33: A 30-Minute Skip Button
04 Oct 2013More Mac Pro speculation, podcast scrubbers and ad-skipping features, iPhone 5S cases, and automatic battery conditioning.
Episode Description:
- When we expected the Mavericks GM (recorded two hours before this).
- Apparent new E5-1680 Mac Pro in Geekbench and what CPU tradeoffs to expect in the new Mac Pro.
- Speculating on the new Mac Pro's fan noise, rotating cable management, and intended desk location.
- FU on John's podcast-scrubber idea. (Spoiler: he knows about the vertical speed-scaling that's been in Apple's scrubber for years, and it's not what he wants.)
- Experimenting with new UI controls and behaviors: some end up being cool and useful in practice, but many don't.
- Marco's brief adventure in designing a custom binary sync protocol.
- The potential conflict of interest of avoiding automatic ad-skipping features in Overcast since Marco gets income from ads on this podcast, and the ethics of publishing all podcasts' subscriber stats on the site.
- iPhone 5S cases.
- Laptop battery health and potential automatic battery conditioning.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s got a fan on over there? Is that you, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s October. You still need a fan? This is how you can tell you’re in the South.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he lives in like a swamp down there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that is so not true, you big jerk. It was so humid in July. Yeah, in July.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, actually, all kidding aside, we’re going through a little bit of a heat wave. Although I will say, and this is just between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us and whoever’s listening on the livestream, I definitely sweat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to death and turn my fan off when I record any other podcast because I don’t have confidence that any of them will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to pull out my fan like you can. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John might have sounded naughty.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like when the guests get to sit on the good furniture but the family doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, exactly. Our podcast, turn off the fan
⏹️ ▶️ John for our podcast, put it on everyone else’s, make their podcast worse. How about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well no, but because I know that Marco can strip it without issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to edit out John’s crickets a few episodes ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that I can’t actually help.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t turn the crickets off for the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I wish I could turn the crickets off But they do not have off switches and they’re very hard to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’s the review John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just Andy. Did you see the rumor that? That they’re gearing up for a late October
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release of Mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ John I was so excited when I saw the Apple insider post that said there was a new build out there wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John developed for you But it was typical Apple insider sounding exciting, but really nothing there. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always sad. I I thought today might have been the GM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, what do you think we’ll get the GM? Like a week ahead of time maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ John If that? Probably. I don’t know. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the GM, like that matters for developers and it matters a little bit for me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point I don’t think they’re changing anything. They’re just fixing bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good. I mean, if they’re aiming for a release quote this fall, well, as we record this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s October 3rd. We’re getting into fall pretty significantly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they shouldn’t be making any noticeable changes at this point. They should just be fixing things. We will see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like you would expect at a certain point they’re going to announce the date for the iPad event too, right? And whether
⏹️ ▶️ John those are, they could do that Maverick stuff at the same time, they could do the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, or they could just do an iPad event and then do a separate announcement. But anyway, those are all coming this
⏹️ ▶️ John month, right, I would imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you see, I don’t know when this was posted. might have been more than a week ago but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I’ll paste this in the chat and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Geekbench result from what appears to be the new Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running a CPU that I didn’t even think to look at, the E5-1 series, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the 1680 V2 and this is it, this link is it compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Mac Pro, the 2010 3.33 GHz which is the fastest at a lot of things that aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely parallelizable. And it does substantially better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s interesting though is, and I looked around, I tried to find earlier, I tried to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other Geekbench results from the other Xeon entries that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to be in the Mac Pro, and this was by far overall the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with single threaded stuff. And it came very close to the best with multicore. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a really, really nice CPU. It’s about $1,000 from Intel, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to be… I don’t think this would be the base CPU, but this might be a plus $500 or plus $1,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option. It could be good. Now, if you two…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, when you two buy the new Mac Pro, are you planning on just going full-orment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it and just maxing this thing out? What did you do with your current boxes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what’s interesting about this one… And this, I believe, was a little bit of the case in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation, but not nearly as much. Intel is really hitting thermal walls here. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shrunk their process a lot, but they haven’t really been able to really destroy single-threaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance compared to previous generations. So that’s why they just keep adding cores. However, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these new Xeons, the whole new E5-V2 line, which is what the Mac Pro is probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be exclusively using—actually, I think it has to be exclusively using—that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole line, if you look at the core counts and the clock speeds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the core count goes up the clock speeds go down because they’re limited by thermal capacities of the surrounding enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So these all have the same TDP and they can all do this turbo boost thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but with reduced capacities as the core count goes up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with reduced benefit. So what you have basically is a whole bunch of CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where there’s like five different top-of-the-line models that all have different characteristics. So like if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more single threaded stuff, mp3 encoding, and or hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything Adobe makes. If you’re doing a lot of single threaded stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll be better off with a higher clocked CPU, even if that means fewer cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the top-of-the-line one is gonna be this 12 core model that’s only 2.7 gigahertz and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like if you do like the multi-core test it does substantially better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this CPU like this one is scoring like a 24,000 on the new geek bench and the the 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core one is like a I believe 29,000 so it’s it’s not like twice as fast but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s certainly faster so if you’re doing things like video encoding all day then that that will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable but for most things the top core model is actually not going to be fastest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll be better off going with something like this, where it has fewer cores, but it can boost them up higher.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about you, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I would get it maxed out if I could afford it, but I’m imagining that the top end one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the top end of most Mac Pros, is going to be silly, silly pricing. But even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you can afford it, you feel like you don’t want to buy it, because you’re like, come on, I’m going to spend as much money as a car on this little
⏹️ ▶️ John black trash can on my desk. I’m looking for that sweet spot of Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know maybe I’ll splurge in one particular area, but I basically want some kind of balance of performance So
⏹️ ▶️ John normally I was forced to buy Something close to the top of the line because I always wanted the best video card they had
⏹️ ▶️ John But with a PTO they usually let you configure that and I don’t think the only time I ever got the fastest fastest CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John was When the original power Mac g5 came out and I got the top of the line one of those because it was reasonably priced
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you know get the fastest one you can get you know it’s two gigahertz or whatever it was and you know three gigahertz was
⏹️ ▶️ John coming in a year, they said. So here we are in 2013. And we’re looking at the geekbench score of a
⏹️ ▶️ John three gigahertz Apple processor. So yay, IBM finally didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ever deliver ever. Yeah. But now I’ll be looking at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing Marco is like, I’m probably going to pick a system with a higher clock speed and fewer cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think that will be better for the things I do on the computer. I mean, at this point, it’s not like it used to be where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, you get a single CPU or a double CPU and you have to worry if you need that second one,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, the one with fewer cores has eight cores in it and 16 threads because
⏹️ ▶️ John of hyper threading. So it’s not like, um, you know, cause that was, I usually tended to go multi-core
⏹️ ▶️ John in the old days because I’m like, look, this, you know, in Unix operating system, there’s tons of processes running all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want all these little background demons and stuff. And even just in a single processor, multi-threader waiting around for cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I, if I could get some with more cores, uh, let them grind away. Plus, there’s multiple processors running all the time. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have multiple cores, so there’s less waiting for CPUs. And even though they’re not stressing the CPUs, just, hey, more cores
⏹️ ▶️ John to pass around. But everything has tons of cores now. So the only reason to go to the super
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core ones is, I guess, if you have an application that uses them, some kind of application that’s massively
