306: My Watch Has Ended
26 Dec 2018Bent iPads, screen protectors, a new Apple SVP, and our 2018 in review.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Casey gets
mediumvery upset about Medium - Did Google really cripple Edge's YouTube performance?
- Casey gets
- John's 2018 Butterfly Keyboard Watch
- Marco's fingerprinty iPad solution
- Paperlike
- John's LEGO and the instructions
- John Giannandrea appointed to Apple executive team
- iPad Pros can ship bent... 🤷🏻♂️
#askatp
- Does Overcast do anything special to inhibit cookies? (via Mitch Cohen)
- Could Overcast get blocked by publishers for not implementing RAD?
- If Intel got its act together, would Apple cancel any ARM Mac plans and stick with Intel? (via Gabriel Salkin)
- What's the ATP editing process? (via Markus N)
- Do Marco and Casey use Xcode in full-screen mode? (via Erik)
- Does Overcast do anything special to inhibit cookies? (via Mitch Cohen)
Sponsored by:
- Away: Because this season, everyone wants to get Away. Get $20 off a suitcase with code ATP.
- Backblaze: Unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $5/month. Start your 15-day free trial today.
- Mack Weldon: Better than whatever you're wearing right now. Get 20% off your first order with code ATP.
Chapters
- 2018 in review
- We ❤️ Medium
- Follow-up: Google vs. Edge
- 2018 Butterfly Keyboard Watch
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- iPad screen protectors 🖼️
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- John Giannandrea, SVP
- Bent iPad Pros 🖼️
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- #askatp: Overcast cookies
- #askatp: If Intel improves
- #askatp: ATP editing
- #askatp: Full-screen Xcode
- Ending theme
- Follow-back: NAS backup
2018 in review
⏹️ ▶️ John My watch has ended. We got Marco having destroyed one of his fancy watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still, I have not done that. My watches are
⏹️ ▶️ John in order. You’re very careful. Of course, all of them are slightly bent, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good for an end of the year episode too. Yeah. Great for an episode where
⏹️ ▶️ John we recap the top stories of 2018. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would never do that. We don’t do enough homework for that. That takes way more preparation than what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to do. We don’t remember the stories of 2018. We don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and whenever Connected does theirs, I haven’t listened to today’s yet, but whenever they do theirs, I’m always like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damn, I wish I would have thought to do that. But then I realize the reality of doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is so much work. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much work during the holiday season. I’m already busy enough. The last thing I want to do is add more work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s kind of like the Oscars, where it’s almost like stuff that happened at the beginning of the year doesn’t count
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. No matter how important it was, the recency bias, I was gonna actually add a section, which is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be 2018 impressions, technology impressions. So it wasn’t gonna be like, let’s survey all the important stories that
⏹️ ▶️ John happened. It’s gonna be more like when you think back on 2018 in the technology world, what is your impression
⏹️ ▶️ John of it? Do you feel like this was a cool year? Or like, what are the things that stick out in your mind? But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John such tremendous recency bias that in my mind, all I can think about are the things that happened fairly recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my impressions of 2018 are like, the stuff that happened with the Mac line towards the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the year, right? And sort of the ongoing keyboard stuff and everything that is like super recent.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the other thing, which we don’t talk about much on the show every once in a while, we have, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire year of Facebook privacy garbage, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and my, my impression of it was basically that a bunch of bad Facebook stuff happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone who hated Facebook still hates them and nobody else cares. But we had like an entire
⏹️ ▶️ John year of it, like testing the theory that people don’t care about Facebook with privacy and stuff. Like we had a whole year of the worst possible
⏹️ ▶️ John things that could happen. Tech people ignored it because they already hated Facebook and everyone else was like, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s my impressions of 2018.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sure I’m missing tons of stuff that happened in the beginning of the year, but it seems like it happened so long ago that
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, you know, I can’t bring it to mind feeling wise, you know. Again, not what actually happened, but just like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is your feeling? 2018 feelings, that can be your analog episode if you haven’t already done
⏹️ ▶️ John your year-end analog episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John You talk about your 2018 feelings? Not a bit. I’m surprised Mike hasn’t got you
⏹️ ▶️ John into the year of thing. The year of adulting or whatever the hell he’s doing. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a year of something. The year of living dangerously. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even know what it would be, to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this was the year of going independent for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Year of unemployment, yeah. We can make up years for you. Yeah, I don’t know. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year of having a second child. It was a pretty big year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was a big year, that’s true. I was thinking more of like the future, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hamilton, you were in the chat, says, year of no sunroof.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, too soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, man. Year of extra headroom. You got to have glasses half full, Casey. The
⏹️ ▶️ John year of not getting your hair must.
We ❤️ Medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeremy Noring writes, Hey, um, did Google cripple edges, YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance? What’s that all about? And this is me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Why? Okay. You can cut this out if you want, but I frigging hate medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so hard. So I go to load this link, pardon the interruption. We see you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here before. Let’s make things official. Sign up with Google. No sign up with Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hell no. Why? In what way is this conducive to me reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this article? This frigging splash screen that takes up the entire, well, it’s not literally the entire screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively the entire screen. No. Why would I ever want this? Oh, this is so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got, I don’t understand why people love medium so much. I understand this is where you put your like whiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little posts about how you hate everything, but can we find somewhere else to do that? Can we just go back to Tumblr for that or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway. Who, who loves
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Wait a second. Who loves medium? Are there medium lovers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it used to be. I
⏹️ ▶️ John I have only heard people complaining about it for a long time now. Even if you get past all the popover thingies or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reading experience if you’re not signed in is like the top, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed top banner and a fixed bottom banner. So you’re looking at what you can see of the article through a slit in your
⏹️ ▶️ John web browser with a bunch of icons floating on the left. It’s such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the big problem that I had. It’s like you try to view it on a phone, which I hear is a common device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read web articles on in recent years and you just have all this like crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cluttering up the viewport that’s all fixed scrolling so like you can’t scroll away like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I I’ve never been a huge fan of medium and as time goes on they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be getting more annoying and less relevant so I’m not I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my opinion is certainly not going up over time. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly not and I don’t I just feel like especially when it was brand new maybe maybe Maybe my data is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old, if you will, but especially when it was brand new, it seemed like everyone loved Medium. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new hot thing. And I just…
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in the beginning, they were courting people. So they were paying people to write on Medium, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they let you have your own domain. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later. They’ve gone through like six different business models, a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of which involved trying to pay publishers to be on it and to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good stuff on Medium. It’s been this whole cycle of craziness they’ve tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And unfortunately, they really, as far as I know, they have not come upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that actually works in a sustainable, stable way yet and is also good for anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John It always seemed like, do you want to have a blog but not own your blog and have the benefit of your blog partially
⏹️ ▶️ John or wholly accrued to someone other than you? Come to Medium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much. And the sad thing is, I published, I think, at least one, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two things there a while back. I forget whether they’re more than one. But like, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a role for it, I think. If you want to spread a message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as possible without having your own presence, without making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own blog somewhere, then it’s a decent place to put it. So that’s why, you know, whenever companies post, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like, we’re dying sunset messages, a lot of times those are on Medium, or like, you know, some like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost like an op-ed page for anybody, right? It’s like, you can write whatever you want there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you don’t have your own site, you know, your own blog that you’re trying to maintain or build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up or draw attention to, if you just wanna get like a point out, it’s a decent place to do that, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as you really don’t wanna build up yourself anywhere else. But it does nothing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you other than get that point to more people. So if that’s the point, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up like a writing reputation or an audience, it is not the place for that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, I think one way you might describe it is like a social network for blogs, because that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the network effect. But the social network for blogs was blog. Like before any of this started, people would link to each other’s
⏹️ ▶️ John blogs. And even if your blog wasn’t big, the quote unquote social network of blogs, whether it was
⏹️ ▶️ John that stupid sidebar or trackbacks or whatever it would be, some popular blogger would read your blog,
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s interesting and post it on their blog. And that’s how you got exposure through this sort of organic,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, internetwork of independent sites. Not that it was ever as big as Medium is, or maybe it was, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it always seemed like it was these smaller independent sites. But there was a social network. it just wasn’t centralized.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if Medium had gotten critical mass like Twitter did, their social network of blogs
⏹️ ▶️ John might have worked out better, but it doesn’t seem like they ever quite crossed that hurdle. So you post it to Medium, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll get more exposure than it would on your lone blog, but it might not get as much exposure it would get
⏹️ ▶️ John if your lone blog got picked up by one of the big bloggers back in the heyday of blogging.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know. I know people want the old days of blogging to come back,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it wasn’t as great as we all thought it was, but these medium is not bringing enough
⏹️ ▶️ John new, bringing enough new stuff, nor is it bringing enough, like in terms of quantity, enough
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers to make up for the fact that they, you know, that you’re not accruing all the
⏹️ ▶️ John benefit of your, your work when you put it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I just, I understand the appeal of having like a push button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here is, here’s your blog. It takes you all of two and a half seconds to create it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can post something here and medium aesthetically. Like, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could I describe this without you guys jumping on me? I agree that there’s way too much like Chrome and decorations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the actual content, but it’s, it looks aesthetically fine. Like leaving that Chrome aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is bad. It is real bad. But if you can leave that aside, like the stuff looks good. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the typography is fine for my eyes anyway, and I’m, I’m no expert, but it looks good. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offensive. It’s not, you know, super janky, but golly, I just, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so bad to me. It just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so bad. – Speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John being offensive in typography, look at the HTML code
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey snippet and the quoted thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John – Oh, yeah, that’s true, actually. – Look at the curly quotes. Class equals incorrectly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey facing curly double quote. – Oh, nice. Nice. I did not notice
⏹️ ▶️ John that. – Some bad stuff going on in there. – All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So, I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for the rant, but I just needed to get that off my chest. So friends don’t let friends use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey medium. And I don’t think they’re, no, they’re not sponsoring this week, but I hear Squarespace isn’t bad. Try code ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe ATPFM. It not be terrible.
Follow-up: Google vs. Edge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so we talked last week about how Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had deliberately crippled the video performance of Edge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft’s browser, by putting a clear div on top of it. And so Microsoft thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, that means we can’t hardware accelerate. Everything goes down the tubes. The performance goes down the tubes. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery life goes down the tubes, et cetera. So Jeremy Noring, who worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Edge, said, well—or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, he did not work on Edge. It doesn’t matter where he worked. He worked somewhere where this is relevant. One way or another, he realized, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed to get keyboard shortcuts or some such working properly and the only way to interrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edge’s very grabby hands on the keyboard was to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a non-selectable div on top of the video. us to like get keyboard shortcuts for video playback on whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey site he was working on. So his point was, yes, this does have the net effect of benefiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google in the sense that it it it destroyed edges performance. But it might have been that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google just needed to do that in order to get video stuff working the way they wanted it to. So it may not be as nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was broken on IE, not an edge. I know it’s confusing with all the different things that makes but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this was a one of the many things that people who make websites have to do a workaround
⏹️ ▶️ John for some browser. And unfortunately, it’s not always easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John conditionalize whatever weird workaround you have to do to precisely the
⏹️ ▶️ John situation where it’s needed, right? So you can do user agent sniffing and say, when they come with this browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, use this hacky workaround to make it work. The problem with figuring out
⏹️ ▶️ John what that condition should be is you can’t tell the future, right? So whatever you put, make it conditional on whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s whatever information you can glean from the browser. You’re like, okay, but there’s going to be another version of this browser
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to come out in the future, maybe next week, maybe next month, but surely there will be another one. Will that
⏹️ ▶️ John one also have the problem? Should we make the condition so that it happens in every,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, every version of IE, but then Microsoft comes out with Edge and Edge’s user agent looks different than IE
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe it looks like IE? It’s not easy. Web development is not easy. So you make a best guess and you say, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to put this condition on here and if this is true, put a transparent div
⏹️ ▶️ John over the video player. And apparently, whatever that logic is also decides
⏹️ ▶️ John to put it over when edge loads the page. Again, it could be nefarious. We don’t know that it’s not. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought this article was good because it was a concrete example of someone doing the exact thing that Google
⏹️ ▶️ John did for non nefarious reasons. So at least at least it shows that there is at least one legitimate non nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for this to be happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was surprising, but you know the internet loves to get up in arms about things and so So here we are.
