284: Hotel California Keyboard

26 Jul 2018

Modern CPUs are more complicated than tomato sauce.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Easier keycap replacement on the 2018 keyboard
  • Membranes are for ingress prevention
    • More from MacRumors
    • "Subsequent remedial measures"
    • iFixit particle experiment
  • Intel giveth and Intel taketh away
    • The mythical USB-C hub
    • Sad recent history of Intel CPUs
• Corrections on the throttling discussion from last week
  • AltiVec
  • TDP
  • RIP hyper-threading
• VRM-throttling theory
• Apple's official throttling fix
  • Macworld's tests
• Intel Power Gadget
  • Removed, and then reappears
• Intel and the Danger of Integration
  • Process-Architecture-Optimization model
  • Itanium
  • Power Mac G5
• #askatp:
  • Retina screen settings (via Greg Kolodziejczk)
    • Eye Friendly
  • What tech opinions do we regret? (via James)
    • Casey's journey to the Mac
    • The iPhone: I'll care later
  • John's pasta-sauce recipe (via James Evans)
    • Rao's Vodka Sauce
• Post-show: The Spanish Italian food inquisition
  • Lidia's lasagna recipe
  • The basis for John's "carbonara"

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Preamble
2. Easier-to-replace keycaps 🖼️
3. Excuses for “quieter” BS
4. iFixit keyboard test 🖼️
5. USB-C hubs in 2020?
6. Intel’s 14nm stall
7. Sponsor: AfterShokz (code ATPBUNDLE)
8. CPUs are complicated
9. Reddit VRM post
10. Apple’s fix
11. Sponsor: Linode
12. Disappearing Power Gadget
13. Intel and the Danger of Integration
14. Sponsor: Backblaze
15. #askatp: Retina scaling modes
16. #askatp: Changed opinions
17. #askatp: John’s sauce
18. #askatp: John’s backups
19. Ending theme
20. A second helping 🖼️

Preamble

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I gotta go get a cup of water because I didn’t I realize I don’t have one here. So hang on a second I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be back play some fish. I’ll be back in a second. Oh god.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, please don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We learned a lot more about the MacBook Pros and everything this week and honestly I feel like we spent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too much time on it But the news is so big that we do need to talk about a few angles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I and like this it’s the kind of news that Whenever there’s like a like a new like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brief little scandal about our new Apple product that news is relevant for like a week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then after that the value of it is basically zero.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Except for the except for the keyboard which has had like a three-year life. Well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they haven’t fixed that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} like it’s one thing like when they fix it. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never know. Have they? Well I guess yeah I guess we don’t know but yeah like when they when they fix it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then it becomes like then the value of like the scandal that happened is basically zero. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I it’s it’s rough that we have to like spend like pretty much three shows talking about this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there’s a bunch of angles in this that are kind of interesting. I’ve learned a lot about this, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope that this can, I hope we can provide some value besides, hey, there was a problem and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now it’s fixed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, it’s been weird because we caught the drama

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with regard to the brand new i9 is i9 or i7 I’m having a brain fart.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, technically, it’s all of them, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} one that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco caused the most drama was the i9.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, I’m not crazy. Anyway, so we caught, we recorded just after that all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey broke, and in the time between we recorded and now, when we’re recording again, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey basically all blown back over. But we’ll talk more about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Our timing was perfect, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} These

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} crises were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perfectly timed for our recording, so thank you, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, actually, I agree. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, because the big fix came out was yesterday, was it? And so yeah, like we actually are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco perfectly timed to to talk about this in a way that is probably complete,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has a decent amount of informingness to it, informidness information

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to it. And like, because you know, like last week, we were kind of in the middle of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Like we had seen the videos and Reddit posts that like, there’s a problem with the new MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro, we think. And we could speculate a whole bunch on what that was. we could say, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I spouted off about like what should and shouldn’t be the case. Now we have the information to actually like now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have way more information than last time. We’ll get to that. So I guess let’s end this preamble

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for now. We’ll get to that. But suffice to say, I know this is a lot to talk about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new MacBook Pro and it’s weird throttling thing. But I think that I think we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco value to add. I will try to keep it brief.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey With that in mind, everyone look at your timestamps now. All right. So to start off, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do some of the more mundane things.

Easier-to-replace keycaps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It turns out that it is easier to replace the keycaps on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey brand new keyboards. From this small website I’ve never heard of called 512pixels,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an Apple service document tells us that the keyboard buttons, is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey word I’m looking for, they’re easier to replace and the membrane is, quote, to prevent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey debris from entering the butterfly mechanism. Be careful not to tear the membrane. So that’s good news.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And hopefully it works. to combine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two follow-up items there. What are you doing? I’m following the show notes, man. What do you want from me? That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John violation, sir. That’s right. Boy, you violated the indenting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} god.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Indenting just for a reason. It’s like Python. Significant white space. Oh god.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, why are you… I thought only Merlin got bad cop John. Now I’m getting bad cop John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s no such thing as bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cop John. You messed with follow-up, Casey. I mean, what do you expect? Oh my word.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keycap replacement I think is a good move like independent of the you know the reliability of the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or how you like it or whatever being able to just fix just one keycap is a smart

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to do and again three years for three years into this keyboard now starting from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 2015 MacBook the fact that they went three years with a keyboard where I have a keycap like pops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off or something that you have to replace the entire keyboard it just seems like not a smart move from a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cost and repairability perspective. So I’m glad that they’ve addressed that, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s such a shame to see there’s nothing actually wrong with my keyboard, but I dropped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something on it and it broke this one key cap off. Well, top case replacement. That used to be the answer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So now that you have a fighting chance, Apple repair people have a fighting chance of fixing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your key cap by itself. Although you have to be careful not to tear a little membrane thing because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John membrane as I fix it, tear down as shown is all one piece. So if you tear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, it’s not like you can replace just the membrane under that key. It’s just one giant thing. So you need a whole new top case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the second thing was like, I mean, we talked about this last week. I just wanted to put in here for confirmation like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. Apple just said the keyboard is quieter, but they had a patent about keeping debris out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the patent looks like the keyboard. So presumably that that thing is not there to make it quieter is to keep stuff out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s own documentation. It’s internal documentation for it’s like service guide or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the keyboard has a membrane under the key caps to prevent debris from entering the butterfly mechanism. It’s right from Apple’s mouth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if anyone still had any question whether the membrane was there to make it quieter or to keep debris out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple has settled that once and for all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s like…

Excuses for “quieter” BS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we have another follow-up item here that I’d like to also read. This was from Josh Fenton, because this is related to this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When Apple issued the release of these new MacBook Pros, and they said, this new keyboard design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is quieter. And everyone’s like, does it fix the dust killing it thing or not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s pretty clear now that Apple was kind of BSing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us on that. Like, yeah, I guess it is a little quieter, maybe, but people are straining

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to hear the difference. Meanwhile, both Apple’s support documents now, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iFixit teardowns and things, confirm that this is not really to be quieter. It’s really there for this ingress prevention.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So obviously that’s the real reason it’s here, and Apple was kind of BSing us. One of the reasons why people speculated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco including us, why they might be not saying why this is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, is that there are a number of class action lawsuits about the keyboard failure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so people are speculating, Maybe they didn’t want to say that it’s quiet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or say that it fixes this problem because that would admit fault that there is a problem in the first place. And we got a nice email

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Josh Fenton, who is a lawyer, saying that there’s a legal doctrine that prohibits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco introducing subsequent remedial measures as evidence of the existence of a previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco negligence or design defect. So the idea is you couldn’t make a legal, according to this doctrine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is not a valid legal argument to say you definitely had a defect before because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new product changed in this way to make this thing better. And Josh Fenton says, while counterintuitive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this doctrine exists in support of a public policy that the law should not serve as a disincentive for people or companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to improve the safety and quality of their products, services, or premises. Because that would be kind of counterintuitive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and kind of damaging over time. So I don’t know, I mean, chances are Apple is being exceptionally conservative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not even wanting to try to have to invoke this kind of doctrine. Like they probably want as much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco immunity as possible against these lawsuits. So this doesn’t say like, you know, they don’t have to come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out and say that this is fixed, but you know, it does seem like they have less legal reason than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we predicted to avoid saying that this is fixed because of ingress. So if that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John true, what’s left is what people were thinking before, which is pride, as in corporate pride, or like, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would we admit that we ever did anything wrong? Why don’t we just say, we have a new keyboard, it’s great, best keyboard we ever made,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s quieter, and just don’t answer any questions about, you know, reliability,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? because if it’s not legal, keeping their mouth shut, it’s a worse look. Because if it was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legal thing, like whatever lawsuits are weird, and you’re right, maybe it still could be an abundance of caution, and who knows if there’s some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John specific case law related to this or whatever, but if the legal reasons are taken out of the equation, the only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing left is like, I think, a miscalculation, a PR miscalculation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perhaps. Because it looks better when you say, we had a problem, and we fixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, and the new ones are great. And it’s not like they’re not admitting they had a problem, they do have the repair extension program and you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that just for the hell of it. You don’t do repair extension program on a keyboard that has perfect reliability, right? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously a problem and yet still somehow they could not bring themselves to say this new keyboard is more reliable.

iFixit keyboard test

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Going back to the keyboard and in these membranes I fix it did some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really interesting work with regard to testing whether or not the membrane does anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So they have this post which will link to where they did a few things to kind of figure out does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this make a difference? And what they did was they? Sprinkled blue powder on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey top of the keys use them for a while and then popped off the key caps to see Okay, where’s this blue powder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the conclusion they seem to come to is that yeah, it definitely helps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the most relevant part of this test though is so they did this glowy sand which is like very very fine and you know it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of cool because you can track where it is and everything and showing that it mostly keeps it you know and an important part is think they compared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to one without the membrane say without the membrane it’s all over the place and with the membrane it’s mostly on the edge it’s good right well then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they took a little bit of sand and put it on and it wedged the keys like instantly yeah because there are holes in the membrane there are big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John holes where the hinges come through so it’s not like sand can’t get in and it’s not like sand has to sneak in through a tiny opening

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the openings are pretty big so uh still you should really avoid getting sand on your keyboard the good news

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we mentioned before is if you do get a piece of sand under your keyboard there’s a chance that they can pop off the key cap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take out the sand above the key cap back on and you don’t have to have all top caters replacement but you know like i said if you’re if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to make some kind of barrier to keep grit out and there are five giant holes under every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John key where grit can get in there’s only so much you can do so probably improved probably Probably better, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe don’t use your MacBook Pro on the beach.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, it’s too early to know whether in practice this will actually reduce the occurrence of the keyboard problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it is kind of nice that they did this test. It is kind of nice to know we aren’t totally out of the woods on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, if you have one of these, you still can’t, like, you know, eat a muffin on top of it without running a pretty big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco risk there. You’re simply, you have a reduced risk. But in a way, I also think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, Casey, you’ve had with your MacBook One, you’ve had a lot of compressed air adventures,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as Apple recommends, trying to move around the piece of dust that gets under

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the key so it goes to a different key. I think with this, that’s probably not going to work. With this, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the dynamic here will be that it is harder for things to get in, but it’s even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco harder for anything to ever get back out. So if something does get in, which is, as John said, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still possible, it’s just less likely, but if something does get in, I bet you’re done. I bet that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. You have no recourse. It’s nice that they’re making this better. I hope in practice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s gonna be so rare because you know I fix it said they had to like try pretty hard to finally get something in it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had like you know really blast it with sand I think so it was I hope that in practice it’s not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a problem but they still have a keyboard that if a piece of dust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets in the wrong spot it will kill it. They just have made it less likely for that to happen so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco progress but not probably completely out of the woods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put a thing in the thing I put in the show notes is that they didn’t actually have to try hard with the sand. Like this is a quote directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the thing. We sprinkle a pinch of sand over the keyboard, type on the keys for a minute, and we don’t even have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lift the keycaps to realize that something is wrong. A few keys have seized up. So it wasn’t actually that hard with sand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know what to think about this. I do think that listening to Marco, I’ve come up with the official

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unofficial name for this keyboard, which is the Hotel California keyboard, where you can enter, but you can never leave.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a Roach Motel. I was going to make the Roach Motel joke, but you tried to make the Hotel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John California. I think the Roach Motel is better, but that may

