268: A Tarnished Brass Age
05 Apr 2018ARM Macs, education feedback, expensive car-phone mounts, The San José Show, subscription BMWs, and ginger tea.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- HAM radio and GMRS licenses
- New iOS onboarding screens are indeed about GDPR
- Education feedback
- Pulsating help prompts
- iCloud's free storage
- Classroom for Mac: What does it mean?
- Inductive charging is great. Who knew‽
- Apple to use its own CPUs in Macs?
#askatp- Lyft at WWDC? (via ohples)
- Should we use the new CloudFlare DNS? (via Bart Hoefs)
- External GPUs for John? (via Josh Rapoport)
- Post-show Neutral:
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Casper: Get $100 off the Casper Wave mattress with promo code atp100. Terms and conditions apply.
Chapters
- Pre-show: Ginger tea
- Follow-up: Amateur radio
- Follow-up: GDPR iOS screens 🖼️
- Follow-up: Education event
- Follow-up: Showing new features
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP100)
- Free iCloud storage tier
- Classrooms for Mac
- Qi, car mounts, and batteries
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Macs switching to ARM?
- #askatp: Lyft in San Jose
- #askatp: Cloudflare DNS
- #askatp: eGPU for John
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Neutral
Pre-show: Ginger tea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also my throat’s burning from all the ginger I put in my lemon ginger honey thing. I put too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally I just mince the ginger but this time I decided to to put a ginger and hot water solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my blender and really puree the crap out of it. It’s really in there and wow it’s stronger
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re using chemical weapons on yourself. Next, next Margo pepper sprays his throat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then of course all the ginger like particles sank to the bottom of the cup So the whole rest of the time I was drinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I was like, oh, this isn’t too bad. But now, I mean, now I’m at the bottom and now it’s every sip is like fire.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need to get crystallized ginger so you can slowly eat the crystals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you know that ginger tea is almost always BS? Like if you try to get like just like bagged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ginger tea, so it’s all dried, every single one of them I’ve ever seen includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as one of the ingredients black pepper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is that BS? Because you don’t like black pepper? because they’re trying to make it feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like fresh ginger with the burn in the back of your throat by making you drink black pepper, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John ginger, fresh ginger, give you a burn in the back of your, I guess I don’t need enough fresh ginger to know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ginger is spicy, it’s like, there’s like a spice to it. But when you dry it out and, you know, make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dry teabags with it, you lose that. And so to make you think you’re tasting more fresh ginger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you are, they add black pepper to ginger teabags to remind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you of the burn that you get with fresh ginger, but it’s like engine noises, it’s totally fake.
⏹️ ▶️ John When do you eat fresh ginger other than this thing that you’re doing to yourself because you’re sick? I’m not sick, I just enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Yes, it’s fresh, but then you chop it up and then you cook it, you make it hot in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pan. What about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ginger that comes with sushi? That’s pickled. Ah, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t eat sushi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you tried it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm-hmm, I don’t like fish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, John. Neither do I. So my problem is I don’t like fish and I’m allergic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything at a sushi restaurant that contains neither of those things. But anyway, I’m eating fresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ginger right now in this drink. It’s really good, but a little burny. But a little burny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I’m making my own ginger tea because actual ginger tea is bullsh**.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because it contains pepper. Like, I’m not convinced that people just don’t like the taste of pepper. You think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ginger fakery, but maybe it’s just, it’s positive peppering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that’s the reason they added it, they would put pepper on the label. They would advertise it as ginger pepper tea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zero of them do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t put salt on the labels, they’re saltin’?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, actually, I don’t think so.
Follow-up: Amateur radio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s do follow-up. Peter Kendall writes that he loves that Marco you purchased some walkie-talkies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your road trip since he is an amateur or ham radio operator and he is glad that they worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. Peter continues, while walkie-talkies don’t have the best range, once one passes an amateur radio exam,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can get access to much more powerful radios. For example, one can get these mobile radios that pump out 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watts and are powered by the 12-volt battery in your car and have a detachable head unit to put on your dash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are other shapes and sizes as well, including smaller ones that are basically glorified walkie-talkies, but more powerful. Holy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monkey! 50 watts is… I don’t know anything, and I know that’s significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, for reference, the walkie-talkies max out at 2 watts, and you only get the 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts if you go… You’re only legally supposed to use the 2 watt versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go to the FCC’s website and register for a GMRS license, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did, and I didn’t want to get in trouble for using the 2 watt channels. And I did it because it was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy and inexpensive to do it. Going all the way for a full ham radio license is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considerably more involved, and I didn’t think it was necessary to communicate between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two vehicles that were usually at most a few hundred feet apart. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t necessary for this use case, but ham radio is one of those things like there’s a lot of overlap between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ham radio and nerd culture, and I respect a lot of it, but I don’t know that much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ultimately I’ve never had much of a reason to get into it because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broadcast nature of that hobby for me I’ve solved with podcasting and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short range communication nature I’ve never really had a need until now and walkie talkies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve my needs perfectly well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put this in here because I feel like it fits well with Marco’s vinyl revival
⏹️ ▶️ John and Raspberry Pi stuff. Not that he’s going to be into it now, but maybe this is like the Ghost
⏹️ ▶️ John of Marco future when he wants another tech thing to get into or maybe he finds himself traveling to upstate a lot or maybe he retires
⏹️ ▶️ John to upstate and needs to have walkie talkies. Seeing Marco take an amateur radio
⏹️ ▶️ John exam to get a license for a more powerful radio is a thing that seems plausible to me. So just put a marker
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Come back in 20 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no way I would ever be allowed to put a giant antenna in my yard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you have your giant compound upstate, you have plenty of land for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true. There’s some sort of ham joke here that I just can’t put my finger on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m more of a brisket person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nah, that’s not the ham I was going for, but I’ll allow it. As long as one of us got one in, I’m good.
Follow-up: GDPR iOS screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Eduardo Ponce writes, if anyone’s wondering whether the new onboarding screens on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 11.3 were all about GDPR, wonder no more. And they include a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a photograph of their Apple TV where there are clearly some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey string, what would you call these? I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placeholders. They’re localization identifiers, basically. So when you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app that’s supposed to be localized to different languages, you usually wrap the string calls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some kind of localization layer like NS localized string or something like that. And so the idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you don’t just hard code the the language strings are going to be shown to the user in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the source code. You have some kind of resource file that is a strings file and then you can localize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the strings file that’s just like a list of all the strings that will be displayed to a user. You can have that localized by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco translators and then you can have a whole bundle of those things in your app and you can have different ones show for different language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and locale settings and your app simply instead of saying like ask the user are you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure the app says give me the string for the are you sure dialogue on this page so it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some kind of identifier for that some kind of like you know are you sure dot identifier dot setup dot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or something like that and so what we see here is there was some kind of problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of bug or something where the string didn’t load and instead it just showed the identifier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has GDPR in the identifier, in the name of the identifiers, for the text of this dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these boxes. So clearly, Apple considers these GDPR dialogues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so like a couple of samples, ATV for Apple TV,.videos,.GDPR,.welcome to movies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or ATV,.videos,.GDPR,.continue button label. So yeah. Nice. It was funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me because I was pretty darn confident that this was, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boiled down to GDPR, And man, there were not a lot of people who disagreed, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoo boy, to the people who disagree, they were very confident that we were wrong. And guess what?
Follow-up: Education event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on. Oh man, I did not think to figure out how to pronounce this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Salian, Calian, Mr. or Mrs. Babcock writes in, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealt with technology at the high school and elementary levels. When it comes to cost and collaboration features, Google wins.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since that device is configured in lockdown, iOS doesn’t count much. As for video editing, it sounds cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s a huge time sink. I didn’t add this, who did? What are we trying to say here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just put a little bit of EDU feedback. We got a lot of people replying, so I just wanted to have a few samples
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of cover the range. That’s what the next few items are about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Andrew Link writes, Creativity is the peak of learning, but 40% of the time I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealing with quote unquote classroom management and 50% is trying to even get students to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reach the baseline. There’s a broad, there are broad family and cultural issues to address
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before tech really matters. Uh, Andrew’s school or whatever is implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google suite over the next two years. It’s a mixed bag. okay, the network hit is slowing everything to a crawl.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, tween memories and Google level secure passwords are painful mix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In other words, everyone’s always forgetting their passwords. Didn’t one of your kids have that happen to them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not me. No, not me. My kid has good password hygiene.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know if you’re serious or not. And I’m a little scared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John The reason I picked these
⏹️ ▶️ John two bits here is that we got a lot of people who are actually in education
⏹️ ▶️ John writing to us and maybe not all of them, but no matter what it was, these
⏹️ ▶️ John these people were using. Everyone had
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it’s not complaints about the thing they’re not using, complaints about the thing they are using. Complaints about
⏹️ ▶️ John the difficulty of the job, about the difficulty of dealing with technology, and no matter what it was they were using, if they were
⏹️ ▶️ John all Apple, if they were all Google, if they were a mix, that everything had a problem. And we know this for tech podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John we complain about technology, and we know the frustrations that most people who aren’t tech enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ John feel about technology, like they’re just frustrated when it doesn’t work, especially if you’re supposed to be using it as part of your job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, so not, not a lot of feedback was like, here’s what we use and we love it. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. Some people liked one thing better than the other. And we say, I’m so glad I have exits better than why, but they all
⏹️ ▶️ John had complaints about whatever it was they were using. So, um, no silver bullet for
⏹️ ▶️ John tech in schools. And I particularly like the idea of like the creativity is the peak of learning sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a pyramid of like, you know, what was that? Uh, is it Maslow’s hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Somebody has a
⏹️ ▶️ John hierarchy of needs. Yeah. And it’s like, you know, safety and bubble and very at
⏹️ ▶️ John the top is like self actualization or whatever And so it’s like in in the classroom
⏹️ ▶️ John Get the kids to show up get them to be safe Uh get you know get them
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay attention get them to absorb something like and creativity is like when you get all
⏹️ ▶️ John that other stuff taken care of and then finally they’re allowed to to blossom and that That’s the aspirational
⏹️ ▶️ John nature of what apple is pitching that by buying our products they will enhance
⏹️ ▶️ John the peak of learning, but you have to get to that peak first. You know, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have the students in the seats paying attention, absorbing the material, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John spreading their wings and being creative with the things that you’ve successfully taught them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was interesting to me that I felt like a lot of the feedback we got about education was very contradictory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, somebody would say, Oh, of course you would want an iPad. The total cost of ownership is so much better. Oh, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never get an iPad. The total cost is so much worse. It was very, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very yin and yang. And it made me laugh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. One more thing. I didn’t put anybody’s feedback. I should have. But the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple devices or whatever devices being expensive and then only being available in a quote unquote, rich schools, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of people were, I mean, there seems to be like a disconnect between the students
⏹️ ▶️ John that attend the schools and a tax base that potentially feeds into them, because a lot of people are like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have iPads in our school and are we’re not in a wealthy area, right? And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it doesn’t mean necessarily that the students who go to the school
⏹️ ▶️ John are well to do, but it seems in some areas more than others. Money
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow is getting to these schools that is not directly attributable to the incomes
⏹️ ▶️ John of the individual students who are attending. And I think that’s just the nature of tax spaces. It depends on where you
⏹️ ▶️ John live. It It depends on how your taxes are distributed. Um, it depends on if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some other program that’s feeding money into the school to buy the fancy iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John for the school that otherwise is not a wash in cash. Uh, I mean, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you the opposite here where, uh, where I live, it’s filled with rich people. Uh, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the technology in the schools that my kids attend, especially elementary school is entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John funded directly by the parents. as in there is no money in the school budget for technology
⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever. And the only reason there’s any technology is because all the kids’ parents are rich and give directly
⏹️ ▶️ John money to buy. Like if you want to see any computers in your kid’s school, you’re going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John collect money and give them to us. Right. Uh, and is it because the tax base
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t big enough here? No, that can’t possibly be it. It’s just a question of budgeting and how much money goes towards
⏹️ ▶️ John elementary and how much priority they put on, uh, Putting technology in school
⏹️ ▶️ John versus tearing down one local elementary school and rebuilding it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John this Taj Mahal multi-million dollar amazing piece of construction.
