227: Typing on Pillows
22 Jun 2017After a Follow-Upocalypse, we finally hear about Casey’s new family member.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Serenity Caldwell on the new iPad
- Ryan Jones makes some observations
- Steve Troughton-Smith makes some observations
- FaceTime capture of Live Photos
- ADAs and default apps
- HEIF is good! is good
- 32-bit support "sunset" in macOS
- High Sierra Format
- APFS is good!
- iMac Pro price comparison
- Oddities between iMac Tiers
- HomeKit is available to all
- Apps can allow "programming environments"
- App Store reviews don't have to reset on update
- Keynote presentation diversity
- Siracusa reviews Goodfellas
- Casey got a MacBook Adorable
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- WWDC doughnuts
- TitleCase.com
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Chapters
- iPad size comparisons
- Type to Siri
- Software-only power button?
- Offload Unused Apps
- iPad Spaces persist
- iOS file-browser launch UI
- iOS default apps
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- HEIF is good
- 32-bit sunsets
- High Sierra CD-ROM format
- APFS is good
- Sponsor: Hover
- iMac Pro price comparison
- iMac configuration oddities
- HomeKit
- Programming apps allowed
- App Store review resetting
- Rate This App API
- Mac apps in iOS App Store?
- Keynote diversity
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Casey’s baby Mac
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Follow-up
- Post-show: Title case
iPad size comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi, this is me and I’m talking to you. Things are happening, John, sounds good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, the fact that you’re asking me if I’m still here is alarming, but I’m just going to keep talking until somebody starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to interrupt me and talks over me, which is pretty much the story of this entire show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Serendy Caldwell, friend of the show, has some iPad size comparisons, and so we’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few links in the show notes. I briefly earlier tonight handled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friend Steve’s iPad and was playing with his 10.5 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it again seems nice. It doesn’t really seem any different in size in the hand than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad I used to own, the full-size iPad. But Srendy has some thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and some comparisons and things. So I don’t know, John, you want to take us through this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the diagram. She originally tweeted them when, presumably when she was writing the article, but those little like yellow
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle diagrams take a look at the one that shows the iPad body size comparison
⏹️ ▶️ John you got like the mini is a little thing up in the corner and then the 12.9 inch iPad Pro is the big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference between the 9.7 and the 10.5 is so tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John proportionally that’s why they feel almost the same because they really almost are the same and if you look at the screen difference
⏹️ ▶️ John between 9.7 and 10.5 it’s a little more uniform where it’s It’s not like a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s more substantial looking. So this is a great representation of how
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve managed to put a bigger screen on an iPad that’s not that much bigger and why it doesn’t feel monstrous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why it just feels like, you know, if you gave it to a regular person and they weren’t intimately familiar with the 9.7, they might not
⏹️ ▶️ John even notice that the physical size of the thing is bigger. So I think that’s a big selling point of this device. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had any doubts, take a look at these diagrams. pretty convincing.
Type to Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Serenity Caldwell, she also has some information about typing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri in iOS 11. So in iOS 11, when it comes out in the fall, users will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to turn on type to Siri in their accessibility settings, which will let you write your commands to Siri rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than shouting them into space, which we had known about, but she has a little bit more detail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t decide if this is going to be awesome or kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of redundant and useless.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice to have that option because sometimes you either don’t want to speak out loud but you want to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality provided by Siri. Even if it’s just, I don’t know if this is the case,
⏹️ ▶️ John but imagine for example that you routinely ask to set a timer
⏹️ ▶️ John or reminder in a spoken way but you don’t want to go through the hassle
⏹️ ▶️ John of launching the reminders app and then typing that same English sentence into the little
⏹️ ▶️ John new reminder field. you can do you can say like you know pick up laundry at 4
⏹️ ▶️ John p.m. tomorrow and the reminder will like set itself to 4 p.m. tomorrow and the name of the thing will be pick
⏹️ ▶️ John up laundry but if you spend most of your time interacting with Siri you may not know
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the syntax that is understandable by reminders and I don’t think it’s exactly the same syntax that that
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri understands so it’s nice to be able to essentially type into sort of a
⏹️ ▶️ John one-stop shop for all the things that you can make your phone do in a vaguely unattended
⏹️ ▶️ John way and not have to say, Oh, I’m in a place where I can’t speak out loud. So rather than me trying to whisper to Siri, let
⏹️ ▶️ John me just type with my thumbs. The thing I know will work with Siri in a nice quiet way, because
⏹️ ▶️ John like all sane people, you have key clicks turned off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how people have key clicks on.
Software-only power button?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryan Jones made an interesting observation via Twitter. He said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is with regard to iOS 11, on the iPhone, you can lock an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I still haven’t had a chance to play with this, I want to see this, but anyway, he said, you can lock an iPhone by pulling down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the top. And additionally, there’s a software shutdown button in settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is still quoting Ryan. Very fishy. The power button may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not be long for this world. So Ryan’s point is, if you can lock your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than with the button on the right-hand side on most phones these days, but rather by just swiping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down from the top, and if there’s a software shutdown button,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then what is the purpose of that right-hand button anymore? Obviously to turn it on, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no reason you couldn’t use one of the other buttons to do that. So does that mean the power button is going away in the future?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if so, what are we going to do about screenshots, man? I want my screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have an alternate theory on this one. I’m thinking that, you know, first of all, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they don’t get rid of the sleep wake button. You know, it serves a very useful purpose and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they might be able to come out with software workarounds, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like having that physical button there to control that very, very useful function of sleeping and waking the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they get rid of it, I assume they’ll have some kind of like other way to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or automatic, I don’t know. Anyway, there’s also like different recovery things that this enables,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the biggest thing that I think this might not be a big deal is maybe that button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being added to settings not because they’re getting rid of the power button, but because they’ve learned that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how to turn their phones off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you turn your phone off is to hold this button down for a while. How many people know that? I bet a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people actually don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish fewer people knew it. I’ve, having just taken a couple of plane flights
⏹️ ▶️ John and seen people on the plane, both seated next to me and in other seats, because, you know, see them when I’m walking up, down
⏹️ ▶️ John the aisles, they go to the bathroom or peeking through the edges of the seats. When I see people who own iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, who turn them off, like off, off, shut down completely
⏹️ ▶️ John when they’re done using them and then boot them back up when they want to use them again, multiple times during
⏹️ ▶️ John the flight, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pull my hair
⏹️ ▶️ John up. It’s like, just, just don’t, just don’t do it. just hit like hit the power
⏹️ ▶️ John button or whatever just put it back in your bag and when you take it out later just hit any kind of button on and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John come back on instantly you can pick up where you left off and it will be fine but people want some people
⏹️ ▶️ John want to turn them off and you know how long they take the boot it’s not a fast boot process I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John maddening so I don’t think the I think you’re right Marco most people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how to turn off their phone I don’t think people should know how to turn out like it’s not it’s not a thing that they should be doing routinely
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously if there’s some kind of troubleshooting, you need to reboot it or whatever, look it up online
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know you can figure it out or ask somebody or worst case go to the Apple store and they will show you but it should
⏹️ ▶️ John not be a routine part of everybody’s day so I don’t want a way for people to
⏹️ ▶️ John better know how to shut down their phone. That’s not a good idea.
Offload Unused Apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and additionally Ryan noted that in iOS 11 there’s a setting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote offload end quote unused apps So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screenshot offload unused apps and then there’s a on off switch This will automatically remove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unused apps, but keep its documents and data reinstalling the Apple place back That’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey odd phrasing reinstalling the Apple place back your data if the app is still available in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the App Store store, which is very interesting because a lot of us, and I’m sure I’m included in that as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, have a whole bunch of ancient apps on our phones that we think we’ll need one day but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably never will. So in settings in iTunes and app stores in iOS 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the beta, there’s offload unused apps, which is kind of cool and kind of interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is an interesting problem that I think maybe Apple’s trying to solve. Like Gruber’s been blogging a little bit about this recently about how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size of of apps, just the sheer size of apps is just tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last couple years. So many very common popular apps are like well over 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megs. And that’s, and you know, it’s full of like bloat from frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and various assets and everything. And Apple has tried to do various things to reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, you know, the app thinning group of initiatives and various technologies and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that. But ultimately, if you think about like how much collective bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and battery power are being used by the App Store diligently auto-updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that people are not actually using ever on their phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can definitely make a good argument for why not only should this feature exist, but it might even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it should even be defaulted to on, because there is just a tremendous amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of data and battery being wasted to update like 50, 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meg apps on people’s phones that are buried in some folder somewhere that they’re never actually using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is an interesting problem. I do think it is wise for Apple to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tackling this somehow, but we’ll have to see, I guess, the implementation details of how this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done to know whether this is the right solution or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this should be on by default because the idea that your phone like rots,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a couple screens away, the app that you only use once in a blue moon, and the one time
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to use it, it’s like, Oh, I don’t have this app, I have to re download it. And you have to wait for it and you’re on a bad connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s a large app or something like that. This strike me as a good idea. I think a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John company and here’s the thing, if someone someone’s phone like fills up, and they go to the Apple store, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, my, my phone is filled up, man, which I bet is I bet is a genius bar thing they get a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Help me, what do I do? How do I make more space be on my phone? Aside from buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a new one? And it’s like, well, any apps you’re not using, let’s sort them by size, let’s go to the usage screen and settings
⏹️ ▶️ John and see what’s using most of your space and all those things that I’m sure the genius bar people do all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John One possible solution I found reasonably nice that is not the same as this preference that either
⏹️ ▶️ John you manually turn on or is on by default that slowly rots out the applications that you don’t use and just deletes them out from under you
⏹️ ▶️ John and makes them like these little booby traps that cause big downloads when you tap on them is to do what Slack does
⏹️ ▶️ John and say every once in a while and I know this sounds like nagging and Skype does this type of thing all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John but I found it not to be particularly annoying. It says on a fairly infrequent schedule
⏹️ ▶️ John hey I’ve noticed these three apps that are this big you haven’t used them in
⏹️ ▶️ John six months do you want to delete them and you can say no and you can say don’t bother me about this again
⏹️ ▶️ John or you can say yes and that seems like do that like once a month
⏹️ ▶️ John right and have that be a preference but but have it on by default or something, I bet people would go, oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot I installed that game, delete. Or they’ll say, you know, as long as you have the button that says no
⏹️ ▶️ John and never ask me about this again, it will never ask you about that app again. You know, Slack does this for tons of stuff. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John these channels haven’t had anyone talk to them in a while, do you want to keep them or do you not want to keep them? You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the Slack frequency is a little bit more frequent. I don’t know what their frequency is, but I find that a very
⏹️ ▶️ John useful, you know, if I was a marketing person, I would say, It’s an intelligent assistant that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uses machine
⏹️ ▶️ John learning to aid you, but bottom line is, it presents options
⏹️ ▶️ John in an understandable way without introducing any new mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ John in gaming parlance. Like the mechanics are still, you have apps, you know you can delete them, right? You can
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and you can delete them. Every once in a while, the thing will ask you, you haven’t used this, do you want me to delete it? As opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to, let me introduce the concept of offloading to you, and now do you want me to do that automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way you have no awareness of yes or no. So that I mean, we’ll see. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try it. I will probably turn on too, because I have tons of apps that I don’t use that frequently. But I will maybe I won’t turn on because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to like offload my downloaded for the 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ John they were up illegal NES emulator apps that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco had on my phone forever. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to delete that stuff. And in typical Apple fashion, it’s not as if I’ll be able to exclude those or anything. So I guess I will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t turn this on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense for people of which there are many who are really short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on space on their phone pretty much all the time. And this is largely because Apple has for so long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold phones with really small storage sizes as the base model. And I think that’s less of a problem with the recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, but there’s still a lot of those out there. A lot of those 16 gig phones are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being used, and so this is a big problem for lots of people. Or people who,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any size phone, their storage just full of photos and videos and stuff, and they don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or can’t pay for additional iCloud storage and everything, so they need the space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would venture a guess that space management is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really big, very common problem for iOS device owners. So anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reduce space is a good thing, especially in this age where pretty much any app you download is going to be like 90
iPad Spaces persist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have some observations from a friend of the show, Steve Trounsmith.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad multitasking, spaces persist after you reboot, so they can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey permanent, which just heightens my desire to be able to pin favorites. So apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spaces are a thing and they’re a persistent thing so that you can kind of set up your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different multitasking panes and whatnot for different tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just swipe between them as necessary, not unlike what you would do on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, pending favorites, like, you know, the fact that it keeps track of what you did, hey, you put messages on one side
⏹️ ▶️ John and like your text editor on the other and you put Slack on one side and a web browser on the other and like it keeps those
⏹️ ▶️ John as little spaces and it keeps them together. And it’s good that it keeps track of them if it really
⏹️ ▶️ John does, because people like as I’ve said a million times, people want to arrange their working environment
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that suits them, but they will, they will give up doing it if they spend any amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John arranging and then that arrangement is forgotten. I’ve always, you know, use springboard is that my modern example to get
⏹️ ▶️ John people to understand spatial interfaces. If you picked up your phone and all of a sudden all your icons and springboard were randomly arranged
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything was out of your folders and all scrambled over a you’d be pissed and be after three times
⏹️ ▶️ John you would stop rearranging stuff in springboard. You’d be like, why bother? Why do I bother carefully making these screens?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the next time I pick up my phone, chances are good that everything will just be randomly shuffled, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how the finder is to me these days. But to get people to understand, like, why do you care? Why do you care about your screens?
