163: Wet Right Thumb
01 Apr 2016USB ports on future iPads, Marco’s love of wires, and John’s opinion of the JavaScript community.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Theories on seasonal allergies
- Follow-up: Walmart is slightly less evil than we thought, at least in renewable energy
- Will we ever see USB ports on the iPad Pro?
- Ubuntu on Windows
- Destiny and a dimming/hiding HUD
- NPM's recent disaster
- Safari Technology Preview
- Intel ends Tick/Tock, introduces
Tick/Tock/ThunkProcess/Architecture/Optimization - Oculus Rift won't work until Apple "releases a good computer"
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post show Neutral: Marco got a Tesla
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Chapters
- Intro: Seasonal allergies
- Follow-up: Wal-Mart evilness
- Why no iPads with USB ports?
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- John’s Destiny TV burn-in
- Node.js dependency drama
- Sponsor: Warby Parker
- Safari Technology Preview
- Sponsor: Audible.com
- Intel has ended “tick-tock”
- Oculus vs. Mac Pro
- Ending theme
- Post-show Neutral: Marco’s Tesla
Intro: Seasonal allergies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m starting to think seasonal allergies are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of bullsh**. Like not that they’re not real, but that I…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have, in the last few years, gotten really bad seasonal allergies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like every single year it is not only worse, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everybody else is saying, oh you know I read or heard blah blah blah, this is the worst year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever for pollen or whatever whatever. Yeah, of course it is. How is every year the worst year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever? And this sounds like something is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John How is every year the hottest year ever? I don’t know if they’re linked together, but it could be that it makes for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a greenhouse effect, let’s call it, might make for easier to have more growing things
⏹️ ▶️ John that produce more pollen. I have no idea if that is even the case, but doesn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ John sound plausible? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see is a problem that used to not exist as much, that now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is exploding in existence and it seems to affect tons of people. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best thing we can do is take medicines that not only don’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that when they don’t work, the people who tell you to take them say, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t work this time because you didn’t start taking it a few weeks beforehand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, oh, you’re building up a tolerance, it’ll start working eventually. I mean, it’s like, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m spending whatever it is, $1.50 a day on these pills that do nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year it’s worse and worse. I don’t know. So, I mean, when I was a kid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to take allergy shots because I had bad allergies and that made them a lot better. And I heard adults
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do allergy shots sometimes for seasonal allergies. Do any of you have, you in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does anybody have experience with that? Because I would gladly do allergy shots again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it could fix this because every year, at least in the spring, sometimes also in the fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just useless for like two weeks. And with a combination of like sick kids season
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the winter preceding this, it’s just exhausting and it makes it hard to do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should try some homeopathic, homeopathic, however you pronounce it, some of those remedies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I hear they work really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I’m already taking them by not taking them. I’m taking the maximum effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dose by not taking them at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco divide by zero, something like that works out, right? you
Follow-up: Wal-Mart evilness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s do some follow-up and it starts with we got a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback about how Walmart is Energy efficient and I don’t even recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having talked about that in the prior episode I remember talking about energy efficiency, of course But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess one of us made some sort of flipping comment about it and in heaven. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ John I threw Walmart under the bus because they’re the they’re the standard-bearer for a terrible giant American
⏹️ ▶️ John company, right? And so I just assumed that they were also also the type of company that would
⏹️ ▶️ John pinch pennies and not bother investing in green energy but that is not the case. We will link to a
⏹️ ▶️ John Walmart’s website where they would talk about all their renewable plans. They plan to be on 100% renewable energy by 2020 so
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not quite where Apple is today but they have plans to get there. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have a whole big page on their website about sustainability. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hesitate to say this because I’m sure we’ll just get more email from you tell me the wal-mart doesn’t do anything bad ever
⏹️ ▶️ John well that’s not true i only wish that their sustainability that they have in this page extended to the sustainability
⏹️ ▶️ John of their work forces in paying them enough to be alive uh… and uh… healthy and not relying
⏹️ ▶️ John on uh… well if they can’t get pay and benefits to us the government pick up slack anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John i don’t like wal-mart have you noticed uh… but they are actually doing solar stuff so i was wrong in that
⏹️ ▶️ John so there you go wal-mart boosters that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there In Walmart’s defense, which is probably a phrase you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John never hear me say again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in Walmart’s defense, if you look at other retailers like Amazon, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instance, it’s often not a lot better. What’s mostly at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault here is retail is a terrible and extremely cutthroat business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and government regulations on things like minimum wage simply don’t go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far enough. Okay, please email us. Next topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I wouldn’t call that a Walmart’s defense. That would just be saying like Walmart does bad things and also other people
⏹️ ▶️ John do too. And so they’re also bad. It doesn’t make them any better to find other people who do the bad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re not going to get into it, you know, like, well, if you know, like the minimum wage is like, well, if my other if
⏹️ ▶️ John my competitors can pay their employees this low, and we don’t, we’re going to go out of business anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, there are many there’s lots of blame to go around. But Walmart is far from blameless, but they do put
⏹️ ▶️ John solar panels on the roof of his things so they’ve got that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing they do okay. ache
Why no iPads with USB ports?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so why don’t you tell us about USB ports on the iPad Pro because apparently we’re all confused about it
⏹️ ▶️ John no not confused. I was just thinking about it the other day. It’s not what you think It’s not like oh the USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ John speeds on the 9.7 inch iPad and stuff like that What I was thinking about is you’ve got this
⏹️ ▶️ John Relatively huge iPad Pro the big one and even the you know The regular size iPad has a lot of room
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and these days the only thing on them and now that they’ve removed like the rotation
⏹️ ▶️ John lock and everything is like power volume and of course that you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the home button and the touch ID sensor but then this one tiny little lightning port on the side and I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John well what’s what’s the next step for the big iPad Pro you got keyboards you can attach them it’s got a smart connector
⏹️ ▶️ John on the side you know it’s got a stylus and I
⏹️ ▶️ John was mostly inspired by Marco talking last week about oh you could always hook up USB things to
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads and iOS devices and they would just magically work if you could somehow find a way to power them if they if they didn’t get enough power
⏹️ ▶️ John from the port and stuff like that like the drivers are on there. So the big iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you not have actual USB ports on it. I mean I guess not more
⏹️ ▶️ John than one because you wouldn’t want to be more powerful than an MacBook one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right. But anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John why why wouldn’t you you know as opposed to having a camera adapter and all this other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like you know or i’m gonna say an sd card slot over but there’s just so much freaking room on the big ipad pro
⏹️ ▶️ John um but as far as usb uh connectors apple is painted itself into kind of a corner
⏹️ ▶️ John with the lightning thing because the practical reason why you wouldn’t put usb connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John on the ipad is if you did put them there they’d be usb type c and usb type c looks a hell of a lot like lightning and
⏹️ ▶️ John i can just imagine people jamming their lightning into the usb c ports or vice versa and that’s like a nightmare
⏹️ ▶️ John as a usability i mean how could you distinguish between those two ports They they are different sizes physically speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably the big one can’t fit into the small one But I don’t think that’s the reason well right
⏹️ ▶️ John But but I mean I think it would be a natural evolution of especially the very big iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro to have actual USB ports on Eventually right, but I don’t see how that can
⏹️ ▶️ John happen when lightning looks so much like USB C So I wonder how Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John square that and if the answer is that we’re never gonna have more than a lightning port on that I’m not entirely sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the best long-term answer if they really want especially the big iPad Pro to become
⏹️ ▶️ John a more and more of a viable laptop replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, there are so many reasons why you could you could you can conceivably think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of why Apple would not be putting USB ports on iPads and iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices in general.
⏹️ ▶️ John But why but why wouldn’t you put it on the big one long term like I understand obviously why you’re not going to put it on like most of the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John line but when they when you get I’ve meant to something that’s so big that it’s it’s so obviously not intended
⏹️ ▶️ John to be just a slip it into your bag type of thing. But it’s like it’s the size of a laptop. Why does that
⏹️ ▶️ John not get one I guess you know Thunderbolt three port or whatever because there’s so much you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s so many doors that opens in terms of how usable is it on your desk as opposed to when you’re walking around with it,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s almost a shame to be constrained by lightning forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s it’s possible they will at some point, You know, we never say never with Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially with a product line that is kind of on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way down on its sales-wise. Apple has done a lot of things with the recent iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we thought they’d never do, in an effort to broaden it or help it find its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feet or help increase sales in some way or another. So, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they very well might do something like that in the future. I think there’s lots of reasons why they haven’t done it so far, and I think they can very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily get past the physical challenges of how do you fit a port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then how do you avoid confusion with the other port. I think they can get around that either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by punting and not solving the problem and just putting a USB-C port on there, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that unlikely, or just ship a dongle or something. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a new standard of USB micro-C and declare it an industry standard even though nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else besides Apple devices will have it for three years and you know then that’s you know they could solve that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that that is not the reason they’re not doing it and and if they wanted to do it they would get around that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I would like to see how they would get around with it because USB type-c seems like I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly Apple had a lot of influence in that connector it looks a lot like lightning it’s a from all accounts a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John connector as far as those things go it’s having to come up with a new one just because
⏹️ ▶️ John the existing one that hopefully by that that point everybody in the industry actually uses and it really is industry standard
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple didn’t make it up having just having to come up with one more weird connector I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like a shame to me it’s in it seems like a shame in the same way that it has always been a shame and it continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a shame that Microsoft chose the same modifier key as Unix meaning that you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do Unix II stuff on Windows it’s a battle between the Unix II environment and the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John environment of like you know control C Does that mean, you know, send the interrupt signal or copy
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it depends on where you are. Whereas Apple, through mostly accidents of history, happened to not have that
⏹️ ▶️ John problem because the Mac operating system uses the command key and to a much, much
⏹️ ▶️ John lesser extent, the control key. So the control key is almost entirely available to the Unix environment. So when they did the
⏹️ ▶️ John chocolate and peanut butter combination that is or was Mac OS 10 and
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10, it was beautiful. And you didn’t have to worry about that conflict. And I feel like Apple is on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Windows control key for the OS side of the equation with its lightning ports Basically making it
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit extra bit of a pain in the butt You know they have now they have a problem to solve whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John these devices that are just USB C from top to bottom Won’t have that problem to solve their only
⏹️ ▶️ John problem will be like how many of these USB C ports do we put on our cool New laptop replacement tablet thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget if the surface has USB C ports on it But anyway, if they wanted to, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing they could do much more easily than Apple. And it’s one of those problems where it’s like, well, couldn’t Windows have changed that? But they added
⏹️ ▶️ John the Windows key. They could have changed their modifier. But it’s just, it has so much inertia. And it would annoy so many people that
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows continues to lurch along with the Control key being the modifier for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, don’t worry. Windows will never have any kind of Unix support. Yeah, that Ubuntu
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I don’t think, I mean, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix is never going to change. You’re not going to take the Control key away from them. And it’s in the grand scheme of things, it’s a small issue,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s one of those things that makes me happy about my combination of Mac and Unix every time I deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And looking at the iPad and that lightning port and the USB-C port shape, it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me furrow my brow a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mean, this is not on our topic list, which is why I’m going to derail us into talking about it. Why do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think they haven’t put a USB port on an iPad so far? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you think they could do with it? I mean, I think the former is easy to explain. Like, why they haven’t done it so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the big things are that it seemed like the past, they wanted to move forward from that, and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to build and support for all these devices and deal with all the technical and software complexity of that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, they kind of like things to be all enclosed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, one of the things that you would want a USB port for would be additional storage, and they don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to do that, they want you to buy it from them. So I think there’s lots of reasons why they haven’t done it before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you think could motivate them to add USB-like ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for kind of general use on the iPad Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen people use the little camera connection kit that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a USB port on it, and the only time I think I’ve ever seen it was you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing live broadcasts when we’re in San Francisco for WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that Jason Snell has played around with it, as have others, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot think of anyone other than you, Marco, that I’ve ever seen use the USB to Lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in the past, USB to dock connectors. So I just don’t feel like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much of a market for it. Like I can’t think of anything that I would wanna plug into my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than maybe the memory card from my camera or the camera itself, hence the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dongle being called the camera connector. I just, I don’t see why one would want this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s a kind of, as with all these things, it’s in a race with the, we talked about this many shows ago, it’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John a race with the wireless technologies, right? So there’s lots of wireless standards out
⏹️ ▶️ John there for everything from wireless display to wireless power
⏹️ ▶️ John to all, you know, obviously we have wireless networking and that has become pervasive.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, it really kind of is a race between the eventual need to do some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that USB does on tablet type devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and how long it takes for all those wireless standards to become, to reach their Wi-Fi moment
⏹️ ▶️ John where they finally become good enough for general use and they just spread everywhere. Because no one loves wires. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could have wireless display and you know, wireless storage and wireless power,
⏹️ ▶️ John So you just come up to your desk with your laptop and put it down and your big screen in front of you turns on like of course who wouldn’t want that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, especially with things like monitors that you plug into the wall. It’s not like you have to recharge the batteries in your monitor, the monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John would still be plugged in, you just didn’t have to deal with it. Anyway, we’re not there yet, obviously with those but so setting that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fact that could swamp all this, the reason you eventually want something like USB on
⏹️ ▶️ John the big iPad or whatever is, I mean, it’s the same reason they added a stylus, right? Or they made the big
⏹️ ▶️ John version that they’re, they’re extending these the capabilities of the device, you know, and multitasking with
⏹️ ▶️ John a split screen that they want people to be able to do things with these devices that they couldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the simpler ones. And it’s because they’re becoming more powerful. They’re becoming you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John there was someone posted recently, I think it was a Jeff Abbott tweeted something about like, look at all of
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPUs that have ever been in I think it was Microsoft Surface, or I forget what it was
⏹️ ▶️ John some other, you know, slim sort of people, something that people accept a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement and look at how many of them are slower than the iPad Pro, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If the top end of technology in terms of computing power is not
⏹️ ▶️ John growing as fast as it used to, and we’ll talk about Intel’s TikTok stuff later in the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually these things that are historically lesser devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops and eventually tablets and eventually supposedly phones, machines will slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John creep up and start closing the gap. And you will be left with a situation where a big iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro can have all the power I mean, they just don’t update the Mac Pro anymore. Eventually, a big iPad Pro will have all the power of
⏹️ ▶️ John the current Mac Pro, because I’ll never forget nothing the machine. And if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a small, you know, it’s again, if the price and size of compute starts dropping to zero,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you will want to have a little thing like that, that you carry around with you in your bag that you chuck on your desk and that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you do so you can connect all the peripherals that you’d want in a big desk environment. You could
⏹️ ▶️ John have multiple monitors hooked up, you can have larger storage, you could have wired networking for faster
⏹️ ▶️ John transfers, you could have all sorts of other peripherals and the question is do you need to plug them in or are they all wireless?
