283: Just Lower Your Standards
19 Jul 2018Hot MacBooks, cool early-‘90s cars, and the rush to get the last Apple photo books.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Videolog(ue)
- Follow-up:
- "Beware the Core i9"
- Reddit thread
- Marco's tweet
- Thermal design power
- Notebook Check tests the 13"
- CPU data sheets:
- Apple ends photo printing operation
#askatp:- Is a dedicated picture machine useful? (via Colton Belfils)
- Does John like Node.js (via Aaron Bushnell)?
- What $15k-or-less car, at least 25 years old, would you buy? (via Gareth Thomas)
- Post-show Neutral
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Jamf Now: Set up and protect your Apple devices at work, from anywhere. First 3 devices are free.
- Northwestern University's MS in Information Systems: Get prepared for an advanced career in IT management, online or on campus.
Chapters
- Intro: Videolog(ue)
- Follow-up: Patented != works
- 2016–17 don’t get 2018 keyboard
- Sponsor: Northwester MSIS
- MBP i9 thermal throttling
- Sponsor: Jamf Now
- More MBP rambling
- Apple photo books
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Dedicated picture machine
- #askatp: Node.js review
- #askatp: Old car for $15k
- Ending theme
- Neutral: S.M.A.R.T. 🖼️
Intro: Videolog(ue)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so freaking stressed right now. I don’t think I’ve really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come to grips with this whole filming car videos thing quite yet, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I can think about is all the ways that the footage I have is not enough and will never work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and is all wrong and the car goes back in. On a Friday morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is roughly the same feeling I’ve had every time I’ve had a car video, but But it’s getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse and worse because I’m now no longer just doing this for grins and giggles. I’m doing it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like sort of my job. So I am just a ball
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stress right now. I should not be recording right now. I should be fiddling around in Final Cut right now. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, if you just find me dropping off the call, just roll on. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I mean, I think an interesting thought exercise might be, assume you had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more time with the car. Do you think you would ever reach the point where you wouldn’t feel all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panicked and insecure about the video clips that you have so far? Don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, I’m just saying like, I think it’s like, I, you know, I’ve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve made, you know, of all the video I have made, uh, I, I had that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling for all of it and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was true. I didn’t have all the right footage. In fact, I had way too little footage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for what I actually needed, but I managed to get a video out of it anyway. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably true of most people who make videos on a deadline. You’re never going to have enough time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or enough people or enough gear to get all of the shots you want exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you want them. And you’re always going to have to make up for something that you didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that’s wrong or that doesn’t fit in during editing, after the car’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s always gonna happen. That’s gonna happen to every single video you make. I think that’s just part of making videos. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I sympathize with this feeling that you have, I think it’s also possibly reassuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think of it as just this kind of inevitability that will probably happen to every video and you’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way around it and it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just lower your standards like DeMuro. Don’t have some footage? Sit in front of a room and shoot yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I had footage of me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco driving, but I lost it,
⏹️ ▶️ John so here’s me not driving. Let me tell you what it was like. It was pretty good. Anyway, Doug’s score.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway, Doug’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a title. No, I hear you. And I think in a serious answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your actually very interesting thought question, or what was the thought exercise? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think in a perfect world where I had absolutely no deadline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I would be doing is I would be filming and then putting that into my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Final Cut project and figuring out, was that good? Was it perfect? Was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good enough? where does it fit, what is the story arc, et cetera. And you know what I mean? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could see it, I would be processing it, quote unquote, live, not literally live, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be processing it like nightly or something in order to figure out if what I had just recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was good enough. And as it stands right now, I’m just like glancing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the footage to make sure it isn’t an utter disaster and then going on faith that I can somehow piece together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something out of it, which is what you were talking about, Marco. And it’s fine, like it’s all fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am deeply, woefully, incredibly stressed right now because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a bunch of mediocre video and no good video. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point I’m just going to have to get over it and deal with it, which is what has happened the last couple of times, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the difference, like I said, is that this time I’m doing the reverse of what John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommended. I’m holding myself to an even higher standard because now in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have more time to make this better when in reality I do have more time but I have no more skill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I had or only marginally more skill than I had before and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it stressed me out some fierce you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to mentally sever the connection between production values and popularity of the video
⏹️ ▶️ John and success of the video if you consider popularity be success because there is not as much connection as you think there is like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean I used to mirrors example D Casey did you see the video I’m referring to where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco he literally lost
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and he just said,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, I lost it. I deleted it accidentally. Here’s what it was like to drive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, the audio quality in his videos, the number of shots,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the quality of the shots doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just, you know, I think, I think you’re stressing about the wrong things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Much better things for you to stress about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and, and again, I think you’re right, but man, it’s hard not to. Plus I still haven’t licked the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio thing. I need to find a lavalier mic or however you pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your microphone. Oh, is that the tip? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, audio is, it’s hard to get it really good. I would say audio, I mean, I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of biased because I like audio better than everything else, but I think audio is more important to get technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good than video, even in a video, because the audio, like, bad audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes the video really hard to watch, whereas bad video is pretty acceptable in a lot in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways and doesn’t actually interfere that much with the viewing experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, I would just go to say, like, you know, John’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you’re making video, you, first of all, you’re looking at people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big YouTube channels and big TV producers and what they produce, and you’re comparing yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a complete newbie, relatively speaking. Also, you’re working alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most big channels and producers have staffs that produce video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, as you know, there’s a lot about making video that’s pretty hard to do by yourself. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you make it work, you figure out a way, or you have somebody help you as much as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With video, there is an infinite, there is no ceiling on production values.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re never gonna reach a point where you think, my production values are right where they need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be. No, that’s never gonna happen. Like you’re always gonna want to get more and more and more and more. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you aren’t like the entire BBC with an infinite budget, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re never gonna reach the level, you know, that level of like of technical perfection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So instead, you know, you have to aim for basically like best bang for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buck. And I mean that both in money and also in time and complexity. And you know, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I made this mistake for my video when I basically bought a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of gear that I ended up using between zero and one times. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re never gonna reach perfection technically, but you just have to reach the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say this is good enough. And that’s gonna be really hard to decide, and it’s gonna be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to finally make that call. Whether you’re there or not, you might already be there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is what people care about what you’re saying and how it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little bit of the video. But if there’s flaws in the video, who cares? Welcome to YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything on YouTube is like, you know, like only the only the very top, top, top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tier are producing things that look like TV. Everyone else is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making do with like their iPhone as the camera and long shots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of themselves talking and everything. And it’s fine. It’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John high-end channels are doing that. I just watched that MKBHD iJustine opening of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iBloom. That was so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which channel it was on, but I don’t know this for sure, but looking at the video, my thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they shot the thing in 8K and then they’re just crop zooming to the interesting parts, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have a camera person. They basically had a camera on a tripod getting both of them, and every time there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a point of interest, because they shot at 8K, hey, they had the resolution to be able to zoom in on peeling the sticker
⏹️ ▶️ John off or zoom in on a person’s reaction. And it didn’t look gross because, you know, they had a ridiculously expensive camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not how you shoot TV. Like, they do that in movies sometimes, but like, really, what you want
⏹️ ▶️ John is a camera person and get the closeup and like do inserts and all like, but they didn’t because it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have time for that. We don’t have the staff. Even though that we’re, you know, bazillionaires and have these amazing big
⏹️ ▶️ John channels, we just want to get this video out and like, and all the way down to Doug DeMuro, putting an iPhone on a tripod,
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing it at himself with no staff and he just crawls around in the car for half an hour and he’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s just like, he should be your inspiration because it’s not like he doesn’t care, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ John quality that he’s putting out by just using like his iPhone and a cruddy microphone, it’s not great, but it’s fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, that’s not the problem with his videos, right? No one’s watching his videos and saying, your video was good, but I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John there was more dramatic lighting. It’s like, can you see what he’s talking about? Can you hear him?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it sound not awful? Good thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, and even only on like the sound gear front to like on in my video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my sound wasn’t that good. I have all the gear in the world I could I could have had perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound, but you know I didn’t have a boom operator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right kind of like you know big long stand to hover it over my head during it you know in the shot. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And or a camera person to skillfully avoid having the boom in the shot if I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know, the right way to get really good audio, to the best of my knowledge, is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have somebody holding a hypercardioid short-range mic right above your head, pointed at your mouth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole time. You will get the best audio that way. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need more equipment and especially, generally, you need a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be doing that. There’s a lot of things about video production where what it comes down to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you need a person to be holding something or looking at something or operating something for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s hard to do when you’re an indie in your house. You can try to rope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your family into it, but even that has its limits of how much they’re willing to tolerate for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… And, Daddy, this boom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is heavy. Yeah, right. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just keep holding a kid. Yeah, so yeah, that’s of limited value generally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you got to figure out good enough hacks. I, who care so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about audio quality, ended up just like having a microphone like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my podcast boom arm pointing near me at too far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a distance and it was, oh wait no, no I forgot I tried that it didn’t, it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John lav mic thing. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have there is my really crappy yet not cheap Rode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless lavalier mic which is not a good idea those things are not very good for their price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, this is the problem. I need you to do a podcasting microphone mega review, but for lavalier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mics, because I’ve solicited recommendations more than once, and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really seems to have experience, surprisingly enough, who knew, with lavalier mics in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loud moving automobile. Now, granted, I would turn the AC either off or nearly off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nobody has really experienced one of these mics in this extremely boomy, loud environment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m reluctant to spend, Like I’ll spend decent money on a mic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I am fairly confident that it will fit the bill. And I’m not the kind of person that likes to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the like, oh, try this, return it, oh, try this, return it dance. So I need someone like you, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these out, not in your electric car, mind you, I need it in your Dino Juice mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to tell me which one is the one to buy. So I can just buy that and be done with it because the best audio I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found so far is by having a brand new GoPro within like six inches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my mouth, which I’m sure is making everyone’s skin crawl, but it actually is the best audio I’ve found in car anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Outside the car I have a crummy lavalier mic that works enough, but I feel like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clips over everything. And so I just need to get a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lavalier mic. I just don’t know what to buy. And I want-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you’re clipping, the problem isn’t the mic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but I’m not even talking loudly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the problem is what’s driving the mic or what’s receiving the mic signal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re clipping because something is exceeding a limit on when it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco converts with the gain back to digital. You’re exceeding the range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what’s receiving that signal. So the way to fix clipping is to lower the input signal or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use an analog limiter. And actually, if you use a USB pre-2, that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have analog limiters. I believe only when the mic mode is being used. So you might need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do some wiring conversion to make that work. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not a problem with the mic. That is a problem with something down the chain there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But generally though, your instinct to put a GoPro right next to your face,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proximity is your friend. When it comes to having good sound in a loud environment, then trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to separate you from the background, there’s no magic to it. it’s just signal to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise ratio. You are the signal, the background is the noise, so you need to be as loud as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that mic while the mic is as far away from the noise as possible. That’s it. And so sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re in a car, it’s kind of hard to get away from the noise, so just get really close to the mic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjust your gain on whatever this is going into so that it’s not clipping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That solves your problem right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and to go back a little bit, one of you said, it might have been John, This takes a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team of people to do. Actually, Marco, you said this as well. This reminds me of a video that Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neistat put out, I don’t know, like a month or two ago, May 31st, where he ended up rendezvousing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with MKBHD as MKBHD was reviewing a Lamborghini. And sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough, there were like five people there helping him do this. And that did make me feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both deeply miserable because I know I will never get to that point, and also really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy because it made me feel like, Okay, if it takes five people to come up with something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that good, then maybe one person can come up with something that’s Passable which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you guys have been saying