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} be before your time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. First of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} all, it is slightly before our time. But second of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey come on. Hotel California is so good. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That’s fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All in the chat room has an interesting question, which I think we should cover real quick before we move on. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guys think this is an acceptable solution? And taking that word specifically, acceptable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think this is acceptable. I’m not in love with it. I think that everyone is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey worried about keyboard reliability, in part because we haven’t really heard what the reliability is like. You know, these machines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have only been in people’s hands for what, a week, two weeks? But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not, well, I feel like it’s acceptable. It is enough to make me think it’s worth trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these new keyboards if you’ve had a problem in the past, But it certainly seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like the Achilles heel status of these keyboards hasn’t changed. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a problem. And it’s also tough because, you know, I’ve been going back and forth between my MacBook Adorable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and my full Darth Vader, you know, 104 whatever key,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wireless keyboard. And although I do love this magic keyboard that Apple makes, and I’ve said that many, many, many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey times on the show, I still like the feel of my Adorable a little bit more, which is weird, I never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thought I’d like anything more than this, more than this magic keyboard. So it’s acceptable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I feel like time will tell to see if it’s really enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, Marco, obviously you have thoughts on this. So let’s start with John and then Marco, maybe you can bring us home afterwards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So what was the question again? Is it acceptable?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so do you guys think this is an acceptable solution?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, I don’t really know what acceptable means. I think the question for me is, would I like recommend these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptops to people, right? like is, you know, say, yeah, you go ahead and buy one. They’re good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like it’s okay. They fix the keyboard things. And the answer to that is I, the jury’s still out as far as I’m concerned. Like, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t, I don’t know yet. It’s too early. It would make me more comfortable, surprisingly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I know they’re not gonna do this, but like if these were included in the repair extension, just because you have this keyboard and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s supposed to be better about reliability and it probably is, but if it isn’t, I don’t wanna pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new top case after a year, right? I want the, it’s almost like the 2017 and 16 and 15 models have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assurance of like, well, you get one and if you do have a problem, don’t worry, they’ll cover it for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John four years, right? And that’s probably how long your laptop will last anyway before the battery’s hosed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whereas this one, it’s like, oh, that problem’s probably gone, so you’re probably fine. But if it turns out the problem isn’t gone, and again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the sprinkling of sand, we see that it actually isn’t entirely gone and they’re under the worst possible conditions. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone spilled some sand on your laptop, right? And you typed on it for two seconds. Then I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanna be stuck having to replace it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s an improvement. It’s better. I particularly like the idea that you can replace a key cap without replacing the whole keyboard. That I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think is a big possibility. Like you won’t have to pay for a whole new top case. You’ll just bring it in. Yeah, it’s annoying, but you got some sand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John under your keyboard. They’ll pop it off, give you a new key app, or you break a key cap by dropping something heavy in your keyboard and they can fix it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I feel like it’s still not up to the bar of the 2015, which is basically a keyboard that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure people had problems with it and people broke key caps off and stuff like that, But it wasn’t it didn’t raise to the level of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, some high percentage of people you know with 2015 MacBook Pros had one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or more keyboard problems like you just know I never talked about the keyboard. It was like the keyboard was the keyboard and whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think this one has crossed that bar yet. I feel like it’s just the as we said in past shows, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the accumulation of band aids. This is like the maximum number of band aids all piled on top of this little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wound. But the scab is kind of still there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else said. I think the jury is still out on this. I really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t wait for, you know, I did order one of these machines. We can talk about that later if you want. Tell you one thing I did when I ordered it. I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ordered one of those silicone covers for the keyboard for like 10 bucks on Amazon. Oh no, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just don’t know. And here’s the thing, like, you know, it’s basically a $10 insurance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco policy. Like I, I can spend $10 on this stupid silicone cover. This problem might have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been solved, but we don’t know It sure seems like it hasn’t really been fully solved, but maybe it’s been improved

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough that we’ll stop caring. The correct solution to this problem is to design a keyboard that either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dust can get in and out freely so that dust getting in for a second isn’t a big deal because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it can just come right back out again like the old ones, or design a keyboard that dust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t get into at all. You know, like if you look at like the design of like the smart keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for iPads, where it’s basically like a cloth membrane over the whole thing, covering the key, like one big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing over the whole keys, so that even like, you know, you can basically spill water on it, and you know, it doesn’t really go in anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I feel like those two extremes are the way to go here. Either make it so dust can come in and out freely, or make it so dust can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get in at all. And they haven’t done that yet. As John said, this is still a band-aid on this keyboard design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I still really want to know what the next design is. Like, what’s the next major keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here? This keyboard, they took a lot of risks, they did a lot of crazy things. They optimized for factors I don’t give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two craps about. Like, great, my keyboard is precise and stable. Two things I have never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once pushed the key on any other keyboard and said, this is too imprecise and unstable. That has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never, like, I’ve never had that opinion of anything. So I wanna see where they go next.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So would you say it’s acceptable? I’m not trying to snark, I’m genuinely asking. Like, I feel like you’re kinda on both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sides of that. So yes, no, acceptable?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco With the caveat that it’s still way too early to tell. Just by the way it seems, by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way it looks, like based on I fix it down and stuff and they’re testing, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give it like a B. Like this seems like it’s probably a decent solution, but it’s not the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solution.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By the way, with your little silicone cover thing, I’m wondering if you have just increased the amount of finger grease that’s gonna appear on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re already past that point. You’re all on board with this. I’ve fought that for years. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I had my very first PowerBook, my first laptop, I was very careful with how I arranged the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco backpack. I made like a whole custom padded compartment out of black felt so it was never squished

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco against. So I told you before my theory about what causes the keyboard imprint on the screens,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it’s closed flat, like on top of a desk, they don’t make contact, but if it’s compressed slightly in a bag,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the screen lid flexes slightly inwards and that compresses the keyboard against the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think that’s where, so it really depends on what kind of bag you’re putting it in, whether anything is on top of it or pushing against it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I used to care a lot about that. In the last few years, I just started losing that fight more and more I got like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different backpacks and different bags and everything and now I just don’t care anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the other thing I noticed it was looking at laptops around work is I think it was 2015 So maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the couple years before like the anti-glare coating would start coming off. Have you seen that? Oh, yeah the delamination. Yes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah a bunch of the ones that work have it of it surprisingly It’s one of those problems that if you don’t like people don’t notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it until I pointed out to them and say you realize your Your anti-glare thing is I don’t know if it’s the anti-glare or de-lamination

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or everybody It’s a you can tell it looks kind of like there’s like grease on the screen but it’s not greased, so you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t clean it off and it tends to happen around the edges or whatever. But people are like, yeah, they shrug. And one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the reasons they shrug is the rest of their screen is covered with finger grease from the keyboard and directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from their fingers. their entire screens look like a mess anyway and they’re just used to it.

USB-C hubs in 2020?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, Marco, you have something to smile about, though, because a little birdie has told us something very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very interesting. Can you tell us about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so as I’ve ranted a lot about before, the USB-C ecosystem is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not really panning out and for me, one of the biggest problems with it, yes, you can convert everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you go out and buy all new cables, you can get like all cables that have USB-C on one end and whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you need on the other end for all your stuff. So you can convert your cables pretty easily, but you can’t convert

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hubs because there doesn’t seem to be any kind of actual like USB-C hub that just takes one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco USB-C port and makes like four other USB-C ports out of it. And, you know, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lots of complexity to the USB-C spec with things like Thunderbolt and DisplayPort and power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s very, very complex. So making such a thing is apparently very difficult, which is why they don’t really seem to exist. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are a few products in the market, like a couple of those like $300 docks that have of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two output ports maybe, but that’s usually about your only option. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think USB-C requires hubs that just, you know, take one port to multiple C ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it to really finally take over. And we’ve heard from an anonymous person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Intel is finally releasing a hub chip for USB-C next year. So this would be a chip that could be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put into hubs. We may not see products based on it until 2020. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know enough about this kind of stuff to say whether this is it, whether this is all we need, whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is even true or plausible. But typically, the chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are in USB hubs and Thunderbolt hubs and everything, they tend to be made by very few manufacturers. There’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, that’s why you have like a million different brand names on Amazon for what appears to be like about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same hub or like the same kind of thing. It’s because there’s like one company that makes those chips in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And usually it’s somebody like Intel or Viya or something like that, like, you know, like one of the big chip makers. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so apparently, if the chip to make USB-C hubs hasn’t really existed yet, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would certainly explain the problem that we have. And if Intel is making one in the next couple of years, that’s probably good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco news. Although I kind of wish it was out now. And I kind of wonder, like, we’ve had USB-C ports on MacBooks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco since 2015. Like, what are we waiting for?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do we want to talk about the history lesson that was also associated with this?

Intel’s 14nm stall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I thought this was a good summary, because like the larger issue, I mean, it’s not really related to throttling, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s the deal with Intel CPUs these days? Like, you know, there’s the bigger picture of like Moore’s law and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ve talked about, but like Intel CPUs haven’t been getting that much faster, that much better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in recent years for a variety of reasons. And one of one of the reasons is that they haven’t been able to get their new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John processor 10 nanometer process online. So they’ve just been making part after part after part out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 14 nanometers. It’s only so much you can do by sort of rearranging the deck chairs like, can we add more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there? I think they’re adding more cores. I think they’re going to go eight cores in the same CPUs that we have six cores in now. Because like, what else,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what else can they do? Because they don’t have a smaller process. And this this sort of semi

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brief history, I think is a good rundown of what the deal was and why Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might find itself in a difficult situation designing its laptop around these chips. So 2016,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when the Skylake MacBook Pro was released, Canyon Lake was supposed to be around corner in 2017 with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an LPDDR4 controller supporting 32 gigs. So in 2016 they’re like, oh, no problem. Next year, 2017, we’ll be able to support 32 gigs with low power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That didn’t happen. Then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cannon Lake got pushed to 2018. Kaby Lake was inserted, which just skyrocketed with HEVC and HTCP 2.2.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Then Coffee Lake got added in 2018, which is just Kaby Lake with more cores. And Cannon Lake was canceled,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John although this person says, the same anonymous person, yes, really, really, although Intel hasn’t fessed up yet. Now Ice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Lake is teetering on the edge of failure, and Intel is prepping yet more 14-nanometer parts for 2019. And here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we still are, 14-nanometer with Skylake memory controller. And the new 15-inch MacBook Pro uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the built-in memory control, which works just fine with DDR4, which is what we’re seeing right now. Apple has made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plenty of own goals in soccer parlance, football parlance, and the MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John primarily due to design hubris. Sorry. But trying to plan products on Intel’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John roadmap has become masochistic. Like, what do you do if you’re going to plan, like, this is the new generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of MacBook Pro and we’re going to design three models for the next three years, and Intel tells us this is their roadmap, and then they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John miss that roadmap entirely and just keep releasing 14 nanometer parts. It’s not a great situation to be in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can argue that the correct choice is to scrap everything and redesign

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new case to handle 14 nanometer things, but the lead times might just not have been good enough to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, you know, we’re all in the same boat here. It’s not like someone else has secret better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel CPUs than Apple. Apple gets the same ones as everyone else. And Intel really needs to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its process online. And we have a topic about that we might get to later, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet another reason why people continue to entertain fantasies of ARM-based Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because one thing that has happened in recent years is Apple’s ARM CPUs are getting better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time and they’re really, really good. And like every time I go to Geekbench or whatever and look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scores for like the iPhone X versus Apple’s MacBooks, like Apple’s 2018 MacBooks, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that far apart. And I think about exactly how many fans there are in an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone 10, right? How big it is, how big the battery is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then I look at the Geekbench scores, and like, our Macs are looking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I know it’s not Apple’s to Apple’s, I know it’s not the same, I know it doesn’t have 32 gigs of RAM in the phone, like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understand, I know it’s not a giant monster GPU, discrete GPU in there but boy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel is really making our Macs look more and more attractive every year.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something that goes into your ear and I have problems with both those things. The in-ear ones just hurt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. I just don’t have the ears for them. The The ones that go around or on your ears are too hot for the summer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. And when you’re walking around outside, it’s hard to hear things like cars driving

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have these little transducers. These are very small. They have like a little wrap-around neckband and these little transducers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that rest kind of in front of your ears on your cheekbones. They send little vibrations that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your eardrums pick up as sound, but the world doesn’t hear it that way. And in addition, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nothing is blocking your ears, you can still hear the world around you. So it’s very practical when you’re doing outdoor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco activities, walking, cycling, even just doing stuff around the house if you want to hear if someone knocks on the door

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CPUs are complicated

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In one of my big rants last episode on this throttling thing, you know, I’ve honestly, I’ve mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tried to stay out of the i9 throttling thing because I just didn’t know much about it and it was a configuration I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have and I couldn’t get access to and it just seemed like it was mostly playing out on YouTube and Reddit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But one of the big lines I drew in the sand was a CPU should never run below its base

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clock. Like it should never have to do that in normal operation. It should be able to sustain its base clock indefinitely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if it can’t, there’s something seriously wrong with the thermal design around it. And it turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out that was not a complete picture of how things work anymore. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve learned a lot since the last episode, and so I wanted to go over a few things. First of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we pointed out last episode, the 800 megahertz clock, like where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the CPU would drop down to 800 megahertz. Now, in the throttling problem, where it would cause like the big sawtooth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco graph, basically of like constant spikes up and down, that actually was the real problem. But sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the CPU will drop to 800 megahertz because it’s idle. 800 megahertz is simply the lowest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clock that the CPU will typically use in just power save mode. It is also used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in very extreme cases for throttling, for thermal reasons. But if your CPU hits 800

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco megahertz, that might just be because it wasn’t doing that much and it clocked itself down to safe power. Secondarily,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so going back to a CPU must always maintain its base clock no matter what.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it turns out that when Intel’s recent AVX instructions are being used,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their processors reduce their base clock because AVX instructions are apparently so like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heavy duty complicated to execute that the processors are designed to actually reduce their base clock

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while running AVX instructions. And I honestly don’t know that much about AVX, but it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the continuation of MMX, like back in the old days, MMX. And then what were the other ones?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There were a bunch of SSE and all those extra instructions, like big vector instructions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to process lots of data at once. So AVX is like the recent version of that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea. It doesn’t even mention Altevec, but I’ll do it because I have to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, your Altevec really took over the world there, John. Altevec was awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So much better than MMX. So among the valid reasons that a CPU might operate below