⏹️ ▶️ John So at this point with today’s technology a lot of them you need to plug in, so that’s why I’m saying like a Thunderbolt 3 port like we
⏹️ ▶️ John keep saying USB, but you know you’d hook it up and you’d have two external monitors. Maybe you hook
⏹️ ▶️ John it up and you have a big giant touchscreen that’s like 27 inches that’s you know like laid out
⏹️ ▶️ John on your table instead of being in front of you or whatever so you could do more complicated stuff and it’s like why why wouldn’t I have a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computer to that how can an iPad drive something drive peripherals that powerful eventually it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to again especially if the top end it continues to grow
⏹️ ▶️ John more slowly than the bottom end so I feel like the functionality currently enabled by
⏹️ ▶️ John a Thunderbolt port or USB 3 port inevitably will come to
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet class devices, assuming tablet class devices still exist, if not like VR devices or whatever. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John question is when that comes to pass, will we need to use a USB connector to do it, or will it all
⏹️ ▶️ John be wireless, or will there be some other standard?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s an interesting thought experiment. We’ve had wireless things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, wireless protocols, wireless networking, wireless device interconnection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards, things like Bluetooth, WiFi. We’ve had these things now for a long time in technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms, over 10 years where we’ve had these things, not only have they been possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’ve been ubiquitous for over 10 years and very widely supported and really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite mature for what they are. And yet, if you look at the devices we use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of things that are fully integrated like iPads, but if you look at a laptop or a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, things that do connect to other peripherals or other pieces of hardware like monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, almost all of that is still using wires that was using wires 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. It seems like as the wireless things have gotten better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so have the wired versions of the various connection protocols and everything. And everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still using wires for lots of good reasons. I love wires because they simply work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better most of the time. They’re usually more reliable. They’re often faster. They can go in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places where wireless can’t, like high interference environments or certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restricted areas like planes where you don’t need a bunch of wireless stuff. They have advantages in things like power delivery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and battery usage and everything else. So wires are kind of, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re here to stay. Everyone always assumes that in the future everything will be wireless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As you said, interfacing with your monitor, interfacing with the stuff on your desk. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that’s not true. Maybe that’s not a safe assumption because I think we’ve had long enough now with wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interconnection things that have been possible and yet we’re still using wires for all these things because they just work
⏹️ ▶️ John But no one uses wires for networking anymore. They take the ethernet ports right off the devices. Like as soon as Wi-Fi was good
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, not good because we always know it’s flaky, it’s slower, like we all know the limitations of Wi-Fi. It’s it’s you know you get interference
⏹️ ▶️ John from your microwave oven and you have interference from your portable phones and your thing and you can’t get on the network and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know you keep dropping off. Like Wi-Fi has problems but as soon as it got good enough people like well screw these things
⏹️ ▶️ John because no one wants to walk from place to place or run wires through their house or plug things in or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do all those things. But some things it’s just not possible. Like, you know, having having the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, wireless display technology. So you don’t you know, all the sorts of all those sort of laptop docks that you
⏹️ ▶️ John see in offices, and the many different incarnations they come in, and then no, I don’t want to dock, I just want one cable
⏹️ ▶️ John to plug in or whatever it is, it’s not that bad to plug something in. But if you told those people,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that we told them, hey, every time you sit down at you won’t have to plug the ethernet cable in and out anymore. It doesn’t seem like a big
⏹️ ▶️ John deal, like who cares? I plug in one cable, it’s fine, it’s really convenient, it’s, you know, it works every time, it’s not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Wi-Fi just wiped all that stuff off the face of the earth. There is no equivalent to Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say Bluetooth isn’t even the equivalent to Wi-Fi, because I think Bluetooth is still not past the level of non-flakiness
⏹️ ▶️ John for anything except for devices that never move, you know. Keyboards and mice, I think people more or less accept Bluetooth, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the annoyance of the battery charging that wasn’t there with wire, so it has a downside so I feel like Bluetooth is
⏹️ ▶️ John borderline but no other wireless technology for anything else like storage or monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that is you know is remotely up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John the net win that Wi-Fi was but it doesn’t mean that they never will be I mean you just read any sci-fi
⏹️ ▶️ John book like technologically speaking there’s no reason you couldn’t have really sophisticated high
⏹️ ▶️ John speed ubiquitous short range high bandwidth Wi-Fi even the power delivery stuff so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying on a very long timescale.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be that long. I mean, do you know people who use wireless charging for their phones?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does that really exist? I mean, like, yeah, like those stupid little pads?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I mean, obviously, you can buy them for Apple devices, too. But most people who use them, I would imagine, use them
⏹️ ▶️ John for some kind of Android device that is not a third-party thing, but it comes with the thing. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John know people who choose to do that. Like, no one’s forcing them to use that. They find it convenient that
⏹️ ▶️ John when they come home, they put all their devices on a big pad, or they put it in a little cradle. And it’s like, well, if you’re putting it in
⏹️ ▶️ John a cradle, if there was a little plug at the bottom of the cradle, wouldn’t would it make a big difference if you plug it in and plug,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re choosing? And they’re, you know, these are not always the biggest technology, it’s just more convenient, when I have to deal with the plug, I just put
⏹️ ▶️ John it on this thing, and it charges. It’s not great, it’s slower, it’s not good enough for everybody yet. But the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that anybody chooses to do it in its current sad, unsupported state shows that there is a desire
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. So I feel like the convenience hooks of all of those wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John things are impossible to resist as soon as they pass the minimum, you know, sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John reliability threshold. And and Wi Fi is the best example. And I think the only one that has passed
⏹️ ▶️ John in and Bluetooth is on the border. Everything else. It’s like, all right, well, keep revising the protocols
⏹️ ▶️ John and a few early adopters will try it and then, you know, revise, revise, revise. We’ll know when it crosses the threshold
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple will have it all over the place because Apple doesn’t want any ports on any of his devices. They don’t even want rotation lock switch for crying
⏹️ ▶️ John out loud. That still drives me nuts. There was no room on the side of the device. It couldn’t be a millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger. Sorry, Casey. We had that empty space for the four speakers. They need every millimeter of that empty space.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s impossible to make the device different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They should just have a mute switch bump. I mean, if they’ll have a camera bump to accommodate that wide component, they should have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mute switch bump on the other side. Then it could be even. The mute switch is a
⏹️ ▶️ John bump. Like, that’s what makes it a switch. It sticks out and you can slide it back and forth. They’ll make it a touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ John button. You don’t have to use your fingerprint to mute. It won’t work if your hand’s wet. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know the wet hand trick, though, right? What? No. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with Touch ID sensors that people found as soon as they introduced is they work fine, but then you go do the dishes, and then you try to
⏹️ ▶️ John unlock your phone, and it doesn’t work, and you’re annoyed. And eventually, your hand’s dry, and it works again. All
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to do is wet your hands a lot and then train it on your wet finger. You can label it as, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, wet right thumb. And then you will train it on your dry right thumb,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll turn on your wet right thumb and both will work. Life hack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that was always my, so there was that, there was that like court case or whatever where somebody at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point ruled that the police can’t ask you for your passcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they can force you to use your fingerprint to unlock your phone. So my contingency plan, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case I ever get questioned by the police and they forced me to access my phone. Suck your thumb. What would be, you lick my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John finger for a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then make Touch ID fail three times So then it would require the passcode and then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have to let them in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just bring Casey with you and he’ll spill water on your phone and they’ll never be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco use it. You gotta do that before
⏹️ ▶️ John the waterproof iPhone 7 comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think honestly, I think it’s already too late because the 6S is already almost waterproof, right? Isn’t it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly waterproof? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s only waterproof on YouTube. In the magic realm of YouTube, you can put it in a glass of water
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fine. If you do it at home, it instantly dies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know where to go from here. Are we in follow-up or are we like three topics deep? I don’t even know what’s happened to this show.
⏹️ ▶️ John One item of follow-up left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh god, when you’re in charge, Marco, everything takes a turn. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never in charge. No, this is a life lesson. Exactly. I’m not in charge, I just kind of took charge,
⏹️ ▶️ John how life works. You need an agent of chaos, as they say. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one ever grants you authority, you have to take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well I’m taking authority and saying let’s get through this one One damn last piece of follow-up so we can get into the real topics.
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John’s Destiny TV burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Casper for sponsoring our show this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, your crowning moment has come. Tell us about what’s going on with your TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has it come? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So more than a
⏹️ ▶️ John because we revisited on the one year anniversary, more than a year ago, I banished my PlayStation 4 from my beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John Plasma television because mostly what I was doing with my PlayStation 4 was playing Destiny and Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John had a heads up display that’s on screen the entire time you’re playing that
⏹️ ▶️ John is 100 opacity and doesn’t move and doesn’t change that much and it was burning in on my
⏹️ ▶️ John display and i revisited a year later to see if the retention had faded and it faded to be almost entirely invisible
⏹️ ▶️ John to be replaced with the cartoon network logo which was also banished from my television uh anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John um so when i banished my ps4 i got a gaming monitor i brought it into another room and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how i’ve been playing destiny still the main thing i do with my ps4 since then for more
⏹️ ▶️ John than a year now. Of course, when I pulled my PS4 from the TV, Destiny was new to me. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John new, but I got it around the time of the first expansion. First? Yeah, I think the first expansion. A
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit after. And I complained on the Bungie forums. The Bungie’s the maker
⏹️ ▶️ John of the game. And I say, it would be nice if you had an option to make the HUD translucent
⏹️ ▶️ John or dim it or do some other thing that would help with burning. And it was a big thread
⏹️ ▶️ John in their forums, mostly consisted of people who don’t own plasma televisions telling
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone who does that they shouldn’t anymore because they’re bad and that’s why they should get LED televisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John internet people. It’s just a bunch of, you know, kids like they don’t they don’t understand why anyone would want a plasma
⏹️ ▶️ John television. The only thing they care about is like my LCD television or they always call them LED television
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and they get into fights with
⏹️ ▶️ John each other and it’s like kids kids calm down like stop fighting over what TV you have like we need to concentrate on Bungie
⏹️ ▶️ John and say Bungie this seems like an easy feature for you to add like translucency seems like it’s within your
⏹️ ▶️ John grasp graphically speaking on the PlayStation 4 to make the HUD translucent or make
⏹️ ▶️ John it smaller or you know many games do this they give you options to tweak your HUD
⏹️ ▶️ John not necessarily for burning reasons you just for customization reasons but yeah it helps with with burning as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well you know there isn’t there is a second option here that they could have done you know just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let you stop playing Destiny because then it doesn’t matter if it’s burned into your TV it’s always showing anyway if you just always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play Destiny if you never use your TV for anything else it still
⏹️ ▶️ John matters you would think it doesn’t wouldn’t matter but it does and anyway you got to stop sometime and
⏹️ ▶️ John destiny is not the only thing I did on my television anyway so the gaming monitor I got is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John does not look as good as my television the black levels are atrocious the response time is better
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway so that’s how I’m playing a destiny for a year and the big thread in the bungee forums bungee
⏹️ ▶️ John like has not really said anything official about the topic of like other than and acknowledging we
⏹️ ▶️ John have heard you about this request. And you know, they haven’t said,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t promise it. Very Apple-like in terms of vague acknowledgement that the issue has been received,
⏹️ ▶️ John but no promises that it will ever be addressed, let alone what time. So imagine my
⏹️ ▶️ John surprise when here I am more than a year later, Bungie was previewing some of the content they’re gonna have in the April
⏹️ ▶️ John update to Destiny. And one of the first things they showed was the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John turn off the HUD. That was mostly the feature they were touting because people who do movies
⏹️ ▶️ John within the game or take screenshots, you don’t wanna have the HUD there sort of making it less cinematic
⏹️ ▶️ John and making it look more like a game. So you can drop the HUD for nicer screenshots and movies and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there was also two other options of full opacity, high and low, maybe there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a medium level. Didn’t really get to see what those look like in the game, but they were there, settings-wise. So there will
⏹️ ▶️ John be options to turn down the HUD. I don’t know if the low setting is low enough prevent
⏹️ ▶️ John image retention. But that’s not my problem. My first problem is that I’ve spent a year playing Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to a gaming monitor, and I’m kind of used to it in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John if I was to go back on the television I would feel like I’m really far away from the screen, even though, you know, you can do the math
⏹️ ▶️ John that my television screen is much bigger. But distance-wise I wouldn’t be able to see as much detail.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m used to being closer to the screen, close enough to like see the pixels, because it’s not a retina display. It’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John know a 1080 HD display just like my television but I’m sitting like two feet from it instead of eight feet
⏹️ ▶️ John away and the other thing is when I mentioned potentially bringing the PlayStation 4
⏹️ ▶️ John back in my wife said that she was not for this idea because that will just lead to more
⏹️ ▶️ John fighting between my son who wants to play Star Wars Battlefront and my daughter who wants to watch television shows so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better when they can be in separate rooms each doing the thing they want to
⏹️ ▶️ John without fighting over the big TV so it seems to me that despite my dreams
⏹️ ▶️ John coming true here potentially the dimming might not be sufficient to prevent Vernon and the
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing is and the other two issues are I’m kind of used to it I’m sitting two feet from my
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor I’m kind of used to playing that way at this point and for the
⏹️ ▶️ John the harmony of the family it may be better to keep my PlayStation 4 in here now if they come up with a PlayStation 4.5
⏹️ ▶️ John as the rumors are that a slightly more powerful PlayStation 4 with that more power potentially being
⏹️ ▶️ John helpful to the PlayStation VR which I may eventually buy. I would buy a PlayStation 4.5 and
⏹️ ▶️ John connect it to the TV so we have two PlayStations and my son and I can play Destiny at the same time finally.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my wife would probably like that even less, but I would kind of have a quote-unquote excuse.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, I’m not just getting a second PlayStation, this is the better PlayStation. And where else am I going to put it? We don’t have room for another
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming monitor, it’s got to be connected to the TV. So this is a complicated situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, as somebody who bought a PS4 only a few months ago, that really annoys me, that rumor.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s only rumor now and the extra power probably wouldn’t be a big deal because it
⏹️ ▶️ John would probably just be for VR, which you’ll probably buy anyway, honest. Aren’t you going to buy PlayStation VR?
