244: The Mac Renaissance
19 Oct 2017How many iMac Pros will Marco buy before the Mac Pro comes out?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: ATP 243 notes
- Follow up:
#askatp- Marco's MacBook Pro
- MacBook keyboard failures
- Somehow Casey got backed into a ton of Mac Pro talk (🙄 –Ed.)
- Special ending theme by Jonathan Mann! Support Jonathan's work:
- YouTube channel
- Patreon
- Hire him to write a song for you
- Songonauts podcast from The Truth: An '80s cartoon for your ears. It's about Doc, Penny and Jojo who are in a band that's going nowhere - until they find a magical drum machine that transports them into their songs.
- Post-show: The VBR experiment
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Rethink what your money can do.
- Hover: Find a domain name for your passion. Get 10% off your first purchase.
- Away: Travel smarter with the suitcase that charges your phone. Get $20 off with code ATP.
Chapters
- Pre-show: K-I-S-S-I-N-G 🖼️
- Follow-up: Sky exclusivity
- Follow-up: Chairs
- Follow-up: Express repairs
- Follow-up: Watch notifications
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- #askatp: User-less Plex 🖼️
- #askatp: ARM Mac Pro 🖼️
- #askatp: iMac Pro quantity 🖼️
- Why is Marco on his MacBook Pro? 🖼️
- iMac Pro thermals
- Sponsor: Hover and .DESIGN
- Pro industrial design 🖼️
- Sponsor: Betterment
- MacBook Redux 🖼️
- MacBook keyboard failure
- Face ID in Macs?
- Special theme by Jonathan Mann 🖼️
- Post-show: VBR experiment 🖼️
Pre-show: K-I-S-S-I-N-G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, did you ever modify last week’s show notes? Marco and I had a bet going to see when you would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t even look at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, you didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nothing. Nothing, dad. Don’t look. Don’t look, dad. Don’t look, dad. It’s fine, dad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew about the dollar signs, free show, Marco. Is it the title? Because it’s all like small caps on the website,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can’t tell if that title
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is messed up. No, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollar signs in your menu bar case here, or have you fixed that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I fixed it during recording.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at it. You’re gonna think I’m gonna complain about the emoji FOMO thing? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ve already skipped over it then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t know. What am I looking at? Tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos and Google sitting in a tree. Anchor in Amazon. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You messed it up by
⏹️ ▶️ John putting the word R in there. R is not in the nursery rhyme. Oh, that is true. That’s all I complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about. I have no problem with you doing a cute thing in the show notes. I have a problem with you not knowing how the K-I-S-S-I-N-G
⏹️ ▶️ John song goes. It would be Sonos and Google sitting in a tree.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ellipsis. Next line would be K-S-S-I-N-G. You wouldn’t say anchor and Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like have you not, you messed it up. But it was two different topics. I was trying to, I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John well you blew it. I’m gonna blow it. Hahaha. We’ll see you
Follow-up: Sky exclusivity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m speaking to you two fine gentlemen tonight from the peaks of high Sierra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as am I actually but for a bad reason all that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I forgot to put that in. That should be a topic today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just put it in and I now have moved it up to the top But we can’t get there yet because we have to do some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up. So since we already are enticing the listeners Let’s just dive right in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. Can you tell me about sky platform? exclusivity if you please
⏹️ ▶️ John I speculated on the last show that Sky’s exclusivity to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV would be, just like every other exclusive in the gaming world, a timed exclusive, and that is actually confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John on that game company’s website. It says, arriving first on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Additional
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms to follow. No time window given, but we’ll see how that goes. So I might just be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John hold out until it comes out on PS4 or whatever.
Follow-up: Chairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And tell me about your chair,
⏹️ ▶️ John please So I have my chair my ridiculously expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John her Miller chair that I’ve been sitting on since like the last show that where we talked about it
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe two shows ago I forget but I just want to give an update on how that’s going. So I did take
⏹️ ▶️ John off both of the arms I had to order another Torx wrench because the one that I had couldn’t fit
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little space or whatever, but it’s always good to have more Allen keys and Torx wrenches,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in metric and standard and all sorts of sizes. Although Torx, it just comes in its own little
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes. T3 is what I needed. Anyway, arms are off. T3 or
⏹️ ▶️ John T30? I forget. Anyway, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. I don’t think it matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John It matters if you want to take the arms off your chair.
⏹️ ▶️ John of Torx wrench things, but they didn’t fit. And they don’t make it, a couple of the screws are
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to get at because the levers that come out that do, that adjust the seat are kind of in the way but it’s not that bad just
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon or some. So I’ve been sitting on that chair for a while and I have just some follow-up impressions
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. I like it. You know it’s it takes a little bit of getting used to
⏹️ ▶️ John because it doesn’t feel like regular chairs but I think I’ve settled into it pretty well. Two things
⏹️ ▶️ John about it have annoyed me so far. One there is an adjustment on it to make the the seat length
⏹️ ▶️ John like basically from the back to the front of the seat to make it longer which is great for people with long legs like me because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not supposed to have like half your leg hanging off the front of the thing so you can make the seat longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish more cars had this. Some of them do. Some cars actually have this adjustment to sort of support your legs more,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, more down towards your knee. They say you’re supposed to have like, you know, two inches between the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of your knee or the back of your calf or whatever and then the seat front. So the Herm Miller
⏹️ ▶️ John Embody has two big handles that you can grab and slide out the front part of the chair,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I do, but unless you are in in a situation where you’re sharing your chair with somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ John and constantly switching back and forth, this, like many of the adjustments on chairs, is something that you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John do once or twice in the beginning when you’re getting used to the chair and you’ll eventually decide what
⏹️ ▶️ John adjustment setting is right for me. There’s only a few choices there, there’s not like infinite adjustability,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you find how the seat is comfortable for you and you leave it there. But for the entire time
⏹️ ▶️ John you own this chair, these two Mickey Mouse ears, coffee cup mug handles
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be sticking out the front of your chair. And every time I get into and out of my chair, somehow I bump
⏹️ ▶️ John into those things. They’re like ears, they’re like useless ears, fossilized ears poking out of the front of the chair.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t like that. Second thing is, since I have it extended almost as far as it will go, I think maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ John do have it as far as it will go for my long legs, there’s like a little bit of a creakiness
⏹️ ▶️ John in the front of the chair as that little telescoping thing kind of flexes in its plastic grooves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe that squeak will go away over time. Maybe it won’t, but it’s not a sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a sound and a feeling that matches up with the price of this chair. So I don’t really like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the final thing, there’s a lot of stuff under the chair for all of the spring loaded, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanisms that handle the thing where you lean back in the chair. And
⏹️ ▶️ John some of it probably also handles like the back tension. And then there’s the gas cylinder thing for the height of the chair.
⏹️ ▶️ John that giant box of works that’s basically under your butt takes up a surprising amount of room. And you say,
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares about that room? Nothing’s going on under your chair, right? Well, apparently I’m someone who occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John crosses his legs and shoves both his feet underneath the bottom of the seat, resting them on the
⏹️ ▶️ John top of the little leg thingies. And I didn’t know I did this as much as I do until my heel
⏹️ ▶️ John started hitting that giant box that I’m now sitting on. And I suppose I could get used to it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m still hitting my heels in that box a surprising amount of time. just like I kind of wish I kind of wish that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John there I kind of wish I had that free space to shove my feet into again
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s my update on the embody mostly I like it I think I’m definitely gonna keep it
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m sitting right now on the steel case gesture chair which just arrived today
⏹️ ▶️ John this still has arms on it and they’re gonna be much more difficult to take off I’m already puzzling over how I’m going to manage
⏹️ ▶️ John this but for now the arms are on and I’m sitting on it definitely feels different than the Embody.
⏹️ ▶️ John But and it has, right away, its adjustment for the length of the seat is to move
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire seat forward so it’s all just one unit there’s no extended bit. It has less creaky bits on it
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s more room underneath it for me to cross my legs. But it definitely feels different than the Embody. It
⏹️ ▶️ John feels more like a normal chair and I’m not sure if I like it as much as the Embody. But I’m just sitting in it for
⏹️ ▶️ John five minutes here so probably next show I’ll have a more longer term update on the comparison of these two chairs
⏹️ ▶️ John and I better hurry up because I got like 30 days for both of them to decide. Probably want my
⏹️ ▶️ John bazillion dollars back for these chairs.
Follow-up: Express repairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last episode I was lamenting the fact that if you have an issue with your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Pixel phone, you can get online and you can tell Google, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got an issue and they’ll overnight you a box with a replacement Pixel and then you put your broken Pixel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the box and ship it back to them. And I thought, man, that would be really awesome to be able to do that with Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish that was a thing. And a handful of people wrote in to say it is a thing. So John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tooker pointed me to AppleCare Plus Express Replacement Service,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is if you have AppleCare Plus, a way that you can basically do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exact same thing. They ship you a box and then you put your thing in the box that the new thing came in, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a joke here from Saturday Night Live that I’m trying to avoid. Anyway, Prem wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, I’ve done this and here’s what it looks like. And so we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s exactly what you would expect to see. So it turns out this is an option. I just had no idea, which if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you live far away from an Apple store, which most of the country probably does, That’s pretty awesome.
Follow-up: Watch notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally via Prem, they pointed me to a KBase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article, hi Steven, entitled, How to Use Your Apple Watch Without Your iPhone Nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it says a handful of things in there, but one of the things it says is to receive SMS, MMS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or push notifications from third party apps on your Apple Watch Series 3 GPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cellular, your paired iPhone must be powered on and connected to Wi-Fi or cellular, but it doesn’t need to be nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that kind of hints to me that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is proxying push notifications. I have since heard reports that WhatsApp,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s what the app was. I know that that is an app. I just can’t remember what people were citing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a handful of people cited something, and I think it was WhatsApp, as not having an Apple Watch app at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, yet people receiving push notifications via cellular. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the developers of Due actually wrote us to say, Due uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey local notifications. I think the scheduled notifications were copied from the iPhone to the watch the last time they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked. And I think one of us had theorized that that may be the case. But it sure sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, and I have since gotten tacit confirmation from a couple of little birdies, that Apple is indeed proxying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey push notifications via, I guess, iCloud or something, in order for your watch, your cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch, to receive push notifications, even if it’s not in range. I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several people explain to me that I’m a moron and that actually Bluetooth works very far, and I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moron that the watch was on wifi, but I assure you, I checked to see what the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says it was on, and it said it was on cellular at the time. So yes, I’m aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the watch does work on Bluetooth and Bluetooth works further away than one would expect. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works on wifi. I don’t know why it wasn’t on wifi in this particular instance, but the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said it was on cellular and I am inclined to believe the watch. So in summary, it sure does sound like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is proxying iPhone push notifications, which is pretty cool.
Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
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#askatp: User-less Plex
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪ Upbeat music ♪ Moving on to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ask ATP. Jason Townsend writes in, for those who run Plex on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you run it with no logged in user? And I can speak for myself and say, I don’t. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is running as part of my user that I’m using right now on this very Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this user’s pretty much always logged in, and that’s okay for me. It may not be okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you, listener, but it’s okay for me. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was hoping you had an answer to this. That’s why I put it in there. I’m like, oh, Casey probably knows how to do this because
⏹️ ▶️ John do the same thing. It’s running as, actually running as my wife’s user, and she’s always logged in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, here’s the thing. You have to be logged in,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t have to be the frontmost user. So if one of my kids comes up and is doing their homework on their account
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same computer, As long as my wife is logged in in the background, Plex still works and runs. So you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John leave their account as the frontmost. But if there’s a way to run it without you being logged in, like cron
⏹️ ▶️ John it and run it as, you know, some other user with no GUI or whatever, I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I haven’t even tried to do it. But I mean, maybe, have you tried anything, Casey? Or are you just like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just always logged in, so I have no need for this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re exactly right. I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John need for it. Yeah, so we’re not gonna say that it can’t be done, just that neither of us has
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to do it. Marco, I assume the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, to me, the idea of running it like without having a logged in user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like as root never even occurred to me because that’s not how I would think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run things that are on a Mac in a server role. Like, even though I know there are things that Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do as a server with no user, like, you know, the built in Apache server and stuff like that, many of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you would run a Mac server for require there to be some kind of application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in user space running to serve those tasks. So the idea of running a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some kind of server role without a logged in user has never even occurred to me to even think about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know that was not the answer that you were looking for, Jason, and I’m sorry for that, but that is the answer for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. And if you happen to know how to do this, I would be curious to hear. It’s not really solving a need that I have, but I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be curious to hear. here, so do write in and let us know. and Jason as well.
#askatp: ARM Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom Myers asks, could you guys help explain why a massively multi-core ARM Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, oh, nevermind, we don’t have to talk about this. Moving on. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John kidding. That’s what you
⏹️ ▶️ John get for not picking the questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually meant to earlier today and I got sidetracked at work and never did. And actually, to be honest, I’m curious to hear your answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, John. So let me, let me reread it. Could you guys help explain why massively multi-core ARM Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t be viable? A 64 core, et cetera, A11X architecture, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it would be viable, but we’ve talked about this on the show before.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a couple of aspects to this. You know, so we all know that Apple makes really fast system-on-a-chip for their
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, and then they make even faster ones that they use in their iPads. And the number of cores in them
⏹️ ▶️ John has been increasing from one, and now they’re up to four in the phone, right? Is it four?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, well, with the 8 series, it’s now six.
⏹️ ▶️ John Six. You got the four slow ones and the two fast ones? Yeah. Anyway, that’s a lot of cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John than they had before. But as we discussed last time this came up,
⏹️ ▶️ John to make something that doesn’t, you know, that’s not like a little system on a chip that takes iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John power but instead takes 150 watts or something like a, you know, a Xeon class CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a very different kind of design. You can’t say, well, because we’ve made a chip for the iPad that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than all of our laptops, right, or all faster than our cheap laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve basically done all the work to make the Xeon class thing and you haven’t. There’s a lot more that goes into
⏹️ ▶️ John making a Xeon class CPU than just saying, oh, we have a core and we’ll just multiply it out. It’s not like a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John where you just, you know, take the execution units and just add more of them. And even that gets more complicated. There’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of things having to do with IO and PCI express lanes and figuring out the whole Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and the various chip sets, not to mention all the, the multiple cores and the cache coherency
⏹️ ▶️ John and the ECC and all sorts of other things that you know it’s not to say they couldn’t do it they
⏹️ ▶️ John would I’m sure they would do an excellent job it’s just to say that they by having lap by
⏹️ ▶️ John having an iPad and phone chips they haven’t done all the work so if
⏹️ ▶️ John they wanted to make one they could but it’s a lot of additional work and the question we’ve always had is
⏹️ ▶️ John is it worthwhile for Apple to do all that additional work to essentially compete with Xeons for
⏹️ ▶️ John a line of computers that they sell very very few of compared to anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe that’s the answer to the viability question. Technically viable, sure, but Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do a ton of work. Financially viable, can Apple justify that ton of work? Maybe they will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John because I mean as people have been benchmarking the new iPhone 8 and 8 plus
⏹️ ▶️ John against Mac laptops, like modern Mac laptops that you can buy right now that are not like last year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John models, and seeing how fast the system on a chip is the case
⏹️ ▶️ John for arm-powered Mac laptops is getting stronger and stronger but the case
⏹️ ▶️ John for arm-powered Mac pros I mean if Apple started this project four years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John and has a Xeon class arm CPU waiting in the wings for like next year’s Mac Pro then fine but if they
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t started that project now you’re not gonna see one of these for a long time it would cost a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money it It would take a lot of time. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Intel does pretty well in the high end, perhaps better than they do in the low
⏹️ ▶️ John end and the laptop space. So best case scenario, Apple makes something that is some single to double
⏹️ ▶️ John digit percentage faster than Intel. And you don’t really get a lot of extra points for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it with less power is the unclass thing because you’re not running them off battery. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of these machines is they’re plugged into the wall And it’s like a huge amount of power going into them
⏹️ ▶️ John to power everything, the RAM, the separate GPU, the multiple GPUs and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. So I think it’s viable, but it may
⏹️ ▶️ John not be financially the best thing for Apple to do. And they have a lot of work to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still super curious to see if, to one day discover if we’ll ever see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ARM-based MacBook Pro. Marco has thoughts about MacBook Pros these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t actually put that in as a topic, but we can talk about that if we want. But
⏹️ ▶️ John before we before we leave this, the I would be super excited to see I think everybody would be every computer nerd
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like someone wants to compete with high end CPUs with Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be great. And like I said, Apple has shown that it’s got really good talent to make, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a question of will does Apple want to make a chip like this? Because if they want to I bet they could
⏹️ ▶️ John do a really good job and it would be super cool but it still strikes me as one of those fantasies like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the halo car kind of fantasy of like Apple’s gonna make everything of its own
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s gonna make a special computer that’s faster than anybody else’s cuz you’re gonna make their own CPU and
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be super cool but I just feel like it’s still a pipe dream let’s baby steps let’s get let’s get a new Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime this century and then we’ll think about putting a 64 core
#askatp: iMac Pro quantity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richard Ernie writes in and asks a disturbingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable question. And that question is, how many iMac Pros do you think Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will buy before the launch of the Mac Pro? I have an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also have an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Okay. What do you guys think the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer will be? I feel like the answer should be one, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will presumably buy the most expensive and most ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro you possibly can in the way only Marco can do, and that should be it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I fear you will somehow talk yourself into, oh, this one thing I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t need and or will make it worse. So like as an example, the dual graphics card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pros. I know there won’t be a direct equivalent of that in the iMac Pro, but something along those lines. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand that the dual graphics card MacBook Pros are hypothetically better, but they’re better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in ways that don’t matter to me. So I won’t get the maxed out top of the line MacBook Pro. Instead, I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different MacBook Pro. So that is the one, I don’t know, like wildcard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you somehow convince yourself that, oh, maybe I don’t need the cranked to 11 version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the iMac Pro, then I could see you in for two. Because the first one will be the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I don’t need everything. And then you’ll decide, oh, that was a terrible mistake. I need everything. And then you’ll get the one you should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten in the first place. John.
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re overthinking it but also under thinking it my answer to this is uh…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what does that mean? well
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see in a second so he’s overthinking it because he’s got his answer of one but then he’s hedging and what about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two blah blah blah but you’re also under
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking it and you’re forgetting a very important factor when i read this question i had an immediate answer and the answer is he will buy
⏹️ ▶️ John two before the launch of the mac pro why will he buy two because he’ll get one because he’s impatient and he’ll buy one for tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer i did not even think about that
⏹️ ▶️ John Going to buy two iMac pros before the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right That is the answer so Marco not that not that it matters because you’re gonna be wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what do you think the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I? Think the answer is most likely to be one, but might be zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I call foul right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco now Somebody mark this date
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said most likely one
⏹️ ▶️ John all right go ahead. Let him let him explain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay? So in John way, I’ll tell you that you’re both right and wrong and John is both wrong and right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the generous plan that would have me buying one is I buy one for myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the Mac Pro comes out I give it to Tiff and I get myself a Mac Pro. The case for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe being zero, it basically leads into the first topic that we have on this list which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco labeled in the chat.
Why is Marco on his MacBook Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that why is Marco on his MacBook Pro? And the reason why is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iMac has some issues that I wanted to get repaired in the eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days left in the warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spiders. Ah, good call. You know, one of those is that the screen has image retention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is probably the biggest issue. The issue that like for long-term value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the ability to sell it for a reasonable price when I’m done with it, I wanna get that fixed. because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen has a screen only issue. I am currently without my main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop computer for probably a week, maybe a little bit less if I’m lucky. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible, like it’s incredibly disruptive. So I have, let me show you my desktop setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. I’ll paste the link in the chat. So the picture I’ve just shown you is what I’m podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey on tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Are you now the mayor of Dongletown as well? I gotta wait for the picture to come in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is tremendous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s like the old times. You need some soda cans.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m currently very much not satisfied With owning an iMac as my primary computer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as I missed the crap out of it I really wish it was separate from the screen because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then if something went wrong with the screen I could just get the screen fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if something went wrong with the Mac Pro I could plug in a laptop to the screen on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desk and use that as a stand-in desktop while I got the desktop serviced
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re not enough of a hardware hoarder to have extra screens around so say it was separate You just had to get the screen repaired You’d have
⏹️ ▶️ John a headless computer with no screen And you still have to use your laptop because what are you gonna hook up the body of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer to? Well, I could get another screen like I could I could
⏹️ ▶️ John overnight another screen I forgot it but buying solves everything buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get the other one fixed and that’s harder to do when it’s iMac like I’m not gonna buy a whole new iMac to use For a week and then return it
⏹️ ▶️ John no, but you’d buy a new 5k monitor for a thousand bucks no problem. Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, if I’m losing a week of productivity here using my laptop as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my only computer, it’s it and like trying to do iOS development on this, it’s crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re not you’re not losing a week. You’re not losing a week. You are you are perfectly capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of being productive. You’re just you’re too fussy to want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. No, I am doing it. Like I am powering through and doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it, but it sucks. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s at substantial reduction of of productivity to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose eight inches of screen space of screen diagonal too for a while. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not great. At times like this, I really make a mental note to say, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the desktop next time. Like just buy the Mac Pro next time. So I really don’t like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of spending a lot of money on an iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might potentially still have, that would still have this limitation of like, If anything goes wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, I lose everything for the time it takes to get it serviced. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this iMac is only three years old, minus eight days, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already has like a few little annoying things about it, and I can already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like, I might not want to use this after, you know, after the Mac Pro comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And I’m assuming for this discussion that the Mac Pro is probably coming out next summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if the Mac Pro comes out way later than that, like if it ends up being 2019 or next winter, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, this might change things, but I might actually just get zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pros because the iMac Pro concerns me in the sense that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard to get an iMac to function well and be useful for 10 years. John’s Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is actually doing that. And you’re gonna pay the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of John’s Mac Pro for an iMac Pro. You’re gonna pay the Xeon tax,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna pay the Pro tax, you’re gonna you were gonna pay like what did they say the base price was five
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand five thousand but you forget how cheap this was even accounting for inflation is ten years ago this is only like twenty
⏹️ ▶️ John some 22 twenty three hundred dollars this was back when the Mac Pros were incredibly cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got yeah exactly yeah even with inflation you’re coming out I think pretty far ahead with that and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro to me like you do pay a lot for it but they last pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much indefinitely like they like they will last as long as you need them to last. And if something does go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong with them, you have a much better chance of being able to practically and economically service it yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the road when it’s out of warranty, etc. And so the lifespan of a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tends to be longer than the lifespan of an iMac. And I’m not considering the cylinder ones when I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this. Yeah, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying. You’re thinking of the old Mac Pros. That’s like, that’s last decade thinking. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, so that was the case. But the most recent Mac Pro Apple has made and none of those things are true about. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John unreliable from the start, it wasn’t easy to repair yourself, and people aren’t using them well for 10 years. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you kind of have to take a wait and see, and that maybe you won’t have a choice of something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is big, reliable, and easy to repair, right? Maybe like maybe that won’t be one of your options.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your option instead will be, you know, a faster, hopefully quieter,
⏹️ ▶️ John and more powerful separate screen thing, but that is just as unreliable as
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the more recent Apple hardware is, and just as weird and flaky, and the first generation has strange
⏹️ ▶️ John problems and all that stuff. I’m trying to be pessimistic, but we’re all kind of thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the new Mac Pros will be like the old ones, and the Cylinder was an aberration. I think that’s still an open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re totally right. It is. I think the Cylinder has taught them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some lessons. I would not expect a return to a giant tower, but I would hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s maybe kind of something in the middle there. Like something between a sealed up cylinder that you can do nothing to and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of interchangeable parts thing. Maybe whether it’s a tower or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Perhaps a magnesium cube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure I want to commit to an iMac. Now if the Mac Pro was totally dead and they said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, okay, we’re launching the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro is discontinued, we’re never going to make one again, we’re just doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iMac Pro. Then this decision is easy. course I would buy one. But because there is a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allegedly coming, I want to wait to see what that is first before I decide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if it’s closer to what I want in having things separate and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having even crazier CPU options and stuff like that, who knows? If it’s more what I want.