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco base clock are either it’s saving power because it’s idle or it’s using AVX instructions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if it’s at full load. And then finally, we talk a lot about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CPU’s TDP. This is a figure in watts, which is the maximum power draw or heat generation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of the thing that a CPU will issue. And it turns out my view of TDP and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my definition of TDP was outdated. The 15-inch is usually like a 45 watt TDP on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those processors, which I thought would mean that at peak load no matter what it would not exceed 45 watts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of heat output and therefore power usage. It turns out that’s not the case. It turns out TDP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the expected maximum average power draw with all cores

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco operating at the base frequency. If Turbo Boost is being used, it can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exceed TDP all the time. Like, it can exceed TDP constantly. It can do it whenever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it wants. TDP is just when Turbo Boost is not being used, when it’s the base frequency and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all cores are maxed out, that’s roughly what you can expect the maximum power output to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, we’ve been told by people who know more about this than us, thank goodness they exist, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before Coffee Lake, which is this generation, and before Kaby Lake, which is the 2017 generation, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually used to be a lot more headroom in practice before the CPUs would really hit TDP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The TDP figures were apparently very conservative. CPUs would not normally surpass them much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco under load, even using turbo. But as we mentioned a few minutes ago, Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not being able to get to their 10 nanometer process, get those chips out the door, has had to cram more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and more transistors and chips into this old 14 nanometer process, which means that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re cramming more cores and more stuff into the chips without shrinking their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco process size, which means they’re just gonna use more power. Simple as that. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the design of each core hasn’t changed substantially to make them more efficient, and there’s no process size shrink to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco give us a cooling benefit there. So basically, these chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are getting more and more complicated without increasing their efficiency much. So they are using more power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So we didn’t just get two cores for free, we got two more cores by basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Intel is now approaching and surpassing the quoted TDP figures much more often. So when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a CPU is under load, that 45 watt TDP processor in the 15 inch can use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way more than 45 watts. It probably won’t sustain it for very long, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco frequently and will easily pull 65 watts. I think somebody even said it could pull 100 watts at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco max load, like if max turbo is on. Like, this is pulling massive amounts of power,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s generating massive amounts of heat, and this is not just the i9, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of the Coffee Lake CPUs, even down to the 13-inch ones. So basically, everything I knew about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both clock speed and TDP was outdated and wrong. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I say this, you know, because it’s, you know, something I really am trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get better at. We wanna make sure our hot takes are well-informed. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s hard because whenever there’s something like this, whenever there is some kind of big Apple drama,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like when that annoying guy on YouTube broke his iMac Pro and CleanApple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wouldn’t fix it because it was broken, not because he destroyed it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like everyone, whenever anything like that happens, everyone comes to people like us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Twitter and is like, hey, what do you think of this? This is crazy, right? Oh my God. And I try to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a really fast opinion out there because everybody wants it, and because I want to give it, because I’m excited too, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if Apple has done something wrong, I want to call them on it too, you know? I thought I knew enough about this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be able to say, like, this should never happen, XYZ should never happen, and they’re wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I just didn’t in this case. Like, there’s so much about this that’s way more complicated than I thought it was. Much, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of it has changed recently, some of it I just didn’t know, and so, it’s just nice to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be able to step back for a minute and try to get a little bit better at not jumping to do so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco absolute conclusions about this stuff so quickly. So I apologize for doing that so often. I’m trying to get better at that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is one example where I think maybe we could all get a little bit better at that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So Intel is kind of in a similar situation in that they had existing definitions based on the way their chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used to work. And as things have changed about chips, as they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always do, as the process shrinks, the things that used to be steady or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reliable before now become more variable different things become important. And as they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had to spend more and more time on 14 nanometer, they’ve had to fudge things just because, you know, you can’t get blood from a stone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you were saying. You’re going to put more cores on, you’re not getting that for free. You’ve got to put more area

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and your things get bigger and they dissipate more heat and there’s just there’s more transistors and they’re the same size as they were before. So where do you think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re getting any savings from? And whatever headroom you had, you’re eating it. So a couple of people wrote in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to like pull the definitions of like TDP and base clock and stuff from Intel’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John documentation. And and what used to be a straightforward definition is now a little bit more wishy-washy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and has more caveats and more special cases. And in some cases, it’s somewhat circular. Like the base clock is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clock that it can maintain while satisfying TDP. And TDP is the power used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it’s running at base clock. Like, you just go around in circles with an asterisk, asterisk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for AVX instructions. And as we’ve seen from the fix, which I think we’ll get to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a little bit, there’s the whole profile of how the cooling system works and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how the hardware deals with changes in load and heat and how that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John integrates with the cooling system and what the optimal arrangement is. And it’s not just as simple as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if CPU gets hot, make cool now, please. There’s a bunch of those curves and their settings. And it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complicated. So it was so much simpler when there was no turbo boost and the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a speed. And maybe you could overclock it. But either way, just stay to that speed all the time. And there was no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed step. And there was no throttling. And it was just, and we still use those same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terms and those same sort of measurements and the same conception of how they work. But in this modern age,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I was saying before with the thin and light laptop and the over-provisioning, things are more complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And everything is trying to some kind of compromise. Because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t have a laptop like this with a CPU like this that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John behaves like one from a decade ago, where it can run at maximum power all day. And that’s how you can measure battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life, right? Everything is a very complicated compromise involving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware and software management and various curves and specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loads, specific applications, sets of instructions. Just everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is much more complicated than it used to be. And I can only imagine what it’s like on phones. The only reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t know what the world is going inside there is because it’s like just a sealed box to us. And we don’t have a history of smartphones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where things were replaceable. We could talk about them in this sort of modular way. But on laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we do. But most of that is out the window now. So we’re grappling with it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think is Intel, because they have to sell these things and sell a benefit. And the last thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to do when selling a benefit is to explain all the nuances. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster under these conditions with these caveats, assuming you do this, that and the other thing. It’s better to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say it’s better to just say it’s faster. Right. And then when people find. But but what about this? What about that? And you look at Intel’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John documentation, it says, yeah, no, that’s in the docs. But it’s very nuanced. And we didn’t feel like explaining that to you in a sales brochure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, ultimately, what this boils down to is the numbers that Intel quotes on the CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this is a two point nine gigahertz processor. It basically means nothing. Like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically like you can’t take anything as absolute anymore. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it means it can run faster than the 2.7 one of the 2.2. Like the numbers are still comparable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the most part, although it was a story I just saw fly by right before I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} recorded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They aren’t even proportional, like like the 2.9 is not like, you know, 40 percent or whatever it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster than the 2.2.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, because you have to look at the turbo things and they might not be proportional to the base clocks. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s one that makes it even worse. The story I just saw before we recorded is that in the in the upcoming generation, which I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re going to go to eight course instead of six again on the same process, as far as I could tell. Oh, geez. They’re taking hyperthreading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of the i7s. So now instead of it being a six core, like 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thread, it’ll be an eight core, eight thread. Just to confuse you even more. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it should still end up being faster than the old ones. But people are going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to run their CPU meters and be like, hey, there’s fewer lines.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This 14 nanometer forever thing is kind of like the, what the hell was it? A chatroom can help me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 533 megahertz front side bus in the G4 for like years and years, even when it was obscene.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So…

Reddit VRM post

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To take a half step back, there was a Reddit post that got really, really popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a few days ago where somebody who strikes me as very intelligent and very well read,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t say that sarcastically, had come up with a theory as to why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this throttling was happening. And they have since edited their post with some new information,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which we’ll get to in a minute. But if you scroll down on the link we’ll put in the show notes, you’ll see where it says original post

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey below. So what they said was they think the problem is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey voltage regulator module being unable to satisfy the power desires of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey i9 CPU. And they did a bunch of crazy stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with setting some switches in either the CPU or the VRM in order to get it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not limit the power going to the CPU. Which from what I can tell, having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey obviously not tried this, seems to have worked if you’re willing to disable SIP and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey install a kext, a kernel extension, all this other crazy stuff. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey worked reasonably well for a little bit until I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey believe it was yesterday, as one of you said earlier, Apple released an official fix. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t, I feel like this has been mostly resolved, but do we have any thoughts on this Reddit thread or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the fix that came out of Apple just yesterday?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the Reddit thread is a good example of like people trying to figure it out on their own. problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, but they can see that we have measurements. We have some tools that we can use. And there’s the thing about the tools

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we’ll get to in a little bit, too. But we’re like, what’s the problem here? What could be the problem? Because it’s not as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simple as just an on-off switch, or it’s always running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at maximum cooling. There’s lots of decisions to be made exactly. How much power should the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John draw for how long? When it turbos, when should it decide to turbo? When should it say, I’ve turboed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough, I should go down? And there are other chips involved on the motherboard, just the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that could be involved in a cooling decision. And so someone was just poking in some registers or firmware or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and changing a bunch of value hex values and some, you know, big bit mask thing and saying this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controls how long it turbos to maximum speed or how, you know, you’re allowed to draw 100 watts for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for 30 seconds and you’re allowed to draw 150 watts for five seconds and just like playing with those numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the goal of taking some workload. I forget what they were doing is the workload and making that workload complete faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s inefficient to bump really hard up against your thermal ceiling and throttle way way down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then bump right back up against it and throw it right right now it’s much better to oscillate with smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John moves like turbo for a shorter period so you don’t hit your your ceiling and don’t bump way way down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so you can just bump from your base clock up to turbo base clock up to turbo or whatever it’s better than going from turbo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the way down to like 800 megahertz or whatever again like mark was saying before if you if you you know and say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh it’s not actually the cpu it’s the voltage regulation module And when that overheats, it responds by pulling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power from the CPU and all sorts of theories. And like, there’s a lot more going on inside there than,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, anyone outside Apple’s probably gonna be able to tell. So Apple’s fix, as the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updated thread says, doesn’t just operate on the CPU, but takes the entire system into account so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it can handle cases where, what if your GPU is making really hot because it’s something in your application is using the GPU?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, it’s all the same kind of cooling system inside there. And an excess of heat can make everything hot because it’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next to each other inside the same case or whatever. So Apple’s patch takes a more holistic view of the system as it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always does and tries to balance the heat and tries to make the components, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slam hard against their thermal ceiling but just creep right up to it but have the cooling system keep them below it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have them oscillate back and forth as you’d expect. Basically saying if it gets too hot, go back down to your base clock,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cool off for a while and then go, you know. So it’s some heroic armchair

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attempts at fixes without access to source code or anything like that, but just access to a machine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I would never recommend someone do something like that, not least because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it requires a kernel extension and disabling system integrity protection, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorts of other stuff. And if it really is a real problem, you should have some confidence that Apple will do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it. And in this case, they did within days. So this is a pretty fast turnaround time from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s some interesting experiments by people out in the field, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would warn people like if you have one of these, like, you know, give it some time, give it a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^John days, give it a week. Don’t rush out and install software that some person posted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Reddit, even if it might look cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but you know, but I think there is there is some value to the side of that of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, if you look at what we mentioned earlier about how, you know, the the the alleged reason that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PR gave for the keyboard membrane was to make this keyboard quieter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when that appears to be pretty BSE, right? So whatever Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco says or doesn’t say about problems like this, it’s hard to know whether it’s accurate or not without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people playing around with stuff like this. One of the reasons I was watching this thread was like, all right, so they say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the VRM throttling is at fault here, that basically the thermal settings were not good for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that processor and changing the thermal settings would fix this problem. So the very first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing I wanted to know when the patch came out was did they change those settings because like with this with this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco method you’re like using some utility to read the settings and then you figure out what the value should be and write

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new settings back. So I was very very curious to go back to this thread once that patch was out to see like all right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had the has this person who who wrote this, like, gone back and updated it with the new one, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if the value has changed with this new, you know, with the patch that Apple released,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s reason was, you know, BS, that this is actually the real reason here, that this value was wrong. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would still be great that they fixed it, but if the value had changed and that was the real reason, that would be like, you know, worth knowing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, worth experimenting to find out. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Fortunately, that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, the value has not changed of this VRM profile thing, of like how much heat it can draw for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how long. So fortunately, the PR explanation appears to be correct. And we’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that, I guess,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now.