⏹️ ▶️ John TIFF will make you buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to see it. I’m not sure I will buy it, but I think it’s at least somewhat likely, just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t plan to build a giant gaming PC to try out the Oculus. So this is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like the alternative to that for more casual people like me. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s cheap enough that you’re like, you know what, fine, I’m going to give it a try. This is giving an honest shot. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you’re not going to be like, oh, it would be better if I had a better PlayStation. No, it’ll be you know, it’ll be what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. The experience will be consistent and you can try it out and find out if it’s terrible or not. So that’s that’s been my plan
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. But I would like a PlayStation 4.5. Anyway, the April update looks interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John One to one infusion. I know I knew I shouldn’t have used that Harrowed Anguish of Dristan that
⏹️ ▶️ John I had 320 drop that was just saving and saving it like just yesterday. I was I was like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John I should just infuse that into my 309 mito. Why the hell not? I know I’m gonna lose a lot of points, but pretty soon 335
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is gonna be dropping anyways. There’s no point in saving the 320. Thank God I saved it.
⏹️ ▶️ John One-to-one infusion coming in April. This ends the gibberish portion of the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Casey, is John okay? I don’t know. Do you think, should we call somebody?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hand on heart, I’m not trying to be funny. I really thought that I had just spaced out and the conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went a totally different direction. I was trying feverishly to catch up figure out what the crap John was just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then oh, oh, he’s just talking destiny again. Never mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John I next next we’ll have Marco tell us about a watch terminology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t even I can’t even Alright, so is that are we good with follow up any other follow up gentlemen? We’re all done.
Node.js dependency drama
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I don’t recall exactly when this happened. I think it was a little over a week ago, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode we were busy talking about the Apple event so we didn’t get a chance to talk about it. Some things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened in the Node.js world last week, some interesting things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a link in the show notes to heinycodes.net, which is sharing my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experiences as a programmer in C-sharp.net and engineering manager. And this person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whose name I don’t know other than Heiny, Anyway, they wrote a very quick article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, or a reasonably quick article about what happened on NPM. And I’m gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a stab as the summarizer in chief, and you guys can interrupt when you’re ready. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a person who had put up a package called Kik, K-I-K,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the, what is it, a chat app or something like that? The people who run that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got in touch with him and were upset that he had a package that I don’t think in any way related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kick the app, had a package that just had the same name. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they told him he should take it down. He said, no. And then I guess they went to NPM, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the package manager, Node package manager that you use with Node. And they got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NPM to take it down. And he then, this gentleman,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided to rage quit NPM and remove all of his packages. So far, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a kind of amusing, but unremarkable story, except that one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packages that he removed was a package that—what was this called?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LeftPad, was it? It was like a 12-line string function.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, you are right. It is called LeftPad. It is a 12-line or 11-line function that just pads a string
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the left-hand side. And apparently, a lot of very popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packages took this as a dependency. So in other words, you know, when you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code in the modern times, you usually have a package manager, something like CocoaPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or NuGet or NPM, or what does Perl use? Something ancient?
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything in Perl is ancient. Something with actual tests that run against the code so you can tell if it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t resist. But that’s CPAN, right? Or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So most modern development platforms and Perl have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey package manager, and NPM is the one for this. And when you have this package manager, it makes it very easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to import somebody else’s code. So apparently what all of these packages did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including some very, very, very popular ones, was they imported this left pad package,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this entire package was 11 lines of code. Well, when this package disappeared, that meant that anyone who had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already downloaded it was okay. But if you tried to, say, code on a new machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in many cases redeploy, then this package was gone and all of a sudden everything broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because so many popular packages took this as a sub-dependency, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like half of the Node ecosystem broke. And this was really chapping a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people’s butts because a lot of the really smug developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much all of whom were right, said, why would you take an 11-line dependency. Why not just write those 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines yourself or just put them somewhere in your project, somewhere under your control?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there was a big kerfuffle about it. As someone who has written a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Node app, which is my blog, and I just recently re-ran
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Clock, which is Count Lines of Code, on my blog, and I put up a short blog post about it, which I’ll put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. The entirety of my blog engine, in terms of the things that that I have written
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 850 lines of code. Then I did a count lines of code on my node packages,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or node modules folder, and that was 180,000 lines of code. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not really one to throw stones on this issue, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s really useful to poop all over package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey managers and the idea of taking dependencies, just carte blanche, it’s a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I do think, however, that taking an 11-line dependency is a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous. So Marco, as chief curmudgeon when it comes to these sorts of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I think John might be even more curmudgeon than me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey on this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m at least better known for avoiding dependencies like this. And the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I avoid dependencies as much as I can is not because I’ve always been like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s because of experiences that I had, mostly during the early days of Tumblr.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lots of things that we used in the early days broke. Lots of third-party components, lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco application layer stuff, infrastructure components that were not very widely used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or were very young or were not designed to be used at big scales. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the problems we had were third-party PHP modules, third-party PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code written by other people that we imported so we wouldn’t have to write our own functions for things like S3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or image resizing, stuff like that. We had so many problems with this code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially the freaking Zend framework. I don’t know if it’s good now, but it sure wasn’t then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had so many problems with almost every third-party library that we used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we eventually just said, you know what, we’re just going to not use any anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time we would use one, literally, not just sometimes, literally the majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time, six months later we would be ripping it out and replacing it with either another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party one that would break six months after that or finally we write our own because they were they just were of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low quality and we’re not designed for you know high needs environment or not designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for edge cases or whatever else because a lot of third-party code out there you know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this myth that that open source stuff will be really well tested and and will kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of be like battle-hardened and and you can rely on it more than stuff you write yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s only true sometimes. It’s only true for some things. And how true that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of a function of how popular that code is. So if you’re using something that is in use by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, from Facebook down to Casey’s blog engine, chances are that’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well tested, and the bugs have been found, and the edge cases have been hit, and you’re not going to be the biggest person using it, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to hit many problems. But when you’re just pulling in third-party code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a lot of things, it’s often hard to tell whether what you’re pulling in is of that level of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality or not. And when you’re in a young language or a module for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something that most people don’t need to do, kind of like a niche module—I don’t know how to pronounce niche, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t—it’s a niche, niche, I forget it. But every time I say it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same way. I’m right there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco with you. Good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. So we’ll just agree that we’re pronouncing it badly. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fewer people use the thing you’re working on and the fewer big people use it, the less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it inherently is simply by being open source or third party or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just learned over time that I was better off writing stuff myself and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoiding dependencies. Even when they work well, they can cause issues like when the version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of something changes and it breaks other things and package managers can solve problems like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time, But I’ve never seen a single one that solved them all of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in anything. Linux, languages, I mean, when you add dependencies like this willy-nilly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re really just adding work and risk. And the idea that you won’t be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deploy your site onto new servers because the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco host of this 11-line function took it down, that’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are so many problems with that that sound just crazy to me. Why are you not in control of that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. As somebody who has run large-scale services before, every dependency like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, to me, is a huge liability. And occasionally it is worth using third-party code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think it’s a lot less often than what people seem to be doing these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, everybody builds on top of something. I mean, it’s not like you’re saying, well, I was using the compiler that came with
⏹️ ▶️ John my system but eventually I learned I had to write my own compiler. I was using the OS to ship with my servers, but eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I learned that it’s wasteful to try to rely on Linux because you never know what the hell they’re going to do and they can break your crap. So it’s better to
⏹️ ▶️ John write your own OS like we all right, we all go on top of something. It’s all just a question of where you draw that line and why. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s sort of for most of our lives been the idea that like no one’s you’re not going to write your own OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and your own compiler. And maybe you’re not even gonna write your own web server. But if you’re writing web applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a certain point around the web server code boundary, then it’s like now it’s kind of more up for grabs. you
⏹️ ▶️ John use an application framework, do you write your own framework, it was the type of thing where you can write your
⏹️ ▶️ John own web app framework, like it’s not, you know, that’s how all the ones we have got here. Like it doesn’t take a 700 man team to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. One person can do it. Yep, I did. If you use one of the popular if you use one of the popular third party
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, chances and you happen to be in a Marcos unfortunate slash fortunate situation
⏹️ ▶️ John of you end up being, you know, maybe perhaps unexpectedly, one of the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John users of everything you do because you are tremendous all of a sudden, you know, the compounding growth or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And let me point out too, Tumblr was not that tremendous when we started hitting these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we probably had maybe a hundred thousand users when all this stuff started breaking. It wasn’t that big of a service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like relative to what you consider like a scaled or scalable web service, it was nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, sometimes when people hit start going to Facebook is a great example. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were using a similar technology stack and their solution was throw people and money
⏹️ ▶️ John at the problem to the point where they were compiling see PHP into c++ and crazy stuff like that. That’s another possible
⏹️ ▶️ John approach. You know, like, and I don’t know if they decided to write everything themselves, they got down and say, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to rewrite the language ourselves and what is that hip hop there replacement thing or whatever. But those
⏹️ ▶️ John are those I feel like are extremes. I think, for the most part, most companies that are doing
⏹️ ▶️ John web development. I don’t know if I’m gonna say for the most part, maybe it’s 5050, using in
⏹️ ▶️ John house web frameworks in the modern era, though, there are so many popular web frameworks that
⏹️ ▶️ John work for so many needs that it’s accepted that you’re going to build on top of them. I think where
⏹️ ▶️ John there are two places where this this silly JavaScript, only three places, silly JavaScript stuff fell down.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is an area that I’m familiar with. Because JavaScript is a crap language
⏹️ ▶️ John that is missing really
⏹️ ▶️ John things that people want, right. Perl started out as a crap language that was missing
⏹️ ▶️ John many important things that people wanted and still today is missing some things that people wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John which means that to sort of to sort of round out your language Ruby has this little bit of degree to because they
⏹️ ▶️ John consider an asset to sort of round out your language and make it habitable you know to make it comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a minimum amount of sort of furniture you need to buy for the house before you can move in and it’s not part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John language it’s you know done in libraries right so JavaScript is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John in that situation which is why there’s all these things that like you know CoffeeScript and TypeScript and other things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are like try to make JavaScript feel nicer those aren’t libraries but the same idea that that no one wants to just
⏹️ ▶️ John use JavaScript by itself because even basic things like say left padding a string are not
⏹️ ▶️ John in the language or the standard library where standard library is defined as what you can run in a browser right
⏹️ ▶️ John so someone’s got to write the stupid 11 line function right? Not in PHP, they don’t. Yeah, or you know, I know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the is array package they’re talking about, like this, the common test that people want to do that’s not in the language that it’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to write, but it’s also easy to get wrong. And it’s just kind of like a basic thing, right? So you don’t have to do that in PHP either. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript, nor Pearl, by the way, JavaScript is in that position. And so that’s why these things exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John The second problem is the JavaScript community, not sort of having
⏹️ ▶️ John their act together enough to realize, alright, so we have this this language that has these gaps, the best way to fill them
⏹️ ▶️ John is not with 10 billion individual dependencies, each of which does one of those function, like
⏹️ ▶️ John as a community, they should have, you know, sort of come together and settled on
⏹️ ▶️ John some much larger libraries are like and round out the JavaScript language for me live 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And maybe the seven competing ones of those, but that is much better than I’m going to do left pad,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to do sane regular expression matching, you know, I’m going to do fake inheritance in a prototype
⏹️ ▶️ John based language. And you know, like everyone’s just doing the little tiny thing and and having a million
⏹️ ▶️ John of those combined. And I think the third failure for all the people who got hit by this bug
⏹️ ▶️ John is people who grew up in an environment where the expectation is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can run your deploy. And part of the deployment or updating
⏹️ ▶️ John a sinking or whatever automated procedure they have that they’re all happy with.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not thinking about the fact that it is connecting to third party servers to do that, right? If you’re just slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John older, if you’re like, you know, maybe 10 or 20 years older than the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are running to these problems, you would have grown up in a culture like I did, where, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re building on top of Pearl, there are gaps in Pearl, and you’re gonna need to libraries, there’s web frameworks, maybe you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ John your own, you certainly you’re building on top of some real basics like DBI and LWP, or whatever the hell,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the sort of core foundational things that most people use Pearl want to do. But But if you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John a big, important company, you don’t go out to C pan to get these packages,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You have your own internal C pan mirror at your company checked into version control. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John know exactly what the hell you’re getting and nothing anybody can do on the internet. It’s going to change what you deploy, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the only nothing is going to break your stuff based on what’s on the internet. And you maintain that mirror and you sync upstream
⏹️ ▶️ John and downstream. And you like you control your own destiny. It’s tons of third party software
⏹️ ▶️ John like a C pan mirror, especially back in the old days was pretty darn big. And it’s like, why do we have to have our own cpan mirror, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don’t want to rely on stuff on the internet, right? I mean, sick for security reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John alone, like so that the idea that pulling something from a repository would break people’s production systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John those production systems were pre broken, not by the fact they were just by the fact that they’re relying on third party code,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just by the fact that they’re the third party dependencies were broken down into microscopic individual functions