⏹️ ▶️ John That costs a lot more money than iPads and that was not funded by people’s parents with direct contributions
⏹️ ▶️ John but with good old-fashioned taxes and bonds.
Follow-up: Showing new features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would one of you like to tell me about what happens when you open a new document in pages?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is a video of it. This is related to our topic before like how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you how do people find help in iOS apps when the screen is so small? How do you communicate the features
⏹️ ▶️ John of your application? So people know when it launches what you can do with it. Again because
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen is so small and there’s no omnipresent menu bar with a help menu. And we were
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about the bad ways you can do this by circling a bunch of stuff on the screen and throwing a bunch of words in people’s faces
⏹️ ▶️ John and pointing a finger and said this tap this thing to do this tap that thing to do that tap that thing and expecting
⏹️ ▶️ John them to memorize it the one time they see it. So this is Benjamin Mayo tweeted a little video
⏹️ ▶️ John of what happens in I’m assuming this is a new version of pages on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they have you know what you do have visible in many iOS applications is a toolbar with some glyphs on it
⏹️ ▶️ John and some kind icons or glyphs either whether it’s the top or the bottom And in pages,
⏹️ ▶️ John this looks like on a phone, you launch it and the new collaboration glyph
⏹️ ▶️ John pulses. Like it just gets a little bigger and smaller. I don’t know if it ever stops pulsing because in the video it taps
⏹️ ▶️ John it right away, right? But if you tap it, it takes you to this little video that shows you like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the collaborate feature and it sort of does this wordless animation showing you
⏹️ ▶️ John how collaboration works. It’s pretty good animation that communicates without too much text,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of what collaboration does. It has a brief explanation, but then shows you a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of things. I don’t know. I think you kind of already have to know how collaboration works to understand the video, frankly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s, I mean, I don’t know if I like that better than the overlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I guess it’s certainly trying to be more subtle. I just can imagine people launching the app and going, why is that button
⏹️ ▶️ John pulsing? Especially if it doesn’t stop. Or if it does stop, you might think you’re, you know, going a little bit mad
⏹️ ▶️ John that like I could swear last time I launched this application part of the toolbar was pulsing and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m pretty sure I wasn’t on
⏹️ ▶️ John have cold medicine or anything anyway I just thought it was interesting here’s here’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John uh trying alternate solutions to scribbling all over our screen with a bunch of arrows.
⏹️ ▶️ John So keep trying Apple.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple giveth and Apple taketh away Good news 200 gigs of free iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for bad news every managed Apple ID account that’s involved in education Whomp whomp
⏹️ ▶️ John bring that up because we talk about oh, they need to give more iCloud storage to everybody free.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, they haven’t for a really long time. Someone put it how long it was like seven years or something since the five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s since I clap was introduced like it was never less than five gigs. That’s what it started at.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And so for for education, uh, this, this is something that a lot of people cited and feedback, including
⏹️ ▶️ John one that just came in just before the show, like how much it costs to buy all the third party things you have to buy to fill in the gaps
⏹️ ▶️ John and functionality that apple doesn’t offer, including, uh, having cloud storage, which according to an email
⏹️ ▶️ John we just Scott, I believe a person said that there is no way to pay for more iCloud storage for
⏹️ ▶️ John students. Like even if you wanted to give them more money for more, you couldn’t. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, that seems that seems very strange to me. But anyway, Apple said, hey, we’re increasing to 200
⏹️ ▶️ John and got lots of applause. But why wouldn’t you, you know, 200 gigabytes free up from five. That is a big increase.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for people who are not students, still five gigabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, we’ve heard from lots of other podcasters and fans and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users, I keep hearing that everyone expects that, oh well, they’re just waiting until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC in June and that’s when they’re going to raise the limits for everybody for free. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly would not consider that a safe bet at all. In fact, I might even bet against that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the 5Gigs is indeed comically stingy and even was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven years ago when I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs introduced it. But you know it was it was bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then and it’s bad now. But services are Apple’s biggest area of potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growth I think. I don’t think they’re gonna want to give up services revenue that easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is probably not a small portion of it. Like you know the people who upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to an iCloud, a paid iCloud storage plan for you know basic functionality of their iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, that’s probably not a small amount of their services revenue. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t imagine them all of a sudden raising it to a level that would cover way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people for free. It’d be nice if this happens. Apple has in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally intentionally taken a hit on margin to do something really compelling for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumers and they’ll usually even warn analysts of that in like one of the earnings calls beforehand. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly I don’t I just don’t see that I mean that happened a lot more in the past than it does now now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see them giving up a big chunk of services revenue when that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly an area where they’re focusing a lot on and depending on for growth.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the balance that they have to keep looking at is how many people
⏹️ ▶️ John are willing to pay money for extra storage versus how many people
⏹️ ▶️ John are at their storage limits but still unwilling to pay. Because when you’re at your storage limit and are still unwilling to pay,
⏹️ ▶️ John that becomes Apple’s problem if it starts to affect their satisfaction. Like if they don’t like Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to charge me money, I don’t want to give them any money, and my phone is constantly full. Because a constantly full phone is
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad user experience. It yells at you about having too much storage, you can’t take pictures, you have to choose precious
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you want to delete. It’s a bad experience, right? And so it
⏹️ ▶️ John is in Apple’s interest to get people somehow to have more storage, ideally by paying Apple money,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s what they prefer. But if it turns out that nothing they do can dislodge
⏹️ ▶️ John this very large percentage of people who refuse to pay money and constantly have full phones, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good situation. Maybe it’s still just a fraction of people. Maybe like people do in the end, they complain, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John pay and that an apple may be willing to do that. And then, you know, people feel better. But whenever I see somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John with a full iOS device who refuses to pay for additional storage, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel apples pain by proxy. This person is dissatisfied or unsatisfied, whichever of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct word, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John product and there is an obvious solution that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John cost that much money, but there’s no way you will convince them to pay for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for nothing to pay for air, to pay for whatever storage should be free, blah, blah, blah. Software should be
⏹️ ▶️ John free. Like it’s, it’s a tough sell, but it really does affect their opinion
⏹️ ▶️ John of their device. not enough to get them onto another device, maybe eventually to get them on another device, but they are mad
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. So I think that’s that’s a problem Apple needs to address in some way. Maybe they can address it just by reducing the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John or changing the tiers or cleverly arranging the tiers such that people get on board
⏹️ ▶️ John like with the thin end of the wedge, like get on board a cheapo tier and then slowly like ratchet up as they need storage to like
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it feel better for people to pay for storage because I feel like that’s the big barrier. The big barrier is
⏹️ ▶️ John not how much it costs. It’s getting people over the hump from not paying anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to paying something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, because so much of this is psychological. It’s more about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling than about whether you can afford or not afford
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever’s the cheapest plan, like three bucks a month or something. A lot of it is more like people are just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of annoyed on principle that they have to pay for this, or they’re annoyed on principle that their phone is bugging them about this thing that they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even actually really read or looked into, they just know that their phone’s bugging them. Or they’re annoyed on principle that they only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get five gigs for free and that bugs them. Or they look at the prices of additional storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on other services like Dropbox and how it compares and they’re like, oh, well, this is a bad deal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s so much more about, I don’t want to pay, than I can’t afford the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X dollars a month in a lot of cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they’re putting their money, like you said, towards a different thing. Like, well, if I’m going to pay for storage, I’m going to get the most bang for my buck. And that takes people
⏹️ ▶️ John off Apple services. If you’re using Dropbox for all your file storage, it’s actually even more viable now
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has the, you know, the share sheet integration for Dropbox and stuff. But, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like I, I think Apple would be, uh, upset if people decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to use Google photos instead of Apple’s photo solution. Like I think Apple wants you to use their photo solution for a variety
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons. Well, they should be trying a little harder on a variety of fronts then.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I, and I think Apple would tell you that their photo solution is like, you know, better on privacy and all those other reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John why you might use it. But if you are, you know, that’s the feature that Google has hammered Apple on. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly running out of storage because you’re filling up your phone with videos and photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple wants you to pay more money and Google says, don’t pay us anything, we’ll keep an unlimited amount of your photos, radius, quality,
⏹️ ▶️ John asterisk forever and ever. People say, oh, well, then why would I pay for the Apple thing? I’m just going to use Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos and I’m going to use, you know, the Google Photos app instead of the Apple Photos app. And I’m going to use the Google website
⏹️ ▶️ John and like Apple doesn’t want you to go all in on the Google ecosystem, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should do something. I don’t know if that means increase the five gig tier to 200
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody for free, but something would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what it is that bothers me so much about this is that I feel like five gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an egregiously obnoxiously paltry amount. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was maybe as much is the smallest modern iPhone. So let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s 30 or whatever gigs, you know, 32 gigs or thereabouts. That at least feels like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re giving you something reasonable. If you have one single iPhone attached to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple ID, it stands to reason that you should be able to back that up to iCloud for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free. That to me would be still more paltry than I would want. Like something along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lines of 200 gigs sounds really great, you know, but let’s say for the sake of argument, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, 32 gigs is what they’re going to bring tomorrow. That tomorrow you can have 32 gigs of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I wouldn’t be as offended by it. I would be slightly annoyed, but I wouldn’t be friggin’ offended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But five gigs is like, man, screw you. We don’t want to give you any storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, but here, fine, fine. Okay, we’ll give you a little bit. Be happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, it’s, I just find it obnoxious. It’s so little. And that’s the thing that bothers me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just like inertia. Like, if they were launching this service today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I doubt that the number they would pick would be five gigs, but it’s probably hard for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, first of all, in typical Apple fashion, they probably don’t look at this very often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like they set it up, it’s going, and it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot like a lot of their hardware releases where like it just gets ignored for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until somebody realizes they should look at it eventually. And so I’m guessing this hasn’t actually been reconsidered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that often. And then because there’s the inertia of having it there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so long, the idea of increasing it by, by a large amount probably does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scare them on two fronts. Number one, you know, margin, as I mentioned earlier, they’re probably afraid of that services revenue going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down or, or having the growth slow down. And number two, every iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot of iOS devices. And so the scale of the scale at which they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to scale this up, they probably can’t offer something like a terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free to everybody because there probably aren’t enough hard drives in the world or something like that. Like there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably some kind of major limit on scale in place here. I don’t know where that limit is. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be way higher than five gigs, but they probably couldn’t say offer 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs to everybody. Like that might be too high, or it might be just impractical, or it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like maybe they can do it in a couple years, years, maybe not yet. So there’s definitely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you there’s some kind of scale concerns there. Whether they are impassable or not, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you start doing the math of how many active iOS devices there are out there, and how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drives and data centers and stuff they would need, it is pretty large numbers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is definitely a factor there. But it might not, it’s got to be higher than five gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well there’s a new single region only variant of S3 for 20% less than the regular price.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get right on that. I’m trying to think back to when the 5 gig limit
⏹️ ▶️ John was introduced and I’m pretty sure that 5 gigs was always positioned
⏹️ ▶️ John as this is not enough for you to… this is not covering you. Even there wasn’t…
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple never sold a 5 gig device with a 5 gig of thing. It was always so clearly the
⏹️ ▶️ John starter price you get a little bit for free but if you use and fill whatever device
⏹️ ▶️ John you purchased five you’re gonna run out of five gigs so it was always
⏹️ ▶️ John with the expectation that if you fill the device you need to buy more five gigs today still is
⏹️ ▶️ John something that if you get it and you fill it as I got to buy more it so it fulfills the same role
⏹️ ▶️ John like it is it is equally able to to cause people to hit the limit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And arguably with the Heek and Heath, you know, H265 stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could hit your limits more slowly now than you did last year because your images are half the size and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, now you can fit 10 minutes of 4K video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, but in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John every photo and every video is so much bigger than it was back when the five gig limit was introduced that
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels more punitive now than it did before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just, it’s a bummer.