iMac Pro thermals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would choose that. The other thing I’m worried about with the iMac Pro is thermals. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a completely new thermal design that basically they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wedging much, much higher wattage hotter running parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside of an enclosure that they didn’t design the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size for. Like, they took the size of the other iMac and it seemed that they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had as a design goal fit these higher-end hotter parts inside of this case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we designed for this other computer and while they seem to have done a lot of work about the internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design of it and dealing with the internal arrangement of those thermals and everything the fact that they didn’t design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the external case for it that they basically said you know wedge this into that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will is probably going to have limitations and side effects that I don’t like so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are going to overheat and and you know be bad over time that’s another the problem I have with my iMac is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GPU fan is now, or the GPU now runs too hot, and the fan goes up constantly, and it’s audible in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my recordings, which is one of the reasons I finally got it fixed, because I can’t have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that’s because these parts in that case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I got top of the line parts when it was out, so these are running pretty hot over three years, and eventually that starts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have problems with cooling. I fear whether the iMac Pro will have those problems or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, because you’re taking these hot parts and putting them into a case that is designed to be thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason, even though nobody cares about how thick their desktop display is on the back. But it’s designed to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin, rather than being designed to hold Pro components. The Mac Pro Towers, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other hand, with the exception of the cylinder, of course, although even the cylinder did have a really clever cooling design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was really good, as long as you didn’t use the GPUs. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro Towers were always like, we’re gonna design a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosure, a complete shape around being able to hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cool the entire range of high-end Pro parts that we’re gonna sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this thing. So I think it was always more likely that there would be fewer problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermals and things like that with the Mac Pro Towers than with the iMacs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m, again, like with the iMac Pro, we still don’t know how loud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it gonna be? Like are the fans gonna spin up constantly and be audible or not? Because the Mac Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the same noise level regardless of what they’re doing pretty much. So like a Mac Pro, you know, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hear it. An iMac, you hear it if you push it. And that’s kind of ungraceful and it kind of suggests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermals don’t have a lot of headroom and everything else. Now there was talk, there was a weird Geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result that may or may not be real, we don’t really know. People are believing that it might be real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be the new iMac Pro CPUs, and they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reporting that they were basically an alternate version of the workstation class. So Xeons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically the highest performance Xeons for desktops, they end in W for workstation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end of their model number, and this usually means the absolute highest clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed for that core count that is available, because it’s gonna burn lots of power, so it’s not quite great for big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server racks, but it’s gonna burn lots of power, but it’s going to be really, really fast for a desktop and it’s going to need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge fan. So those parts usually end in W. The ones in Geekbench ended in WB or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just B, I think, anyway, and they seem to be running at lower clock speeds than what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’d expect. Still good, still really fast, but it looks like they might be having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use lower wattage chips in these iMacs than what a full Xeon workstation chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be in like a tower. And that’s most likely for thermal reads, because those are 140 watt chips, 150 watt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips usually. and an iMac chassis is usually designed to hold, I think, like a 60 or 80 watt chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, again, they have redesigned the internals of this to offer more cooling to fit higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wattage parts, but they also need to leave room for the GPU. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, we still don’t know what the trade-offs are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get workstation-grade components into an iMac Pro, into that same case size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m guessing the trade-offs are gonna be related to fan noise under load
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a possible heat sealing that might limit the range of performance they can get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those processors. Whereas the full-blown Mac Pro that I hope will come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out sometime next year, that shouldn’t have those limitations. That should be able to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full wattage parts, that should have a cooling system that has lots of headroom and that can cool quietly under load.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if it will, but it should, because the previous ones did. All of them. Even the 2013 had that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope the Mac Pro offers those things and if it does, that’s the computer I want to buy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the iMac Pro. But because neither of these computers are out yet, there’s probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be other factors that go into it. So if possible, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my iMac, coming back from repair, can last me until the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro comes out. So I can then decide then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no way you will see that hot-looking new iMac Pro and say, No thank you, I’ll wait.
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⏹️ ▶️ John Also, speaking of industrial design and cooling, in one of the many interviews
⏹️ ▶️ John and books that never seems to happen, if I could get like Johnny Ive and all of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John John Rubenstein and all the people together and ask them about like past Apple designs,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to know what changed between
⏹️ ▶️ John nowadays and back when Apple made
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheese grater. Because if you think about the cheese grater, and this is what I always hope that the new Mac Pro design will be, but who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’ll actually be. The cheese grater, as you noted, and as Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ John in his white world said, I think in the introduction for the original cheese grater, that the Power Mac G5,
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, the design of it was not so much like all the modern Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ive, or not just Johnny Ive, but the modern Apple designs like by, by Johnny Ives design team where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we wanted to boil it down to its essence and find, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey uncomplicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John simple, direct, blah, blah, blah, all the things they do for things that are like phones or portable things where
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want a lot of gigos hanging off it. Whereas the cheese grater was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we wanted to be honest about the fact that the main job of this thing is to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a heat exchanger, like it was modeled off of heat exchangers or air exchangers like that are up in
⏹️ ▶️ John rooms that suck in air and one temperature on one side and eject it out the other side, a different temperature. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody said like the actual cheese grater was modeled off a heat exchanger, right? And so it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John designed to be the most sort of, well, you know, it was designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be true to its purpose, but But its purpose wasn’t to be a beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John object, right? Its purpose wasn’t to be portable and uncomplicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and simple and obvious. Its purpose was to exchange heat. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was the purpose. And so it was designed with that
⏹️ ▶️ John as a goal. And it seems like so many things that Apple makes nowadays are designed with
⏹️ ▶️ John a simplicity of form as a goal, which is a fine goal, especially for portable things. But as you said, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John really cares that much about the simplicity of form. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John a more honest iMac Pro on the back of it would have looked like the back of a transformer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it would have looked like a giant heat sink. It would have had bulges and flares and fins. Or it would have looked like the underside
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a Ferrari. Like all sorts of ground effects and like a diffuser. Like it would
⏹️ ▶️ John say the back of this computer is all about ejecting heat. Because honestly speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the purpose of this computer? It’s the iMac Pro. It’s not the iMac that’s simple and elegant and just looks like a screen and you
⏹️ ▶️ John say, where’s the computer? No, this is the iMac Pro. Its job is to be the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John possible all-in-one computer that human beings can make. And the main problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of a fast all-in-one computer is getting rid of the damn heat. So the back of it looks crazy and just
⏹️ ▶️ John as big and chunky and has heat coming out the wazoo. And that’s what the cheese grater
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It is a big, giant thing. Cold air in front, hot air out back. Gigantic fans, nine fans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs was raving or however many of the original one had, look at
⏹️ ▶️ John these fans, they’re all computer controlled to be just the right amount of cooling at the right, so they’re not all running full blast all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. You know, there is an elegance to it, but it is so purpose built to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John house all that hot stuff and get it cooled. So I hope the Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the trash camera. It’s like, what is the essence? What a form of the Mac Pro? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I want it to be functional and the function is heat exchange and things
⏹️ ▶️ John whose function is heat exchange don’t look like lozenges, bars of soap, or
⏹️ ▶️ John simple, elegant designs. I mean, in many respects, the Chimney Mac Pro, the Trashcan Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John does have a purity of purpose, cold air in bottom, hot air out top, just like the G4 Cube, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was not designed to be like, how much heat can we get rid of? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John they just had, you know, the two GPUs in there and the CPU, and they couldn’t even cool them well enough. Like, so it was a clever
⏹️ ▶️ John design for its size, but it was very, very small. If you want to build something with a massive heat exchanger capacity,
⏹️ ▶️ John you make it bigger. You wanna have excess capacity, not be right on the borderline. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, getting back to what I was saying, I would ask them like, it’s like the same people who were there. Johnny Ive made the cheese grater,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now he’s making all these beautiful featureless things with no ports on them. What changed?