Apple’s fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. So, Apple has released a software fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and we’ll put a link to Jason Snell’s coverage on Six Colors. But the quote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from Apple is as follows, Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that there is a, this is from them, a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro. A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 supplemental update and is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recommended. We apologize to any customers who experience less than optimal performance on their new systems. And then there’s some marketing drivel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after that. So Macworld took a look at it and they said their preliminary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey results from our 4K Premiere test is that the 2017 2.9 gigahertz Core i7, 90 minutes to do this thing. The 2018

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Core i9 before the patch, 80 minutes, so a delta of 10 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The 2018 Core i9 after the patch is 72 minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is 8 minutes quicker. So, and additionally, they also saw that the clock speeds were pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey flat, which indicated that things were operating as they should have been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because before the patch, the symptom was basically you have this, as I mentioned, the sawtooth graph of the, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you look at the processor frequency, where it would peak really high and then drop all the way down to 800

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco megahertz, and then peak really high again and drop all the way back down and just like constant fluctuations and something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was clearly overheating or being mismanaged like so that’s not normal it’s supposed to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that spiky and crazy so the patch did indeed fix the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I actually talked to Apple about this I had a call I asked about the VRM thing they said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was not it but ultimately I don’t really have any more information than that that isn’t in the statement I’m really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really curious I’m curious to know just like some more technical detail about like a missing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco digital key in the thermal management system firmware. Like I’m curious what that means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Didn’t ask Apple about it? I did, but you know, it was, you know, I didn’t get a lot of technical detail.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, they were very, you know, friendly and open to whatever they knew how to answer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But unfortunately, you know, this statement really covers it all. Like there’s not, besides that I was able to confirm that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the VRM thing was not it, I don’t really have any other information that wasn’t in the statement, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was nice. I talked to them, you know, they seemed genuinely concerned. I asked them if they bought a freezer to rerun the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco YouTube test. They did not. They didn’t seem to think that was very funny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Otherwise, yeah, so it’s, I would like to hear from any listeners who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, but like just how this stuff works at this low level, like what, like, what is that a missing digital key? Does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that just mean like whatever their method of controlling this in software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco may be like it was not running or if it was not being loaded by some like firmware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco download at the CPU level, if the CPU was like falling back to its like built-in profiling instead of having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple customize it, which I think might be what’s going on, but I just want to know more about this at a low level just out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of curiosity sake, but the reality is the problem is fixed in the sense that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like, you know, before it had these weird thermal characteristics and in many tests it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slower than the one that came before it, or was at least not faster by very much, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now the performance graphs have smoothed out and it is faster than,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically it is as what you’d expect, the fastest CPU option is the fastest performing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in real world tests, which, so that like, that was the real problem, and that problem seems to have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fixed. They did tell me that this problem affected all of the 2018

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Pros, So not just the i9 and the 15-inch, but also the i7s and the 15-inch, and the 13-inch options

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as well. This bug apparently affected all of them, which does lend more credence to the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they are most likely telling the truth on the source. It isn’t like some weird thermal thing with the i9 that it affects all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them. But I don’t think people really saw it that much with 13-inches yet, so I don’t know if we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of test results to confirm maybe how bad it was before and where it is now. But regardless,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s fixed, I’m happy, and it seems like it’s pretty much a closed book.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have the same academic curiosity about the explanation because the fact that this one paragraph thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t have technical details but does decide to say a missing digital key which is just enough to intrigue you, you say, really?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, but what does that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean? The theory that I’ve heard, like you just said, the most prevailing one is it’s some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John piece of software that’s supposed to be signed and wasn’t and so didn’t get loaded or something, but I don’t know. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not into giving you a technical explanation But I think the most interesting part about this, I guess not interesting to consumers, all you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care is that the thing is fixed and it is so great, right? But that it’s not actually like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s one of those boring software problems where it’s basically like a build system problem or like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CI pipeline problem or a packaging problem. Like it’s not actually a problem with the technology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a problem with the boring part of the system where you package up the bits for sale and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make sure that those are the same exact bits that you tested. But of course you have internal only things And so it was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what they what they were selling to consumers was not exactly the best they thought they were. And it’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great because you can fix a problem like this is not a hardware problem. It’s like purely a software thing and they can send you a software patch and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fixes it, right? There must be relief to all the hardware people involved. Like everything’s fine. The cooling system is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not a catastrophic failure of thermal paste or something. It’s just the software we thought we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sending out to you and your laptop is not actually the software that you got. So here’s a patch. you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone’s relieved. It’s kind of like how a lot of the recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leaks from Apple have been like similarly related to like the build

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system or like putting things on URLs temporarily where they shouldn’t be or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like just sort of mundane human error unrelated to the creation of the product. The people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John creating the product are working really hard and doing all the things and doing everything right as best they can and then someone goes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidentally puts like, you know, an unreleased version of operating system on a public URL or like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the build system builds something that they think is an exact match for what they tested but actually isn’t and they ship these laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to people and they have the wrong bits on them. Stuff like that happens, like it’s not a big deal, this is a pretty fast turnaround

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time but I’m still technically curious about the details and somebody’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boring tell-all nerd book about Apple 20 years from now can include this in a chapter. This will be the most boring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chapter. And we’re like, let me tell you about the time that the build system screwed up somehow.

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Disappearing Power Gadget

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Check it out once again, linode.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then we have one final piece of drama over the last few days that luckily this show has avoided.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The Intel Power Gadget Utility, which I guess is a way, I’ve not used this. Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have you used this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have actually. So it’s Intel’s kernel extension that you have to install.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But basically it becomes an app that you can run that simply shows you nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco little graphs and numbers about what your processor is doing, how fast it’s going, what kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco utilization it has, like as a percentage, and how much power it’s drawing. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how we’re able to see things like, oh, this CPU is spiking to this peak frequency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then dropping, and then spiking again, and then dropping, and the water is going crazy, and the temperature is not. And you can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all things like that because of this utility from Intel called the Intel Power Gadget. And as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far as I know, I don’t think there’s another way to get, you can get like heat from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco various system settings, reading apps, but I don’t think you can get clock speed and CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wattage that easily or that precisely from anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, so this thing existed and then didn’t and now does again. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apparently it was pulled from Intel’s site right around the time everyone was trying to grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it to figure out what the hell is going on with these new MacBook Pros. And then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess, was version 3 just appeared in the last 48 hours? That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sort of does the same thing. One of you guys was kind enough to put a quote in the show notes. In version 3, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are additional features that include estimation of power on multi-socket systems, as well as externally callable APIs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to extract power information within sections of code. And apparently, it’s important to note the latest release also includes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey support for Windows 10.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s like the entire changelog. So the mystery, again, with the, you know, if you wanted to assume that Apple’s evil,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, oh, they found this problem and their solution is to get on the phone and tell Intel to pull the power gadget.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, but then it’s back a day later or whatever. And when it comes back, the changes have nothing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with like, cause it’s not multi-socket system. It’s not Windows 10. And it’s not about instrumenting sections of code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like why did it disappear? And you know, why did they then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John release version three? Who knows? It could have been just a coincidence, but either way, all the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screaming that it was a conspiracy theory about some terrible problem Apple had.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The problem Apple had was actually not terrible. It was actually easy to fix, and they fixed it immediately, and then the power got out of its back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So don’t always assume that Apple is out to get you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but at the same time, you could see why people got here, right? Because Apple’s solution,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when the 2016 MacBook Pro came out and had weird, terrible battery life, depending on what you were doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was to hide the battery life remaining indicator in the menu bar forever. So like, their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solution there was, here’s this thing that’s showing people how weird our battery life is with these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new complicated laptops. We’re just gonna hide that information. So it actually was totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plausible that Apple’s solution to people are seeing weird things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the frequency graph might be, convince your partner Intel to pull the frequency graph utility

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from your website. Like that is a totally plausible outcome based on their past performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I can see why people thought that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think hiding the number though is partly because the numbers weren’t accurate and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they were misleading. Like the thing with the speed thing is like, look, you can hide the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gadget or not let people install the power gadget all you want. They still have a stopwatch. They can still run a workload and time it versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the old version and say, I don’t need to see what the frequency is. I don’t know what the problem is. All I know is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this thing is slower than it should be. Like in that you can’t stop people from doing that. And the battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power thing is like, we have bad estimates of battery power and people are flipping out about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they’re flipping out when they see the bad estimate. They never actually say, okay, is that actually how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time I have remaining start a stopwatch now like they’re just flipping out on the numbers. So like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fact that it was back like a day later, I don’t I don’t doesn’t just doesn’t add up to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like and maybe they did. Maybe some panic PR person did call and ask them to pull it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it was part of some grand conspiracy to hide a big problem because there wasn’t a big problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There just wasn’t like the problem was a small problem and it was fixed and it was like it was not unexpected. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t have to research it for a month. They didn’t have to do it. Send the testing. I bet it was pretty quick when someone said I figured out the problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People don’t have the right bits on their computer. Like it’s the best problem to have like we this is not actually a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was the build system or whatever. I’m calling it the build system. That’s probably the wrong word. I’m sure there’s some apple word for like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way things get onto the computers that you buy. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I don’t think you can. I can see where people got there because again, people assume apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always evil or whatever, but just things happen so fast and we’re so quickly disproved in this case that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think people even had enough time to get up a full head of steam about being angry about the conspiracy theory about apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apple making Intel pull its gadget and then re added with windows 10 support. It could be like the sticky note on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store where it’s like this is every time they have to power gadget utility, it’s always gone for a day.

Intel and the Danger of Integration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so moving on let’s talk a little bit more about Intel because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about a month ago Friend of the show Ben Thompson wrote a really really really great article at stratechery With

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey regard to kind of Intel’s problems and how they got in this I guess mess that they’re in today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s been a while since I’ve read this all I certainly did read it John I think you might have added this to the show notes. Can you come take it away

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and tell us about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John On this show, we’ve talked about Intel, I think most of the time in the context of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ARM stuff, you know, our Macs or Intel chips and phones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, just kind of the comparison between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Intel offers Apple and what Apple is essentially offering itself by like buying PA semi and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making its own chips and making its own GPUs and doing all of those stuff. I think maybe a year or two ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the focuses was that Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a big strategic advantage to Apple and that their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process technology, meaning how small they can make the features on their chips, was a generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ahead of everybody else. And so no matter how much more efficient ARM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CPUs were and no matter how much Apple could custom tailor them to their exact needs. It’s very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard to overcome the fact that Apple had to make all of its ARM chips using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John larger feature sizes, bigger transistors, than Intel did. So even though Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may have old and creaky chips, and x86 is old and creaky, even x86-64,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s inefficient and all these reasons why ARM is better than Intel, Intel has this advantage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, they take whatever their designs are and they can make them much smaller than everyone else and they use less power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they just have all these advantages. And the discussion then was, wouldn’t it be great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple could get its arm CPUs or system on chips or iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff and design them, but then have Intel make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them? Say, we have designs. Intel, we don’t actually want your chips.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We just want you to be a fab for us. Here’s the design. You make it for us. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you make it on your industry-leading, smaller than everybody else, always ahead by a year and a half, two years ahead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of everybody else. And that would be the best of both worlds. It would be the best chip designs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then these, the smallest fabrication size. And the discussion then was like, yeah, but why the hell would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel do that? Because they can, they can’t charge you as much. They can charge you way more for their high end, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel CPU, you know, Xeons or I-9s or whatever, because it’s like, that’s our intellectual property.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We design it and we fab the chip. And so we get, you know, we get double, we can double

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dip there. Whereas if we’re just a dumb fab and we just say, oh, we’ll manufacture things for you and you’ll bring the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing yourself, we can’t get as much money from you. So, and we’re ahead of everybody else. So I bet everybody would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love for us to fab their stupid designs, but we’re only going to fab our designs. That’s our competitive advantage. You all suck. Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is great. Um, and that, that seems like such a long time ago. Maybe it wasn’t as long ago as I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I thought, but it seems like such a long time ago. Uh, and over the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John since then, there’s been smaller stories about Intel willing to fab chips for other people, which I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that have appeared in our show notes at various times. And maybe we haven’t actually talked about it. Maybe they just got booted out because the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John became irrelevant. But the most recent story, as we’ve talked about on the past few shows, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel. It’s supposed cadence. It used to be the tick tock where it would be like they do an architect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change, then a shrink and architecture change, then shrink on on like a yearly cadence or an 18 month cadence or whatever the hell was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um, has been slowing down and they made all these PR things that to be TikTok, and now it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John process optimized, whatever. Like they made a three-step process. And then as Marco said a few shows ago, now it’s TikTok,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk, talk, talk, talk. They’ve been stuck at 14 nanometers for a really long time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for longer than anyone thought they would be, including Intel. Intel had grand plans for their 10 nanometer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Now, about six months ago, we were hearing like TSMC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, they’ve made it to 10 nanometers or 7

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometers or whatever, they’re ahead of Intel. And then people are quick to say, well, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like base clock speed and TDP. Feature size is another one of those things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used to have perhaps a more common and simpler definition than it does these days because now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are arranging, are making transistors with these strange or 3D arrangements of elements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the microscopic level, like building these little pyramids and structures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and fins. And it’s not as easy to say, well, what is your feature size? What are you measuring between what is your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s like dot pitch on a monitor or versus dot pitch on a trinitron Like it’s all kind of fuzzy and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the gist of it was that Intel’s 10 nanometer is actually smaller than TSMC’s 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometer or maybe even smaller than TSMC 7 nanometer or whatever and so There was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, maybe six months ago still a reason to say yeah It looks like and they’ll might have lost his fab lead, but it’s not actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John true But at this point with Intel still unable to deliver 10 nanometer stuff and TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making I think they call their 7 nanometer or whatever like it doesn’t matter that Intel’s 10 nanometer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it may be as good as or better than a similar number from TSMC. TSMC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks like it’s gonna actually deliver its process in shipping products for customers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Intel still can’t and so I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ben Thompson’s article is more about the history of Intel and like how it got to this point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I feel like Intel’s strategy, aside from like selling their arm holdings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and losing and and opting out of the contract to make the CPU for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the original iPhone and various other strategic mistakes, if Intel was still ahead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of everybody on process, their, you know, their integrated design as Ben calls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, where they make the CPUs and and have the fab would still be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John viable strategy. But if you’re not the best fab in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and during when you were you also refused to fab things for other people, all you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John left with now is x86 and its legacy of compatibility and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a fab that is not helping you at all. I mean, at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a certain point it might be better for Intel to have TSMC manufacture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their jigsaw chips for them if they can never get 10 nanometers. Like, it’s just, they’re in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad situation. And it’s one of those messages that is explicable. It’s like, this stuff is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John difficult to do. You make some bad bets seven years ago or five years ago, whatever the crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lead times are, and deciding how you’re gonna fab your 10 nanometer. And sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just doesn’t work out. Like, it’s a bummer. It’s a bummer for Intel, but it’s an honest loss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel, to me it feels honest. It feels more honest to me than boneheaded decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, you know, sticking like itanium, uh, the, their, their instruction said that was going to compete with X86 64 and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opting out of the iPhone and all that other stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe also feels like a more honest loss than, uh, refusing to fab