Classrooms for Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Classrooms for Mac. So there’s already a Classrooms app for iPad, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, I don’t remember, doesn’t really matter for iOS. And they said Classrooms for Mac is coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in June as a beta. What? Why not now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a beta? Why June? Well, there’s one clear, well, I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say clear answer. There’s one clear theory about that. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one hopeful theory about that. Yeah, exactly. And probably a few other explanations are less interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And one of the less interesting ones is probably the accurate, you know, real answer. But the fun theory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we can pontificate about is Marzipan, which is that supposed cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey framework that is maybe but maybe not coming at WWDC. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps that’s why we can’t talk about it, because there’s more things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to come in June at WWDC, and then it will all be made clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s why you can’t download it. Like, because if you download it, it then everyone just you know run class dump or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and look at the frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and but speaking of frameworks the the much more boring explanation is it’s ux kit the same thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John photos and stuff is made out of like when when apple has been in situations in the past where there’s an ios device and they
⏹️ ▶️ John want something more or less like that ios device on the mac they have ways of doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t involve the rumored uh cross platform framework thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and also but just might not be ready yet like it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most boring explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’re just not done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing it and that’s and that I think is by far the most likely. I love the idea of this Project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marzipan thing. I really hope it’s real. And I do think this summer would not be an unreasonable time to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into beta. That would be a really fun explanation for this. It’s much more likely that it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t ready yet because it is not, like, the fact that Apple said, here’s an event that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to announce something, but you can’t actually see it or buy it or use it yet for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few months. That’s so common now. like that that’s constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used for all sorts of reasons for all sorts of products it the most rare thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is when they have an event and they announced something that’s ready right then you can buy like today or tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the less common case now so the fact this isn’t ready yet I really I think it’s unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has any other meaning other than it’s not ready yet but
⏹️ ▶️ John it probably is using UX kit because I don’t see why they would port something from iOS and not use the the framework
⏹️ ▶️ John they have that they have used successfully deport a bunch of stuff from iOS, right? That’s not the cross-flight, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John Marzipan, but it is a way that Apple has done this in the past, and I’m sure it saves them time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially if Marzipan requires support at the OS level on the Mac side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it probably would, they probably wouldn’t have that support in High Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would probably be pushed to the next version of Mac OS, or maybe even the one after that, if it’s gonna launch in beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s not gonna be ready in time for this coming school year. It’s gonna be launched probably in like October
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something and no IT administrator should be installing it in October.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, it’s probably just not ready yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And setting aside UXKit, like the way, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I perceive lots of new Apple applications to be iOS like whether or
⏹️ ▶️ John not they use UXKit under the covers when they just feel like an iOS app. Photos certainly does.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco maybe, Maps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Maps, maybe Contacts or Notes, depending on how you squint at them. Reminders, calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it could be argued that this is actually not iOS-like but merely the modern Mac way, like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to say this is what modern Mac apps sort of look like, but if you use iOS a lot, a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ John look mighty familiar. And again, I’m not looking at the, I’m not class-dumping every single one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John apps to see do they actually use the same framework as photos or is it, you know, but from
⏹️ ▶️ John a user’s perspective, they feel very iOS-y. In this case, we know it’s an application that already existed
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS, and so it makes sense that they would use some technique to reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the work they’ve already done on iOS rather than re-implementing it from scratch in AppKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m sure when this application comes out someone will tell us definitively. Probably Steve Trout and Smith.
Qi, car mounts, and batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one quickie I just wanted to share. I have finally joined the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world of inductive charging, and by and large, my phone for the last couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weeks now has not had anything plugged into it. And inductive charging is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, it turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knew? Oh, that’s right. I told you this a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but the difference between you and me is I didn’t crap all over inductive charging. I just said, oh, that sounds neat, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the point I’m trying to say is the Mophie base that I think you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the rest of the world recommended is really great. And I got what appears to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, like what is aesthetically a terrible mount for my car, but in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey functionality is a really great mount for my car. And so what I can do is I can get in my car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can just kind of drop my phone in this little mount and it starts charging. And when I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to leave my car, I just pick it up out of the mount. And it’s super convenient. I’m only ever in my car for like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes at a time. So I’m doing this just because I think it’s cool, not because it’s ever particularly useful. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inductive charging, super cool. And it is super weird after having had an iPhone since the 3GS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have gone for like two weeks without having plugged anything into my phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey odd, but I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like, I know a lot of people try it and it’s not for them. That’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find it very much for me as well. Like I really, like now plugging in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, like when I travel, it just feels barbaric. It’s like, wait a minute, man, like I have to plug this in? Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so weird. The one thing I will, I do still plug it in in the car. I did, so in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode about my $7 piece of garbage that I was using to mount my phone in my car before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of people wrote in to recommend better phone mounts, and by far the most commonly recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is the ProClip line of products. And you basically, you go on ProClip’s site and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy like a certain like base that’s made to fit exactly your model of car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you buy the second part of it, which is the phone part that you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the one for exactly the phone you have. And they interface in some kind of standard way. And so when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get a new phone, you can just replace the phone part. When you get a new car, you just replace the car part. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not cheap. The combination of both sides of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was $90. Holy hell! And you have to mess up your dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, right? Well, no, so it does a, um, uh, like a pressure fit inside one of the air vents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it just, it’s like, it’s like pushing against the top and bottom of the air vent to kind of wedge yourself in there with like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rubber pad under it to keep it in place. And I gotta say it is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really solid. Like my, it is the only thing I’ve seen that has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually keeps the phone like totally still, you know, you can run over a bump or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The phone does not move. Like it is, it is attached very firmly to the car. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very easy to get an install the cable routing as much as I got the kind I got the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s see the adjustable phone adjustable iphone holder for lightning to usb cable. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do is it has like a little clamp in the bottom. You actually stick an apple cable into it and this is this is where I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my one black apple lightning cable from my iMac pro. I used it here because it looked better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in black and it is basically a dock and so I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick my phone into it and it is getting a wired charge and it just stays right there and it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only major downside of this is that it’s $90 for this combo. It was $30 for the car part and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $60 for the iPhone adjustable thing with the cable. So again, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap. Way more than my $7 piece of garbage. However, also way nicer than my $7 piece
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of garbage. and I can see myself keeping this up as long as I continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use Waze on a semi-regular basis in my car. I think as I get new phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and new cars down the road I think I will probably stay in the ProClip ecosystem for now because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly nice. Like you can like take the phone out with one hand and the mount doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move and stuff like that. Like it’s just nice. Like it’s solid and heavy-duty and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just really nice. The reason I stick with wired charging, which is why I thought of this here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that Qi charging is not fast enough to charge the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone and run Waze. It can keep the phone at about the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge level it’s already at or maybe very slowly trickle charge it while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like the the charge rate really requires a 10 watt plug like a like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get from the iPad bricks or from the high-powered USB chargers. So it really requires that to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both run ways constantly and also charge the phone at a meaningful rate. And right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think any Qi chargers, even the 7.5 watt Mophie one, I don’t think any of them can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it fast enough. So for Qi charging in cars, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly can’t recommend that unless you are very light with your phone’s usage in the car but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for wired stuff, I can recommend ProClip if you were willing to spend $90 on a clip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your phone in your car. This is the difference between you and me in summary. You bought one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car charger for $90. You could buy three and a half of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the inductive chargers that I just bought, which admittedly are not nearly as nice, I’m quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Three and a half inductive chargers still can’t charge my phone for ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You know what I’m saying though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, this is you and me in a nutshell. I don’t need three and a half chargers. I need one charger. Yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. I’m just saying. Also, before we get a bazillion pieces of email,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do we really care about the report that came out recently? I don’t remember where I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, about how wireless charging destroys your battery because when it’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to keep your battery topped up, it’s like discharging, recharging, discharging, recharging, discharging, recharging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I really care that much. And maybe I will if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see that my battery is not doing well, which maybe I could do in this new battery window or a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in settings. But I don’t know, man, like especially someone who keeps iPhones only for a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t care. Like Apple wouldn’t have made this a thing if they thought it was going to nuke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their batteries. So, hashtag yellow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought the pitch was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was heat. Yeah, part of the idea was that because Qi charging generates some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat, like a little more heat than regular charging, that charging your battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a hot environment is worse for it. operating your battery in a hot environment is worse for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there might be something to that. I can’t imagine, because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing the management of the charging on the phone end in their firmware, I can’t imagine they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow it to abuse the battery like that. I think they would control that a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit better. But that’s not abuse. Everything does that, laptops and phones. They allow it
⏹️ ▶️ John to discharge a little bit and then trickle it up and then discharge a little bit. Everything, every Apple device has done that
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. that’s good. I don’t think inductive does that any more than plugged in because
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marcus said, Apple’s controlling it. But if all charging things produce more heat for
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent power transfer to the battery, which makes sense to me for a inductive type thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John then maybe you have a little bit extra heat. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but regardless, I think just using your phone on a regular basis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably doing way more wear on the battery than the minor differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how you charge it. Generally, charging it more slowly is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for its long-term health. But again, in which case, Qi chargers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should actually be really good for it in theory. But it’s the kind of thing, like we talked about it before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just use your phone normally, you’re gonna burn through batteries over a year or two. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that Apple’s offering less expensive battery replacements, I think if you care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of thing, It’s much more reasonable to just go in after two years and get a new battery for 30 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to have to micromanage your entire life around not using convenient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things or trying to tiptoe around the battery. Because you know what, no matter what you do, it’s gonna wear out in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable amount of time. Like it’s gonna wear out probably around the same amount of time as it would have no matter what you did. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might as well use your phone to its fullest potential. Use whatever’s convenient about it. Use it how you wanna use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if your battery wears out in a year and a half or two years, just get a new battery for 30 bucks and just plan for that ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John And try to live a healthy life so you can live long enough for some battery technology to come out that has way
⏹️ ▶️ John longer charge cycle failure rates. Like, I don’t think we can expect infinite. Like, I can charge and recharge
⏹️ ▶️ John and uncharge this a million times and it never degrades, right? But if you can just change it from whatever these battery batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John are rated at, like they’re rated for like 1,000 cycles or something before they’re kaput, if that was, you know, 100,000,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would seem like that you could use a phone basically forever and the battery was as good day you bought
⏹️ ▶️ John it as the day it went away. We are not living in the current
⏹️ ▶️ John with that technology available, but there are lots of research things that are all the
⏹️ ▶️ John cliched five to ten years away. So stay alive long enough and you might see one of those happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will also say, if you are interested in getting a battery replacement, maybe wait on that
⏹️ ▶️ John no choice. The wait time is like four months now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that yeah, we keep hearing from people that the wait times span from weeks to months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for getting new batteries. You know, there’s so many people going in now after the Battery Gate scandal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now with 11.3 actually telling them, you know, whether the battery is degraded or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of people going in, and apparently the wait for the batteries at the Genius
