152: Daddy Didn't Want the Good Graphics Card
14 Jan 2016Casey bought an iMac. You won’t believe what happened next!
Episode Description:
- Casey bought an iMac... and you won't believe what happened next.
- Plex vs. Infuse
- Follow-up:
- Apple TV Tech Talk
- iOS 9.3
- Post-show: Wheel of iMacs
Sponsored by:
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use promo code ATP15 for 15% off your first order.
- Blue Apron: A better way to cook. Get your first two meals for free with this link.
- Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code EGGSALAD for 10% off your first purchase.
Chapters
- A tale of woe
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP15)
- Turns out desktops are nice
- Sponsor: Blue Apron
- Plex and Infuse
- Follow-up: Swift default final
- Follow-up: Rust vs. Swift
- Follow-up: MagSafe, USB-C
- Follow-up: Upthere and AWS
- Sponsor: Hover (code EGGSALAD)
- Apple TV Tech Talk
- f.lux and Night Shift
- Multi-user iOS devices
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Wheel of iMac boxes
A tale of woe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry I ruined follow-up. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we should start tonight’s programming with a tale of woe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll start by saying I bought a computer. Oh. I bought a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whoa, okay. So first of all, congratulations. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand on heart, John and Marco did not know that this happened. I’ve been keeping this a secret from them so I could spring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on the show. I bought a 5k iMac. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your possession yet or did you just order it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh it’s here. It’s in my trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t unpack it yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no I did. Uh oh. This is my tale of woe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it fit in your trunk? You only have a 3 series.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh stop. So I have… I bought this 5k iMac, I don’t know, like a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. And I watched it march across the United States via FedEx ground which was infuriating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I did it to myself because I didn’t pay for like the super fast shipping but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a patient man and it was infuriating watching it march across the US. But anyway, it arrived yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I booted it, I set it up. I moved files from my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal computer with my beloved yet very old, circa 2011
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high-res anti-glare 15-inch MacBook Pro. I moved files from my work computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Retina MacBook Pro, my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got everything set up. I put all the software I wanted on it, at least at a glance anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything seemed okay. I then performed a software update.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I let the software update go. I walked away from the computer. I came back to the computer. It seemed like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had hung after like 20 minutes or something like that, which was well under the, or well over the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it had estimated to take the software update to run. There was nothing on the screen. The backlight was on. The computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had not, to my knowledge, rebooted. Everything was just there. Or I should say nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was there, actually. So I powered the machine off, which, to be clear, may have been the fatal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistake. We’ll come back to that. I powered the machine off. I powered it back on. The chime sounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s it. The backlight’s on, the chime sounds, nothing else. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Turn the computer back off after having let it sit for a while. Turn it back on. The chime sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s it. Hmm, this is not good. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s go through the steps. PRAM reset, no good. SMC reset, no good. Make a USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boot disk, no good. Mash down on the D key to try to get to diagnostics, no good. Recovery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no good. Internet recovery, no good. It’s in a trunk. I have a Genius Bar appointment tomorrow, although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I may just end up returning it and buying a different one because it’s already completely hosed. I have no idea what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It might’ve been me. I’m not saying it wasn’t me. I am not looking for the internet to tell me what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with respect to the internet. It will be figured out tomorrow. I have engaged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two ex-Apple geniuses. I have engaged a friend of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody could tell me a good answer as to what I could do to resuscitate it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think something just genuinely broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco During the problem, were there any USB or other kind of devices connected to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could have unplugged, And did you try unplugging them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had my microphone installed because I was all smug and happy because the way this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode was supposed to go was I was supposed to say to you, guess what, guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am now talking to you on my 5K iMac. The way this episode is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually going is, guess what, guys? I actually have to either return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or get this thing repaired tomorrow, which is exactly what I’m going to do. I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very sad. I did try a target disc mode as somebody is asking the chat. I tried target disc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. I have tried everything in my repertoire and everything that two X geniuses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a friend that works at Apple has asked me to try. None of it has worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very sad, but I will tell you in the two or three hours that it was working, it was a magnificent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer and I cannot wait to hopefully get one that work sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the next week. Yeah, so I’m very sad. It’s a sad, sad day
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like when my grandfather would complain that modern cars, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John a specific complaint was modern car engine bays don’t have any place for you to get your hands down in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like, because everything was all packed together really tightly. And then he would complain about the plastic shrouds covering everything up
⏹️ ▶️ John and complaining about how hard it is to replace things like air filters, and they don’t have carburetors anyway. But a
⏹️ ▶️ John related complaint to your 5K iMac is like, back in the days of my
⏹️ ▶️ John most feverish trying to diagnose problems, one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do in this situation, I almost adjusted until I realized it’s pointless, is to try to figure out what the hell’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Like you hear the chime, it passes the post-test, right? And then what happens? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can it not find the disk? Are you getting into the boot process? And the way you usually tell that is you could hear
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it had started accessing the hard drive, you knew by the series of ticks and sounds is it is it
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for a boot sector is it just power cycling discs on and off or is it actually beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John the boot process which has a distinctive sound to it or in the old days with a floppy drive you could tell what the computer was doing and
⏹️ ▶️ John at what point things went wrong but with an SSD and nothing on the screen and definitely no indicator
⏹️ ▶️ John lights or anything like that you know hardware indicator lights for the PC folks you have no idea what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going on it it posts there’s no image on on the screen, has it begun the boot process? Can
⏹️ ▶️ John it not find the hard drive? I mean, if it couldn’t find the hard drive, you’d have the blinking question mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it did pass post, because I think that the chime only sounds after it does the whole, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John post is power on self test. Like, the whole, if you had like bad RAM or whatever, you’d get one of the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John chimes or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, all my whole diagnostic tools are useless for these computers, they don’t make any noise except for the stupid fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the fan going? There we go, we can ask that. Is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fan turning?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it crank up to full speed if you let it sit there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No it does not. And I actually let it sit overnight just to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John extra specially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that it wasn’t just me being impatient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you spill water into it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not. Thank you for asking, but I did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s important to establish that. Where? I mean, are there any openings that face upwards? Is there one in the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he can get water in there. I have faith. Because I mean, there’s openings in the bottom here. I’m going to look behind my own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, that’s funny. There are no openings that face upward that I can find.
⏹️ ▶️ John not? There’s not like a slit on the top part?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see one. I didn’t think so. So yeah, so it’s sitting in my trunk. To be honest with you, I’ll probably just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey return it and probably just order a new one because I feel like it’s already tainted.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still hoping, hoping or thinking or suspecting like this is actually a software, like it’s not a hardware problem, it’s a software
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Did you, I know you said you tried a million things, the only other one that you didn’t mention that I could think of, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John two things I can think of. One, I’m assuming since you consulted all these experts, you made sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John they all I had the most recent up to date knowledge about the keys that you have to match because those have changed over the past
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of years. And a lot of people might give you advice to hold down key combinations that are no longer the correct ones for
⏹️ ▶️ John the same operations. But assuming that’s handled, the only one I didn’t hear you mentioned is verbose, verbose,
⏹️ ▶️ John verbose booting mode. I believe it’s command V, you should look it up the one that spews
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Unix console text to your screen during the boot process. Sometimes that’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John way to find out at what point things go off the rails. During the boot process, the boot process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not try that. However, I did not mention that I also phoned AppleCare at like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to help you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, my thought was, let me give them a shot, see what they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. And I started the conversation slightly, well, mildly passive aggressively.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, here’s what I’ve tried. PRM reset, SMC reset, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to try to establish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we really don’t need to go through all of this again, if you please. Have you tried blowing the dust out of the plug?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if the SMC reset apparently on these Macs is to unplug it, wait 15 seconds and plug it back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in or something along those lines. In any case, I tried everything I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to try. I tried everything that the AppleCare person told me to do. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all likelihood, I will just return it tomorrow. I have not yet canceled my Genius appointment. We will see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot stress enough, Internet, that by the time you hear this episode, this will already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be resolved one way or another.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’ll be in the process of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolved. Well, it’ll be in the process of being resolved. Please, Internet, I appreciate your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback, but it is too late by the time you’ve heard this. Can you use the fast shipping for the replacement?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I order a new one, I will absolutely spring for the fast shipping because now I’m really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really sad that my—literally, I used the thing—let’s see, it was 7 o’clock because Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was after Declan went to bed that I booted it and started transferring everything. And at 10 o’clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or thereabouts was when I was calling AppleCare. So I used it for three hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel so bad for you for this. Because like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, and let’s not forget,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the first desktop I’ve bought in easily a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And we will definitely interrogate you about why you chose to do this and why you did it now and etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I really want to know all these things. But first of all, I do want to express my sincere condolences because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate it. It so puts a damper on a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase of a thing you’re really excited about that you hardly ever get to buy, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes and it has some problem that you have to deal with. That sucks. It puts such a damper on the whole thing. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly Yeah, it really does. And you know what I thought about—so yesterday, obviously, I was much more angry and pissed off than I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am now. But yesterday I was thinking about it, and I thought, what if, for the sake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of conversation, this was my very first Mac. Like that’s a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience. Now admittedly, this is definitely a fluke. This is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not something that normally happens. To my recollection in my eight years of owning Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s right, eight-ish years of owning Macs, I have never had a software update fail. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be clear, this is a fluke. It’s weird. But damn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it isn’t frustrating. And oh my goodness, if this was my first Mac, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go running back to Dell. Now, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John an idiot, so I’m not going to do that. But. I was about to go crazy here. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. But I’m just saying, imagine if your first experience with this, it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the $3,000, $3,200 computer. Imagine your first experience is, oh, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works for three hours and then it’s dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it doesn’t really matter. Like, that experience doesn’t really matter unless it’s some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John epidemic, which I’m assuming it isn’t right. But every every every company has like the doa things. All that matters
⏹️ ▶️ John is what happens after that’s all that that’s what that’s what you know what I mean? Like for Dell, the reason speaking of Dell, the reason a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John like Dell in the enterprise anyway, is that when something happens, when someone drops
⏹️ ▶️ John their Dell laptop, when something breaks, or whatever, you can have new hardware in your hands
⏹️ ▶️ John in a shockingly small amount of time. And so it’s not, you know, things are going to happen, you’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a you’re gonna buy 50 Dell laptops and one of them is going to be the OA. That’s not the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John annoys you would annoy you for example if you were going through Apple if you had to wait a week to get the new one it doesn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John you if the next morning when you come into work somebody from Dell is there with a box and says give me your old one here’s your new
⏹️ ▶️ John one later and you’re like oh that was easy and so for Apple like the thing that counts
⏹️ ▶️ John is how good was your Apple care phone experience which in my experience is not that great how
⏹️ ▶️ John when you go to the genius bar how is that experience going to be and how you know how much
⏹️ ▶️ John fuss do they give you how sympathetic are they this matters to how sympathetic is the person to your frustration
⏹️ ▶️ John about getting a DOA computer which is basically how it’s set categorizes because assuming this is a hardware thing it’s not like the software
⏹️ ▶️ John update broke it it’s just you know if it’s the hardware problem that this machine was just DOA and it’s best to find this out now
⏹️ ▶️ John right it’s all about how it’s handled after the fact and my one I have two Apple stories about
⏹️ ▶️ John this I think I’ve told the other one on a past podcast but when I got my SE30 the power supply
⏹️ ▶️ John made a high-pitched noise that only people under 30 could hear. I do remember this. Yeah and that was my most disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John one because because I was a kid and when you’re a kid or like when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a kid at heart like Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you get your hopes up for this exciting new shiny computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes and you’re sad right so that was that was the most crushing one and the other one which I may have mentioned in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past is when this was the Pizza Box Power PC Performa actually
⏹️ ▶️ John Performa 61 something CD got that for Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John and or was a family computer but whatever it’s mine and the the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John gross PC sourced 15-inch multi-sync Apple monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John that came with it was DOA like the monitor just didn’t work you plugged it in nothing happened no lights came on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John so I got that on Christmas Day and I was older so I wasn’t totally you know devastated
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have any other monitors that could fit it because of the differences in the connectors this was a multi-sync monitor it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a PC monitor connector but with a slight difference and anyway all my other ones wouldn’t work with it
⏹️ ▶️ John so you get something on Christmas and you can’t use it on Christmas you’re sad too Apple had a new monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John on our front doorstep the morning after Christmas that’s pretty impressive yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s not only did they not wait for us to ship it back or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John ship it to us and get it here is that it was like you’re sad on Christmas Day you go to sleep you wake up the next morning monitors on your doorstep.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that was pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m curious to see how this works out. But you’re absolutely right that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s all about how how how sympathetic people are and how people react to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it’ll be fine. It’ll all it’ll all work itself out. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, what a bummer. What a serious bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And how much hassle it is like, do you have to convince anyone of anything? Is there a lot of paperwork to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John out? How long does it take for you to have the situation remedied to your satisfaction?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it can make a big difference. Even if like you got it fixed the next day, but to do that you had to like
⏹️ ▶️ John argue with someone on the phone, that’s a terrible experience. But if you go through it and someone is
⏹️ ▶️ John sympathetic and just, you know, it seems like bump, bump, bump, oh, that’s it, yep, that’s it, you’ll have a new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John on day X. You’re like, oh, that was easy. And you come away from that experience if everything has gone well.