2018 Butterfly Keyboard Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, speaking of things the internet is up in arms about, Marco, let’s talk about the 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Butterfly Keyboard Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring this up. Uh-huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco For the record, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring up the butterfly keyboard. You’re going to have thoughts about it. So apparently the space bar types double spaces occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I think this was your work. Tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Yeah, you tried to, maybe I should have put it in title case. 2018 Butterfly Keyboard Watch. Does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that help? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I thought, and then I saw watch and I got myself confused. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like Baywatch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, what was… It’s really not. Oh, no. What was it? What was the Will Ferrell movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the TV news anchors? Anchorman? Oh, God, I’m trying to think. Thank you. How did I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that? I couldn’t think of the movie. I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for a movie with watch in the title.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, no, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like, what was it? Like, Good Night San Diego or something like that, where they put the errant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question mark at the end and he totally got confused. That was me with watch just a moment ago. It’s the end of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the year, kids. I’m tired. Tell us about the the butterfly keyboard because we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about that enough on the show
⏹️ ▶️ John The 2018 butterfly keyboard watch is something that I’ve been participating in and I think we all have to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ John Which gets to the question that we posed when this keyboard was first introduced this this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2017 2016 keyboards butterfly keyboards except that it’s got this membrane over it and
⏹️ ▶️ John the question is Does the membrane make it more reliable than the 2017 and 2016 butterfly keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John which had problems with debris? If does it make it more reliable and if so by how much or is it the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the other ones? Difficult to tell from anecdotal evidence, but pretty quickly we started getting reports
⏹️ ▶️ John that Some 2018 butterfly keyboards are still having the same
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of problems with you know getting stuck or not typing When pressed or double typing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever my personal 2018 butterfly keyboard watch started when I got a 2018 butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard with the 2018 MacBook Air and About the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time that I was thinking about this, I saw a tweet from
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul and Storm, the great musicians, on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I saw a Reddit post linked about this, about the spacebar putting in double spaces.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also saw double spaces appearing when you hit the spacebar on my 2018
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, what’s the… You guys don’t know this. I need someone who knows some
⏹️ ▶️ John references somewhere. Chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please mentally insert the my watch has ended speech from a Game of Thrones at this point. My watch
⏹️ ▶️ John has ended. I have a butterfly keyboard and it types two spaces
⏹️ ▶️ John when I want it to type one sometimes and I’m sad. And this is a very common problem with 2018 keyboards. All these 2018 keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John have the membrane in them. All of them somehow have allowed some speck
⏹️ ▶️ John of dust to come through the giant gaping holes in the membrane and get underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John something in the space bar and cause it to double space. And I’m sad about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Someday I will watch that show. Maybe I’ll think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, same. It’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John over. This last season is coming up, so it’ll be all done. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can just watch it all at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to. Time for you and me to get started then, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we’ll get started in about 10 more years, once it’s totally irrelevant.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s one of those shows that you can’t watch with kids in the room. So that may make it more difficult to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fine. So anyway, so the membrane, it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have been that a speck of dust has gotten past the membrane. These keyboards have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of different kinds of problems over the years. It isn’t just dust intrusion, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it. And when dust or other particles get under the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does break really easily. But that isn’t the only problem they’ve had. They’ve had, remember when,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is less of a problem with the current generation, but remember when the 2016s first came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had huge problems with like, the metal would just like pop and snap with thermal expansion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sometimes the keyboard, like the thermals of the keyboard itself, would affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether the keys would press properly or not. Like sometimes it would only start acting up when it was warm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like these keyboards are just horrendously engineered from the very start. And part of that was the dust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingress issue, but that wasn’t the only problem they had. So it does seem anecdotally, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2018s are failing a lot less than the other ones, but they still have some of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that the other ones had, because fundamentally this design is problematic. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a little bit better protected against its own horrendous design with the 2018 membrane.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the space bar in particular is a very big key and people don’t think about it, especially in
⏹️ ▶️ John these days of modern keyboards that totally abstract what’s going on there. But if you have a very, very large
⏹️ ▶️ John key, a long key like the spacebar is. The tricky part about that is you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so that if you press on the very very left edge of the spacebar or the very very right edge of the spacebar
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t tip like a seesaw. The whole spacebar has to go down when you press way over on the edge
⏹️ ▶️ John of the spacebar otherwise, you know, weird things happen because it would feel weird if you pressed the spacebar and it
⏹️ ▶️ John tilted instead of the whole thing going down. The old, uh, much more
⏹️ ▶️ John chunky mechanical, I know it doesn’t make sense to call it a keyboard, but that’s what people call them. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John older keyboards with larger pieces that have sort of like an anti-roll bar, like from cars
⏹️ ▶️ John the space bar. So when you press down one side of the space bar, this little metal anti-roll bar would pull down the other side of
⏹️ ▶️ John the space bar. So the whole space bar would go down, uh, the butterfly keyboard and all these other much
⏹️ ▶️ John lower profile keyboards than the old chunky ones have similar mechanisms so that they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like you’re tilting it. So they don’t feel like you’re hitting an old track pad and and just one end is going down. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the space and the tolerance is so thin in there. So if one key is going to have problems, like mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John problems with their mechanism, the up and down mechanism, it’s going to be the space bar because that is the most
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and most difficult key to get right in terms of, you know, debouncing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is presumably what’s going on here, where when you press a key and it activates some kind of mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John switch, it doesn’t just say going down, going down, going down, make contact,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a certain period of time making contact, and then stop making contact. What actually happens is you hit the key,
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes down and makes contact, then it bounces off, and then it makes contact again, then it bounces off, and it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John contact again, and then it bounces off, makes contact again, then it eventually settles down. This happens very, very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve told this story before. One of the first assembly code projects I had to do in college was
⏹️ ▶️ John writing a driver for a keyboard, and you had to debounce the keys, which means you’d wait for the key to make contact,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’d put in a delay to wait for the bouncing to stop. Because if you didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d get 25 letter A’s when you hit the letter A. You don’t realize this is going on, but this is how all keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John have always worked. Otherwise you’d A, A, A, A, A, A, A, because the computer is so fast, it sees those bounces.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to say, A has made contact, let’s wait a little bit. I had no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John And A is still, so that’s what I mean by debouncing keys. And this is like a 16-bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John like eight megahertz processor. So you don’t need a particularly fast computer to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, did you know about this? No, I did not. Debouncing keys? I’ve talked about this on this very show.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I had no clue. All right. Sorry, go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google for debouncing keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I had no clue that either this was a thing or that you wrote a keyboard driver to prevent this.
⏹️ ▶️ John all new information. Debouncing keys is a good first assembly project, especially since you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John such a wimpy computer. It was like slower than an Apple II type of thing. You’re writing a 16-bit assembly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it shows you that as slow as any computer could be, it’s way faster than your brain thinks it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So quick aside, did you enjoy doing the assembly programming in college?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it was super fun. I had a lot of fun with it. Like, we were taught sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John what the instructor called structured assembly, which is like assembly. Like, imagine C didn’t exist, and you were forced to write
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in assembly. You’d come up with some set of rules that basically mimic the structures you have in C,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can keep things straight, because you have a limited amount of characters for like the labels and stuff. And you just say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John I consider this like, this is a for loop, this is a while loop, this is an if, this is an else, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d come up with structures and standards, conventions for all the different labels.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you make like ASCII labels for different jump locations and stuff, so you have a way to refer to them later. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John just bang that out. Because you can type whatever you want. If you just type assembly willy nilly, you can just compare
⏹️ ▶️ John and jump and fly all over the place and you’ll just make a giant mess. You need some kind of structure. And the structure is you essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John invent the world’s most verbose C, and you force yourself whenever I need a condition, I’m always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do it this way, the label’s always gonna be like this, and this jump target is going to look like this. And whenever I have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John an if-else, I’m always going to do it in this order, because you can do them so many different ways. If you come up with a structure
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, you can write surprisingly long programs in assembly that still mostly look
⏹️ ▶️ John like line noise, but that if you look at them and squint, you can say, oh, I see the structure
⏹️ ▶️ John now. You kind of, at this point, I already knew Cs, but you could see the C code that this would be equivalent to,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s like 100 times long and everything is a bunch of three or four little letter sequences that
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make any sense if you don’t know the instruction set.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. I ask only because when I was in school and I also did computer engineering, we had a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course where we were doing assembly programming on, I think it was an HC11, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were paired with a partner. And I don’t remember if it was required or just happenstance, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was paired with a EE and I was a computer engineer. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loved doing this programming. Like, I don’t think I would want to do it for a living or anything like that, but I also had an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good time with it. Now, unsurprisingly, my assembly was nowhere near as structured as yours was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was a hodgepodge, but it was so cool and so fun writing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we did, I wouldn’t call it a device driver, but we like drove, um, what is it like an eight, eight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segment LED? You know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m thinking? Yeah. Seven segment display. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Okay. That’s what it was. You know what I’m thinking of where you could basically display numerals. And we did like a basic calculator.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, it was really, really cool and really fun. And I kind of miss it, um, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, uh, I don’t want to ever really do it again, either, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I don’t, anyway, uh, the debouncing thing, I don’t think that’s, you know, what’s happening here. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s happening here is a mechanical issue that is much chunkier than a typical debouncing would
⏹️ ▶️ John be. So the debouncing, you know, firmware or whatever in the keyboard is probably working fine. It’s just that these
⏹️ ▶️ John keys are doing a thing where they’re going through the whole initial hit and bounce and settle
⏹️ ▶️ John and then hitting a second time and you’re getting two spaces instead of one. That’s my guess anyway, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to tell. Because again, debouncing keys is not a new technology and it’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is so transparent that kind of like the way DRAM refreshes itself
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly, I think we’ve talked about previously on this show or maybe another one, that is terrifying once you know that it happens but if you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John you just think RAM is magic and you write values into it and get it back out. It’s the type of thing that you can mostly take for granted.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m assuming whatever is going wrong with the keyboard is in fact a mechanical issue like the ones Margot described
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, either it’s debris or metal fatigue or a plastic thing breaking or something
⏹️ ▶️ John bending when it shouldn’t or something expanding thermally or contracting thermally. Bottom line is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a spacebar. Two spaces appear makes everybody sad, including me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and you know, one of the problems I’ve had with these keyboards too is like Like, the spacebar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the up and down arrow keys don’t feel right. Like it seems like whatever the mechanism, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the butterfly mechanism here, it seems like it’s, the design of it is optimized for the size of the regular, of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you know, most of the keys in the keyboard are like kind of one size. And if you make a key that’s substantially larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or smaller than those, like in the case of the spacebar being larger, same with like, you know, shift and return, you know, those are also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit big too. Those feel weird. They don’t feel right. And I’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the same problem with the up and down arrows, those little half-height keys. They don’t feel good, they feel kind of weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes it doesn’t feel like they’re activating correctly. Like, it just adds to the massive pile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems this keyboard has, and my still very strong opinion that this never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have shipped, let alone been brought to the entire product line. But hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have heard this message by now. God, I hope we get a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. Anyway, so I’m curious, John, are you gonna get yours serviced? Like, are you willing to go without this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not have it for a day or seven?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna go with the tried and true Casey technique of tilting it at 75 degrees and blowing air into
