I don't know if all the time, but I imagine very often it's taking multiple readouts of the sensor over time and combining them with computer smarts to reduce noise, increase more detail, so on and so forth.
John:
Now, if you're whipping your camera around in a circle and you do that, it's much more difficult to line those things up because maybe you only have a partial picture on the frame or maybe the frame has shifted so much that you can't realign them or maybe subject has moved in between, right?
John:
It's a hard problem.
John:
But that's what phone cameras do to make amazing pictures is they take more than one photo and combine them into a single one.
John:
HDR is another example, right?
John:
And in the quote-unquote expensive real camera world, they just weren't able to do that because it took so long to read one frame off the camera that you can't constantly be taking hundreds of frames in a rolling buffer and combining them because you just couldn't get that many photos that close to each other in time.
John:
But now with the Sony A1 and presumably future cameras, with incredible readout speed where they're able to read the entire sensor 30 times per second, it becomes possible for a camera like this to do what phone cameras do.
John:
I say possible because the Sony A1 doesn't do any of the stuff that I'm describing.
John:
But for two reasons.
John:
One, previously it just couldn't because you couldn't read the sensor that fast.
John:
And two, Sony doesn't have, as far as MWare, software to do that.
John:
So I'm excited for this camera.
John:
It's a technical marvel.
John:
Like I'm not going to buy one.
John:
It's too expensive, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But it does mean that the next frontier of, you know, high end photography and video cameras is not so much us keep adding more megapixels because there I think there have been cameras with more megapixels and they're just they're not chasing that anymore, it seems like.
John:
But instead, it's readout speed.
John:
It's how fast can I read this sensor?
John:
And there's a whole bunch of buffers down the line in the cache hierarchy.
John:
How big is the rolling buffer of photos?
John:
How fast can I read out?
John:
How fast can I dump them to storage?
John:
Again, the A1 has lots of impressive specs here where you can just hold down the shutter and fill your giant, what is it, CFexpress 2 or whatever, 160 gigabyte card.
John:
with a huge number of photos how long how long before you have to stop holding down the shutter what does the photography rate decrease to it's pretty amazing you can take hundreds of photos and also the io is so fast that if you take your finger off the shutter for a second it will make sure it dumps them all to the card which is a big change from cameras from only a few years ago where once you filled the buffer you'd have to wait like
John:
five or ten seconds for it to flush the buffer to the card and then you can take photographs again so uh this is an exciting camera even though there's no way in hell i'm gonna buy it although i would definitely take one for free if someone wants to give me one um but i'm mostly excited that it will become plausible and
John:
for camera companies like sony and canon or whatever to do what our phone cameras do in the coming years i say plausible because the hardware will be able to do it it's just a question of whether they will be able to make the software to do it and it also makes me think one more time of you know uh grubber reminded me of when he when he posted
John:
A recollection of Phil Schiller on stage at one of the WWDCs saying, or Gruber asked, is Apple the best phone camera company in the world?
John:
And Phil said, no, we're the best camera company in the world.
John:
That was years ago, by the way, and Apple hasn't shipped a dedicated camera.
John:
But if Apple ever did want to ship a dedicated camera, they could buy the sensor from Sony.
John:
They could do their own computational photography and, you know, maybe let someone else do the lenses.
John:
And boy, that would be an amazing product, but it would probably cost more than my Mac Pro.
Casey:
I mean, if we start saying that it's OK to spend $6,000 on a camera body, the next thing you know, we're all going to be spending $6,000 on mono.
Casey:
Oh, oh.
John:
Monitor is way bigger than that camera.
John:
So just in terms of square inches, you're really getting your money.
John:
The camera does have a display on it, but the display is terrible compared to this monitor.
John:
It's very tiny.
Marco:
does it have a thousand dollar stand i don't think it's i bet there is a stand you can get for these cameras that cost a thousand dollars that's what camera equipment is like oh yeah it's called a tripod like a really good tripod is probably more than that i mean like this this is i i haven't been paying attention to the camera world um for lots of reasons including the fact that i think i've actually finally admitted to myself that i don't care anymore
Marco:
about cameras but um i i really am very impressed to see this you know being pushed forward i mean this category of camera like you know you're like oh my god six thousand dollars that's nothing new like like back when i was more of a camera head this would basically be the competitor to like the canon 1d series
Marco:
which is aimed at sports photographers, photojournalists, people who need really, really high-end hardware for very fast capture.
Marco:
That's where the sports comes in usually.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
There is definitely a market for this that they are directly attacking with this.
Marco:
It's not totally unreasonable for that market.
Marco:
I'm glad to see that they're still in the game.
Marco:
I'm glad to see that this is still moving forward.
Marco:
Even though I'm not in it anymore, it still excites me on a technical level that this kind of stuff is still happening.
John:
Yeah, the exciting thing about this camera is previously Sony had split its top end line into two models.
John:
The one for sports, which is the one that had the crazy high frame rate and the fast readouts that was like the A9 series.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then the one that was super high resolution, which was the A7R series, which had lots of megapixels, but didn't concentrate so much on being able to shoot at high frame rates and
John:
being able to jump to the card fast or whatever and this a1 does both it has more megapixels than the a7r series and it has faster shooting than the a9 series and it costs as much as both of them combined so there you go like that that's why it's impressive like you don't have to choose anymore if you're wondering like which sony should i get just get the most expensive one because it does all the things
John:
Which is good.
John:
It's good to have that option if it can exist.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And also, there's a bunch of more interesting things about this sensor.
John:
This is a brand new sensor.
John:
It's got the RAM stuck on the back of it.
John:
It's stacked CMOS.
John:
It's the next advance in the sensor thing, but it has the effect of making all the rest of Sony's cameras, kind of like the M1, say, okay, but when are the other cameras going to get a good sensor like this?
John:
Not this exact sensor, obviously, but like a scaled-down version of the sensor.
John:
Or like the new LG OLED panel that they're only putting in their highest-end TV.
John:
It kind of makes you wish, but when are they going to put that panel on the affordable TVs?
John:
So this is truly a flagship, you know, top-end, bleeding-edge product, and we'll have to wait until next year for it to start to trickle down.
John:
I put this in here mostly because I've been deeply into... Again, I tend not to fret too much about computer purchases, but camera purchases, I'm just like the two of you.
John:
I've been fretting about what camera to buy for so long, going back and forth and back and forth, just...
John:
learning about cameras and lenses and trade-offs and prices and this i mean this particular camera doesn't throw a monkey wrench in anything because there's no way i'm buying this but now i know the technology that's available and i'm like oh when the the new a7 the a7 IV comes out not the a7R IV their names are so bad but the a7 without any stuff after it
John:
When that one comes out, will it use one of these new sensors?
John:
Because the rumors are it doesn't use the same sensor as the old one.
John:
Like the A7C came out, but it uses the same.
John:
It's basically like an A7 III inside a compact.
John:
Oh, I know this is just nonsensical jargon to everybody.
John:
The point is, kind of like TVs.
John:
cameras i'm now in this paralysis mode where i don't want any of the current products and i can envision a product with current technology that if i could take one from column a and one from column b and one from column c and shove it into a camera that's the one i want but they haven't made it yet so i just sit here buying nothing and looking at reviews
Marco:
Yeah, this is, again, like, you know, I think I've largely admitted to myself finally that, like, I'm just, I'm no longer into photography.
