287: Open-Faced Compliment Sandwich
16 Aug 20182018 13” MacBook Pro review, fall Mac speculation, and John’s preparations for a war he intends to win.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Model 3 software update for the right jog wheel
- Printing PDFs from Photos by ⌥-clicking the
Buy Bookbutton - Backblaze
- Data retention
- Backing up a NAS using AutoMounter
- Dock auto-hide delay
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -int 0
- Marco reviews his 2018 13" MacBook Pro
- Fall laptop predictions
#askatp:- Why isn't there a RSS-like thing for video?
- Why trust the cloud at all if we can't have future-proof encryption?
- Which macOS feature gets 🌆 first? (via Marc Edwards)
- Post-show: 🐝
Sponsored by:
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi that works. Use code ATP to make overnight shipping free to the US and Canada.
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- AfterShokz: Headphones powered by bone-conduction technology. Use code atpbundle for $55 off a Trekz Air bundle.
Chapters
- Intro: Cheesy Dad
- Follow-up: Model 3 controls 🖼️
- Follow-up: Book PDFs
- Cloud-backup retention
- Backblaze NAS hack
- Faster Dock hiding
- Sponsor: AfterShokz (code atpbundle)
- 13” MBP review: Cons
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- 13” MBP review: Neutrals
- 13” MBP review: Pros
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- Fall Mac speculation
- Low-end versatility
- #askatp: Video podcasts
- #askatp: Trusting encryption
- #askatp: Mac feature deathwatch
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Bees
Intro: Cheesy Dad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have just barely picked up what it is you’re even talking about, because I haven’t been much online in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple days, but I get the feeling that the Europeans don’t know that clinking a glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a wedding means that the bride and groom should kiss, and you’re saying they should, and so you’ve made it your life’s goal to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which Aaron has told me to let go of. But yes, everything you just said is accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love too that, like, there’s a certain kind of person at a wedding who will do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you are exactly that kind of person. It’s like always it’s somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cheesy dad. Oh yeah. You are that cheesy dad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Reporting for duty, sir. Reporting
Follow-up: Model 3 controls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a lot of angst about the Tesla stuff. Who knew that Tesla had fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that get very cranky when you don’t speak exactly perfectly about their beloved cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, when you said that, I thought, wait, I thought we didn’t talk about the going private. Oh, you mean your mild
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey criticism of
⏹️ ▶️ John the controls on the steering wheel. I know, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And apparently, everyone who owns a Model 3 wrote in to tell us that there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a software update to the Model 3 after it was released, I believe in about April or so, according to most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that allowed you to put the cruise control set speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right wheel because you know the steering wheel has two little like jog wheels on it like little scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wheels on it. The left one is volume for your audio stuff and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right one in the S you can you can map the right one to all sorts of different things. I have mine mapped to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunroof. I also mentioned last show I didn’t know how to change that they did it for me during the during little intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup thing. We got a few people who wrote in to tell me how to change it and also tell me where the manual is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I saw that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to find that tweet and put it in the show notes. It was a very rare instance of an extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snarky tweet done in a way that made me not hate the author.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh yeah, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a little bit on the snarky side, but it was politely snarky, which is a very, very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard thing to balance, but it was very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. That was perfect. But see, and here’s the thing, though. To me, like that—so, you know the Model S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to adjust the set speed for the cruise control you have a little stalk on the left and you can push it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or down it’s the it controls cruise control and auto steer everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving it to the right wheel on the steering wheel like the right scroll wheel on the steering wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s nice it’s better than not having it but that’s my sunroof control so if that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now be my shortcut for cruise control adjustment what do I do to open the sunroof
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you do it in the Model S if you don’t map it to the steering wheel is you have to use the touch screen you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open up the controls thing you have to see it’s tap in the lower left open up the controls thing and then that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opens up like a big overlay like a modal dialogue that has a bunch of different sections in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it’s things like you know the controls for the car things like you know opening the trunk unlocking and locking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that and one of those things is sunroof but normally I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one selected because another one of those things is cold weather and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all all the fall, winter, and spring, I keep the cold weather one as the currently selected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pane of that setting screen, so I can quickly turn on the seat heaters and the wheel heater.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To have the sunroof have to be a different mode of that screen, that’s just clumsy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a firm believer, as Casey, I believe you’ll back me up as a fellow sunroof
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan, I’m a firm believer that sunroofs need always available physical controls,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same reason that windows have them. You don’t have to use the touchscreen to roll up the windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s buttons on the side door panel thing because it’s a very common thing to open and close the windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a car and the sunroof is just a big window. So it should have the same affordances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as every other window in the car does for quick opening, quick closing. So it’s nice that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the model three has this ability to put the cruise adjustment somewhere. But the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that was a hack that did after the fact. and it shows because to get that, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to use the touchscreen for your sunroof. And I haven’t actually driven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 3 yet or know how the touch interface is arranged. So maybe the sunroof
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is more convenient on it than it is on the S. So I’ll see about that, you know, the first time I ever drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but honestly, I’m not in the market for a 3. I’m very happy with the S. But all this is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, follow up, I’m glad they have that ability, But I honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of, it’s kind of shocking and disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reduces my confidence in their design sensibilities that this functionality was missing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first place in the three. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly The funny thing is when you a moment ago were saying, okay, if my sunroof, you know, jog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheel thing is taken away, how do I open the sunroof? I’m answering the question in my head and saying, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just reach your arm up and just hit the frickin’ O. Michael
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Manister Right. I would much prefer that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want this to be on my steering wheel, but they just, you know, they don’t have any buttons up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the sunroof like every other car does. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I understand. Let me make it clear. Like, I’m not a designer. I, of course, have opinions about design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related things, but I understand in general the idea of minimalism and, you know, removing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these unnecessary buttons. I mean, I’ve come around on the home button or the lack of a home button on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I quite like the gestural, you know, actions and whatnot. But I agree with you. that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a certain subset of things that should always have physical controls. I think volume absolutely should. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think even more than one volume control, one on the wheel and one that, say, the passenger can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reach. I think that’s critical. I think that temperature personally is critical. That’s one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I very much miss about on Aaron’s car is that temperature controls through the touchscreen. And I think sunroof,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right, and windows, of course, but I think you’re right about sunroof. That should have a physical control that is easy to access.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think it was on the show a few episodes ago, I was lamenting that the sunroof control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on many Hondas that I had seen or driven in years past was on the left-hand side of the steering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheel, which I always thought was bananas, because then the passenger can’t do anything about it. And some of this stuff should just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have—it should always have physical controls, and to put it on the touchscreen is silly, if you ask me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got a whole lot of flack from a whole lot of people, though, you haven’t even driven the Model 3, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have driven a Model 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re the only one of us who has, I think, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I think that’s right, unless John is going to pipe up here in a second. John’s here? It turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have driven a Model 3. Admittedly, it was only for about 20 minutes, but I did get a very thorough walkthrough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the gentleman who owned it, who goes by Dave, a very nice gentleman I’ve met a couple times now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He was kind enough to let me drive it for about 20 minutes. So I have driven a Model 3. Forgive me if you happen to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Tesla fan, if I did not get an encyclopedic amount of knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about your beloved car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in the 20 minutes I drove it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an encyclopedic. I know that’s probably not right at all, but whatever. I don’t care. It’s just, oh my gosh, you say anything negative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Tesla, man, and they come out of the woodwork. Catch ya!
Follow-up: Book PDFs
⏹️ ▶️ John We were talking last week about the photo books and how you can print a PDF of them
⏹️ ▶️ John from the photos application, but I said that it didn’t like print it exactly how the book’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John get printed because it doesn’t know how to do the dust jacket. It just kind of has one page of the
⏹️ ▶️ John PDF that has the cover and then the next page has a little tiny picture that’s on the flap and the next page is a back cover and
⏹️ ▶️ John so on. So we can try this name George Jacobson
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe. Yeah, that’s I’m going with. I wrote in to tell us that you can account this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the most obscure feature that no one would ever find. You can option click the buy book button,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So not only is there no menu item for this, but there’s a button that says buy book. If you hold down
⏹️ ▶️ John the option key when you click the buy book button instead of buying the book,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the ability to print what they call a production PDF. So that fully preserves
⏹️ ▶️ John the format of the book. So it will be a PDF that has like one really long page that is
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially the dust jacket that if you printed it on a long piece of paper and folded it over you’d get the dust jacket
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and all the other pages
⏹️ ▶️ John so now I had to go back and recreate the production PDF of all of my books but it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John that I know that there’s no way I would have found this like I don’t go around option clicking everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is not even something that you can use your intuition about like Mac applications to think um here if I option click
⏹️ ▶️ John the buy button it’ll let me print a different PDF than the PDF I can already print from the menu item,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does. So if you’re trying to preserve your book, I recommend I’m doing both now I recommend both
⏹️ ▶️ John the print PDF menu item and also option click the buy book button
⏹️ ▶️ John to make your production PDF.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never would have found that but I am glad that that we have been told for you John what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the answer is because I don’t know how any person could have found that. I almost want George or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whomever it is to write it. Probably Yorg. Okay well there they are whoever you are right in and tell us how in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name of all that is holy did you figure that out because my word.
Cloud-backup retention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, moving on. Uh, Naren writes, and this, this is not the first individual we’ve had write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in about this. Um, there’s one big advantage of crash plan over backblaze backups. Writes Naren.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Backblaze only retains changes and deletes for 30 days versus crash plan, which maintains revisions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey essentially forever. I learned this directly when some pictures I had in iCloud photos got corrupted. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only saw this around six months later with backblaze. I would not be able to recover this, but with crash plan, I could go back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before the corruption happened to recover the file. I don’t, I’m not at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all arguing this, but I haven’t personally encountered a situation where this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be a big deal. I’m not trying to say it’s not a big deal. I’m just saying me personally, I haven’t encountered this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my experience. But man, a lot of people are perturbed about this. This is not the first time we’ve heard this feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is a little surprising to me that it’s that important to people, but I mean, I can understand it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s something to keep in mind, especially with like BitRod and data integrity or whatever. Very often you don’t find out
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s some data that you thought you had that actually is corrupted until well after 30 days. That’s why it’s good to have multiple,
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple backup strategies and multiple backup things. Uh, and you know, having one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps a 30 day window fine, but having all your things to keep a 30 day window is bad. So make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John you have, uh, backups, uh, back to what you think is a reasonable one that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t probably keep everything forever. I’m not sure if crash plan actually does. Uh, certainly time machine doesn’t cause
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll run out of room on your desk or whatever you’re backing up to. Keep that in mind when choosing your backup
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy. long how far back does the backup go
Backblaze NAS hack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, with regard to Backblaze, Gavin German wrote in something that is genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fascinating and I haven’t had the chance to try this out yet, but I’d love it if anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the audience, including the two of you, would try it and tell me your results. So tweet at me and let me know. But Gavin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, to get Backblaze to back up my NAS, I use AutoMounter from PixelEyes and we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes, to mount my NAS shared folders into a folder on my Mac other than the default slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volumes folder. So Gavin wrote some more, but the summary is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it appears that if you don’t put things in slash volume and instead or volumes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and put it in somewhere else, anywhere else in your file system within reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then Backblaze is happy to back it up as a portion of that computer’s file system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thus you can kind of sneak your way into getting a NAS backed up via the non-professional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it’s called Backblaze backup. Is that a reasonable summary, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and other people wrote in with suggestions of like using sim links or hard links to directories, which is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Max can do that a lot of other unique systems can’t do all sorts of ways to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John backblaze that whatever you wanted to back up is not on the forbidden list like you know, hard linking user,
⏹️ ▶️ John the slash usr directory somewhere in your home directory and stuff like that. I hope backblaze isn’t listening because
⏹️ ▶️ John all these techniques can be detected and worked around is you can’t really fool the system, it can always figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out. hard links might be harder to figure out but i bet there are still apis. certainly sim links there are apis to figure out. and same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with mounting. if backblaze was determined enough given any directory it can determine
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a mount point, is it a sim link, is it a hard link, and then trace it back to its origins and figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out if it’s supposed to forbid it. but it doesn’t surprise me that backblaze doesn’t go to those heroic lengths because if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something like this to subvert the system like you’re in the vast vast minority. so
⏹️ ▶️ John i might consider trying this but like Marco said I mostly consider the online backup to be a last resort
⏹️ ▶️ John and user local I can’t actually reproduce it’ll just kind of be tiresome I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any actual user data there it’s just compiled stuff although at this point now I have both backplays
⏹️ ▶️ John and crash plan running on the same computer and I’m probably going to continue like that for a while so I feel I feel like I’m covered.