⏹️ ▶️ John with ridiculous names, but because they weren’t, they weren’t masters of their own destiny, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John what you choose to to do in terms of dependencies, you can decide based on what Marco was talking about, you know, is it reliable?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it suitable for my purpose? Am I better off doing it myself? Is it a core competency? But like all these sorts of decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, you’re going to do everything you’re going to do some things with third party code, whether it’s your OS, your compiler, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but especially if it’s package management, you have to have that stuff in house. And these days, it is nothing to have a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John mirror of some public repository in your you know, or just the
⏹️ ▶️ John individual packages you want, check them into your version control, you don’t need the whole freaking repository. The repository
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t need to be involved in your build and deployment process, just get the code that you need. And then that code will never change out from
⏹️ ▶️ John under you. If it is suitable for your purpose, it will continue to be suitable until you decide that it’s not. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John in summary, Weber snappers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know where to go from here. All I will say is that it’s interesting that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you bring up like deployment, because one of the things that I was thinking about when this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all going down was that when I deploy Camel to Heroku,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m deploying is just my code, including my list of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dependencies. And just like you said, John, Heroku is then going out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NPM and fetching all of these packages on my behalf. So this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well could have bitten me if myself or one of the packages I depend on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was dependent on the one that got pulled. So this is exactly something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have run into because of the way I choose to host my site. And I choose to host on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Heroku for a variety of reasons, but mostly, like you said, about core competencies. I don’t have the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest, or desire to be a Linux server admin, and so I choose, for better or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse, to have a platform as a service. And that’s what I like. and I, worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but fine. But that’s what I like, and that’s what works for me. That’s how I’ve chosen to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And yes, there are ways around this, even with Heroku, but my point is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even an innocent bystander like myself, I am potentially guilty of doing the same
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s weird to me that, you know, it doesn’t really matter, practically speaking, that you’re pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John from the internet as you deploy. Like, wouldn’t, I don’t understand why that needs to be a dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the process. like that that’s I feel like that should be pulled down like the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way you pull something from Cocoa pods and now it’s part of your application. Every time you compile it doesn’t read downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John from Cocoa pods and silently updated to a different version or get it like or just you never actually have it and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I know it’s like more dynamic and just like oh, we’re all this interconnected web and network connections
⏹️ ▶️ John never go down and I can trust what’s on the other side of the network but I don’t understand how you can trust it honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t even you know, this is maybe this is another weird CPAN thing but like what kind of security
⏹️ ▶️ John is there if you’re if you’re dynamically pulling every time you deploy you’re just trusting you don’t even know what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John npm repositories heroku is using and how they might be poisoned with what i mean it doesn’t matter her personal
⏹️ ▶️ John site it’s not this is not a specific issue it’s just the culture of it’s the same culture that gives you websites
⏹️ ▶️ John that end in dot io that implore you to you know run curl and pipe it through bash
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what i mean it’s that kind of culture it’s kind of like a return to return to the
⏹️ ▶️ John really old days. When when I was first starting Unix like it I’ve told the story before it be you
⏹️ ▶️ John all TTYs were world writable, right? That’s how naive they were like it was telling that there was no SSH
⏹️ ▶️ John your passwords are flying in plain text every time you tell an editor FTP anywhere all TTYs were world writable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like the free love 60s right? And that era came to an end but then then you know fast
⏹️ ▶️ John forward 20 or 30 years and people are are pulling from an unknown website and piping
⏹️ ▶️ John to their shell. Sometimes they’d have pseudo in there. It would be like someone just put in the chat room sometimes they’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John seriously, I’m going to pull from a website and pipe to pseudo sh.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know some. It’s a utopian world that has never actually really existed
⏹️ ▶️ John and cannot be recreated by wishing it were true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize that the websites that end in dot IO are inherently bad. This is news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the whippersnappers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still look for snappers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Haven’t you seen you’ve seen the websites I’m talking about like some some some cool new technology and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a website ends in dot IO and their installation procedure wants you to just run a curl command and pipe
⏹️ ▶️ John it into a shell. I like no thanks. No thank you. I will not do that. I mean is it
⏹️ ▶️ John any really any better when they had like you know shell archives that you download like char files and you just run those
⏹️ ▶️ John blindly. Maybe it wasn’t that much better but I feel like you’re crossing a line when the network
⏹️ ▶️ John is involved and you’re just like blindly trusting bits going over a wire that you’re just allowing to execute on your machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that you just pulled off a website because it’s like is it the same as downloading you know unknown binaries
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like you can everything is Turing complete I understand how it’s all equivalent and they’re not really that different and it’s like oh kids these
⏹️ ▶️ John days right but there is a difference um there’s a reason like we’ve moved to signed binaries and
⏹️ ▶️ John all the sorts of cryptographic things to assure us that at the very least the the application comes
⏹️ ▶️ John from the person we think comes from and hasn’t been altered there’s a reason that has rolled out on you know phone platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John and to lesser extent desktop platforms and game consoles and everything like that. And the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John practice of executing arbitrary code pulled from websites in
⏹️ ▶️ John your shell flies in the face of that progress.
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Safari Technology Preview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Ward Parker for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t believe the Safari nightlies have, or the WebKit nightlies have, which is it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk to iCloud. And so if you’re like me and rely on Safari and rely on bookmark sync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and things like that, you can use the Safari technology preview. The reason this is a segue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what we were just talking about though, is that I tried this on my work computer. I haven’t put it on my personal one yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I immediately went to install the 1Password extension. When I did so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I attempted to enter a password for whatever it was I was looking at at the time, and the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey password extension said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. This isn’t signed the way we expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thus, this is dangerous. Thus, we don’t want you to do this. And that comes back to what you were saying a minute ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, about cryptographically signing things, making sure that what you’re looking at is what you expect, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I just thought that was interesting and good on one password for telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me these things, although I couldn’t figure out a way to override it, which which is a little bit of a bummer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it still worked really well outside of the one password issue. The technology preview worked well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything seemed fine to me. I haven’t had the chance to kick the tires too much yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far so good. I’ve really liked it. Have you guys played with this at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only have one question. Did all of your plug-in icons all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of shift over to the right side as you were using it, or did they stay where you put them on the left side of the address bar?
⏹️ ▶️ John that freaking address bar even in non preview Safari even just in regular
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari frequently the icons in the toolbar of Safari decide they don’t like where they are
⏹️ ▶️ John and would like a new home
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and then I put them back they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all just they end up just all because I think what happens is if they get updated I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they lose their spot and they get and they always get added on to the right side so I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a balanced bar so I have four of these buttons that go in the address bar from extensions I like to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two on the left two on the right. And they always end up just having all four on the right after, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within a few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not good about remembering where you put things. In the grand tradition of the modern Apple, they will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you rearrange things sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they will not respect your rearrangement. The only place I can say that isn’t true is to the credit of iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John Springboard is usually pretty good about not moving your crap. Not 100% because
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while something will bump out of place. Like if you do an OS update and it adds an
⏹️ ▶️ John unmovable undeletable Apple app and it’ll bump your things around or whatever but it’s pretty good but anyway Safari toolbars
⏹️ ▶️ John yes yeah I have experienced that like I said I experienced that not in the beta not in the nightly but just
⏹️ ▶️ John in the regular stable one not even during updates and I usually blame like weird iCloud syncing like
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets it loses track of things and it’s trying to notice that I added an icon somewhere six years ago on a Mac that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer in service but there’s some state on some server somewhere inside apple that wakes up
⏹️ ▶️ John once every three months and spews a bunch of XML towards their property lists towards
⏹️ ▶️ John my various Macs and perturbs the icons. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how am I supposed to pin cute dogs to Pinterest if I can’t find the Pinterest button in Safari?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a problem. Why? Find the key shortcuts. But the most important feature of
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari technology preview still unmentioned. What is the most important feature?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the copy the clipboard thing so you can get rid of flash? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a purple icon. Come on. It’s the whole reason anyone would ever why would I want to? Why would I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John use this? Well, it’s purple. Purple is better than blue, and definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John better than nightly, which is gray. Yeah, no, actually, that’s the purple
⏹️ ▶️ John icon is actually, you know, I do like it. I do like it better. And it does look neat. And it’s the reason you might want to try it. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it highlights the one disappointing thing for me about it. I would have preferred the Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John system where you can just sort of tell Chrome go on the beta channel or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You only have one installation of Chrome and you just say, but Chrome update yourself from the beta channel instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of the regular channel. And the reason is Safari is still my default browser. And I realized
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m pretty much never going to use the Safari technology preview unless I sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John disable or make inert the standard one so that the the preview can sort of take over
⏹️ ▶️ John as my default browser, but I don’t really want to do that either. Like I would, I would prefer to just have one Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John and switch it back and forth from should I be pulling updates from the beta thing or not. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is certainly better than it was before because I never really ran the nightly is for the reasons that Casey covered that you know it wasn’t it wasn’t signed
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple so you couldn’t have the iCloud connection and everything so this is a step up but I don’t really want
⏹️ ▶️ John to run two copies of Safari and I don’t want to have to zip up the old one and I’m not entirely confident
⏹️ ▶️ John that even if I tell the OS that my default browser is this one that the other one isn’t going to launch
⏹️ ▶️ John on its Maybe I should give it a chance. Maybe we should try using the purple one for a while and see if the blue one comes back
⏹️ ▶️ John to life zombie-like unless I zip it. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of good new tech in, like Casey mentioned, in the new one. A bunch of Shadow DOM stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John ECMAScript 6, which is a slightly less crappy version of JavaScript. So much
⏹️ ▶️ John hate. Yeah, the copy and paste, not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey paste, sorry. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cut and copy
⏹️ ▶️ John commands, which is great. And I love that they highlight, you know, is the only reason anyone still has legit
⏹️ ▶️ John reason to run flash because it’s the only way to get stuff onto the clipboard. We do it at work because sometimes you just want to have a link
⏹️ ▶️ John that you click that copy something into the clipboard. And having to run flash for that has always felt gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John So another browser supporting a natively is good. But anyway, purple icon, thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Another interesting thing here, I’m gonna read you the entire cut and copy portion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s very short, programmatic cut and copy to the clipboard, it’s now possible to programmatically copy and cut text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in response to a user gesture. With blah and blah code, having this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ability may eliminate some websites last need for the Flash plugin. So yes, I love the dig on Flash. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I tweeted about this earlier, a handful of people were like, Oh God, people are just going to start pasting things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on me or they’re just going to start copying what’s in my clipboard. What is this going to mean for one password? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone was, a few people were getting very upset. And I think it’s important to note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that this is read only, or excuse me, right only to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s in response to a user gesture. And three, I’m very curious to hear what that gesture is. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it can only be on like a click handler or something like that? Is it something more explicit? I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I think this is a really good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s already support. I think Chrome already supports it like other modern browsers Have have ways to get things onto
⏹️ ▶️ John the clipboard without flash, right? So it’s not Safari’s not the first one to implement this feature. And yeah, the security
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s useless for even in response to a gesture Like everything can be used to exploit eventually, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John with some sort of buffer or floor or whatever But they can’t pull the websites cannot get it What’s in your
⏹️ ▶️ John clipboard all they can do is take their crap and put it there which could still be annoying like those stupid things You know when
⏹️ ▶️ John you try to copy and paste text and they put the little attribution line next to it like we’ve all seen that one,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it can still be annoying to put stuff into your clipboard. But annoying websites are always going to be annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what. And so if the website does that, you just won’t go back to it, or we’ll just deal with the annoyance. But they can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you copy sensitive information and go to a website, this feature does not allow the website to get
⏹️ ▶️ John at that information in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. This is a this is a good thing. And it’s It’s another example of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a slightly more transparent Apple, which I approve of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really pleased with the way 2015, 2016 have been with Apple being more transparent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Swift, with this. This is all good stuff, and they should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be commended for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, remember we talked about Safari as the new IE kind of stuff? Like, not that this is a direct reaction to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this specifically addresses a lot of the actual issues raised
⏹️ ▶️ John in that like, Oh, why isn’t Apple doing more on shadow DOM or whatever, like, the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John they just had the nightly is and it was an opaque development process and you had to wait for the next version of the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS to come out to get the thing now this is, you know, incremental step towards
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you’re not a developer and you just a regular user and you want to get features earlier, here’s a more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it even more convenient than the nightly is that we’ve been building for you for a year and here’s us talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John on our blog, the business is not the first blog post, the Safari, the webkit blog has been updated frequently to talk about the new features
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re planning on adding and, and just been much more open about stuff that we previously would
⏹️ ▶️ John have had to wait for WWDC to sort of read the tea leaves of the webkit work, or, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, because you couldn’t even see all the webkit work because Apple would do stuff internally, and they wouldn’t commit to the public repository
⏹️ ▶️ John until like they were ready to release. And they’re just being much more open about that process, including talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about future products to say, we’re adding this, that and that, and they’re going to be coming in a future release, which is, you know, like they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a swift is unheard of from the old Apple sort of talking about future features
⏹️ ▶️ John for products granted obscure, techie nerd type products, right, you know, that only
⏹️ ▶️ John web developers or GUI application developers really care about, but still, it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John trusting that people are going to understand, oh, well, you promise this feature, whatever, like, if you see the whole development
⏹️ ▶️ John process going out in the open, you’ll understand when things get booted out when Oh, this, this make it in time for Swift three,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when inevitably some proposal doesn’t make it in time for Swift three, even though they talked about wanting to put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in there, no one will be mad because anyone involved in the process would have seen every step of the way
⏹️ ▶️ John why that thing didn’t make it into the process. What else were you doing during that time? What like when everyone can see the
⏹️ ▶️ John process, it’s so much more understandable. It’s like, oh, well, that that didn’t make it into Swift three, we’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’re kicking it down the road. It doesn’t seem like some sinister plan to withhold technology goodies
⏹️ ▶️ John from you. It just seems like the fallout of software development which has all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of unexpected things and when you’ve seen all those things happen in front of you who who can be I mean I’m sure someone will still find
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to be mad but very few sane people will be mad about it.
