The Hotness Has to Go Somewhere
God, I hate this freaking LG monitor.
It's been crooked all night.
I can't fix it.
It's like one degree off.
Like I just, but I can't figure out, it's like John's audio sync.
I can't like straight, just freaking LG, so fine.
I was in Costco the other day going through like the monitor section and I was saying like,
LG always makes bad stands and I just go there and I hit them with my finger and you just go online tap tap tap and the LG ones would just like shake like little spinning plates little bobble heads you know because they would just keep shaking as you went this is so hilarious like the like the the Alienware Asus one would just move once and come right back and it's like bad shocks on your car it's so bad
I've been doing a lot of driving today in the Defender.
Oh, and?
It's interesting.
There's a lot about it I like.
There's a lot about it that is, you know, going back to the past.
Like, I had to get gassed today.
Oh.
i'm so sorry well and and i so i i got the gas at the pump and it was all you know gross and it's you know i'm like relearning like oh do pumps take wireless payments now no um and at least costco does this one i mean this is you know some random one upstate right then
At least this one wasn't advanced enough to have ads playing at me while I was standing there pumping my dinosaurs into my car.
But I'm so out of practice that I pumped the gas and then I drove over to one of the parking spots to go inside to the soda factory.
And I had totally left the gas cap totally off.
like not just the metal door like the the cap wasn't even screwed back on like i just totally forgot just normally the car will have a warning light for that because it'll like the pressure on the gas tank will be weird and it'll put on a light yeah and maybe you know had i driven more than 30 feet maybe that maybe it would have told me that but i just like drove like 30 feet and parked at least you at least you disconnected the you know took the nozzle out didn't just drive away with it attached to the car yeah that's true right right right
yeah so it's yeah but anyway so i one thing i i realized so you know i did i did i mean geez a lot of driving today probably six hours of driving today you know got finally a lot of carplay use in and one thing i've been waiting for this i've been waiting for this yeah oh first of all before i forget the key fob is ridiculous like this thing let's let me have my pocket here
this is bigger than an AirPods pro case.
Like it should be to punish you.
It should be shaped like the defender.
It should be like, it should be really tall and boxy and have huge wheels on it and lots of ground clearance.
This thing.
I mean, I don't,
I don't think it's that much bigger than a lot of modern car key fobs.
I've just been spoiled by Tesla's nice little, like, tiny mini Tesla thing.
So there's that.
Anyway.
Oh, and another funny thing.
So, you know, the Defender, it's a very tall vehicle, as discussed.
Lots of headroom for John's hair.
But, yeah, very tall vehicle.
And...
I've attached a roof box to the top of it for reasons.
And I've never done this before.
I've never used one of these boxes before.
But as part of my beach preparedness, I wanted to carry with me recovery gear if I get stuck.
So that includes things like I have Max Trax traction boards.
I have a giant, one of those elastic tow ropes and some soft shackles and other towing equipment, basically, in case I need to be towed out or tow someone else out.
And that's all pretty bulky, big stuff.
And so I figured, let me get the smallest roof box I can and put it all in there.
That way I can load the back.
Because when I'm actually using this vehicle,
the trunk is usually full of something, whether it's groceries or whether it's like our luggage coming to and from upstate or whatever, like the trunk is usually full.
So I don't, I didn't want to spend trunk space on all this recovery gear because frankly, trunk space is not that generous in this vehicle.
Okay.
So I got to pause you again.
Yeah.
I got to pause you again.
You bought this probably not inexpensive toy for yourself on the promise that it would be excellent on the sand.
And then immediately just thumbs your nose at it by putting a bunch of sand recovery junk on top of it because you assume that it will inevitably and eventually get stuck.
Well, he already had that same recovery stock.
Yeah, I had it all in the FJ taking up its entire trunk.
That's right.
All right, all right.
I'll begrudgingly allow it.
And just to be clear, you're talking about like a Thule or equivalent that you put on the top.
Is that right?
Yeah, it's this Inno thing.
I looked at the, is it Thule?
I thought it was Thule.
I very well have that.
I might have that dead wrong.
I'm not sure.
Why would you pronounce?
Anyway, maybe they do.
I mean, that's certainly not a charitable way to pronounce that.
But anyway, so I got this Inno thing because I looked at the Thule, I looked at their offerings, and this Inno one was lower than what they offered without going to their really long, super long ski one.
Because I don't need a lot of height.
I just need some storage volume.
This one's only nine cubic feet.
Because I didn't want to be sticking up even further into the sky than I already am.
This is going to make your car even more aerodynamic.
Right.
But anyway, so I attached this box, and so now the vehicle is even taller.
So even without this box, I'm pretty sure it would not fit in my Westchester garage.
I think my garage is too short.
It's an old house.
The garage is probably from somewhere around the 1960s.
So, you know, there's no way this vehicle is fitting in the garage even just with like the roof rails on it.
And then when I add another, you know, whatever this is, like 10 inches on top of that, forget it.
And it was so high that I even – I took it around today.
Like I'm trying to drive it as much as possible even when I'm in Westchester where I could just drive, you know, the Tesla.
But –
I wanted to just get a feel for the vehicle, get a feel for how big is this thing, get used to the visibility and the handling and everything just so I can drive it better because I've never driven a vehicle this big, really.
And so I drive it so carefully.
I drive it like when I rented that RV.
I drive it like that.
but anyway so i'm driving around town getting groceries and everything and i'm like can i fit under these parking garage gates like i don't even know and like one of them like i was pulled into the whole foods garage and and it says like you know clearance eight foot two and i'm like hmm that doesn't sound that high it doesn't look that high uh let me you know i go under it really slowly i'm watching through the sunroof like watching the roof box and like i cleared it but i didn't look like i had a
it didn't seem that generous so i'm like okay i'll make it under like bridges and stuff but maybe not low parking garages i'm getting used to having the larger vehicle but anyway carplay so for the first half of today i'm using carplay and this is wireless carplay great you know super super nice and
And it's fine.
The only thing is that everything is laggy.
Like, you know, you hit pause on the steering wheel or, you know, you tap up, tap pause on the screen or whatever.
And it takes like a half a second to a second to actually respond.
And, you know, and that's, that's to almost everything.
So play, pause, seek back, seek forward, um, the Siri button.
And even like when a navigation prompt would interrupt the audio, um,
the audio would keep playing in the podcast app for like an extra half second to second before it actually, like while it's being ducked, it would get ducked, but you'd still hear what the person was saying for another half second.
And then it would take another half second lag on the way out.
And I realized, I remember like,
I have a couple of these little tiny, they almost look like crappy little Android GPS units.
They have little mounts for cars that are CarPlay test rigs for me.
They're like $200 from Amazon, way better than my old test rigs where I have to actually have a head unit and everything.
And they're literally just like cheap Android tablets, basically, in a car enclosure with a DC in.
And one of those that I have, the first one I got was wired CarPlay.
I later got one that had wireless support, which makes debugging way easier.
Because you can have a USB port on the phone.
Anyway, so I noticed with those that wireless car play on those is very laggy.
And so I ended up really hating using the wireless one because, again, you'd hit play pause and it would be wait and then it would go.
And if you plug in wired, it's like no lag at all.
I seem to have that same lag doing wireless CarPlay in this.
And I'm wondering, is every wireless CarPlay vehicle like this?
Like, is this just a thing with wireless CarPlay?
Yes.
Well, I shouldn't say that with such authority.
In my experience with, admittedly, a third-party dongle bridging between the wired-only CarPlay and my phone...
So, you know, this is maybe not the best example, but I noticed that my little dongle, which I do like, and if I remember, I'll put a link in the show notes, actually, and there are newer versions than what I have.
But anyways, my dongle, there is definitely a lag as compared to when I'm directly connected.
I personally don't find the lag to be
Or perhaps I've just gotten used to it.
But as we all know, of the three of us, I am the least discerning by a mile.
So consider your source here.
But yes, I've noticed with my car, there is a dramatic difference between when I am on the rare occasions when I physically plug in, if I'm going to be in the car for like multiple hours at a time.
or 99% of my use when I'm just using that dongle thing.
Yeah, there's definitely a noticeable lag.
Now, I have updated the software on that dongle, which is an adventure because it clearly is right out of China, and not everything has been translated, and the things that have been translated have been, air quote, translated.
But nevertheless, I have been able to successfully update the software a few times, and it's gotten better, but it's still laggier for sure.
And...
For me, I will take that trade-off for not having to plug in because my trips, generally speaking, and this might not be true for you, Marco, but for me, my trips are like anywhere between five and 20 minutes tops 99% of the time.
And so it's not long enough usually to bother plugging in my phone, but long enough that, hey, it would be nice if CarPlay came on.
And so this dongle that I bought, which at the time, or it was a gift actually, but I think it's like $130 or something like that, well worth the money to me, even considering the lag, because it's just convenient to keep your phone in your pocket and be able to do all the CarPlay stuff and not have to worry about plugging and unplugging.
This is probably the first worldiest of first world problems.
I acknowledge that.
But I think that juice is worth the squeeze, but...
But yes, there is definitely a noticeable lag and it's, it's stinky, but you get used to it.
Because, because I noticed like when, so, you know, there was a, there was a period today where Tiff and Adam were going into a store and I had, I had, I guess I got to like wait in the car and play with all the settings and everything for the, really for the first time that I actually had like a good amount of time with it.
And I went through all the menus and put all the settings and I actually found there was a setting to turn off wireless CarPlay.
and to then force it to be wired.
So I love that that setting is there, so I got to try it back to back, and it's night and day difference.
When I turn it off, when I'm wired CarPlay, it responds much more quickly than even Bluetooth in other cars.
Like Bluetooth in the Tesla, which doesn't support CarPlay.
Bluetooth there is kind of in between these two in terms of lag.
And then just wired CarPlay, it was...
like extremely delightfully fast.
Like I was so pleased.
I was like giddy, like how quickly it was responding to everything when wired.
And then sure enough, go back to wireless and it's, you know, very laggy and frustrating.
And so I think I'm actually going to keep it wired for a while.
Cause again, as you mentioned, my usage pattern is a little bit different.
Like I tend to go on a small number of long trips, but,
rather than a high number of short ones.
So for my usage pattern, I think it's probably worth the hassle to plug in to get that satisfaction of having it be really nice as I'm using it.
Plus having it charge while you drive, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I'm going to play with that back and forth a little bit here and there and maybe report back later.
But I was kind of surprised.
I would expect wireless CarPlay... CarPlay didn't exist with wireless at first.
I would imagine down the road when they added it, I would expect that one of the design requirements if they're going to add it would be no major downsides in the experience compared to wired.
I'd say it's a pretty major downside.
It's laggy enough that it's weird.
Yeah, I mean, again, maybe I've gotten used to it because I've had this dongle since around the time I got my first vaccination.
So I guess it was like a little over a year now.
And I definitely have gotten used to it.
And it's gotten better, like I said.
If I was in your shoes, I would probably plug in, just like you said.
But seriously, if you set your expectations appropriately, and if you're not quite as discerning as Marco or John, then I think you'll find...
wireless CarPlay to be well within the realm of acceptable.
But as much as I'm giving you a hard time, I don't disagree with anything you've said.
And even I can notice that there's definitely more latency when you're wireless.
Well, keep in mind, the hardware in cars is pretty universally awful.
Like,
extremely behind the times, very old, very slow stuff, and Apple doesn't control both ends of this.
If you want to know how fast Apple can do a wireless display thing, just use Sidecar on a Mac and an iPad, and it's incredibly responsive, right?
Because Apple controls both sides of that.
They control the hardware and the software on both ends.
Here, they can require that the carmaker support such and such a protocol on these ports with this thing, but they can't control what hardware carmakers use, and
I continue to be amazed that no matter how expensive the car is, they are seemingly using like 386s inside there with like no memory, extremely slow.
Like Tesla probably has the most powerful hardware of any car because they use semi-modern components, NVIDIA GPU, so on and so forth.
And even in that case, it could sometimes feel less responsive than an iPad, right?
If Apple wants to do something for the car industry, instead of making a car, instead of trying to figure out self-driving, they could just donate a bunch of old A-whatever chips to car makers because they're just so much faster and more capable than what is in place.
And I don't think...
You know, your brand of car has a particular reputation for having, you know, very good infotainment hardware in it.
You know, some brands are better than others, but, you know, it's it's grim out there.
So I'm glad that the wired one works better, but I'm not shocked that the wireless one is pretty terrible.
Well, and there are some other considerations.
It's like when we send computers to space, they have to be extremely rugged and extremely reliable and be able to tolerate.
Yeah, that's what the car makers say.
That's why we're using 42 nanometer.
But yeah, in cars, you have to tolerate huge temperature extremes.
It has to work in the freezing cold and the super hot.
It has to work in direct sun.
Good luck getting your iPhone to work in direct sun for very long.
There are different requirements there.
And so I understand why it would be more conservative there.
I'm apparently the king of tangents today, and this is the show of the trios of the kings of tangents, but here we are.
I have noticed, I don't know if this is something that's happened recently or I'm just noticing it more recently.
Do you guys find that when you are outside, particularly in the summer, your phone or your iPad, I've had this happen on my 2018 iPad Pro and my iPhone 13 Pro, all of a sudden the brightness will like collapse and it'll be considerably less bright.
Yeah, that's thermal overloading.
That's what I was going to say.
I assume it cools down a bit, and then it gets bright for like half a second, and then it gets back dim again.
I don't feel like this is something that's been going on for long.
I feel like this has happened in a semi-recent software update.
Again, might be bananas.
I might have this all wrong.
No, it's just because it's August.
That's what I was going to say.
Maybe it's the time of year.
This happens every summer because, yeah, that is the phone going into thermal protection mode, basically.
There's a couple of levels to it.
One of the levels is, oh, crap, I'm getting too hot.
Turn the screen brightness down.
And then if it still gets too hot, then you'll actually see it go into thermal shutdown where it'll show that little alert message saying, sorry, you can't use me right now.
Okay, so I'm glad it's not just me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Okay, so going back to what you were saying, what do you think of the CarPlay experience?
And I don't mean that flippantly.
I know you've used CarPlay on occasion, certainly during testing, but this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first or one of the first real honest-to-goodness genuine uses out in the quote-unquote wild.
Do you like it?
Do you think it's good?
Are you somehow yearning for your Tesla for some reason?
Well, specifically with regard to infotainment for some reason?
What do you think of CarPlay as an idea?
So when I, you know, using the Tesla for the last five, six years, so almost seven, seven years.
Wow.
Using the Tesla for all that time, my solution not having CarPlay has been, I just got a Proclip USA phone mount and just mounted the phone, you know, next to the steering wheel on the dash.
