314: Kernel Panic in the Night
21 Feb 2019Hopeful rumors for 2019 Macs, the state of Mojave, and a tale of Apple ID woe.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Hosting a podcast for free on Anchor or SoundCloud
- Contacts syncing limits
- Mojave stability
- Rumor explosion from Ming-Chi Kuo and Mark Gurman
#askatp:- Could the next Apple TV be wireless? (via Ed Cormany)
- Is wireless CarPlay a deal-breaker? (via Eddie Lee)
- How is season 3 of The Grand Tour? (via Paul Walker (not that one))
- Post-show: Apple ID Management
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Free podcast hosting
- Gmail misspellings
- Contacts syncing
- Sponsor: Fracture
- Mojave stability
- USB audio bug?
- Sponsor: Boxy Suite (code ATP30)
- 16” MBP rumor
- 31.6” 6K3K display rumor
- Mac Pro rumor
- Marzipan rumor
- #askatp: Cheap Apple TV
- #askatp: Wireless CarPlay
- #askatp: The Grand Tour
- Ending theme
- John’s Apple ID
Free podcast hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to edit myself a lot tomorrow because I made no sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel like there were a couple of times I went right off the rails myself. Make us sound smart, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s only so much I can do. Oh, brutal. Brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s going to be like that tonight. I see how it is. Let’s start with some follow-up. Mark Bramhill,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a friend of the show, Mark Bramhill, who did, what was it? Welcome to Macintosh. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right? That’s right. Yep. Great series.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic series. Mark writes that, and this is with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting a podcast from nothingness, Mark writes, maybe the most compelling reason for a new podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be run on Anchor is that it’s completely free. If you’re making a show for fun and don’t expect to make money, about $300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year for Squarespace or Libsyn or something equivalent is pretty much a non-starter. And that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good point that I think we kind of glanced off of last episode, but I don’t think we really hammered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home. So I’m glad that Mark clarified for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s interesting. Like, you know, in most other types of online hosted content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there have been free options since early on for that content for a long time. First you had online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text hosting, you know, and eventually online image hosting and images with text in the form of blogs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. And there have pretty much always been like free places you could start a blog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, like Tumblr was one of the first ones that really exploded in popularity as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a free blog host. But even before Tumblr, there were places, they were more limited of what you could get for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you could put something up, like Geocities. You could put something up there for free. With video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was really not much of anything until YouTube came around, but before Anchor, I don’t think there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were any meaningful free podcast hosts.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about SoundCloud?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yes, I guess SoundCloud, yeah, maybe that would be it, but I don’t know, I don’t think you could host a podcast for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. You can host a SoundCloud channel for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not every SoundCloud channel has an RSS feed to be a podcast. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s an optional thing that you have to pay for, but I’m not positive on that. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is noteworthy that Anchor was basically trying to be like the Tumblr of podcasting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to do an easy end-to-end solution that was also free. I still don’t love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s now part of a private podcast walled garden service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not great, but it is noteworthy that it was free. And for podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to continue to remain open and diverse and to protect the health of the ecosystem, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we need more free options. That being said, it’s hard to make those economics work out because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while most podcasts don’t get many downloads and therefore the economics are fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap for most of them, if we hosted our podcast on something that was free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what it would cost them in bandwidth. We know that it would cost them probably thousands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars a month in bandwidth and CDN costs to host our show for free. You need a lot of scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to pay for the expensive shows with all the low traffic shows and some way to make money on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s ads or whatever else. You need a lot of scale to make that work. And also, anything else about making podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not free either. To make a podcast, you pretty much need a microphone. And while you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to use the microphone in your phone and get a little bit of the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, it’s going to sound really crappy and it’s not going to be very easy to listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can make a beautiful blog that is easy to read on a free service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Tumblr and it’s fine. You can’t make a good sounding, easy to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to podcast without having spent any money at all on something. While
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value of a free service is very high, the idea of bringing podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the masses by making it free, there’s still that inherent barrier of the medium of like you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a microphone and it doesn’t have to be a great microphone it doesn’t be a very expensive microphone but like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outlay of money is necessary to make a podcast that sounds listenable. So it like there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already a barrier there. I don’t know how much of a barrier you’re removing by making the hosting free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s already pretty cheap.
Gmail misspellings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Hugh Rowlands, and that’s H-U-W, writes, further to John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email address woes, Gmail, among others, also redirects common misspellings. My username
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Hugh H-U-W. So the idea is instead of H-U-W, which is the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spelling of his name, he can actually get email at H-U-G-H, which is kind of interesting. Hugh continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it happens to my friend Nikki, N-I-C-K-Y, who gets emails for someone called N-I-K-K-Y,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nikki. I bet John gets emails for J-O-N and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t test this. And this seems a little suspect to me. Can it possibly be true? It
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it can’t be. But I was afraid to send mail. I was afraid to be one of those people who sends a mail to an
⏹️ ▶️ John address that’s not actually his own, to test this out by sending it to variations of
⏹️ ▶️ John my names. But if true, that just increases the collision domain. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John completely bananas to me. And I don’t understand why anyone would make a system like that. Couldn’t that be a security
⏹️ ▶️ John problem? Yeah, no, I think so too. Some confusion, some feedback confusion
⏹️ ▶️ John on this topic because they didn’t understand what we were really talking about. Bottom line is people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know their email addresses. So they enter an address that is not there somewhere that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to send them email. And the email gets sent, but not to them because they entered the wrong thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people said that they get misdirected email. And not all of them had
⏹️ ▶️ John email addresses that looked like they might have common misspellings or very short or whatever, it’s just a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that happens to people. The one aspect I don’t think we touched on very specifically last episode
⏹️ ▶️ John was, so Gmail might have all these rules about, oh, we don’t care about dots, and like most email
⏹️ ▶️ John addresses, you can add stuff with a plus, and maybe there are also these homonyms or whatever, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but everything else on the web doesn’t know or care about that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when a website asks you, you know, set up an account, enter your email address and a password,
⏹️ ▶️ John You can set up an account with a dot, without a dot, with a plus, without a plus, and as far as that website’s concerned, those are
⏹️ ▶️ John all entirely different addresses and entirely different accounts. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s another reason I think it’s such a bad idea to do this type of thing, is because
⏹️ ▶️ John the particular rules for your email service provider can’t possibly be known by the entire rest of the web, even
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail, which is, you know, probably the world’s biggest email provider. Its rules are not
⏹️ ▶️ John implemented in everyone else’s websites. So you can make multiple accounts with the quote unquote same email
⏹️ ▶️ John address as far as Gmail is concerned. And that gets very confusing for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember their email address. Did I answer it with a dot or without the dot? It’s too much too much
⏹️ ▶️ John confusion over something that should be much simpler than it is. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I’m all for it being case insensitive, which it is. I probably think according to the email standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John So once you start doing sound-a-likes,
Contacts syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, we had some interesting anonymous feedback about contacts syncing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was the, I vaguely remember the context for this, but I think John, it was you that had brought this up originally, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was complaining about my contacts not syncing, like, this is the classic, you know, cloud whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like the simplest thing that was ever synchronized. I, oh, my contacts should be synchronized between my Palm PDA and my
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop PC, right? Just it’s the, you know, the stereotypical use case. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in this day and age, contacts are so few, like we don’t have many contacts. Most
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have hundreds or maybe thousands, but it’s not like there’s millions. And they’re so tiny compared to photos or video or
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other things that we deal with on a daily basis. So surely in 2019,
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple being quote unquote better at cloud, your contact should sync. And yet still
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2019, or I think it was 2018 when I last complained about this, sometimes I’ll modify contact on one Apple device.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those changes won’t appear on any other Apple device ever. and there’s nothing I can do about it. And I was frustrated by that, and we went
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth with a bunch of follow up on it, and someone pointed us to an Apple page that said, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your images are bigger than this size, we won’t sync them, or maybe we won’t sync them, or they should be
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, and blah, blah, blah. And then we were trying to experiment, so people made shortcuts that would find
⏹️ ▶️ John all your big images and make them smaller, and it’s just, and why is there no error message,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, is this really true? Is this really a thing that happens? Why would, if the images are too big,
⏹️ ▶️ John Why wouldn’t Apple just resize them? I never actually experimentally determined whether this was the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I did run a bunch of those shortcuts, but I didn’t actually go in and shrink my images, partly because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a form of protest. You know, I’m protesting, you know, biting off my nose to spite my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco face here. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John my images aren’t huge, like they’re reasonable sized images. I want them to be okay resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to do what I see so many people do, both in their avatars and social networks and in their contacts where they have
⏹️ ▶️ John an image of either themselves or some other person that’s like seemingly 32 by 32 pixels with heavy JPEG compression.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just looks like a splotchy mess. I don’t need them to be 20
⏹️ ▶️ John megapixel images, but a 500 pixel by 500 pixel image, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is reasonable for a headshot for a contact image. And that’s too big if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, you know, if the JPEG compression isn’t heavy enough or if God forbid it’s a ping, oh, then forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you’re over the limit. The limit was like 200K or something ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 224 or something along those lines. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, Apple should just deal with this. They should, if the images are too big, it should
⏹️ ▶️ John reformat and recompress them. And honestly, whatever the limit is, they synchronize a terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John of my photos, practically. Like, they can handle my contact images for crying out
⏹️ ▶️ John loud. So that’s, I haven’t personally resolved that, but here is anonymous feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John from inside the mothership, attempting to explain what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this individual writes in to say, it turns out that the iCloud server only supports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JPEG image types, even though the CardDAV spec allows any kind of image.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the Mac, all the images are just converted to JPEG before being uploaded, but on the phone, an image is only converted to another format
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the original image is too large. So a small ping or tiff would not be converted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and would fail to sync. Contacts uses bulk uploads to send multiple changes at once, and if one contact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of a bulk failed, that contact would just be blacklisted and never sent again unless it gets edited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, if the Boko upload only contained broken contacts or just a single contact that was broken, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be a bug that would cause it to immediately try to sync again and then bad things would happen, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, regarding error messages about images that are too
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t gloss over the bad things would happen. Why do you gloss over the key part? I need to put more things in bold.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the key part of that paragraph. It’s a big detailed explanation of, of, uh, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a little too obvious to the poor person who is telling us I didn’t want to out the birdie by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback it’s anonymous I think this is a key point though so what they’re saying is like if there was a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a clean edit I don’t care I don’t think about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my god fine carry on John
⏹️ ▶️ John so if the if the thing is a has a broken contact image where like it you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it can’t sink it it would just keep trying to sink it over and over again and this is another one of those possible sources of battery drain right
⏹️ ▶️ John so what’s killing my battery and that’s why that we have the energy thing you might find out you know contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John is killing the battery would it show up as iCloud or whatever but they can get stuck in a loop where it’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to sink you the one and only image that was part of this upload but there’s a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with it and it can’t sink in it would just keep trying over and over and over again and then we’re just kill your battery. That’s the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with all these background processes. If you have any sort of little bug, you can destroy your battery
⏹️ ▶️ John without knowing it. It’s not the type of thing that it would, it’s like a game running in the background where it would just get super hot or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s enough activity that it would slowly wear down your battery and you might not quite know what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John So not only is contact syncing buggy and doesn’t work all the time, but it can also kill the battery in your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, which is no fun. You may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continue. But yes, Apple is definitely getting better at services. Speaking of, the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little Bertie continues that with regard to error messages about images that are too big and really the lack thereof,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HI, which is human interaction, viscerally hates error badges or dialogues, especially on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also very rare that a 400 or 500 server error actually is actionable by the user.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even though this error, which technically had some way for the user to fix, or this is an error that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technically had a way for the user to fix, the actual server error sent back to the client
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t even specify what was wrong. So the server knows what’s going on and arguably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have just fixed it, but be that as it may, it doesn’t even tell the client,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, by the way, this image is of the wrong format or is too big or whatever the case may be. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a failure on multiple levels to me. The server should be able to fix this, first of all. Second of all, it should message