Faster Dock hiding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the ask ATP section of the last episode, we discussed our doc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strategies. And I think it was John, you had said that you had issues with auto hide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it took too long to unhide. Was it you that said that, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think I said I couldn’t handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So a couple of people have written in to share with us some defaults, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things that you can put in the terminal in order to either remove or at the very least speed that up. We’ll put them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. Have you tried this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, but it only solves half the problem. It solves the animation problem, but there’s more to the waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John than just the animation. And by the way, it totally eliminates the animation, but if you enable the service basically
⏹️ ▶️ John instant, but that doesn’t mean that the problem is solved because you still have the delay, the human
⏹️ ▶️ John delay of acquiring your target once the dock appears, because you don’t know exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John where at the bottom of your screen, the Safari icon is, or whatever you, we know it’s towards the left side, but you have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to appear and and then you have to retarget. So, the delay still exists, it’s just shorter. You’ve now
⏹️ ▶️ John eliminated the waiting for the animation time, but truth be told, during the waiting for the animation time,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re probably acquiring the target. Like, the main problem is that it’s not visible. You can’t see it in your peripheral vision, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see it in the corner of your eye, you can’t see it as you move your mouse. You have to get the mouse all the way down to the bottom, then it appears, then you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to acquire your target, then you have to move your mouse again to get it. It’s much easier to sort of always
⏹️ ▶️ John have the dock in your peripheral vision and be able to move your mouse right down to the target. So once again, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have to run the doc at all because I always have drag thing on the screen and it doesn’t hide and it’s pinned
⏹️ ▶️ John to the upper right corner, kind of where the process doc was in classic MacOS, in the latter
⏹️ ▶️ John days of classic MacOS. But it can’t do notifications or badges and those are things that I tend
⏹️ ▶️ John to need to look at All day long.
Sponsor: AfterShokz (code atpbundle)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Aftershock’s bone conduction headphones. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist in the world in the summertime in a place that is hot, bone conduction headphones are great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they don’t put anything on or in or around your ears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that there’s nothing to really make you sweaty. The way they work is they have these little transducers that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest next to your ears and just send little vibrations through your head that your eardrums pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and so they pick up sound but the rest of the world doesn’t hear it and as you these little vibrations, you don’t even feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, really. And it wraps around the back of your head with this little titanium headband.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole thing is basically weightless. And it’s wireless, of course, so there’s no wire to get in the way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of this doesn’t go on or in your ears. So, that also has the benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of letting you hear the world around you. And this changes everything if you are wearing them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while you’re walking, or jogging, or biking, or just walking around the house, and you wanna hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if someone knocks on the door, or if someone’s trying to talk to you while you’re walking around outside, it’s wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear the world around you in addition to your podcast or your phone call that you’re listening to through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weightless wireless Trex Air headphones. And these are also just good headphones. They sound pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for talk, they are great for battery life, weight and size, they’re actually pocketable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the range is fantastic, they’re backed by a warranty so you don’t have to worry about that, they are water resistant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you get caught in the rain or if you’re sweating a lot, it’s no big deal. If you need to take a phone call,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they of course have a built-in microphone, They have dual noise cancellation microphones, so it makes your speech easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear for the person on the other end. I use these headphones all summer long, and now increasingly the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the year too, because it’s just so nice to be able to hear what’s going on in the world around me without making myself hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and while still listening to a podcast. It’s wonderful. So see for yourself.
13” MBP review: Cons
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a Trex Air bundle. Thank you so much to Aftershocks for keeping me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool while listening to podcasts and for sponsoring our show. ♪ Up, down, up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down, up, down, down, down, down, down ♪ Marco, you are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey living in paradise anymore, if you can consider Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, you’ve been traveling, So, tell me about your fancy-schmancy new MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I’m actually back in paradise for a little while, but my iMac is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still here. But I had some family travel to do, and I had a lot of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do while I was family traveling. And so, one of the reasons I kind of jumped the gun on my laptop upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and got this was that I was gonna spend some time, I was gonna spend like a week back at home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while my iMac Pro was still on vacation. but I had the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UltraFine at home, the 5K LG UltraFine, and that couldn’t plug into my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best laptop ever laptop. So I decided, I’ll jump the gun, I’ll get the 13-inch, the new one, and see how it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve now spent a good deal of time with it. I spent about two weeks of really solid work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, as it being my only computer for those two weeks, doing lots of iOS development,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other stuff. And so I have some impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, really quickly, just remind us what the specs are of this machine, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t- It is the 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro. It has whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest-end CPU is, which I think is like a 2.7 or something like that, i7, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The highest CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and one terabyte SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It comes in just under $3,000 retail, I think. Oh, and I got it in silver.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not get it in space gray. What? I have seen these in both colors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve owned these now in both colors, and while I don’t I wouldn’t make this statement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so confidently about the 15 inch, but I would say the 13 inch looks better in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silver. Come at me haters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is that? What, it’s the same as the 15 inch but smaller. What changes about it that it doesn’t look good
⏹️ ▶️ John in the in the space gray?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Similar how like you know certain car sizes look better or worse in certain colors. I just think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the proportions of the 15 inch, the 15 inches is really big and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really flat. And so it looks kind of weird to have like this giant, flat gray rectangle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the 13 inches is a little bit better proportioned like for aesthetics and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like unanodized or like the uncolored aluminum basically. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just looks better. It looks, you know, slightly old school in that way, but I wouldn’t say it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like outdated. Honestly, I think Space Gray is being dramatically overused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple about five years after they should have done it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the era of everything being black and dark gray and dark mode and everything, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that time has actually passed and I think we’re coming out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hasn’t passed, we have to wait for the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John will be like that black DLC finish, like the watch. Yeah, that’d be awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It would be, see?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but anyway, so silver I think really is the color to get on the 13 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I were getting a 12 inch MacBook One, I would say the same thing. I would say don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Space Gray. I would say either get the pink, the gold, or the silver.
⏹️ ▶️ John Blasphemy! I’m still baffled by this 13 inch versus 15 inch preference. I’m not ruling out
⏹️ ▶️ John that you may have gotten a brain parasite from cat poop because I can’t find anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to hang my hat on about how you would like the color on the one that’s slightly bigger but not like it on the one that’s slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller that are like literally the same shape but scaled and not scaled that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. No but it’s not the same because the 15 because as you often point out the keyboard’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same at all so you have like you know more speaker area and you know it’s so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and I’m never around I’m very allergic to cats so I’ve I’m never around cats like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I stay far away from them. You’d be around their poop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cat. Where would I be around cat poop that cats aren’t?
⏹️ ▶️ John So Hops goes out and he’s unattended and he’s cat poop and he comes home licks your face.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we move on from the cat poop? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter. I don’t let him out unattended. That’s not the kind of dog people we are. Oh my god you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t let him out. He runs all over the place. He’s running all over the beach where he’s probably not supposed to be. He’s eating cat poop
⏹️ ▶️ John all day long. He’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John Cat poop all over that beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never bring my dog to a beach that clearly says no dogs at the entrance.
⏹️ ▶️ John No of course not. You would never post pictures of that happening to Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s clearly unpoliced after about 7 p.m. and before about 8 a.m. So I would never bring my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog to a beach that he wasn’t allowed. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unpoliced. So the cats can go, great, a giant litter box for me to poop in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I definitely wouldn’t let him run free off his leash on said beach because it would definitely, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require a leash if he were allowed. But certainly, you must have dogs on leashes at all times and beaches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and parks where they’re made to run around. Anyway, I’ll start with the negatives about this laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I do have positives to say. So So I’ll save those for last. I’ll do like the compliment sandwich thing. Well, I guess the open-faced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compliment upside down sandwich that fell on the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start with the negatives. Um, the keyboard, I have a few things to say about it. Some are negative, some are not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The, the big complaint I still have, even after two weeks of using this full time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even after lots of time using the built in keyboard rather than desktop mode, like I did, it was about half and half, about half the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time it was a desktop mode, about half the time was using the built in keyboard. I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a lot of typos with this keyboard. And it’s not about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travel, I’ll get to that. It’s not about that. It’s still about the modifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the layout that just make it more error prone. So as we mentioned before, the lack of the inverted T shape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the arrow keys, that’s still a big problem. I’m disappointed still that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is preferring aesthetics here over usability. And also when they moved to this keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they shrunk the margins in CSS parlance. The margins around all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keys got much thinner, and also, because the whole keyboard depth-wise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got thinner, the height difference between, basically, the peaks and the valleys, like the top of the key versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the margin between them, it’s a very small difference. And so you combine those things, you combine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these super skinny margins with the small difference between the key and the surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco margin area, height-wise, and also the lack of the spacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the arrow keys, and also the fact that the keys themselves don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any kind of dome shape. Like the keys are not concave at all, they’re just flat as far as I can tell, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s super subtle. So it basically feels like one big flat surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s hard to navigate this keyboard by feel. It’s hard to know where your fingers are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is now my third laptop in this series. I’ve had that problem with all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and no matter how long I typed on any of them, that problem never got better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really? This is not something that has affected me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I find it very hard to feel where my fingers are with this keyboard because you can’t really feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the corners or edges of the keys as well because it’s so not as different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the surrounds, and they’re skinnier, and the keys are super flat, and they don’t move at all when you push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, so it’s like, I find it’s still a very error-prone keyboard no matter what you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the key switch feel. So moving on for a little bit, as I mentioned last show, it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run a bit hot. Disabling Turbo Boost with the Turbo Boost Switcher Pro app that I love so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, does work very well if you wanna run it for a while without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making your hands all hot and sweaty. It’s pretty nice, because disabling Turbo Boost cuts performance by about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third, but it dramatically decreases the heat that you feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Touch Bar is still annoying, but ever since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mapped Caps Lock to Escape, as I mentioned in previous laptops, remembering Caps Lock to Escape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is super easy. You do it in System Preferences under Modifier Keys, and you don’t need any third-party utilities to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve trained myself to do that for the last, I don’t know, two years or so. So Touch Bar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly it doesn’t get in my way. I don’t go near it, it doesn’t go near me, we respect each other, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know we don’t like each other, but we have to live together, so we stay out of each other’s way. I still wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was an option to get this computer without the touch bar and I still think the touch bar is a massive flop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at least we are staying out of each other’s way. Small design nitpick here but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that I noticed all the time, the intake vents that run along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bottom sides of the laptop they kind of scrape my legs a little bit. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this you know nice carved slot. It actually is nice when you’re picking it up because it gives you like a little bit of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a handle to grab you grab into those vents with your fingers but it actually was kind of uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of times I noticed when you actually have this on your lap and you’re wearing shorts so your legs are exposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit those little vents actually would carve into my legs a little uncomfortably this is not a huge thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is it is kind of like a thing like ooh that’s kind of ungraceful I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss the charging LED on the end of the cable and the cable management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wings on the power brick. There’s a lot about USB-C charging that I’ll say in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better sections of this review that I like, but I still miss the power brick being nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the cable being nice and having those nice little features. Still now two years into this design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has shown no good reason why those had to go, and I wish they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring them back because it doesn’t feel like we’re simplifying when we remove those cable management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arms and the charging LED from the cable. It feels like Apple is trying to increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its margins by cutting costs and cutting parts. And when you’re selling a $3,000 laptop, that’s not a good look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is known for having really nice products that are full of little delights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just wish they would stop taking them out unnecessarily. Like, fine, if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good reason to take it out, fine. But I don’t see any good reason why there couldn’t be a charging LED on the cable or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable management arms on the power brick. and those just make things nice when you’re using them and they took them out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m still upset about that. I’m never gonna stop being upset about that. That’s gonna be like in some future podcast, somebody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna play a sound effect every time I complain about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about the charging wings a while back though and like especially given if you look at the USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote USB-C cable they give you to charge with, it’s much thicker. So I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John the wings would even work with that. But if you go back farther, you remember the disc shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was before my time, but I know what you’re talking about, yeah. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives you that was if anything, I think actually a better design in the wings more elegant than the