Marco:
And my iPhone satisfies my needs perfectly well enough.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
One of the things that I think would be very welcome is what you were saying.
Marco:
If the big cameras start to develop the ability to do some of the good tricks that phone cameras are doing related to software-based image enhancements and everything, to do some more of that...
Marco:
to some degree cameras have always done that.
Marco:
Like, you know, if you compare like an unprocessed raw to the JPEGs, the camera makes, obviously they're doing some processing.
Marco:
They're doing some noise reduction.
Marco:
They're doing color mapping and stuff like that.
Marco:
Um, so there's always been some degree of processing that, that the cameras do, but it's, it, you know, phones have so far surpassed what, what cameras are doing that, uh,
Marco:
Phones can now make incredible images in tons of conditions and situations and of subject matter that big cameras can't even approach.
Marco:
Not even close.
John:
On that topic, by the way, though, one of the things I'm always looking at is the advancement of Sony's sort of class-leading...
John:
autofocus and uh you know the one one feature that they've had for years that they keep improving is their uh object tracking and eye detection because when you're taking a picture of a person you usually want the eye to be in focused there's no reason that our iphones can't be doing that like it's not a computational challenge that the iphone can't tackle like the iphone processor crushes anything in these cameras
John:
why doesn't why don't our iphones do face and eye track and they do face detection they'll put a box around a person's face right but they don't i mean maybe they do it and they just don't show the little box but i would love for them to find people's eyes so i wouldn't focus on like my big nose but it would actually get the focus back a little maybe it doesn't matter because the the aperture is so small in these things that the difference between focusing on the tip of my nose and focusing on my eyes is never going to be noticeable at the apertures of these things but
John:
it just seems like a thing they could do and on that front by the way sony sony did eye detection then they did animal eye detection because eye detection would never work on your dog because their eyes look different than ours and this year they added a third item like they have a menu for it's like fish they did eye detection uh animal eye detection and bird eye detection
John:
Which makes sense because people take pictures of birds.
John:
But birds are animals, people.
John:
Come on.
John:
Rename them.
John:
I'm just like, what the?
John:
Animal addiction.
John:
It's like throwing shade on the birds.
John:
We've got people, animals, and birds.
John:
Stupid dinosaurs.
Marco:
What if you want to take a picture that includes your cat attacking a bird in midair?
Marco:
What will it focus on?
John:
according to the reviews the bird eye detection works so badly that it will not it will not get the bird i mean the bird detection they gotta work on that because it's the first year it's out but it's totally for people who take pictures of birds like literal actual birds with those really long lenses you know oh yeah well because again like if you're if you're aiming if you're no pun intended if you're aiming your your camera market um at people who still buy big cameras and whose needs are not solved by phone cameras
John:
bird watchers are actually a surprisingly large category because they need such incredible telephoto distance like the a phone will never have that so like it does make sense for them to add that yeah and these things are you know these are examples of computational photography because this is all machine learning like the canons actually have much better bird detect i think where they will they will find a bird and when the bird turns its head towards the camera then they will find the eye of the bird and that's all based on machine learning stuff of recognizing what the heck does a bird look like
John:
Same thing for, you know, because it's the whole body of the bird that they're finding.
John:
There's basic object detection of the thing that's moving, but the bird detect is like, not only do I recognize that's an object, but that's a bird.
John:
So they're coming along.
John:
Well, like I said, the sensor readout, it sounds like such a minor thing, but...
John:
Until this happened, there was no way for a top end camera to be able to do what the iPhone does by combining three or four or five photos into one because it couldn't get three or four or five different readouts from that sensor in a short enough period of time with a moving subject to do anything useful.
John:
And now suddenly that becomes plausible.
Casey:
it seems weird to me that canon or sony or somebody hasn't like thrown all the money at people at google or apple that are on the camera team and just said hey you know the computational photography stuff we want that please you know come work for us and make that and i know it's not quite that simple but it seems like it would be a real winner yeah apple and google are slightly more profitable companies than sony so hiring people away is going to be tricky yeah
Marco:
Well, I think there's also – I think there will be two major challenges off the top of my head for that.
Marco:
I mean number one is like I don't know how much their market is actually asking for that.
Marco:
As phones have gotten so good and have destroyed the entire like low to mid and slowly eating the high end of the market –
Marco:
the people who are still buying Sony's high-end cameras and everyone else's high-end cameras are mostly people who don't want a lot of that processing, I bet.
Marco:
It's mostly people who are using it more professionally, who want more raw type stuff.
Marco:
I mean, video took over the entire SLR style and mirrorless market as well.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
Many of these cameras are used only as video cameras for their entire lives because they happen to be really good video cameras.
Marco:
I think that video taking over with this market kind of saved a lot of this market.
Marco:
I think a lot of these companies would have been done a while ago if not for video.
John:
I mean, they can steal features from Apple there, too.
John:
Like, you know, the thing that Apple does where I forget what frame rate, but you take it in one frame rate and it takes two of every frame and then combines them or whatever.
John:
Like that, you know, I think it's like if you shoot, you shoot it and you get 30 frame per second video, but the video is actually taking 60 frames and then either it's picking the best one or combining them.
John:
These cameras should totally do that.
John:
Like, that's a great idea.
John:
And they're able to do 4K at 120.
John:
So they have frames to spare.
John:
But as far as I'm aware, none of them do it.
Marco:
Well, but I think this gets to the second problem.
Marco:
Problem one is their market doesn't really seem to demand a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
Problem two, I think, if you look at the ridiculous advances in silicon and hardware required for the iPhone every year to do this kind of processing with a tiny little sensor –
Marco:
It might not be technologically feasible at a reasonable price in a camera body without like a giant fan in it to do this level of processing for for like a sensor that big from a big camera in real time.
Marco:
Like it just might not be reasonably technically within Sony's ability to make an image signal processor that could do that.
John:
they're doing pretty good like sony had overheating problems with a lot of their cameras in fact my line of cameras has that problem for this exact reason that the thing that was overheating was the cpu right um but they more or less seem to have solved that with the current generation of cameras presumably by having tsmc make them
John:
chips in a smaller process size, but I, I think that they mostly, the technology is there to do the silicon fabbing and to do the image processing.
John:
Cause remember Sony also has image processing expertise.
John:
Like for example, in their televisions, like that's one of the main selling points of the television, take an LG panel and they slap onto it, a Sony image processor.
John:
So I think they're pretty good at doing that image processing.
John:
And more recently, no thanks to Sony, but thanks to TSMC or other companies, they're able to get that within a reasonable power envelope.
John:
And like you said, more importantly, a reasonable heat envelope in their cameras that I think they're within shooting distance of doing this.
John:
I mean, we'll see when they get this 50 megapixel thing out.
John:
But like...
John:
They remove the recording limits on all their things.
John:
They can go for an hour at a time without overheating or anything.
John:
And now this one is shooting 50 megapixels at 30 frames per second in photos.
John:
So I feel like the grunt is there.
John:
Hardware-wise, they just need to get the software part of it together.
John:
I mean, this is the top of the top end.
John:
We'll circle back in three years and see how it's trickled down.
John:
But...
John:
They really could use some of that expertise from the phone market.
John:
I know what you're saying, like, well, pros don't want that.
John:
They don't want you messing with their pictures.