⏹️ ▶️ John actually liking the brand more than you would have if you had just gotten the thing and it worked out of the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, totally.
⏹️ ▶️ John The perverse way of human nature works. The worst one though, the one you can’t recover from,
⏹️ ▶️ John luckily we’re all out of this phase, is like when I got my obscenely expensive Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John 22-inch LCD monitor and it had dead pixels on it. And I tried not to look for them, but I could see
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And there’s nothing you can do about that because I knew going in what the policy was. The policy is if there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John X number of pixels and they’re this far apart or whatever, sorry, luck of the draw, you got unlucky. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I guess I suppose I could have returned it and tried again and returned it and tried again and returned it and tried
⏹️ ▶️ John again, but I was just not up for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, yesterday I was really upset, not even just angry. I was I was genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset. But today, with a little bit of clarity now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see that this is like the most first world of first world problems that my shiny new computer didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately. Oh, well, like get over yourself. But man, it did bum me out a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You paid good money for that thing. Don’t, you know, don’t diminish this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so hopefully it’ll rectify itself. We don’t need to talk about this anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you guys don’t have anything to say, we can move on to follow up. But if you have any other questions, I’m happy to field them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have so many questions. But first, we have to do a sponsor read. Fair enough. And first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quick correction. A couple weeks ago, I did a read for Casper, Casper, the mattress company Casper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I forgot to give the coupon code. So if you go to casper.com slash ATP
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase. Once again, code ATP at casper.com slash ATP $50 off. So anyway, thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casper, sorry about the mistake.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey are fantastic. And I tell you what, I have them. I’ve paid for them in the past. I’ve paid for them just this week
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So check them out. Go to fractureme.com dot com and use code ATP15 to get 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first order.
Turns out desktops are nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring us this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of my questions was about, I know you’re not going to mess with it yourself, but RAM that wiggles loose as the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing took its bumpy little journey across the entire country.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you say that. I reseated the RAM just to be safe. No difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have said the safe thing is to not try to do that because, I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you scuff your feet on
⏹️ ▶️ John carpet and like, I don’t know, I would be like, look, I just can’t, I haven’t touched the thing. It came out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John box. I’ve been using it like like you use a computer by pressing buttons on the keyboard and mouse or trackpad. And now it’s fried
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, you opened it up. Well, but you’re supposed to be able to open it up. Ah, you know, so I just, I’m always paranoid
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple. So I would not have even tried that. I would have just brought it instead of the Rams unseated. It’s not my problem. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair, fair point. And actually that brings up a really interesting point. Let me tell you how I know I’m old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was extremely and remain actually extremely skeptical that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me doing like command R for recovery, I believe that’s right. I was looking at the documents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was doing these keystrokes, so if I get them wrong now I apologize. But like Command R, Option Command R,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it is for internet recovery, and D for diagnostics, all these things that I was mashing, I initially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was doing that on the new Bluetooth keyboard that came with it, which by the way I like quite a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really liked it a lot a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the new like semi-skinny one, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s correct. But anyway, so I’m doing all of this and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing it on a Bluetooth keyboard, and the old man in me is so damn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skeptical that this keyboard is even connected to the computer that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I first plugged it in with the lightning cable. Then I decided, no, I’m not even convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s good enough. And I have a 101-key Apple keyboard that I got from God knows where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s USB. I plugged that in and did all these keystrokes again just to be safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s it weirded me out to be relying on wireless devices in order to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kick off these extremely low level like boot sequences. I don’t know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s me being old and weird, I suppose. Anyway, any other questions or should we do some follow up? Why did you get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer? Right, so I knew it was time to get a different computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hadn’t bought a computer since my already mentioned 2011 high res anti glare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. That thing sits on my desk constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all it does is sit on the desk. And even though I’ve been a laptop guy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily a decade and change, in fact, I think I made the switch during school. So somewhere in the early 2000s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was when I really became a laptop kind of guy. And I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to myself, I will have a work laptop as we discussed quite a bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several episodes back. I’ll have a work laptop. And it occurred to me just yesterday that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my high res anti-glare, you know, MacBook Pro that I could put an SSD in like we were just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about. So I will still have a laptop and even in a real pinch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can take Aaron’s scuba diving MacBook Air and use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if I really wanted to use a laptop. Beyond that, as I’ve also talked about on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron got me a brand new iPad mini for Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and for a lot of things, especially when mated to a Bluetooth keyboard, that’s probably sufficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, say I wanted to write a blog post downstairs while I’m sitting next to Erin on the couch, I could use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iPad, I could use her laptop, I could use my old laptop, I could use my work laptop. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I have like 84 portable devices rolling around the house, do I really need another?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I have a couple of things that I really want running all the time, like Plex, for example. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have that running on a desktop rather than running on my laptop?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it seems to me like I’m running out of good reasons to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop. And so if I’m going to get a desktop, and damned if I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lust after these like Apple Cinema displays that are all over the place, the client that I’m working at, which we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about in the past, why not just bite the bullet and get a damn iMac? And that’s what I did. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tell you what, it’s weird only having one monitor because at home, not right now actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I put it away, but at home I typically have two monitors. I always have two monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s weird only having one monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He knows you can have two, don’t email him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know you, thank you, thank you. Oh my God, thank you. I know you can have two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but when it’s a 27 inch screen, you really don’t need it. It’s really okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh my God, is that screen beautiful. Did you guys know that that screen is really pretty? Yeah, I feel like we should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this in the past or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco has the worst one, but I have the same one as you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s if only somebody would have told you about a month ago about all the benefits of desktops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, yes. So, eventually I thought, you know, it’s all kidding aside, I thought, you know, let me just try this desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing because you know what? It’s a lot of, no question, full stop. It’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. What I got was, I don’t know, I apologize if I said this already, but I got a middle of the road one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got it with eight gigs of RAM because I was planning on putting some aftermarket RAM in it. Did you get the good CPU?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the four gigahertz CPU and I got the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one terabyte SSD. So basically a fairly loaded middle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the road iMac, 5K iMac, because I didn’t see the need for a really fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey graphics card because I don’t ever play games. So I loved the machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the three hours I got to use it before it died. And I’m really looking forward to sticking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. I really think this is probably going to be the right answer for me. Um, ask me again in a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months, obviously. And I say that both sarcastically and seriously, because I’m curious to see if I miss it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It works yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. If, if it works, but I’m, I’m really thinking that, that this was probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right answer, especially if I start doing a little more iOS development, which I’m, I’m hoping to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon. That’s a pretty good way to do it. And I will say that after having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used this 27 inch 5k iMac for two and a half to three hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As I was going to troubleshoot, I got out my work 15-inch Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro, and hand on heart, the first thing I thought to myself was, holy God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this screen is tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco never thought that about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 15-inch laptop ever before in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so two things you and I ruined on. First of all, the screen quality of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5K is still way better, even the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has the worst color gamut than yours. The screen on the 5K is way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the screen on any of the laptops, including the newest 15s. We’ll see if that changes when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to Skylake in a few months or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John as of today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iMac screen is by far the nicest screen that Apple sells. Maybe the iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t looked too much at it, but like…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought the iPad Mini was actually the best of the portables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean maybe you know for like certain metrics, I you know I know the test you’re talking about but but like among Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the 5k iMac is just far away far ahead of the other ones Because just I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything about it like the the color the contrast like the the pixel density
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know a bunch of stuff. I don’t understand It just looks great and once you’re accustomed to looking at a 5k
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at a retina MacBook Pro you can tell the MacBook Pro screen almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems blurry by comparison. It is a very different look and it looks fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the 5K. So first of all, you are now ruined. So yes, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug in additional monitors to it, but you won’t want to because anything else you plug into it will look like garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple is not yet shipping a standalone version of this monitor. I hope they do in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who do want multi-monitor or who don’t have a laptop or don’t have a 5K but have a laptop or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for now, this is the best screen Apple sells and the only way you can get it is inside a 5K iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nothing else matches it. And even having a laptop next to it is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no contest. So A, you’re ruining screen quality and B, you’re definitely ruining screen size. You know, now, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I feel, how I felt for years, ever since I got a giant monitor like this. I can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on my 15-inch MacBook Pro and I have and I need to usually a few times a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. I need to do something really heavy on the MacBook Pro and I’m glad I have it. But every time I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on the MacBook or I’m tempted to work on the MacBook Pro and I can work on the desktop, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either it’s just on the other side of the house or I’ll be back home in a couple days and I can do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, I will just put off work until I can do it on the big screen because I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I will be way happier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more productive doing it on the big screen. So you will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow a similar path where you’ll be like, well, I could work on this laptop, but his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen is so cramped. I might as well just wait till I can go upstairs and do it on the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see. I am genuinely a little, I’m going to use the word worried because I can’t think of a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word, but I’m a little worried about what this means for my home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life and for my relationship with Aaron, because I don’t often sit with a laptop downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next to Aaron, but I wouldn’t say it’s uncommon either. And now if I want to use my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer, I’m going to have to be upstairs in one of our bedrooms, which, you know, is, is my in-home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey office and that’s where I’m sitting right now to record. And so I don’t want to ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron on a regular basis. Um, just because I want to be upstairs on my fancy new iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’ll see what happens. I mean, if that’s the most of my problems, I’m in pretty damn good shape, aren’t I? So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, but I don’t mean this to be snarky. I mean, I genuinely, and then in the two and a half, three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours, I’m, I w I use the thing. I really, really, really loved it. I really did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And admittedly, some of that was like, Ooh, shiny, but it was fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it worked well. I was transferring things from both laptops to the, to the, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac. It God knows what’s going to happen with that data if I return it. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was transferring stuff to the iMac at ridiculous speeds. I was doing like 18 things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at once. I’m a really heavy user of what is it? Spaces, the multiple virtual screens. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know it’s all wrapped into mission control now, but I barely use them on this. I Mac, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God help me. I have like 10 different windows open at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Shut up, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I had like 10 different windows open at once, which is like eight more than I usually have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Maybe I just have a simple, simple mind, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re not the only one with spaces. I see with all these youngsters at work who like we have many more
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs at work now, and we have many more youngsters at work and everyone, it’s very easy to get multiple monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John at work. So the main, like the way
⏹️ ▶️ John young people, I’m generalizing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the way the young people I see at my work. Kids these days. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly, use their Macs is they have multiple monitors, they like lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors, like the more the better. One guy had like six, it was ridiculous. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they full screen everything and they attempt to use spaces in Mission Control to cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John through things. Like I’ll be sitting there and watching somebody do something if they’re there, they’ll be demonstrating something and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll have, they’ll have a text editor full screen on one 17 inch monitor and
⏹️ ▶️ John another text editor or web browser full screen, another 17 inch monitor. And sometimes it’d be like, well, go to this webpage, go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John source file, go to this, go to that, go to that terminal window. All these things would fit on like one 17 inch screen if the person
⏹️ ▶️ John like used windows the way they’re supposed to do that because really,
⏹️ ▶️ John filling an entire letterbox format 17 inch screen is ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But instead it’s like, where’s that window again? Where’s that window? Lots of gestures and keyboard combinations
