282: Not Unreliable Enough
15 Jul 2018Don’t worry, we didn’t just talk about the new MacBook Pro. We also had time to review all of Europe.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Distributing Marzipan Apps
- Siri is multilingual... until it isn't.
- Window air-conditioner hacks
- New MacBook Pros
#askatp:- Capturing out-of-warranty hardware (via Ali Shah)
- How do I use a 34" monitor? (via Andrew Troup)
- Lost picture troubleshooting for Brian Sturm
- Post-show: Let's talk about Europe.
Sponsored by:
- RXBAR: Whole food protein bars. Use code ATP for 25% off your first order and free shipping.
- Mack Weldon: Better than whatever you’re wearing right now. Use code ATP for 20% off your first order.
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi that works. Use code ATP to make overnight shipping free to the US and Canada.
Chapters
- Intro
- Caked Marzipan
- Siri is monolingual
- Follow-up: Window ACs
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- New MBPs: Keyboard
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- New MBPs: Internals
- State of USB-C
- MBP Leather Sleeve
- Sponsor: RXBAR (code ATP)
- #askatp: Apple keeps broken products
- #askatp: Using a 34” monitor
- #askatp: Lost vacation photos
- Ending theme
- Review: Europe 🖼️
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so it’s been a long time since we talked to each other, which is weird. Not good, not bad, just weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s kind of unusual, especially, you know, when we were planning all this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had no idea that there would actually be pretty relevant news in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoops. Well, it worked out perfectly because if we recorded a regular time, we would have just missed it. But now we’re just coming
⏹️ ▶️ John in at the right time. And not only has it happened, but we’ve also had the follow up on it already. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get to it. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact, Casey and I did our homework.
⏹️ ▶️ John We did. It’s not time for that yet, but yes, I know you both did very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We got a sticker on the wall, on our charts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want my gold star, dammit.
Caked Marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friend of the show Steve Trout and Smith had a or made a fun discovery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what feels like forever ago now He writes here’s a fun thing That’s kind of significant the UI kit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps in Mac OS Mojave are the exact same build as in iOS 12 This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggests that marzipan apps will be updated in lockstep with iOS And are not some weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fork for the desktop on their own delayed schedule, which has huge implications, right? He so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he also has a screenshot where he’s doing a little bit of spelunking trying to figure out What are the build versions of like voice memos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the home app and so on and so forth? And sure enough, they match, which is interesting. So what I’m curious is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how if there’s a new release for iOS, like how does that make its way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on to Mojave? I guess these are not App Store apps, are they? Because like Shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an App Store app or will be, but these are caked into the OS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not exactly sure what the mechanism is for this. Caked? Well, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know, built into.
⏹️ ▶️ John that sounds kind of gross because, yeah. I don’t know why. I mean, I read this tweet and I had a different take
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Like, I don’t like the idea of individual applications being tied to OS releases,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we all know what happens then. And you don’t get updates for a really long time. You only get updates when the OS gets updates. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if the apps are independent, you can update the apps when it’s appropriate to do the apps and the OS when it’s appropriate to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS. It’s interesting that these are, of course, quote unquote Mac apps, as in they’re meant
⏹️ ▶️ John to run on a Mac. there the OS whose build number they’re tied with is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS that they run on, which is also weird. Like, I also don’t I mean, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s good to know that, you know, they’re not a weird fork. And basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the iOS codebase gets updated, it’s not like you have to wait for the the marzipan version
⏹️ ▶️ John to also get updated, like there’s enough sharing that it’s like, Oh, well, they fix, there’s some bug and they fix it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t just get fixed on iOS. And then you have to wait a month for it to get fixed in the Mac version. Presumably it will be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John in both places. But the distribution mechanism, as Casey pointed out, is the big question. So what does it mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John the stocks application, the marzipan stocks application is updated, is basically the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John shares enough of the code base that it’s updated at the same time as the iOS stocks application? How do you get that on your Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it mean Mac OS updates are now synced with iOS updates? Does it mean you get an update in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac App Store? I don’t know. These are all good questions. It’s trippy.
Siri is monolingual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On a completely different note Yonah writes in to say I’m an American living in Germany and we just recently got a home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pod I like it a lot. But while Siri is available in many languages, she is still monolingual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In they go on to explain my wife is German and likes to listen to German groups However, we have Siri set up in English
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we pronounce the names of German groups correctly Siri cannot understand us We have to pronounce them in a way in English speech speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with zero knowledge of German might try So like the three of us it happens the other way around to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey German Siri mispronounces English songs as if they were written in German I also speak Hebrew. Some Hebrew songs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Apple Music have their titles transliterated, while others are written using the Hebrew alphabet. So English Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does know how to read Hebrew, and if a song is playing with a Hebrew title, and I ask what’s playing, she responds, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, and then there’s silence. Bye. More silence. So Yano continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it also means I can’t ask for these songs by name. I plan on opening some radars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was in response to, you know, we were talking about how, you know, one of Siri’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantages over some of the other voice platforms that’s often touted by Apple and its executives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of its fans and defenders is that Siri has really good support for multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages and for different locales around the world and everything. But we got this feedback and similar feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from lots of people basically saying that series, you know, multiple language support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is maybe overstated or that it becomes really a problem when you mix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages between what you’re speaking and what you’re speaking about maybe, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the language of your phone versus the language of other things because of issues like this. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a monolingual person, I found this quite helpful when I was driving in Canada and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving to Montreal a few years ago with Apple Maps, and it pronounced the names of French-named
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streets the way I would pronounce it in my head as someone who knows zero French, which is hilarious. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to repeat it now because it would be just embarrassing for me, but it did make it easy to read the street signs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I could hear Siri butchering the names the same way I would. But I could see how this is kind of a big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually know multiple languages and you mix and match them with what you’re asking Siri for or about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it apparently has no good support for mixing languages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Hebrew thing is just embarrassing.
⏹️ ▶️ John if it can’t read it at all, just substituting silence,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably the worst choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John worst choice would be Siri explaining to you what it can’t do. It’s just not
Follow-up: Window ACs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, one of my favorite things about ATP, and I mean this genuinely, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have an unbelievable breadth of people that listen to the show. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think of what you would expect to be the kind of person who would listen to the show, and you would assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a developer, probably on the Apple platforms or something like that. But sure enough, we have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other people that listen to the show. And Ralph Middleton writes in, as an air conditioning expert, training
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the air conditioner water, which is what Marco was talking about doing, to reduce the noise, eliminates the efficiency gains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drilling a hole in the drain pan of my window air conditioner, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. It eliminates the efficiency gains and it will increase the power usage because the unit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to run longer to cool the room and the system runs at a higher pressure and might also shorten the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life of the compressor. So in other words, yeah, it’s gonna be a little quieter, but don’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Ralph adds, as for John’s comments, there’s a reason why the HVAC industry has a slang term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for these units. We call them quote window shakers quote, which I thought was quite amusing as
⏹️ ▶️ John well. Someone also sent us a tweet that I just bought the same air conditioner that Marco has and it comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John a big yellow warning sticker on the outside of the thing. It says do not drill holes in this air conditioner.
⏹️ ▶️ John They apparently know it’s like a popular thing that people do. It’s the first thing you see when you open the box. I got let me open up this box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Aha. Why is it telling me not to drill holes and then like, you know, a day later you drill a hole in your air conditioner. You go, I see why that sticker
⏹️ ▶️ John was there. I’ll take the risk. It worked great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the, how can I phrase this delicately? There are many, many, many ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, I don’t know if envious is the word I’m looking for, but I wish I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more like the two of you guys. But one of the ways I am deeply glad, with respect, that I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like you two is being deeply offended by any noise that is within three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miles of my head. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John spoken like someone with central
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air. Well, yes, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John But… You don’t, when’s the last time you’ve dealt with a window unit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh… list of my grandparents which is admittedly been a few
⏹️ ▶️ John make a horrible shaking are you i don’t think you could sleep in the room
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well i was there for a few times i don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know like with with a really loud body cladding
⏹️ ▶️ John based on pink are rattling air conditioner running on and off all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long let me give you this one and let’s assume that’s true how many fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are allowed in your entertainment center right now john Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got more fans of my entertainment center than you do and you know that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey My television has fans my
⏹️ ▶️ John playstation has fans my tivo has fans
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but how many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those okay let me
⏹️ ▶️ John in the television of course is always on and the number of fans that my tivo combined with my television is probably more than the total in your
⏹️ ▶️ John entertainment center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna I’m gonna pull on this thread because I’m a fool until I can get where I want to get How many of those fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bother you though? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think any of them really.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, that’s lies. John Syracuse. The TV ones
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe a little bit when it’s hot, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. You lie. All I’m saying is that both of you are very deeply offended about these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there are many ways in which I wish I was more like the two of you, and I am glad that this is not one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways. Oh, man. manner let’s move on
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco one Wi-Fi router just doesn’t cover most people’s houses or apartments all the way. Every room,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full speed, no dead zones. It’s pretty much impossible because you have things like walls and building materials
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey There has been some news in the last, what was it, two days, three days, doesn’t really matter. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has released some new MacBook Pros, asterisk, dagger, double
⏹️ ▶️ John dagger. No asterisk, where do you think your asterisk can?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, this is a legitimate update.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, there are new MacBook Pros, but that’s it. There’s no new MacBook Escape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no new MacBook One slash MacBook Adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, the MacBook Escape is called MacBook Pro. So what they really did is they updated only the models with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, there’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John asterisk. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John by our naming scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apparently they are too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So anyway, so there’s new MacBook Pros. On the surface, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t seem like too much. So the really, really obvious things on the surface anyway are that for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 15-inch, you can get up to six cores and I believe four cores was the max before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get up to 32 gigs RAM, 16 gigs was the max before. You can get up to a four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabyte SSD, which is very impressive and extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive. It’s something like $3,200 just for the SSD in American dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can also get a Radeon Pro discrete graphics with up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to four gigs of video memory. Actually, I guess that’s in every configuration. That’s all 15 inch, 13 inch gets up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a two terabyte SSD and gets Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics with 128 megs of ED RAM. And four core.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, oh yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically they both got two more cores. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is nice. You get a core and you get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core. Yeah, like you know, for the 13 inch, that doubles the core count. For the 15 inch, you get 50% more. Like that’s, and that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t like, you know, Apple invented this, you know, this is Intel’s new coffee lake generation of processors. It’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good generation. As Intel, the company is completely falling apart. They’re getting desperate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trying to eke out more new products out of their existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture and process node size, because they can’t get their new one online. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they got desperate enough to start increasing the core counts on the high bend parts for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old, what are they on, 14 nanometers still for this line. So we get Coffee Lake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, it’s Intel’s like, you know, tick, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock scheme and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, well done. So that’s the obvious. Oh, and True Tone display, which is super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And True Tone Touch Bar, which is cool, even though no one’s asking for it, but it’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s the obvious stuff. What’s, or the more visible stuff, But there’s actually a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than this under the hood. They are all also getting the T2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip for secure boot and on-the-fly encrypted storage. And also, hey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dingus, I almost said the actual trigger word, which would have been not good. So this T2 thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually a pretty big deal. That came out of the iMac Pro, and this is the first mobile device that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using it. And at first glance, like, yeah, okay, whatever. But that’s actually really, really important because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that dramatically increases the security of these devices. And that had to have been a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big deal, trying to get devices that are not constantly plugged in and not always on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to basically run iOS in order to boot macOS. So I think there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more here than meets the eye, but nevertheless, this is not necessarily the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey silver bullet we wanted. Or is it because they tell us, Marco Arment, there is a new keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you have tried it and I have as well. Marco, tell me your thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way Apple presented this keyboard update is it is an improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third generation butterfly keyboard for quieter typing. And they keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that the only purpose of this was to make it quieter. They even told Dieter Bohn at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Verge the third generation keyboard was not designed to solve the failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues that have plagued the previous ones. It was designed only to be quieter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco according to Apple’s statements. And there are probably good reasons for these statements because there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lawsuits against Apple right now against those keyboards, the previous, every previous butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard before this. What’s interesting is that iFixit started tearing down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these, I believe last night and found that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key switches now have basically like a silicone protecting like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gasket over the over the key switch basically so that it’s almost like a whole silicone like umbrella