John:
But I think for a lot of applications, especially for the YouTuber market and that type of thing, they do want you to do stuff like Apple does with the video.
John:
It's the reason so many YouTubers rave about the video quality from Apple's phones, because Apple does all this clever processing with your video to make it look reasonable right out of the camera.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Thank you so much to Flatfile for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Donald Rabideau writes, do you use any utilities like CleanMyMac X or 10 or whatever or Onyx to perform system maintenance?
Casey:
If not, is there any particular reason?
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
I haven't ever really felt the need to.
Casey:
And plus, for a while there, I was reinstalling Mac OS like it was going out of style.
Casey:
And so, like I've said many, many, many times on the show, to some degree, I consider my computers mostly ephemerals.
Casey:
So I never have a build that it seems like I never have a build that sticks around long enough to develop the sort of cruft that one of these I suspect would get rid of.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
That's just me.
Casey:
Marco, how about you?
Marco:
So I'm going to say two things that are potentially conflicting.
Casey:
Oh, this will be good.
Marco:
I never run anything like this.
Marco:
I don't think such utilities are usually necessary.
Marco:
I think there's always been a lot of superstition
Marco:
and you know in in computer solutions you know even back when we were in the windows days like you know people thought like if you defrag every night it'll it'll save your hard drive and it'll make things run faster because everything will be in optimized loading locations and everything and you hear about all these you know procedures you should run to maintain your computer and a lot of them i think are just superstition and don't actually don't actually end up being necessary or don't don't provide meaningful improvements and
Marco:
So I never use any of these kind of utilities, and I don't think most people need to.
Marco:
The second half of what I'm about to say now, I'm currently on an installation of Mac OS that I need to badly do a reinstall because it doesn't work very well.
Marco:
Why is that?
Marco:
This is the one that I imported from my iMac Pro onto my new Mac Mini, and there's a lot of stuff about it that's messed up.
Marco:
One of the biggest things that's driving me nuts that I think might motivate me to actually finally do this is that I can't search and mail anymore.
Casey:
Oh, neat.
Marco:
And I've tried, I've gone, looked at all the different crappy website articles of how-tos of how to rebuild your mail search, and I've done everything that all of them have suggested, and it doesn't work.
Marco:
and so every search should return zero results and it turns out i search my mail a lot that's actually a fairly common thing that i need to i need to find an email uh so yeah i have to do a reinstall other interesting side note that it has nothing to do with this question but i looked it up um a little while ago during our show some real-time follow-up
Marco:
my Mac mini return window is still active for the next two hours.
Casey:
Oh, which, why would you want to?
Marco:
I don't know, but it's, it's interesting to know that I guess like I could theoretically return this Mac mini and then in April, I'll spend the Apple credit on a new one.
Casey:
if I still want one.
Casey:
Oh, I see your point.
Casey:
I see your point.
Casey:
I missed your point.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I'm not, I'm not entirely sure I, that would be worth doing, but it is worth knowing that I can do that.
Yeah.
Marco:
also um i i really kind of miss my macbook air like as my primary computer so we'll see maybe i i don't know and and it turns out like all of my problems that i was having with the thunderbolt docks seemed to mostly be that my ethernet wire in the wall was bad and so actually the rest of the thunderbolt dock ecosystem seemed to work just fine
Casey:
Oh, Marco.
Casey:
All right, John, do you do any of this sort of thing?
John:
Well, I'm going to – I know the question is asking us whether we use it, but I'm going to echo Marco's advice that, in general, if you have a Mac, you do not need to do any of these things for multiple reasons.
John:
The first reason is that lots of these sort of –
John:
preventative maintenance procedures or as marco called them superstitions that is a fertile ground for scam apps right because they're always they always want to advertise your computer may be in danger you may have a virus you need to do this run this program every day to make sure your mac is healthy um
John:
A lot of those apps are scam apps.
John:
They're apps that are installing malware, mining for Bitcoin, doing all sorts of terrible things, putting toolbars in your browsers back in the old days, like all sorts of unsavory things.
John:
So that's one reason to avoid them.
John:
The second is you don't actually need to do any of the things that these things do, like even the good ones that are actually legitimate applications.
John:
your mac will run just fine on its own or if it doesn't it's a bug in the os that will be fixed in an upcoming version of the os and it's not like uh it's something you need to do to fix it so i do not recommend people seek out these programs i do not recommend people respond to ads that advertise these programs i don't recommend people get these programs
John:
That said, I have several of these programs and I'll tell you why.
John:
Sometimes if you are a, you know, technically oriented Mac enthusiast, you may find yourself in a situation where your Mac is doing a weird thing and you want to figure out how to make it stop.
John:
And the solution is to do one of the many things that these legitimate programs of these type do.
John:
Reset your launch services database.
John:
Delete some caches.
John:
Rebuild your mail index, right?
John:
Delete your spotlight index and rebuild it.
John:
Like all sorts of... Reset your PRAM.
John:
Who knows?
John:
There's a million things that you can do.
John:
You don't need one of these tools to do those things at all.
John:
You can do them all from like the command line or whatever, right?
John:
But...
John:
If you're technical enough to want to try to fix something yourself but not technical enough to trust yourself messing with the command line, if you can find one of these programs that is legitimate and frequently updated, that's the key, frequently updated.
John:
So, like, the way you can tell is, like, oh, Big Sur has been released.
John:
Is there a new version of Insert Tool XL?
John:
for big sir out like the day of or a few days after that shows that someone is updating that thing hopefully in a legitimate way right if on the other hand you have a version of one of these programs that you've got three years ago and you try running it today hopefully it will refuse to run and say whoa i can't run on this i don't even know what os you're running on if it doesn't refuse to run that's another warning sign right so in the best case occasionally i will want to use one of these tools
John:
to do a thing with less work than me trying to go through my old notes documents and look up some command line incantation.
John:
Because remember, the command line incantations change from OS to OS as well.
John:
And so if you do a web search for like how to reset your launch services database, you might find a command line that worked three years ago that doesn't work now or does damage now.
John:
A well-maintained version of one of these utilities will have the up-to-date way to try to do the things that it does.
John:
That said, even the best of these programs can absolutely be accidentally used to screw up your system, either because of bugs in the program or because the user error, as in you probably didn't want to do that and now you're in a bad situation, right?
John:
So once again, I will say...
John:
You should not have one of these programs.
John:
In general, you don't need it, but occasionally I resort to it
John:
even if it's just like the best of these tools will tell you what it's going to do for the command line just to say, hey, I'm not going to ask you to do it.
John:
But if you were to do it, show me the command line you would run.
John:
And then I can use that as an input into my larger problem solving saying, well, this tool says it's going to run this command line.
John:
And these Google search results say you should try this command line.
John:
And this Apple forum post says I tried this command line.
John:
And then I can try to figure out what, you know, what the truth is.
John:
Read some man pages, try some experiments myself.
John:
Like,
John:
But we're way off in the weeds here.
John:
If you find yourself having to do this type of debugging, you should probably just, you know, I would say take it to the Apple store.
John:
But I don't know what you do now in COVID times.
John:
But yeah, don't get one of these programs.
John:
But a really good one of these programs is actually a useful tool to have.
Marco:
I will say one tool I do use, which is not really one of these programs, but it's kind of in the outfield, in the ballpark maybe, I use the disk space searching programs that will scan your disk and tell you where your space is going.