⏹️ ▶️ John wings because you don’t have to fold and unfold anything and the radius that you’re bending the cable at is much gentler.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they should go back to something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it is nice that you can detach this cable from the power brick. But those aren’t mutually exclusive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like it’s nice that you can replace the cable separately, but you can also have good cable management built in somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have a replaceable cable. Anyway, as I mentioned, I use this laptop basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a desktop with the LG UltraFine 5K display that they worked with Apple on and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple has promoted and still promotes because they don’t have their own display yet. I really hope their display comes to the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As a desktop, laptops are still really mediocre and many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not most of our listeners use a laptop as a desktop at least part of the time, if not most of the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you all know what I’m talking about. But for the few of you you don’t. The LG UltraFine monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still, first of all, it’s ugly. I know I complained about this before, it’s really ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s weird that its forehead is bigger than its chin. It’s always a little bit slanted or a little bit off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the stand. I can never get the stand quite right. Everything’s cheap PC maker plastic. Like, it’s just a really mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosure around what is actually a pretty good panel, but like everything else about the monitor sucks, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its built-in USB hub. I have never had more problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more bugs and more inconsistencies as I have with peripherals that are connected to the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultrafine USB ports. The whole appeal of USB-C and Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to be able to run one cable to your laptop and have it basically become a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco docking station. Have the monitor, you have everything plugged in your monitor, the cable has power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and peripherals and display all over one cable. That is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promise. We’re not there. It’s just buggy. I still had lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of devices that I would plug into the monitor that wouldn’t be recognized, but if I pulled it into a port of the computer, it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The operation of Mac OS and of this laptop is buggy when using external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitors. This is, again, not anything incredibly new, but there’s still certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like how, when you have a Touch Bar and therefore Touch ID machine, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t display the password box on login. And it could be because it was waiting for a Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though the lib was closed. This was a much bigger problem when these 2016s first came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, when the first Touch ID ones came out. It was way buggier. It’s better now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still not fixed. You still have weird little inconsistencies. Like you still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know when you walk up to your computer and push a key or move the mouse to wake it up, you still don’t really know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna wake up. Because about 10% of the time it just doesn’t. I still did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have failures to wake from sleep. I had one of those T2 Bridge OS kernel panic crashes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when this monitor was connected, never when it wasn’t, only when this monitor connected. So it’s still just, it’s kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of inconsistent and kind of broken to use it as a desktop. But during the rest of the times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it was working, performance-wise it was fine, there was a little bit of slugging with the GPU driving all those pixels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most of the work I do, that doesn’t matter. As an Xcode development machine, it was totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once I got it working, once I got it woken up, it was actually a really nice machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Better than I expected. I hardly ever heard the fan spin up when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in desktop mode, even when I was pushing it, which I could not say the same thing about the 15 inches that I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past. So that’s good. It does seem like that’s maybe getting better. Or this is just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t using a discrete GPU, So maybe that’s just, you know, a lot cooler. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, moving on the rest of the USB-C world in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First, a quick shout out to our friends over at Cortex.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey This episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Cortex this past week was awesome because it included this wonderful rant from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our friend, Gray, who decided to buy all in to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ecosystem, including buying the Blackmagic eGPU, as well as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this aforementioned LG 5K monitor and with a brand new top of the line 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro and trying to connect them all together was a disaster because USB-C just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all over the place. It’s terrible, it’s inconsistent, it’s poorly described, poorly labeled, poorly documented.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The products are unreliable, the cables are unreliable. It’s like everything about it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s shocking that it’s like a four-year-old ecosystem at this point, anyway, or a three-year-old ecosystem at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have now had two USB-C products flake out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in significant ways that I know of. One of them is a four-port USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one-port USB-C power delivery charger. The other one is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C to Ethernet and three-USB-A dongle. Both of those are made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by everyone’s favorite company, Anker. Anker makes really good stuff, allegedly, most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes maybe in the past. But both of these things are both Anker products and they have both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaked out on me in various ways. The USB-C to Ethernet one just usually doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you plug it in, it might not work. Unplug it, plug it back in, then it might work. That one is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me is garbage. And the, my beloved like four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port USB and one port USB-C charger, the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part will only supply enough power to charge things if there isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cable plugged into the third USB-A port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You got that? Maybe I didn’t read the manual, but if there is a cable, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s nothing on the other end of that cable, if there is a cable plugged into the third USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port on this four-port USB-A charger, its USB-C port won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Got it? Maybe these USB-C peripherals were made by the creators of Myth. Not Myth,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. You have to know to just plug it in, try every slot, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you figure out, aha. Because that’s how you must have figured this out,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Pretty much. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why does it sometimes not charge? Let me try something in this slot. No. Let me try something in this slot. No. Aha.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Found it. So these things are garbage, and even everyone’s beloved company, Anker, can’t make reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C products. I’ll get to something else I’m trying in a second. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think covers the negatives of this laptop and the world around it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I just wanted to chime in on the Cortex thing. That situation, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple parts of it that made it funny. One was that he’s trying to do gaming on a Mac laptop with an external
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU. But anyway, setting that aside, the external GPU comes with a short cable. That was the origin
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, and he wanted to have the eGPU on the floor, which again, may or may not be the best thing to do. But the thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was- No, that’s totally reasonable. It’s a box with fans that’s like, You know you want it to be away from you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but here’s the thing though I know what what he you know part of his his problems were like that It was a thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John cable not a USB or whatever there are length limits And the length limits are shorter the
⏹️ ▶️ John higher bandwidth thing you’re trying to connect I don’t know if the eGPU thing comes with a three foot
⏹️ ▶️ John cable just because Like that’s the maximum length or just because they’re being cheap or just because they expect people to
⏹️ ▶️ John have it on the desk But you can’t put a 25 foot USB C or not in the UFC, Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John cable connected to your eGPU probably. Like there are length
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco limits to the standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what they are. They’re probably pretty big for what they’re doing, but do keep that in mind among the million
⏹️ ▶️ John other things that you have to keep in mind when this world is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco completely unlabeled identical looking cables
⏹️ ▶️ John is that even if you get everything exactly right, if one of your cables is beyond the length
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s supposed to be, or you’re really close to the limit and you have a limited power or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be also a cause of your problem. That’s true of any cabling system, Thunderbolt 3 in particular, since
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so high bandwidth and in theory so low latency for doing stuff like having external
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs, I bet length limits are a factor. So that’s my bit of advice.
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. Finally, Wi-Fi that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know by now, as all of you know, if you ever try to put a Wi-Fi router that covers your entire house or your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire apartment, it’s really hard. You always end up having like dead zones or slow areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or places where you get like the one little arc of reception and then everything kind of breaks because it thinks it has Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it just doesn’t have enough coverage. Eero fixes that. And they do it by a trick that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the business world has known for a long time. They broadcast from multiple access points that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover your house in a mesh. And the business systems that have been around for a while can do this, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually require wiring to every access point, and they’re usually really expensive and really hard to set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, and basically require you to be a network admin to understand. Eero fixes all these problems. So first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, it’s super easy to set up. Eero Wi-Fi routers are the easiest Wi-Fi router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever seen to set up. It’s not just easier than any of the other distributed systems, it’s easier than all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other routers I’ve ever seen, single or distributed. So it’s super easy, the units themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are beautiful, they’re tastefully designed, they look like Apple products honestly. You know, they’re these little white units,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main base station is about the size of an Apple TV, and then the secondary ones are called these beacons.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco as nightlights. They have a built-in option for that if you want to use it like that. And they’re just great. The Eero app talks you through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re going to put them, you know, where they’re necessary in your house, helps you kind of map things out. And then you have wonderful features
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi coverage and you don’t have to worry about Wi-Fi coverage ever again. You just have it all over your
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13” MBP review: Neutrals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, Eero.com, E-E-R-O dot com, and use code ATP to make overnight
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have a couple of neutrals about this laptop and the world around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Wait, we’re talking about cars now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The battery life has been kind of all over the place. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple days where it was really bad, like about like three hours, and a couple days where it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good, like seven hours. And so it seems like when I’m actually working in Xcode, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an average I can expect is like four to six. That’s been what I’ve been seeing so far. And to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the higher end of that, I have to use Turbo Boost Switcher and turn off Turbo Boost. That does help a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also still concerned about the long-term keyboard reliability. You know, these are just too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new with this new revision of this keyboard. We don’t know yet about that. That might end up being a huge problem down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road. I don’t know. So far, I’ve had no problems. but again it’s only been about two weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that I’ve been using this keyboard more and more and more and with the revisions they have made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since 2016, I’m upgrading my opinion of the key switches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from torture to fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glowing review. I still don’t like them, but they have reached the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I consider them fine. The previous ones, like the old style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys, I consider those decent, or even good. This I will upgrade to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, that’s better than I ever thought I would think of any butterfly keyboard after trying the first god awful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Let’s leave it at that.
13” MBP review: Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now for the positives. I actually really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this laptop overall. Number one thing, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the size. You know, I’ve been saying for a while, because my travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs were getting lower, I wanted to move to the 13 for a while. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last summer I bought a MacBook Escape. Or last spring, whatever it was. I loved the MacBook Escape, except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it’s only two ports, two ports and a bad keyboard. Like flaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out keyboard. Other than that I loved it. Now I have four ports because I got the Touch Bar model this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and the keyboard hasn’t died yet. So I love it again. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love this size. You know, even though I complain about the thinness, it is nice that it’s super thin. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they added two millimeters, I wouldn’t even notice. What makes the size feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good to me is the footprint and the weight. Like, the way I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like pick it up and walk around one-handed, I can do that with the 15, but this feels a lot better doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. And it’s just a really nice size. I’m very, very happy with the size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Performance of it is excellent. It is faster by a decent margin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s faster than my old 15-inch was. And it’s a 13-inch. So like, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that, again, to get that quad-core CPU in this enclosure is great. You know, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other improvements, like the super fast SSD. It’s not an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Like, when I got back to my iMac Pro, I noticed. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was damn good, especially considering it’s only a 13-inch. It gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me really good performance for any laptop, and pretty decent performance for any computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of that in a three-pound 13-inch laptop is really quite something. And it does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly with grace. Again, it runs a little hot if you leave turbo boost on for, you know, while doing heavy things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does run a little bit hot, but if you turn off turbo, I get about the same performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as my old 15 inch had with turbo on and in a much smaller package. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that performance if I need it and when I don’t really need it to be maxed out, when I want to conserve battery or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conserve heat, I have that option and it’s great. Like I just, it’s a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco balance. This, I just, I love this so much for performance and for size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch ID is really nice. Since I last tried touch ID in the Mac, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was mostly in 2016 and a little bit in 2017, the Mac OS was still super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy with it, as I mentioned earlier, with waking from sleep, it would ask for touch ID when the lid was closed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more often. Now, those problems are mostly fixed, and when it works, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster to me. Unlocking the laptop just seems faster than it used to be. It used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not much of a time savings because it was so weird and slow and buggy. And they seem like it’s better now. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and software is now better at detecting whether Touch ID is there. It’s also better at detecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you have Touch ID in the machine, but the lid is closed. Like, so one password, for instance, would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show me the Touch ID dialogue if the lid was closed and I was running in clamshell mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would actually say like, we need your password because you can’t reach Touch ID. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like there’s the software side of it is just much more mature now. USB-C charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome. I really, really enjoy all this, all my complaints aside about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other aspects of this, I really enjoy having just one charger and one charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable between my laptop and anything else I bring that happens to be USB-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So on this trip, we had the Nintendo Switch with us and Tiff was playing it pretty heavily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and she’s playing it for her podcast, Playing for Fun, which you should listen to on Relay FM. It’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games and good things about games. So we had to charge the switch a lot on this trip. And I was using my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. And it was really nice to be able to just like, here, take this cable for like an hour, you charge the switch, I’ll let my laptop battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drain for a little while. Then, when you’re all charged up, pass the cable back and I’ll recharge mine. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was so nice to have just one charger in the bag. And to know that like, if I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another one, they’re actually really easy to get because there’s tons of USB-C chargers out there now. It’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice to have, if I can ever find one that works reliably, Anker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be nice to have like a USB-A multi-charger with USB-C ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well and with power delivery. Like those kind of sometimes exist now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s more coming out every few months. That’s nice. I hope they eventually make a reliable one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also really nice to have the ability, although I haven’t tried this yet, to use external USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power delivery batteries. So if the battery life doesn’t end up being awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me and I’m going on like a cross-country flight, I can get a USB-C battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and extend my life that way. That’s awesome. That’s something that you either couldn’t do before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you go all the way back to the era of having multiple batteries you could swap out, or you’d have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of weird hack with a third-party 12-volt battery with some kind of hacked MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug on the end of it that wasn’t really officially supported, and there was all sorts of weird stuff. USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging is really nice. I’m very happy to have that. And finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dongle situation, again, maybe I should have made this a neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s kind of unknown. During my last rant about this, which I rant about every two weeks, listener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Medicalism wrote in and recommended a StarTech dock. It is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my Merlin style, it is the StarTech DKT30CSDHPD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco StarTech.com USB-C multi-port adapter, 2x USB, 3.0 HDMI, USB 3.0 HDMI SD Gigabit Ethernet with power delivery USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PD USB-C docking station.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is available on Amazon for $72. I’ll put the link in the show notes. And what Listener Medicalism are willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, over 35 of these are in daily use at this person’s office.