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iBook video They’re also they they were using their iPhone to shoot the front of the thing because again They didn’t have time to have
⏹️ ▶️ John multi camera setups and it’s just like well, whatever We got the one thing on the tripod and then if we need a shot of the front of it We’ll keep awkwardly
⏹️ ▶️ John turning it towards the camera, but then eventually Just use our iPhone or whatever and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone shots because they’re shooting the opposite direction direction, you could see the camera on the tripod and you could also
⏹️ ▶️ John see like this bored person off to the right, like not paying attention to them making the video, just like fiddling around
⏹️ ▶️ John on the computer with no interest in whatever they’re doing. Uh, you know, this just
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anyone cares. Like it’s fine. They just want to see the computer. Like I mean, maybe I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ John could have told I got to move, but it’s not like they’re going to reshoot it. Like it’s just this is the one and done. It’s just this is the thing we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John opening the box. We’re excited about it and we’re done. And then I didn’t look at the view count on the video but I bet it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John high so don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. One point two million. Yeah so
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re fine. You’re just fine. What’s the view count on the DiMero video
⏹️ ▶️ John where he lost the driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t remember which one it was. I know exactly what you’re thinking of but I don’t remember what the video was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll look it up. Hang
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. I know I just I really needed a I needed a pep talk and I appreciate it because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I it’s it’s that typical thing where my vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is is far beyond the means of my ability which is probably in the grand scheme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things a healthy thing but when you’re in the midst of it and when you have this ticking not time bomb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this ticking clock because this car is gonna go back as I record in basically a day you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have all day tomorrow to record with it and then that’s basically it and so I just there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this deadline that just won’t go away and it’s just stressing me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. And the moral of the story is I just got to keep doing it. I got to keep trying it. I got to keep just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting the pieces together with the utter crap that I’ve filmed and try to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something out of it, but golly, it’s tough. And, and, and I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way I’m going to really get better at this is to do more and more and more of it. But that’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I only have access to, but so many cars, especially for the duration of time. You know, I don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of access to a lot of cars for a whole week. You know what I mean? I could I could potentially get access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cars for a few hours like Demiro does, but I am nowhere near that
⏹️ ▶️ John point. He does what he has in a few hours. That should be it should be your inspiration. His video, by the way, has 900,000 views. The
⏹️ ▶️ John one where he deleted all the driving footage,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which which car was that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lexus. So keep in mind also, Casey, like, you know, you’re saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because this is the first video that you’re you’re doing after you’ve gone independent. You’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placed this additional standard or burden on it of how good it has to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still only your third one of these. So don’t worry about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just became self-employed. That actually, you’re self-employed as a podcaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The video stuff is currently your hobby. And so it doesn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be amazing this time compared to how it was last time, which was already pretty decent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s still just your third one of these. And by the way, let me point out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do have access to lots of cars for more than a week, the ones that you own or have owned, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars you can borrow from your dad or whatever. So you have access to more cars than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think. And you might think it’s not worth reviewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it went away, like Aaron’s old Mazda, or your old BMW, if that still exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John should have got footage of Aaron’s Mazda.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. First of all, I think it actually is kind of fun to have modern reviews of old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars. I think that’s kind of cool. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. I mean, people watch all sorts of total bullshit on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they’ve got to watch stuff like that because it’s actually pretty fun. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that will be practice for you to get better and more confident for when you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press cars or when you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to cars. So like, you should be doing that now anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, just keep in mind that like, all the burden you’ve placed on this, it’s still only your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third video. Give your, you know, cut yourself some slack and realize it’s not gonna be perfect because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s your third one. Listen to the third episode of any podcast anybody has ever done, like the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first time they started podcasting. It’s not very good. And like, you know, everyone learns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get better, but it takes time, it takes practice, and that’s what you’re doing, but you’re at the very beginning stage of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. So cut yourself a break, deal with what you got, and you’ll get better over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate it. I mean, I’ll get there. And for the record, I am not at all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey above, you know, doing old car reviews. I am totally into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And had this been something I was really considering doing when we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rid of Aaron’s car, which was, I think, almost to the day, a year ago now, I absolutely would have reviewed the crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that Mazda 6, which was probably the best car that our family will ever own. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, that thing was bulletproof for 10 years and we put almost no money into it. And it was a great car from the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we bought it till the moment we sold it. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so I wish I had done it. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, um, but no, it was, it was a great car and I miss it. Unlike my BMW, which has just been sitting rotting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I still haven’t done anything with it. But I think I might know what I might be buying, except maybe not. And that’s kind of the arc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this forthcoming video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll talk about that after the video is out. This video is both answering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of my questions and raising all new ones, which is the best I understand the worst, but
Follow-up: Patented != works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Hart writes us to say that the patent office has a policy to reject any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey patent of a perpetual motion machine unless there is a fully built working model. This was like a one off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comment that John made, if I’m not mistaken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on the last episode. Yeah, I was pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John out that like the Apple’s patent on their little keyboard condoms, like you can patent stuff. It doesn’t mean that it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John works to do the thing that you say it’s supposed to do. So Apple patented this thing to keep crap out of your keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But does it keep crap out of your keyboard? Doesn’t matter. You can get a patent on it anyway. can patent anything, even perpetual
⏹️ ▶️ John motion machines, which I’m sure I had in my mind for this specific reason. Because perpetual motion machine is
⏹️ ▶️ John such a, you know, it didn’t say this in the Wikipedia article, but because it’s such a popular thing in like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the history of humanity, like everyone thinks they’re always thinks they’re making a perpetual motion machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet tons of people tried to patent perpetual motion machines. And it’s probably just an annoyance. So the patent office in the US has
⏹️ ▶️ John a specific rule that says if you get something that basically is a perpetual motion machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John just flat out refuse like special case rule were in order with your stupid pepper perpetual motion machines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just know you have to show us a working you have to actually show us a working thing that actually works the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you say it does, which is not true of other patents. And so this is the Wikipedia thing goes on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if a patent is granted, this is what I was getting at does not it does not mean that the invention actually works. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John means the examiner believes that it works or was unable to figure out why it would not work. Another dumb thing about the patent
⏹️ ▶️ John system. Patent examiners, who are just these people, are expected to make a determination
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, do you believe this works? Or can you not figure out why it wouldn’t work?
⏹️ ▶️ John Give a patent. I guess I’m the expert and everything. So what I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at is still holds, despite my perpetual motion machine, not being a valid one, just because they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been so inundated and annoyed by that in the hundreds of years of the patent office. you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get a patent on all sorts of things does not mean it does what you say it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite thing too is like remember last episode we had been written into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by an air conditioning expert of like you know like window air conditioner expert and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time somebody wrote in who claims to be a former patent examiner to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us this. We actually we heard this information from a number of people. I forget whether it was Steve and Hart here.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same guy though. Same guy. Same air conditioning guy works in the patent office.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I can’t tell if you’re being serious.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might be. I mean, that’s the magic of email. You can make up anything and email it to anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re so gullible. Write us anything. We’ll just believe it and say it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show. Please don’t encourage them. All right, moving on.
2016–17 don’t get 2018 keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, 2018 keyboards will not be used to repair the 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pros, according to Joe Rasignol at MacRumors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a quote, When asked if Apple stores and Apple-authorized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service providers will be permitted to replace the second-gen keyboards in 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new third-gen keyboards if necessary, Apple said, No, the third-generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. Then they quietly added under their breath, Please give us more money. No, that’s not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This actually kind of makes sense as we’re learning more about these machines as people are getting them and taking them apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the major changes of these machines is that the battery size is pretty different. The new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones have a bigger battery. There’s been a few parts inside that have had to be redesigned or moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly to fit that bigger battery. Well, the battery is part of the top case. The keyboard is also part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the top case. And in fact, there’s some speculation at iFixit because the one they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took apart weighs the exact same as last last year’s model, even though it has a 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger battery. So they speculate that they made up the weight difference by reducing some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal mass in the top case. So whatever the case may be, it does seem like the top case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is different enough with these 2018 models that it probably is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a trivial job to fit one onto the previous generation MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And since the keyboard is part of the top case, that’s probably why they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit this particular new keyboard in the top case it comes with on the old computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, this isn’t the only option they have. They could re-engineer the 2017
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 2016 top cases to have these silicone membrane things that protect the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys from dust. They’re choosing not to take that option. And I’m not that surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Apple does these kind of extended repair programs, or when they have a flaw like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their solution usually isn’t, we will fix it in a way that is permanently fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. Their solution usually is, we will repair it for free up to X years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you just have to buy a new laptop if you don’t want this problem anymore. That’s what they did with the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failures before, or that repair program, that’s what they did with the cracking plastic on the plastic MacBooks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s what they’re gonna do on this too. Like, if you have a 2016 or 2017,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your keyboard will probably never be fully 100% immune to these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We actually don’t even know if the 2018s will be yet. It’s a little early to say. But if the 2018 rubber gasket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, or rubber membrane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing does fix the problem, that’s not coming to the older ones. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand why with the likely difference in top case, but doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it suck any less for the owners of those two generations of laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That’s why you don’t wanna end up, you know, getting a quote unquote bad model or whatever, because
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re just, even with the repair program, which you have to wait patiently for to come into existence, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to bring it back one or two more times. And that’s just annoying to have to bring it back and be without your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, you know, it’s just, you feel like I wish I had a laptop that I just bought and then
⏹️ ▶️ John used for a while and it was fine. now you know that
⏹️ ▶️ John the likelihood of you having to bring it back in is exactly the same as the likelihood was from the time that you bought it because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re putting the same exact part in it.
Sponsor: Northwester MSIS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Northwestern University and their master’s program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in information systems. Visit sps.northwestern.edu.is for more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information. Are you interested in building the technical skills, management expertise, and professional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network needed for a successful career in IT management? If so, the Northwestern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco University’s master’s program in information systems might be just what you’re looking for. The program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is led by by a professional faculty comprised of leading data science experts and offers a range of options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to meet your career goals. You can choose from seven specializations, including AI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data science, and IS security, plus more. Unlike traditional computer science programs, Northwestern’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Information Systems degree emphasizes project development and management. So graduates emerge with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the skills needed to excel and lead integrated projects. You can build this deep skill set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and broaden your professional network while earning your Northwestern master’s degree campus or online.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Find out more about Northwestern University’s master’s Program and Information Systems. Visit sps.northwestern.edu.is.