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bar is literally like weeks or months in a lot of places. And so, by the time, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you buy a new phone now, and you cheat charge it all the time, by the time the battery wears out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should probably be able to get one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Might not be $30 anymore, but. That’s probably true. Oh, and one more thing on this ProClip thing. I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John when you mentioned your clip and people sent in stuff. I went to this site because I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for similar clips. I think I had just bought one for my wife and I was wondering if there were better ones. And
⏹️ ▶️ John on the ProClipUSA.com website, the image they have in the background at the top of the page
⏹️ ▶️ John shows a mount that goes into the gap in the dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John between the top stuff and the thing that has the vents. It doesn’t go inside the vents like you were
⏹️ ▶️ John just describing. And I have one right now that goes inside the vents. That’s usually a typical way to do it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John see that on the website?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like going. I do see what you mean. Mine does not do that. Mine presses against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top and bottom inner edge of the vent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And so when I saw this, I was like, well, forget that. I’m not jamming anything into the cracks in my dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it had just gone into the air vent, I probably would have been like, oh, well, that’s how they all work, so it would be fine. So that scared me away. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it depends on your exact model of car, but I really don’t want anything. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John once you do that, you know if you ever take that out, now you have giant gaps where that thing has been wedged in for the past six months
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bloomberg reports that Apple is planning to use its own chips and Macs starting in just a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of years and giving Intel the boot. I feel like we on this show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have flirted with this topic on and off pretty much since the show started in 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on the one side, I find this fascinating, and I feel like we should talk about it. On the other side, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we’ve been around this topic so many times, I’m not sure what else there is to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, Intel has not had the dramatic improvements that they used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have. Their, what is it, TikTok cycle has been slowing down, and now they’ve basically said, yeah, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to do that anymore. So Apple may be taking matters into their own hands when it comes to CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they may just start putting those in computers rather than just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones and fake computers. I mean iPads. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are our thoughts? Because what we assume, we don’t know, but we assume these would be ARM processors, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different than the Intel processor in a Mac. It’s a different instruction set, which means things would have to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, all your apps and the operating system would have to be compiled again. Like there are many, many, many things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that fall out of this. It would basically be the PowerPC, the Intel transition all over again. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do we feel? Are we excited? Are we bummed? I mean, let’s start with Marco. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really know what to think yet. At a high level, it seems inevitable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if Apple wants to keep maintaining the Mac, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitively and if they want to push it forward and if basically if they’re are going to care about the Mac again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this does seem like an obvious direction to take it. And we have seen rumblings that they are caring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the Mac again. I mean, the iMac Pro, I think, is one of the biggest ones. Like, there’s a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the iMac Pro that they didn’t have to do, but they did it anyway, and they made a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great product. And so I’m heartened to see, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are actually investing, you know, non-trivially into Mac hardware. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope to see more of that as the year goes on. I hope to see fixed laptops. I hope to see the Mac Pro. We’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how that all turns out. But clearly they have had some kind of change of heart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least change of direction with Mac hardware. If they’re gonna keep doing stuff like that, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does seem like an obvious place to go because Intel really is holding them back in a few areas. Now I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all areas. You know, as some people have pointed out, we haven’t seen what Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip design department can do for competing with like the Xeon in the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. You know, they could probably do a pretty good job if I had to guess, but we don’t know that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we do know is that Apple can definitely compete with Intel with their chip designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at lower ends of the power spectrum. So that would be most important in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, the most commonly sold Macs, small laptops. Like that’s where this makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge difference. Like if you can actually have, say, something like the size of a MacBook 12 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you can have something like a real computer size, like a 13 inch, you can get serious gains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in battery life and maybe even performance at the same time by switching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a modern Apple arm design in these things probably. So it does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s a really clear place to go. In addition, Intel has been a pretty crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supplier to Apple I think in recent years, and not even that recently, over a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, Intel has really had a lot of problems itself, a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping its chips on time, getting its fabs going and whatever it’s needing to do, a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with performance per watt compared to ARM chips. In a lot of ways, Intel is really not delivering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well on supplying Apple with what it actually needs. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t that different from when IBM was not delivering very well on PowerPC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple made a switch. You know, in that case, to Intel, because they were doing great then. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Apple decided to take this kind of move, as long as they care enough about the Mac to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push this kind of thing through. Because it’s a big job, it’s a really big job. It requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of major and long-running changes. It’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a heck of a transition if it happens. It’s gonna really need a lot of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of time. It’s gonna be a little messy. However, I do think where they would end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be really nice. Even if it doesn’t even go to the whole line. Even if it doesn’t do the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high end, like the desktops and the Xeons. Even if it just stays in the smallest laptop line. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the 15 inch doesn’t even have it. But maybe the 12 inch and 13 inch do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’d probably start on the 12 inch, honestly. That would be really, really competitive for those products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good battery life, you get pretty competitive performance. And many of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the apps that people use, you know, first of all, many of the apps people use are the built in OS apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that come with the system. And so those would all be ready, you know, on day one probably. And then, you know, a lot of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people use would be simple recompiles or not that much work to get them updated for it or recompiled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. Um, so like, I think that could be a really great direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the products to take. The downside to this, where I’m concerned, and I did a little quick tweet about this earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main reason I’m concerned about this is that if this is true, which that’s a big if, I worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will Apple in the near future or ever place enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority on Mac OS to really make this happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well on the software side? Because ever since iOS came out, Mac OS has been really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distant second priority. They have made no efforts to hide that and I think it’s obvious to everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you could argue that that should be how it is because iOS devices sell so much more than Macs and really are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bulk of the company’s income and everything. So Mac OS is really not a priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them and hasn’t been for a long time. And what we see every time they do try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to update Mac OS, they seem to be getting messier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sloppier and introducing more and worse and more embarrassing bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time they rewrite a subsystem, it comes out buggier than the one before it. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might eventually catch up, but it usually takes a few releases at least. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of problems with macOS. And it seems like they’re incapable of touching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it recently without breaking stuff. And a lot of times the stuff they break never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets fixed. So I’m concerned if they’re going to approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of move to ARM, like a whole architecture transition, if they’re going to approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with the same level of, frankly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if it’s carelessness, but at least they are not giving it the resources that they need to make quality so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, if they’re going to attack this problem like that, then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might just break everything and make everything way worse and maybe never fix it or fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very slowly or never fix certain parts of it. That’s where I’m concerned. It’s like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really want the Mac platform to be brought forward in big ways. It needs it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, if it’s going to do that with the same amount of starved resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seeming disregard for quality in exchange for ship dates, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think is beneficial to the platform. So that’s my concern.
⏹️ ▶️ John Getting back to what you kicked us off with, Casey, the fact that we’ve discussed this many times in the past, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bit of inside baseball meta concern, but I’m always worried about
⏹️ ▶️ John how much to repeat something that we’ve said on a past show, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t assume that everyone listening now has listened to all the dozens of hours
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about this same topic. But on the other hand, if you have listened to them, do you really want to hear this, hear us say the same
⏹️ ▶️ John things again. So on this topic, I’m I’m looking for two things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Marco was at least looking for one of these, which is one is something new to say on the topic,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think Marco has found with his concern about the care and attention that they’ve shown to Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS being applied to a hardware transition, right? Which we haven’t really talked about that much in the past, because I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John past few times we talked about this, we weren’t collectively as disgruntled about the quality of Mac OS, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one is is specifically for this story when stuff like this comes out I’m looking for is there any new
⏹️ ▶️ John information in this story like is there any information period
⏹️ ▶️ John other than hey guess what Apple could could transition Mac to a different processor that it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John itself and in this story there
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t really much new information except perhaps some dates
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole lot of hedging this this line from the article is great. I would call this comprehensive
⏹️ ▶️ John says Apple could still theoretically abandon or delay the switch. Theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ John is the icing on the cake there, but Apple could still abandon or delay. It’s like you’re reading this whole article. Let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you, Apple’s going to do this thing. Halfway through the article says, and by the way, they might not do this. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, we get it. You’re covering yourself. Okay. You can say, well, we didn’t say that we’re gonna. We just said they
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna but they might not and then theoretically abandon or delay theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ John they can abandon or delay it there’s no theory you don’t need to anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John not a big fan of the article but as in all these things set aside the article and just take it
⏹️ ▶️ John as a data point as another little pebble to the pile you know maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ John pebble you know we’ll see like where there’s smoke there’s fire kind of as you see more and more stories about a topic,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe start to start taking it more seriously than just like when we’ve talked about in the past, it has just
⏹️ ▶️ John been sort of idle musing like because it’s an obvious thing like Apple is really good at making
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting better at making our own processors. Uh, and Apple likes to control this stuff and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to make more and more of the stuff themselves or design more and more than stuff themselves and have it fab
⏹️ ▶️ John and Intel’s been falling behind like lots of reasons, uh, to talk about this. So I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to rehash all the things we’ve discussed about in the past but um
⏹️ ▶️ John i mean i kind of actually i kind of do but i don’t i i want i want everyone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John listening now to know all the hours of discussion we had about this because i want us all to get credit for having the foresight
⏹️ ▶️ John and wisdom to have discussed these issues well in the past but i don’t want to have to repeat them for everybody now so the the
⏹️ ▶️ John only one i will repeat explicitly is uh one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John is in tension about on this topic is the idea of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John spending the money that would be required to make an arm chip that is essentially useless
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS devices, right? To make an arm chip for the Mac Pro, for instance, right? 150 watt
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro caliber chip to make something like that to design it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a lot of work and you can reuse a lot of the work you did for the lesser chips
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in phones and iPads, like to use the cores and assemble them or whatever, but a lot of the stuff you do
⏹️ ▶️ John will only be for that Mac Pro. Like you won’t be able to use that chip
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere else because nothing else has that that power envelope. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, when we’ve talked about this, the question was always, all right, well, so Apple can reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the chips directly, like in the MacBooks and stuff. But when it comes to the Mac Pro, if they’re going to transition the whole line, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to make that chip themselves from scratch there is no you know and that’s a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ John to invest does Apple really want to invest that amount of money solely in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John as Margo just said and you know in our in our modern iMac Pro having error we can say hey they actually
⏹️ ▶️ John spent a lot of money money they didn’t necessarily have to spend reusing and
⏹️ ▶️ John adapting technology from iOS things in an application that basically is only
⏹️ ▶️ John useful in the iMac Pro like that t2 chip is probably not going into an iPad anytime soon,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not even going into a laptop, right? Uh, cause that, well, who knows? I’ve got a T one in there. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. But they spent a lot of time and money building the iMac pro and they made a good product out
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And like the touch bar before it, as much as we may or may not like it, it shows a willingness to invest in Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware that is probably out of proportion financially to how much money
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac brings in because as we’ve pointed out, and as Apple now seems to agree, the
⏹️ ▶️ John max importance is also out of proportion to the amount of money it brings in its importance to the overall
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple platform and not just because you develop iOS apps for it, but that’s part of it. But Apple seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on the same page with with all of us now about, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John pro Mac users are an important constituency. They had that roundtable a year or so ago or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple said they agreed, and it’s made us all happy for a long time when we’re patiently waiting for the fruits of that labor.