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely it wasn’t Steve Jobs saying, please make me something that looks like the underside of a Ferrari, right? So someone
⏹️ ▶️ John there was like, okay, was like in the design brief, the main job of
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that you are making is to be an efficient heat exchanger. Do that in the most elegant way that you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t imagine Steve Jobs was forcing Johnny out to do that. Steve Jobs probably wanted it to be like the trash can. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t like all the big, you know, fins and, and you know, holes all over the front and back
⏹️ ▶️ John and giant fans and stuff. He just accepts that as a cost of doing business, but they did the best job they could with it. But it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the same people are there, but their philosophy has changed. And Apple has stopped making computers
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, whose purpose is not to be simple, obvious, white,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple pencil with no things on it and just this beautiful, perfect form.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, when Johnny comes on the show, I’ll ask him about it and see, like, has he changed his mind? Has
⏹️ ▶️ John his philosophy evolved? Was there someone forcing him to make those older computers the way
⏹️ ▶️ John they were? Was someone forcing him to put all those ports on the side of his laptops? Like, I don’t know, so many questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny, come on the show, we’ll talk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s gonna happen. No, I mean, I totally agree. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish Apple, you know, like, you know, Apple is, you know, famously, you know, talked about courage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remove the headphone jack and, you know, that, and Apple is a very, is considered a very bold company for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the courageous designs they make. What they lack, it seems like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, in the, in the hardware designs of their computers, is not courage, but confidence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They need the confidence to know that they can make something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sacrifices visual symmetry for functionality. That doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take courage, it takes confidence. Because you have to be able to know in your head that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if the press says, Oh, you know, it got thicker. Or, wow, that iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks pretty thick from the back, or whatever. Apple has to be confident enough to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to say We we believe in our design because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better that way even though you’re saying it doesn’t look as good or whatever We know that it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better And it seems like they don’t have that confidence anymore or it’s not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know properly enforced somewhere along the way or something because a great computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing about its physical form should detract from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how great of a computer it can be. And there are certain models in the lineup where you’d make a different choice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so things like the 12-inch MacBook, where the whole role of this computer is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the absolute smallest, thinnest, lightest computer we can make and have it still be remotely usable. So then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make different trade-offs. But as you go up the line, as you get more and more to the larger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher-end and pro machines, and especially once you get into things like desktops, which are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro by nature and have very different physical demands around them and very different usage around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, the decision always has to be made the other way of, yeah, you know what, you can make it beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have the confidence to know that you can make a beautiful design while still letting it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco function well as the computer that it has to be. And it seems like Apple doesn’t have that confidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore or at least, or they don’t have that ability anymore, which is even more concerning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand your point. I deeply disagree. And I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showing external confidence by doing things like going all in on USB-C, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C was not, it did not have a terribly great story when the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the MacBook Pros went all in on USB-C. And it’s gotten better, but as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently wrote about- I was gonna say, the story isn’t that great now. No, no, no, and that’s exactly what I was gonna say. It’s gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, but without question, there is a long way to go. And I thought your post touched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that really well. Or I shouldn’t say touch on it. It handled it really well. Um, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they’re showing external confidence, but. With a few tweaks. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I would say is it’s the internal confidence that they lack. It’s the internal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confidence for some designer or whomever to go to Johnny and say, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe we should make this a little thicker, or you know what, maybe more than one port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Mac book adorable would be useful. Or you know what? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe wasn’t so bad. And I think the problem is internal courage to stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to whoever’s calling the shots on why it is these things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, as it appears to us, very crippled. Like they’re great machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love my MacBook Adorable. I really do. But damned if it wouldn’t be great if I had one more port on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, you know, or damned if it wouldn’t be great if I had MagSafe on it, because just yesterday, I think it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ripped it off my nightstand. It was charging on my night. Oh god. I caught the cable with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my foot and it came flying off my nightstand It’s fine. Thankfully, but did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it land in a pool of water? No, it did not land in a pool of water. Thank goodness The water beds are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trendy. So we were safe there. God. Can you imagine me with a water bed? That’d be terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco They still have their fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case the point I’m driving at is I think it’s the internal confidence It’s a problem that nobody’s standing up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnny or the the mythical version of Johnny who knew who even knows if it’s really Johnny anymore, but the mythical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnny who is saying, no, this MacBook Adorable will have only one port. No, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butterfly switches are the only way to go. Whoever is making those decisions, be that an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual or a committee, I think it’s the lack of internal confidence to say to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, this isn’t right. This isn’t good enough. We do need one more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port on the Adorable. We do need need better keyboard switches or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think that’s where it’s lacking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, it’s like, it’s like, what is the design brief? What is the goal here? And I think, you know, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John design philosophy and the goal for a lot of portal devices is very often don’t have so much crap
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Don’t have a million buttons, don’t have a million ports, it’s easier to waterproof, it’s simpler, it should look simple
⏹️ ▶️ John and obvious. Having the front be all screen is a natural evolution of not having a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, and not just have a screen and a single button on the front. Like that kind of elemental simplicity is
⏹️ ▶️ John very appropriate for a certain class of devices that Apple happens to sell a lot of, because you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone with a million things sticking out of it for most consumers. It’s supposed to be a thing that fits in your pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ John and even laptops, you can see an argument for there. Laptops are simpler when there’s less stuff, when there’s fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John moving parts, fewer seams. Like, you know, just compare the original
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum, you know, PowerBook G4 to a current unibody one. the design
⏹️ ▶️ John goals and evolution of that trying to say simplify, simplify, simplify has made a better portable
⏹️ ▶️ John computer because it flexes less because it’s you know, it has fewer seams. It
⏹️ ▶️ John has fewer things to go wrong on it, even the hinge is more robust and everything about it is simpler. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then that extending to start taking ports off and then you start to get into, you know, I’m not quite sure about
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but you can see kind of an argument for the simplicity. But where this goes awry is on things like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Pro and certainly the Mac Pro, the story has to be different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your goal has to be different. You can’t take that same design philosophy that works for phones and
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets and possibly also laptops, especially the small ones, and say this same
⏹️ ▶️ John design philosophy should apply to our professional modular computer, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what it’s supposed to do. As Marco said, professionals don’t care what the the hell the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of their desk under desk mounted computer does like it is supposed to fulfill
⏹️ ▶️ John a job and its job is to be really fast and capable
⏹️ ▶️ John and being really fast and capable means ejecting heat and having a lot of room inside
⏹️ ▶️ John and being reliable and stuff and if that’s your goal like these are the
⏹️ ▶️ John most important things it’s got to be super reliable and just chunky and
⏹️ ▶️ John very powerful and like the maximum amount of power and flexibility you design a different
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I start thinking of things like power tools or off-road
⏹️ ▶️ John vehicles not like cars that you buy but like actual like you know getting around on the farm or going
⏹️ ▶️ John through the jungle or whatever those things they can be elegant and have nice designs
⏹️ ▶️ John but they have a job to do and their design is entirely focused around that job. No one is trying to say
⏹️ ▶️ John can Can we get huge ground clearance on this off-road vehicle, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not have a big gap between the wheels and the wheel well?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Could we cover that over with something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Could we make it so that we have a skirt that when the wheels compress, the skirt moves
⏹️ ▶️ John up so it looks more elegant? It’s like, what are you even doing? Are you trying to make this car look like a low-slung
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla? The whole point is it’s supposed to go off-road. It’s like, yeah, but it’s so ugly when you can see all the
⏹️ ▶️ John suspension bits and you can and see all this air under the car. That’s skirt idea, we can make the skirt work. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, don’t try to make the skirt work. Like just put huge amounts of travel and big
⏹️ ▶️ John exposed springs and shocks and don’t worry about the skirt. Don’t worry about like the big gap.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what it’s supposed to do. Just make the best off-road vehicle you could make. That’s what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John them to do with the Mac Pro. And the iMac, it’s like, it has to be just as slim as
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular iMac. Why, why would you make it just as slim as the regular iMac? Yeah, maybe you can. They’re also smart with their
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling. Like you already have the iMac. The iMac is, oh, I don’t even know where the computer is. It’s so skinny.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we got rid of the optical drive so we can make it even thinner on the edge. It looks beautiful and elegant. And it does. And I think an
⏹️ ▶️ John all-in-one computer that is very thin and elegant and has a beautiful screen is a product they should make. And they do, it’s the 5K iMac. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great. When they go to make the iMac Pro, why is it like design brief hasn’t changed, yet it’s supposed to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fastest computer you could buy. Especially remember, as I pointed out before, they weren’t gonna make the Mac Pro. The iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro was gonna be their top of the line. And still they said, it’s got to fit in the same case. And that’s what’s wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they have the wrong goal even before they begin executing. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know where that comes from. I don’t know why that philosophy is extended. Maybe it’s they just think all technology should be like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t always think like this. And the cheese grater Mac Pro is the perfect proof. Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ John made that computer and talked about it. His team made that thing. And it is perhaps the most
⏹️ ▶️ John brutally utilitarian thing that Apple has ever made. It’s a big silver heat exchanger freaking handles
⏹️ ▶️ John on it with a huge amount of space in it. That’s what I want. I want I want I mean not that exact design
⏹️ ▶️ John but I want that philosophy. Execute it well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and the thing is like that like that giant metal tower full of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fans and everything and ports in the back and huge air holes in the front and back. That thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is beautiful. That is the nicest PC tower ever I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen bar none. It’s not even close. And for For people who love computers and who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need high-end pro computers, that is beautiful. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to make it ugly. People who look at that and say, that’s ugly, are people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who hate computers. It seems like the people who were responsible for designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers at Apple hate computers. And I don’t say this lightly. What I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say here is literally that it seems like the computers at Apple are designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the goal of hiding and getting rid of as much of the computer as possible. And there is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place for that again there’s a place for that in like the ultra thin and light the MacBook you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know 12 inch and everything and even maybe the airs although we’re going backwards in that direction as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the air range but at the high end you are selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people who need computers and in many cases who love computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and those people don’t want you to hide everything away, especially when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes at the cost of practicality and functionality. Those people are happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the computer. We are happy to have ports and air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes and a little bit more thickness in order to get like a better keyboard or better battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life or something else. Like that market isn’t trying to get rid of the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re buying a computer. They like computers and the pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to see like the pros want a pro piece of gear the people who buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the giant off-road vehicles are not looking at them and saying man this thing’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly it’s a shame no one can make these things prettier no they love the way they look they buy them because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the way they look partially and their functionality as well some people just for the looks but you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sort of make up to make a honkin Mac Pro tower that’s full of high-powered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best components they can make, you know, cooled with giant slow fans so they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really efficient and really quiet even under a load. That is beautiful, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good design for a high-end pro computer. What they seem to be doing now instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is applying the wrong design principles to, like you know, what John said, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what these tools are here to do, they’re applying the same principles as they’re applying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the ultra thin 12-inch ultra portable. That’s not good design. Design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how it works. A famous guy said that once. Like design is taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the requirements that the people have who are going to use this thing and making something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that works well with those requirements and also hopefully looks decent in the process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s design is about those requirements and how you literally you know design the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the work to accommodate those. So what they’re doing when they make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a pro computer that has massive practical problems when used professionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when used by anybody that’s actually bad design no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it looks. And so they really need I think to shift this thinking and I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have with the Mac Pro they really need to shift this thinking back into it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is okay to make a computer that looks looks like a computer. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is nothing wrong with having a high-end pro desktop that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to cost like $8,000. To have that be a little bit bulky and to have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know go under your desk and to have that look like a square with ports in the back and fans in the back like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine. That’s actually what people want and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those people If that is designed well, it will be beautiful, no matter how it looks.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could have it designed like a Star Trek spaceship. Like, it can be cool, but it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John be fulfilling its job, and its job is to eject heat and hold lots of things and be super fast. And it’s just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John end up with a different shape. You end up with a different everything about it. There’s lots of options available, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of things I’m imagining. Wear gets fuzzier, I think, and I was thinking about this when I was sitting, looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the bunch of laptops around the table at work. A lot of people at work now have the same thing I have, the 2017
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro, with its four little USB-C slash Thunderbolt 3 ports all
⏹️ ▶️ John around the sides of it. But then other people still have the 2015 ones like I had earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And honestly, when they’re all sitting around the table like that, other than the fact that the new ones are space gray for the
⏹️ ▶️ John most part, they don’t look that different. You can tell that the new ones are thinner and the screens
⏹️ ▶️ John are nicer, right? But the other ones don’t look that bad. But I look at the sides of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones and like they don’t look that much thicker, but then I see SD card,
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI port, MagSafe, USB-A. I’m like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think again, we talked about this when they did the Mac round table and I was like, but they said, didn’t they say something
⏹️ ▶️ John about maybe they’ll be reconsidering their choices with the MacBook Pros and coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out with new ones that appeal to people more? And I kept thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe in the future they would reconsider their decisions and put an SD card slot on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, or just make different decisions about ports and stuff like that. Sort of backpedal
⏹️ ▶️ John on the relentless simplification
⏹️ ▶️ John on their biggest laptop. And I’m not expecting them to make a keyboard that’s not the same size as the small ones. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John going crazy here, but I’m just saying the utility of, I think a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John are jealous at work of the people who come in with the old laptops and just plug their thing right into the projector with
⏹️ ▶️ John no dongles, right? Or that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe of ripping the thing in and out and then get up from their desk and stuff. And maybe they’re also jealous
⏹️ ▶️ John of me with my single wire connecting with all the other stuff. So there’s advantages to Thunderbolt as well. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think of it this way. If they came out with the new MacBook Pro that had an SD
⏹️ ▶️ John card and HDMI on it, a lot of people would love it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m trying to think who would hate it. The people like, I don’t want that additional complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never use HDMI. Would they hate it? Would they just be like, oh, whatever, I don’t care. I don’t use those ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, who would really hate it? Other than saying you’ve just mucked up my perfect, clean, symmetrical
⏹️ ▶️ John design, but I don’t think people who buy them care that much about it. And the people who would love
⏹️ ▶️ John it, boy, would they love it. So in this new Mac renaissance of where we all believe Apple’s turned
⏹️ ▶️ John a corner on the Mac and is paying more attention to it and is gonna make a Mac Pro and they’re making the iMac Pro and they’re doing all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things, I’m waiting to see how far does the Mac Renaissance go? We know it goes far
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that they revived the line of computers that they weren’t gonna do. So that’s great, I love it. Like, and that gives me hope for everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else. But a real test may be, what happens to the 15 inch? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John they go more utilitarian in any way
⏹️ ▶️ John on it? Do any ports come back? Is there any recognition that
⏹️ ▶️ John some decisions made with the current line of computers may not be exact? even if it’s the keyboard, which is a topic
⏹️ ▶️ John of conversation this week, which I may or may not to get to in the show, do they change
⏹️ ▶️ John their thinking on the keyboard and say, we need to take another run at this in a big way, even if the new
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard is just as thin as the old one, to just have a different philosophy of saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we need to rethink this. Like how much are they willing to reconsider
⏹️ ▶️ John on the models that are, you know, are not the, I was gonna say are
⏹️ ▶️ John not the very, very top end, but the 15-inch is their top end laptop, right? How much are they willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John reconsider? And I’m still maintaining fantasies that they’re going to be willing to reconsider
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, that the new Mac Pro will be the giant purpose-built heat exchanger that I was describing,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the iMac Pro really will be amazingly fast and competent, even if it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the same case, and that the new line of laptops, like, we’ll see that they’re learning from their mistakes and they
⏹️ ▶️ John make different decisions about it, and they can make a big deal out of it. Like we heard you, we know you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want as many dongles. So now there’s HDMI and an SD card or whatever, whatever they decide, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a huge applause line. Tons of people would love it. It would make the computers more popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people will be disappointed that it’s not as simple, but how many? How many who don’t work in the sealed
⏹️ ▶️ John off frosted glass area with Johnny Ive would actually be disappointed by those computers? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Johnny Ive, come on the show. We’re waiting for you.