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for other people because I feel like there was a way when, because they were a leader, their fab was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the lead for so long. should have been a way for them to leverage that to make money while also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maintaining like their, you know, their top end deals like well, we’ll fab for certain other people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we won’t fab things to compete with their own chips. And I’m sure they did that to a limited degree. And that’s what those stories were about a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^John months ago. But now they’re in a really rough place where they they need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get their 10 nanometer process online because they can’t just keep they can’t just keep making new arrangements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the same course than 14 nanometer forever. Eventually, if they get stuck

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with this for much longer, Apple will have no choice but to leave. It’s kind of like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Power Mac G5 situation all over again where Apple just couldn’t get better parts. They couldn’t get laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parts, period, and they couldn’t get faster chips for their high-end things. So it’s like, what choice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do we have? We have to go to Intel, essentially, because the option would be, I guess we’ll just keep shipping water-cooled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Power Mac G5s forever at the same exact speed because we have no one to buy a faster CPU from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Intel said, we have faster CPUs, and we make them faster every year. And so you should come to us. And they did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Say Intel comes out with these eight core i9s, right? What happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next year? 12 core i9s?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it becomes the size of a Kraft American cheese slice inside your computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, you can’t just keep adding cores, and there’s not enough parallelism into workloads to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deal with that anyway. I don’t think they’re in that situation. I think they probably will get their process online like they’re highly motivated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do so. But I’m it’s it’s probably safe to say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel has lost the massive lead they used to have. And we you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not not that we’re on board the sinking ship because again, these the arm CPUs that we’re imagining are theoretical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like hey, where’s the arm CPU to compete with the Z on doesn’t exist. It could, maybe doesn’t sign Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you can’t say there’s an obvious thing to go to. And of course, is AMD which is resurgent and which does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not fab its own chips. It uses Global Foundries which is the fab part of AMD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they spun off. And I think Global Foundries also might be catching up to slash matching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel and Process at this point. I haven’t been keeping up with them as much as TSMC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, the world order in the silicon chip CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world has really really, really turned upside down from even just a few years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ago. And we just, you know, we’re we collectively as consumers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple are all kind of stuck having to make some very difficult decisions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is like our decision is, do I keep buying these new new computers every year, even though they don’t get they aren’t getting that much faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or better right at a certain point? It’s like, what’s the point of me buying a new laptop if it’s about the same as the one I bought last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year? Or if my phone is faster again, at the geeky bench scores for the iPhone 10 and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compare them to Apple’s entire current MacBook and MacBook Pro line, you will be depressed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Apple’s choice is, do we basically have to?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Should we have started a project to switch the Macs to ARM three years ago? And in retrospect, we only realize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it now, and now we’re kind of screwed too, because it’s not like we have alternatives. Did we start talking to AMD

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and see if they can make some kind of Ryzen technology laptop chips for us? I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s so much easier when you’re like, we have the best CPUs and every year Intel comes out with new ones and we’re on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great gravy train that lasted a long time, but it’s, you know, the smooth ride

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is over and some hard decisions are gonna be coming soon and it’s not really anybody’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fault, like, except for maybe you could say Apple should have had more contingency

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plans, but yeah, things are about to get real interesting, it seems like.

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#askatp: Retina scaling modes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco late, you want cloud backup. And if you’re going to have cloud backup, Backblaze is the best. Go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to backblaze.com slash ATP for that 15 day free trial. Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Greg Kolodziejic, he writes, do you ever use higher than default scaling on retina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screens? If so, when? So let me see if I can figure out the right way to summarize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. So since Retina is by default just kind of pixel doubling everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you have two pixels worth of information where one would have been before. That’s a summary. I’m sure it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey somehow technically inaccurate, but you get the idea. So what you can do is if you have good eyes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I do not, then you can actually go in some laptops, you can go to the native

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey resolution such that you can get everything to be really, really tiny and you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fit a whole bunch of stuff on your screen. So, I have terrible eyes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I never do that. And in fact, I think on my, actually, maybe on my adorable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do, now that I know I have to double check that, but on my old work laptop, which was a 15 inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey laptop, I absolutely left it as the default. And that’s because I have terrible eyes. John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you now have a laptop. What are you doing with this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do run mine at non-native res because I never look at that screen. And remember, my goal was to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have my external monitor be exactly the same resolution as my internal monitor because I mirror

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. Because then every time I connect my external monitor, none of my windows move. So that’s what I do. My internal monitor, I run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it a non-native 1920 by 1200. And I just never look at that screen. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s exactly what my external monitor, 24 inch, runs at. And so yeah, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like non-native res when I have to take my laptops to a meeting and I have to look at the non-native res. A, it’s too small for me, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John B, it’s blurry. So it’s not what I prefer, but I do it at work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that particular reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s it is worth pointing out that the default scaling has changed. The 2016s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t actually change the number of pixels or the size of the screens, but they did change the default to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one notch higher than native rather than saying, do you use higher than default scaling? What we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really should be doing is do you use higher than native to X scaling, which by default are the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones you do. So anyway, so on the on the 15 inch, that would be if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the one that simulates 1680 instead of 1440. That would be one notch up. That is the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco default, but the actual native pixels are 1440 times two. I use the 1440

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setting most of the time on my 15 inch because even though things are kind of big and kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of chunky, I like that. Like I like the scale that it’s at when I’m doing like work,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like heavy work, like Xcode or logic, I will bump, I will bump it up. I use a utility called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iFriendly that, uh, that’s EYE, not I, you know, the letter. So iFriendly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, I’ve mentioned it before, it’s a utility where you can just assign like a certain combination of modifier keys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then the up and down arrows to next resolution to up or next resolution down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you can change resolutions really quickly just with a key command. And so I will use that to oscillate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between the super high one that John uses, the 1920 simulated one if I’m doing podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco editing in Logic, or the 1680 one which is the one step above default, or one step above native which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the new default. I’ll use that one to encoding, Xcode, stuff like that. Or if I’m just doing like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco email and Twitter and wasting time like that, I will use the 1440, which is the native 2X

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mode, where everything’s a little bit bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Real-time follow-up on my Adorable, I actually do have it set to more space. So the default is 1280

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by 800. I have it set to 1440 by 900. I guess my eyes aren’t as bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as I thought. Go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. An actual 2X pixels on that or something like, it’s like the 1152 by whatever, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the actual 2X pixels on that screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, 1152 by 720. Your eyes are bad though, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you couldn’t tell it was non-native.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, it’s real blurry. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hope so badly that when they do a major redesign of these laptops, I really want to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 2X pixel, actual pixel nativeness move up one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco step. Like I want the 15 inch to actually have 1680 times two. I want, and similar like 13 inch to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have 1440 times two. Like I want them to actually move up a step

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in pixels to match their current space setting defaults.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do they ever do that on the plus phones? Oh, that’s a good question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plus phones are still using their 3x scaling down to a 1080p screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the iPhone X actually has those 3x pixels. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s kind of a shame about the pluses. I was hoping that eventually there was like a stopgap and eventually they would just do native,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I guess they did, but just on the X. So maybe when they’re all X-ish phones, we’ll finally be done with that non-native.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not that it’s bad, it looks fine in the pluses, but it bothers me at like a anal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John retentive level. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco honestly, I think like on the 15 inch, you know, when you run it at the one step above at the 1680 step,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it looks okay. I can usually stop noticing it after a little while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But when I spent that, you know, day owning the 12 inch, I never stopped noticing that the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just looked kind of blurry and crappy. Like I think the smaller the screen is, the more apparent that difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is and the 12-inch I think looks noticeably bad in that way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am glad I cannot see it. Yeah.

#askatp: Changed opinions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey James asks, what tech-related opinions that you once strongly held do you now cringe about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey For example, saying something like the original iPhone size was the optimum size, which I think I might have said. Me too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the bigger Android phones were ridiculous, which I think I also said. Me too. What else, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what other opinions did you have that maybe you were wrong about? And I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thinking about this earlier today, and it occurred to me that not only do I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a great opinion to share with everyone, but I have documentation to prove

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. So when, uh, when I was big into Tumblr back in like 2008 and I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the time was running a Ubuntu on a ThinkPad and I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a distro upgrade from like, uh, Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron or something like that. I forget exactly which one it was, but everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crapped the bed and I decided I’m over it. And meanwhile, I was going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey back and forth with, uh, one Marco Arment via Tumblr discussing what, what really, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do you like Macs? Like it’s just, you’re paying for the name, you’re paying for the design,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever that means, like, if they’re just a big waste of money, I can build something much cheaper and you and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I, Marco basically had this back and forth over the course of like a month over Tumblr, like quote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tweet or not quote tweets, good grief, uh, Tumblr reblogs and things of that nature.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it is all there for you to see my friends. If you go to the URL in the show notes, you can laugh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at how ignorant and silly I was back in the day. And that is something that I probably shouldn’t put in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show notes because I’m pretty embarrassed by it. But you know what? It’s part of me. And that was me 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years ago. So Marco, what do you regret having said?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, a lot. I regret most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of what I said, like by the next day, let alone like, if I look at like my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old blog posts, I mean, you’re really playing on hard mode here, Casey, like looking at your own blog post like yeah everyone’s old blog posts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are embarrassing to them or and if well they should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} if they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John luckily yours are dead links tumble blog which is not a word dot Marco dot org

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slash post slash big number is four or four or actually the host name doesn’t even resolve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and actually speaking of that I found a link on one of my posts to an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey old Marco dot org posts like the old old old Marco dot

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} org those are where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was just Marco dot org slash number and those are very broken as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well very rough. The links are still up, maybe some redirects are broken, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those pictures are still up somewhere. Oh God, they’re bad. Please don’t find them. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where it was right after the iPhone was announced and I’m like, I’ll care later about the iPhone. It’s actually called the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone I Will Care Later and it’s like, yeah, it’s expensive. I just got this awesome

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new Sprint Motorola Q. I don’t need the iPhone. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that lasted like three months, but yes, I mean, look, I’ve always been an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco idiot with this stuff, so like a lot of what I say, I look back on very poorly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I can try to pick out some major themes, I think one major theme is that I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always, I still view phones as these like secondary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and inferior devices, but a whole lot of people out there view phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as their primary device, and I still need to get a little bit more on board with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Also, I think kind of a major theme of my mistakes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco misstatements and regretted opinions is something that I think is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty common here. Judging new tech primarily by its specs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or its pricing. And this is kind of like what you were saying a second ago, Casey, about when you were judging Macs like before you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saw the light. Like, it’s so common for people like us to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco react to some new device or tech or announcement or whatever as like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh, you can, like, you know, the iPad or the iPod has less space than a Nomad, lame. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s like, to judge tech based on like, oh, that’s a terrible deal. I can build a cheaper machine than that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, why does anybody buy this thing or whatever? And kind of a larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco theme of that is like, you know, understanding the reasons why things can be good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or compelling, or the reasons why people might choose to buy something. Go beyond specs and pricing. There are lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of other factors. There are lots of utility factors that we might not know about that aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just raw specs. There are pricing things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the price might matter a lot more to somebody than somebody else, or whether it’s people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at different income levels, or whether it’s a business buying something versus a person buying something, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the value something might have to somebody They might be very different depending on who they are, what their needs are. And even things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco underestimating fashion and visual appeal of things. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the big reasons why the 12-inch MacBook has been pretty well-selling as far as I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tell is that it’s cute. It’s really cool. Like, it’s just like, it really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does hit that fashion and visual appeal thing in addition to, you know, the practical nature of having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something very small. Like, there’s a reason why people buy this incredibly compromised machine. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not because it’s incredibly compromised. It’s because there is some practical aspect to it being so small in life, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also it’s really cute and a lot of people like that and it just looks cool. And then finally, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of close this out, just generally, the biggest ways I get things wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are assuming that whatever the important factors are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in evaluating things like this today will be equally important tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that basically assuming that the factors that matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco won’t shift over time. When in fact, if you look at what happens in tech, they always shift over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. Everything is constantly shifting. We are standing on quicksand. Everything is constantly moving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around. But I too often assume that whatever the situation is now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll just be that way indefinitely. And that’s far from true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John? It’s a burden being on the right side of tech history so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Because while