And so it's, you know, just outside of my field of view, like, you know, diagonally down into the right a little bit.
And I just, and I plug it in.
So it's charging all the time.
It communicates with the car of Bluetooth.
So I have all that integration.
So I, and I just use, you know, Waze, my mapping app on the phone as a regular phone app.
And so, you know, if I have to like bounce over to music or overcast, like I can do that, but it's not safe to be doing a lot of interaction with the phone.
So the idea of CarPlay would be, hey, let's, you know, restrict what can be done
and optimize it for a larger screen with larger tap or wheel targets and fewer interactions possible.
Don't show any kind of messages that could be distracting with text.
So all of those benefits with CarPlay are there and are real.
I do find, though, that it is a little frustrating how limiting it is.
But, you know, in a way, that's good for me.
Like, I don't want all the capabilities of the full phone when I am driving.
It's unsafe to use all those capabilities.
I don't want those available to me and I don't want to have to use them.
It's unsafe at any speed.
Right.
But at the same time, if doing something in CarPlay is clunky, then that will result in my eyes being distracted from the road for a longer period of time.
So I don't know if it's... I'm sure it's safer overall, probably, but...
Self-control with what you're doing is way more important than the type of screen that you're looking at for the actions that you're doing.
And if CarPlay... By being so limited, I'm not sure if it's actually...
going to be that much of a gain over what i was doing before just having the phone and amount again having the phone and amount and just practicing reasonable self-control and not like texting or anything like that that i've driven that way for you know almost seven years or whatever and it's been fine it's been great um and i've had all the abilities of the mapping apps like yeah so the for the first part of this morning i um i tried using ways for the first leg of the trip and
And its CarPlay view just was buggy and just was displaying an empty map and just wouldn't load the map.
And I tried force-quitting Waze.
I tried restarting CarPlay.
It just didn't work for whatever reason.
I'm on the beta.
It could be that.
Who knows?
It's beta life.
Welcome to summertime, being an iPhone developer.
But...
I just couldn't use Waze.
I had to switch over to Apple Maps.
And it was frustrating that I couldn't use my preferred mapping app.
I tried it again later in the day.
It worked fine.
But all that time, Waze, like the iPhone app, would have worked fine.
It's just their CarPlay view that was buggy.
So I had to deal with the fact that, well...
I'm using it through the special view mode and I have to use it through this mode.
I don't have a cell phone mount for this car yet.
And so it was kind of annoying that I had to deal with this buggier side of Apple's software or Waze's software.
One of them, whoever was responsible for this not showing a map, you know, I had to deal with that.
And I know from Overcast development, CarPlay is buggy, and it doesn't get a lot of attention.
And so when there are weird little CarPlay quirks, as a developer, you kind of just have to deal with them.
And you have relatively little control over what is shown on a CarPlay screen.
You have some control.
You're kind of working with these pre-made template styles and everything, but certain little behavioral details you can't control.
So anyway, so...
it is kind of a mixed bag compared to just having the phone available to you in a mount.
I do intend to just, you know, live with it this way for a long time just so I can experience more of it and so I can be a better CarPlay developer for my app, you know, actually having used it more.
Like, that's fairly important to me for my app.
So I'm going to keep using it this way.
I'm like, I'm not going to switch over to a phone mount quite yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if long term I stick a phone mount in this car.
But I don't know.
We'll see.
I'm sure people will send us this link, which I'm sure all of us have already seen by now, but we'll put it in the show notes just so people know.
There was this like Swedish study on touchscreens versus physical controls that has been going around the Internet for the past week or two.
You know, and surprise, surprise, they found that physical controls have an advantage over touchscreens in terms of distraction.
I have to say, though, I'm not convinced by the rigor of this issue.
study it seems like they did a small number of perhaps not entirely representative tests and the results are not particularly as dramatic as the the you know the distribution of this magazine would lead you to believe if you actually look at them so i don't think this is you know i'm i don't i don't think this is a great study but i do think that the biggest factor in terms of distraction uh is kind of what marco was getting at but in terms of like
Well, not so much self-control, but what you actually use the touchscreen for.
So in all the cases, whether Marco has his phone mounted or he's using CarPlay, he's not using the touchscreen to adjust where the airflow is going or to turn the fan up or to turn his seat heaters on or to adjust his side mirrors or anything like that in the Land Rover.
Right.
There are no car controls there.
There are just the map and whatever phone things he might be doing.
And the self-control is, okay, if you have access to the full phone, don't use all the features of the phone.
But there's no amount of self-control he needs to not use a touchscreen to turn on seat heaters, right?
That's just not on the touchscreen.
It's not on...
In the defense of both this comparison and of your example here, first of all, I think the tasks that the comparison thing had them do, I'm not sure we're super realistic for actually making this judgment.
There are some esoteric stuff in there.
And secondly...
When you have – like right now, I'm learning a new car because I just got this car.
I'm still learning.
I've never had this brand before, so I don't know their conventions.
As I'm learning this car, even the physical controls have a learning curve.
I have to figure out where they are and how they work.
That's one of the things the study did well, though.
It let people sort of study ahead of time so they weren't doing a learning process.
So everybody who was being tested had – you were able to sort of figure out the controls in a stationary car and get it down pat.
Oh, okay.
That's what they were trying to test.
I still don't think it's a particularly representative test because the things they had them do are not particularly representative.
If you look at the results, it's not like the touchscreens all lose to all physical controls.
It's more of a mixed bag.
You'd have to study this more to...
it'd have to be more rigorous than a magazine article but but they did at the very least do that and say look we're not we know it's hard to figure stuff out and like i said physical controls can be stuff to figure out but just like study ahead of time take two hours and basically what they were trying to do is like okay you know exactly how it works now speed run it right now you know you're not looking for any buttons you know where the buttons are you know where they are on the menus you've done it a hundred times before but now do it as fast as you can because this test was like
You know, how quickly can you do it?
How much ground does the car cover when you're distracted?
And they tracked where their eyeballs were and where they were looking.
Another big factor in this is how low down on the dash is the screen versus how high up is your phone mounted and stuff like that.
Again, I don't think this is a great study, but I personally believe that a smart mix of physical controls and screen is the best solution.
And anything that goes all in one direction or the other is probably leaving money on the table in terms of using the interface for what it's best for.
But also, you know, just to finish my argument also, like, you know, when I learned the touchscreen in the Tesla over six years or whatever, I became very fast with it.
The downside, though, and right now I'm very slow with the Land Rover because, again, it's unfamiliar to me.
The downside, though, is when you learn those touchscreen...
then after six months they got a new freaking designer and they move everything around and so it's like it's like you're forced all of a sudden unexpectedly to have a new car in the morning in a bad way it's like wait a minute where do my controls go now everything looks different and has been moved around and reorganized because some designer from facebook got into tesla and just decided to have a fun with it like like that kind of stuff like that drove me nuts with the with tesla and that's going to happen with you know many touchscreen things that are run by these more kind of tech forward companies like
That's unlikely to happen with BMW, Toyota.
They're not going to be changing their interfaces through software updates, probably, I hope.
That's going to be less of a thing with these traditional companies.
With somebody like Tesla or Rivian, these very techie companies, I think it's going to keep being a problem where...
You get used to all the controls.
And again, I think once you're used to it, I think this is the kind of thing that I bet in a few years they're going to do more studies like this.
And over time, there's going to end up being no difference between touch screens and physical controls for most people when they are familiar with them.
yeah i don't know about that because the big the big barrel first of all there are things that touchscreens are just plain worse for but even for the things where they might be as good once you thoroughly understand where everything is the problem they have is what i just talked about before touchscreens make you wait between steps due to slower hardware physical controls don't make you wait you can press the button press the button press the button press the button the
buttons you know there's no lag there's no waiting it's a physical interface right it's not like you need to push the button in six inches and hold it for two seconds right whereas if you know it's two menus deep and you know exactly where it is you don't even need to look at the screen you still need to wait for the next screen to load and right now there is no car interface where there is no screen waiting and i would imagine that even an apple one on a fancy a whatever chip in a fantasy apple car would also make you wait so they could play some stupid 120 frames per second animation that takes 0.25 seconds
This argument is presuming that things are in subscreens or subpanels.
When people criticize Tesla's design for being all touchscreen, that applies much more to their current vehicles than to the one I have, which was before they cut the steering wheel in half and got rid of the shifter and everything.
The one I have, and pretty much every Model S before 2020 or whenever that change happened, every Model S, every Model X before that time,
they had a small number of levers and buttons and then a lot of stuff on the touch screen.
But then the touch screen, first of all, was giant.
And it would, it would have a lot of controls along that, especially on that bottom strip that you didn't have to bring up a subscreen.
And so it was kind of like having a physical control array in the sense that you could always count on, on the, this certain array of very common controls, like, you know, the fan speed and the defroster and everything that was all on the bottom row.
in like the in this kind of constant toolbar that was down there and so when tuck screens are done well like that one generally was before this stupid new designer came in when these things are done well and i also had you know a few physical controls for like the most common stuff so you know the the shifter you know like the you know drive direction shifter um you know obviously things like turn signals windshield wipers um you know the the you say obviously but they basically got rid of a physical physical control for that and now it's a
capacitive button on the steering wheel i know anyway i love that that you think that you had physical controls for all the most obvious things so i have a volkswagen golf and i have a volvo suv and i can tell you in aaron's volvo the hvac controls are on the touchscreen and mine have a physical dial that you that you twist and only one of those cars can i adjust the temperature without looking down and it's my car i
In the Tesla, before the stupid software update last winter, in the Tesla, you could have done that.
You're just saying the controls are always visible.
It was in the corner.
It's right there.
You could literally just reach down and boot.
I'm telling you, after driving one of these for many years, I was just as fast with that as I ever was with physical controls in any of my other vehicles.
I think that's the type of thing you need to test, but I can tell you in car reviews, everybody hates it when the HVAC controls are touched.
Yes, almost all the car manufacturers make them visible all the time.
They dedicate a part of the screen to it.
It never changes.
They even lay them out like physical controls.
They're always there.
They have the temperature things.
It's almost like they took a picture of the physical controls and just made it on a touchscreen.
Some of them even have haptics, so you can actually tell when you push the button, so you don't have to look down to see the button highlight, and yet they are universally reviled in favor of actual physical buttons for those controls.
Is that just old fogeyism?
Maybe.
But these are car reviewers and they spend a lot of time in these cars.
They don't just drive them for five minutes, right?
So I'd have to think that there's something to the idea that even with no nesting, even with entirely visible controls, even with years spent in knowing exactly where it is, that it's still ever so slightly more distracting, slower to do the touchscreens.
That may have to do with responsiveness.
It could be if we get good haptic feedback on screens and they're very responsive and people have the confidence that when the same confidence they have of pressing a button, because when you press a button or turn a dial, there's that physical feedback through your body that gives you the confidence that you're doing the thing you thought you were doing, right?
If you can get a touchscreen that is that responsive and that communicative, then yes, I agree, a fixed set of functions that never goes away that is that communicative will be equivalent to physical.
But we're definitely not there yet with current cars.
Most of them don't even have any sort of haptic feedback, let alone haptic feedback that is as reliable and reassuring as turning a knob or pressing a physical button.
That's why the Fords have a big, giant plastic knob poking out of the middle of their touchscreen for a bunch of functions.
Right.
I don't know if that's why they have it, but they do have that, and I think people like it, and car reviewers like it as well.
I think that's a silly solution.
I think it's better if you're going to have physical controls, just don't shove them in the center of your screen, but whatever.
I do think that the trend of putting more and more stuff on touchscreens, part of it is fads and fashions and looking high-tech, and part of it is cost savings, and both of those reasons are not the right reason to be doing that.
The only reason to be moving things to the touchscreen is because
they're better in measurable ways, in enough measurable ways than the physical equivalent.
And right now, that is not the motivating factor for touchscreens in cars.
It's the other two things 90% of the time.
Oh, yeah.
And I agree.
Physical controls, I would rather have them, and they are the nicer and probably better option in many ways.
But I think the difference between...
a control that has a physical knob or button versus a touchscreen that is well-designed where things are always in predictable spots that you can learn, I don't think that's that big of a difference as much as you guys are saying.
Oh, I disagree so much.
I disagree so much.
And what would I know?
I've only used these cars for years.
Well, but here's the thing, though.
But you're getting myopic because you're used to the Tesla and nothing else.
So I put a link to a picture.
That's like saying, like, when the iPhone first came out, oh, touchscreens are crappy because all the other touchscreens on the market suck.
No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
You can make a good one.
No, no, no, no, no.
You're missing my point.
So I put a link in the show notes.
This is not my picture, but this is a picture of Aaron's Volvo.
I'm sorry, an equivalent to Aaron's Volvo.
And you can see in a huge font in the two bottom corners are the temperature, which just so happens to be 69 degrees.
Nice.
So those numbers never leave the screen.
They are always there.
Always.
They are always there.
And I find it so much easier to adjust the temperature on my car where I can blindly reach down and twist than having to tap that number and then reach up to the plus button that I know is roughly, I know roughly where it is, but I have to plus, plus, plus, plus, or minus, minus, minus, minus.
That's a nested control.
That's not what Margot was talking about.
Yeah, like the old Tesla design, it had the up and down arrows right on the number.
They're always there.
And that's what I was saying.
The car viewers really hate that.
They really hate it when the supposedly new Ferrari has touchscreen controls for climate.
And they're the Tesla style.
Always visible.
No nesting.
No pop-up menu.
Again, just like you took a picture of the physical controls and painted it onto the screen.
all right i mean i i maybe i'm wrong but i i the volvo interface is bad because it's making you do a sub menu that's terrible oh no agree i'm not trying to i'm not trying to defend the volvo interface what i'm trying to say is i live this i go back and forth at several times a week i'll be either driving aaron's car or in aaron's car and then other days i'll be in my car so i am going back and forth weekly and i see and live the differences between the two and for something like hvac oh my gosh give me a physical control please and thank you
We are sponsored this week by Snap AR.
Snap AR is an ecosystem of products, programs, and people supporting development, distribution, and discovery of augmented reality.
Snap AR is built by, yes, that, Snap Inc., the same company that creates Snapchat.
You know, many people think of Snapchat, the first thing that comes to mind is the social platform for Gen Z. You know, people can puke rainbows and grow dog ears and turn your expressions into cry face using AR and, you know, share these fun moments with your friends.
But,
Snapchat's parent company, Snap, Inc., has also invested more than 10 years into the underlying AR technology that powers Snapchat.
Over 250 million Snapchatters engage with AR moments over 6 billion times on the platform every day.
