255: The Thermal Paste Lottery
04 Jan 2018CPU exploits, iMac Pro impressions, iPhone battery PR, and a special intervention for Casey.
Episode Description:
- Apple's battery slowdown PR
- Accelerated rollout
- The Talk Show #210: Australian Battery Scam
- Phone throttling isn't always the issue
- iMac Pro thermal throttling
- Marco's iMac Pro
- Intel CPU exploit
#askatp- What if we had to use iOS? (via Aaron Bushnell)
- What if we had to use Windows? (via Brandon Butler)
- What if we didn't have advertisers? (via Mark W)
- Post-show: Marco stages an intervention for Casey
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Chapters
- Closing out iPhone batterygate
- iMac Pro thermal throttling
- Sponsor: FlightLogger
- High Sierra font-smoothing bug 🖼️
- Very early iMac Pro impressions
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- CPU exploits
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: One big iOS feature?
- #askatp: Why we hate Windows?
- #askatp: Do ATP without ads?
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Hire Casey!
Closing out iPhone batterygate
⏹️ ▶️ John He didn’t follow my go-to statement that even Casey missed. I’ll move it up. Here you go. Go-to fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice. Because it’s just running off the end. You got to end up going back to ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I guess you just run off the end again. What can you do? It’s basic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last we spoke, which feels like 13 years ago, or maybe it was just last year, I guess. It was exactly seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco God, I’m so out of whack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot the joke already?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It hasn’t been that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As soon as I said, was it real, I was like, no wait, he’s making the joke again. No, I’ve been off for two weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I haven’t had a job, and it’s totally screwed up my schedule.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re going to talk about that, by the way. I know it’s not in the list, but we’re going to talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Okay. Anyway, so exactly seven days ago is what I said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was before Apple issued their December 28th memo entitled, A Message to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our Customers About iPhone Batteries and Performance. So this is Apple trying to do some PR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cleanup about the battery gate, if you will. The last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time we spoke, this hadn’t been shared yet. A lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed semi-angry with us that we didn’t take Apple to task more about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of people deeply believe that the only reasonable explanation for this battery stuff isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey science, it isn’t chemistry, it’s greed. The only logical explanation for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Apple’s greedy and wants us to buy new phones. Sorry, so Apple’s been doing a lot of cleanup. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey satisfied with this, but I was obviously the least punchy about this issue in the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place. So I don’t know, John, you haven’t had much to say. Let’s start with you. How do you feel about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PR push? And does this make you feel better, worse, different? Don’t care. Tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ John The PR message was good. Apple’s usually pretty good with PR. Like you can read it and it uses like regular English sentences
⏹️ ▶️ John and says and explains things in a straightforward way without tons of weasel words in it. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to convince anybody who’s still convinced that Apple is, you know, doing evil things on purpose, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, uh, you know, it, it’s straightforward and I think it’s worth linking to for people who haven’t read it
⏹️ ▶️ John because like very often companies will put out a press release and you’ll kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of have to read your, you know, the, you know, whatever, the tech side of your choice
⏹️ ▶️ John to get an explanation of what the press really says, you know, right? But in the case of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s things, I think you can just read the press release. Like, you don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John someone to interpret and to translate from corporate ease into regular language.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, it doesn’t mean you’re going to find it convincing or like, oh, now I’m convinced before I didn’t believe it, but Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple told me they’re not doing anything wrong. And now I believe whatever, like, but anyway, you can read it and hear an explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is typically vague because I don’t want to go into super techie details and I still have some curiosity
⏹️ ▶️ John about the super techie details mostly because I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have something else I can tell people who have questions about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I know this is just about the press release and we’ll get to the little thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Renee Ritchie tweeted about it in a second but the question I have and maybe you guys know the answer maybe you read
⏹️ ▶️ John something more about it is because a lot of people are wondering hey, is my iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this happening to my iPhone? Right, so there’s lots of people say, oh, you can run this thing, it’ll check your battery health and if it’s below
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain percentage, then it’s probably doing it and blah, blah, blah. But the other way people have to test it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’ll run a benchmark and, you know, my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife has a brand new version of the same phone as me and she runs a benchmark and gets this number
⏹️ ▶️ John and I run on my phone with an old battery and I get that number. Or I run the benchmark and then I get my battery placed
⏹️ ▶️ John and I run the benchmark again. Like the idea that running benchmarks and getting some numbers as a way to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of gauge whether you’re subject to the throttling. And the question I have about this, and I don’t know the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, but I think might be sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy is
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple’s throttling thing is there to, as Apple says and as
⏹️ ▶️ John most people seem to agree, like mechanically speaking, like how does it actually work?
⏹️ ▶️ John It clocks things down to prevent sort of the maximum power draw
⏹️ ▶️ John like these these things if they run at their maximum speed And they draw the most power that they can draw sometimes It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John too much and the battery old batteries can’t keep up and so what they’re trying to do By downclocking
⏹️ ▶️ John is to prevent you from ever drawing that much right? But during
⏹️ ▶️ John normal use like my question is is it down clock all the time like from
⏹️ ▶️ John boot time on it’s like we normally we would run your thing at you know, one gigahertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now we’re running it at 800 megahertz. So we’re just making up numbers. These aren’t real. And we just run it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s from the boot time on and we never changed the clock speed is 800 instead of one gigahertz the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or does it downclock in response to demand? In other words, it’s running at full
⏹️ ▶️ John speed until you go and try to run something extremely intensive like a benchmark. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it downclocks you because if it didn’t downclock, you downclock, you would see that you’re about to draw too much power.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the answer to that. But I think if that is the case, if it’s dynamically downclocking,
⏹️ ▶️ John then by running a benchmark, you are forcing your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John into the downclock mode. And for all you know, when you’re sitting there, reading Twitter or sending text messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is actually running at full speed all the time. And it only gets downclocked when you do something demanding.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, I don’t know the answer. And that’s that’s a place where I wish Apple would be more forthcoming
⏹️ ▶️ John with the technical details, but you know, obviously that’s not going to be in a press release. And so far I haven’t seen any official
⏹️ ▶️ John word from Apple explaining in nitty gritty detail exactly what it does to your, uh, to your clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on this. I did want to mention there was a great discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about lots of different sides of this issue, not just how Apple has done the PR and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of very good questions being brought up on last week’s episode of the talk show with John Gruber and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jason Snell. It’s the talk show episode number 210 for the show notes. And it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a really good conversation because there’s a lot of sides of this that, that either we didn’t cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or we, or we only briefly covered. Um, and a lot of questions that have come up kind of since then with more time to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it, uh, from exactly seven days ago. And I think one of the biggest things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, there were so many factors that made this a problem that are totally Apple’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, things like the OS is really do run too slowly on old hardware, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really does seem like they don’t care that much. I’m sure it’s somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job, and maybe a lot of somebody’s jobs, to make the OSs work on the older hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the actions speak louder than words, and it clearly is not as high of a priority as it should be, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been true for years. That’s one of the many problems that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really exacerbated this for Apple. The reason why people have been thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years that Apple secretly slows down their phones to make them buy new ones is because new OS’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often run so much slower than old ones when you install them on like a one or two generation old phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a big question. I would also, you know, one of the bigger questions that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think people have been asking over the last couple of weeks is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why did this only happen from the iPhone 6 forward and is it happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster than it should? We’ve heard all sorts of crazy reports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over Twitter and email and everything, but a lot of people are saying that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing this battery throttling happening on a phone within its first year or its second year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s reasonable. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had a lot of time to do research on this. Somebody said Samsung makes some kind of guarantee about a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery health percentage after two years. I don’t know enough about that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it certainly seems like, yes, batteries do degrade over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yes, they have problems, and this is actually a pretty clever engineering solution to try to make phones with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco severely degraded batteries still usable, but I would like to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe from people who know more about this stuff, who know more about battery hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design. Is this actually inevitable at the scale and timeline that it’s happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is there possibly some kind of bigger design problem here?
⏹️ ▶️ John So just to get to what Rene communicated, like Apple in this press release had said that they were gonna start this $30 battery
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement thing in mid-January, but actually they’re starting it now. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John their supplies may be limited, but they’re not waiting. So if you want to go to an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store right now because you think you have a bad battery and you wanna get the $30 deal, you can do that. Like you don’t have to wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that was the minor announcement. As to what you were getting at, Marco, I think a lot of it is explained
⏹️ ▶️ John by some of the things we’ve experienced, or you’ve experienced multiple times
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the new laptops. It’s a combination
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of… Not anymore, my
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome now. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a combination of processors
⏹️ ▶️ John getting more powerful and having, and being more power efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John by you know turning off or down clocking
⏹️ ▶️ John or momentarily increasing and decreasing their clock speed like
⏹️ ▶️ John basically a larger Delta between how much power does the CPU draw when it’s not really doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much does it draw when it’s doing all the things that that is that gap has gotten wider
⏹️ ▶️ John and at the same time Apple has been aggressively making their things thinner and their batteries smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe around the iPhone 6 is when it started to cross that threshold of hey
⏹️ ▶️ John this system on a chip has a really big range between I’m doing all the things playing a game
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m just you know scrolling a text message screen right
⏹️ ▶️ John and at the same time you know the battery is getting bigger to power the bigger screens but also
⏹️ ▶️ John there was still like there was sort of the end of the thinness race uh they don’t think they really got much thinner after the six model
⏹️ ▶️ John six and seven and eight are kind of the same and actually the ten is even a little bit thicker than those
⏹️ ▶️ John so those phones could sort of be the phone equivalent of the 2016 2017
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros where the battery can last a long time if you’re scrolling web pages in Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John or using text edit or something but if you’re doing anything aggressive on them
⏹️ ▶️ John your battery life goes in the toilet because the battery is scaled to sort of a low average usage
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you use all the CPU and GPU all the time it destroys the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s just that’s you know obviously it’s not shutting off your computer or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we discussed before the the throttling Prismu for thermal reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John on The Mac Oprah’s, but I think this that as to whether this is inevitable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a natural consequence of of essentially chips getting better about power efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have all these things that if they use all of them at once, it’s tremendously fast and uses a lot of power,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s relying on the fact that most of the time you’re not doing that. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ John can get away with doing, putting a very small battery in there. If they had to treat
⏹️ ▶️ John the system on a chips in the iPhone six, seven, eight, and 10, as if they’re running at full blast all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, the batteries would be three times as big, right? they wouldn’t be able to get away with a battery that
⏹️ ▶️ John small in there. And the other possible thing is heat. I don’t know what kind of factor
⏹️ ▶️ John that is. I don’t feel like the phones get particularly hot, but that could just be because the heat is being trapped on the inside. But
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of excessive heat, or I suppose cold, really hoses your battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know if this is founded in battery chemistry. Some battery expert can tell me or not, but I always
⏹️ ▶️ John get the feeling that like the margin of error on a really small battery is just so much
⏹️ ▶️ John lower, like that it’s thinner, that the temperature gradients can get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle of it, you know what I mean? Like faster. That it’s just so wafer thin that if it’s hosed in any way,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s stressed or hosed in any way, there’s so little battery there. Like if it’s made hot
⏹️ ▶️ John or cold, the whole thing heats through or gets cold straight through immediately because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wafer thin, right? As opposed to if it was a battery like in an old power book that was
⏹️ ▶️ John just huge brick. subjecting that to external heat for a short period of time, it’s like, well, the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John might get hot, uh, from whatever warm thing it’s next to, but it’s going to take a while for that heat to penetrate all the
⏹️ ▶️ John way through the entire self. If the heat is an external source. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, the solution to all of these things is, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John make processes to take even less, uh, less energy, even when they’re going full blast and
⏹️ ▶️ John put in bigger batteries because bigger batteries, you know, it’s the cure-all to all battery-related