⏹️ ▶️ John You hear all these podcasts, you know, Cortex talks about it all the time. I think they talked about it on Hello Internet. We’ve talked about it here,
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about it on Connected Upgrade. Is there a tech show that hasn’t talked about, hey, how do you arrange your home screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that that is a discussion topic at all is because you can arrange your
⏹️ ▶️ John home screen, you can arrange springboard, and you put things in a place, and they stay there. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why it is a thing at all. So with with spaces, having them
⏹️ ▶️ John persist is great because that will let people start to get kind of an arrangement and being able to pin favorites to
⏹️ ▶️ John say like I guess it sorts them in like the most recently used order or something I don’t know I haven’t tried it but I’m assuming it’s some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of automatic order that says all right well when you go back to that switcher the last two
⏹️ ▶️ John or three spaces you used will you know will be in the first two or three positions
⏹️ ▶️ John so and so forth if you could pin a small set of things to say no matter what I do with my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John these spaces are always in this disposition that would also I think help people’s workflows because they have kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ John way of working and a set of Applications that they group together and they’re gonna do other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff They’re gonna jump off to some other weird application go over here over there But when they come back to the switcher to be able to Know
⏹️ ▶️ John when you invoke the switcher this just stab in this position and it’ll always be your Safari messages
⏹️ ▶️ John space or whatever this is you know, this is a tiny miniature version
⏹️ ▶️ John of of window arrangement on personal computers, but as we’ve seen in personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, just too many damn windows for most people, and they don’t, even if they use
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces like Casey does, I rarely see people who aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty darn computer nerdy develop any kind of system with spaces, just because it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do the same thing trying to do on the iPad, to pin them, to say, this space should
⏹️ ▶️ John be here, and it should be full screen, it should have this or these three windows in it and it should never change.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can do that on the iPad, if you make more people be able to do that on the iPad, people will be a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John happier. People who could not accomplish Don’t push the same task on a Mac.
iOS file-browser launch UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More from Steve Trout and Smith. iOS 11 lets document-based apps pretty much present
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the file system as their launch UI, replacing all the galleries or grid views that everyone writes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is kind of cool that you can just use basically a file browser as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing you land on when you launch an app. And so that makes a lot of redundant code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all these different companies and people have written just go away, which is really exciting. And this is more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embracing of the iPad having a file system.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put this in here because I just immediately upon reading this tweet, imagined
⏹️ ▶️ John the very first application that tries to ship and do this. The app store rejects. So sorry, you can’t show the file picker as
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to. Doesn’t that totally sound like an app store type thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John he means technically speaking. Yes. Now there’s like a canned Apple view that shows you the file system. And in a lot of applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes sense where Mac apps do it, where you launch office apps, do
⏹️ ▶️ John it and maybe even pages, you launch and you get an open save dialog, or you get, I guess, someone do have those custom galleries,
⏹️ ▶️ John like choose from these templates and make a new document or whatever. But in many types of applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a natural way to do it. And I think most of the best iOS applications still
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to write their own like Procreate or whatever, or like, linea, however you pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ John the name of the icon factory app, they all have kind of a view where it shows you here’s all your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially if it’s an image editing application to show you little thumbnails and stuff rather than showing you just a bunch of file icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you really do have an application that mostly deals with just files that are not graphics files,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might make sense to launch into the Apple provided picker, at least maybe in version one of your app, until you make the fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John version that shows you a preview like the Google Docs app shows you. It’s just a bunch of text documents, but it shows you little previews of them, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually surprisingly useful. So anyway, I’m watching
⏹️ ▶️ John this to see the first person brave enough to ship an app like that to see if they get rejected.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not going to be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, like, they’re holding WBDC sessions about doing this. Like, they want people to do this. It’s going to be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we’ll see. Famous last words. No, if it’s an NES emulator, you have a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or do you remember way back when, when there were tethering apps? Like, I think I had…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. iTether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And I kept that because it was on the App Store for like a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was basically like you needed a component on your Mac and you needed the the app on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I kept that thing on my phone for years because I had the AT&T unlimited plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of the ways they tried to shimmy you off of that plan was by never, ever, ever, or as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew anyway, never allowing you to tether. So I had this like tether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I tether or something like that, that I would use to be able to tether from time to time. And I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like had a saved version of the installer somewhere on my hard drive. So just in case the installer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went away, I would still have it. I had the app that I like cherished more. I probably had a backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the IPA somewhere just to be safe. I mean, oh my God. I remember that. Those were the days. And then there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be other apps like a flashlight app that would, oh, by the way, have a Socks server on it. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you, you know, triple tap in the upper one third of the screen while holding your nose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and bouncing on one foot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engage a Socks server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that was discovered, was off the store.
iOS default apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, the Apple Design Awards, the ADAs, they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing, which I think we spoke about last time, but it used to be that, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it, the Monday evening of WWDC, the first night of WWDC, they would have an event where the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Design Awards would be given out and it would be done in front of an audience, blah, blah, blah. This past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, they kind of did it quietly, but people got to schmooze with some of the execs, which is pretty cool. Well, Zach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Conright’s in says it’s worth noting that Apple gave out 80 days to indie alternatives to mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes and reminders, but still won’t let you set any of them as a default, which was a pretty observant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that that Zach had noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re rewarding, like, oh, these are well designed applications, and they may well be. But I always feel for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who tried to use the non default applications, because in each one of them, there’s some aspect of it that
⏹️ ▶️ John is less privilege than the Apple one. Like for mail applications, you know, it could be as simple
⏹️ ▶️ John as like when I click a mail to link, when I tap a mail to link on my phone, which application launches or when I
⏹️ ▶️ John tell Siri remind me to blah, blah, blah, where does it put that reminder? You know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re so close. It’s not, I don’t, I don’t even understand why. Apple clearly wants to encourage
⏹️ ▶️ John notes and mail and reminder applications. Like they’re a staple of the non game section of the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like, you know, growling at them and saying, why are those people trying to compete with our built in applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to encourage it. And here they are at eight winners. These are great examples of applications that Apple apparently wants to encourage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let people use them as their default, right? For all these in the calendar, notes, reminders,
⏹️ ▶️ John mail, they’re so close. And the limitations are less than they used to be used to be much harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to use alternate applications. But like, why not go all the way I’m every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John we wait for this some years, there is more to look forward to than others who don’t talk about it. But because I don’t think we mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, but I’m always thinking about it. Hey, when will I be able to use alternate applications, even
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac? Back in the classic Mac OS days, there was an entire control panel for you to set
⏹️ ▶️ John up. This is the application I want to use for mail. This is the one I want to use for instant message or so on and so forth. And that that kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of is still in Mac OS, if you know where to mess with things, but it is not prominent. Like some of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John are hidden. Like you go to the Safari preferences to pick your default browser and Chrome will constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John try to change your default browser. It’s all weird UIs to the same underlying data store but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly not as prominent as it used to be. At least power users can figure it out. On iOS a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just not possible I suppose unless you jailbreak which is frustrating especially we already talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John this but you know Siri and the increased number of intents. It would be great if they made intents
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the things that you can do with Siri for mail notes and reminders. If If those things don’t already exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose they don’t. But certainly you can’t tell, Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John applications do it. When you’ll tap a link in the Gmail app, it’ll throw a thing in your face that says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you wanna open this link in Chrome, hint, hint, hint, or Safari? And then there’s a little switch
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, ask me about this every time. So I always just hit Safari and hit the, don’t ask
⏹️ ▶️ John me about this every time and be done with it. But I feel like Apple can implement this well and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John rocket science. So again, maybe in a couple years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and actually for the record, I’m pretty sure they did add, they are adding it for notes in iOS 11. That’s one of the two things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they added, I think. But if I get that wrong, I’m sorry. I’m still buried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in WBC stuff because I learned that I have to rewrite my entire audio engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean the, what do you call it? The tent you mean is in iOS 11, not
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can change your default application,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah, the change in the defaults, I can’t imagine. We’ll see, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. That’s one of those things where every WDC that comes around, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a whole bunch of stuff that is no big surprise. And there’s usually a couple of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we always say, wow, we never thought Apple would do that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve been for years saying, we’re pretty sure Apple’s never going to allow you to change the default apps for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these kinds of things. But one of these years, it could be one of those things. They could just do it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’d be like, oh, look at that. Cool. And we’d move on. deleting the built-in apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We never thought they would do that either. There’s all the little asterisks on how they kind of sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer it now. It’s not really deleting it and things like that. But they did it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they put the effort into that to make that happen. As iOS gets more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more mature, many of the arguments against them offering defaults…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, one of the arguments used to be things like mail. There are places all over the OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they have built-in mail composed sheets. And yeah that’s true but then they made extensions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they made Siri intents and things like that which kind of break down these barriers and let anything plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and kind of do similar things. So you know the idea of having custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrations with certain things like those are actually slowly being removed in favor of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like extensions and intents. And so it would not surprise me if they decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually let you change things like your default mail app and your default browser at some point in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still wouldn’t say it’s likely, but I think the technical foundation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now there that they could do it if they wanted to without massive weird side effects.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t think they will, but again with Apple you never really know what, you know, never say they’ll never do something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well they’re so close now, like you said, with the extensions. And each individual application, just take web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John or mail applications for example, is all they would need to do for mail chain make a preference
⏹️ ▶️ John in Safari that controls where mail to links go to is that it like what’s left because you
⏹️ ▶️ John know there’s there’s the extensions for like add this as a bookmark or I mean I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John they also have like tapping links in Safari search and in Siri search results
⏹️ ▶️ John or something you know what I mean or do you want me to open this web page and stuff like that I don’t know it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve throughout the system in more places than I think but it always seems like they’re so close like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no what What are they holding back for now because extensions really did blow it wild wide open
⏹️ ▶️ John and now almost all the things that you had previously Done with the single default application
⏹️ ▶️ John now you can pick from a list and you can rearrange that list Which by the way, I really hope the rearranging of that list sticks better
⏹️ ▶️ John hope these spaces stick better than the rearranging that list because I’ve always had problems with that. Oh, yeah But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems it seems I don’t know I don’t know what the holdup is other than just you know not a big priority and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those sort of small things most people don’t care about that it’ll get to eventually.