John:
I wouldn't put those in this category at all.
John:
Everyone should have a disk space scanning program because those are read-only, non-destructive, and they're really useful.
Marco:
yeah well they can you can destruct with them like you can delete from them usually like oh really which one which ones do you have that you can delete from daisy disk daisy disk and space gremlin are the two favorites in this household tiff prefers daisy disk for the prettiness i prefer space gremlin because i mean it looks like it was designed by a space gremlin but it was it i i prefer it just the way it works um yeah so daisy disk i think is the more common choice
John:
My recommended one is Grand Perspective.
John:
It used to be called Disk Inventory 10, or actually Disk Inventory 10 was the original one that had this UI.
John:
I think Grand Perspective is the more modern incarnation.
John:
I don't know if they're related in any way, but they look very similar.
John:
And all it will do is give you a big view of a bunch of, you know, a rectangular view of your hard disk based on area, what's filling the space.
John:
And that's it.
John:
That's all it does.
John:
And you can mouse over the little rectangle, the big rectangle and say, what the heck is this giant rectangle?
John:
And you find out it's like, you know, well, here's the danger.
John:
These programs don't delete anything, but they'll tell you what all the files are.
John:
And you're like, what is this big rectangle?
John:
VM image.
John:
Do I need that?
John:
I'm going to go delete it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Usually they're smarter than that.
Marco:
Like usually they don't usually show like system stuff by default or let you delete it by default.
John:
But, I mean, Grand Perspective doesn't show you things that aren't owned by you because it doesn't have permission to, especially in this modern OS, even if you get full disk access.
John:
Like, I don't think it runs this route.
John:
But it does show you everything.
John:
And the danger of one of these programs is not that the programs are going to do anything, because as far as I'm aware, Grand Perspective can't actually modify your disk at all.
John:
But it's the user who says, I don't know what this thing is.
John:
I'm going to delete it.
John:
It's like the story of, you know, when Mac OS X 4X came out and everyone found a library folder.
John:
And they're like, whatever this library thing is, I don't need it.
John:
And they would just delete it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or, you know, system slash library or slash system.
John:
Or, you know, it's a classic thing on the Mac of people finding the system folder and saying, I don't need all this stuff and just putting it all in the trash.
John:
So even though these programs themselves are not harmful, they give you enough rope to hang yourself because now you know where all the big files are and you don't think the computer should need that big file, but it may turn out the computer really does need that big file.
John:
System integrity protection helps a lot here because it will prevent you from deleting parts of the OS.
John:
But there are still things that are not technically part of the OS that you could delete with like, you know, authenticating it as an administrator or something that you probably shouldn't delete.
John:
So be careful.
John:
But I think a program like that is really useful for you to find like the three, you know, movies you downloaded in iTunes five years ago that are each taking up five gigs of space in your hard drive and you totally forgot about.
Marco:
By the way, one more real-time follow-up.
Marco:
So another thing that's wrong with my installation that I'm using, in addition to the aforementioned issues, is that somehow when I migrated this installation to the new Mac Mini, I got a previously relocated items folder.
Marco:
which contained nothing of use, so I put it in the trash, and I tried to empty the trash.
Marco:
And I now have this item that I cannot empty from the trash.
Marco:
It says that, because previously relocated items includes the subfolders security, user, like USR, the Unix kind of user, and then in that, a symlink to X11.
Marco:
And I can't delete it because it says X11 is required by the system.
Marco:
And I can't put it anywhere else.
Marco:
So I have this item that's just stuck.
Marco:
I just can't empty my trash forever.
Marco:
I have a non-empty trash forever.
Marco:
Oh, I also have the Windows Server high CPU usage bug on this one, even though Chrome is totally gone from this computer.
Marco:
So yeah, there's a lot that's not right with this installation.
Marco:
But I'm still not going to run some other weird utility.
Marco:
I'm just going to reinstall it.
John:
sometimes finder refuses to empty your trash but if you just go to the command line and go into your dot trash folder you can you can just do r minus rf and it'll kill it sudo r minus rf will definitely almost certainly kill it be careful like i'm telling you to run terrible commands like carefully marco specifically and nobody else carefully go into your dot trash folder in your home directory where is it is it is it under volumes trashes
John:
No, it's just in your home directory.
John:
Oh, look at that, .trash.
John:
CD.trash.
John:
And then do you see all the files there?
John:
If you do, just try r-rf on those files and sudo if it doesn't work.
Casey:
Hey, maybe not while we're recording.
Casey:
Not while we're recording, please.
Marco:
What do I need X11 for?
Marco:
I am not allowed to ls.trash my home directory, even with sudo.
Marco:
Operation not permitted.
John:
Do you have an admin account?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
This is my account.
Marco:
I'm telling you, this installation is not right.
Marco:
I gotta get rid of it.
Marco:
That's not right.
John:
You should be on the list.
Marco:
You're on trash.
Marco:
I almost decided to record tonight from the MacBook Air.
Marco:
I almost plugged it back into my whole docking at my desk because that installation is so good and I miss it so much as I'm using this one.
Marco:
But I haven't had time to blow this one away because I've been pretty busy.
Marco:
I gotta get rid of this.
John:
Does your .trash directory have any extended attributes set on it?
John:
Does it have weird owners or permissions?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't want to deal with this.
Marco:
I just want to put this away.
John:
This is not the only issue.
John:
Step one, reboot, and then step two, see what the heck's going on.
Marco:
But honestly, step three, the Mac Mini really does suck at Bluetooth reception.
Marco:
I had to keep moving it closer to my main stuff setup.
Marco:
I first had it like...
Marco:
beside my desk on top of a file cabinet like which because it could be tucked away neatly there and there the mouse barely worked and and watch unlock wouldn't work at all i would say it's too far away so i now have it like scooted over like tilted up behind a speaker but it's like it still has really flaky reception it's like this is so much worse than the macbook air oh god oh my god to go back a half step i really like daisy disk and i recommend that one yeah and i really like space gremlin if if daisy disk is not your style try space gremlin it's it's my favorite
Casey:
Dan Blundell writes, I just got a Mac Mini with 8 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
Performance is great, but it typically uses between 500 megs and 2 gigs of swap memory.
Casey:
I don't notice a hit in terms of performance, but I read in a couple of places that swap memory might impact the lifespan of the SSD.
Casey:
Other places say it's not really a concern with modern SSDs.
Casey:
If I'm satisfied with performance, is protecting the SSD from swap memory a good enough reason to pay the premium for more RAM?
Casey:
I mean, honestly, I don't know why if you can afford it, you wouldn't just get more RAM, but it sounds like the ship has already sailed.
Casey:
So I honestly don't know what the situation is with lots and lots of writes on SSDs these days.
Casey:
As our resident file system expert, John, what's the situation here?
John:
So first thing to keep in mind is the amount of swap memory, as shown in various places in the US, is not really what you're interested in.
John:
What you're interested in is how many page ins and page outs to the swap file are happening, like activity traffic, right?
John:
So swap files tend to be allocated in these very large chunks.
John:
Just because you have a big swap file in one of these large chunks, if nothing is being read or written to it very frequently,
John:
It's no big deal, right?
John:
You only care about the traffic.
John:
And as Dan noted, lots of activity on SSD, slowly, very slowly, wears it out.
John:
So you should be concerned if there is a tremendous amount of activity going to and from your SSD anywhere, not just a swap file.