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MacBook Redux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, rethink what your money can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, there was one thing about that picture I posted about my setup that you appeared not to have noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your glass of water?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jon, how many dongles do I
⏹️ ▶️ John have? I don’t know. There’s a whole, some of them are black and some of them are white, so I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really tell. I gotta zoom in. Am I at 100% on this? Let’s see, zoom in. I see… Jon, what shape are
⏹️ ▶️ John my arrow keys? Oh, they’re not full size. that the yeah the screen’s different I could tell from the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John bars and that’s 2015 yes it is but you do you still have a dog what is that Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah you know dongle
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah Thunderbolt Ethernet and then you’ve got the mag safe what is the black thing coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t exist in the new ones but does exist on my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John the trackpad is smaller and the little cut out where you’re the finger thing where you reach in to get the lip
⏹️ ▶️ John to open it up is actually not as wide as well I believe anyway yeah now Do you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a 20, I can’t keep track of what laptops you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Do you still have a 2016 or 17? I do, but not for long. I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John right, and where did this 15 come from? Is this just one of your old ones, or did you buy another one? eBay. eBay, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you just buy these directly from Apple now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can, they still sell them. Yeah, they still sell them brand new. This one was, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the base CPU, the 2.2, with the 512 SSD, which I basically, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required a bigger SSD. The last, when I actually had one of these, you know, in 2015, um, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the two 56 SSD and it killed me. I, I, like, one of the reasons I had to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just because I, I just kept slamming into that. Cause like, you know, when you, once you’re doing iOS development, you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of disk space, uh, to keep up with all the betas and everything else. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, so five, 12 SSD, everything else is base on it. Uh, and it has Apple care,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, because it was bought in September of 2016, like a month before the new ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out. So it has AppleCare till 2019. The battery only had 50 cycles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, and it was $1,600. To get the same thing new from Apple with AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be $2,800. So I decided to go used on it, and it’s totally great. Because so here’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, basically what happened here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my plan of getting the 2017 15-inch and using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all summer at the beach and then bringing it home and bringing the LG 5K home and using that as my desktop until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro comes out. That plan ended up being just not working for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it ends up, the 15 inch is not a great desktop. It can serve as one with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LG display. It can be a desktop, but it’s not a very good desktop. I would rather use my three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old iMac that is purpose built for that than use the weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clamshell and everything else. And so, I’m just gonna try to keep using my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, I gave these butterfly keyboards a year. I first had a 2016 Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bar 15 inch, sold it, switched to the MacBook Escape, sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to my Curly, and switched back to this this summer when I had this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harebrained desktop idea. I gave this keyboard a year. I’ve had the 2016 version and the 2017 version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re all just incredibly incompatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me. I thought I’d get used to it, I didn’t. I hated every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute of typing on it. Every single time I would think to use that computer, I would be kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would turn me off from wanting to use my laptop, to have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard there. Because every single time I typed on that keyboard, I hated it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every time I said, you know, maybe everyone’s right and I’ll get used to it. And I gave it a year, people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t get used to it. And every time I would see someone else’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like John, what you were just saying about the conference room, every time I would see someone else’s 2015 era, 13 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch Redmond MacBook Pro, I would be like, oh man,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I never sold mine. I like that so much better. And I started browsing eBay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know what, these are not that expensive. To get one that’s very lightly used, these are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty inexpensive, and I can sell the one I have for probably like $2,800. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I waffled about it for a while and I was worried. I’m like, is it gonna feel really old?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Am I gonna regret losing USB-C? Am I going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regret that it’s bigger and heavier? Is everything gonna feel and look old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m gonna feel like I’m stepping back into the past? My impression of this has quite surprised me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. Nothing about it feels bigger or heavier. It is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s such a small difference that honestly when you go the other direction, you don’t really notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, it’s a half pound heavier, and it’s a couple of millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wider in each dimension or something like that. Like it’s not that much different. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t, like for all the crazy things we gave up to go to the super thin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, USB-C models, it didn’t actually get that much thinner that much lighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and the battery life is better on 2015’s by the way. On this used 2015 model, the battery life is better than my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost new 2017 model. And not by a small amount either. Because, surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery is actually 33% bigger. So that actually matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with an older processor. So anyway, you don’t notice the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size difference when you go the other direction. I did not notice the loss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the trackpad size. I did not like I you just immediately adjust.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact it’s actually easier because now there’s no more accidental trackpad input when you brush against it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not notice the loss of the touch bar because I always hated it and never really got into using it. I occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss touch ID but not much. I love having the arrow keys back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the way they were because I can feel them. Because you need arrow keys that have a different shape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the rest of the keys because they are far away from the home row so when you reach over to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you are not as precise as you would be with keys near the home row because you’re moving your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand a little bit so you need there to be some kind of tactile feedback so you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel where the right keys are in order to hit the right one. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new generation arrow keys that have no metal gap in them and that are all the same height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so easy to hit the wrong one on because your hand is moving over there and has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anchor itself based on feel. So the arrow keys in this are perfect, they feel wonderful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the keyboard is perfect and feels wonderful. For about a second it felt mushy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it felt great. So that took no adjustment time. The ports are luxurious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got to remove Oh, geez, I mean a whole bag full of stuff from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my travel bag. Like I got to remove so much crap, so many dongles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My entire dongle bag is now just in storage until I have to switch back to a USB-C sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future. So that’s like my travel bag is so simple. It’s just the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a power adapter and a couple of the USB cables that I was already bringing before because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing else in the world is USB-C. So like, I was already traveling with USB to lightning cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could plug them into hotel, you know, lamp tables and stuff. So I’m just using those now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to travel with. And the computer and the power cable. That’s it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a SD card reader, I don’t need any dongles, I don’t need any hubs and HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapters and everything. It just works. And it’s all built in, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks great, and it feels great, and it feels like a computer that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was designed for use. Not a computer that I have to adapt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself to it. This computer was designed for me to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I am just so much happier. The only thing I miss about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new one, I don’t miss the thinness, I don’t miss the lightness, I don’t miss the space gray,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because by the way, the space gray, that’s a very fragile coating, and that’ll chip pretty easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you even nick it a little bit. The only thing I miss, surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I actually kind of miss having USB-C for power. Even though I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t miss the old USB-C brick that doesn’t have the little cable management wings, it is nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to use other third-party chargers. So, for example, like the Anker 60-watt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I have. It’s nice to use that. It would be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to use USB-C batteries if I needed to on a plane. But ultimately that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much of a problem because this thing has a 99.5 watt hour battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it It’s a pretty big battery. The battery life is pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably won’t ever won’t need a battery in practice It’s just great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t feel noticeably slow. It doesn’t like there’s nothing there’s no other downsides to it And in fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you buy an old one off of eBay Not only do you save a ton of money all the accessories cost way less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they did when they were new So like I long ago I got rid of my Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter because I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never use it again so I had to buy a new one to use Ethernet here at home for this because that’s how I like to run my computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and You know, I think when it was new it was like 30 or 40 or 50 bucks I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on eBay new for like I think $19 I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another another power adapter an extra power after coming tomorrow Also new that was $30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s just it’s just great I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s a reason they still sell this, because it’s a fantastic computer that I bet a lot of people are still buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just great. I’m so happy with it, and I hope that I can use it until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make a computer that actually is better for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have thoughts. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the epitome of different strokes for different folks, right? Because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically this machine as a work machine, and we are still buying or really leasing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this machine brand new for incoming employees, incoming engineers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We do not have a Touch Bar Mac that is being issued by my company yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget the reasoning behind it, but it basically boils down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it provides little to no benefit, So why bother? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time I’m away from my desk and away from my wireless magic keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have to type on my work laptops keyboard, I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. God, do I hate it? It’s mushy. It’s sloppy and it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels frigging gross. And it’s funny to me because you have the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same opinion, but the other direction in that, uh, we are like polar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opposites on this and you know what, that’s, that’s fine. You know, everyone has an opinion. That’s okay. What works for you is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What works for me is great. And that’s fine. But it’s funny to me that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer this so heavily, particularly the keyboard, like the rest of it. Yeah, that makes sense. But particularly the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, I’m surprised you prefer it that much. My question for you though, is what’s your long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game on this? Like, you just going to pull a Syracuse and run this until you can’t get whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous California code name is like three or four versions from now. Like what, what is the long game?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because eventually I reckon you’re either. So there’s only a couple of ways to go, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You use this until you can’t anymore. And then you’re going to have to figure out a new plan. You wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple to have an oops, we’re sorry, which to be fair is certainly possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not exactly their style. Um, yeah. And unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like I had a third, but I lost it, but you see what I’m saying? like you just go to, I guess you buy a Lenovo?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, you know, what is the long play for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then? I mean, I could hackintosh it with someone else’s laptop, but no, I mean, the long-term play here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope this lasts me long enough that I either stop caring about having a good laptop, stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needing a good laptop, or Apple starts making better ones. And as simple as that, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it lasts that long. If not, I’m gonna have to figure something else out. It could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be next summer they might release a new one that I like and that I switch to that. I have no idea, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly I don’t I think that would be too soon. I would be that would seem very unlikely to me. My long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan here is like when the when the scroll direction changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Mac OS, whenever that was, was that like Lion or something? It was a it was a while