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, go through spaces with the control arrow keys and gestures to swipe from one to the other to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing they’re looking for appear on one of the two screens. And they can’t see what’s in front of behind.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just have to like, and they don’t seem to have an awareness. There’s no like, like it used to be where spaces were 2D
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of just like a 1D strip. Remember the 2D spaces thing? So you can go up, down, left, and right. Then at least they’d have a fighting chance. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I see is two screens that I see hands moving furiously I see two screens blink, blink,
⏹️ ▶️ John blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. Oh, I found it. There it is. And then we’ll go back to the other thing. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. Oh, I found it. This is this does
⏹️ ▶️ John not seem efficient. So yeah, anyway, people like I mean, we should we should know
⏹️ ▶️ John this from the from Windows. Windows taught us that people like to maximize everything. And the Mac users like what max
⏹️ ▶️ John users just don’t maximize everything. Well, guess what, now that max are more common. The people who maximize
⏹️ ▶️ John everything have max and they try to do work the same way. So don’t do that, Casey, it’s a waste of your screen space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t typically maximize everything. But what I typically do is have spaces kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of orient like things. So as an example, the probably the best example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I have one space that has my work I am the relay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slack and I messages in three tiles on that space that take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the whole screen. So the, the left half of the screen is work. I am, this is on my work computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, the left half of the screen is work. I am. And then the right half of the screen is split in half.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the top half is relay Slack and the bottom half is iMessages. And that’s actually what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on right now. So that’s just a simple example. Um, and I like spaces. It’s not for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, but like I said, when I was using the iMac, um, I found that, that I could just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tile damn near everything on the one space, which is a weird thing for me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my love of spaces is also the reason that I feel like I can’t use any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse other than the magic mouse because I am addicted to the two finger swipe. I understand that Mike’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beloved MX revolution or whatever it is has configurations in which you can swap spaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with buttons and whatnot. But But for me, I’ve always used the magic mouse and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it. Plus the mouse crippled him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that mouse also crippled him. So there’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey details. Right. No big deal. Right. Um, so anyway, so yeah, so I, in my brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage and again, I know I sound snarky, but I’m not trying to be in my very brief usage of this machine. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really, really liked it. And if I return it tomorrow, if I get it repaired tomorrow, one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way or the other, I am looking forward to having some honest goodness time with it. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was fast. It was, it was nice. It was pretty. The screen was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beautiful. I really enjoy the new peripheral peripherals. The new Magic Mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed roughly the same to me. I couldn’t tell any major differences. Like I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the differences are, but just from feel and whatnot, I couldn’t really tell the differences. The new keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, I really, really liked a lot. I feel like every single Apple keyboard in the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the 2011 MacBook Pro, I have the 2015 MacBook Pro, I have the 101 key keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a four battery Bluetooth keyboard, I have Aaron’s MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every single one of those keyboards, I swear to you, feels just a little bit different, but I really liked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new Bluetooth one. What is it, the Magic Keyboard or something? I always get the names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong. Anyway, whatever the brand new one is, I really liked it a lot. So the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excepting the fact that it died, was wonderful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put a quick personal anecdote, my office is a disaster. The one in my house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a disaster. You could barely see the carpet and there was like a path between the door and the chair and that was about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And in preparation for this thing, as it was marching across the country, I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did what Aaron has been begging me to do for like two years now and I cleaned up my office and my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was all clean. I have a glass desk because I’ve had it for forever, but I guess I’m that kind of a loser.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have this glass desk. It was all cleaned off. I moved my mic from one side of the desk to the other, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re a podcaster is like a really big deal and I was all ready to go and it was gonna be great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now it’s in my trunk to get repaired or return tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sucks. Yeah I’m very sad. I feel, I really do feel so bad for you because like I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just as I said earlier like the idea of like you know having like you know thought about it and saved up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then finally ordered and tracked and received this thing only to have it then just be broken like it just it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a damper on what should be like the exciting time that you finally got, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you paid for it, you waited patiently, you got it. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, as silly as it is, one of the things I was most excited for was to say to you, was to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say to the two of you, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Right. I’m talking to you on my new iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I said, when I was doing all of this installation, I already had my mic connected because there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason not to. And then, never mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, we’ve talked about this far too long. We should probably do some follow-up, especially since we have a fair bit of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I appreciate you indulging me, and next week we will have some amount of follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either I returned it, or maybe I got it repaired. We’ll see what happens. But we’ll follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back up next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, before you move on, do you want to preemptively apologize to Declan for his bad
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft 2.3 framerates?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, given that he’s, what, 14 and a half months now, I’m not too worried about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I said Minecraft 2.3. By the time he reaches Minecraft age, you’ll still have that computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’ll be using it, and the new version of Minecraft will probably not get great frame rates, and he’ll ask why, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’ll have to explain to him, Daddy didn’t want the good graphics card.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Do you really think the good graphics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card would make a difference when he’s playing a game on a seven-year-old computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it will, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Minecraft is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume there will be no Minecraft 2, but who knows at that point in his life. But Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John can be surprisingly demanding. If you crank everything up to max on my 5k
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, which has the best video card that you can get in that particular machine, you can make it chug occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it can happen. You know, obviously he’s not going to have the graphics settings maxed, but I think even at standard
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics settings with a reasonable draw distance, by the time he is of
⏹️ ▶️ John age and Minecraft has evolved to have slightly fancier graphics, perhaps, it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get great frame rates. And someone’s going to have to answer for that. And well, I guess I’ll explain it to him if you don’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s not like you’re going to get rid of that beautiful screen. You’re going to use that thing for as like it’ll be a viable computer
⏹️ ▶️ John for a really long time, except maybe for Minecraft.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, first of all, I need to teach you guys about selling computers while they’re still worth something. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second of all, I love John that you that you assume there might not be a Minecraft 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Microsoft bought them. I understand. It’s a billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollar business. There will definitely be a Minecraft 2. It might not be good and it might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be for a while but there will definitely be a Minecraft 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s already on the App Store, did you see it? All right, no, I mean like put it this way,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Notch still owned it, I mean there would, there should have already been a Minecraft 2 and 3 but there wasn’t because the
⏹️ ▶️ John company and the person who owned it just continued to revise the program and continued
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell, you know, the original program. Now that Microsoft owns it, you’re right, there will surely be a Minecraft 2 at some
⏹️ ▶️ John point but I’m not quite sure when that will be. It could be borderline. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what kind of priority it is for them to get mine to get a Minecraft 2 out
⏹️ ▶️ John versus just revising and continuing to sell Minecraft on every single new platform because they are selling the same game over and
⏹️ ▶️ John over again. They’ll sell it on PS4, they’ll sell it well you know less so now but they’ll sell it on Xbox One, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John sell it the PC version, they’ll probably sell a windows phone version you know they’ll sell they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John selling the iOS version uh so i don’t know if there there is a burning need to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a minecraft 2 before Declan reaches that age but we’ll
Sponsor: Blue Apron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re sponsored this week by Blue Apron, helping you cook better at home. Go to blueapron.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to get your first two meals for free. Now look, you need to know how to cook. Not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should you know your way around the kitchen, but cooking at home means eating healthier and saving money instead of ordering expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unhealthy takeout every night. But where do you start? Blue Apron has you covered. For less than $10 per meal, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliver all the fresh ingredients you need to create home-cooked meals. Just follow the easy step-by-step instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they give you for each recipe, with pictures of every step right on the recipe card so you can see exactly what it’s supposed to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. It comes with exactly the ingredients you need. There’s no massive amount of extra, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some herb that you’d need to throw away in a week when it goes rotten. And regardless of your dietary preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have lots of options. They make it a breeze to discover and prepare dishes right in your own kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this week they have things like garganelli pasta and tomato sauce with fresh mozzarella and arugula orange salad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a mouthful, literally. And buffalo chicken sandwiches with endive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and blue cheese salad. You’ll also cook with ingredients that you’ve probably never used before, like this week’s poblano
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chili or baby bok choy or pearl onions. Now, all these recipes are between 500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 700 calories per portion, so it’s really delicious and good for you. Right now, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your first two meals for free at BlueApron.com slash ATP. That’s BlueApron.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Blue Apron, a better way to cook. I am still thinking about that Thai soup they had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two months ago. Man, that was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, it’s funny you bring that up. So, um, as part of Blue Apron sponsoring us, they gave us a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks of free meals. And I have been wanting to try Blue Apron for the longest time. It took us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of one week for Aaron and I to look at each other and say, this might be worth it because this is really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. And tonight we had Korean, and I’m going to butcher this, Korean teok and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spicy pork ragu. And this was one of those things that it’s not totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of our comfort zone, but not in our comfort zone, if that makes sense. And oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, was it really good. And last week was our first week. We had a few different things and they were all good. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I really, I’m really loving blue apron so far. And I think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much done deal that Aaron and I are going to end up signing up and actually using our own money to pay for it. Cause it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, we had the same dinner today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, did we? Oh, that’s delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same thing. I have the exact same blue apron meal. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Did you like it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. It was one of my favorite ones that I’ve had so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Same here. Like it was one of those things where we were both like, yeah, we’ll try it We’ll see how it goes and then Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I looked at each other after having had a few bites and we were like wow Is this good like we didn’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can I found that I’ve not been able to predict like ahead of time which ones I’m gonna like and which ones I’m Not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to mostly because they’re you know, they’re so varied that you really have no I
⏹️ ▶️ John have no Like baseline to say well, I like that. I don’t know. I’ve never had anything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that before right? The other thing, this is getting out of the edery, but into like blue apron hacks. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is a thing that people do. So say you sign up for blue apron and you do it for a while and it’s like interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like one of the reasons I think you should do it even if you just do it for a short time is just to see a try a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of different new foods or whatever. And they give you like they give you the ingredients and they also give you like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you. Is it always one page mark? I would know like a one page thing on how to cook it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen it be more than one page. It’s always been it’s always one sheet of paper with about eight steps in the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And it has the ingredients on the other side, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the front of it has like a big picture and then listed ingredients and then the back of it has like like a two column
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grid of instructions with photos at each step,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So when you’re done with blue, I’ve been say you decide not to pay for it anymore. You still have all those recipes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you liked one of them, in theory, you could go and make it yourself. Go buy the ingredients yourself. I mean, not going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the perfect little portions that blue apron gives you. So you’ll have to adjust the amount. So maybe you have leftovers and maybe you will have that rotting,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, herbs in the refrigerator, but you can make these
⏹️ ▶️ John again yourself. Like there’s no reason like if you find one that’s a super favorite, just add it to your collection of things that you
⏹️ ▶️ John regularly make for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ve I mean we’ve been with blueprints for I don’t know maybe six months now. We’ve been but long before they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sponsor. We’ve been using them and we we’ve been doing that since the start. We’ve collected all of our all the recipes we like. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have this giant stack of them accumulating on our bookshelf. Yeah, yeah, yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the problem I had though I try I wanted to make the awesome. I think It’s like chicken kha soya or something. I’m sorry, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what the name of it is. But it’s this awesome chicken Thai soup. And I tried to go buy the ingredients
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it last week and just like my store had almost none of them. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s… We’ve been using it a long time. And that should tell you all you need to know. I mean, we keep using it. What I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it… This is way too long for a sponsor read. But sorry, what I like about it is that…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason we did it was that we don’t like to have to think about like, what are we making this week? And then plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge groceries. We lasted like two weeks trying to do that, and every six months we would try to do that again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we would just fail so soon afterwards. They take all the decision-making out of it for you, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really nice, when you just don’t want to have to make all of these decisions about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are we having every single night? So it’s really nice for that.