John:
So what you want to know is, am I swapping, not do I have a two gig swap file hanging around somewhere, right?
John:
Now, if you've determined that you are frequently swapping a lot,
John:
It would surprise me if you didn't notice this, because although SSDs are much faster than spinning disks, they're much slower than RAM.
John:
So if you were paging in and out to that SWAT file a lot, I feel like you would notice that performance wise.
John:
Now, SSDs deal with the wear out factor by essentially being over provisioned by some amount.
John:
So as they wear out cells inside them,
John:
There's actually more than whatever, you know, say you get a 512 gigabyte SSD.
John:
There's more than 512 gigabytes worth of storage inside there.
John:
They keep some in reserve.
John:
And when you wear out a portion of it, they will use some of the other, right?
John:
The more expensive an enterprise of the SSD, the more they are over-provisioned and the longer they will last.
John:
But I would suspect that in a consumer laptop being used by a consumer to do normal things,
John:
Something else is going to die before you wear out that SSD, most likely, unless you are doing some really weird stuff with lots of paging or lots of constant IO or constantly recording video.
John:
I don't know what could cause that amount of IO, but in general, I think modern SSDs are probably going to put up with the amount of reads and writes that a normal person does.
John:
So I would not worry about having too little RAM causing lots of swapping, which in turn causes your SSD to wear out.
Casey:
Jan Philipp writes, if I copy three files in three different simultaneous copy processes in the Finder, will the bits of the three files be written mixed on the hard drive as opposed to if I had run the copy process sequentially?
Casey:
Is there more order in the bits on my hard drive if I let one copy process finish before I start the next?
Casey:
I would like to know the answer to this question just out of curiosity.
Casey:
Let me tell you about defragmenting your hard drive.
Marco:
Well, and how with SSDs, it becomes a much more complicated thing with what you want it to be and what it needs to be.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, John, here again, this is your kind of part of the world.
Casey:
What's the situation?
John:
Back in the day, computers would address hard drives, like spinning hard drives, fairly directly.
John:
If you think of what a spinning hard drive was like, it's a bunch of disks that spin and they're stacked on top of each other.
John:
And in between them are a bunch of read and write heads.
John:
Right.
John:
It's like you think of like, you know, seven record players or five record players stacked on top of each other with little heads reading them all.
John:
And the, each of the discs had, uh, well, they had what you can imagine, uh, like a track.
John:
They're not like, they're not like a, uh, a record where it's a spiral that starts in the middle and goes out to the edge, but instead they had concentric circles like a tree ring.
John:
Right.
John:
And one of those rings is a track and,
John:
And a sort of pie wedge shape of the disk is a sector.
John:
And you could also address what's called a cylinder, which is a track through the entire stack.
John:
So you can imagine the outermost track.
John:
The outermost cylinder is that track on all the disks that are down there.
John:
And in the very, very early days, computers would address hard drives.
John:
by track and cylinder and sector like more or less directly like that the operating system had the ability to say i want to write in the fifth sector of the outermost cylinder of the zisk or whatever right and in those cases like the language marco was talking about in case you just mentioned the uh
John:
defragmenting thing where there was computer programs that would visualize they would take all these these cylinders and sort of stretch them out and connect them together so it becomes one big long line and then they would wrap that line into a rectangle shape and they would say this is your hard drive all these this rectangle and every one of these pixels represents like a particular you know sector on a particular track or whatever like not even that but they'll break it up into some even-sized chunks and
John:
And they would rearrange your files so that all the bits that belong to whatever the operating system are all next to each other and all the bits that belong to this are next to each other.
John:
When they say next to each other, they meant like address wise because they can address these hard drives more or less directly.
John:
And for example, bits that were all on the same track one after the other.
John:
you could read those in a big line because the disc would spin and like a little record player, the little head would go over that track and it would read as the track went underneath, it would read all those bits.
John:
And it's great if they're all on that same track because then you don't have to move the heads.
John:
If instead you had the first part of that file is on the outermost track, then the second part is on the innermost track, then the third part is on a middle track,
John:
Just to get those three little bits, you'd have to go, okay, read from here.
John:
Now move the head.
John:
Wait for it to steady.
John:
Now read from here.
John:
Now move the head again and wait for it to steady.
John:
It was way faster if they were all on the same track because you just move the head and then spin the thing around 360 degrees and get all the bits off that track, right?
John:
That, in theory, was what defragmenting was doing for you because the disks were more or less directly addressable and the addresses were more or less sequential within each cylinder or whatever.
John:
And they would try to make the files contiguous so that the first bit of the file is right next to the second bit and third bit and fourth bit and fifth bit or whatever.
John:
And that's why they'd have these very pleasing displays of taking your disk where all these files are scrambled everywhere.
John:
I'm going to make it all contiguous and I'm going to color code it.
John:
So the operating system is one color and your, I don't know, audio files are another color.
John:
I don't remember what defragging things did, but I did the same things with Norton Utilities back in the day on my Mac.
Marco:
Well, and there was a reason why they would put all the files next to each other.
Marco:
It wasn't just to make it look pretty, although that was, I think, a big reason why people liked watching it.
Marco:
But it was because if you put all the files near each other, or all the parts of a file near each other, the heads would have to spend less time going back and forth seeking across to different cylinders on the disk.
Marco:
Because back then, and well, still, hard drives, like spinning disk hard drives, headsets,
Marco:
If you need to move the head back and forth, it takes way longer than if you could read like sequentially off of one track or off of nearby tracks.
Marco:
The more you have to move the head back and forth, the slower it is by a lot.
John:
Because you'd have to move the head fairly quickly to get there, but then you have to wait for the head to settle because you wouldn't stop on a dime.
John:
It would like vibrate a little bit and you had to wait for it to settle down and then you could read again and then you'd start moving again.
John:
It was terrible, right?
John:
That whole paradigm started to fall apart way before SSDs came out because once you break the connection between the operating system and the physical device in terms of addressing, all bets are off.
John:
So in the early days, like I said, you could actually address physically the attributes of the hard drive.
John:
But eventually you would say, hey, hard drive, write this into, you know, address, you know, cylinder one, sector five.
John:
And the hard drive would go, oh, yeah, sure.
John:
Totally.
John:
I'll do that.
John:
And it would put those bits wherever the hell it wanted.
John:
Like the connection between virtual addressing and physical addressing was broken by modern hard drives because they would add things like cache and they would allow the hard drive mechanism to make its own intelligent decisions about where to allocate stuff.
John:
And it was no longer address one is next to address two is next to address three is next to address four or whatever.
John:
whatever physical attributes where you could sort of control it and say, I'm going to put this on the outer track of the hard drive because that spins faster, right?
John:
And it'll be faster to read.
John:
And it would be like, oh, you can tell the hard drive that, but you can't actually make the hard drive do anything because the hard drive is now this complicated system, which is a little miniature computer with its own algorithms of a head movement and its own RAM cache and everything.
John:
And once that relationship was broken, trying to do any kind of defragmenting thing to get the bits next to each other
John:
wasn't guaranteed to do what you wanted maybe it did maybe it didn't it was difficult to tell ssds of course don't have a head that's moving anywhere and in ssds there's usually not any particular extra cost for reading something from one location or another that's not entirely true because they do read things in regions and it you know the regions aren't the size of one byte so if you're going to read a byte from here and a byte from there there is additional overhead but
John:
Now, more than ever, is a suckers game to try to arrange things physically in the storage through the operating system, because the operating system is so far from the physical reality of the storage that it has no hope of controlling where things are.