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it back to the client. And third, the client should then message that to the user so that action can be taken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But instead, Apple chooses to just spin out of control until your battery melts. Good call,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like a situation where like the things that they care about and are measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John just overwhelm the actual purpose of the system. So it’s like, we don’t wanna see error dialogues, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna see badges or things that are telling me what’s wrong. And I just want
⏹️ ▶️ John the syncing to work, right? So if you have small images or they’re all JPEGs, or like if you satisfy all
⏹️ ▶️ John these invisible constraints that nobody knows about, everything will work fine. And your product will pass
⏹️ ▶️ John QA with flying colors and be like, look, it does all the things that we said it would do. And it has that good old Apple user
⏹️ ▶️ John experience where there’s no sync button and you don’t have to do anything and it just works. But of course it doesn’t just work
⏹️ ▶️ John because the real world is different and you might have images that you’re big and they might be in different formats and it doesn’t convert them except on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John when it does. And they can repeatedly try to upload them, that might fail, but it’ll just keep trying again. And
⏹️ ▶️ John all the while it’s doing this, one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, first of all. Like the system behind the scenes is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of crap that apparently both the server and the client people aren’t aware of. But at no point is any dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John coming up with an error message or anything. So everyone’s like, it’s great, fine, it’s good. Like, and if
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery, if it drains the battery somehow, it’s so invisible, they would never pinpoint it. Like there was much more to this feedback about
⏹️ ▶️ John how they eventually found the problem where they’d get it reported and they’d be like, I don’t see what the problem is. It always works
⏹️ ▶️ John when I try it. Like, and it just happened to the time he happened to write where someone complained about it and it got to an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John human before the server logs for that interaction were expunged and they could see what was happening. Like this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens with these client server systems. Everyone has to be on the same page and understand how the system works end to
⏹️ ▶️ John end and connect the dots, right? You can’t have it so like, every time someone complains, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I don’t know what your problem was and we can’t see the logs for that anymore and it works when we try it, so I guess it’s not a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John close the bug, right? We all know when things like this happen where syncing doesn’t work, but it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the reason, you know, Marco talked about the reasons why we don’t report bugs, I think on the last episode, but there are other
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, even if you were super conscientious, like, what are you gonna say? Like, it’s so hard to reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t control the server and so separated by time, you’re like, I did a change to a contact
⏹️ ▶️ John and the change didn’t show up elsewhere. And it’s just exhausting to even think about what they might have to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring you through to make it work. It’s like, you can figure all that out on your own app, but you don’t need people. Like, you need a good
⏹️ ▶️ John test suite, right, Casey? Like, try all the different things, right? Try big images, little images,
⏹️ ▶️ John images in different formats, different devices, turn them on and off at different times. like this is this
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the job of doing cloud sync and the fact that there are all these unwritten
⏹️ ▶️ John rules and edge cases and reasons why it won’t work completely silently behind the scenes that even Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know a that it’s failing and be if it is family they don’t know why for years and years for
⏹️ ▶️ John something as simple as contact syncing this makes me very depressed if all this is true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like this is basic stuff contacts have been a thing that we use on our devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. Contact syncing has been a service Apple has provided since it was called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DotMac. This shouldn’t be a hard thing. This shouldn’t be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, oh, all of a sudden we’ve just started syncing contacts for the first time ever and we all of a sudden have to deal with these new problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that no one’s ever dealt with before. Like, no, this is pretty simple stuff and it’s embarrassing that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as flaky and poorly implemented as it is.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now one of you is Anxious to talk about Mojave stability. I’m guessing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John but you do have an ancient Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Now this I mean, I’m not talking about that one Obviously, I’m talking about the 5k Mac that is always on the latest operating system. I updated
⏹️ ▶️ John to Mojave Anyway, I didn’t want to pass judgment too soon because the point zero
⏹️ ▶️ John is always weird and give it a while, but now I’m ready to declare that Mojave is
⏹️ ▶️ John less stable on all the systems that I run on, which is my iMac and my work
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, than was High Sierra. And it’s not like there
⏹️ ▶️ John is some terrible problem that happens all the time, but there’s just enough problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. And when I say stability, I mean like stability, stability, as in my computer doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work anymore. Stability, not like, oh, an app crashes or it does a weird thing or there’s a bug. Both
⏹️ ▶️ John my work computer and my home computer exhibit problems that it’s like game over. You must
⏹️ ▶️ John restart the computer with the power button kind of thing. It’s not a hard freeze or like this is everything. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop one is kernel panics, which I hadn’t high Sierra two. It’s because it’s a laptop and laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John do that and I have to plug it into a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John hub thing with an external monitor or whatever and I’ve still never been able to determine is this the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of the hub device? Is it the problem of the laptop? Is it a software problem? I don’t know who or what to blame. All I know is that
⏹️ ▶️ John I get slightly more kernel panics in Mojave than I did with High Sierra.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got them with High Sierra too, but I get slightly more. The only upside to Mojave on the laptop is that
⏹️ ▶️ John I can, for the most part, plug and unplug it with the laptop lid closed, I
⏹️ ▶️ John get kernel panics at different times. Usually like when it’s plugging my laptop for
⏹️ ▶️ John the first time during the day when it’s been in my laptop bag the whole night. Sometimes it had a kernel panic in the night.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I think it panics when I plug in the thing for the first time, whether it’s open or closed. Anyway, that’s the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at home, this, you know, my five K Mac is on all the time. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s no real weird software on it. I uninstalled crash plan because I thought it might be
⏹️ ▶️ John to blame for all this stuff because it was running out of memory or whatever but that wasn’t it. The thing I get on my 5k Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is on all the time, is I’ll come up to the computer in the morning or the first time I
⏹️ ▶️ John use it for the day and I will wake it up and I will you know enter a password or whatever to unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John it and on the screen in front of me I will see a bunch of dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ John either asking for like an iCloud password or a keychain unlock password and I’ll see a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of them stacked on top of each other. very often the menu bar will be gone. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ John learned from experience that there’s nothing you can do to get out of the situation. You can enter whatever password it’s asking for and it will just reprompt
⏹️ ▶️ John you or you will reveal the dialog box underneath it. You can hit cancel on these dialog boxes and new ones will spawn as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John as you can hold down the escape key.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Your computer’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically borked. It thinks it’s not logged into iCloud anymore. You can’t switch to a different account. You usually
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t restart. The way I usually restart is I open a terminal, which brings back the menu bar and I reboot
⏹️ ▶️ John from the command line, which I think counts as a clean restart then,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose. But sometimes the power button is required because you can’t even get the terminal to launch because
⏹️ ▶️ John command space doesn’t work or the docks is unresponsive. I don’t know what its problem is. What happens
⏹️ ▶️ John during the night that it suddenly thinks its key chain is locked in, isn’t logged into iCloud? Oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the best thing is, when it comes back up, everything is fine, but then you get a dialogs on all your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, you’ve just signed into such and such computer with your new Apple ID, you know that
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it doesn’t happen every day or every week or even every month, but probably every
⏹️ ▶️ John 1.5 months I’ll come to the computer and it will be doing this. And this didn’t happen, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say maybe not at all, or maybe it only happened once in High Sierra, so I don’t know what its problem is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Mojave has not been a fun ride for me. My Mac Pro running L-CAP,
⏹️ ▶️ John solid as rock, doesn’t have these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s because it’s a Mac Pro, that’s why. Yeah. Those things are flawless. Yeah, I suppose so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever it’s worth, I don’t discount all that, but my experience with Mojave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been no different than High Sierra. Now High Sierra was not great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind you, but I haven’t found it to be any worse.
USB audio bug?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do want to mention there’s this thing going around about USB audio potentially being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem with T2 equipped Macs. I think it’s a thing, but I can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much of a thing it is. So I will throw the link in the show notes, but basically the idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of people are reporting USB audio dropouts or glitches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other like problems with maintaining continuous audio streams to USB 2.0 devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, maybe not 3.0 devices, although there’s very few audio devices that are actually USB 3.0. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reports seem to indicate this is a T2 Mac only thing, so basically only the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most recent Macs. But honestly, I’ve seen a lot of reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of problems of USB audio being a problem on all Macs since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either Sierra or High Sierra, I forget which. So there is something going on there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think it’s new and I also don’t think it’s every Mac or every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio device because like I use multiple USB 2.0 audio devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my iMac Pro and I use the same ones on my previous 5k iMac before this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so this one has a t2 that one didn’t and neither of them seem to have these issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that other people have reported but other people report using other devices with other computers and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have issues so I don’t think there’s any simple thing that says like it’s only T2 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s only Mojave or only since High Sierra or whatever else. But there is some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of audio thing going on and it’s been going on for a little while at least. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I, I assume it was one of these like discovery D situations where like Apple rewrote the audio subsystem at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some point, uh, in the last few years and it’s causing problems, something like that. But I don’t know, there’s something going on and it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s another one of those problems. I bet the people who have them can reproduce them, but trying to convey the information
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple is difficult. Like, you’d have to get them to like bring them to your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and put your kernel into debug mode and attach a remote debugger to like figure it out. Because I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John bet they can’t reproduce it. I mean, just as you’re saying, you use USB audio all the time and you don’t have this problem. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone reported this problem to you and you worked it out, but you’re like, but I don’t have this problem and maybe you even have the same hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what’s the deal? Like, it could be, you know, audio is always weird. It could be so many strange
⏹️ ▶️ John things USB is always somewhat flaky and I remember back when Max
⏹️ ▶️ John had Firewire and USB the preference was always to use Firewire if you could for things like reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John audio because it had features of the bus for guaranteed timings and everything that USB didn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John These days USB is so pervasive and so fast that it shouldn’t be an issue but because there
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that sort of pseudo real-time guaranteed delivery whatever stuff that Firewire had
⏹️ ▶️ John you get by just with the massive bandwidth of modern USB but maybe there are still glitches I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad I haven’t had these problems either because all my peripheral, my audio peripherals are USB. But then again, I’m using a 2008
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. And on my like stability issues, the kernel banks and laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, laptops are garbage. I always assume that they will work on a laptop. But for my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John one, it annoys me that everything that goes wrong happens when I’m not there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not like I’m using the computer and something goes wrong. When I’m using the computer, everything is always fine. It’s when I come
⏹️ ▶️ John the next day and it’s been on all night. What happened in the night? And the new console, and Mojave’s really annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John me, he’s like, I can never figure out where it’s hiding my logs. Like, just show me the files and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll run them through a pager myself. I don’t, it like cuts them off and I can’t, so like, when did you kernel panic
⏹️ ▶️ John or when did you start freaking out? Like, I don’t understand the new database format. I don’t understand how to find the files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the UI makes it seem like the world began 10 minutes ago So I’m very confused by the
⏹️ ▶️ John new console database thing. Anyway, I don’t know what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometime in the night, this computer flipped out and the only way to bring it back is to reboot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully cleanly, but if not cleanly, then a hard reboot. And I would love to know what’s happening, but I can’t report this to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, Apple, every month and a half or so, I come on my computer, is really confused about the world and I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John reboot it. They’d be like, all right, well, what do you want us to do about it? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, I don’t know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the reports to Apple if there’s some, Like it’s not even a crash, like it counts as a clean reboot. I’m just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like this kind of problem. I much prefer a problem where when I do a thing, a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing fails and then I can like, you know, debug. But this is just, you know, a mystery
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. So here’s hoping that the next version of Mac OS somehow makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing also, before we leave the topic, before I forget about the audio stuff, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of the reports of the audio, of the USB audio bugs seem to suggest that using either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt devices or, here’s the kicker, using a Thunderbolt hub,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a USB-C hub, but a certified Thunderbolt USB-C hub.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That apparently fixes the problem. So apparently, if you plug a USB audio device into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Thunderbolt 3 hub, the problem goes away. Which suggests to me that the problem is not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system’s handling of USB audio, What is a problem with hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some like some types of hubs? You know, Thunderbolt hubs have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, way, way higher certification requirements than straight up USB-C hubs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why there’s relatively few of them. That’s why they’re so very expensive. And that’s why they tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be small, like low end things. They tend to be like these $300 like big honking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 17-poor things because it just takes a lot of cost and complexity to make a Thunderbolt hub. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most people are plugging most devices into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when using a T2 equipped, which means USB-C Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop or desktop, what most people are using are cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C hubs that are based on USB, not Thunderbolt. And so maybe these problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mostly being explained by like, these hubs suck. And the way these hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle each other suck. Like that whole ecosystem of USB-C hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is terrible. Any kind of USB-C port adapter and everything, those are all awful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if plugging them into a Thunderbolt hub fixes the problem, then the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy USB hubs, not USB audio in general. So what I highly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggest anybody out there who’s having USB audio issues with any recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern Mac with USB-C ports, chances are good you’re plugging into some kind of adapter along the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I highly suggest you, please for the love of God, don’t do that with your sound equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is maybe why I don’t have these problems, because I don’t do that. Whenever I have sound gear, I plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it directly into the computer with a USB-C cable. I just, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different cable, like the sound box has a USB-B