⏹️ ▶️ John The I Mac Pro is one of the fruits of that labor, It’s good, right? It came out good, right? So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all enthusiastic about that. But that makes it more and more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John that they would be willing to spend the amount of money they would need to spend to make a bunch of arm CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John reusing cores and other technology and stuff from elsewhere, but in it, but in a
⏹️ ▶️ John big giant high power blob that is not useful anywhere except for Macs. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this story is another pebble in the pile. The iMac Pro and that round table some more pebbles.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s starting to look more and more likely. Things against it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to come up with a new angle on this and the new angle that I have not against this theory but because
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean they’re not gonna do it but something that if they did do it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a disadvantage to Mac users it would be a step down from where they are today is
⏹️ ▶️ John that none of the stories I’ve seen rumors or whatever have suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John that what Apple would actually be doing is making a new line of CPUs that they
⏹️ ▶️ John would use in Macs and that they would also sell to the whole rest of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I haven’t even seen
⏹️ ▶️ John that suggested like no one no one even dares speculate about that let alone say that they think it’s the thing that Apple is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do so we always just assume yeah Apple would make its own CPUs because they like to make their own
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever’s and they make their own A-series system out of chips and then they make their own Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ John not Wi-Fi whatever the W1 chip and they make they make all sorts of stuff right not make but you know design
⏹️ ▶️ John and have someone fab for them and they don’t sell them to the rest of the industry yeah they they license the W1 for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John of peripherals and stuff like that but they’re not selling the A11 chip to other cell phone
⏹️ ▶️ John makers this is not a thing they do and we just assume if they were going to make chips for the Macs, they also wouldn’t say, oh, this is our new
⏹️ ▶️ John business now, by the way, we’re selling chips to everybody in the industry. And what that would mean
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Macs would have CPUs that are not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the CPUs that are running in other things in the industry. And what so what is it? Who
⏹️ ▶️ John cares? What does it matter? Or don’t we just care if we have an ICPU in our Mac? Well, right now we are in a, a, a,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you would call it a golden age used to be golden age. Now it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite gold. Now it’s more of like a tarnished brass age anyway, where,
⏹️ ▶️ John where max use the same CPUs that are also used in the servers
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. We run server side software in, which means that if you’re writing server side software and using the Mac as your dev environment,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can run VMS and you can run Docker and you can do all sorts of things, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and run the same software that’s running on your server locally on your Mac, because they’re both x86-64 CPUs, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And to a lesser extent, you can also run Windows stuff because Windows runs on x86, and you can run Windows in virtualization
⏹️ ▶️ John at high speed and so on and so forth. And those are real advantages for
⏹️ ▶️ John certain constituencies of pro Mac users who use the Mac as like a development
⏹️ ▶️ John platform for writing server-side software. And maybe it’s just because I’m in that world that I see it a lot, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John have been shocked over the course of my career, how prevalent Macs have become for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially, you know, not, well, who pejoratively use them as glorified terminals, right? I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really true, because lots of people do local development. Like, they will, you know, they will run Docker on their Mac, they will run, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, VirtualBox on their Mac or whatever, and they will use software
⏹️ ▶️ John and binaries that run on the server, they will run them on their Mac, right? And so they’re not just
⏹️ ▶️ John using it as glorified terminal, they’re actually doing local development. That is one class of software developer. server-side software
⏹️ ▶️ John developer. So if Apple makes a CPU transition, the Mac as
⏹️ ▶️ John a server-side software dev platform becomes far less attractive because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not going to sell those CPUs to run on the server. Now it could be if they just use the same instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set and somehow ARM on the server becomes a thing. Lots of companies have been trying to make ARM on the server a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. It hasn’t quite happened, but if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to make it happen and no one else makes it happen and Intel continues to
⏹️ ▶️ John or even AMD continue to dominate the server space with x86 64 it makes the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac less attractive in one particular area and same thing for Windows I’m just picking this example but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John rely on the ability to run Windows virtualized Windows at full speed as part of some
⏹️ ▶️ John important business that you do that lets you use a Mac when previously you couldn’t because you can also run Windows on it I know
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows is ported to ARM as well, right? But it really just depends on do people
⏹️ ▶️ John port all their Windows software to ARM? Do they recompile it for ARM? Do most PCs sold become ARM?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ideally, whatever transition Apple makes, the whole rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the industry would also make. PCs, servers, everything. Whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not Apple helps them make it. I think Apple will not help them make it. So the only way we can get,
⏹️ ▶️ John maintain the golden age where everything runs on the same platform is if the rest of the industry also
⏹️ ▶️ John transitions more or less at the same time without any of Apple’s help which seems unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ John to me so that would make me slightly more sad and I think it would make the
⏹️ ▶️ John app the Mac slightly less desirable or even viable
⏹️ ▶️ John for certain pro applications everything else that the Mac normally does no one cares you can develop Mac software
⏹️ ▶️ John on it you could run all your applications you can browse the web so it’s probably not that big of a deal but it is the one angle that I have found myself
⏹️ ▶️ John pondering, you know, if I’m able to bring myself to believe that they’re really gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, what would that actually be like? How would it change my experience of Macs, you know? What would it…
⏹️ ▶️ John and I didn’t even get into, you know, playing Windows games or whatever, because who cares? That’s really small. But I look around my big company full
⏹️ ▶️ John of hundreds of developers and how many Macs I see and everything they’re doing with them and think, what if that Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John was ARM but all of our servers were still x86? How would that change how viable the Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ John for you and I think it would be worse. So that’s one more
⏹️ ▶️ John thing for me to not look forward to. On the flip side of that is what Margo was talking about, how awesome it would be on laptops and I frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think how awesome it would be on the Mac Pro. I would love to see a massive multi-core Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John design ARM processor that outperforms a Xeon with less power. I would love that and I think it’s 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John possible maybe on Apple’s second or third try and hell maybe on their first try. Those people are really smart.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are some things I would miss.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One other thing to think about is like, we’re assuming that, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does this transition, that the processors being in their hands would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a good thing and that they would outperform, or they would match or outperform what Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing. And the assumption in that is that they will always, or at least for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outperform what the rest of the PC industry is doing. But that might not hold. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be. What if they complete this transition and then they find themselves actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing as well as the PC industry or not caring as much about the processors they’re developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac and therefore like, you know, today we have the issue of, you know, it doesn’t seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they care as much about the Mac as they do about iOS, so, you know, they have like these product lines that just sit around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. When Intel does make a new generation of processor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that much work to create, to update these same product lines to use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new component. It’s way less engineering resources to take Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest chip and stick it in the Mac you already have designed than it is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design the next version of the A10 quadruple X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, that would be like the high performance version of this year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A series processor. It’s very possible that could backfire on us. It could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be that Apple takes it over, then down the road decides the Mac is not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to them, which wouldn’t be unheard of because that’s already how it’s been. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just never update those chips for those compute for the Mac. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John’s like, because they’re not selling these chips outside of Apple, which I can never see them doing, there’ll be no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other pressure for them to keep those chips updated. So that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might make them like, it would basically raise the cost of updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac line to keep pace with the latest and greatest hardware. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the last thing Apple needs is for that cost to be raised because right now they already seem to have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of trouble justifying investment in the Mac. So if it’s more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to update the Mac to you know update Mac hardware to the latest generation of whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually could really backfire quite badly on us and we that could result in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even less attention, even fewer updates, even less competitive performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what the rest of the industry is doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the trashcan Mac Pro. We were like, oh, why isn’t Apple updated to use the latest Xeons?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, imagine there were no latest Xeons and Apple could say, we’re using the highest performance
⏹️ ▶️ John A whatever processor available. It’s like, yeah, but well,
⏹️ ▶️ John got me there. I mean, they are. Like, they just haven’t made another one. So technically it is still using
⏹️ ▶️ John the fastest one, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you get the good and the bad with like bringing this stuff in-house to Apple, you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably pretty good performance and power efficiency gains, but at the cost of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you’re at the whims of Apple. And Apple is, you know, fickle and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many areas unreliable. And you know, this, you would be at the whims of whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they felt worth doing even more than you are now because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cost of keeping things updated would be higher to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s worth mentioning the other angle that a lot of people are talking about mostly because this Bloomberg article is so
⏹️ ▶️ John careful not to say anything definitive about anything. They’re like, well, you know, that Bloomberg girl doesn’t actually say
⏹️ ▶️ John arm anywhere. They just say Apple would make its own chips. What if they make their own x86 chips?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they could do that. You know, money solves a lot of problems, patents, licensing,
⏹️ ▶️ John instruction set, whatever, you know, dealing with Intel, like assuming you threw enough money
⏹️ ▶️ John at the people you need to throw money at to be allowed to do that. could probably make a pretty good x86 chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a hard time believing Apple could make a substantially better x86 chip
⏹️ ▶️ John than Intel because Apple’s expertise thus far has been in making ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs and x86 even just plain old x86 64 is a
⏹️ ▶️ John much more let’s say warty instruction set than ARM. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of history behind it, it’s weird in lots of interesting ways and Intel has
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of experience in instruction decode hardware and all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ John chip within a chip ways to crack apart those big variable with instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John and feed it into a machine that works more like a modern processor on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as big a difference as people think because modern ARM RISC-style processors
⏹️ ▶️ John also have to do lots of great stuff internally as well. But there’s a lot of institutional expertise that
⏹️ ▶️ John both AMD and Intel have that Apple does not have when it comes to figuring out how to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 instruction set faster, even just the x86-64 one, which is much nicer than the 32-bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John let alone the 16-bit or whatever variants. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems much less likely to me. It really hammers on what Marco was getting at,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, okay, Apple, now you have something to keep up with. You’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John your own x86 chips, and so we can still ask the question, hey, Apple, you have an update the whatever chip in your whatever Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. Meanwhile, Intel has released three new chips that are faster. What’s the deal? You could just use those Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. Why did you go on your own? Or at least if they do arm, we can’t tell them, you know, unless someone else decides
⏹️ ▶️ John to make like 17 core, uh, arm chips that they, that they’re stubbornly refusing
⏹️ ▶️ John to use in their new arm Mac pro or whatever. Um, so that’s, I think this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this realization and everything we’re talking about is leading people to talk more around this Bloomberg story about, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think for the first time I’m hearing people speculates more seriously about the idea of them having
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 at the high end and arm at the low end like for some sustained period of time rather than having
⏹️ ▶️ John a Transition where you just say all the x86 Macs are gone and all the Macs are
⏹️ ▶️ John a whatever arm chips But rather instead saying we’re never going to do make the investment
⏹️ ▶️ John to compete with Xeons those are always going to be Xeons in the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro and we will keep up
⏹️ ▶️ John with Intel’s line as much as we always have and We’re just not going to do stuff there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for all of the Macs that can essentially take drop-in
⏹️ ▶️ John chips from our iPad and phone line maybe with some minor tweaks in terms of adding more cache or maybe some more
⏹️ ▶️ John cores and a beefier GPU and stuff like that, those will
⏹️ ▶️ John get ARM. And as Marco said, those are the majority of Macs sold. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the x86 Macs will just be this technical curiosity that nerds and developers use. the
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs that most people buy to do basic computing stuff and word processing
⏹️ ▶️ John and run office and web browsing and run spreadsheets and watch Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever else people want to do, those will all be arm. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is an unprecedented, that would be an unprecedented move because Apple has never had a sustained
⏹️ ▶️ John dual CPU strategy on the Mac. It has always been a transition. Old chip goes out, new chip comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in, new chip has lots of advantages. loves the new chip. Look how fast it is. Look how
⏹️ ▶️ John fast graphing calculator runs on the power PC. Look how fast everything runs on x 86 versus these ancient
⏹️ ▶️ John power PCs that IBM doesn’t update anymore. Um, I am
⏹️ ▶️ John not enthusiastic about that future, even though it makes sense from a technical perspective in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of like what you want to spend money on and what you don’t because to Marco’s earlier point,
⏹️ ▶️ John dealing with an OS that runs on two different platforms, Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a who is it? I think A. T. P. Tipster said it on Twitter is a bug multiplier. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, potentially there are new bugs that might only exist on one platform or another throwing another
⏹️ ▶️ John very it’s not double the bugs, right? Because not every bug is architecture specific, but throwing another
⏹️ ▶️ John variable into the mix, especially as variable as significant as the instruction set,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, is not the best way to drive down bugs and cost. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be that the software, maintaining the software and dealing with the bugs and the changes there, is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually more expensive than dealing with the hardware. I don’t know how that shakes out in the grand scheme of things, exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how many millions of dollars it would cost to build a Xeon competitor yourself versus how many millions of dollars it would cost to
⏹️ ▶️ John maintain in perpetuity, or at least for a decade or so, two architectures
⏹️ ▶️ John that you make an OS, the same OS for, with the same apps compiled to stat binaries and two tool chains
⏹️ ▶️ John and all this other stuff. So that also strikes me as it’s not ideal. Like the simplest solutions