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over it that I know check room I’m trying not to call it a condom that’s everyone that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everyone is saying I know it’s basically a key condom but it would be a
⏹️ ▶️ John lousy key condom and allows the umbrella for that matter because of
⏹️ ▶️ John good a there’s a hole right in the middle of it but be more
⏹️ ▶️ John if you think about it it can’t entirely enclose the key mechanism because if it entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John enclosed the key mechanism how would the keycap attach maybe with magnets but that’s not what they do so no
⏹️ ▶️ John no magnetic keycaps so that would be clever idea apple think about that anyway uh bad probably bad inertia
⏹️ ▶️ John on the keycaps um there are holes at all four corners for the little nubbin thingies that the keycaps click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so anyway so they they have fitted this like silicone membrane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um a pretty pretty substantial change under the keycaps and apple is insisting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was for quiet typing and it is quieter and they seem to be insisting that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phrasing Apple is giving everybody sounds like there was no failure problem. What do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? That is a very, very, very small percentage of people that there is no failure problem. The problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people have with it was that it was too loud, which it was. I don’t think that was the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with it. I also bet that wasn’t even the biggest initial complaint about it, but it was loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was also made quieter in the 2017 revision. didn’t talk about it then. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless of what Apple says, which might be being constrained for legal reasons for the lawsuits about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their keyboard failures, it certainly seems like this was designed not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for quietness as the goal, but as iFixit put it, quietness as a side effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the actual goal, which was making these keys resist the ingress of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dust and crumbs and stuff, which renders them inoperable pretty easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that seems to be one of one of the bigger problems that caused the failure problem, if not the biggest problem that caused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the failure. So anyway, it sure seems like regardless of what Apple is saying, which seems like it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BS-y, the actual story here is that they re-engineered this keyboard to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fail less. Now this is the kind of thing that we can’t know really yet, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time will tell, but it is basically like as I fix you pointed out, they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did exactly what a patent that they filed, and I believe that Granted says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was for, like, in, I think, last spring. They filed for this patent that basically, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outlines exactly what they did and why, which is to prevent stuff from getting under the key caps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to make them quieter. So, it certainly seems like this is the goal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what they did. And only time will tell if it actually makes them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaningfully more reliable. So, anyways, the homework we did, before I get to it, the homework we did was that Casey and I both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco independently went to Apple stores today because I believe today was the first day that they had them on display, played with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new MacBook Pros, typed in the keyboards, tried them out and got some impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, as the only one of us who uses a butterfly keyboard on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis, what did you think of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my initial impression was, and really actually it was my entire impression, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was immediately obvious, was number one, it is much quieter. Number two, it feels,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to use the word softer, but I’m not sure softer is really the best word for it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only way I can think of to describe it is the prior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butterfly version. So the one that I have on my MacBook Adorable that I bought almost exactly a year ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things I loved about, or I do love about it is that it feels very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey precise. It’s like the difference between getting in a luxury car and twisting the temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dial. And you know how it has those really nice, strong clicks. It’s clear that somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineered that dial so that it’s really nice or like a really, really, really nice gear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shift, which is actually relevant this week because I have another press car, which maybe we can talk about that later. Maybe not. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a really good shifter is super, it just feels precise and mechanical and it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like strong and almost angry a lot of the time. And, and that’s that I really, really love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. And I love that about the MacBook durable. that’s actually sitting next to me right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new ones, they still felt very mechanical, but just ever so slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey softer. I almost said mushier, but that implies a negativity that I don’t mean. It just felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it had been dampened ever so slightly. And that was the first thing I noticed. And the second thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noticed is it’s unequivocally quieter. And what I ended up doing was, our Apple store is not tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in Richmond. And so at one point I felt like I was one of those 80s style,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, synthesizers, play synthesizer players. Cause I was like rotating 180 degrees between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one table that had the brand new keyboard and another table that had the, basically my Mac book keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t get to the point that I was like, you know, spread armed, typing on both at the same time, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the synthesizer power move in the 1980s. But anyways John is rolling his eyes so hard at me right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyway it definitely felt different. I would not say it was, I did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer the new feel, but I wasn’t, you know, turned off by it, if that makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would prefer the feel of my existing keyboard because it was so just precise. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so precise. However, if the choice I have to make is my occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in need of compressed air keyboard that feels delightfully precise, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing that feels ever so slightly softer, but doesn’t need compressed air every month, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m choosing the new keyboard every day. That was my two cents. Now, you come from what I would describe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a fairly mushy keyboard, which is funny because I didn’t think of the 2015-era keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as mushy until I got used to both the Magic Keyboard and then even more so this new Butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Switch keyboard. So this, I would assume, still felt to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably not that different than the keyboards from years past. So what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the original MacBook One keyboard in 2015, the very first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Butterfly keyboard that we used. All of these keyboards have had the exact same amount of travel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And some of the reviews when the 2016s came out said that the 2016s had improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keyboard by increasing the travel, and that’s not what they did. And Apple was very careful when they worded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they described the 2016 keyboards. What it did was basically improve the way the key kicks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. It improves the amount of feedback that you feel. So the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butterfly keyboard on the 2015 MacBook One, not only was it low travel, but it also had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no kickback on the keys, and so it was incredibly unpleasant on a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fronts to type on. They had this keyboard and they were like, you know, we’ve had a lot of negative feedback about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard because it’s low travel, it feels like crap, a lot of people hate it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when presented with the option of putting in their new MacBook Pros across the entire lineup, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chose to put it in anyway, even though a bunch of people hated it, even though it was very controversial. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to improve the lack of feedback, rather than increasing the travel, they basically just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made it kick back harder. And that’s one of the big things why it also was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much louder. Like the original MacBook One keyboard was not as loud as the MacBook Pros were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2016 and 17. The MacBook Pro mechanism, like the way it would kick you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, it made that horrible popping noise, and that’s part of the reason why they were so loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 2017 models did change the keyboard, as I mentioned earlier. What was different about it was they added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some little rubber gaskets somewhere, basically, and it made it both a little bit quieter, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also softened that kickback a little bit. It made it such that it would still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kick back more than the original MacBook One, mushy, flat keyboard, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t as harsh. It felt a little bit more refined, a little bit nicer. Still had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible, low travel, but it was just a little bit nicer feeling and a little bit nicer sounding. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 2018 revision is just a continuation of that same path, basically. So when you compare the 2017 to the 2016,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel like, oh, this is a little bit softer and more damped. 2018 is just a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more softer and more damped compared to the 2017 revision. It’s the exact same path,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now done with, I think, a little bit more of a, you know, of stronger change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this big new rubber membrane under it, and hopefully with the side effect of keeping crap out of the key. but the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels and sounds, I would just say, is a continuation of that same progression, which is, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple trying to make the best of a keyboard that has a lot of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why they keep including it in the laptops, you know, I think right now is just a matter of inertia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or stubbornness, and we’ll see whenever these laptops get like the next actual external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case redesign, we’ll see if they stick with it or if they actually meaningfully change this keyboard then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right now the story appears to be Apple sticking to their guns and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of the many, many problems this keyboard brings, from reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to feel to noise, they’re just applying Band-Aid upon Band-Aid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon Band-Aid. So this is the latest Band-Aid on this keyboard’s many problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it works. I hope, you know, in the sense that, you know, it doesn’t make the keyboard feel any better. It doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feel like it has any more travel. It doesn’t make the keys any nicer to type on. I typed on it and had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same opinion I’ve had of the previous ones, which is, I can get used to this. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact, for a while I did get used to it, but I don’t like it and I think it’s bad. Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new keyboard, if whatever you thought of the previous ones, you will think the exact same thing about this new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t feel meaningfully different. It just feels a little softer and it’s quieter, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My store was a little bit loud, so it was hard to judge noise. I was able to do side-by-side typing though, there was a MacBook Escape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right next to one of the new ones so I could judge, because that one hasn’t been updated yet. You do feel the difference, it is noticeable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not massive. If you didn’t like the keyboard before, you still won’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Hopefully, though, this will make it not as failure prone. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, you know, the question on everyone’s mind, which I was all over Twitter about, much to many people’s chagrin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, you know, Apple didn’t say the one thing we wanted them to say, which is this keyboard’s more reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t say that, again, probably for legal reasons, but regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we haven’t got that info from them. And ultimately, we won’t know if what appears to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix for reliability, we won’t know if it actually works for like months. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we basically have to just see, does this fix the problem or not? Do people seem to be not having this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the previous ones would break pretty fast. A lot of people would have them fail within the first few weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or months. So we should know over the next few months whether this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is making a meaningful difference or not. Also, if anyone’s curious, I’ve heard a number of reports from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that they sent in their MacBook Pro for repair recently and got this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new keyboard put into it. We’ll see if that ends up being true, but this might, if you send yours in for keyboard service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the repair program, it might be in this new keyboard, which should be pretty good if that’s the case. How do they know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they got the new keyboard? The genius told them, apparently. Anyway. How’s
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it’s kind of a bad situation like the refrigerator light in the refrigerator like the only way to actually know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the new keyboard is to pull your key cap off but then you probably just broke your keyboard again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, so keyboard I do want to talk about the rest of the update but just to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complete the keyboard subject I am tentatively optimistic I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this keyboard is overall a bad design because it needs so many band-aids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to function as well as any other keyboard ever has with a much simpler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cheaper and more reliable and more universally agreeable design. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still think this keyboard is just band-aid upon band-aid upon band-aid. That’s simply bad engineering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s throwing good engineering after bad, I guess. This keyboard should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be used the way it’s being used. It should be more dramatically redesigned than what has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. And I hope that happens when the next physical redesign of these laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens. Until then, this probably will fix it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be good enough for people to use it without it breaking, I hope. A good design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have the keyboard not fail so easily when stuff gets into it. This one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just trying over and over and over again to make sure stuff doesn’t get in because when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff gets in it’s catastrophic. You know, give them credit for hopefully fixing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this seems like a temporary fix. The real fix is to design a keyboard that isn’t so fragile in the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just a quick addendum to that. I by and large agree with everything you said, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to say for those of you who maybe don’t upgrade your laptops, I don’t know, every other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month, Marco, if you haven’t tried these butterfly keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not like the one on my MacBook Adorable for the first week or two that I had it. And then I really came around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it and now it’s actually one of my favorite keyboards ever. would like a hint more travel, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten used to that. And like I said earlier, I really, really love it. So if you go to the store and play with it for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few minutes, be it the louder ones from circa 2017 or the brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new one that’s three days old or whatever, you may not care for it in the store, but you may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come around to it over time as I have, but certainly I agree with you, Marco, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this probably needs to be rethought on a more general basis. And if you really didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care, if you really and truly didn’t care for the ones over the last couple of years, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably not going to like this one either. It is a bit softer, but it’s otherwise mostly the same. It is a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey softer and I thought a lot quieter, but otherwise it’s mostly the same stuff. So, John, any thoughts on any of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this before we move on to any other new MacBook related things?