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Yeah, everything gets heavier and it takes longer to charge. But if you’re having problems delivering
⏹️ ▶️ John enough power or your battery is getting damaged in some way or whatever, if you just have
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of headroom and lots of excess battery capacity, then even if the thing degrades
⏹️ ▶️ John by 20% in the first year, if you are over-provisioned on battery by 50%, you’re still good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think to hopefully put a period on this whole topic, I think the thing that’s most unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and distressing about this is that a lot of it, if not all of it, could have been avoided with better messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Apple. And if Apple had just been more upfront about, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the unfortunate reality is your phone’s battery is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older than, you know, it’s designed to be or not, it’s not up to the snuff that we hoped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. So the bad news is it’s not going to run quite at full speed. Like we, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, CPU won’t run quite as full speed as we want it to, but the good news is it won’t randomly shut down on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, if you have the time, why don’t you go to the Apple store and we’ll charge you a little bit of money to replace the battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, had it been messaged more appropriately, I think it would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a much smaller story. And I think that we can all agree that. But…
⏹️ ▶️ John Or a thing about what you were just talking about with the messaging, aside from people like just not
⏹️ ▶️ John believing the messaging and everything which we went over last show It’s kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ John other problem with that that makes it tricky and maybe one of the things that motivated Apple not to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it It’s not as if there is like a little Thermometer gauge
⏹️ ▶️ John or a single number that pops out of the battery that tells you how good or bad your battery is It’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John guesswork and sort of like well the last time we went through a charge cycle Here’s what the curve look like and here’s what the voltages
⏹️ ▶️ John were at various times like it’s a lot of guessing and it’s like well but it was just it was in a
⏹️ ▶️ John really cold car then so does that counter but now it’s really warm and like There are just so many variables
⏹️ ▶️ John and because batteries Like they’re not like bananas where you get a good one and a bad one
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s an overripe one or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but they are
⏹️ ▶️ John not as they’re not quite as uniform as other components might
⏹️ ▶️ John be because it’s all just a big Chemical soup and they try to make them all uniform and try to make them all good but it really depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on how you use your phone. You leave your phone on the dashboard in the sun or in your
⏹️ ▶️ John car when it’s freezing cold weather because you leave it in your car and you forget it for two hours. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John those things hurt your battery. So if they were to bring up that message, the first problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is you could be bringing up message that’s a based on all our heuristics. We kind of think your battery is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy and maybe they’re wrong because their heuristics are a little bit off because of extenuating circumstances that weren’t taken into
⏹️ ▶️ John account. And now someone is really mad because their phone is three months old and now you get a story. My
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco three month old
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone told me that my battery is bad. Refund, refund, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the other possibility is that you are an unlucky person who
⏹️ ▶️ John happened to get a battery that either was bad from the factory or got damaged by some excessive
⏹️ ▶️ John temperature changes during shipping or something like that. Like someone,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of all the components that you could potentially get that are end up being like you know bad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of the other components have good easy ways to test them, but batteries, you can test it at the
⏹️ ▶️ John factory and it’ll be like passes all tests with flying colors. But after three weeks of charge cycle, some internal
⏹️ ▶️ John weakness or flaw in the battery causes it to not be performing well. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John that case, I mean, I can say the messaging is good for the consumer to say like, Oh, I’ve got a bad battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John and presumably they’d get it replaced under warranty but it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you distinguish that from the case I described before where actually your battery is fine and the thing is just freaking out for no good reason
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m not sure what the solution is a lot of a lot of time people have battery issues
⏹️ ▶️ John with their phone and the easy answer is to just get a new battery and one of the things I think I learned from the feedback from last show
⏹️ ▶️ John is that a surprising number of people who listen to the show either
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves or didn’t know or know people who don’t know that you can replace
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery on an iPhone. Like that’s even a thing that can be done for any amount of money anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John I assumed it was a thing that everybody knew and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey A lot of people were
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, until this thing, I didn’t even know you could replace a battery in the phone. If I had known I could have just replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery, I never would have gotten on a new phone. Now some people were saying if I had known a battery replacement would fix the problem, But other people
⏹️ ▶️ John were saying, I didn’t even know that was a thing that you would do. Or maybe they didn’t think it was a thing that Apple would do. Like maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John could find some, uh, you know, sketchy vendor who will crack open your phone and give it a go. Or you could try to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it yourself, but that it’s an official Apple thing that you can do. Um, and the final thing on that is
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people have been reporting, um, and I don’t know if this is Apple policy
⏹️ ▶️ John or informal policy or not, but before this all happened, if you took a phone to
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple store and say, Hey, I’m having problems with my battery. They would run your phone through like
⏹️ ▶️ John a diagnostic to check like your battery health according to whatever you know, whatever rules and number
⏹️ ▶️ John pops out says your battery is like 80% okay, or whatever. And there was some number. And if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John below that number, they would say, okay, we’ll replace your battery for 80 bucks or whatever, like whatever they
⏹️ ▶️ John were charging, right. But if it was not below that number, if it says your battery is 99% healthy, according
⏹️ ▶️ John to our tests that they wouldn’t do the replacement for you and that you would throw your money at this
⏹️ ▶️ John and no look here money $80 take this money and replace my battery and they said no sorry our diagnosis
⏹️ ▶️ John tell us that your battery is still good so we won’t replace your thing right
⏹️ ▶️ John and enough people gave me that story that it seems like a thing that’s really happening and the reason I was interested in it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John we had an iPhone 5s that we were it was gonna be a hand-me-down phone for my son and I and
⏹️ ▶️ John we thought like oh before I you know it had had been well used. It was I had been used for at least two years, maybe longer,
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily used. And so we’re like, Oh, well, I don’t want to give him a phone with a two year old battery. You know, we want to be able to reach
⏹️ ▶️ John him and he’s probably not going to be very good about charging it. So before I give him this phone, let me go to the Apple store and replace the battery. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John brought the five s to the Apple store to replace the battery. I gave it to the outburst. I said to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John I made a genius bar appointment. I said, you know, I just want a new battery in this phone. And it takes it from
⏹️ ▶️ John me and runs it through diagnostic and says, Oh, this battery actually looks like it’s pretty good. It’s like 85%. percent. I’m like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. I don’t. It’s not. There’s nothing wrong with the battery. I just want to replace it because I’m giving it to my son as a gift and I want him to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a fresh battery. And the guy said, oh, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he did it for me. Right. And only now in retrospect, do I look back, think back to the like
⏹️ ▶️ John the strange pause and the way he kind of said, oh, to think maybe he was doing
⏹️ ▶️ John me a favor. Like I wasn’t like aggressive about it. I had no expectation that I was going to be told no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just explaining, Oh, yeah, no, sorry. Sorry to make you think I had a problem with my battery. I don’t have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with my battery I am just here saying just period I want a new battery didn’t argue with me and didn’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me they have a policy They do but he did do a little pause So, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what to think anymore. Maybe Apple geniuses can chime in and say what was the policy before?
⏹️ ▶️ John this whole throttling PR thing, but Either way at $80
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Apple should have replaced the battery for anybody who could throw that money out them at $30 I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like Apple’s probably losing money in every one of these battery replacements So I kind of understand if they’re not gonna give you the $30 deer
⏹️ ▶️ John deal if your battery is like brand spanking new and their test Says you have you know 95% capacity or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me about Phone throttling and how it’s not always the explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another big threat of feedback. Hey my phone Takes 25 seconds to launch the messages
⏹️ ▶️ John application damn Apple and that thermal throttling a A lot of things can be wrong with phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to tell people that if your phone is super slow and doing all sorts of terrible things
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly related to this just started after the iOS 11 update or whatever it may be
⏹️ ▶️ John there are many many things that people have experienced and have written to us about and that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have experienced personally where your phone gets unreasonably slow when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s It’s doing nothing hard and with a brand new battery and I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you that those things are not
⏹️ ▶️ John to phone throttling. Those are related to something else terrible and I wish I could tell you what it was. Lots of people like
⏹️ ▶️ John wipe and restore your phone and that would fix it, which is the worst possible like you almost wish that what doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work like please don’t let this work because it’s the worst kind of sort of cross my fingers plug in and unplug it
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But very often that actually does work, which is terrible. That should not work. You would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to know what the problem is. But all I’m going to say is, if your phone is like really slow, like someone just wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, they press play on like, you know, a podcast player, it takes five seconds for audio
⏹️ ▶️ John to start. That is, I’m pretty sure that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU throttling, right? Because the throttling is not we slow your CPU to 1%, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you’re getting any kind of performance problems that are pervasive
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere throughout the operating system and really, really slow, like 100 times, 200
⏹️ ▶️ John times slower than it should be. Like you’re waiting three minutes for messages to launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not this issue. That is another issue that is probably worse. And we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even tell you what it is. And if you want to go get a new battery anyway, go ahead. But for those
⏹️ ▶️ John things, like, you know, sometimes it’s not a tumor. And sometimes it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John phone throttling. Sometimes it’s something even worse. And yes, sometimes it
⏹️ ▶️ John does coincide with an OS grow upgrade and I have no explanation for what it is. But I can tell you it is definitely a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I experienced it myself my wife experienced on her phone. wiping and restore
⏹️ ▶️ John fixes it for me about like 60% of the time and I hate that it does. And I don’t really recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John people wipe and restore as a matter of course, but you know, if unless you know unless someone else knows a
⏹️ ▶️ John better way to figure out what the heck that problem is. You just want to make the problem go away sometimes. Unfortunately, sometimes wipe and restore
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t fix it and then what do you do? I don’t even know. But anyway, all that is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s something wrong with your phone and it’s still under warranty, bring it to the Apple genius. Let them sort
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. If they can’t figure out maybe they’ll just give you a new phone. But it’s not always throttling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find in In my experience, it’s usually lupus.
iMac Pro thermal throttling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking more of throttling. Let’s talk about the iMac Pro and its thermal throttling. This is the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about throttling apparently Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is slightly different. But anyway people have iMac pros now including Marco, which we’ll get to later in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John and some of the people who have them are Testing them out and one of the interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John tests that you can do with these now that they have them and they have something That can measure all the temperatures
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the little bits is hey Let’s see if anything we can do with this iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John causes any of the parts inside it to not run as their normal
⏹️ ▶️ John clock speed? And the answer is that yes there are things you can do to make both the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and the GPU dip below their normal clock speed albeit briefly. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is an Apple Insider article and they ran it through a bunch of benchmarks on CPU and GPU and
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part it stays pegged at whatever its you know speed that its rated speed is but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nice little graphs where you can see it dips for a second or two down to a slower clock speed
⏹️ ▶️ John and it goes back up to the top and the interesting part I think about this throttling
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is nothing to do with battery obviously this gets plugged in the interesting this is all about heat the interesting part of this throttling
⏹️ ▶️ John is I say during all these tests the fans are not really going
⏹️ ▶️ John nuts right in other words that it seems like this throttling could be avoided
⏹️ ▶️ John if the system was tuned to crank the fan speed up a little bit more,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it seems like, at least as far as this current iteration of whatever firmware and OS
⏹️ ▶️ John combination determines all this stuff, that the iMac Pro is tuned to be
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet, as quiet as possible, while more or less maintaining maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John speed. And again, you can’t instantaneously crank up the fans and instantaneously
⏹️ ▶️ John extract heat that’s going to cause the thing to throttle itself, right? So I think their option would be
⏹️ ▶️ John to avoid these brief, you know, one or two second dips below normal
⏹️ ▶️ John clock speed, right? To avoid that, you would actually have to run the fans louder and sooner,
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps to a significant degree. And instead, they’ve chosen to tune
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing to be as quiet as possible while allowing for occasional dips in clock
⏹️ ▶️ John speed, which is an interesting trade off, which means that I bet this machine is pretty quiet. And again, Marco, you will get a chance to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John all your experiences with this eventually. But also that this is another
⏹️ ▶️ John way that I feel like this thing is hopefully, probably, potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John differentiated from the Mac Pro because again if a machine is
⏹️ ▶️ John ever going to be tuned to never dip its clock speed because it can’t get enough heat away from it,
⏹️ ▶️ John a purpose-designed modular doesn’t have a screen attached to it yada yada yada
⏹️ ▶️ John like pro computer would be the one to do it and the all-in-one sleek slim
⏹️ ▶️ John amazingly compact pro components jammed behind a screen is the one that is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John stay as quiet as possible but occasionally allow dips in clock speed
⏹️ ▶️ John so it doesn’t have to be too noisy.