⏹️ ▶️ John are that Apple doesn’t do this transition or that they transition everything to the same architecture on all their devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And any sort of hybrid thing, though it might make sense from a nickel and dime
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, I bet if you had to pitch it to the board of directors, it would seem to too
⏹️ ▶️ John much like a half measure. And they would say, why don’t we just all go if you had to pitch them and say we’re going to go all arm and it’s unified
⏹️ ▶️ John and we have a unified framework and a unified architecture and we own all the stuff that is way easier to sell to a board
⏹️ ▶️ John of directors than any of the more technical solutions where you leave the Pro Max’s
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 and you support both of them and have two toolchains, two compilers and fat binaries and you don’t transition. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think that’s a winner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny because I’m of two minds about this whole thing. The Casey from a couple of years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lived in VMware Fusion in Windows but on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would most likely really hate this. And this is exactly what you were talking about earlier, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the advantages of being able to virtualize an OS or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a platform that’s based on the same platform you’re running is that it happens really, really fast, right? This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in contrast to this hypothetical future when you’re trying to emulate x86 on top of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM. And who knows? Maybe this phantom Apple processor would be so damn fast that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could get away with it, but the likelihood of that is not good. And so, you know, past Casey, who was doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows development on his Mac, does not want this at all. And I think the last time we really spoke about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seriously, I was still that Casey that does not want this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the current me that only works on Xcode and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, other things that are native to the Mac, and I haven’t run Windows in at least a year, if not more,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like I have a problem with this. And the thought of my beloved 12-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being faster with a battery that lasts even longer, which to be fair, I don’t have any particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaints about the battery on this thing. But that being said, you can always have more. More is always better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So having a 12-inch MacBook that is considerably faster and yet has much better battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sounds frigging awesome. Like I totally want that. But what I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing is considering what am I losing out on because maybe there’s some app that’s vital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my workflow that I won’t be able to use anymore. Like, you know, FFmpeg, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is open source, so presumably I could compile from source if I needed to. But just let’s suppose for the sake of discussion that FFmpeg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was never built for ARM, could not be built for ARM. Like, that would stink. I use FFmpeg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time for stupid stuff that doesn’t matter. But, you know, whether or not it matters, it’s important to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Wait, to be clear, you use it on the 12-inch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great once in a while, not usually. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps not my best choice of analogies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or examples. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get my point, right? Is that there maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s the app Rocket, which lets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you easily insert emoji pretty much anywhere on the system. Rocket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a modern app. I would assume if this arm thing happened, that Rocket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would get updated. But what if for the sake of discussion, Rocket isn’t updated? I use Rocket constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably hundreds of times a day. And if it didn’t get updated, that would really bum me out. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, there are probably trade-offs that I’m not considering, but on the surface and going on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the assumption that in, you know, a, this phantom new Apple processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that goes in the 12 inch Mac book is, you know, five times faster and uses half as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power or whatever the case may be like that sounds fricking great. And Apple being in control of its own pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds fricking great, but. Who knows? I mean, like you guys were saying, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be that Apple makes crummy desktop level CPUs. Maybe it would be that they’re even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slower than Intel. Like we don’t know how it would turn out. But on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’re faster and then they don’t make a new one for three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like you never know how it’s gonna turn out, but the optimist in me thinks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell yeah, like even if Even if it’s painful at first, because some of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really love don’t get, you know, don’t get moved to like fat binaries or whatever they end up doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in principle, this sounds great. I’m all in on it. I think I’d really like to see how this plays out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it sounds like we’re waiting until at least 2020, if not after that. So we’ll see. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John how much stake you want to put in dates in this article.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows VM thing, like I think that’s definitely a pretty rare case, because you really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to use a Mac, but we’re kind of doing Windows development and you can get away with it because of VMware. But I’m honestly, I’m surprised you
⏹️ ▶️ John were able to tolerate that because that’s no way to live on a Mac, constantly be using VMware to do Windows stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s my alternative? Use a Dell? I’m not a monster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. Well, at some point, maybe that’s better. But like the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reason I brought up server-side- At no point is that
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Yeah. The reason I brought up server-side of stuff is not just because it’s what I do for a living,
⏹️ ▶️ John but because they’re, you know, think of the big tech
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, you know. You’ve got Apple, what is it? Apple, Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon, maybe Microsoft, Facebook, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook, Amazon, increasingly Microsoft and Google write
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of or mostly server-side software. And when you picture the
⏹️ ▶️ John stereotypical developer who works at any of those companies and you picture them using a Mac and being a cool
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerd hipster person, they’re writing server side software on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to think that there is some aspect of having the same CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture as all of their servers makes that a more desirable
⏹️ ▶️ John development platform. And there are a lot of those people, right? I don’t know how many people are using
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac to do windows development because they hate windows so much, but there are a lot of people writing
⏹️ ▶️ John server side software. And my impression is that Macs are very prevalent at those companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I think it’s a use case that actually may raise to the level of being a
⏹️ ▶️ John factor in Apple’s decision that they will at least consider it right. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like just think of the Apple says, well, we considered it, but it’s not important enough use case. It’s too small. Like we care
⏹️ ▶️ John about consumers, right? So fine. 10 years from now, uh, if you went
⏹️ ▶️ John into Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Amazon and looked to
⏹️ ▶️ John all the developers who are doing server-side development, what would it look like? Would it still be filled with Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or would they be mostly gone now? And people switch to what? To Windows, to Linux?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, something that’s still on x86? Or it could be that by initiating this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple finally kickstarts all other companies to start pushing ARM on the server more,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Amazon rolls out ARM on the server for all your EC2 instances and everything, and Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM on Windows really starts to take off, And Intel just really has a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John decade and really just fades from prominence. And we’re all happy because we’re all using ARM everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s a possibility, I suppose. But, you know, I just, the big
⏹️ ▶️ John tech companies these days aren’t the big tech companies because they make
⏹️ ▶️ John native applications and hardware. Most of the big tech companies are big because they
⏹️ ▶️ John run server-side software on cloud infrastructure on x86 CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and their developers all use Macs and run Docker and stuff. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just to clarify what I was saying earlier about FFmpeg, that was really a crummy example, because FFmpeg is open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source. So presumably, like I think I said it earlier, but that could be rebuilt from source. But there’s got to be some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closed source thing. Maybe it’s an Adobe product, which doesn’t typically get updated very well. Maybe it’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other thing. Maybe it’s MakeMKV. Maybe it’s any number of other apps that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you wouldn’t be able to recompile yourself from source and maybe won’t ever get upgraded or updated, I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, for this new platform. And then you would never be able to run that app again. And that would really stink. Or you would have to be used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of, what was the virtual, not virtualization, but the thing that, thank you. You would have some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Rosetta style situation where yes, you can still run it, but it’s at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a compromised performance and blah, blah, blah. So that’s the thing that worries me is that sitting here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, I’m all enthusiastic and it sounds great. give me my ARM MacBook Adorable, give it to me tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But maybe I’d get that ARM MacBook Adorable and realize, oh, this grass isn’t quite as green
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I thought. Marco, any other thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the software argument is a good one. I think in any transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, one of the big risks and problems is that you do lose some apps, you lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. Like when we went from PowerPC to Intel, not everything made it along the transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now the Mac is in a very different place than where it was in 2006
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that transition really happened. You know, now a whole lot more Mac software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really in maintenance mode or being totally unmaintained and the software that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people still use. You know, like a lot of developer attention moved to mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of Mac developers no longer work on their apps or rather the apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developers of a lot of Mac apps are no longer working on them. So the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in a kind of a bad spot to go through an architecture transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no other modifications. I think this is possibly one of the reasons why I’m so excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this idea of Project Marzipan, of having iOS and Mac kind of cross compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the apps, is that I think that could really revive a lot of the Mac software market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would dramatically, I think, increase the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interest in the Mac and developer support of the Mac because it would lower that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barrier, allow more skills to be shared, allow more code to be shared, etc. So, you know, we talked about that before. So anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to revive software interest in the Mac among developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be very well timed to go before or during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a partial or full architecture transition because that’s when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the developers to be active on the Mac. Because right now if you look around like like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re about to lose 32-bit probably this fall almost everyone probably has something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will break. You know we saw this on iOS too like when when iOS dropped 32-bit almost everyone lost something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might not have been using it anymore but you know you know not everything made it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how this is going to be too. Like if Macs transition away from Intel, not everything’s going to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. We’re already losing some, a lot of things with 32 bit. And so to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that without significant destruction and problems for your users, you need a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco healthy and well-maintained software ecosystem. The Mac had that in 2006
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s why PowerPC to Intel went so well. It’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say the Mac has that now. So this kind of transition I think would be a very bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea unless and until the Mac has more active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development from third parties on it. And right now I don’t see that happening without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of major intervention. And Project Mars Japan could be that. And so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons again, I really hope that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the good news is that if either one of these things happen, I don’t think anyone can imagine a sequence
⏹️ ▶️ John in which the Marzipan-y thing doesn’t come either before or simultaneous with the CPU transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because it takes so long to make CPUs and Apple has already
⏹️ ▶️ John dabbled in what it takes to reuse stuff that you wrote on iOS on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that just seems so much closer to being a reality to me than a CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John transition. So I think we will get something to address the
⏹️ ▶️ John GUI API parody between iOS and the Mac before
⏹️ ▶️ John any CPU transition or at exactly the same time as the CPU transition for the reasons you just said,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple, I think, recognizes the same thing that going through a transition with the Mac market the way
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, it’s just going to make more people say, well, that’s the last straw. Screw it. I’m just going to be an iOS developer
⏹️ ▶️ John or do something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see. It’s exciting times ahead. possibly. You never know.
#askatp: Lyft in San Jose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Oh Please writes, hey, will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lyft be generally available during WWDC, as in not swamped with users or should I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rent a car if I want to see the things around San Jose, like the Computer History Museum?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In my experience, from only one year of WWDC in San Jose, it was fine. Like, I can’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever waiting on a Lyft for any particular reason or for any particular amount of time. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any troubles. I don’t know about you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Compared to San Francisco, San Jose is like a neutron bomb went off. Like there’s nobody there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a weird side effect though. Like you’re right, first of all, San Jose is empty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem with San Jose, so it’s kind of like the inverse plot of the Truman Show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it seems like you walking around are the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco human being there and everyone who works at every establishment in San
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jose seems like they’re an actor and for the very first time ever you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking them to do their job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a bit much but you are closer to the truth than I really want to admit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco California. Like it’s it really does seem like you are like the first customer everyone’s ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had. Everyone it’s their first day on the job. job. Like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found this to be the case last year, almost everywhere we went, almost every day. It like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in various different contexts, like it just seems like the city. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the first time people have ever come here. And I know it’s I know that’s not the case. Like I know, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a big city. Like, obviously, people are here all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not that big. That’s the thing. It’s not a big city.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, hiring like lifts and stuff, you know, for your time there, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to tell the person how to drive. You are the first person to ever ask them to do their job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all likelihood, or at least that’s how it will seem. So I don’t know what happened in San Jose to make everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behave this way, but that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ John it felt the entire time. San Jose from the perspective of an adopted New Yorker.