⏹️ ▶️ John So now that we’re like a few years into this, this revision of the laptop line and the
⏹️ ▶️ John new case designs, the new keyboards, and we can kind of look back at it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a bit of a keyboard tragedy in that
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard never was never bad enough for them to do an all hands on
⏹️ ▶️ John deck we have an emergency we need to redesign this so what it looks like instead is that they had a plan like we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to redesign our laptops and there’s going to be like a three or four year plan and here are the ones we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John release in that plan right and as we’ll get to it in a bit I think the guts
⏹️ ▶️ John of this one are actually more substantially revised than you would imagine given the case things there. But they had
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole line that they were going to do. Here’s what the case is going to look like. Here’s the size.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s how much battery we can probably fit in. We have a little wiggle room. Here’s the ports we’re going to have. Here’s, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we’re going to do a series. They do this all the time. It’s like car generations. You have a certain generation of a car and there’s a new model year
⏹️ ▶️ John every year, but the generational turnover only happens every, you know, three or five years
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And this keyboard was a problem from the very first model.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they tried to do a lot of things to address it, but it was never a big enough problem for them to say, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to scrap our plans. Like, we can’t go with the year two, year three, year four plan
⏹️ ▶️ John that we wanted to because it just turns out the keyboard is catastrophically bad in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of reliability or customers hated or whatever. So we have to and we can’t fit another
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard in the same space so we have to revise. This keyboard never got to that point. In general,
⏹️ ▶️ John some people didn’t like it, but some people did like it. It was unreliable, but not unreliable enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as Marco detailed, every single new model year, so to speak, every single new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that came out with this keyboard in it, they’d make a tweak. Let’s try this. Let’s try that people, you know, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John questioning. Nothing’s about vastly. Let’s make it bounce back. Oh, now it’s too noisy. Let me make it quieter. Uh, how now we have
⏹️ ▶️ John to address the reliability finally. Right? And that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a shame because that is basically a, you know, a component of
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer shouldn’t require this many tiny changes just to reach
⏹️ ▶️ John an acceptable level. It’s not as if every year there are every year we’re just making it better. Like imagine the screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John it had an anti-glare coating and every year the anti-glare coating got like a little bit better, right? That’s not what they’re doing here.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re always trying to address problems and didn’t really get around to addressing the reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John problem until many, many years into it. And I think now is the time I should point out that
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the other wonderful things about the patent system is you can patent things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean that they work for their stated purpose, right? So you can patent like a perpetual motion machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could patent wings that you can strap on your arms and let you to fly. You can patent all sorts of stuff, right? So the patent
⏹️ ▶️ John says this little membrane for preventing crap from getting into the keys to make it better. As Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out patent means nothing you don’t like it might work for that purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John it might not as I said earlier this little membrane for practical
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons has holes in it holes where if a piece of dust or cracker or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John got under there it would get under the butterfly mechanism and jam it it’s better than having completely open
⏹️ ▶️ John having four little holes at the corner certainly but the holes are still there and the holes are still there because
⏹️ ▶️ John this keyboard was never designed to have some kind of wrapper on top of it to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John crumbs from getting in because that’s just not how it was made if it was made that way it would have had it
⏹️ ▶️ John from day one and it would have you know like these are all like almost literal band-aids a little
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of plastic like what can we do to the existing keyboard that has been
⏹️ ▶️ John a minor not big but minor thorn in our side for many many years what else can we
⏹️ ▶️ John do to it’s like it’s it’s like they do this with model use of car it’s like well we can’t we can’t redesign
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole engine but what if we just put an extra piece of duct tape over here and make this wire
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker like we have a fundamental problem but we can’t it’s not big enough for
⏹️ ▶️ John us to invest in a fundamental fix we’ll just wait for the next generation we’ll address it then in the meantime
⏹️ ▶️ John what can we do or like Apollo 13 we’ve got these parts we’ve got this thing there’s nothing else
⏹️ ▶️ John we can all we can really can we wrap something around it yeah but then how will the keycap attached, why don’t we just leave holes in the corners? Good,
⏹️ ▶️ John done and done. Like, it’s it’s better enough that this is all they
⏹️ ▶️ John can do. And it’s not an elegant solution. It is a kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of gritty, you know, slapdash solution. It’s better than no solution at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s a shame. You know, it’s one of those problems. And I’m sure people who work at big companies have experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John that it just never got big enough for the big fix, which is good that it would never got big enough. You know, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s only been a minor problem, but bad in that we’re all forced to wait and suffer
⏹️ ▶️ John through this long slog with this design. And the ports and everything are similar, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s worth noting that the repair extension program that Apple rolled out for
⏹️ ▶️ John all Touch Bar Macintoshes does not include Macintoshes. Sorry, MacBook Pros. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s too long. It does not include these new models.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the repair extension As of the recording of this show, if you go to the repair extension thing on Apple’s website
⏹️ ▶️ John and you look at the eligible models, it does not include the 2018 models, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John this could be Apple’s way of saying, we don’t need to include the 2018s because they’re fine in terms of reliability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it could be Apple’s way of saying, why would we proactively put the 2018 models on there? Let’s wait a year,
⏹️ ▶️ John because no one has one of these things that’s older than a year old, wait a year for the warranty to expire. And if we still have problems, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll add the 2018s. that would be a sign that they probably made the wrong choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we come to 2019 and suddenly the 2018 models appear at the bottom of this
⏹️ ▶️ John repair extension program, that shows that they just could never get this keyboard to work reliably. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that every single one of these keyboards that they ever sold, despite no matter what they did to it, still had
⏹️ ▶️ John enough of a repair issue that they felt like they needed to have a repair extension program.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that would be bad. So, you know, here we are waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for, I suppose, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say the next great keyboard, but how about the next good keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple? And I mean that in terms of reliability only, because like I said, lots of, you know, Casey really likes his keyboard. I’ve grown
⏹️ ▶️ John to mostly like it, all the key layout, which is distinct from the mechanism, still really annoys me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s clear that they just, that this keyboard, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a loser, it’s not really a winner either. It’s just kind of, it kind of messed up this whole generation
⏹️ ▶️ John of computer and provided just one more thing to be annoyed about. I mean, the ports and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John issues and battery life and the thinness and everything are one thing, but it’s just not a
⏹️ ▶️ John big deal, but just big enough of a deal to just
⏹️ ▶️ John be sitting here for you know it’s great for ATP three years worth of shows we get to talk about the same stupid keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John but but yeah I don’t know what the phrase for it is but but I definitely have experienced things like this
⏹️ ▶️ John at work where if you are like an employee at this company you almost wish that it had been a bigger problem because if it
⏹️ ▶️ John had been a bigger problem they would have fixed it thoroughly but it’s not a big problem it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny problem and Some people really like the keyboard, And so here’s where we are.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so I think that’s enough about the keyboards, but one of you, and I don’t really care who it is, convince me, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think this is true, but convince me that this is not a minor update and this is actually, to some degree, the real deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my, this is not really true in terms of what the technology inside this is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I, when I squint and look at this, it’s kind of like the previous models
⏹️ ▶️ John were the first try at putting like a little arm processor
⏹️ ▶️ John to control a touch bar and do all this stuff like inside a Mac. And we talked a lot about that when the touch bars came
⏹️ ▶️ John out, this kind of, uh, you know, introducing another CPU from the world
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS, like a little watch OS thing and running that screen and we’ve talked a lot about the touch part everything right
⏹️ ▶️ John when I look at this model it looks like let’s take
⏹️ ▶️ John an iMac Pro and shrink it down into a laptop that’s not what it is it’s not a Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ John in there it’s not actually an iMac Pro but a lot of the attributes and sort of like the the overall system
⏹️ ▶️ John design of this thing down right down to the t2 chip and what it’s being used for and the performance that they’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John from it with the on the fly encryption everything. It’s like the the iMac Pro represented
⏹️ ▶️ John the newest thinking about how to make a Mac and the new MacBook Pro, the
⏹️ ▶️ John top-end new MacBook Pro is taking that thinking that is revealed in the iMac and saying we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do that to our laptops as well. Internally. Externally they’re the same. There’s no new ports. There’s no anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But let’s take that thinking. Let’s put a very powerful ARM processor in there and let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John use it to do things to make the Mac both faster and more capable. It’s not just running
⏹️ ▶️ John that little tiny screen. It’s encrypting all your hard disk data on the fly. It’s listening for you to say hey dingus,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s running the touch bar. And I think I read something somewhere that it might actually be used in
⏹️ ▶️ John like video encoding or something. Who knows what it’s doing? It’s basically an A10 class processor. It’s no slouch
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, right? And so I think that is much more significant than,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, going from insert something lake to insert something else like, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, Oh, there’s new CPUs and maybe the GPU got better, right? That’s speed bump. Great. We love speed bumps. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and then you get a bigger SSD. This is a fundamentally more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and different design than the old laptop. The T one is not as
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated into the system as the T two is the T two is much more important to this max operation than the team whenever was.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think this is actually a fairly significant internal revision. So much
⏹️ ▶️ John so that if this, you know, if they had waited until like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the new case design and everything to incorporate the T2, I think that would have been appropriate as well. So now it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like an iPhone 4S situation where we were getting significantly revised
⏹️ ▶️ John and much more capable and powerful internals, including a larger battery to support all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same old case and a keyboard with condoms on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. I agree with you 100%. I think that there’s a lot more to integrating the T2 with macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than any of us, including me, would have thought at first glance. And the more I think about it, the more I think this is a really impressive effort.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, when I first saw this press release and all the reviews thereof of these new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machines, I was like, really, that’s it? But I think there’s more here than meets the eye. Marco, what are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mentioned earlier the, to me, one of the most significant changes of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, of this revision of these computers is the core count increase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, this is the kind of thing that does not happen often where you can get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger number of processor cores without increasing the thermal design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the maximum wattage of the chip, which therefore usually brings like a change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in computer size. Like, you know, you can go from, before this, you could go from two cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to four cores, but you had to get a 15-inch to do it. You had to like, go up a size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in computer to get those additional cores. And this matters a lot because modern CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture is, like, you don’t gain that much performance per core,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per revision of these processors. Like, you know, every year, they might get, at most,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually 10% faster per core than the one before it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding number of cores is like one of the only ways you can get meaningful performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increases between computer upgrades. And usually you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of locked in to whatever the number of cores is for the size of computer that you either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want or can afford. And so I did a little bit of research. 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBooks slash MacBook Pros have been two-core Since the intel transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was 2006 wow you have not been able to like that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last time the thirteen inch line got another got more cores was two thousand six.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The last time the fifteen inch line got more cores was twenty eleven this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the kind of thing that happens often so the fact that you can now get. four cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 13-inch size, which basically puts it, you can now look at Geekbench, got all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scores up today for all these new laptops, you can see. Basically, it’s like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the next size up in CPU performance for free. Now, not other areas, GPUs are still very different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if CPU performance is what was limiting you, which for a lot of developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the case. Like a lot of developers, you know, especially if you’re writing Swift or if you’re just doing large Xcode compilations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are doing a lot of parallel work on those processors. And processor performance is a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important thing then for Xcode people and stuff. And so basically what this gives you is you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either take a roughly 50% performance gain in your 15 inch line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if a 15 inch was previously suitable enough for you in CPU performance, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can now optionally go down to the 13 inch size if you want to. So that’s pretty awesome. That’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal that does not come very often. from a pure performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco genre or performance category perspective, this is pretty awesome. Now, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13-inch still doesn’t have a discrete GPU, which to some people is a pretty big problem. To me, that’s actually a feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it makes it simpler and much better on the battery, but that’s a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In a different way also, one of the problems that people have had with these laptops since 2016,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the introduction of the Touch Bar generation, is that the 15-inch could not be had with 32
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of RAM. It maxed out and only came in 16 gig configurations. This was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge complaint from a lot of pros. But, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, you know, Apple’s defense of it was basically like, look, we can’t give you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32 gigs of RAM yet because Intel’s chipsets don’t yet support low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power 32 gig configurations using low power DDR or whatever, whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco originally did DDR3, now it’s DDR4. Low-power DDR4 I don’t think exists yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least is not available in mobile chipsets. And so basically, Apple couldn’t deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32-gig configurations without using higher-powered RAM, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have a pretty bad impact on battery life, apparently. So what they appear to have done, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping to get more details on as soon as these things are more thoroughly taken apart and analyzed, but what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they appear to have done is, only on the 15-inch, actually have included probably an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external memory controller on the board and are using DDR4 RAM, not low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power, but just like standard DDR4 RAM. So there’s, you know, presumably there’s a performance gain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there from going from DDR3 to DDR4, but also this allows them to offer 32 gig configurations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think they’re actually doing DDR4 even if you don’t order 32 gigs, even if you stick with 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve even made the battery a little bit bigger to compensate for the additional power draw. The battery is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like about 10% bigger. 7.7 watt hours they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery a little bit bigger and Apple is leaving the battery life estimate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same, even though it’s totally meaningless. So basically they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they have like evened it out. By the way, they also increased the battery by about 10% on the 13 inch for no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparent reason, except I wonder maybe the CPUs use more when they’re being maxed out because they’re a little bit more, you know, all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional cores, I don’t know. Anyway, I hope the 13 inch has better battery life. We don’t have good battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tests yet, but I really hope it has a good battery life because the previous one with Touch Bar really did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so they’ve done this pretty significant engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add a 32 gig configuration option to the 15 inch. And that’s great because that really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was holding people back. It didn’t affect me personally because the kind of work I do fits fine in 16 on a laptop, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, like if you’re running a bunch of VMs or doing like large data analysis or things like that, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really needed that. And so it’s nice to have that. So, and also, you know, they increased the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco max SSD from two terabytes to four terabytes. I don’t know yet whether they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dual modules in there like they are with the iMac Pro. It’s part of the reason the iMac Pro SSDs are so fast. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro configurations use dual modules in RAID zero basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they do because one of the other stories that came out today is that someone benchmarking the 13
⏹️ ▶️ John inch, not the 15 inch, the 13 inch against other 13 inch laptops. And this is like a laptop review site. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarking against the HP Spectre and Dell XPS and a bunch of Asus and Microsoft Surface
⏹️ ▶️ John books, right? And so like, everybody except for the iMac, the average
⏹️ ▶️ John of megabytes per second in like a file copy test is like 200 to 400 is the range. And the Apple, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John 13-inch MacBook Pro is 2,500 megabytes per second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this is a little bit suspect though because it was a file copy test and on APFS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s optimized away.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that I’ve seen enough from this to make me think that it’s not an APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John file clone thing. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but my guess because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the T2 and because of the dual module thing that you mentioned is that they are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John because the iMac Pro gets numbers like that now like you can, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it’s using the T2 unless it’s a special T2 that’s wimpier. I’m assuming it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John one. does the IO and I’m assuming they using the dual modules, certainly they would have to be to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the four terabyte one makes me think that this is actually just a really, really fast SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even the 13 inch model. And that’s that’s another example of what makes these pro machines, how are they
⏹️ ▶️ John different than the MacBook? Well, the MacBook doesn’t have a T two and doesn’t have these dual modules doesn’t get this copy speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John If this is an APFS clone thing, I’m going to be sad. But for now, I’m totally willing to believe that it really
⏹️ ▶️ John is a very, very fast SSD. And that definitely feels like it is earning the Pro moniker
⏹️ ▶️ John in MacBook Pro, especially when you can get it on the 13-inch model and it’s not reserved for the 15.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So anyway, so when you look at this update, from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a performance standpoint, it is significant. It is adding more CPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which hardly ever happens, increasing the top-end specs, even though if you max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out, you get like a $7,000 laptop, but it is increasing how high you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the SSD and the RAM by doubling those. And the T2 is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processor, right from the iMac Pro, it’s an awesome disc controller especially, that’s what’s giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these kind of SSD performance gains in addition to just having high-grade flash, like Apple making its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller has paid off pretty well, the T2 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pretty awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you get the secure boot stuff. Exactly. And the on-the-fly encryption, the quote-unquote free on-the-fly encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the sort of the new architecture, what does a Mac look like? what does a modern Mac look like? The
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac Pro and now these new MacBook Pros are the first models to look like what Apple’s conception
⏹️ ▶️ John of what a modern Mac looks like until they get around to actually making our Macs or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it looks very different that if you go down the line to like, look, what does the Mac Mini look like, speaking of an old computer? It
⏹️ ▶️ John looks very different internally in terms of how the machine boots and how it operates while it’s running than these new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So all of that said, this is a major update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in performance and in some of that architecture stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my tweet about this, which a lot of people were very mad about, I said when I first saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the specs and I first saw the press release, I said, quote, this is a very minor update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only thing I regret about that is the word very. It’s not a very minor update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it’s still overall a minor update. And the reason I say that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, as I said, performance-wise, it’s a major update. I don’t know anything about the GPU, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t talk about that, but it’s probably faster. The CPU and RAM and SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all got major updates. The keyboard, I didn’t know when I wrote that tweet whether it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually fixed or not, because all they said was it was quieter. If the keyboard is actually fixed from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reliability problems, that is pretty major too. But the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still think this is a minor update, I call it a spec bump because it really, you know, it’s a big spec bump, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a spec bump because there are some major factors of this laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line that made it so polarizing to begin with that are still the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The keyboard is still a controversial low travel keyboard that a lot of people don’t like the feel of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The touch bar is still really polarizing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m being kind. lot of people want to be able to order these computers without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touch bar, you still can’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think revolutionary is the word you’re looking for?