⏹️ ▶️ John takes advantage of every core you have. You get almost linear scaling if you double the number of cores. But I don’t use any
⏹️ ▶️ John of those applications. So I’m going to be looking for probably, Maybe I won’t buy the fastest,
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest, low number of cores processor, because they might charge a premium for that too. This has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with how Apple prices things. But until I see the prices, maybe I’m getting the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ John one, because the cheapest one is going to be $5,000. And then, you know, that’s what’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. Right, yeah. I mean, the pricing is still such a big question mark on these. We have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the entry price will be, what the CPU upgrades will cost, anything. I mean, we don’t even have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ballpark, except that we can assume that it’s probably not to be that much different than the previous Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe a little more to cover those graphics cards, but I’m still betting entry price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of $3,500, which is higher than the current ones, because I think they do have to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those graphics cards with a healthy margin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certainly, the US assembly is going to increase their cost a little bit, but I don’t think it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough relative to the profit margin of this product to make any difference in the retail price.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think that they can put the bottom line pretty cheaply. Intel charges 500 retail or whatever for their thing. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting that price. That’s probably the most expensive component in
⏹️ ▶️ John the system. Maybe the video card gives it a run for its money. There’s not that much else in the system,
⏹️ ▶️ John just in terms of physical goods and the amount of stuff in there. If you were to build your own PC with this processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John the processor would definitely to be the most expensive thing in the system. And then you’d buy a retail gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John video card and a motherboard and a case and you’d slap it together and you do that good old PC Mac price comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could see what is the real price of this stuff? Take that home-built
⏹️ ▶️ John PC cost and then cut a whole bunch off that. That’s Apple’s actual price. So I think there is room for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a healthy 45, 50% margin and still offer
⏹️ ▶️ John this machine entry level under 3K. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see. I mean, really, those GPUs are such a big question mark. Because at retail, of course, they’re very expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re also now going to be like a half generation or one generation old by the time we actually get them,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they pre-announced the Mac Pro, and it’s like, but no, now the video card is crappy. AMD announced their next-gen GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? We waited so long for this great machine, and we don’t even have it in our hands, and the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is already, you know, AMD’s already got their next-generation architecture. I’m like, oh, I’ve got to buy this previous-generation
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture and my brand new Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I’m curious though, and I admit I don’t know enough about the various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-level workings of the motherboard and the bus and the chipset and everything. Is there much of a chipset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is it all in the CPU now? Anyway, one thing I noticed though, comparing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking on Geekbench, looking at the scores, comparing the Mac Pro to other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPUs that should have similar scores, the Mac Pro does a lot better. and i’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wondering you know we know that the met the new mac pro is designed in this crazy way to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to basically use every possible pci expressly and to use every possible amount of bandwidth through that cpu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the chipset i wonder if they’ve been able to make some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks because they can assume there’s going to be nothing else in the bus besides what they have in their stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there enough headway for them to like tweak that to make their systems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10, 15% faster than you just buying a super micro server and sticking a Z on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Is that even possible? I don’t even know. I’d love to hear from listeners who know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would think that they would definitely make it 10 to 15% cheaper. Because as you said, they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about internal expansion pretty much at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Although they do have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cover the cost of a very custom designed motherboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. But I don’t think it’s outside the expertise of
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who make motherboards. It’s not a standard size or shape, but I don’t think that’s the, you know, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the stupid round case and that triangular piece of metal thing is more expensive than just getting motherboards cut to the,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re rectangular shapes. It’s not like they’re, you know, and they do custom motherboards for all their laptops anyway with those crazy shapes
⏹️ ▶️ John to work around the components. So this is a much, this is relatively a freer environment. Look how much
⏹️ ▶️ John room, like, think of what Apple has to stick motherboards into. Laptops where there’s not a millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John to spare and everything is like, every capacitor is laid out, so it just barely clears like the little post
⏹️ ▶️ John holding the screw that holds the case together. The Mac Mini, which is tiny. Phones and iPads, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it, there’s no room in there to breathe. The iMac, which is relatively luxurious, but they keep squeezing it thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinner, and it’s just laptop parts in there anyway. And then finally the Mac Pro, where you can have actual rectangles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three of them! Three actual rectangle printed circuit boards. But yeah, the lack of any
⏹️ ▶️ John other expansion in there, I would imagine would allow them to just trim every single
⏹️ ▶️ John component that’s not absolutely necessary to run what they know will be in the box. This This machine, this new
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, is designed electrically and physically a lot like a couple generations
⏹️ ▶️ John ago game console, albeit with much more expensive components, right? But you know, it’s got, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tried, you know, one fan, you run a game console to have one fan to cool the whole thing. No internal
⏹️ ▶️ John expansion, everything’s all just like shoved in there. There’s a CPU, a GPU, memory,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I guess the internal hard drive flash replaced with SSDs. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big tubular game console that costs tons of money and probably doesn’t run games that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think that the fact that it’s going to be made in the US is going to have any empirical difference on
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t think so. For US customers anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the extra amount they have to… It really depends on what’s shipped where. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you say, oh, no, they don’t have to ship it from China to me. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they have to ship probably every component that’s in the thing from China to Kentucky or wherever the heck the thing is built, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John ship the finished product from Kentucky. It’s being assembled in America, but the places that the components
⏹️ ▶️ John come from. And in terms of assembly, this is probably the easier, an easier thing to assemble. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not machining aluminum and jamming little pieces in there and everything. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a metal frame, slap the circuit boards on it, a plastic case, a fan on top, a little
⏹️ ▶️ John power supply, slap it all together, you’re done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and the tolerances amongst those major components are a lot better. I mean, obviously, the tolerances within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a component are just as bad as always. But like you were saying earlier, it’s a lot harder to squeeze a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a phone than it is in the trash can.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, plenty of room in there. Although I was having waking nightmares while I was idly thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier today about, what will the fan sound like when I’m playing a game on that thing? I
⏹️ ▶️ John know when I play on my current Mac Pro it’s the only time I ever hear the fans is and it’s because the fans and like
⏹️ ▶️ John Section a 9 of the 15 wind sections that are in a Mac Pro start cranking
⏹️ ▶️ John up But normally you don’t hear them at all because the GPU is doing nothing But you know start playing a 3d game for an hour or so
⏹️ ▶️ John and you hear this whine and it’s not the giant CPU fans The it’s the smaller ones that are blowing across the
⏹️ ▶️ John video card area plus also the you know The actual active cooler that’s on the video card itself
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’m like well, that’s kind of noisy Will this new one be better because there’s only one fan
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’ll be worse because the only alternative when things get hot in there It’s just a crank up the one fan that they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to even higher speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the one you have now is that the 8800 with the stock fan?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I’m very familiar with that fan That is by far the loudest part in that computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even even at idle speeds eventually mine got I guess a little bit of dust in it somewhere And so it became a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit louder And even at idle speeds like I would you know I would take the lid off and stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my finger on the hub So it would stop that fan It was a massive difference in noise like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not not to the point where you’d have to replace it But to the point where you notice it, and you’re like wow that’s kind of inelegant a little
⏹️ ▶️ John I had that on my g5 where that fan it You know it started to go bad and when they start to go bad You know it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like nails on a chuck where do you get rid of it? So I bought aftermarket aftermarket cooler to put in there that was
⏹️ ▶️ John probably actually noisier than the old one, but so far on this 8800, for many years
⏹️ ▶️ John of service, it has not started to pick up that telltale little scritch that you know is just gonna eventually get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for a video card fan that I assume you leave your computer on most of the time or all the time? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleeps at night. Okay, that’s pretty good, but still, for a video card fan from 2008 to last,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until now, that’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, this is a champion.