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Downsides are there’s only 60 watt power delivery pass-through. Which should actually be fine for me, but I don’t even need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pass through, I can just use it as a dongle. But not a single failure among those 35 in daily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, not a single failure since they They specified a standard issue with all the USB-C MacBook Pros company-wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco According to IT, nothing on them has failed or is flaky. So I bought one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I used it when my stupid Anker one died at home. I switched to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I plugged everything. I used the Ethernet part of it. I used the SD card reader sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t use PowerPass through. I used it just as a dongle without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PowerPass through. but I use the USB ports and the ethernet and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the SD card. I didn’t try the HDMI yet. It is completely forgettable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Finally. You know, that’s what you want. You don’t want to ever have to think about your dongles. You wanna just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it work. And what’s nice about this is it is kind of big and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of heavy and kind of expensive, but it bundles a whole bunch of stuff together at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t need to carry a whole bag of dongles anymore. I can just carry this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe one Apple one as a backup. And that’s really nice. I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I don’t love that I need these things, but this is the nicest one I’ve used so far. Now, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, Metaclism and their office with 35 of them have worked great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mine, for two weeks, has worked great. But, like every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other USB dongle thing like this, if you look at the Amazon reviews, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of people who say it works great And among people who say, mine flaked out or mine died.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s really hard to give any kind of good read on this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, is this actually good or not? Is this actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something I can recommend? And the answer, unfortunately, is probably not, because I don’t have a big enough sample size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with this listener’s email, because these things are known to be so unreliable just as a whole. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say, the one I have is working great. and this listener allegedly had a bunch that are working great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If this continues to work great, or if I’m able to get a good USB-C, you know, multi-whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dongle for when I need it, that does make these laptops a lot nicer to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, I can say this is fine for me. So anyway, wrapping it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really like this laptop. I like it more than I expected to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though there are things about it I don’t like, like the, you know, I still don’t like the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I overall, I really like it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very happy with it. And I can strongly recommend with a few caveats of like, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little early to judge the keyboard reliability. Otherwise, I’m very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you bring up the size of the 13 inch MacBook Pro, because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall, I am a devout super fan of the MacBook Adorable slash MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one slash MacBook 12. And I love it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so unbelievably portable. It feels to me almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same size as an iPad. And in reality it’s not, but it feels that way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was Stephen Hackett did me a terrible disservice and he let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold his 13 inch MacBook Pro, I think when we were in Austin. And I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is noticeably heavier and larger larger than my MacBook adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But not aggressively heavier in larger than the MacBook and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who boy is it faster? So I am not in desperate need of a new laptop. In fact, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argue I don’t need a new laptop at all, but given that the adorable is so slow, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew going into it, I’ve been telling myself, Oh, when the next adorable comes out, I’ll just get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those and, you know, kind of be on the underscore plan of just churning through adorables. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been really having some naughty thoughts, if you will, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey defecting to the 13-inch MacBook Pro for all of the size-related reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you just brought up, that it’s really extremely portable and also extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful. So I don’t know what I’m gonna do, and I’m certainly gonna, at the very least, wait until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook One slash Adorable gets some sort of update,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps it gets removed, or whatever the case may be. But it would not surprise me if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Casey from six months from now ends up with a 13-inch MacBook Pro all of a sudden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I gotta say, if you think about what kind of bang for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the buck you’re getting, both for money and for size and weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you get for the 13-inch, performance-wise, flexibility-wise, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not including the Escape in this, really, because of its two-port limitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty annoying, and now the Touch Bar version of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a pretty large performance advantage over it. But you literally are getting what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was yesterday 15-inch class performance in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 13-inch laptop that is only one pound bigger than your 12-inch. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, and that’s a 50% increase. So that’s not a small increase, relatively speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still a super small, super portable laptop. You know, this is the size, 13 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and three pounds is the size of the 13 inch MacBook Air, approximately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s basically a MacBook Air by most people’s recollections or definitions of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that means. And so to have this amount of performance in it and have four USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports is awesome. and it is by far, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best bang for the buck of what you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in size and performance. If you actually want bang for the buck specs-wise, I think the entry-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15-inch is always that. The entry-level 15 is always best bang for the buck for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheer specs, and if this was my primary computer, I’d probably still want the 15 just for the extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grunt and screen space and GPU and everything else, but as the secondary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portable computer, I have zero temptation to go down to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12-inch because this, to me, is close enough in size and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just so much more computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I totally hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of size-related things, like you mentioned the side vent thingies. The same side vents are on the 15-inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I imagine they aren’t probably as big as the 15-inch is wider, so they end up not digging into your legs
⏹️ ▶️ John as much Is there more towards the middle of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legs than the edges? Yeah, that’s possible. I mean, and that’s, you know, like the actual like lap ergonomics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all these things. I also think 13 is the best balance for that. The 12, I mentioned this before, the 12 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found, you know, during the day I had one, I did not find it comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use in my lap. Like just, maybe it’s just like, you know, the size of my legs or how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the spacing of my legs or whatever it is. Like I couldn’t make it comfortable to use my lap. It was like too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small. Whereas the 13 and 15 are much more comfortable for me to use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. So once again, Casey, I will also push you in this direction of, for God’s sakes, get the 13.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now on the vent things as well, this reminds me of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was the first round of unibodies where the actual edges of the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John when the lid was open, like the edges of the bottom part were pretty sharp and people complained about
⏹️ ▶️ John it like being uncomfortably sharp if you had your wrist there. You shouldn’t rest your wrist while you type anyway. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was sharpened and in later models, they dulled it down like they knocked off the edge a little bit on
⏹️ ▶️ John all the unibodies. And that’s what they’ve been doing from that point on all the modern unibody laptops have the edges
⏹️ ▶️ John knocked down for the most part. So they’re not super sharp, except for apparently and I’ve noticed this too, when I carry mine around
⏹️ ▶️ John at work, because I feel those little edges as well, except for the little ventages. So a revision that Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John make, if they actually introduce a 2019 version of the same model, which I really hope they don’t do,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they revise it entirely. But either way, knock down the edges inside the vents, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not really any place for anything that sharp on a consumer product that you’re supposed to hold in your hands
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a knife.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually have a macro photo I’d included in a blog post in 2011 of the edge that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about that in the 2009 MacBook Pro is super sharp, and the 2011 MacBook Pro, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of rounded it off a little bit. So I’ll put that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is pretty good. forgotten about this post until you brought it up. So all in all, it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you might keep this for longer than any other laptop you’ve bought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, any other new laptop you’ve bought recently. So you might have this until September?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that too aggressive or do you think that’s a safe bet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, ultimately, I’m, again, I’m very happy with this laptop right now. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, again, barring any unforeseen, like, you know, keyboard breaking issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna stick with it for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m super glad and super surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, speaking of keyboard breaking issues, I’ve got the 2017 MacBook Pro at work.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the first time, was it yesterday or today, I hit the space bar
⏹️ ▶️ John and it felt a little weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey near. Find you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some compressed air. Yep, find some compressed air. The time is coming.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it went back to normal and I just forgot about it. But this is the first time the keyboard has done anything unexpected. So
⏹️ ▶️ John now, I mean, again, I don’t use it all day, right, for the most part. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it happens once, it’s usually not over. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the end of it. And it was baffling me why this might have happened. But then I recall that I did take this
⏹️ ▶️ John computer with me on vacation in a place where there’s lots of sand. And I did the entire time I was there, use
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard to the extent that I used it at all. Mostly I was just dumping photos onto it. so it’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t like, I didn’t take it to the beach, I wasn’t really using it for anything important, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was open in a house that was basically filled with sand, as all beach houses are, so, who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I’m just trying to ignore it and go back to using it as a laptop as a like a
⏹️ ▶️ John big flat Mac mini, connected to my external keyboard and mouse and monitor.
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Fall Mac speculation
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think this is not in the notes, but do you think, John, that we’ll see a Mac Mini update before the end of this
⏹️ ▶️ John No. No, I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it is rumored for the first time, probably in 10 years, like it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumored from, you know, from Ming-Chi Kuo, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John has a pretty good history.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think 2019 is a safe bet for a Mac mini update.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right. I don’t think it’ll be this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it could be this year. There’s no reason, it could be any day. Any day could be Mac mini day, but 2019 seems like a safer bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think this fall will have in store for the Macs in general? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, like, you know, I think the regular iMac, the non-Pro iMac, is overdue for an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The chips are out. That’s kind of a no-brainer. There’s almost certainly gonna be an iMac update. They’re pretty good about updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, usually. And the iMac, I think, it would be nice to see them basically do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iMac Pro update to the regular iMac and remove the 3.5-inch hard drive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesign the cooling in there. Yeah, I know SSDs are really expensive, but it’s also 2018, and if you really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four terabytes of storage, you can use externals now. It’s no big deal. Externals are big, cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re already using a desktop, it doesn’t need to be internal. So I think they could really save a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iMac, because when you take out that hard drive in the middle of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have much more room for a big, quiet cooling solution, which is one of the reasons why the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is so awesome. As for, and of course, T2 update and everything. As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the rest of the Macs, there’s been this giant question mark about what the heck is going on at the low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. and because they updated the high-end laptops and haven’t touched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the Escape, which would normally have been updated, or the 12-inch, as you mentioned, Casey, which would normally be updated about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same time, leads me to believe that there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something interesting happening this fall. What could this fall look like for the laptops, like from worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to best? Worst case scenario, I think, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current trio trio of low-end laptops that all kind of have significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides, which are the extremely limited and compromised 12-inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ancient 13-inch MacBook Air, an ancient but very versatile and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well-loved MacBook Air, or the somewhat limited and very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Escape. Those are the three low-end laptops that are currently confusing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entry-level Mac buyers and disappointing enthusiasts who want to recommend things to people to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy. Somehow I think this needs to get resolved and I think the dip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Mac sales and the quarterly earnings is showing this. Having the low-end laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be this weird segment of the market that’s very poorly addressed right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is hurting. I think they’re likely to solve it this fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Worst case scenario is they don’t solve it, nothing changes. because none of these things get updates this fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Second worst, I think, is they get updates, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just like a spec bump here or there. It’s not a significant change, and therefore all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things still have problems. So basically, what that would look like is the 12-inch getting the new processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the year, the MacBook Escape getting some kind of 15-watt new processor of the year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the MacBook Air probably getting no changes and probably still being sold.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, that’s kind of the, you know, the not worst case but mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. That’s kind of what Apple’s been doing for a while of like telling the same story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only louder because we didn’t like it the last two times they told that story. So yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really want the 12 inch MacBook which is nothing like an Air or you really want the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Escape which is way too expensive and less versatile than the Air. Trust me, you want those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we keep saying no. So anyway, those are the bad outcomes. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one possible good outcome, which I’m slightly confident might happen because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does seem to be turning things around pretty well recently in the Mac area, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if they finally release something new that actually resolves this low-end thing, that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the replacement for the MacBook Air? And I can see two ways they might do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one is they change the MacBook Escape enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to make it a better air replacement. So what that would look like would basically be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely a price drop of some sort to bring it more in line with what the Air’s pricing is now. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more ports, even if it’s USB-C, I know we’ve already lost that battle, so even if it’s just four USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports or something, something to make it more palatable to people who really just want a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Retina Air that Apple refuses to make. Or, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could maybe change the 12-inch MacBook to be a MacBook Air replacement, Apple might try that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think it is one. I don’t think it’s ever gonna be one, because that five watt chipset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just so limited. It’s so limited performance, and it is only having that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one port, people hate that. I know a lot of people love that laptop, but it’s not MacBook Air buyers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that laptop. So then, what I think is my most optimistic possibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, but I still wouldn’t rule this out, What if we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next body style being launched in this new product? Because this would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be the first time Apple debuted a new body style in the entry level or the smallest laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First, it was the MacBook Air in 2008 and then 2010. That was the new body style. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the first unibody was the MacBook Air. And then when the 12-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, that debuted what became the current generation MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style with its crappy keyboard and super thin everything, USB-C only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the start of a new body style. So the timing would not be unreasonable for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fall to be the debut of a new body style that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts out as just the low-end laptop and maybe goes to the pros next year. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very excited at that possibility because even if, I mean, jeez, I guess worst case scenario is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do debut body style and it’s even worse in all these areas that I care about. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no ports and a flat glass keyboard. Yeah, that’s possible. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, again, I think Apple has turned the corner on the Max and is heading in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right direction now. So I would love to see like what a new body style would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, whatever debuts in the low end is probably going to make it to the high end in a year or two. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be interesting to see if they do change something like what direction does it take in areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are controversial about the current pros? So what direction does the keyboard take? What direction does the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take? What direction, you know, what changes? Are the ports different? You know, what, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s different? Because that could really indicate where we’re headed next. And so not to mention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that it would be a really cool thing to finally revive the the bottom of the MacBook lineup.