⏹️ ▶️ John Revolutionary touch bar and touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it says right here. If you just keep saying it, maybe it’ll make it true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The port situation is identical. You still have, you know, well the Escape hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated yet, so maybe the next Escape will have four, I hope. you know, you still only have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four USB-C ports and the headphone jack and that’s it. So, and the headphone jack’s still on the wrong side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you still don’t have MagSafe or you still don’t have a dedicated port just for power so that you can use all four of your ports for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful things. You still don’t have any other legacy ports or SD cards or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whether or not you think those things are important or not, the fact is all that stuff is unchanged basically. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when judging how significant of an update this is, whether it is a, you know, quote, major update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a spec bump, which is considered a fairly minor update. This changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost nothing about the computer if you didn’t like what it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The pricing is all the same. It’s still very expensive for what you’re getting, and the upgrades drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it even more up and up and up. And some of that’s justified, but most of it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s still, you know, expensive. The touch bar is still forced upon you for all these high-end configurations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The port situation’s the same. The keyboard is basically the same feeling if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t like the feeling of it. It’s not a major update because for all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons why people didn’t like it before, the only one of those that is definitively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed is if you didn’t like it before because it couldn’t go to 32 gigs of RAM or four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes of SSD. That’s the only thing that was definitively fixed. The keyboard reliability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have been fixed. We all hope so, but we don’t know that yet. So that’s why I classify this as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a minor update because the major factors of what makes somebody like or not like this laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly haven’t changed at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I compared it to the iPhone 4S because the iPhone 4S looked just like the 4
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was the beginning of people being
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even a new phone, right? But the insides were way better than the 4, like significantly better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you couldn’t see it. You look at it and it’s like, well, it looks like the same iPhone. It’s got the same screen, got the same buttons on the outside,
⏹️ ▶️ John same ports. Like what’s different about it? It’s all on the inside. Same deal with these. If you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at them, you’re like, unless you notice the true tone color shifting, you’re like, this is the same laptop, what’s different?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, lots of stuff inside are different. In significant ways, it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. The difference between this update and the 4S update is that most people liked how the 4 and the 4S
⏹️ ▶️ John looked on the outside. There weren’t, not in how it looked, but like, there weren’t a lot of complaints in terms of the
⏹️ ▶️ John feature set. We weren’t yet at the point where we were screaming about bigger phones and stuff like that. So like
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason these are like the same generation of laptops is they make more or less the same trade-offs in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of the product. Number of ports, size, battery life, weight, all the things that make up a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just that within that house, within that size, that number of ports, the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard, everything, they’ve done lots of stuff to the insides. But the fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs of how heavy should a 15-inch be, how long should the battery last, how expensive should it
⏹️ ▶️ John be, touch bar or no touch bar, screen resolution, which we’ve touched on a bunch of times with this, you know, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John being down from the old 15 inches unless you go to the scaled fuzzy. All those trade offs are the same, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John this is part of the same generation that came in what, 2016, the MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so this is, this is still that generation. It’s just that inside they’ve changed a lot. So
⏹️ ▶️ John everything I was saying before about these being very significant pro update, I’m talking only about the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John The outsides, the same trade-offs they had always made. If you like those trade-offs,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you’ve got a computer that you already liked, only it’s way more capable and more powerful and more impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John on the inside. If you didn’t like those trade-offs for whatever reason, you’re still waiting for the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple laptops to come along.
State of USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco, did you buy one yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but I’m probably going to. Which one? 13-inch. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been playing with them a lot. I’ve been talking for a while now, ever since I got the Escape.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been talking about how I want to go with 13-inch for my next laptop. I can get used to the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, as I mentioned. I can avoid the touch bar. When I got the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in 2016, I remapped escape to caps lock, and I’ve just kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all my computers that way since then. So now, I just don’t hit the physical escape key anymore. So I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back to the touch bar if I want to, and it’s not going to be a huge problem for me. Although accidental input is still a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but oh well. I’m fine with most of the trade-offs that this makes. The one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really that drove me nuts was the keyboard reliability problems. So if those are indeed fixed, I will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no problem going back to this. And one other thing worth mentioning, during this update, Apple did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally stop selling the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro new. They were selling it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it disappeared from the store during this update. So that makes me sad. But there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about the modern line that I like, and that I miss from when I had them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, a lot of people insist on MagSafe being a super important thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like MagSafe, but I don’t need MagSafe. And I really miss not being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like plug in any SAT I want, you know, or whatever, but that’s nice, but not massive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I miss the ability to use third-party chargers and to use USB-C battery packs to give me a little bit of boost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s nice, like I actually do miss that. There are more and more things in the world going USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would like a computer that has USB-C port or two or four. So that would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to make a whole migration of all my stuff to USB-C. I would love that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because USB-C has a great potential and it could be really nice if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USB-C world ever arrives. And we’ll get to that in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so like there are things that I want from the new models. I want the ability to drive external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco displays, you know, at 5K when I need that or if I need that. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like True Tone. That’s, I love that they now have that. That’s great. And I kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of my computer being more secure from things like webcam and microphone hacking. Like, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that’s protected by the T2 and it was also by the T1. I like the idea of the encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being less costly and things like that. So I do like a lot of what the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones offer. And so I do plan probably to get a 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because now I can get the performance from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15s I’ve been using in a 13 inch size. And that’s pretty cool. I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna give it a little bit of time only because, you know, I just finished all the traveling. I wanted a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop for this summer. It would have been great if this came out two weeks ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I just completed my need for it for the next couple of months. So I don’t, right now I just don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop change for a little while. And hopefully that’ll give me enough time to get people’s reactions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on whether the keyboard’s actually fixed. And also I still have a big question mark about battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s still, I think, mostly unknown.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re gonna get this 13 inch touch bar and then as soon as the 13 inch Escape is updated in the fall, you’ll sell it and buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. That depends on what they put into the Escape. So the reason why the Escape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t been updated seems to be that I don’t think Intel has actually released those chips yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like whatever the 15 watt with GPU, like whatever that combination is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be used in the Air and the Escape. Intel apparently hasn’t released those yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see, like I don’t know if they’re actually gonna bring quad core to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what the performance difference might be and what Apple’s gonna do about it. Those are all unknowns.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all these weird rumors about what they might do with the MacBook Air or whatever, but they’re all just rumors at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see what happens in the fall. My one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remaining major concern about these, assuming the keyboard has been fixed and assuming the battery life is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both of which are significant assumptions, but I still am disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by how much the USB-C ecosystem does not let you convert all the way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. USB-C is only great when you only need the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of ports you have on the laptop. As soon as you need more USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports, you hit walls, you hit limitations, you look for products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t exist. Because USB-C should be an easy transition to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make. It should be, you go to Amazon, and you buy a bunch of cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can replace all your current cables with USB-C on one end instead of USB-A.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, if you have a peripheral that has a micro USB port on it, fine, just go buy a cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for five bucks or whatever that has micro USB on one side and USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the other. and all of a sudden you’ve converted that peripheral to USB-C. You can replace your lightning cables, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more costly, but you can still do it, fine. So theoretically, it should be easy to go all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in on USB-C by just buying new cables for stuff. And cables, you know, you get them on Amazon, they aren’t that expensive, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is, there still don’t appear to be any USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hubs that meaningfully multiply one USB-C port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one USB-C port into many USB-C ports, with a couple of exceptions. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of like, those like $300 docking stations that multiply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one USB-C port into like two or three plus 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other legacy ports that you don’t want. And that’s fine, if those are your needs, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, can I talk a bit about those $300 boxes for a second? Yeah, absolutely. Because I don’t think it’s entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. And I have my box at work is not $300, but I don’t know, it was a hundred something or maybe 200 and something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those, like I can never tell whether I should blame this on the fact that it’s a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John and I hate laptops and they hate me or whether it’s that box.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But first of all, they’re not made by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. And second, it’s really cool that I can connect one cable to my
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, just one, and it provides power and gives me a box that connects
⏹️ ▶️ John me to many display port, USB-A, what is it? The, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, there’s, my headphones go into that box, like all sorts, it’s, when it works,
⏹️ ▶️ John it provides more or less the dream of USB-C. I connect to one tiny little cable
⏹️ ▶️ John and I get all these features, I can use a bunch of legacy peripherals, everything works, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But pretty often, at least once a week,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t crash my computer, it doesn’t kernel panic, but something doesn’t work. Now audio is not going
⏹️ ▶️ John through my headphones. I connected my laptop, but it didn’t turn on my external monitor. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, my external monitor is totally blank.