⏹️ ▶️ John those things always die. This is a champion machine. Like, this has had the fewest hardware problems of any Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John I have ever owned, including all of my old classic ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it comes out, I’m curious to see benchmarks. I’m curious to see when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bare Feet gets a hold of it and test it against the other Macs and against other models within itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really wanted to see how these CPUs perform in real world use or with real benchmarks once we have the retail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines and see what we can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s really going to be telling to me is whole system performance. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the PCI SSDs, are they super fast SSDs? Or are they just like, nah, the SSDs are fine? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to feel fast if when you launch the thing and you click on System Preferences and it loads all those preference
⏹️ ▶️ John panes or whatever, that it’s like, wow, I can notice this is faster. Is it going to feel faster than an existing
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac that’s all SSD? Or will it just feel like, yeah, it’s about the same?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s crazy is like, I don’t even think it has a serial ATA controller. Now, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it? Like there’s exactly like there’s so much stuff that by getting rid of all the internal expansion, there’s so much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it just doesn’t need to have. And it just, you know, it could dedicate tons of bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the stuff it does have, if it can use it, and then just have, you know, three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt controllers and be like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John done. Oh, could be interesting. What’s up with the JPEG decompress result in this benchmark?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, look at that. I don’t know. I have no idea. But, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see like the, this is kind of like testing the A7 and text benchmark,
⏹️ ▶️ John where the AES multi-core score is like twice as high.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly. Because it’s hardware accelerated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they had a hardware instruction. That’s the best way to win benchmarks. Oh yeah. Add a hardware instruction for whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re benchmarking.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 10 times faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And one of the reasons why I keep looking at these benchmarks is like, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my current computer has a 3 or even probably 4 year old CPU by this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this actually isn’t that much faster than it in single core stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m kind of like, I don’t want to buy a whole new Mac Pro and go through all that expense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s not going to be a Retina display to go with it and therefore, you know, another whole reason to get it. There’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be the right in the display and the there’s not gonna be a massive upgrade in CPU performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available Like it’s kind of stupid to have a three-year-old to have a three and a half year old CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s almost as fast as what you’re about to launch today But that just shows how little progress Intel has made with the Xeons
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve already got a PCI Express SSD a big one, right? So like you should definitely look at you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Does this it? if we Put a black sheet over your desk and didn’t tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re using your old Mac Pro or your new one and you can’t tell a difference than maybe wait for the second generation. I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John wish I could wait for the second generation system, especially knowing all the things that we know now about,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, maybe the retina displays won’t be ready yet, and the new GPU architecture from AMD
⏹️ ▶️ John is out, and those architectures don’t change every year. So it would be nice if I could
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for a second, but I can’t wait. I mean, I’ve had this computer way too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, how old is the one that you have at work? Because you have a Mac Pro at work as well, don’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got, I don’t know, I think it’s around five years old. But it was the first, it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you call it? The Intel chip whose name starts with an N that I can’t pronounce.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The Nahalad?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the first one with integrated memory controller. It’s the single CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John socket version of those, with the stupid one with triple channel memory and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco four RAM slots.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I got it because it was the cheapest Mac Pro that was available at the time. And so I give
⏹️ ▶️ John work break. And instead of getting a $300 Dell crap box, They’re going to buy me this super
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive, whatever it was, $2,000 Mac. But the replacement cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John for machines at work, I think now is like 18 months or something for the crappy Dell laptops that everybody gets. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had this machine for five years. So I feel like I really, they got their money’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I was going to ask is, are you replacing both home and work? Or do you think you’re going to do one and not
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have any control of what happens at work. I have put an SSD in the one at work. So I kind of got a new machine
⏹️ ▶️ John when I put in that. It was like a 500
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD or something. So I’m not hurting at work for CPU, but I’ll definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John get one at home and see how it goes and then see how much. At work, I might even just ask for an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John next or something. I don’t know if I really need to have the Mac Pro at work.
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⏹️ ▶️ John I just saw a tweet from somebody a little bit before the show extolling
⏹️ ▶️ John the virtues of Squarespace and how they loved it so much. And the thing is, like, that was a tweet from a person who I know doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to my podcast and you know, wasn’t tweeting in response to a sponsored message from Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was just a user of Squarespace who was a non technical person who wanted to have a website. He
⏹️ ▶️ John said, Oh, Squarespace, I love you so much. Everything is so easy. That makes me think that it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John We hear about Squarespace and lots of podcasts, and they do sponsor a lot of podcasts and advertising and other venues or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But regular people who use the product also actually like it. That helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Absolutely. Going back a second, before I forget, first of all, there’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question in the chat room that I want to get to in a second also. But going back to the Mac Pro for a second, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked earlier what video card you had and everything, I forgot to actually finish this point, but have you heard the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan spin up on the retina MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably in the office where everything is noisy but not in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of I’m using one and I hear it because I’ve never really used one for an extended period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that was the one where they first did their asymmetrical blade thing and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually really really good. Like it’s very quiet even when you’d expect it not to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then when it does ramp to full speed you can hear it but it almost sounds like white noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like pink noise, one of those various expensive office noises. It sounds kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air whooshing, not as much like a whirring high pitch noise. It’s hard to describe it, you really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear it. But it sounds better and it is less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable than a fan of a regular design spinning at roughly the same speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the new Mac Pro will, it also has that same design, I believe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned that specifically, it also has the asymmetrical blades and it’s one giant slow fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John You sure about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so, I’ll have to double check. Chat room can go look it up for us. Yes please do. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they do the same thing I would imagine that having one giant fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has the capacity to cool two cranking GPUs and one cranking Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to 12 cores plus the power supply to the whole thing. That’s a lot of capacity. So if you’re just stressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it, like just the CPU, I would imagine it doesn’t have to spin that fast to cool that adequately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would guess it would probably be pretty quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now was that the was it the retina MacBook Pro that you and I will really use stole from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Snell and ran?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, because that that I heard if I was there with you, this was WWDC last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’re You’re absolutely right. You can hear them for sure, but it sounds a lot less offensive, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is weird. If I was listening to this and hadn’t heard the fans on a Retina MacBook Pro, I’d think that we were all crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really is different, and it really does make a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, and John Solo in the chat had just confirmed from Apple’s Mac Pro promo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site that it does have asymmetrical spaced blades. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John impellers, not propellers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s this weird giant thing. Anyway, so yeah. The question that I wanted to get to from a few minutes ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is from Brad hyphen hyphen colon in the chat room. He said, are you, the letter U,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supposed to put the Mac Pro on top of the desk or on the floor? The new one. So what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually a good question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re supposed to put it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top of the desk. Right, but I mean, everyone who’s had a Mac Pro up until now puts it on the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, because the Mac Pro is supposed to go on the floor. This is another thing I was thinking about when I was thinking about a Mac Pro. As I reach down to
⏹️ ▶️ John plug in my podcast microphone, I plug it into the front of my Mac Pro and I say, well, I’m not going to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that anymore. Yeah, there’s no more front ports. Right, but that’s why it rotates. That makes for an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John demo, but you can’t really rotate the thing with cables sticking out of it. They all yank. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco All the dust
⏹️ ▶️ John comes forward. It’s like the diagram of Mac Pro 2010 where it shows our big tower, and then it says Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro 2013, and it shows the little trash can with a million peripherals hanging off of it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with a bunch of cables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please stop sending that to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We’ve seen it a million
⏹️ ▶️ John times. All right, but anyway like that you know I’m thinking I’m gonna already have a USB hub attached on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro like I have Everything attached to my Mac Pro, but yeah I’m gonna have to use a USB hub or something because I won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to plug something into the front of it anymore For putting it on the floor if you put
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the floor it would look like you have like It would look like a trash can I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John it I think it’s too small and lonely to be on the floor by itself
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like imagine if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a Mac Mini on the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, what’s it doing down
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there? And also
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got little vent holes on the bottom. And so if you put it on, I think it does,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does. And I want to put that on a carpet. My Mac Pro has got the little feet, and it’s up off the carpet. I really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to put anything that’s going to sink into the carpet. And would it even be steady down there, like knock
⏹️ ▶️ John it over with my foot? Like, it’s not big. People who haven’t seen it in person, it looks big in the advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures. Like, it’s not a big computer. So I kind of like it on the floor, because it gets the
⏹️ ▶️ John noise below the level of the desk and out of earshot for me. But this is probably gonna have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John on my desk I mean, I guess I won’t take up a lot of room But it’ll take up more than zero room Which is what my current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac and all the cables have to go into the back of it And and you will hear the fan more than you would if it was on the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then again the fan is also now the only moving part in the entire computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we done with Mac Pro because I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco probably should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah Can I ask the arbiter of all things follow-up? Will you allow me to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one brief piece of follow-up so we stop getting spammed? It
⏹️ ▶️ John depends on what it’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what you got it about the scrubber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm hmm. Oh my God, we get this. We’ve been getting this like every hour.