MBP i9 thermal throttling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, it’s SPS.northwestern.edu slash is thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to Northwestern University and the Masters Program and Information Systems for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a kerfuffle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently we can’t just have nice things and be excited about them instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We all need to get grumpy about something and this week we’re all electing to get grumpy about the 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro with the i9 processor. So Dave Lee, who I’m not personally familiar with, but seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like he is no schmuck by any stretch of the imagination, has a YouTube channel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where he reviewed or maybe not even reviewed, but made a video about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Core i9 MacBook Pro. And the TLDR of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it apparently runs real hot. And because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will throttle itself and not use the full potential of the i9 processor because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it gets too hot too quickly. And what he was seeing was that it only runs for a few seconds, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly how many, but not very long before it throttles itself. And justifiably, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty grumpy about that because the whole idea behind getting this maxed out MacBook Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to do the sorts of things that he does, in this case, video editing, anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as someone who is dabbling with video editing myself, I can sympathize with this. So he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually tested the i9 MacBook Pro, the brand new one, and just sitting there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then he literally put the thing in a freezer. Which you should not do. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which you should not do. For lots of reasons. He put it in a freezer and ran the same test. I believe he was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exporting or rendering or something in Final Cut Pro 10 or whatever the case may be. It doesn’t really matter the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the test. But he tried it again and it turned out it was like 30% or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better when it was in the freezer, thus implying that throttling was the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I have a couple of problems with this test in that, of course, any processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to run a lot quicker when it’s cold, just like a motor runs a lot quicker
⏹️ ▶️ John gets cold. No. No, that’s not true. No. He’s stopping it from throttling. First of all, the time scales on his test
⏹️ ▶️ John was, it was like a 30 minute thing. So just based on his video is like, I’m going to do I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to max out all the cores, presumably for like 30 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then and that’s why he was running it against like the old the previous generation that had two fewer cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one with two fewer cores one, presumably because the new one with six core was was throttling
⏹️ ▶️ John itself down to a lower clock speed, and the other one was not throttling itself as much. And then when you put in the freezer,
⏹️ ▶️ John the new one one handily over the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So everyone is really, really, really perturbed about this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure what to think of this because I certainly wouldn’t be happy if I spent a whole pile of money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this machine that quickly, you know, thermal throttles itself because of thermal issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to some degree, I feel like some amount of this should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected, though perhaps not as much as we’re seeing. And I can’t decide if I’m actually upset about this or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should go through the Reddit ones too because they have some, again, this is just anecdotal testing, but there’s more numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John for more people. I think the Reddit ones got more specific. So that was
⏹️ ▶️ John a 30 minute test and it’s like, all right, well, the Geekbench numbers all look good, but Geekbench doesn’t take 30 minutes to run.
⏹️ ▶️ John So at what point does the throttling kick in? Does it just kick in if you max all six scores with,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for a half an hour or does it kick in after 30 seconds? So this is one person did a test where it
⏹️ ▶️ John was throttling down to 800 megahertz, which is bad. After less than five minutes, he was running
⏹️ ▶️ John this prime number benchmark. It was throttled down to 2.5 gigahertz after less than one
⏹️ ▶️ John minute with maximum fan speed on. So this is this goes to something that Marco mentioned earlier today on Twitter that
⏹️ ▶️ John a possible fix is Apple to tweak the fan controlled cell, just blow the fans faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was a test in which they artificially made the fans blow at max speed the entire time, just crank them
⏹️ ▶️ John to max and did a test and it still throttled down to 2.5 gigahertz after less than a minute on this Prime
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And it was throttling down to 2.5 gigahertz with automatic fan on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the fan doing what it wants to do as well. So the 800 megahertz thing after five minutes is bad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anytime you look like a Prime number generator or some other kind of like hotspot producing thing, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not representative of real loads, but I think the Final Cut export probably is representative of
⏹️ ▶️ John real loads. So this is just two data points here. Two people, Dave Lee
⏹️ ▶️ John on YouTube and AEA on Reddit. And there’s a bunch of other people in the thread giving their experiences as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it certainly looks like this laptop doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John quite have enough cooling to realize the full performance of all six cores
⏹️ ▶️ John under harsh conditions, admittedly, but I think potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John realistic conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, if it was just Dave Lee’s video, then I would have assumed he got a bad one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the fact that a lot of other people are now chiming in with similar reports, it does sound like this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just a fluke with his laptop, it seems like this is just this model of laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this processor. I would like to know, has anybody posted whether the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15-inch CPU has this kind of throttling?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I have to imagine it’s related to the cores. We’re discussing this on Twitter a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ John as many people point out, thinking of Marco as well, like that, this is not a process shrink like
⏹️ ▶️ John this six core is made on the same process as the previous four core, right? So you’re not getting well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we could fit more cores in because everything is smaller. And that’s how we can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John get it into the same thermal envelope. Like I have to imagine I don’t know what the actual numbers, but I have to imagine the six core
⏹️ ▶️ John processor puts out more heat than than the four core does, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s made on the same process. You of blood from a stone, right? So I don’t think they removed a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John cash and made the GPU smaller to wedge in the other cores or anything like that. Or even if they did, it’s obviously not making up
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. And the cooling capacity is determined mostly by how fast
⏹️ ▶️ John can the fans move air and how many heat pipes can you snake from the little contact patch. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, this is what I was getting at last show about the inherent design trade-offs. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what trade-offs are made for the 15 inch. There’s a certain envelope of size, weight, power,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all that stuff. The trade offs made for this chassis
⏹️ ▶️ John may not have been made with the expectation that they are going to have to cool what is it now 14 nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John six core processor, the expectation may have been that surely by 2018, there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be 10 nanometer six core processors, and that’ll fit in this chassis, no problem. And so let’s design everything
⏹️ ▶️ John around that. But Intel, as we have later in the topics if we ever get to it. Intel has been
⏹️ ▶️ John very late on its smaller process size, and so we have many, many generations, talk, talk, talk, talk,
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco said last show, of these 14 nanometer processors, and it’s entirely conceivable that just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can handle the heat most of the time, but if you really max out all six
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, and maybe the GPU as well, that even at maximum fan speed in a fairly hot room,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna throttle. Like, that’s, well, laptops suck, everybody. Let’s get a Mac Pro and be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to understand this problem, it helps to, I’ll go over briefly some of the factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. CPUs are, you know, modern CPUs, they’re rated by their TDP, which I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stands for thermal design power. And this is basically like the maximum amount of heat expressed in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts that the processor is allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to emit under load. And if it’s hitting the TDP limit, it will usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clock itself down. Now, they realized as an optimization, like you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic clock speeds to be able to like boost one core super high for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little while, as long as it doesn’t hit thermal limits if the other cores aren’t doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. And if all the cores are super busy, like they are in like, you know, multi-core exports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Final Cut, multi-core benchmarks, things like that, then you can’t go quite as high, but you can still usually boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speed a little bit until it gets too hot. and then you gotta slow it back down. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Turbo Boost does. Turbo Boost is what manages that, it’s what offers these higher speeds sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not all the time, higher speeds of a certain workload, like single threaded ones, but not all workloads. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all that, what is expected from every processor? Every processor advertises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its base clock speed. This is the speed, like in this one, I believe it’s 2.9 gigahertz, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed that is advertised on the box, and then usually it’ll say, it can turbo boost up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Usually it’s like another 500 megahertz or 800 megahertz above that. Does this one go to 4.5?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was a turbo boost number of 4.5 or something crazy like that. I think it’s 4.8. It’s ridiculous, it’s very, very high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so with a properly engineered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer and a properly engineered processor and a properly working cooling system, the base clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be sustainable no matter what. even if it’s a hot day, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re maxing out all the cores for eight hours, the base clock should be fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The processor should never have to dip below the base clock. If it ever did flow to the base clock, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wrong with that design or with that hardware. Simple as that. So there was also an article posted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today about the 13-inch on notebookcheck.net.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s testing the 13-inch base model, so I believe the i5 13-inch base model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re claiming throttling on this, But if you look at the Intel Power Gadget graph, which Intel Power Gadget is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little app that you can run from Intel that shows you the frequency and wattage and temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your processor in a little graph as you run benchmarks or do things. So you can see whether it’s throttling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not. You can see how much wattage it’s drawing. You can see how hot it’s getting. But what they’re showing with Intel Power Gadget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 13-inch is maintaining at or above its base clock speed. It dips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below it for like a second, but that’s it. Like the whole rest of their benchmark, it is hovering above. can see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like a gray line that shows where it is like it’s hovering above that. So the 13-inch doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appear to have this problem in this base model configuration. Unfortunately we don’t have more tests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet of the higher configuration of the 13 or the lower config of the 15 so it’s kind of hard to know if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a problem with all these or some of these or none of these. Hopefully by next week we’ll have more information. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when properly working these processors should be able to maintain at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their base clock no matter what and then as thermals allow be able to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the base clock and the turbo boost max speed as they kind of sit at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or near that thermal ceiling during load and the problem with this 15-inch is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can’t even sustain its base clock like the 15 inch i9 according to these reports from these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple people now is that it can’t even sustain the base clock after a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short time and that means something is really wrong that like that is not normal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a major problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, wasn’t that true also of the previous 15 when you plugged in an external monitor, its base clock went
⏹️ ▶️ John down, right? So it’s not as if this is unprecedented.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but when Yes, so I run into that problem last summer, where Yeah, this was not talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that much. But I believe the base clock was like 2.4 or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would base it would clock itself down to 2.0 something like that. What Yeah, when when an external monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was connected, it would just, like the base clock would just get reduced automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I heard from a couple people on Twitter about it. I checked mine, it did it too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had like the maxed out 15x from last year, from 2017, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did it, and it sucked. And you know, I wouldn’t have probably noticed if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people didn’t point it out to me. So sorry for everybody who I just ruined your CPU. But
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t expect that, though, is people expect when I’m plugged into power, like at my desk, that’s when I’ll get the maximum power
⏹️ ▶️ John out of my laptop, because, hey, everything’s plugged in. You don’t have to worry about draining your battery. Everything should be fine. But it’s not true,
⏹️ ▶️ John because heat is your other enemy. It doesn’t matter that you’re plugged in. Actually, you’re getting worse performance than if you weren’t connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to your big monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And that’s that to me, like laptops in some ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make better desktops than ever, You know, like, connectivity is better than ever, external bandwidth, external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor support is better than ever. But it seems like the thermal situation is just getting worse over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Like, they’re even more annoying thermally because they keep getting thinner and thinner and thinner and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and smaller. But the processor, like, the max TDP in these processors is not going down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is one difference that I noticed looking through the Intel spec sheets between the two years. The 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPUs, they have a TDP of 45 watts, and that’s unchanged between the years. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something on Intel spec sheets called configurable TDP down. And they explain this as basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop manufacturers are able to set the processor to actually have a lower TDP than 45
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts if they want to. And last year CPU could be set as low as 35 watts. The 2018 doesn’t have that option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t list configurable TDP down as available anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe Apple was configuring it down last year. This year they can’t because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel doesn’t offer it anymore. So they just let it fly and are seeing what happens, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good thing if that’s what’s going on here. And this probably won’t affect the 13-inch because a 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU is a 28-watt TDP. Same for last year and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. They both have configurable TDP down, and this year the TDP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down is actually lower. Last year it was 23 watts, this year it’s 20 watts. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not affecting the 13, but again, we don’t have enough data to tell yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are we getting angry about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s like I said, last year’s did the same thing that you could decide to be