John:
So that's that game is entirely over.
John:
So getting back to the question, which is, hey, if I'm doing simultaneous copies, are the things spread out or are they together?
John:
there are so many different layers between your time sequencing of operations like i'm doing all the files at once or i'm doing them in sequence there is the various io buffers in the operating system there is caching all the way through the entire storage hierarchy and then there is the actual physical addressing of the individual chips in the ssd
John:
It's trying to control where things land by time sequencing is not going to work the way you think it's going to work.
John:
And even if it did work that way, the benefits on something like an SSD are minimal.
John:
That said...
John:
It takes some amount of computing to do IO.
John:
And if you do lots and lots of IO in parallel, you could not in a finder copy, but you could in a very large, you know, much bigger scenario, swamp the CPU by doing, say, 100,000 threads, each of which is trying to write a file at exactly the same time.
John:
And that could slow you down as opposed to doing those 100,000 files either in sequence or more likely in batches that equal the number of CPU cores you have, right?
John:
So it's not like time sequencing of I.O.
John:
can't affect your performance.
John:
But when you're talking about three files in the Finder, A, don't worry about it.
John:
And B, there really is no control even at the operating system level of exactly where those bits land in your storage.
John:
That's the magic of a sort of a layered hierarchy, like the separation of concerns.
John:
Having the operating system know the physical attributes of your storage and control them directly is a worse system than what we have now.
John:
So just let go and let storage handle it.
Casey:
Trust the system.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, Aiden Traeger writes, do you think Apple will ever offer iCloud backup for the Mac?
Casey:
It seems like another way for them to increase services revenue through iCloud storage upgrades.
Casey:
I understand the logic here, but no.
Casey:
Given how stingy they are with, although it's gotten better recently, how stingy they are with iCloud storage space as it is, I personally do not see this happening.
Casey:
This is why many-time prior sponsor Backblaze exists.
Casey:
But that's just my two cents.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
iCloud backup seems like an obvious thing to offer on the Mac.
Marco:
That being said, it's more complicated to offer on the Mac, as people like Backblaze know, because Mac data locations, Mac data volumes, they're just different from iOS devices.
Marco:
The way...
Marco:
What would you back up?
Marco:
Like iCloud backup on the phone is not just a 100% file system clone of your phone.
Marco:
It backs up like things that are marked as documents and data for certain apps and things like that and like has different dimensions for how it backs up photos and whether it backs up things like music or how it backs them up.
Marco:
On the Mac, all of that is different.
Marco:
Where apps save data, how they save data, how they mark their data, it's all different.
Marco:
Whether they store it in caches or in the library folder or whether they store it in documents on your file system and your home directory.
Marco:
There's so many different variations of where and how they store everything that in order to reasonably be sure that you have all the important stuff on a Mac...
Marco:
You kind of have to back up everything, or at least almost everything, which is way more data volume than what iCloud Backup usually includes on your iOS devices.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
Problem number two is iCloud Backup is actually a pretty bad backup.
Marco:
I know this because, like, so, you know, I'm sure every parent out there, or even if you're not a parent, you've probably had a situation where you or someone in your family has accidentally caused some kind of data loss to happen on an iOS device, but, like, in one app.
Marco:
So we had an issue like this recently where my kid was editing some levels in a game that has a level editor built in, and he accidentally deleted the wrong one on the level list screen, and he accidentally deleted one that he didn't want to delete as he was deleting other ones.
Marco:
And it crushed him, and he'd worked so hard on making this level, and it was just gone, and there was no undo.
Marco:
And I'm like, I'm like, we might, if we, if we can, we can try to get this back.
Marco:
I'm like, if it was on here yesterday, which was before your last iCloud backup, we can try to, to restore this from yesterday's iCloud backup and see if it's in there.
Marco:
But what that will require to basically have time machine for one app from like five minutes ago or one day ago, what that would require would be to capture a full computer-based backup of the iPad because a lot of stuff is not backed up to iCloud backup like Minecraft data.
Marco:
So you still have to do like the full computer backup to even have a backup at all.
Marco:
And the entire rest of the time that he's, like, using his iPad out in the world or whatever upstairs, there's no backup of any of that stuff that's not an iCloud backup unless, like, you know, the two or three times a year we remember to, like, do it to iTunes or to Finder now.
Marco:
And then to actually do, like, a restore, a, like, oh, crap, I messed something up in this app,
Marco:
you have to blow away an entire iOS device to restore all of iCloud's backup from the previous backup onto it.
Marco:
So you have to like first wipe it, then install an entire backup over it.
Marco:
So it's this massive, like destructive and incredibly time consuming process that,
Marco:
to even see if you can maybe get this information out.
Marco:
And at the end of the day, like we didn't even end up attempting it.
Marco:
We decided, I'm like, I told him like, here's what it will take.
Marco:
Here's how long it will take.
Marco:
Do you want to do it?
Marco:
And he decided not to, because it was going to be a while of having his iPad not be usable.
Marco:
But it just showed like, if this was something on a Mac,
Marco:
I could just go to Backblaze and restore that one file, which it would have backed up because it can do that.
Marco:
Because on the Mac, you can have third-party backup solutions that can read the entire disk or read special things however you want them to.
Marco:
And they can do things that Apple doesn't do, like offer point-in-time backup recovery of only certain files or save version histories of things.
Marco:
And I don't see Apple doing any of that stuff.
Marco:
That stuff kind of looks messy to Apple.
Marco:
That's not the style that they operate their services in.
Marco:
Their services tend to be like, what is the 75% solution that we can offer that will solve basic needs in a basic way pretty reliably?
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
And so if they did offer iCloud backup for the Mac...
Marco:
I think what we would want it to be, in theory, would be cloud-based time machine, basically.
Marco:
That, I think, is what we would want it to be.
Marco:
But I don't think it would actually be that.
Marco:
I think that's too much data and too much functionality for the way Apple would actually design and ship such a service, if they ever would.
Marco:
So I think, really...
Marco:
Not only would they probably not do that because of the aforementioned complexity of offering that on the Mac, but also iCloud backup sucks if you have other options.
Marco:
If I could have Backblaze on my phone instead, I would because it would be so much better.
Marco:
And for all of our devices, like for, you know, for all of his Minecraft levels and everything, that would be so much better.
Marco:
Part of the reason that I play my games on a PC now is that I run Backblaze on the PC so I can back up my game data.
Marco:
Because I can't do that on an iPad or something.
Marco:
So I think logically it makes sense.
Marco:
Hey, they should offer iCloud backup for the Mac.
Marco:
But once you start thinking about what that would entail and what that would actually be, I'm not sure it's a very compelling alternative.
Casey:
What do you think, John?
John:
I think they should offer this backup.
John:
In fact, Apple did offer backups as part of iTools, I think.
John:
Do you remember the backup icon that was an orange umbrella?
John:
I do not.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
That was before our time, I think.
John:
It was an Apple app that was creatively named Backup, I believe, and it would backup your computer or files on your computer to the cloud, I think even before cloud had a name.
John:
But anyway, it was terrible, and it went away, and it was just as well.