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Intel has ended “tick-tock”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Intel has ended TikTok. And I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what to say about this, other than I think it’s pretty expected. So John, what are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just kind of sad that I finally nailed down which one was the tick and which one was the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey talk and then couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change the process. All the hard
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey work I put in, I studied and studied.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So which one is the tick and which one is the talk?
⏹️ ▶️ John Shrink is the tick. OK. but it’s not that it matters anymore. Now they have much
⏹️ ▶️ John more sensible names. So they had to come up with another, another, you know, I don’t know, catchphrase or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing term for their new strategy. Thunk? So instead of TikTok,
⏹️ ▶️ John or TikTok Thunk, they came up with, it’s not great, TikTok was much better. So that team
⏹️ ▶️ John did a better job than this team in coming up with the acronym. But this was PAO, and that stands for process
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture and optimization. And so which one is the shrink? It’s the one that’s called process.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s much easier now. They made that part of it easier, but PAO does not roll off the tongue like tick tock does.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s basically, you know, process is the tick architecture is the talk. That’s when they
⏹️ ▶️ John produce a new micro architecture, a new chip that has a, you know, a different number of execution units and different
⏹️ ▶️ John branch prediction and different cache size. And, you know, like it’s a new architecture. And then they’re adding a new third
⏹️ ▶️ John phase called optimization, which as far as I’m aware, I’m looking at older articles here, we’ll link in the show notes from
⏹️ ▶️ John and tech. As far as I’m aware, they haven’t really nailed down what’s going to happen in
⏹️ ▶️ John the optimization phase beyond saying, well, it’s not going to be a shrink, and it’s not going to be a new architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be this third time, when we do other things, what can they do in optimization,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can make the integrated GPU better, they could, you know, maybe make it
⏹️ ▶️ John use less power through more clever, you know, power management, or throttling or
⏹️ ▶️ John thermals, or, you you know, I don’t know what they’re going to do the optimization phase, we’ll find out, but it’s going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John formal, a formal part of the process. And as many people in the chat room are snarkily
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to imply, like, tick tock, may have been the strategy in name for the past
⏹️ ▶️ John year or two, but the sort of the length of the tick and the length of the talks have been stretching
⏹️ ▶️ John out in weird ways. And really, this three phase architecture is just more of an acknowledgement
⏹️ ▶️ John of what was sort of happening already, the time scales are stretched out more. and that Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to recognize that and set expectations to say we are gonna do new process and then we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do a new architecture and then we’re going to sort of work on the two of them together for a little while longer to
⏹️ ▶️ John give the next process a longer time to hopefully arrive on
⏹️ ▶️ John our new three-phase schedule so we’re all sort of still staring
⏹️ ▶️ John at sort of the oncoming train of the the end of Moore’s law.
⏹️ ▶️ John The real end is very far out in the distance, theoretically speaking, but practically speaking there
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be… it’s getting harder and harder to make things smaller and smaller with lithography techniques.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the research and the money required to go down to the next smaller size is like, you know, the real
⏹️ ▶️ John next breakthrough has to be like, do we have to continue to use lithography, you know, sort of shining,
⏹️ ▶️ John not so much light, or you know, shining forms of electromagnetic radiation
⏹️ ▶️ John onto a thing to cause the areas exposed to react differently than the non exposed areas.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what we’ve been doing for our entire lives to make integrated circuits.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what’s next, assembling transistors out of individual atoms or weird technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know in the you know sort of the R&D realm you can definitely make things smaller that way
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t make them at scale and so there’s this sort of general research gap but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel plows bravely forward and the last show we talked a lot about Intel missing their dates and holding up Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever But the bottom line is they’re still ahead of all their competition in terms of their process How
⏹️ ▶️ John far along they are at different process sizes? And that continues to be an advantage for them
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe they’ll be the ones to make the next step before everybody else because they’re putting in the time and energy
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re already ahead of everybody else so You can’t really be picking on Intel too much because they are
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of at the bleeding edge of this but If there is a wall out in the future Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John may just get to it first and then everyone catches up with them and then Intel’s advantages is gone
⏹️ ▶️ John So stay tuned for the ATP episode in 15 years when we revisit that topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. I can only hope. All right, so.
Oculus vs. Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Intel kind of falling on its face and speaking of really crummy and loose segues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the oculus founder said that the oculus rift which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was Shipped in the last day or two, right? Anyway, the the rift will come to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac only if Apple Apple quote ever releases a good computer quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s all Intel’s fault So, what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By what metric is Apple not releasing a good computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I hit on this a little bit last week. I mean, the main thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Oculus requires a pretty intense graphics card. And over time, more pedestrian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones will probably be able to drive it just fine. But right now, it’s so cutting edge and it has such high graphical needs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it requires a really, really high-powered graphics card. There’s only a handful in the PC world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are good enough to do it, and Apple ships none of those in any of their computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only computer that could even come close would maybe be the Mac Pro, but the current Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is two and a half years old or so, and has fairly outdated GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of being so old. I think we covered this a little bit last week, so I don’t want to go too far into it now, but I think the short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version is that there’s a few problems here, most of which Apple doesn’t appear to care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I’m sure John will discuss in a second, I don’t think Apple cares that much about games on the Mac, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has so far, for a long time now, tied their updates to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel’s updates. And as we discussed, as Intel’s cycles have been getting longer between major updates to their CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has also stretched out Mac update cycles. And Apple’s habit, as discussed last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, of skipping some processor are generations that Intel gives them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their lower volume products like the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro and even some of the laptops these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. Their strategy, Apple’s strategy for skipping some of the things that they could use, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like holding off until better ones come later, that’s also working against them because again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the Intel generations have gotten longer, we now have a situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have today with most of the laptops where we’re sitting around waiting for the Skylake revision from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel to come out in quantity so that Apple can ship the new MacBook Pros. And meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones you buy today have something like a three-year-old CPU in them. So something here has to change. Either—well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope something has to change. We’ll see if it actually does or not based on Apple’s actions. But obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel can’t deliver new generations of chips any faster. We’re seeing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re seeing that they are slowing down in their rate of being able to deliver these things because just everything’s getting harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple needs to either be okay not getting these markets and be okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling three-year-old hardware in Macs, you know, brand new today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis, or Apple has to stop skipping Intel generations, which would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally cut their product cycle time in half because they tend to skip every other generation on some of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products like the Mac Pro, or Apple Apple can start issuing updates to products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when there is no new CPU to use from Intel. Which they have occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, but it’s not a routine thing for them. Any of those things could solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem. Also then you have the issue of like, even if they kept their products more up to date,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what products does Apple sell that could accommodate the size and thermals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a high-powered GPU? And it’s basically like one and a half. It’s like the Mac Pro for sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then maybe the big iMac, depending on the cooling requirements and everything. You basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have two Macs that Apple could plausibly put really high-powered GPUs in, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of those are probably pretty low-volume products for them, especially the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it just seems like Apple doesn’t really care to address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this market, which I think is unfortunate because I wish Apple had a little bit more hunger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in attracting people from PCs than they seem to. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of the whole iPad stuff, but that’s a whole different thing. But I do wish they would solve this more often because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would make Macs better also. And if Apple ever has VR ambitions, this will hurt them as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for now, this is the situation we’re in and we’ll see if any of those factors change.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s attitude towards these things has been frustrating. Like a couple of years ago, I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John something on my blog asking for the cheese grater that that hadn’t been updated in forever, back when the show
⏹️ ▶️ John just started. That was one of the reasons their icons was the old cheese grater with the sarcastic new label
⏹️ ▶️ John on it because they introduced a new Mac Pro that was barely new. And it’s like, are you ever gonna update this? What’s the deal? And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for them to, is there anyone left at Apple who really cares about high performance computers?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they’re not gonna make a lot of money for you. No, they’re not gonna be high volume. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John of things. But if you are computer enthusiasts, isn’t there
⏹️ ▶️ John someone there who like really likes fast, great computers, just like the example I used for
⏹️ ▶️ John Halo cars in the car industry where lots of car companies make a car that’s probably going to be a money loser for
⏹️ ▶️ John them just because car companies are filled with people who love cars and people who love cars tend to love fast cars and
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful cars and so they make these cars that are just, you know, you might look at them as a boondoggle like
⏹️ ▶️ John you spend all this money on R&D, it’s got all these custom parts, no one’s even going to use this thing and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird and finicky or whatever but you make it because you love cars, right? And they did that the two
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro I mean, you may not agree with their vision, but you can’t say that they just kind of punted it and just like, Oh, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another tower computer. They had the vision of this crazy tube shaped computer like
⏹️ ▶️ John that this was their vision of high performance computing. And you know, it had these at the time fairly powerful video
⏹️ ▶️ John cards with 12 gigs of VRAM, which was unprecedented shipping stock on a Mac. And it was, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, it was interesting and innovative on all fronts. Was it a good supercar? Was it a good halo car?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not or whatever. But then you can’t go and then just let that sit there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, man, you just lose interest, right? Because that’s sort of like on again off again
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where it’s like we love high performance. Here’s an amazingly expandable Mac that looks like a cheese grater
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s easy to open up and you can swap the RAM and we’ll update it frequently and well, you know, you can put
⏹️ ▶️ John in different video cards and it has slots and look how easy it is taking in out the drives and the first one can only do two drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now this one can do four and it’s even easier to get the drives in and out. And you know, they made a water cooled one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it seemed like they were on that bandwagon for a pretty long time and then they lost interest. And then they came back and were interested and then they
⏹️ ▶️ John said immediately lost interest again. And that’s not a way to to attract people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have similar sensibility like hey, are you one of the people who’s like, you know, a gearhead who loves
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, supercars and high performance cars? Do you like big high performance computers, in some memory
⏹️ ▶️ John specs as an end in and of themselves. Like you don’t even need this, but you just think it’s cool. The same reason
⏹️ ▶️ John people buy fast cars that they can never drive at the full speed that are going to drive. You know, it’s like, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John that type of does Apple care about the customer? Sometimes they do some because there are people inside Apple who are
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, but then all of a sudden they don’t again and it becomes hard to trust the company and so many people so many things I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, been reading lately about pros, you know, maybe these people who actually have legit need like
⏹️ ▶️ John professional graphics people or professional 3d people, professional video people or whatever, saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes Apple, it pays attention to them, but then they don’t. And they’re kind of tired of
⏹️ ▶️ John the the relay, the rocky relationship, and they’re going to somewhere that has more consistently supported
⏹️ ▶️ John them, they’re switching to PCs or whatever gamers have long since made that decision is like Apple has never really cared about
⏹️ ▶️ John gamers. And only incidentally, when they shipped machines were as easy to swap video cards, would you buy a PC
⏹️ ▶️ John video card, flash it for your Mac, shove it in there, and then boom, you’ve got a Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually really good gaming PC as well. That’s part of Palmer Lucky’s complaint here.