Sponsor: FlightLogger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Flight Logger. Go to flightlogger.co or search for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flight Logger in the app store. Flight Logger lets you easily search and save your flights,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organize them into custom trips, share your travel schedule with friends and family, and much more, all
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco brings the ease back to air travel with a visual timeline of your itinerary to keep you on schedule
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco gate changes, you can track and get notified of arrival and departure times, delays, and baggage claim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information, which is awesome, it’ll tell you what claim your bags are coming on, and you can share your flight information with friends and family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for no waiting airport pickups and peace of mind. Flight logging and flight tracking and flight status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, honestly, the ones I’ve seen that aren’t Flightlogger, they’re kind of a dumpster fire. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not an easy to use, attractive category of apps, generally speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually used Flightlogger before they were a sponsor here, because I’ve heard them recommended strongly on other podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I gotta tell ya, the hype is real. It’s a great app, and it’s miles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead of the others in terms of having a nice appearance and making the features easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use and easy to understand. It really is great, and it supports all, I mean, there’s so much stuff, I can’t even tell you it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an ad. You can locate the aircraft on a map, you can see your flight as you go, which I love. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can import flights via email forwarding, you can just forward your confirmation to his special email address,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll import automatically. There’s so much to see here, and they even have a cool little trick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to the settings menu and shake your phone, and you will get a new entry that I think ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners, especially John Syracuse, might appreciate. So check it out. Go to flightlogger.co,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Flight Logger in the App Store or flightlogger.co for an incredibly nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to use app for easily tracking, saving, and getting alerts for your
High Sierra font-smoothing bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, thank you so much to Flight Logger, a really cool flight tracking app, for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You did order an iMac Pro, as it turns out. As it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, yes I did. And? And I am now running High Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aww, welcome to months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my fonts are now overly smoothed and blurry because my font smoothing setting is not fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me interrupt you right there. I have heard you, you know, confessioning about this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months. I don’t understand what it is that you’re so angry about, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really kind of don’t want to know because I don’t see it right now. I don’t see the arrow in the FedEx
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo and I don’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ John You haven’t changed your settings. Marco is changing his settings from the defaults for response smoothing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I used to expect that if a setting is going to be there, that it should work properly. Otherwise, why have the setting?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so what do you set it to? So the setting I’m talking about is in settings, general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turning off use LCD font smoothing when available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, mine is off. So what am I supposed to see that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garbage? It’s off? Yeah. Okay, open Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something else that would truncate text automatically with an ellipsis. Look in the source list, make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it nice and narrow. All right, hold on, hold on, hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Slow down, man, slow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down. I was trying to find the right project,
⏹️ ▶️ John Launching Xcode, bounce, bounce,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Launching Xcode on your non-pro iMac must take ages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, you’re such a jerk. OK, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I see an ellipsis in the middle of one of the folder names in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco particular project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what you should see, if that setting is unchecked, is you should see that the text with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ellipsis should be rendered thicker than the text without the ellipsis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, f*** you, Marco. Oh, God bless America.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You see it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m never going to be able to unsee this now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that isn’t that isn’t the only place that this shows up. Basically, like if text is being rendered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with certain, I don’t know the details, but with certain like core text behaviors that are being applied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. They basically make it ignore that setting and make it always should always use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LCD fonts moving and it’s new to High Sierra that is not yet fixed. It would in whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and workflows and things I use that shows up a lot. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather just live with my blurry text everywhere than have it be inconsistently blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, right now I am living with that setting back on, which is the default, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sucks, but it sucks less than having everything be inconsistent. I think it also applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Finder windows and stuff. It applies a lot of places, and it’s annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why do you think LCD font smoothing is blurrier than plain old anti-aliasing? my eyes, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John plain old anti-aliasing with gray pixels is blurrier than the little sub pixel thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that the LCD thing is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t I haven’t ever like taking a macro lens to my screen and really like compared how they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but it seems like the effective visual thickness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the fonts like how thick they appear to be appears slightly thicker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s using the LCD fonts within which is their version of sub pixel anti-aliasing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think it was the
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite. In old non-retina monitors like the one I’m staring at, I always find the opposite. That LCD font
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothing makes them appear thinner, and plain old anti-aliasing with a series of grayish pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John makes them look thicker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s what I would assume, but regardless, the way it appears visually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, the perception of how it looks, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the sub-pixel anti-aliasing is being used, which is the default, the fonts do appear thicker.
Very early iMac Pro impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so how’s your iMac Pro? It’s beautiful. I’ve seen one once at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC. In fact, John was with me. I can tell you they’re beautiful, but tell me other than the physical appearance, how is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, ask me next week, because I’ve had it for literally one day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day during which I have been able to do very little on it because I’ve been very, very busy. The one thing I will—I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I’m using it right now. It’s wonderful so far. It does look incredible. All the black things on my desk now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look cool. The few remaining silver things on my desk, like my speaker and headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amps, now look really out of place because they’re silver instead of black. So God knows what I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do about that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John what about all your shit boxes? Those
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all are silver, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are, yeah. Now, shit does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have black versions of some of their products, so I might look into that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John them or just deal with it. I can get you a can of Krylon. You can fix all those silver boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real quick. Yeah anyway, so yeah, so it’s my initial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressions. I don’t really have any yet because it hasn’t been enough time. However, one thing that is immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco striking besides the look is just how incredibly quiet it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even quieter than the 5k it for me at least and maybe that’s because my 5k is old and the platters are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of bad blocks or whatever the Apple people told me I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know more likely the inside of the case is filled with dog hair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My dog doesn’t shed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s… You’re right, it doesn’t shed. That makes a difference. And he really doesn’t. He needs a haircut very badly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he does not shed. Anyway, so it’s strikingly quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it is ridiculously quiet. So I’m very much enjoying that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, if nothing else, will push me to very aggressively move this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into being Tiff’s computer as soon as the Mac Pro is presumably released, if I want it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want her computer across the room to be this quiet as well. It is shocking how quiet it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how quiet it seems to remain under load by all the reviews, but I have not experienced that yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but ask me again next week. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin So both Jason Snell and Underscore have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me that FFmpeg encodes tend to be twice as quick on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro as compared to my 5K Mac. And although I don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FFmpeg encodes as often as I probably paint it, it happens often enough that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am salivating at the thought of it. And then I see the price tag and I’m reminded that I don’t need one of these after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My goodness, it seems like it would be it’s just so much faster and I’m super jealous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just think all my all my RAM errors are being corrected and detected. Oh, man, this is so great. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so harsh. It’s so nice to be back on a Mac Pro again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re so mean to John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said in the in the the follow up, but I do find it interesting that this machine appears to be tuned
⏹️ ▶️ John for quiet above all else, which is like an interesting way to go for you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what it says to me that actually that they do actually have cooling more cooling, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John they chose parts that are clocked lower, like whatever these special number parts that they use from Intel, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar to other parts that Intel offers, but a little bit lower clocked, like they would have the headroom,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they wanted to be quieter right rather than having it like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John almost as if the design goal was quieter than the 5k iMac which you could see of them maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it should be as quiet as the 5k Mac but it ends up being quieter like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John dramatically quieter uh and not because it can be that
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet and never throttle but it can be that quiet and almost never throttle
⏹️ ▶️ John like just little blips little blips here and there like i’d encourage people to check out the apple insider article look at the graphs
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s mostly never throttling little dips here and there and so and again like this probably
⏹️ ▶️ John varies on the ambient temperature of the room how good the thermal paste is on the model that you happen to get
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of things like that that’s something else that uh a couple of follow-up uh youtube links and unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John i don’t have for the show notes but uh if you just go onto youtube and look for like iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John or Apple thermal throttle cooling blah blah blah uh powerbook powerbook sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John macbook thermal throttling. One of the things that the PC builders like to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is take apart Apple computers and take off the heat sinks and the heat pipes
⏹️ ▶️ John and scrape off the thermal paste and put on like their fancy thermal paste.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes they put on multiple kinds of fancy thermal paste, which boggles my mind that they take the entire thing apart,
⏹️ ▶️ John scrape off the thing, clean the CPU and the heat sink, put on thermal paste, set, reassemble
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire thing, test it and then repeat it only to scrape off the pace they just put on and put on even more ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive special thermal paste made with like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. Like made made with these adamantium elements that make the things like more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John than printer ink. But they get like, you know, double, you know, single or even
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes double digit increases in or decreases in temperature just for
⏹️ ▶️ John merely applying new thermal paste or better thermal paste.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is true not just of laptops, but of all computers. As it
⏹️ ▶️ John ages, and as you go through heat and cool and heat and cool cycles over and over
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the thermal bond between whatever is pulling heat away from your chip
⏹️ ▶️ John and the top of the chip itself degrades, right? And I’ve always wondered why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t use whatever these very fancy thermal pastings are. Maybe these
⏹️ ▶️ John ones last even, like they’re good when they’re installed new, but after a year they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John of crap. Maybe it’s just a cost saving thing. Maybe they can’t get thermal paste of that quality
⏹️ ▶️ John in the volumes needed to sell millions and millions of whatever’s. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always something I suspect when I hear someone says like, Oh, I got a five K I Mac and it’s like super loud
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, that happened with the PlayStation four. So a lot of the places in force, like I got a brand new PlayStation four and it sounds like a jet engine is taking
⏹️ ▶️ John off and again, getting back to the battery as being like the sort of touchy feely
⏹️ ▶️ John squishy element that could go that could be like a you get a bad banana
⏹️ ▶️ John right the touchy feely squishy element of almost all electronics these days is
⏹️ ▶️ John how how well assembled and was it like how good is the thermal bond
⏹️ ▶️ John between the hot little square rectangle and the apparatus meant
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull heat away and so you may end up getting a PlayStation four where
⏹️ ▶️ John the it’s just not seated properly or there’s not enough thermal paste or there’s too much thermal paste or it’s crooked
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other problem with it. And right out of the box, the fans run at max speed. You’re like, Oh, what’s wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with this thing? It’s like, yeah, that part of it, like the silicon chip is solid
⏹️ ▶️ John state and they can test it and verify it. And if it’s good, it’s probably good. But and you know, the assembly
⏹️ ▶️ John process, if they over torque or under torque a few screws, it doesn’t matter. But if one of those screws is one of the screws that
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps the heat sink properly seated on the thing, or if like the a little machine
⏹️ ▶️ John or person that puts a thermal paste on, got it off by a few millimeters or like just so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things can go wrong that seem like sort of very analog. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if that goes wrong, it’s like you just feel like you, you lost the lottery, like you’re bummed out
⏹️ ▶️ John or you, you won the crappy lottery. Like most of the time everything’s fine, but every once in a while you get a lemon and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, why are these fans so loud? It’s like, uh, like if you, if you’re one of those people, you could crack it open and try to fix it. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not, you have to just try to return to try to they’ll say, Oh, fan noise is normal. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re playing a game, the fans just spin up. It’s like, Yeah, but when I just turned it on, like, listen to this, you can tell there’s something wrong with it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you have to argue with the person and beg. And it’s like my worst nightmare. I’ve had pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good luck with, with fans so far. But like, imagine you get a new five camera, who was the one
⏹️ ▶️ John who does was Stephen Hackett was complaining about his noisy five k max someone we know, I think recently got a brand new five k
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac and could not believe how loud it was. And I whenever I hear that, I’m like, maybe they just expected