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Is it 75, 73? I forget, I have to look up that tech note to make sure I get the right angle, otherwise this will obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. Does it matter? Spin around in a circle, do any angle you want. It’s not gonna make a difference. It’s not gonna really fix the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. Make sure you defrag your hard drive too, that’ll really fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John man, savage. I mean, of all the keys that are to go wonky,
⏹️ ▶️ John the space bar is one of the least objectionable because two spaces are not as egregious as two
⏹️ ▶️ John of any other letter, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s wrong. Input devices should be 100% reliable, period, all the time. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree, but I’m just saying, like, you can limp along with essentially a broken computer
⏹️ ▶️ John for much longer with a space bar that doubles than with another key that doubles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would rather have Casey’s iMac that turns itself off like once a day randomly than a keyboard that’s unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for years. Yeah, it is 75 degrees by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good luck with that. I’m sure I’ll make a big difference.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, Marco, you also have some thoughts on input methods, but in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s for virtual keyboards. Tell me about your iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You think I use the virtual keyboard?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was reaching real hard for a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco segue there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good luck. So I added this little teaser to the show notes here that I wanted to talk about my fingerprinty iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a solution that somebody recommended to me. And I’m sorry, I forget who recommended this. I believe it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was somebody on Twitter a few weeks back. But anyway, somebody on Twitter recommended that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to alleviate my complaint about my iPad Pro always being incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visibly fingerprinty and just really gross looking. And even if you wipe it on your jeans, it doesn’t really take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all off. The iPad Pro just has this massive fingerprint attraction problem ever since the pencil has existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so somebody recommended that I use a screen protector and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically recommended the Paperlike, which is at paperlike.com or paper.me, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both. And this is like this fancy German screen protector and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tries to simulate the texture of paper and the point of it is to make the pencil usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel better, to make it feel more like you’re drawing on paper, but it happens to also be a pretty nice screen protector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I ordered it and I said, you know, let’s see how this looks. Let’s see how it actually works. And it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a long time. I actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this because it was before the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existed, but I use, I, on my first three iPhones, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the iPhone four until retina. So iPhone, iPhone three G and iPhone three GS, I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matte screen protectors on all of them. Gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is truly terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I didn’t think they were terrible at the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the reason why, so keep in mind back then, first of all, there was no oleophobic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coating back then. That was a feature that came later. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I liked them, and I was able to apply them perfectly. Like there was never, you know, you wouldn’t like see dust or bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything like that under them. So like they looked fine. The only thing you would notice is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that it kind of adds like that, like rainbow noise to like how it looks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It almost, it looks kind of blurry, but pre retina, you wouldn’t really notice that. It wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t a big deal. It just made it look like a matte screen. And the reason I like them is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it changes the feel completely. It’s much easier to move your finger across it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s, it has a totally different feel. And I actually greatly prefer the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the touching feel of a matte screen protector. And I keep saying matte here, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the glossy ones I think are not, not great for lots of reasons. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the matte one, and those mirror ones, oh God, forget it. But the matte ones seem, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy the feel. So I got this for my iPad Pro, and thinking, you know, I know it’s not gonna look great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the screen contents are not gonna look great. But I do wanna try it and see like, do I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefer it, you know, how does it affect the fingerprintiness of it? and can I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tolerate the look of it? I gotta say, I’ve been using it now for about a week and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but there’s some interesting things about it that I thought were worth bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and telling you about. So first of all, they have this amazing detailed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco procedure of how to install this thing without getting dust on it, you know, trapped under it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, I got some dust trapped under it anyway because it’s pretty much impossible not to. To their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit, they go through crazy lengths to give you like little, little, like, you know, tools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like different wipes and things. And they had this whole video about how to do it in these little alignment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stickers. So you can do it real fast. Like it’s, it’s a pretty impressive process for a, for an inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imperfect flawed procedure, but I did get it on there without too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many dust things under it. It’s not perfect, but it’s, it’s close enough. And I got to say it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does look less fingerprinting. It is still very fingerprinty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is significantly less than how the iPad looks without a screen protector on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I do greatly dislike how it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when displaying content with a light background. When you’re displaying anything with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a black background, like white text on dark background, that looks fine, you don’t really notice that it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s displaying dark content on a light background, anything with a light background, you see that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like rainbow noise pattern in it. And I would love to know, anybody out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know, if there are screen protectors that still have this like matte kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel, but that don’t show that like rainbow noise, I would love to know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that exists. I don’t know if it exists. I don’t wanna start buying like 50 screen protectors. I just wanna know like, if anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows exactly what I’m talking about with this rainbow noise, and if you know of anything that doesn’t have it, please let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ John How could it not have it? Because if it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, that means it’s bumpy. And if it’s bumpy, that means, you know, we got
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole refraction of light going through, like it’s basically a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of little lenses. So I can’t imagine it being both bumpy and not refracting light
⏹️ ▶️ John and separating the colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, you’re probably right. Like, I mean, there’s probably a good reason why like all the ones I’ve ever seen have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem. But if anybody out there knows of one that doesn’t, you know, please let us know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I do really love how it feels. It is way more pleasant to touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really love it. It is, as designed, really nice with the pencil. Now granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hardly ever draw things with the pencil, so like it’s not that much affecting me there, but it is a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement in how the whole iPad feels. And it’s a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downgrade in how light content looks. And there’s one other side benefit to it that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought was very interesting that I actually like quite a bit. It has a cutout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Face ID sensor module, the little, you know, the notch. That’s not really a notch on the iPad. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only real problem I have with this iPad is that I’m always covering up the Face ID module when I pick it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always. And it so happens I’m often picking it up when I’m trying to unlock it to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it. You’re literally holding it wrong. I am literally holding it wrong. Even though I’m holding it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most obvious way you could hold it when it’s in Apple’s keyboard dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you constantly get the arrow of shame? Constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John At least once a day. It
⏹️ ▶️ John should start adding like carrot weather. It should be like, uh, dummy, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco covering the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John want me to do with this FaceTime? On your palm? On your thumb?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I am, I firmly believe that the only major design flaw of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this iPad that I have found yet in pretty heavy use over the last, you know, couple of months, whatever it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only significant flaw is I think the camera’s in the wrong place. If it’s only going to be one, I think that’s the wrong place for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. would and it could even still be on that edge. But just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re looking at edit and landscape instead of being in the left center, it should be like in the upper left.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know that way I think that would cover more orientation. But then I don’t know if that could get in the way of the speakers. I don’t know. There’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reason why they centered it. But tell you what, man, it’s really annoying. And if there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras on all four edges, it’s the only solution or two put you know, put one, you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the pencil charger is like in that because there’s plenty of space up there, they could totally do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I’m telling you man, covering up this camera is a huge annoyance. But with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen protector on, because it has a cutout that goes around the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area, you can see where the camera area is. And so I have found that it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to avoid it because you can see it, it’s outlined, it’s clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as day where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have put like yellow pinstripe tape around the thing with a big X that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put your hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. No, but like, so I found that I’ve actually been, it’s actually been easier to avoid the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera, the housing, you know, covering up with my hand, because I’m seeing where it is now, as opposed to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grabbing the iPad by the side and then I get the arrow of shame. So I actually, I really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feel, the pencil behavior, and the cutout of the notch of the screen protector,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I really hate how it makes light content look. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if I’m gonna keep it on long term, but I’m keeping it on for a while because it really does feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very good. And it solves that very annoying problem I have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s nice to see you embracing the Naked Robotic Core by completing Apple’s product by adding to
⏹️ ▶️ John it the accessories that you want that make it the product you want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s already covered in their accessories. I got the keyboard, I got the pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John What else do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want? Yeah, it’s, you have to accessorize and keep adding stuff to it. What is it that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad for you? Just getting the core by itself, maybe that’s what you want. And if you want the skinniest, lightest thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have, that’s it. But because you can’t take stuff off if Apple adds it. But if you wanna add stuff, you can put a
⏹️ ▶️ John big clear thing over the front of it and a big sticky thing on the back and magnetic keyboard stuck to it and stick a pencil on the top of it and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John stickers in the back of it and put some sort of USB-C dongle hanging off the end of it. Pretty soon you’ll have the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John most ungainly laptop. What a dirty screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always talk about applying screen protectors, which I haven’t done for my devices. I mean, I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gross because I think it kind of ruins the aesthetic and also, you know, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on how big it is and what shape the device is that year, you might also feel the edge and the edge can
⏹️ ▶️ John collect dust on it. But more importantly, as you pointed out, getting a
⏹️ ▶️ John cover down on the thing without any dust or bubbles gets much harder as the device gets bigger. So
⏹️ ▶️ John putting it on a 3.5 inch phone, you’re really super careful, maybe you can pull it off, especially if they
⏹️ ▶️ John send you a kit to do it that includes an inflatable clean room.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is actually very tricky. You never realize how much dust is in the air. And I can’t imagine doing it with something
⏹️ ▶️ John as big as an iPad. That’s extremely difficult. But it brought to mind the most difficult thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever had to do related to putting thin, clear
⏹️ ▶️ John film down precisely. And it’s not having to do with iOS devices. It’s having to do with LEGO.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do assembling a LEGO set. I got a really cool X-Wing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s like the ultimate collector’s edition X-Wing Lego set and it has a special piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of course for the X-Wing canopy. I think it’s a special piece, I don’t know, maybe they use it other times.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a clear, very large clear canopy. Like this X-Wing is big. It’s not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way too big, like the little Lego minifigs, that’s not what scale it is. It’s scaled practically for like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, six inch, you know, action figure doll thing to go in the seat. It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John big. So the canopy is very big. And the canopy is 100% clear, but of course the X-Wing
⏹️ ▶️ John has sort of like the metal struts along the edges of the
⏹️ ▶️ John canopy. So the set comes with the clear canopy, and it comes with stickers
⏹️ ▶️ John to cover the top, the right, left, and the back of this thing. And the stickers
⏹️ ▶️ John are entirely clear. Like, it’s kind of better than what they could have done. They could have said, really
⏹️ ▶️ John all you need are dark gray lines along the edges of this shape. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John could have given you a very, very skinny pinstripe that you put along the edges, but instead they gave you
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece that covers the entire side and it’s entirely a clear sticker except for the
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very edge, which is like dark gray. And you have to put on four of
⏹️ ▶️ John these stickers and they all have to meet exactly at the sharp edges of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And of course you don’t want to get any bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath them. And like the instructions just show like peel the edges off
⏹️ ▶️ John the sticker, put the edge down, peel off the backing, lay the sticker on it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to be kidding me and they know like you look in the set and it comes with two sets
⏹️ ▶️ John of these stickers because they know you’re gonna try it you’re gonna screw it up you’re gonna scrape
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing off painfully because those lego stickers are not easy peeling stickers they are you know
⏹️ ▶️ John they once they go on they’re hard to get off and then we’ll give you a second attempt at it uh so we’ll put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John to uh have some photos on instagram of the instructions which are just like i mean they
⏹️ ▶️ John look straightforward if you’ve never put stickers on a lego thing before or if you’ve never put tried to put a large clear
⏹️ ▶️ John sticker on something precisely aligned before and then the finished product which looks perfect in the
⏹️ ▶️ John picture uh but i assure you it is not perfect there are one or two flaws in it
⏹️ ▶️ John and like this is this is good it’s gonna get so i don’t envy anybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John has to put a giant clear protector on any of their devices i know a lot of people who work in stores become like experts