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HEIF is good
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Speaking of photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a moment ago, let’s talk about what is it, heaf or haif? I always get it wrong. The Apple people have been saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heaf. Heaf. Okay. All right. So somebody in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming John, says that heaf is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Heaf is good. Heaf is like, those are some of my favorite sessions, the heaf H-E-V-C
⏹️ ▶️ John sessions. if you want to take a look at some sessions, TechNerdy stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John at WWDC, I think these are some of the best ones for a bunch of reasons. So the first is that
⏹️ ▶️ John HEAF is good. It is better than JPEG. It’s better than PNG. It’s better than all the
⏹️ ▶️ John existing formats in terms of the things that Apple cares about and that you should care about too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Image size, flexibility of the format. It kind of reminds me of like the various, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna call them pirate formats, like the Matryoshka or whatever, MKV container thing, like where they
⏹️ ▶️ John just say, here is a really super generic container that is flexible
⏹️ ▶️ John and straightforward and fits a whole bunch of stuff in it. And look at all these things that it can do. And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pin it down with these arbitrary limitations that make sense at the time. And one of the examples in
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing was like, whatever the maximum size of a JPEG is, I forget what it is, but I’m sure it seemed ridiculous when
⏹️ ▶️ John JPEG was created in whatever, 1980 or 90 something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yet here we are today and it’s like it’s an actual legit limitation that is problematic for JPEGs. One
⏹️ ▶️ John of the demos they had, and not to spoil it too much, one of the demos they had of Heaf was of a panorama
⏹️ ▶️ John that they zoomed in on and they just kept zooming and zooming and zooming and it was this ridiculously large panorama and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, is this some cool new application like Google Earth that just reloads new tiles and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like totally custom UI? No, they were just zooming a Heaf image, which itself
⏹️ ▶️ John internally can use a tile-based format and its resolution can be massive and you literally couldn’t do it with JPEG like it
⏹️ ▶️ John all was was an imagery as far as I could tell but you couldn’t do it with JPEG is JPEG can’t support an image that size period
⏹️ ▶️ John right never mind the efficiency of being able to quickly read and display just the
⏹️ ▶️ John portion that it’s on the screen with the whole tiling stuff the pictures are smaller for
⏹️ ▶️ John the same quality or better quality for larger sizes and they can contain lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of different things like it’s almost like he was made for live photos I bet it was kind of the reverse,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, and it’s a shame that live photos came before he, but Hey, you can store a series of photos, photos, plus
⏹️ ▶️ John video at the same time. But you know, smart diffs between the frames of the stuff in them is what I was talking about in the,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the live show where I was speculating that perhaps, uh, that every frame of a live photo
⏹️ ▶️ John stored in heat format is of equal quality. That’s why you can pick among them. Reportedly, that’s not the case. We got at
⏹️ ▶️ John least one report that if you pick the real photo, it is still like, you know, the still photo is still
⏹️ ▶️ John higher quality than any of the animation frames, but maybe animation frames are higher quality than
⏹️ ▶️ John they were. I suppose it makes sense that if you had to shave full quality for every single frame, you’d take up
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of, uh, of, of memory. Cause those are actually pretty big. Maybe you couldn’t even dump
⏹️ ▶️ John them off the sensor that fast, but even if it could, you probably wouldn’t want them to because it’s kind of inefficient, even with interframe diffs. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, the reason heath and HVC are big deals is because aside
⏹️ ▶️ John from just being new formats, um, and better is this is like a foundational technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they didn’t really hammer on it too much, but this is going to last if you know if all goes
⏹️ ▶️ John well This is gonna last 10 15 20 years. It’s gonna define your experience on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and Mac in terms of What are my images? What is my video
⏹️ ▶️ John made of how good does it look and how much room does it take? It is so fundamental to every single thing that we
⏹️ ▶️ John do Especially with cameras being as pervasive as they are today that any kind of change in them is
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you don’t change it for the hell of it. Well this year we use a totally different image format next year, there’s a different image format. No, we pick an image for
⏹️ ▶️ John when we stick with it for a long time. And these formats are just better. They’re just better. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this will this will change all our computing lives in like boring ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll continue to change them for years and years and years. Like I don’t I don’t think this is like a weird fad type thing. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope it really does catch on and sweep across the entire industry because I’m ready to get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of those old formats and change to this new one. Like why? Why hold on to a format that makes larger files that
⏹️ ▶️ John are worse quality, that has less flexibility and is more difficult to deal with. So I encourage
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone to look at these sessions. I think this is exactly the type of sort of underlying core technology that certainly within the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem and hopefully within the ecosystem across the whole industry, because I hate it when Apple does something better
⏹️ ▶️ John and no one else copies it. And again, he finished ABC are not Apple standards. These are ISO standards, international
⏹️ ▶️ John standards. Apple. I don’t know if Apple had any influence at all in making them. Who knows? But either way, they’re not Apple proprietary.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I really want the whole world to move to this. Every time I think about the whole world moving to it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think back on GIF. And then I think we could we couldn’t even escape GIF.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How are we really gonna change?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are we all going to change the heap and HTTP? How long did it take to get transparent ping support in all of our browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m old, I know. But my fingers are crossed for these standards.
32-bit sunsets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Let’s see what else we’ve got going on. I didn’t entirely understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this tweet from not underscore David Smith, from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey employee David Smith. He’d said that 32-bit support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is sunset in macOS. This is a bigger deal than it seems. I386 is the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fragile-obsc-ABI non-swift supporting architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understood bits and pieces of that. Can one of you translate for me what the crap that
⏹️ ▶️ John It says it in the notes right below it. So the the fragile Objective-C API. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the fragile Objective-C API is where, well, it’s the non-fragile one is where it
⏹️ ▶️ John escapes the fragile base class problem, which is basically if Apple ships a framework and they have a class and it has like fields
⏹️ ▶️ John name and age in it, right, and people build applications top of that framework, and they ship them. And then the next version, the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system, Apple wants to add a hair color field to that same class, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The fragile base class problem is like, oh, we can’t add hair color field to this class, because a bunch of applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are shipped that are compiled against the old version that just has name and age. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way we can add a field because of the fragile base class problem is all those people need to recompile their application
⏹️ ▶️ John against the new version of the the framework that has this new field, right? And so the Apple fix this, I think maybe in the
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade to 64 bit runtime. And it’s not a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John now, but it is still a problem in the 32 bit objective C ABI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they didn’t bother fixing it there because you know, backward compatibility and
⏹️ ▶️ John also because I assume they removing away from 32 bit eventually, and now they are. And so this is
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem goes away entirely like then everything that they have certainly Swift and also well Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eventually get a
⏹️ ▶️ John stable API but I’m sure I’m assuming they will do the same thing there and all the 64-bit objects we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have this problem so they’re leaving behind a limitation and also 32-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t support Swift which is 64-bit only so that’s another reason to ditch it so
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah 32-bit Mac not long for this world and someone asked me on Twitter recently why do
⏹️ ▶️ John I care as a user whether aside from a bunch of my applications potentially breaking
⏹️ ▶️ John what benefit is there to me as a user for Apple ditching 32 bits for it? I don’t care if it’s a problem for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and they have this fragile, you know, base class problem and they can’t update frameworks, the bubble,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a developer. I’m just a user. I don’t want a bunch of my applications to go away. Why do I care? The main reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially on phones, is once you load a 32 bit application that loads 32 bit libraries,
⏹️ ▶️ John those take up memory and it’s better to just have the 64-bit ones in memory instead of having,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you’d have seven 64-bit applications all sharing a single, you know, shared memory instance of a library.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you launch one 32-bit application and it has to bring in the 32-bit version of that library just for that application.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, your phone will use less memory doing the same things,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory. And then the other one is just, you know, simplification. If Apple doesn’t have to support this old runtime, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can, you know, it’s a simpler operating system to not have to to support this old stuff and anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John you can delete code and not include things and just you know it simplifies everything so presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John that will make your phone more stable and faster and your applications more stable and faster and yada yada yada. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the benefit to the user is kind of esoteric and maybe not that particularly visible but This
⏹️ ▶️ John is what we call progress. You can’t support 32-bit forever.
High Sierra CD-ROM format
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More on High Sierra. The High Sierra format is the early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco file system. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that we’re actually following up on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Used for CD-ROMs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The joke that John made during the live show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It wasn’t a joke, it was a memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, about High Sierra being like a CD-ROM format name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just to say that High Sierra is not two words that have been combined just by Apple for the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of the operating system, that it is in fact a thing. just you know that this this volume format
⏹️ ▶️ John logical file system used for CD-ROMs in 1985 1986 right they named it after High Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John like they didn’t also make up that term so I’m just defending the High Sierra name put a link
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wikipedia article on the topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh that’s really old yeah that’s this is yeah because it’s before the ISO 9660 that’s the one that most CD-ROMs were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Remember the the Mount Rainier packet writing standard that was trying like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for did you guys ever get packet writing CDRs to actually work and not be a problem for something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I did. Because I got the super expensive fancy one that all the magazines said
⏹️ ▶️ John would work, and it really did. You could incrementally add data to CDs. It was amazing technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was so, like, the whole thing, in CD-RWs, too, how incredibly slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and unreliable they were, there were so many efforts put into trying to make CD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco burners behave more like floppies, so that you could just write part of one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then add some files to it later and then maybe delete some files which wouldn’t actually really delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them but would just like mark that block as deleted and just add some more to the end and there were all these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards of doing it and they tried to define like industry standards to combine them all and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was always a just giant buggy mess and maybe maybe this is one of those things that like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac people John like maybe it was perfect for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was just crap on the PC side but I can tell you one thing it was really crap on the PC side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my first CD burner, which was a SCSI 4x2x6 from Yamaha,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey which was awesome. We might have had the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Probably. That was like, it was so good at everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, but you try to get any of those packet writing things to work and it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, no other computer could ever read them. You were lucky if your computer could read it tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say, the reason you had all those problems is using crappy IDE CD-ROM drives, but using SCSI ones too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Yamaha was a pretty reputable vendor. All of mine were obviously SCSI, and mine were super expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John top of the line Yamaha things with fancy back applications. I had pretty good luck with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did it all the time. That was my form of backups back before I had enough money to have
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicate hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space. Because hard drives were still quite expensive back then. No, I mean, CD, like having the first CD burners, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it was amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to make your own mix CDs, but like everything that tried to make it more like a floppy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a hard drive just always sucked, it had so many problems. Before we leave this topic, I will say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of my favorite pieces of esoteric optical disc technology I ever owned was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had one of the Kenwood True-X CD-ROM drives that read at 72x
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by splitting the laser into seven different beams and reading seven tracks in parallel.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s different. That sounds super reliable, and I’m sure it was very quiet when it’s spinning at 72x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because I think it was only spinning at 12x. So it was way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John than the 52x CD-ROMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounded like a four-stage jet engine that would spin up one stage and go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vroom, vroom, like
⏹️ ▶️ John really super loud. It was waiting for the disc to shatter apart like a wheel that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which they occasionally did. And I was always kind of surprised with the 52X CD-ROMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounded so crazy. It was kind of surprising how few disks shattered inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, they actually worked most of the time, and they really shouldn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I always got nervous putting the sticky labels. You ever do that, the sticky labels
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on top of your things?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to put them on perfectly, because it’s like having an unbalanced tire.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You get it in there, and the label is a little bit off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember all of that. I remember when we had one of our earlier PCs that had an external CD-ROM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive that was, it had like a little tray or cartridge that you would put the CD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in. Yeah, the caddy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I couldn’t think of the word. I knew it wasn’t cartridge, but I couldn’t think of the right word. Yeah, it had a CD caddy. I remember that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember getting the CD burner early on, so this was high school for me. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember I was very popular amongst the high school kids because I could like make a mix CD, just like you said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember, and Marco, you particularly will appreciate this. I briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got into trading tapes in the Dave Matthews Band taping community, because Dave Matthews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Band, as we all agree, is a jam band. And so my first couple of trades,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I had done was I had said, hey, send me cassettes of what you’ve got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And since I have nothing to trade, I have no concerts of my own, I will digitize them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put them on CD, and send them back to you. And that’s how I scored my first couple of concerts, and these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were concerts that I had been at. And these concerts were very different from each other because, as we said, Dave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matthews Band is a jam band. Anyway, we should move on and talk about APFS. Matt Stauffer Lauren Zabucki
APFS is good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey APFS is good as well, as it turns out. And yeah, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I know, John, you don’t have many words to say about this. So, Marco, would you like to take over?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. It’s a file system, and it’s new, and it’s not HFS+.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John therefore, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Let’s move on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously, did I talk about all these things on a past show already? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think you did. I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think you did.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not done. In a rare case of me not finishing previous episode. I have like 40
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes left on last week’s episode because we’re recording this early.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I talk about all this already? Just it’s you know it’s fine. The people love you, John. If they want,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can skip to the next chapter. That’s what it’s there for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will add a caveat. I may have talked about all the everything I’m about to say in a past episode. If
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, I apologize. But just pretend I’m like a teacher and telling you things multiple times to make you retain it more.