Plex and Infuse
⏹️ ▶️ John Chatroom says the recipes are actually available online for free blueapron.com slash cookbook
⏹️ ▶️ John and also their logo looks like Totoro So there you go. What more could you ask for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so alright, so we should we should do some follow-up and we have a fair bit. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s buckle up kids Let’s start with we talked about plex a little bit last episode in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe was the episode before but regardless We got a lot of people writing in to ask Have you tried infuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Apple TV and we’ll have a link in the show notes The idea with Infuse is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat Plex-like in that it will auto-discover metadata about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your media collection, so it’ll show you your list of movies with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie posters and things of that nature. But the real kick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the party trick that Infuse has, from what I’ve gathered, is that it will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the transcoding on your device. So really there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason that you couldn’t just sit a bunch of files on an underpowered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology and let Infuse just look at it and then do the transcoding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right on the Apple TV. That is excellent and it sounds great. I haven’t tried it yet, but it does sound good. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have with this though is that it doesn’t solve a couple of the other problems that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex does fix, which is number one, it doesn’t give you external access to your media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one of the greatest pieces of Plex is that you can get to your media from outside of your home if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you set it up properly. And secondly, you can’t share other people’s libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like Marco and John and I, we have all shared our libraries with each other so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, for example, could stream one of the movies that I have. You’ve been doing it all week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house to his house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve been watching through your top gear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, right. And the reason that it hasn’t worked for the last 24 hours is because I moved all my Plex stuff to the iMac that’s now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my trunk. But anyway, so yeah, so it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t do external access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and doesn’t do sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I tried to infuse as soon as people suggested it, because I’ll jump on top of anything. Like as soon as we talked about it, I don’t know, it was like many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many shows ago. Like, oh great, infuse. I immediately bought the $10 like pro version, whatever. Yes, sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John come right on. I’ll give it a try, sight unseen, because I got two recommendations from random strangers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the whole reason I wanted it, I’m trying to support the app economy. The whole reason I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John it was to. You’re the one. I had this file that I was trying to play that I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to eventually end up using my this one and I had to use my iMac as the Plex server for because the
⏹️ ▶️ John has no problem transcoding it Plex served from the iMac to my Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John was the only thing that played this thing with with all you know played it all period but
⏹️ ▶️ John played it smoothly and everything so I tried to fuse I immediately looked at those that exact file which turns out it is
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the info from mplayer so I don’t know how to parse it but it’s he vc which is I think h264
⏹️ ▶️ John particular profile 1920 by 1080 so 1080 I don’t know if it’s I or P I assume it’s P
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a it’s all a video file 24 frames per second about 1100
⏹️ ▶️ John kilobits per second to track 48 kilohertz a AC audio
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple TV can’t play without stuttering so it’s it’s it’s it’s decoding it on
⏹️ ▶️ John the device it can’t handle this so I was sad because that was the one reason I bought it but aside from that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a reasonable like way like Casey said if you have a whole bunch of folders full
⏹️ ▶️ John of video files sitting somewhere on your network this will go through the folders and play stuff for you
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I’m not sad that I purchased it I am sad that apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John their software combined with the wimpy a8 relatively wimpy
⏹️ ▶️ John a8 CPU system on a chip thing inside my Apple TV can’t play play this fairly demanding
⏹️ ▶️ John file. And I already watched the whole show. I watched it on my iPad by the way, because what I did was I went into Plex and finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I finally had to give in and say, fine Plex, you can optimize this, quote unquote optimize
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it to a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John size. And then I watched it on my TV and on my iPad over the course of a few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so you said this was HEVC video? Because that’s H265. That’s kind of a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like, that’s, it’s very reasonable to not be strong enough to play that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, that’s probably it doesn’t have it doesn’t have the hardware. I remember reading about some Apple thing that actually has H265
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware, but it isn’t actually used. But anyway, yeah, that would make sense in that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Infuse probably does great because the aid has dedicated H264
⏹️ ▶️ John decode hardware. But if it’s not H264 and instead is H265 and either the system on the
⏹️ ▶️ John chip doesn’t have hardware for it or the hardware isn’t enabled by Apple’s OS, then, yeah, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be trying to do it on the CPU. And I can understand why it would choke to death.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I also should point out that just earlier today, I listened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to MacPower Users episode 299, which we will put a link in the show notes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’ve ever wanted an unbiased opinion about, or certainly not biased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by me, opinion about Plex, if you’ve wondered how to get started with it, if you’ve wondered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it brings to the table, listen to MacPower Users 299. It’s a really great episode that goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all into Plex. So you should check that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s one more drive by complaint about Plex, which I cannot believe that they don’t do. I just assume they did. Maybe I haven’t found it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have a blog post, which maybe you can link in the show notes, Casey, about like introduction to Plex that you did a
⏹️ ▶️ John while ago, like how to name your files, linking to like the Plex file naming guide and figure out. I’m like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I wondered when I read that at the time, like, because I wasn’t using Plex that much. I’m like, this seems weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is he doing this? Just because like, Oh, if you want to have everything perfect, just do it this way. But like, surely there’s a feature in
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing where you can essentially just find some media that it either has shrugged its shoulders at or has
⏹️ ▶️ John misidentified and say, Oh, well, you got it wrong. And go in there and just type some random words in a search box
⏹️ ▶️ John until you find the search result you want and go, Oh, yeah, it’s that one. So like, say, you mislabeled Star Wars or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s confused about what it is. You know, like, Oh, well, you don’t know what this is, because I have the files
⏹️ ▶️ John named weird or whatever. So I’m just going to go in to your search box and type Star Wars and see the 8000 results for Star
⏹️ ▶️ John Wars and find the one that is not the special edition, but the original 1977 version. I just click on that one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is that one. Is that feature not exist in plex? If it exists, I can’t find it. No, it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could swear it does. But I can’t walk you through where it is because my iMac is in my trunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right. Anyway, maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t found it yet. But like every time I go to edit the metadata, it’s like, you know, if I name the file,
⏹️ ▶️ John then yeah, we’ll figure it out. If I don’t name the file, right, all I can do is like pick cover art and stuff. If it
⏹️ ▶️ John is totally wrong about the metadata, I can’t do a search and say, surely the database
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re using has this metadata in it, you’re just not finding the right one. So rather than me editing the individual metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I don’t want to do, I just want to say, let me do a search of your big database full of stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a pretty broad search. And let me pick the blob of metadata that I’m telling you is this one so that I can
⏹️ ▶️ John manually fix everything that I had, like so that if I didn’t know how to label, like some, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John special of a show, like a Christmas special of a show, that’s not part of any particular season, I didn’t know the secret
⏹️ ▶️ John season zero weird, you know, convention they have, I can be like, Oh, well, Let me just do a chronological
⏹️ ▶️ John search of the most recent episodes from this series and I will find whatever blob
⏹️ ▶️ John of metadata corresponds to this and then click on it and it will automatically label it as like season zero. I’m like, Oh, I would never
⏹️ ▶️ John figure that on my own. Anyway, I’m still still working through my Plex expertise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, the thing with Plex is it’s very opinionated about file names and file conventions. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once you understand its opinions, it’s actually very simple to work with. And that’s what my blog post was about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am almost positive the feature that you’re talking about, John, about fixing mismatches, I’m almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure it’s there, but I don’t want to say that for certainty because I can’t try it right now because, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Plex server is currently in the trunk of my car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll keep looking for it, but the thing with the opinionated naming, its opinions
⏹️ ▶️ John are wrong. So I refuse to comply. I know the naming scheme now. I’ve read the documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s no way in hell I’m putting a year in parentheses at the end of my movies or television shows. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I object to season zero. I don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, season zero for TV shows is specials. So like the Top Gear Polar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Special, for example, would be a Season Zero entry.
Follow-up: Swift default final
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, we have a fair bit of feedback about Swift and default final and and I’m stunned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m flabbergasted It appears that Marco has done some homework and has put something in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve led an email. Yeah Wow Yeah, I hit three keys to make this happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Are you okay? Do you feel all right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No All right, so this was a feedback from Nick Matsakis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco From a longer email is very thoughtful. I’m gonna read just a quote here He said, so we were talking about Swift basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having having classes be default final as a proposed change to the language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during their evolution. That’s kind of a debate raging on right now. And this would mean basically that by default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classes couldn’t be subclassed. That you could subclassing would still exist in the language but rather but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the default unless the class was specially marked with whatever keyword would say, you know, extensible or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, the default would be you can’t subclass things. So Nick says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the late 80s and early 90s were the heyday for object-oriented programming. And languages designed in that time, like C++,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Objective-C, and Java, it was taken as a given that subclassing was a good thing and should be used pervasively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, a couple of decades of experience with such languages has led to two key insights I think we’ve learned as an industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first is that in order to write classes that can be robustly extended through inheritance, allowing both the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and derived classes to evolve with minimal risk of breaking each see also the fragile base class problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Careful consideration should be given at the time the class is designed and written. I think this argues for default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed. I think we’ve learned an even more important lesson though, which is that class inheritance should be thought of as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a limited tool to solve a prescribed set of problems, not a general mechanism for code reuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this makes a lot of sense to me, like this I totally agree with Nick, you know, I think I kind of breezed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last and when we were talking about this last week, a quick statement of basically saying like I think we’ve seen a lot of anti patterns and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dysfunction that subclassing everywhere can bring and some of the challenges it brings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I agree that what we’ve seen is that it basically shouldn’t be the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s everywhere and the Java people will have to find a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey program, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the PHP people have to find somebody else to copy.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is actually a pretty old nugget of wisdom, the
⏹️ ▶️ John downsides of subclassing. And you can tell it’s old because objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C is in many ways a reaction to it. Objective C is like 1989 ish like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John itself a very old language and not objective C so much but like the frameworks built on it, app kit
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it was called. I think maybe it was always called app kit. But anyway, the next the next step
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks, especially the UI frameworks, use delegation a lot, a lot more than
⏹️ ▶️ John contemporary frameworks for doing similar things that were all about subclassing. either, you know, functional,
⏹️ ▶️ John in which case, they didn’t have object classes at all, or they were enamored of the idea of subclassing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the next API APIs and frameworks heavily use delegation patterns
⏹️ ▶️ John to avoid subclassing to say this is a better way that way we have understandable individual objects
⏹️ ▶️ John that just use each other to do things and the way you alter behavior is by giving
⏹️ ▶️ John it a different delegate. I mean, how that’s essentially, Marco can correct me if I’m wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John The, The next equivalent of like, you know, you don’t write a main routine. There is a main routine obviously, but
⏹️ ▶️ John your app delegate is basically your application. Am I correct in my vague understanding of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like you don’t subclass UI application like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you provide an app delegate that conforms to the protocol and you get messages delivered there and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t pay attention it bloats over time and eventually all of the code in your app is in the app delegate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s like writing all of code in main like a rookie mistake right but uh but yeah but
⏹️ ▶️ John like so even even like the the very simplest starting point of your program
⏹️ ▶️ John is done through delegation and lots of the ui frameworks are done through delegation because and then you know delegation
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually not not specifically delegation but uh trying to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John inheritance can lead you to uh a sort of the the inversion of a control
⏹️ ▶️ John pattern which can get kind of weird and nasty speaking of java where you’re trying to use composition instead of inheritance
⏹️ ▶️ John but you want to give people access to the different pieces that get composed into the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John and so your entire program is dictating what things are composed into what to get your classes
⏹️ ▶️ John into the parts we need to go anyway any any sort of uh program code reuse essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John technology a code reuse technique whether it’s inheritance or delegation or composition or any of the other patterns in the lovely
⏹️ ▶️ John patterns books can go awry but i think I think pretty early on in the history of IoT-oriented