⏹️ ▶️ John at it i have a whole system but really the environment is such an important aspect of it, where unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you have some system that actually filters out microscopic dust particles or blows them out just in time
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, it’s very difficult to get a perfectly clear seal down on one of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That looks terrifying, trying to apply that. And you’re right, that’s probably easier than what Marco did with his iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the thing with the iPads is like, with the sticker, you don’t get a chance to reposition.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even get a chance to peel back with these Lego stickers. It’s not like you start to put it down and realize you made a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John and can reverse. You can’t even reverse with these things. Because if you try to reverse, it will leave the sticky stuff down.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Lego stickers are no joke. They are not static cling, smooth stickers
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can peel on and peel off. They are like one and done. Once these two surfaces meet, that’s it, unless you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in for an hour of scraping and peeling and scrubbing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the thing with the iPad screen protector, you basically just kind of have to do your best to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimize dust and flaws, but not care when you get them, because you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried, I followed all their instructions. I had like this, I was using one of my video lights kind of diagonally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across it so I could see all the dust like as it would fall onto it, and used all their different cloths and tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. And yeah, I still got dust under it. You know, not a lot of dust. It was like, you know, two or three visible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specks, but you know, it’s not like causing these giant bubbles in. And it’s like, if you look in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the right place, you might notice it. but compared to all the rainbow noise, it’s all over it anyway, and the fingerprints that are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visible on top of it, it’s, you know, it kind of just blends in with everything else. So yeah, the solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is stop caring so much. I kind of feel like that’s kind of like the secret to happiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this entire area about the iPad, of like, it’s never gonna look perfect, even if you just use it totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock, it’s gonna be covered in fingerprints if you’re using it at all. So an iPad never looks perfect. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s gonna be imperfect, it might as well be imperfect in ways that you like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, not caring really works out well. You should try it.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me butcher somebody’s surname. That’s my favorite pastime. John G. N. Andrea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that sound about right? Hopefully.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah. Yeah. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the gentleman who was hired from Google, who was the CEO of Google. Yeah, yeah. This was the gentleman who was hired from Google, who is head of machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey learning and artificial intelligence. He has been named to the company’s executive team as senior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vice president of, guess what, machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy. And this has happened since he joined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple in April of this year. So stars on the rise and or they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really, really want Siri to not suck so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when he was hired, everyone’s like, this shows that Apple is serious about AI and he was a good hire from Google, who’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John acknowledged leader in this area. Apple’s not doing so great. And I don’t know. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really know how corporate politics work at this level. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re hired and then quickly put up to a VP, is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the deal coming in? If you do a good job, you’ll quickly go up to VP? Or did he do such great work that they,
⏹️ ▶️ John or is he being courted from somewhere else and they don’t want him to leave, so they bring him up? Or are they just trying to show that
⏹️ ▶️ John machine learning is important to the company? Like, is it all those things combined?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a good sign, because having Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John acknowledge that machine learning and artificial intelligence is important to its future
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. It’s better than them not doing this, or not having anybody reporting,
⏹️ ▶️ John any vice president whose job it is to do this thing. But on the flip side, I’m not really
⏹️ ▶️ John as interested in Apple showing how important something is, I just wanna see their products
⏹️ ▶️ John get better. And there was a story going around recently about one of those showdowns between
⏹️ ▶️ John like Siri and Amazon’s Echo and Google and all that other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John where they ask it a series of questions and then give them a score based on what percentage they get right. I’ve never liked those quizzes
⏹️ ▶️ John just because you can make any of them win depending on how you phrase the questions and which questions you ask. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John ask 20 questions about something that one service knows way better than the other, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ask anything about that other service’s strength. It can really skew things, right? But anyway, they
⏹️ ▶️ John ran this test, and the recent results show Siri gaining serious ground over where it used to be. It’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John in second place, I think. I think it was behind Google, but ahead of Amazon, barely, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ John improved by like 20% since the last year. Anecdotally, I think Siri is
⏹️ ▶️ John improving, but as, I think Gruber wrote about this recently, as many people have pointed out, Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of times you ask your HomePod to do something and it gives you the brush off and says, but you can try that on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. It’s like, just do it. I don’t know why these things
⏹️ ▶️ John only happen on my phone. Like HomePod, you’re gigantic, you weigh a ton, you’re plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ John the wall. There should be nothing my phone can do with Siri that you can’t also do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please, and you’re made by the same company, please make it happen. So Siri gets points off for
⏹️ ▶️ John being uncooperative in areas where it thinks it’s not supposed to be doing something or currently can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do something and tells you to go talk to your phone instead. Which may or may not be fair, I was like, isn’t Siri on the phone too? Are you
⏹️ ▶️ John testing Siri or are you just testing the HomePod? But the bottom line is, if you’re just yelling something into the
⏹️ ▶️ John air, chances are good that the HomePod will hear you way better than your phone, even if you have Hey Dengis
⏹️ ▶️ John enabled on your phone. Because who knows where your phone is and could be in a pocket or could be in another room and it just doesn’t have all the
⏹️ ▶️ John microphones and you know, the super duper always listening power
⏹️ ▶️ John of whatever the hell the HomePod has going on. So I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is taking this seriously, but show me the results, show me the money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve been using my HomePod more and more because it’s in the kitchen now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you play podcasts on it? Because I know you had your iPad in the kitchen, and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, if I’m in the kitchen, I want to listen to podcasts. How easy is it for you to say, you know what, I want to listen to podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I want them to play on the HomePod? It’s too hard, so I don’t do it. Yeah, that brings up, because that’s been my
⏹️ ▶️ John experience too. with all these speakers, not just the Apple. I have a bunch of speakers spread throughout my house. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I want something magical to happen, like, oh, I was listening to a podcast, an overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the car ride over, and I get home, I want to continue listening to it in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I start thinking about how I could possibly make that happen, and I short circuit myself and say, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me just airplay it. Let me just use a Bluetooth speaker. I take all these
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly intelligent speakers, and I say, I’ll just forget it. I’m just gonna pretend you’re a dumb speaker that understands
⏹️ ▶️ John how you can send audio from my phone to the speaker. And that’s not as good. I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to say something in the air and have some podcast player have an understanding.
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point, I have so little faith that I don’t even ask the HomePod to play playlists in
⏹️ ▶️ John my iTunes account because I think, oh, I forget, can’t forget, does this not support smart
⏹️ ▶️ John playlists and it only supports other ones? Like, I keep forgetting which of Apple’s things only support albums but not
⏹️ ▶️ John smart albums playlists but not smart playlists or I just think it won’t know what the heck I’m talking about or
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t know how to phrase it or whatever. So I just don’t even try, which is bad on me for not trying
⏹️ ▶️ John but bad on Apple for making me think that it’s just not going to work and I should, you know, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John continue your multi-home pod kitchen lifestyle story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, a little sidebar here. I recently got a Sonos amp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re new like speaker amp because it has AirPlay 2 support and it basically it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sonos unit that drives two speakers and can accept input from your TV or from a line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in or from AirPlay 2 and automatically switch between those things which I absolutely love.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s awesome. Anyway, so I now have AirPlay 2 in two places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the actually three if I include the Airport Express in my office which I keep trying to make work and keeps not working so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And so now I have multi-room output that is supported by both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon Echo family of devices which I also have a few of, and AirPlay 2. I can directly compare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in some cases use the same speakers, between the AirPlay ecosystem and the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash Alexa ecosystem. Neither one of these systems is reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about multi-room audio for me. I have tried lots of different ways to phrase things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried different ways to name the devices or the rooms or whatever. It’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get these systems to work reliably. And I don’t know who’s at fault with, you know, between like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon and the Sonos system. I do definitely know who’s at fault with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 2 ecosystem though, because like, you know, the Apple devices are the master control devices there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I know what’s going on there. And it is so hard. Like if I say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, hey, you know, hey Dingus play so-and-so in living room and kitchen or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No combination of phrasing and anything like that is working reliably for me. Sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they’ll work sometimes, not other times. One set of phrasing will work on one family of devices, but not the other one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes weird things happen, like it’ll say it’s playing and it just doesn’t. Like it’ll say it’s playing in a room and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to that room and it’s not playing there and you go to the app and it’s like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You didn’t ask me to do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s really messed up. And I don’t know if anyone else has similar issues as me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with multi-room stuff, but man, it’s rough to do it by voice. If you do it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a device, like if you open up the Sonos app and do the Sonos version of it there, or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you open up Control Center or the Music app and you go to the AirPlay menu and you do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from an iOS device, like you pick up the devices there, works fine. But by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voice, it’s still a mess. Anyway, so that, going back, that sidebar is now over, going back to the main,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the master of branch here. The main issue I have with Siri, in addition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some of the reliability stuff, is that it’s still just so much slower than Alexa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, in just how long it takes when I say something to get either a response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the thing happening, it’s just slower. And it’s slower enough that if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are accustomed to the Amazon ecosystem, you really notice that delay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that’s because of some kind of fundamental engineering flaw in Siri or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of implementation detail that they can easily fix, But changing leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really good sign that they’re taking this more seriously. I mean, they didn’t technically change the leadership. He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was already there, but like elevating someone who’s relatively new and who seems pretty good at this stuff to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a higher title that is more important to the company and has more public visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and public scrutiny, that’s probably a good sign. And so I hope this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a result of them taking Siri more seriously. And, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just, I hope that it clearly what we’ve seen over the last, you know, seven years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve seen is that Siri seems to have fundamental flaws and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitations that make it slow, inconsistent, unreliable, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in spotty areas that seem to move around a lot kind of dumb. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem to have fundamental problems with it that have prevented them from improving it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all these years in strong ways in these areas. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that we have both the Google whatever and Alexa, we can see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be much better. This can be much faster and much more reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in some cases smarter. It seems like the smart part is kind of catching up, but it’s still not faster or more reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that I really hope they work on. I really hope they’re taking it very, very seriously as some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major effort to like redo Siri because it really needs it. It’s just too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow and too inconsistent.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I worry about is that this new person is actually going to be concentrating mostly on the things that we
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen released yet, whether it’s like artificial intelligence for making the iPhone camera better
⏹️ ▶️ John or machine learning for doing proactive stuff on the phone about notifications. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of areas for machine learning and artificial intelligence that are forward-looking, that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not simply enhancements of like, you know, last decades war over, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John voice, personal sizes. Surely of course, Siri can and does need to get better like we just talked about. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are the vice president level, you’re overseeing all this stuff. So part of it is, yeah, let’s make Siri better. But part of it is also,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s, you know, make the next great thing with the next much more exciting thing, like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John voice assistants of this style or old hat, and maybe it’s a successor to Siri, you know, is one of those things. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I like, that’s the thing about being a vice president, how you, how you balance all you know, you’re in charge
⏹️ ▶️ John of all this stuff. How do you balance? Uh, you know, what, what to concentrate
⏹️ ▶️ John on more than anything else? Like, what, what do you put your attention on if you have any budgetary control? How much money do you put towards
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Because surely apple has been and continues to do tons of stuff with machine learning and
⏹️ ▶️ John artificial intelligence that is unreleased entirely and stuff that they did that
⏹️ ▶️ John was never released like or still hasn’t been released. Like all the stuff they’re supposedly doing with the car stuff, the self driving
⏹️ ▶️ John car, that’s all machine learning and artificial intelligence stuff hasn’t seen the light of day. So that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John totally invisible to us. And presumably that project is still ongoing and I’m not sure what form