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah maybe even earlier than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah so when the scroll direction changed I thought you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have an option to keep it the other direction but we know how Apple is. There’s only there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only gonna be a limited time that that option is gonna be there so I might as well get used to the new one now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and switch. So I switched immediately, hated it, gave it like a few days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still hated it, and I switched back. You know what? There might come a time where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have this choice anymore but that time hasn’t come yet. So let me just enjoy the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like it while I still have the choice and then when the time comes that forces me to make you to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a choice I want to make I’ll deal with it then so that’s kind of my philosophy with this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a sustainable plan to just keep using the 2015 MacBook Pro forever obviously that’s not a stable plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t need to give it up right now I am way happier with this laptop right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I am with the 2017 model and so I can use this for probably a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably going to want to move to something else before I’m forced to move to something else. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I might as well enjoy this while I can, while it is still great, while it is still competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and useful and works great. When the time comes, for whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stops being the case, then I’ll figure it out then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up, it was Lion by the way, where they added the feature. All
⏹️ ▶️ John And I am still, I still have that in the non-default setting as well, because I-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of you are saying that you are not on natural scrolling. You’re on the scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school, yeah. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word, you’re so old. The two of you, I’m so disappointed in you. You’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no reason to change it. Like, I mean, I didn’t even try
⏹️ ▶️ John to get used to the new way because they gave you an option from day one to not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, well, it’s not like, it’s not even a PLIS hack, it’s a GUI option. Uncheck, never think about it again. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve sustained that. Like, it’s still there. still you can do the opposite way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s the way I like it. I also remap command into new folder because I’ve been doing that since I was 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years old. And there’s a feature in the operating system that lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to any
⏹️ ▶️ John menu in any application. And it’s a supported thing. So of course I do it. Like, I don’t see why I wouldn’t. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of a computer being a computer, right? That’s what separates us from the multi-pad
⏹️ ▶️ John mongrels, right? Like we can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do, you know, you don’t like the keyboard shortcut,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? I can reassign it, and not by hacking something. It’s a feature of the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences. You just go there and type, like, it’s a real thing. Anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I kind of feel the same way about scroll direction. Like, if forced, you know, they take it
⏹️ ▶️ John away and there’s no plist hack or whatever, I probably won’t go to heroic links to get it back, but I might grumble.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, uh. You might grumble?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Marco’s plan is mostly sustainable because like I,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I still keep thinking, perhaps wrongly, that we
⏹️ ▶️ John are in the beginnings of a Mac renaissance and that it’s gonna take a while
⏹️ ▶️ John because computers take a long time, like the pipeline is long, but then Apple is indeed reconsidering
⏹️ ▶️ John some of its broad decisions about how it makes Macs. And so the new
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard that has more travel and is more reliable and is more pleasing
⏹️ ▶️ John to people who don’t like the new one and is only on the 15 inch model or whatever, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John coming like anytime soon. But if they start on it now, in three
⏹️ ▶️ John years, it will be here and that’s, you know, like them reconsidering
⏹️ ▶️ John how they build their computers and what people want out of them, like satisfying Mac users again, that
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac roundtable, everything they said in that Mac roundtable was essentially, we hear you,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve realized we’ve been doing things in the wrong way. And we’re going to change course and try to do them in the right
⏹️ ▶️ John way like the way that will make everybody happy. Starting with Hey, the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were gonna get rid of it. We didn’t think it was necessary, but actually it is. How far that goes? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re a little patient, I like, I think you have to give it time
⏹️ ▶️ John because takes you know, there’s a long pipe, you know, the pipeline takes a while to, to flush
⏹️ ▶️ John all this bad stuff out of the system before you see the new ones. just a question of how far they’ll go. The Mac Pro is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a great test. If the Mac Pro comes out and it’s another cylinder type exercise,
⏹️ ▶️ John that does not bode well for Marco’s eBay computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because he’s going to be hanging on to that for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while while he waits for the, you know, all like one approach they could take is
⏹️ ▶️ John we know a lot of people love the new keyboard and I kind of like it too, by the way, like I almost never use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think my laptop at work is actually a great test case because if my laptop keyboard work dies
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a bad sign because I type on it so little like I type up my other keyboard all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and she’s a desktop but it could be that a lot of people like that and one way they could go is
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll just make that reliable find a way to make that keyboard that feels like that the case he really likes and a lot of other people
⏹️ ▶️ John really like and that I kind of like to other than the arrow keys and all the other laptop keyboard crap that I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John just because of key layout just make that reliable if that’s what they do in three
⏹️ ▶️ John years again bad sign for Marco. So we have many things to be watching but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m you know I’m still entertaining fantasies that they are really turning the ship here
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna let the Mac be the Mac in hardware and in software and
⏹️ ▶️ John make all of us old-school Mac users happy because honestly like who
⏹️ ▶️ John are you trying to make happy with the Macs? Who is who’s super happy with these new computers? Maybe people might like them
⏹️ ▶️ John and I know a lot of people do like the new keyboard but I don’t think anybody’s head over heels for the
⏹️ ▶️ John new laptops and nobody was really head over heels for the new a Mac Pro either so
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some work to be done there and Apple says they’re gonna do it and I feel like I I want to give him a chance to bowl
MacBook keyboard failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before we leave this topic, we should also mention the amazing article by Kasey Johnson
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at The Outline about the keyboards that came out yesterday. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, basically going through her process of like having to get keys repaired multiple times at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Genius Bar, the crazy things they tell her, the, you know, the, the, the like feigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprise, oh, it must be a speck of dust. It’s like, come on, this is a widespread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue. Like they should know about this by now. It’s a great article that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think everybody should read. It spawned a lot of discussion around the other blogs as well. Pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone linked to it and said, yeah, me too. So it’s pretty great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to add to this, there are a lot of people when stuff like this comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, like when we complain about the keyboard here, or when other people complain about it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when people report problems with it, there’s a lot of people who are like, well, I love it. favorite keyboard ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the old ones all feel like crap to me now. Not that different from Casey’s opinion of it. And I want to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state two separate things here. You know, number one, you can love it. You can love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the new keyboard feels. That is a separate thing from is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable or not. Like if the new keyboard has as many problems as it appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have anecdotally from almost everyone I know who has one and almost everyone who I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked on Twitter, problems are widespread with keys getting stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or breaking widespread it certainly seems like this is a pretty big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s also important to point out these laptops aren’t very old and they’re having these problems already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know in many cases they had these problems within a few months of ownership so it’s you know there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are problems with this keyboard you can like it you can like the way it feels but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it has problems with reliability it’s a bad keyboard regardless of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think of yours personally. My second thing to point out is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these aren’t the only two choices we have. You have the 2015 and earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard and you have the you know MacBook hard as a rock keyboard that breaks constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are other options for keyboards that Apple can use and in fact they already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one and Casey already loves It’s called the Magic Keyboard 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Magic Keyboard 2 is very, very thin. It has Johnny’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumb layout where there’s no space between any of the keys, and the arrow keys are all the same, so they’re all square and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no gap, so you can’t feel where they are. So, it satisfies Apple’s needs to be thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be symmetric at the cost of feeling good. It has pretty shallow travel, feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very precise, has a much more precise click and less wobbliness than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old 2015 laptop keyboards. Best thing is that uses scissor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switches. The old reliable scissor switches that didn’t die when one speck of dust got in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one key. Apple already has the solution to this problem. They can have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern clickier feel with lower travel, they can have the stupid layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they want of the keys with no space and bad arrow keys and it can be super thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it can also have reliable key switches that also do provide a little more travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the MacBook keyboard and a little less travel than 2015 keyboard so it’s kind of this nice hat this nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy medium there and it should be way more reliable so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all they have to do is take that keyboard that they already make and find a way to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that into laptops and if you go to a store and you look at a magic keyboard they’re pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damn thin I have a feeling that Apple can figure out how to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John so being the optimist again I think that you know again it takes a while for these
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions to make it from like we’ve decided to do a thing to do manifesting a product so it still could be
⏹️ ▶️ John years but their recent changes in the iOS device line
⏹️ ▶️ John give me some optimism here one of the best examples is both the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ John and I guess the 8s as well. Like the iPhone 7 prioritizing battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life and going with the same form factor for the third year in a row and getting so much better battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John than the 6 and also the 10. The 10 not being
⏹️ ▶️ John you know even thinner than the 7 like saying we’re going to you know either make
⏹️ ▶️ John it thicker or keep it the same thickness and we’re going to spend that on battery the two extra hours of of battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life shows a change in philosophy from every single year we’re gonna keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John it thinner and thinner and just try to maintain. Past two iterations have been
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not gonna try to make it thinner at all costs and just maintain. We want to increase
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life. 7 was better than the 6 and this 10 is way better than the 7. Two hours they advertise
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s what exactly what we’ve been asking them to do. You’re making the wrong choices, you’re making it too thin, go in the other direction
⏹️ ▶️ John and it took many many years for that to happen but they did it so I
⏹️ ▶️ John am optimistic that even if it’s not the exact magic keyboard that three years from now the
⏹️ ▶️ John new professional laptop will have a keyboard that is reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe that also has more key travel maybe not because I don’t know what the percentages
⏹️ ▶️ John are for people who like the new one and people who don’t and like I said I kind of like it
⏹️ ▶️ John but certainly the reliability, whatever they have to do there. And by the way, on the reliability front, someone who’s been using scissors, which keys
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time and who’s had them on laptops for a long time, um, they are way more
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable, obviously, than the, than the butterfly ones have proven to be, but they’re also less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John than their predecessors. I have broken keyboards with these scissor switches
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple times. I’ve worn through at least one, possibly two, because one of my keys is sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John wonky at work. Uh, aluminum apple extended keyboards. I have broken keys
⏹️ ▶️ John on PowerBook G4 era computers, which also had scissor switches under their very
⏹️ ▶️ John different looking key caps, right? I have never broken a key
⏹️ ▶️ John switch on an Apple Extended 2, which I used for years and years and years, since like 1989 or whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John the SE30 came out. I have never broken a key switch on any keys before that. So if you wanna compare
⏹️ ▶️ John reliability for the little plastic scissor switch things compared to the quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote mechanical keys and other keyboards in a turn that drives me nuts as if switches are not mechanical.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a downgrade in reliability for size. It’s just a question of, is it an acceptable downgrade?