⏹️ ▶️ John programming, the downsides of inheritance were clear, and anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that came after that sort of understanding has tried to do something different, including the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that were the precursors to the frameworks that Apple now uses. But we were talking about it in the context of, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John even AppKit and UIKit and all these frameworks that use delegation patterns as application programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John often use subclass either because that’s the intended use of the thing still in some cases, or because
⏹️ ▶️ John you like that thing, but you just want it to be a little bit different. Or you need to just override this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, like, because it’s possible, it is a tool that’s in the tool belt of programmers to get what they
⏹️ ▶️ John want out of frameworks, whether or not their framework really ever intended you to subclass that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. So another thing that was written in Andreas Hartl,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he made some great points about mocking using Swift. He said, there’s another unforeseen consequence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of going final by default, tests that could have used mocks to ensure their framework method as was called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t do that anymore. This is because mocks rely on subclassing to replace all API functionality with no ops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to get into what mocking is if you’re not familiar with it, but suffice to say that in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of years, I’ve really gotten into unit testing, like formal unit testing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and mocking is kind of your path to happiness there. And it’s what really made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me understand why designing to interfaces or protocols, if you will, is really kind of the right idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s that’s that’s not an insignificant problem if this is the way that Swift goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought that was a very, very astute point.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like it’s not a significant problem to me because I assume there would always be a compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John mode that says disregard the final keyword. You know what I mean? Like for when you when you run your unit tests,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t seal anything up as final because it shouldn’t it shouldn’t affect functionality. you would disable some optimizations
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe you wouldn’t have a bug for bug compatible thing in terms of maybe there’s like a bug in the compiler that causes the
⏹️ ▶️ John optimization goes awry. But it seems trivial to me to have a compiler option
⏹️ ▶️ John that says either just ignore final entirely, like don’t seal up
⏹️ ▶️ John any classes, or change what the default is or something like that that allows you
⏹️ ▶️ John to mock in your unit tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, that’s an interesting point. I don’t know how that would be handled. Moving Moving on, Neil Cronin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was one of a few people to write in and point out the error in what I, or potential error in what I had said. I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly how I’d phrased things, but it sounds like I probably got it a little wrong. He pointed out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that C-sharp methods are final by default, but classes are not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I think I might have interspersed classes and methods a little bit last episode, but to be absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear, classes are not final by default, but methods are. So that’s my bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that. We’ll have a link in the show notes to that. Also Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D. I’m not going to even try to pronounce your surname. I’m back. I go with Zomback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, there you go. Pointed out that you can do something like final and objective C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a couple of fancy compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John directives. You put enough underscores and anything is possible in C, C++. underscore
⏹️ ▶️ John attribute underscore underscore double open parens objc subclassing restricted double
⏹️ ▶️ John closed parens yes there are so many attributes you can add you could annotate
⏹️ ▶️ John all your things with nullability information for the swift bridging and you can say objective c
⏹️ ▶️ John subclassing restricted that’s from Jesse Squires gave that little attribute
Follow-up: Rust vs. Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then one of you guys wanted to talk about rust versus Swift versus go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was me the rust people Have come out to defend the honor of their language
⏹️ ▶️ John and to differentiate it from those other things go and Swift We were talking about the languages that are kind of in a little
⏹️ ▶️ John group of these Static compiled languages with
⏹️ ▶️ John an eye towards being a better C++ Without all the downsides of C or C++,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know being like Swift essentially And Benjamin
⏹️ ▶️ John Sago, yes, points out that rust I mean, I think we mentioned the show, but he’s as emphasized
⏹️ ▶️ John by a lot of rust people. Rust is not garbage collected, go go uses garbage collector at runtime and Swift, of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, uses reference counting. That means their programs you can write and rust that you couldn’t write in Swift or go such as graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John intensive game, a browser, Android and OS or device driver or a garbage collector or anything that has to interact with
⏹️ ▶️ John the language that has its own garbage collector. would imagine the Swift people at the very least would
⏹️ ▶️ John object to the idea that you can’t write a graphics intensive game or browser engine or an OS because
⏹️ ▶️ John those are some of the state of goals of Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, I would even object to his characterization of garbage of reference counting as a form of garbage collection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I don’t think I agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what he’s talking about is like, my understanding, I’m sure we’ll get more email about this rest because I haven’t done enough
⏹️ ▶️ John of my homework is that the way Russ gets around not having a garbage collector and not doing reference counting is
⏹️ ▶️ John at compile time it figures out what it has to do with memory
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than at run you know in other words it’s not like the thing against garbage collection we know we
⏹️ ▶️ John know is like at some point you have to go wander all of your stuff and clean out the garbage and that takes time and
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you do it on another thread at some point you may need to pause the program
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you don’t need to pause it and you have a pause free garbage like there’s always some kind of overhead of
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do the garbage collection while your program is running and the swift solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the objective solution for that matter, but the swift solution is figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John what, use reference counting to figure out when things aren’t needed anymore and put the reference count,
⏹️ ▶️ John put the stuff that deals with the reference counted in line with your program. So while your program is running, it will do
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, do this thing, increment this reference count, do this thing, do this thing, do this thing, decrement this reference count. And like when the reference count
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to zero, you can get rid of that memory. And so it’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John lining your program, It’s actual code execution. It’s not another thread running in a garbage collector or anything like that It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s as if you had written in your program in C parlance You’re writing malloc and free right, you know when you can free the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s when you write the free thing And you know when you’re allocating memory because you’re at malloc and you have to figure out you know
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s reference counting, but it’s inline and so in some code You don’t want this bookkeeping
⏹️ ▶️ John of incrementing and decrementing this number to keep track of how many? References there are to it. You just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you’re writing the the kernel of an operating system in C most of the time you’re not implementing
⏹️ ▶️ John your own reference counting system you’re just putting the the mallocs in the right place and putting threes in the right place or if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in a particular part of the kernel you can’t use malloc or free you’ve got to do everything with wired down memory
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you can’t have anything having to you know like it’s not it’s not appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John to have automated memory management in that way I would imagine the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John for Swift is that you can write those parts of the program if you understand enough About
⏹️ ▶️ John how swift manages memory even though you don’t see any of the memory management You can do it in such a way that you
⏹️ ▶️ John know that all of these silly Reference counting increment decrement stuff will
⏹️ ▶️ John be removed by the optimizer as no ops because you know exactly how you know how things are gonna Get sorted out
⏹️ ▶️ John and this thing will run straight through without any memory access stuff But still rust is heavily focused on the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that it does not use a garbage collector and it doesn’t use reference counting So it’s really trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like C and C++ They both of them do not have garbage collections and they don’t use reference counting unless you write it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Russ is definitely a closer A closer match to a replacement for those
⏹️ ▶️ John programs and I do believe that there are probably some programs especially now With Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John as young as it is that could be written in rust that could not be written as efficiently in Swift But long
⏹️ ▶️ John term, I think that’ll be quite a battle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Anything else about Swift,
Follow-up: MagSafe, USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, how about MagSafe and USB-C ports?
⏹️ ▶️ John Last episode, I think, we’re talking about the MacBook One connector with that MagSafe adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John that fits in the little USB-C port on the side, and whether it was really necessary. And none of us had MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Ones that we had tripped over or yanked the cord out of. And I said I thought that nobody had done that
⏹️ ▶️ John experiment well. Glenn Fleischman didn’t really do the experiment, but did delve into the science
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the USB-C connector and to try to figure out with thought experiment
⏹️ ▶️ John and some basic physics calculations and some numbers from the USB-C spec what would
⏹️ ▶️ John happen if you tripped over a MacBook one cord that was plugged in as compared to what would happen
⏹️ ▶️ John if it had a MagSafe connector and the conclusion of this article which again this is an older article might have been even before the MacBook one
⏹️ ▶️ John was out but it had to be announced obviously was that your laptop will fall the ground
⏹️ ▶️ John that yes you totally can pull a MacBook one off of a surface onto the ground by
⏹️ ▶️ John tripping over the cord just based on the forces involved and the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John of the yanking and the angle and all these other things you can read the article to find out perhaps not as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as actually doing the experiment perhaps not as good as a bunch of people who own MacBook ones having their children
⏹️ ▶️ John trip over the cords and find out what happens but so far no one has written in about that happening so all we have is this
⏹️ ▶️ John speculation by Glenn Fleischman but So there you go, there’s an answer.
Follow-up: Upthere and AWS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and why don’t you tell us about up there and whether or not they use AWS? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John just a quickie follow-up last time Someone had said they used AWS and up there had replied in Twitter No, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John we host all our own stuff and so a couple people went back and forth on Twitter trying to figure out well then why is up
⏹️ ▶️ John there connecting to AWS and A theory was that it was because of crashlytics was a crash reporting thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and up there confirmed They do use crashlytics and crashlytics said if you if you use crashlytics,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will connect to AWS So there’s your answer to why up there is connecting to AWS.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s for crashlytics Excellent. That’s the magic of Twitter by the way Twitter like random
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast that we do random listener of the podcast uses some use little snitch software
⏹️ ▶️ John to say they saw connecting AWS then the three companies that replied three sort of corporate Twitter accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John the The Little Snetch account, the Crashlytics account, and the UpThere account. It’s the magic of Twitter
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Apple TV Tech Talk
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much to Hover for sponsoring our show once again. Excellent. So you went to a tech talk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I went yesterday to the Apple TV Tech Talk in New York. So the tech talks are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple goes around the country with the developer relations team,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not every year, maybe every couple of years. It depends on when they can do it. But they basically send the team around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of as like a halfway point between WWDCs. And they put on these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little, it’s basically a one day mini WWDC that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually focused on just one relatively new platform. So I went to one a few years ago that was just for iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe last year, I might have watched one, I forget. But this year they’re doing Apple TV tech talks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s free, it’s one day, you sign up, it’s just picked by lottery, and it’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cities around the world. And you just go and it’s in like a hotel meeting room or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks exactly like MiniWBDC. It’s great and very well presented.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, high quality presentations, but only like a few hundred people in attendance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than 5,000 in the giant Moscone Center. So like it’s a nice small scale. You actually get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like talk to the Apple people and meet other developers on a nicer, smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shorter, and way less expensive scale. So I went and it was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still am not entirely convinced that I want to be developing for the Apple TV yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to do it sometime. I’m not sure that time is now. I’m very excited to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco develop for it, I just, I don’t know. I’m not seeing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market demand for it yet, really. So if you really want overcast on the Apple TV, I guess let me know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now I just haven’t heard from enough people who really want that. And other things I think are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more important for now. I do look forward to it. It’s a great platform. The talks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were all about basically video playback and games. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main areas that they focused on because that is what the Apple TV is best at, video playback and games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As an audio-only podcast app, I’m not sure there’s much for me to do there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides get people’s audio into their home theater systems, which people do occasionally request. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem like there’s much demand for me there, But we will see. iOS 9.3 and tvOS, whatever, is it also 9.3?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new beta that we should talk about. They added a podcast app, like their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own Apple podcast app finally. So I guess we’ll see. If a lot of people use that, and I start hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people saying, oh, I switched back to the podcast app so I could play it on my Apple TV. If that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens a lot, I will definitely respond to that, and I’ll make it happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think eventually it might, but I don’t think the time is yet. So I guess we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re like somebody who makes the app for a video owner, like a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people there I talked to, like they were like the iOS programmer or on the iOS programming team for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a TV network or something like that, like you know, where that makes sense, like for them to be making apps, that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total sense. But for me, I’m not sure it makes sense yet, but we’ll see. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think we should honestly talk about iOS 9.3. What do you guys? I
⏹️ ▶️ John was just gonna second your endorsement of Tech Talks. I’ve only been to one, but it was it was exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John you said. It’s like a little mini WWDC in a worse venue.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, but it’s free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s one day. It’s great. With slightly, slightly worse food.
⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, the food here was was better by a lot. Maybe things have changed. I guess probably depends on the hotel. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe they have to use the hotel’s catering, but the one I went to was they had these terrible little box lunches, which granted
⏹️ ▶️ John the box lunches WWC aren’t that great either, but these were even worse. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, this we had like we had a hot buffet and and well, I mean, it helped. I didn’t I didn’t even try the coffee because there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a Cafe Grumpy downstairs. So I just went to the Cafe Grumpy and got excellent coffee there.
f.lux and Night Shift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah 9.3 so this was weird. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird. Monday or yesterday I forget. Anyway this week earlier this week Apple unveiled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a page on their website called iOS 9.3 preview so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they released I guess beta 1 right I haven’t even looked at it yet but they released beta 1 of iOS 9.3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever version of watch OS I think corresponds to that and then TV OS the same you know whatever version corresponds to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s a few very interesting things about this. So first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, Apple has never given like this like public unveiling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a beta OS before and in a marketing way. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do it in OS X. Like at a certain point in the OS X beta release cycle for many many years now, they’ve had a
⏹️ ▶️ John page. It’s basically apple.com slash OS with a little X slash preview
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other word and it shows you the features of the upcoming as yet unreleased this is even before they have
⏹️ ▶️ John the public betas they wouldn’t do it for the very first build very often they’d wait until like it was a WWDC announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John but they would have an entire section of their site dedicated to the OS that you cannot yet download
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird thing for iOS is I don’t know if they’ve ever done for iOS I don’t pay that much attention but they did it
⏹️ ▶️ John but pretty much simultaneously with the beta release to developers so it’s not like developers
⏹️ ▶️ John would go to Apple’s public website to see the features of the beta that they are just able to download now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s great. I mean, and what would usually happen in the past with iOS is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta would come out, and then immediately all the rumor sites would have people digging through it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within hours of it being released, rumor sites would have 10 articles about each little minor change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere in the settings screen, or an app got a new tweak or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this makes sense as a way for Apple to basically just kind of own that and control the message and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be a proper marketing handling of this kind of event, rather than just letting the rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sites dictate everything. So that’s good. It’s kind of like legalizing pot. It’s like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to discourage the bad behavior, just take away the value. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, here, here’s everything that’s new. Here you
⏹️ ▶️ John go. Well, not everything that’s new. I still hope, I assume the rumor sites found all the new. That little
⏹️ ▶️ John change in that setting screen, Apple’s not gonna put it on their giant preview page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the Wi-Fi assist label of how much data is used.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or stuff like that. Like there’s still plenty of fodder for rumor sites to dig into, but they hit the highlights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it’s plenty of boring fodder for them to dig into, and yeah, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s their core, the core audience needs to know, tell me every screen that changed, did
⏹️ ▶️ John they change the spacing on this label?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the most high-profile changes they’ve made is called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Night Shift. And Apple was the very first people ever come up with this idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of changing the color balance on your display, changing the white balance so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s cool temperature, and what we consider now to be neutral, during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day. And then at night, it slowly changes to a warmer color temperature, so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have your eyes be shown blue light that keeps you awake and makes you sleep worse. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly warms the color temperature on the display until you go to bed, and then changes it automatically the next day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish this was available on my Mac. For years I’ve wanted something like this and no one has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever thought of it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John If only. Your tone of voice makes me think you suddenly support patents. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco other people have had this idea before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t, like, an idea is out there for anybody to take. So I really hope,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget if they even did have a patent or whatever, but this is an obvious enough idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not call this a Sherlocking. I would not call this a case where Apple is taking an application
⏹️ ▶️ John wholesale, like, you know, the Watson application and making their own equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s named, that’s named based on the same themes, the original application that looks like the other application that works
⏹️ ▶️ John like the other. This is not an application. This is a fairly simple idea that was not
⏹️ ▶️ John invented, I’m sure, by the creators of the Flex application that you’re referring to.
⏹️ ▶️ John totally okay with Apple taking, because it’s a good idea and I don’t think anyone should own that
⏹️ ▶️ John idea, even if someone actually does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I think I might disagree with both of those points. So yeah, I was being sarcastic obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we’re talking about is there’s been this application called Flux, spelled F dot L U X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s been available on computers forever. And they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS kind of hack version where they couldn’t put it in the app store, so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a silo where you could download a binary library with a project into Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it installed onto your phone. They did this back in November
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it got thousands or millions of… tons of downloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then on November 12th, two months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they posted saying that Apple had contacted them and had said that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the iOS download of their of their kind of side loaded app here was in violation of the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreement and so this method of install is no longer available. Apple has indicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this should not continue. So they don’t really say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple like legally threatened them or anything because technically they could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continued to distribute it probably and And so this was all just two months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then all of a sudden now in what is the next major iOS feature update,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that next update has a feature that is a direct copy of what this does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wonder if they actually made some kind of small deal where maybe Apple said like, we don’t want you doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, shut it down and we’re going to do it ourselves and we won’t sue you or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shut it down, we’ll give you a small amount of money and we’ll do it ourselves and you won’t say anything. know that it’s probably something
⏹️ ▶️ John only reason they have to give them some money is if they have a super dumb patent on this idea right there’s two separate issues here
⏹️ ▶️ John one being mean to the makers of flux and not letting them use side loading to this not
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing side loading at all like that’s a whole separate issue of like hey Apple why is the only way that people can get
⏹️ ▶️ John applications on their devices through the app store what about a a way that you won’t complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about that expert users can use not a lot of people are gonna use it no one’s gonna download Xcode and build their
⏹️ ▶️ John own thing and sidelined like only you know only the nerds are gonna do it why not just let that go that is a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John issue the separate issue from is it okay for Apple to take this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that again I think the inventors of flux probably did not invent of changing the color temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John you display based on the time of day and incorporate that into their OS for those
⏹️ ▶️ John their most popular platform that seems like a no-brainer slam dunk and the only thing that Apple would trip across is if
⏹️ ▶️ John someone has a super dumb patent on and they have to pay somebody for it I have no idea about those legalities, but I think that whole
⏹️ ▶️ John system of the law is stupid. I am totally okay with Apple incorporating this idea because it’s a good idea and
⏹️ ▶️ John because nobody should own this idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I first of all, I think the way they’re doing it, just the timing of this and the way they came down so hard on flux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then immediately made their own thing. I think that that makes Apple look like a jerk. Really,
⏹️ ▶️ John make their own thing or were they already making it to had they are like, how long has this feature been, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, flux is an old application and there have probably been applications before, but I don’t think the timing is they
⏹️ ▶️ John saw people side voting Flux and then they said, oh, we got to get on that and decided to add the feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like the type of thing that might have been in the works for a while, but who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I disagree. I think it’s exactly it’s it’s a simple enough feature that that is exactly what probably
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But so even if they did it, what then what difference does it make? Like someone saw the idea. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a thing that users want again, separate from the notion of telling Flux they can’t do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that, I agree, is kind of jerky and annoying, right? Telling flex they can’t do it is separate from the idea of,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s a good idea. We should build that in because that’s exactly how they should work. If there’s something that’s a really popular idea that is very
⏹️ ▶️ John much a system level thing, which I’m amazed that flex could even do what they did, because it seems so much like a system level thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That should be built into the operating system. And how do you find those things? You either think of them yourself, or you see that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of user demand for this type of thing. Oh, lots of people are interested in this feature, we should build it into the stupid OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’m not saying Apple shouldn’t have been allowed to do this, or that they shouldn’t I’m not even saying they shouldn’t have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but the timing of it, the way they did it and the timing of it, I think is distasteful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and makes them look pretty jerky.
⏹️ ▶️ John I disagree. I don’t think they look any more or less like jerks. The thing that makes them look like jerks is not letting them sideload.
⏹️ ▶️ John Incorporating the feature in the OS makes them look like smart OS vendors. I don’t think it makes them look like jerks. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s any timing. I don’t think if they even said, we exactly copied this, we were inspired
⏹️ ▶️ John by Flux, and if they came out publicly and said that the story you’re surmising is I still think that would be fine because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s like that’s this is a consequence of the idea of people not owning Ideas like you want people
⏹️ ▶️ John not own ideas But it still seems distasteful to you that someone came up with this thing and that like that
⏹️ ▶️ John they you know Immediately copied it from them. It’s not there’s nothing, you know, it’s they didn’t own it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the transfer of ideas It’s the reason the reason I at least I’m against patents is the idea that Someone will have an
⏹️ ▶️ John idea and another person will hear that idea and say that’s a good idea and take that idea and run with it and like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not theirs to to own and there’s no copying going on it’s a shared anyway whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should point out like I did a very similar feature in insta paper like five years ago like it’s like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like I said it’s not it’s not a new idea to computing it’s not a new idea to like non
⏹️ ▶️ John computing related lights like the whole light theory I don’t know there’s probably some study many many many years ago about
⏹️ ▶️ John uh color temperature and light affecting sleep patterns that all this is spun out from.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like I don’t and that’s why I fear if I don’t know if someone will send us the link, I fear
⏹️ ▶️ John that flux actually does have a patent on this because seriously, like it should not be should not be patentable
⏹️ ▶️ John period. And even under the the rules of our current patent system, it should have been rejected based on prior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that never happens. But anyway, so I do want to get into a slightly a discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the the assumption or the scientific basis of this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, just to clarify, when we say change of the color temperature, for anybody who doesn’t know, if you’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen somebody buy a CFL or LED light bulb that looks really blue when you put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in the house, especially at night, or if you have one that was way too yellow or orange,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re kind of seeing the issues of color balance in our expectations. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of the day, during daylight, daylight colored light is you know more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more towards at the blue end of the color balance spectrum the way we the way we normally think about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then at night things like fires and old street lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and incandescent bulbs those we think of as as like especially like the bulbs we think of those making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like white light but in reality it’s really most it’s more yellow tinted than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco daylight is and so our eyes adjust for this cameras are for that’s what this is about white balances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cameras our eyes adjust for this and so we think when we’re sitting in a room lit by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly yellowed incandescent lights in you know at nighttime when it’s dark outside we don’t think of it as being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a yellow light we think of it as being a neutral white light but then if you see something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neutral colored like daylight it looks blue to you by comparison because you’ve already adjusted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that orange so anyway the the the principle behind this is that computer screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t change their color tone throughout the day so that what looks like a neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white color balance during the day on a computer screen does look bluish and or you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too bright. It can be perceived as and it’s kind of tricky but you know it looks like too harsh or too blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or too bright in like a dimly lit nighttime room for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the idea here is that this can confuse your body into into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not preparing for sleep or not not sleeping as well or or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve looked into I’ve tried to see what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scientific basis for this is because the idea is that if you can if you can make the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift its color temperature into the warm area so basically make your make your computer devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change their own white balance along with what’s going on in your house and around you and your environment so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the daytime they’re neutral and what we might consider a bluish or cold white, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at night they shift and everything gets tinted yellow. The idea that that will help you sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely sure that the evidence I’ve seen so far proves that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a good theory, it might be true. The studies that are cited everywhere mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to indicate that brightness of light is important. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it might not be important to change your lights to be more yellow at night. It might just be important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid bright screens at night and using bright screens like in bed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or before bed or whatever. That I think makes it from the actual study I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to find, which is pretty few and far between, but the Flux site has a good list of them. Bright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light emitting devices are a problem to use late at night for this purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t necessarily follow that changing the color temperature of those screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixes that problem. The studies I’m looking at, like the one that Flux posted most recently on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it Public National
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sciences? Anyway, I read that one and that was like, you know, iPad versus book, and it’s like, if you read an iPad for four hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before bed versus if you read a book for four hours before going to bed, the iPad users measurably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had worse sleep and related issues. I thought at first, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were just measuring if you’re bouncing around with apps, that’s engaging your brain in a different way, but no, it sounds like they controlled for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. They had people watching to make sure that you’re actually reading a book, but it’s like, if you’re staring at an iPad screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before bed versus reading a book, reading the book is better. But they didn’t test if you stare at an iPad screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with neutral color temperature versus one that is slowly shifting itself yellow, they didn’t say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was better. So it seems like this is two separate things that the studies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have been done so far show that bright lights at night can hurt your sleeping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also we think it’s more pleasant and easier on your brain to tint things yellow, but nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has actually proven that. And Apple’s wording on the feature is actually very carefully aligned with this. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says, many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep. Nightshift uses your iOS device’s clock and geolocation blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah and automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum making it easier on your eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t say that the color shift will make it easier to fall asleep. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says bright lights have been shown to make it harder to fall asleep and this will be easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your eyes but there’s no connection to sleep there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised they can’t get sued for easier on your eyes because like I don’t even know if that’s supportable.