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes, but there’s some portion of the time of this newly minted vice president’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be spent on that. Right. I don’t know. It’s a, it’s a tough job. That’s why, so I’m not a vice president,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a step, uh, to our complaining about Siri, I would like to pile on and complain to about Siri, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I use my watch, which I know is a thing that Marco is unfamiliar with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and mostly John as well, but for me, the one Apple watch user of the three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will not infrequently go to do something using Siri on my watch, typically sending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Aaron a message or something like that. And I will say, hey Dingus, tell my wife, please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring up a pacifier or something like that. And often,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, maybe not often, but probably a third of the time I see, hold on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll tap you when I’m ready, and nothing. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cellular Apple Watch where I have not disabled the cellular connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Often this happens when my phone is not nearby. And what I think is the problem is that it spends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way too much time trying to find my phone. But this happens a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the house. And so even let’s suppose if my phone was across the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s nowhere nearby, it is understandable for it to take a second or two, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just one, to see if it can talk to my phone. But after that, I don’t care how power expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. I want that Wi-Fi radio powered on and I want it using my home’s internet connection. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that doesn’t work within a second, assuming you can power the radio on that quickly and get a connection that quickly, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to go to the damn cellular network. why it’s there and it just, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fallback procedure is infuriating because it doesn’t fall back. It falls down every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it drives me insane and it makes this watch, which I otherwise quite like, I mean, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still on my series three and I otherwise really, really like it, but it just makes it infuriating and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these sorts of paper cuts that make me so unwilling to give Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chance. Whereas it is far more rare for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon lady in a tube to fail to hear me or to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever to answer my question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the powering out of the radios, unfortunately, I have to imagine, cannot be done fast enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to satisfy your demand for action now. And they can’t leave them on all the time because the batteries would be dead. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is a technology problem that is not easily solvable at this point. The only thing I can
⏹️ ▶️ John think of is they have to add, I’m sure Marco knows more about this, and I’m sure this is a ridiculous idea, one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those arm-swinging powered battery chargers to your watch to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch even thicker. You know what I mean? There is a lot of energy going to waste there, but unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John to make one of those, it would actually. No. There’s a very small amount of energy going to waste there. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of energy. The problem is capturing it. I don’t think you can actually capture enough to appreciably charge any kind of battery
⏹️ ▶️ John of any reasonable size. you can capture enough to perhaps wind the world’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, tiniest, most delicate spring in a mechanical watch, but
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not too much charge. But there’s a huge amount of energy, just you’re just not capturing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was an episode of the podcast, of John Chichy’s podcast called Pragmatic about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A while back, it’ll take me a little while to find it. It was from a few years ago when the Apple Watch first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out. I’m pretty sure he did an episode specifically about like, could you power a smartwatch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an automatic rotor the way mechanical watches power themselves. And yeah, basically the answer is no, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t produce anywhere near enough current to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could do it. You just have to have a huge weight on the thing. The thing is, if you actually were harvesting enough
⏹️ ▶️ John energy, it would be like regenerative braking for your arm. You would feel it. That would not be comfortable. It would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to move your hand around while it has a heavy gyroscope spinning really quickly. Have you ever had a gyroscope? Did you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys have gyroscopes as kids? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you get one of those in your hand, and a big, heavy one spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really fast, and you move your hand, you feel the resistance. That’s what it would feel like if your watch was actually harvesting
⏹️ ▶️ John the energy of your arm. You’d have to feel it. And even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John felt it, it would still take a lot of muscle to put the charge, it would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John those radios or flashlights that you crank. You get a crank and you feel the cranking, like it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John do you feel about that, Casey? If before you used Sierra, you had to turn, difficult to turn dial 10 times,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then it would instantly respond when you talked to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it was, I mean, I know you’re joking, but if it guaranteed it to respond and even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this hypothetical perfect world guaranteed it to give me a reasonable response, not like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, go talk to your phone because I’m useless, then I would consider it. It would almost be worthwhile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the problem is a lot of the times when I’m invoking this, I’m saying, hey, dingus, like even to my watch, I’ll say, hey, dingus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell my wife, blah, blah, blah. And that is just not a time when it’s conducive to wind. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that you’re being facetious, but it’s a reasonable thought exercise. And in certain circumstances, heck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I would wind my watch 10 times in order to guarantee a response from Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like, this is kind of like the always-on watch face is a problem we have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John the technical solution to become feasible. Like, an always-on watch face would be better, but can’t do it because of battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John Always-on Wi-Fi when you’re at home would be better, can’t do it because of battery. So, you know, time marches
⏹️ ▶️ John on, and hopefully we will cross both of those milestones eventually. you
Bent iPad Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Speaking of, we were talking about earlier how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet loves to get upset about things. And I really didn’t want to give this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time on the show because I think it’s kind of silly, except then it seemed not so silly anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has confirmed that some iPad Pros ship slightly bent shrug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, well. Yeah, that was, I see. What I think is actually going on here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there is indeed a defect that happens to some of the iPads and they ship them that way, which they shouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they got asked about that and the real answer is, yeah, those are defects, they should be returned and exchanged.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you see some of the pictures online that are like very bent. And I have a feeling if Apple really did say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, some slight variation is normal, I don’t think that level of bending from like the Reddit pictures is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re talking about. And then so, today, the day we’re recording, which admittedly is before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, many of you were hearing this, Dan Riccio in an email to somebody like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like kind of Steve Jobs style, like really, you know, the way to get news out there is like to respond to somebody’s email because they know it’s going to end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac rumors. So Dan Riccio from Apple said basically that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some amount of bentness is normal up to 400 microns, which is 0.4 millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is like the pictures that you see on Reddit of the bent iPads, those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bent way more than 0.4 millimeters, way more. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not what Apple is saying is acceptable. And so, you know,.4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeters over the entire width of like a 13 inch iPad might be noticeable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. Honestly, probably not. You know, to most people, I think that probably would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be noticeable. So I think this is mostly, it’s a non-story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that I don’t think Apple’s doing anything unreasonable here, but their communication about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was really awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John So one thing to keep in mind with the bend is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you make a device that’s entirely flat and has straight edges any kind of bend is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be much more apparent than the old design that had curved edges right because there was less of
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard line less everything doesn’t have to be perfectly straight if you had a bend in a curved one
⏹️ ▶️ John because the edges were curved in this sloping Apple style like gradual whatever the hell it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John called the ellipsoid curve thing or whatever you could hide some you know
⏹️ ▶️ John you might not notice that the curve starts back a couple of millimeters from where it would have started because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a slight bend in the thing uh when you make it totally flat even
⏹️ ▶️ John you know even accounting for the camera bump and everything you can put it
⏹️ ▶️ John on what you think is a totally flat table which is another potential issue the table might not be flat and
⏹️ ▶️ John hold down one side of it and what you’re expecting to see is is nothing, like the other side doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John move or go up or be elevated at all. And if you see it move up at all, you’re like, oh my God, it’s bent. And you would
⏹️ ▶️ John never notice that on a curved one. And also the thing is so thin, so that proportion-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of gap that you might see, it looks bigger in comparison to the thickness of the device, unless it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if it wasn’t a, it was much thicker, that gap would look much smaller in comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ John So 400 microns, the measurement they give to
⏹️ ▶️ John give you idea how big that is. It’s four sheets of paper. But when I think about it, four sheets of paper
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of thick and I wouldn’t want that to be able to fit underneath the edge of my new iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is part of what Apple always does, like pushing the envelope on manufacturing,
⏹️ ▶️ John making these exquisitely finished devices to
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely high tolerances. And the iPad Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John really pushing the limits of that because it’s the thinnest device they ever made and it’s really, really big and wide. What
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey was talking about before, like not wanting to talk about this, are people who buy one of the new iPad Pros and then
⏹️ ▶️ John like bend it over their knee and be like, look at this, it’s a $1,200 thing and you can bend it. Yep, you can bend it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re a big strong boy, you can, you can. Like, it’s really, really skinny,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You can also do the same thing, by the way, to the lid of almost any of your laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John if you really feel like it. It’s really skinny. You can bend it over your knee, I promise you. Don’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re just breaking your stuff. It is a concern, like with the iPhone 6, if
⏹️ ▶️ John during the course of normal use it may get bent. I think the iPad Pros are approaching the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John they may have to take a different design that accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John for the fact that there’s going to be some flex. We’ve talked about this before when we were talking about new materials in the post-aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John age, whether it’s like going back to plastic or carbon fiber or something that springs
⏹️ ▶️ John back from bending better than aluminum does. Glass actually does a much better
⏹️ ▶️ John job of springing back aluminum. You can kink. Glass tends not to kink. It tends to bend until it shatters.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can’t really kink glass. And so this iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you can make it much thinner. I don’t think it would bend in normal use, but I think it might bend
⏹️ ▶️ John mishandled inside a backpack. That’s what some people have been talking about. I put it inside my backpack with a bunch of books and I
⏹️ ▶️ John carry my book bag with me, you know, to and from school or work or whatever. and I take the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing out, I notice it’s slightly bent. I can see that happening in the same way that people could bend iPhone 6s in a tight
⏹️ ▶️ John jeans pocket. Like, it could potentially happen. You sit down on it, you know, you could bend your thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this may be, you know, either it’s going to stay this thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John or get thicker, or they’re going to have to come up with a different design. But as for the
⏹️ ▶️ John specific design, part of pulling this off successfully is figuring out how
⏹️ ▶️ John to manufacture and assemble it so that when they come off the line at the end and
⏹️ ▶️ John ship to the customer, that they are actually flat. Now I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple trying to correct for this as they’re like, oh, it’s about like the cooling process during manufacturing, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John materials, you know, expanding and track different rates at different temperatures because it’s not all, you know, a giant thick
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of metal. There’s different things inside there. There’s glass, there’s plastic, there’s all sorts of stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can say, oh, it was coming out slightly bent just to make a minor adjustment to the manufacturing process so that, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, cooling or whatever, you know, when it’s all done contracting and coming to room temperature that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s flat. The problem is that you don’t know what temperature is going to be used at. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you account for the conditions at the end of the line of the factory, they may not
⏹️ ▶️ John be the same as the conditions in transit, which may not be the same as the conditions where it’s used. If you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John use it on a cool fall day or you live in the tropics and you and your house is
⏹️ ▶️ John 80 degrees all the time. Like basically like this is how, you know, Thermostats work and lots of other things where
⏹️ ▶️ John they had put different materials right next to each other But join them to each other and they expand and contract
⏹️ ▶️ John to different temperatures and they curl like it’s how the thermostats Old-style thermostats used to work, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very difficult to take something that is very thin Very solid
⏹️ ▶️ John and made of heterogeneous materials and make it so that it doesn’t deflect slightly in changes
⏹️ ▶️ John in temperature So I feel for Apple with their with their challenge here because the thing is so thin
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, maybe they have to do like a floating panel type design to use like cabinetry parlance
⏹️ ▶️ John where the insides sort of float inside the outsides so they don’t deflect or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an easy problem. I think Apple should solve it and I would be upset if I got one that was bent. If I got one
⏹️ ▶️ John that was 400 microns bent, you know, I would live with it. My current iPod, iPad is probably 400
⏹️ ▶️ John microns bent. That’s another thing that Dan Riccio said. This variance that they allow
⏹️ ▶️ John them off the line with up to 400 microns of bend, that is tighter than the variance of previous
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads. Previous iPads are allowed to bend even more than that and probably are like, don’t go look at your iPad. You might not like
⏹️ ▶️ John what you find. It’s like, uh, so I don’t think this is much of a story,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think the story here is how like the manufacturing story, how difficult,
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple’s making it harder and harder on themselves to make products because
⏹️ ▶️ John our standards for them keep going up because their products are just so much, you know, cleaner and tighter
⏹️ ▶️ John than they were back when you remember back when they assembled laptops out of multiple different pieces of aluminum, they look like
⏹️ ▶️ John just ramshackle, you know, sheds compared to the solid things that we have today.