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be quieter, or maybe the they lost the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal paste lottery. Yeah, well, and that I think that one was actually like a defective one. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I will say that, like, you know, now having having used the 5k iMac full time for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years, my only complaint really was that under load,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it got loud. And it was kind of annoying, you know, to hear the fans when when it was under a load.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have this brand new, awesome, high-end generation of the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically not do that at all, or do that to such a small level that most people don’t even notice it’s doing it at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically to have it be quiet under most loads, that is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade. And you could argue, as some people on that Apple Insider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comment thread did, you can argue it’s a pro machine. It should never throttle from thermals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think there’s a question of degree there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it can be really, really quiet under most workloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and only give up like 1% of its total throughput on the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably take that trade off and I bet most buyers would too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, especially since you would have to run the fan, not just like, oh, like
⏹️ ▶️ John during those blips just make the fan a little faster. I think to get rid of those blips, you would have to
⏹️ ▶️ John substantially run the fan substantially faster much earlier than you think you would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to. It’s not as if you can react to them in real time with fan speed. And so it is actually a trade off. And so basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John like these things look like they’re pretty much never throttling in exchange for very quiet performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could go to you could go to absolutely never throttling in exchange for iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K sounds performance, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. But like, I don’t want that. I gladly would give up that last little tiny percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of performance for a computer that is quiet pretty much all the time than one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does what the 5K iMac does, which is just ramp up, ramp down, ramp up, ramp down. Like you can always hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things moving. And we can
⏹️ ▶️ John just wait for the Mac Pro and have it all. We hope, right? That’s right. Until it’s introduced,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the fantasy computer that solves everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. Exactly. So Max Uck in the chat asks, is it possible that I would ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick with the iMac Pro and not buy the Mac Pro. That is possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, we won’t really know until the Mac Pro is released what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Correction. It is impossible that you won’t buy the Mac Pro, but it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that you buy it, return it, and then go back to the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Truth. It’s possible. I am going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to probably be incredibly satisfied with the iMac Pro in the meantime. As I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on previous shows, if the iMac Pro was it, if there was not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be another Mac Pro, if this was the only Mac Pro Xeon workstation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple was going to make, I would totally just buy it and be fine with it. I would occasionally complain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had to bring in my computer for service and I lost my whole computer because the monitor had a dead pixel. That would make me upset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, I’ve been using a 5K iMac for the last three years because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided the overall package of the iMac with the wonderful Retina screen and everything was better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me than the 2013 Mac Pro. I might make that same decision again after seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro, the next Mac Pro. But the next Mac Pro will also be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently, allegedly coming with a new Pro display. I assume it’s going to be at least a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5K Retina display, if not bigger. Man, it’d be awesome if it was 8K or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, I’m not, I don’t think, I don’t know how likely that is this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they release something that ends up being less compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me than the iMac Pro, then I’ll get an iMac Pro for myself and give this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to TIFF. Maybe I’ll wait till the next generation, probably not. But because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve seen a lot of people, a lot of Mac commentators and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, we really have to see how often Apple updates the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re expecting like annual updates. And don’t expect that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if Apple is serving this line responsibly and as well as they possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, they probably won’t update the iMac Pro in a meaningful way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annually. They might and they should update the GPUs annually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that they will, but the most responsible way to update this machine would be to update the GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically whenever there’s a new like major update to GPU line that it uses, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is usually about once a year. But the Xeon CPUs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses are not updated every year. Usually Intel gives meaningful Xeon updates about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every 18 months to two years. So that’s the kind of upgrade cycle that I hope to see here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything less than that I think is optimistic and they would only be able to update the GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the SSD, But probably not any meaningful CPU updates more often than that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So so far so good not a lot to say because it’s brand new yeah an hour in yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep Are you Kia was gonna be quick remember? Are you keeping your peripherals?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The black ones mm-hmm hell yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you won’t be using the keyboard I assume is that correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no that’s true the keyboard I am NOT planning on using because I use a natural keyboard which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all it the keyboard I use is the Microsoft sculpt ergonomic keyboard which happens to also be black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gray so that works out well it looks awesome with all the new stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I do have the black trackpad and the black mouse the black keyboard is still in the box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I I don’t know I’ll probably send it to John or somebody I don’t know do you want it I’m already buying
⏹️ ▶️ John snails oh I was gonna give you mine for free you want to send me it for free I’ll also also take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, do you want?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I am acquiring underscores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John coincidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ John The, what do you call it, the black market, so to speak, for iMac Pro peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ John is alive and kicking. The space gray market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coincidentally underscore. This is the thing, like, if I were to order myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMac Pro, whether or not I wanted any of the peripherals, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely no chance I would not order all three of them. I would order the keyboard, which of course
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to get. I would order a mouse and I would order a trackpad because why would you not get the whole set?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Underscore did that. And even though I am not a trackpad kind of guy, when he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me he had the whole set, I was like, all right, just send me an Apple Pay cash request
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for whatever the sum total of that would be. I don’t even want to know what it is until you ask for it. So I can’t back down because I’m sure it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like $300. But I’ll just take the whole set off your hands. And I’m very looking forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So about, I don’t know, a year or two ago, I added a trackpad to my setup. So I have left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand, left trackpad, right mouse. And that’s what I plan to do. Keyboard in the middle. It’s really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It takes only days to get into the habit of using the trackpad with your left hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not using it all the time. I’m basically just switching off. If I need to reach something with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my left hand, I can. If I need to move with the mouse, use my right hand, I can do that too. It’s surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to get accustomed to regularly using more than one input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device, even with your non-dominant hand. It’s really nice. And now, I’ll occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, like I’ll need the desk space for something else for like an hour, and I’ll move the trackpad like up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a different spot where it is so it’s not accessible to me, and I miss it immediately. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep putting my hand where it is, expecting to use it, and it’s not there. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really has worked itself into my setup very, very fully. and it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, and I miss it when it isn’t there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know how much I’ll use it in general, but in the brief amount of time I’ve used Final Cut Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh boy, do I wish I had a trackpad for a lot of that. So I am a devout mouse user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in general, but for that, I am very looking forward to having the trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s very nice for the two-finger scrolling gestures in both directions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like, you know, I started it for Logic when editing podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could scroll the timeline left and right. That’s probably why you want it for Final Cut Pro, right? Yep, yep. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m good and I’m precise enough with it that I can pretty much use regular mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality at pretty much full speed with my left hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I need to, and it’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s pretty cool. Yeah, I wanna use it for scrolling laterally in the timeline and also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zooming, you know, so making, I don’t know what the technical terms are this but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than showing the entire timeline of a maybe 15 minute video all on screen at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once maybe I want to blow it up so that there’s only 10 seconds of video being shown on my entire 5k
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen and I’m doing that deliberately because I’m like really trying to tweak timing on something so I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to pinch to zoom and all that so yeah I’m going to be freaking broke but I am looking forward to these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stealthy you know space gray don’t call it black black peripherals.
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys both need 27-inch iPad Pros so you can do multi-touch editing of your podcast sound video.
⏹️ ▶️ John True. Like you’re like one degree, like you’re doing this indirect thing where you’re swiping around while staring
⏹️ ▶️ John at a screen. It’s like just bring them together. You’re so close.
⏹️ ▶️ John and your hands and your elbows.
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CPU exploits
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else about the iMac Pro before we move on to this Intel thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if we have do we have time for the Intel thing? I think we have to get to ask ATP and we can push the Intel thing off till next
⏹️ ▶️ John week by which by which time planes will be falling from the sky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Come on, we have we have time for at least the opening of the Intel thing. We’ll talk about it for a little bit and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Ask ATP will be quick. Famous last words.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is like the Intel thing it’s huge news but we don’t really know a lot about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. So we need to talk about it but we’re gonna be talking about it more next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know enough about it to
⏹️ ▶️ John give to give a reasonable summary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right so let me let me take a stab as chief summarizer in chief and John whenever you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get fed up with it just interrupt me and we’ll we’ll move along. It appears that on Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPUs for sure, but probably on other CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey architectures, there is an exploit wherein, and I have to back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up just a half step, as a CPU is executing instructions, as it’s executing code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that modern CPUs will do is they’ll start looking ahead to what code is coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’ll start actually pre-executing some of that code in some circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get kind of ahead of the game. This is like when you grab a book and jump to the last page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see who killed who or who survives at the end or whatever the case may be. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these CPUs will look a little bit ahead and start to execute stuff that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think is coming. And that’s true of most modern CPU architectures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what’s a little bit different between CPU architectures is that some of them, or I understand that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of them have some protections around what’s considered like operating system or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really kernel code and what’s considered kind of quote unquote, the user’s code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it is strange. All right. Sorry. And warning. Here we go. Just cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in now. Cut in
⏹️ ▶️ John now. All right. So you’re so yeah, everything you set up to that point is good about speculative execution. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I’m not I’m not an expert on this either. And it just came out today. I’m reading about it after work, so forgive me if I’m getting some
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of it wrong but The the
⏹️ ▶️ John exploit as as it has been explained to me in various articles and over Twitter So take
⏹️ ▶️ John that for what it is is that? during the speculative execution
⏹️ ▶️ John of instructions It will spec it will start executing
⏹️ ▶️ John instructions before it’s sure whether they are valid things to do and depending on what what mode
⏹️ ▶️ John your CPU is in and what address is trying to reference and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are certain things that you could be trying to do that are invalid reading from a memory location that you’re not allowed to read
⏹️ ▶️ John from because it’s not mapped into your process or something like that or whatever. Or reading from kernel memory,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a distinction that exists in pretty much all modern processors of having memory
⏹️ ▶️ John space that belongs to the kernel that can’t be read by user land processes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will do the speculative execution and then eventually figure out, of I wasn’t, you’re not supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that I wasn’t supposed to do it. And I’ll be like, Oh, well, okay, I’m not allowing that to proceed, you’re not going to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do whatever it is you were trying to do, even though I kind of started already executed part of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John nevermind, let me undo that. And so it undoes it, right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John given how far ahead of itself, it does speculative execution, not just like one or two things ahead,
⏹️ ▶️ John but several things ahead. If, if the destruction if the instructions are
⏹️ ▶️ John dependent on each other. So I’m going to speculatively execute this instruct this operation
⏹️ ▶️ John here. And then I’m also going to speculatively execute the next one, which depends on the result of the first one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it turns out like you weren’t allowed to do that one. And so it rolls everything back, right? So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you actually successfully read something you weren’t supposed to. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the side effects of doing those operations can leave a bunch of crap in the cache.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, well, so what the stuff that’s in the cache is not the stuff that I wasn’t supposed to read because that never got there because I wasn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to do that read. But because the thing you weren’t supposed to read, participate
⏹️ ▶️ John it like influenced where it influenced what got put in the cache from the
⏹️ ▶️ John other instruction, you can back solve and figure out the what
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing what the place you weren’t supposed to read from was based on how the result
⏹️ ▶️ John of that was used to get I know this is very confusing. Like it’s basically like looking at the side effects
⏹️ ▶️ John of an operation that you weren’t supposed to do and that was actually rolled back just just to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what that number must have been what what that in that memory address must have been and
⏹️ ▶️ John in that way you can figure out someone was saying even like just a bit at a time like you can figure out what like what the most
⏹️ ▶️ John significant least significant bit of that address used to be you can slowly but surely reveal the entire contents
⏹️ ▶️ John of physical memory many of much of which belongs to processes that you’re never supposed to see
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is a pretty terrible bug which basically means all the protections of saying you just can’t read arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ John memory on the system, because all sorts of stuff is in memory, like encryption keys and the password
⏹️ ▶️ John that someone just typed and all sorts of stuff is in, in memory, like in physical memory on your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the protections of the operating system, and the CPU and all that stuff is supposed to prevent you from
⏹️ ▶️ John reading, you know, memory from processes that belong to the operating system itself
⏹️ ▶️ John memory from processes that belong to other users. For example, if you’re using AWS,
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon web services or are the shared hosting where your stuff may be running