#askatp: Cloudflare DNS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You ain’t wrong. All right. Uh, Bart Hoofs writes, Hey, should I use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new cloud flare DNS thing, or should I stay with Google’s DNS thing? So to recap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google has a free and not open, but a free DNS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the DNS servers, actually the IP address 8.8.8.8. And what you can do is you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use Google’s DNS, which is supposed to provide perks, although honestly, I’m not even sure what they are anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The last time I used it, the only thing it really provided for me was making things like YouTube slower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I was hitting servers that were very far away from where I was sitting. I guess one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the advantages is it prevents your ISP from knowing as easily what web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey addresses you’re going to and things of that nature. Instead, you’re giving it to Google because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a better choice, I guess. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, so that was a thing. It is useful if your ISP’s DNS craps the bed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I know is a a Comcast-ic thing to happen, but I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never really had that trouble on
⏹️ ▶️ John files. Or if your ISP does stupid redirects, where they take over the DNS when you
⏹️ ▶️ John typo something and throw you to some stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco page that has a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of corporate stuff on it. Yes, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco terrible. That’s the main
⏹️ ▶️ John reason not to use ISP DNS, because they do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, also, I really don’t trust ISPs to be ethical at all, because they have shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the US that they’re not. Like, they’re just not. They will do anything and everything to be as sleazy as possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what are you gonna do about it? There’s no competition, and now there’s no FCC to regulate them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can do whatever they want, and they know it, and they do. Like, I would actually trust Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than I would trust Verizon, which is my ISP, or any major ISP in this country,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because at least Google, like, there’s a lot riding on that. If they mess up, if they do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creepy, like, so I think they’re less likely to try creepy stuff, and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do creepy stuff, they’re less likely to get hacked and have my information legal over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a few reasons why I think I would trust Google over any ISP. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I think I trust Cloudflare more than any of them because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A. they’re not an advertising company and B. they’ve spelled out in their post announcing this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they’re doing this for free, what’s in it for them, like what is their business plan here and their business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan is in part because they seem to honestly care about making the internet a better place and in part because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they offer enterprise DNS services that would be better and are faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if more people who access the enterprise’s sites are using their DNS on the client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side. So there is a clear business reason why this benefits Cloud Flare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that does not depend on creepy stuff that I don’t want them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so sounds good. I’m not using it personally, but I will say that I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far more likely to use this than Google’s thing. I do use my ISP’s DNS because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t often fat finger URL, so I don’t see that god awful Verizon search page that I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it hijacks when you enter a bogus
⏹️ ▶️ John URL. They used to have a way for you to turn that off by the way, like you could go to Verizon’s preferences and find it somewhere and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But there still is. It’s poorly documented, but like if you change like the last digit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your DNS servers in a certain way like you get you get alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah that used to be that used to be the way but there’s a lot of like outdated documentation in that and sometimes what
⏹️ ▶️ John used to works stops working and it’s it’s annoying so I dig it up
⏹️ ▶️ John and on your on your concern Casey about 888 and 888 8844 the other one like that’s my concern and my
⏹️ ▶️ John experience with them as well as like a lot of the the ISP DNS likes a sort of local
⏹️ ▶️ John DNS use the fact that that that DNS is local to get to give you different names
⏹️ ▶️ John for common services. So you hit the closer incarnation of it. And if you use
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google one, so the theory went that it didn’t know where you were to as much, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would just send you to a server far away or that has a worse route to you. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure Google with its a thing does a bunch of stuff to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John that less severe. And you’re not going to some central DNS server in the middle of the country
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives everyone the same number for all of the different services. And that’s why, you know, like it tries to
⏹️ ▶️ John be local, like all Google thing, it’s massively distributed. It’s not just one thing in one place.
⏹️ ▶️ John But my experience has been that whatever that local thing is, it’s not local enough. And still occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John I will get poor performance. On the flip side, sometimes you’ll get better performance. if you try using your ISPs
⏹️ ▶️ John DNS, I found ISP DNS to be unreliable as in no name resolves
⏹️ ▶️ John or crappy as in it gives me like the same IP for that name as everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else was on my the same ISP as me and it’s crowded and if I switch to a day to day I get better traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John but either way I this I think cloudflare is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the same thing as Google in that regard. I didn’t I didn’t read their full blog post but that
⏹️ ▶️ John that concern is real and does sometimes have ramifications and that’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ John hesitate to suggest to non technical friends and family. Oh, you shouldn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John the ISP DNS just always use a data or 1111 or whatever. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they do find themselves in a situation where they’re being sent to a server far away and they get terrible performance, they’re gonna have no idea how to
⏹️ ▶️ John debug that. And I feel like it’s better for them to just use the ISP DNS so then at least when it breaks
⏹️ ▶️ John they know the number to call and complain to people and the complaint will be legitimate and they won’t find themselves in a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where the ISP support person eventually discovers that they have some weird DNS and say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, there’s your problem. Just they’re at the mercy of their ISP in more ways than one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even for me, I think maybe half of the devices in my house use the Google DNS, but the other half
⏹️ ▶️ John use the native ones and I choose based on how important it is for that device to get good
⏹️ ▶️ John video streaming from like Netflix or whatever. Not an ideal situation. An ideal situation
⏹️ ▶️ John would be if the kind of technical expertise,
⏹️ ▶️ John general morality and aligned business incentives demonstrated by
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloudflare actually existed in ISPs, but we do not live in that country.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not even close. Thank you.
#askatp: eGPU for John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is too bad. All right, so Joshua Appelport asks, hey John, with the release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Mac OS 10.3.4, have you considered getting an external GPU enclosure and a fancy graphics card to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do more gaming on your Mac? Can your Mac even support this? Isn’t it way too old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t even have Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t, I can’t even, I’m running El Capitan. I can’t even run Sierra, let alone High Sierra, let alone the latest
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco version of High Sierra. John’s Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t even have USB 3. Nope. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John more generally to the question about external GPUs, I think those
⏹️ ▶️ John are a good solution for people who need to use GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John intensive things on a computer that can’t fit an internal GPU, so laptops, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And my main concern in the laptop realm is
⏹️ ▶️ John based on my experience using my 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro at work,
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly connecting it and disconnecting it to my monitor and a hub thing that gives
⏹️ ▶️ John me USB-A connections and what else comes
⏹️ ▶️ John off of that? Many display port for my old monitor or whatever. Anyway, I plug it into a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that periodically makes it, forces it to turn on the discrete GPU and
⏹️ ▶️ John connect up to an external monitor and the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is terrible. There I have to do all sorts of weird dances and
⏹️ ▶️ John do things to make sure the machine doesn’t feel too rushed or too hassled by me plugging and unplugging
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Very often I plug it in and it just ignores me. Then I’ll unplug it and plug it in
⏹️ ▶️ John again. Oh, maybe now it’ll pay attention. Sometimes, no matter how many times I plug it in and unplug it, I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John pull the power cord out of my hub thing that it’s connected to and basically
⏹️ ▶️ John reboot the hub thingy. Sometimes it freezes with a black screen And so like all this is making me
⏹️ ▶️ John think, do I really want to be plugging and unplugging a GPU and thinking this operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system is gonna handle that gracefully? Cause it can’t even handle plugging it into an external monitor in a consistent manner.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I am not optimistic about how good an experience it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be to use an external GPU, but especially to connect an external
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU to a system that didn’t previously have it and disconnect it without doing all sorts of dances
⏹️ ▶️ John and jumping through hoops and bending over backwards makes the machine isn’t too rushed or isn’t too upset by me plugging in
⏹️ ▶️ John the second GPU so my faith in the reliability of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system to handle this is shaken despite the fact that I realize this is a revolutionary feature
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who are on the go previously had no way to
⏹️ ▶️ John increase the GPU power of their portable machine like you just only so much you can fit in that case and it
⏹️ ▶️ John would just the fans would be spinning you get the hottest one you could and it would still be terrible and now all of a sudden you’re telling me I can get this
⏹️ ▶️ John little external enclosure and have massively more powerful GPU, maybe they’ll just deal with the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll just be worth it for them to be able to do like live video previews of 4k video or whatever they’re doing with their
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU rendering, stuff like that. But for me personally, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not, my choice of a gaming rig would not be a Mac laptop with an external GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a reason I’m waiting for the Mac Pro. So I don’t know, I’m not personally interested in this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks for Our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Rover.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long
Post-show: Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, I think I have a solution to your BMW problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I’m trying to solve my BMW problem with more BMWs and a shed load
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of money, then yes, you have definitely found a solution for me. BMW has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come up with a subscription service. You heard that right. That is not a joke. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now offering a subscription service only in Nashville, or I’m sorry, it will be offering a subscription service
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only in Nashville for $2,000 a month. And up! $2,000 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can choose between X5s, 4-series, 5-series,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug-in hybrids, et cetera. And they will deliver with like white glove service. They will deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car you want to your door. They will take away the car you already have. and you can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assured that the car you are given is freshly detailed, etc. etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For $3,700 a month, you can alternatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get access to M4, M5, M6 convertibles, as well as X5M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X6M, etc. None of these apparently offer the 7 Series, but you know, whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s interesting about this is it includes not only access to the car, but insurance, maintenance, roadside assistance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey etc. etc. So if you are willing to trade an asinine amount of money for a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of convenience, you can get a suite or a fleet, I should say, of BMWs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at your disposal. And I think in general, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty cool idea. idea as long as you don’t have kids where you have to plug in a car seat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as you’re not the kind of person that likes to have a whole bunch of things sitting around in your car, be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rag or a charger, perhaps a obscenely overpriced car charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go with your obscenely overpriced BMW subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, wait. Do you have a rag in your car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I have a rag in my car. Why wouldn’t you have a rag
⏹️ ▶️ John your car? What kind of rag do you have and where is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, so generally speaking, it is a blue surgical rag that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never used for surgery, but my uncle was a eye surgeon for the longest time, and he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would either purchase or snag a series of these blue rags that are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a foot square, and they are the best rags for general purpose use. And they’re intended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be used in like surgeries and things, but he would just grab them and then give a batch to my dad or me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is sitting in the little container compartment whatever in the driver’s side door. So if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to say wipe off the inside of the windshield because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’ve had my windows open and some like, you know that kind of like film that gets on the inside after a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can wipe it off with that. If you ever have to kill a spider because somehow a spider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found its way into your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but then you’re smearing spiders all over the windshield after the next time you clean
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So the reason I asked about it is because it brought back memories of my
⏹️ ▶️ John grandfather who also had a rag in his car, but it was a filthy rag and it was in the trunk and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was used to clean off the dipstick when you’re checking the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oil. Yeah, that’s the only I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen. I’m more curious, what are these rags used for in the surgery? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mop up blood and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, jeez. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an eye surgeon, that’s not terribly useful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or one would hope not anyway, but for general purpose surgeries, I’m assuming that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re for. surgery and surgical cleanliness. Um, the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey reason I was moaning about you,
⏹️ ▶️ John about your, uh, use of this, uh, rag that you keep in the door pocket
⏹️ ▶️ John to clean the inside of your windshield is because first of all, the inside of
⏹️ ▶️ John your windshield is a hard spot to clean. It’s inconvenient. It’s hard to reach, right? You know, like just arm angle
⏹️ ▶️ John wise. Um, and stuff does all sorts of film of your human grossness like
⏹️ ▶️ John collects on there and everything. But the other problem, especially I imagine in Casey’s car, although he can correct me if I’m wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that potentially you may use something to clean the dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that is right below the windshield, some kind of product to keep that clean or maintain it
⏹️ ▶️ John or protect it from UV or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re thinking like Armor All or
⏹️ ▶️ John Equivalent. Or anything like that, right? Something. Something other than just a completely dry rag to
⏹️ ▶️ John clean that part of your dashboard and make it look nice. If you touch the rag
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re using to clean the inside of your dashboard, any part of it to the
⏹️ ▶️ John inside of your windshield, if you touch that to the dashboard and then bring that to your windshield, you are in for a world of hurt
⏹️ ▶️ John because the last thing you want to do is have even a corner of that thing touch your armor all covered dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and then smear that all over your window because you will spend the rest of your life with your arm at a weird angle trying to get that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John off the inside of your windshield and it is not easy. There’s some good YouTube videos about this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct and only sane way to clean the inside of your windshield involves
⏹️ ▶️ John basically surgical cleanliness. It’s like you’re in a silicon chip fab clean
⏹️ ▶️ John room. You must use a rag, perfectly clean, freshly clean, has not touched
⏹️ ▶️ John anything else, use it to wipe off the gross film, then maybe you can use the other side of that rag and
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s done. Then you have to get your next rag and you can’t touch any part of the trim or anything else that
⏹️ ▶️ John might have armor on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it. Oh my God, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I have an alternate policy. No armor all ever goes in my car. I hate armor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All I hate the idea that I touch any surface and it’s greasy. That is awful. There was one time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like a detailer used it without asking and it drove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me nuts. I was like taking like a beach towel like wiping it like trying to wipe it all off.