John:
But
John:
Ever since they've rolled out iCloud backups for iOS devices, I've thought, okay, well, you should bring that to the Mac because it shows that that's a thing that you have an appetite for doing.
John:
It is a thing that all users need, that all users do need cloud backup.
John:
And especially in the new era of services going up like a rocket at every earnings report, hey, this is another service you can sell.
John:
um now i know it's like well who cares about the mac we do sell it it's called the icloud storage and we charge through the nose for it and nobody buys it on their ios devices because they're cheap so it's not really a successful big services success story and the mac is a much smaller market so maybe no one cares but apple totally should offer icloud backup for the mac
John:
Now, as to why Apple is going to be bad at it when they do, setting aside history and all the things that Marco noted about how the way the iCloud stuff works for iOS devices, is that should you cloud-based backup...
John:
Well, not just well from a technical perspective, but well from a financial perspective, like to make it make that sweet services revenue with those sweet services margins.
John:
You really need to do what Backblaze does and actually do the storage yourself, because if Apple is just reselling S3 storage from AWS to us.
John:
AWS gets a cut.
John:
Like that profit margin that you're paying for AWS for S3, that's money that could be part of your margins, Apple, if you did what Backblaze does, which is run your own storage.
John:
Then you don't have to pay another company a slice of the profit for the storage.
John:
But it also means that you have to figure out, hey, how do you run storage at Apple scale?
John:
I mean, Backblaze does amazing things with storage, but they don't have as many customers as Apple has.
John:
To do storage at Apple scale, you need something like Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS.
John:
But all of those companies will want to take a share of the profit.
John:
So if Apple ever does iCloud backup for the Mac, if they don't roll their own storage, it's going to be more expensive than Backblaze, not just because they're Apple, but because some cloud provider will be taking a portion of money for every single byte that's stored.
John:
You know, I always do wonder how Apple can afford to do whatever they're doing for iCloud Photo Library because I don't think they're running their own storage from that.
John:
So iCloud Photo Library is basically a wad of Apple software in front of S3 or something similar.
John:
Do you think Apple has trouble affording anything?
John:
i mean but the whole point of the services stuff is you want it to be profitable because it's you know like the more people you sign up every new person you get that's more profit it's it's a it's a good business to be in that's why services revenue is going up it's not quite as profitable as making tv shows but you know because like when you make the show once and lots of people watch it every person who stores a bite you have to pay for that bite but if you could economically run your own storage uh
John:
You could come within the ballpark of Backblaze's pricing, which is fairly amazing in the grand scheme of things.
John:
So I think Apple should do this.
John:
I think when they do it, it's going to be too expensive.
John:
And I think it's going to be too expensive because Apple doesn't want to do its own storage.
Yeah.
John:
again you could say that's wise it's like well what do you want apple to do become like aws and azure and google cloud and my answer is a much longer answer which is yes they totally should do that because if they don't they're constantly paying money to those people but thus far it doesn't sound like apple wants to do that so i am ready for the mediocre uh mac placed icloud backup solution from apple because a mediocre one is better than none but a good one would be great
John:
Head of Backplay has not sponsored this episode.
John:
They didn't need to.
John:
Apparently not.
Marco:
Well, thanks to the ones who did.
Marco:
Linode, Away, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join as well at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did.
Casey:
I'm snowed in.
Marco:
Did I tell you that?
John:
The bay is frozen, right?
John:
You can't take your ferry out?
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
We are officially stuck here for probably another couple days.
Marco:
It will be in total, ends up being probably about a week because there's no ferry service.
Marco:
So we are snowed in.
Marco:
We are eating our way through the freezer.
Marco:
at worst case scenario you could always walk through the a-hole fence over the causeway over the bridges like you're not actually stuck right you know i mean you so if we were to get a driving permit ever you know in order to drive across the sand to go over to that one bridge uh we could do that but there's also a lot of people who have those permits who we know and so like you know if we were if we really need stuff we could just ask people we know hey can you give us a ride to costco or whatever and they would do it
Marco:
But I don't like to ask for favors that I don't need.
John:
People want to know what the A-hole fence is.
Marco:
You actually don't need to cross the A-hole fence to go off the island.
Marco:
The A-hole fence is the other direction.
John:
Oh, all right.
Marco:
But it's the Point of Woods fence.
Marco:
You have to be a bit of an a-hole in order to build an entire fence across an island to block people from accessing an entire section of the island.
Marco:
For an island based so much on walking and biking and everything, to block off your entire town from anybody walking and biking into it is kind of a jerk move.
Casey:
So one of my jobs when it comes to ATP is I take a first crack at the show notes.
Casey:
And on a good week, Marco won't find very much to change.
Casey:
And sometimes he finds a lot that needs changing.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I was Googling the .00 woods in order to put it in the show notes.
Casey:
And I found fireisland.com slash town slash point hyphen O hyphen woods hyphen fire hyphen island.
Casey:
That'll be in the show notes.
Casey:
And I will read to you a small excerpt from this.
Casey:
Well pedigreed families came from all corners of the country to summer at point O woods.
Casey:
While many neighboring Fire Island communities are predominantly populated by New York City and greater Long Island, some residents, Point of Wood residents, cherish their land and water sports almost as much as they value family continuity and their way of life, and of course, their privacy.
Casey:
Wow, what a bunch of jerks.
John:
I mean, it is what it says on the tin.
Marco:
Yeah, it's certainly not known for its diversity.
John:
They don't just let in rich people.
John:
You have to be the right kind of rich people.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, you do.
Marco:
That's a real thing.
Marco:
It's as bad as you think it is.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
Their houses will wash away just as easily as yours when the big storm comes.
John:
I don't know if that's comforting to you.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
Thank you.
Casey:
Interestingly, Point of Woods is not called Lonelyville, which apparently is another community on Fire Island.
Marco:
Yes, Lonelyville is a real place.
Marco:
It's probably the best named place on Fire Island.
Marco:
I will say there was – Fire Island has a lot of communities, some of which are extremely liberal, old hippie liberal, also some very gay communities.
Marco:
And this past summer, I got a pair of electric sandbikes, and I took a few rides just to travel to see different communities that were further away that I'd never seen before.
Marco:
I took a couple of rides with my neighbor, and I don't have any issues seeing –
Marco:
naked people it's the human body it's fine and people want to celebrate their body that's fine oh no i was i did find it pretty awkward to watch two naked men playing badminton
John:
interesting there's a lot of jumping in badminton yeah that was my uh fire island well not fire on specifically robert moses off of robert moses not far down from robert moses which is a public beach uh you can very quickly find many nude beaches and i remember that from my childhood too and it's yeah
Marco:
yeah because i decided our very first trip i'm like you know what let's see if we can ride to the lighthouse which is the end of the it's like right next to robbers you'll have to go through there yep you pass a whole lot and at first i think you know you see one out of the corner of your eye like oh i think that person's naked and then you start seeing oh everyone's naked and then and then you feel weird being the person on the bike who's like riding through like i shouldn't be here i i feel i feel like i'm like i don't want to be like a tourist in the naked place you know i i don't want to like make anyone else feel uncomfortable just keep your eyes down and keep walking
Marco:
yeah or biking yeah but the badman that's that's something i think everybody either should ever see or should see once it doesn't even sound comfortable you know what i mean no it's the thing like i i i mean good for them you know that's i'm i'm happy for them that they're they're willing to do that i feel like sometimes you need a little support
Marco:
yeah it just i would i i would never choose a sport that involved so much jumping to do as a naked man for men and women men and women both sometimes need a little support when you're jumping anyway good thing we're talking about this for some reason they're not out there in the winter though
Marco:
No, we... This is not a very populous place in the winter.