⏹️ ▶️ John So APFS is good. I learned some things about it in the APFS session that I
⏹️ ▶️ John may have talked about last week. It will convert your encrypted drive. So if you have FileVault on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to worry about, oh, it won’t be able to convert by thing because it understands the FileVault encryption and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will do all the things it has to do. So you won’t lose any data and you won’t lose any encryption. It will
⏹️ ▶️ John convert your fusion drives. And when it converts them, it will improve your fusion drives. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John a BFS, unlike hrs plus will guarantee that the metadata all stays on the SSD, like that’s where it writes
⏹️ ▶️ John the new APFS metadata, and it keeps it all there. So aside from the fusion drives, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John moving the actual data, like, oh, the files you access frequently will move to the fast storage and leave the files you access less frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John on a slow storage, you know, that’s how fusion drive works. APFS will make sure that all the metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the information about the files, all the file names, their sizes, their dates, where all the little data blocks are,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that will stay on the SSD always, which will make things a lot faster because reading metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, involves a lot of seeks and a lot of small reads, and it’s great to have them on the SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John Disk Utility, the new version of Disk Utility, which I don’t know if it has a resizable window and resizable
⏹️ ▶️ John columns yet, I haven’t checked, but that would be a great feature. Anyway, it will convert your volumes, so you can open
⏹️ ▶️ John Disk Utility and point it at any HFS Plus disk and say, please change this to APFS. It will not currently
⏹️ ▶️ John make them bootable I’m assuming they’re gonna fix that if you want to make it bootable you have to run the installer the the high Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ John installer to make it bootable but again I’m assuming that’ll be fixed mobile time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine a thing that most people don’t know exists but does I think it still only runs on laptops like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on your Mac laptop and you’re not connected through a time capsule wirelessly or any other time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine interface like you know it’s you have time machine on but as far as you can tell like your backup
⏹️ ▶️ John drives are not you’re not communicating with your backup drives like say you’re on an airplane or something you’re editing a document
⏹️ ▶️ John many years ago Apple added a thing that still backs up using time machine to
⏹️ ▶️ John your own disk it’s not gonna protect you if your hard drive dies because you’re backing
⏹️ ▶️ John up your disk to your disk but it’s supposed to save you like if you’re editing something and then a while
⏹️ ▶️ John later you accidentally delete it and you’re like oh I want that back I’m on a plane and it was my important presentation well mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine had been in the background making copies of your stuff to this other location on your disk and you can invoke
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine on an airplane with no Wi-Fi and get back old versions of your documents.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are some caveats to that which I’ll get to in a second, but the APFS story here is
⏹️ ▶️ John that because APFS has constant time snapshots where they can take a
⏹️ ▶️ John consistent snapshot of your disk in a small and fixed amount of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it doesn’t depend on how much has changed since the last time or anything like that is just mark this as
⏹️ ▶️ John a consistent state. And, and it takes space on your desk, obviously, and retain
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but it can do it very quickly and very efficiently, which means the previous implementation of mobile time machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is fairly intense, like it was mounting a virtual file
⏹️ ▶️ John system in a secret corner of your drive and then writing to it as if it was another volume, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like it was really weird involving hidden directories and fake remaking. It looked
⏹️ ▶️ John like you have a second volume inside your first volume And it would have to like Crawl over all your files
⏹️ ▶️ John and find the ones that have changed and make copies of them to this virtual file system very very slow whereas the APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John one is just Snapshot as a literally a couple seconds doesn’t matter how much stuff you’ve done since last time
⏹️ ▶️ John you did that the snapshot itself It takes constant time
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it yourself with a command line TM You till the time machine you command line utility which is useful by the way on any Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve never Just type man tmutil to see all the different things you can delete old backups and Mess with
⏹️ ▶️ John your backups, and you know screw yourself if you’re not careful, but anyway It’s it’s a neat utility new
⏹️ ▶️ John command tmutil space snapshot We’ll take a snapshot you can if you have high CR beta run it now
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll be amazed at how quickly it runs The thing that bothers me at mobile time machine, and I can I kind of understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why Apple’s doing this But it’s still a little bit of a bother is it runs hourly
⏹️ ▶️ John and so for you like working on a presentation and then you hose it in some way, you want the backup, you can get the one from
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour ago. But if you just created this thing within the current hour, there are no backups of it. It’s like, oh, hourly,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not good. Why don’t you take, you know, I wish I had backups every five minutes or 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, remember, all these snapshots take up space because it basically says everything that’s on your disk right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John save it. And so if you delete a bunch of files, they’re still taking up space in the snapshot, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I understand why they don’t want to do like a snapshot every five minutes because you’ll fill your disk with snapshots even if they trim them off the end. So hourly
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably a reasonable compromise, but I mentioned TMUtil
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshot. It’s like, well, if you’re paranoid, you can set up a cron job that runs TMUtil snapshot every five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John while you’re on the flight and you’ll be saved that pain. Just remember to turn it off later or else you’re gonna fill your disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the important thing is those snapshots happen really, really quickly. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gotta be way more reliable and efficient than all the weird stuff that was going on before. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a nice upgrade for mobile time machine. We mentioned a couple of shows ago, hey, when will
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple release the version of Mac OS that uses APFS to make time machine better? This isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s only for local backups, but I assume in a future version of the Mac operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming Apple continues along this road, that I guess you would call it remote time machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John actual time machine backups to a different volume, hopefully on a different disk, We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John use the the smarts of APFS to do something intelligent I think they might be using it now to just take the snapshot and read
⏹️ ▶️ John from that snapshot to send to the remote disk But it’s not quite the same thing as you can imagine like Smart deltas
⏹️ ▶️ John or what’s changed? I’m not quite sure what they can do They can’t do the same thing to ZFS where you get like block diffs and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is really cool But they didn’t go with the FS. They went with APFS. So we got what we got. But anyway, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they can make strides there as well
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iMac Pro price comparison
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we please do a topic?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we have two, three pages of follow-up left to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This feels like we need to declare like a follow-up barrier. We can go through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John them quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Start the clock. Oh, challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Start the clock. All right, here we go. You two ready? Buckle up. Matt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bidolf writes, iMac Pros price comparisons. PC Gamer had a hand-built PC from parts that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matches the iMac Pro in spec. It cost $4,686 versus Apple’s $4,999.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Billy Flattery writes, iMac model price comparisons. Just notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the mid and high end.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t just read the follow-up items. That’s not how you go through quickly. You have to have commentary from everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John on each item. We just have abbreviated commentary. Yeah, Mac, opening
⏹️ ▶️ John Bill Flaherty, go ahead. Bill Flaherty? No, no, no, no, no. Da, da, da, da, da. You have to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey discussion. Marco, we tried.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just a race to read things.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is what people tune in for.
⏹️ ▶️ John We tried so hard. This is the show. So you think just reading quickly is how you get through it quickly. How you get through it quickly is by not having extended
⏹️ ▶️ John conversations, by saying one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How we get through it quickly is by not breathing when I’m reading at all. That’s how we get through it quickly. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to build some gills and give them to myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how I get through it. I will show you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’d like me to do the next one. I can do it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The thing I want to point out here is anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s price comparisons from one computer, the iMac Pro versus some PC that you build, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, if you match the specs of the iMac Pro, you end up with a pretty expensive PC, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John The obvious little asterisk that’s on all these stories is no sane person would build
⏹️ ▶️ John a PC like the iMac Pro, because most people who need, like say, a really big GPU for
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming, aren’t gonna put a Xeon in it, and they’re not gonna have ECC RAM, and they’re not gonna have this really expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K display. So even though this price comparison is right, nobody,
⏹️ ▶️ John no PC builder would build a PC like the iMac Pro for most of the things that people
⏹️ ▶️ John build PCs for, because they would tailor build it. It wouldn’t be the most expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John best everything you can put in a computer. They would decide, I care about, you know, do I care about ECC?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do I care about the CPU? Do I care about the 5K screen? And they would end up with less expensive machine. That’s all I wanted to say
iMac configuration oddities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, He points out that between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mid and high end iMacs, not the iMac Pro, but the iMacs, with the same configuration, have the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price, but the high end has the better video. Is he missing something? And there’s a screenshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will put his tweet in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, look, when you play with a configurator, sometimes things don’t make sense. Oh, well, Apple’s, you know, not always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfect and we aren’t always perfect. Let’s move on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well that means the advice here is if you’re configuring a Mac, try config, you know, you click on one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them and like pick three or whatever, try the other one too and try to match the specs. It’s worth doing once or twice
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make sure the prices aren’t out of whack. Thank you.
HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you had volunteered to cover this next piece.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s because you can’t pronounce this, Victor’s last
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I’m not gonna pronounce his last name. Guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Victor wrote in to tell us that HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco protocol spec is now open to all devs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can build a smart device using, how do you pronounce that, Arduino?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arduino, yeah, I believe that’s right. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and control it via HomeKit without getting an MFI license. So this seems like, oh, great, Apple has opened up HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you don’t have to go through all this onerous stuff to get HomeKit certified. But there’s a twist,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So this is for interoperability. People can build things that are compatible with HomeKit and
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to be an MFI, made for iPhone. Is that still what it stands for? Is this made for iPod? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. It should be made for iOS. Anyway, you don’t have to get that license.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is Apple’s explanation. It says, at a user level, differences will include the process for onboarding an IP-based accessory
⏹️ ▶️ John to the network and a warning dialogue in iOS that the user must acknowledge before continuing. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to be certified as part of the program and you can interoperate, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t you won’t have the Apple authentication co-processor
⏹️ ▶️ John or you and you won’t have the Wi-Fi Alliance certification and The user of your device will get a warning dialog.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not It’s great for hackers. It’s like it opened up Hey, if you want to mess with something and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can bypass these that’s kind of like when you right-click open something on the Mac you know, power users
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it, but it doesn’t suddenly make HomeKit a free-for-all for everybody. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to be part of the HomeKit ecosystem as a first-class system, you still have to go through all the old stuff, but this is nice for people
⏹️ ▶️ John who just want to hack something together to get it working.
Programming apps allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The App Store guidelines have been updated to allow programming environments. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this. Apps designed to teach, develop, or test executable code may, in limited circumstances,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code provided by the application completely viewable and editable by the user. Not surprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless somewhat interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’ve been against like, hey, no programming environments for such a long time. nice to see them turn the
⏹️ ▶️ John corner on this. Does this mean that Xcode for iOS is any closer?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s the same distance it’s always been, which I think is actually pretty close. But it does mean
⏹️ ▶️ John that people trying to make programming compilers for iOS, programming environments for iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer have to deal with Averview just summarily rejecting them because they execute
⏹️ ▶️ John code from the internet or whatever.
App Store review resetting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of the App Store, reviews no longer reset on update but may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optionally do so. Did we not get to this last episode? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t think so, but it’s an exciting development
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, short version is basically before when you submit a new update to an app, all your reviews would reset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’d have to click over like the all reviews tab. Now there are no more two different tabs. Now there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one set of reviews and every time you submit a new version, you could now choose whether you want your reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reset. By default they don’t, which is good. So if you have a really huge, buggy, horrible version of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and you get a whole bunch of one stars and your next update you want to reset the slate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do that. But by default you’re going to get a whole bunch of reviews all mixed together from all previous versions and it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine and you won’t lose your ratings anymore. Awesome.
Rate This App API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, additionally with the App Store, the review API, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for developers to say, hey, why don’t you go review my app or rate my app or blah, blah, blah. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had announced a new API somewhat recently, it doesn’t matter exactly when. I agree. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But apparently it is now mandatory. Use the provided API to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prompt users to review your app. This functionality allows customers to provide an App Store rating and review without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the inconvenience of leaving your app. and we will disallow custom review prompts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the only thing here is like, we don’t know, it doesn’t, they don’t actually say when they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disallowing your own custom rate this app prompt, and they also don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they’re actually going to be enforcing this. And they’re probably not gonna ever say that, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been rules against using push notifications for promotional or marketing purposes since the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning of push notifications. And yet, if you look at pretty much everybody’s phone isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know yours as a computer nerd and maybe even yours almost everyone else’s phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always has on the lock screen a notification and from some mass market app that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey these things are now on sale come buy them now or something those are against the rules
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have always been against the rules but Apple has never enforced it because it’s a hard thing to enforce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this is one of those things to or like are they actually going to find a way to enforce enforce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ban on custom rate this app dialogues maybe, but it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what are they going to do like have people using the app inside Apple and hitting the report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button when an app does this because it’s not going to do it during like the two minutes that they’re reviewing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during app review. So this this sounds like something that it would be nice. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can find a way to enforce this, but based on their rate of enforcement on spam push notifications, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, no argument here.
Mac apps in iOS App Store?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a question, can we see iPad and Mac apps on iPhone in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store? Probably not. If so, it’s a bug. Who cares?
Keynote diversity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trode Winterborg writes, previous keynotes you’ve discussed Apple’s efforts for equality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on stage. It’s even more important to do so when it’s as bad as this year. Was it that bad?
⏹️ ▶️ John I miss something? I think it was pretty bad. Like, can you think back to who you saw on stage during the keynote?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see anybody except for white guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were a couple of women, but I think it was a worse ratio than usual.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And as we discussed in the past, like, this is not the type of thing that you can easily solve
⏹️ ▶️ John in a year because it’s not like you’re gonna fire all your senior executives and bring up other people like what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to happen is the people who are in charge of the things that are being announced like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the people who are most responsible for them get to get up there and show off their thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and you would hope the people in charge of the important things at Apple have a reasonable ratio
⏹️ ▶️ John you know some kind of diversity that you you know, that reflects
⏹️ ▶️ John the diversity that you want your company to have. At Apple’s top executive ranks, the diversity
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that great. And so every time there is a product that is announced
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, this is your department, come up and talk about it, guess what? It’s another, you know, gray-haired white guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, it’s good to mix in other people for other portions, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they brought up some women to do demos, for example, or if you get third-party people up there, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re faced with the same problem because who knows who’s running those third-party companies as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a thing that I’m sure Apple is watching and I think we should at least continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to be cognizant of it as well. I don’t know what the solution is other than for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John continue its efforts to hire and promote all different kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of people instead of making it an old boys club.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m now I’m disappointed in myself because I usually am at least basically aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of in a broad strokes how good or bad it was and I really didn’t think it was this it was that bad this year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I must be wrong but I feel like I remember a handful of women up there certainly not in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executive roles but nevertheless so that’s that’s a one demerit for me apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well it’s like that thing where they say like you know people’s perception what was the
⏹️ ▶️ John the one with people talking. If you’re in a meeting and you ask the men in the meeting what percentage of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time were women talking and what percentage of the time were men were talking, the men will say it was about 50-50, when in reality it was like 15%
⏹️ ▶️ John that women were talking, right, and 85% of the men were talking. That seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like 50-50 to men. I forget what the exact number is, but it was some absurd amount that men perceive it to be equal
⏹️ ▶️ John when women get a fraction of the time. And if women even start to approach like a quarter
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time or a half of the time, then men perceive it as the women talking all the time and men don’t get a chance at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just what you’re used to, right? So if you’re used to seeing a keynote, which is literally three well-known
⏹️ ▶️ John white guys who we see every single year, and there’s one woman, you’re like, wow, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was 50% women this time, and really it was like one woman out of three other white guys. So that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John something to be aware of in terms of cognitive biases. It all depends on what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John used to and where you’re coming from. So the perception that it was not that bad and it
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like it was pretty even. It’s just based on what you’re used to seeing and if it was different than what you’re used to.
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Casey’s baby Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, make your next move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we done with follow-up? See
⏹️ ▶️ John how we’re able to do it even with the middle part where Casey’s trying to speed run through it and I had to sculpt him? Even
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that. I’m so sorry dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, you have a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco baby Mac. You got a baby Mac in your family. Congratulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is an adorable baby Mac, isn’t it? Yes, I think I spoke about at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the live show that we just mentioned that I had placed an order for a MacBook Adorable for those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who are not aware of the lingo, which by the way, was it you or Gray that coined MacBook Adorable?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was Gray. I call it the MacBook One.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s right, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve even mostly stopped doing that recently because I feel like now it’s been long enough that you can just say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12-inch MacBook now. So I usually just call it the 12-inch MacBook now. But CGP Grey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Hello Internet, or was it Cortex? I forget on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey which show. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have been Cortex. Yeah, I think it was Harvey Cortex. Anyway, on Cortex, Grey was the one who coined the term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Adorable. And then, you know, Mike and you stole it. I don’t think anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else calls it that among our podcaster friends, but yeah, regardless. The 12-inch MacBook slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Adorable slash MacBook One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So when Apple announced that they had refreshed them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the WWDC keynote, which was mildly surprising to me. I know a lot of people had said, oh, it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At this point, every time Apple refreshes a Mac, it’s mildly surprising. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually pretty accurate. But yeah, so within hours, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey placed an order for my MacBook Adorable. It arrived Thursday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of last week, so the day after we recorded. I don’t recall when the episode went out, but it arrived after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we recorded. And I have been using it on and off for the last four days, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is we’re recording on the following Monday. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to say so far, I freaking love this thing because imagine how amazing it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a device the size of an iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a computer, so it can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anything. Oh no, you’re gonna hear about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not a toy. It’s not a thing. There’s no ball and chain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey involved, asterisk. There’s no ball and chain there. It’s a full-on computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can do, prepare yourselves, computer-y things. Amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I did just a few minutes ago? I transcoded something on FFmpeg. Did you hear it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. Why? Because it was slower than dirt, but also because there’s no fans. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no fans on this device. Are you sure it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco done yet? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is done. It took forever. at like one half X, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my MacBook Pro would do it at like one and a half X, and I haven’t done this on my iMac in a long time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, all kidding aside, I do love this thing. It is not without problems, but I do love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is unbelievably light, and I picked up Erin’s MacBook Air, which is several years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old now, but I mean, obviously, nothing has changed on the MacBook Air except that megahertz boost that it got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So her MacBook Air is an aircraft carrier by comparison. It is mammoth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by comparison, weighs a ton. And in fact, just this morning, I was carrying my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beloved iPad mini, which is also ancient and also effectively brand new. Funny how that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was carrying my iPad mini and my MacBook, adorable, and it occurred to me based on no facts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on just what it felt like in my hand, it felt like my third generation iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the one that John and I both had that we both loved. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of the Retina iPads, which kind of weighed a ton, kind of overheated a lot. The combination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my MacBook Adorable and my iPad felt like roughly the same weight as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-size iPad from a few years ago. The keyboard, there are pluses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and minuses. Overall, I would say I like it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely do not love it like I do the Magic Keyboard. If it had 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 30% more travel, I think I would start moving toward love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s hard to describe because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird turn of phrase, but it feels more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stable, this keyboard, than perhaps even my beloved Magic Keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keys just don’t move laterally in the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that certainly my MacBook Pro does. My MacBook Pro is effectively unusable, that keyboard right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, because between the Magic Keyboard and this keyboard, the MacBook Pro is like, it’s like typing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, you know, the MacBook Pro keyboards, not the new fancy pants ones I’m talking about before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scissor switches, the MacBook Pro keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Lexuses of keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John They are the marshmallows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of keyboards. It’s like typing on pillows, and I don’t mean that in the like, ah, comfortable way. I mean that in the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ugh, god, this feels gross way. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those keyboard pillows. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey comfortable to type on. You can feel the keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can feel where the arrow keys are without looking or missing the, oh god, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. No, so first of all, I think it’s hilarious how many people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yelled at me for complaining about the new keyboard so much when even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fan, basically, if you’re a fan of the new keyboard, you will tend to complain that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the old one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John either way, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the new keyboard is so different from the old ones, if you like the new one, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to complain about the old one and vice versa.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s mostly true, however, I only dislike the old one in retrospect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a perfectly fine keyboard. It’s just, now I’ve seen the light and now I don’t ever want to type