⏹️ ▶️ John The quote I put in the notes about this is, you can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John line AMD Fire Pro D700 and it still doesn’t match our recommended specs. Like it doesn’t even meet,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here’s sort of like the, here’s what we think you should have for the Rift. A $6,000 Mac Pro doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John meet it. You know when that $6,000 Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John was introduced it would have been a reasonable thing like if Oculus had come out then their Their minimum spec may have been lower
⏹️ ▶️ John like the you know lower resolution or whatever lower target frame rate whatever the things are but Nowadays, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John same computer It’s still six thousand dollars And it’s still got the d700 in it and the world has just
⏹️ ▶️ John moved on by leaps and bounds even when it was introduced in This case the d700 was not a gaming focused card so even when it was introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John there were gaming cards that were way faster Right, but now it’s just ridiculous But the price hasn’t gone down
⏹️ ▶️ John right the whole Apple thing of like we will continue to sell the same computer for the same price for three years
⏹️ ▶️ John While the rest of the world moves on which you can get away with in some markets But if you’re gonna do anything and sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the high-end pro super powerful or whatever like I just wish the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether it has pays attention to gaming at all I just wish the Mac Pro Would be the best fastest computer of the world
⏹️ ▶️ John at something for any sustained period of time because I feel like that is entirely possible Fine make it the best computer
⏹️ ▶️ John for running that weird, you know painting, you know, 12 megapixel textures in real time
⏹️ ▶️ John onto models, things they demoed at WWDC for Pixar and everything, make it the best computer in the world for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John for more than 15 minutes. Like, it doesn’t even have to be games, but I think it should be something. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, it’s sad that they’ve been neglected like that, and it’s sad that in this case, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is completely missing out, as far as we can see on the outside, on the entirety of VR. Which,
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows, I really hope Apple has all sorts of VR projects internally, and they decided it’s not ready or not interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John or the form it’s taking on PCs are not interested or whatever. But they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not allowing people who buy their even their highest end computers to participate in it
⏹️ ▶️ John even speculatively. So it’s kind of it’s kind of depressing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the final point is that the whole Palmer like he’s slamming the max I think he’s slamming with reason. But it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that you need an amazingly powerful graphics card to to do quote unquote VR.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need it for the Oculus Rift, which is a particular VR product, but as we talked about earlier, if you have a PlayStation 4,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get PlayStation VR for a couple hundred bucks extra, it’s not gonna be as good as the Rift. It’s not gonna be as powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it will run on your PlayStation 4, which is nowhere near as powerful as the recommended system
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Oculus Rift. So VR does not equal Oculus Rift. They’re two different things. This is a specific
⏹️ ▶️ John product, and VR is a concept. Hell, they have ones that you can use on your cell phone. Now, obviously the Rift is probably gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John highest end one or whatever. But you don’t have to entirely miss out in VR because you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a fancy high end gaming PC, you’ll if you’re interested in it, as as at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and I both are, we’ll try it out on a couple hundred bucks thing we buy on our PlayStation. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it will probably be weird. And it’s gonna it’s the very first consumer release of this technology. So inevitably, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years from now, we’ll look back on this VR and think either it’s ridiculous that we even considered VR to be a thing or look
⏹️ ▶️ John back and look at how incredibly primitive it is compared to what comes after it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll link to that piece in Polygon to basically saying your Mac is fine for VR, just not for the
⏹️ ▶️ John Rift. Which again, it’s high end versus capability. Like I want
⏹️ ▶️ John some Mac somewhere to be the best computer in the world for some demanding computational function
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m into fast computers. That’s why. Like I don’t feel like I need any way to justify it like that. And I wish there were more people in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple that had the same attitude.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it isn’t just about gaming or VR, you know, like even even if VR doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take off or even if even if you Can if you can disregard gamers as a market Apple cares about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lots of Apple software or software that Apple customers would have run Can make use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the extra resources of a well-equipped Mac Pro You know The Mac Pro is the only computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Mac lineup that can have more than four cores and as discussed previously Obviously, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to John’s chagrin, I run a utility in my menu bar called iStatMenus. Me too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That uses up all those cores. It shows me when my cores are in use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by what. And I’ve noticed, you know, like over the last few years, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, even though making software multi-threaded is difficult and not everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can effectively take advantage of multiple cores, I have noticed in recent years that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of the things that I I do are taking advantage of multiple cores. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of… And even stuff that a lot of people would use like Apple’s Photos app, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any kind of heavy photo workflow, Lightroom, Photos app, Aperture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you do any kind of video stuff, of course, that’ll use it too. Lots of software that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people use can take advantage of any amount of cores you give it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within reason. So you know, you can, right now, you know, the iMacs and the 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros have four cores. I would love to have an eight or 12-core Mac Pro. That would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right now, they’re just, they’re not that competitive because there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy one right now with the prices and the age of them and everything. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much software now, so many common needs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of Apple customers do have that could take advantage of this. You don’t have to just be a video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor or a high-end gamer to want a Mac Pro. And I can complain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at length about the trade-offs made by the new tube Mac Pro compared to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old cheese grater. It is overall a good product if it was updated on a regular basis, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old cheese grater I think was a better one, honestly, in many ways. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I at least want something, some sign that somebody at Apple both A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares about the Mac, which is, I know a lot of the executives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do care about the Mac, but sometimes it’s hard to see the actions of that on the outside. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco B, that somebody high up at Apple cares about high-end pro use of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac. And that is the part that’s been seemingly fading in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, and I worry about that. It’s one thing to exit the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game, to discontinue Aperture. Final Cut I think they’re still okay on. I don’t know much about the video world, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are maintaining that okay. Logic, they’re maintaining okay. You know, even if Apple starts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slacking off on the software side of addressing the pro market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worries me greatly when they start ignoring the hardware side, because like the software side, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good alternatives. You know, if Aperture went away, well we have Lightroom, you know, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the new Photos app. If Final Cut goes away, there’s like Avid and other things people use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, if logic goes away, there’s other audio editors. But if there’s no more high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac hardware, you have to abandon the entire Mac platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have an alternative to that, which is a really high bar, and it’s a really big ask, and a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me don’t want to do it. I don’t want to abandon the Mac. I don’t want to build a Hackintosh or switch to Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Windows. I want to keep using Mac OS, and Mac OS was designed incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and incredibly well architected to take advantage of incredibly high-end hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple just doesn’t really sell anymore. And that’s kind of sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the OpenGL stack is not great, but aside from that, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you make a decent point, Marco, but I also don’t think we should be throwing in the towel quite yet. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree that they don’t update things like the Mac Pro as frequently as anyone in the world but me would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want. I’m perfectly happy with them not updating it, but every 10 years, so I don’t have to go through another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those months of this show when that’s all we talked about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, um, but, but, you know, in all seriousness, I don’t think that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That we should be too, um, disgruntled or sad that we haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one in admittedly a fair bit of time, because presumably this will get fixed and it will get fixed soon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. And, and I, I don’t blame you for being grumbly about the pace with which They’re fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re refreshing the Mac Pro, but it’s got to be coming. I mean, it has to be and presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John hope so. That sounds like exactly what we were saying when the cheese grater was over, like, well, but they’ve got updated
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eventually. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we enter the second phase, which is like, maybe they’re never going to update again. Maybe they’re just going to stop selling Mac Pros. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ John was the headspace we were in around about the time that the tube appeared, because we were seriously considering,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, Apple is really has a consumer focus lately, and they’re all about the iPhone and the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, do they really need the Mac Pro in their lineup? Not really, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like they can get away, like maybe they just won’t make any more Mac Pros and then they came up with the Tube. And like I said, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John argue about whether the Tube is the correct vision for high performance computing, but you can’t say they skimped, you can’t say they
⏹️ ▶️ John just gave you a watered down iMac in a tube shape, like that thing was a Mac Pro through and through
⏹️ ▶️ John with their vision of, you know, a whole bunch of ports on the back of the thing and circular and two huge
⏹️ ▶️ John video, not one huge GPU, but two huge GPUs in one of them, you know, and their technology for using them
⏹️ ▶️ John for compute, also use them to drive the graphics and the enclosure. And like, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the same vision as the cheese grater, but it is a high performance vision. And it was exciting to see that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that was actually the Schiller can’t innovate my ass thing, right? Like, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can’t innovate anymore my ass.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was legit. You know, you could be crowing about that. And again, like you can just disagree about the vision
⏹️ ▶️ John of the product, but you can’t say that they were skimping and were afraid and were just kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John dipping their toe into high performance computers. They wanted to make the future of high performance
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, but it’s just, it was just been so painful to see that thing land and then
⏹️ ▶️ John just nothing for so long, especially since the one that landed, you know, as we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John much on the show, what Marco and I wanted was, what was I calling it back then?
⏹️ ▶️ John The quad 27 inch display, right? And we knew this thing couldn’t drive it, right? And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, but this is the first one, you know, it can’t drive it. Maybe it could drive it. No, it can’t quite drive it or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not the one that we want, but okay, maybe the tech’s not ready for it. But surely the next one will do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. We didn’t think the next one was gonna come three years later. You know, we thought, yeah. And in the meantime, we both got 5K iMacs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, my wife did anyway. So we’ve got our display, but it’s not in a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and the current Mac Pro still can’t drive it. And we assume the next one will be able to drive it, but we don’t know when that one’s coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that’s a question mark, honestly. Like whether the next Mac Pro will be able to drive a 5K display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is honestly still a question mark. But to me, I’ve complained in the past about the drive-by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software updates, that lower priority things seem to get these drive-by updates where they’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention for an hour, you’ll have one engineer working on something for a week and then never allowed to touch it again, that’s when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get something like the El Capitan disk utility. It seems like the Mac Pro, from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we know so far, and maybe Apple’s about to prove us us all wrong on this. I hope they are. But from what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know so far, it seems like the Mac Pro update to the Tube was a drive-by hardware update,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they were ignoring it for seemingly for a long time, and then they had this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great update that, you know, again, I can complain a lot about what they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it, because I think they made it a lot more narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot more expensive than what it was before. They really narrowed the APO and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they eliminated a lot of totally vile use cases. But they did innovate, as Phil Schiller’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ass said, they did innovate. But, if, like, they innovated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they just kind of dropped the ball after that. Like, there are new CPUs for that they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have used in the meantime and they skipped a generation. They could have upgraded the GPUs. Yeah, they could have upgraded just the GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they’re so focused on this machine, having these two workstation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs that somebody like me who would want to buy the machine doesn’t need at all, I would gladly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it with one consumer GPU because I’m buying it for the CPU power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like the RAM’s healing and everything else, not the GPU reasons. If they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refocus the entire machine on this high-end dual GPU use, then follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through on that. And they didn’t follow through. The GPUs are sitting there stale forever. I’ve heard from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who try to use OpenCL for things that it’s really kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the ball dropped on it as well. That it just seems like they came in and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did this huge redesign and refocus of this product that we weren’t really asking for and then didn’t follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through even on that. So that’s why I’m so sad for this product because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the Mac Pro. I love especially what it used to be. I love having this extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexible, expandable tower that had two CPU sockets, tons of RAM slots, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a whole bunch of drives in it, and granted, you can modernize it in other ways, like, you know, these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t maybe need as many drives anymore, because now we’re in the era of SSDs, and the drives have gotten so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, you don’t need as many anymore, so like, you can see them removing some of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do still greatly miss dual socket configurations, and I do greatly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss configurations that don’t have two graphics cards because I don’t need them. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they write this at some point soon. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they will or not, but I really hope they do. And I’m still maintaining some optimism because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they don’t, the iMac 5K is a great product. I’m using mine. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost always very happy with it. I would like a lot more CPU power, so if they make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Compelling Mac Pro that I can get eight cores in reasonably. I would love that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they if the Mac Pro Withers away in irrelevance the way it has been over the last few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years And if it’s never if it’s never good again, I still have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac and that’s fine, but boy I wish I got the Mac Pro back just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of CPU speed
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because of CPU speed and fan quietness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, exactly. Things like being totally silent at any load level is just kind of more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graceful and nice. Having the Xeon class components and the ECC RAM and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it, I feel like it makes things slightly more reliable. Having more internal ports, stuff like that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like more USB ports built in rather than having to use flaky hubs, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love all those things about the Mac Pro. In many ways, I miss it. And again, if If we never get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it back the way me or John want it, we’ll deal, we’ll be okay. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like a waste that there’s all these amazing CPUs out there at the high end world. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the next generation, the Broadbell Xeons, there’s a 5GHz part with 4 cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you could have a dual socket configuration, have two of those, 8 cores at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5GHz, that would be incredible. That would be the best single threaded and multi threaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac. but they’re not gonna offer that because the current Mac Pro design is only one socket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the CPUs they use can do two, they just don’t offer that machine. And it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much more they could offer. There are so many great processors in the Z-Online they could offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are so many use cases the old Mac Pro solved that the new one doesn’t. And all those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make me sad, but I’m still hoping for a Mac Pro update soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see what happens, I guess. Have faith. It’ll happen. Hope so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Warby Parker, and Audible.com. and we will see
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, The
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Podcasts
Post-show Neutral: Marco’s Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you added a family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco member. I did, yes. It has wheels though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You subtracted one too. Yes, may the M5 rest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in peace. I’ll miss that car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’ll tell you what, when I was preparing to drop it off, and when I did drop it off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was almost in tears. Like I really this is the only time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve ever given up a car that I owned where I was really sad to see it go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every other time I’ve that I’ve that I’ve either Stopped having a car or upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a different car Every other time I’ve been kind of ambivalent toward my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old one for some reason, you know either You know before I was leasing it either be like, you know Cuz it was cost me a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money because it was breaking down constantly and that’s why I was getting a different car or like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know with my previous 3-series lease I knew I was upgrading to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco m5 so going from a 3-series to an m5 was a huge jump and I was like oh man I’m so excited this this 3-series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’ll be fine I’m going to the m5 you know forget forget the 3-series this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the the m5 it’s so good and it’s so different from where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going that I was I was almost regretting it I was almost like I was almost second-guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my move like when I was trying I’m like man, am I gonna really regret this? Like, cause you know, where I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is different. It’s not all better. It’s better in some ways, worse than others.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that M5 just is such a good car that I was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very sad to leave it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m sad that you left it behind. I mean, I don’t blame you. It’s not like you did anything wrong, but I’m sad about it because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I feel like I bonded with that car. I mean, it’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve ever driven. It’s the only car I’ve ever driven in two countries. It’s the only car that’s ever shuffled me around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Germany. It’s the only car I’ve ever been in or driven the Nürburgring on, in, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We as a group of four spent a lot of good times in that car, and you guys as a group of two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and three spent a lot of good times in that car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sad, but that’s okay because you have bought yourself a Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I have leased myself a Tesla. They still own it. Well, that was the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John You leased the M5, too. It was never really yours. Yeah, exactly. Like, I know you