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you two were toiling in the PC mines,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was trying to tell anyone who listened that GUIs were the future,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that mice were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco awesome. This is like the best statement ever on the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just like, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} no, seriously, I was trying, not trying to be like, you know, silly. I was trying to think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of an opinion like that I would cringe about. So part of it is, yeah. And you thought of none?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I’ve been an Apple fan from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco start. My opinion is that it’s so hard being right all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Well, no, but if you’re an Apple fan from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start, you had to endure a decade of everyone telling you you were nuts and that you knew nothing about technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that only toy computers had mice and the GUI was stupid, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it wasn’t actually that long, but it seemed like a long time. And it seemed like everyone else said that and you were in this, but we were eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John proven right. And cringe cringe worthy opinions like I was thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much I preferred Essentially 72 DPI black and white screen like on the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac like the pixels could be black or white There was no gray like to be clear to the people listening who don’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this I that was it black or white But the pics were really really small like they were essentially 72 DPI like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 1x what we would consider 1x in today’s retina parlance not not 2x retina, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 1x like the you know half of that resolution and And I preferred that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to CGA 320 by 200 with pixels the size of boulders, even though they had color,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Whatever it was, CGA, eight color, 16 color, eight color, I think maybe, eight ugly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John colors. And you would think, well, okay, well later you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look back on that and say, how could you have preferred black and white? But I look back on it and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still think that was, you know, for my taste, my personal taste, that’s what I preferred. And I don’t regret

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and saying, You were just saying that because your computer couldn’t have color because the original there was no option for color on the original max Until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac to write which I didn’t have even when it came out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So was it motivated by just the things I can’t have but I look look back on it now You know many many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years distant and say I kind of do prefer the precision of the monochrome screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Then having eight very ugly colors in CGA with like whatever rectangular pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, right? I still hold that opinion And that gets to the heart of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole cringe about now. I don’t regret having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opinions that were based on the best information available at the time. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that, you know, I couldn’t have been expected to know the future. And so I don’t, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t regret like, I mean, maybe you could say it’s a lack of foresight or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s difficult for me to think of, you know, big phones are a good example. example, I still don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big phones. And you could say, well, you know, I never made a proclamation that the world won’t like them or that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one should have one. Right. But I made a proclamation that I don’t like them. I still like they’re just not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. If I had made a proclamation that Apple should never make a big phone because no one will ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy them. Maybe I would I would cringe about that. But I don’t think I ever did that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I tend I’m so over tentative about this maybe comes from writing all those articles and getting all people yelling at me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about them early on. But it’s like, I’m pretty careful and what I say to be measured. It may not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be what people hear, but it’s what I definitely what I always wrote because I my my greatest joy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the world was quoting myself back to people because they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you said the blah blah blah. And I just copy and paste from the article in the comment section and say, here’s the sentence that I wrote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they would say, but that sentence has whatever. And then I would paste the same sentence and I put a word in bold and be like reading comprehension

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people right there. That’s not what I you know, I’m very I try to be precise and podcast is obviously harder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be precise. But in In general, I feel like I’ve been mostly measured with things. The best I came up with, and I think it’s a pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, although still I feel like it falls under the category of best information available at the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s cringe-worthy, but it’s probably my worst call ever. It was a call.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It wasn’t like a strongly held opinion, but this thing was stated as like, you know, what strongly held? This wasn’t a strongly held opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is more like a one-off, which is perhaps just as damning or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like it was something, an opinion, a prediction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based on the best information available at the time. And it was back before Steve Jobs… I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think they had bought Next or whatever. Apple had bought Next. And Steve Jobs is not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back. He’s like… I don’t think he was even ICO, interim CEO at that point or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So what’s the deal? So Apple got Next. They were looking at B. They got Next. Next is cool. B was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cool. They went with Next. and hey, you get Steve Jobs back. Isn’t that great too? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reason I remember this one is because I wrote it and people like quote it back to me occasionally. And it was like, I was not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John optimistic about the chances of Steve Jobs coming back to Apple. I was like, give him a few years, he’ll burn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out. Cause he’s such a loser. He’s such a burnout. He burned out of Apple, right? Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he did the Mac and then just got ousted and just was a big baby about it and started Next. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company basically failed to do anything they wanted to do and just got acquired by Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so yeah, you got next and it’s cool operating system. You got some great technology and you got Steve Jobs. But what are you expecting Steve Jobs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do for you? He’s a two time loser, right? Like he’s, he’s not cut out to lead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this company. And so I had like a one offline one of my articles was like, yeah, Steve Jobs is back, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure how great I’ll do. I’ll give him I give him a few years, right? And based on Steve Steve Jobs’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entire history as an entrepreneur and a manager

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of corporations and as a CEO, up to that point, that was to save money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was the wrong call, obviously, and perhaps the wrongest call ever to be wrong. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was based on the best information available at the time. It’s not like I was ignorant of Steve Jobs’s history. I’d read everything about him. I’d been following

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his entire career. He was like my idol. I loved the Mac. I loved everything about it. As

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a great person to lead a company in the right direction, he had not proven to be that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at all, right? So that’s probably my worst call. And I don’t cringe about it too much,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s just, I’m just so incredibly fantastically wrong. And again, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a one-liner, I throw a vag. But all my other tech opinions, I feel like mostly are founded on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reasonable conclusions based on the information available. I’m gonna throw this to you too, because maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m just terrible at remembering. Places where I made a terrible call, is any that you can recall in the history

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of ATP or even before that you want to remind me of that I’m forgetting?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bazell. Moving on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Ian Bradbury writes-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a strongly

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} held opinion. Come on, don’t ruin my joke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s all you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} got,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you got nothing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I honestly don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know. I mean- Oh, remember when John thought that one star reviews are only left by old people or by young people?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What was it? Like, you were

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} totally wrong. Oh, I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco remember that. It was so comically wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was I think I was that was a case where I was more precise than you thought I was Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was what the sub that’s what the subsequent debate was about about the precision about what you heard versus what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} said But anyway, we already had that debate and no, that’s not that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a cringe-worthy thing And we didn’t have any good information in one direction or the other so it was inconclusive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I honestly I can’t think of Anything that you’ve said that has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just unequivocally wrong And I’m sure there have been things said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that’s factual iris, but this is a strongly held strongly held opinion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like no, I remember like you were saying like that that negative reviews and badly written reviews were all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco young people That like old people would never do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure I said all young people. I’m sure I said never Yep, that was you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You know I’m always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going with the absolutes. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sounds like you. Ha, ha, ha,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ha, ha.

#askatp: John’s sauce

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on before we all divorce each other Ian Bradbury writes. Can we get an update on your crash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plan situation? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait who rearranged this this was done on purpose

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} See, I’m just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monkey less one at the end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But but there was a reason it was in that order John you’re messing with my system

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right. I always put the most frivolous at the end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, but there was a purpose for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} this, but that’s okay Yeah, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not discernible to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} So well, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is one of your biggest regrets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, now we just got to reboot this whole darn thing, because, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’ll just see how this turns out. Okay, here we go. Where’s the little clapper? Take two, clap. James

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Evans writes, there are too many recipes online and I’m clueless. Would Syracuse share the secrets of his favorite pasta sauce?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I’ve talked about this on other shows. No, I don’t put the recipe of my family’s pasta

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sauce recipe. It’s boring. Like most people wouldn’t like it. It’s not exciting. It doesn’t have anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interesting. There’s no secret ingredient. It is not novel. It doesn’t taste any different than anything you’ve seen. It’s very straightforward.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I say no reason to put it up because if I put it up, it’ll be like an endorsement. You should try this recipe. You’ll love it. You probably won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love it. It’ll probably just be like, why would I ever do this? It’s like I’d rather have it out of a jar because that’s what you want. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s the pasta recipe that I want and it’s the pasta recipe that I feed my family and that’s fine with me. I feel no reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to share my incredibly boring family pasta recipe with anybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Knowing full well that you would say something along those lines, I have a bonus question Ian Bradbury

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the most BS answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s true. Like, I don’t want the burden of people saying, hey, I tried your recipe, I didn’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Good, fine, whatever. You know, like, it’s, I don’t, it’s not, it’s not worth, you’re not missing anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You go find any recipe online, try it, find the one you like, go with that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. What should sauce absolutely have in it and what should sauce absolutely not have in it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re talking about tomato sauce. It should probably have tomatoes. OK, I’m going to say that I feel like a safe bet. Tomatoes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I should have tomatoes fresh, crushed, cubed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} diced,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not diced. What do you mean?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I can’t. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assume you can do it. I’ve done it with fresh. I’ve done it with canned. I think fresh is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably better, but but it’s really difficult. It has to be just the right tomatoes at just the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right time. We grew them ourselves in our backyard for a little while. And even then, it was like depending on like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the crop and when you pick them and what you got, like it was variable. Canned is much more reliable and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what we use all the time. So either way. What should not go in it? Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tons of stuff. Wait, hold on. Before you leave, so what kind of tomato? Are we talking like fancy San Marzano kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} thing? Like is there a certain kind that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like? Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} there a certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brand? Because there’s a brand that’s called San Marzano but they aren’t actually San Marzano

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} tomatoes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so I think we talked about this with the olive oil thing. Like olive oil and San Marzano tomatoes. It’s very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to know whether you’re getting the authentic article. I don’t have any secret techniques for doing so. We just try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get legit San Marzano ones because we feel like there is a small difference in taste that makes it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your mileage may vary. Maybe you like ones from New Jersey better. Maybe you like some from California better. I think it’s personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John preference, but there are good ones and bad ones. So try different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones. Are there any other tomato products that you mix in with the canned tomatoes, like adding additional tomato paste

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something like that? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, you can do that. I mean, we do it with bolognese and stuff, but that’s not a recipe. That’s just from a book. But no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our family recipe does not add any tomato paste or anything. but I wouldn’t, you know, if it’s a part of the recipe that you like, go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it, whatever. Garlic, onions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both? Both in mine, yeah. Some people add sugar to sauce. Are you one of those,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or do you have an opinion about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that? I am not one of those. I know people do that. If that’s what you like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do it. Do you cook the meat in the sauce with the sauce, or do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cook them separately and apply the sauce to the meat table

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side? So this is an interesting thing. So the recipe that we use is basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my father’s mother’s recipe, slightly modified, but my mother’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mother also had a recipe. My mother’s mother baked the meatballs in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the oven, did not cook them in a sauce. My father’s mother fried them in a pan and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let them cook the rest of the way through in the sauce. And so that’s what we do. We form them, fry them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a pan to brown the outside, and then they cook the rest of the way in the sauce. That seems like the most common.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I’ve had my mother’s mother did the baked ones, and I like those too. And her

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sauce is a little bit different as well. So I can picture in my mind her sauce and my other, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had both of them all the time. You go over to one grandparent’s house, you have one sauce. You go to the other grandparent’s house, you have the other sauce. I prefer the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one that we have now, but I like both of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do you prefer a sauce with a prominent note of oregano or other spices like that, or do you prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it more just to be like tomato, garlic kind of thing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oregano for me brings to my, I like oregano. I like tons of oregano. I put tons of oregano on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my pizza. So oregano, a prominent oregano flavor in pasta sauce makes me think of pizza sauce, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I tend not to go in that direction. But lots of fresh herbs, you know, parsley, basil,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff like that. I like that to be a flavor in the sauce, and it is a big component of my sauce,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but not so much on the oregano. Because like I said, I love oregano. I probably put way too much oregano on my pizza.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My family hates it, but I love oregano. But it makes me think pizza, and that’s not where I want to go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you were forced, you know, if you were somehow compelled in a way that you couldn’t just weasel out of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have a jarred sauce. For some reason you’re desperate, you need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tomato sauce, you have to buy one of the jarred ones that would be in a typical grocery store, what do you buy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That would never happen, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} would not. I know, I don’t care, you’re forced, somehow you’re forced. I don’t know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t even know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} brands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are or what are available, I would not eat it, I would not buy it, I wouldn’t do it. I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wouldn’t do it. Hey, when’s the last time you have even had canned sauce?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My wife bought jarred sauce that she used in like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of her family recipes. Like it wasn’t just on pasta. It was like some family recipe she had that one of the ingredients

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like a jarred sauce. Probably the last time I had it is in whatever that recipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was, which I don’t think we’ve made in years. I don’t think I’ve ever had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other than like being a guest over someone’s house when I as a kid, jarred sauce on pasta,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like in my own home, under my own control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Muckerman Wow. Steve What would you say to that question? Do you have a preferred sauce, jarred sauce?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Muckerman I’d go Rayo’s. There’s a lot of decent

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} sauces these days. Steve Rayo? I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never heard of this. Muckerman Yeah, R-A-O. It’s common now. It’s a little expensive. One of the big jars

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might often be like eight bucks if it isn’t on sale, but it’s really good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Their vodka sauce is also fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s really easy to make sauce though and it’s really easy to make a huge amount of it for not a lot of money and Freeze it. There’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason anyone should have jarred sauce. Don’t do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So was there anything else that people should absolutely not put in their sauce

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, there’s a million things don’t don’t put a whole turkey in it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks, thanks, you have fulfilled all of my expectations for this question

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you kept you kept going, what should absolutely not go in it? Like, I don’t know your cat like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come on. Like, is there some specific thing you’re trying to get at? Like you asked, you tried to ask

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sugar thing. I don’t think there’s anything like anything commonly used. It’s particularly controversial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that like you can come up with ridiculous stuff, but there’s no commonly used ingredient that I’m going to say you should definitely not do. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, sugar is the closest because I feel like you probably shouldn’t do that, but some people do. So whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are we done or do you want to do the last question?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s let’s do the bonus questions since it’ll hopefully be quick although now my whole joke is ruined because I put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this question in Expecting John to not say anything about his sauce and I’m actually kind of proud of you Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because you were able to tease out some facts despite all that so tomatoes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oregano and onions and garlic you’ve cracked it you’ve cracked the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey code Hey, it’s more than you were willing to share

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} just a few minutes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boring I told you like and just all those in reasonable proportions and you’re fine time.