And Snap has taken all the learnings from building the Snapchat platform to create SnapAR, an ecosystem that gives developers access to the underlying AR tech that powers Snapchat so you can use it in your own mobile apps.
They have Lens Studio, an IDE designed to create best-in-class AR experiences for Snapchat, Spectacles, and mobile developers' apps.
They have something called Camera Kit, an AR SDK that brings the power of Snap's AR camera to your app.
Creative Kit, which enables one-tap visual sharing from a developer's app or website to Snapchat.
And so much more.
SnapAR powers experiences built by big brands like Puma, Live Nation, and Vogue to change how we shop, play, and connect with each other digitally and in real life.
And they can also bring tons of value to various industries including AR fashion, gaming, art, retail, immersive education, entertainment experiences, live events, navigation, utility, and beyond.
You know, AR use cases are as endless as your creativity can imagine.
Learn how you can bring the power of Snap's AR platform into your mobile apps.
Join the community and download Lens Studio, an IDE built from the ground up for developing AR experiences.
All of this at SnapAR.com.
That's SnapAR.com.
Thank you so much to SnapAR for sponsoring our show.
Let's do some feedback.
I don't necessarily want to attribute this feedback.
Do we want to attribute this feedback?
There's no request for anonymity, but you can provide it.
Optional anonymity.
Okay.
I am going to executively declare anonymity for this individual who provided the following feedback.
I worked on the S3 team in the earlier years.
We specifically changed the licensing for our docs to make it unambiguous that other products, even competitors, could clone the API.
I think this was maybe 2009.
Our director realized we had an opportunity to define the de facto standard API, as John articulated well.
I think this was like two episodes ago.
We knew it was a win for us when other products advertised an S3-compatible API.
Not long after Google Cloud launched, they not only copied our API, but also error codes and parts of our documentation.
This was all back before AWS even provided a supposed client library.
The executive team didn't want to have to deal with version updates, library compatibility, et cetera.
It took a long time to convince them that AWS should provide a client library with a dedicated team to support it.
So thank you, Anonymous.
And when they did, it was 19,000 lines of PHP or whatever the hell it was.
Oh, goodness.
All right.
So let's talk about CarPlay navigation voice volume.
And I'm not...
i'm not really sure what to make of this or particularly the second half of this but the first half makes sense uh daniel finley writes there used to be a setting in maps to adjust the volume but this has since been removed in ios 15 and there's a old nine to five mac link that we'll put in the show notes about that but john tell me about the second half of this which i'm a little actually for the first one it's fun because like the the setting that used to be in maps apparently you can still search for it in settings and the match will come up when you tap the search result it doesn't take you anywhere because the solid the setting has been removed right
All right, so Josh Biggs has this feedback.
Siri's volume on CarPlay can only be adjusted while Siri is speaking from the driver's side volume control on the steering wheel.
So they're saying, like, of all the things that we tried, no, no, no.
Not only do you have to change it while it's speaking, not only do you have to.
Well, we told you that.
You can't change it on the phone, and you can't change it on the console.
You can only change it with the steering wheel control.
Yeah, see, that's new to me.
which i'm not entirely sure i tried that i'm not entirely sure i believe that lots of people sent me like we saw last week you know pictures of all my toyota has a thing called voice and it has this option for words no this toyota did not have that option now this was a fleet car it was a rental it's different than other things people ask me why i didn't use the built-in nav there was no built-in nav when you went to the built-in nav thing it's like you should option navigation contact toyota or whatever like so fleet cars are different or whatever but i'm pretty sure that wouldn't have worked either
That is really, really weird.
But just FYI, if you happen to have a car and you tried all the things we listed before, here's one more to try.
While seriously speaking, steering wheel control only.
Seems unlikely, but try it.
If somebody can independently verify this one way or the other, I'd love to know.
Because I'm not trying to say that Josh Biggs is wrong, and that's the person who wrote in, but this strikes me as extraordinarily unusual.
So Josh very well may be right, but I would love to have some independence.
It'd be totally dumb if it was true, because what sense does that make?
None.
Right.
Exactly.
It's not Josh that I have a problem with.
It's Toyota.
Matt Rigby writes, and actually, even before I get to Matt Rigby's feedback, I would like to thank everyone for the kind notes about our baby, you know, how do you get ready for a baby discussion?
There were a lot of people that said some very, very kind things.
And I will speak for all three of us in saying we really appreciate that.
And that was very kind of you.
Now, specifically with Matt Rigby's feedback, I'm writing on behalf of my partner who is a postpartum doula to say that postpartum doulas are a thing.
They can fulfill a ton of the needs you touched on, especially for new parents who have recently moved and are without social connections or far away from family.
Or just for new parents who have trouble letting in someone they'd otherwise be asking a favor of.
Unlike a birth doula, postpartum doulas work mostly with families once they're home from the hospital or have had the baby.
They can assist with things like recommendations of medical specialists and local groups while you're too overwhelmed to look
basic coaching for new parents, coming over and running a load of laundry, watching a new baby for 30 minutes, bringing over snacks, prepared meals, et cetera.
They usually work on a sliding scale that's, shall we say, cheaper than software developers.
You can read more at donut.org.
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
Yeah, I can strongly.
I didn't do a postpartum doula over here because I didn't frankly know those existed.
But we did have a regular doula for the birth process and the lead up to it.
and she proved to be extremely helpful and you know they're basically like you know kind of birth coaches um and and they can teach you through the process they can answer a lot of questions beforehand and then you know during the process they can you know not only help you through it and coach you through it but also kind of be an advocate for you um with in terms of like what you know what's going on medically and stuff and that's also extremely valuable so i can recommend looking into that if you uh if you can and if you can find somebody good
It's kind of like getting a lawyer to represent you or when you're doing real estate.
What is it called?
Like a buyer's agent?
Like someone involved in the process who actually has your needs, who's actually representing you.
And you would think, oh, my doctor has my needs in mind.
But actually having a doula to advocate for you during labor and delivery is incredibly useful because they know what they're doing.
They have experience with it.
And you may not be – neither one of you may be in the best position to –
advocate for what you want and need uh in the strongest way it's good to have someone with experience and then postpartum doula i also didn't know it was a thing yeah i'm sure my wife did but that's why we put this feedback in there now you listener know as well
So I think we might, might be able to avoid a 45-minute discussion about the app channels this week.
But I would like to know, no promises, Marco.
I would like to know how your test went of recording the 4K Fios channel standby banner.
To recap, we were unsure whether or not if you set channels to record the channels app, to record...
the files channel that broadcast in 4k to record they're like hey we're not airing anything right now would that come through as 4k yes or no and you said you would give it a shot and apparently you have i did and it's not it's 1080 now it wasn't a broadcast it was just it was just the banner thing so and if you look at the banner it lists a broadcast that is in the past so i'm not sure what the deal is but no 1080 so far i'll try it if i ever catch it in a broadcast
Yeah, I would not be surprised necessarily if it did not record in 4K, but I did ask my buddy John about it, and I'm pretty sure he said that it should come through as 4K, but no promises.
And then, so we got some really good feedback from Colin Weir that had a map attached to it that...
It makes my skin crawl.
I'm offended by how awful this map is.
But let me talk about the feedback.
So Colin Weir writes, to get 4K over the air, you need to live in a market where your local channels have upgraded to ATSC 3.0.
These deployments are few and far between.
And much like cable, the content is not widely available.
Even if your local network is broadcasting ATSC 3.0, most of the content is probably still 720p.
And so Colin provides a link to a website where this god-awful map exists.
And if you're not American, this probably won't be quite as offensive to you.
But this map doesn't have any intelligible boundaries for the purposes of locating yourself.
Like, I understand these boundaries...
can you not find yourself on a map of the u.s i mean roughly but my state is not a wee little state like yours is mine is relatively large and i don't live in a you don't know where you are in that state you're just somewhere in there looking at this map no i don't know where i am in the state i think i'm in the orange section you need to brush up on your geography maybe you get one of those map of the united states puzzles where you have little wooden pieces but shaped by each state yeah we have it we have i don't know where you are in the state but that's you know i'm allowed to not know because we don't live there
Well, anyway, I don't know.
I hate this map.
I viscerally hate this map.
But be that as it may, this is useful feedback and I do appreciate it.
So do you live in one of these areas?
Because I'm not even going to try to guess for you.
So the three categories in a legend are on the air with ATSC 3.0.
I guess that's the good one.
It's like, you've got it.
You've got ATSC 3.0.
Good for you.
That's orange.
then readying broadcast is blue and then announced target market is blackish or dark blue uh both of those colors mean you don't got it and it's just a question of when will it come who knows and then there's gray areas which is like not even on anyone's radar no no timeline announced tough luck to you uh my uh where my island is gray yeah my where i live is blue which means readying broadcast so i don't know how long they're going to be readying but who knows um
colin continues the best way to get high quality 4k content is to have it fall off a truck yes we all know that uh most non-4k over cable is probably three to four megabits netflix 4k stream is 25 megabits and blu-ray is around 60 megabits i'm assuming that's per second to just give you idea of the relative qualities
So Mike C. Wells in the chat has given me a link to a different part of ATSC.org where it says all seven of Richmond Petersburg's full power local television stations have begun broadcasting with the next gen, aka ATSC 3.0 signals.
So apparently such a thing exists here in town.
I had no idea.
But that does indicate to me that I was able to read the map and say that I was in the orange section.
So ha.
Ha.
You're on one of the orange things.
Good for you.
All right.
So I guess I would need a new antenna or maybe a new HD home run.
I don't even know, actually, what I would need in order to get this.
Somebody tell me.
Reach out via Twitter.
All right.
Moving along.
Let's see here.
Okay, so audio and video sync.
We got a lot of feedback about this, including from former feedbacker Matt Rigby from just a few minutes ago.
He apparently is a dialogue and ADR editor and has his own page on IMDB, which I just think is the coolest thing in the world.
But anyways, Matt Rigby writes, your friendly neighborhood dialogue and ADR editor here writing in again to say when it comes to syncing audio and video playback delay, there's an app for that.
And Matt was far from the only person who recommended Ketchin Sync.
And so I've not used this, but apparently it's an app that helps with this sort of thing.
So Matt continues, this was introduced to me by our chief engineer here at Postworks New York and has been used to calibrate mixed rooms where we've done multiple Apple, HBO, Netflix, A24, et cetera, shows and movies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so catch and sink.
I think that's a kitchen sink pun.
That's my best guess.
Oh, I get it.
I get it.
Because I don't think it's a term, an industry term.
It's just someone, whatever.
I don't know why you're catching the sink or whatever.
So I use this app.
We should read the next item and then I'll tell you my experiences with it.
So Andrew Gibbons writes, John asks, at what point do I want to align to the zero?
Look at the source.
Download the YouTube video and open it in iMovie or Final Cut Pro.
Where did they align the zero?
That is the same place you want to align it.
So this is the question I had last time.
It's like I've got a video timeline and I've got an audio timeline.
And the audio timeline has like a lump where, you know, you've got the attack and decay of the beep noise, you know.
This is all stretched out and elongated because it's 240 frames per second me recording my television screen, right?
And what I'm trying to do is line up the video where it shows like, you know, the white bar in the middle of the line and make the audio waveform line up for that.
But the audio waveform is like an inch wide.
And I've got, you know, that one frame of video.
Where do I align the audio waveform?
And Andrew's answer was look at the source video that you're playing, like the thing that's playing on your TV.
Put that video into your editor and
and look at where they aligned it.
So you'll see the audio waveform in the source video, and then you'll see what part of the waveform did they line it up with.
Now, here's where things start getting awful.
So first, let's take a look at this.
You can just pull up that image.
this is the source audio file uh with no adjustments to it whatsoever uh i have moved the playhead first of all look at the audio waveforms look how beautiful they are yeah that's very good they are vertical lines they don't have any attack it's just like instant loudest volume and then there's like a little parabolic decay right and and this is what the playhead lined up exactly at the beginning of that noise would you look at the video above it please
It's not lined up.
Not even close.
The mark is not on the zero.
Oh my gosh.
So I have it lined up exactly the beginning, but the mark is like at 35 milliseconds past the zero.
So I'm like, all right, what the heck is going on here?
Maybe that's what they built into it.
Because again, this is a YouTube video.
Maybe they're telling you to eyeball it.
So maybe they did this because they know people are always a little bit late or whatever.
Like maybe that's just something they did on purpose, right?
But then I'm like, aha, but wait a second.
I downloaded this off YouTube with like YouTube DL.
And I think I did like a, you know, H265 encoding.
I need to get like the source thing.
The source thing is WebM.
So I'm like, let me just look at the WebM.
I don't want to convert it.
Maybe the conversion does something weird because we're talking about minor, minor things here.
So I downloaded the WebM and then I had to find something that can show the WebM with a timeline.
So here is the WebM file.
Now look at the waveform now.
It looks very different because this is a different editor.
It's not iMovie, but it's an editor that natively understands WebM.
And again, it's got a similar shape and you can line up with exactly the frame before the sound is.
That's closer.
It's closer, but it's still not on the zero.
I'm like, God damn, what?
What?
And so I'm like, okay, but this is just some, I had to find like an editor that understands WebM.
I don't know if this editor is any good or whatever.
So I found a second editor that understands WebM.
And here is what that looked like.
oh now now it's in the other direction at negative 100 milliseconds that's a big difference this is the same file this is the source web m file drowned downloaded directly from youtube and i'm putting the same file two different editors and these are not small differences when the total delay that i'm putting in is in the range of 100 milliseconds a delta of like plus 35 and minus 100 milliseconds
Just everything is out the window.
Right.
So catch and sink.
I originally I didn't plan to mess with it.
I'm like, I don't need that.
I did my own way and it's fine.
And it's also like 20 bucks or something.
Right.
And I did launch it and you can try it and demo it.
I'm like, that seems a little bit janky.
But after this experience, I'm like, all right, catch and sink.
You're up.
uh and they they give you a bunch of test videos that you can download as files at different frame rates and stuff they don't put any of those videos on youtube or something in theory i could upload one to youtube but that would go through all sorts of processing steps or whatever so instead i just put the thing i put these video files in my synology and i played them with infuse which is the thing that does the decoding on your device anyway
they have them in prores and h264 i tried a whole bunch of different things i played them i use catch and sync this app has one of the most frustrating interfaces i've ever used on an ios app in my life right so it's forces forces you into landscape mode uh a lot of the things you need to do involve moving using controls that overlap with the like the gripper bar in ios 15 you know that thing on the bottom like the horizontal bar
If you take that bar and you swipe it sideways, you'll go to another app like that.
But you have to swipe sideways to mess with the timeline.
So it doesn't seem to understand that bar is there.