⏹️ ▶️ John angry about or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is- There’s a huge difference in degree though.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it depends on what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though. No, going from like 2.4 to 2.0 or whatever it was, is very different than going from 2.9 to 800 megahertz. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, but the 800 megahertz
⏹️ ▶️ John one, like it’s really mostly going from 2.9 to 2.5 with the base thing on this. It depends on what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re doing. Like this was a Prime 95 benchmark. Like I don’t know if what
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone is ever going to do is gonna get you down to 800 megahertz, which I think is as low as the thing can possibly go. That sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John a situation where you’re really maxing everything out and maybe it’s also hot and maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John also have a bad thermal solution in your thing. But the thing is with all laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me great. If you remember the original MacBook Air, it had these thermal problems as well. And 800
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megahertz was as low as it could go. That was back when, I believe it was still called SpeedStep, the frequency
⏹️ ▶️ John technology back then. Yeah, the max was 1.2 or something. So it was 1.6, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was going down to 800
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, like laptops are always
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially thermally compromised. They all come with the ability to slow themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John down when they get hot. And to some degree, when you sell a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t control exactly how hot it’s going to get. People use them on their laps, on top of a puffy comforter,
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of a pillow, and it blocks all the vents and the things get super hot. And basically the machines have to protect themselves, right? And if people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know or don’t care about that, their computers running at half speed and tough luck, right? But in reasonable conditions
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of a desk at like a room temperature room, you know, like Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should be able to maybe not max out everything because I think it’s a high demand to say
⏹️ ▶️ John max out everything on the GPU and all the cores and every special unit. Like I feel like if you do some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a name for this kind of test, but like to try to melt my CPU type tests where everything is super hot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I you probably just you’re going to throttle but just using all the cores, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna in a laptop, and a laptop of the size and shape of apples ones, you’re just using all the cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be able to sustain that because it can with four cores, as you noted in that little graph showing the four core thing staying
⏹️ ▶️ John above its base frequency and ping ponging back and forth, but never going below base, that’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ John with six, why buy a six core machine, if that’s what I was literally slower than
⏹️ ▶️ John the four core ones, because it was throttling lower, the four core one could maintain its base. And this one was going
⏹️ ▶️ John well below its base and taking longer. So why are you paying for six cores? Like, Oh, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of multi threaded work. Well, is it actually going to complete your multi threaded work faster? Do you keep the thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ John at like, you know, 52 degrees, then maybe it’ll do it. But so this seems like not
⏹️ ▶️ John a great situation. But it really depends on what you’re doing. Are you using
⏹️ ▶️ John all six cores in bursts of 25 seconds, then you’re probably fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it probably will never throttle, right? Are you running three hour render jobs? Maybe consider
⏹️ ▶️ John a different solution because it seems like unless you work in a freezer, which again, you shouldn’t do. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it might run slower than the four core. What is what is apples like return thing
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you just don’t like it for any reason? It’s like 14 days or 14.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this would be good if anyone’s buying one of these like, again, this is why laptops are not the ideal pro
⏹️ ▶️ John machines in many situations for a variety of reasons and also why Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John particular trade-offs, especially for the 15-inch, are perhaps not ideal because they could have made a much
⏹️ ▶️ John thicker computer with better cooling and yada yada and Intel’s behind there’s lots of reasons but anyway bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is if you’re wondering should I buy one of the machines or not well is are all six cores going to be useful to me
⏹️ ▶️ John buy one try your typical workload see how long it takes and
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s slower than a four core, return it and get a four core.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also, I mean I disagree with you a little bit in the sense that I don’t think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should just blindly accept these limitations of like well it advertises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these high specs and you’re paying for these high specs. In fact you’re paying quite a lot for these high specs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re buying it expecting these high specs and then oh you actually can’t use, you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this performance if you actually try to use it all at once. Like that to me, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at best is acceptable in a consumer line. But when you’re talking about the highest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end models that are specifically advertised at doing sustained pro kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, I don’t think we should settle for the resources that you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that are advertised and the performance that’s advertised not actually being available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. Like turbo boost, as I mentioned, Turbo Boost is optional, and I understand that. Like, that, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense that, like, maybe under certain situations, you can’t use the Turbo Boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed, because that’s what Turbo Boost is. If you could always use the speed, they would just raise the base clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, but, you know, so, understood. Like, Turbo Boost is an optional bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you can get it. But, if you can’t maintain the base clock, that to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically, it’s false advertising. It’s like, you designed this machine, you sold me this machine that says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do X, Y, Z, but it can’t actually do X and Y
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Z at the same time. Like that, or you know, it can’t do X and Y at full speed if I plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into a monitor like that, which is a configuration you specifically advertise and promote. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me is not good enough for a pro machine. Again, at best, if it’s acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere, which is a big if, it should be acceptable only in consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and low end machines, not in something advertised, marketed and priced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a pro machine, desktop or laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John My exception was only if you were using literally all the hardware. So not just all six cores, but also the H264
⏹️ ▶️ John decoder and also every single execution unit on the GPU at the same time. And the reason I say that is because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not enough cooling in certainly an Apple laptop size case
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to sustain a powerful GPU and all the cores and all the ancillary
⏹️ ▶️ John execution units and massive IO and like just light up everything. Like have you ever seen those things where they try to say, you know, can
⏹️ ▶️ John you use, can you keep all the pipelines fed? Can you do run all the SIMD units, all the integer units,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the floating point units, all the GPU execution cores? Like, can you actually run,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everything at once to see, like basically, can you melt this thing? Can you, it completely
⏹️ ▶️ John artificial, no real world type scenario, custom designed heat generating thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on all components because it’s not representative of most real workloads, probably any real
⏹️ ▶️ John real work. It’s more of a torture test to make sure to test your cooling solution, right? And I think there is
⏹️ ▶️ John no laptop available with a powerful discrete GPU and a six core CPU that
⏹️ ▶️ John has sufficient cooling that isn’t like the size of you know, a giant brick, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just too much power output, right? These machines are designed, like they’re they’re over provisioned, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no way that they can cool all that stuff in that case with those fans. So they’re relying on the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re never gonna be running all of it at once. And that’s the only place I’m giving the exception. If you light up everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could say even on a pro machine, with this size and weight trade off, it’s just not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re just using the CPU and not really using GPU, yes, it should be able to sustain that. And if you plug in a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John and it auto throttles down from 2.4 to two, that’s bogus too, right? The only exception I was allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John for is that there is a certain point of a travel. Like I said, using it on your lap in a pillow or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Or in just a very hot room, you don’t have air conditioning. This room that I’m in right now is probably 85, right? This,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t control the entire environment. So if you’re in an 85 degree room and you’re hearing thermal throttles and you’re super angry about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, try it in a 68 degree room and it doesn’t thermal throttle. Are you okay with it then? The bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is that laptops are a compromise. And part of the way they get to this compromise, we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about with battery life too, is they’re over provisioned on battery life. assume you’re not going to be doing big
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive stuff with CPU and GPU all the time, the battery life is like most of the time, you just be tooling around
⏹️ ▶️ John and cores are blipping here and there, right? And you get the advertised battery life. But if you do any serious work for a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John period of time, you don’t. That’s how they get. That’s that’s how laptops are made these days. That’s what the trade
⏹️ ▶️ John offs are, which again argues for if you really want to have a laptop, and you really need to do all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple needs to make different trade offs for a laptop for you or you just get a desktop. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I guess just maybe it’s just repeating what you said in terms of like the pro thing or whatever. But Apple’s version of pro is super
⏹️ ▶️ John thin and light. And you just can’t have super thin and light with that CPU with that GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John without throttling in some scenario. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, I’m saying if you light up everything, just the six cores, like a Final Cut Pro export
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses all six cores or an Xcode compiler something that needs to be run at base clock speed and
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of related class action lawsuit about this eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John because this seems more more class action lawsuit friendly than the next term
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor thing. But we have to see more data because if you can get them to go in less than five minutes, if you can get them
⏹️ ▶️ John to go down to 800 megahertz, that’s class action lawsuit territory. But then again, maybe it’s just this one
⏹️ ▶️ John guy got a dud. So we’ll have to wait and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. I wouldn’t expect a lawsuit, honestly, because like you can You can get a lawsuit over like iPhone batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everyone buys iPhones and it’s so much more like headline grabbing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lawsuit about that. You can get, the lawsuit about the broken keyboards only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just barely started because they affect, it affected all of the laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, looks like, this looks like it’s probably only gonna be affecting the highest end configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their highest end laptop. That’s brand new right now. So I’m guessing either it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never have a lawsuit or it will be like three years from now, but that’s very unlikely for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, I see your point about like tests that are designed to max out everything and to heat things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, although I don’t think I necessarily agree that those should be permitted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fail. But when you look at, these tests are not throttling only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under Prime95, these are throttling under Final Cut Pro, as you mentioned. So that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a legitimate workload, but it’s literally one of the workloads that they promote this machine to market this machine to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? So like, the fact that this machine can’t handle its flagship marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workload without having thermal issues is a pretty serious problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, whether it affects you as a customer of these, I don’t, you know, it’s up to you. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a problem that needs to be addressed. Like, it’s not, this isn’t just gonna, we can’t just hand move this away and say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an inherent problem with laptops. They all do this, you’re holding it wrong. Like, that’s not gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solution here. the solution here is gonna be like, this configuration of this machine at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a serious design problem. And whether they address it with faster fans, which by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, congratulations, and your machine just got louder. Is that really better? Like?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the faster fans don’t seem to help. Like that’s what they were maxing the fans, you know, artificially making the fans run
⏹️ ▶️ John at max the whole time, just to see does that solve the problem? The answer is no. Well, it helped the problem. It didn’t make the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem go away. It helped, but didn’t solve, right? I mean, so it, nerds tend to be annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John by like number on box not equal number in real life. But the real the real test is,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it faster than the four core? Because if it’s not faster than the four core, then what is the point of
⏹️ ▶️ John this machine? Again, for your workload. So like that, that’s all that really matters if it was faster than the four core,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not, but it still didn’t match the numbers in the box, people would be angry because like, oh, it’s supposed to do what it says in the box, and you could
⏹️ ▶️ John probably sue them over and everything. Right. But practically speaking, ignore all the nerd stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the six core doesn’t do your work thing faster than the four core why would anyone ever buy the six
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Moving away from the thermal thing for at least a moment. Now that we have all the benchmarks of all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU configurations, I honestly am kind of disappointed by how much faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 6-core isn’t than the 4-core and the 13-inch. Like it is faster and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not you know, it’s faster by like a decent amount But it’s not it isn’t as much faster as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have expected before I saw, you know, all these all the actual benchmarks of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different options like to me The 13-inch in this generation looks like the one to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get if you don’t need a GPU Like or this or the screen space of the 15 like because it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13-inch Again, we still are missing most good like long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benchmarks I still have no clue on battery life of either of these machines. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they both got the bigger battery, but only the 15 got the DDR4 RAM to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eat some of that power. So the bigger battery presumably is also to address, you know, the fact that these CPUs have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores than they probably should at their process size. But, you know, it’s still the same TDP, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that might not matter. So basically, battery life is still a big question mark, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like the 13 is the one to get if your needs can be solved by it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but sometimes people want 15 inch. I wonder if there’ll be a market for people to manually disable