#askatp: John’s backups

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, Ian Bradbury writes, can we get an update on your crash plan situation? How do we come back from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that? We don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} have to. Cut it. This is why you haven’t added it. No, go for it. Go for it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re talking about crash plan. Yeah, let’s talk about crash plan. By the way, we’re sponsored this week by Backblaze. Go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can we get an update on your crash plan situation? Are you still using them or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have you bailed? I am still using them on the small business account for reasons, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most of them are laziness. John, what are you doing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m still using it and I think I got upgraded to the non Java client. It’s weird that I can’t actually tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it doesn’t like, I don’t know. I don’t think that the non Java client, if that’s what I indeed have, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any better or worse than the other one. Maybe I just have too much RAM on my Mac and I don’t notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. It’s a little bit weird that I can’t seem to get the menu bar thing to stay in the menu bar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I can’t, you know, the menu bar icon for crash plan. Like it’s not there a lot of the time. And I’m like, does that mean it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backing up? But then I launched the app and then I tell it to put the menu bar thing in And it’s like, oh, my last backup was like 10 minutes ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s working and it’s doing its thing. And I can confirm that the backups are there, but it seems a little bit weird and flaky. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m still using it. I think it’s still backing up my external volumes. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sometimes it seems like it’s not. It’s like, wait, it’s unchecked. It’s not backing up my external volume. But then I go look for a file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I put on my external volume like a week ago, and it’s in the backup. So it’s a little bit weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and flaky, but the price is still right, and it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Why, okay, we’re sponsored this week by Backblaze, and I like them a lot better than Crash Bandicoot. That aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why in God’s name would you want your backup program, your last line of defense, to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit flaky and to not be entirely sure it’s working?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not my last line of defense. You know how many lines of defense

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I have? That’s one of many lines

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John defense. There’s no other thing that will do my backup drive without me doing iSCSI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something. The drive and backup, to be clear, is my media drive, which really I don’t care that much about. It’s mostly just stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I rip from disk. it’s not there is no essential data that I’m that I have that I’m questioning like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure if it got backed up or anything. It’s just that I have no other way to back this up for such a low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John price and crash plan continues to do it. So I let it that’s mostly just for convenience so that if I do lose everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can get all my media back from my backup without having to you know, worry about rebuilding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that whole thing. But if I lose my media because it didn’t back up or something like I don’t care. It’s it’s just you know, movies and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week aftershocks backblaze and Linode, and we’ll see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental, oh it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 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 N-t Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse, it’s accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They didn’t mean to, accidental, accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John check broadcast so long.

A second helping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And my media is also duplicated to a second technology that’s sitting right next to it. So it’s not like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on wait Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait Wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} timeout Do you have you have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plan I have a play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} play number something. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s 214 if I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} mistaken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s like a two drive or a three

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} drive or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You don’t have enough media to long over Like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} know so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but my giant Synology with eight bays only two or three drives are dedicated to media

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and those two or three drives are duplicated to the second synology Huh, and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s also I believe it’s also they’re both also in some kind of rate arrangement. I can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a lot of backups like the chances of and that’s for my media that I don’t even care about it Just ripped movies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff like I don’t it’s not even I care about my data that I care about is backed up like a thousand time. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m good. When you make the meat in the sauce, are you talking just, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just meatballs? And we’ll get to meatballs in a second. Or is it meatballs and sausage? And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it includes sausage, do you get sweet sausage, hot sausage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a mix of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both? For most of my childhood, it was just meatballs. But when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would go over to my mother’s mother’s house, she would do sausage too, and I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. So in my own life, we have in recent recent decades gone to both,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, because my wife really likes the sausage. So we do sausage and meatballs, mostly meatballs, but with a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of additional sausage. Uh, I go with sweet sausage. Uh, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} hot at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all. That’s, that’s, that’s no hot at all. It’s just, that’s what I prefer. I think it works better for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. I would argue you’re missing out. I prefer a 50 50 split,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I, I like it. It’s fine, but it’s not, it’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for something that tastes like what I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and when I was a kid, my grandmother always did sweet sausage. That’s what I like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, the meatballs. Mm-hmm. Similar to before, what definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes into the meatballs and what definitely does not that some people might frequently put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in? Did either one of you ever have my pasta sauce and meatballs? Didn’t I feed it to you when you were over here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe? I did. They were delicious, but I forgot about what’s in them because that was a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ago. add my my my rule of meatballs for me, but like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like it’s applicable to people like and it’s not related to making them at home. It’s that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all the things that you can order in an Italian restaurant, the one you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the one that someone like me most often avoids and I would argue most people should avoid is meatballs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have never had a meatball at a restaurant in my entire life that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was to my liking. It’s not because they were bad, they were just different than what I wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Usually because they were fancier or weirder or they’re trying, like, but the variability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of meatballs in restaurants is astounding. It is way bigger than the variability of like any other thing I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can think of. You never know what you’re gonna get. Meatball could mean anything. You have no idea what the predominant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taste is gonna be, what the size is gonna be, the consistency is gonna be. and you know nothing about it. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is totally a black box. And if you like just rolling the dice and it’s fun to do or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like Swedish meatballs have more consistency in restaurants than Italian meatballs. Because Swedish meatballs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they taste like Swedish meatballs. Italian meatballs, you have no idea what you’re getting. So that’s just my tip for meatballs. My meatballs are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boring. They are beef only, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John breadcrumbs and parsley, and just like it’s not, that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no pork. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use an egg to bind it? Yeah. Okay, so you got ground beef, you got an egg, parsley,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco breadcrumbs. Salt and pepper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Salt and pepper, okay. Like, they’re very boring. Like, that’s the problem. The reason I’ll never go in a restaurant is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you serve this at a restaurant, they’ll be like, those meatballs are kind of bland. That’s my meatball, sorry. That’s why, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, that’s it. They’re very boring. No, I’ve made the fancier ones at home just to see if like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m missing out on anything, like the whole, you know, bread soaked in milk and see if I do that whole big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing. that yeah I mean I don’t I don’t you Tiff is our meatballer in the family and she’s very good at it but she doesn’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think yeah and I’ve done it and those are fine it’s just not what I’m personally looking for in a meatball like I like them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll eat them and sometimes you know I’ve other people have ordered meatballs in restaurants occasionally I’ve had one that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a pretty good meatball but it’s not what I want mine are boring they are they are what I want I it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taken me 20 years of marriage to get my wife who is the meatballer she’s the former

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the meatballs in our in our chain right I’m I’m the cooker of them, she’s the former, to form them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the expected size, because I have a specific size that I want them to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} No. That was gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be my next question. So is it like golf ball size, or bigger, smaller?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John She’s got it down to a weight. She uses a food scale now. She’s hacked the system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s the weight? I don’t know what the weight is. I can do it by eye, right? But she’s the one who forms them, so she

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uses the food scale. And if she was here, she would tell me the exact weight. Maybe it’ll be follow-up in next week. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is bigger than a golf ball. It is smaller than a tennis ball.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that seems about right. Because one of the ways that restaurants

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco often go wrong is by making them really big. No, a lot of restaurants, you’ll get two. The giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John American?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like baseball-sized ones, right? Yeah, that’s like a meatloaf. That’s like a bad meatloaf. Yeah, because there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good way to cook that. Something that’s that big.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you have to bake it or you have to leave it in the sauce forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s never gonna cook enough without overcooking the outside, or you’ll just cook it forever and kill it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’ll just taste like nothing. There’s no good way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that. I see them more often in restaurants, the tiny ones. Golf ball or smaller, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too small. Those, I think, I have found those are usually frozen. I bet they’re usually brought in. Because when you buy a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big bag of bulk meatballs at Costco, or if you-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which you should also not do, do not buy bags of meatballs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All those Costco meatballs are good. Oh, come on. Of course

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you think they’re good. Meatballs are so easy to make. You take meat, you put it in a ball. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} not be easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m pretty sure it’s the Costco ones that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} realized over the last year or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so are friggin delicious. I love those things. I’ll have to look and see

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I feel like if you have meatballs for some not very important purpose, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re making a meatball sub, I love a good meatball sub. But honestly, the quality of the meatballs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a meatball sub is not as important as the quality of meatballs if you’re having like pasta meatballs as your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entree. If anything, you want the meatballs on a meatball sub to be like the crappiest meatballs they Like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John possibly be because it’s like fast, crappy fast food. Like it’s, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like wanting American, it’s like wanting processed American cheese on your grilled cheese. Because that’s what a grilled cheese is supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be. Right, or like a cheese steak with Cheez Whiz. Because like that actually. Everyone’s got their line. No, no, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been converted on this over time. Like I used to be solidly provolone on the cheese steak.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But then, but I tried, you know, with a couple trips to Philly in the last few years, I finally tried Cheez Whiz. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had to admit, like I even did, Tiff and I, I got a provolone one, she got a Cheez Whiz

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, and we each traded half of the other, so that we could each have half of one, half of the other. It was unanimous,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we both agreed, yeah, the provolone’s good, but the Cheez Whiz was definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. Well, we learned about both yours and Tiff’s junk food tendencies from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Top Four, so that kind of fits with my new culinary vision of both of your palates.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Real-time follow-up with regard to the meatballs, Little Birdy has told me that the correct weight is three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a half

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ounces. All right, thank you, little birdie. So I’m curious, you mentioned, you know, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes into it, breadcrumbs, an egg and everything. I don’t remember hearing you mention onion. Do you not put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco onion in meatballs, and if not, why?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do not. Why? I don’t know why, it’s because my parents didn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? That’s literally why, like, I’m not making this, again, I’m making, I want to make this, because we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had, to be clear, we had pasta and meatballs every week of my life, essentially. Like, not on the same day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every day, but pretty much once a week for my entire life until I left home, right? So it was a staple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And a staple like that, like I liked it, it was good, it was one of my favorite meals. I want to keep having that meal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why do I not put onions in it? Because they weren’t in when I was a kid and neither one of my grandparents put onions in it, that’s why I don’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure it would taste good and it would be fine. It would change it, it would make them a lot more moist and that’s not what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my meatballs are like, so that’s not what I do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are there any ways in which you deviate from your parents’ recipe on this traditional meal?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like the sausage is like combining because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my father’s mother didn’t do that, but we put that in. The recipe I got from my dad, because he was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one who always made sauce at home, like, you know, my wife can tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by, you know, iMessage Casey, like the amounts that he wrote down seem to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like off and we like mess with them a little bit because they don’t seem to be right. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what really we need to do is write down a more accurate recipe for our children. At this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even know, because my wife’s the mixer of ingredients, right? So she’s the one measuring out all the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and dumping it into the big thing, and she’s the one mixing up the meatballs and forming them into balls, right? Following the recipe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supposedly, quote unquote, following from what my dad wrote in our cookbook, like when it was like, you know, take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this cookbook out for you to be an independent adult. But he didn’t write down, like what we do is not what he wrote down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we really need to nail this down in some reproducible way. Now we just do it out of habit. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is just a thing we do, and it’s just like an assembly line, and it just happens. But we have honed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it a little bit, to the point where when my dad visits, and he makes his, quote unquote, his sauce, he doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it as good as ours, so we must have done something to change it. Maybe we’re changing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ratio of like, it could just be as simple as like salt and pepper, or like using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pre-seasoned breadcrumbs versus not pre-seasoned, but anyway, what we make is now what I like, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s actually has drifted from what I had when I was a kid, but it matches like, because it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a continuous gradual thing, like it matches my memory of what it should be. Like your accent?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Kind of, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah, it changes over time, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I honestly, I think we’ve improved it. I think now, I think I would rather make my sauce for myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than have anyone else make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Well, that’s good. Like that’s kind of how you want it to be, right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re not doing that, then like if you have some recipe that like, oh, but I can never make it like my mom makes it, figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out how your mom makes it, right? like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or figure out a better way to do it that you end up like, like, because, you know, don’t assume that like the way that your family’s on it forever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the best it can be like, find your own path.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s kind of why we did it with fresh because my parents, to my knowledge, no one ever made it with fresh, but we had a tomato

⏹️ ▶️ ^John garden in our house when we got our house and we’re like, let’s try making it fresh. And it was boy, it was a lot of work. And a couple of them are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really good. But a couple of them, it was fresh. We’re kind of stinkers. And we were like, overall, the you know, the work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the math doesn’t add up to get that one great one. But those five cruddy ones and and then our neighbors built a bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fence and put too much shade for us to grow tomatoes. But anyway, uh, yeah, can’t same thing with the cans. We’re always pursuing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what are the best tomatoes to get? Where can we get what we think are real San Marzano tomatoes and are they actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better? I’m always reading articles about different canned tomatoes and cost wise because we still make it a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot. So we’re looking for the big ones that we can buy in bulk, you know, cheap. We don’t want to pay $8