And then it's got frame advance, you know, forward back buttons on the left side of the UI with touch targets that are so small that when you sit there, speaking of trying to use touch targets to do things, when you're using a touch target going frame, frame, frame, frame, frame,
inevitably when you're getting close to lining things up the way you want them, you will miss tap by like a millimeter and tapping anywhere outside those buttons will tell the video to play.
And then it will just play and mess up your position.
Then you have to try to scroll it back to the right position.
Oh, you switched out of the app again accidentally.
Go switch back to the app in the multitasking squisher, get the thing lined up, carefully avoiding the little bar at the bottom, tap frame, tap, tap, tap, tap one more.
Oh no, it started playing again.
It's, I hate this app with a fiery passion.
I don't know if anybody uses it.
It's like, it has one job.
Make the touch targets like half the freaking screen.
Frame forward, frame advance.
I should not be able to.
Anyway, ignoring all of that, one of the things this app has on its page is per device offsets.
It says, by the way, we've measured somehow and determined that
for these hardware devices and this os there is inherent there is an inherent delta for the the phone itself in terms of when you because you remember you're holding the phone up and recording your television screen in a movie there is an inherent delay in the phone itself and it tells you find your phone but you know so mine is iphone 11 pro ios 15 and the delta is plus 15 milliseconds and you can go to settings on the app and add the plus 15 milliseconds i'm not sure where they're getting a number but whatever so i did that
And then I use this app to try to line up the, you know, the timings of everything.
And you will not be shocked to learn that it had a different number than every other thing that I've tried.
Right now, it was in the ballpark.
Like if I if I did it with my current settings, the Delta was, you know.
10 or 20 milliseconds and so what i ended up doing is i used catch and previously for example i was just in one input apple tv my apple tv input as measured by my previous technique with the iMovie was 120 milliseconds according to kitchen sink catch and sink whatever according to catch and sink after i fought with it and cursed at it for a while it thinks the delta should be about 150 milliseconds
So I changed it to 150.
I'm going to live with it for a week and see if I notice a difference because it didn't tell me you're off by 100 in either direction.
It told me you're close.
But, you know, and again, this is with the 15 milliseconds like inbuilt delay that I did.
According to this web page, it tells me you should do that for an iPhone 11 Pro.
all this just is very frustrating because there are so many pieces of hardware and software in the chain and the like what you're doing is such a fine adjustment right that any kind of any kind of thing that adds a little bit or moves a little bit or is a little bit off just throws the whole thing off because like the margin of error is equal to the size of the adjustment you're making practically which is one way of telling me don't worry about this it's probably not that big a deal but you know i did notice when it was off and i did notice when i improved it uh
more updates next week oh my gosh all right continuing joshua scholl writes uh executive summary for lip sync try to err on the side of audio slightly behind the video preferably 10 to 20 milliseconds uh joshua writes i work in the cabin automation industry we design and build computerized systems that go in aircraft and attempt to marry up modern technology features like bluetooth wi-fi hdmi etc with the byzantine faa certification process so that billionaires can have surround sound and watch netflix on their private airplanes
This sounds like the most fascinating and infuriating job in the world.
But anyway, Joshua continues, your brain is much faster at receiving inputs from sight than sound.
When you stop and think about it, the mechanisms make a certain amount of sense.
Sight is pretty much all electromagnetism.
Hearing involves some mechanical interfaces in your ear.
As a result, brains are used to sound slightly lagging sight.
I know this is based on some actual research, but I'd have to dig that up.
Industry received wisdom, and our requirements lead to settings for that sound no more than 10 milliseconds ahead of video, but easily as much as 40 milliseconds behind.
Having sound slightly behind is far more ideal than ahead.
So this is interesting advice in terms of, hey, if there's going to be a margin of error, try to err on the side of the sound lagging.
I'm not sure entirely by the reasoning here, though.
The thing about, okay, well, you've got air pressure waves have to move your eardrum, which moves little hairs inside your ears.
That's all true, and the electromagnetism interface for eyes, in theory, could potentially be faster.
But here's the thing.
When a human is talking to you from across the room,
The sound comes out of their mouth in sync with their lip movements.
It doesn't reach you in sync because you see their lips before, you know, assuming your interface was equally or whatever.
But that's, you know, the thing making the sound, your lips, that pee, that plosive comes out when your lips do the pee thing.
Like, there's no question about that.
So one way to think of this, and I think it is a reasonable way, is to say your television should act like a person.
When the person on the television makes a plosive with their mouth,
that's when the pee sound should come out of the television.
And if you're seated really, really far away from the television, yes, the sound will get to you later than the light does, right?
Because of the speed difference.
But that's exactly the same as it would be if a person was over there.
That being said, I think what most of us are used to may not be that.
Because when we watch someone on television, first of all, half of it's ADR, so there's not even a connection between the person's lips and what they're saying.
But second of all...
That's why I was saying adjust it when you're on your couch.
You might want it to be in sync as if you are sitting as close to the person as you visibly are.
Because when you see a headshot on a TV, that person's head on a 65-inch TV is like three feet high, right?
So it's like you are sitting close.
It's like that person is not 10 feet from you, right?
They're whatever distance they would be for their head to be three feet high in your field of vision.
And that's why I'm adjusting it from the seating position on my couch and not adjusting it as if it was a person who was standing where my television is because their head would be much smaller in that case.
Anyway, this is a very complicated topic.
I'm glad to know the wisdom that, hey, if you're on one side or the other, make the sound lag.
And that's kind of why I'm trying the 150, because that's a little bit more delay in the sound, and I'm going to see if that feels better.
All right.
Tell me about TiVo ad skipping, if you please.
I wasn't being fair to TiVo.
My wife informed me that if you have the new interface, which I don't like, TiVo will auto-skip ads.
It still won't do it on the iPad app, which is annoying, but only my old downstairs TiVo won't do auto-skipping, but the new interface will.
If I had known this was more TiVo love, I wouldn't have admitted it into the show notes.
Speaking of, I am not kidding you.
I refuse to read the following feedback.
I will not because I disagree with it so much.
I will read it just because I feel like this is amazing.
It's just one person's opinion, but it is a very strong opinion.
I disagree with this so much.
I will not read it.
Here we go.
This is from Jason Smith.
For over 10 years, I ran an HD home run for four tuner setup to record over the air TV using antenna in my attic.
I use a product called Sage TV and later a channel setup.
There is not a human being on earth I would recommend this to.
Alton Brown is famous for his hate of unitaskers in the kitchen, but a TiVo or God forbid a cable company DVR is always a better option than this.
Do you like people in your house asking, why can't we watch TV like normal people?
Do you like troubleshooting some insane issue where the fragile Fabergé egg of your home setup you created needs troubleshooting and robs all of your free time from you on the weekend?
Do you like doing tech support over the phone when you're out of the house and explaining to your significant other, okay, the TV will work again soon, but you need to restart the Synology?
Hopefully they will buy a Vibraslap.
and randomly at three in the morning play it loudly in your ear to wake you up to remind you that you chose the worst option for team managing tv don't get me started on managing files john's wife is 100 correct in her desire to not have the channel server running on her computer her computer should not be the source of entertainment for the family that has to be up all the time in order for the rest of them to watch tv every iteration of a home-based dvr setup is bad and always will be this is a job for an appliance
Jason has very strong opinions.
I mean, yes, he has 10 years experience with it.
And you can say, well, you use the bad software.
It's much better now or whatever.
But it sounds like this is not something he tried on a weekend.
No, this this is incredible.
I mean, look, haven't we all been guilty of setting up, you know, complicated technical solutions in our houses that like really Casey, he's never done that.
I'm still thinking about fiber.
I'm still thinking about fiber.
No, I'm not guilty of this at all.
But no, I genuinely like of all the things that have gone wrong with my setup, all of which were self-created about the only thing that I don't think is ever broken is channels.
And I'm not trying to say Jason's lying.
I'm not trying to say he's even wrong necessarily.
But his lived experience is so the polar opposite of mine that I just I can't wrap my head around it.
Well, people have different experiences with tech, and I could definitely feel where he's coming from.
One thing I didn't mention last time, which is I feel like a reasonably big advantage of TiVo and other kind of all-in-one things is, I mean, it's right in the thing I did say many times.
Channels and setups like that have modular components, right?
So you get to pick and choose which they are.
You have a lot of flexibility.
You can be more cost-effective that way.
It has lots of advantages.
But one of the disadvantages is
that because the components are modular, that means they're separate and that means you need to communicate between them.
With TiVo, the cable goes into the TiVo box and in that same box is the hard drive that will record it and a thing that will decode it.
So there's no network traffic throughout your house of whatever that signal is.
The network traffic is entirely within the TiVo because the video goes in there and other than if you're watching on your iPad or something upstairs, but the video goes in there
And the hard drive is right in the same box.
So you do not need to send X number of megabits of video wandering across your house.
Whereas if you do the channels method and you have things spread out, the, you know, my cable goes into my HD home run and there's an ethernet port, but then I need to send that video downstairs through my network to the Synology where it gets recorded.
And then when I play it back on my TV, I've got to send it back from the Synology through the network to the thing.
Not an issue for me in my house and my network bandwidth the way it is, but it's just one more thing to think about.
We were sponsored this week by Memberful, the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience, used by some of the biggest creators on the web.
You know, selling memberships is a great way to diversify your income.
You know, personally, we sell memberships, and I love not having to rely solely on ad revenue.
To have multiple income streams is really, really nice to have as a content creator.
And Memberful is by far the greatest and simplest way to sell memberships.
Maybe you haven't done it yet and you want something that integrates with the tools you already use.
Great.
That's memberful.
Maybe you have some other kind of membership system, but it's getting too complicated to manage and you want to simplify it so you can get back to focusing on what you're best at.
Again, memberful is great here.
They handle the hard stuff so you can focus on what you do best and still earn revenue through diversified means and quickly.
Memberful has everything you need to run a membership program, including optimized checkouts, dashboards, member management, analytics, and
apple pay support free trial support gift subscription support and so much more and they have fully integration with the tools you already use with lots of integrations with the most popular services as well and they have a world-class support team ready to help you simplify your memberships and grow your revenue whenever you want to get started they will help you do it memberful is passionate about your success and you know they don't try to like take too much control you know it you retain control of the branding and
And your audience and your membership payments even go directly to your own Stripe account.
And that's really important to me.
You know, I'm kind of fiercely independent and I wouldn't have it any other way.
So Memberful is really a great option here.
Get started for free with no credit card required at memberful.com slash ATP.
See for yourself how great and easy it is to sell memberships to your audience with Memberful.
Once again, memberful.com slash ATP to start that free trial today.
Thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.
all right let me briefly talk about feedbacks um do you know what gentlemen suddenly i started getting responses to my feedbacks sometimes i don't know why why would that be why are people rewarding you for your tantrums that's my question running to the press never helps running to the press i mean is he the press i don't know yeah probably he ran he ran to himself and he's and he stomped his feet real loud
I did, and I stand by it, darn it.
I listened to it again, and I stand by it.
But anyways, I had a couple of different feedbacks actually get a response.
There were two out of the, what, seven or so that I cited last time.
I'll put the feedback numbers in the show notes, but one of them was about manual transferable implementations with regards to the new photo picking API.
That is fixed.
Legitimately fixed.
And the update I got was, thanks for submitting this report and for your patience.
We believe this issue has been addressed in updates to iOS and macOS.
Please test with the latest macOS 13 beta 5 and iOS 16 beta 6, which I did.
Thumbs up.
All good.
The bigger one was the toolbar regression.
This is when I'm swapping views in SwiftUI and one of them has a toolbar, bottom bar, one of them does not.
And it never honors the new views bottom toolbar, never shows it.
And so I got the following feedback.
Hi, Casey, thanks for filing this feedback.
If you're running into issues with bottom bar not showing or showing when it's not supposed to, you can try using the toolbar, you know, either visible or I think hidden for, and then your toolbar location.
I'm trying to read you an API, which is why it sounds a little funny.
Modifier to work around this issue.
That was extremely useful feedback.
Full stop.
That was exactly what I wish I had seen long ago.
That would have been great.
However, I tried this this morning, and maybe this is something wrong with my code.
I haven't had the chance to break this out into a demo app to see if it's me or not, but...
What ended up happening was when I use this modifier, it shows the toolbar that's up in the navigation bar.
And it does indeed show the bottom bar, which it was hiding previously.
So, so far, so good.
Except...
one of the two bars always looks disabled.
They're not disabled, mind you, but they're grayed out and are not showing the app's tint color as though they're disabled.
If you tap on them, they work, and then it'll flip to the other one being disabled.
So one of the toolbars is always disabled.
I don't know what I'm going to do about this before I ship.
I have no idea.
I have a week or so, maybe two weeks until Iowa 16 ships.
I have no idea what I'm going to do about this.
I really don't have the faintest idea.
So I have written a response saying that this seems like it's still broken.
I still need to do my due diligence and break it out in a sample app and see if it's really broken there or maybe I'm doing something wrong.
but I got feedback.
Hey, that's look compared to where we were and where most of our bugs are.
I mean, look, and I have, I have great news too.
My, the one, like the one bug I was really tracking all summer that actually, you know, I had, I filed a couple of like enhancement requests that I know those just go right in the trash, but I figured like, at least let me, there's this one that's actually a bug that I talked about last week about, you know, the tint color not applying to the navigation split view buttons.
And sure enough,
in beta 7 it's just fixed i didn't get a response on the bug but i don't care they fixed the bug like that's that's i you know every i did my due diligence when beta 7 came out i opened up xcode i installed the new beta on my phone i you know the new xcode update that's actually beta 6 thanks a lot it's off by one now um and you know now and so i've ran everything and it just worked
And I dutifully closed the bug saying, hey, thanks, you fixed it.
So last time, when we last left this bug, if I'm remembering the right bug, what they were telling you is the deprecated API does what you want, but it's deprecated.
And the new API is functioning correctly and doesn't do what you want.
So what did they do to fix it?
They made it function correctly.
Now, they didn't comment on, you know...
The bug screener's comment to me was basically like, hey, you're using it wrong slash this is broken by design in more words than that.
But the gist of it is, yeah, this is just broken and sorry, it's your fault for expecting it to work.
And I responded with an argument that that's crappy.
They never said anything, but they just fixed the bug.
And that's it.
So it's done.
I wonder if that was intentional or it's just backsliding.
Because the communication you have is this API isn't supposed to do the thing you want.
But then in the new beta, it does do the thing you want.
But they didn't say, by the way, we changed our mind.
And now we agree with you, Marco.