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port on it, like the you know, the big like printer end. I get, I have a B to C cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I plug it in directly. So there’s no adapters being used. It’s simply a different cable with a C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port on the computer end and whatever the audio device needs on the on the other end That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has solved the problem for me or I’ve we on my iMac. I plug it into USB a port and problem goes away, too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I highly suggest anybody out there having these issues Eliminate the hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the audio pathway and just plug it in directly to a port if you only have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one port like Casey I’m sorry. This isn’t going to work for you at least if your laptop needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power. But whatever it takes, plug it in directly to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer, directly to one of its ports without any hubs, and I bet the problem goes away.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I was suggesting that my USB-C, you know, docking box
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I have at work, which is great when it works, because I plug in one cable and I get power, and I get my monitor out,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I get my headphones, and I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be the slogan for any USB-C. It’s great when it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m totally willing to blame that because it does weird stuff. One of the fun things it does is
⏹️ ▶️ John if I close the lid on my laptop when it’s plugged in, the external monitor, instead of just going
⏹️ ▶️ John black, often shows an exciting color static
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. That’s not what you want. Garbage video memory. And sometimes it moves and has patterns
⏹️ ▶️ John that repeat. So it’s something about, because who knows what’s going on inside this box. It’s obviously still sending a signal to the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor, but it’s just like whatever garbage is in the video buffer inside the box or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John So obviously weird stuff going on. And occasionally I will, after kernel panic, see the report that it’s sending to Apple and it’ll say
⏹️ ▶️ John something like Thunderbolt 3 power initiate failure something. It’s not a Thunderbolt 3 box,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s, I don’t know, the error message is something about the hardware did something unexpected. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, okay, well, it’s not the max problem then, it’s this weird box. Well, there’s two things about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, whatever the USB-C spec says or whatever, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers should be able to handle exceptional cases where a peripheral
⏹️ ▶️ John does something unexpected without kernel panic. I know that’s a tall order, right? But like ideally that
⏹️ ▶️ John should be what it does. And the second thing is, very often, even excluding that box entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will just take my laptop out of my bag where it’s been all night and open it up and expect the screen to come on for me to be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to use my laptop, and that does not happen. And there is no USB-C in that scenario, it’s just me and the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so obviously it’s not just flaky
⏹️ ▶️ John peripheral. Sometimes the laptop just doesn’t want to wake up or wakes up but doesn’t want to turn the screen on. That could be
⏹️ ▶️ John the box not convincing it to switch to the internal thing. Or like, we’ll wake
⏹️ ▶️ John up but be doing something so that everything beach balls and I can’t even reboot. Like, I have hard rebooted this laptop more
⏹️ ▶️ John than I have hard rebooted any Mac since like the classic Mac OS day. It is ridiculous. So in summary, laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just anecdotally, I have found like the USB-C generation of laptops, 2016 and forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me has been the least reliable in waking from sleep and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing other things related to external monitors. Like, when you’re just using it as a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lift the lid, turn it on, close the lid, it’s fine for me. Whenever I’ve involved external monitors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have just had them be incredibly unreliable. And this is across now three different ones that I’ve had.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve all been similarly unreliable. And so I think it’s just this generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like, you know, and Apple can do, you know, they can blame the hub makers, they can blame the monitor makers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can blame USB-C. Ultimately though, whoever’s fault it is, it’s Apple’s problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s their computers that are having problems for their customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of whatever this USB-C garbage situation is. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to whatever Apple might do to the laptops to make them more reliable in the future, and by the way, I’m super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited about these rumors, but maybe we’ll get to that, but whatever they’ll do, I hope Apple also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really takes a good hard look at what they can contribute to the USB-C ecosystem, peripherally-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I still want them to make a hub. I want Apple to make a certified Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C hub because very few other people make them, and no one makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any portable ones, as far as I can tell. Correct me if I’m wrong, listeners. I think all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt 3 hubs are externally powered large docking station style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. I don’t think, what everybody carries around with the laptops, those little USB bus powered things that are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size of a large card reader, I don’t think any of those are certified Thunderbolt 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please, anybody, if you know of one, write it and tell me. Small Thunderbolt 3 bus powered hubs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they exist. And that’s what everybody buys. So ultimately, if Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to themselves release something that is reliable in that category, what everyone does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is go buy these like $40, you know, multi-port things, and then the result is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their Apple laptop is unreliable for them. So it’s Apple’s problem, really. So I really hope Apple fixes that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still holding out hope, as remote as it might be, for Apple to make a first-party, good USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub, and I’m adding the qualification now. I want to be Thunderbolt 3 certified.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wish they were $40. We have, at work, we’re all issued with our laptops with no ports on
⏹️ ▶️ John them, issued this thing that like fills both of the side ports. It has two, you know, it’s a single thing. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big card reader and it’s got two USB-C connectors. And so it plugs both of the holes and you get like
⏹️ ▶️ John a single USB-C maybe. It’s got a bunch of ports on it in a fairly small package. But then I looked up how much those things cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was over a hundred dollars for each one of those things. And they’re, no, they’re not reliable. Like, so it’s not even that cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I mean, it’s work paying for it, so whatever. but it’s some no-name brand, or at least it’s not a brand
⏹️ ▶️ John that I recognize, over $100. So it’s like at that point, you know, and I’ve also never seen a Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John bus powered one, so I don’t know if they exist either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If only. I mean, given that Apple is so enthusiastic about staying in product categories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Wi-Fi routers, I’m sure they’re going to dip their toes directly into Thunderbolt-
⏹️ ▶️ John But they are interested in being the dongle market. They sell tons of dongles. Yeah, that’s true. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John just a different kind of dongle. and they should be all about that.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We heard some rumors over the last week, mostly via Mac rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in turn via Ming-Chi Kuo. There’s a lot here. So we can start,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well how would you like to start? I guess we should talk about the MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Mac Pro. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, MacBook Pros. Oh my god. Let me pour a drink real quick. No, just kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is MacBook Pro. I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey MacBook Pro. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually pay attention to without drinking too much. So preface all this by saying, these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all high-level, vague rumors. But the fact they come from Ming-Chi Kuo is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantial. He seems to have a very, very good track record. Much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what he says comes true, probably more than any other reporter. I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think his record’s even better than German’s recently. So I think his record’s pretty good, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he often has very specific details that show up nowhere else that end up being true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever he says that’s like spec-wise tends to be fairly good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s weak, which is where everyone’s weak, is like the schedule,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing, marketing, like naming, and occasionally, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, something that he says just won’t ever happen. But I think his record’s better than most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumor sources. So anyway, that being said, super excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumored MacBook Pro 16-inch? 16 or to 16.5 inches
⏹️ ▶️ John like it. My impression of these rumors is that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a bigger 15 inches. This is a replacement for the old 17 inch, which
⏹️ ▶️ John went away a while ago and now could potentially come back. Like basically if you want a laptop and
⏹️ ▶️ John your main concern is not portability, but is instead having tons of screen space and lots of power.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the laptop for you and there haven’t since they got rid of the 17 inch laptop. There hasn’t been a laptop like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest you can get from Apple is 15, and if that’s not big enough for you, tough luck, get an external monitor. So even
⏹️ ▶️ John though they keep saying 16 inch, 16.5, I’m thinking that this is not like, oh, we’ll stop making 15s and we’ll just make the 16 or 16.5.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking this is the new big laptop in the
⏹️ ▶️ John small, medium, large sort of set of three, a 13, 15, and 17 inch. See, I disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the new 15 inch, basically. I think this is the replacement for the 15 inch. And honestly, I’m very excited about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that because, you know, as we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many times before, so I’ll be quick, I promise, please, I’ll be quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot about the current laptop designs that I think is too much of a compromise for thinness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lightness. And I think Apple really, really gave up a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end value here with this generation of laptops and the high-end features that buyers, especially at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 15-inch, really want. It really makes sense to let the 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch be as high end as it needs to be and just make this, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, get the size to accommodate that. And it seems like, you know, with the current generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve complained before that they have made the same trade-offs for the whole line. The same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-offs being everything needs to be as thin and light as possible, and we will sacrifice things like power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thermals and reliability to get things as thin as possible. That trade-off makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some products. It makes sense for things like the 12 inch. It makes sense probably for the Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe it might make sense for the 13 inch category, depending on what the trade-offs are. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 15 inch, this is the high-end model. This is the pro model. This is the model that people want the most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re buying the 15 inch because they want high-end hardware. They want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as few compromises as possible. If they can make it a little bit bigger, even if it’s only a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small amount, first of all, I think they can achieve that screen size without making the body that much bigger, because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of bezel you can still get rid of. But making the whole thing a little bit bigger and a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit thicker, and maybe, heaven forbid, a little bit heavier, could make them have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really awesome 15-inch that would resolve most of the complaints they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had with the current one. And I really hope that’s what they’re doing. I think it’s very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this rumor is only about the 15 and does not specify anything about a 13-inch, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last few generations, they’ve replaced the 15 and 13 either simultaneously or very close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to simultaneously to each other. So that is interesting. Maybe it’s just incomplete info. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this really is only an update to the 15, but I am super excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hear both that they’re looking at a bigger screen and that it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allegedly a redesign of the laptop, not just a, like, you know, like it isn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen, it’s a redesign. And all of our listeners know painfully well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been waiting for the next redesign of their laptops for a while now. I’ve been very vocal about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can’t imagine it would be worse than the current ones. Maybe I’ll eat my words,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but based on what they have done to the products that are new or have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been redesigned recently, like the Mac mini, the iMac Pro, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopeful. I think they have their heads on straight again in this department, and I really wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what this is, and I really hope it comes out this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see how this is, you keep talking about it like this is the new 15 inch. There’s not 1.5 inches
⏹️ ▶️ John to spare on the screen diagonally. Like it’s, this is a bigger laptop. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a new 15 inch. Even if it’s just 16, an initial inch of screen
⏹️ ▶️ John space is big and if it’s 16.5, it’s even bigger. Like, so right,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could get rid of the 15 and replace it with this thing, but I feel like it would not be a new 15 inch with
⏹️ ▶️ John a bigger screen because a new 15 inch with a bigger screen is no longer a 15 inch. Like this is not just a slightly bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, one to 1.5 inches is big. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gotta be the new big model. Maybe they get rid of the 15 and just have a 13, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John have a small and a really big and there’s no middle ground anymore. It’s hard to tell with these rumors because basically what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got is, let me tell you about a screens. And they couldn’t even nail on the screen size which makes things, they don’t even have a parts leak for the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact screen. But you know, this is setting aside the redesign because obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re massively overdue for a complete redesign of all their laptops and I hope they totally do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the idea of a larger screen laptop mostly has me intrigued as the resurrection of the 17 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John because as a user of the 15 inch, I carry my 15 inch laptop from meeting to meeting, I wouldn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16 or 16.5, I would downgrade to the 13, which maybe is fine with Apple, like whatever, pick the size you want. But I think a 15 is a nice,
⏹️ ▶️ John a good size between as small as you can get without feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John too cramped and 16 or 16.5, which I feel like is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want the biggest screen possible without being completely ridiculous. And maybe they decided that 17 was ridiculous, so 16.5
⏹️ ▶️ John is less ridiculous, we’ll see. The rumor site, I’m looking at this Mac Rumors article, does mention
⏹️ ▶️ John something about 13-inch, just says they’re gonna add a 32-gig RAM option to the 13-inch, but that doesn’t say anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about redesigns, and I assume that when they redesign them, as with all of their
⏹️ ▶️ John generational laptop things, it may not start across the entire line, because that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is apparently gone. Used to do that back in the good old days. You remember when they would redesign the laptop on every single laptop? There’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be a new 13, a new 15, and a new 17 on the exact same day. What a miracle that was. Anyway, whatever new generation they come