Low-end versatility
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like they need to reconcile that that lineup not
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that eliminates like I don’t think their current distribution of
⏹️ ▶️ John body styles and price points makes any sense, even if they were all like up to date and new, I think it’s just too much of a mess. So I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for some consolidation. And you can consolidate all sorts of different ways. You could leave the stupid MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and just consolidate the the 12 inch and the 13 inch into some compromise machine, you get more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John you could leave the 12 inch it’s so darn small and consolidate the air and the escape into one like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of different ways you can slice it but they just have too many computers that vary in in stupid ways
⏹️ ▶️ John the interesting thing to me thinking about thinking about the air going away uh
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know the escape going away and being replaced by by a new model leaving the leaving the 12 inch being
⏹️ ▶️ John the super small thing is a making a model that you could that
⏹️ ▶️ John whose price can extend down to where the air used to be. So like entry price for that being 999, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then extending it up, right? And be like, we’ve been talking for years now
⏹️ ▶️ John about dongles and not having any traditional ports and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, reliability of hubs and stuff like that. But sometimes when I think about this, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the high end and the tech nerds actually have more tolerance for being being annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John by dongles than the low end does. Like when the air finally goes away
⏹️ ▶️ John and some poor unsuspecting non-computer enthusiast goes into
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple store and buys basically the cheapest laptop they have and leaves with a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that does not have USB-A ports. It’s not like those people use tons of peripherals,
⏹️ ▶️ John but thumb drives are so common now, they give them out at trade shows and stuff, that I bet because there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John many people that buy the cheapest Apple laptop, like it’s their best selling model, right? Because there are so many of those people,
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of those people who just expect to plop it down their desk and shove in the stupid thumb drive from the trade show or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and find out that there’s no port of that shape on the side of the thing, I feel like that might be a more,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the final hurdle, the final 80% of people who don’t know about Dongletown,
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing everybody into Dongletown, I think there may be more of a customer
⏹️ ▶️ John sat impact of finally ditching the air, because
⏹️ ▶️ John so many people keep buying that thing and because it survives, because it’s rugged, because it has the ports, because
⏹️ ▶️ John all those things that are attributes of the air that we all assume will go away in the new one, certainly the USB-A ports we
⏹️ ▶️ John assume will go away, that the impact of consolidating the line and getting rid of the air could be
⏹️ ▶️ John much more angry customers than they ever got when tweaking the high end, because
⏹️ ▶️ John high end, there’s lots of carrots, like, well, we grumble and we hate it, but it’s new and it’s shiny their advantages and all the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John you talked about. But the low end people don’t care about new. They don’t care about shiny. They don’t care about the advantages. They think they just got a broken
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop that doesn’t have the right holes in the side of it. And it just seems like it seems punitive. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel that way often about the current laptop. It just seems punitive. I look at the giant blank, empty sides of these laptops and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, you’re why are you punishing me? And I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John back when the the original removal of all ports from laptops came around, Apple was sending out
⏹️ ▶️ John like surveys to people and asking them what kind of ports they use and stuff like that. I was so hopeful that like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, they’re that they’re thinking about this. And again, in the April, you know, Mac Pro event where
⏹️ ▶️ John I was attaching all my hopes and dreams to vague mentions of perhaps rethinking what the laptops look like, which
⏹️ ▶️ John in retrospect, they’re probably just talking about the 2018 that we just got, which didn’t satisfy me in any way when it comes to the port situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I really hope that whatever they do in the low end, that the things
⏹️ ▶️ John have Like something that acknowledges
⏹️ ▶️ John what I think is the stark reality that just USB-C ports on every single
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop is less satisfying than breaking the purity and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, fine, one of our models has an SD card slot, or fine, we put one USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ John on something, like anything, any kind of compromise, just because it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t see the benefit I’m getting from not having a USB-A port. I
⏹️ ▶️ John see the inconvenience all the time. I don’t see the benefit. And the same thing with the low end. You can’t have every port,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have Ethernet, you can’t have like every single thing that the old ones had, probably because they’re too small. I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are lots of ports that would fit, that would be really convenient and I just, Dongletown
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, not doing it for me. I don’t like it. It makes the laptop feel
⏹️ ▶️ John worse to me. Like I want, I want to be able to plug in the things I I need to plug
⏹️ ▶️ John in and as we pointed out a million times those old interfaces are
⏹️ ▶️ John Taking a long time to go away eventually they will fine and when they are the you know, then we’ll go to this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re they’re still around. They’re still they’re still in my face every day and I don’t know how long
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna take for them To disappear, but they’re still here so I really hope that there is consolidation in the line and I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John for some glimmer that shows that they are are willing to not
⏹️ ▶️ John be purists about the fact that the only holes in the side of their laptops are for air
⏹️ ▶️ John or For a port that may be USB C or Thunderbolt 3 depending on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, what are you looking to plug into your laptop that you feel like you can’t without a dongle
⏹️ ▶️ John Any USB a peripheral
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John all USB up. I connect my camera to pull pictures off I my sister bought a thumb drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wanted to copy the pictures to it that thumb drive is USB a right and I’m I’m not even talking about HDMI at work all the time because
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand that’s not a concern of people who buy $900 laptops probably, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-A and SD, those two things both annoy me. Obviously, you’re not gonna get probably
⏹️ ▶️ John both of them, but one of them, the SD card slot, it’ll fit. It’s thin enough to fit, I promise you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can find room in there for an SD card slot. That, then I wouldn’t have to connect my camera to it. I would still have to use
⏹️ ▶️ John a dongle when I connect to her thumb drive. And what if I forgot my dongle or didn’t have it with me?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s annoying to have to have dongles around. dongles aren’t attached to my laptop. They’re in another bag
⏹️ ▶️ John that hopefully is in the same place as my laptop, right? That’s less useful to me
⏹️ ▶️ John than a laptop that has one USB-A port on it somewhere for lazy things. iMac Pro’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got them. It’s a brand new computer. It can be done. There’s room somewhere just for one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them for legacy reasons. And again, if you’re gonna put it on one, put it on the cheapest one because those people are most likely
⏹️ ▶️ John to have old peripherals and aren’t gonna be like, because I’m a fancy boy, I’m going to go replace all of my cables
⏹️ ▶️ John with USB-C cables because I want to enter the USB. They don’t think like that. They just have stuff and they buy a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John that they used to be able to plug your thing into. Now they can’t and now they have to get an adapter and it just seems worse. It just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so I don’t know. I’m looking for compromise. I’m looking for some
⏹️ ▶️ John visible compromise on the ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re waiting for a train that ain’t coming, if you ask me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I agree very much with both of you. I think I really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to have that versatility again for all the reasons you mentioned. I do agree that low-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buyers are also, you know, are most unforgiving when it comes to that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of removal. That’s why like forever, the one, the Mac that sold in ridiculous volumes was that one that still had the optical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive, the 101, because a lot of people still will
⏹️ ▶️ John use that long after. My mother still uses a laptop with an optical drive because she can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John play discs from the library in any other computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like a lot of people still want that. And it seems, to a lot of buyers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these removals of things don’t seem like moving forward, as you mentioned, they seem like cheaping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And earlier when I was talking about the PowerBrick removals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have removals for new models that then cost more than what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re replacing, that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That loses a lot of customers, it loses a lot of buyers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it makes people feel like they removed them for greed, you know, or profit instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some, you know, good design reason or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s ideology though, for the most part. It’s not, you know, the cheaping out of like, you know, not having the power
⏹️ ▶️ John cable for the power brick, or the, you know, that’s, you know, nickel and diming. But the other stuff, it’s like philosophical, like that
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to leave those legacy things behind, which I’m all for, but it’s just, the key is getting the timing right. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air, I feel like, has protected Apple from this for a while, because so many people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and it’s always there, just like the optical drive one did. And speaking of the optical drive, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not arguing for optical drives. They should not be in laptops anymore, but I’ve been unable to convince my own mother
⏹️ ▶️ John that she can get video online. She says, oh, but I can get the discs for free from the library. Oh, well, you can buy an external
⏹️ ▶️ John drive for 50 bucks. Oh, but then I gotta have a thing attached. She doesn’t wanna have a thing attached to her laptop because it’s gonna be inconvenient when it’s on her
⏹️ ▶️ John lap. It’s just easier to have it built in. And that’s exactly the same thinking with everything else, SD cards
⏹️ ▶️ John or dongles. It’s just easier to have everything built in. I always think of it this way. I don’t like instead of arguing for like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, arguing for this or being against progress, we always say, imagine this. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John you had like you just you just mentioned it and we mentioned all the time. Imagine you had something the size and weight of the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John with a retina screen with USB C power, but all the other ports. People
⏹️ ▶️ John would love that thing for $999. People would love it. Like imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John a 15 inch MacBook Pro that had an SD card slot. Would they like it? Would people like it more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John than the current people would like it more. The people who never use the SD card slot, they’d be neutral,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Oh, they lost 75 millimeters of battery, they’d be fine, right? People who
⏹️ ▶️ John want an SD card slot would be over the moon. They would be like, don’t buy the ones without the SD card slot. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine a 15 inch laptop with one USB-A and an SD card slot. People would
⏹️ ▶️ John love it. They would absolutely love it. It would be better. If you gave any pro person, you can have this
⏹️ ▶️ John one with the SD card slot and the USB-A and all the other ports or this one without them, which one is better? No one’s going to say, I like the
⏹️ ▶️ John purity of that one. I like how it doesn’t have those other ports. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m never going to use those ports anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m probably losing at least 15 minutes of battery life from those things intruding into my case. I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John rather have the one without those ports on it. Everyone would pick the one with the ports, even though they’re legacy and
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly and so on and so forth. Hell, if you made the arrow keys half size, I bet you’d get a lot of takers. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John these products that we imagine that are exactly the same as the current products with a few tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John compromises would be more attractive products. More people would want
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy them. And the only reason we don’t have them are for reasons of, it seems, ideological purity
⏹️ ▶️ John and sort of pushing the world forward. And I applaud that, but I wish the pushing had worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish we had transformed over, I don’t know if I should say overnight, I wish we had transformed over
⏹️ ▶️ John the past three years to an ecosystem where USBC is the only thing we needed. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s time to consider a compromise. And, you know, I said this a couple years ago, we talked about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, my realistic compromise hope is just SD. Yeah, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s because it’s the one that’s the skinniest. That’s basically what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m going for. It’s the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the skinniest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’re never getting USB back or any of the other reports. But but SD seems achievable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you said nope to use BA but like the iMac Pro is USB A I was I was flabbergasted by
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Like because the Mac I can’t imagine the Mac Pro I think we talked about this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the iMac Pro, a brand new computer, a brand new fancy awesome computer, it has USB-A ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s awesome. I can finally plug eight USB things into my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you were given the choice between the iMac Pro with those USB-A ports and without one, which one would you choose? If you had to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay $100 more for the one with USB-A ports, you would probably pay it. Like, it’s just, it’s insane how much
⏹️ ▶️ John better it makes that computer. I would have paid $500 more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s like, I use USB for so much at my desktop, like all those ports are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so tough because I think it’s hard for the three of us to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember that just because it says MacBook Pro doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily mean it’s only professionals that buy them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moreover, the definition of professional is huge. You know, our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definition of professional, except maybe John, Is that a GPU really doesn’t matter. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can have the crummiest GPU in the world for Marco and me, because we’re just using the operating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system. It doesn’t, you know, we’re not doing much with the GPU and yes, I’m sure you’re writing in right now to tell me, Oh, core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ML and blah, blah, blah. Okay. You take the point I’m making is we don’t, we’re not playing games. We’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing 3d stuff for the sorts of things that Marco and I do. A GPU doesn’t matter, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a kind of professional where the GPU is critical for what they’re doing. So you’re doing a lot of CAD work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example. And I think that it’s easy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to lose sight of the fact that, you know, if you look around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and granted I haven’t been on a college campus in a long time, but if you look maybe in like a Starbucks or something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, you know, Marco, if you lowered yourself to going into a Starbucks, you see a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of MacBook Pros. You don’t see, you see a lot of Airs as well, but you see a lot of MacBook Pros. And certainly in my place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of business, I saw plenty of MacBook Pros on desks of people who did nothing but office or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, you know, Google docs sorts of things. And for most people that buy a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, I would argue that an SD card slot is wasteful. Now I do agree with what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you said, I think it was John, you know, put it in there. Who cares? It’s thin and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make some people happy and everyone else will just kind of shrug over it. for it, but I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I don’t think that, I mean, I certainly had no use for an SD card slot until I bought a camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2014. And if it wasn’t for the fact that I bought a big camera in 2014, I would still think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just a stupid port to take up space. And so just because it’s important to the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an SD card slot is important to me. I would kill for an SD card slot in, in any of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops, but just because it’s important to us doesn’t mean it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important to the majority of Apple’s customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I and I think that the three of us, myself included, often lose sight of that, because we want the computer that’s perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us. And the fact of the
⏹️ ▶️ John is, the point I was making is that the port that is most important to most of Apple’s customers is USB.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s the point I
⏹️ ▶️ John was making with the loan. Like, realistically, if that’s your judgment criteria, like what is important to the most buyers,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s USB. Because the most buyers buy the cheapest laptops and cheapest laptops come with USB and people who buy
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap laptops have tons of USB stuff and they don’t want to rebuy stuff. But we all think, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not going to do USB because it’s too big or whatever. So I don’t know that. So that’s what that’s why my fallback position
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fine. If you’re going to hold
⏹️ ▶️ John line, if you’re going to hold line and USB, then then throw in the SD, you know, because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s like the photographer’s computer, whatever, like, and if they were into Tim Cook, the Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook product mindset has lots of things that are different about we talked about them keeping products on the market for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John and not doing updates and stuff like that. A similar philosophy that could have been part of the template
⏹️ ▶️ John philosophy but hasn’t been but falls in the line of like things that Apple didn’t used to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’d say like, Oh, that’s not an Apple style thing to do. One of those is having
⏹️ ▶️ John a million different variations of a product, right? That’s not a thing that Apple does. They have variations of a product. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John they also have colors mixed in, which is nice. But in general, it’s a cheap thing to do. But it’s not like you can choose to buy the
⏹️ ▶️ John 15 inch with the SD card slot and 15 inch without the SD card slot because there’s too many variations. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine an alternate universe where that was yet another thing that Tim Cook decided to do to take from like the world
⏹️ ▶️ John of PC laptops, where you can get it a million different ways. And say the old Apple didn’t do that. But the new Apple decides,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, we are going to have 25 different SKUs, you can buy the 15 inch with two USB A
⏹️ ▶️ John ports, you can buy it with an SD card slot, you can buy one model with CF card slot, like
⏹️ ▶️ John is an alternate universe Apple that could also exist and would I think, serve the needs of
⏹️ ▶️ John customers better because imagine when you were picking them, if you had more options to pick and the person who didn’t want the
⏹️ ▶️ John SD card slot could not have it and maybe that had more battery space, or the person who wanted it could get it and you could choose
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s, you know, obviously, Apple has never really been like that. And that’s kind of what the Pro Max for
⏹️ ▶️ John and in general, laptops aren’t like that. But and it would cost Apple more and they would make less money and
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be stupid from a supply chain perspective, there’s many reasons it’s not going to happen. Right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as a customer, wouldn’t we all love that ability? Like it would be attractive to customers and things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are attractive to customers have the magical ability to for for Apple to get more money from us for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. There is, especially on the high end where there’s some price flexibility. If you give some if you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Margaret was saying, he’s ready to pay $500 for USB ports like there is demand for this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Apple just needs to find the right balance between satisfying demand without making a million
⏹️ ▶️ John products, which is ridiculous. But having enough of a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that is attractive that people get excited about it being released. People were excited about the iMac Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ John there hadn’t been a Mac like that available to buy for any amount of money for a long time. People were