It should do the thing you want.
it does do it good for you but yeah i mean i think the reason why um somebody thought this was worth fixing is that it's it's not like it was behaving a different way intentionally it they were basically their response to me was basically you know paraphrasing you shouldn't expect this to work this way but
but like it's the most obvious way for it to work it makes it sound like it was intentional that they didn't intend it to work that way and so it not working that way isn't a bug it's what they always meant well anyway we'll find out if anyone communicates hey did you intentionally change your mind about this was that person mistaken about how the api is supposed to work uh so you're good in beta 7 but if beta 8 it goes back to the other way it's not as if you've had any subsequent communication that lets you know whether beta 7 was a mistake you know i mean
Yeah, I'm definitely not going to be deleting my UI kit workaround anytime soon, just in case.
But anyway, hey, running to the press helped.
Surprise, that's how it always does with Apple, unfortunately.
I wish it didn't work this way.
I wish that, first of all, I wish that everybody had access to get their bugs fixed and that more bugs got fixed.
And second of all, I wish that for those of us who are fortunate enough to have a loud enough megaphone that we can actually get our stuff fixed when we complain about it,
I wish we didn't have to complain about it to get it fixed, because the last thing we want to be doing is complaining constantly, and that's not really what we want to be doing here or what anybody wants to hear.
And so I wish the system was just better and that these kind of workarounds were not necessary.
And long-term, I hope they can actually do a better job of achieving that.
Yeah.
Obviously, in the rush right before all this stuff is about to ship, this is a bad time to be telling them this.
But this is the reality that things have to change here long term because what they're doing seems – it just does not produce quality software at the rate they're pushing it.
And it doesn't produce quality software for them or for us.
Like, our software is now crummier on account of them not being able to respond with the quickness that we want them to.
Now, with regard to running to the press never helping, Martin Pilkington writes, I found one needs to treat radar like the App Store.
Putting an app in the App Store won't ensure anyone finds it.
You need to market it externally.
Similarly, radars are only really found if you rant about them online and someone at Apple sees that rant.
This is so freaking frustrating, but it is a perfect distillation of what I've been saying over the last couple of weeks slash couple of months.
It is 100% accurate.
yep you got to market your bug it is a hundred percent accurate and it's bs that that's the case but i'm trying to keep myself reined in so i don't go on another rant and then bjorn scoglund writes sounds like an opportunity for ad revenue for apple if i ever heard so just wait you'll be able to pay it'll be like paying for indulgences at the church you're gonna be able to pay money to get someone to look at your bug and honestly like it's kind of like one of those things and you know there's a lot of things in video games especially video games that have subscription where they'll
There'd be quality of life improvements where like, oh, you don't have to hit this button an extra time or you get more space in your vault in Destiny or whatever.
And those things seem silly and trivial.
And I just hope that, you know, no one ever, well, game designers are pretty good about this, but like the amount of money that people would be willing to play to pay to, for example, get more room in their vault in Destiny is obscene.
And so if they ever did say, hey, if you want your radar looked at, just pay us some money or let's have a bidding war or let's have an auction for it.
They would make so much money because developers are desperate to have their bugs looked at because it could mean the different.
I mean, maybe not for, you know, a dinky app like I make or whatever, but like because I don't really care one or the other.
But like what if your app is the basis of your entire company and you have you're a VC funded company, you've got to make money and your app is broken and you can't figure it out.
How much money would you be willing to pay to actually get Apple to look at and respond to your feedback or radar?
an awful lot well what kind of response are you getting like are you getting the kind of bs responses that i often get i'm not i'm not endorsing this i'm just saying that's how much people want it like they'd be willing to pay obscene amount which is why apple should never do it and there are dts support instruments incidents which is kind of what that's for hey you can you get a certain number of those with your developer subscription i think you can pay for more of them can you i believe you get two i've never used one because i'm always afraid to use them because we only get two and i've literally you know been in
been a developer for like 14 years i've never used you're saving your super for the big boss and you beat defeat the boss and you never used it because you were just saving it the whole time right yeah anyway so there are ways to do this through money but all i'm saying is like the uh how desperate developers are how desperate rank and file developers are to get any response to their feedback it's part of the reason why people go to the uc i can talk to you human being
who you know like it would kind of be fun if the human beings that we ever see treated you the way feedback because you'd sit down you show them your sample project you'd explain and they just sit there silently looking at you and you'd be waiting yep and then like 10 years later they'd come to your house knocking on your door and say oh you just need to put this line at the bottom
All right.
There's been an announcement that, as has been foretold, the first iPadOS release on 16 will actually be 16.1, which is coming, quote unquote, this fall.
Apple writes, this is an especially big year for iPadOS as its own platform with features specifically designed for iPad.
We have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule.
This fall, iPadOS will ship after iOS as version 16.1 in a free software update.
Let me translate that from corporate speak.
Everything's on fire and we're not going to fix it in time.
So we'll get to it eventually.
Yes, there won't be an iPad OS 16.0.
They're going to skip 16.0 and just keep it on 15 point whatever as iOS moves to 16 until 16.1 is ready with iPad OS.
the flexibility as they say well it's not the same os so we're not stuck in the situation we would have been years ago where it's like oh but but ios 16 needs to go out because it needs that's what you need for the new phones and the phones are going to ship come hell or high water so what do we do do we rip these features out of ipad but now we don't have that problem because ipad os is a separate os and we have the flexibility to ship it later when it's ready that's i understand where they're coming from but from a user's perspective
especially in the past several years apple has been leaning on uh very heavily and i think to good effect the synergy and between its platforms that when they add a feature they don't just add to one platform it's added to all of them and works together with them and when one platform ships substantially before the others that often leaves its users in a weird situation where like my phone is on ios 16 and has for example you know the family shared photo library thing but my ipad and my mac are not
And so how does that work?
Sometimes you just miss out on the features.
It's like, well, the point of this feature is sharing, but if I can't use it on my Mac, I can't use it on my iPad.
Yes, it's good that the shared library works between me and my spouse on my phone, but I can't do any editing on my Mac.
And do I even want to do the shared library like that?
And then you have situations like, I don't remember if it was notes or reminders or one of the others where there's like a one-time, one-direction upgrade of your database backing for your thing.
I say, you know, this OS has a new back end for, you know, notes.
If you upgrade this, you won't be able to see these notes on old devices.
Do you want to upgrade now?
And if you say yes, now you've like got this split brain scenario where some of your devices see one set of data and some of your devices see the other.
So although I endorse not releasing the OS when it doesn't work and stage manager is a big mess, you know, that's better than nothing.
I'm sad that the one feature that I'm looking forward to, I can't even use on my phone on my iPad, let alone my phone on my iPad on the Mac, because the phone's going to get the update and then the Mac and the iPad potentially months later.
And that's not a fun experience for me.
And obviously, Apple's not doing this on purpose.
I just feel like there are still more kinks to be worked out in terms of Apple...
Yeah, I mean, honestly, based on everyone's reviews who are using it heavily, like all the iPad power users and stuff who are really giving it a good try...
it seems almost similar to the problem with the Mac settings app in the sense that they, they, you know, demoed this at WDC.
They made this like, you know, a headlining thing.
Um, but it really seems like stage manager is really not ready to ship.
And frankly, I don't know if it's going to be ready, you know, another month or two later.
It doesn't, it seems like this is possibly like another year before this is, this really probably should have been released again.
See also system settings app, um, you know, and, and,
By the way, we haven't heard yet anything about macOS, but I think it seems very likely that macOS will probably have the exact same delay for many reasons, including... But macOS was always targeted to October.
It's always been.
MacOS hasn't been released at the same time as the iPhone OS for iOS for, what, five years, six years?
It's been a while.
Oh, okay.
But yeah, so anyway, it does seem like this year's releases, there's a lot in them that probably needed more time, like probably needed another year.
And I don't know what that says about what's going on there.
I mean...
I said this before, but I think we really need to remember that during the last few years, there's been massive disruption to their workforce with the pandemic and with work at home and some of the turmoil going on with certain internal issues and internal conflicts and scandals and stuff.
So
There's been so much disruption, and they've done a really good job overall of hiding that from us.
But, you know, this disruption has happened, and their work has been affected.
And so I think this is that, you know, finally coming home to roost, that this year's releases...
the core of them seems fine.
I've been using the beta on my phone all summer, and it's not crashing or anything.
The battery life is mostly recovered.
It's fine.
The core stuff is fine, but the list of new features this year was pretty small,
And you look at something like Stage Manager or the System Settings app and you're like, wow, the big feature that they demoed is kind of not ready and looks like it won't be ready in the near future.
And I think we're just seeing they're human too and this cycle through all the pandemic stuff and everything has been tough on them and they haven't gotten done everything they probably wanted to get done.
That being said, if things are in this bad of a state,
somebody should have made the call this spring to say this is not going to hit in time for this year this is not going to be good enough in time for this year so let's punt it till next year and they didn't do that and i and i think that's going to bite them really hard this fall as these features you know ship in some form and just are really rough and
And I don't see any evidence that stage manager or system settings on the Mac is going to be really great even if they ship it on the day before Christmas.
Fall goes until December 22nd or something.
They could ship this right before Christmas.
I still don't think that's going to be enough time.
The interesting thing about Stage Manager, from what I've read about it, I mean, I have iPadOS 16 on my iPad, so I've been using it a little bit.
But most of the complaints that I've seen from the people who are just really diving into Stage Manager and the iPad Power users are not that Stage Manager is crashing or is buggy.
It's that they don't like how it works.
And the changes, such as they are from beta to beta and just the way that Apple's designed it, it makes me seem like the main problem with Stage Manager is...
uh they've made the wrong decisions about how it should work right like when you do this this happens and apple would say yeah that's exactly how we meant it to work it's working great and people say no that like i know you meant it to work that way but it's terrible right that they had the wrong idea about when you launch an app what should it do when you close an app what should it do when you want to add another app what should it do when you want to try to move a window what should it do and it's like at every turn apple has made choices in stage manager that ipad power users don't like and
And that is a different kind of problem than like they may have thought, oh, it'll be ready in time.
It would be ready in time.
I think if the choices they had made were pleasing to their users, but the users will hate it.
And so it's like, well, it works and it's not buggy, but everyone hates it.
So we can't really ship it like that.
So I hope what they're doing is saying we need to rethink like we made the wrong policy decisions.
The design of this feature is wrong.
And that is a tough place to be.
It's kind of like where they were.
Well, not quite the same with the Safari thing.
I guess the design decision of address bar optionally on the bottom, that was okay.
But every other part of that design was the wrong decision.
And it's not like it was buggy.
They're saying, this is just a bad design.
It makes it harder for web designers.
It's not pleasing to look at.
It's not easy to use.
you know, start over address bar on the bottom.
Fine.
Everything else forget about it.
And that's what they did.
They said, okay, how about, how about we did the address on the bar on the bottom, but it's like the address bar on the top.
So like, see, was that that hard?
They can't do that with stage manager.
There's no, there's no like super obvious way they can change things.
But I think the struggle they're having is we, you know, it's not like we just need to burn down a list of bugs and we'll be ready.
It's we need to rethink this feature because what we thought would be pleasing to our users is not.
Yeah, and that's not something that happens quickly.
That's not something that happens during a few months in a beta period.
That's something that happens over like a year or two of like, hold this feature back from the public.
And, you know, we'll ship it maybe in a future software update after we've rethought and reevaluated it.
Do you think this is going to be the next AirPower?
You think they're actually going to pull it?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think so, but it sounds like it's real.
I have not used it.
My iPad's too old and busted, but I don't know.
From what I've heard, it's not in a good spot, like you were saying.
I've used it, and again, I'm not a heavy iPad user, so my usage of it doesn't matter much, but I've used it, and it's fine.
I don't prefer it.
The way it works, even for my very simplistic cases of having three apps that I'm switching between and maybe have two on the screen at once...
i don't like it very much and i and i frequently turn it off and just do like you know a split view or something but again i'm not a heavy ipad user frankly i i would be surprised if well i guess i was gonna say i'd be surprised if they pulled it it's easy to pull it
Yeah, well, it's easy to pull technically.
It's not easy to pull ego-wise.
It would take a lot of swallowing egos and a lot of facing the music for people if they actually did pull this before release.
That being said...
Given how the iPad power users are receiving this over the summer, and as you mentioned, things that aren't just bugs, that are actually just design choices that people aren't liking and that aren't working for people, and behavioral choices that aren't working for people, that's a hard thing to fix in a short time under pressure.
When you're facing that kind of thing, pulling it and possibly bringing it back in the future is what you should do.
And again, I would say all of this exact same thing about the Ventura system settings app.
I think the right move is to pull that and just ship the old app and whatever very few differences there are.
Network location, you've got to fix at least one thing.
we'll just delete it i mean that's what they did in the new one right they just left it out um you know maybe but yeah so anyway i think it would be less work and would result in a better outcome if they pulled both of these things for this fall and and just put them back in the works polish them up decide whether to ship them later you know for next next year's releases but in neither case do i think these things are going to be shippable by november or december
Well, so if I had in my magic envelope, here is the correct policy decisions for all of the interactions in the stage manager, and I threw that to Apple, they could implement those decisions in time because, you know, they have the functionality.
It's just like a question of when I do X, what should happen?
And it's a menu of possible things that could happen, all of which the feature already does.
It's just a question of which one of the things that you do.
Problem is, I don't think they know.
They don't know what's in that envelope.
They don't know, well, how should it work?
And that is not a good place to be.
It's like, we don't even know how it should work, let alone getting it to work the way.
But
I'm mostly stage manager.
Again, I've used it on my iPad and played with it or whatever, but I'm also not a big iPad power user, but I've used it on the Mac a lot.
And remember, according to that rumor slash inside story, this is a feature that grew on the Mac originally.
And I have to say, on the Mac, it fulfills its role in such a superior, more straightforward way by giving you essentially spaces without spaces, little subgroups of windows.
And the reason I think it works so much better on the Mac for that purpose, if that's what you want,
is because well two things one it is solving a problem that the mac has which is if you don't want to manually manage a bunch of windows it doesn't have a lot of tools for you to sort of manage subgroups of windows other than spaces which is intimidating to a lot of people and it's kind of a heavyweight solution and has its own set of problems in terms of not kind of similar stage manager kind of determining like well when i click on this dock icon where does this new window open is it going to switch you to another space or whatever um stage manager on the mac does a little bit better in that and the second thing is it doesn't
how it fits in well with the basic mac model of there are windows that are rectangles you can resize them from all the edges you can move them wherever you want stage manager says yep you can do that with stage manager too all we're doing is essentially taking subsets of windows and shuffling them in and out in front of you and you can see the little subset so you can hide that thing
And you can move windows between them, but there's nothing else weird you have to learn.
The windows are the same as the regular windows.