⏹️ ▶️ John out with, it will eventually spread to the whole line. Maybe not on day one, but whatever the new
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop comes out with the new design, even if it’s just one, we know that eventually this design will appear
⏹️ ▶️ John on all the other different sizes. So it’s long overdue, and I’m excited about it as well. But at
⏹️ ▶️ John this point, the rumors are pretty thin on the ground. And even for the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like one of the things we’ve talked about that I’m most looking forward to with the redesign, aside from the keyboard, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe having, getting rid of the non-native
⏹️ ▶️ John scale factor, right? So getting back to the resolutions that we used to have before they went retina, to
⏹️ ▶️ John be true native resolution at 2X with a reasonable screen. That just feels like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of understand why they did that for power and size, But like screen technology has come
⏹️ ▶️ John so far since then, so far that there should be no reason for that compromise anymore on at least
⏹️ ▶️ John one model. Maybe you have that compromise on some of your models or maybe most of your models, but can we just have one
⏹️ ▶️ John with native res out of the box that doesn’t feel cramped? That’d be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like that compromise makes sense on low-end models. Like I would expect that compromise to continue on the 12-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Air. Anything that ends in Pro should not be running a non-native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution scaling thing by default. Like it just shouldn’t. Like those screens, they already segment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen quality as like, you know, like the MacBook Pros have the higher brightness, they have the P3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color gamut. Like they already have these be higher quality screens in other ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The resolution should not be a compromise. It should be high-end resolutions to match
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other high-end specs. Right now it’s not. And yeah, I too hope that this gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them a, you know, now that they’re changing other things around here, I hope they take this opportunity to change that too. I also think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like size wise, I’m, you know, I’ve, I’ve switched between the 13 and the 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every few years basically. And uh, I, I love having the 15 when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to be doing a lot of work on the laptop. Cause obviously when you have more screen space, you know, it’s, it’s great for certain types of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is really most types of work. Um, but I’m very happy currently with 13 for my, for my current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs. I would also though be very happy if they just kind of moved everything up a little bit like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now they have 12 13 13 13 and 15 what if they had you know 12 13 14 and 16 like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if there what if the air is the 13 and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro becomes 14 and 16 that I think would be totally fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the the current 15s would maybe get like a half-inch bigger in each dimension
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accommodate the new 16-inch screen with a smaller bezel, but that’s fine, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge difference in practice, and I think people who want the biggest screen possible would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take that trade-off, because having more screen space is that important. But I think also having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook Pro at around 14 inches could be awesome. Like, if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MateBook Pro, the rip-off with the little pop-up webcam in the effin’ key row, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that thing had about a 14-inch screen, And it looked amazing, and it was a great balance of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size versus screen real estate. It was a fantastic size. And a lot of PC makers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now are shipping little 13-inch, roughly, sized laptops that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have 13 1⁄2 to 14-inch screens, and they do look incredible. This is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the area that I want Apple to really compete very well in, because they used to. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to really be industry-leading in like the screen size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and resolution that you would get for the size class of laptop body.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve lost that lead in recent years. I want them to regain that. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Like it’s not like this is out of their expertise or it’s not like it would require a compromise. They’re among
⏹️ ▶️ Marco domain. Like it would just require them like putting their foot back on the gas like they used to. And so I, again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have such high hopes and I know my hopes are not gonna all be fulfilled here. I know we’re not going to get things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like USB-A or the SD card back. Those are probably long gone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve accepted that now. What I really want is if Apple’s going to make these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern USB-C laptops, make the damn best ones in the industry again. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t been for three years now. I know they can do it. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to do it. Now that there’s rumblings of something big and new coming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really hope they retake their crown and start making the best laptops in the world again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember the last 14-inch laptop Apple made?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, the iBook G4 back in 2005. Do you remember the screen resolution? 1024 by 768, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right. Not quite right enough. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey am very impressed. 14 inches at 1024 by 768.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, it was 14 inch, but it was probably bigger than the current 15 inch because of the huge bezels
⏹️ ▶️ John on the thing. So like it was a different, it was a different, it was like, I think it was like an inch around all sides of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, probably
⏹️ ▶️ John heavier too. Yeah, it was a very large Apple. But yeah, that is the size that Apple, Apple has been in the 13, 15, 17
⏹️ ▶️ John break down. 14 is this kind of strange thing, but it’s all, it’s all about how you shape
⏹️ ▶️ John the case around it these days. So lots of new things are possible.
31.6” 6K3K display rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, we should probably move on to the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Casey brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John up the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, sorry. All right. Before we get to the Mac, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John we do the display before we do the Mac Pro, because that’s… That works.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Potentially related.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re all interrelated, yes. And as much as I snark about the Mac Pro, like, this is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting. And I am curious to… I would like to spend an episode talking about the Mac Pro when it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officially announced. What worries me is that we’re going to spend a year talking about the Mac Pro and…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Us? Yeah, but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting with the display 30 31 point 6 inch 6 K 3 K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently we’re skipping 5 K and going to 6 K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But where what is this 3 K what’s going on here guys?
⏹️ ▶️ John I love I love the very exact size 31.6 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John again. This has got to be because they’ve seen a panel right have seen some kind of panel there because Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is interesting. We talked a couple shows ago about like, you know, what if they do an 8K display
⏹️ ▶️ John and how feasible is that and how useful is it? And obviously we have the 5K displays that are in all the iMacs.
⏹️ ▶️ John We even talked to a couple of shows back about how hard it is to find a 5K display
⏹️ ▶️ John outside of an iMac. Like if you just want an external one, there’s that LG one that’s apparently not very good and
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of other ones of dubious provenance on Amazon and stuff that don’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a common thing in the industry. But Apple puts in all their iMacs and we love those displays. We’re like, well, they could just
⏹️ ▶️ John make an extra one of those and that’d be fine. But for the pro, maybe they’ll do something bigger. So now this rumor of not a
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K display, which would be boring and old hat because those have been in iMacs forever, but also not an 8K display
⏹️ ▶️ John because maybe that’s just too much to be driven by anything and maybe there aren’t that many benefits and maybe it’s too big and all the things we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about, but instead a 6K display. I don’t understand the 6K, 3K thing
⏹️ ▶️ John either. So I’m going to set that aside because I like I haven’t found
⏹️ ▶️ John good articles that link. I personal I have not been able to find a link to the original and being Chico thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it not in English and that’s why I can’t find any links to it because I wouldn’t be able to understand it in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re private research notes that he issues because he’s an analyst that I think people like by access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to his research notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, someone’s buying it and putting it all over these rumor sites, but they’re doing a bad job of transcribing describing it or summarizing it. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John so, but anyway, so a couple of things are interesting about this, uh, to, uh, to me about this
⏹️ ▶️ John issue here. One is that it is not five K, but it’s also not eight K. So I’m, I’m all
⏹️ ▶️ John on board for a six K like better than five K sounds good to me, but I’m not, I’m not dying
⏹️ ▶️ John for eight K I think. And, uh, and a larger screen 30, you know, Apple used to make a 30 inch display that was higher
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution than any of the displays they make now in terms of points, obviously not in terms of pixels because retina,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love a 31.6 inch 6K display. But the most interesting thing to me about this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the modifier that in the title of this room it says with mini LED
⏹️ ▶️ John like backlight design. I haven’t, you know, I’m not keeping up with the external display
⏹️ ▶️ John industry, but I am keeping up with the TV display industry. And this is an interesting intersection
⏹️ ▶️ John because as far as I’m I’m aware I’ve never seen a computer display that attempts to bring
⏹️ ▶️ John television like technology to computers because they’re the different
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and television has different requirements than computer displays do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s no reason they can overlap. So what they’re talking about here is in in television.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we discussed this on some shows in the past if you have an LCD television, normal
⏹️ ▶️ John LCDs, there’s a big white light that’s on all the time behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen. And then in front of that you have a liquid crystal display that has a bunch of little
⏹️ ▶️ John cells that you can turn on and off to let varying amounts of light through. And then there are colored filters
⏹️ ▶️ John over the different colored subpixels. And it’s more complicated than that with QLEDs and so on and so forth, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John picture this mental model of how an LCD works. Big light that’s on all the time, and a thing in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John it that blocks the light from coming through to varying degrees. And that’s why when we talk about black levels, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want an entirely black LCD screen and the backlight is on all the time and you shut off all the
⏹️ ▶️ John liquid crystals and say, please, liquid crystal, don’t let any light through. They can’t do it. Some light comes through. So if you go in a pitch black
⏹️ ▶️ John room and you put on a quote unquote black screen on your LCD, it lights up the room because it
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t stop the light from the backlight coming. So you know, for decades now,
⏹️ ▶️ John the technology in the television industry to try and deal with that has been called dynamic backlight where the
⏹️ ▶️ John backlight isn’t on all the time. The backlight is instead segmented into pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John and they only turn on the backlight behind the parts of the screen that need backlight. So if you were to put on 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John black screen, they would just turn off the whole backlight and lo and behold, perfect blacks. The problem comes when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have something like credits going like white text scrolling on a black screen, you need the
⏹️ ▶️ John backlight on behind the white credit text, you can’t turn the backlight off there because the white won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John show up. But you don’t want it on any of the black part. But the backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John is cut into segments and those segments are like big, like they used to be, you know, 16, 20
⏹️ ▶️ John segments. Now they’re up to several hundred segments, but they’re not as small as a pixel. So to light up
⏹️ ▶️ John a word that’s in the middle of the screen, like a white title on a black screen, you have to turn on a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole bunch of the backlight segments so that you get the lights on behind all the letters. But you’ll also
⏹️ ▶️ John have lights on behind the black that’s next to the letters because the segments aren’t the size of pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many led like backlight is, you know, the sort of march towards can
⏹️ ▶️ John we can we get a backlight where the size of each addressable
⏹️ ▶️ John region of the backlight approaches the size of the pixels if you get it all into the size of the pixels you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need a crystal display anymore and you can just go to actual mini led where you just have light emitting elements to light up all the stuff we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about that on a past show but a compromise is to make the dynamic backlight segment
⏹️ ▶️ John small enough to be able to just light up the backlights behind the text and and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know in your fictional credit sequence so you get less bleed like a bleed or bloom
⏹️ ▶️ John is what they call it when around the white letters in the black background you see this glow it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John the glow is from the backlight that’s behind the black sections because they can’t address just the parts that
⏹️ ▶️ John are behind the letters so that’s television technology but in computer monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John they tend not to do that maybe it’s because you don’t care about black levels on computer monitors you’re not using them to watch movies using
⏹️ ▶️ John them to most of them are lit up all the time anyway and if they If they don’t have good black levels, who cares? Like it’s not like you’re watching
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer in a pitch black room. And if you are, do you really care? It’s not important to computer displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things that are important to computer displays, sometimes it’s like responsiveness. And if you have a backlight, it requires
⏹️ ▶️ John processing to figure out which parts of the backlight can go on. There can be input lag, greater input
⏹️ ▶️ John lag when you have a system like that. But the upside is that you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John very powerful backlights to do things like HDR if you can light them up and turn them on full blast behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the bright regions and turn them off behind the areas that are darker or dim them on the areas that are darker and get higher contrast
⏹️ ▶️ John ratio and all that other stuff. So this rumor is that basically television-like technology
⏹️ ▶️ John coming to a computer monitor to presumably give you a computer monitor with better black
⏹️ ▶️ John levels and stronger HDR than any existing Apple monitor for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I find very exciting because I’ve never liked the
⏹️ ▶️ John complete separation of television technology and computer monitor technology because people do watch video on computer
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors and people do computerish things on televisions. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that they’re word processing on it, but every time someone turns on a television, essentially what you get is a computer display
⏹️ ▶️ John with some kind of remote, whether it’s your Netflix app or your cable box, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John program grid or whatever. Like we’re all using, basically, computers attached to our televisions or if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no computer attached, your television itself is a computer because they’re all smart TVs. And that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John for when you’re not watching a program, it is a computer display. And then you’re watching whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John video is on the set. So it scares me a little bit because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what they’re describing is a very complicated technology and it makes for expensive, complicated televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John where all sorts of things can go wrong. But I trust Apple for the most part to get displays right. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants to make me a display that’s better than a 5K display, that has more pixels and is also 31 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m probably completely on board with that. Like I said, when we talked about the 8K display,
⏹️ ▶️ John I might feel better about it if they also offered a 5K display that was basically just the iMac display,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I love that display, and I want the option to buy that for some reasonable amount of money than to
⏹️ ▶️ John be stuck with this very exotic, very strange first-generation mini-LED-like
⏹️ ▶️ John backlight 31-inch 6K display, which is probably gonna cost an arm and a leg.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like so many first gen display technologies, it’s probably not gonna be a particularly good