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s we I’ve been getting it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. Well, we’ve been getting our fair share as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to cover this or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John shall I? Yeah, sure. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s so we talked about I suggested a feature for Marcos podcast app last week, half
⏹️ ▶️ John jokingly, but you know, improving the audio scrubbing experience and many, many people wrote in to tell me that I should
⏹️ ▶️ John use the built in feature of the regular audio scrubber where you
⏹️ ▶️ John slide your finger up to and change the speed from like half speed scrubbing quarter speed scrubbing
⏹️ ▶️ John or fine scrubbing or whatever a lot of people thought that was actually a new feature in iOS 7 it’s not it’s been around
⏹️ ▶️ John for a very long time I think maybe even back to iOS 3 and a lot of people asked
⏹️ ▶️ John like doesn’t that do what you want no it doesn’t doesn’t do what I want like what I was trying I did a bad job explaining
⏹️ ▶️ John it because it’s you know off the cuff and it’s difficult to explain visual stuff like this but the key
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that that feature is lacking for when you’re trying to scrub through a two hour podcast or something really long,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it doesn’t change the visual feedback. Even though you supposedly have more fine control, like when you move your thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John an inch, it doesn’t really move the little thing an inch, it doesn’t change how far the little play head moves.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in a two hour podcast, a single retina pixel will be like 10 seconds. And so how do you fine
⏹️ ▶️ John scrub through 30 seconds of audio when that’s represented by three retina pixels?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, you can move your finger, and you’re not jerking the thumb along, but you don’t know how far you’ve gone kind of like you. What I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for, I was trying to express last time with my video game analogy, is you want a connection between what you do with your finger and an immediate,
⏹️ ▶️ John clear visual response showing what you’re doing. And a clear visual response isn’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John playhead doesn’t move, playhead doesn’t move, playhead moves one retina pixel which represents 10 seconds. That is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a good connection between thumb and finger, which is why I’m looking for something with zooming or some kind of other thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more like playing a video game and it’s, you know, a complete 60 frames per second, very responsive experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of zooming in and zooming out and zooming in when you’re doing fine movement and zooming out so
⏹️ ▶️ John that the movements, the visual movements are connected directly and always, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you always see immediate to scale feedback of your finger but the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of time that it represents changes because we’re zooming in and out of the time. It’s very difficult to explain and the other thing I want to say
⏹️ ▶️ John about this feature is a lot of people like, oh that’s a cool feature I would love that or Marco should do that or shouldn’t. The thing about any
⏹️ ▶️ John features, especially ones you’re just like wouldn’t it be cool if, you can’t tell until you implement
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So I’m not saying that this is going to, this would be the best thing in the world. It could very well be that if you went and implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it would be terrible, or the first three tries would be terrible. You’d find out this is, you know, a different approach would be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a lot of people think as soon as, you know, you just ascribe an idea, or maybe you draw something on an app, and you’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John just make that, I know that will be good. You don’t know until you actually implement it. And sometimes, especially in this case, implementing
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be very difficult and complicated, especially if you’re not like a game programmer used to trying to do, you know, responsive control
⏹️ ▶️ John systems. So you really have to, Not that I think Marco was weighing this heavily in his mind, but you really have to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re in for in terms of, I’m going to try to implement this really complicated, difficult feature that may
⏹️ ▶️ John not even work out. I won’t know until I get it implemented. I’ve already wasted a week trying to get it done. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the calculus for doing this. And that’s why, despite the fact that people are like, oh, I would totally buy this program. Remember I said there’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like five people who would buy this program if you added this feature? I was off by a factor of two of, I think, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I said that I would do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But each one of them thought, like, man, I bet you’re getting a lot of replies. I got like 10 and so yeah 10
⏹️ ▶️ John people would do it But they don’t know what they’d like it either because you can’t you cannot tell you can’t even tell
⏹️ ▶️ John if like an App like you know Twitterific or something is gonna be good that uses more or less simple scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John and and gestures You can’t even tell that’s gonna be good until you implement it let alone this thing Not that I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody should do this and I think it would be a cool feature if someone’s got to be in their bonnet About making this really cool
⏹️ ▶️ John But I am under no illusions about whether the thing I described would actually be awesome and how difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be to get it to be awesome. There’s a reason making awesome games is difficult, because you can get something
⏹️ ▶️ John working in a game engine, even that’s hard enough, but then it’s probably terrible until you tweak it to death to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean there’s been so many things, like when I was making Instapaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were so many things that I tried and threw away because I couldn’t get them right, or they sounded cool in theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here, I’ve dug up this link, I’ve pasted it in the chat now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it sounds cool in theory, oh, let me use the accelerometer to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anti-shake on the screen, so that, because whenever I was like riding the subway in New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco York, trying to read on my phone, you get jostled so much on the train that it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hard to keep your eyes on the screen, so I tried, oh, let me do this anti-shake thing, and I just, I just could not get it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you don’t get it exactly right, it actually makes it worse, and like gives you motion sickness. You have to get it exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right as to be extremely responsive, and I just couldn’t do it like as far as I could tell I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the hardware was accurate enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John probably wouldn’t be that’s the other thing you might find out maybe this thing this feature I have my head isn’t actually possible on the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware or maybe it’s only possible on a 5s but not possible on most people the phones people have right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly and so so I’ll have to see I mean that’s the kind of thing I’ll tell you right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’m probably not going to probably not gonna make it into version 1 but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am gonna I have wanted to play with the scrubbers for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I do want to attack that problem sometime, but it’s probably not important enough to put it in 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that was going to be a 1.0 feature, it would be the flagship feature of an app. Like an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that includes that kind of thing as a 1.0 feature, that would be what the app is known for, because that’s the type of thing where you would sink
⏹️ ▶️ John all your time into this. Like I’m going to make whatever it is you’re going to make, and it’s going to have a scrubber, and my whole experience
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be focused around the scrubber. It’s going to be what my app is known for, the app with the awesome scrubber, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? Yeah. not really what you’re making.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it might be. I mean, you know, I talked last week I think a little bit about how it’s challenging to make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now playing screen. It’s challenging to design that because that’s, you know, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of the app, honestly I don’t care about the design. Like I’ll make it work, I’ll make it look good, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole rest of the app, any kind of navigation, structural thing, it doesn’t really matter. It’s probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a bunch of table views because it doesn’t really matter. What matters to me the most by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the playing experience. When you’re using the controls on the playback screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing the most common actions that you’re likely to do when you interact with your podcast app. That’s not navigation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not adding or removing shows. It’s playback controls and seeking and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. That is the kind of thing that I do want to get really right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there anything else that’s going on with Overcast that you’d like to share? Anything from last week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What am I forgetting? You’re asking that as if you have something in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. No, I’m rewriting my, uh… I’m rewriting half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my sync protocol tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How? You haven’t even released it. You’re already chucking it all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, just, like, the ideas are the same, but I was using… Okay, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to figure out… So the server… It has server-side crawling. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve said that before, so I don’t think I’m revealing anything new here. It has server-side crawling, of course, because that’s… That’s the obvious way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it in this day and age, and there’s a lot of benefits to it. So I have to figure out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the server tells the client what episodes should be in this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, does it include, like, obviously there’s the list of feeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you are subscribed to, but does it include every episode that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those feeds, or just the ones that are new to you? Like, just the unplayed ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you? So in other words, do you include all the back episodes? And if you do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do some cool things. Like you can instantly toggle over to the list of all episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and add certain ones back or make certain things faster in navigation and management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right after I tell you that I don’t care about navigation and management. It improves things there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the downside though is that there’s a lot of, there’s then a lot of objects for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sync engine to manage. You have to somehow keep track and keep in sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this much larger set of items as you’re communicating between these two things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn’t want it to take up a whole lot of bandwidth. So I made the first sync platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or sync protocol totally binary on the way up. So when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device communicates to the server, it sent as part of the request ‑‑