⏹️ ▶️ John More yellowish is easier on your eyes? How is that? Maybe it’s because it’s not measurable. That’s why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why it’s supportable. It’s like it’s vague enough. You’re like, well, what does easier mean? So maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s vague enough that they’re okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right. And I mean, you know, there’s all sorts of like theories about like that’s why you see a lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yellow tinted sunglasses. Theories about like if you if you reduce the blue light more than the other colors, it’s easier on the eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there. There are other things about that, but I don’t. And so I think that’s probably backed up, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it doesn’t seem like this is connected necessarily. So I think if you’re concerned about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure, try flux or try this. Try night shift. If you find it pleasant. Great. You know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s a separate thing. It might not be helping you sleep, but I think if you want to sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is it. We do have evidence so far. It seems that either reducing the brightness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the screen is probably way more important. The screen
⏹️ ▶️ John already does that automatically to some degree. Like you can pick your brightness, but it does adjust based on ambient temperature within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would say reduce the brightness, especially at night. Like either keep it low all the time like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do, or just set it lower at night, even set it at the middle point lower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or just if you’re concerned about this, and maybe you should be, just don’t use your devices before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bed because the studies are pretty clear that that helps a lot. But I don’t think we know that changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to yellow has a meaningful effect on the quality of your sleep. It might be more pleasant, but it might not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meaningful effect either. But if you believe it
⏹️ ▶️ John will, then it will. Because the placebo effect is incredibly strong. And so there’s two aspects. One, some
⏹️ ▶️ John people just find it more pleasant. They just like it. It’s like, call it fashion or aesthetics, or it just
⏹️ ▶️ John gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling. They just like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other one is, if they believe it will give them better sleep, there is a chance that that belief will cause them to have better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. But it could be just like, if you start thinking about having better sleep and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanting to make changes in your life to give you better sleep, you will probably make other changes that will also give you better sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, so if you want better sleep, chances are you should, you know, she’s doing multiple things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those might be, don’t be like reading your phone every single second at night until the second you go
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the opposite of the placebo effect because I do usually the last thing I do right before I go to bed is
⏹️ ▶️ John look at an iOS device, which is pretty bright in a pretty dark room. And I’ve been doing this for
⏹️ ▶️ John just years and years and years, you know, since I was has existed is a thing since the iPod touches existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every so often, I think this is like exactly what they tell you what not to do like
⏹️ ▶️ John a bright, mostly white light in your face, like, right before bed. I
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if this is making me not be able to sleep, then I go to sleep instantly. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m trying to convince myself that what I’m doing is going to be harmful and I sleep fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco funny how that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If Apple, you know, maybe the Apple feature does more like maybe it also adjust the brightness if not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it should like that like that would be like if it if it also reduce like what I just said like you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduce the brightness of your screen at night also in addition to like the the automatic thing the brightness
⏹️ ▶️ John range yeah like basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you yeah like like move move like the set point down also like or yeah move move the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range down if it also does that automatically that’s a lot more valuable and maybe it does I haven’t tried it yet
⏹️ ▶️ John although I’d be like it’s my it’s my device getting dim what the hell Oh, it’s that stupid thing again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate when my display looks too dim and I realize that I’ve accidentally leaned on the brightness button on my keyboard or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? Yeah, and like for a long time, people have complained, many people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complained that, and I agree with this complaint, that the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brightness setting on iOS device screens often isn’t low enough. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a room where that is the only illumination, like Like if you’re reading in bed at night, the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brightness setting is often still too bright, especially if you’re using an app with a white background. And there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of people who will use the accessibility toggles to try to make it even dimmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which messes with my app, and then they send me bug reports. There’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who have been doing this for years, of using special accessibility settings or special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app features to try to reduce it even further. I mean, in an old version of Instapaper, when I first introduced dark mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to get around this problem, I actually had a translucent black layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I could put over the entire window. Just a giant UI view over the entire window or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layer, I forget which one, but just a giant overlay that I could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dim as necessary in dark mode because the entire interface was not dim enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially on an iPad where you have this giant, giant bright screen. It’s way more of a problem on iPads than it is on iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most people should just go into another room because I think the bottom brightness setting is too dim to look at. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s two things that are here. One is, is it putting off enough light to annoy another person who’s trying to sleep in
⏹️ ▶️ John the room? Yes, I grant you it’s doing that. But the other is, does it look like a normal screen? Or does it look like a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s broken? And when you put the brightness of the bottom setting in any iOS device, it basically looks broken, like things don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look right anymore. It’s not just a dimmer version of the screen. Now you’re changing it in a material way. Like there are
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you can’t read because the contrast is too low. Everything is super dark, it does not look like
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly dimmer version. I thought you what I thought you were going to say about the screens is, and I’ve heard this complaint as well is that
⏹️ ▶️ John in with the dawning of LED backlights many years ago on most devices, they go
⏹️ ▶️ John way too high, like the top brightness setting is blinding and noon in the noonday sun, you have to put it on max
⏹️ ▶️ John brightness and like these like monitors from random
⏹️ ▶️ John brands that are not like Apple monitors or Dell or HP. But just I mean, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John brands that you’ve never heard of, they They have these really cheap monitors and their top brightness setting, you can like cook eggs with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really bright. I mean, even Apple’s, like I have my 5K, my 5K is set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just one notch above the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s way too bright if I set it up more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just, it’s crazy bright, which is good. I like having that headroom, I guess. I mean, and maybe you still want
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like, you know, I said noonday sun, but if you actually have your iPhone 6 out in the noonday sun and put it
⏹️ ▶️ John on max brightness, you’ll see it’s actually not that bright after all compared to the sun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. like like you they they do this it makes a lot of sense on portable devices especially because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have to use it outside in sunlight it you really need every bit of brightness you can
⏹️ ▶️ John but what you need there to which need there’s different display tech because LCDs as you crank the brightness you just kill like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a completely black screen and you crank the brightness to max that you can use a black LED
⏹️ ▶️ John backlit screen completely black one as a flashlight in a dark room because that’s how much light just comes through it is
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s basically the backlight is on behind every single pixel and the little liquid crystal things are trying not to light the light through
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do which is why plasma TVs look better. So OLED doesn’t have that problem because it
⏹️ ▶️ John is just not causing the pixels that are not lit up. They’re just not emitting any light. There’s no light behind them. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to block anything. They’re just not putting it like a plasma. They’re just not putting out any light. So the move to OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John could help because if you did have like oh I’m cranking my iPhone 6 brightness in the noon day sun and I still
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t see the screen, even if you put a backlight behind that it was this gigantic super bright backlight.
⏹️ ▶️ John The contrast between the white regions and the black would still be basically the same ratio and so
⏹️ ▶️ John it would still look all washed out in the noonday sun. What you really need is to say this is, you know, you can turn the backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John down to a degree where the LCD screen can block the light going through because
⏹️ ▶️ John the light is so wimpy that it doesn’t go through but the room is so dark that where it does come through you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a better contrast ratio. So different display tech, and this is even before you get to reflective display tech Which of course
⏹️ ▶️ John is a real way to go where there’s not actually light coming from behind it But like a Kindle you’re relying on the sunlight coming
⏹️ ▶️ John down and bouncing off And you just make regions of it black so it doesn’t bounce off as much and then you get something that acts
⏹️ ▶️ John like yay an actual book a paper book where it becomes more readable in Sun right instead of less, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we do not have a good hybrid between backlit and Reflective screens there are
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of ones that have been tried involving either ink and LCD or combinations of various other tech and none of
⏹️ ▶️ John them are mainstream yet, so we’ll still wait for that. But in the meantime, OLED is the next significant step in this area that should really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On this week’s Connected, Federico talks a bit about Night Shift. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had said that he had been using it for a while, and then he went back to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think he had turned it off or something like that. And he said, I think he had said that it was like getting stabbed in the eye, because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Federico doesn’t believe in sleeping when the rest of Italy sleeps, he sleeps when we sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so he said it was really jarring when he had turned it off in the middle of the night. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not it’s real, it certainly is a strong placebo from what I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s also just like, you know, as I mentioned, like your eyes adjust to it. Your eyes have, you know, auto white balance, you know, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera terms. The difference when you’re not adjusted, it’s a huge difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and the easiest way to see this difference is if you have a camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set the white balance on it, make manually to daylight and take a picture outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during daylight and it should look normal. Then with it still set to daylight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a picture inside your house at night and everything will look insanely yellow. It’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. This is not a subtle shift in colors. It’s a massive difference. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just using your device one night with this feature enabled the whole night and the next night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have the feature disabled the whole night, you might not even notice the difference because your eyes are adjusting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as night falls the entire time as this thing is happening it’s a slow change but if you then immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while your eyes are adjusted to the warm color immediately see cool colors then it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very jarring I don’t think that necessarily says like how big of a difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this makes or whatever I think it’s just like yeah the shift is a big shift you know but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t I don’t think we we have anything to show that this is like super effective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, it’s primarily an aesthetic preference and then it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be related to eye strain or, you know, like the, you know, the ease on your eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, the connection to sleep quality I think is still very unproven.