⏹️ ▶️ John iteration of this tech, just like the very first 5K display was quickly superseded by the one with the P3
⏹️ ▶️ John and the very first Apple Cinema display, that 22 inch was superseded by the 23 inch that was better in so many different
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll probably buy it anyway, but if they offer both a 5K and a 6K, I may have a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John conversation in Hammond Hall over it for an episode or two, which Casey richly
⏹️ ▶️ John deserves after hemming and hawing over which car to buy for like two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At least I saved it for the after show, which means it could only be but so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really am very intrigued by this rumor of this display. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the stuff you said, that, you know, all about like the possible different backlight technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possible HDR, that all sounds great. I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am much more interested in the shape and size of this thing. Like the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this rumor is very specific, comes from Ming-Chi Kuo, and is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a supply chain part, I think the credibility is high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Like again, this is not a guarantee, nothing ever is in rumors, but like this sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very likely to actually happen, to actually be real. And it’s very interesting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, by going larger than 5K, that alone is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Apple has not shipped a monitor larger than 5K resolution ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and larger than 27 inches not recently, only they had the 30 inch back in the day, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great monitor for the time. It was a little bit, actually, it was a little bit taller, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the same width pixel-wise. So for them to be going wider is interesting, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re also changing aspect ratios here. Like, they’re going for two to one. So it’s actually a significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wider aspect ratio than what they’re shipping right now in the 27s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, frankly. So to have a wide display is very interesting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just on the desktop, we haven’t, the rest of the PC industry is doing that. Like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see these like super wide, like what, like 40 inch, 37 inch displays from other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They typically aren’t retina, but like those are out. They’ve been out for a while and people tend to like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to have like a super high end retina version of something like that from Apple is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appealing and really interesting to me. What’s also interesting, we got this wonderful, very detailed email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from John Deets, and I’m not gonna go through the whole thing, but short version is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the specific 6K by 3K resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very interesting for Apple products because it’s exactly perfect for like maxing out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Thunderbolt 3 single cable while still having just enough bandwidth left for like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB controller, so to offer a few USB ports and like a FaceTime camera. And so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think makes this even more plausible, even more interesting that, yeah, you know what, if Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna make a Pro display today, most of the Pro computers Apple sells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are MacBook Pros, and they wouldn’t make a Pro display in 2019 that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t work with their flagship MacBook Pro. Like that would just be weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not very wise. So it would make a lot of sense for Apple’s Pro display to be something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Thunderbolt 3 Max that have been shipping for the last few years can use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to max out the resolution of a Thunderbolt 3 cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the biggest display you could possibly have while still working on those makes perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. And so that alone is, I think that lends credibility to this. And also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just very excited about that because like that, this sounds like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like turning stuff around and is gonna release some really exciting stuff for the Mac this year. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just really, really love that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want them to max out that cable because I’m still holding out hope for FaceTime in this thing. You mean Face ID? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, yes, Face ID. Because it’s huge, it’s a huge piece of hardware, you’ve got plenty of depth,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can put Face ID in it, it will fit just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you would have enough bandwidth for an entire USB 3 hub, I have a feeling Face ID would be totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine with that. This would not preclude Face ID from going into this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have my own concerns. Like I don’t know if they would do that for lots of other reasons, but bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not be the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you might like, I don’t know if they can tell it all over that same single cable is what I’m getting at.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I want it just because every time I sit down in front of my computer, I’m like you have a perfect view of my face giant
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor that I’m always sitting in front of and exactly facing. Like there’s not like phones and other devices
⏹️ ▶️ John as you found out with the iPad very often doesn’t have a good line of sight on your face either because your hands blocking it or it’s positioned
⏹️ ▶️ John in a weird way or it’s on a table and you’re glancing at it, but desktop computers, it’s the one place where you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John highest chance of having perfect alignment of face and camera. And I just don’t wanna type my password anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t wanna, and I don’t get to use the fingerprint sensor on my laptop because it’s always closed,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wouldn’t wanna reach, like, I’m just, I’m right there, I’m sitting right in front of you. Every time I see a box come up and it wants me to type my password,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, you’re staring right at me, computer. Like, but it doesn’t, you know, so I really,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s definitely like a pro-level feature. Like how do you, how can you justify the enormous price
⏹️ ▶️ John of this monitor will surely have throw in a $15 face ID sensor array
⏹️ ▶️ John from a phone in there and plummet through the OS and the hardware and, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John put face ID on a Mac. It’s time. Put face ID on a Mac. You cowards, as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the thing about the display and the Mac pro and a lot of these rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. I’m excited about them, not necessarily because I want to buy any of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. Certainly I would imagine they will be unaffordable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just excited for Apple to really give a again, because I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like they haven’t in a lot of ways, most, especially the Mac up until recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as we briefly alluded to earlier this episode about, you know, airport and wifi routers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they, I actually just unearthed my Apple rechargeable batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they made for Magic Mice and their keyboards. And I’m not necessarily advocating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple to make battery chargers again, but it just seemed like there was a time that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cared more about every ounce of the experience, even the parts that seemed ancillary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like batteries. They wanted every ounce of the experience to be really and truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. And I can’t say I’ve felt that way about Apple for several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years now. I think some of that may have made sense. Maybe some of it didn’t. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really here to argue about the particulars. If you’re interested in that, listen to the last 300 episodes of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show. But I, I just feel like I’m really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see Apple really and truly start to give a shit about the Mac from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start to finish in a way that I don’t think they have in a long, long time. And it really seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this is a very big aircraft carrier that takes a long time to turn, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we’re seeing it changing direction and I’m really, really excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only problem I have with all this is that this is yet more stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are as a community and the three of us as talking heads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we are putting in 2019 and 2019 is, it was probably already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destined to be a disappointment because of all the things that all of us expect and I’m including myself in that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now with all this, oh man, that’s a lot to deliver. Cause remember, we also are expecting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, wonderful things from iOS 13. We’re expecting marzipan to hopefully not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suck. We’re expecting now brand new MacBook pros. We’re expecting the Mac pro we’re expecting maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this fancy display. There’s so maybe on an iPad mini, maybe an iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch. There’s so much we’re expecting for this year. And I would be flabbergasted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see Apple be able to deliver on all of those fronts. So I think somebody is gonna end up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disappointed here. It’s just a question of who and why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody with a Mac Pro people should be disappointed because we waited the longest. Get mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco guess the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John people are the least likely. that a lot of people are going to get something.
Mac Pro rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John But we could transition to the Mac Pro rumors. And Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John commented on this, and I forget which. Maybe it was from Mac Rumor Story or whatever. Like their attempt to summarize
⏹️ ▶️ John this Ming-Chu Kuo stuff that apparently we can’t look at directly because you have to pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no one just transcribed it, saying that there are, what was the language? Like, considering,
⏹️ ▶️ John saying something about the Mac Pro WWDC. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or something like that. It maybe wasn’t, it
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t a quote, obviously, but like considering, like as we’re pointing out and as I
⏹️ ▶️ John said in the Slack channel earlier, like you’re not considering, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be WMC, like it’s either WMC or you missed the whole year. Like what, are you gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not ready, fine, but you announce it when it’s not ready. Like it has to be done by the end of the year
⏹️ ▶️ John or you missed, it’s a 2019 product. And if you’re gonna miss that, everyone’s gonna be angry and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. But if you’re not gonna miss it, then like, show it to WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the time to show it. You have to show it. I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple mulling preview of new modular Mac Pro at WWDC in June. They’re mulling it over, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s, first of all, like I don’t buy that for a second. Like when a rumor site says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is still considering something, what that really means is we think Apple’s doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we don’t know yet. It’s not Apple’s unsure, it’s we, the rumor site, are unsure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, and you know, things can get bumped from the show and could be announced around the show. They could be announced
⏹️ ▶️ John before the show. It’s very often they’ll have like the stuff they announced before the show just to get it clear the decks for the stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be in the keynote. Like, but I’m just saying like that time of year, like obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t expect it in early 2019, but I also think you shouldn’t wait until like November, like
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s not ready, even if it’s not even going to ship in 2019, you showed at WWDC, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a video, you have a thing and you’re like, and you tell us when we can put in orders and when it will ship and maybe you missed those
⏹️ ▶️ John dates or whatever. But at this point, if it’s a 2019 product,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should show it in 2019. WWDC is the time to show it. I will be
⏹️ ▶️ John super disappointed if WWDC comes and goes and there is nothing about the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that will be very bad for everybody involved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling we will see either the Mac Pro’s release or more likely a preview.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I boy I’m getting nervous about like the Mac Pro’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release schedule. The fact that we are that the rumor is a possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reveal at WBDC but not but like no one’s even rumoring that it’s going to be released then which means that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll probably get previewed then and it’ll probably be released like in December.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t mind that. I don’t mind like you know if you show me the computer and tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me what’s going to be in it and maybe how much it’s going to cost and when I can place an order like I’m I’m not, you know, we waited this
⏹️ ▶️ John long. It’s not like I’m gonna say, oh, I can’t order it at WWDC, total fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Just, you just gotta say something, you know, show the monitor, show the Mac Pro, let
⏹️ ▶️ John us all know what we’re in for, you know. I can imagine it being bumped by, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say they were revising all the laptops at that time. And they, plus they have iOS 13 and the new
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Mac OS. I can imagine it being bumped from the keynote or pre-announced or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like, it doesn’t have to be on stage in the keynote, But around that time of year, within
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple weeks span of when all the Apple announcement stuff takes place, they gotta say something. Because if they don’t, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be a million stories about it. They’re gonna have to address it in the PR. And they can’t just say, we continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that Mac Pro is a 2019 product. We have nothing to say about it at this time. It’ll be bad for them, press-wise. They could
⏹️ ▶️ John say that, but everyone will be mad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just waiting for you to realize that this is going to start at like five grand and try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reconcile your frugal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John nature with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Saving money for a long time. I haven’t bought a computer since 2008. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Quite a nest egg. I could buy this computer with like loyalty
⏹️ ▶️ John points from like Amazon alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I’m saying is, if this thing is like 5K for the computer and 3K for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each K horizontally or vertically in this monitor, then you’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very sad panda when you’re paying like, you know, eight or nine or $10,000 for this for the silly Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I have my limits. Like I said, if the 6K monitor is some astronomical price
⏹️ ▶️ John and they offer a 5K monitor, I like it with the 5K because I like that monitor fine, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little bit wary of first gen dynamic backlight 6K display
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, right? But we’ll see. They can’t, honestly, they can’t charge too much for the monitor. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John was pointing out like the original cinema display was like $3,200 or something in 2001 money
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever year that was. This new one can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive than that. Like honestly, you can get a 70 inch television with this technology in it for less than $5,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think, and it has less resolution, although they did have 8K displays
⏹️ ▶️ John at CS and everything. Anyway, I don’t expect it to be more expensive than an 8K television, let’s put it that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the Mac part, like if it’s whatever, You know, the Mac Pro, we still don’t have anything on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. There’s a couple of rumor stories going around that
⏹️ ▶️ John are just rehashing the same language we had before, but we got nothing solid on the Mac Pro. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what could possibly be in it? It’s either got expensive Intel Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of PC parts, or an ARM chip that Apple made up that’s the magical thing. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a ceiling on how much that stuff can cost. It’s not gonna have, you know, holographic
⏹️ ▶️ John magic pixie dust inside the thing. It’s just gonna be PC parts in a really expensive case.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think there’s a ceiling on that too. I think it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You say that, but let’s not forget how much Apple just loves marking things up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. Any other rumors we really care about? Apple Watch, ECG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in more countries, new ceramic casing design.