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the request body, it sent like a binary stream of a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of integers, basically. And it worked fine, and it was really, really small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It used very little bandwidth to communicate information for a lot of items, because I really did fairly intelligent packing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work there. And this is, by the way, I tweeted a couple weeks ago that I hit my 64-bit bug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I had a struct align issue. That’s what it was. It was in that binary protocol.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you just taking native C structures and sending them over the wire?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I was packing them into an NS data, but otherwise yes Which I learned is
⏹️ ▶️ John Protocol buffers or something Google’s got them sitting there waiting for you to use them. I bet they work in 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so I As I was designing the system and as I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it became increasingly clear that It was gonna be very hard to expand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was fairly error prone and and it was just being a pain in the butt. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured, you know what, this is 2013, I don’t need to be using a binary protocol. So now tonight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m changing it to just a JSON dictionary that I run through GZIP. And that gets it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the way down to the original size because the dictionary is just, you know, like the same few keys followed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the same few, followed by digits zero through 10, it Huffman codes pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it actually compresses fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. So I’m changing that part of it to just be a little bit less technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool and a little bit more functional and less fragile and less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prone to things like endian changes being a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid stuff I was doing on the server to interpret this that I really didn’t need to be doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you made it more technically cool, not less. It is uncool to send binary data over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, oh you know what if you guys don’t mind do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see Greg Mittens question I would like to address that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I actually had just added that in the show notes tonight but I didn’t know if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would want to address that or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah sure I’ll address that. All right so Greg Mittens question is and he asked this via the contact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form he said do you anticipate any conflicts of interest between ATP and overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for example would you feel resistance towards implementing a potentially cool feature like a more seamless ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skip button out of fear that it would devalue ATP’s ads. Okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of all possible conflicts of interest, I can’t think of them all right now. Maybe something might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come up someday. I don’t know. But I will address that one in particular because I have thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be really cool since I’m going to have server side infrastructure, it would be really cool to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to like do basically the Amazon Kindle popular highlights feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things that are skipped in podcasts. And that would be an easy way to build an automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad skipper or an automatic skip Merlin’s comic book section thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love Merlin. It’s all right. So it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting for that. However, I love podcasts, and I love podcast creators,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I am a podcast creator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know in reality what that would do if this got popular. Honestly, even just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the existence of this in an app that any sponsor had heard of, that would to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devalue podcast ads. Even if I didn’t have my own show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just caring about the ecosystem as much as I do, I don’t think I’d want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would feel bad doing that. And if you want to skip ads on your own, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I’ve skipped ads before. It’s not the end of the world if a few people skip ads, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to enable it to make it much better in mass like that would do some damage, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to do that. The last thing I want—this medium is not very big. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly very small producers, often single people or small groups of people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. It’s very small producers. We’re not talking about ripping off NBC here. talking about ripping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off small people like us. And so I just would not feel good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that. And yeah, that probably has something to do with me having my own show, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is if I thought about it at all, even if I didn’t have my own show, it would still feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit wrong to do. So that’s the kind of feature that I’m going to almost definitely not do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, but there’s a gray area there, is there not? And what I mean by that is, you could have a 30-second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skip button but you could avoid the cool kid coalescing of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this data to get the communal skip button does that make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense right I do have a 30-second skip button I think that’s an important feature to have for any for any client
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly comes back to Merlin’s comics right
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds doesn’t put a dent in the 30 minute skip button right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so yeah, I mean, you know, it’s important to have things like that, but I’d rather like leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to the user, you know, leave it to them to skip what they want to skip and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t massively enable automatic ad skipping at scale. You know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would just be kind of a dick move for the whole industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John The highlights feature is still a good idea, though. I would like to know, like, which sections like if it only it’s kind of like only
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing upvotes on comments, right? of downvotes where instead of people marking the sections that they want to skip,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many, you know, who, or even just having people, like the equivalent of dropping a marker, or people,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re listening, if they think this part is particularly good, hit like a star or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something. Yeah, like a like button.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it expands out in 30, in a minute, in either direction, and makes like a centrally located little,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, point. And then you can see where the points cluster, like, oh, this is the funny part, or this is the part with the most likes and stuff. That
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s, that’s the kind of thing I could do. I mean, I thought about too, like, whether I want to go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole area of, like, detailed stats tracking. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would probably anger some people if I just snuck it in. That, like, oh, by the way, I’m recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sections that you skip on my server to accumulate with other people’s data and present this to people in some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, anonymous but accumulated way. Or even just, like, what they listen to and when. Right. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to start tracking that and get into things like, you know, like, I want to be able to tell publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people who use Overcast subscribe to your feed, how many people of those listen to this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how many of those people started it but didn’t finish it, or how far did they get on average? I want to be able to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishers that. First of all, as a publisher, it would be interesting to know that. And second of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, if you’re in a position where you have a bunch of people using a client and you control the server side of it, why not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that data and look at it and try to gain some kind of insight and try to share that with the world? There’s not a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason not to do that except that it will anger some people to be collecting that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I do choose to do that, I don’t even know if it will make it into 1.0, probably not, but if I do choose to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that, I’m going to be very upfront about that happening because that would be weird if I wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now would you as a means to make Overcast have a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey income channel? Would you consider not selling the data but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps selling access to that data? So I don’t know, either other podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owners, I mean, I guess you kind of, maybe you already answered that a moment ago, but would you, would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that be free if I had a different podcast and I wanted to know all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the detailed statistics about what Overcast users were doing with my podcast? How do you, how do you envision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I, I kind of want to be the anti-stitcher here. Stitcher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, if you want your podcast to be on their network or if they somehow add it without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever telling you, all your hits go to them because they cache the file and they transcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and everything. So all those hits don’t go back to your server. So there’s a bunch of people listening to your show that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t track unless you work with Stitcher, which means signing up with them and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreeing to all their crazy terms and some of them are pretty crazy and all this stuff. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make me feel good to even think about working with them ever. And so the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I want to do is, if I am collecting these stats, even though I’m not going to be transcoding people’s files, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I collect any stats about shows, I think I just make them public, just on the site, just here, you know, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the page that shows the show, just here’s all the stats about it that I know of. I would feel better about doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But is that dicey in the sense that, to some degree, listener numbers are kind of like a salary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and oftentimes podcast producers don’t like to share that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, certainly. But, you know, the reality is my one client on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one platform of iOS is very unlikely to ever get big enough that these numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco represent the entire market or even a uniform subset of it. Sure. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very unlikely to ever be the case. So I don’t think it would cause that kind of problems. You can already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at things like our friend, underscore David Smith, his PodWrangler thing. He’s told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us about how our show ranks in his app relative to other shows. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just his app, and that’s a very different ranking than the iTunes top podcast chart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You look at things like Instacast and Pocketcast that today already have directories,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they will list their most popular shows among people using their apps. It’s all a pretty different set.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The tech podcasts rank pretty well on all of them, but it’s all very different from the iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top podcast directory and things like that. So obviously we’re not looking at a uniform, random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subset of the overall market with any of these clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because tech nerds listen to tech nerd podcasts and buy podcast apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on David Smith’s stuff, I think This American Life was like mid-pack.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the reality, This American Life gets slightly more than all the tech podcasts in