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like it was yours, but you were just leasing it. So you were always, you were never willing to commit to the M5. You’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John like, for three years, I’ll give you a trial period M5. Maybe I’ll like you, maybe I won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re probably going back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Believe me, you don’t want to own an M car older than three years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it depends. Like, the thing I’ll miss most about the M car is just what we just talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about about the Mac Pro. Like, I mean, maybe it’s partly where I live, but like, Tesla’s like the Toyota Camry of where I live.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’re all over the place. but I rarely see an M5. I think there’s like two in the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, extended neighborhood area, but there’s like a Tesla on every other driveway. So the Tesla just seems
⏹️ ▶️ John less special because it’s less rare. It’s also less of a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro in terms of, we make lots of good cars and they’re plenty fast, but can we take one of our cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it, you know, as good and as fast as we possibly can? And I don’t even care what kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John car it is. Even if it’s a big giant four-door sedan, we can make that go fast too. let’s let’s work our magic
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s the you know it’s the almost pointlessly exotic high
⏹️ ▶️ John end right and the Tesla especially since you didn’t get the pointless exotic high in Tesla but
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you had it’s still more it’s got other goals because it is a whole new
⏹️ ▶️ John platform a whole new technology and it is necessarily more prosaic we are not at the at the stage
⏹️ ▶️ John yet where there can even be an electric car that is a regular street car that
⏹️ ▶️ John is as focused on ridiculously excessive performance applied to another car
⏹️ ▶️ John as the most ridiculous AMG Mercedes or the M5s or any sort of supercar
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. So I feel like you are taking a step up in practicality
⏹️ ▶️ John and a step down in ridiculous automotive excess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, first of all, I think I think I disagree with two two big things that you you just said. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say the Model S in its various supercar configurations, which I didn’t get, as you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the P configuration and then the one with ludicrous mode, I would say those maybe are those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of extreme configurations. And also, I have never seen as many other M5s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one neighborhood as I have when I visited your neighborhood.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of fives and there are a couple of M5s, but the Teslas are everywhere. They they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John like seriously it is the Toyota Camry of my neighborhood like when I commute all I just see is Tesla’s
⏹️ ▶️ John and before the Tesla as I pointed out much to Casey’s upsetness
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Panamera was the other thing that like
⏹️ ▶️ John came on the scene. Panameras were everywhere and I was like who is buying these cars they were everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re only talking about happy thoughts this time John no Panamera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John discussion. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same type of thing that the Tesla and the Panamera are both like four
⏹️ ▶️ John door cars, but shaped trying to be shaped like sporty cars like you know how the
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla it doesn’t look like an M five it is definitely more kind of like I’m a sporty car.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have four doors. How can we sort of make that look nice and Tesla does obviously a better job than the Panamera
⏹️ ▶️ John does of it. But they’re both doing that type of thing. And it’s, and it’s kind of I feel like both of them are
⏹️ ▶️ John very similar to Marco like midlife crisis cars where you know, that’s why Marco’s car is red, right? Yeah. Where
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to feel like they have to get a four-door car, but they do have to get a four-door car, so they go to the Porsche dealership
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a four-door car. And then modern version of that is, I have to get a four-door car because I have a family, but can I get
⏹️ ▶️ John this super fast electric one and get it in red, and now I still feel like I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple things real quick. Number one, the Tesla is light years better looking than the Panamera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Panamera is just hideously ugly. So I was grabbing the Panamera link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the show notes as we were recording and I landed on the Panamera model page Which I’ll put in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room There are one two, three four two They’re like what is this 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different models of Param Panamera that run from seventy eight thousand one hundred dollars to two hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sixty Three thousand nine hundred dollars for the Panamera Exclusive series. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you want that? Who in the name of God would pay a quarter of a million
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars for a Panamera?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have you haven’t shopped for a Porsche recently Porsche measures their option packages in units of Hondas. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John The Porsche options have always been obscene their prices are you know, they’re expensive right but any Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ John you take you’re like I bet I could add like ten thousand dollars in options like no one option is ten eleven
⏹️ ▶️ John twelve thousand dollars If you can add all the options, your car suddenly costs $263,000. And you’re like, what happened? I thought I was shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John for $80,000 four-door car. And now, yeah, Porsche options.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m assuming Porsche options are actually rivaled by, like, Bentley and Rolls. But no one ever talks about how much
⏹️ ▶️ John those options cost. Because once you’re shopping for that, people don’t talk about money anymore. But every time,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the past, like, decade and a half, ready review of Porsche, they’re like, oh, and Porsche’s options. I don’t know what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking. But, like, if you want anything, it’s thousands and thousands of dollars. It doesn’t make any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are 24, is that right? No, 22 911s.
⏹️ ▶️ John is that a thing? People like options. I mean, like, if it makes sense to a portion, you’re like, do you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John pay? I mean, like, all right, so fine. You’re gonna pay $15,000 for the carbon ceramic brakes. Do you feel like paying $7,000
⏹️ ▶️ John for a different headliner on the interior? All right, we’ll charge you that. Whatever, dude. Like, how do
⏹️ ▶️ John you feel about special headlights for $3,000? Yes? check that box
⏹️ ▶️ John sold it just it adds up really fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right i apologize i derailed us i just i i never looked at buying a porsche not that i’m really looking at it now and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i’m i’m just flummoxed by how many options you have if you can’t buy a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking tuba toothpaste you’ll never be able to buy a porsche
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me let me teach you a valuable lesson about this podcast never apologize for derailing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow i can’t i can’t trust your judgment on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John issue have you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listened to top four it’s a it’s a total train wreck a delightful train wreck but a train wreck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um which by the way listening to john try to keep you uh within the guardrails on that episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just wonderful it was hysterical
⏹️ ▶️ John i felt i felt like i kept i kept things contained better than average better than better than the average
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still not well all right so anyway we have totally derailed so tell us about the test how was the pickup experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’ve only had it for like two days so far. How is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? So the pickup experience, I should just say, we’ve talked in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past in Neutral and in the aftershows here about different car companies having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different dealer experiences. And a lot of it just depends on your local dealers, but sometimes it does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the company is set up, certain companies have better or worse dealers and dealer attitudes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than others. But Tesla, I’ve been to two different Tesla dealers and talked to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few other people on the phone here and there, and they’ve all been awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Super low pressure. I think the salespeople are not commissioned, and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that contributes a lot to the easier going nature of talking to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, just really positive experiences dealing with Tesla so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, I haven’t had to get tricky service or anything yet, but I know some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have had Teslas for a while, and they’ve all reported very positive things about even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service and stuff like that. So, so far, incredibly positive experiences dealing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them as a company. There’s no negotiation on the prices, which also makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things a little bit nicer and simpler. Like, you literally order your car online. Like, you can call them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can go into the showroom and you can order it there if you want to, but ordering it there is just you using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a computer with their public website on it and you just place the order with them if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s refreshingly simple and nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And everybody who works for Tesla, who I’ve interacted with, seems like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were from California. Super laid back, nice, trendy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super nice people. So very, very positive experiences there. The pickup was just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other car pickup where you pick it up, you sign some papers, you transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the license plate and registration. Oh, so that did work out. Yes, I got to keep my blue license
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plate, my blue and white New York plate, instead of the ugly new yellow ones. I’ve been trying, this is now the third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car this plate will be on, because I refused to upgrade to the yellow ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re hideous on every color of car.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was just like any other car pickup. You just walk down the stairs, and your car is on a rotating platform
⏹️ ▶️ John with the battery connected through the floor. It’s really just like, and then you go outside, and you’re in a different country, and you drive
⏹️ ▶️ John on the road 140 miles an hour. So pretty much like every other car pickup. Exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other car pickup, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I re-listened to that, partially because I think Underscore said he had just re-listened to that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of Neutral. And, oh man, I felt so bad for John because you really got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of browbeat into being on that with us. But, God, it was a fun episode and a fun trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, they walked me through the features of the car and everything. Which you promptly forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have actually read some of the manual. I will have you know. than five pages?
⏹️ ▶️ John He knows how to open the trunk, at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I read, I think, four pages of the manual because a lot of the features of the car are not intuitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, for instance, the rules of when and how it locks and unlocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually not obvious. So I’ve had to look up things like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do I turn it off if I’m sitting in it? There’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like that that are not intuitive. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have referred to the manual a few times. But, so going over the car, taking it out and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, I’m only two days into owning it, as you said. So take all of this with a grain of salt. I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change my mind later. But at the moment, I mentioned how sad I was to give up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M5. But I’m not sad anymore. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very sad for like the two hours between when I when I turn it in and when I picked up a Tesla and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was worrying like I wonder if I made the wrong decision here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really was yeah and until I until I started driving the Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it reminded me why I went to Tesla in the first place why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided to make this move. Never drive a Tesla if you don’t intend to possibly buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Because when you drive it, it really… I’m not going to say it’s disruptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s an abused term and disruption usually is involved with low-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disruption. This is definitely not low-end disruption, at least not yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is transformative in the sense that once you drive an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all-electric car, especially a good one like a Tesla, but You know, even the lower end all-electric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars, like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf and stuff like that, that are much more affordable, even those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this property where… Chevy Volt’s not all-electric. Sorry, the Bolt, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter. The Leaf is the only one anybody buys, right? Anyway, so all-electric cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this property. Once you drive it, it feels so different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in my opinion, so much better than driving a gas car. It makes gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars seem like old clunkers, and it makes them seem irrelevant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the point where now, like, now that I, now that I’m in the electric car mindset, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling how they feel, and how they drive, and, you know, seeing how they work, and the advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have, there is no gas car on the market that I want. You know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW comes out with, you know, the next M5, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have all-wheel drive, and probably coming out in a couple of years, I don’t think I’m going to care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t want a gas car. Like once, once you get used to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits of electric, there are still benefits to gas. You know, long highway range is a big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That electric is just, is not only not there yet, but probably will never be there for maybe our,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe our lifetimes or at least a big part of them just because of the rate that battery technology improves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my God, it is so different. It feels acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise like like I got the 90d not the fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy fast one That’s the P version. I didn’t get those. I feel like such a douche for even talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this I know these are very expensive cars. I’m talking about but I don’t know if you if you if you think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bully Probably stop listening by now if you haven’t stopped now, sorry about that. But anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so It feels first of all, it feels like I’m driving a train
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because trains are usually electric and like like I you know I spent a lot of time on trains like in you know commuter rails and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subways and everything and the way and you know trains are electric the way they accelerate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it has a certain feel to it electric cars accelerate like like electric trains do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they just like the torque curve the way they feel off the line the way they sound even like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like I’m driving this incredibly smooth, futuristic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesomely powerful thing. In a way that gas cars, even very powerful gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars, just can’t feel, like they just can’t do that. Even now, buying like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle of the road configuration of the Tesla, it’s so ridiculously good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so ridiculously fast, I am so glad I didn’t get the faster one. Because the faster one is a big price jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a big hit to range for a difference of speed that not only do I not need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that I described when we last talked about this, as actually unpleasant to me. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was actually too fast, and kind of felt like I was being punched in the face when I tested over that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is a really good configuration for me so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I haven’t taken a big trip with it yet. I haven’t put up to like a full supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and had to wait 40 minutes to even start my charge yet. Like I’m sure I’m going to have experiences with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this car over the next three years that I’m leasing it, I’m sure I’m going to have experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that aren’t all roses. But the everyday driving around town, which is what I do the vast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco majority of the time, is just amazing in it so far. It really is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m even sold on the touchscreen. Matthew Feeney I don’t know about that. Steven Lee Again, ask me again in a few months. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things will change. But so many things, just the way it does things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the advancements it has are so nice. And the interior quality isn’t as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as BMW. The sheet metal isn’t as good. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the car’s other aspects besides the drivetrain are actually a step down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what BMW offers in their high-end configurations. And I don’t care. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good the drivetrain is. I just don’t care about that step down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why I’m saying this is truly transformative slash disruptive because it makes you ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the downsides and not care about the deficiencies because the core of it, the drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco train, the feel, the handling, it just feels so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes you forgive all the little nitpicks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you might have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what’s your favorite thing so far?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just driving. I’m being stupid. I’m finding reason to go run stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local errands just just to get me out of the house into the car again. Like just, it just feels so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. It’s so incredibly smooth and immediate and direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling. It’s just ridiculously good. The more time I spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it, the more I like it, the more I appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Underscore also has a 90D, if I’m not mistaken, and he visited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down here, I think it was right after Thanksgiving, around Thanksgiving sometime around then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I drove his car, which I think we briefly spoke about on the show actually, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ruined my car immediately. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are things that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m sure if I had one, I would suffer through and learn to live with it. I didn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the touchscreen, though it did make a lot more sense when I was in the car and seeing all the things I could tweak and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey configure, it did make a lot more sense than I would have expected. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regenerative braking is really peculiar. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like it, but I wouldn’t say I disliked it either. It was just very, very different and weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s also, that’s an option you can turn down also.