⏹️ ▶️ John What article are you looking at that lists all these things? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve seen a million articles talking about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s in the show notes and it is an image that I presume they just completely copy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pasted from the like research note or whatever it is because it is an odd image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it has all of this stuff in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked at that image five times like why is the same ad showing up on all these articles? Like an ad banner
⏹️ ▶️ John blindness refused to let my eyes look at that image because I’m like Like this is a weird banner. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they have bad inventory. Ad inventory rotation is terrible because every article about this Ming-Chi Kuo
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff has the same banner ad in it. Alright, yeah, this is a terrible graphic
⏹️ ▶️ John with low contrast, tiny text.
Marzipan rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the other thing that’s worth talking about is the Marzipan rumors, which are
⏹️ ▶️ John not which is a German Bloomberg thing and not a Ming-Chi Kuo thing, but I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worth talking about the extra nuggets of information that are about that. We talked about Marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ John many times in the past, and honestly, this Bloomberg article doesn’t have that much more information, except
⏹️ ▶️ John it tries to nail down both a timeline in terms of what Apple plans to do in year
⏹️ ▶️ John one, two, and three of its Marzipan rollout, and it tries to talk about a purpose of
⏹️ ▶️ John a goal of eventually getting to the point where you can make a single application
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can buy from a single store and run that application on your phone, on your iPad and on your Mac, which
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s presented as here’s what Apple is planning to do. But when we’re talking about Mars band, that was one of the possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ John that whatever this is an experimental thing. But eventually what you want to be able to do is have some way
⏹️ ▶️ John just like you can make an application today that runs on the iPhone and the iPad the same application
⏹️ ▶️ John to have an application that runs on all three of the platforms and they would do that by basically making UI kit
⏹️ ▶️ John run everywhere and having conditional code that understands when it’s on a Mac and when it’s on an iPad and when it’s on a phone to
⏹️ ▶️ John lay out differently and handle touch differently and handle mouse input and all that other stuff but this explicitly says
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I’m going to do and it says it would be like first the iPad apps will be able to run on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and then they’ll do phone apps later because they’re the most different from the Mac things and it’s it’s all very vague
⏹️ ▶️ John and and hand wavy and schedules like that. I can’t, I can’t imagine even Apple committing to, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does put its stake in the ground of saying what Apple’s trying to do here is to get
⏹️ ▶️ John one store where you can buy one application that will run on all the platforms. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, it’s, that’s an interesting idea. Uh, it’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John technically possible, but I think as we’ve seen with the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because the thing is possible. Like, you can write an iOS app now that is an awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad app that takes advantage of the iPad and all of its unique features and the screen size and everything and is also
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good iPhone app. But in practice, that doesn’t happen too often. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John big, huge companies can’t even be bothered to make an iPad app at all, let alone a single app
⏹️ ▶️ John that scales for both of them. And the number of companies that make a really good phone app,
⏹️ ▶️ John a really good iPad app, and a really good Mac app are few and very far between.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not because they can’t do a single shared code base because there’s so many differences
⏹️ ▶️ John in the platforms, the input methods, the way things behave,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t magically get it for free. You have to do additional work
⏹️ ▶️ John to get things to work. It’s not to say that Apple isn’t doing this and shouldn’t do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that once it is technically possible to do this, all the problems will be solved and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac will have as many apps as the phone will have as many apps as the iPad is not going to happen because the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad can’t even get as many apps as the phone and they are very similar to each other in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John input methods and frameworks and all the other stuff. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John you know if this is Apple’s goal I think it is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John an admirable goal and a good goal, but they will have a lot of work still
⏹️ ▶️ John to do even once they make this technically possible. Because the technical barriers
⏹️ ▶️ John are not the only and probably not even the biggest reason that the Mac doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John as many high-quality applications as it should. So
⏹️ ▶️ John many companies just ignore it entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. So this marzipan thing where, you know, we’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many ways bringing UI kit to the Mac, a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older Mac folks, John, seem to be really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumpy about the thought of the design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ideals of iOS coming to the Mac. And as a person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who really loves the Mac, I get that. I really honestly do because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the way the Mac works. I like the way Mac apps work, particularly Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps that are done well. And I don’t think that iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, that paradigm fits terribly well on the Mac. And certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the example apps that we’ve seen, we’ve talked about this many, many times are not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the home app in Mojave, Stocks, News, et cetera. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being said, I think I’m overall kind of excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what happens from this, because the Mac certainly seems to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also-ran platform amongst Apple’s platforms, because all the attention seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be on iOS. And I would really, really like to see what comes of unleashing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of really quality iOS developers on the Mac. You know, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco has said in the past that he has no interest in overcast for the Mac. And I bet you Marco that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would at your first glance or first thought might be to kind of phone it in if you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make one with this, you know, mythical marzipan, but I could see you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all people just kind of phoning in one to begin with and then realizing, well, if I just tweak this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit, it feels a lot better on the Mac. Well, if I just tweak this other thing a little bit, it feels a lot better on the Mac too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And next thing you know, you have this like really incredible overcast for Mac, which you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stumbled into by accident, accidental. Um, and so I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I, I’m excited to see how this goes. The only thing that kind of disappoints me about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this article, this Bloomberg article is that it, it says, or it either implies or says that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arm Macs are going to be like, maybe next year, maybe in probably 2021 or 2022.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m also really excited for our Macs, and so I’m hopeful that that timetable is wrong. But we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what happens. But I don’t know. A lot of the longtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac users seem to be really, really grumpy about Marzipan, and I am not. I am cautiously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very, very optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing I’m looking forward to the most about Marzipan is shovelware. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds so terrible, but like, I’m not looking forward to it in the idea of like, there’s going to be these great
⏹️ ▶️ John triple platform apps and I don’t care about the unification of the store. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John do continue to be frustrated by so much of the modern computing world that
⏹️ ▶️ John just bypasses the Mac entirely. I realize that I don’t think about it that often
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m not stuck on a Mac. I have an iPad. I have a phone. So it doesn’t feel like I’m personally missing out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Mac platform is missing out. I was thinking today about the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of Netflix, which we all have and we all watch and you know it’s on our televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John on our iPads you can watch it on your phone if you want to. And Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of years ago I forget what it is their first show was like they rolled out 4K and their
⏹️ ▶️ John flagship shows or Amazon Prime you know brags about its 4K content with like the expanse
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything right. So 4K is a thing on video streaming services and Netflix is the biggest video
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming service or I don’t know if it’s the biggest I think it is but it’s the biggest in terms of mind share. you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t watch 4K Netflix on a Mac. And it’s not because Macs don’t have 4K displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs have huge, beautiful displays. Even a 5K iMac, 4K video would look great on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now people probably don’t watch Netflix much on their Macs. They probably watch it on their television or on a portal device. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John get that, but the fact that it’s not technically possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s two aspects to that. One is the web and its open standards
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s associated DRM and HTCP and all those other stupid things. Like that’s the reason why you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go to netflix.com and watch 4K content. Again, it’s not a technical barrier, it’s a techno-bureaucratic
⏹️ ▶️ John BS reason, but it’s the truth. Like you can’t see it there for stupid reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you can see 4K video on your television, on your 4K television, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you couldn’t, it would be pretty dumb. And on iPads, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t, I’m not sure what they’re streaming this. It’s not like they stream 4k
⏹️ ▶️ John or 1080 or like the, there was this dynamic streaming and various different compression techniques
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but I think you can get better than 1080 on an iPad, uh, from Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if marzipan existed and if you can get better than 1080 video
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming in the Netflix app for iOS or in the Netflix app for
⏹️ ▶️ John your crappy smart TV, and it was easy to port the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix app to the Mac as a shovel where that could be finally a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to give the Mac a capability that it never had before and ability to watch 4K Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John using your shovel where Mars upon Netflix app on your Mac. And because mostly what you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is just blowing it up to full screen and just letting video play. I don’t really care how ugly the UI is. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want that capability. I want the Mac not to be 100% Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John another example, bought a great Mac Twitter client and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John let it die on the vine and just said, No, we’re not going to make that anymore. Go to the website. Like they can’t even be bothered
⏹️ ▶️ John to provide an official after killing third party clients as hard as they possibly could without actually killing them 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ John They couldn’t even be bothered to just just use the web, right? I feel like the Mac is being left
⏹️ ▶️ John out of so many things. So if Marzipan lets those companies
⏹️ ▶️ John provide shovelware, minimal effort, oh, we found a way we can make a little bit of extra money
⏹️ ▶️ John with very little effort by just taking our iOS app and throwing it over the wall and letting it be a terrible Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app, I’m all for that if it gives me apps that I was never gonna get in any
⏹️ ▶️ John form anyway, like Overcast, like you’re not gonna get Mac version of Overcast ever unless something like Marzipan
⏹️ ▶️ John exists. That to me is the biggest short-term benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John as a Mac user of marzipan, that I just want access to apps that no one would bother making before.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not great for the Mac as like, let’s show me the power and glory of the Mac. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John shovelware does not do that. But in the short term, that’s what I want. I want that shovelware. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John Overcast for the Mac shovelware, and I want Netflix app shovelware, and I want Twitter client
⏹️ ▶️ John shovelware. Well, maybe not, because I use Twitter, I reckon it’s way better than that. But like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to sort of get on an even playing field. And then we can see, okay, How do we actually, is this actually a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to make good Mac apps with this? What’s the three year plan for this framework evolving and making
⏹️ ▶️ John unified apps across platforms? And is that a thing that people do? One of my hopes is that perhaps because
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac users are willing to spend more money on apps, again, probably because they’re bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a physical size and people, I still subscribe to this theory, people will pay more money for things that display
⏹️ ▶️ John on a larger screen. Television accepted. If it turns out you can
⏹️ ▶️ John charge more money for a Mac version of an app, maybe that incentivizes people
⏹️ ▶️ John to, it doesn’t incentivize them to make a universal app because people like $10 for this app that runs
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone, my iPad and my Mac and it’s great and all those platforms, that’s a rip off, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sell it the Mac only version for $29. It provides utility for a Mac user
⏹️ ▶️ John who needs it to do their work, right? So this is weird, historical, and I think current
⏹️ ▶️ John day dichotomy in markets. And I’m hoping that if it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if Mac enables shovelware and also lets people realize, you know what, if we just make a straight up Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John version of our, of our application, we can charge astronomical by iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John standards money for it. If it actually is an application that has utility for professionals to do their job.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s still true. It’s not as true as it used to be. You can’t charge $499 for
⏹️ ▶️ John Final Cut or whatever the hell it cost originally. But you can charge more than five bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and people don’t have an aneurysm. So there’s that. So I hope,
⏹️ ▶️ John God, what did I say? Someone on Twitter who’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a modern, regular, rational person was discussing applications and they’re like, I found this
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you know, and I was surprised. It’s expensive at $9, but it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John was talking about like a professional graphics app or something, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive at $9? Like what planet are we on? Like you, people just get so,
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about the Overton window. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a professional app, like the sales tax should be $9. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t a simple application. It was a complicated, big, powerful application. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of expensive at $9, but try to get over that because it’s a really good app. Like try to get over that? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sandwich at like a fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John place in the city. I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t Pixelmator. It was, but it was like something on that level where $9 seems like the steel of
⏹️ ▶️ John the century when you see what this application can do. But yeah, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what the ceiling is on Mac stuff these days, but I feel like it still is higher than iOS. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping the medium term is that we see some people
⏹️ ▶️ John looking again at the Mac and thinking of targeting it because they can actually charge more money