They have window widgets on top of them.
You can move them and resize them exactly as you do all the time.
If what you want are subgroups of windows that you can shuffle in and out, Stage Manager more or less provides that for you.
it's like they took the mac feature and said well we can't just bring that to the ipad because the ipad's got its own way of doing things we can't just let people move windows wherever they want we have to snap them to both different certain sizes and certain positions so now we have to implement a policy to say you know because ipad apps don't expect to be all sorts of random sizes they just expect to be these three different size classes and we can't even let people ipad users move windows because what if they move them and only a sliver is visible and they can't grab that sliver with their fat meat fingers so we have to make it so that the windows carefully arrange themselves into a pleasing arrangement and
And we can't have too many windows because we don't have a lot of memory, even though we implemented virtual memory.
But never mind.
You can only have four windows at a time.
And so what happens when you add another window?
And it's like the team that has the instincts of how an iPad interface should work.
The positive example of that is how they did cursor support.
They took cursor support and they iPadified it.
And I think they did an awesome job.
But those same instincts and maybe even that same team said, we have the stage monitor feature on the Mac, iPadify this.
And I think just the allergy to making window widgets or making it like the Mac or allowing iPad users to arbitrarily resize their apps or arbitrarily move them.
has made them so compromise this feature on top of the apparently inherent limitations of how many windows you can have at a time, which in theory have a technical foundation that's causing them not to allow you to go hog wild with windows, has made the feature very limiting, very frustrating, and then...
within those limits when you take an action where you expected something to happen like hey this new safari link that i this link that i tapped in my note should open a safari window in my current stage manager thing not chuck me to another one when that doesn't happen for technical reasons or whatever or when you try to arrange windows so they're pleasing and you move a window with your finger and it snaps back three inches but says no don't you like it better like this and you go no i didn't like it better like that i moved it there because i wanted it to be there don't move it back on me
All of that has poisoned this feature that I think, not that it's better suited to the Mac, because the Mac doesn't need this as much as the iPad does.
The Mac already has a way to arrange Windows.
This is an additional boon to the Mac for people who didn't have this feature before, whereas I feel like it's almost like a life preserver to the iPad power users who desperately need something that lets them do this.
Viticci talked about how
When he went back to using like the old thing, slide over and all that, that set of very limiting rules that iPad users railed against for many years, it's like that felt like relaxing to go back to that because at least it was a set of rules he understood and at least he could manipulate it to get what he wanted.
Whereas with stage manager, no matter how much fighting with it, he couldn't get to do what he wanted.
And that's a damning assessment because the whole point of stage manager is supposed to feel like now you have more flexibility than that very limited slide over.
When slide over feels like the relief from stage manager, things have gone terribly wrong.
So is it going to get pulled forever or no?
I don't know.
I think it can be saved if they figure out the right policy decisions of how it should work on the iPad.
And I think that the only real technical barrier is, should we, someone eventually going to say, hey, apps that are on the iPad have to handle being resized in arbitrary windows.
That may be a big ask and that may take years to come around, but I think it's inevitable that if you really want the iPad to be able to do what it deserves to do, you can't constrain every single iPad OS app window to the size classes that we've known.
I think that's fair.
I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
But it's interesting.
It's interesting for sure.
All right.
One other quick thing I wanted to briefly take mention of or make mention of, and then we can move on.
There was a hack that Plex announced this morning as we record.
Apparently, this was reported in a bunch of places, including 9to5Mac.
Plex wrote, we want you to be aware of an incident involving your Plex account information yesterday.
While we believe the actual impact of this incident is limited, we want to ensure you have the right information tools to keep your account secure.
Yesterday we discovered suspicious activity on one of our databases.
We immediately began an investigation, and it does appear that a third party was able to access a limited subset of data that includes emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords.
Even though all account passwords that could have been accessed were hashed and secured in accordance with best practices, out of an abundance of caution, we are requiring all Plex accounts to have their passwords reset.
Rest assured that credit card and other important payment data are not stored in our servers at all, and we're not vulnerable in this instance.
So granted, it was at least the hash, if I'm reading this right, not the actual plain text password, but still.
So on the grand scheme of things, do I care?
Not really.
You know why?
Because I use one password, and Plex had its own unique password.
So what did I do?
I changed it.
And then the problem, unless a misunderstanding, goes away.
And it's no big deal.
I have many problems with 1Password these days because I really don't like 1Password 8 at all.
But that's a discussion for another day.
But yeah, this is why 1Password is great.
Because I changed that password and I moved on with my life.
Did you have to reclaim your Plex servers?
No.
And actually, I did not receive this email.
The chat room is asking, did you guys get this?
Did you get this?
I didn't actually receive this email myself.
I'm reading from 9to5Mac, which is a little bit alarming.
But nevertheless, no, I reset my password this morning.
I didn't see any of the self-issued DDoS that people were getting.
Apparently, everyone was trying to reset their passwords at the same moment.
I had no problem with that.
I didn't have to reclaim my Plex server.
Was it you, John, that said you had to do that?
I had no problem.
Yeah, like when I changed, I got this email arrived at 1.43 a.m., which obviously I didn't see it, but then when I woke up this morning, I saw it, I changed my password, and then I went to, yeah, I knew I'd have to re-sign in to all my Flex stuff, because I did the option, when you change your password, you can say, oh, and by the way, also sign me out of all my devices, and that's what they recommended you do, so I did it.
And then I went to my Plex server, pulled up the web UI.
I'm like, hey, I'm going to have to sign in again.
And I signed in.
And then I listed all of my servers.
And then when I went to one of them, it says, this server is unclaimed.
You have to claim it again.
And we'll associate it with your account.
I'm like, all right.
Well, so I did that.
I mean, it was just a button press.
But it did take a surprisingly long time.
Maybe their servers were starting to be hammered at that point.
I don't even know what claiming the server is.
I don't believe I've ever done it before.
But it wanted me to do it again.
So I did.
So it's what happens when you like move it to a different computer.
It's just saying that this server belongs to this Plex account.
Otherwise, anyone else could swoop in hypothetically and say, oh, that's my server.
And then you get God, you know, that other person would have God access to your server.
We are brought to you this week by Collide.
IT admins often feel like they have to choose between their commitment to cybersecurity and their duty to protect their employees' privacy.
Naturally, you need safeguard company data against hacks and breaches, but you don't want to turn your workplace into 1984.
Traditional MDMs give the IT team complete access and control over company devices.
But since employees are inevitably going to use their work laptops for some personal activities, these tools can saddle you with surveillance capabilities you never wanted, like access to photos and browser history.
And before you know it, your end users are complaining about all the security agents slowing down their laptops, developers get frustrated by the lack of autonomy, and people start secretly working on their personal devices just to get things done.
It's easy to fall into this trap of top-down security, but this is not the only option.
Collide is an endpoint security solution built around honest security.
Their philosophy is that employees aren't your biggest security risk.
They're your biggest allies.
And your relationship with them should be based on transparency and informed consent.
This works by notifying your employees of security issues via Slack, educating them on why they're important, and giving them step-by-step instructions on how to resolve them themselves.
For IT and security teams, Collide provides the right level of visibility for Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, and it addresses high-risk issues that can't be solved through brute force or automation.
And your end users can see exactly why and how every piece of data is being collected via Collide's user privacy center and their open source code base.
you can meet your security goals without compromising your values.
Visit collide.com slash ATP to find out how.
If you follow that link, they'll hook you up with a goodie bag just for activating a free trial.
That's collide, K-O-L-I-D-E, collide.com slash ATP.
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Bart Kowalski writes, why do some app updates weigh in at multiple hundred megabytes in size, whereas updates from smaller teams weigh in at dozens of megabytes in size?
Anecdotally, it seems that larger companies' app updates tend to be larger, while smaller companies' updates tend to usually be much smaller.
I mean, I don't think my garage door opener app needs a 200 megabyte update every few weeks, right?
How many changes could they squeeze into a garage opening app each time?
Because of this, I'm super selective about what I manually update and when.
Is it just a case of laziness where a dev simply re-uploads the whole app instead of some small part of the code base?
Is there something going on on Apple's end?
Is there something else going on that I have no idea about?
Please enlighten me.
I mean, I don't know what the best way to approach this is.
First of all, there isn't any sort of incremental update in the App Store, right?
Or am I missing something?
There wasn't like back in the early, early days, but they added that probably at least five or six years ago.
It's been a while.
So we have, when they introduced something called app thinning, remember that?
I thought that was less about incremental updates and more about rather than shipping you like a fat binary with everything that every device will need, I thought app thinning was, let me just give you the junk for your particular device.
That's what it started out as, but I think it later came to also encompass actually doing more like a diff style for the app as well, for updates.
Oh, all right.
Then that's my mistake.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that includes that.
But anyway, the App Store is doing this for you, and it isn't an issue of the developer not updating a diff and just uploading the whole app.
That isn't on the developer.
The developer updates the whole app to Apple every time, and then Apple chooses how to send that to each device.
So that's out of our hands.
What makes apps big can be a lot of things.
Some of it is stuff that small developers and indie developers like me tend not to use as much, if at all.
We tend to have less.
One of the biggest sources of app bloat is stuff like image and video assets.
If your app has a bunch of graphics and parts of the design...
Each one of those is going to be stored as a relatively loosely compressed image.
It's going to be a PNG somewhere.
It's going to be massive in the bundle.
Apps that have a whole bunch of screens and designers and everything, something like Instagram, there's so many different screens in that app to do all sorts of different things.
All those buttons and toolbar icons and everything, those are all stored as images somewhere in the bundle.
Images alone are a huge part of a lot of these apps by big companies just because they have just so many of them and so many screens that you don't even realize are there if you're a more casual user.
So that's part of it.
Just tons and tons of images.
Also, if there's any kind of animation where they're showing you, some kind of instructional animation, do this, then do this.
That's going to be rendered as a video, and that's going to be, again, very, very large files.
So that's part of it.
I would say that's probably a large part of it, maybe even the majority for most apps.
But also...
there's actual code bloat.
And this, I mean, it takes a lot of code to hit 200 megs, but it can be done.
And this is often the result of cross-platform frameworks.
Things like Electron or any kind of web technology-based thing, they have to embed...
huge amounts of both, you know, resources like images and stuff and also just huge amounts of code to be their giant runtime layer for whatever kind of fancy framework they are trying to do in the name of efficiency in other areas, which is hilarious.
So,
Overcast is a little under 10 megs because I don't use any of these giant third-party frameworks or middleware layers or cross-platform layers because I don't have to because I'm one person making an app for one OS and that's it.
If you're doing something as a big company, you're required to have big company bloat.
And the reason you need big company bloat is so you avoid wasting money.
And so instead you have to hire thousands of developers and other support staff to make these massive apps in the name of efficiency and making sure you don't accidentally have anything that is inefficient or wrong.
So anyway, most of this is the result of like
Your standard big company needs.
So more developers writing larger amounts of crappier code with larger amounts of supporting code around them on top of many, many, many layers of other people's code and libraries and everything.
And there is no incentive at any part of that.
to make things smaller.
For many of the people involved in the stack, there's no ability for them to make it smaller.
But at the larger level, there's just no incentive for them to make it smaller because Apple doesn't care.
Most users don't notice or care.
And so you kind of have no incentive to fight against the current.
And where the current takes you when you're working in a big company is just massive amounts of bloat.
Overcast is 10 megs.
A switch class is only three and a half.
That's interesting.
Oh, super.
I'm actually going down.
It always irritates me whenever some part of the APIs requires an image.
Because I'm like, I can just...
render this with a few polygons in code or i can give you an svg or a pdf so it's just a vector that's like you know a kilobyte why do i have to render a 1024 by 1024 png image of and and also give you this image in 14 different sizes and fortunately over time they seem to be moving away from that and like every new os update that comes out
usually there's a way for me to decrease the amount of those assets that I have to have in the app.
And this summer there are a few of those little niceties as well, so I'm happy about that.
But yeah, where most of my size comes from is stuff like the watch extension or previously having to embed Swift runtime stuff, although the need for that is going down over time as well.
But yeah, it's mostly that kind of overhead.
The actual overcast code is a few megs at most.
yeah the mac apis pretty much want bitmaps for things too and it's annoying especially when like for example the menu bar icons those are template images that treat just template images there are ways that you can use a pdf for them but a lot of the apis do ask you for png and like the mac icons where they wanted 100 size now there's a way where you can just give it one size it's like i'm just going to give you one size just use this everywhere which is not best practice on the mac because you really should be tweaking your icons to read better at smaller sizes and stuff but
Yeah, there's a lot of bitmaps.
I mean, something that programmers might not realize, like everything should just be vectors.
It's like in the end, something is turning that into a bitmap to put it on your screen.
And so you can see how it's more convenient to just start with a bitbound disk and you can like memory map it and do all sorts of stuff.
But the new APIs are doing that for us behind the scenes.
Something is nothing people don't realize about.
You've talked about this, Marco, about that, you know,
people who are a little bit technical but don't really think about the consequences oh jpegs those are compressed images they're really small it must be very efficient um yeah it is an efficient way to store images but when you display that image on the screen something's got to decompress it and it needs to exist somewhere in decompressed form so it can be put into a window buffer that takes up memory somewhere and yes the window backing stores are compressed on mac os and probably on ios as well
But that compression is not as good as JPEG compression because it needs to be really fast.
Right.
So, yeah, things get big real fast, whether they're big in memory or big on disk or big both.
And as for the incremental updates, I have vague recollections of what you're talking about, too, Marco.
But I would love for someone from Apple to or anyone who knows point us to the WWDC session or whatever.
Does app update do byte range diff deltas for updates?
Or is it on a per file basis?
Because I can imagine updates being really big if they're doing it per file.
Because if you change like one, if you change one little bit of metadata on that 150 meg QuickTime movie that's your like opening QuickTime movie, whatever.
That's your opening tutorial animation.
Like, oh, maybe you just changed.
You removed GPS data that you didn't need to be there.
It's just metadata.
Like, 99% of the bytes are the same.
Does it do byte diffs?
Or does it say, oh, this file has changed.
Here's a new 150 megabytes.
If you know the answer to that question definitively, please let us know.
Indeed.
Another thing that I feel like I have seen in the past is massive, but I can't cite a source that confirms or denies it.
I thought a lot of these like analytics and ad SDKs tended to be just freaking huge.
Like I thought Firebase was massive as an example.
Again, I very well may be wrong about that, but I thought some of these things were big.
I mean, they're big, but not relative to like 500 megabyte video file.
Oh, sure, sure.
They're bigger than they should be.
And I think Marco hit on the main one, which is like frameworks.