⏹️ ▶️ John Me using an Apple extended, Apple aluminum extended keyboard for seven years
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I break a key, I’m like, all right, I’ve been pounding on this keyboard eight hours a day at work for seven years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I accept that I have now broken one of the very commonly used keys and I can kind of get it
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix because I’m pretty good at like prying off these key caps and putting it back on, but it’s always a little bit wonky. And you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Seven years, good job keyboard. You’re filthy anyway, because I haven’t been cleaning you well enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Buy another keyboard, 50 bucks and you’re fine. That we’re willing, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all willing to trade that. Even though Apple extended too, you could defend yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John from a mugger with and it will still work fine. Like it’s just, there is no, you know what I mean? Like literally
⏹️ ▶️ John never broke. I remember I dropped the pocket knife off a high shelf and it
⏹️ ▶️ John landed on the keyboard with like the blade out, because I don’t know why I had my knife with my blade out,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it like cut off like the corner of one of the keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing was still fine. Like enough force to actually cut the plastic of the key cap of the key switch was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the thing was like a tank, but you know, so there’s leeway for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John be thinner, be more elegant, be lighter weight, reduce reliability,
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t reduce it quite that much. And it feels like they’ve gone too far with this one. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some hope that they are going to turn the ship on this one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it frustrates me that none of us know how widespread this problem really is. We just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s all anecdotes and like, oh yeah, of course, you know, everyone who’s going to respond to Casey’s article, not this Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other one is going to be like people who have keyboard problems. And the same thing with like when Marco was complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard, you know, a year ago, of course, we heard from all the other people who hate the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other people have reliability problems. Right? But we can’t tell percentage wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a representative sample. It’s just the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are at the extremes and probably mostly people that agree with us. But Apple knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Apple geniuses probably kind of know because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just there taking all the repairs and stuff. So I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John we knew exactly how much we’re overreacting to this and not. anecdotally, it just seems so
⏹️ ▶️ John clear that, like Marco said, these are new computers, the keyboards are already failing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey Johnston’s article, like it is the it is of a type is of you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a very typical article where if you are in, if you are in the industry of like writing about these type of
⏹️ ▶️ John products, and you personally have to bring your brand new computer back three
⏹️ ▶️ John times, because the keyboard won’t work. That’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know I’m writing an article about this because this is way outside the realm of expectation three times
⏹️ ▶️ John like fine some you get it it doesn’t work once you get a repair like now that it’s repaired it’ll be fine especially if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you bring it in oh well this is the new 2017 keyboard with the rubber bubble blood now it’s repaired it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you bring in and they replace a huge piece of the computer at great expense and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just you all you’ve done is start the timer again and go to kick the video six weeks have passed out
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it back in again that’ll be another three to seven hundred dollars and new one and just like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a bad design. Like there’s no hope if you feel like bringing it in and getting huge parts of your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced because it’s all one giant thing doesn’t make you feel like now
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem is fixed. All it makes you feel like is you just started a timer on the next failure again. That’s just a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John design. And that’s I like I really hope that you know that
⏹️ ▶️ John over we’re capturing these devices and we’re looking at the issue and we’re taking stock and it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John not that big a percentage and blah blah blah blah like I don’t I don’t I don’t know what to believe but I do know
⏹️ ▶️ John the hopelessness of that feeling I kind of felt it with my Thunderbolt display when I would bring it in and get it quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John repair with huge amounts of the guts replaced but then I would get it back in the same problem would be there and I had to bring
⏹️ ▶️ John that in three times as well but luckily the third time was the charm and you know that did it but these
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards I have very little faith that your third repair is going to be any more successful than your
⏹️ ▶️ John first or second repair especially if you’ve got the quote unquote new keyboard on the second repair
⏹️ ▶️ John and the third repair. So this is all the type of thing that makes me believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple will change its mind on this design, a new keyboard or adapt
⏹️ ▶️ John the magic one that the other Casey House is so confusing. Casey loves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in two to three years, we will see a new 15 inch with these new keys and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will talk about it in a subtle, but not particularly self deprecating way. and
⏹️ ▶️ John we will all cheer and it’ll be safe for Marco to buy one unless it still has no ports, in which case he’ll still be angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, just for the record, I have not used a Touch Bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro for more than about 45 seconds in an Apple store. So that could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the utter filth and dumpster fire that everyone says it is. I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do freaking love my MacBook Adorable. Are there things I would change? I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have one more port. I would love to have MagSafe, but in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grand scheme of things I freaking love this computer It’s all of the good parts of the iPad except without that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS thing that holds you back and so I love this computer I am looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to one day in like two years or something like that eventually getting a touch bar MacBook Pro at work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Seeing what that’s like don’t I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my I’m honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know what? I mean? I love my iMac I am I am hopeful however
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that especially this keyboard that I think Marco, you know, you made a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really great point earlier you really me. I do like it I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it, but I also concur that it is not as reliable as it should be and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Had to buy it and we talked about on the show. I had to buy a can of compressed air it’s the first time I bought one in probably a decade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I needed to blow out this microscopic piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of dust from under the keyboard, such that it would operate properly again. And it turns out I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just moved it to a different key. And the second time I blew it out, and I think that actually did it. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not an acceptable answer, right? I’ve never had to blow out an Apple keyboard before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just hope that Apple is willing, and I think they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is willing to revisit this in the future. But I love this iMac, and I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this MacBook Adorable. and we’ll see what happens with my next computer whenever I buy it.
Face ID in Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I wish this MacBook adorable had though was touch ID or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Face ID question mark that would be cool. Do we think that’s coming?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah before we just turn to the Mac show which happens occasionally. Sorry people. We’re Mac users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean have they seen the show art it shouldn’t be that much of a
⏹️ ▶️ John face IDs of Mac has been in here for a while And I just want to touch on this especially in light of Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about iMac Pro versus Mac Pro I forget how
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that the iMac Pro is gonna have a secure enclave. Did Apple just announce that or did people like just
⏹️ ▶️ John ask the person who was in front of the computer at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco WWDC? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was in some firmware reference or some EFI reference somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well anyway, one of the potential advantages of an all-in-one computer, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the advantage that Apple leveraged to bring the 5K iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John at first, is that you can do a lot of stuff when everything is inside the same case. So a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John display controller with like, you know, the timing controller and the dual internal
⏹️ ▶️ John cable, you can do all that and it’s like it’s all in one box, you don’t have to worry about that. They can give you a 5K screen
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iMac before they can give it to you on the Mac Pro or some other computer with an external
⏹️ ▶️ John thing because they don’t want to have two wires connecting it and it’s inelegant and blah blah blah. Well one of the other things that you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John is stuff like Face ID where you’ve got a seer enclave and you’re guaranteed to have a camera and you know where the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera is and you know what the quality of it is and you’ve got it pointed at the person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John face and you’ve got all the sensors and the IR dot thing and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So face ID starts to take off and works well. I really do want to see
⏹️ ▶️ John it on Macs and you know the all-in-one computers both laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John and the iMac are a perfect place for it to appear. We were talking about touch ID and the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John on Macs, like on a separate keyboard, but that poses a lot of problems. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John the touch bar work over Bluetooth? If the secure enclave is inside the keyboard, how does
⏹️ ▶️ John that communicate? And similarly with Face ID and the IR sensor and the camera and everything, if Apple makes
⏹️ ▶️ John an external display, which they are, they’re making an external display, but they want to put a Face ID in it, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could do it, but how does that communicate back to those computer? I guess the answer is like, oh, it’ll just be
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt 3 and there’ll be no problem, but that’s an additional complexity that makes that monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John even more complex and more fraught and more like potentially flaky
⏹️ ▶️ John than if everything is in the same box. So I don’t know if the iMac Pros will have Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of seems like they wouldn’t just because I feel like the timing of their
⏹️ ▶️ John production and the timing of the iPhone 10 production don’t match up in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would expect the first iteration of the iMac Pro to have them. but I
⏹️ ▶️ John fully expect and I think Apple should integrate Face ID into
⏹️ ▶️ John all of their Macs eventually if it works well, much more so than Touch ID which has been integrated into the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John but hasn’t made it to the desktops and having you have a laptop with Touch ID now and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the best implementation, it’s a little bit slow, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love it if I just opened the lid on my laptop and it unlocked by seeing my face because it’s the perfect scenario. When you
⏹️ ▶️ John lift the lid on your laptop, chances are even better than when you use a phone that you will be facing it. Like that’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ John open the lid on your laptop when it’s facing you, right? It’s like, here I am, you open it up and your face comes right
⏹️ ▶️ John into view. Whereas your phone, you could like pull it out of your pocket or whatever, might be facing a weird direction, much more challenging there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And similarly on iMac, you sit down in front of your computer, boy, it’s got a great view of your face. It can spray those IR dots
⏹️ ▶️ John all over. Like it’s just, it’s right there. Everything’s built into one thing. And so I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they do bring that to Macs. I really hope they kind of like skip Touch ID and say, well, we brought
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID to our laptops and it’s okay, but you know what? Let’s just skip right to Face ID because even more
⏹️ ▶️ John so than Casey’s beloved watch unlock, Face ID is the ultimate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was gonna say, because it’s super quick now, super quick. Between the new watch and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new OS, it is super fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you don’t have to have your watch on and you can just sit down and different people can sit down and can recognize who they are and switch to their
⏹️ ▶️ John account. Like if they can do that well and fast, that is a better future for authentication
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac than Touch ID ever could be, and it solves so many problems. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John downside is it’s more difficult to do on the Mac Pro. Supposedly they’re a top-end computer, now you have to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out a way to, you know, get those cameras. And maybe I’m overblowing, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbird really does solve this problem entirely. For them, they have plenty of bandwidth and side channels for all these weird sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, and there’s no problem with the drivers. I just worry it will be less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John than it is in the iMac, where they’ve got everything inside the same case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other problem is with laptops is that you have a pretty severe thickness limitation on the screen lid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the screen lid is extremely thin. You know, they can’t even fit a decent front-facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera in the laptops. Like, you can get like, you know, a $3,000 MacBook Pro that’s brand new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the FaceTime camera on it is worse than like the iPhone 5S’s FaceTime camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s really, really bad front cameras on the Max. Possibly for cost reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they just don’t care, but most likely also because of thickness reasons those screen lids are super thin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know if they can fit good enough sensors into those screen lids on the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually achieve face ID anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the camera is probably good enough already. It’s just, I don’t know how thick the IR sprayer dip thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is. I mean, as
⏹️ ▶️ John soon as we get the iFixit tear down on the phone, like, are they using all that thickness for the additional sensors? Or are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually those sensors super thin and it’s no problem? Like, I feel like it can fit.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not as much room as there is on a phone, but you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can always make it a millimeter or two thicker. I wouldn’t say that they should go with the bulge, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not the first generation, but down the line, those sensors, there’s nothing inherent about the sensors, like
⏹️ ▶️ John optically speaking, that makes me think they can’t have it. And I think the camera is plenty good enough already. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just the auxiliary sensors, the multiple cameras or the IR thing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how thick they are. But anyway, no problem on the iMac, plenty of room there. And so that should be the first
⏹️ ▶️ John place it appears is on their big desktops, because you’ve got more room, more power,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s what they should do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have this slight fantasy that maybe the iMac Pro does have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Face ID, and that’s why it’s not out yet. They were holding it back until the iPhone unveil with its Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think in reality, that’s very unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John timing just doesn’t seem to work out, because you know everything having to do with Face ID is coming first on the 10, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John is everything that the company is focused on. The iMac Pro was started so long ago. It just seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like their flagship phone is going to blaze the path for this. And then like, it just doesn’t, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work out timing wise. I feel like even the second generation iMac pro that
⏹️ ▶️ John they may be in the planning stages, even that one might not have face ID incorporated, but you know, I would love to be surprised too.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not like any of us scrutinize the forehead of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of the iMac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John model and that thing to look for a tiny little impossible to see slightly differently colored black
⏹️ ▶️ John areas in the forehead to see if we could see an IR sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s way more likely that Face ID does come to the Mac, but that’s, you know, in like three years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not probably not soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to wait that long. Next year I want to see it in an iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that can be in the in the pro display. Like, you know, we have speculated on the show, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they mentioned in the Mac in the Mac Pro briefing last spring that, you know, they’re working on a Mac Pro and also a new pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display. We know nothing about that display except that they said it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist. So we don’t know what size it is. It could be 8K. We don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have no idea what size it is, what resolution it is, what features will it have, when will it come out, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will it cost? We have no idea. One of the obvious questions is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would make someone buy the Apple Pro Display instead of the LG Mediocrity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Box? And Face ID could be a great answer because you know it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cost more because it’s going be an Apple display. So like if Apple is going to sell that, you know, if LG still selling there is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s assume this thing comes out next summer. Let’s say the LG 5k display next summer is a thousand bucks. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at best it’s going to be maybe 900, but it’s probably going to be about a thousand bucks next summer. Apple comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say their display is 5k. It’s probably going to be at least 1500 bucks. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, what can they do to help justify that cost? You know, if LG is going to be a thousand now, Apple’s not going to be a thousand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the ways they can, one of the things they could do that no one else can do is Face ID. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can build that in. Like that would be an incredible selling point that would make pretty much everyone at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the high-end choose that display over some other thing from somebody else. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something they can do. We don’t know. Until we get actual information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hopefully actual product releases from the Mac Pro and this Pro display, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many unanswered questions that make it very hard to contextualize the iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to decide whether to buy the iMac Pro or the other things. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you said you’ll be buying 13 iMac Pros. David
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Hover and Away. and we will see you next week.