⏹️ ▶️ John ready and willing to throw money at Apple to get that computer. We haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ John an event like that in the laptop line for a long time where people are like, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this giant wad of money that I wanted to throw at you and I’ve been hemming and hawing. It’s more like when
⏹️ ▶️ John the new laptops come out, the people are like, well, they’re better than the last ones and they’re making progress, but nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John is like throwing money at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I disagree. I think the launch of the 12-inch was one of those moments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because anytime you introduce a radical new size, especially when it’s smaller than what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had before, that does tend to create one of those moments.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was 2015 I was talking about. I mean, I guess that’s only three years ago, but it It seems like a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right that 12 inch was definitely an event like that. So was even the original MacBook Air, which was a stinker of machine
⏹️ ▶️ John was in like that. And the original retina 15 inch was definitely an event like that. Yeah, that’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to recapture, like where it’s like, Oh my god, have you seen the new laptops, I have to have one that hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John happened since 2015.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the touch bar, man, the touch bar, everyone wanted the touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it was announced, no one cared about.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John close. Because people didn’t know like, it was cool. And people were excited but I think there was some trepidation
⏹️ ▶️ John because like I don’t think people could consent they weren’t sure it was new enough that they weren’t it’s kind of like a like how like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone like it seems cool but you’re not sure because you’ve never used a phone like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that right oh my god no like
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have a new technology that people haven’t used before like how many people had ever used
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop with a little screen on the keyboard almost nobody right so you didn’t know it looked cool but you’re like but will it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John be cool and useful you don’t know until you try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right yeah when When the iPhone was announced, everyone’s like, Oh my God, I know exactly how and when and why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will be cool. And I want one right this second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey When the touch bar was used, everyone’s like, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we’ll see what
⏹️ ▶️ John developers do with this. The iPhone looked amazing. But how many people had used a
⏹️ ▶️ John complete touchscreen smartphone by that point? Almost nobody, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the potential for it to say, well, maybe, you know, again, remember that the angst over the keyboard, if you haven’t tried a software
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, you’ve seen them do it and like they talk a good game, but you don’t know what it’s going to be like, right? Same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with the touch bar, same thing with any kind of technology that most people haven’t used. There is a question about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The question was decisively answered with the iPhone as soon as literally anybody touched one for two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John The touch bar, like, it wasn’t like that. When you touched it, it was like, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, maybe when software supports it, kind of, like, some people like it, some people don’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s obviously not a home run. But technology like that is not, it’s not like a known quantity, Whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ John Retina 15 inch, it’s like the 15 inch that you know and love, but it has an amazing screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and the case is cool and smaller and it has all the same parts as you had before. So that’s not an issue. And the keyboard is about
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as it was before. So that’s not an issue. So it’s just like win, win, win. Everybody loves it. Take my money, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the one thing I want to go back to before we move on from this topic, which we’ve spent way too much time on, which I’m now contributing even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to, is that, you know, Casey, like, you know, your your little segment there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, you know, low end use and John about but like your mom’s optical drive and everything. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very common thing for tech dudes like us to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk down about other people’s needs, to say like, oh, well, this person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are just doing casual things, or they’re novices, or they’re just doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office work. They don’t need technology or hardware spec X, Y, or Z, or they don’t need advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And first of all, we should mostly not be doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s generally not, it’s at best unproductive, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at worst can be quite insulting, or and you know, have other major issues with it. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that like we as both, you know, us and all the listeners of the show should be a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conscious of, like, you know, don’t tell people what they don’t need, basically. Like, if they’re not asking, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell them. Because, you know, the reality is, lots of things about these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops, we don’t need, or most of the people buying them don’t need. Lots of things about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are better than they need to be. For most of the time, the things are mostly used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we have them anyway. Like, how many people buy the 15-inch because it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big screen, who don’t need six cores? Probably a lot, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? But it’s fine, like, that’s what it comes with. Who don’t need, you know, I bought the 15s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had discrete GPUs. I didn’t need discrete GPUs. I didn’t have an option to buy without it, so I just took it. As I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in previous shows, I have either never or almost never used HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports on laptops, but I had them, and you know what? Just in case if I was ever at a hotel room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and needed that, it would’ve been nice to have. I never use the webcam,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but some people do, fine. Having extra things on a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just in case someone does need them, is a good thing. That’s not something to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimize with our current design trends, obsession with ultra-minimalism for its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sake. Like, minimalism is not an admirable trait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, it’s not something to aspire to. It doesn’t justify itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just an attribute. It’s something that’s like, oh wow, that is quite minimal. That doesn’t mean it’s better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that isn’t. Laptops are general purpose machines, especially once you get into the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and high end of the line. Like, you can look at something like the 12-inch and you can say, well, it’s fine to take a bunch of stuff out of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s the super extreme version of this thing that like, you know, it’s very compromised to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit this size goal and fine, it’s buyers don’t care, fine. But the rest of the laptops should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as general purpose as possible because you don’t know what people buying them are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to need. You don’t know if the person who you think is just gonna buy it for running Microsoft Excel every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often is next year gonna start taking some programming courses and change their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career and need to run Xcode and need to compile Swift. Like, you don’t know that. None of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that. Even if it’s like, you know, even if it’s something that we think we know well, like say a parent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a relative or something, and it’s like, oh, I know they won’t use it for much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know what, next year, what if there’s an update to the Photos app that needs a bunch of CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power to do something, you know? Or something like that, like something that a lot of people do, and all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sudden this affects somebody that you didn’t think had advanced needs. So like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never a good argument or position or statement to take or assumption to make that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only need low-end stuff or that, oh, you won’t use this. That’s what like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, let people make their own decisions and, you know, and let the future take its own course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that, believe it or not, was largely the point I was trying to make earlier and I don’t think I did a good job of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I was trying to say is just that everyone can define pro differently and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is absolutely critical for a photographer, like an SD card slot, could not matter less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to someone who is only writing code and X code, you know? And so I think that the most important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you just said is that these, if these machines are really and truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for professionals, they need to be versatile or they need to go the route that John was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like Dell, you know, or gateway 2000, you know, made to order. Yeah. But, um, but we, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we all agree that’ll never, ever, ever happen, even though it would be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I have to interject. Your example of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need the SD card slot if you’re just going to use an Xcode? One of the uses I had for my SD card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slot in the past was when I would buy a laptop with too small of a built-in hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive and bring it to WBDC every year where I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John download like seven gigs of betas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then 30 gigs of WBDC videos that wouldn’t fit on my built-in hard drive, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and download some my point. Yes, I see what you’re saying. Even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was only using Xcode, I still used that SD card slot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to build on what you were saying earlier, that’s a perfect encapsulation of why these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things need to be more versatile. Or maybe just USB-C needs to be better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually am not on the USB-C hate bandwagon. I don’t love it, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind it. I’m in Dongletown and I’m not there begrudgingly, but it is not paradise either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just a a place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe you only have one of them. You need more to hate them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s it. And actually, I do get quite frustrated at only having one port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just having two ports would make my world, well, twice as good, I guess, wouldn’t it? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I think it’s just that the three of us, I think, can all agree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just stinky that these machines aren’t more versatile. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can, even if you’re firing up your email client right now to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are versatile that’s what USB-C is all about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But A, please don’t. You can just hit command W now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the other thing about it is USB-C has its own set of problems and the rant on Cortex as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny as it was is applicable. Like when I was looking at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever you called it god awful named doc that you were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you referring to the Zyrotec DKT30 CSPDVHD30?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what I’m referring to. I had to dig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like triple, you know, cross check that it wasn’t a Thunderbolt 3 thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was only a USB-C thing because they’re the same cable. Well, except they’re not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they look like the same cable, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ain’t. You don’t have to check. It’s only $72. There’s no way it’s Thunderbolt 3. Fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you see what I’m driving at, right? So like, even in this world where, which I am actually on board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the hypothetical future of USB-C where you can plug anything into anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it all just magically works and your laptop can become anything. It can even become a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC, so to speak, with your humongous, ridiculously sized external GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the reality is that USB-C is trying to cash checks that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody is really able to cash. That analogy took a real bad turn. But you get my point. It’s not working. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not working. We’ll fix it in post. Don’t worry. But it’s just not working. I think that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can all agree, and the lack of sales have shown, that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops are not scratching really anyone’s itch as well as they
#askatp: Video podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s try to cheer each other up. Let’s do some Ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Chowdhury writes, you’re Marco, podcast 101 explanation prompted a question for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why do we have a similar decentralized RSS driven protocol for video? Why are videos primarily hosted on a service like YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Vimeo? Is it just the acute ubiquity YouTube enjoys right now? In other words, why did video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasts never take off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s I mean, we can we can kind of predict and we can look at certain certain things that happened or certain technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realities and say, well, it’s probably this. The reality is, you know, it probably is many factors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of which are just like historical, you know, the way things happen timing-wise. But, you know, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the technical stuff is pretty significant. First of all, like, you know, YouTube started getting popular a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time ago. And back then, like in like, you know, the early to mid 2000s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting video online was incredibly complicated and incredibly expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you just want to host a podcast on your own web server or on your own CDN,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you can host a small podcast okay without having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major problems or having major bandwidth costs. But if your podcast starts getting enough downloads that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors start caring about it, for instance, that starts to be a pretty big bandwidth bill pretty fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what we needed really for podcasting to take off was dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast hosts that, you know, through large-scale economics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, made podcast hosting easy and affordable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like Libsyn is where we host our podcast. We have our website at Squarespace. It points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to files on Libsyn. Libsyn has been great. We’ve been with them the entire run of this show and Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it. They’ve been around forever. They basically use the law of averages and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale to say, all right, well, it doesn’t cost much to host most people’s podcasts, so the few like ours that do cost the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money, I think it averages out and it’s fine. Same thing, Squarespace works the same way and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Video though, as large as podcasts are, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast might be 10 times the size of a webpage. Well, video is another 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of that. It’s a whole other additional, either order of magnitude or close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to an order of magnitude, more data than podcasts. It’s also more sensitive to the needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like varying bit rates. We can upload our podcast as a 64K MP3 mono
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sounds great to everybody. It’s also though small enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can stream it on cellular to a phone and it doesn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of data or stutter and needs a buffer. Video though doesn’t work that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Video, it will use as much bandwidth as you can give it. And you want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the super high quality one that is like 4K or 1080p that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can watch on desktops or on your TV, on apps on your TV, but then you also wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller versions that are transcoded down for when somebody browses on their cellular connection on their phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t use like seven gigs to stream them a video or anything. And so video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the files are way larger. You need multiple versions of them to really host them effectively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You probably also need multiple formats of the video to serve different types of clients with all the different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, crazy, different file formats that they support. And all of these things used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be even worse than they are now. Like, you know, five, 10 years ago, all these things were even harder and even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated for video. Transcoding it took forever, it took a lot of CPU power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of, you know, complications with hosting video. So, what all this added up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, hosting your own podcast was a little tricky, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doable for most people. hosting your own video was way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder and way more expensive for most people. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that difference of degree caused there to be way more demand for a service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like YouTube where everything is centralized and they kind of take care of all that for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to podcasting. Like podcasting is just, it’s simple enough and economical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to host and to consume and everything that it lent itself more to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piggybacking on what was initially like the open blog infrastructure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whereas video, it was just so much more complicated and so much more data and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more bandwidth. And even back then, even like, you know, players sucked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when YouTube was getting popular, like Flash video had just barely become a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was still really hard to even make a video player that worked very well on a webpage or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on people’s computers or anything. It was so much harder than audio ever was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think that’s mostly why things worked out that way. And now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just a whole bunch of network effects. There’s a whole bunch of lock-in, where if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start your own video stuff off of YouTube today, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still have all those complexities of, it is way bigger, it is still way more expensive to host it yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is more complicated in the sense that you have to have multiple formats and codecs and everything else, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all those problems. But also, YouTube is where all the listeners, or all the watchers are. Like, all the viewers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on YouTube. And so, there are other, or Facebook, but Facebook just steals its content from YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything else that’s not Facebook or YouTube basically doesn’t matter for video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s where all the people are. So, you could do a video podcast, that that technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists. I don’t support it in Overcast, but most other app support video podcasts, they’ve always been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marginalized though, because most people who watch video are watching it on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it is a combination of technical aspects and also just the timing and the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the empires were built.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I’d add is, hey, this is mostly an accident of history, but once it got rolling in this direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was difficult to turn it back. So podcasts have been, and still are for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ John long form kind of things, whereas video started necessarily because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was so expensive and so large as short form and with short form and
⏹️ ▶️ John with it being video and video having more appeal to more people, those people like to see things and not just hear them.