⏹️ ▶️ John universe combined. So yeah, it’s not a representative example. And that’s why I think I don’t think it’s probably a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, because it’s like any show that you are on
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to probably have a disproportionate number of listeners in your podcast app that you talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about on your show. So it’s like, you know, it’s not good. You think the information would be interesting, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly don’t want to sell it. You’re just like, look, here it is. Take it for what it is. You know, it’s kind of like when the same thing happens
⏹️ ▶️ John with websites when they show like, oh, you know, iOS 7 adoption numbers. and they show the hits to their website. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s not iOS 7 adoption numbers. That’s people who go to your websites’ iOS 7 adoption numbers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John your website is about iOS and Apple stuff. And so it’s not, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unless, it’s very difficult to pick any single website that would be representative of iOS adoption
⏹️ ▶️ John as a whole. But certainly, it’s not going to be some Apple tech news site that is going to be representative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And to answer CO laugh underscore in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s saying, you know, listing rankings is very different from listing numbers of subscribers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true, however, I think if I did list numbers and not just relative ranks, the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would show, because I’m not gonna be taking over half the market or anything, the most this is gonna show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how few people use my app. Like that’s the most likely outcome is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow, your app, you only have 500 people who listen to This American
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Life in your app. Wow, you have nobody using your app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be the bigger risk there. It’s not that I would become so huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all of a sudden you’d be able to tell how everyone’s doing just based on my stats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know, it’s a tricky thing. I probably won’t even do it in version one just because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth the time, But I would like to look into that in the future. Anyway, let’s move on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anything else except all me. Because this isn’t the Marker Show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to do another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor before we move on? Might as well. Let’s do that. Tell me about something else that’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This really is awesome. They’re pretty cool. This is one of the coolest people, or some of the coolest people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sponsor podcasts. No offense to all the sponsors, but these guys really hit it out of the park. It is, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Igloo Software, AKA Igloo. igloo is an intranet you will actually like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP so that igloo knows that we sent you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way they keep buying sponsorships, and we can keep buying new Mac Pros so that way we can have the credibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tell you to buy the new Mac Pro and then you can rationalize your upgrade. With igloo you can share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content quickly with built-in apps. They have built-in blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter-like microblogs and wikis. Everything is social. You can comment on any type of content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can at mention your co-workers, you can follow content for updates, and you can use tags to group things around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you work. You can also add on rooms, like mini igloos, for each of your teams to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in. It’s very easy to use, the whole thing is drag and drop. It features responsive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, and uses beautiful fonts from Typekit. Your igloo is enterprise-grade security,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can start using it right away. This is really cool. It’s all this stuff that you get from big social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks and big social products that normally your internet is like stuck in the 80s. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff that we’ve been finding out that works and is cool on the consumer web, they take a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff, they take the best of this stuff and they make it work for an enterprise internet with all privacy and security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you need when you’re working in the enterprise. So, Igloo is free to use for teams of up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 10 people. That’s pretty cool. That’ll cover a lot of companies that our listeners have out there. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Igloo grows past that, it’s only $12 per person per month. So if If nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, check out the website just to see their really cool, funny videos about their service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they are made by none other than Lonely Sandwich, Adam Lissagor, Sandwich Videos. So they have their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own sandwich videos, really cool, check them out. Go to igloosoftware.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP to start building your igloo. Thanks a lot to igloo for sponsoring the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wanted to ask you, Marco, since you, well the world conspired against me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you got your 5S just before the show last week. Not that I’m still bitter about that. Now that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve had a week with it, any new and interesting thoughts? To be honest, I really don’t have anything new and interesting. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still love the thing, but you only had brief moments with it before the show, so I didn’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had anything interesting to add.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really. No, it’s my new iPhone. It works. I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you given up on Touch ID?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I have I I’m going to Singleton with you actually with all of us except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Are going to Singleton next week indeed? And I’m probably gonna turn it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there just to have like just to try it out like with a conference setting Like I said earlier like oh, maybe I should lock my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m at a conference But the reality is I don’t really leave my phone anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know I never take out of my pocket I never like leave it on a table like if my phone is either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my pocket or in my hand That’s it. So I don’t really I’ve never really had the need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like no one’s ever picked up my phone and mess with it Not once so the only reason I really need it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if somebody actually stole my phone out of my hand Which does happen, you know But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a lot less common than people tweeting pooping when you get up from the bar and leave your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s I Really? I’m not sure that I’m ever gonna stick with it, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Oh And to answer see you laugh underscore again in the chat room. How do you charge it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I charge it now next to me at night. So somebody would have to break into my house or my hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room when I’m traveling and come up next to my head and take my phone off of its charger or cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it when it’s charging. So again, it’s really not… Like I’m not one of those people who always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a dead battery and has to be plugging it in at parties and stuff. I’m never that person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m never in that situation. So there’s just really very rarely a time when anybody could get my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone without me knowing. Without me knowing immediately and being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco react immediately. So I don’t know. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s much of a problem. And the worst case scenario is they get into my email or something. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are they going to do? Read the stuff I have saved in Instapaper? That’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fine. Just don’t delete it, please. else they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really gonna do on my phone besides read my email or you know try to do a password reset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get the email from that and so you know like the email is really the big security there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know how long would they have my phone without me knowing about it before I could start doing something about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean to answer head lead in the chat are we seeing or you or I seeing any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues with the accelerometers or gyroscopes since that was making the rounds today I have not but I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that I’ve been in a position that I would have noticed it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m the same way. I mean, as I said last show, I think, and multiple shows, I’ve never had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compass work properly in any of my iPhones ever. Since they added the compass, which was in, I believe, 3G, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never… Or no, it was in the 4, I think, or the 3GS. Anyway, I’ve never had it work properly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not once. And so I haven’t tried it with the 5S yet. I’ve only had it for a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m guessing it still works about the same, which is it works sometimes, which for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a compass isn’t good enough. So I’ll probably never rely on it. The accelerometer, you know, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the accelerometer has always been accurate enough that it’ll work okay, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inaccurate enough that I’m never going to use it for anything particularly sensitive. So again, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Now, John, forgive me. You said Tina is getting one, but not yet. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John She kept, she couldn’t decide which color she wanted, it comes down to. And kept fretting and asking me, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think I should get? I don’t know. She liked the gold, and she was afraid I was going to make fun of her.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, just get the phone. Just get the phone that you want. Whatever you want, get the one that you want. Don’t worry about what