Because if you have some kind of framework that has like a widget library or whatever, especially if it's a young framework,
they'll give you the whole framework you may never use that control in your app but you ship with the whole it's kind of like when the swift runtime ship with everything they didn't really pare down the swift runtime as far as i know to just use the features that your app use you just get the whole thing and so if you're using you know react native i'm not trying to blame or whatever like you know or the mono back in the days i don't know if anyone still uses xamarin yeah xamarin stuff uh you just get the whole framework with your app because it's very difficult to figure out the exact features your app is using and pare down the library so it just has those features because everything is so interlinked
And so, yeah, if you looked at your app and just cracked it open and you were like, look at all this image data, I'm not using any of this.
Like, that just comes as part of the framework.
I think that's probably the biggest source of blow up.
And maybe SDKs are like that because maybe the SDK itself uses some cross-platform library that includes a whole bunch of things that it doesn't use all of.
It adds up, but I do feel like that it is actually pretty difficult to...
to outrun video files or even even just audio files if you have like you know long amounts of audio video files images and stuff like that can outrun your code bloat size pretty quickly if you have any substantial number of them yeah and also like you know on the on framework um you know problems
The number of frameworks and the size of them that you add to your app is oftentimes done either you don't have much say in the matter or you do it without actually really investigating this.
So, for instance, if your app is ad-funded, like most ad packages, you have to add in whatever the Google one or whatever.
But if your app is ad-based, you may have to add funds.
three or five or ten different ad platforms SDKs just so you have the ability to maybe show their ads.
And oftentimes there's logic in some of these SDKs where they bid for the spot and whoever is going to pay you the most, you can show the ad from that provider.
But that means that every provider you might show the ad from, you've got to build on their SDK.
And fortunately, there's been so much ridiculous consolidation in this business that there aren't that many of them left.
But that is still a thing that people do.
And so if an app is ad-supported, you end up with huge amounts of bloat there.
But also just in general, the style of development that so many developers these days across multiple platforms, not just iOS apps, the style of development these days is...
If there's a need that you have, the first thing you do is look for a package or framework that offers it and just blindly add it to your project.
And don't even care how big it is or what it's adding or what it needs.
Node is famous for this where...
They go totally overboard.
And there's that example of like the, you know, the is even thing that required is odd to know.
And that was, I mean, that seemed like it was almost a parody.
But that culture is so deep in developers these days that it just, you know, we as an industry have like framework-itis where you're so quick to jump to add a framework for a very simple need.
And there's so relatively little scrutiny put on what that means and what that's going to cost your app in terms of size and bloat and complexity and impossible security issues down the road.
Um, and, and that's just how, that's like the best practice these days.
And, and, you know, people make fun of me for not doing this.
You know, you make fun of me for writing my own S3 class or whatever, but like, yeah, but my class is 200 lines and you know, the real one's a hundred thousand or whatever.
Like,
That stuff adds up.
That's how everyone programs these days.
Everyone programs by just jumping to a whole bunch of frameworks.
Oh, I need to do this relatively simple calculation or show this relatively some kind of widget.
How about I add this entire framework over here just to have this one simple thing that I could have written myself in an hour?
I wouldn't say it's the best practice to do what you're describing, to give an example.
Oh, it's what happens.
This is very close to your example.
This is a real example from my previous job.
When we started to do much more stuff with AWS, we of course wanted to be able to use the AWS APIs.
We'd already had our own S3 library because that's a simple thing to do, as Marco found out.
But we needed to do more stuff.
There's more things you can do with AWS.
They have APIs for everything, right?
And so, of course, we're using Perl, which is weird, and we have limited choices.
But anyway, someone...
So some developer and some other team decided, I'm going to go to CPAN, which is where you get Perl modules from, and I'm going to find a good AWS library.
And they found one.
They said, oh, yeah, I want this.
This thing gives access to the AWS API for services.
I'm going to add this.
And I added it to their task, and they're sending their tasks through the process of approvals and stuff like that.
And I was somewhere in the approval chain as one of the higher up like sign offs on things or whatever.
And I had to give that a big red X and say, and they said, why, what's wrong with this?
Why can't I have this thing?
I'm like, well, you included this dependence, this new dependency on this new library.
I'm sort of the keeper of the CPAN libraries and the tools that we use to install them.
Like, yeah, I need that for the AWS API.
Like, did you look at that dependency at all?
I think I have the numbers close here.
I'll try to put a link in the show notes if I'm right about it.
But this is from memory.
So we had CPAN modules installed across the company.
And these are the modules that we use.
And we used version control to track them.
If you added another one, it had to go through approvals.
Everything was all checked in.
All that stuff, right?
Not like Node, where it was pulled down in the build process.
It was very sort of baked in.
And this, including this one new dependency, would increase the number of files by like 50%.
I believe there were 32,000 files.
Oh, my gosh.
32,000 files as part of this distribution.
I'm doing that from memory.
If you would like to download this tarball and untar it and then just do a find wc-l to find out how many files are in this thing.
I'm like, yeah, this task that you're doing is not worth increasing.
Over the course of the 20 years this company has existed, we've added 65,000 files in our company CPAN module repository.
You're not going to add 32,000 as part of this one task.
Find the AWS APIs that you want to use.
Write your own functions to do them.
You'll fit it in a page of code.
Please do not add this library.
And hopefully this didn't happen when I was there.
We should also put a corporate rules.
So the next person who says, hey, I want to use this API from AWS.
Oh, great.
There's a library that gives me access to the entire AWS API.
And obviously this is auto-generated.
Like that's a lot of problem with these things.
They're auto-generated.
If there's a spec for the API, there's some like, you know, JSON schema or some kind of, what is that?
What is that spec case?
You might know.
XSLT?
No, that's old.
um the the standard for describing web apis where you can auto generate an interface to it and everything like that anyway wait so we're auto generating all of our spam now like that's even that's even better that's no it's it's a swagger thank you gordon freeman had a swagger um it's a way to describe api so if you have if you have your api described in swagger there's lots of tools that can they can uh you know just let you play with the api in that way
um but anyway it's so clear that this no human wrote 32 000 files it was auto generated based on the api spec which is cool until you have 32 000 new files in your in your source code repo it's like yeah no so that is not best practice and that's kind of the role of more senior people to sanity check that because you're right marco people will if they're not experienced say i found a thing that solves my problem let me just add it but you should look at what you're adding um
Uh, and that's the thing with modern computers being so fast.
Oh, it's just real easy.
Like, you know, everything's fast.
Everyone's using SSDs or whatever.
If I had you to guess, how many files do you think you added in that task?
I don't know.
It was probably like a couple hundred or whatever.
Nope.
32,000.
Well, and the thing is like, you know, if, if you think to look for it, that's one thing.
But when you involve working with companies, uh,
Even if that one developer is like, hey, I probably don't want to do this because it adds this thing.
If their boss is like, just do it.
We need to hit this ship date or we need to solve this need or have this requirement met.
You just have to do this and that's it.
Because the way that bloat on your user's devices is treated by almost every software publisher of any type, it's treated like you're spending someone else's money.
They don't think... They don't consider at all, hey, maybe we shouldn't be taking up hundreds of megs for our very relatively simple app need on every person's device who has to use this.
And that adds up.
First of all, it's eating into your storage.
You've got to buy more expensive phones or whatever to have bigger storage needs.
That also...
all that code at some point is going to be loaded into memory, or at least a large part of it is going to be loaded into memory.
And so then you're eating into people's memory in their devices, you're making their batteries not last as long, you're making other apps get kicked out of memory more often, therefore making everything slower when it has to switch apps and reload stuff.
Like...
Those are all real costs.
We had this discussion a few months back when one password switched over to Electron, and we all complained about that.
This kind of stuff matters.
These companies and these developers, whatever processes or sloppiness are leading to this massive bloat,
They're spending everyone else's money, but they're not spending their own.
They don't consider it as like, this is going to cost us in our app being big and bloated.
No, they don't care.
Or the people who are making the decisions can't care because some other decisions are being made above their head that's forced them to do things a certain way.
And that's when you're an indie, you can care about things that big companies might not care about because you can just do things the way you want to and with your own priorities and your own sensibilities.
And there and there's no one else telling you from above like, hey, we really got to, you know, hit the ship date and make this quota or fill this requirement or, you know, comply with this regulation or something like you don't have the needs of big companies.
So that's why our apps are able to be so much nicer in certain ways, because we're able to make decisions just for us.
I was unfair to this AWS module.
I will put a link to it in the show notes.
It only has 30,165 files.
Oh, you are such a meanie.
You are so mean.
Which I now just untarred onto my desktop.
So I will never move that.
You know, if you're in the business of selling computing resources, maybe making your libraries really blow.
it might be a very profitable move this no this is to be clear this is not an amazon library this is a library that just some random person of the goodness of their heart auto-generated and uploaded to cpan based on some aws api definition so it's it's i'm not faulting the person who made this it provides comprehensive coverage for apparently the entire aws api at the time they generated this file it's just too big to include if you need one or two functions
All right, and then finally for today, Robert Campbell writes, are you familiar with SV-Alt or Svault?
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to pronounce this.
Anyway, they make outboard cooling accessories for laptops.
I'm getting ready to upgrade and considering a move from desktop Mac to MacBook Pro if I could get sustained performance for large photography processing tasks.
Assuming even an M1 Max MacBook Pro will eventually throttle under sustained processing loads, do you think an outboard cooling booster like this vault might move the needle?
I'd love to make this thing as fast as possible when docked at my home office.
Maybe I'm overly sensitive to heat-induced performance issues having been burned in the past, question mark.
Background info.
I run a photography retouching and graphic design business and thinking about replacing two Macs, an Office 2017 iMac, which is having trouble keeping up, and a similar-aged on-site MacBook Pro that's even slower, with a single top-spec 14-inch MacBook Pro Max dropping the desktop Mac.
The new MacBook Pro will spend 80% of its time docked to my office and 20% on site.
I've maintained the two-machine workflow as previous MacBook Pros have trouble staying cool and slow down dramatically during long production jobs.
For many of the reasons you guys have discussed at length, I'd love to reduce my two machines to one.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about this.
Do you guys have thoughts?
So I have never used this one particular company's things, but I looked at them when this email came in, and it looks like basically like a laptop, like a clamshell mode laptop stand that is itself a giant block of metal that has some fins carved out.
So it looks cool.
I will say it looks cool.
Some of them have optional fans that you could mount on them and everything, but
I can tell you, as somebody who... I drive my MacBook pretty hard.
Now, granted, I don't have a photo retouching workflow.
That's a very different type of load than what I'm doing to mine.
But that being said, I would suggest get the 16-inch, put it in whatever clamshell stand you already use, or whatever you can find, and just try it first.
I think you will be surprised...
how much it takes to make it slow down because you know like so what Robert said right in the middle here is assuming even an M1 max MBP will eventually throttle under sustained processing loads comma that's not a safe assumption actually like I would suggest like try it and see if it actually does throttle under sustained loads of your type because I can tell you I have never seen mine throttle
If I'm destroying the CPUs, not only does it not throttle and it stays at the same speed the whole time, but I don't even hear the fans.
You're lucky if you can even hear the fans spin up with these new ones.
They're that good.
as you know throttling is a different story like to make a throttle it has to both be at its max you know cooling abilities so you know the fan running whatever its max speed is and still not be able to keep up that's when it will actually throttle i have i've never seen the m1 max 16 inch even come close the 14 inch might because it's smaller has you know probably you know presumably like you know a little bit less thermal mass in there but this if you go if you get the 16 the
I think you'd be very hard-pressed to make it throttle at all.
The only time I've ever even heard the fan spin up on mine is when I was doing a multi-hour-long ML training model that was totally saturating the CPUs and the GPUs for multiple hours straight.
Then the fan spun up a little bit, and it was a little bit audible.
But that's it.
That being said, if you're looking at something like this...
I looked at it because I was like, hey, I keep my MacBook in clamshell mode all the time.
Maybe I should look at this.
I didn't end up going with it.
And part of the reason why is that for these things to work, just physically speaking, the hot part of the laptop has to be on the bottom, the way you orient it in clamshell mode.
The hot part is the part basically between the screen hinge and the keyboard.
That's where all the heat sinks and main processors and everything are.
But
I flip mine over so that the hinge of the screen is up.
And the reason I do that is to give it a little bit of boost in convection cooling.
Because that way it is sucking air in from those little side slot vents, sucking them in on the bottom, and shooting hot air out of the top through the screen hinge vent.
And I don't know if this makes a big difference or a small difference, but it probably makes a difference.
And so even just running it in any stand that way with the screen hinge up instead of down, I think you'll be totally fine.
I don't think you need anything else.
And if you actually are stressing both the GPU and CPU for sustained periods, you might hear the fan.
That's a very different thing from throttling.
And again,
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
The assumptions that you've made about how Macs behave, performance-wise, noise-wise, thermally, if you've made those assumptions only with Intel machines...
drop all those assumptions when you're moving into the M1 and M2 era because those assumptions no longer hold the way they did.
And they, the performance characteristics and thermal characteristics of these things are very, very different than what you are used to.
And they're way better.
And so try, you know, if you're going to do this,
You don't need a heatsink probably for almost any, like unless you're working in a very hot environment doing, you know, video rendering 24 seven, maybe even then probably not, but just get the 16 inch and run it in regular clamshell mode with the screen hinge up on any, on any stand.
And I would be shocked if you could actually make that thing thermally throttle.
Well, so the thing is, when he gets a new Mac, it's going to be so much faster than his old Macs, no matter what, even if it was throttled to 50% speed.
Like, there's that.
So you won't mind that.
And the other thing is, you won't notice if it throttles.
It doesn't mean that it's not throttling.
If you look at the people doing these really picky benchmarks where they're...
getting the clock speeds of the sub-execution units inside the SOC, right?
You can see that parts of it do throttle, even when the fans aren't running in an audible way just because you get hotspots, but you won't notice unless you're running like a benchmark and comparing, you know, fractional percentages of performance difference.
The reason they're noticing is because they wanted to see like,
with the m2 macbook air which we know does thermally throttle in a way that you might actually notice the pros also have sub components that sometimes thermally throttle even when the fans are low but by such a fraction of a percent you would never notice unless you're running a benchmark and again keep in mind that this new computer you're going to buy is going to be so much faster than your old computers you will never miss that fraction of a percent so don't worry about it but related to this thing
With the M2 MacBook Air, people have been experimenting with it, and, you know, it thermally throttles, and I've said on past shows, I think that's the right call for that machine because fanlessness is itself a feature, and Apple should ship a computer that is fanless, and this is the one, and thermal throttling is, you know, a perfectly good price to pay because even with the thermal throttling, it's still faster than the machine it replaces, and it is exactly as silent because neither one has a fan, right?