⏹️ ▶️ John So our expectations keep going up and they keep pushing the limits. They keep making their things thinner and
⏹️ ▶️ John using designs that will draw your attention to any flaw.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then yeah, they kind of flood this in the PR saying, Oh, some bending is normal. That’s not really the answer. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not Apple’s fault because they’re the question they were actually posed in the cases that they were
⏹️ ▶️ John addressing probably were within this. But this story on the Internet gets put right next to
⏹️ ▶️ John the picture from Reddit of someone’s iPad that they bent over their knee. That’s like a centimeter off the table.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those two things aren’t connected to each other, but they’re next to each other on a web page. And so it seems outrageous. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like, I think their, their actual reaction should have been something along the lines of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get one that’s been, you bring it back and we’ll exchange it like that’s that should be the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reaction like that is you know that is a defect bring it back and we’ll change it and but that’s not what they said they instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said it’s totally fine it shouldn’t affect it if it’s bent it’s like no
⏹️ ▶️ John no yeah they were trying and what they were trying to be is is honest in it like oh there is a tolerance there
⏹️ ▶️ John there is some sort of range where it’s okay right if
⏹️ ▶️ John they just told everyone just bring it in and we’ll return it that would have been fine too because people who have a 200
⏹️ ▶️ John micron bend are not bringing it back. They’re gonna be like, I guess it’s flat. And people who have a huge bend are gonna bring it
⏹️ ▶️ John back and either get it exchanged or argue with the person that they didn’t actually bend it over their knee. That’s the tricky part
⏹️ ▶️ John with this is unless you take it out of the box right in front of the people in the Apple Store and look at it right that moment,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you tell whether this was in someone’s book bag and bent because they threw their book bag onto the floor of the bus
⏹️ ▶️ John or something? Or whether it came out of the box like this? It’s just based on the word of the person. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of a difficult situation. But yeah, they just told everybody, if you got a bent one,
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it in and we’ll exchange it. Maybe they didn’t want the extra traffic. Maybe they didn’t want to have to deal with determining
⏹️ ▶️ John whether, you know, they’d have to deal with this anyway. People are bringing in bent iPads right now to Apple stores and
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for them to be exchanged. Maybe they just didn’t want to ramp that up. I don’t know. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Marco should now take a look at his iPad Pro and Casey, you’ve got one to
⏹️ ▶️ John see if see see if yours are bent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know I did that while you were talking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I glanced at mine earlier and it seems that I’m putting it on my glass desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it seems pretty damn flat
⏹️ ▶️ John got to sight down the edge. Sight down the edge of the thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did. I did. Earlier today I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. And it does not seem bent to me. Now, as we have established not only on this episode but the last 300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatever episodes, I have far less of a discerning eye than most.
⏹️ ▶️ John to help you. When I say sight down the edge, I mean pick it up and hold it like a shark fin up to your eyeball
⏹️ ▶️ John and look along the top of it. It sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems straight to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it doesn’t curve to the right or to the left when you’re looking along the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edge? I understand what straight means, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a video podcast. I don’t know what you’re doing over there. All I know you’re putting it on the cable and trying to look for a gap between the
⏹️ ▶️ John table and the iPad, which is not what I’m asking you to do. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Just like that. Where’s the stupid button in Skype? All right. Now it’s a video podcast. Don’t do it. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John God. You’re inside my pleasure thing. Why is this video? You have to look over the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. I’m looking, look it, I’m looking right here. See, there we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you’re looking into the USB port.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are you doing? Are you podcasting with your closet door just like half a jar? How can you handle that? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his sound deadening, the closing there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s like, you can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey close it, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either open it or close it. Show me how you’re sliding down the edge, because you still aren’t doing it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I supposed to do? Now I deeply regret everything that’s happening right now. See, so like this, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John seems. No, no, like a shark fin. and
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I supposed to do here? Didn’t you just look at Casey and do what he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did? Oh God. So this is the first time, I think, in 300 whatever episodes of ATP that we’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video on for more than an accident.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so John, I’m looking at it like this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, imagine there’s a car driving along the road that is the edge of your thing, and you’re looking directly
⏹️ ▶️ John into the tailpipe of that car. And what you’re looking for is to see, like you’re using foreshortening
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if it curves to the right or the left. Like does the road curve to the right or the left or is it dead straight? And
⏹️ ▶️ John by looking down the edge of it, you are taking that long distance and you’re compressing it so that any
⏹️ ▶️ John deflection is exaggerated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at Marco’s iPad in this video and it looks pretty damn straight
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s doing it right. You can do this, by the way, with your bookshelves too. Go up to your bookshelves, put your eyeball right to the edge of the shelf
⏹️ ▶️ John and look down your long bookshelf and you’ll see how bowed they are from the weight of the books.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, I think it’s bent. Hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God. Here we go. Now it’s probably that mine is bent. I just can’t see because I’m blind and an idiot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it looks like it’s bent towards the camera. Yeah, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if, are they doing the thing where like they bend it so that it lays flat with the camera bump?
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? No, they’re not. You may be doing that by pressing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face down on the camera. All right, so now you got all in my head. Now I’m wondering if I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh God, this is such great audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, there’s totally, there’s a clear bend if you look at one of the short edges. Towards the kitchen or away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the kitchen? Now let me see if I look at the other short edge. Yeah, totally. The short edges, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s definitely bent. Which way is it going? Point the direction that it is deflecting. All right, so from my perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, it goes like this. Yeah, even I can see that on the video, I think. All right, it’s curving towards the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so that like, if you lay it flat, the camera bump will be pushed up such that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is actually more flat without a case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so you may be giving it that bend by constantly putting it down
⏹️ ▶️ John on the camera bump and pressing down with your fingers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I hardly ever I’m almost always using it in the keyboard. Yeah, well, maybe came out of the box that way. Well, look at that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bent. Well, I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway, that it’s so far. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not affected any like I can’t feel the bend
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t think you could see it. If you weren’t doing that like that. I was giving you the way to be able to detect this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your eye. See here’s what’s interesting about it is I put it on a desk and I like poke all four corners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen down screen down. No, of course not. I’m not an animal. Well, but if that’s the flat part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, but I would expect if I put it on the desk with the camera bump on the desk, it should rock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it kind of doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John All right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, so now let me put it with the camera hanging off the desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, desks aren’t flat either. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so if the when the camera when I hang the camera off the desk, but have the rest of the iPad on the desk, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like if you if you push all four corners or the three remaining corners that are on the desk. Two of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do rock very slightly, but you don’t even, it isn’t even enough to feel the rocking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You only see the rocking. Does that make sense? So it’s pretty subtle and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might even be intended to make the camera but more level? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well that could be what they’re talking about with the with the cooling thing during the manufacturing process.
⏹️ ▶️ John knows. I bet if you change the temperature of the thing to be either hotter or cooler it might undo that bend or reverse it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I’m turning off my camera now, this is bullshit. Anyway, return to tablet. Return to tablet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have this screen protector that’s like nicely applied on here, but not that much dust on it. I wouldn’t want to redo that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the other thing. You get the perfect screen protector applied and then your device dies. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I can’t return this one. I’ll never do this again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this is going to make for such good audio. Enjoy this edit. Good grief.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah, all right. Let’s just try to bring this episode back around.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have video of this and not video of Marco killing cricket with an iPad too.
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#askatp: Overcast cookies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkout. That’s away travel.com slash ATP and code ATP for $20 off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a suitcase, because this season, everyone wants to get away. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some ask ATP. Mitch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cohen asks us, does Overcast do anything special to inhibit cookies and podcast downloads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure the large podcast distributors take advantage of this and I wonder if shared hosts like Libsyn do as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This isn’t the worst thing in the world, no worse than web cookies. I only use quote unquote private browsing now, which at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deals or at least helps with tracking. So I wonder if removing cookies from the HTTP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cookie store might be an option to improve privacy. Secondly, I know it would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumb cat and mouse game, but do you think NPR or other hosts would selectively block players via the user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agent string for not playing ball with their rad-like proposals?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So this is a two-part question. First part about cookies. So this is an easy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not persist cookies for any kind of downloads or anything, for anything really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does, my own, you know, my own API, the Overcast API does not use cookies in that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it doesn’t need them, so it doesn’t do that for that. And then for any kind of downloads from third-party servers, like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either artwork, or which is sometimes third-party, or through,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or for the actual podcast downloads themselves, which is what this question was talking about, there’s an option when you create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an NSURL session in the API to use ephemeral sessions, which means basically they’re not saved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that no persistent data is written to disk. This does not mean that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use cookies during the session, because a lot of times, if you, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re following arbitrary download URLs out there on the internet, the downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process itself should use cookies within the request that it’s making. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if you request something and it’s going through like four different redirects, one or two of those redirects might set a cookie.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you don’t then send that, when you follow the redirect to get the next step of the redirect chain, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t work right. So I do use cookies within the request, but then they’re not saved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore they’re not used in future requests to the same server. So it’s something that can only be used within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the session of downloading that one file, but there’s no real ability to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cross request or long-term tracking using cookies. Now there’s other ways they can do it, like with IP address tracking, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t do anything about. But cookies, I treat cookies basically in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost the most hands-off way possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something that people who aren’t developers might not realize. They think of cookies as this magical thing on the web that tracks
⏹️ ▶️ John you, but when someone makes a web request for something, like from some code you write, like
⏹️ ▶️ John when a developer writes code to make a web request, you or the framework you’re using actually
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do some work to make cookies work quote-unquote the normal way. Obviously, your web browser is doing this. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John point of a web browser. But if you’re in a program like a podcast client and you have to make an HTTP
⏹️ ▶️ John request to download a file, cookies are just an HTTP header that the server sends back.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have to do anything with that HTTP header. You can ignore it, you can never read it. You can do nothing with it and drop it on the floor. Now as Mark
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, to successfully follow a bunch of redirects and get to your download, you might have to tell your
⏹️ ▶️ John framework that you’re using to make an HTTP request, by the way, take that cookie and save it or whatever. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t make an explicit effort to say, oh, and I’ll also save that to disk, So that like pretending
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little mini web browser inside there so that the next time you quit Overcast and relaunched, I still have that cookie. If you don’t explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, or if some library you’re using doesn’t explicitly do that, it doesn’t happen. So in other words, the
⏹️ ▶️ John websites don’t have the power to make these cookies go into your program that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re writing. It’s up to the program to accept them and handle them in the expected way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, there is a small complication to that. And that is that certain times, depending on the framework that you’re using,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on the OS and the language and the URL accessing framework you’re using,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes cookie storage is automatic. And it’ll just do it, or it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John like. Yeah, it might be the default. And that’s considered a good feature, because it’s a pain to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it manually yourself. You’re like, oh, it’s great. The framework does it for me. I don’t have to think about it. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a choice. Exactly. And then regarding the second part of the question about whether my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intended non-compliance with NPR’s RAD spec might eventually result in them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like user agent banning me. It’s possible somebody might at some point do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I care because I don’t think first of all I don’t think there’s a risk that that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very likely. It’s not good business to start blocking clients for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively minor reasons like that like that’s not that’s not a major reason to block somebody and So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t think that my non-compliance with their spec would even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make their radar. They wouldn’t even care that this podcast app with 2% or 3%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market share doesn’t do our spec. Because you know what? Even if the spec goes really, really well, there’s still going to be 75%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the market that doesn’t implement it. So I wouldn’t stick out enough for them to care. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they did, and suppose they got real mad at me. Suppose they got real mad at me and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to block Overcast and they sent me legal things saying, don’t, you know, don’t change your user agent to evade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this or we’ll sue you. We’re blocking you. That’s it. Oh, well, what can I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the fact is the, you know, of like the top 50 podcasts and overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them aren’t NPR. Most of them aren’t any one provider. Um, the wonderful thing about podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the audience listens to all sorts of diverse things and it would really hurt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lose popular shows somehow to it, for a popular show to not be playable in my app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while remaining playable in lots of other podcast apps would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty big jerk move and it would be really inconvenient for me and I would definitely lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some customers to it. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I wouldn’t lose my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire customer base. I probably wouldn’t even lose 20%. Like to give you some idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this might mean, it wouldn’t mean that much. It would hurt, but it wouldn’t be the end of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business and I would just keep going. because it probably wouldn’t affect any shows I listen to. And oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reality is, if I’m big enough for them to care that I’m not implementing their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spec, I’m probably also big enough for them to not want to lose my audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely. So this kind of thing would probably never happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, getting to the cat and mouse thing, you just change your user agent string to make it look like you’re Internet Explorer or some other podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John client. Like it’s just a string that you send with the request. Like it’s cat and mouse because they could keep, you know, aha,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m banning all things that look like your user registry, but if you make your user registry indistinguishable from some other
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast, like it’s stupid. It’s not a feasible thing to do.