⏹️ ▶️ John I think. And then she kept pressing me. I was like, if it was up to me, I would tell you to get Space Gray. And she’s like, no, I don’t like that. You know, something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, eventually, she finally decided, and she ended up getting a silver one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so so it is in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, she didn’t buy it. She ordered it online because, like, she went to the Apple store once, like after work
⏹️ ▶️ John one day, and they didn’t have any. Like they only had sprint or something or whatever. And so she didn’t want to keep going back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the store. And I was telling her, I heard on the latest talk show that Gruber was talking about how nice it is to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to order it from your phone. And you could tell it replace the phone that I’m currently ordering from. So when the
⏹️ ▶️ John new one comes in the mail, it’ll be like all set to replace that other one. You don’t have to enter all your information,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I thought was neat. And so I told her to do that, and she did. It was a little bit tricky in that when you order
⏹️ ▶️ John from your phone, you are logged into the Apple Store application with your iTunes Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John and we share an iTunes Apple ID for like the households for the apps that we buy. So had to sign her
⏹️ ▶️ John out of her iTunes Apple ID and into her own Apple ID that she uses on her Mac and stuff, then
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the thing and then sign back. And so it’s a little bit cumbersome. It would be nice. Like Apple’s usually pretty good about
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you a separate Apple ID for each thing that you use. Like this is the Apple ID I want to use to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do my iCloud syncing. And this is the Apple ID I want to use for the App Store. And this is, you know, especially on the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. But on the phone apparently the iTunes and App Store Apple ID is shared with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Store Application, but anyway, she ordered it. It says delivery
⏹️ ▶️ John in October Kind of like Mavericks is due in fall
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know what that means. Yeah, you know and she picks over because in the end I think she decided
⏹️ ▶️ John that her color Coordination options are best with a more neutral color like silver
⏹️ ▶️ John even though when you put the gold in a case It is really hard to tell that it’s gold unless you especially depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on the color temperature of the lighting That’s how you know is that silver is that gold or is it just warm lighting
⏹️ ▶️ John in this room? It’s really hard to tell so she got silver and she got the red leather case with it And she got the 64
⏹️ ▶️ John because apparently I convinced her With what’s my talking on the past show about how you’re regretted if you get the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m curious to see what the leather case is like I got a so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a stock bumper on my fort This is so boring, but I’m already committed. I got a stock bumper on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4S, and I liked it a lot until I destroyed it over the course of a year. And then I rolled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without a case for about a year. And I didn’t shatter anything. But by the end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the second year with my 4S, it was looking a little rough. And so I got this literally $3.50 monopriced bumper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the 5S, which is OK. But I handled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the leather case for literally 5 or 10 seconds when I was in line on launch day. And my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recollection of it after having been up since 5, and this was like 8 or 9 in the morning, was that it was really nice, but $40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn dollars. And so I want to go back to the store and see if maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s worth it and a little bit more, a little bit nicer than this cheap bumper that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize says Monoprice across the side on one side until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already here. But I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. So in summary, I’m curious to hear what you guys think of it once you
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve played with the leather case on other people’s phones. And the slams I heard against the case was that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to get off, which I don’t really care about because it’s not like I’m ever going to take it on and off, and I doubt my wife would either.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that it made the buttons hard to press. And so that was the first thing I tested when I saw someone’s phone with a leather case.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it does do is it’s kind of like if you have wood detailing in your house and you put
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of layers of paint over it, the detailing kind of goes away. That’s what it does to the buttons. They used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John prominent and easy to find and feel. the leather over it, they become less prominent,
⏹️ ▶️ John stick out less or whatever. But the actual pressing of them, it felt fine to me. I don’t know what they have
⏹️ ▶️ John inside there, but it’s not, I’ve had plenty of crappy cases from my iPod Touches over the years. And some of them, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you feel like you’re squishing your way through just this big jello blob and somewhere under there’s a button.
⏹️ ▶️ John It felt pretty positive, the connection between I press here, the button goes in, and there was the little click of the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John button could be felt through the leather thing. And my main thing is, she said, yeah, You said
⏹️ ▶️ John they said the buttons are hard to press and like look I’ve tried it’s not that bad But how often do you hit the volume up down buttons? I don’t hit
⏹️ ▶️ John them that often on my iPod touch I don’t know if she hits them often and the power button like when do you ever use the power
⏹️ ▶️ John button? I have long since switched to using the home button to wake my thing up and especially with with the touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID thing Like do you guys ever touch the power button on the top of your iOS devices all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep? I always I always wake it up with the home button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I hit when I’m like taking out to check the time or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and I and if I ever want it to sleep, you know, because I’m done using it then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t let it timeout I’ll just turn it off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess maybe I do grab it for it for when I turn the thing off Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I don’t do it when I’m waking it up, but maybe when I put it down I don’t know. But anyway, it’s the button seemed
⏹️ ▶️ John like they were good enough to hit and you know, whatever like Yes, it’s expensive. But all I can
⏹️ ▶️ John think of back to is the leather iPad cases, which I think we’re like 70 or something
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all ridiculous, like you can imagine what the margins are on that thing. And the worst part about the leather cases is they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even feel like leather. Like if you’re going to use real, genuine leather, it should feel like leather. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t even smell like
⏹️ ▶️ John leather. It smells like something else. Someone was saying it smelled like original NES manuals,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that person may have been having a stroke, so it’s hard to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Alright, I’m good on the 5S. Anything else, though?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think I’m good. All right, so John tell me about how to charge a battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh No, not this again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not about charging the best another thing. We got a lot of replies about it I was thinking that someone at Macworld
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking to me about like what features do you want to see and maybe it was ours I don’t remember what features do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see a Mavericks or something? This was like before Mavericks had been announced It was like what features you want to see
⏹️ ▶️ John at 10.9 or whatever and one of the ones I suggested That’s been bothering me for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John is is if you, like my wife, have a laptop but keep it plugged in pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much all the time, that’s terrible for your battery and it would be nice if the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John took care of that and extended the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life. And why is it terrible for your battery to be plugged in all the time? Well, it’s not the fact that it’s plugged in that’s terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the fact that the battery is charged to full capacity all the time. It’s very bad
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep a lithium ion battery charged to 100% capacity all the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that will shorten the life of your battery. So that when you do unplug it after it’s been plugged in for two years straight, and you unplug it and you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it, you don’t get the kind of battery life that you would, you know, if you had just taken it out of the box on day
⏹️ ▶️ John one and charged it to full and then gone to a cafe or something. Oh look, there. In the new Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John what would you like to see? I didn’t think that was it. Anyway, so I’m going to put a link in the chat room to that article that I was thinking of that
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to Google for but couldn’t find. So this came up again in a Wired article, and it’s always these same guys
⏹️ ▶️ John from like Battery University, a bunch of battery scientists, promoting this idea that, hey, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John bad for lithium-ion batteries in particular to be kept at full charge all the time, and it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be nice if OSs took care of this and kept it at a lower charge level. And they say that the optimum
⏹️ ▶️ John charge level for storing lithium-ion batteries is 40%. So if you’re going to put it on a shelf and
⏹️ ▶️ John let it sit there, don’t charge it to full capacity and put it on a shelf, and don’t drain it to nothing and put it on a shelf,
⏹️ ▶️ John it to 40% and put it on a shelf. And their suggestion for active use things is charge it
⏹️ ▶️ John to 80%, discharge to 40%. That is the best way to extend the life of the battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John The current Mac OS doesn’t do any of these things, but it does, in more recent versions, as everyone has
⏹️ ▶️ John been telling me, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, it does make it oscillate between like 100% and 95.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it doesn’t just leave it capped off at 100% because that that would be terrible. It does kind of, I think they call it conditioning the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery, where it lets it discharge to 95, then charges it back to 100, then lets it discharge
⏹️ ▶️ John to 95. And what I’m suggesting is a feature that would let it discharge all the way down
⏹️ ▶️ John to 40% while it’s plugged in, and then either keep it at 40% or bring it back up to 80, whichever
⏹️ ▶️ John one is actually better for the life of the battery, I’m not sure. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem with this feature, and the reason it hasn’t been implemented, is not a technological problem. It’s a user
⏹️ ▶️ John experience problem. Because if you do that, then when you need to take your laptop, you’re like, oh, well, now the stupid thing’s at 40%.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now like my battery, the battery life I was supposed to have in my laptop, because it was in this middle of this crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle where it always drains it down to 40% or charges it back to 80 or maybe keeps it at 40%. Now I