⏹️ ▶️ John My ethernet thing, it doesn’t see the ethernet adapter. That’s the other thing I plugged in. It doesn’t see the ethernet adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever reason. So maybe, like sometimes it’s just a matter of unplugging it, plugging it back
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And of course I have these rituals to prevent it from freezing. So when I disconnect my laptop, I have to open the lid first,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not necessary anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but I do it all the time anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It helps. I swear to you, it helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I just keep doing it, whether or not it’s helping anymore. But it’s shown that if
⏹️ ▶️ John I do that, then it successfully negotiates the GPU. But very often, I come back to my desk with my closed
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, and I plug it in, and my monitor just doesn’t turn on. And once every 1.5 weeks, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to unplug the power to my little $150 box and plug it back in. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John once every two weeks, I have to unplug the mini display port and plug it back in, even though I power cycled the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, it doesn’t crash, it takes me a couple of extra minutes. And I don’t know if it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an OS problem and this is Apple’s fault, or it’s a fault of the box, or both. I like the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that this box doesn’t have drivers. I enjoy that about it. I like the fact that for the most part
⏹️ ▶️ John it works. But it’s a little bit wonky. If this was my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that I paid all this money for, or if this was a desktop, I wouldn’t accept these things. It’s a work computer and it’s a laptop, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John just kind of go along with it. But that dream of
⏹️ ▶️ John having a box that gives you all these other things only works if that box works as reliably, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say as reliably as a USB hub, but we’ve talked on past shows about how USB hubs have similar reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John both cases, we’re looking for Apple to provide a first party reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John solution that is known to work with their operating system and their hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John in cases where third parties can get like 98% of the way there. The
⏹️ ▶️ John last 2% always just bothers me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like, it’s one thing, you know, if you’re going to change all the ports on the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be this new kind, and you’re going to offer dongles or adapters or hubs that can emulate the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports, that’s a it’s a much weaker proposition. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old ports that you are, you creating or adapting to are less reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than if you would have just built them into the computer in the first place. I don’t know, you know, people who defend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these like, you know, hubs and issues with USB unreliability, I don’t know what kind of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do where they can tolerate unreliability without it being either, you know, at minimum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty severe annoyance. But when you have like actual work to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your computers, you can’t have your peripherals wills randomly stop working or be flaky or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be anything but 100% reliable. And when you have a built-in port, the vast majority of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in ports on computers are 100% reliable. And when you have to rely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on little hubs and adapters and things like that, usually you’re relying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a very small number of chipsets that are actually inside these things no matter how many brand names are on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually it’s like they all have the same like one or two chips in them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from God knows who and they are usually you know all sharing the same mediocrity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how much you pay for it or what brand names on the outside and this is why like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nice when Apple makes the adapters because usually they’re rock-solid. Apple has been in the past pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at that. Unfortunately at about the same time they released the 2016 MacBook Pro with all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ports they also seem to back away significantly from first party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapters and dongles and stuff. Now they outsource tons of them to Belkin and other companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they seem to have exited a lot of that business. Problem is no one else has really taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and made reliable ones in mass. Like every time we talk about this, people write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in saying, oh well I have this one from insert brand here and it’s one of those ones that you see all over Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s like a little thing that sticks onto the side of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your new MacBook or MacBook Pro with USB-C on one side, and oftentimes they’re even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offered in space gray and whatever else to match the metal colors. And then on the other side it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of USB-A ports, an SD card slot, maybe a USB-C power pass through if you’re lucky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s usually about it. And these things cost between 20 and $60. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ton of those things out there. And all of them, if you look at the reviews, they all have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same problem, which is, a lot of people say they work fine, a lot of people say they don’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all seem to just be based on the same cheapo chipsets, and they’re not that great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re flaky and unreliable, just like most USB hubs. So Apple bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big on the USB-C ecosystem, like three years ago, with the first MacBook, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even bigger with the 2016 MacBook Pro revision. And the ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t delivering, still. It’s been, now it’s been two to three years, depending on how you measure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the ecosystem is still not good enough. I wish Apple would just start making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own things again, that, and they wouldn’t need to make a whole bunch of them, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple needs to make a USB-C hub. That’s it, like they need to make a USB-C hub, period. They already made the little $80 thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that multiplies one USB-C port into one USB-C port, one USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port, and HDMI, that is pretty limited. And that’s it, and it’s $80.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like they did the bare minimum to say they had an adapter, and it’s almost insulting how little it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one seems to make an adapter that goes from one USB-C port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to four USB-C ports. That’s like, if you actually want USB-C to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off, you need things like that. And I know it’s really hard, because the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port on the laptops, except for Casey’s, isn’t just a USB-C port. it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Thunderbolt 3 port. And it has all these alternate modes it can do, and it can do things like USB power delivery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like if you multiply something, maybe all of those ports would need to have 100 watt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity, or we need to be Thunderbolt 3 compatible, which dramatically increases the cost and complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might not even be possible, I don’t even know. And that, you know, you can say like, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it because you know these things, but like, not all of my USB peripherals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need Thunderbolt. In fact, I think zero of them support it. Not all of them need 100 watts of power. Not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them need even USB 3 speeds, let alone 3.1 and all the bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. And you can also say, well, you shouldn’t make one that can’t do all those things because then you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fragmentation of what the ports can do. But you already have that. That’s already a thing. Like you already have massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fragmentation of what a USB port and USB cable can and can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on whether it supports Thunderbolt and whatever else. Ultimately, this is an ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, for these laptops to be good without a bunch of asterisks on the end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, for a lot of people to really be able to get into them, we have to be able to transition to the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem. And we still can’t, because there are still these gaping holes in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you basically can’t go all USB-C because you can’t multiply the ports. And if no one else is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, maybe Apple can. I just, somebody has to do it. We need this ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mature. it just isn’t happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, as we’ve discussed many times, another way to address this problem is to put more ports on the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John machines, which we’ve gone through ad nauseum, but it’s not going to happen in this generation. But in the next generation, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John put more ports. It’s not like there’s not room on the side of these computers. You could put ones that are just plain USB-C, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s thing on the MacBook One. You could, maybe you can add more Thunderbolt 3 ones because of
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of PCI Express lanes. Or maybe you could on the one that has just two ports on
⏹️ ▶️ John the side. I don’t know. But anyway, there’s room on the side to add essentially plain old
⏹️ ▶️ John USB ports. And then you don’t have to worry about hubs in the same way that it is more convenient,
⏹️ ▶️ John technologically speaking, if not physically speaking, to have HDMI and Ethernet on the side of your laptop because
⏹️ ▶️ John then you don’t have to worry about adapters, you don’t have to worry about getting just the right expensive fancy hub that works reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s built into your computer and if it doesn’t work, your whole computer is broken, but most of the time it does work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can tell you having used at least three different adapters to
⏹️ ▶️ John get Ethernet and HDMI and USB and other things out of my laptop at work, all three
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, none of them are as reliable as the built in ports for on
⏹️ ▶️ John other laptops that I’ve used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what’s 100% reliable? All the ports on my iMac Pro.
MBP Leather Sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very happy for you. You know what else is 100% reliable? It’s the leather sleeve for the new MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, they made one of those?
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm-hmm. $180 for a 13-inch. Oh!
⏹️ ▶️ John $180. Now, here’s the thing. You know I like my pouches.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I got my phone in a little pouch. It did not cost $180. Yep. Yep. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the utility of a sleeve like this. So, Apple, we
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about the trade-offs Apple makes with their laptop products, they’re really pushing to make
⏹️ ▶️ John them thin and light, even if the needs dictate that it could get away with
⏹️ ▶️ John being thicker. In particular, on the 15-inch model where they’ve added the 4 terabyte, 4
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM, not 4 gigs of RAM, what do they have to know, 32 gigs of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could have made it thicker. I mean, it’s not that they’re not going to do it because that’s the next generation type thing, but the trade-off they made is it being very thin. I found
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow managed to wedge more battery in there, which is great, good job, but they’re very thin.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have a very thin laptop, one of the advantages you get with that is that you can put it in
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of protective thing and it’s still actually pretty thin and light. And if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John like me, don’t like the idea of your pretty laptop getting scratched up,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have one of these sleeves, and if it, I don’t know how well it works, but assuming it slides in and out of that sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ John nicely and isn’t a pain to get in there because of friction, it’s great to be able to take your
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, throw it in the sleeve, throw it into a book bag or something, and not worry that
⏹️ ▶️ John other crap in that book bag is gonna scratch up your laptop. So that’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ John say the main audience for $180 leather thing is somebody who wants to keep their
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop as pristine looking as my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s $199, John. For the 15 inch. That’s the big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one, the 15 inch, yeah. Oh, okay. I guess with the most
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. more leather it’s that’s clearly yeah oh man two hundred dollars i mean they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re nice they look nice right i don’t know how well that leather will hold up maybe the brown ones will like look aged or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it’s it’s classy like i saw you reacted to this this tweet i think
⏹️ ▶️ John casey someone mentioned uh someone was all cranky about apple saying that they make uh they used to make high-end products
⏹️ ▶️ John now they make luxury products yeah uh i like you don’t entirely buy that premise but
⏹️ ▶️ John they have in recent years, decade or so, leaned
⏹️ ▶️ John more heavily towards the clearly luxury-oriented market. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John the products are made for it, but that like on the watch, you know, they have that gold one, and they have the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy Hermes leather stuff, and they make lots of products that are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need a $200 leather sleeve for your laptop. It’s just a nice thing. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John treat for your laptop. It’s a nice thing. It’s a luxury item, right? The laptops themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think are luxury items. They do not come gold encrusted. You can’t get a gold, literal gold
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro. They are still very expensive, obviously, but accessories
⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly where you should do luxury things like this. If someone wants
⏹️ ▶️ John a $200 sleeve for the laptop, Apple should be willing to make it and sell it for them, and they should buy it, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they should be happy because it’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t think they’ll sell a lot of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should actually point out, when we went to the Apple Visitor Center,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff and I made a couple of impulse purchases. I bought an orange leather case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my phone because I wanted a leather case because my phone kept sliding out of my shorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pockets in the summertime, and it’s so slippery by itself. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like the orange one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John bought- Have you ever had, before you say Tiff bought, have you ever had a leather case for your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that has not been brown or black?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is the first time. The previous ones were always black.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I haven’t had them, but my wife has had many cases
⏹️ ▶️ John and different materials and different colors. And my experience has been ones that are not brown, black, or gray
⏹️ ▶️ John look really nice because Apple’s really good at making things in pretty colors, but that the color doesn’t hold up.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see, we’ll see how this goes. Maybe you’re a cleaner than more people. Maybe your pockets are cleaner, but let’s circle
⏹️ ▶️ John back in a year and see what your orange leather phone case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. I mean, I probably won’t be using it in a year because one of the reasons I decided to take that risk.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have no problem. You’re immune to aging because you sell things before they can get dirty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it already is getting a little bit darker and blackened on the front corner by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the status bar because presumably it’s like rubbing against the inside of my pockets and turning slowly the color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of denim or whatever. But I mean, I knew this would happen because I’ve seen this happen to other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. It’s fine. I’m okay with that. But yeah, so I bought my orange case, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I liked it and it looked cool. Tiff bought the iPad version of this leather sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for her iPad. So we actually have some experience with this in the family. And- What color did she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get? The pink one. And she had good reasons for buying it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it was just kind of the impulse purchase of being in Apple’s new visitor center,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was awesome and everything else. But part of it was also utility. And, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she basically, she likes to keep her iPad in like a backpack or something while traveling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but without, she doesn’t like keeping the smart cover on it and stuff. Like she just takes it out and uses it by itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, without a case or cover on it while like, you know, handling it to actually use it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also has the slot for the pencil, which she always wants to have with her. So like, it actually works pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, this one, you know, for the laptops, it’s a little bit less of a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. in the sense that it doesn’t add a huge practical advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you wanted to toss a laptop into a bag that doesn’t have a dedicated laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket, if you can still find such a thing, this should help. Other than that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really argue for it. But I agree with your point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, that if Apple wants to make fancy leather stuff and charge a bunch of money for it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sell it only to people who like to make expensive impulse purchases for things that make them happy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine, I don’t care. As long as they keep making computers that are good, I don’t care what kind of leather stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make on the side. I will laugh at it occasionally when it’s ridiculous, but I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue that they shouldn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much would a leather sleeve for iMac Pro cost? Because apparently they’re doing it by square
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because the 13 inch costs 180, and the 15
⏹️ ▶️ John inch costs 200. I guess the 5K iMac slash iMac Pro model, maybe that’s a $500 sleeve.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you just leave it on all the time, like, I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a leather vest for your computer. Like a bra for your car, but for your computer. It’s got that chin
⏹️ ▶️ John down there. You can cover that with leather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, or maybe it would only go on the foot. Yeah, right. It’s a little booty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if you put the rest of the iMac Pro in leather, it might have ventilation issues, but maybe you could just put the foot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in leather, and then it wouldn’t like slide around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk. the iMac Pro boot.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So for Ask ATP this week, Elyse Shaw writes, I recently had to replace an AirPod due to a weird sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with issues and that was out of warranty. They charged me $70 plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tax as promised, but the Genius Bar employee also took my old one. I wondered why, and he didn’t seem to have an answer. I realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is also the case with other replacements by Apple. Can you hazard a guess as to why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume that they want some sort of proof. I guess if they’d never mind, you said out of warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I have a couple of reasons. One is that Apple has a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually explicitly states it sometimes too, as they they say capture things, hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that they make that has a problem. So yeah, they’ll give you a new one or sell you a new one or whatever. But they also
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see what what happened with the old one, what went wrong? What’s what was the problem with it? So they can see if they have some
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of systemic hardware problem or whatever, especially for hardware devices that like don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have much software on them to speak of that is user accessible like an air pod. So I can imagine that they’d want your
⏹️ ▶️ John old air pod to see what deal is. And the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is pretty gung-ho on recycling old electronics. So
⏹️ ▶️ John very often they will offer to take any old iPod or iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything that you have, and I don’t know why they’d make it mandatory, but rather than
⏹️ ▶️ John have you throw out this thing with a bunch of heavy metals into your garbage, Apple will take it and
⏹️ ▶️ John let one of its weird robots rip it apart and harvest all of the goodies inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think of a third reason, which is that there’s probably some way, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t take the things back, to cheat the system and to get free stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow. And if there is a way to abuse Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get free stuff, people are already doing it, and Apple is going to lose money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it or have other problems with that, like market devaluation or fraud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fraud sales and things like that. You have to keep in mind, Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive, well-known company that sells high-priced goods all over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, and people are willing to pay top dollar for them. So any way to scam the system, any way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get free Apple stuff, or to get it for less than it’s worth or whatever, will be abused,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is being abused. And so if there’s any scam to run,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are doing it, and Apple is probably trying to find some way to clamp down on it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t thought through whether you can arbitrage a replacement AirPod into something more profitable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but rest assured that these policies are in place. Probably, certainly the capture thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably usually newer stuff though, like when it’s first released, maybe the recycling angle, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly just to prevent various abuses and scams that would be more possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they didn’t take back the old thing during a repair.
#askatp: Using a 34” monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew Troop writes, can you suggest how to productively use a 34-inch monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not be a complete curmudgeon married to a set of smaller monitors? I’m losing my mind. My background
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, my jobby job has gifted me a quote, developer monitor quote, which is a 34-inch Dell curved monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which supposedly has a 3440 by 1440 resolution. I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller monitors for my entire career and I’m really struggling to figure out how to be productive with this giant canvas. The applications that I typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use for work include PyCharm, Sublime Text, Outlook, point, sigh, says Andrew,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word in our work version of Skype. I tried having all the apps open at one time with each having a dedication,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicated portion of the monitor that was distracting. I also tried minimizing ones that are not in use, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John Syracuse, a king of window management of weird window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management. Why don’t you tell us about what you recommend for Andrew?