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same real or virtual CPU as other people’s stuff and you have no visibility and you don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John their other processes or whatever. But physically speaking, the machine that you’re running on in ram next
⏹️ ▶️ John to your information is somebody else’s information. If you can dump all of ram by using this X point
⏹️ ▶️ John to slowly reveal every single address and memory, that’s really, really, really bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is not just like, Oh, someone like there’s a bug in this processor, like the F div bug
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, and they’ll just fix it by making a new version of the processor. This is more or less inherent in the way speculative
⏹️ ▶️ John execution works like their whole their whole cleanup process actually does the cleanup, but they didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ John that the thing that was valid to do if it was influenced by the thing that was invalid to do
⏹️ ▶️ John can leave information hanging around such that you can back solve and figure out what the invalid
⏹️ ▶️ John information you’re supposed to be getting out with. That’s my attempt to explain this and why it’s not just like, Oh, there’s a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John in Intel CPU and they’ll fix it. It’s why it affects like all Intel CPUs for the
⏹️ ▶️ John past many, many years, not just like one thing. It’s why it also affects arm CPUs arm
⏹️ ▶️ John came out and said, Yes, this affects our CPUs as well. AMD says it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John affect their CPUs because they do speculative execution in a different way. And it’s not like this is unfixable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you will have to fix it in hardware, you’ll have to change the way the hardware works. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like the general trade off they’re making here is the hardware wants to be fast. So it’s like, we’ll clean
⏹️ ▶️ John up after ourselves and try to be secure. But if we don’t have to clean something up, like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ John information that was pulled into that cash line or whatever, oh, you don’t need to clean it up, because that was from the valid operation. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John one is fine. Like it’s garbage data, but it’s not insecure. It’s not like we’re leaving information in there that will let someone get something.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just leave it there. Because it’s it, it would be caught more costly to erase that right
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna have to make different trade-offs to get rid of this because it’s not like something they can
⏹️ ▶️ John you know first of all they can’t fix it in the CPUs that are already out there because it’s out there is out there and they can
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it in future architectures if I take it into account but it’s going to make a big difference now the fix for it in software
⏹️ ▶️ John that people are slowly rolling out and that actually is in a Mac OS 10.3 point was it 10.13 point
⏹️ ▶️ John two yep has this fix according to one random person on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fix they’re doing is basically to say that when you’re in a process, don’t map
⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel into the same address space as the process, put it in entirely different
⏹️ ▶️ John address space entirely like entirely separate address space. So you can’t use this exploit
⏹️ ▶️ John so that you would have to switch modes and go into a switch memory images and go into entirely different address space, which is slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people are doing benchmarks and saying, okay, with this software fix where we shove the kernel into an entirely different place, instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of allowing the kernel to virtually live inside the same virtual address space as every user LAN processor, which makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it really easy to when you switch into kernel mode to do kernel stuff, then use your stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes it slower to do that if you more widely separate them, but it fixes this vulnerability. So everyone now
⏹️ ▶️ John is benchmarking how much slower is it? Is it 30% slower? Is it 1% slower?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it only slower when you do heavy IO? Is it only slower in our synthetic benchmarks, but it’s just the same and normal?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does the frame rate of my game go down? So now everyone’s, you know, applying patches to their
⏹️ ▶️ John Linux kernels or trying the windows patch version or whatever, and trying to see if
⏹️ ▶️ John you know just how bad the performance hit is. But this is a really critical
⏹️ ▶️ John serious bug because the only way it’s really truly going to be fixed at the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John level is for them to make different design decisions, different fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John design decisions about speculative execution in their CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna have to figure out a way to do that. So it’s fast, too. And everyone’s freaking out about it, especially for things like shared
⏹️ ▶️ John hosting, because you can exploit this from anywhere, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can just get code to run on the CPU at a low
⏹️ ▶️ John enough level, then you can just dump the entire contents of memory of that machine, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John your processes, other people’s processes, the operating system, everything is like heart bleed times a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John like not just get information about the process that you’re exploiting get information
⏹️ ▶️ John about the you know anything else that is running on the hardware which is slightly terrifying uh so
⏹️ ▶️ John understandably everyone who does shared hosting and everyone has an operating system is all busily trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to update their kernels to work around this thing at the cost of a potential speed hit and then dealing with the fallout
⏹️ ▶️ John of that speed hit it. But but yeah, so Apple’s already got the fix in the latest version of High Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was some tweet about the upcoming version of High Sierra having something else in regard to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of the challenges point out that like there are JavaScript proof of concepts like when I say you can get something to run on the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter what it is like if you like imagine running
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine running JavaScript that accidentally dumps the entire contents of your machines ram that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s bad that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pretty bad that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like one of those exploits like you’d see in a movie like that’s so stupid you can’t run something on a web page it dumps dumps
⏹️ ▶️ John the contents of ran there’s a little thing called memory protection dummy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait a minute so I think you might be either you’re misunderstanding these or I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically so there are two big bugs or two big exploits that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we’ve that we’re talking about here. The names I think finally came out tonight. One of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is called Meltdown and one of them is called Spectre. And the Meltdown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the one that basically allows the cache
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priming effects that you were talking about earlier. Like when you try to access an invalid address,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can basically run timing, like run very precise timing benchmarks to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out like is something cached or not and then you can figure out based on that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what roughly what addresses certain kernel functions map to that have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco randomized using using address space layout randomization and so that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can like but you can’t read other processes memory space you can only read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kernel memory because the kernel memory has been shadow mapped into your process space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the way I am so sorry to anybody listening who this is over your head we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to explain it but it would take a long time because we’d have to explain virtual memory and addresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of functions and interrupts and interrupts and everything. And it would be kind of a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, so I’m so sorry. Um, feel free to skip the rest of the chapter if you want. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, so that’s, that’s the meltdown attack. And then the, the specter attack is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not about revealing kernel addresses of things. It is about actually dumping kernel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory and being able to access the the contents of kernel memory, but it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kernel memory, because it is mapped into your process, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the memory of other processes on the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure from the explanation that I read, I’m pretty sure that either a combination of these exploits or one
⏹️ ▶️ John or the other can actually eventually iteratively go through the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John address space and eventually get all the contents of RAM RAM by presumably by walking your
⏹️ ▶️ John whole giant, you know, address space and causing it to page in to physical space. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that you read, pushing out everything else in turn and RAM. Um, it may just
⏹️ ▶️ John be kernel space, even if it’s just kernel space, that’s still pretty bad because tons of interesting information isn’t there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it seemed to me that the people, the reason people are shared about scared about shared hosting is that and that how
⏹️ ▶️ John you could jump, uh, read processes in a different virtual machine is one of the other proof of concepts and like
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, that’s not just looking at the kernel space that’s in your process, but that you’re able
⏹️ ▶️ John to look into the memory inside other virtual machines makes me think that you can actually get just
⏹️ ▶️ John dumps of the contents of RAM. But these are, you know, so we’ll put a bunch of links in the show notes, all of which
⏹️ ▶️ John I have not had a chance to read. Because again, this is all coming out just, you know, today. Now, as I’m leaving work, these things are coming out.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are there are abstracts, there are white papers, there’s proof of contract Proof of concepts on these things. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John nice Google site Google has One of the projects that it called Google
⏹️ ▶️ John project zero found either one or both of these exploits originally
⏹️ ▶️ John Google also has a good page that explains in sort of much simpler language than we’re doing here a very
⏹️ ▶️ John broad vague kind of thing About speculative execution exists. It’s supposed to clean up but
⏹️ ▶️ John some stuff gets left around like that’s the you know that’s all you really need to know to understand the nature of this thing. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get down to the nitty gritty details. But a Google also this, okay, here’s all the Google things Google
⏹️ ▶️ John has, we have all of our different services and Gmail and Google Cloud things. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and they go through them all one by one and say, here’s how this is with respect to this bug. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John patched these, we haven’t patched these, this will be patched soon and which is nice. I was looking for a similar page
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple, but I suppose such a thing is not forthcoming. Or maybe there’s, you know, come out with it tomorrow or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But every person out there, I’m assuming Amazon is doing something similar, has to
⏹️ ▶️ John now explain to you how many of their systems are vulnerable,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many have had their kernel patched to fix this, and what the timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John are, and what you can expect as the customer. Like, if you have an Android phone, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that vulnerable? How old is your Android phone? Who makes it? So on and so forth. because
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of vulnerability is really scary. Like basically if someone, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you cause untrusted code to run on your CPU, and again, trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it from JavaScript just shows you like code, I wouldn’t run untrusted code, or do you load web pages? Because you’re running
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially untrusted code, then, you know, bad things
⏹️ ▶️ John can happen. Now, as for the performance issues,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I first thought this was a performance bug, I wasn’t that worried about it because I was like, well, no matter how big the
⏹️ ▶️ John performance problem is, if you’re not worried about being exploited,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean? Like I can imagine like having a toggle switch that says switch into this mode and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to run a local game that I trust, right? And I’ll get full performance from my game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but the more I hear about this bug, the more I think that whatever the performance hit
⏹️ ▶️ John is, we’re all just going to have to live with it until Intel and arm
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody else who is susceptible to this update, like produce new versions of their micro
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture, produce new chips, essentially like the there’s nothing you can do about the the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John pro the market right now, he’s just going to have to run it in the slow mode to be protected from this. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John he already is basically because he’s got the latest high Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So guess what, you’re already
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. But there’s nothing you can do until you wait for Intel to come up with a new chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not susceptible to this because it’s not, like I said, it’s not a bug or a problem or
⏹️ ▶️ John someone made a boo-boo and they meant it to work one way and it works the other way. This is working as designed, it’s just an attack
⏹️ ▶️ John that they didn’t account for. And so there’s really nothing to do except go
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the drawing board and say, how can we design a CPU that is fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that is not susceptible to this category of attack? It’s not just one clever thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John one like silly value that trips up something. It’s an entire category of attacks that exploit
⏹️ ▶️ John the predictability of what’s supposed to be unpredictable. Like one, one, uh, part of
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these exploits, I think was like that they had completely figured out exactly how the, uh, the branch predictor works
⏹️ ▶️ John on a particular Intel, uh, CPU that helps them, uh, predict what it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do in various situations. Cause you do have to manipulate the speculative execution to get it to do what you want to put, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John need it to, you need to know which things it’s going to speculatively execute in which order so that you can set
⏹️ ▶️ John things up to produce a side effect that gives you actionable information about the thing that wasn’t supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John be read. Right. Anyway, if your eyes are glazing over, we apologize. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John take, take a look at all the various PDFs and webpages we will link in the show notes. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we’ll come back next week. And if we’re all still alive and the entire world hasn’t burned down
⏹️ ▶️ John in a year 2000 style apocalypse then we can talk about it more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the year 2000. It seems that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably going to be it’s probably gonna end up being a really interesting thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to extreme nerds and most people are probably not going to notice at least on Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On other platforms I don’t know how big the differences are because of their how they manage memory and stuff but on Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are saying who know more about this than we do, that any Mac that has the PCID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature on the Intel chip, which pretty much all modern chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do from the last five or so years, it’s not a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance hit if your Mac is one of these. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with us trying to talk about this this week, it’s so big of a story, probably, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we really can’t ignore it. We really can’t say, oh, we’ll talk about this next week because we don’t know enough about it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reality is we’re going to talk about it probably both this week and next week because we’re going to understand it better next week and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news will have happened, more of the patches will be out, we’ll be able to see some of the performance impacts that it has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is probably a really big story, but we don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know yet. It could just be fixed and nobody notices the impact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we all move on. So we apologize, apologize. We’ll do our best to cover it next week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also if there’s more news to cover. And I guess we’ll just see what happens. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a user who has somehow made it through this explanation and has not skipped the chapter yet, and you don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand it, and you’re worried about it, I would say there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not reason to be significantly concerned as an end user from what we know so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far. I would just make, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John update your operating systems, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely install the updates and everything, but it’s not going to all of a sudden make your computer super slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not going to throttle your battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John That should be the new thing. We should tell people that Microsoft is throttling your Windows computer and Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John If only Linux was a company. Tell people it’s a company. They’ll believe it. The Linux company is throttling your Linux computer
⏹️ ▶️ John by introducing a kernel patch that can produce up to a 30% speed loss. Look at this
⏹️ ▶️ John Select One benchmark in Postgres. Look how much slower it is. Linux is slowing
⏹️ ▶️ John down your computer to make you buy a new Linux, which is true. They literally are. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John literally patching the kernel to make it slower.