⏹️ ▶️ John A centralized service like YouTube, like it’s killer feature. The reason it got all those users is its ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick something that you might want to see next. Like that’s how YouTube is used
⏹️ ▶️ John today. like that sort of the network effect of the social network effect that you’re surfing from one thing to the
⏹️ ▶️ John next. Oh, here’s a clip of a cute dog. Or here’s a more clip of a cute dog. Or here’s a clip of a cute cat, right? There are no
⏹️ ▶️ John cute cats. Yeah, the way you consume video like that kind of way, especially when videos were, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, they had to be short because you couldn’t upload like I remember, I forget what the time limit was on YouTube in the beginning, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco short. It was like 10 or 12 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, they’re just so darn big, right? That’s today, even even with 30 minute videos and stuff. That’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John how YouTube is consumed. Whereas no one surfs podcasts in those ways. So a centralized
⏹️ ▶️ John site that can feed you related things or an algorithm can work, right? wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really help with podcasts, because no one is listening to because people watch like the middle two minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John of a video, then they skip to the next video and watch the first 30 seconds, and they skip to the next video and watch like the first three minutes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No one does that with podcasts, no one skips to one podcast and listen to two minutes in the middle and skip to another podcast, listen to the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John and skip to another podcast and scrubs to the end. Like that’s not how podcast works. And you can’t scrub the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John as you can scrub with audio with video rather. So YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John and video were made were more natural fit for the snowball effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas even if if podcasts had started off or audio on basically recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John audio being served by a central service, you wouldn’t have had all those the same network effects. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco pointed out, it so happens that podcasts were lucky enough to piggyback on the blog
⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure, which was already open and decentralized. There was no open and decentralized infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John for video for YouTube to piggyback on. So it made its own thing. And so their paths diverge pretty early.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think video is definitely a more natural fit for a winner
⏹️ ▶️ John takes all social media, gather up all the users and eyeballs using an algorithm that feeds them what they
⏹️ ▶️ John want. that model works better with video than it does with long form audio.
#askatp: Trusting encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dominic writes, why do people entrust their entire digital life to the cloud? The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason, of course, is simple. Because their lives are encrypted. Their files are encrypted. All right, well, that was an easy ask, ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, Dominic continues, but here’s my certainly somewhat naive question. How do we actually know that today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encryption algorithms cannot be broken in the near future? What makes everyone so darn sure that the data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uploaded to Backblaze, CrashPlan, et cetera, can’t be decrypted retroactively in a few years, meaning within our lifetime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by say, quantum computers? I don’t trust the whole thing because I am obviously not a crypto expert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and can only listen to my gut feeling. Can you please shed some light on this and calm my gut?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I am not a crypto expert, but as far as I knew, math pretty much says that this is not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a thing unless there is an unbelievably dramatic change in computing power like maybe quantum
⏹️ ▶️ John computing. I have to un-calm both of your guts then, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John How do we actually know today’s encryption algorithms cannot be broken in the near future or within our lifetime? We don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. Weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms are found all the time. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John may very well be that people listening to this now live long enough to see things that are encrypted with today’s
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable encryption technology are trivially crackable. That could totally happen. But to
⏹️ ▶️ John get back to the calming part, the actual mathematical
⏹️ ▶️ John computational security of the encryption of your data is like the least important thing when
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes to actually protecting your data. Your data is going to get leaked due to social engineering,
⏹️ ▶️ John human error, hacks, malware. It’s no like brute
⏹️ ▶️ John forcing the cryptographic algorithms is very low on the list of things that you should be concerned about. Not because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s impossible, because but because there are so many easier ways to get your data. That’s what everyone’s using.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what you should be worried about. It has nothing to do with the cloud. Is your data more secure, your data
⏹️ ▶️ John secure if you never read it and write it and bury it in a giant safe in your backyard like but then you and you can’t access
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? So there’s, you know, there’s, people are paranoid about this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, the alternative is don’t do this, which is definitely safer. Like don’t use computers. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put your stuff in the cloud. Like don’t do all that stuff. But it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no safe haven. We should all be aware of these things and use best practices and
⏹️ ▶️ John keep up with it and do all that stuff. Just, you know, just like how you learn how to drive safely and how to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a home without accidentally burning it down. Like there are things we need to learn about the way that we live that can make
⏹️ ▶️ John our lives safer. But if if your concern is about strength of
⏹️ ▶️ John cryptography, there’s nothing you can do about that. Don’t worry about it. Other people are trying to take care
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. It’s not 100% safe. Nothing is. But people will get your data some other way way
⏹️ ▶️ John before they brute force crack the encryption on Backblaze.
#askatp: Mac feature deathwatch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friend of the show, Mark Edwards, did not write this for Ask ATP, but I couldn’t resist because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was so good. Which macOS feature will be removed first? And he provides three pairings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dashboard or remote disk. So dashboard is the thing that I think is off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by default, or you can put like little widgets on your screen, which was very popular back, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, 10, 15 years ago. What was the Yahoo thing or the thing that was bought by Yahoo? Confabulator or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John something like that? Confabulator,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep. So that’s basically dashboard, the same thing. And then remote disk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the thing where I can use another computer CD-ROM, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it was introduced with the MacBook Air, the first MacBook Air, because it didn’t have an optical drive. And so they introduced a feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called remote disk, which would allow you to use the optical drive from your big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac or from someone else’s Mac on your little MacBook Air that didn’t have one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So which one of these do we think will go first? Will be removed first? Let’s start with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco. It’s a tricky question because I think both Dashboard and Remote Disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are probably protected by most people at Apple who would make such decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either not knowing that they’re there or having forgotten that they’re there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s pretty unlikely that either of them would be there for long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to say Remote Disk will be removed first only because it still shows up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Finder Windows in the sidebar as like under devices like and that’s just kind of always there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m guessing somebody will it’s more visible than dashboard dashboard you have to like hit a certain shortcut key to enable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it if it’s even enabled by default right you said it might not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be I don’t think it is it doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah so remote disk is visible in Finder so I’m guessing somebody will see that before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll see dashboard like we should probably take that out
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this one’s easy dashboard will be removed first, I don’t even understand how it still exists. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is speaking of someone who literally uses dashboard every day and wishes it was still developed. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John it amazes me the dashboard still exists, it almost certainly is going to be removed first. As
⏹️ ▶️ John for remote disc sharpen the finder, maybe it only shows up if you have an available remote disc, maybe doesn’t show up if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see another Mac through like, Bonjour, or whatever, zero conf rendezvous, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, dashboard. Yeah, I cannot I cannot understand how dashboard still exists. It seems to me that it has to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first. What are you using it for?
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it to check the weather. I use it to look at stock prices and I use it with the web
⏹️ ▶️ John clips feature that was added later in dashboards life to see a whole bunch of what are they?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re ganglia graphs. I think ganglia graphs. I don’t know. Maybe they’re maybe they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John graphite graphs. Anyway, web clips of web pages that are sitting on my Mac. There’s HTML
⏹️ ▶️ John files that show me, you know, metrics from various metrics dashboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s literally like a dashboard. I throw my mouse cursor into the corner. Yes, I have a hot corner for dashboard. It’s the lower left.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I see a bunch of graphs that are relevant to my work. And I can check the weather, and I can look at a calendar, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can look words up in a dictionary by typing them into the dictionary widget. And I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think John’s right that dashboard’s going to go first, because remote disk, you could make an argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Could maybe, I guess dashboard does have utility too. I was going to say, you know, remote disk has utility whereas dashboard doesn’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not fair. But I just think dashboard’s going first. All right, the next pairing, DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey player or OpenGL. And John, let’s have you start first.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, they mean like remove, remove, not deprecated. Right. DVD
⏹️ ▶️ John player, I guess, because you only need DVD player.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, that’s not right. Let me think about this some more. So you say you only need an optical drive, but what if you attach that stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John external one that they…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is actually really easy. DVD player is not 64 bit. They didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought they updated it. Oh, maybe in Mojave did they? I’m not running Mojave yet, but, because it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, first of all, like, they don’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s not Blu-ray player, it’s DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player. Right, like DVD player is, I think, it is certainly no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer necessary for most people who would be running the latest OS. Like, there are still Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in service, like your mom’s, that has, you know, the optical drive that’s used to play DVDs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think those people are less and less likely to be running the newest OSes, or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even be running on hardware that can run the newest OSes. So I think DVD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player’s removal would be first, even if, apparently people in the chat are saying that it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated in Mojave. Yeah, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. Boy, man, what poor engineer had to do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s probably not, like a 64-bit port of a program that hasn’t had new features added in years is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. Well, it depends on what APIs it was using. Anyway, so, but I’m still gonna say DVD player first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think the removal of DVD player will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer problems and affect fewer people than the removal of OpenGL would.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you will permit me to Syracuse this question briefly, the question
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is which Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS feature will be removed first? Oh gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John implication is that removal means, like what does it even
⏹️ ▶️ John mean in an age where you can’t buy the operating system separately? Like, what does that mean? Does that mean if you buy a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John a brand new Mac, and you take it out of the box and you open it up, the DVD player isn’t there? Is that what removal means? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I would assume that would mean, yeah. Because sometimes when you buy a Mac and you take it out of the box and you open up,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are things like in the applications folder that are not part of the OS, right? So, at various times,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has bundled programs with Macs that are not part of the OS, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s… I kind of get what they’re going for. But for things like DVD player, I can imagine it being available
⏹️ ▶️ John to down now that they’ve done a 64-bit port I can imagine them making it available to download for a long time and I can even imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John it coming on your Mac like in a utilities folder or some crap but I can
⏹️ ▶️ John also imagine if you were to wipe your disk and do a fresh install that is not there and so how does that you
⏹️ ▶️ John know it this is actually there’s a lot of nuance to this question but anyway we’ll take it we’ll take it at face value saying you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a new Mac you open the lid you look you load the thing up as DVD player there um because they did a 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say OpenGL because Apple has not has had an info open GL for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re super gung ho on metal. Uh, third party open GL libraries will
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly exist. Third party DVD players probably already do exist, but are not that popular. So I’m going to say open
⏹️ ▶️ John GL leaves before it’s impossible to get DVD player.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, here again, I agree with John on this. So I think John and I are in agreement twice over and Marco you’re standing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by yourself. Let’s see if we can bring it back together. Now, Marco chess or grapher. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even remember or know that there is a graphing calculator for lack of a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of describing it, but basically a thing that can make graphs, mathematical graphs, built into Mac OS. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So- I knew. No, of course you
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Because graphing calculator was the most impressive feature of the PowerPC architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco When? When the PowerPC Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John came out and you wanted to demonstrate, great, so it’s a PowerPC Mac, who the hell cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John All my software broke. Why do I care about this? You show someone one graphing calculator and they go, Ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ John ah, that’s amazing. And fast. Look how fast it can do graphs. Look,
⏹️ ▶️ John the graphs are kind of three d. Um, grapher is, I don’t even know if it shares any of the code base with that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, uh, it’s the spiritual successor to graphing calculator is a great story by the way about a graphing calculator
⏹️ ▶️ John that you should all read. I think it’s in a, is it in folklore.org? I don’t remember where site is, but just Google for
⏹️ ▶️ John graphing calculator, origin story, apple or some crap like that. And it’ll probably be the number one hit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, which is first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go? I have I’ve just launched both of these apps. I think for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you never launched chess. Come on. I don’t think I’ve ever I didn’t even know I I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew Bailey there was a chess app, but I’m not like I know how to play chess, but I don’t play chess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just never thought to launch it. Graffer I don’t think I knew existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I’m kind of mad because I would have used this a lot. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I hope I remember that this exists because I occasionally want to do this when I’m writing a new algorithm for something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of want to see how does this function grow or whatever or how does this map the way I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to. So yeah, I actually would use this. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both frustrating and kind of enlightening. When I first launched Chess, it prompted me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to download a 1.2 gigabyte voice assist package
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also put up an iCloud login sheet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like in the wrong spot over the window like it’s like a detached sheet that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s supposed to be window modal but it’s not at the top of the window it’s like kind of in the middle asking me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sign into the account in iCloud that I’m already signed into. So it sure looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one’s ever launching this chess app like it sure looks like this This is, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears to have iCloud support for some reason, maybe for, you know, game center kind of stuff. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the top it says Marco Arment dash computer new game. So I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has some kind of advanced functionality that might break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas Graffer seems pretty standalone. Like it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of pretty low level things would have to break or die for Graffer to die. So I’m actually gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, perhaps unbeknownst to Marco, since he doesn’t seem to know what’s installed on his computer chess has his origins
⏹️ ▶️ John on from next. Right. So it has a long it’s a survivor
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like graphing calculator has its origins, even though I again, there may be nothing share with original application has
⏹️ ▶️ John its spiritual origins, if not its code origins with classic Mac OS chess comes from next step.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like chess is hard to kill. I feel like it’s a it’s a classy thing. Chess is like
⏹️ ▶️ John snooty and high class, right? But same thing. Graffer. Graffer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Math is math is is fancy to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco chess. The old
⏹️ ▶️ John things old things that you were complaining about with chess means that like if you haven’t been noticing
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally I would mention this in a Mac OS X review. They’ve been adding features to chess like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone somewhere is like this year I’m going to add like I remember like when really bad
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac speech recognition was ported from classic Mac OS to Mac OS 10. I think they had a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could say chess moves and it would do them like instead of using the mouse, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned that the game center stuff and the downloading the voice thing, like maybe the voice thing is part of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I think people are developing chess. It certainly doesn’t have a very good first run experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m willing to say I’m gonna say Graffer loses because I’m gonna say that the next people are in control
⏹️ ▶️ John and that they’ll that there will always be a game called chess on here because they will never let it die and grapher
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t have I don’t know if graver is being developed whereas chess people keep adding stuff to so I’m going to say grapher goes first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with john and I agree with john because chess is something that I would argue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost anyone could be interested in whereas not as many people will be interested in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey graphing equations. So I think grapher goes first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What a fantastic bit that was. Thanks, Mark
⏹️ ▶️ John Edwards. There’s lots of stuff installed in in your computer. If you don’t know it, go check out the application utilities folders
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime or install xcode in the graphics, the graphics tools from xcode, which are harder and harder to find, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, away Aftershocks and Ero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M A-N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental Accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental Check
Post-show: Bees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about bees. What? What is this
⏹️ ▶️ John about? Bees are back.