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, I don’t like curved monitors, but that’s just a personal
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey preference. I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s anyway. Uh, even though I carefully edited down this thing, you skipped
⏹️ ▶️ John over a couple of important sentences. One is the nature says my brain thinks that an active application window
⏹️ ▶️ John should be approximately the size of a laptop display with the exception of terminal windows. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then he says at the end, uh, about minimizing applications, it seems like I’m wasting the capabilities of this
⏹️ ▶️ John big monitor. Uh, if you minimize stuff, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Andrew understands where he’s going wrong at all points but just
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t able to break old habits. The idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a certain size that an application should be and that size is approximately the size of a laptop display is someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who seems to be thinking in terms of a laptop display. Laptops, you know, they have small displays compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to desktops and very often you want to see as much as you possibly can so you end up maximizing Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you just get into this mode where you think like like it’s an iPad. I can see one thing at a time
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes up my whole screen because why wouldn’t it because the screen is so small and I have all sorts of my whole workflow
⏹️ ▶️ John is you know is around shuffling these entire screens
⏹️ ▶️ John in and out and so you start thinking of applications as the whole screen but
⏹️ ▶️ John not all applications and I would say most applications are not best suited to be
⏹️ ▶️ John 15 or 13 inch 16 by 9 landscape rectangles right
⏹️ ▶️ John a messages window for example if you’re running messages and sending people text messages 16 by 9
⏹️ ▶️ John fullscreen 13 or 15 inches not the appropriate size of your messages window if you make your messages window
⏹️ ▶️ John that big either because you’re tiling or because you just think of all windows like that you’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ John your space well all right and you know I can I can tell you how I
⏹️ ▶️ John use windows doesn’t mean you’re gonna use it but like but Andrew Andrew recognizes that that the all these things that he’s tried just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like they’re right like divvying it up like it’s a big grid or keeping them all the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size, although he gives an exception for terminal windows because he’s considers those different and adjusting again, it seems wasteful. 16
⏹️ ▶️ John by 915 inch terminal window is too big and you’ve got the whole 80 column thing people are
⏹️ ▶️ John on about it various times. The breakthrough that you have to make if you’re going to make this work
⏹️ ▶️ John is to stop thinking in grids and tiles and fix things and let each
⏹️ ▶️ John application window be a size that it is natural for the content and arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John things in your space. I always use this analogy and I don’t know if it’s the worst analogy in the world because most people have zero experience
⏹️ ▶️ John being a painter or anything like that, but arrange your workspace on the monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John like you would arrange a physical workspace when doing a task, a task that where you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of tools and peripherals but are doing kind of like the thing in the middle and I use this
⏹️ ▶️ John painting because you’ve got your your paints and you’ve got your solvent and you’ve got your palette
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ve got the canvas and you got the thing that you’re looking at but it could just as easily be taking apart a clock
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bunch of tools or working on a remote control car with like parts bins and the things you’re working
⏹️ ▶️ John on and a vice and a lamp and whatever just Arrange your workspace on the screen like that And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you’re doing more than more than one thing, right? And you have to have some way to move things around maybe think
⏹️ ▶️ John of it as you know I sometimes use the analogy of pieces of paper on a desk and pieces of paper all the same size So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not great. There really is no perfect analogy because the great thing about computers is
⏹️ ▶️ John The limitations and can you know the constraints of the physical world are not present on the computer You can make things
⏹️ ▶️ John appear and disappear you can move things instantly and make things come to the front from behind in ways that you can’t in the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John world, but To make an efficient use of a large amount of space you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John in in many ways, treat it as a spatial workspace. Arrange your stuff, size
⏹️ ▶️ John your stuff, position your stuff, get a feel for where your things are. Don’t be constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John by the mental model that you have that it’s a bunch of uniform blocks, or it’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel that you’re spinning and shuffling through things, or you’re just alt-tabbing in PC parlance through
⏹️ ▶️ John this series of screens. All of those patterns do not make efficient use of your space and if you can’t do that, just go back to having a small
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor and swipe your way left and right forever.
#askatp: Lost vacation photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yay, yay, yay. All right. And then finally, Brian Sturm writes, I just got married, congratulations, and returned for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my honeymoon this past weekend. We took many photos with my iPhone, but didn’t have the best service along the coast for much of the trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was experiencing some weird quick quirkiness with vibrations while using the phone, and Apple rep recommended that I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iCloud backup and then do a factory reset. I did this. After the reset, the issue went away, but we realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following day my iCloud photo library no longer included any of my photos taken on the trip, aside from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones from our first two days and our last day. I did create a shared album during the trip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the photos during the lost period are still in the shared album, but not my regular photos library. I’ve reached out to Apple support again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they haven’t been much help in getting anything recovered at this point. I’m curious if any of you or your brilliant followers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any ideas for me. I do not, other than to say, this is why you always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quadruplicate your backups. That’s not a word. I don’t care. You always do your backups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many times over just to be absolutely safe, especially if you’re doing a factory reset of any kind. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have definitely done not only a backup, but also image capture prior to doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or or even just grabbing it with photos one or the other, which is exactly what I did before I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iOS 12 in place up update. I did a iTunes backup. Then I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an image capture backup just to be 100% safe because we had all just come back from London when I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, image capture backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part. What I’m saying is grab all the photos on my phone using image capture, put them on my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, so you’re talking about back in your phone. Yeah, so the thing, the angle I thought that was interesting about this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the challenge of going on a trip, which we all recently did, where you’re gonna take a bunch of photos
⏹️ ▶️ John that are important to you and making sure that you really have them
⏹️ ▶️ John all, like, I mean, say, you know, your laptop gets dumped into the ocean or someone loses your luggage or it turns out just
⏹️ ▶️ John something weird with your thing and they need to do a factory reset. Like, the idea of of being
⏹️ ▶️ John on the move and taking a bunch of pictures and then getting to a point where you have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something that requires sure knowledge that you have your stuff elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, sure, go ahead, wipe my phone, reset it. I have all that stuff elsewhere. It’s fine, it’s in the cloud, it’s whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, in this case, because you had that, the fact that you did return from the trip and you could have done a better backup, that’s probably a better way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. But I always find myself worrying sort of in a transition period
⏹️ ▶️ John before I return. And the strategy I use to deal with photos
⏹️ ▶️ John is whenever I go somewhere and we’re taking lots of pictures, the first thing I wanna do is make sure I
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough memory cards. This is not the same for taking pictures with your phone, but I have enough memory cards for my real camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t need to delete any of the photos off my memory cards. So my first line of
⏹️ ▶️ John defense is, yeah, I take pictures, and then I take them quote unquote off my camera
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere else, but they don’t actually delete them off of the memory cards. They stay on the memory cards. So
⏹️ ▶️ John memory cards are my first backup. When I come home from the vacation, I should have memory cards filled with photos that are all in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory elsewhere, but their original location on the memory cards are still there. Second thing is I always make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m on a vacation, I have some way to get my photos from those memory cards
⏹️ ▶️ John to someplace that is physically not with me. So if I lose all my luggage or drop everything that I have into a lake
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, took yesterday will be someplace else. And for me that because of the way I do things, that means memory
⏹️ ▶️ John card to computer computer up to iCloud down from iCloud down to computer at home
⏹️ ▶️ John up from computer at home to 17 different backup services, right? And you can do this at the end of each
⏹️ ▶️ John day while you sleep, plug in your computer, let it I let photos push all my photos up to iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because I have things on at home that pull it down from iCloud and push it back up to backup services. I have this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing flowing, right? I also have my computer that I have with me on vacation set to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep all like in that option of photos either optimize storage or don’t I say don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do not optimize storage keep all the originals there and ditto for the other computers in line
⏹️ ▶️ John all this is to try to make a chain so that my photos are only briefly in
⏹️ ▶️ John one place and very quickly in multiple places and I’m sure that they’re in multiple places
⏹️ ▶️ John because this big you know this big chain I can see that I trust that the different pieces are traveling from here there if I really I want to confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John I can pull up Backblaze or Crashplan or something, look to see, pick a random photo you took yesterday,
⏹️ ▶️ John confirm that it’s in your cloud backup service, which means it’s also in two Macs in between that made its way
⏹️ ▶️ John there. In that type of scenario, you don’t have to be quite as paranoid about, I’m wiping
⏹️ ▶️ John my iOS device because you’re sure that it was only on your iOS device as the sole location
⏹️ ▶️ John for like one day max. And after that, it’s been in seven different locations. So backups at home
⏹️ ▶️ John are one thing, but backups on the go, you really kind of have to sort of build like a bucket brigade and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco every day of
⏹️ ▶️ John data and every night, make sure that bucket brigade runs right. And then you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have real cameras, keep everything on the cards as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Iroh and RxBar and we will see you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cuz it was accidental It was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter You can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C a s e y l Issa that’s Casey list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a r co a r m anti Marco Armin
Review: Europe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the three of us were just overseas for various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All over one sea. Are there multiple seas? I mean, does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really? Yes, we went over one of the many seas. Oversea. We went overseas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we got to experience the UK and Marco, you also got to experience continental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Europe. And we did this because our dear, dear friends, Mike Hurley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now Adina Hurley, they got married and we were all invited. We all got to go and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of our friends got to go and it was very funny getting to see our mutual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audiences kind of realize over time what was happening and it was it was great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. I am really thankful to get to see everyone. I am really thankful. I was here to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike and Adina get married and I was thankful that Aaron was able to come so that she could meet a lot of the people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that she had not met which of course does not include you guys or your families, but does include
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people like Jason and Snell, for example, or Stephen and Mary Hackett. And so there were a lot of people that Erin got to meet that she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had not met, which was really great. But first and foremost, I wanted to, on behalf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all three of us, congratulate the Hurleys. It was a beautiful wedding. I know we are all, three of us, extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited for them. And they are currently honeymooning, so they hopefully won’t hear this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very long time. But in any case, we thought, we have opinions, the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. Let’s talk about the UK. And let’s start by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me do my conversion here. Uh, and it was an unreasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and unseasonably hot time for the entire duration I was in the UK. And I think John, you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, and I think you were there a couple more days than me. And then Marco, you lingered for like a day or two and then went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into continental Europe for a couple of days. But the entire time that I was there, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the moment I got on the airplane in Dulles and the airplane’s air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just wasn’t quite up to snuff. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great. From the moment I got on the, on the airplane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the moment I got on the return airplane, I was sweaty for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like five days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight. It was 85 ish Fahrenheit, 80 to 85 Fahrenheit, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly 30 degrees Celsius pretty much the entire time. And, and as an American who lives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in what most would call the South, 85 is not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hot. I mean, it’s hot, but it’s not that hot. However, the difference between the American South
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the United Kingdom is that we believe in something called air conditioning, whereas the whole of the United Kingdom seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not. And what I always hear when I talk about this is, oh, no, no, we only need it for like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks a year. But apparently the two weeks a year has been going on for like two months for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15, 20 years, and they just haven’t admitted to themselves. Nevertheless, I can report back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the two coolest places in the whole of London, or at least based on my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the capsule in the London Eye, which was delightfully cool, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good because otherwise it’d be a greenhouse, and one Waitrose’s supermarket that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we happened to step in for a brief moment, which had its AC cranked to like 60 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fahrenheit, and it was just like something between 15 and 20 Celsius and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. Oh, and our hotel room was also, I think I set the air conditioning at 16-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stauffer** What? Your hotel room? All right, all right. You need to stop. You need to stop talking now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeffrey Laflin Why? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You didn’t have a dream hotel?
⏹️ ▶️ John Matt Stauffer Listen, listen. So I’m somebody who is always cold, right? Because we
⏹️ ▶️ John have air conditioning at work and I live in America, I wear long sleeves and and a fleece
⏹️ ▶️ John at work. When I fly on my plane, pants, you have a plane, t-shirt, long sleeves,
⏹️ ▶️ John fleece, blanket on my legs. I’m always cold in air conditioning. Because in America, the
⏹️ ▶️ John air conditioning is made for people who are always hot. I’m not always hot, I’m always cold. So I’m all
⏹️ ▶️ John wrapped up, right? I was hot all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the reason is, like, and it just got worse day after day after day. It really
⏹️ ▶️ John ramped up because towards the end, I had to wear like a wool suit jacket or whatever the hell I was wearing and pants
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything and that was really hot. But like there was no relief. All right, so I did not stay
⏹️ ▶️ John in a hotel. I did like not an Airbnb, but basically the equivalent, which was really, really nice. And I really enjoyed it except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the fact that this place had no air conditioning. Right. So there was no escape. And I was desperate
⏹️ ▶️ John for somewhere anywhere to have quote unquote, American air conditioning, the gift shop
⏹️ ▶️ John by a tourist trap. No grocery store. I actually went into a waitress. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John The cabs, no air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They wouldn’t turn it on!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why wouldn’t they turn it on in the cabs? I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it existed. I was in a black cab. The only cab I took was a black cab and as far as I could tell there was
⏹️ ▶️ John literally no air conditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well I was in like Priuses or Prii, whatever they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John called in plural. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ John probably like Uber or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Maybe, those should have air conditioning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. They didn’t! They had the friggin’ windows open like animals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We took one that was like some like, one of those like Europe only brands that I don’t, at least like Citroen or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And- Or Peugeot or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. Yeah, something like that. And it was like, it was on our way to the wedding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we requested, because we were wearing our formal stuff and Tiff’s like, can you please turn the air conditioning on like as cold as it goes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the guy was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And he turns it on and we’re just getting so hot, especially like whichever side of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car was in the sun at any given moment, like where the sun was coming in through the window, it was just, and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Tiff’s like, can you maybe make it a little colder, maybe turn the fan up a little bit? And you could see on the control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel, It was set to the temperature low, like LO, so you know that’s as low as the temperature can be set,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the fan was on max, and we could barely feel it. I just think the cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there even are under the impression that it doesn’t get hot there. It was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John unbearable. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John the compressor was just shot or it needed more refrigerant. But there’s something to be said for just
⏹️ ▶️ John never having relief.