⏹️ ▶️ John my God. And so did Microsoft and so did Apple. But no one is benchmarking
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to you know, no one is running servers on Mac servers and mission critical things like
⏹️ ▶️ John the AWS thing. I heard a bunch of people like that. If you had a if you had a bunch of systems that were near the edge of their performance envelope
⏹️ ▶️ John on like the on the EC two instances that you’ve provisioned, and they all take a 2% performance
⏹️ ▶️ John hit. And suddenly you’re really close. You go that next few percentage, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a problem and have to get some more hardware. This can actually affect… Even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a small effect, anything you do in cloud computing can have a ripple effect if you’re close to
⏹️ ▶️ John the edge of your capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I feel kind of bad that… Yeah. Then you’re… They have to update…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If this has a big effect on you, besides the fact that pretty much every server and cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instance is probably going to have to be rebooted in the next few days. That’s going to be a bigger problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rebooting all the servers is going to be a more disruptive effect of this than I think anything else. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could disrupt your monthly bill. Yeah, but if it disrupts your bill by a meaningful amount,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then either this problem is way worse than we thought it was on Linux, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were already running too close to capacity anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the thing is, it depends on workload. So if anything is going to have a weird workload that happens to be like super
⏹️ ▶️ John IO intensive or something like that. It’s some sort of, you know, like running a database server that it just all it does all
⏹️ ▶️ John day is just tremendous amounts of IO and a 5% hit to your, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John your million dollar bill. That 5% is a big increase in the amount of heart we have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, we’ll see how it is. I bet most people will just patch and update everything. But like any one of these problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, but not everybody’s going to patch. And so this is like heart bleed. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John you never know, Like for how long are there going to be systems with like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the known vulnerable hardware spans many years and probably many vendors at the
⏹️ ▶️ John very least Intel and arm how long is that bum hardware going to be out there
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much of the hardware will never be updated to run a kernel that is patched to avoid this vulnerability.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Aaron Bushnell writes, suppose you had to give up your Mac and solely use iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Apple agreed to add one iOS feature of your choice. What would it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be? And let’s start with Marco, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a really hard time with this question because if I were to solely use iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean that presumes a lot of things like, can I still make iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on iOS? Like is there a way for me to do that? Because otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my career has a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS has a problem if there’s no way to make iOS apps. Well, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s, yeah. So like, I mean, technically, I suppose I should say my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer is the iOS feature that would make me use iOS would be Xcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s so much more complicated than that. Like, you know, so let’s assume that somehow, somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tools to do software development exist as part of this new theoretical world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’d be forced to use iOS. Other than that, I think I would have to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just larger screen devices because, you know, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s wish for the 27-inch iPad, honestly, I don’t love that concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for myself, for the way I work, but whenever I try to do anything on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is non-trivial, I run into screen size limitations really fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried the 12.9-inch iPad briefly. I didn’t find that that was for me. Just physically, it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird to have a handheld device of that size for me. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this would be in practice, but just some way to get larger screen space. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if only there was a way that the physical size of the input devices that I was interacting with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not tied to the screen size of the device I was using. Maybe we could have like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proxy touch device that I could touch that was smaller, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the size of like a large iPhone maybe. I could touch that, maybe put on the desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I could have a nice big screen like a little bit back, maybe vertical, so I could see it better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I could arrange a whole bunch of small apps in little rounded rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe I could move around and rearrange as necessary, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see what you did there, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Margot cheated, because this was supposed to be an iOS feature, and he started describing hardware, but we’ll let it slide in the interest of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John My iOS feature, I think I would probably go with external storage
⏹️ ▶️ John support, because it doesn’t sound fancy, but it’s a really annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John limitation that on an iOS device, you can’t just plug something in and then go to the files
⏹️ ▶️ John app and just drag things around in it and go from Dropbox and drag things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mounting storage so that it’s available to every single application natively everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John is just an unnecessary thing that impedes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like the bad old world where instead of there being like sort of an equivalent of the Finder or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that everything is application specific. And so yeah, the photos application can read from your SD card or whatever, but SD card
⏹️ ▶️ John is not universally available and mounted as a volume to any application that wants to look at it because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not the way iOS rolls with the file system. So if I had to use it all the time, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to act in a slightly more Mac-like manner with regards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I was going to say a real true-to-form terminal, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you can get from jailbreaking, and I know you can get wonderful apps like, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, Prompt? Is that what I’m thinking of?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That- Yeah, Panix. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t open up a local terminal. That’s for connecting to other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. But I think if I had to choose just one, what I’d actually choose is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just being able to sideload apps without going through the App Store and understanding their risks involved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and blah, blah, blah. but I think I would just want to be able to sideload apps. And I think that would make a tremendous difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean like, you know, being able to download a binary in the same way that you can on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac or, you know, the same way you would get a binary from the app store, but have it not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come from the app store. That’s what I would say.
#askatp: Why we hate Windows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brandon Butler asks, and I’m going to slightly tweak the verbiage here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could all of you give some specific details about why you don’t like Windows? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely curious. As the most potential most recent Windows user, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kick this off and say I haven’t used Windows for more than a few minutes in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a year and a half, but the last time I used Windows, which was Windows 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, The thing the things that bothered me about it the most were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey High DPI was not pervasive throughout the entire operating system So some some things worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at what you know, we would call retina resolutions in the Mac world and some would not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re clearly in the midst of a tour. They were at the time in the midst of a transition. So there was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a control panel but then there were like other places to tweak a lot of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings or or sometimes some settings were only in the control panel or only in other places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s really, really, really frustrating, especially if you’re not deep in the Windows world to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, okay, which one of these two or three places do I need to go to in order to say, change your desktop resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that? And third of all, the third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, while there is an unbelievable amount of third-party apps for Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of them, In fact, I would almost say the overwhelming majority of them are utter garbage. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at something like less. The last time I used audacity, it was very, very powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was visually, I’m not going to say offensive, but hideous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah. And audacity is available on the Mac as far as I’m aware, but it is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quintessential garage band equivalent for windows. And it is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hideous to look at. And I just don’t think that third-party developers on the Windows platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really take design nearly as seriously as your average third-party developer on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac. I believe we started with Marko last time, so John, let’s move to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John John Svazic So luckily this question just says, some specific details of why I don’t like Windows, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to be exhaustive. You already touched on a bunch of them. I’ll throw out some that
⏹️ ▶️ John are near and dear to my heart. basic interface paradigm of not
⏹️ ▶️ John having a menu bar at the top of the screen, but instead of instead having the menu bar embedded in the window for someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who likes to have a lot of windows and arrange them, repeating
⏹️ ▶️ John on every single one of those windows is incredibly wasteful and infuriating. And it makes it hard from nowhere the menus are and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you got the whole infinite height target, yada, yada, not that I had used the menu bar that much, but just the space savings alone
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, look, we’re going to burn the top part of the monitor for the menu bar, but that’s it. No matter how many windows you get open,
⏹️ ▶️ John no more space is taken up by the menu bar. The obsession with full screen and the the tiling
⏹️ ▶️ John features that unfortunately, the Mac has copied where Oh, slam the window against the side of the screen. Now it’s taking up half or the top
⏹️ ▶️ John third or the bottom third. That’s not how I use windows. I don’t want that to be that way. I hate full screen. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like the you know, taskbar, whatever the hell they’re calling it these days in the bottom that’s mutated
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot. I’ve never liked it. I don’t really like the doc that much either. But I like the doc better than that stupid thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The the aesthetics of its It’s sort of DOS origins with backslashes instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of forward slashes and all caps file names that are shouting at me and dot three extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And many of those limitations have been slowly winnowed down over the years, but tons of them are still
⏹️ ▶️ John there, including stupid things like drive letters, which just aesthetically just give me the willies and I
⏹️ ▶️ John do not like. The mouse cursor is the pointer is
⏹️ ▶️ John white instead of black, which is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, just I don’t use windows a lot, but as part of my work, I use it in a virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John machine enough to be enough to know that
⏹️ ▶️ John it just doesn’t appeal to me in so many ways. Like I guess like fundamental ways, like how window management
⏹️ ▶️ John works and how applications work and sort of the connection between like applications
⏹️ ▶️ John and windows and how they appear in the taskbar to just little tiny picky things are just plain old aesthetics
⏹️ ▶️ John of what icons and menus look like and what font rendering looks like and, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John drive letters. I mean, just drive letters. That should have been all I had to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You guys basically covered it. I mean, it’s like, you know, death by a thousand cuts. I mean, it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to nail down specifics, you know, without having used Windows in a very long time. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it comes down to, you know, what John said about just like design preferences, a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes down to, Casey, what you said about the quality of most software available and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the community around it just being pretty lacking. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a wasteland of mediocrity and bad decision-making.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I really had to use something that was not Mac OS, I honestly think I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more inclined to try to use Linux than Windows at this point and I used Windows for a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. It’s not that I didn’t know it. I know what I’m missing basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and while granted I haven’t used the versions from the last probably literally 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so from what people say they aren’t that much better in a lot of pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critical ways or just kind of in like ecosystem conditions. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think I’m speaking from some position of experience you know probably not as much as Casey but more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than John and it just does not fit for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really seems incredibly mediocre and if that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing that I ever knew and it’s the only thing that was available, I could make it work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just be annoyed with it pretty frequently, like I was when I was using it full-time.