⏹️ ▶️ John two cores on their 15 inch to get better performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of them. One thing I thought of too, like so I, on my 2015, actually I wrote a blog post with this forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, there’s a utility called Turbo Boost Switcher Pro that, it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quotes my blog post on its product page, I guess, but I ran tests and basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disabling Turbo Boost with a utility on my 2015 MacBook Pro, and to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of effect does it have on performance and battery life. It’s actually, it’s a pretty interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and useful test, and the utility is such that if you get the Pro version, it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically switch for you, so you can do things like run without turbo boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever you’re on battery, and then when you’re plugged in, enable it again. And the difference is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty striking. You do lose noticeable performance. Like in Geekbench,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I lost something like 20 or 30% of my performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also gained like 20 or 30% more battery life, and the laptop became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way cooler under load. Like it’s a pretty big difference, because not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having turbo boost makes it, when it’s properly engineered in its thermal system, makes it stay way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below the TDP, even under load. So it’s actually a really nice option to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have if you’re trying to max things out, or if you don’t always need the massive amount of power you bought but you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to turn it on selectively. At the time when I had the 2016 and 2017s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this utility I don’t think worked with them. And I’m curious to revisit that and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it works with them now, if it works with the new ones, because being able to manage that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really useful. Also, it’s long since overdue for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add low power mode to a new version of Mac OS. And an easy way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to implement that, in addition to things like background service stuff and time machine slowing down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else, easy win number one is on the 15 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force the integrated GPU to be used as much as possible and turn off turbo boost. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, if you’re gonna do a low power mode, it actually is pretty compelling to have that option. I wish it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available to users on all the machines in some way, even if it’s just exposed to some API and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps have to do it. It is kind of nice running without turbo boost sometimes. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other thing I’m a little worried about with the thermal situation here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these machines are brand new. Now, over time, the thermal paste is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna start cracking and become less effective. The fans and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vents and heat sinks are gonna fill with dust. Things are gonna start getting a little bit out of whack, a little bit out of alignment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Over time, the cooling system of most computers, especially laptops, becomes less efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what’s gonna happen if these are barely holding on today when they’re brand new? What’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen when they’re like two years old? And normally you’d expect like at that point you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start maybe hearing the fan a little bit more on your laptop. And maybe it runs a little bit hotter and you don’t really know why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no headroom here for that and that I think worries me also long term for these machines.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I remember also you mentioned it a few times is the extra power for the RAM and the bigger battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John extra power means more heat from the RAM, right? There’s a lot. You’ve got two more cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got a big GPU and that extra power going to that RAM and also
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly the four terabyte SSD. If you get that option, that’s more heat in a case that really
⏹️ ▶️ John has basically the same cooling solution as before. Those two little fans and the heat pipes, there’s not really a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of wiggle room for what you can do in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If only they could make a case which was a little bit thicker or maybe had, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a millimeter to spare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wouldn’t that be amazing?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like, so the next round of laptops, the next generation, in addition to potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John having more ports and bring back MagSafe, all of our wonderful dreams
⏹️ ▶️ John of what they could potentially do to make everybody happy, right? Anyway, fantasies, whatever. But one thing they can actually
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely do and they totally should is have an option at the top end for a thicker laptop. Thicker,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that much thicker, it will be thicker, it will be heavier. You don’t want it if you want lightweight and thin, but make
⏹️ ▶️ John one thick, heavy, and powerful option, right? Because that laptop, you could put a cooling solution
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that wouldn’t throttle with a six core, right? And it would automatically be faster than this one even with the exact same hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. You can put bigger batteries in it and get more battery life. You’d have room on the side for a 10 gig ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter or whatever. That’s a product that they don’t make anymore. The 17 inch used to fill that
⏹️ ▶️ John role. It had a PC card slot, for crying out loud. But it’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t have to be a 17-inch laptop, but it could. People buy 17-inch laptops. It’s a small market, but it’s there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a, you know, and I don’t, I didn’t expect them to come up with that now, but for the next generation,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s something they should definitely consider. They’ve kind of done that on the phones accidentally, like
⏹️ ▶️ John by making all the screens so much bigger, and it’s like, wow, we have so much more room for battery now, and an OLED screen
⏹️ ▶️ John takes less power, and voila, the iPhone X has pretty good battery life. Like they backed into it somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they, we need to find some sort of similar trend them to follow in the laptop market to somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John make a thicker laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we’ll see how this all plays out. But I don’t know, it’s disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s disappointing that, you know, after all this time of not really getting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it wasn’t that long, but it feels like it’s been a long time without updates, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we are finally given this this golden apple to consume this this wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey golden egg to use. And it’s still got problems. It’s still not as gold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we thought. It’s gold-plated, perhaps. It’s rose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco gold. Yeah, it’s rose gold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, like, this, what they’re doing with the laptops now, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love this generation, which I’ve made very clear, but they have updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it every year. They have you, they have not skipped a generation of CPU that’s available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are updating these machines on the schedule that we want them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updating the machines on. They’ve, and the schedule they used to always update their machines on. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve been saying, we’ve been complaining for years that lines were getting neglected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire CPU generations were being skipped, and with the laptops, they’re hitting the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. They’re hitting every generation. They have updates, they released this dumb generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2016, they made another one that’s exactly as dumb in 2017, and here’s one that’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less dumb in some ways and more dumb in others in 2018. Like, they’re doing exactly what we wanted them to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that they are updating these laptops every year. That’s great. The only problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they’re continuing to use a series of hardware generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in its physical design and other choices that has a lot of problems and a lot of downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping that this year’s revision would be the one where they changed the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco body design again even though that would be premature relative to their previous durations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how how long they use these things. I was hoping they would move one up, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could, for all the complaints with the current one. And instead, they address the complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different ways. And that’s fine. But I really hope the next generation that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes the body style really takes into account customer feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this generation. Because there’s this romantic idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple just dictates what it knows we actually want and never actually takes customer feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doesn’t really care what we think because they know best. And I think some people at Apple actually do work that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think that’s mostly in the past. It seems like the last couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of years, like since the Mac Pro Roundtable and the Pro Workflows group and the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro and things like that, I think they seem to have a different mindset now, a much more healthy mindset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, oh crap, we were in space and designing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with immense hubris and that we’re getting increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distant from what our customers actually wanted and needed. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they have course corrected. But when you course correct, it takes a while for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new products and new changes and stuff to actually get out into the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They decided to make a new Mac Pro, what, like a year and a half ago now? And it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be out for another year. and that’s a pretty big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They, you know, it took them probably like two or three years for the iMac Pro to come out. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably developing this horrible generation of laptops for two or three years before it came out in 2016. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this course correction has happened. I think we have enough evidence to suggest, as we mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, as I mentioned on Twitter, as John mentioned a couple weeks ago, like the Mac Renaissance, it does seem to be happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem like they have turned the ship. They are on the right track. We think it sure does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look that way, but we haven’t seen the result of that in the laptop line yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it kind of remains a big mystery as to whether they have cracked the course in the laptops or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping to see it this year. We didn’t. I sure hope we see it next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, related to getting what’s printed on the box or whatever, consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John expectations, I think someone earlier in the chat had mentioned that that’s just not how the world works. If I buy a car with 300 horsepower,
⏹️ ▶️ John it always has 300 horsepower. some bad news to you or ever
⏹️ ▶️ John how cars work. Although I have some good news, sometimes after you use a car for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has more horsepower than when you bought it. So but anyway, no one dinos their cars. And then certainly they’re not measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John the horsepower at the wheels. And there’s all sorts of other things you don’t want to know about. So just continue to think that your car
⏹️ ▶️ John gets exactly three hundred horsepower as advertised that they drive it off the lot, and you’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also unsafe at every speed. All right. Anyway, Anyway, um…
Apple photo books
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about something that’s really going to cheer us up since we’ve been a little sad lately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s going on with your photo books these days?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I found out about this on Twitter, I think, which is part of the reason I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to put it on the show, as a public service announcement to other people. Apple, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know, has a thing in their photos application where you can take your photos and you can order a
⏹️ ▶️ John book, like a bound hardcover book, with your photos printed inside them. inside them, which is a nice thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. They’re kind of expensive, but they make nice gifts and they’re a good way to, uh, they’re a good, nice alternative to
⏹️ ▶️ John making prints and then putting the prints in a photo album. You just make an actual book. It’s really neat. Um, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ending that service. Uh, and the way you would find out about this and the way that the person on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John found out about it is they went to order a book and photos pops up a dialogue and says, Hey, hey, just so you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, uh, we’re, we’re not going to do this anymore. And after September 1st, we’re not going to take any
⏹️ ▶️ John more orders for books. So if you didn’t, I wouldn’t have found out unless I had gone to make a book, right? And normally
⏹️ ▶️ John I make a book like once a year after I come back from my Long Island vacation and I have photos
⏹️ ▶️ John and I make a book. That’s when I would have seen that dialogue and that would have been very close to September 1st.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m glad I saw this on Twitter. Thank you to whoever put it up there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sad that they’re ending this program because I have I’ve been printing books for
⏹️ ▶️ John my beach vacations and I’ve been going back in time for past years and printing a book like I started from 2017. Then I went backward
⏹️ ▶️ John to 2016, 15, 14, working my way backward through time. I made a book for my parents for
⏹️ ▶️ John Christmas gift. I did a book of our Disney vacation. I did all sorts of stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, it’s kind of like whenever you get around to it, it’s kind of a time consuming thing and whatever. Now that
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that they’re canceling them, I’m making books like crazy. I’m dumping all my money. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve ordered like seven books and I’m not done. I’m still going like because I got I have to race back
⏹️ ▶️ John to you know, I have to do all the years we want to be to vacations and all the major
⏹️ ▶️ John vacations and just I got to get and maybe asking why, why bother? Why don’t you just get your book
⏹️ ▶️ John for another place? Apple’s not the only company that makes photo books, tons of places make photo books. Photos has even has a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where it’s like a third party plugin system, a terrible, terrible third party plugin system
⏹️ ▶️ John for like, what is the thing? Not smug mug, snapfish or whatever I
⏹️ ▶️ John can make a little plugin thing where you can order a book using the photos app, but it will be printed at Snapfish
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So you get different pricing, you get different layout options, but all those plugins are pretty terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve had books printed, not me personally, but my wife and for school things and stuff at other
⏹️ ▶️ John businesses and they’re fine. But the Apple ones are very Appley. Like they’re very
⏹️ ▶️ John elegant and simple and I’m not going to say tasteful because it just depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on your taste. snapfish ones are tasteful too. It’s just if you like put it this way if you like
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ive and his white room and all the featureless glass and aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware you’ll like these photo books and that’s that’s the aesthetic I go for in my books the layout I use
⏹️ ▶️ John is it’s a little misleading because if you look at the different layouts they have the app
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible at previewing them but one of them is like the big picture I want pictures to be big so I’m going to pick that one don’t what you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pick is called garden blooms which doesn’t make any sense but just trust me, it gives the most
⏹️ ▶️ John layout to say most of my pages are full page, full bleed,
⏹️ ▶️ John edge to edge, top to bottom, right to left photo. Right. But you also have the option to do
⏹️ ▶️ John two photos vertically or three photos vertically. Like you have lots of different options of just basically slicing up
⏹️ ▶️ John the page into regions. That’s the way I like my books to me. I haven’t found another photo
⏹️ ▶️ John bookmaker that has layouts like that. But, you know, even worse to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s, you know, very picky about these type of things, there’s no way it’s going to match my existing books.