Multi-user iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re running a bit long and I’d like to wrap somewhat soon, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wanted to at least bring up this multi-user iPad thing for the classroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently there’s going to be a whole bunch of changes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using iPads in the classroom. And again, this was covered in the most recent episode of Connected where Frasier Spears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed up. And it genuinely seems really, really interesting some of the stuff they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Teachers can look at their pupil’s screens. We’re not sure if that’s live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if it’s just like a snapshot. There’s multi-user iPads, so a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user can log into any iPad and get their home folder, so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that iPad. We don’t know a whole lot about it, but it seems really interesting. I’m fascinated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear the reports from the field how this works, but I’m very skeptical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll ever land on regular consumer iPads. What do you guys think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s got to come to Rego. This is one of those like bigger iPads. Like it’s guaranteed this is going to come
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. It’s just a question of when because us enough iPads are shared devices and
⏹️ ▶️ John families even as just like the three kids fighting over the two generations old iPad that
⏹️ ▶️ John has been handed down to them. Yeah, they just need that like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve needed this feature for a long time and it seems like it’s not it seems like it shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John too hard to do. Like it doesn’t break any sort of UI paradigm. They could just have an
⏹️ ▶️ John app for switching or whatever. Like it’s, because once you’re using it as a user, it’s just like a regular iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only context switch is, oh, well, you know, now your sister wants it, so give it to her. And then she
⏹️ ▶️ John launches that same app and taps on her icon. And now it’s her iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they have to fight over storage space. And you can use iCloud to mitigate that. And what happens if you don’t have enough room in iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John then when your sister logs in, you lose your save data because it couldn’t get uploaded to iCloud. and there are details
⏹️ ▶️ John to work out here and there. But this seems like a very obvious feature that needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to come to, especially if iPads continue to be more sophisticated and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and everything. Multiple users is a thing that we know is useful for
⏹️ ▶️ John large devices that multiple people might use, like iMacs or even laptops or even iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure I would assume that it’s definitely coming to regular consumer iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, setting up the education environment is presumably like a big provisioning thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I would imagine this is the kind of thing that it will, it does look like it’s very useful for education, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not really sure Apple cares enough about enabling multi-user iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for in people’s houses. Because right now, the way it’s solved is either, you know, either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not solved and you just stay logged in as one person and, you know, everyone just ruins all your high scores or people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get different iPads for different people. And that’s presumably what Apple wants. Apple wants everyone to have their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. I’m not sure, because if you think about what’s involved in this in a home environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without the central management of what the school is doing, in a home environment, what’s involved here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is things that are really messy in iOS today, such as having multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes Store accounts logged into the same device, apps from different people installed, or from different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accounts installed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s all been solved in OS X. I mean, it’s the same underpinnings. have multi it’s a multi
⏹️ ▶️ John user system, you have separate, you know, the directories and accounts and sandboxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, you can have two people logged in to different Apple IDs and different accounts into the store. Like, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like this is all there’s no tech reason, there’s very little UI reason, the only reason it hasn’t been done
⏹️ ▶️ John so far is because it’s not really an important feature. But it’s one of those ones that I feel like they’re going to get around to eventually. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anyone has ever not purchased another iPad because their current one like
⏹️ ▶️ John they would say, Well, we’re going to get another iPad, but this one has multiple users. No kids will still complain when multiple users
⏹️ ▶️ John like forget it like no, if you can afford it, you buy one if you can afford it or want to buy one if you can’t afford and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it, you don’t buy one. All this is going to do is make lives a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t want to buy another iPad and do want their kids to share it and are sick of hearing people
⏹️ ▶️ John complain about it. He broke my mind Minecraft castles or he messed with my
⏹️ ▶️ John high scores or or deleted the app that I want or read my texts or whatever complaints people are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have. I just think it has to come and not anytime soon. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it’s even this year or next year, but you know, eventually there’s going to be iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John version 13 and they’re going to need features for it and this is going to be one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe but I it’s the kind of thing where like the amount of work it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have like you know to separate out like all the iCloud and an App Store stuff with multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logins and iOS like the the amount of work that’s going to take but isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John already done don’t you think it’s already done like aren’t we essentially aren’t we essentially using
⏹️ ▶️ John a multi-user system that just has one user on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it’s it’s done at the level of like the Unix user level sure but it’s I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s done at like the the like services integrations level like I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John but why wouldn’t it be done at that level level because those same demons the same demons running on 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, it doesn’t work that great on 10 a lot of times, but it’s a very different environment but like this keep in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind I was this is also the part of iOS that not only relies on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that big messy store and iCloud back and it’s really hard to get anything out of but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems to be the buggiest part of iOS is like the part that manages your account logins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to these backends. That is it’s it is so always fraught with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor bugs that like pop up the dialogues for you to log in all the time and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John it does that like you said does it on the Mac too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah and that part of iOS is a mess and it’s probably a mess for a good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably a mess because it’s it would be so much work to fix it that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just will never get around to to improving it like I don’t know if it timescale I mean you know I’m exactly never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying never but like but Well, but why
⏹️ ▶️ John is it a mess on the Mac? Like, it just seems like what I would expect for them to implement the multi-user feature, there may be some
⏹️ ▶️ John things where they cut corners where they’d have to go back and fix stuff. But for the most part, what you’d end up with
⏹️ ▶️ John is with two separate messes. You’d have multiple users, both of which would experience the weather that we talked about on the past show,
⏹️ ▶️ John where sometimes it keeps asking you for your password, and they would both experience that. They would both get their own little private experience of
⏹️ ▶️ John those bugs, but I don’t see that as an impediment to them both having their own private experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re making very bold assumptions that, like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, the Unix underpinnings of iOS have ridden all the way to the user-facing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portions of iOS. If I were Apple and I was writing iOS code way back when, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t even a thought that there would be multiple users, you bet I would probably be taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortcuts to try to get things out the door quickly that assumed that there will only ever be one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user to any of these systems. I really think that Marco is right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s gonna be a long time before we see this.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but Sierra, so I agree with that, that they did take those shortcuts. iOS 1.0 or
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone OS, the original iPhone OS, all it was was just a massive collection of shortcuts. It had to be to even get
⏹️ ▶️ John things to work. But this feature in iOS 9.3 shows that they’ve actually done the work already.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s only a question, like they had to have done the work because hey, look, multiple users. And yeah, it’s for enterprise and classroom
⏹️ ▶️ John and server and cloud, and it’s aimed at a different user base or whatever. But they had to have done that work.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had to have gone through everything and said, find all those places where we cut corners because this thing isn’t going to work at all if when
⏹️ ▶️ John one student logs in, they see the other person’s stuff or if they can’t log in to the, you know, they’re doing that, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is being done. And so once that’s done, it’s only a matter of time where they decide to eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get around to giving you the version of this that’s not just for classrooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s, I mean, it’s done to some degree. And we don’t, I mean, none of us know, like we should ask Fraser Spears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of us know to what degree this is done. What is kept per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user? What isn’t? But is it down to the iCloud account level?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does every kid have their own iCloud account? Or just their own files? Probably, I don’t know. I would guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is done to a fairly shallow level. I would not expect this to be an easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to just say, oh, we’ll just take this and just enable it for everybody. I don’t think it’s gonna be that simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just had a sad thought, which is, their multi-user switching could basically be erased
⏹️ ▶️ John the everything about the previous user and go through a really fast first setup process. Like in other words, there’s only ever one user
⏹️ ▶️ John and switching involves deleting the user that was there and putting in another user. So
⏹️ ▶️ John really, a single user all the time and all they do is delete everything having to do with one user. Really hope they didn’t implement it that way, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John would probably work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think didn’t. I think Fraser said that might be actually how it is done.
⏹️ ▶️ John He was saying like, if there’s not, if there’s not a room for your stuff, the idea is that it’ll take your stuff and put it in iCloud, which makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like, Like if you switch accounts to somebody who has more stuff than can fit on the current iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to purge the old person’s stuff, especially with a classroom, because the iPad in a classroom doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have three users, it can have like 15 or 20. And so you can’t fit 15 or 20 people’s stuff on there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as you change users, eventually someone’s stuff’s got to get purged. But I’m thinking of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenario where every time you switch user, it says, there used to be another user of this iPad, but forget they
⏹️ ▶️ John ever existed, delete all their stuff, push it up to the cloud, blah, blah, blah, blah. create
⏹️ ▶️ John a new user and it’s only ever a single user iPad. As far as the iPad is concerned there’s only ever been
⏹️ ▶️ John one user just changes periodically and that would be depressing and that would be a way to implement this as a shortcut but I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they didn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly I do think that in this day and age you know it makes sense to do this in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classrooms where you might have a bunch of devices like stationary installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a classroom like in a lab or something like that or you have to or you have to share them between people because you don’t have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that probably happens a lot in education. I I think in this day and age, I don’t think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need to be that concerned with multi-user use of today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads, iPhones, and laptops. Like desktops, maybe. Even laptops, like most people…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to have data on what percentage of Macs out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more than one user account that ever get used.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, wait until Adam gets older and he wants to use your computer and suddenly you’ll be thankful that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John give him his own account.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ll just buy Casey’s old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac at that point and give
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll just buy him his own computer, right. Yeah, you’re gonna put a computer in your seven-year-old’s
⏹️ ▶️ John room and then come back and scrape the peanut butter off the screen periodically.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s what I do on iPads now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, not in his room, but yeah, I have to clean the peanut butter off of my iPad Air 2 now whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, multiple accounts I think is a good idea. I don’t think it’s going away, and
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you think it’s important for iPhones and iPads as it exists now as the iPad Pro continues to develop
⏹️ ▶️ John in that direction as it becomes a more viable desktop and laptop replacement. I think it’s inevitable.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I concede that I may be overestimating the sophistication of this multi user implementation. There
⏹️ ▶️ John may be a massive amount of work to be done. I still think it will happen. But let’s just push the timeline out a few more years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, fracture blue apron and hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
Post-show: Wheel of iMac boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tired you probably looking at too many blue screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably like last couple episodes been pretty good we can’t put that in the show because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know to self congratulatory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like saying it’s gonna be a short show yeah really
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah it’s true yeah follow-up is back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up was back with a vengeance today that’s true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well the the plex one was it was really a topic like that was just like more about plex
⏹️ ▶️ John well I mean both of you have very different lots of difficulties with the concept of follow up in the format.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, please educate us. Casey’s a tale of woe
⏹️ ▶️ John like it just like, well, we usually start with follow up, but instead we’re gonna start with the other thing, which is properly a topic and then flex
⏹️ ▶️ John and the infuse app infuse app is a follow up item. Let’s talk about the infuse app that people recommended. Here’s how it
⏹️ ▶️ John worked for us, blah, blah, blah. But then the spinning off into hair is what you know, my complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John about flex. I’m guilty because you lead me into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah it’s all our fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plex and your guide to Plex and what you’ve heard like Plex is a topic, your tail of O is a topic,
⏹️ ▶️ John the follow-up item you could have cleared this infuse item in like you know two and a half minutes if we just hit the bullet points.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway we survive the show survives we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. I was actually thinking as we were I noticed as we were talking about Casey’s iMac for 40 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we even began follow-up I thought you know this is actually a better format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of like having the follow-up like after topic one because it gives you a chance to like get into the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something new first.
⏹️ ▶️ John No it doesn’t. Chronologically speaking you hear the previous show and you’re angry because
⏹️ ▶️ John they got a bunch of stuff wrong when the next episode start you want to hear immediately that Casey knows that he got the C-sharp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I don’t know I I put the tale of woe first because I thought it was more dramatic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that way but I did kind of like having a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something a little appetizer before the follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you always do that, yeah. I mean, you always, that’s the format of this show is one of you has something to say before we
⏹️ ▶️ John begin the follow-up. And how long that thing is, it’s fine, but it’s usually an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was my time to shine, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Don’t take it away from
⏹️ ▶️ John me. It’s your time to cry about your poor iMac. How about that case, the box, though, the little
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very weird. I liked it, but very weird. Although, I tell you what, putting that junk back into the Styrofoam,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what a disaster. because I’m an idiot when it came to that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found it very easy to repack an iMac. I
⏹️ ▶️ John find it pretty easy to you just need practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, I’ve never had to deal with it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had to bring my had to bring my Thunderbolt display back to the Apple Store many times. So I’ve had to practice with that size
⏹️ ▶️ John and shape. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I just never done it before with a with something that shape. I mean, the last time I’ve had a desktop, it was a tower, which is a big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rectangle. So it was very different for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t quite understand the like, aesthetically, I understand the the box. But usually the
⏹️ ▶️ John things Apple does with boxes are about fitting more in a shipping container, you know, basically like in less environmental waste, more things,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, more product and less volume, right? But I really don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re packing these things up like, you know, top bottom, top bottom, top bottom to try to get space saving.
⏹️ ▶️ John So all I see is that that wedge they cut out of it is just empty space in the shipping containers when they ship these and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even you can only stack them on the way now not that anyway, I it seems like it’s just an aesthetic thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I can buy. But if There’s some shipping-related reason why they want
⏹️ ▶️ John that taper. I’d love to hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would you wouldn’t stack them like one right side up, the next right upside down?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I don’t think they do that. Like I would imagine that they’re not meant to be shipped upside down, right side
⏹️ ▶️ John up, upside down, right side up. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like. I think they are. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet they are. I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they are. You think so? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because like what do you think they fill the gaps with? Like a whole bunch of Mighty Mice? Like just tosses
⏹️ ▶️ John and fill all the little triangles? That’s what I’m saying. Like it just seemed like the apps
⏹️ ▶️ John would be air. I would imagine that these things ship only in one orientation for just for
⏹️ ▶️ John like the security of like bouncing around and cargo containers, but maybe they do ship fine upside down
⏹️ ▶️ John and they do alternate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The chat room is very upset because you are very wrong, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m wrong. They don’t do upside down right side up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are wrong in saying that they are all right side up. They are they are wedged in one right side up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one upside down as as Marco and I suspected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. I just thought they wouldn’t do that. I thought they like that shipping them upside down would be bad. You know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing with the side up arrows on boxes that no one pays attention to. I still see them on
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes that come to my house, usually not facing up anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine how bad it would be, though. However Apple ships them, that’s definitely not how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UPS and FedEx are going to ship them. So imagine if you designed a computer and a shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method of that computer such that it had to be kept a certain way up. Otherwise, it would just break.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it doesn’t have to be. It’s just like that’s the best orientation. It’s the most So when Apple controls the shipment
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like that, but in the last mile it’s all over the place because they still double box it Oh, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it’s but but the outer box is also that same shape. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep The real reason for this of course is to make the giant wheel of IMAX those guys made If you
⏹️ ▶️ John just put them together not alternating eventually you get a big wheel That you can stand in and
⏹️ ▶️ John run around. Oh, that’s awesome Out on the quad in there what I assume is their college because this is where people have a
⏹️ ▶️ John this many IMAX and be this much free time Yeah, I think their key
⏹️ ▶️ John the key thing that they did either right or wrong depending on your look at is they used empty boxes And so they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco were held together They were
⏹️ ▶️ John held together with that with like clear packing tape and everything and eventually the packing tape and like the boxes themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John Structural integrity, but if you put an iMac in each one of those things that would have had some serious momentum if you could have ever
⏹️ ▶️ John got it moving. Yeah, it would have been very heavy. That’d be a very expensive wheel.