#askatp: If Intel improves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, here’s another example of, oh, your Twitter username is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever. Well, Grinch Reel Salkin, how do you feel now? He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco would like to know what if… I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aware that Christmas usernames were a thing. I knew the Halloween thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to feel bad when poor Grinch Reel is like, that’s the name my parents gave me, you insensitive clod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reel. This individual would like to know, hey, what if Intel got their act together, fixed their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process issues and launched this new architecture, we’ll put a link in the show notes, all in 2019 or 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would Apple think twice about switching to ARM or is it too little too late? You know, this is kind of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this implies that the ship has sailed and Apple’s definitely switching to ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s kind of how I feel. So I don’t blame the Grinch for saying that, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t actually true as far as we know. I mean, I, I concur. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like there’s enough smoke for there to be fire here, but we don’t really know. But that being said, given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my just gut feeling about the situation, I do think it’s too little too late. Apple loves control, Apple wants control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they do not want to rely on Intel anymore. Marco, what do you think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have not been following whatever this new architecture is, but I do ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the ship has already sailed. And while Apple could possibly, I don’t know, unsail it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync it, I don’t know, whatever it is, whatever they would do in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy metaphor, I don’t think they would because ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Apple is deciding to move to ARM, they would be doing it for a few reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of those reasons is that Intel’s performance recently has not been very good. But there’s lots of other reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, things like control and having things be in-house. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can almost certainly make more money per unit if they control that, because Intel’s CPUs are very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a big financial incentive there, and there’s a huge control incentive. We know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple loves controlling their core technologies. The lack of the control in those technologies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last five years or so has really gotten them burned badly from Intel. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if Intel suddenly stops burning them next year somehow, which honestly I think given Intel’s performance recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very unlikely, but if Intel suddenly gets better again and it’s like, okay, now we’re back on track. We’re starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to develop things regularly again and not miss our targets and keep things moving forward and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be more competitive on performance per watt. That still doesn’t change the fact that Apple was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really badly burned for like five years. And so I think Apple would take this as a chance of, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We now know that we don’t want to depend on Intel at all, even if they quote, get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. We don’t want them. So I think that chip has already sailed. I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to sink it. And it’s probably for lots of reasons beyond just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one architecture has taken them too long to reach.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think it kind of depends on the specifics of the thing of the new architecture. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll link to this Manatech article that outlines it. But this is like a
⏹️ ▶️ John public presentation that anybody could see. And it’s necessarily vague about future
⏹️ ▶️ John plans because they don’t want to make promises they can’t keep. So they talk about the architecture and
⏹️ ▶️ John the plans and the and the different models and pretty much what each one is do, but they don’t get down to the point of saying exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what the benchmarks are going to look like. Here’s how much power it’s going to take. Here’s like the actual nitty gritty
⏹️ ▶️ John details of like, okay, so Apple, so you’re making a laptop next year and you need a part that has this
⏹️ ▶️ John performance and uses this much power and power is so much more complicated now because it’s like this crazy curve,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what you’re doing. Like there’s nothing that concrete in this presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is purely like this many execution units. Our focus will be on single threaded performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John new instructions for AI, blah, blah, blah, but very vague and high level. But what Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pitch to Apple would be, and was in the past, they get the much more concrete
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers. Like when they switched to Intel, Intel basically gave them a preview of the core architecture. They said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the chips we’ve got now may not look so hot, but here’s what we’ve got in the pipeline. We’re gonna make these core chips and here’s our pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ John for core chips and here’s what we expect. This year we’re gonna have this price, this size, this power, this performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John the next year, this next year, that and that roadmap, which I presume was way more detailed than
⏹️ ▶️ John what anyone got in the public looked really, really good. And Intel actually
⏹️ ▶️ John delivered on that roadmap, which helps. And so Apple was super happy and we were all happy. We got
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel max, they were super fast. The core architecture was a great architecture for a long time. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John so much better than anything else available, especially in terms of power and performance. So it was good for Apple’s laptops. It was good
⏹️ ▶️ John for the desktops. Everybody was happy. This presentation of here’s what we’re gonna give you
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have enough detail to say whether it’s that great. And looking at the high level thing, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not impressed by this high level plan. I don’t look at this and say, wow, Intel’s gonna have some great chips. I look at this and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John best case scenario, if Intel delivers everything they say here, they’ll keep their head
⏹️ ▶️ John above water, right? And that’s not what Apple wants. They want things to kick butt. They don’t want just sort of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll kind of get out of the current slump and get our momentum back and they’ll be pretty good. but like
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple wanted to, even though they wanted to win Apple back or keep Apple on board,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would have to show them very concrete numbers that are way more impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John than these vague numbers. And Apple to Marco’s point would have to believe them and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, and Apple basically would have to compare it to, here’s our internal projections
⏹️ ▶️ John of we made our own chips, what we could get. Intel, you better tell us that you’ve got something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s way better that we can’t possibly reach and also is worth the extra money
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to charge us, it would be a very difficult sell. So I don’t think anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in this article convinces me that Apple should stick with Intel instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of its theoretical arm chips, assuming their arm chips are way better than this. And unless Intel is showing Apple super
⏹️ ▶️ John secret stuff that’s way better, I don’t think Apple will be swayed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you think that ship has sailed?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I think, like I said, what was it, the last thing? might as well be screaming that they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make RMACs at this point. So I will be extremely shocked if 2021
⏹️ ▶️ John comes and there are no RMACs.
#askatp: ATP editing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin, who is the director of the podcast, is also a member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the podcast’s YouTube team. Marcus N. writes, Do I over or underestimate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the amount of time it takes to cut an episode of ATP? Do you care to elaborate on the process? Also, as someone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not listen to the live shows, how much do they differ from the downloadable episodes? Marco, I think it’s probably best for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to take this one, if you don’t mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Morgan, PhD, Ph.D., Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan, School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, PhD. Yeah, sure. So total editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for an episode of ATP is generally like most of a morning. that’s maybe a couple hours, two to three hours, depending on what else is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and how complicated of an edit is. How much John talks is a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differentiator, because John talks in long, uninterrupted blocks that usually don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require much editing at all. So I can skim over a lot of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether or not they require editing, they don’t get editing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think sometimes they could use some editing, but apparently they don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing. And then, of course, editor’s privilege is I edit myself the most. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a me heavy episode, that takes a little bit longer. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it ends up taking maybe about one and a half times to two times the duration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the show, like, you know, in additional editing time. And as for how it differs from the released show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not actually a major difference. It’s mainly in, you know, deciding when to start and stop it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is the pre-show? What is the post-show? Where does it stop? Where does it start? Putting in the ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we all sound better because all the audio files have been brought in and normalized from all of our local recordings and everything, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a much better sound quality. And then content-wise, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove any talkovers, if at all possible, anytime that one of us talks at the same time as the other one, because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumping in at the same time or whatever, I’ll try to remove those. If a joke takes too long to land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before Casey laughs, I’ll move the laugh forward, so that way I sound funnier. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, it’s minor stuff, Like if I repeat myself a lot in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paragraph that I’m speaking, which I do all the time, I will try to reduce that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I say something, or if any of us say something that’s just a total blunder, I will remove it or I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will fix it. If a joke doesn’t land, nobody laughs, I’ll take it out if I can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like stuff like that, just to make us sound better. If we ramble on about something for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s really just like asking like, chat room, what was this thing? And like, we’re just talking about something that we don’t even know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer to, or what we’re saying is totally wrong, I will try to cut it out completely. That way it saves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us a week of emails saying, you know you were wrong about that, and here’s the real thing. Just try to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential problems before they happen. So for the most part, I would say what you’re getting with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the polished, finished, edited product compared to the livestream is you are getting like 95%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the value, but in a way better, nicer package nicer package
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like 50% less of the garbage and flubs. So it’s I don’t think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missing out much by not having the live shows if you don’t listen live.
⏹️ ▶️ John Occasionally, you’ll take an entire segment and move it from the beginning of the show to the end of the show or whatever, which usually you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t notice because you don’t know when it was actually said, but that’s rare. Usually what you hear is sort of the order
⏹️ ▶️ John that we said things in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, almost always because the problem is we refer back to things all the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I try to move a later segment into an earlier part of the show or vice versa, you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear in the conversation, oftentimes you would hear us say some reference to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that wouldn’t make sense because you hadn’t heard it yet or whatever else. And so I almost never move things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much. I will cut entire topics sometimes if it doesn’t go anywhere. If it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow up on something really obscure that I don’t think anybody would care about that we didn’t have much to say about, sometimes I’ll cut that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then we’ll get a week of feedback about why we didn’t say something about it and then I’ll yell at you in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure you’ve all heard this before. So yeah, that’s about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try to limit the length of the show to right around two hours. I don’t like going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past two hours, or if I do, maybe only by like 10 minutes. But I try not to go past that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally some trimming there is necessary. But for the most part, you’re not really missing that much if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t hear the live shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John and we won’t go back in and re-record stuff. So for example, in this episode, Casey, unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John said lady in a tube again, and we’re not gonna give him a chance to correct that. And he’s just gonna have to live with the fact that he
⏹️ ▶️ John said it reflexively without thinking about it, and it just glide, you know, went right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I was gonna edit that out, but I don’t think there’s a good way for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. No, there isn’t, that’s what I said. You have to cut that whole segment, so we’ll just know that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult to speak extemporaneously on a weekly basis and not flub something. We acknowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John that we do it. We’re sorry, but sometimes it just stays in the edit because we’re not gonna go back and have Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John reenact that section.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, of course, yeah, because it wouldn’t sound right. It wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sound right. It’s not like we don’t want to do it because we’re lazy, it wouldn’t work. We’re not actors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Definitely not. My bad. Remind me what the preferred nomenclature is there.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can go with cylinders, you could go with person in a tube. We’re trying to avoid,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, sort of the fridging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cereal. As soon as I said that, I was like, wait, this isn’t right. But I just had to roll on at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. Whoops, sorry about that.