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And I think that works against Apple’s supposed plan, according to this rumor of unifying things. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you make a unified app and you do a great job at it, you will not be rewarded by the market. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if it is perceived to be a phone or iPad app, nobody will pay $29 for it because they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, Oh my God, I’m like, wait, you’re getting three apps in one. It’s like, I don’t want three apps. I just one an iPad app and iPad apps cost $1.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what the hell’s the deal here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ve talked about this before. So again, I don’t I won’t go into too much detail here. But like, there’s the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Mac purity, where like we we as Mac users and Mac enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want all Mac software to be Mac like, and that means certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it means certain behaviors and it means being implemented with certain API’s like you know, the native app get API’s and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the market is very different. And the reality of the market is very different today. You know, there is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little new Mac software being developed that is that definition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Mac-like, that is using the native APIs, using AppKit and everything. There’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little Mac software being developed anymore like that, and even less new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac software being developed like that. And so I think the era of that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the norm on the Mac is far over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while we still have apps like that, and I hope we continue to have apps like that because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really good, we can’t expect all apps to do that and we can’t expect all developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come to the Mac at all to come to the Mac on those terms because that has been the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling proposition for a long time now and we see that the market has said no. That’s why you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have companies like Netflix and Twitter not having Mac apps or ending their Mac apps because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just not worth it. That’s why you have people like me who make iOS apps not coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Mac, because the amount of additional effort and recoding that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be required, or having a separate code base that would be required, is not worth the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would get us. So you need something to resolve this. Even Apple can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco justify spending completely separate, from scratch, different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort on the Mac anymore. Like, Apple tries to unify their own efforts between the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iOS as much as possible. Everyone else does too. The reality is that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get people these days to write software for a very small number of platforms, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one, Android number two, and the web number three. That’s it. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want the Mac to continue to have good apps that aren’t all just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco electron garbage, you need the Mac to be able to run iOS code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. and you need the process of bringing an iOS app to the Mac to take way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less effort than it does today. So, Marzipan is 100% necessary even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the apps aren’t as good, even if it will result in mostly shovelware, which it will,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even if it makes all of us Mac enthusiasts cry when we try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use these awful apps to do anything beyond the most trivial of tasks, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will. We still need it. The market still needs it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac still needs it because of the realities of the market and the realities of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is worth developing for for most companies these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has other ways to do this though. Like there are other levers that Apple could in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory pull. Like maybe they’ve given up on them, but like back before iOS, obviously Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John making tons of apps for the Mac because it didn’t have any better option, right? So iLife and all those
⏹️ ▶️ John other great things, right? We can’t go back to those days, but one thing Apple can do
⏹️ ▶️ John is sell tremendously more Macs than they do now. Obviously, they’re never gonna sell as many as they sell phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe the only way they can sell more Macs is to cannibalize PCs, Windows PCs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a way to make the Mac as a platform more attractive. Sell way more Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So far, Apple has not seemed very interested in selling way more Macs. They’ve been happy to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John a gradually increasing number of Macs. They’re not doing anything. If you had to list, what are the things
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has to do to take market share away from Windows. They’re not doing most of those things, or certainly not
⏹️ ▶️ John doing them particularly aggressively. So given Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John apparent willingness to let the Mac’s market share be more or less what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John their only options are things like Marzipan. Because what can you do to make your platform more
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive? You can either resign yourself to only having it be the platform where things
⏹️ ▶️ John that only take place on the Mac happen, and even that’s temporary because you assume that someday Xcode will
⏹️ ▶️ John be available on your big iPad and so on and so forth. And but in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ John people can buy Photoshop and Lightroom and run Xcode and buy big expensive Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but do everything else on their iPads and phones because including watching Netflix because you can’t do that decently on a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you have to find some way to make the Mac a platform where it is worth it to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. Take the custom effort to do applications made for the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that are Mac like that and that take a significant investment that you can charge a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ John for and actually sell a lot of copies. You know, maybe that’s a loser deal because you could say, what if
⏹️ ▶️ John we Apple had 100% PC market share still not worth it. So what it’s such still
⏹️ ▶️ John such a drop in the bucket compared to phones and really Apple should be concentrating on AR or whatever. Like I see the arguments, it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense. But that is another thing they can do. And they just they’re that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t doesn’t seem to be part of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy. Well, I don’t even think that would be enough though, because you don’t see a lot of these companies making apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Windows either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, that’s what I’m saying. Like, it’s bifurcated, like you have Windows, Windows has like 80% or something, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac maybe has 20 worldwide, and so they can’t even bother for the 80%, but I feel like, like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has the best 20%, and that’s not enough. Maybe if they had 100%, like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that still wouldn’t be enough, but maybe it would be closer. Maybe you’d get more than just, is there room in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac market for more than just Photoshop, Final Cut, and like three other
⏹️ ▶️ John applications? Like, is that it? Is that the only room in the entire and Microsoft Office, I suppose?
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe the, you know, days are numbered for that. Maybe there’s room for four more applications
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had tremendously more market share. I don’t know. Like, there’s, it can be better than it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. You definitely need to enable shovelware and unifying the platform will go a long way.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve, you know, this whole problem, this whole situation we’re in could have been solved long ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John by one of the two approaches that we thought Apple was going to take, they seem not to, which was basically making the iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John more capable or making the Mac more iOS-like, and they’ve chosen to do neither very well.
⏹️ ▶️ John in the current situation. We should have already had an iPad where you can run Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John and do everything you can do on a Mac, but we don’t. So until we have that, we’re stuck with the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Mac is still, the Mac, it’s still big, expensive, complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a substitute for an iPad or a phone. most people do not choose it. Most people choose
⏹️ ▶️ John to get an iPhone and maybe an iPad, but probably not a Mac. So here we are, so many
⏹️ ▶️ John years after we thought these two, that one of those two things would have happened and neither has happened. So
⏹️ ▶️ John instead we’re trying to bridge the divide with Marzipan, which doesn’t make iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices more capable and doesn’t really make Macs as friendly as iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, but at least lets the software travel more nicely between the two realms.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think they’re faced with the fundamental problem of, well, what’s the deal here? Does this mean you’re never gonna make iOS devices more
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful or as powerful as the Mac? And just forever we’re gonna be in a situation where there’s this weird platform where
⏹️ ▶️ John a few really cool things happen plus a bunch of shovelware? Like, that doesn’t seem particularly tenable either. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a larger grand plan than just, hey, now we have a way for you to develop for
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our platforms with a single application because that’s technically cool and is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John required, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental platform divide that Apple continues to be faced with
⏹️ ▶️ John of their own doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was intense. Shall we do some Ask ATP?
#askatp: Cheap Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start out with Ed Cormanni. He says, with AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming to so many TVs, do you think there’s a chance that the next Apple TV hardware could go wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only, so it’s similar in shape to like an AirPort Express or an Eero Beacon, and sell the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lack of cord clutter as its premium feature? So I’m not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure what Ed means here. So I’m assuming there’s still HDMI from this thing to the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think he’s saying no, not that. The Apple TV would put its
⏹️ ▶️ John picture on your television without having a wire that attaches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone. Oh, hence the AirPlay 2, right, right, right. Sorry. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, that makes much more sense. Okay. No, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’ll happen, personally. It’s too much latency. Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey networks are too iffy, no small part, because there’s no Apple Wi-Fi hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. I say no. What do you say, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Latency is not a problem. The problem is that the reliability, but basically
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no reliable good standard for this. And HDMI continues to evolve. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John big selling point on the 2019 televisions is who can get HDMI 2.1 support, which supports
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K at higher frame rates and larger bit depths and all the other stuff. Like HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to get bigger, better, and faster. So there’s, and there’s no wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John standard out there that is keeping pace with that. So there’s no way that Apple would confine themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if there existed a reliable standardized way to wirelessly send pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point in the evolution of television, they would not confine themselves to that because they want to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John support all the new standards. So, you know, I don’t think the current Apple TV supports HDMI 2.1, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if it even can, but if Apple wants to stay in this business, they will have to because higher
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rates, higher resolutions and higher bit depths continue to come to televisions and
⏹️ ▶️ John our benefits that customers can see for the most part, especially better color depth and better HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’re stuck with cables, probably HDMI cables for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John to come. And by the way, kind of like USB-C with the million different cables that look the same but are actually different, HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like that, probably even worse because you can buy a cable, but there’s no such thing as
⏹️ ▶️ John an HDMI 2.1 cable, right? You can say, oh, I saw on Amazon, I can buy this cable. It says HDMI 2.1.
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.1 has a bunch of features, not all of which have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be supported. The official support naming scheme for HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John cables is kind of like USB. Remember they have like super speed, high speed, mega speed. Like they had all these
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid names where they used up their superlatives so they had to make even dumber superlatives.
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI is doing the exact same thing with 2.1. So you cannot get a 2.1 cable, you can get like
⏹️ ▶️ John a high bandwidth, maximum speed something cable. And each one is like, oh, this one has,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are the things like auto latency mode and variable frame rate and high bit
⏹️ ▶️ John depth, but doesn’t do a high frame rate with 4K. Like it’s a big menu of things you
⏹️ ▶️ John can choose from. Depending on which cable with which adjective, it’s exactly the same mess as USB.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why these companies don’t learn their lesson. It’s mostly because they make these a la carte standards where
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t ask every manufacturer to support everything. Very often because it’s not possible. Like HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good example, where HDR had a standard, but to this day, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no television that achieves the maximum brightness as specified in the HDR specification,
⏹️ ▶️ John period, let alone across the entire screen. But they can’t say, well, you can’t call your television,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t say your television has Dolby Vision support unless you can output like 20,000 nits or something. They can’t say that
⏹️ ▶️ John because no one can do that. So they have to let the people say, this television supports Dolby Vision. So you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to support some subset of the features, but still be able to call yourself Dolby Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John or HDR 10 plus or HDMI 2.1. So tons of televisions will be coming out that say
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.1 support, but it’s this giant technical morass once you figure out what does that
⏹️ ▶️ John actually mean? What features of the specifications does it support? And God forbid, what cable do I actually need
⏹️ ▶️ John to get those features? Oh, wireless, forget it. We can’t even get the wired stuff right yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, like we will reach reasonable limits of human perception until we go into to like
⏹️ ▶️ John retinal implants or glasses or other things that are closer to your face, but that’s no time soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also add that the idea of like the Apple TV getting cheaper by omitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDMI, I don’t think that’s what’s making it expensive. You know, the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV is expensive for a number of reasons. Number one is Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they probably still want a very healthy hardware margin on this product, whereas their competitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mostly selling them probably at or near cost to achieve, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later on down the road margins using service revenue. It’s a good question whether Apple should do the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Like, should the Apple TV hardware be a major profit center for Apple? I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say probably not, especially since they are pushing a services narrative now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is incredibly uncompetitively priced against its competitors, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be me. But you know, the other thing is Apple has made the Apple TV a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end device hardware-wise. Like, it has a pretty good processor in it, it has really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good support for the HDMI and 4K and everything else. You know, it has wired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet and everything else. It’s a pretty good box. If they wanted to make a cheaper one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think step one is cut their own margin, and I don’t know if they’re gonna be ever willing to do that or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Step two would be to make a lower-end box. And they don’t do that by cutting out the HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port, They do that by scaling back the processor and maybe removing ethernet and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the kind of thing I would expect to do that. And the current Apple TV box is spec’d for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very advanced operating system running on it, a very highly interactive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI, and to have enough hardware to play games and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those are things that maybe it doesn’t need. Maybe Apple could scale back the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that runs TPOS. it turns out most people aren’t using it to like, browse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real estate listings and shop and other things that they originally demoed when they revealed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this generation of Apple TVs. Maybe they could scale it back and have one that really just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs the TV app and has very simplified hardware as a result and could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore sold at a very low price. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here, but I don’t think the HDMI port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what’s making it expensive.