⏹️ ▶️ John My daughter told me, daughter told me today, she said the wasps are back, but I don’t think they’re wasps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know, like, I don’t want to get up close to see, do their stingers have barbs or are they
⏹️ ▶️ John smooth? Can it sting you repeatedly with no injury to itself? Or is it one stinging out? I don’t want to find out the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John to that question. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t it just like, aren’t, you know, wasps, like, don’t they have like an extra segment, they look like big ants, whereas bees will like bees.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. Again, I’m not going to go. I think they’re just I think these are just bees. But the key thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ John care about in terms of wasp versus bee is wasp equals multiple stings without dying. That’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And they tend to also be more aggressive. Like when you if you upset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wasp hive like you’re going to have a bad day, whereas if you upset a couple of bees like they might not notice or care.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Maybe I’ll try to get a macro photo of these later. Anyway, I’ve had troubles in the past where
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who did a shoddy job siding my house left little gaps that the that these insects love to go
⏹️ ▶️ John into and they would build hives inside my walls and I can’t be having that. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John the grandiose vision in my head of solving this problem last time is that I will make my house their tomb.
⏹️ ▶️ John to build a hive inside my walls. Guess what? I’m sealing you in there. Enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My house is now your tomb. So I did that last year or not last year, a couple years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John by finding the opening and fighting my way in there and clogging it up with stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John these stupid bees can’t get through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, what do you use? Like a spray foam thing, like great stuff? Or you use some, are you like shoving newspaper in there? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Newspaper’s not gonna do it. Before I decided on the make my house their tomb strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried the spray that kills wasps. You can buy it, like the wasp and bee stuff. But that’s really for like soaking
⏹️ ▶️ John a hive that’s hanging from a tree and that’s not the situation I was in they were like in my walls but I tried that anyway and
⏹️ ▶️ John they left it off so I was like fine you were being you know you’re being entombed and so
⏹️ ▶️ John expanding foam would work and I think I use some of that but I use like silicone
⏹️ ▶️ John caulk to like sort of cap it right so they were thoroughly sealed the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with the old one is that it was like along a windowsill and there were all sorts of places where they could get in so I kind of had to seal up the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But yeah, expanding foam will definitely do it. That’s what I plan to use this time is expanding
⏹️ ▶️ John foam. But here’s the trick. So you have a tiny little gap that seems like can how can insects even squeeze their
⏹️ ▶️ John little bodies in there? And yet they do, right? And you see him flying in and out, right? Getting up there,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s never in a convenient place and using the silicone caulk
⏹️ ▶️ John or spraying the expanding foam or whatever is that you’re going to do to seal it up. They’re not going to be happy when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They’re not going to sit out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar and go, hey, what you doing, buddy? You seem like you’re doing something to our hive. Are you poking something
⏹️ ▶️ John into our hive? We’re cool with that. No, they’re not going to be cool with it. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the trick. And of course, me with my priorities, my first thought is because I’m going to use expanding foam
⏹️ ▶️ John this time is I need to put masking tape all around the area because when the expanding foam expands, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it expanding onto my trim and siding because it’s a pain in the ass to get off
⏹️ ▶️ John who ever used expanding foam. So I’m going to put the masking tape down and And then let the expanding
⏹️ ▶️ John foam go and run away. And then when it dries, come back, come back and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, peel off the masking tape and scrape off the excess foam. And I’ll have a nice, neat little plug into the hole.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s that’s my plan. My execution of that plan has been thwarted by the fact that putting masking
⏹️ ▶️ John tape near the entrance to the hive pisses them off. Something awful. So I put one piece of tape
⏹️ ▶️ John then they swarm like angry bees, because they’re angry bees, for a surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John long amount of time. Like, I’m doing it at dusk. They’re supposed to be like chill at dusk. And so I come back 15, 20
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes later, like, if you calm down, now I can put up a second piece of tape. Oh, now it’s swarm time again. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, right before the show, like, literally moments before the show, it’s dark outside. And I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to be asleep now, stupid bees. So I go out there in the dark. Do bees sleep?
⏹️ ▶️ John they are dormant in the nighttime for the most part, because they can’t get anything, they don’t have night vision, so they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really get anything done in the dark. I had to of course turn on the porch light to be able to see them, because they’re right by my front door.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I went up there on my ladder, and I was starting putting tapes, and for the most part they were dormant. In fact, I could
⏹️ ▶️ John see one just hanging out in the entrance of the hive, but he wasn’t bothering me. But there was one stupid bee that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get in for the night, that’s just like do-de-do, banging
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco into the siding and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, and like nesting in my hair, crawling on the inside of my glasses lens
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other things that are very
⏹️ ▶️ John disconcerting. Oh god.
⏹️ ▶️ John disconcerting. And then of course there are moths and bugs all over the place smacking
⏹️ ▶️ John into me all of which feel like they could be a bee about to sting me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right? Right. You know so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why are you still doing this? Like. What do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean still? Why have
⏹️ ▶️ John you not hired this job out? Oh no I’m not hiring this job out. This is this is personal.
⏹️ ▶️ John their house my house will be their tomb I’m sealing these bees in yeah I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna handle it and and I was asking I have been stung by many many
⏹️ ▶️ John bees yellow jackets wasps over my life many of them I have had bees inside my t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John I have run screaming from a giant hive I’ve smashed hives of rocks I have not
⏹️ ▶️ John out of trees I have a long and it was like the what was the tagline for
⏹️ ▶️ John for those terrible movies where it was like battle between the werewolves and the vampires. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco asking us this question. I’m asking the wrong crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone from the incomparable here, they would tell me, but there’s like a centuries long battle between me
⏹️ ▶️ John and the whatever category of insect that bees are in. So. Bees?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I need to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ll be able to. Anyway, I put a lot of extra tape in there before I had to run away. That stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John do-de-do bee was like freaking me out and then I had to to come in and podcast. So maybe tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ John I will spray the phone, but probably chances are I’ll try to apply more tape and anger them some more. So far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just stupefied by why you are doing this. What
⏹️ ▶️ John like I do that. You remember, I think I posted to slack like the couple years ago when I
⏹️ ▶️ John battled the first round of them. I posted a picture of myself wearing my be protective outfit. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was like a thousand degrees. It was, you know, whatever. It was really, really hot and humid
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m wearing like sweat pants with the socks pulled over them. Been there. A giant
⏹️ ▶️ John sweatshirt and like a knit, like a knit hood or something over my head, like my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John had knit or something. Like I was trying to cover every inch of my body and it was a thousand degrees and I was sweating through
⏹️ ▶️ John every inch of that clothes and my wife took a picture of me and I think I posted it to a Slack. I can find it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John This time I’m there with shorts and a t-shirt, which is why I’m freaking out a little bit more when the thing is flying all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, you know, when it crawled around the inside of my glasses lens, I did tear my glasses off and leap from the ladder and run away. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it was it was very fraught.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we we had an in ground infestation many years ago that we were trying to take care of ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t find the image right now. But suffice to say, we did the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Like we loaded up with like 13 layers and sweatpants, even though was like July
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And down here we actually have summer. And so, um, we, we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sweating to death, but it’s funny you bring all this up because just the other day I saw this float by on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter and somebody linked it from cocky, actually a comprehensive guide to yellow stripey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. And I have no idea if this is accurate or not. It’s probably all BS, but oh man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it funny. So we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. It is quite amusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I had a bad time with yellow jackets before. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these were in my house, there have occasionally been beehives that are in cracks in my roof or cracks in the eaves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our house and everything. And they’ve never gotten bad enough that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually would call somebody to come deal with it. But the thought of dealing with it myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never crossed my mind. That was never under consideration at all. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to put on a giant net and gloves and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try to masking tape over the entrance to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not messing it. Remember, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not asking them over the entrance. I’m asking me around the entrance to protect the entrance from the foam.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to put in there that is going to seal this up because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John these things are not good diggers like there’s not like they’re going to, you know, anything that seals it up. Good paper
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t do it probably. but you know any kind of foam or a caulk or anything like that they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get through that they’re sealed in so I feel like they only have one way in and one way out and it’s this little tiny opening
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s it’s going to it’s gonna solve the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fully support this guides definition of yellow jackets
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah these things look like yellow jackets but they’re not yellow like they’re not that yellow so I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell they are that maybe there are just honeybees I don’t know it’s maybe I’ll try to save one that one of the things I
⏹️ ▶️ John learned through my long centuries of battling these creatures is Do not crush them near the entrance to their hive
⏹️ ▶️ John because crushed bees make the other bees super angry Like that’s whatever the smell
⏹️ ▶️ John of crushed bees. Don’t do it. Like it’s tempting. They’re just laying there It’s like I’ll get us crush this one and then I’ll be safer
⏹️ ▶️ John as I do the rest of my work Do not do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the definition of yellowjacket as per the comprehensive guide to yellow stripy things is as follows Once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your food and we’ll fight you for it never leaves you alone. We’ll sting you just for the fun of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and It’s just a jerk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Nice words of color there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a little more colorful than that But you get the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever been stung by one or seven You would say is just a hole the way
⏹️ ▶️ John guide does Yeah, when I was a kid Like the second house we lived
⏹️ ▶️ John in had a yellowjacket hive under a set of rocks That I fought with the entire time we lived
⏹️ ▶️ John there like you try to crush it underneath the rocks But obviously it’s like under the ground or anything there, too Yeah, and boy
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent a lot of time like I was young and didn’t didn’t know it didn’t have the weapons of mass
⏹️ ▶️ John Be destruction at my disposal yet. So Yellow jackets were the ones that would most often
⏹️ ▶️ John get caught inside my clothing I remember running my retreat was I would run inside one of the family’s cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they’d be in the car with me and
⏹️ ▶️ John Inside my clothes and they were in the car and it was a bad situation many many times. I would do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they because they they’ll chase you to like if you just run away there. They’re not like, okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t care anymore. They got nothing else to do today. Yeah, exactly. They will chase you and will not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give up and can sting you lots of times. Yeah, they’re fun. I strongly suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you consider hiring a professional to do this job.
⏹️ ▶️ John This seems like- I am a professional. That’s why I’m trying to communicate to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve handled this before. I will handle it again. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Marco, if, I don’t know if you’ve met John Syracuse, but how can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put this gently? He’s a cheap bastard and there’s no way that he’s going to hire this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, let alone the fact that he wants to seal them in a tomb inside his house. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no way John will be paying to hire this out. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. I got a roof
⏹️ ▶️ John leak. You want to fix that too? Yeah. I don’t even know how much someone would charge and I think the person who deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with it would get stung. I’m not going to get stung. I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to, I’m going to win. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, you’re gonna- I didn’t get stung
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last time! You’re gonna do it perfectly, yeah. You’re gonna somehow defeat this colony of what sounds like probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasps without getting stung.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I did it last time! I did it for the last one! Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was a kid, back in the house with the yellow jackets, I was a dumb kid. Now I am a smarter adult
⏹️ ▶️ John who may get stung, but probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t. Why don’t you take the bird that occasionally makes noise against your house- Eat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the friggin’ bees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like turn the bird against the bees and just see who wins. And if they both lose, both problems are
⏹️ ▶️ John solved. Yeah, the bird hasn’t been around lately, so that that’s a problem I haven’t been able to solve. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not have extensive, extensive experience dealing with a woodpecker that thinks my house is a musical instrument. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I am just at the mercy of the bird. But thankfully, it has not been hanging out lately. But the bees, I know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Does anybody make drones that can apply masking tape and spray foam?