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I mean, at the cost of range, of course. A little bit. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, well still. The things that that car can do though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both performance wise and technology wise, are tremendous. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Underscore was saying, if I recall correctly, that he had set up his car such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when he pulls up to his house, it opens the garage. Which is a totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple thing to do, right? Like it has a GPS on it, it has a garage door opener on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell it, this is my house, this is where I need to use the garage door, so just open the damn garage. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s such an obvious thing to do that I never thought of until he said, oh yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally does that for me. And I think he said you could even tell it to raise the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suspension a little bit when he’s arriving at the house to give him a little extra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room to go over like the curb or whatever it is, or the lip. Stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff like that, but really smart. You know what I mean? And stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, it was just so impressive. And the fact that it had an app that didn’t suck, like I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been able to use the BMW Connect or whatever it is app. Well, it was comparatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less sucky than the BMW app that I had used two years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, there are third-party apps because they just reverse engineered the API that the official app was calling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s totally safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, the API can’t do anything harmful. It can’t stop the car or make it go. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just open the sunroof and turn the heat on and stuff like that. It’s not that big of a deal. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow, even simple things, like I just said, the garage door opening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it closes when you leave too. Like when you pull out of the driveway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to leave, it can close the garage for you. And when you come back home, it opens it for you. Yeah, you’re right. Stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It’s just really nice. I mean, and even having the big touch screen, like one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of converting to the big touch screen now and appreciating it is like it makes certain things possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or better that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a car. For instance, you know, it just shows a Google Maps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view and you can turn on satellite, you can turn on traffic overlays and everything. you’re getting like really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well reported traffic overlay traffic data. I just leave the map on all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, even when I’m doing local errands, which is most of my driving, because I have multiple routes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can use to get to places I’m going and I can see the traffic on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant map screen of where I’m going without having to program in a destination, without having to make a trip out of it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPS wise, I can just like glance at the screen casually and I can see, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that avenue over there is all full of red. Let me take the other way. I’m just little stuff like that. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen, um, enables little stuff like that. Or even just like, because it’s so tall, like it has these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different modes where you can have, you can have one app taking up the whole screen or you can split it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have a top and a bottom app. And it’s such a large screen that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have like navigation as one of those things. And then the other one could be like the media player
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something else. It’s nice having all of that on one screen. Whereas the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars I’ve used, they’ve had these much smaller system screens where you kind of have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch modes between different things, and then you gotta wait, and it’s kind of laggy sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, I mean, again, and the Tesla one is not perfect. It isn’t as fast as I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be for a car of this caliber. I think, I have to double check with this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I hear a hard drive in there. Oh, interesting. As opposed to an SSD. I think I’m hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I’m if I’m doing stuff in the car and it’s parked like I was like setting up the music system. It was parks where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was like dead silent. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just piping that in to make you feel more comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s it. Yeah, fake hard drive recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John audio. They want they know that the age of the people who buy these things and they want them to feel like they’re in a
⏹️ ▶️ John familiar place with spinning hard drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall it’s it is it is more responsive than the BMW system was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, it isn’t as responsive as like an iPad but it’s not that far off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s really quite nice. Even simple things, like one of the little things that I like when driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, first of all, when you stop it, it’s dead silent and the whole car is incredibly quiet, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love. Coming from an M car that’s made artificially louder and it already is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty loud to begin with, that’s a welcome change to have a quiet car for once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, they have a cool hill hold feature where every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time you stop the car fully by default, it has a hill hold. So it holds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the brake for you and shows a little H on the dashboard so when you know it’s happening. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you stop at a traffic light and then you can just take your foot off the brake pedal for the entire time you’re waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s weird. Well, the whole car is weird, but at first, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird and then you start playing with it and you’re like, oh, that’s really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. It’s just simple things like it’s you know people always ask you know so far with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the autopilot stuff and the auto drive and the Summoning and everything and I did on a autopilot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the test drive I haven’t done summoning or anything else, and I’m probably not going to use these things a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little bit scared to use a beta feature To pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my brand new car in and out of my very tight garage. Oh come on I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be doing a lot of that speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up You got rid of that friggin m5 and you and I never did a launch control start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. I’m so angry right now I completely forgot about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I didn’t forget about that and I actually considered doing one on the day I turned it in like just that morning, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t you have because I had three year old tires and it was raining I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t think, because even, even a regular, even a non-launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controlled start in that car, the rear tires would just spin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I’m so disappointed in you right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even mad. I’m just disappointed. Of course. I, well, that’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. I’m really curious to see how this goes a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of different times. I’m curious to see how this goes the next time you go upstate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either to your family or TIFF’s family, because TIFF’s family is like right on the ragged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edge of your available range, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the short answer is I don’t know yet. I mean, by like the rated range, which of course nobody actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco achieves, there’s tons of headroom. By the actual range driven,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems as though I will probably have enough range to get there and back on one charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but without a lot of headroom so I probably won’t want to do that. So I will probably be plugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there. They have, surprisingly, an extra dryer outlet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is… which I know most people don’t have but they happen to have one because it’s upstate and it’s crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up there. So they have an extra dryer outlet that is within close distance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I could park. So I’ll probably plug in there with an adapter. But, you know, That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I mean, and all the rest of the time of my life, I never have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to a gas station again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, but then if you come visit us, that’s something like a 400-mile drive, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re just not going to be able to do on one charge. And so then you’re going to have to do the supercharger dance. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be fair, the superchargers started, I think, on the 95 corridor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the road that runs almost directly between you and I. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to choose a place to test out the superchargers, it’s a pretty good place to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because they have plenty of them. But it’s still a fairly considerable distance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and long enough that you would probably have to stop once if not twice, adding a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not inconsiderable amount of time to an already six to eight hour trip to 10 depending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what time you’re going. So I’m curious to see if you guys have a reason to visit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. I don’t know, maybe if Top Gear or something similar to Top Gear comes out in the fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to see how that trip goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too. I mean, it could be totally fine. It could make us think, oh, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we should bring a gas car next time we come down here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, every time I drive to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house, I regret some part of the drive because there is no good way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to drive to your house and back without hitting some kind of massive traffic problem. like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found a way that’s, that’s, if not good, it’s, it’s not bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the very least. At the worst, it’s meh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an improvement because I tell you what, the Washington corridor on I-95 at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any time when any human being on the planet could possibly be awake is a disaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you avoid that whole corridor, which I think you guys took that route once,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I think you ended up in like some other disaster by pure dumb luck, bad luck. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are ways to avoid the bad spots, but but you’re still it’s it’s crapshoot no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know I’ve been talking a lot. You’ve been talking a lot John. What are your thoughts and questions?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well two days in I don’t know I mean I really feel like he does have to live with it longer like especially especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the touchscreen stuff because like I You’ve articulated the advantages of that very
⏹️ ▶️ John well, and I totally see all those advantages, but I just I still just wonder about about the
⏹️ ▶️ John minute extra hassle of adjusting the temperature by having to change a screen before you can hit a button as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to a button that’s always there, that’s just, I mean, I’m annoyed by the physical buttons in my accord and those are physical buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just annoyed by the fact that they’re bad physical buttons. If I had to change a screen to get to it, like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be fair, I mean, first of all, this is kind of like, you know, transmissions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were bad always annoyed me. And now I just don’t have one and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe having no buttons for you is better than having bad
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons. If you’re not a climate control micromanager like I am, you won’t bother you as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco climate control micromanager. I tend to just set it and forget it, like the TV commercials always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say. I tend to not play with it very often. Also, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair, Tesla climate controls are always on screen, and they’re always in the same spot. They’re always on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bottom row. So you don’t have to change modes to get there, they’re always there. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do want to make a quick little adjustment, you can, and you don’t have to change screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, there are actually a good number of buttons. They’re all around the wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s levers and buttons all over the steering wheel. And some of them are even customizable. You can remap them to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things. So actually, I found, I was worried about the cruise control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls. for, you know, cause like, you know, most, most good cruise controls, you can like manually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set and you can like raise it up and down by like one mile per hour or five miles per hour, like by certain gestures or certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing of levers. Tesla offers that too. Like they have a lever on the side of the steering wheel. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cruise control lever. It’s actually easier than BMW because like most other cars you have to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cruise control on as an explicit action and it’s off by default whenever you turn the car on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Tesla, it’s always available. You just hit it and it sets like it’s like You actually save a step.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that. Like it’s actually surprisingly well designed even in its physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls for a car that appears at first glance to not have any physical controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John So at least you have the option of upgrading your controls. Like the thing that annoys me the most, the biggest downgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John in Honda’s climate controls and the series of Hondas that I’ve had is the switch from
⏹️ ▶️ John individual buttons for modes in terms of top vent, bottom vent,
⏹️ ▶️ John feet, and defogger, all the different modes of how air can come out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the various vents in your car. The switch from having a dedicated button for every single one of those to a single button that
⏹️ ▶️ John cycles through them. Cycling through is the worst. Nobody wants that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Tesla, does it have a mode switch to cycle through the modes or does it have separate buttons for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them? You don’t even know yet? Yeah, I don’t really know yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing is that the bad thing is that they’re not real buttons. They’re just a bunch of things on the screen and it’s hard to find if you’re not looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing is that if they don’t have a good setup, you can just wait for the next software update and there’s a chance that they will change. Whereas my buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John are never going to get better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s funny. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see what you think of this after after a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of the climate control, though, is there an all mode? Yes, there is. That you’re missing from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the M5 had it. It did? BMW 5 Series and the older 3 Series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John modes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yours does. The current 3 and 4 Series does not have an all button. So with the current 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 4 Series BMWs, if you want to raise the temperature of the whole car by one degree, you have to turn two different knobs
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea of whoever came up with that, whoever marketing person came up with like passenger
⏹️ ▶️ John driver split climate control and then front and rear split climate control, the same person who came up with non-smoking
⏹️ ▶️ John sections in restaurants. Yeah, exactly. same air you’re on the same air guys like there’s a limit I know you
⏹️ ▶️ John know someone can feel better with warm air blowing on them versus cold air blowing them but bottom line that’s not a big space
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on the same car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well but it’s just it’s just crazy making to me that BMW’s current three and four series
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah no that that’s worse that’s it that’s like a fallout of like so someone came up with this marketing feature that they made people
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it sounds oh it sounds good you know we’re always different temperatures and this will fix things when it really won’t fix them and then
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that to to build a misfeature that’s like not only did we make the silly feature but
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if you don’t want it, now it adds complication to what used to be a simple thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like now, you have to adjust temperature twice every single time. Like that’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s… Like at that point, why not just have single zone climate control at that point?
⏹️ ▶️ John My car… This is my first car to have dual zone climate control. My current Honda is the first. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, if I could have bought it without it, I would have, but it has come standard. And it annoys me because A,
⏹️ ▶️ John I never want to use it, mostly because I’m usually the only person driving the car. And B, the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John button, in Honda it’s not an all button, it’s a sync button. When sync is
⏹️ ▶️ John on, everything you do to the climate control affects the whole car, which is how it should be all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I go for other buttons on this completely smooth, seemingly featureless expanse
⏹️ ▶️ John of buttons that are defined by slices into the smooth featureless expanse,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if I’m wearing gloves or whatever, I accidentally bump the sync button and don’t notice until a day later when I realized I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John adjusting the temperature just for quote unquote my side of the car and the other side of the car
⏹️ ▶️ John is is still set to you know totally the wrong temperature and it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will tell you what though my Subaru was the first car I had a dual zone climate and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love it because Aaron is usually cold and I am usually warm and being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to adjust each independently is wonderful. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Subaru did not have an all button and my life improved dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I bought the BMW. If for no other reason than because of the all button, because then I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually tended to micromanage a lot more in the Subaru anyway, but anytime I adjust the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air in the, in the BMW, I just have to spin one little spinner, one or two notches, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re delightful little notches. They’re really crisp, really well-built, really well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as only the Germans and probably the Japanese can. It’s so much better that way. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could not pay me enough money to buy a car with one zone climate control. That is insanity to my eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you, John, would have a problem with the knob feel somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I know. Well, what I would kill for a knob is another downgrade of the Accord. I don’t even have a knob. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John up and down buttons. Huge up and down buttons that are like, and the same type of thing. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more of a division between them, but it’s so clearly that they designed these buttons to
⏹️ ▶️ John look nice and not to be distinguishable as individual buttons. And of all the things like I’m glad I have a knob
⏹️ ▶️ John for volume, although honestly, I just use a steering wheel controls for mostly for that, which is not a knob. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a knob for fan speed, please instead of that’s the worst. That’s like the arrow keys and the old Apple. Remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the old Apple keyboard layouts where they didn’t have the inverted T even the half size one. Instead they had four keys next
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other that was like, I forget the order but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh yeah, right
⏹️ ▶️ John up down. Well, so this is the this is the microcosm that I have up and down fan speed buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John is up on the left or is down on the left. It’s completely arbitrary. If it’s just like I have a picture in my head
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know which one it is now but every time I’ve got to think about it and fumble around and figure it out I would love a knob
⏹️ ▶️ John for that and I would love a knob for temperature instead of a granted very large like red upward facing
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow button and blue downward facing arrow button for temperature.