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that mushy, marshmallowy, disgusting mess ever again. But no, I do love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Adorable. I don’t feel generally speaking that it’s particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow. I have done a little bit of Xcode on it. I’ve done some basic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computing tasks. And to be fair, this thing is never really intended to be a powerhouse, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s intended to be a travel computer. It’s intended to be an around the house computer. It’s intended to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically a, I don’t want to use my work computer or I don’t want to be sitting in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-home office, computer, computer. So it’s for anywhere that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not either my actual office or the office in my house. Everywhere else I would be using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I do still use my iPad from time to time. And for better or worse, as much as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snark, like I absolutely believe that you can get work done on an iPad. For me, as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said before, and I was joking earlier, but for me, every time I use an iPad to do work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And define work however you would like. For the sorts of work that I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I either can’t do it on an iPad because there is no Xcode on an iPad, or it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be considerably more difficult because something like transcoding a video in FFmpeg, which I do way more often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than any normal human should. I would have to, you know, remote into my iMac and do it that way. And my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my, the particular iPad I have doesn’t have a keyboard attached to it. And so for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime I try to accomplish anything on the iPad, it genuinely feels like I have a ball and chain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attached to me. I’m not saying that’s true for you, Mike. It’s okay. You don’t have to yell at me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, that is true. And so having an actual frigging computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can do anything that’s as light and portable as an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, in my personal opinion, is amazing. And I love this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The one thing I’m not sure I love is the one part of the MacBook One,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because by and large, I actually don’t mind having only one port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m pouring one out for MagSafe because, man, do I love MagSafe. But generally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really mind having one port. I’ve gotten two or three, I think three dongles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a, I think it’s Anker, we’ll put links in the show notes. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s an anchor, uh, uh, device that has three traditional USB. What does that USB?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco get it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, thank you. Three USB ports and a gigabit ethernet jack or port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connector, whatever, uh, interface on it, but it does not have pass through power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s a bummer. So as an example, when I wanted to do my initial time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup, I had to make sure that the stamp thing was topped up because otherwise I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wasn’t going to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And there’s like not that much data on this thing to begin with. So that’s uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s something I’ve never had to worry about before. And that’s kind of frustrating. Um, if this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular device, if this particular ethernet, uh, adapter had passed through power, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would go away. I got a SD card reader. I don’t often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take pictures off my camera. I almost never do it on the road, but I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have the ability to do so. I don’t lament the fact that there’s not an SD card slot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the device. Would I like it? Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, how much do you pay for that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card reader? 30 bucks? 12 I think for Monoprice and I’ve already used it and it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was very very cheap. Would I prefer it to be on the computer? Of course, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am I bitter about it not being? No, it’s very small. It was like 12 or 13 dollars. Again, I’ll put a link in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes and it seems to work just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, just add it to your dongle bag that we all have to carry now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the thing like yes, and I do have to have a dongle bag. The other thing I got was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI adapter which does have pass-through power and this particular one also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a single USB a Port on it. So that’s probably going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my general purpose Adapter because it has pass-through power. It has USB a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it has HDMI So it has any of the things I would typically want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have while having pass-through power the only thing it doesn’t have is Ethernet. So I guess maybe in retrospect I should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten a USB-A Ethernet adapter, but presumably it would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been speed limited, whatever, it doesn’t matter. But to your point, I have yet to order, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to order a small little, I forget the name of it, but a Tom Bin bag that I can put all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these little dongles in and have my USB-C dongle bag. There’s not that many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like I need any more, but I needed them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, need is relevant, right? In the name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of portability, you now need a dongle bag. I have one too, and for the same reason, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use these new computers now when traveling, and you just kind of need that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before I make you continue and tell me all about more stuff about this, I do want to interject one brief
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John here, and that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even though I’ve been using the MacBook Escape as my computer for this role,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Escape has only two ports. I have found that to be incredibly inconvenient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more often than I expected. And so to go from two… So, for example, during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our live stream, the MacBook Escape was my computer that I was… It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing the live broadcast. It was playing sound effects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the PA system for our ad bumpers and stuff, and it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup recorder and everything else. Anyway, so I was using it. Because we were in a room full of laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nerds, I didn’t want to rely on Wi-Fi, so I had an Ethernet connection for the live stream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internet connection. So that’s Ethernet takes up one of the spots. The audio interface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s no more audio line-in functionality in any Mac, except for the Mac Mini, anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why, except just to save money, I guess. Line-in used to come on every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. I don’t know why Apple decided nobody needs line-in anymore, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cheap to add it’s really cheap to be there. It doesn’t take a lot of space. It’s just as it’s just another headphone jack. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s room for that. Why isn’t the room for a line in but whatever the reason Apple decides that computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need line in jacks anymore. Um so you need an entire audio interface or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB sound card or something if you want a line in on a computer. Um so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet in one port line in audio interface on the other port. That’s it and I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted power. So I have a few options here. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get some kind of dongle. And I actually bought the Apple dongle that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the expensive $70 one that has the one HDMI port,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one USB-A port, and a charging pass-through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s basically what I have, but a cheap knockoff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and the reason I bought the Apple one is because I was using this in production,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in a live show with a thousand people in the room, I did not want any part of that thing to fail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other problem is that that’s a USB-A port on there. And so one thing that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting, as I’ve found as I’m trying to convert to a USB-C lifestyle as much as I can, just for my own convenience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when traveling, trying to get as much USB stuff as possible, and actually, listener Remy wrote in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure, he didn’t say whether we can use his last name, so I’m not going to, but listener Remy wrote in a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, basically pointing out this problem in the USB-C ecosystem right now, that as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he could tell, and I agree as far as I can tell, is anybody making hubs that convert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB-C port to more USB-C ports?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that was a very interesting point, and I’m sure that there is one somewhere, or maybe there’s many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I certainly have not stumbled across one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, neither have I. And actually, the LG 5K monitor is one such thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not aware of any standalone hubs that like you convert one USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port to like four USB-C ports like I’ve never I have not seen that. One of the problems with the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle is what I was facing with this Apple dongle which is like okay so I have a USB-C cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my sound interface and I have a USB-C Ethernet adapter and I have a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power adapter. The Apple dongle thing only converts one-to-one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on C. So it has an A port, but then I need to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an A Ethernet adapter, which I don’t have. I haven’t had it since the MacBook Air. I can move the sound card to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but I wasn’t sure I wanted something as critical as the sound card to be going through a dongle with a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little mini hub in it. So the USB-C ecosystem is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of hard to fully adopt right now because you can’t, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as we can tell, you can’t multiply USB-C ports. You might think, oh good, my computer has two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four, or in your case, one USB-C port, but that also replaces the power port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, like, that, well, if you actually want to be plugged into power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just lost a port, which might be your only one, or at least, so now you’re down from two to one. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’ve been accustomed to most Apple laptops for the last many years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have generally had two USB ports on them. And you could be plugged into power and also have two USB things plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. Well now you’re down to, on the MacBook One, you’re down to zero. On the MacBook Escape, you have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re plugged in. And so like it’s, and if you actually try, if you actually spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lots of money on one of the Apple dongles, or the less money but still money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one of the third party ones, that by the way, if you look at Amazon reviews for third party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C hubs and dongles and things. The reviews are all over the map
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of them seem like they’re at best inconsistent, maybe unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a lot of problems it seems. And they’re probably all using one of a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of chipsets and things and maybe those are the problems. Who knows what the problem is, but regardless it’s a problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to reliably multiply these ports, it’s really hard to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a big problem. And now that you’re in this ecosystem, you’re going to find that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. Anyway, so what I ended up doing for our live show, I just ran on battery power the whole time, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a terrible solution. And the MacBook Escape, which has amazing battery power when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not doing much, goes from 12 hours battery life when you’re casually browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Safari to if you’re actually running stuff off of it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes to about three hours of battery life. And that’s not great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re running a podcast like this one. So it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I was basically juggling like before the show. I would like, you know, unplug the sound card and plug in power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while. And then right before we started, like, you know, yank that out, like switch over, but then you can’t test things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was it was actually really incredibly inconvenient. And that was that was one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times besides when my keyboard stopped working, that was one of the first times when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually did regret having the Escape, because having only two ports is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly inconvenient. And this is not the first time that this has been inconvenient for me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having one port, I imagine, for you is even worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is and it isn’t. I think if this was my only computer, it would get really ugly really quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would probably have some sort of ridiculous dock. But again, the whole point of this machine is to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super portable. And so what I ended up with was $80
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth of dongles and cables. So the Lightning, I didn’t mention previously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I got a Lightning USB-C cable off Amazon again in knockoff. That was $8.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The HDMI adapter, which is basically the same thing that Apple sells except a knockoff from Monoprice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was $30. The SD card reader was $12. And the Ethernet thing was $30.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it’s a total of 80 bucks, roughly. Well, I’ll have links in the show notes. All of these seem to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. They’re not terribly large. They seem to work okay. Uh, if this was my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only computer, I’d be really grumpy and bitter, but since it’s not, and since I’m not going to be doing terribly challenging,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difficult tasks on it for the most part, it’s, it’s really not bad at all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can see where USB-C will be pretty cool. And the reason I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see that is I wanted to try out my HDMI cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I brought the, the MacBook adorable downstairs. I hooked up an HDMI cable to the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hooked up that cable to the dongle, hooked up the dongle to the MacBook. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought to myself, I wonder if I can power this all at the same time, just to see, cause I thought for a minute I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe watch a movie off of it, just to see if it would work. And it occurred to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait a second. my switch dock is right here, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my pro controller charging cable. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, and sure enough, it wasn’t actively charging the MacBook, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least slightly keeping it afloat by taking the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging cable for the pro controller on the switch, which I believe is USB-A to USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it comes out of the switch as USB-A, goes into the pro controller or in my case, the MacBook as USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it seemed to work. And I’m sure over hours it would eventually drain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my battery, but it was very wild that was an acceptable way of doing things. And additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was talking to Underscore, who has one of these as his travel computers, as far as I’m aware anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he was saying that what you can do is you can issue the actual charging brick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that came with it, which by the way, to my eyes, looks barely any bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad charging brick that’s been the iPad charging brick forever. I understand that there’s one that works with the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah, blah, or the same one with the right cable that works with the iPad, but this thing, the charging brick is comically small.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyways, what Underscore was saying was just use one of your anchor or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-A hubs that does nothing but charge. Just let the thing sit overnight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suspended, charging, and it’ll be just fine. It’ll be topped up by the morning. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I necessarily need to go to that route, but the fact that that’s an option, that’s super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I can see how this USB-C lifestyle could be awesome, but it’s definitely not 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome yet. I don’t know. Now, John, you haven’t gotten your new computer for work yet, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they notified me about it. They said, hey, we’re going to buy the new ones. Guess what? And then they
⏹️ ▶️ John started giving me flack about wanting a one terabyte drive because it cost a bazillion dollars from Apple. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we’re working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why do you need a one terabyte drive for work?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a lot of virtual machines. They asked me the same question. Why do you need such a big drive? Do you have unlimited space on
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft OneDrive or blah, blah, blah. It’s like, you don’t want to run a virtual machine off of that. Why do you have so many virtual machines?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, because I do. We’re doing local development and you’re doing it on a Mac. And Docker runs in a virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John machine and I have virtual machines for other kinds of flavors of Linux and it’s just the way it is. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you sound just like them. Why do you need all this stuff? This is what I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As soon as you said VM, the conversation was over for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not, yeah, it’s not just one VM. And try to convince them that you can’t run a VM off like OneDrive or Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive. I mean, you could, but it’ll just be painful. So we’ll see how that goes. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also, one of the big reasons is you can never upgrade it. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the justification you need. If you are buying an Apple laptop, or most Macs today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, if you’re buying a Mac today that does not have upgradable storage, then the answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why do you need the terabyte is literally like you can never upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. So if you want this laptop to last however many years that you intend it to last,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to really get as much storage as you can afford because that is one like burial to just run into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s like you can never change it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well at work they’re never gonna upgrade anything anyway. They don’t care. My main pitch was like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac I’m using right now is eight years old. Cut me a break here. I already saved the company a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. Yeah, and I don’t think I was specific, by the way, about what I ordered. And for the record, I ordered the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically maxed out MacBook Adorable because to build on what you were just saying, the conclusion I’ve come to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when buying a Mac, this may not be applicable to other manufacturers, but when buying a Mac, the order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of operations is get as much RAM as you possibly can. That’s step one. Step two is get as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disk space as you possibly can within your budget. And then step three, in my personal estimation, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the biggest processor you possibly can given your budget. And I find that RAM makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the biggest difference, SSD because of all the reasons Marco just gave you, and then finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU because why not? And so I got a maxed out MacBook Adorable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was not cheap, but it can do anything I want it to do. Maybe not with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speed I want it to, because like I was saying, transcoding something in FFmpeg is not fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is otherwise, to me, a no-compromise machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s really awesome. The only thing that I think is slightly a compromise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does make me jealous of my iPad mini, is I kinda want cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it. I don’t need it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t need it. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kinda frivolous. It’s kinda frivolous, but God, it would be so nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not frivolous. It’s 2017, for God’s sake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Having cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in laptops, PCs did like in 2005, like this is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous thing to ask for. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that a lot of people could use. Like you know I’ve been getting it on iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically forever because it really does make iPads way, way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picky like me. And yes I know tethering exists and tethering has gotten way better than it used to be. It’s way easier than it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use. But to have cellular built in is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And like now the data plans are even are cheaper than ever. And like when you have a combined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family plan, like it only costs me ten bucks a month to have my iPad on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular plan. So and it’s usually the same shared pool of massive data that I have from AT&T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for just another ten bucks a month. And that’s great. Like so it’s to me it’s a no-brainer on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad. And the second they release cellular laptops, if Apple ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this, I will immediately trade in whatever laptop I have for a new one with cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that is how much I want that. Like it is such a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big thing. It’s one of those things that unless you experience like having a Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only iPad and then having a cellular iPad, which is the exact path I went through. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think you’ll ever really understand how much more convenient it is. Yes, I understand tethering is a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I’m aware that you can turn on tethering from the other device if they’re all in the same iCloud account, yada, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yada. I am aware that it is as easy as it can possibly be to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tethering against another device work. I get it. But that will never,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever be as convenient as having the connection on the device you’re on. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just won’t. If you’re sitting there and you have a furrowed brow and you’re like, what is he talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m telling you, it’s the way it is. Try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometime. It’s like having to use a dial-up API, like a dial-up interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your computer. Like, okay, connect to the tether. Now disconnect from the tether to save the battery on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tethering thing, or to make it stop burning data in the background in my backpack. It’s, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage it. It’s still something you have to manage, you have to do, you have to sometimes wait for. And you’re still then draining the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery of your phone, or having to plug it into one of your one USB ports. Like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just like, it’s not, everything about that is painful. It’s another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I that another reason I ran into with my laptop planning with the live show is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my backup option before I got to the venue I was thinking I might have to use tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the internet connection and again I’m not going to rely on wireless tethering in a room full of a thousand people with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices so I was going to use USB tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to bring lightning cables with both types of USB ends so I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure that I’d be able to plug with either the dongle or a direct port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just friction. It’s just all these things that just add friction. The USB transition is adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friction. The fact that it still isn’t like, no matter how much money you’re willing to spend on dongles and new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables right now, you still can’t fully transition to USB-C. So you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be living in a mixed world for a long time and it still sucks. And there’s still these inconveniences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how like, okay, well now my ethernet adapter is USB-C but now I can’t plug it into USB-A port I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to use a hub or something that only outputs USB a like there’s all these there’s gonna be these problems forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right tethering and versus built-in cellular is like a it’s similar it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just friction it’s more friction and when there’s friction you use things less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it gets in the way or sometimes it doesn’t work like you know think like when it’s built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it’ll work every time when it’s not built in when you’re tethering like occasionally it won’t work and that will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be annoying or a problem for you like having it built built in is just so much nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I completely agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does your escape have Thunderbolt? Yes. You look into Thunderbolt hubs to try to solve your, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John know USB-C hubs multipliers apparently aren’t out there. Tipster hasn’t delivered his promised
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like a Thunderbolt hub
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives you ethernet and a bunch of USB ports and audio in and all the other stuff. You looked into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You know, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. Maybe I should. I’m not sure any of those Thunderbolt hubs ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were adopted by enough people to even know whether they suck or not. I would be hesitant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to also invest in any kind of Thunderbolt 2 gear right now, and Thunderbolt 3 gear is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still too young or not even out yet, depending. Well, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can’t use it either, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I understand this- Right, you don’t have Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. If I understand this whole kerfuffle correctly, I don’t have Thunderbolt that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get to externally. So for me, that’s useless. I’m stuck with just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight USB-C. And I’m not saying, obviously, that that’s true for everyone, but for me, it’s USB-C or bust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, I mean, so far, I really love this thing. I’m traveling with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it very, very soon, so we’ll see what I think of it then. Part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey draw of getting such a small computer was on the plane back from dub dub, the person in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me decided to recline. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very strong opinions about jerks, people who recline their seats in planes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when this person reclined their seat, there was no way for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to use my laptop, except perhaps reclining, but I’m a gentleman, so I wouldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. There was no way to use my 15-inch laptop without giving myself horrible pain somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my body. And as silly as it sounds, that two or three inches that that person infringed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upon what is my space, damn it, that made the difference between me being able to use my computer and me not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas this thing, I mean, it’s almost an iPad. I could pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it anywhere. And I just, I really, really love it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super happy with it. The space gray is so darn good looking. I don’t know why anyone would buy any other color.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love this thing. It definitely does have some problems here and there. It has some catches. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some issues. Most notably, I do think even just one more USB-C port would make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a world of difference. But generally speaking, for the purpose this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop exists in my world, which is to be an accessory, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either a portable machine to do everything in a pinch or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just be an accessory so it doesn’t have to do everything at all, it is pretty much perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I am overjoyed with it. Now, ask me again once I start getting some real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time with one of the bigger iPads on iOS 11, and maybe I’m going to start having some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buyer’s remorse because this new stuff in iOS 11 does look darn good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that will ever really change the fact that this computer can do everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want it to do. Maybe not the speed at which I want it to do, maybe not without a few dongles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I wish I didn’t have to carry, but it can do literally everything I want it to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas an iPad, for me, either can’t or can’t do it without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a Mac nearby or having a keyboard nearby or without having any number of other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things to support it. And while I deeply respect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mikes and the Federicos and the Ben Brookses of the world who can figure out a way to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this technology work for them, for me, if I have to write a workflow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again is one of the most mind-blowingly amazing apps written by unbelievably great, great people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I have to write a workflow in order to get this device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do what I want it to do, then to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s already failed because I have to bend the device to my will. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this computer, this tiny, adorable, darling little computer of mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do everything right off the bat. And that’s what’s important to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know how they sell ski racks for the top of cars?
⏹️ ▶️ John They should sell that for Macbooks. It would just be like a ski rack for your Macbook
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you just click in
⏹️ ▶️ John all your dongles, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that would really hammer home the point that Marco was getting at before, which is like you buy these computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that are super slim because portability is paramount, right? then everybody needs to bring
⏹️ ▶️ John some other thing with them to make the computer usable for them and that some
⏹️ ▶️ John other thing compromises portability so much more than an extra millimeter would.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I suppose if you never need to bring anything, then you win the portability. Like yes, thank God
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s portable and smaller and light. But if you have to bring a single dongle, then it’s like game over. And having
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual rack attached to the back of them would be a nice way to communicate to Apple like if that ever
⏹️ ▶️ John became a popular product. Like, look, you made this thing portable, but then we had to put a ski rack on it. Thanks a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s the thing. Whenever Apple removes a port, we hear from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who say things like, well, you never used that anyway. Just now, 20 minutes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was ranting about how no Macs have line-in ports anymore, except the Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reasoning behind that, that almost any Apple fan would come up with in two seconds, because it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hard to come up with this reason, is, well, most people don’t use that. I have one, I’ve never used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s what everyone says. Whenever Apple removes something that I like, everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says, well, I’ve never used that port. But like, for everyone, that’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one thing that I would say about that with all my previous laptops is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never used the HDMI port. But a lot of people do use the HDMI port. And you know what, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I say I’ve never used the HDMI port, that’s probably wrong. I’ve probably used it like once or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco twice. And during those once or twice times, I bet I was really glad I had it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a line in jack for audio, like this is one of those things where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t that hard to add. They already have the entire like USB audio codec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip in these computers anyway. Like it would cost them almost nothing additional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And while most people don’t usually use it, sometimes people use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And during those times, it’s really nice to have it. And I would say the same thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many other features. Like I never use the front-facing camera on any of my things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people do, so it’s fine. I never use many of the capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people don’t use all of the capabilities of the computers and the computer devices they have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That does not mean that the correct design decision is to get rid of everything. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this obsession with getting rid of things, minimizing things, deleting things, erasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. The reality is, these are general purpose devices, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more they can do, the more useful they’re gonna be to people, the more they’re gonna help people, the more often they’re gonna be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do what people need them to do, with the equipment they already have, without buying a bunch of dongles and having them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with you all the time. I really, I wish that Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the courage, and I’m using this word deliberately here, have the courage to say yes sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to have the courage to say, you know what, even though most people don’t use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, the SD card slot, for the people that do, that’s incredibly useful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not really being a problem for us to keep it there, so let’s keep it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or how about maybe if we’re going to have a whole new line of computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is reducing the number of ports it has down to almost nothing, How about we give people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most of that port that we possibly can? And maybe they are now, I don’t know. I don’t know the details about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt bandwidth and stuff, but I feel like Apple needs to step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back a little bit from the obsession with removing things because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really does overall make these things less useful in times when people don’t expect that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or don’t welcome that or we have to patch over these wonderful, beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco objects with things like dongle bags in our bags that now we have to carry these additional things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spend the 80 plus dollars on all these additional adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we didn’t need before. With the computers that we bought a few years ago, we didn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dongle to do this common thing and now we do. And so have we really made progress?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that sounds worse to me. There’s nothing wrong with a computer having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a capability that most of its customers don’t use. If it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not costing you a lot to have it there, if it’s not causing some kind of big problem, what’s the big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with having it there for the time when someone does need it and then they can be happily delighted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, oh, my computer can do this new thing that I need to do suddenly right now that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco predict or plan for or buy a dongle for ahead of time. What’s so bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that? I think the answer is it’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get rid of them simplifies things, to get rid of them makes things smaller and thinner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as much as I am 100% behind you on thinness being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bad thing for phones, like we could stand to have our phones get a little thicker, and you’ve been saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a long time and I agree with you. In this case though I have to concede that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing being as thin and light as it is, it’s pretty nice. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly why I bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s differences here. I’m not saying that the one super thin, super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light computer in the lineup has to have a million ports on it, because obviously that actually doesn’t have the room for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But I’m talking about, okay, I got over them removing Ethernet a while ago because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, Ethernet’s really big, so that makes sense. But SD cards and audio jacks and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty small. You can fit those in thin bodies. It isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem. A lot of these things seem to have been removed just because they thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people didn’t use them enough anymore or they were tired of shipping them or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to tell whether some of these things were removed for good reasons that benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the customers or for reasons that only benefit Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the benefit nobody, we all know they just need to add a second USB port to the adorable and then he’s an SD card reader
⏹️ ▶️ John to the big giant expensive 15 inch and like and then maybe put four ports on the escape
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re all happy like it’s not we’re not asking for the moon here, you know, again, you’re not gonna be even a part of these things. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had for USB C on the escape, you’d be able to get over a lot of the weird USB C ecosystems, you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, whatever, I’ll get four dongles and plug them all in and have power, right? And on the Escape,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it is super thin. You don’t have room for much of anything. But, you know, how about a second second port? You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe a third of you can fit in there. That’s fine. And on the big giant 15 inch that has everything in it, SD
⏹️ ▶️ John card plus five USB-C. Who’s going to complain about that? You can probably still complain about the audio and being missing,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I think any analog input at this point is crazy. So it would have to be the optical one with a little, you know, little
⏹️ ▶️ John light at the end of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got rid of optical, too, and all the the new MacBook Pros. They used to be the hybrid jack that has the optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. They have also the iMacs getting rid of them too, which is unfortunate because I use mine, but oh well. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only pick certain battles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they’re saying that the digital audio through USB is the way to go. Like I said, I’m all on
⏹️ ▶️ John board with the USB-C as they are tiny. Just please give us more of them. Or I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can come up with some kind of reliable hub because I suggest the Thunderbolt hub
⏹️ ▶️ John a solution to your problem. But you know, it’s not the type of thing you’d want to order a week before going to
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC and cross your fingers that thing doesn’t flake out because as we all know, hubs are notoriously flaky.