#askatp: Do ATP without ads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally Mark W asks if podcast advertising went away overnight. Would you still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the show? I Haven’t talked to you guys about this, but we used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to semi regularly ask each other. Hey is everyone still cool Now we just assume it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess but when we started neutral When we first recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my recollection We didn’t think we had any sort of advertiser at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then Marco was able to get was it Squarespace. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for neutral we got Squarespace for the entire run of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the last minute, like right before we were gonna record and release the episodes. My contact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there said, yeah, we’ll take them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. Oh, so it was before we recorded? I thought it was after, but you would remember better than me. It was at least before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we released them. That, yeah, that I agree on. I can’t, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. What I was driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at though is that one way or another, at least for me, when I started doing this, I was doing it just for fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to talk to my buddies about cars. And it’s turned out to be lucrative, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tremendous blessing, and I’m super-duper thankful for it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I think—I certainly hope it doesn’t go away tomorrow, but if podcast advertising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went away tomorrow, I would absolutely still talk to my two good friends for a couple hours about nerdy crap each week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would suffer through. Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Morgan I would do this podcast even if it made a lot less money than it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the fact is, if the advertising went away and we had to switch to a direct payment model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it probably would make a lot less money than it does, but I would still love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it. And what’s nice is that having the money coming in from the ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more strongly justifies putting in a lot of time and doing it on a regular schedule.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If we didn’t have the ad money coming in, it would be a lot easier to say, like, one week when it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy, oh, you know, I can’t do it this week. We’ll skip this week and we’ll just do it next week, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll skip the next two weeks is some of us are traveling and it’s hard to schedule it or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s a very good point I didn’t consider. And I completely agree with you. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember exactly when it was that we decided this was really a thing, but it was somewhere around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the middle of 2013, which is almost five years ago. And in almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five years, we have not missed a week. And sometimes, particularly in summertime and particularly around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christmas time, we to do some really ridiculous scheduling in order to get everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to line up such that all three of us will be here every single week. And with one exception, when we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deliberately traded John for Christina Warren, we have always had all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us every week for like four and a half years. And that is normally very easy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but occasionally extremely difficult. And I agree with you, Marco. We would definitely punt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wouldn’t say frequently, but a lot more than never if if there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no real money involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you guys covered it. I mean, practically speaking, the show’s big enough now that we just do like Patreon
⏹️ ▶️ John or some sort of direct payment and we would just continue. Like, I’m not saying that would be the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as advertising. Like Marco said, it would almost certainly be much, much less, but it would be enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so that we, I think, probably maintain the exact same commitment that we have now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Flight Logger. and we will see you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it was accidental. John didn’t do any research.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Post-show: Hire Casey!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you are off work, Casey, for a long time, as discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the most recent episode of Analog,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? I’m not! No, I’m not. I worked today. Well, I worked from home today, but I worked today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the agreement was, once the baby is born, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco taking- Which is any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Which is- Any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second. Literally, it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John Any day is Mac Pro day and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seriously. Like, it is possible that the baby might come out between the time that we record this and when I release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tomorrow. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is possible. Unlikely, but possible. Um, so anyway, so yeah, so the agreement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with work, which when we recorded analog, I was going on the assumption that baby would be born
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the new year. And there’s reasons why I assume that it’s not really worth getting into,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but suffice to say, smart money said it was already going to be here at this point. And it isn’t here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So once the baby is born, I will be off of work for roundabouts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of eight weeks. Um, something like that. So I’m going, oh, my company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed from 2017 in 2018 to giving us three weeks of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paternity leave instead of two. So if the baby was born before the new year, I would have only gotten two weeks of paternity leave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And since it’s been, since the policy has changed and it will be born sometime in 2018, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting three weeks of paternity leave, which is excellent. And if you’re from another country and you think that’s barbaric,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, welcome to America. This is how it works here. because three weeks of paternity leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is unheard of around these parts. Anyway, so after those three weeks of paternity leave,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve told work, Hey, I’m just going to take some unpaid leave. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to leverage FMLA, which is a law in America that says basically they can’t fire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you or lay you off when you have to deal with like a big medical issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a birth. And so I’m going to take some FMLA and they don’t have to pay me and they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be paying me, but I’m just going to take a lot of time off. So the thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that once I was supposed to come back in January, I would just basically blow off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey January and February. In reality, what’s going to happen is I’m going to blow off all of January,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably all of February, and maybe even a little bit of March, depending on when this baby comes. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I want to give Erin some time to adjust to having two kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to be there, of course, and I want to adjust to having two kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would just be nice to have some time with the family. To bring this back to the SKTP that we just finished,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really the express reason that I am able to do this, other than just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being reasonably financially savvy and not spending eight times what I make,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in no small part the reason that this is possible is because of every person listening to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I owe all of you and especially my two co-hosts, you know, my deepest gratitude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because were it not for the extra money that this show provides my family, I don’t think I would be able to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and take some unpaid leave to be with my new baby and my family. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really excited by it. I have all these visions of all these like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside of work endeavors that I want to work on like a video of Aaron’s car, which I’ve filmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a teeny bit of but very, very little of. I want to do an iOS app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s like half cooked, but I have a lot more I want to do for it. And there’s all sorts of other things I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do, but the reality of the situation is your life is destroyed in the best possible way for like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months, once a baby—well, at least two months—once a baby is born. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of that, we’ll see if I accomplish getting changed in the mornings or if I’m just stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same PJs for like two months. But we’ll see. Anyway, why do you bring it up, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to make you a little bit more uncomfortable right now. Okay, so I apologize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in advance. You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hate this. No, no, no, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need to hear this. Mm-hmm. This is your chance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Listen, I’m serious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, what you’re gonna have is two or maybe part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost three months of not going to your job every day. Basically, not having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job. So you’re going to have a nice little preview of what it is like to be independent. It’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ruin me. Oh, it’s going to ruin me. So A, yes it will. B,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your job can’t fire you for taking this time, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly going to probably be knocked down the favorites list. I wouldn’t assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re going to be long for that job anyway. And C, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been talking for years about about wanting how great it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work for yourself full time at home, basically. To be there with your family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically to do the kind of life that I hope that I do, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m here when the family needs me. I can be present for moments. I can help out around the house. I can also do some work sometimes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make some money, right? The reason I’m able to do it is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I have good income from a podcast, and I have software development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco income, making that even better. Well, I know how much you make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your podcast, because we split this evenly between the three of us, so you make the same amount that I make, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we make the same amount that John makes. So I know exactly how much you make from this show, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the same that I do. And so I know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good, and I know of course it’s irregular you know, when the hell advertisers pay and everything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get like bursts of money here and there and then nothing for months and then big bursts of money. So like it isn’t like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normal income. It doesn’t provide health insurance and stuff like that. So you know, I augment this with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software development. That’s basically what you do too. You just that your software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development is from a job that it like you’re working for somebody else. If they’re paying you, they’re handling a bunch of crap for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty consistent, et cetera. So, this is a chance for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try not to do YouTube full-time, because that has a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slow ramp up. You’re not going to get to a YouTube career in two months. That’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen. This gives you a chance to become an iOS consultant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the other part of your income. So you too will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software development income as well as podcast income. That is enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a pretty nice life. And so I’m telling you right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you should go into this break seriously with the expectation that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might not go back. And now I’m telling the listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I know the kind of listeners that we have, make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I’m serious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make Casey do this because by sending him work, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have consulting work—Casey did not ask me to say this and he’s probably really mortified right now that I’m saying this—if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have consulting work that Casey could do for your company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hire him now so that he can get this going and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in two months he won’t have to go back to his job. This is your time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. This is an opportunity. Because look, some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are naturals at going into independent life. Some people, you know, they jump right in, or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a big plan and execute that plan, and they’re able to do it right. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not what I did. I was pushed into it. I was quit-fired. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had been kind of wanting to maybe do it like you say sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I didn’t choose when that was happened. I was pushing the deep end and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so incredibly thankful for that. It was it was like the best thing that could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened to me. It was an external force forcing me to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I should have done because I needed that push. You have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push now sort of in a way because a baby’s coming into your life again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know how much work that is. So you’re taking this nice sabbatical from work to have paternity leave to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know get things going. This is your push. Make it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This, and I’m telling you, audience, please, for the love of God, hire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey. Make him do this. We will all be so thankful, including Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if he can, because look, you will be so much happier.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know someone who might not be thankful and might not be happy? No, there isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, there is this one person that I think might not be so happy about this and I might not be so thankful and that’s Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ John who expects Casey to be on paternity leave because he’s gonna help with the new baby
⏹️ ▶️ John and Declan. Where if instead he’s on paternity leave working on himself starting his consulting
⏹️ ▶️ John business while she juggles two screaming children, I’m thinking maybe she’s not gonna be so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for this advice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this is the flaw in this plan. Like I’m with I’m with Marco right up to the point where, oh and by the way Casey has a new baby
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whole point of this vacation is not let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey launch a vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John career like he’s taking this time off for a reason and everything you’re describing
⏹️ ▶️ John takes time away from the reason he’s supposedly taking off for and so I feel like this is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not the right time and secondarily having a screaming baby at home is gonna make Casey long for the office
⏹️ ▶️ John on I wish I could leave this house and go to a place with adults
⏹️ ▶️ John and just do work in quiet peace like everyone has those moments with babies is just a fact of life
⏹️ ▶️ John and so unfortunately when he’s at the end of this time he may find himself begging
⏹️ ▶️ John to go back to the office which is exactly the opposite of what you want to get him like booted out into
⏹️ ▶️ John the independent lifestyle so I’m thinking maybe maybe the timing isn’t exactly right obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John when is the time right if you really wanted to make this happen Marco you need to get him fired from his job
⏹️ ▶️ John in that case Casey and Aaron both wouldn’t be very thankful to you so I I don’t know what the solution is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. So I appreciate it, first of all. Let me say I appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny because I really don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular interest in going back to consulting. And let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provide a verbal glossary for a minute. When I say consulting, I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both flavors of consulting, because there’s the consulting that I did in years past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is I was part of a company and a group of us would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be given – poor choice of words – but given to another company to do work for that other company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then that work would cease and I would go back to my original company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m always an employee of my original company, but I bring this up to say I didn’t have to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for healthcare. Well, I did, but you know what I mean? Like there was company healthcare. I didn’t have to drum up work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there was a sales team that did that for me. So I basically just showed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, billed my hours and left. And so it was still consulting in the sense that I had little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to no control over my destiny, but it was not consulting in the same way that you’re talking about, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the work just fell in my lap. And if it didn’t, that wasn’t really my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is different what you’re discussing because it would be forevermore my responsibility to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure out how to put money in my pocket and thus how to get work on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that scares the ever-living crap out of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re right to say that the only way I would leave my job is if I had a considerable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of work lined up in advance. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you know, over these two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months. You never will. Oh, I know, I know. But hear me out for a second. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought is, if I really want to go down this road, I think John’s right that I don’t think I can really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this. I don’t think I could actively start the Casey-less consulting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corp. The Casey Consulting Corp. Very alliterative. Anyway, I couldn’t start Casey Consulting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Corp. while I was off because John’s absolutely right. The point of this break is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be with the family and I don’t really want to taint that with work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I knew that at the end of this break, so early to mid-March, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a month or two of solid work lined up, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly consider not going back to my jobby job. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really hard thing to do. And you’re absolutely right, Marco, to say, eh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not quite so easy. But it would take a lot for me to take this stable—well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I perceive as a stable paycheck and yes, we can get into the argument that no paycheck is stable, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to say no to the stable paycheck and healthcare and instead say, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, I’ll just figure it out. I’m not a, I’ll just figure it out kind of guy in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, no, I know, I know. And all of that said, what I haven’t mentioned yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I’ve been talking to a lot of our mutual friends and feeling out, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you probably don’t have enough work for a full-time partner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but do you have a little bit of work you could send my way?” And I hadn’t had a chance to ask you this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question, Marco, but you were on the list of people I wanted to talk to about this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because my vision— Marco doesn’t work well with others,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. I know he doesn’t, but yet here we are four and a half years later. So there is something to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John said for Marco’s ability— It’s not programming work. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Marco even fired his support people. He can’t even have someone do support. I know. It’s better to just not