#askatp: Full-screen Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everybody. All right. And then finally, Eric asks, Hey, for Marco and Casey, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I’ll throw Johnny on this too, in a different way. Do you use Xcode in full screen mode or with multiple windows? For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I have a kind of similar tile approach, as I’ve talked about in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with when I podcast, generally speaking, well, at least when I’m writing an iOS app, it’s been different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now than working on an iPad thing. But when I had, or I’m sorry, when I’m working on iPhone app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was working for work, work, it was almost exclusively iPhone work. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would put the simulator in the upper right hand corner, I would put the terminal in the bottom right hand corner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would have Xcode on the left side of the screen extended all the way until it kisses the side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the simulator window. So it’s, you know, 80% or 90% of my screen. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can always at any moment, see the terminal, see Xcode and see the simulator all at once. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I roll. The only time I ever really use full screen, which is very rarely is if I’m on the adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have a physical device connected for debugging purposes. Otherwise, I never really use full screen mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, how about you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Similar. Not only do I not use Xcode in full screen, I almost never use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in full screen ever, unless I’m like watching a movie on a computer for some reason. That’s it. Because the problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full screen to me, it is so different from the way I both work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way I want things to be in a windowed Mac multitasking environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s one of those things that I feel like full screen is up there with Launchpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like things that were added to the Mac in the time where they wanted to make it more iOS-like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that I don’t think should have been added, and I think ultimately are just weird and don’t fit in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Full screen to me feels like I’m on a ride. My computer’s taking me for a ride. Look, this giant animation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoop, moved the whole 27-inch screen over while I wait for this animation to happen in and out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, it’s just, I feel like I’m being taken for a ride and that’s not a good feeling. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I am not controlling things the way I want to control them and the computer is trying to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a show for me that I really don’t want. And it furthermore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, the practical reality of it, like switching in and out of full screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the core that I have a problem with. Like, you know, that’s why you got all these big animations that you got to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. But then also like full screen work mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like that must work for some people because it sure looks good in people’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in like product shots when you see like a new version of an image editor or something comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and in their product shots it’s all running in full screen. Look at this wonderful pro awesome black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background environment where this creative person is getting their work done. It’s the same kind of people who like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do all their art on their iPad. It’s like that’s great. I am not one of these people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, full screen mode just does not work at all, and I’ve never seen anybody for whom it does work. If you’re out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe you exist, just like John’s HDMI CEC unicorns, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you exist out there, but I’ve never met one of you, and I’m certainly not one of you. And especially when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing development, I am going between multiple apps. I’m going between Xcode and the simulator at the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least, and I’m probably also going between Xcode simulator and Dash, maybe between Xcode and its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own documentation window and its own organizer and devices windows. Like Xcode itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a multi-window app if you’re using it for much of anything. Instruments is yet another app slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of windows that you might be using. You might be also using Terminal and also using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a web browser to look stuff up or to read an article about what you’re doing or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a tutorial running or God knows what. This is one of the reasons why I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode on iPad is further away than most people think it is Because development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is inherently a very, very multi-app, multi-window, multitasking-heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job to do. And I’ve never seen any developer work in anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-screen mode, because the reality of most development work is you’re bouncing between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff so much. It just doesn’t really make sense to have this full-screen takeover mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where going in and out of it requires all these big, dumb animations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have met somebody who works in full screen mode, because I am getting real time follow up from Jelly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has said that he does a lot of stuff in full screen, including Xcode. I don’t know how you do Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full screen in anything bigger than like my MacBook, but apparently that’s how Jelly rolls. And additionally, I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add that I am a very heavy and very, well, I don’t know if I should say very heavy, but I’m a very enthusiastic user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of spaces. Oftentimes my web browser is not on the same space as Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the simulator and all that. And it sounds like, Marco, you are not a fan. And if I recall correctly, John is very much not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fan. But I do like Spaces and I use them a lot. John, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of obliquely talked about in the past that you do a fair bit of JavaScript development these days, particularly Node.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you using Visual Studio Code? What are you using for that? Or BBEdit or what have you? And are you doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that full screen or are you doing the Windows of Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ John Accounting? I mean, you know the answer to this. I’m obviously using multiple windows for everything, but lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John at work do development work, coding with stuff in full screen. I can tell you people love full
⏹️ ▶️ John screen now. Maybe most of them are ex-Windows users who are just like trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on everything being full screen. If you’re not, as you two both know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are not accustomed to dealing with a whole bunch of Windows and embracing the idea that you get
⏹️ ▶️ John to decide where they belong and having faith that the applications that you use will honor and remember
⏹️ ▶️ John your manipulations of those Windows and it won’t just be throwaway work, right? If you embrace arranging Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can work fine in that environment. But if you don’t, it feels insecure. It feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like just a bunch of loose garbage on your screen. You’re just like, I just need to get this full screen so I’ll feel like I’m anchored
⏹️ ▶️ John to the walls and I’m safe again. I’ve seen people use everything in full screen. Their web browsers are full screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their IDs are full screen. Their file browsers are full screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like everything I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of- And to clarify, are you talking about maximized windows or actual with a full screen mode?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m talking about actual full screen where you can’t get the window widgets unless you jam the cursor against the top
⏹️ ▶️ John and wait for the little thing to slide down. like full screen, full screen on the Mac. Oh my God. And I don’t know how they
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. It’s not how I work either, but I do know that people love it. And again, like very
⏹️ ▶️ John often a web browser, full screen on a 15 inch MacBook Pro is an
⏹️ ▶️ John absurd waste of space because like it’s not comfortable to read lines that long. And if the lines
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t that long, then you’re just wasting space on either side or on one side of the other of the thing. So no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t do anything full screen. I think the people who use their IDs full screen, like you mentioned Visual Studio Code, A lot of the IDs
⏹️ ▶️ John for web development let you do, you’ll have a file browser in your left-hand pane and you’ll have a
⏹️ ▶️ John shell. You can do all your shell commands from within there too. Like it’s a terminal, it’s a file browser, it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John a code editor, right? And they like the fact that they three-finger swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John to the next space, which is really the next full-screen app and that’s their browser, right? Or they use multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors, but if they use multiple monitors, they say, ah, multiple monitors, finally, I can see more than one thing at once because they don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can have more than one thing on a single monitor You put them in Windows. Anyway, everyone has their own habits.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think full screen is incredibly popular on the Mac. If I took a survey of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac developers who use Macs at work, I think the majority of them would use at least one app full
⏹️ ▶️ John screen all the time. I use zero apps full screen. I am not a fan. Surprise, surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Away, Mac Weldon, and Backblaze. and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. It’s accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental Accidental!
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t mean to Accidental! Accidental! Tech, why
Follow-back: NAS backup
⏹️ ▶️ John I just reminded me with that mention of backblaze, I have some backup follow
⏹️ ▶️ John up, some, some post show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco backup, some follow
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey back. I don’t know what the hell you call this. Yeah. Ain’t
⏹️ ▶️ John no follow back show. All
⏹️ ▶️ John When, when last we left. Oh, I love you. My absurd backup situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you remember the situation, but I will describe what it was. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so, so crash plan was getting rid of their home plan and they had the small business plan and they had a deal
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could switch from home to small business for a discount rate and the discount rate would expire. That discount rate has recently expired
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I’m up to paying much more than I would for something like Backblaze for my CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ John backup. But CrashPlan will also backup network volumes and Backblaze will not, so I was in this quandary.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in preparation for this quandary I entered this absurd situation on my wife’s computer which hosts our photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library of, you know, I already mentioned I’ve got the photos on external SSD because they outgrew the main
⏹️ ▶️ John one. That’s fine, you know, Backblaze will do directly attached disks, but I also have my Synology
⏹️ ▶️ John mounted on there and Backblaze won’t back that up. So on her computer
⏹️ ▶️ John I was running CrashPlan and having it back up both of the attached drives
⏹️ ▶️ John and the mounted Synology. Also running Backblaze,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was backing up both of the mounted drives, but not the mounted Synology, also running Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Machine, which is backing up to the Synology and also to a directly attached drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John she had three, oh and sorry, finally, Google Backup and Sync
⏹️ ▶️ John backing up her photo library to Google Photos. So that’s one computer running
⏹️ ▶️ John four programs for the purposes of backup, and one of them just had a price increase and now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like three times as expensive as it used to to be one for like $5 a month or $15 a month or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of those backup programs, namely CrashPlan, occasionally pisses me off by
⏹️ ▶️ John going wonky. It’s still a Java program, and its main
⏹️ ▶️ John challenge seems to be that it doesn’t expect to backup quite
⏹️ ▶️ John as many files as I have. Mac OS X has a lot of files in it. I have a lot of files.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m shocked. Yeah, the Synology is easy. The Synology, because they’re big video files, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like TV shows and movies, that’s actually pretty easy because the number of files is small and each file is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John large. That’s ideal for a backup program. You would think, oh, a backup program, it’s gonna really choke on those big files. Backup programs love
⏹️ ▶️ John big files. What backup programs hate? Hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of small files and directories.
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes them flip their lid. So I have literally multiple millions of files that are being
⏹️ ▶️ John backed up and CrashPlan chokes on them. And if you go to their help
⏹️ ▶️ John document, they’d be like, you need to give CrashPlan more memory so it doesn’t choke on these files. With the wonders of Java,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve ever done anything with Java and you use the Java command to run a jar file or whatever, you know that you can specify
⏹️ ▶️ John on the command line how much heap space it’s supposed to use. I feel like I shouldn’t have to specify this because I feel like I’m back in classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS telling my applications how much RAM they have. Just allocate the memory you need, I feel like saying. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco apparently that’s not the way Java
⏹️ ▶️ John works for reasons I don’t understand. I’m sure there are very good reasons for it, but it’s frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John as a user. So CrashPlan suggests if CrashPlan is freaking out and isn’t able
⏹️ ▶️ John to launch and never seems to back up anything, get it to launch somehow. I’m not sure how they expect you
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this. And then go into an obscure preference thing and increase its memory allocation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve been doing that for a couple of years because eventually it just stops backing up because it can’t handle it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I somehow get into the program and get it to launch and increase its memory. So right now I’m paying $15 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month and I’m giving CrashPlan, guess how much memory I’m giving CrashPlan?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, probably in the order of gigabytes. Jet Ram, want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go on over under? What am I giving my backup program to
⏹️ ▶️ John backup my files and my mounted Synology?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d say like two gigs of RAM, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John insane. I’ll say eight gigs. Someone in the chat room says 10 gigs. I’m giving it five gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can tell you that if I give it four gigs, it does not work. Five gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ John like at this point, I’m increasing it by a gig each time, it doesn’t work. So four gigs does not work, five gigs does work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even with five gigs, occasionally, I will come and find my computer freaking out and the
⏹️ ▶️ John process hung and be unable to launch the thing. And so I’m just kind of at the end of my rope
⏹️ ▶️ John with CrashPlan. It just can’t handle what I’m asking it to do. And at a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point, like this is a 16 gig machine. I don’t want to, I know it’s not using all five gigs all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time, but I don’t want to even say reserve or carve out five gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John for my backup program. That doesn’t feel good to me. So I uninstalled CrashPlan.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t like cancel my account yet because I have to wait till I replace it with a different backup thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I installed CrashPlan and my new plan is I’m going to back up my Synology directly
⏹️ ▶️ John from it to B2, Backblaze B2, for about $12 a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not cheap, but I feel like I’ll get the computer, I’ll get, you know, my wife’s computer
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the business of dealing with the backing up of the Synology and let the Synology back itself up. And that is running really
⏹️ ▶️ John fast and it’s straightforward. I didn’t have to allocate five gigs of RAM. I don’t even know if my Synology has five
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM total. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco installed the cloud sync
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I pointed it to the B2 backup, and it just shoving files,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it right now. It’s uploading files right now. And Backblaze has a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John control panel, and you can set limits on how much you want it to spend, and it has a nice price calculator. I think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John end up being like $10 to $12 a month, all told. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel great about it, but I feel good about getting crash plan on the computer. So suddenly I have five gigs of new
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM and I have one fewer process slaughtering my disk. So now it’s just Google Backup
⏹️ ▶️ John and Sync that’s slaughtering my disk. Backblaze, like, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s not even running. It never does anything to my computer untoward. Like it doesn’t cause it to hang.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can schedule it to run at night. It is always backed up. I look at it, I’m like, are you sure you’re backed up? I never see you running.
⏹️ ▶️ John How can you be backed up? It’s like, yep, totally backed up. Last backup was like two hours ago. I got all your files.
⏹️ ▶️ John I go to the restore panel, like, yeah, there’s the files. Like, that’s how it should work. It should just work. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to think about it. It just runs. Much nicer. Google Backup is saying, I like the fact that it puts my photos into Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos. I don’t particularly trust that it’s getting all of them, but that’s like my fifth level backup of stuff. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my situation now. Eventually I will cancel CrashPlan. The good thing about CrashPlan is it will
⏹️ ▶️ John retain old versions forever. Like, you know, it had like, it had a cascade where it would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll keep every hour for the first day and every day for the first month and every week
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first two months and then every month like but it but it wouldn’t like it would keep your oldest copy
⏹️ ▶️ John that was pretty neat and the fact that it did not work back so the fact that it was unlimited for a flat fee but they just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get their act together with that Java program and I’m not giving it 5 gigs of RAM anymore.