Special theme by Jonathan Mann
⏹️ ▶️ John pressing the spacebar. I’m pressing the spacebar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spacebar. I’m pressing the spacebar. And
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This computer is about
⏹️ ▶️ John a year old, and it was very expensive. I have been
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting to upgrade for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now you’re telling me That it would need extensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Surgery for a speck of dust Lodged beneath the butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ John I found your instructions They were not helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can of air I feel like an idiot
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause I’m pressing the spacebar I’m pressing the spacebar
⏹️ ▶️ John I am pressing the spacebar, I’m pressing the spacebar,
⏹️ ▶️ John and nothing is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening. I’m pressing the spacebar,
⏹️ ▶️ John and nothing’s happening. Get me out of here!
Post-show: VBR experiment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell us what your little experiment was last week with the show, not with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco your computer, but with the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this didn’t go so well. So long-time listeners will remember that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a bee in my bonnet, as Casey would probably say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about… I was upset that Apple’s mp3 decoding library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not properly seek VBR mp3s and that podcasts could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be way better if they could be VBR mp3s because variable bitrate means that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can for instance the silences between all of our words that overcast is hopefully shortening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you for you know 70% of you the silences between all of our words can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few bits because there isn’t much information there the words can use a decent amount of bits but not a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount because they don’t need that much and then the theme song that plays between the after show and the regular show can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like music bit rates and all of that could be done a total file size of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much compared to a constant bitrate mediocre quality file just because different parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the file need different things and some of them need more and some need less so it makes sense to encode with a variable bitrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the problem is if things that don’t properly support variable bitrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they basically read the file as if it’s either the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco average bitrate of like the file size divided by the duration or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they read the very first mp3 frame which is the first few milliseconds of the file and they assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the whole file is whatever bitrate that first frame is and so this causes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of problems oh and also the way some of them would calculate duration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they would read that first frame see what the bitrate is look at the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size and just divide it and say all right well if the first frame is you know 32 kilobits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is a 100 meg file and this is gonna be like what would that be like a five hour long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file or something like that. The mp3 standard is very old it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide a lot of a lot of niceties in this regard so you know there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some bad implementations over the years. However VBR encoding has been around since literally the late
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 90s so this is not a new thing to do and it’s extremely common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for music files to be VBR encoded because it’s it’s a way to achieve very good quality without obscene
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file sizes. So this has been around for literally 20 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not everything supports it properly. The main problem that you see when it’s not supported properly is either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the duration is misreported because of what I said earlier, or seeking doesn’t work properly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that you seek to a timestamp and as far as the player is concerned it is playing at that timestamp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the content that you are hearing is not the content that’s actually at the time you’re hearing the wrong thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the time if you seek because the dumb way to seek is if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know the file size and the duration you can say all right well if the user seek to the 50%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point in time in the duration seek to the 50% byte in the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then just start playing from there with a VBR file though you don’t actually know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the 50% of the bytes through matches up to 50% of the time through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the distribution of different bit rates could be different different parts of the podcast. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when something doesn’t support doesn’t support VBR properly you have that issue where seeking to a timestamp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not actually play the correct timestamp. Well we started getting a lot of reports from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Android mostly this past this past week when I released the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying hey your chapter markers are all messed up and seek to the wrong timestamps in, you know, insert name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Android podcast player. It wasn’t too long before somebody, I think John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, asked, did you by any chance encode the show in VBR this week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer was yes, I did. So Apple added VBR seeking support finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iOS 11 and in High Sierra. And now that iOS 11 has over 50% market share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nobody listened to podcasts on the Mac, sorry Casey. So I figured this would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a safe time for me to try VBR, to just see like how many problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are we gonna hear from anybody who has problems or is no one gonna really notice or care? Because most of our listeners are on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a vast majority of them upgrade to the new OS’s fairly soon. And since the global share of iOS 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was over 50%, I figured that’s pretty good. And I knew it worked fine on Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on any other iOS app that used the built-in iOS libraries. I figured Android is nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Surely they’ve figured out a 20-year-old MP3 standard by now. Turns out that was wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out that I don’t know the great details on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how MP3 decoding is done on Android, how many different libraries there are to do it, what versions there are out there, because I don’t know anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Android. But suffice to say, most of Android or all of Android in practice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not support VBR seeking of MP3s. And therefore, or at least the libraries that podcast makers use. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly again I don’t know the details of all this. Short version is they’re not supported. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of our Android listeners started bothering us and the app makers who make Android podcast apps, some of which are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very mad at me right now. It was causing enough problems that I was convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put a CBR file back, a big constant bitrate file back up and that this was not a good test after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. The failure rate was simply too high. So about a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after release, I switched the file out for a regular bitrate, lower quality, larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file. It turns out this was a failed experiment for VBR last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know when I will try it again. I think what this has shown me is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically Android’s not ready. You know, iOS just got ready, Android is not ready, and because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nature of Android, it’s probably gonna be a long time before podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makers can safely ship VBR files without causing problems for people. So I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably not gonna do VBR again for a very long time, possibly if ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the other thing is, if I can, for instance, serve different files to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different clients, like right now there’s not a lot of infrastructure in place for that, things like our hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and our website and things like that. But if I were to go through the complexity rabbit hole of adding something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that where I could serve different files to different clients, then I probably should stop using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MP3 altogether for like the good one and I should start making like an Opus file, because Opus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a way better codec than MP3 and I could get awesome quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with VBR, naturally, in something like a third of the file size. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I’m ever going to actually be able to practically use VBR MP3s as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast again, but at least now that Apple supports it in their libraries, which means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that every iOS app will now support it, at least there’s a chance, and I hope I can do it in the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s probably gonna be a long way off if ever. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should just serve up the show as a HEVC video, but
⏹️ ▶️ John with no video. It has all the features that you want from it. It’s audio stream,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s variable bit rate, and chapter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco markers and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it may turn out to be playable on more platforms sooner than variable bit
⏹️ ▶️ John rate MP3, because it’s not like VBR MP3 is the new standard we’re waiting for people to catch up, as you
⏹️ ▶️ John noted, it’s 20 years old. So if they haven’t done it now, what’s their motivation? Whereas all of the HEVC and all those
⏹️ ▶️ John new containers is a new format, and I think most platforms will adopt it so people can watch
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K video or whatever on it. Although there’s, what is the competing one? What is the Google one that they like? Is it VP9?
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the VPs. Yeah, well, anyway, you still probably serve two different frosted things.
⏹️ ▶️ John next time, just, you know, do the experiment in top four is all I’m saying. I can’t hear about pumpkin spice food.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so angry, they’ll get over it, they’ll be fine. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s escalated quickly. It’s not as important as hearing us complain for the umpteenth time about the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro keyboard and the Mac Pro. I mean, that’s a good priority straight there. Although I have to say, seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture of all that food that you bought, like I tried not to do the math. Like I feel like you were
⏹️ ▶️ John running the show at a loss based on how many hundreds of dollars worth of crap food you buy for each episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then, you know, give away or throw away. It’s just, it doesn’t seem to make economic sense and he’s giving you tummy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fortunately, pumpkin spice garbage food from discount retail stores is not very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, that definitely was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John probably. That was a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food. Yeah. That was a lot of food. Well, it’s big boxes. I mean, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, it’s crap food.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s not a lot in there. Did you try it all other than the ones that you were too afraid to? Like, did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every box and consider? Oh yeah. Yeah, like there were a few that we cut from the show. Like there was a bag of popcorn. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were a few that we cut just because it wasn’t interesting. like we I mean we recorded something like an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour and 45 minutes worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it was two sessions right yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John because of upset tummies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we ran out of time like the first session we had to fit in the school day because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were doing during the day and like it was time to go pick up Adam at the bus we had to stop like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like it we had way too much so yeah that was that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a lot of editing there
⏹️ ▶️ John well put a link in the show notes this is one of Marco’s other podcasts and it’s very different from ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a lot of fun. And if you’re interested in it, you’ll be able to link to it. In this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John they tasted a bunch of pumpkin spice food. I don’t know why is what they do. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the premise, the premises of the show is that they rank them, but it’s a farce. So anyway, check out the
⏹️ ▶️ John to be tied for my number two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have 45 honorable mentions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Yeah. I give them the honorable mentions just once they get into the four that they can’t actually pick
⏹️ ▶️ John four. Marco had a new twist this time because it was like, this would be my number
⏹️ ▶️ John two except it’s not my number two because I’m weird about things. So he had an alternate number
⏹️ ▶️ John two and three after he’d gotten up to his number one and he’d done the other ones and he’s saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John would actually be my number two but and there was some kind of explanation that made sense in his mind but it didn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John make any sense as to why his number two was not even in the top four.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s it. Yeah. Truly mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’d already had lots of pumpkin beer at that point, so we didn’t really know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I, not honestly, I had like three sips of pumpkin beer, because one of them I didn’t like very much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the other one I didn’t have time to drink, so it was, I was, I was high on pumpkin spice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco donuts and cream cheese and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sorts of weird stuff. I like
⏹️ ▶️ John how the, the, the pumpkin spice donut holes that barely had any flavor is like you were munching
⏹️ ▶️ John on those anyway. It’s like, you know what? Donuts. Yeah, they’re good. They’re not pumpkin
⏹️ ▶️ John spicy. They don’t even make minorable mentions, but donuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can have donut holes in pretty much any flavor, and they’re gonna be amazing, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna want more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re so small. Yes. They barely count. They feel free.
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re missing on this show. How come we don’t get snacks? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hell? I know, right? You got toasters for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I had to supply my own food, and it was like toast. I