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a tiny 16 ounce can because we will break the bank on that. So we’d much rather get the we get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a giant restaurant size, like barrel type can things. Nice. Because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what works out. We make it in big batches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you mentioned earlier that you don’t like ordering spaghetti meatballs at a restaurant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I agree with like if you’re going to an Italian restaurant to me like ordering spaghetti and meatballs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it’s like going to a bagel shop and ordering a plain bagel with plain cream cheese. It’s like, OK,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that’s probably going to be all right, but that’s like the most boring choice you can make. And you’re probably missing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out on much better options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the other thing is this, the red sauce, the tomato sauce in Italian restaurants, really hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or miss even good Italian restaurants, because there is a difference in taste. Some people like it spicy. Some people don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some people like a bland. Some people like lots of oregano. Lots of garlic. No, you know, like there’s so much variable. You just don’t know what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting. So the meatballs are very variable. But even the red sauce is pretty variable in my experience. So I, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do not order that ever at any Italian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco restaurant. Okay, so then my so my question is, you go to an Italian restaurant, you know, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good one. What do you order?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When I was a kid, uh, growing up on Long Island, we went, we’d go to Italian restaurants all the time because that’s the kind of restaurant my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dad liked. My wife can relate. I’m shocked. I like, I like to, um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, the kid thing to get, the thing that I, I and my siblings always got and I just associated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my mind like this is what kids get in Italian restaurants. I have no idea if this is true, but what we always got was baked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ziti. Oh, that’s a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choice. All the time. And it came in an, in in an oval ceramic thing. Oh God, what a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco waste,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what we did on Long Island, we’d get baked

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} ziti.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If your children, I understand, children have terrible food at restaurants, what do you order now as an adult?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, so as an adult, first of all, I hardly ever see decent baked ziti, right? So I don’t order that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore. I still like it. Recently I was in Colorado visiting my parents and they have a hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time finding good Italian food there and they had baked ziti on the menu. My parents said, yeah, it’s actually what you remember and I got it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of pure nostalgia. And it was. It was like it was in the same sort of oval-shaped oven safe ceramic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thingy on top of another plate because it’s super hot, but the cheese really, you know, crunchy on it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s good comfort food. So I have ordered that recently, but mostly what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I get, my go-to is always, and everyone’s going to hate me for this, but it’s the truth. Veal parm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, I know about the cows. Believe me, my mother is a vegetarian. Every time I ordered veal parm my entire life, she told me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the poor cows taken away from their mother. I know about the cows. You don’t have to tell She’s literally told me my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entire life The only time I ever get it as an Italian restaurant. I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get it a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Casey I’m afraid to ask you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Actually had that for dinner last night coincidentally no, if I go to an Italian restaurant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Do I have to answer this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} question? I feel yes, honestly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All of a sudden I feel like, all right, so if I go to an Italian restaurant, in my personal opinion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which the entire internet is now going to write me and tell me how wrong I am and I don’t care, just save your keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fingers, I don’t care, don’t tell me, I like lasagna. I like lasagna a lot. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can get good lasagnas at a restaurant, you can get bad lasagnas at a restaurant, and I feel like it’s a good metric. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so because of that, I will often order lasagna.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a little risky, but less risky than spaghetti meatballs. I was never a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lasagna fan as a kid at restaurants or whatever, but I’ve been making the Lydia’s lasagna recipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at home and it is amazingly good. Wait, Lydia’s? You don’t know Lydia? No.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The famous TV chef Lydia Bastianich, I think her last name is. She’s my favorite television

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Italian chef. I really do like her recipes. She has a lasagna recipe which is, guess what, really boring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is the straightforward like this is lasagna. There is nothing weird about it. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just plain. I make her bolognese recipe also very straightforward. I just had I just made her bolognese recipe like two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John days ago. She’s my favorite like other person to get Italian recipes from because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like she’s from the same sort of, you know, geographic and culinary background as my grandparents,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? You know, New York City, New York Metro area, Italian American, same generation of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John immigrant more or less. And she makes food like they They made food like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like. But Italian restaurants are all sorts of things. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all kinds of pasta dishes, all kinds of boring pasta dishes. At

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of my favorite Italian restaurants, I’ll order pasta with garlic and oil.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll order pasta with tomato, garlic and oil. Just very simple. I love pasta.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll order that if it’s on the menu. exciting recipes. It’s just a question of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something that catches my eye at a particular time. I will wander an Italian menu much more than I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will another restaurant where I feel like there’s only a few safe havens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco First of all, that reveals a lot of like about your psychology of restaurants that like you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at this is like this is a safe haven. Like I can only order these things that are safe on the menu for things I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. Yeah, well, if you go to a fish place and you don’t like fish, you’re looking for like the one the one, you know, fish option

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or, you know, like lots of, I’m not particularly adventurous with food. So I looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at a menu, there’s often very only like two or three things that I think I would even potentially like. But in Italian

⏹️ ▶️ ^John restaurant, I’ll like almost anything that’s not fish.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m being told by the arbiter that you do indeed order a lot of veal parm, but not as consistently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as you used to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes it’s not always on the menu. And sometimes I have a crisis of faith and I’m this veal parma is not going to be good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t order this. I have to, you know, you just don’t know. Like you see it on the menu,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you’re like, hmm, maybe not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steven Do you, does it not bother you? Like when you mentioned a minute ago, like, you know, that you often will just like get pasta with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, garlic and oil or whatever. Like, do you, does it bother you to order something that you could very easily make at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco home?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Paul Oh no, it doesn’t bother me at all. Someone else makes it for you. That’s what you pay them for. Like, I mean, I will,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will very often complain when I order an exact dish that I make at home and I order it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I go, mine is 10 times better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. See that, see that, to me like that’s the risk. Like, like, you know, ordering like a veal parm, that makes sense because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s something that like most home cooks are not going to make, right? Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} so that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can- You’re not going to buy veal because you’re too guilty in the store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} restaurant I’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Right, yeah, the restaurant’s like, well, you think, well, they already have it back there. I know it’s terrible, but, you know, and like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, like to me, like, you know, I’ll go for usually if I’m in an Italian restaurant, which honestly isn’t that often, but, but when I’m in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an Italian restaurant, I’ll usually go for some kind of fancy pasta dish. So like maybe a ravioli or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a tortellini or just like a cool shaped pasta like orchetti or something with sausage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and vegetables or something like that. Like some kind of like a fairly complex dish. Like I probably could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make this at home, but it would be like a lot of chopping and a lot of like a lot of steps. So like I’m probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not going to. And you know, something like that, like fresh flavors, you know, fresh tomato, fresh mozzarella,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that. Like I wouldn’t go for something as simple as just like pasta with, with garlic because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would be afraid of that happening, of like, I don’t want to order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something that in this restaurant that I could go make at home for 50 cents that would be better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, sometimes I feel like if it just, even if I feel like I could do it slightly better, as long as it’s good enough, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine with it. And yeah, it is a waste of money. We don’t go out to eat that often. We very rarely go out to eat. And so I don’t mind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John paying $16 for something that costs them 10 cents to make. Like, I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine, that’s the whole point of going out. But occasionally, like one of my favorite things I make at home is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe, which is a combination. That’s probably my favorite thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I make. And lots of restaurants are starting to have it. And I make the mistake of ordering it. And every time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m disappointed. I’m like, and sometimes it’s like, it’s OK. But I eat it, and I’m like, I just think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mine is just so much better. Often because mine is simpler. Like, they add more stuff to it. They put cream or peas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it. It’s like, what are you even doing? Stick to the basics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Those are good. cream and peas and maybe like onions and like prosciutto maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh man. I would rather be having my… I’ve ruined my wife with the carbonara. She always asks me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make carbonara, which isn’t actually carbonara. It’s a modified Lydia recipe that isn’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John called carbonara, but anyway, that’s what we call it. Oh no. You butcher carbonara? She orders it at restaurants

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and her complaint is always, this is not as good as what we make at home. So now at this point, she’s stopped ordering it. She just can’t. She doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it anymore. She’s like, I know I’m going to be disappointed by this. I’m not going to order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I’ve tried to make carbonara a number of times and I butcher it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad. It’s my wife’s favorite recipe. She periodically gets like uncontrollable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cravings for it. I’d be like, I need carbonara today. And so I have to make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for her. That’s actually a good point. I’ve forgotten that, you know, for years my go-to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was lasagna, stated earlier. But in the last handful of years, I have started getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really into carbonara. And I try not to have it often because it is extremely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} extremely bad for you. It’s not health food. Oh yeah, it’s horrible. Oh man, is it good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And Tina is writing me now to say that John’s Carbonara is awesome and now I want it. So it sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re making Carbonara

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} tomorrow. I may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have triggered it again. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Carbonara tomorrow and I’m coming over for dinner because I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} some of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. Yeah, next time we’re at your house, here’s the menu, right? We figured it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The thing about a Carbonara though is even though my wife loves it and I really like it and one of of my children will tolerate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. I don’t serve it to guests because I assume everyone else will find it just disgusting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because honestly, it is disgusting in an unhealthy way. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what I make is very… It’s oppressive. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} heavy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never serve it to guests because you’d be like… But that’s carbonara. Okay, so normally carbonara, feel free to correct me, normally carbonara

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is some kind of pasta, often linguine, I think, or whatever the broad version is, usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pancetta, peas, onions, some kind of cream and egg,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You are making the restaurant version of it. Right. So how do you, how does yours differ?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the, and again, what I’m making is not actually carbonara. Actual carbonara is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Parmesan cheese, egg. You can do the whole egg or just the yolks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then, you know, spaghetti and black pepper. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And like no, no peas, no cream.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No peas and no cream? That isn’t carbonara at all!

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And pancetta and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guanciale,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait, I can be talked out of cheese, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John peas. Yeah. So no, the peas are not like go look at like what is traditional carbonara

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or go to Italy. like you’re not going to get cream and peas in it, right? So that’s it. That’s the basics. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John American restaurants to try to, you know, kick it up a notch, boom, Emeril, add all sorts of other crap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it. The cream is in addition to like add to the richness, and I’m sure there’s some variation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it anyway, it’s like that. But anyway, Italian American carbonara does not have cream, but adding it, it’s like it fits, like you see how it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John works with it. And it’s cheaper to add cream than to add more Parmesan cheese. Ah, that’s why. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m actually making is a variant of Lydia’s recipe, which is not called carbonara. I think I think she calls it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, she calls it like linguine with, I don’t know, with, I don’t know, I forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the hell the name of it is. It’s some descriptive name that’s just like listing the ingredients. I do not add cream,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I do add onions. And I add chicken stock, which is not on the menu, but it’s something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I add to my thing. I only use yolks, no whites, and I use way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way too much Parmesan cheese. And the meat has changed. I used to use plain old bacon because it’s all we could get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when we were in Georgia and we just kind of stuck with it because, hey, bacon is good tasting, only a specific kind of bacon. Now we’ve switched

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over to pancetta. I’d use guanciale if you could ever find it, but it’s impossible to find it. That sounds pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John awesome. Yeah. So it is not really… The reason we call it carbonara is the predominant flavor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is parmesan cheese and egg yolk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I’m on board with that, but that is very different than what I envision as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carbonara. Yeah, because you’re all thinking of the restaurant one that has cream and peas in it. Yes, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, basically add peas to yours and I’m sold. I just went to so our our favorite Italian restaurant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we’ve been going to, you know, since 1994. I don’t know how many years that is, but it’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that still exists and it’s great because they no longer even have a sign on it. Like there’s no there’s no word

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the outside of the restaurant that says the name of the restaurant at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Uh, so it’s just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John restaurant. It says nothing literally says nothing. There’s no words. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but anyway, it’s still still there. We still go to it and they make a thing that they call chicken carbonara, which has chicken, mushrooms,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cream, uh, pancetta, uh, and, and rigatoni.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s like, how is that carbonara? I guess because it has the, you know, like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has the pancetta and it has cream and that kind of counts. It’s a great meal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love it. I love the taste of it, but it’s just, it’s like, it’s a restaurant variation and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, and it has a cheese on it. I honestly, I think the cream is because it fits in with the richness and it kind of works,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s much cheaper than adding more of the $21 a pound Parmesan cheese to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steve McLaughlin Similarly, there’s an Italian restaurant by me that serves a Farfalle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Carbonara, which seems wrong in every measurable way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Paul McGuiness Those are the bow ties, right? Steve McLaughlin Correct. Paul McGuiness Now, see, honestly, I like bow tie pasta for saucy dishes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it picks up the sauce really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well. Steve McLaughlin Mm-hmm. So theirs is described on their menu as chicken sauteed in a cream sauce

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with prosciutto, peas, and Farfalle pasta. And, oh man, it may be like terrible restaurant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey carbonara, but it is delicious. Terrible restaurant carbonara. It is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that sounds great. I would probably order that. And the reason my wife doesn’t like them is because they’re not what she’s expecting. She’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not expecting cream. And so even though it may be like, oh, this is a good creamy pasta dish. It’s not what she wants when she wants carbonara.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John She wants the thing that I make, which also isn’t carbonara. But anyway, there’s good. There’s probably some good. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can just probably look at Lydia’s thing of like watching her make carbonara. There are very few ingredients. It’s very simple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s easy to screw up. You can obviously scramble the eggs, but a little bit of practice, you’ll get it. And at least then you’ll know like this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is the base. And then if you want to start adding stuff after that fine, but I would say draw the line of cream because if you’re adding cream, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a different, that’s a different thing. Maybe good, maybe great, but just maybe call it something different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now I really want carbonara or something awful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was just glad you didn’t say you put Velveeta in yours.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. Well, I would never cook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but It just puts it on top at the end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Shells and cheese are good, man. Don’t knock it till you try it. I have tried it. I’ve tried it. I’ve tried it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, it’s good.