⏹️ ▶️ John do support than to have someone hire someone to do support. He works alone like Batman, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Can I not be your Robin, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I not be your Robin? No, but seriously though, I’ve been polling a lot of our mutual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends to say, hey, you know, and my thought has basically been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, if Marco can give me five hours a week fairly reliably, like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not asking you to say yes or no right now, I’m just saying hypothetically, Marco says— What would that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost? Honestly, I’m asking, because I don’t even know, I have no concept of what consultants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the thing is, I don’t really either, which means I haven’t really done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my homework. Would this be like $1,000? I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what it would basically amount to is— More than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like five grand a month at least?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a reasonable hourly rate is anywhere between $100 and $300,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on geography, skill level, etc. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s split the difference and call it $150 an hour times, say, five hours a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times four weeks a month. That’s like three grand a month, right? And again, I’m not asking you to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything right now. I’m just trying to pose a hypothetical here. So if you say to me, you know what, Casey? I’m good for three grand a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for at least a couple of months, maybe even six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And if— You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what? I would do that if you quit your job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, that’s what I’m saying. I’d find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something for you to do, whether it’s like working on stuff on the app that I can’t get to or doing the web app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can make yourself a Mac app, I don’t care. I’d do that. I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Genuinely, that’s very kind of you. I’m serious. I know you are. Only if you become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a full-time consultant. I know. Oh, I know there’s caveats here. It’s like Kickstarter. You’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the whole thing. Exactly. So, yeah, that’s kind of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it is, though, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you dedicate five hours a month for six months and Underscore dedicates another five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours a week for six months and Underscore says, yeah, I think I could get five hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of work your way for six months. Suddenly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m at 10 hours and if I do that four more times over, that’s a full workday. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to an American anyway, 40 hours a week is full work week. Now maybe the answer is I just understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m taking a pay cut and maybe I only work 30 hours a week and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just am okay with that. You know what I mean? So like I haven’t really taken this too seriously yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will say that I’ve talked to a few of our mutual friends, a couple of our mutual friends and started to float this idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, hey, if you have things that you can’t get to or don’t want to be bothered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and you’re willing to throw money at that problem, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think of me. I can maybe make that work. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if that’s going to work out, but that’s like my fantasy world where I have all of the perks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of being my own man and leaving the jobby job and doing my own thing, but at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the beginning, very little of the drama about it hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that I’ve already established that between you and underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Bob and Susie and Timmy and Sally, I know that I’m going to get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, 40 hours of or 30 hours or whatever of work out of you for at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few months to at least get me going. And then at that point, in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should hopefully start taking care of itself. And I can either, you know, talk to local businesses if I need to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe it turns out that you and I work super well together. in this capacity and maybe you say, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what, let’s go have half and half on over, obviously, I’m talking about my butt here, but you know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’ll start to figure itself out after that. And that’s like my fantasy land,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’ll see what actually ends up happening. But the tough thing about it is just what John said, like, I think I can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of this, I can do some of the hustling during this two months, but I don’t think I can do the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working during this two months, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know? Yeah, even even your optimistic projections make me think that you your consulting work will pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John the health care you’re giving up by losing your job based on how much Marco is
⏹️ ▶️ John for health care as an independent, you know, like I don’t maybe it’s cheaper where you are than it is
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m sure it is, but health care costs a lot. So yeah, because that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s the main thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like you’re getting well, it’s just a number though. That’s the thing like so many people myself included were scared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go independent because of health insurance, and that’s a big reason, but it’s just a number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it isn’t that you can’t buy it. It isn’t that you can’t have health insurance. It’s that you have to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a way to make that much money. That’s it. Remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the emotional drain of it as being like this big thing in your life and just consider it like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m going to be independent, I have to at least make this amount more than I think I do to pay for the health insurance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s all it is. It’s just a number. But it’s a big number,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John point. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like over $1,000 a month for almost any situation with a family. But again, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a number. So you’re paying that now, sort of, with work taxes and what they pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you versus what they’re charging. Someone’s paying it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Your healthcare now is free. It’s being paid for somehow. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, this is an incredible opportunity that you have You basically have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability, you have the opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dip your toe in the water of this market to see if this is the kind of thing that you can and want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. Now granted, as John said, you’re also going to be taking care of a family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a newborn in it. So you’re going to be busy and tired, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an opportunity that is unique in your life right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not going to get a better chance to try this out than this for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a really good chance. And also, I really, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowing nothing about the people at your company or the politics of your job, because we don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that, I really don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this job is going to be as long-lasting or stable as you might want after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you take this break. I don’t know any company that would look favorably upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Even if they say it beforehand, they might think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Somebody who matters might think that or might be saying that, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality is you’re going to be kicked down to the bottom of a totem pole after this. If push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes to shove, if they want to change things up in the department or they get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new leadership or something, I would not assume this job would still be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So at some point, you’re going to be thrust into this, probably, of like, oh, what do I do now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, you can do that without taking any risks because you’ve already booked yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this paternity leave and this sabbatical kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you’re calling it, with the company. You’re already doing this. You have this chance now laid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out for you. I highly suggest you take advantage of it. And I’m pleased,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m asking the audience, just bury Casey with offers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consulting work. Just to show him how possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is. Like this is totally a thing that people do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can happen. If only, you know, most people are like, geez, I would love to get more consulting work, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any way to reach people. Turns out you have some ways to reach people. And even though you won’t use them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this way, I will. So for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the love of God, bury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with work. Give him consulting offers from your company’s people. Give him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s what Casey needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you need that push. I know because I needed that push and I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many of the things you’re saying about the way you look at these things is the way I was looking at things. You need this push.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a great opportunity to have that. For the love of God, audience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make him take this opportunity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate it. Yeah, we’ll see what happens. I don’t know. I would love for it to be the case, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see what happens when this episode is released. But I don’t know. It’s a scary thought. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a super scary thought. I am super fiscally conservative within the family’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey financial world. I am super scared of risk, and I always pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the word wrong. I always want to say adverse, and that’s not right, is it? I’m sorry. Averse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, thank you. I really don’t like taking risks and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the worry wart in me, the chicken little within me says, are you insane?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m adding another mouth to feed, another person to be responsible for that I am wholly responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for because I’m lucky enough that Aaron doesn’t have to work. And yeah, now I’m going to take this reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paycheck again, understanding that not all paychecks are really and truly, well, really no paycheck is truly reliable, but just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go with me here. I’m going to take this reliable paycheck and say, no, thank you. Like that’s bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would I do that? But on the other side of the coin, I totally understand where you’re coming from. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, you know, if it ends up that I think I can scrounge up, you know, 30 to 40 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of work for at least a few months at at least passable rates,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be hard to say no to that because having the flexibility to be with the family would be pretty darn nice. So yeah, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. tell you why you’ll do it because you are the kind of person who highly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco values that presence and time with your family. That’s why you’ve been talking about it for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you do want to be there. And by the way, another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to possibly give this up, you could make more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you considered that? It’s not like you’re taking a huge pay cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. You’re taking probably a small pay cut for for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then after that, you could make more than you were making before, all while being home much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more often. And this is even setting aside, like yeah, you’re gonna have to have some times where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t help out the family because you’re busy working. That’s gonna happen, of course, that’s a thing. But you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still gonna have way more time at home than you do now. And you’ll have also way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more flexibility. And that is so, so nice. when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to all of my kids’ doctor’s appointments because I can. Little things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, that stuff just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it adds up and it ends up, you just have so, you can have so much more presence in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your family’s life if you can be working at home for yourself and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictate how you spend your own time. It’s a pretty big change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and upgrade of lifestyle. And the only reason a lot of people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it is because a lot of people can’t do it. And I totally understand that, but you, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a chance here and an opportunity here that a lot of people would kill for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why I think you should take it. And rather than viewing it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge risk to taking a big pay cut and giving up this income instability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have, I would instead view it as an opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make even more money with way more freedom and way more presence to your family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to establish what would probably end up being the most stable and bulletproof type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of income you can have because you would have diverse sources that are all within your control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s like overall market forces that might affect it but that’s way less likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a problem for you than like one particular job that happen to work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know things going bad there or changing there or that company having problems or whatever else. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the love of God people hire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right like now like I want people to flood you with offers in the next like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two weeks, because obviously like probably in the next week you’re having a baby. So like that’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next week is gonna be busy for you, but like you don’t say the week after that start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at offers and start doing the math because babies, I know they’re a lot of work, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do sometimes sleep. Not for very long necessarily, but you will have time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you will be able to like browse your phone while you’re like heating up a bottle or something. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you will have time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s when Declan’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there will be opportunities for you to check your email and to read your phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run some numbers in silver. Like this exists. This is it. Like take this opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really give this a try. Because the worst thing that happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you decide either you hate this and you wanna rush back to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there’s a reason, I don’t tell John to do this, because I know John would hate this kind of thing. So I don’t tell John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. John loves his day job. Or at least. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John loves having a day job. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco statement. That’s also not true. Yes, it is, John. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You’re a company person. No, no, no. I’m with Marco on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, if you have to work at all, if you have to work at all, I think you love having a regular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standard, stable day job in many of the same ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to paint you as like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a loner on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know my life. Oh, God. Come
⏹️ ▶️ John on. We know your life. I don’t want to work more than anybody, more than all of you combined. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s a workaholic and literally doesn’t know how to not work. Casey, I think, is just middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the road normal, but I desperately don’t want to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s yeah, that’s probably true. But the point is, like, I think of the three of us, like, I would never recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John go independent because I know he would
⏹️ ▶️ John never do consulting. I can tell you that if you want to say something now something I hate consulting is like a nut mind idea of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nightmare, right? Like I know you would hate this. And so I would never recommend this to you. But I know Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d actually you could do it. And you and I think you would appreciate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I think whatever, you know, because consulting isn’t like all, you know, roses, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Connelly Oh, no, it’s not. In a lot of ways, I hate it. But you’re about to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, I think, what is absolutely true, that in this fantasy world where I have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work laid out in front of me that I can perhaps even be mildly choosy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, and in this fantasy world where I’m able to work from home and actually get get work done and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be there for the family at hours wherein I need to be there. All of that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make the juice worth the squeeze, where even though I really hate the idea of being a full-time consultant again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all those perks would make it worth it if I could be there for the family, if I could make my own hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and choose my own clients, etc., etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I really think you could do this. I really think this is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance to do it. And I think the audience would come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through if you need them to. And you do. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they could make this happen. Because look, you have…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at the opportunity you have. You have two or three months of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, in the sense of they’re not going to fire you, free leave from work, during which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could set this up if you wanted to. You have a platform where we can beg people to hire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, and a hundred thousand people are going to hear this. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need a hundred thousand people to hire you. You need like ten.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but if all hundred thousand would like to send me an offer…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least ten people in the audience can send you a serious offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word, that’s hilarious. Yeah, I mean, we’ll see. We’ll see. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very kind of you to to make the impassioned plea and I very very deeply appreciate it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And one of us has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to well and for the listeners to if you’ve stuck around for this part I also again I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys affording my family the ability for me to take that time off Even if I squander it and just go crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to work It just the fact that I can take that time Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is is an extreme blessing and I’m really thankful for it. It’s funny with my job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I I, I think I’m more valuable than you’re painting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but I think that’s more about circumstance than it is necessarily about, Oh, I’m so fancy. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, you know, we, the particular employer that I work at, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two teams, one on the West coast, one on the East coast and on the East coast, the iOS team, as it stands right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now is myself and an intern. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is not in my work’s best interest to. get rid of me unless they’re getting rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire East Coast operations for iOS, which is certainly possible. And for a long time, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were on the precipice of doing exactly that. Now, I don’t think that’s the case. Here again, I acknowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ll never really know. It could happen tomorrow, etc., etc., etc. I am fully aware of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I am at least mildly valuable by circumstance, if not by ability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m relatively valuable based on ability. Certainly not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people really understand RxSwift and whether or not you like it, whether or not you think it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. It is a unique skill. So if anyone is interested in – if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone happens to want an RxSwift consultant, let me know. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have more flexibility in this job than I have in most jobs to be at doctor’s appointments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be at home when necessary. And I think that I am more valuable at this job, again, either by circumstance or ability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or both, than I am at a lot of places. However, I still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by and large, agree with your points that there’s no amount of flexibility that is more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working for yourself. And I did the semi-hard work in 2017 of setting up an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LLC for myself. So some of that administrivia is already taken care of. And in some ways, I’m even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better equipped to run with this, which is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco neat. Yeah, like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already dealing with like, you know, having to do estimated taxes and everything from the income from this show. Like you’re already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealing with that from side income from your podcasting. So like that’s… And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me offer an alternative perspective on your current status. You and I have talked before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the whole, you know, company having West Coast and East Coast things. And I was… I didn’t know whether you wanted to bring that up on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but since you did bring that up, let me give you an alternate perspective on what you just described as your status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Your company seemingly used to have a lot more iOS people on the East Coast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they’re on the West Coast and the East Coast has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just you left and you’re about to take off two months. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at this as a really good opportunity for the company to consolidate their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey operations in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John new location.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also you’re saying you’re super awesome and valuable to the company but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about to take three months off, and they’re going to have to figure out how to do things without you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so they will. I’m not saying that you’re going to walk in in March and be immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laid off, but I think if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re looking to consolidate on the West Coast, which certainly looks possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this would make my list of incredibly reliable paychecks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, and I agree. Now for what it’s worth, what I haven’t mentioned is we actually have a new iOS developer starting next week, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe, or week after. And that person is fairly junior. So the understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, is that they were just kind of, kind of do their thing until I get back and then I’ll tutor them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the ways that we do things at my employer. But I’m not, I’m not saying you’re wrong by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any stretch. I’m just saying it’s, it’s not the sort of thing where I’ve turned the eight ball over and it says all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the signs point to you getting laid off. I’d say some of the signs point to me getting laid off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not all of them. But who knows? I don’t know. In a perfect world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will either get a bazillion wonderful job offers and I’ll have to choose who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like my clients to be, or there will be nothing but crickets and that will solve the problem a different way. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see what happens. But anyway, I appreciate you giving me the nudge and that’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you. Mad Fientist I’m dead serious. This is not a nudge. This is a push. You know what to do.