⏹️ ▶️ John It won’t be exactly the same dimensions, it won’t look the same. So I need to go and print
⏹️ ▶️ John tons and tons of books before September 1st, go through all my photos and just slap them together
⏹️ ▶️ John and throw them into a book and get everything printed. And I’m really sad about it because certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t print the books for next year and the year after and the year after, right? And so I’m going to have this discontinuity,
⏹️ ▶️ John my beautiful collection of books that are all all nice and neat and the same size and everything, and then this is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John the new books printed by somebody else. So I don’t blame
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple for stopping. I’m sure they don’t make a lot of money on this, but most people probably don’t even know this feature exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’ve never tried this feature, give it a try before it’s gone. Like I said, the books are actually kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of expensive, especially if you put in a lot of photos in them. But they look pretty nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re for gifts and stuff. They’re interesting and unique. It’s not like you just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John them something off the shelf. If someone gets something, they don’t understand how you made this amazing one-off book, you’ll be impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. And I find them, you know, a little bit more pleasant than like the old style
⏹️ ▶️ John photo album with a bunch of printed photos shoved into little clear sleeves or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I don’t know. That’s it. I’m just I’m just sad and I’m spending hundreds of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t wait until the official announcement on September 2nd that the demand for photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey books has ramped up so much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thanks mostly to John Saragusi, that we’re bringing them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. There’s been this spike of usage in Massachusetts for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We can’t figure it
⏹️ ▶️ John out. I do have some complaints about them, like my main complaint about the books, well the software for putting
⏹️ ▶️ John your software for putting your photos into books and photos is grim. It is real. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about it before. It is like, it should just be like a master class on how
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a frustrating piece of software. It’s like the simple job of taking photos and putting them onto pages is made so difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John by bugs, by misfeatures, by just so much about it is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t wait for you to use one of like the web based ones. The web based ones destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Really? Because usually they’re real bad. All right, I’ll give you I’ll get my favorite example
⏹️ ▶️ John is it has like there’s a photos along the bottom and a tiny little strip that you can’t make much bigger and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t. You can’t like spacebar or zoom or whatever to see the pictures bigger. So if you have two similar looking photos, good luck figuring out
⏹️ ▶️ John which one is which without actually placing them, but set that aside. You got photos on the bottom and in a horizontally scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ John just one single row of horizontally scrolling forever, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John you scroll to find the picture you want and you drag it up onto like one of the pages in a little book thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it loses your scroll position in the bottom thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John you go, let me get that next picture. Oh, no, now you’re back to one end again. So now horizontally scroll, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s favorite thing to do. Horizontally scroll to find where you are, drag it up. Oh, no, up you’ve lost your scroll position again.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just basics. That’s just like it’s there to torture you. So you can do it. You eventually scroll back
⏹️ ▶️ John and find the place where you were. Don’t get confused. It’s it’s a bad interface. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual books that you get printed, my main complaint about them is they don’t do a good job of aligning
⏹️ ▶️ John the dust jacket on the spine of the book, right? So you know, dust jacket work, they wrap around or whatever. And they they
⏹️ ▶️ John let you do printing. I think they make you do printing on the on the spine of the book that says, you know, whatever Long
⏹️ ▶️ John Island 2016. If you look at where the printing is on all my different books as I sit in there
⏹️ ▶️ John on the shelf it’s all over the map because when they fold the dust jacket onto the books they don’t quite get
⏹️ ▶️ John the text lined up with the spine. And that kind of annoys me especially given how much
⏹️ ▶️ John money I spend literally over $100 for a single one of these books sometimes because I’m a crazy person and
⏹️ ▶️ John I max out the number of pages they’re willing to put in and they charge you like a dollar extra each page so it adds up fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t do that. But they look really nice. If anyone wants to come to my house and check them out I’ll show you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen one, but I’ve always heard, not even just from you, I’ve always heard that they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are high quality. Like, it is kind of sad when an option that goes away, because we have, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff gets a book of our Instagram family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures every year. So every year we have the same little, and I think it’s Blur or somebody, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those big companies. And there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threat they might go out of business a few years ago, and I remember we kind of freaked out and we’re like, well, but what if we have to, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size of our book would change and we have to find someone else who integrates with Instagram. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was actually, you know, fairly scary and disruptive. And the good thing is they didn’t go out of business and so we’re still using them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, I remember like that was like the same thing you just said, like, you know, the spines aren’t gonna all line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. They’re gonna be different. There’s gonna be the old kind of book and then a new kind of book. Like, there’s something to be said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. And also, you know, if you look at Apple today, if they didn’t have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service already and there was some rumor that came out that Apple was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to launch a photo book printing service today. We would laugh it out of the room because it would seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous that today’s Apple would be printing you photo books for $80.
⏹️ ▶️ John they do make leather sleeves for your laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, that’s true. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think people would just file it mentally with one of those little things that Apple does for people who have more money than cents.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another reason Apple felt that it should do the photo book type stuff with
⏹️ ▶️ John the iLife things is that back then Apple was very big about, we want you to have an experience
⏹️ ▶️ John that is Apple quality. And it’s definitely a Steve Jobs thing, I don’t know if he said this on stage, but he could have.
⏹️ ▶️ John We looked at the photo books that are out there and they’re all terrible. We want one that’s up to Apple standards, so we’re doing one ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now if you order a book from our software, you’ll get an Apple quality book. I don’t know if that
⏹️ ▶️ John is still true or if it was ever true, but that ethos that it’s worth doing ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ John because to give the Apple quality experience, we can’t trust
⏹️ ▶️ John a third party to do this. If we outsource it or use some vendor, which of course they are, like it’s not like they’re doing this themselves in their
⏹️ ▶️ John own Apple factories or whatever, but like that they are able to assure the quality
⏹️ ▶️ John of the product that you get. So you get a Mac and you get iLife and you get a photo book, it will be an Apple quality
⏹️ ▶️ John photo book. down to the Apple logo that’s on the book, but then you can also opt to not
⏹️ ▶️ John have on the book because that’s just the kind of company Apple is. Yes, they will watermark your thing with a little
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and not watermark your pictures, but put a little Apple logo on the back. But you can say you know what, Apple, don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what you should do. By the way, tell them not to do it because you don’t want an Apple logo on your books. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that Apple is entirely gone. But certainly the Apple that would do it just because they
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t stand the idea of any Apple customers having a less than Apple quality photo book, that apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to exist anymore.
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#askatp: Dedicated picture machine
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. And when you’re ready to sign up, make sure you use offer code ATP at checkout to
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. And Colin Belfills writes in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is having a dedicated picture machine useful? I’m thinking about getting a Nikon D3400 and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 50mm prime having interchangeable lenses and an adjustable aperture means it seems like it would be useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can a camera that cheap be worth it compared to phone cameras? I don’t know barely anything about the Nikon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D3400 that Colton is citing here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that I was really, really worried about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending, I think it was around $1,500 for my Micro Four Thirds camera and a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it’s a 25 millimeter prime, which I think is the equivalent of a 50 millimeter prime, if memory serves. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I bought this camera right before Declan was born, I was deeply worried that I was wasting a pile of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I cannot tell you, I genuinely don’t think I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describe with words how thankful I am that I spent that money and that I use that camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime we have something that’s even vaguely important. Because the pictures that come out of my iPhone are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. The pictures that come out of that camera, by comparison, are incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not trying to say that this particular camera is particularly better than any other camera. It may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be quite a bit worse or better than the D3400, and I’ll let one of you guys chime in in a second and tell me if it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But having a camera that has proper glass on it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find it useful to have interchangeable lenses, but that’s not even necessary, really. But having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a camera that can get a real wide open aperture with really decent glass on the front of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can take phenomenal pictures. And I am so unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proud of some of the pictures I’ve taken of my family. And a lot of that has been me, but a lot of that has also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been the equipment. And I don’t think these same pictures would look near as good with an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they do with my particular camera. That’s just my two cents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suspect you guys are gonna agree with me, But let’s start with you, Marco. What do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I love the way this question was phrased. Is having a dedicated picture machine useful?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Talking about a camera, because when I first read that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, oh, they want to build a computer for photo processing? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing. Because if you want to build a dedicated machine for Lightroom or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe it should be a Windows PC, because Lightroom runs on Windows, and you can build this giant, crazy monster PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what I thought. but no, it’s about the camera being a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture machine, which is just a glorious way to phrase that. You know, having a separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera from your phone is a pain in the butt. It’s simple as that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really a pain in the butt. You have this other thing you have to carry, you have to buy it to begin with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta buy accessories for it, you gotta buy batteries and chargers, you gotta keep it charged. It’s never charged when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want it to be charged, if you don’t use it that often. You have to maintain it, You have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do firmware updates sometimes. If you ever have to transfer the photos off of it onto your computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or phone or iPad, it’s kind of a pain, it’s kind of slow. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luxuries that you get with the phone camera that you don’t get with any other camera. Things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, connectivity, being able to snap a picture and immediately share it without using some weirdo Wi-Fi transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, which are all terrible. That you get certain advantages with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing that an iPhone does. You get things like automatic HDR, you get things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like different skin tone stuff, you get certain stabilizations, and you get really good video with surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good sound right out of the iPhone. All these things are either absent or worse on most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or all standalone cameras. But then you see the pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the pictures make you want to take more pictures with the camera. Well put. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always this constant battle because it never stops being a pain in the butt. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this battle with myself. I used my good camera yesterday for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first time in probably two months. And that sucks, like I should be using it more. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of a waste. But using a camera is inconvenient. But when I look at what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my like super favorite photos are, photos that are so good that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would want to get them framed, or photos that are so good that I use them as my desktop wallpapers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are always shot with good cameras, never with phones. So there is certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quality argument on a number of fronts. You know, big cameras will just have way better resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually. They have the ability to have way better optics. They don’t always, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the ability to have way better optics. What they mostly give you though, besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much larger sensor and being able to capture more detail and lower noise and oftentimes just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better everything, they also give you flexibility in what kind of optics you’re putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. You know, with your iPhone, I hope you really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high, or like narrow aperture, 29 millimeter perspective, because that’s all you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your iPhone. If you happen to have an iPhone that has the 2X lens, like the 7 Plus, 8 Plus, or 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get two choices. Neither of which are that useful. You have your default,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 29, 28 millimeter one, and then the 2X one is like a 40 or 45 millimeter one, which is like fine, but it’s not amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not a good portrait lens. It’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a telephoto by any means. Neither lens is particularly wide or telephoto.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the iPhone basically gives you a really easy, convenient middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of photography. It’s like you can shoot the middle 70% of what you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to shoot, and it’ll look pretty good. But when you wanna do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s outside of that, that’s like on the more specialized areas of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optics or capabilities or quality, you can’t do that with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little tiny, like pinky nail sized lens and sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that probably costs $40. Like you just can’t. There’s no way to match the quality of a camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the optics when you have something that small and that cheap. So phone cameras are great because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re always with you. And there’s lots of stuff, you know, as the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are so many great photos and videos that if I didn’t have a phone camera, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not have. I would just miss because I would be in those moments, my camera would be at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home, and I would just have no way to capture them. And I have my phone to capture those now, and it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you really want amazing photos, you need to use a real camera usually.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the specific question was, can a camera that cheap as cheap as the Nikon D3400 be
⏹️ ▶️ John worth it compared to phone cameras? And this specific model? Yes, definitely. Because this is an APS-C
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor, which is just massively larger than the sensor in your iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a it’s a reasonably reputable brand. And like, so yes, this camera will absolutely be
⏹️ ▶️ John worth it. All the things that Marco said are true. But just to make sure that you don’t end up buying like a camera with a tiny, tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor. It’s like, oh, you know, this this camera doesn’t need a better picture. So I found it. That’s what you’re worried about. This specific model,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Nikon D 3400 will absolutely take better picture. It’ll be able to take pictures in situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where your phone just can’t like because they just come out as a blurry mess because it’s like it’s too dim or you’d have to use the flash
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll come out all gross. So yes, yes to the specific model with the 50
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter prime lens, you will take pictures you could never take on your phone if you have the camera with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you think it’s worth it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s only like 500 bucks, like it’s totally worth it. Like it’s a good like to see, because what you have to determine,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Margo said, is but will you bring it with you? Or will it just sit in your house? If it sits in your house, it’s doing you no good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to actually bring it with you. Like you have to come up with some kind of arrangement where you decide, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John a time when I’m gonna bring the big camera or no? If you never bring the big camera, then obviously it’s not worth it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have occasions where you think you might wanna use it, this will be worth it in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John the quality you get out of a $500 camera with an APS-C sensor. Yes.