But people want to tinker, and one of the things they did with tinkering was they took the M2 MacBook Air and they just put thermal pads inside it, like they replaced the little, like,
black vinyl stickery thing that is itself a heat transfer and just use like the thermal pads that you would put in you know for for removing heat in like a pc build or whatever and then it made a huge difference but it made a huge difference in a way that we've discussed on tests on past things those thermal pads were taking heat away from the soc and the other components and dumping it to the case of the computer which makes the computer feel hotter and
And, you know, there are rules about how hot the computer can get and still be allowed to be on people's laps.
And so I think the M2 MacBook Air is calibrated to not even come close to getting too hot to comply with whatever different countries' rules are about, hey, here's how hot your laptop can get and still be a consumer product, right?
Because you don't want it to burn people.
And I think the consumer rules governing that are way far back from burning people.
Although it's hard to believe if you think about some of the Mac laptops of the past and just how hot they got in certain areas.
But that's kind of the tradeoff with laptops.
A lot of them have like, quote unquote, not very good cooling because the hotness has to go somewhere.
It's like, why don't you just dump it to the case?
Well, now your case is hot.
And even if it's not so hot, that's going to burn you or it's uncomfortable.
No one wants a hot computer on their lap.
So a lot of these times, especially with the M2 MacBook Air, I feel like the computer is choking down heat on your behalf rather than dumping it to the top of your legs.
And you should thank it for that because, like I said, even when it's thermally throttling, it's still faster than the M1 version in most tasks.
But, yeah, for Robert's question, just get an M1 Max MacBook Pro.
It will rock your world.
It'll be great.
yeah thanks to our sponsors this week snap ar memberful and collide and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join at atp.fm slash join we will talk to you next week
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U
So a couple of weeks ago, I did something I have never done before.
And because we haven't had enough car talk on the show, I thought I'd talk about my car for a minute.
Yeah, let's do it.
I replaced the wheels of my car.
And I now have different wheels than what it came with.
I have never had the occasion to do that before.
Now, wait.
When you say, I replaced the wheels of my car.
Oh, I didn't do it.
He doesn't have one of those machines that takes wheels off the rim.
Well, no, no, no.
You mean the tire off the wheel?
No, I do not have that machine.
No, my car came with summer tires, which means that under like 55 degrees, I really shouldn't be driving the car.
I did.
I never drove it in snow because that's just suicidal.
But I did occasionally drive the car at less than 55 degrees.
And despite what you two think, I know you think I live in some tropical wasteland.
But well, I guess right now at this time of year, I do.
Not all year.
Bad time example.
Not all year, though.
And so in the wintertime, it does get relatively cold.
And so I found myself not really driving my car very much in the winter, which was a bummer.
And I finally got to the point in my stock tires after, what, three years, four years, something like that.
When did I get the car?
2018.
So four years.
I finally blew through the tires, which is impressive because I forget what was on the stock, but whatever it was, it was soft enough that they shouldn't have lasted four years.
But they did because I never drive anywhere.
So I was hemming and hawing about what to do.
And I decided what I wanted to do was replace the Volkswagen English Town wheels, which is what it came with.
And it was the only thing that the car came with, the only option I had for the car when it was new.
And even though years before and after had different options, I wanted to replace the Volkswagen English Town wheels, which I frigging hate and I have always hated, with the Volkswagen Pretoria wheels, which are the ones that I... Wait a second.
You just got good on explaining how you had summer tires and you didn't want summer tires.
And suddenly now we were replacing the wheels.
Is replacing the tires a prerequisite to replacing the wheels?
Yes, because why would I get rid of why would I stop using the stock wheels that had the stock tires on them when the tires still had a bunch of tread left in them?
I'm a frugal man.
Oh, so you're going to switch back to the summer tires in the summer?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
you know i i want a permanent switch from what i had to something new so why didn't you just get new tires for your car because i hate the wheels they're not connected this is two separate things one you don't like the wheels and want new wheels two you want to have tires so you can drive it in the winter but those seem like two separate tasks you just combine them into one as if they're connected but it's just uh aesthetic annoyance and then i'm not able to drive my car in the winter and so i need new tires
right well and i also need to do tires because the summer tires like i said were shot at this point like not only did i hate that they were summer only but they were they were you know that's that's the thing you have to do to to like the practical thing i can't drive my car as much both because the tires are worn out and even when they weren't worn out i can't wear them in the winter so i need new tires but then the wheel thing is just like while i'm in there i found a way to spend more money which is i don't like these wheels that's exactly right
So I decided to get Pretoria wheels.
And then my buddy that I talk about often, who is one of the ones that convinced me to get this car in the first place, kept nagging me and saying, you should go down an inch.
You should go down an inch.
You should go down an inch.
I'm telling you, you should go down an inch.
It comes with 19-inch wheels.
He kept beating me up saying, go 18, go 18, go 18.
If he had his druthers, I would have gone 17 inches.
But he said, no, I know you'll never go 17 inches, but go 18 inches.
So what I did was I bought Volkswagen actually makes an 18-inch version of the Pretoria, which is my beloved wheel.
I will put links in the show notes.
And I went and bought 18-inch Pretorias and got new tires mounted on there.
And now I have my beloved wheel, the Pretoria, with 18-inch wheel and tire combination.
And I got to tell you,
I think he was right about going down an inch because now I don't feel every pebble in the road, even in race mode, because I have the magnetic suspension where it actually gets stiffer as you move through different modes.
And in race mode, I needed new kidneys by the time I drove a mile or two.
And now I only need a new back, not new kidneys.
So that's a marked improvement.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no benefit to bigger wheels except if you like the way they look.
Everything else is better when you get smaller ones and just get bigger tires.
There is sometimes also a performance advantage depending on the setup, but the ever-increasing size of wheels on cars is a great example of
customers voting with their wallet for a thing that is on paper worse for everybody involved but people really like how it works like that's why when you whenever you see like a concept car or even more forget about concept car when you see someone a sketch of a concept car you know they show you like the designer's sketch in the designer's sketch the wheels like they don't even have tires on they don't even have rubber bands around
them they're just like yeah massive discs that are huge because it looks cool and people have been have been paying for that they say we want bigger wheels when they you know the wheels have just been going up and not like even my Honda Accord I think my first Honda Accord had like 15 inch wheels now my Honda Accord I think has either 18 inch or 19 inch wheels on it it's just wheel inflation is everywhere and people don't care that the ride is worse and so I would just my recommendation for anybody who's about to spend you know six figures on a fancy luxury car and you're listening to our show a join up at atp.fm slash join please but be uh
Do not go for the 22 inches.
Do not go for the 23 inch wheels.
Yes, I know they look the coolest, but if you want to get your money's worth out of your $300,000 fancy car that you're getting, pick the smallest.
The smallest wheel is going to be like 20 freaking inches anyway.
Just get the smallest wheel you can get if you value your spine at all.
Yeah, and so this has been really good.
I really don't personally, this is just for me, I personally don't care for the look of most cars with non-OEM wheels, with wheels that did not come with a car.
In this case, I'm cheating a little bit because in the year before my car was made, the year after...
The car was offered with this exact wheel in 19 inches, and so I'm kind of still within my own rule set.
But I think these ones look so much better.
And the other advantage of going from 19 inches to 18 inches, and I'm not 100% sure of these numbers off the top of my head, but I believe the 19-inch wheel is something like $800 a wheel, and that's without any rubber around it.
It's $800 a wheel for the 19 inches.
And the 18 inch was like $400 a wheel or something like that.
Such a bargain.
Well, yeah, it's still a pile of money.
Don't get me wrong.
You mentioned like wanting the essentially first party wheels.
And I mostly feel that way as well.
But I have to say someone in my neighborhood has a Honda Accord of my generation with third party wheels on it that are not Honda wheels.
And they look really good.
And I look at them and I like, well, I have two things.
One, my wheels are super duper curbed.
Yes, some of that is me.
A lot of it is other people who live in this house.
But, yeah, I don't like having my wheels, what do they call it, curb rash?
They've been hit into pieces of cement that has caused damage to them, and it is not attractive.
But the other thing is these wheels I see in the neighborhood, I thought they looked really good.
Now, they look boy racery.
They actually kind of look like these Pretoria wheels, but even more boy racery.
And they're kind of, like, inappropriate, and people would probably laugh at them because why should a Honda Accord have such sporty wheels on it?
But they looked really good.
Next time I see it, I'm going to take a picture of it and show you, and you can tell me.
if I should never, ever do this.
Maybe this is like my version of like the Civic Type R. Like, should I get a giant wing on my Accord and just say, no, don't do it.
But boy, I liked how these wheels look.
So I fantasize about changing my wheels, but the wheels that are on my car are $650 each on a Honda Accord.
Yeah, it's bananas.
They're so expensive.
But yeah, I would be very interested to see specifically what you're talking about.
So please do send a picture along.
They're like this.
They're like six spoke or no, how many is this?
But five times, 10 spoke.
I think they're either 10 spoke or six spoke and they just have kind of like wire.
They make it look like a little race car and I thought they looked really good.
They'd probably get curbed even worse than my current wheels because they kind of stick out a little bit.
But I was like, wow, that actually looks good on an Accord.
Anyway, I shouldn't and probably never will buy new wheels for my car, but it is a fun thing to fantasize about.
Can I tell you, though, one of the disadvantages of being the only person in the house that is capable of driving your car, because, again, Erin doesn't think she can drive a stick, even though – well, it's been years since she's tried, but I bet you she could –
nevertheless uh when i curbed the snot out of one of my wheels which was 100 my fault i couldn't even be like well maybe that was the time aaron took the car no no she's literally she's driven the car maybe once and it was around the neighborhood i think it was my fault and i curbed the piss out of it oh if she had done that to one of her wheels i would be still beating her up years later yeah
And so this is a fancy modern cars with hilariously expensive wheels.
Also, these days have the cool cameras that will show you like the vertical view of how far your wheel is from the curb.
And I'm saying car makers should go one better.
Forget about auto lane assist.
It should be literally impossible to drive a Ferrari's wheels into the curb at two miles an hour.
Yeah.
the wheel should not the wheel should not let you do it they should have lidar sensors dedicated to knowing like put them in the wheels i don't care like this is slow speed it just i should i i should not be able to turn the wheel and curb the wheels on a car that expensive because those wheels cost as much as my car individually probably because they're made of carbon fiber or whatever just like i know the cameras are there and you got the beeping and you got all the different sensors and all the things but it's like we need to just
It needs to be an impossibility to curve the wheels in these cars.
I see it all the time.
I look at fancy cars all the time.
I always look at their wheels, and you look at them, and you're like, ooh.
You can just see that one or two bad days that they had where they scraped the wheels, especially in the Boston area where the roads are so narrow.
Everyone's got to get really close to the curb.
Everyone's in a hurry.
Uh, it's really easy to scrape a wheel.
You think you're never going to do it.
You're three years into owning a car.
You don't pay attention for one second.
And it's like, well, now you're either going to live with that or you're going to pay $700 for a new wheel.
I find the not caring option is really great in this case.
Like, like I decided like back, back when I, when I got the Tesla, I decided at that point, you know what?
I'm just going to let the car get used.
And I'm going to let it get worn, and I'm just not going to care about, you know, small stuff.
Now, when a plow hit it, I got that fixed.
But, like, you know, I have, like, on my winter rims that I cut the snow tires on, one of those is scratched up pretty badly from a pretty bad curb incident.
And I just – I don't care.
I just – it's fine.
Like –
This is the way to do it.
I use my car.
My car is a tool for me to use.
When I open up the trunk now, there is so much dust and crap that I can't even vacuum out anymore.
It's so buried in whatever the carpet stuff is in the bottom of the trunk.
I don't care.
It's fine.
It's there to be used, right?
Like now, on the Defender, now that I put that roof box on it, I can't even go through a car wash with that thing anymore.
So therefore, it's never going to get washed.
Oh my God, Marco.
It's just never going to happen because I'm not going to do it.
You know how much that matters?
Not at all.
You could have had a trunk liner.
We have like a rubberized truck liner, so you can just take that out and hose it down and it's convenient.
But you should clean your car occasionally.
Well, even like for the Tesla, like I got rubber floor mats to try to, you know, you know how much good that did?
Now I have too many floor mats and, you know, who cares if I got dirt on the rugs?
Like that's what they're for.
They're designed to be used.
Vacuuming is not too much of an ask.
You can do that.
I mean, you should get on my schedule.
I clean my car once a year whether it needs it or not.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Once a year I'll take the box off and I'll go through an automatic car.
But when I clean it, I take all the floor mats out.
I vacuum them.
I take the trunk liner out.
I clean that out.
I vacuum the whole inside of the car.
I wash the outside.
It's not like I'm detailing the car, but you got to get the, as Merlin would say, you got to get the big stuff.
All right.
Once a year, I'll drive to Casey's house and you can watch it for me.
Yes, please.
For the love of God, please.
You should start watching some car detailing channels to see what actual fancy car detailers do.
I love watching those things.
Someone will bring in their McLaren F1 and you see what car detailing in the McLaren F1 is.
First of all, again, the detailing job on the McLaren F1 costs as much as my car, but they do a really good job.
They do a really, really good job.
The part where they're cleaning the brake calipers with Q-tips, you're like, okay, they're getting the money he's worth.
Oh, my God.
I cannot... No.
I can't make myself care that much.
It's so much work.
I feel like I'm... I understand and agree with the principle of what you're saying, Marco, but I can't let go that much.
My paint is...
is awful because i've gone through road debris that's left chips everywhere and it's just like i i've used the car to your point and i am mostly okay with that yeah that's what it's for use it agreed but i need to wash the car at least once a month and curbing wheels is that's like actual damage it's not like oh it's cosmetic like at a certain point you're taking chunks of metal off your wheels and it's you know it's more than cosmetic yeah
It is, but it's such a common thing.
For instance, on the Tesla, when I moved out of the parking lot last time, I noticed that I now have a very small scuff on the corner where somebody parked next to it and scuffed it on the way in.
It's way too small to get fixed by anybody.
This is a car that lives in parking lots most of its life.
Scuffs on the plastic bumpers are going to happen to everybody.
You just have to wait for them to accumulate to the point where you do it.
But curved wheels really hurt a lot because it's metal and it's like there's no occasion.
Like bumpers are kind of – you don't have control over that.
But like you're not going to – no one –
is going to accidentally scrape by you and curb your wheels.
They're going to hit your bumpers.
They're going to put leaves and paint on your doors, but the wheels are probably fine.
So if the wheels are screwed up, it's because you did it.
And that's why it hurts.