⏹️ ▶️ John night when you go back to your hotel room and cool off, I think that makes a huge difference, because as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I was aware, like my internal body temperature just increased over the course of a week. And it was, I could not find
⏹️ ▶️ John any place, like not a single place that had American air conditioning, which by the way, I find frigid and terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at a certain point I was just like, please, can I just be cold for five minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just so I can go in the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it will be a blessed relief to go outside. So yeah, it was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sweaty there. And I think the worst was we went out to Windsor to do touristy things with the kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John and we were on the, the, or the national railway or whatever, not, not the same as the, the tube, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, it’s like above ground, big train. And there was some kind of accident,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was, they had a nice euphemism for basically a train killed somebody by hitting them on the tracks. But the way this was described
⏹️ ▶️ John to us as our train was sitting there on a siding for like an hour was, uh, trespasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think I got the pronunciation class,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s not in train parlance. The problem is not that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John has been run over and killed. were trespassing because you shouldn’t be on the tracks. So trespassers was the problem. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were in this train, packed train, packed. So we’re standing in the aisles, seats are filled, people
⏹️ ▶️ John are packed into the aisles, like, you know, shoved up against each other. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure there was either no air conditioning or the heat was on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because it was so hot in that train
⏹️ ▶️ John and that train was not moving, like dead stop for a long,
⏹️ ▶️ John long time, which they apologized profusely for. They’re very good at apologizing on
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. There’s not much less
⏹️ ▶️ John I could be wearing, and I was dying of heat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I really mean it. I did get the relief in the hotel room, for sure. But pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, with the exception of then, the London Eye, and 15 seconds in Waitrose’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was sweaty from Wednesday until Monday. It was ridiculous. That being said, there’s just there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t so bad I mean you know my hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John did you have air
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco conditioning in your hotel yeah or where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stayed yeah we yeah Tiff called me like when it became clear about a week beforehand that was gonna be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hot from the forecast Tiff called the hotel just make sure like we really do have air conditioning right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah that was fine and it wasn’t that hot outside
⏹️ ▶️ John the saving grace is that it did get cooler at night mostly that was the thing that really
⏹️ ▶️ John killed us was like in the beginning like oh yeah it’s hot during the day and we don’t have air conditioning but we’ll open all the windows and turn on
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of fans and at night it actually gets cool not so cool that I was cold because I was still never cold
⏹️ ▶️ John even at night but you’re like oh there’s a little bit of relief but by the end of the week it wasn’t getting that much cooler at
⏹️ ▶️ John night and it’s like oh we gotta we have to leave this country now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the only time I was really hot was when I was either in cars or in the tube like that that was pretty hot otherwise it
⏹️ ▶️ John was fine speaking of speaking of trains though by the way I was trying to think of the the comparison
⏹️ ▶️ John because of public transport. Just let us get out of the way, the public transportation in London is way better than it is in Boston.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a low bar, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying anything. Oh God, it kills New York too. One thing, when I go to London,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is now my second time spending a good amount of time in London, and boy, does it make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New York look bad in a number of ways. It’s so nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, everything just kind of works really well. And look, I’m sure London has its problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere has its problems. But one of the biggest things that makes me sad for New York when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m there, is just how awesome the transit system is there. How like, you know, Apple pays,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all contactless everywhere, and you just beep in and beep out wherever you go. There’s no stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards to get and recharge and everything like that. The mapping is great, the routing is great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the announcements are very clear, the stations are clean, everything’s well signed. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s- It’s not Japanese level of efficiency and cleanliness. Not that I’ve ever been to Japan, but I’ve certainly seen lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of video from there. So it kind of reminded me of Boston in that it’s an old city and there’s big, dirty
⏹️ ▶️ John tunnels filled with rats and pigeons and everything, right? But the trains are pretty nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re more or less on schedule. The signage could be a little bit clearer, but it’s still pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good. The trains come when they say they’re going to be coming. When they screw up in some way, they apologize
⏹️ ▶️ John profusely with a British accent, which makes me feel better. And it’s really easy to get from
⏹️ ▶️ John point A to point B, which is something that definitely cannot be said of most US cities
⏹️ ▶️ John with public transportation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a city with public transportation. That
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing I wanted to get at with the trains though is that in Boston, I commuted for a couple of years into downtown Boston
⏹️ ▶️ John and a couple of years to slightly to the left of downtown Boston, taking multiple trains and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Air conditioning on trains in Boston, it exists. It
⏹️ ▶️ John works more than in the trains in London, but the tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the air conditioning in certain lines of trains in Boston is that they,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they have air conditioning things somewhere on the trains as they travel around. And
⏹️ ▶️ John those units extract heat from the interior of the train and exhaust it
⏹️ ▶️ John to the exterior of the train. And if you’re on like Park Street Station, when there’s 17 trains
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, all of them are blowing their heat out of the inside of their trains to
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside and you are standing on the outside of their train waiting for your train to arrive in an underground station
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with tons and tons of other people and I think that’s the hottest I’ve ever been in
⏹️ ▶️ John a US train station is just waiting around as train after train comes in blowing hot
⏹️ ▶️ John air in your face and then they have a bunch of fans because like the train stations on air conditioning they have a bunch of fans
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to cool you off but all they’re doing is blowing the hot air at you so if you ever wanted to know what it’s like to live inside a
⏹️ ▶️ John hair dryer try Park Street station in the height of summer in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Boston. So to move on from the heat, which I could talk about for hours, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John coolest things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have, Marco, you have fair. Marco I think mentioned this a minute ago. One of the coolest things about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey London was that it is assumed that everywhere takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Pay or at least that’s the way I treated things. It is just assumed everyone takes Apple Pay and it is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unusual if that’s not the case. Whereas the United States is the exact opposite. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is assumed nowhere takes Apple Pay, and it’s extremely unusual and wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when somewhere does. And that was extremely cool. I was really happy
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So you’re listing that as a benefit, like, oh, it’s great, Apple Pay can be taken everywhere. But my take on it is
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly different. I was super annoyed by the fact that many people had an Apple Pay
⏹️ ▶️ John price limit. Oh, you can use Apple Pay anywhere. You can use contactless, unless you spend more than 30
⏹️ ▶️ John pounds, more than 40 pounds. Why? Why? What happens after I spend? And pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much because we’re on vacation, every single thing we ever bought was more than 30 pounds and more than 40 pounds. And so we couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use Apple Pay. It was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoying. I never ran into that, but I do know what you’re speaking of. And that seems completely bananas to me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would still, if given the choice, between the American setup of almost no Apple Pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s effectively limitless when we have it, or the European setup where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s everywhere, but it has a limit. I would take it being everywhere, personally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for whatever it’s worth, by the way, I used Apple Pay for as much as I possibly could, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was almost everything I bought, including a lot of like, you know, restaurant tabs and stuff that were more than 30 pounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never ran into that limit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d heard about it a lot, but I also never saw that limit. Can I just state
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plainly and for the record that the plugs of the United Kingdom, I am aware of how safe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are. I understand how safe they are. I have seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the YouTube video about how safe they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco are. It really is quite impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a great design.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. Also you mentioned the safety but when like when the person, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, the apartment wrangler was showing us around our place, right? Like here’s where the laundry
⏹️ ▶️ John is, here’s how you work this, that, the other thing. He made a point, and I think this was like for lawyerly reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t even know, to show us how the plugs work.
⏹️ ▶️ John to assure us that they’re very safe, but there is, as he phrased it, lethal voltage.
⏹️ ▶️ John We do have lethal voltage in this country, so be very careful, and if you just put them in like this, or like so, he
⏹️ ▶️ John probably said, you’ll be fine. Which, if I didn’t know better, we’d be making you think, wait a second, is he trying to tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have like the world’s most dangerous plugs and you need to tell everyone who comes here how to work them or we’re gonna die? When
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, it’s the opposite. They’re much safer than US plugs, and he didn’t need to tell us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. Well, except that you have to put the ground, or as they would say, earth pin in first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John otherwise it won’t let anything else
⏹️ ▶️ John in. But again, it’s not going to kill us if you don’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that way, right? Well, I don’t think they’ll physically let you plug in unless you put the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John earth. Sure, sure. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like there’s no risk of death. Like this whole thing was phrased as a safety thing of like that we do have lethal
⏹️ ▶️ John voltage in this country. I’m like, oh, so they have some countries that have non-lethal voltage or it’s just like, you know, one milliamp
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes over to the wires to your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either way, I just want to make it plain. I understand how safe they are. I get it. You do not need to link me to that YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video. However, they’re the dumbest, hugest friggin’ plugs in the entire world, and I hate them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking about that when I was there. We all look at the ridiculous plugs and they’re comical, ha. And I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does a 12-outlet power strip look like in the UK? Is it the size
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco carrier? Do they not even exist
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because it would take up your
⏹️ ▶️ John whole room? How does that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work? I’m pretty sure Underscores Airbnb had one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw it on the floor, and it was massive. It was hilariously large. Uh, but yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also don’t really, I don’t have a problem with it, but I don’t really understand why every outlet is switched, like, I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convenient, but, um, it seems weird to me. Oh, also I forget who it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but somebody pointed out to me that, uh, apparently it is illegal to have the bathroom light switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within the bathroom, which is annoying as hell. And that’s the UK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thing. It will,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re from new England, you’re very used to the light switch to being outside room. So that wasn’t that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I wasn’t used
⏹️ ▶️ John to the light switch as being at knee height everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apparently, my house is
⏹️ ▶️ John made by Hobbits. And by the way, to save us from tons and tons of feedback, yes, we all know that the voltage is different
⏹️ ▶️ John and higher in Europe than here. So people are saying that’s the explanation for we have lethal voltage. I assure
⏹️ ▶️ John you, 110 is also lethal in the US.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s way, way more smoking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in London anyway. And I remember the rest of Europe this way too. God, you should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Paris. Way more smoke. I don’t even want to think about it. I think my lungs just clogged just thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. Paris is made of cigarettes and bad traffic patterns.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s so much smoking in London. It’s unreal how much smoking there is. And I said this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to somebody, I don’t remember who it was, I think it was somebody native, and they were like, what are you talking about? You can’t smoke inside, blah, blah, blah. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you take a half step out of any doorway anywhere in London, and you’re just walking through a cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of tobacco. It is unbelievable how much, and remember that like, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what brand it is, it’s Altria, which is like RJR Reynolds or something like that. They’re based in Richmond, Virginia. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I smell considerably less smoke in Richmond, which is the headquarters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of one or more tobacco companies than I did in Europe. There’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more smoke in the UK, it’s ridiculous. Oh my God, it was getting frustrating and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uncomfortable by the end of to the trip. I did not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, that’s one thing that, like, my overall impression of London
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, boy, I like so much about this city.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Completely agreed. And they seem to be like 10 years or more ahead of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on many, if not most, fronts. But smoking is one thing where it’s like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re like 10 years ahead of them on smoking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re 10 years ahead of them on smoking in certain places in the US. It really is regional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but but I think if you took like the national average, I think we’d be significantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know more progressive than them Although man, let me tell you Paris was Another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level like and I’m you know, I’ve heard people this you know this varies by European
⏹️ ▶️ Marco region and country as well, but and and Paris does seem to be like the the peak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of smoking culture, but My goodness. Yes. So, you know as as you mentioned I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’d spend most of the trip in in London, but then we spent the last two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days of it in Paris. I had never seen it, Tiff had seen it only briefly, and so we went on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to check it out. So we went with a couple of friends to Paris, just for two days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, we didn’t see that much of it, because we honestly didn’t have time and it was the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a trip, we were exhausted. But I think I saw enough of it to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decent idea of roughly what it’s like. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience of riding the Eurostar under the tunnel and from London
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into Paris is a cool experience. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the train stations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on both sides, especially the one on the London side, which is St.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like Pancras, but almost. Anyway, it’s a beautiful station and the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Paris side is also very nice. When you get there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it couldn’t be more of a display of the different cultures when you compare the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco London side of this train which is you know orderly and well managed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has a nice beautiful station you get there. We took a cab there and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know nicely you know manage needs to get everything. You come out the parasite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can only describe the way you get a taxi out of that station
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as chaos. Like, you have to meet taxis, like, weirdly, like, across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the street by this bar. There is nowhere for them to stop, so they just kind of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop everywhere. And so, like, this massive intersection in front of this train
⏹️ ▶️ Marco station, which I assume a lot of people come in on all the time, that’s why it’s there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Has nowhere good for taxis to pick people up and there’s seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no Like, you know police like moving people along like they do in front of in front of airports in the US now Like so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t just like sit there forever. No, there’s none of that there So like you step out of this train station
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re just plunged into the most chaotic road situation I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever seen and the rest of Paris doesn’t seem to be that much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that regard in the sense that that the roads are just chaos. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent a lot of time in New York City. I’ve seen a lot of other big cities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been to Rome. I’ve never seen worse drivers and worse road layouts than Paris.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing. I don’t know how anybody drives there, or frankly walks there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s really quite something to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anybody whose job involves driving in Paris every day, I salute you because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could not do that. Also noteworthy about Paris,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge amounts of motorcycles and motorcycle-like things like scooters and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Massive amounts of motorcycles. It seems like everyone there drives a motorcycle, and they are all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, everywhere that you could park motorcycles was a line of motorcycles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen a place with more motorcycles. And I’ve never seen a place with more people smoking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a ridiculous amount of smoking everywhere. It was like being in Pennsylvania in the 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it was just like an amazing amount of smoking. And like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really strange. Like, you know, we had this beautiful hotel room that was a couple stories up from ground level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in this little tiny hotel, like in this like beautiful like Parisian street scene. It was so picturesque