⏹️ ▶️ John got to run, I got to go out, let me take my laptop with me, it’s at 40%. And people would hate that and it would be terrible. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of understand why they haven’t implemented it as a feature. I kind of understand why when they chose to do it, they just had it oscillate
⏹️ ▶️ John between 100 and 95%. But at the same time, for people like me who know
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, I’m going to… This computer, it just sits there on that desk plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John in day after day after day after day. It’s like it’s behind the 27-inch cinema display. Like, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John reach around behind it to even get it. We don’t even look at the screen even though it is open for cooling reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be nice if the OS, at least just APIs or something, where you could tell it,
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle between 90 and 95, go down lower, don’t even charge past 90. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John many people who are tweeting back and forth have been either telling me or asking me, you know, isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John what electric cars do? And yes, it is what electric cars do, because they are optimizing
⏹️ ▶️ John for the life of the battery, because you don’t want to buy a $90,000 Tesla. And two years later,
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery is fried like it would be on a laptop that you use constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you do the math, then if you count these tax credits, and if you count the time that you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend getting gas and repairs for your other car, then it ends up being only $1 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but then you’re out $90,000 for the car when you’ve got to get a new one, because the cost of the battery is like half the cost of the car. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John those batteries, full capacity, like charged to full capacity, and most of those batteries, they don’t let you go past 80
⏹️ ▶️ John in most, you know, I don’t know about Tesla’s exact policy, but the same thing with like the Prius, and any car
⏹️ ▶️ John with a battery, they pretty much don’t let you charge that battery to 100% capacity, because it’s terrible for the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. They let you charge to 80, and they They don’t let you discharge all the way either, so you’re kind of using this
⏹️ ▶️ John middle band of power in the battery. And when they give you the power ratings for the battery, and they tell you how
⏹️ ▶️ John much mileage you got, they’re telling you how much that middle is worth, because they want you to avoid pushing the thing to 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John capacity, unless you do some big override and say, I need super-duper range for this one time. And the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing for draining down. They don’t let it go down to zero, if they can possibly help, but they want you to recharge it before
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets up to there, and zero isn’t really zero. Apple’s laptops are just starting to do that now.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you have it plugged in, even if the battery, it’ll lie to you. It’ll say, oh, battery
⏹️ ▶️ John is full. And it’ll show the little whatever the plug symbol that shows that the battery isn’t charging. But maybe it’s at
⏹️ ▶️ John like 96%. It’s just trying to tell you, we’re not going to charge it anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re in the middle of this conditioning cycle or whatever. So I kind of understand why this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t exist. But I think at this point, especially in an energy saving release like Mavericks, that would have been the time
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, either provide APIs or provide some optional mode for like, click this
⏹️ ▶️ John checkbox that says, yes, I’m always plugged in and accept the fact that if you need to leave in a hurry and grab your laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might not be at 100% capacity. But I don’t think that’s coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I’ve seen some of this feedback fly by. And I know a lot of people have pointed to Fruit Juice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is apparently an app. And do I have this right? So what it does is it tells you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to unplug, to kind of force you to take charge of this whole situation. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I’ve tried to do that manually. And every time I’ve tried to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John manually, I accidentally leave the computer unplugged and come back and find that it has gone into hibernation mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John The whole point is, you can’t trust me to plug and unplug. I will forget. I want to leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the little MagSafe thing connected all the time and then have the computer say, I’m not accepting power now because I’m in this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it does with conditioning between 100 and 95. But for a much bigger range, treating
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery inside this plugged in thing more like the battery in a car. Or the battery in a car that never
⏹️ ▶️ John goes anywhere. So again, maybe keep it at 40%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, one thing they’re doing with iOS 7, which we can now talk about finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they have, in iOS 7, they have this background fetch thing, which is awesome. And they talked in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WBDC about how one of the ways it works is your app says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s how often I’d like to be woken up for background updates. And the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually decides when to actually do it. And what it does is it actually measures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it keeps track of when you tend to launch certain apps or when the phone tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be completely idle for a long time. And then it tries to predict when you’re going to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app next and do the update shortly before that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time during a time when you’re likely to be on Wi-Fi and have power. Like if you’re charging overnight and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wake up in the morning and you launch your it’ll launch it like shortly, it’ll back and refresh it shortly before that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it has fresh data. If they brought something similar to that over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, which they probably can do pretty easily, then they can do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically do a charge cycle down to 40% and then back up to 80%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know every third day in the middle of the night when you aren’t using your computer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you never use your computer and during that time or you’ve used it like once in the last year during that time, so it’d be worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could offer a feature like that based on heuristics and analysis of how you actually use your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer so that it could be doing this stuff when you don’t even notice because you’re asleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. That’s what I was going to say. If you were going to do this, that’s the way you would try to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. With the heuristics of background apps on iOS, it’s not the end of the world if it didn’t get my
⏹️ ▶️ John RSS subscriptions because it hasn’t learned my… It’s kind of like the Nest thermostat, where you want it to learn, but the consequences of it not learning aren’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John big. In the case of charging your laptop battery, the negative consequences are a little bit more severe
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of user experience, where like, I guess Nest, if it makes your house the wrong temperature, pisses you off too. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, the new MacBook Pros and the new operating system will
⏹️ ▶️ John learn your habits and keep your battery life longer or whatever. I still think it would have to be opt in, because there’s going to be, especially during
⏹️ ▶️ John learning period, and even outside the learning period, like that time when you need to grab your laptop and go,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s at half capacity, and now you’re pissed. and you’re like, I paid all this money for this laptop with 12-hour battery life, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I get six because I picked it up at the wrong time. And the final thing is that Apple probably is the only one that
⏹️ ▶️ John knows how many of their laptops spend their time plugged in all the time. Maybe I’m an outlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe that’s why they don’t care, because most people who buy a laptop use it. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John our laptop is plugged in 99.9% of the time. But the reason we got a laptop and not an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John is because when we go on vacation, we just grab a little 13-inch Air, And it’s much easier than you know trying to log
⏹️ ▶️ John an iMac and even like when I’m podcasting in here My wife wants to use your computer She unplugs
⏹️ ▶️ John the laptop and brings it into the other room so she can use her computer with all her stuff on it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little portable form so We’d have to see what the numbers on that are and it could be if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough people do it You know certainly I always get would get that type of thing first and it has with the background updates
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually they’ll get around to bringing that back to the Mac and that’s that’s definitely future. I’d like to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right Anything else are we good for today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, let’s keep it there for today. We’re pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This might actually be a little bit shorter is it safe to say that an hour over an hour in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no Alright, thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week Squarespace and igloo and we will see you next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin cuz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Harmon, S-I-R, A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USA Syracuse. It’s accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They didn’t mean to. Accidental. Tech podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John so long. People in the chat room are still obsessing about
⏹️ ▶️ John this battery thing. Why don’t they just stop sending energy to the battery once it’s fully charged? They do.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do. This is a problem we should get an
⏹️ ▶️ John electrical engineer on, even though my major was electrical and computer engineering. Somebody who works with electricity
⏹️ ▶️ John every day to give whatever is the current best analogy. Because the way people think electricity
⏹️ ▶️ John works and the way it actually works are not the same. I think people visualize, probably because this is one of the metaphors
⏹️ ▶️ John they use in school, visualize electricity like water going through a hose, and somehow it’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John because the water is always pressing into your battery, like puffing it up like a water balloon, and that’s not why it’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bad to keep a battery at full charge with no electricity going into it. Just charge it up to full,
⏹️ ▶️ John disconnect it from everything, and suspend it in a vacuum tube. It’s still bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the analogies of water flowing into things and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what is the normal use? Like the current is the volume of water,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the voltage is like the speed of the water. Like all those analogies lead people astray and make people think about
⏹️ ▶️ John their electrical components in ways that are not healthy. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t worry people. The electricity is not pushing into your battery really hard causing it to bulge out.