John:
It's too bad it hasn't been that cold.
John:
You get to the point where the bay freezes and you can just walk across it.
Marco:
Well, it's... Yeah, it's not... And it's not at that point now.
Marco:
And we had to have the talk with Adam like, hey, never try to walk on the frozen bay because you could fall through and die.
Marco:
Like, that was a fun talk to have.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Did I ever mention that I bring Adam to school on an e-bike that looks kind of like a yellow school bus version of an e-bike?
John:
No.
John:
I thought he was taking the sand bus.
Marco:
No, so here's the thing.
Marco:
There is bus service to bring him to the school from here.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
they were saying earlier, like, at the end of the summer when they were registering all the students, they were saying, like, because so many more students are here this year because of the virus, and because on the bus, they had to have distancing available on the bus, so they couldn't run the bus at the full capacity.
Marco:
They could only have, like, you know, one kid per seat or every two seats or something like that so that the kids would space out enough.
Marco:
They said that
Marco:
if like any more kids register for the school bus, they would have to go to like a two cohort system of schooling of like, you know, you only go on like a days or B days and the rest of the time you're remote because the buses were going to be too full.
Marco:
And so we said, all right, well, we don't need the bus.
Marco:
We live within, we live about, I think about maybe three quarters of a mile to a mile away, something like that.
Marco:
So we said, look, we can just take bikes and walk sometimes and it's fine.
Marco:
And that worked out great.
Marco:
until you know winter happened uh and then you know we have situations where like it would be somewhat unsafe for us to ride our like two regular bikes across this like slushy icy mile so anticipating this and you know bad weather days i got um there we go yeah it's the rise riz blade
Marco:
This bike is – it's an electric sandbike, so it has the fat tires.
Marco:
Fat tires also work on snow and to some degree ice.
Marco:
And so I wanted a way that I could drive Adam to school basically in bad weather or in cold or snowy conditions that he could ride on the back because they don't make electric sandbikes small enough for Adam to drive himself.
Marco:
Believe me, I've looked –
Marco:
But they do make this kind of like scrambler style electric sand bike that has a long banana style seat so that you can have a passenger sitting behind you.
Marco:
And it has foot pegs and put their feet on and everything.
Marco:
So it's designed to have a passenger that's somebody relatively small, like a child.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I got this thing and I got it in yellow because it is basically our school bus and yellow is the only color that was in stock at the end of the summer.
Marco:
But that's different reasons.
Marco:
But so, so on bad weather days, I drive Adam to school on this and we call it the bus and
Marco:
Even though it is an electric sandbike.
Marco:
And it works great.
Marco:
And today was perfect for it.
Marco:
Because today, the aforementioned snowstorm, we had to ride through like six inches of flooded slush water and part of the ride.
Marco:
And then the rest of the ride was pretty icy and snowy in the morning.
Marco:
rode this thing through it just fine.
Marco:
It's not the first time we've done it.
Marco:
It works fantastically.
Marco:
And so, yeah, we kind of have our own, like, fun, you know, school adventure this year.
Marco:
Like, you know, we're going to school at the beach full time.
Marco:
And because we can't have a car, we don't have the right kind of permit and probably won't be able to get one for many years, I have this weird electric sandbike that I drive my kid to school on sometimes.
John:
Car wouldn't help you anyway because you don't have roads that go up to your house.
John:
Where would you put your car?
Marco:
No, the walks, like the big sidewalks that act as roads are wide enough for one car to just barely fit down them.
Marco:
So some of the year-round residents do have, most of them actually have cars, but you aren't allowed to keep the cars here in the summer because there's too many people around.
Marco:
But in the winter, if you have one of the special permits, you can keep a car as long as you have somewhere on your property that you can park it.
Marco:
Anyway, so someday we might get a permit, but that hasn't happened yet, and we don't know when or if it will ever happen.
Marco:
So, in the meantime, I got this.
Marco:
Now, what people usually will do instead, rather than electric sandbikes, most of the people solve this problem by buying a golf cart, which we could do.
Marco:
You don't need any special permits for that.
Marco:
We could do that as long as we use it in the winter and not the summer.
Marco:
But golf carts are very big and not that cheap and not that easy to get, and I don't really...
Marco:
like them that much like an e-bike is so much more fun like there were there were a few times when in the fall there were some really rainy days and we had some contractors doing stuff in the house and one time they offered like if i just wanted to borrow their golf carts to drive adam to school in the heavy rain i said sure because it had like it had like the roof and little side zip things and i you know i took that school and i had to keep like pulling over to the side to like let other golf carts pass and you know it was a big pain to have such a large vehicle
Marco:
Whereas this thing, this wonderful little e-bike, you just kind of zip around everybody, and it's great.
Marco:
Like, you can fit anywhere.
Marco:
You can pull over really easily.
Marco:
You can ride up on the side of, you know, the little berm if you need to.
Marco:
It takes no space to park it.
Marco:
It stores under the house easily.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
I'm very happy with this thing.
Marco:
I love the world of electric bikes.
Marco:
I think it's wonderful, and I think it's temporary before they get classified as motor vehicles by most states and become much more hard to legally use.
Marco:
But in the current time of them being this kind of weird in-between thing that regulators are mostly ignoring or it's going under their radar, they're just wonderful.
Marco:
They're delightful to ride.
Marco:
It is not at all like riding a bike.
Marco:
And if what you want to do is exercise with a bike, this is not for you at all.
Marco:
And this particular one is a terrible bike to try to pedal manually.
Marco:
Because the seat is so wide, you kind of have to have your knees pointed outwards as opposed to straight down.
Marco:
It's a terrible bike to pedal manually, and they're really heavy.
Marco:
If you just kind of treat the pedals as a technicality and just use the thumb throttle, it's wonderful.
Marco:
And yeah, so most people don't need something like this.
Marco:
But if you do, this is quite a fun thing.
Casey:
That sounds like pretty much everything you ever buy.
John:
I like that.
John:
It's got all these gears, but it's like, do you really need all this mechanical advantage of the electric motors doing it for you?
Marco:
Yeah, I, again, I've tried pedaling this, and I have a different kind of e-bike, because I mentioned I have two.
Marco:
I have a different kind for the sand, a nice little Saunders one.
Marco:
That is like a more traditional style seat and everything.
Marco:
So, like, you can pedal that one manually.
Marco:
It's heavy.
Marco:
And when I ride that on the beach, I usually set the assist level down a little bit and I pedal along with it.
Marco:
So that way I'm getting some exercise, but I'm able to use the assist resistance level to control how much exercise I'm needing to put into it.
Marco:
So if I'm going through a really tough section, I can amp it up a little bit.
Marco:
Or if I want more of a workout, I can turn it down a little bit.
Marco:
This thing, though, the Rise Blade with the big banana seat, you basically can't pedal it manually.
Marco:
It's so hard to do.
Marco:
It's so awkward.
Marco:
It's not at all made for that.
Marco:
But if you need just something that is small, inexpensive, and street legal almost everywhere, including here, then it's pretty great for that.