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we could open our windows and just have like all the air coming in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the sounds of the Parisian street scene, and it was wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except that there was a restaurant in the first floor of the hotel, which meant that from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours of about 4 p.m. to well after we went to bed, there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically people constantly smoking. Just constantly. Endless chain smoking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from people just sitting at a restaurant. They couldn’t stop themselves from endless chain smoking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ridiculous amounts of cigarette smoke, which we really don’t like. And so that kind of, we couldn’t leave the windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open at night, which was unfortunate. And then we also flew out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paris, because we figured that would be efficient. You know, we wanted to see the second city,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we took the train there, and then we flew out of there when it was time to go home back to New York. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if it’s just the airport we went to, which was Orly. You know, there’s basically two major airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco O’Reilly. I have not, yeah, I have not seen Charles de Gaulle. I don’t know if it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine or Lee has one of the most confusing layouts I’ve ever seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like first of all it’s the first airport I’ve ever seen anywhere in any country where you walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and you don’t walk in to check-in desks you walk into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shopping mall basically and Finding the check-in desks is a challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in itself, right? Then you get there and they’re in all these like weird little like zones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the signs are It’s not a language barrier. Most of the signs were also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in English, so that wasn’t the problem. It was just hard to find stuff. It was hard to understand where anything was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was hard to understand where you were supposed to go. And it was just the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdly laid out airport I’ve ever seen. It was very, just like lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odd design choices and standards that seemed to be enforced everywhere else that weren’t enforced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, and things like that. And then like getting to the gate was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it was, you know, there’s like one gate with seven different letters. Like there’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like gate 31, but there’s actually seven gate 31s and here’s you’re at 31
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D or whatever. And they’re all right next to each other. It’s very, very strange. And then like boarding, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign said boarding, but they weren’t boarding for forever. And, and, you know, normally like I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t usually indulge like, you know, people’s boring travel delay stories, but this one just suffice to say this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flight was full of delays and like the and the plane was a mess and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crew was like rude and curtain everything is like it couldn’t be more different than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the London side of the street like like the scenario it was BA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like the London crew on the London plane was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a newer nicer plane everything was perfectly clean the London crew was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much nicer so much better of a crew and just so much friendlier and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the French of course were just like angry that you existed and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure Paris is really good at a lot of things like the food was pretty good. I’ll give them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But transportation logistics are not something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would give to the French as a strength.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of British Airways, I want to give a shout out to British Airways again. I’ve only flown them twice in my entire life and both
⏹️ ▶️ John times I have been impressed by their airline food. Not that it’s impressive food, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airline food. Yeah, no, we’ve flown BA a few times now and they’re great. I like them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. I don’t plan to ever fly in or out of Paris again, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was not as much nice or fun or anything positive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the London part was great. I will give them lots of credit for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and another thing about the British Airways food, not only is it good for airline food, but there’s tons of it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a six hour flight, which I frequently, six and a half, whatever hour flight that I frequently take to San Francisco.
⏹️ ▶️ John The difference is, at San Francisco, they give you like one bag of potato chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and then your choice of whatever very bad tasting $12 sandwich you want to buy from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John On British Airways, they just constantly kept bringing food. Here’s a snack, here’s a dessert, here’s a meal, here’s a dessert, here’s a snack,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s a drink. I was I couldn’t eat anymore of like I
⏹️ ▶️ John you are bringing me too much free food Not free obviously because these tickets were expensive, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean? It’s funny you say all that about to go back a half step Marco to say all that about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Paris because I have been once as a kid and once with Aaron and Most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people I know love Paris. I am glad I have been to Paris.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really want to go back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I have had my Parisian experience and I’m good. Thank you. I think I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. Well, and also like and I’ll give them credit to like I was really worried that I, you know, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always heard very bad things about how like how incredibly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rude Parisians in particular are when you are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco French. And, you know, even if you try to try to speak the language, like I’ve heard that it’s just a really bad scene.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is one of the reasons why I was afraid to go to Paris or France at all. And that wasn’t a problem at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was totally fine. You know, the people who we talked to from like the hotel people to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taxi drivers to people in stores and restaurants, they all spoke English just fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us. They didn’t seem to have a problem doing it. You know, we would try, we would like greet people in French as best as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could in all of our minimal broken French and they would quickly identify us as Americans and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start talking to us in English and it was fine. And so that was my biggest worry. Turned out not to be a problem at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I really did, like, the smoking was a big surprise. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transportation logistics being hilariously, comically bad was also a big surprise. The big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason to go there, to me, was like, I need to experience French food in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco France. Because like, you know, French food is great, and I figured it would be awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And it was really good. But one thing I noticed that I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m apologized to the great nation of France for what I’m about to say. But this is simply the truth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was really good, but it wasn’t better than French food in New York.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, French food has been known to be good for so long that you can get good French food in lots of places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like that that actually isn’t a great reason to go there anymore. Like or to or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t go there just for that. you can get great French food in almost any city.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you’re only there for two days, but I would imagine that the difference is that aside from like, oh, well, you can go to the right
⏹️ ▶️ John high end restaurant or whatever. I think the difference was probably that the floor is a lot higher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know what I mean? Like I bet it’s the same thing with pizza and bagels and the New York metro area
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you live in Paris, you can basically go to whatever stores around the corner and get a good French bread.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not true in most of the US where you can’t just go, I’ll just go to the thing around the corner and get
⏹️ ▶️ John a baguette and it will be good. Definitely not true. Around the corner in the US is a supermarket
⏹️ ▶️ John with terrible bread, right? So that’s kind of the floor of like, how bad does it get for
⏹️ ▶️ John just the boring staples that everybody buys? I bet in Paris, they’re all pretty good. It doesn’t really get
⏹️ ▶️ John that bad. In fact, they’re all probably better than the best you can get in lots of places. But if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just shopping for restaurants, I can imagine, well, if I go to the best French restaurant in New York and I go to
⏹️ ▶️ John an okay French restaurant in Paris, maybe they are are comparable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back, though, to the thing that we can all share, which was the UK, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really love London. I grew up not too far from New York, further than Marco is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not terribly far. And I think New York is one of my favorite places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the world. But London may even be a little bit better to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I just love London so much. And yeah, the plugs are weird. Yeah, they really need to learn what air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But by driving
⏹️ ▶️ John on the wrong side of the street and trying to kill me constantly Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John oh it’s street signs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why why does london not believe in street signs? Why is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not a thing? They’re on the buildings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John always. I know I know
⏹️ ▶️ John well Hey, look, I I mean I complain I complained to mike in person about this on my first visit to london about the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John street signs in the buildings But I have to admit boston is worse Because boston
⏹️ ▶️ John just sometimes decides not to label the street that you’re driving on it labels the cross streets be like, Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what road am I on? Like, you don’t need to know that. At
⏹️ ▶️ John London, if you can find the signs on the building three stories up, they have both streets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labeled. That’s not always true. But I take your point. But I now I’m complaining again. And I don’t mean to because what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to do is be complimentary. I love London, the people that I spoke to were super nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, their accent is delightful. They dealt with this is both people I knew and people I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dealt with me being a stupid American graciously, they were extremely accommodating. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love London and I’ve been in prior years, I’ve been to other areas of the UK, mostly the southern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area of the UK. And I love it there. I really, really do. Yeah, driving on the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side of the road is weird. Driving the wrong side of the car is weird. Weirdly enough, I actually met a friend of mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is American but is living in Wales. And he picked us up from Heathrow and we went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a park. And I found it more alarming to be on the the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side of the road than I did the wrong side of the car because I was sitting shotgun. It was weird to me that I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the road issue more alarming than the car issue like you would think I would expect to have a steering wheel in front of me, but no that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. But but yeah being on the wrong side of the road was deeply troubling.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like if you’ve ever driven the wrong way like I’m in the wrong lane in the US like
⏹️ ▶️ John briefly if you have to like go down, you know, like it just you’re right. You’re driving against traffic right briefly. They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John in movies a lot right and you know American movies like oh the hero is escaping in a car chase and
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to go into oncoming traffic. Every time I’m driving in the UK it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m in one of those chase scenes and then
⏹️ ▶️ John just expect a fleet
⏹️ ▶️ John be coming at me at any moment and swerve out of the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, like I felt the the side change thing as more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like like a huge mental burden was placed on me because like you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as people in the world and you know as as as you get older, you develop optimizations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how you navigate, how your brain works, things you look out for, things you assume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the things is, you might only look one direction when you’re about to cross the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco street, and maybe you only look the other direction right at the last minute, but you’re pretty sure you only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to look in one direction, or at least the main risk is only coming from one direction. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you form this kind of optimization in your brain. You can look there first and don’t pay too much attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it the other way or whatever. And when everything just slipped around on you like that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to defeat the optimization, you have to bypass it, and you have to consciously remember every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to bypass it and to defeat that optimization and to flip it around and just look everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that to me, it made it, my whole feeling while I was there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was constantly having this slight baseline of stress that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something wrong or forgetting something or about to get hit by a bus because I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consciously over and over and over again make myself ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these optimizations I’d built up for how to walk in a city. And that was, I found,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very challenging to maintain. It was just a constant mental burden. And this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because I’ve hardly been there and spent very little time in places that have right-hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or left-hand drive, so, whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is, right-hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Anyway, so that was a big cognitive burden for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ultimately, I agree with you, Casey, that London is one of my favorite places. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I’ve only been there twice now, like, I spent a good amount of time there each time, and I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it. And, you know, if things continue to go badly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough in our country that if things ever get bad enough that I’d want to leave the country, which, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would have to be pretty bad because family and everything. But if we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever had to leave the country, that would be very, very high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the list for where we would go. Sorry, they don’t want immigrants there anymore either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll also say, I mean, if I haven’t angered the French enough, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food in London was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And both times I’ve been there—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. I agree. The food, like, you know, English food has a bad reputation because, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, traditional English food wasn’t very good. But that’s long in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, and what you have in London now is possibly the best food city
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world. Like it is so good. Let’s not go crazy here. No, but well because, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like honestly because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there a better food city than New York? It’s, they’re up there. They’re neck and neck in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways. Certain food types are probably better in London, certain food types are probably better in New York, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the food in London is fantastic. And it really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget everything you think you know about British food if you haven’t eaten at nice restaurants in London recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s amazing. And I would say I had just as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing food in London as I did in Paris.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think I actually like traditional British foods that the things that everyone kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snubs their noses at. But I agree like I didn’t go in any fancy restaurants while we were there. We didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy meals. But I actually think that British food gets a really bad reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think it’s deserved. I actually think it’s much better. It’s fairly simple. The traditional stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fairly simple, but it’s simple stuff done extremely well and who doesn’t like that? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it – I couldn’t agree with you more. I think it’s a really bad reputation. So yeah, I mean I really enjoyed our trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was way too short, but we were going without kids. So it was to be expected and we were very thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we had that time just for the two of us. It was great to see the two of you. It was wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see Mike and Idina get married and then all of our friends as well. But I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey London and I want to go back tomorrow. I don’t want to pay to go back because getting there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, being there is expensive, but I want to go back tomorrow. So Mike, Idina, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get married to each other again in like a year? Let’s just make that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can just go anyway. I know, but you need an excuse, or at least I need an excuse to justify it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And gosh knows that John isn’t going to go on a transatlantic flight for nothing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been to London two times in two years. We need to give it a rest.