#askatp: Node.js review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Bushnell writes, I believe Syracuse mentioned doing more Node.js development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a semi-recent episode of ATPFM. This was probably from like six months ago, but that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are his thoughts on Node so far? What does he like and dislike? And I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey written any Node in a long time, but I have done a semi-reasonable amount of Node for someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who never did it professionally. So I have thoughts on this. But John, you were the one addressed. What do you think about Node?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was maybe was from six months ago, but I’m still doing no stuff as far as I’m doing any stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my first impressions haven’t really changed. I’ve been using it for about a year and a half or two years
⏹️ ▶️ John now. I’m coming from the Pearl world, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John which most people aren’t familiar with, but it is is a particular kind of world. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the things that you see in modern languages like Ruby and Python and node
⏹️ ▶️ John owe their existence to things that were in Pearl and Pearl’s got like the old creaky version of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so one of the things that’s very popular right now is of course NPM having a common standard and
⏹️ ▶️ John a common repository for to package up software and reuse it, which is why every node product
⏹️ ▶️ John has a million dependencies is the beauty and the horror of node. So I’m constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John comparing NPM to CPAN, which is Perl’s, like the OG
⏹️ ▶️ John distribution mechanism for open source software, right? It’s one well-known place where
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone uploads their stuff and that, you know, we can share this. The old thing was like, oh, there
⏹️ ▶️ John must be a Perl module for that because there was a Perl module for everything. Now people say that about Node. Of course, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Node world, there’s not one Node module for everything. a hundred of them
⏹️ ▶️ John and 99 of them are terrible. And they have nonsensical names because
⏹️ ▶️ John namespace solution is like the epic. No, one of the problems in those seems to have is they made just too darn easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to contribute to contribute to C pan. There was enough of a hurdle that you just didn’t get random stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but NPM is just, it’s too easy to contribute. So all the sensible names are taken by crap modules that
⏹️ ▶️ John are not maintained and everyone has nonsensical names for the good one. Then it’s very difficult to tell out of the 800
⏹️ ▶️ John NPM packages that claim to do this thing, one is not a virus, is not written
⏹️ ▶️ John by someone who has no idea what they’re doing and is actually maintained and is popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you learn that through culture like, oh, you just sort of as you spend more time in the
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem, you learn everyone knows about package X or package Y or whatever. But it’s not it’s not a great system
⏹️ ▶️ John to enter into as a new person trying to figure that out. And even the ones that are supposedly quote unquote good.
⏹️ ▶️ John The backward compatibility ethos is very different than it was in the pro world
⏹️ ▶️ John where they would like very rarely break backwards compatibility, even when adding new features.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas when I started to give an example, when I started doing node, we’re using mocha for testing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was mocha. I forget this specific version. It might have been some other nonsense word.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I took one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of my original
⏹️ ▶️ John projects. I’m like, Oh, I should update that and run it through a new CI or whatever. So I grabbed the project. I’m like, I should
⏹️ ▶️ John update these things. I if there’s been any new versions. The particular unit test thing I was doing
⏹️ ▶️ John had gone from version like 0.9. And now it was on version 66.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in between every stage, you know, 0.9 to 1.0 1.0 to 2.0. Those are all breaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the semantic versions, those are all backwards incompatible changes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to go through all those transitions say, Oh, you’ve got a 0.9 code, you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to change it to 1.0, do this. And then you want change from 1.0 to 2.0 do this. Oh, you want to change your 2.0 or 3.0? That’s just two
⏹️ ▶️ John years. That is a little bit ridiculous. So my two main complaints, and this is not new
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints everyone who uses node has always had complaints is that there’s, there’s too many NPM packages. Most of
⏹️ ▶️ John them are terrible. Almost none of them are up to the standards of the
⏹️ ▶️ John well known decades old pro modules that I’m used to like for for a certain function like Oh, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the best node package for talking to a progress database? Whatever you think the best
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it is worse than worse in terms of reliability, speed, features, comprehensibility, documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, standardization, stability, all, all measures that I care about. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything was better in the Pearl world, uh, for that, perhaps not performance cause Pearl super slow, but you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? Um, so I feel kind of like a cranky old man saying you whippersnappers, you’re making all these nonsensical
⏹️ ▶️ John mod NPM packages with nonsensical names, most of which are really bad and you break things too
⏹️ ▶️ John often and your documentation is bad and you don’t have good tests. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just it just makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco feel like a cranky old man. Beyond that, you like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but no, the thing is, I do like it. I do like it because it’s nice. It’s working it working in a language like
⏹️ ▶️ John if people don’t know, know, like it’s JavaScript, right? But it’s not JavaScript like it is in the browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is so refreshing to be able to work with modern JavaScript standards. You know, it feels like a different language.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a different language like it is nothing like writing JavaScript for the browser. It is so nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t even you use transpiling, we just, you know, use use the six straight up or like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so much nicer. And it’s fast. And despite me complaining about all the packages, usually there, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find something to do what you want, even if it just don’t look at the source code. That’s my advice. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re old and cranky like me, and you find a package that does what you want, and it seems like it’s pretty popular
⏹️ ▶️ John and reasonably well maintained, just don’t look at the source because you’ll get sad. But anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I mean, I think everything you said is reasonable, which maybe indicates that I’m becoming a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cranky old man as well. But I mean, when I was teaching myself Node, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was getting really, really popular. This was 2013, I think. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was getting really popular and I wanted to teach myself Node. And so I wrote what I call Camel, which is my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blogging engine. And basically once I wrote it, I have barely touched it ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since because it’s been pretty foolproof and that’s not a challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before anyone tries to break my blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s not a challenge. I’m sure there’s problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, again, I’m sure there’s problems. I’m not saying it’s perfect. All I’m saying is I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew zero node. I knew JavaScript okay, but I knew zero node and within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a month or something like that, I was able to come up with an entire blogging engine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the world’s best blogging engine. It has a lot of problems, but it does exactly what I want it to do and exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way I want it to. And for that, I think it’s really great. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and remain really pleased with how approachable it was. However, I echo everything you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, John, that it’s easy to fall into one of the many traps that are set on either side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the path you need to walk to have a successful Node project. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do quite like it. I think it has certain uses where it’s really, really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and certain uses where it’s not as great. But by and large, I like it a lot and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no regrets having used it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and we didn’t mention one more thing about the about NPM security. Not great. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are always getting, you know, security of that guy pulling left pad. That’s not really a security
⏹️ ▶️ John issue. But recently, they had a malware thing that was added to like an ESLint configuration module or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. There are controls on who can upload to popular
⏹️ ▶️ John packages. You know, again, package signing, some form of authentication,
⏹️ ▶️ John your GitHub keys. Like it’s all the wonders of the modern open source world. But because
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has so many dependencies with NPM and the dependencies are so small and so distant and so deep,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very easy to get one package that you don’t realize that like 50% of the world uses and injects some
⏹️ ▶️ John malware into it and now you’ve infected a lot of people. That’s not great either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Marco, you’ve never really touched it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I wrote my first feed crawler for Overcast in Node.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, not my second, my first one in PHP. Second one was Node, third one is the one I use now, which is in Go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Node one ran briefly, but I kept having memory leaks and stuff with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John capture problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John You were probably on like, that was like Node version 0.7 or something, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John language, not just the NPM packages, things change so fast. Like what are we up to now? Like node
⏹️ ▶️ John nine or something? Like there’s a new major version of node like every five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can’t keep up like even just hearing about like I don’t even use it just hearing about it. I can’t keep up with like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the heck is going on in node or any JavaScript web
⏹️ ▶️ John framework. And like the language, they add major language features with every new every new version picks
⏹️ ▶️ John up something more from another one of the you know, ECMA specs, right? Major
⏹️ ▶️ John important features. and it’s like you’re still using that sucker they added a single weight what are you doing it’s like when
⏹️ ▶️ John did they add a single weight it was like last week it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh they just added a single
#askatp: Old car for $15k
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, finally Gareth Thomas writes and I thought this was a really clever question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get a magical extra garage bay and Must fill it with the car you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have $15,000 and may only buy a car that is 25 years old or older
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you choose for those of you who cannot do mental math? That means 1993 or newer? 1993 or older you mean? Sorry. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the test anywhere. Yes older
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will start us off It took me about four and a half seconds to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the answer this question There is only one answer this question as far as I’m concerned. It is a 1990 through 1993 choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your year Nissan 300 ZX twin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turbo because I had the non turbo edition In the early 2000s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was obviously quite old at the time, but I loved that car I still think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks reasonably modern today. I miss that car even the naturally aspirated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version I miss it and I would kind of wish I never sold it and I would definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a twin turbo version And I’m pretty sure you can be those can be had for under 15 grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco you’re buying an mr2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I Looked at my other options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don’t I don’t follow of old cars that closely, so I kind of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsed around AutoTrader, which made this very easy. It was just like, all right, price cap of like 16,000, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure I can negotiate it down to 15, so price cap of 16,000, maximum year 93, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could just browse through different brands and what’s available. And I actually was unable to find any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DeLoreans within this price range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but. You wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want one. Yeah, probably not. But I was able to find a bunch of other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One other option I looked at was the, I wanted to see, what does BMW offer? I only found there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one M5 that fit the qualifications for sale. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was white, and it also had like 115,000 miles on it or something. And if I actually got an old BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 25-year-old BMW, that would last like two seconds before something
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you don’t know what you’re getting there because those aren’t original parts anymore. Who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that thing? Right, exactly. There were a good number of BMW 850s, which was a V12 coupe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey are interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, and it’s funny, they actually just announced, like recently, they’re doing a new 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series, which is basically the new version of their massive high-power coupe, which is basically like an even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger version of the 6
⏹️ ▶️ John series. Yeah, the new 8 is just the 6, but they made the number two bigger just to make you spend more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. Exactly, yeah, it’s like a tweaked up 6, But anyway, so yeah, maybe I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at something like this, but ultimately I’d be very afraid. I mean, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too afraid to own a four-year-old BMW out of warranty, to try to own one, a 25-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even like, if a car that old breaks, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix it? Like, who do you even go to? You have to like, you have to like have like, special dealers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know that can even get the parts or make the parts or find the parts that work somehow. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know how you maintain a car this old when it breaks. I have no idea how that world works. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine it’s a big pain in the butt and probably very expensive, but also I imagine certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things break and it’s just like, well, you can’t fix that. Sorry, you’re out of luck. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ruled out BMW for the most part because I knew that more things would break on them than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I would be willing to fix. So yeah, I looked at basically, yeah, the Toyota
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MR2, 91 my favorite generation of mr2 which again i’ve never actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driven or even been inside any of these Uh, this is the one I saw when I went with two cars and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee with you So I saw the outside it looked awesome. It’s just as I expect but uh but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to someday drive one of these and and maybe own one if that wouldn’t be totally ridiculous, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have the garage space. So oh well Uh, but this is I think it would be fun because it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I I know realistically it’s by any modern standard It’s not going to be fast It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure as hell not going to be safe. So you can make an argument that nobody should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving 25 year old cars now because modern safety standards are so much higher that anything this old is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a death trap, even if it was good by the standards of its day. So you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t be driving any of these, but if for some reason I felt like driving one of these, this would be kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’d be fun. It looks very retro, like 80s slash early 90s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it looks pretty cool in that way, I think, and they seem to be not that hard to find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because the Toyota, I feel like I have some chance of it being remotely maintainable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you can choose to either simply answer the question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or do what you really want to do, which is make merciless fun of our answers and then answer the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question. We all know
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going to happen here. I want to point out that Gareth, I think, phrased this part of the question for me and then but then Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John needed it as well. You get a magical extra garage bay because Gareth knew that my objection would be I’d have nowhere to put the
⏹️ ▶️ John car. And Marco just said, Oh, I don’t have the garage space for it. You forgot about the magical extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garage bay. That’s what I said. I said in reality, I would never buy this because of that. But in this hypothetical exercise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I accepted that premise and moved on.