⏹️ ▶️ John horrible. Probably smearing it all of the inside of your windshield. Yeah, Armor All is the worst, but there are lots of things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use to clean the inside of your car. All of them have, in various ways, you do not
⏹️ ▶️ John want them touching your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windshield. No, they don’t. Vacuum cleaner and cloth, that’s all you need to clean a car. You don’t need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, to, like, coat your dashboard with
⏹️ ▶️ John grease. Unfortunately, even water, even, like, dampness, the problem is the grease comes from you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco comes from your body, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what what’s collecting on the inside of your windshield is human scum right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s coming from inside the car that also settles on your dashboard So even just rubbing it with a dry cloth
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re picking up some Some grease and if you if you would like to rub The top of your dashboard with a dry
⏹️ ▶️ John cloth and then take that same dry cloth and rub your windshield You are adding to the mess on your windshield cleaning the inside of
⏹️ ▶️ John your windshield is really hard to do I and i’m terrible at it by the way Like don’t think just because I reference
⏹️ ▶️ John those youtube videos that show you how to do it, right? I am terrible at which is why I know how difficult it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to do. I mean maybe Maybe I’m just not as as greasy greasy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t I hardly ever have to clean the inside my windshield I just don’t touch it and by not touching it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah Well that that is one that is a reasonable policy because a lot of people make the mistake of getting
⏹️ ▶️ John Something on their windshield and then they try to like rub it with their hand or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something and that’s it has grease on it And now you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just started the cycle of grease grossness. But Casey’s rag, that thing, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John never touch that to the inside of my windshield because I think you’re just making it worse. Casey, you need to come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You are fancy enough of a car person. You need to come on board the time to crack out the completely
⏹️ ▶️ John sealed, completely sterile, never
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seen the light
⏹️ ▶️ John of day rag, which I will carefully handle with my perfectly clean hands and
⏹️ ▶️ John wipe down the inside of my windshield, maybe not even the whole windshield, but just half of it, and then throw that thing away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then your rag, just keep in the trunk for dipstick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checking. Or you can just have lower standards. Can we get back to the point? So BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a subscription service. So do you think the BMW concierge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John would do this for you? Come
⏹️ ▶️ John to the rag. Because you’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like, what if you have a car seat? What if you have a rag? I mean, because they say they will personally deliver the vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They arrive fully fueled and freshly detailed with personal preferences already preset. he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like can I get a filthy rag in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the door pocket yeah. What do you mean by personal preferences is it just like where the seat is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or can it be like can you also install this particular brand of car seat in this spot load the pocket below it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these three toys my kid likes and wants to play with in the car today put my brand of sunglasses in the sunglass holder that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably not there because bmw doesn’t put on less holders anywhere. How far will this go? Could you get them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pick your scent in the seven series? I think yeah like could you get them to include one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these surgical rags that mops up Casey’s uncle’s eye blood in the door pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can reach it? And can they pre-clean the windshield for you so that you don’t get anyone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ambient grease on your windshield?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they say it is detailed, so you shouldn’t have to do anything. The windshield should be sparkling clean when you get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I just think this is an interesting thing. The first I’d heard of this was actually with Volvo with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new XC40, where you get your own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey XC40, and you can, the interesting thing about this actually is I could swear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had read that you can do this all via an app on your phone, which, how does that make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when there’s payment involved?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Netflix for cars. You just constantly get a bill for $3,700 every month, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John covers all the cost of you picking whatever vehicle you want. Like, it more than covers the cost. They just charge you too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but in the case of Volvo, they’re saying, what makes Care by Volvo unique,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what they’re calling their subscription service? No down payment, no price negotiation, one flat monthly fee with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no surprises, includes premium insurance no matter where you live, maintenance and excess wear coverage, upgrade to a new Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in as little as 12 months, subscribe easily online or via the app, and a 15,000 mile allowance per year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, if I was interested in an XC40, which that’s not the kind of car that I particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want, this is a really, really cool idea. I don’t know how much the Volvo setup costs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and oh, there you go, starting at $600 a month for the base model, $700 a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for their equivalent of the M Sport, which they call R-Drive, or excuse me, R-Design. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the BMW version is, you know, many times that. And yes, I think it’s a cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea, and I kind of like where this is going. The thought of just paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one monthly fee to have everything taken care of is really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John But believe me, they’re charging you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for it. This is not a good deal financially
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking. None of these things are good deals financially speaking. Peace of mind wise, it may be appealing to you to say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t have to worry about it, but you are paying not to worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for the $3,700 a month one for the high one, to get the M cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can lease an M5 for $1,000 a month. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insurance on it is going to be less than that, more. It’s not going to be another
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand a month. Take at least three M5s and you could just rotate them each day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And the funny thing is, like, Casey, you just said, like, oh, wouldn’t it be great if you could just pay a monthly fee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have everything taken care of? You can do that already. It’s called leasing. It already takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care of almost all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this. Well, but it doesn’t do insurance. Like, not to say that paying an insurance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bill… But it does include maintenance and roadside assistance, and you get a concierge to your house. Did I never tell you about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the same car all the time. I mean, this is totally for rich people who are like, like, oh, today I want to try this car. Oh, today I want to try,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, BMW came out with a new car. Is that included in my Netflix for cars? Sure it is, I’ll trade this in. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like you really have to have a lot of time and also, to Casey’s point, not a lot of junk in your car to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this kind of rotation. Although, like, I was trying to think of things in my life that have been like this, that actually have been
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculously good deals, and I thought of one, which I’m sure this doesn’t exist anymore, but someone can write
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell me. When I was a kid, I went skiing almost every year. And when I was a teen, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to buy fancy new skis for myself for a huge amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only way to know which skis you want to buy is to try a bunch of skis, kind of like test driving.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at the mountain, they would have demos. You could go to the ski shop and say, I want to demo skis,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d give them some paltry amount of money. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe it was $15, $10, $20.
⏹️ ▶️ John And- How much could a banana cost? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was a really, I remember it seeming small to me then, right? And in exchange for that
⏹️ ▶️ John all day, you can go to the ski shop and point to the $700 in 1990 money ski behind the
⏹️ ▶️ John counter that you wanted to try and say, I want to try that one. And you’d give them your ski boot and they would adjust the bindings and say, here you go. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to go up and take a run. You come back down and you say, all right, let me try that one. And you’d point to the $800 in 1990s
⏹️ ▶️ John money ski over there and they would take your boot and adjust the bindings and give it to you and you go up and come back down. You can do that
⏹️ ▶️ John all day. They changed skis as many times as you want, no additional fee each time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time they would adjust the bindings for your ski boots and your weight, and you would get to try hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars of skis in one day for one flat fee of like 10 or 15 dollars. Now granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John the lift tickets were 100 bucks in 1990 money, but my parents were paying for those so I didn’t have to worry about it, but I just, I remember being
⏹️ ▶️ John amazed at what a good deal it was. Like, there was no equivalent of that. It’s as if
⏹️ ▶️ John you could for a fee of like $80 try as many BMWs as you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted for a week and just every time you wanted to go back to the dealer, I’m going to try that one now and you don’t have to buy anything at the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of it. And I didn’t buy anything at the end of it. I tried all these skis on real ski mountains, which is why I found how
⏹️ ▶️ John I found my beloved Rossignol 7S to be the ideal ski for me, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I still own to this day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like that actually is, you know, one possible reason why somebody could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably want on a plan like this is like, I mean, I don’t know if they have like minimum terms, but if you could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for it for one month and like if you wanted to buy one of these cars, but you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide which one and you didn’t want to make like an expensive mistake, you, you know, kiss $2,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodbye or whatever and just try basically having a one month test drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all these different models and you could make your decision that way. Or say if you were trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a car review channel off the ground on YouTube and you needed access a bunch of cars to review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schedule it so you had all them you could do them all in one month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine being able to review like seven different cars in one month because you’d have access to them
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to pay Casey for that so we can have his little demuro ad in the front and say I got this car courtesy
⏹️ ▶️ John of you know whatever Toyota the blah blah like you do a little ad for them like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they pay you oh this is why I’m not a YouTube car journalist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah well neither am I these days apparently Porsche also has one called Porsche passport which
⏹️ ▶️ John so you could try all two of their cars they have so many SUVs and plus up some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any case I just think it’s a very cool idea I don’t I don’t know that it’s gonna work for most people not the least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which because it’s an obscene amount of money but like you guys were saying this is trading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money in favor of convenience and you know to your point Marco if you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go this route like there’s an argument that leasing would be just as good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or almost as good. You don’t get a guaranteed one-year upgrade in a lease,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or most leases anyway, like you would in the case of the Volvo one. And you don’t get access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to many cars in a lease like you can in the BMW or Porsche ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do think it’s a cool idea, and if you have more money than sense…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the good thing is, like, this makes leasing look pretty reasonable by comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leasing, you don’t get every year’s new model, but most cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year is a really minor update. Most cars, they only change in substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways every three to five years. So you don’t need to get every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. And while I would miss the, or while you would miss the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concierge with your blood cloth, I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the parts of this that are appealing to you right now in theory are really directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like you’re ready for a lease. That’s what this means. Like you are so ready for a lease
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re like, Oh, I can just pay a flat monthly fee and then like maintenance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is included. Yes, there are ways to do that and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to worry about upgrades down the road. Yes, yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do it now. I can offer you a wonderful deal where I will offer you most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this service for a quarter of the price and you don’t even have to be in Nashville.
⏹️ ▶️ John great. The main reason I think leasing is not for Casey is because it will force him to make a new car buying decision
⏹️ ▶️ John every three months and I don’t think the show can handle that every
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, even every three years. That’s true. If people just made cars I wanted to buy it would be so much easier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like just make make the model 3 have an actual dashboard make the model s not a bazillion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make BMWs that don’t break any Of these would be reasonable options make a golf bar with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing if you lease if you start a three-year lease today What you’re doing is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kicking that can down the road for three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can say no, but you can say like, you know what? But I would rather not think about this for the next three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll get back to it then. It’s like snoozing your car angst. Like you just snooze it for three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, remind me in three years to revisit my, my car craziness. In the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meantime, I will happily drive this thing that’s being taken care of by the lease plan and I don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about his maintenance costs and that thing could be like an M three or something. Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just waiting for BMW to have a round table about manual transmission,
⏹️ ▶️ John manual transmission, reliable cars, but I don’t think that’s in your future.