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be nice if it would be nice if Apple didn’t leave this as a third party opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John for those things. So you know, they’re close, like I think the lines are close on, you know, their
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop lines are close on the things they’re including. And again, like I said, a couple shows ago, I’m glad they put USB a
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iMac, because it’s not like there’s not room for it back there. Plenty of room. And boy, isn’t it convenient to not
⏹️ ▶️ John have even more dongles hanging off the back of your fancy new iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m still pinning my hopes on those statements that whoever was said during the Mac roundtable about
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro that they’re thinking about, you know, MacBook Pros that address some of the customer needs.
⏹️ ▶️ John The easy answer is, guess what? You already saw those. They announced them at WWDC. How do you like them but I’m still holding out
⏹️ ▶️ John they they meant they’re gonna add SD card to the 15-inch right? Right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil? I wouldn’t count on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could happen. It could set we… there’s so much room for it there. Also one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I want to argue about your your Thunderbolt hub thing for a second here so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so people in the chat pasted this link to apparently the Belkin did make a Thunderbolt 3 hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so So first of all, it’s $350. And this is not just the one time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost every Thunderbolt hub that has ever existed that actually is Thunderbolt-based and not just USB,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re almost all $300 range in that ballpark. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason this is not a solution, number one, is that it’s very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number two, is that it adds all ports that aren’t USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. It has USB-A ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then two Thunderbolt 2 ports. Who needs that? If you’re moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this new ecosystem, you want Thunderbolt 3 devices that use USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On top of that, it needs its own giant power supply. Let me tell you, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a geek wisdom thing, one of the biggest reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many peripherals or things like peripherals, why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often fail or suck is crappy or unreliable AC, DC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power supplies. Like, basically, if your thing is not bus powered, if it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powered by its own external power brick, not only does that make your desk and stuff messier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also it is way more likely to suck or fail because those power bricks are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap. They’re always crap. And the one thing you do not want is to rely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one of those power bricks or to introduce them into your setup and cause possible noise or interference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They always suck. They’re always cheap pieces of crap. And so anything you can do to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needing external power into a peripheral, you will be better off for it. But that also means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that USB hubs are often either unpowered, which sucks, and you plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in devices and there’s not enough power, or they need these things, or they only have two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. So it’s like any of these hub solutions almost always suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way to make the USB-C ecosystem not suck is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, just have as many of these ports on the computers as you can fit and as the chipset can power and drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, step one, try to avoid the need for hubs at all. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the correct answer, if you’re arguing for the USB-C future slash, now it’s really the present,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re arguing for the USB-C world, You should be totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accommodating and it should be awesome for people who are willing to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and buy USB-C everything. Like, look, like Casey, you bought a new laptop, I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my laptop, like, I went out and I bought a USB-C Ethernet adapter and a USB-C SD card reader
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and USB-C lightning cables. And like, I’m like, you know, if I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna go all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. I’m gonna get all USB-C stuff. But if you do that now, it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks. Because there’s still no USB-C port multiplier hubs out there, as we said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier. So you still have to live in this weird mixed world and you’re dealing with all these unreliable hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with crappy Amazon reviews that are made by no-name companies. And even the ones from good companies like Anchor have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible reviews. And it’s like, it just seems like this whole world of USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relies currently today on this ecosystem of crappy hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kinda ruin the whole thing. like once you go beyond the ports in your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what we need is for the computers to need fewer hubs, A, by having more ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and B, we need good hubs. And I know this is not an exciting topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but think about how long it took to find good USB 3 hubs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just with USB A ports on them. I mean, I don’t know if you guys have good ones. It took me like two years to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good USB 3 hub that didn’t flake out and disconnect drives randomly that were plugged into it and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. still today USB 3.0 which is now comparably ancient, very few hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are good, but there are a few that exist. We need good USB-C hubs now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as far as I can tell from the world out there, I don’t think we have any that actually give you more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ports, let alone good ones, and the ones that give you different ports, again, as I mentioned, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be consistently good. And so if this world is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen, if this is going to actually take off, we need those two things. more ports on the laptops, and we need great hubs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And until that happens, it’s gonna be really a pain to have USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices. And that’s why I kinda feel like, would it kill Apple to make a good hub? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s the most boring Apple product in the world, but they make boring stuff sometimes, like all their little adapters and cables. Like, they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other boring stuff. That would enable this. Like, if Apple just made like a decent, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one to four USB-C hub, that would be great. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think we have seen the entire rest of the electronics world, they have shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us over the last like decade, they can’t do this. They cannot do this reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The entire consumer electronics industry is not capable of putting out reliable USB hubs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we’re lucky if we can find one model of one sometimes that works for a while. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God’s sakes, Apple, just give us a USB hub. Like, that’s all we need. ATP Tipster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your only hope. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Away, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hover. and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him,
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so
Post-show: Follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we didn’t actually complete follow-up yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course we didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We have one…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will we ever complete follow-up? Is it even a possible thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If John has his way, the only way we complete follow-up is by ceasing to record the show anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, we have one piece of follow-up that we did not cover but is very important, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is WWDC Breakfast. So, Rich has written
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and said, I had donuts at WWDC breakfast three out of five days this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe they were gone when you arrived, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John That shows that they’re insufficient donuts. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if they’re gone
⏹️ ▶️ John I arrive, I feel like I was coming at the same time as I show up every year. And it’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the very first person in line, but I’m not super late either. You need to have enough donuts for everybody. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John that means it’s a lot of donuts, but you got to do what you got to do. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would also like to thank our listeners. I have gotten a surprisingly small amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of flack about my completely embarrassing Philadelphia cream cheese incident, and I appreciate you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking pity on me. So thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is summer break though for a lot of people. I bet a lot of people haven’t gotten to the episode yet. That’s
Post-show: Title case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of getting flak, we had—one of us, one of the three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, was very bitter a couple of days ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the three of us had committed the ultimate ATP sin, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not getting title case correct. Because I tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the audio could be totally garbage in an episode, and that would be less offensive to one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my co-hosts than the title case being
⏹️ ▶️ John incorrect. That is not the case at all. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can care about
⏹️ ▶️ John more than one thing at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I like good audio quality. I also like correct title case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those two things, it was particularly frustrating because we discussed on the show, hey, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey use title case,
⏹️ ▶️ John which letters should be capital, just use the website. And then Marco decided, you know what, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like what the website said. I have different opinions about what title case should be. And he changed the title. And I see it in my
⏹️ ▶️ John feed with a capital F and four, and it stabs my eyes like daggers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway I’m blaming Marco for this. If you looked at the title of our show and said, boy these guys don’t know how to use title case, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, I take full responsibility. I looked at the way it was capitalized and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought that does not look right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly how grammar works, you’re right, you did it. This word
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t look like it’s spelled right. I’m gonna change it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, spelling and stylistic capitalization are very different things. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are many rules of both grammar and for things like style manuals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for publications. Many rules that, like, with permission,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you sometimes can break. Like, if you know what you’re doing and you, like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re breaking the rule, but you decide, like, the rule is wrong here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you can break
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco drifted from, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, stylistic breaks and know what you’re doing to just deciding that the rule is wrong. And
⏹️ ▶️ John are two different things I feel like. One is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John competing belief systems that you understand the nuances of and you choose among them. And the other is, I don’t know too much about
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but that seems wrong to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for listeners who are not aware looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list of episodes, basically the title of the last episode was, what was for suckers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something was for suckers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Scrolling. Smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling is for suckers. And titlecase.com, the website that we’ve used that we agreed upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is our like title case capitalization authority. It capitalizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the phrase title case or smooth scrolling is for suckers. It capitalizes the is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not the for because for I guess I guess it probably has a rule not to capitalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prepositions, but to always capitalize verbs. That’s my guess right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the verb so you capitalize that, but then for you don’t and I thought having every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single word capitalizing that and not the four looked wrong. Like having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is capitalized and not the four. And I tried making both of them lowercase, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t look right either. And I made both of them capital, and that looked the least wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the things that we had.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing with style guides is, you have a agreed upon set of rules that you use, and you can change the style
⏹️ ▶️ John guide, but you can’t say, for this instance, I’m gonna ignore the style guide, because why even have the style guide then, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like consistency. And titlecase.com, I do not hold up as, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how I would capitalize it either. Like I would do it differently if I was, but this was just the tiebreaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like to make Casey’s life easy so he doesn’t have to guess and we don’t have to discuss it, just go to this website. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the website’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff that we don’t agree with, but it’s just consistent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you not able to deviate from the thing that you’ve decided is consistent if you think it’s wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it’s wrong too. I would do lowercase i and lowercase f. That’s what I would have done, but I deferred to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website. And I would have settled for that. all I decided was that capital I lowercase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F looked wrong and either they should both be lowercase or they should both be capital.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I just wanted to assign blame. That’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it’s totally my fault. I overrode it and I knew you would be mad and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a calculated risk like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I wouldn’t notice which is…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. I knew you would notice. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance you were not going to notice. But it was a calculated risk based on like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think John is relatively happy with me. you know, as much as he can be these days. I think I could probably get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away with doing this maybe once a year. And this seems like a good time to do it because the way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco titlecase.com did this looks so bad to me. So I decided
⏹️ ▶️ John should spend the rest of the year making your peace with titlecase.com, as I have. Because again, it’s not the way I would capitalize
⏹️ ▶️ John either. You have to make your peace with it. And Casey can spend the rest of the year working on his comma usage. I wonder if I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it and just change it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where where was there a an aggressive amount of commas and what what did you have
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t repair anything. I just left it as is but like all right, so what do we got here
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for aggressive? You mean in the show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the listener so Casey usually writes all or almost all of the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John John’s ancient comma slow comma Mac Pro. Oh, yeah, it shouldn’t be after slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should be gone. Yeah, that’s right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That it’s I stand by it still looks right to me sitting here today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no you’re ruining my argument
⏹️ ▶️ John Written languages does it look right to Marco or Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, this is a rule number. That is wrong It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John No one reads the show notes anyway, it’s fine. But a lot of people do read the title, so…