⏹️ ▶️ John The magical extra garage is real Marco. And to people who are asking the
⏹️ ▶️ John chat room, the parameters, the question that I think we all answered is that you’re buying it today. So it’s a used car. $15,000 is
⏹️ ▶️ John your budget now. So you could go on to like auto trader and pay someone $15,000 for a used
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, nothing to do with what the car was cost when it was new or anything like that. No time travels involved here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, so if you ask this question to two oldish people, or at least people who are much older than 25,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think our first inclination and what all we all did is to try to buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John card that we liked back when we were alive 25 years ago when it was new. Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John buying his old car. Mark was buying a car that he never, he wanted but never got. My first instinct was to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to get my first car, which is 1992 Honda civic, I still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think was a great car. Oh, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John why? A stick shift 1992 Honda Civic. Now here’s part of the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, so I can kind of, so one of the things I looked at was old Acura
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Integras, which are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Civics, because my friend had one of those in college and I drove it all the time and it was a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fun. It was like some crappy, like late 80s Integra that was totally beaten up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and horrible, but it was a pretty fun car to drive for a college kid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and if you get the newer Integras, some of those are actually a pretty decent, pretty quick car.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like after the generation you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John the square headlights, when they had the four tiny circle headlights. We had one of those. My parents had one of those, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it became my brother’s car. It had a sunroof though, so my head hit the headliner. I didn’t like it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about the 92 Civic is you can get a 92 Civic for like
⏹️ ▶️ John two grand, right? But I’ve got a $15,000 budget. So what I would be looking for is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 1992 Civic in amazing condition with with low mileage. The
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with these Civics of this generation is they’ve all been massively modified, because these were
⏹️ ▶️ John the original tuner import car. You could do so much to them. So it was very, very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to find a 92, 93 Civic that has not been modified. But if you have 15 grand, maybe you find
⏹️ ▶️ John a low mileage pristine thing, right? So but anyway, that was my first instinct. But I did look in the
⏹️ ▶️ John other direction as well. And so let me just not pick my nostalgia car. What else can I
⏹️ ▶️ John find that has nothing to do with nostalgia? like kind of like I did in our original neutral thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John I came up with the Acura NSX because you could get one for 25 grand, which probably isn’t true now because they’re going up in price. But back
⏹️ ▶️ John then it was like be amazed at some car that you didn’t think you could get 15 K, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s 25 years old. And I was leaning towards Mercedes there because I always love
⏹️ ▶️ John those, you know, late 80s Mercedes. And back
⏹️ ▶️ John then they really made them like tanks. They over engineered everything. Not to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have great reliability, ability, but just to say that the parts tended to last a long time. There wasn’t things chintzy on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were very big, very heavy. The safety is not terrible because they were just
⏹️ ▶️ John so big and heavy. So if you have a fighting chance, like unlike a 92 civic, which will crumple like a tin can,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, an eighties s class or something would probably protect you reasonably well for a 25 year old car.
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t find any s classes that were in the price range, but I did
⏹️ ▶️ John find you can get yourself. I really wanted to be 12, but I do it. I could not get a V12 Mercedes for 15k. I just couldn’t find one on
⏹️ ▶️ John Autoradar. You can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John the 850 from BMW. I don’t like that car. But I could find
⏹️ ▶️ John the V8 once. My car, if I don’t go with just buying my 92
⏹️ ▶️ John Civic, is 500 SL. I always loved that generation, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John late 80s, early 90s 500 SL. I should have had a link to it, but I hope you’re envisioning the one that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m thinking of. It’s a convertible. It’s a two seat. It’s got a big V8 and it’s built like a tank.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s old school 80s Mercedes. It’s incredibly heavy. You know, like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John I always wanted to have one of those if I can have a big S class because it was just so ridiculous to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh, it’s convertible. Is it small and light and nimble? No, no, it’s a gigantic battleship.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why that’s why you need to be 12. It’s a gigantic battleship with like 600 horsepower V 12 in the front Like
⏹️ ▶️ John a two seat car, two seat convertible with a 600 horsepower V12. It’s ridiculous today. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John made them back in the 80s and they were awesome. If I can’t get that, I’d get the V8 and I would be satisfied because it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing to me that you can get a 500 SL for 15K, but you can if it’s 25 years old.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get a 500 SL for six grand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually not a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John What was the mileage in this? 104,000 miles. I mean, like the 80s, it’s kind of like buying- That’s an early 90s one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, both. Yeah, both. Both Honda and Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ John like made cars differently back then. Honda was before the big Japanese decontent. And Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ John just everything was just massively over engineered and ridiculously heavy and just beefy. So there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John chance that this car will still be holding together. And I think people treat Mercedes pretty well, like
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike an integrity, which people are going to beat the hell boring, rich people drive the Mercedes. Hopefully it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in better condition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our three sponsors this Squarespace, Jamf Now, and Northwestern University,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcasts, so
Neutral: S.M.A.R.T.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so let me give you the good news and the bad news. The good news is this press car that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have has answered a lot of the questions that I had about what I need to buy for a new car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The bad news is the press car that I have has raised a million new questions about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car I need to buy. So we’re all going to go on this journey together over the next few months before I finally make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Even further.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to go on the journey? Like we haven’t been on this journey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The journey is never ending, my friend. It’s going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. The journey has been like every other after show for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the last six months. Six
⏹️ ▶️ John months! It feels like it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey years. Oh yeah, it’s gonna be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot longer. It’s like the M5 purchase story all over again, but with something far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less exciting at the other
⏹️ ▶️ John end. Now that you don’t need to go anywhere anymore, I don’t think you need a car at all. It’s to solve this problem. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cut the Gordian knot here and say no car for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s actually something I’ve been considering, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could get like a something done like a smart
⏹️ ▶️ John car. Drive. Did you I saw I think someone mentioned in one of our slacks but I saw what
⏹️ ▶️ John I can only assume was a convertible smart car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in London. No I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I saw I saw one in Paris. It was actually I thought it looked really good. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like apparently smart a while back made like basically like a little like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little coupe like a little it looked it looked almost like a little sports car like it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would know. it look like it looked like a smart car that had gone through a bridge that was too low
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like it’s like the cartoon where like the person goes rolling past the camera like they’re no longer under engine
⏹️ ▶️ John power but they’re like their their their head is all blackened from an explosion that goes and like
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls to a stop after the top of the car has been torn off it looked incredibly unsafe and ridiculous looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like you were riding like like one of those little cars outside the shopping outside the grocery store that your kids go in that
⏹️ ▶️ John rocks back and forth that’s what it looked like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s called the Smart Roadster. I would say it looks almost like like the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car version of the Miata. Like it’s it’s very much like in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John vein. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I walked past one that was that was in Paris and I was like, Oh, what’s that? Like, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in the sense that like, I want that. But that’s really interesting looking like it’s kind of cool. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like something to it. I thought that I thought it looked really cool in person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the picture you posted. But that’s not what I saw. What I saw looked
⏹️ ▶️ John much more ridiculous. So that car is just ugly. But the one I saw looked much more ridiculous. It literally looked like the
⏹️ ▶️ John grocery store little put a quarter in and the car shakes back and forth, but with adult humans in it. My word.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to figure it
⏹️ ▶️ John out. There is another 2018 smart convertible, but this also isn’t what I saw. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the one I saw, I mostly saw the front of it, but I think the one I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the little hatchback version, the coupe convertible version that’s on the Wikipedia page here, which does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, I think, significantly better than the one that has just like the chopped off truck back thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the smart convertible, but it’s also not what I saw. This is the thing. The thing that I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a quarter of the size of this, assuming that’s a normal sized
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco person. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m talking about. This, the rest of their lineup is terrible. The smart roadster was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, they had to stop selling
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s an ugly car. It’s an ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. What’s the relationship, by the way, between Smart and Mercedes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I believe Mercedes was selling Smart cars here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Richmond. Now maybe that was a one-off on that particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealer? I think they own it. Is that what it is? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s a sub-brand of Mercedes. I don’t know if it always
⏹️ ▶️ John was. I think they’re A-class. Isn’t there A-class? Like, doesn’t it share a platform with the Smart?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’m misremembering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. It’s an acronym for something that I think might involve Mercedes in
⏹️ ▶️ John the M part. Yeah, I don’t even know what the acronym is for the hard drive checking thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a smart car. I’m trying to remember what the hard drive one stands for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something monitoring of…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Derives from cooperation with Swatch. There you go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Mercedes. Swatch Mercedes Art. S-M-A-R-T. Swatch Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Art. That’s why they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so ugly. Holy smokes. I never knew that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. Self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel so much better, John. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaning of that is almost as useful as the functionality itself.