#askatp: Wireless CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Eddie Lee writes that my lease is up in a few months and the only requirement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve given for my next car is wireless car play. There are very few cars with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I’ve never used it. Should it really be a deal breaker for me? We have two cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, both with car play, neither with wireless. To my knowledge, and this is outdated, so I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, but to my knowledge, the only stuff that does wireless car play is BMWs and certain aftermarket head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey units. Now that’s possibly incorrect, so check my work on that. But that was the last I heard. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so if you really, really, really want a BMW, then guess what? Jackpot. But otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re in for a rough ride. I personally use CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only very rarely. I use it when I’m driving Erin’s car because I don’t have my phone hooked up to her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car’s Bluetooth. And if I’m in my car, I only use it if I’m doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like navigating with Waze. You know, I’ll use the onboard navigation in my car for most things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m going somewhere that I know is traffic or from going on a very long journey, then I will use CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. Or if I’m in the middle of a text message conversation that I really don’t want to stop because it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easier to do that via Siri, via CarPlay, but otherwise I don’t use CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that often. That being said, I didn’t want to buy a car without CarPlay as a form of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future proofing and insurance. Uh, so as CarPlay hopefully gets better and I don’t think it’s bad today, but as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it hopefully gets better, then even if I do have to plug in like an animal, then At least I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still have that option. Now, John, neither of your cars support CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or just Tina’s. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John None of them do. So I have no experience with it. I’m not even sure if I would use it. I would say though, you should get your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone hooked up to the Bluetooth in your wife’s car. We have all our phones on all the Bluetooth on all our cars and it’s fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s convenient. Like if you’re, if both phones are in the car, you can pick which one, but if you’re the only one driving
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s nice, it’ll just pick up your phone and go. You don’t have to get plugged in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I sometimes get collisions, like if both of us are in the car and a phone call comes in for me and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going through the car audio, which isn’t a problem. It’s not that I’m taking a private call or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I don’t know, I’ve never had a good experience with that in any of the cars we’ve had.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of phone and Bluetooth though, this is a good opportunity to say that ever since iOS 12 came out,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my car or my phone or some interaction between them is causing the Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John stack to crash on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. So like, I can see this when I, if I open my phone, because I was getting tired of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, why are you not connecting? Sometimes it just wouldn’t connect at all, or sometimes it would take a long time. So I’m like, what’s going on? Went to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Bluetooth screen on my phone. And you see it sitting there, right? And what I’ll see is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the car is doing something, the phone is hanging out there, and we’re like, okay, connect, connect, connect. And what will happen is,
⏹️ ▶️ John while I’m staring at that screen, the big switch at the top that says Bluetooth switch to the white, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll go from green to white, right? It’ll go off. All of the devices will disappear and roll up in an animation,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like the screen will entirely blank out and then it’ll all come back and then it will connect. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like Bluetooth is crashing on my phone or the entire Bluetooth interface is crashing and rebooting on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. I don’t know how my car is doing that. It causes delays. It could just be a weird car thing. I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea who to blame, but this didn’t happen with iOS 11. It does happen with iOS 12 and it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So coming back around to the actual question, which I’m not sure I even really answered to be honest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you need wireless CarPlay? I would say it’s certainly better, but no, I don’t think you need it. CarPlay in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. Wireless, no. John, thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Having not used either one, I can’t, it’s hard to say. Like I like the comfort of having a wire, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea of not having to plug something in. I feel like I’d have to own both a wired and wireless CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the call, but I haven’t owned neither, so I can’t have a good opinion about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, how’s that car play in your Tesla?
#askatp: The Grand Tour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And keeping with the car theme Paul Walker asks, how are you enjoying season 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Grand Tour? Did you like the Detroit episode? I have either of you kept up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Grand Tour at all I’m a little behind but I’m assuming Marco you have not correct and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. All right Do you do either of you plan to?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not opposed to pulling up an episode if you tell me there’s one segment of one good one But I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m more likely to see segments of it like as the clips in YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John something than I am ever to go back and watch the whole episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever I think of watching TV, I don’t think of pulling that up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s always like, it’s always like the back of my mind like, oh, I would like to at some point check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that show again because people like you say that it’s good now. And it just hasn’t come up yet. It hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened yet. So someday maybe it will, but I’m not there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So about the grand tour. It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. No, I don’t know if it’s me. Like, it’s not you guys. It’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what the problem is. But this season, I have watched,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think all but the most recent episode or maybe all but the most recent two. And it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing it for me. And the interesting thing is, in my personal opinion, the last couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of seasons of Top Gear, like Top Gear as it exists today, With
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joey from friends with Matt LeBlanc and Chris Harris and Rory Reed and Sabine Schmitz. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that I enjoy top gear by and large, and there are some cringy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moments within it. The grand tour it occurred to me over the season
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mostly cringy, but there are some good moments within it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I keep watching it, I guess, out of habit. I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. And there are definitely moments that are good in the beginning, the beginning of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cam, uh, the Columbia special was the season, the beginning of it, the first like 10 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes of it was really, really good. And then it went right the crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downhill real fast. And so I don’t know how am I enjoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? No, not really. I’m not actively disliking it. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know everyone is running to Twitter. Just tell me about how much of a jerk Jeremy Clarkson is. I am aware of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I listen to the most recent episode of analog. I think you can separate the art from the person Maybe you can’t and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine different strokes for different folks but I will say that I Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the grand tour is really doing it that much for me And I think some of that is me seeing Clarkson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as being a real and true jerk Which I always sort of did but I’m seeing more and more of it now than I ever have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I think some of it is realizing how unbelievably scripted and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey staged it is which yes I know it’s always been that way. Like my, my, my brain really does understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all of the show has always in forever been scripted, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think in the past I was able to kind of turn that off and just let it wash over me and enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the theoretical spontaneity of it. And now as I watch them, like blowing up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a helicopter in like ultra slow motion with six different camera angles, And you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that’s deliberate. And yet they’re playing it off poorly. Like, oh, geez,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how did that happen? It’s just, I don’t know. I feel like maybe it’s because of my own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car videos, even though I’m not saying they’re anywhere near grand tour quality, but something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it has clicked in my brain where I’ve seen how the sausage is made and I’m not interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the sausage anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Matt Stauffer Our little Casey’s growing up now. He knows Top Gear is fake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve always known I
⏹️ ▶️ John I know but I feel like but now you know oh god do I ever know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so and Clarkson is just so not a good person
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I think I would and if I was gonna watch a car show I think it’d be more likely to because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still recording the new top gear I’d be more likely to pull that up but honestly even that I like watching the Chris
⏹️ ▶️ John Harris top gear segments on YouTube some of them are long something like eight or nine minutes of him just driving a car and talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I like Chris Harris. I like Chris Harris on cars when he was just on YouTube. I like him on Top Gear.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like Joey. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think he’s pretty good on Top
⏹️ ▶️ John Gear. I don’t want to hear what he has to say about cars. I’ve decided. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Chris Harris, I do like, so I watch him on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Fracture and BoxiSuite and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to accidental Accidental Tech Podcasts So
John’s Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John I Moved my Apple ID stuff to the after show because I didn’t want to just continue to complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about That stuff that doesn’t work with Apple, but honestly like so this is this is a whole giant cluster
⏹️ ▶️ John of things It’s tied up in the thing that we could have talked about but it’s probably too much inside baseball if Apple requiring
⏹️ ▶️ John developer account develop Apple IDs to have two-factor on Which is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a hassle for unrelated reasons. But anyway, this is why I was delving into Apple ID stuff It’s like, okay well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to enable two factor on my Apple ID and I figured out how I’m going to do it and how I can reuse my phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John add the Apple ID, but deactivate the stuff on it and make a new account on my Mac and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s annoying, but it can be done, right? And delving into Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID management has reminded me that my base assumption, which continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to be reinforced, is that nothing associated with this will work. Right. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John ostensibly a bunch of features that you know things that you can do to your Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John For example, in theory, Apple IDs have payment methods and you can change
⏹️ ▶️ John the payment method. There’s screens for it all over the place. You can do it in iTunes. You can do it in a web browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could do it on your iPad. You could do it on your phone. You could do it on your Mac and the system preferences. All sorts of different
⏹️ ▶️ John ways days to see your payment method and change it. Maybe your credit card
⏹️ ▶️ John needs a new expiration date. Maybe you want to swap one credit card for another. But in practice, my
⏹️ ▶️ John base assumption is well that won’t actually work like yeah, there are screens from that but you won’t actually be able to do it and that’s proven
⏹️ ▶️ John proven true again and again, I will go in there and try to change my credit card and it’ll be like obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John error, different error if you do it on the web, different error if you do it on your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just doesn’t work, right? Uh, you know, can I remove a payment method?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, your only choices are credit card or PayPal. There is no option to remove a
⏹️ ▶️ John payment method. What if that card has been stolen and canceled and you want to just get it off of an account
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? Like, in theory, you should be able to remove it, but there doesn’t seem to be an option. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. So I spent 90 minutes on the phone with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get this stuff resolved, working my way through the layers of technical support from first level, second level,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, trying to get up to the point where someone can actually, like, I want, I wish I could just jump to the end and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you put me in touch with someone who has access to the server logs? Like, I need to just go
⏹️ ▶️ John to that level, right? Because I know where all the UIs are. I know what all the things but thing is in second,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a mistake because in second and third tier, they have new information at those tiers as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, and a lot of that information is part of why I just assume nothing will work because there are rules
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the contact syncing. There are rules for this system. They’re not presented to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John the user. Maybe they’re on some support article somewhere. They’re certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John not in the UI, and they’re certainly not propagated back from the server to the client in a way that you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just give you these generic error messages. So one of the rules I discovered, or I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if I discovered the rule, but I discovered the shape of a possible rule is, what they told me on like tier
⏹️ ▶️ John two or three support was, Oh, I see when you try to change your payment method, it’s telling
⏹️ ▶️ John me that you can’t add that credit card to this Apple ID because it’s already used
⏹️ ▶️ John on too many Apple IDs. Did
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know that was a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? I know. And so I’m like, Hmm, used on too many because that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the error doesn’t tell you that the error says like invalid payment method or an error occurred, please contact Apple or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like one of the things gives you a link, it gives you a URL in the dialog in
⏹️ ▶️ John a web browser, but the URL is not a link. So you can copy and paste
⏹️ ▶️ John that URL, and if you copy and paste it, it just lands you on a generic, like, here’s how to get help, pick your
⏹️ ▶️ John product page. Like, it’s a terrible link. At least it goes to a page, it’s not a 404, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t help you at all. But anyway, it doesn’t say anything about that. I’m like, okay, here’s some actionable information.
⏹️ ▶️ John My next question was, how many Apple IDs is this payment method used on? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they told me? We don’t know. No, they did not say they didn’t know. What
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be two… so they gave you a number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna say… what would be too many? I’m gonna say two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’ll be three
⏹️ ▶️ John or four. They told me that this credit card number couldn’t be added to this account
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is already used on eight Apple IDs. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this like your whole family? And I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John eight Apple IDs? Like, do I know eight Apple IDs? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, so first I said, kid Apple IDs don’t count, right? Because they can’t have payment.
⏹️ ▶️ John They say, yeah, kid Apple IDs don’t count. I don’t know whether to trust them, but they told me kid Apple IDs don’t count. I’ve only got
⏹️ ▶️ John the two kids. So if I count my Apple IDs, my wife’s got an Apple ID, both my kids have one,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we count one for me. So that’s four Apple IDs. But of course, I don’t just have one Apple ID. I have my developer Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s five. The developer Apple ID is the one that used to not be in email, like that’s my oldest Apple ID, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I also have Apple IDs that I’ve used when making OS X reviews back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I know I have more than just that. But of the five, you know, so I know I have at least
⏹️ ▶️ John one other testing Apple ID, so that’s six. But I know that credit card isn’t used on all six of those
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs. The kids ones don’t have any payment methods, and a bunch of the other ones have a different credit card.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t name eight Apple IDs that are that are in my family. Even if I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe I added it to my mom’s Apple ID at one point, that still doesn’t add up to eight. I said, can you tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me the eight Apple IDs? He said, no, we don’t have the list in front of us. It just says, using too many Apple IDs, eight. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s just set that aside. I’m like, okay, well, at least I know something new now. Now I can
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe solve this problem. My problem, by the way, was I wanted to enable two-factor and I also wanted to make sure that my
⏹️ ▶️ John developer Apple ID is all set to go for WWDC. I know this isn’t pressing in February or whatever, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John when the WWDC lottery comes, if you win, they try to charge your card and if they can’t charge your card, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they might give your ticket to someone else. And so I wanted to make sure that I had a payment method working with my Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had done this, like I made sure everything was okay, you know, before the two
⏹️ ▶️ John factor stuff came along. But then I credit cards all got stolen. So I had to change them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was a big mess. Anyway, so I’m here I am doing it again. So like, all right, I can solve this problem. What I’m going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is find an Apple ID that has the credit card on it, remove the payment method from that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, thus freeing up whatever this one less than whatever this limit is and then add it
⏹️ ▶️ John to the new thing. But again, you have to go back to your base principles. Assume nothing will work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you remove a payment method from an Apple ID? No, of course you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I go to an Apple ID, I find one, I found one of my testing Apple IDs, I went through one of my old OS X articles,
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at the screenshots and found out what the old Apple ID was and then
⏹️ ▶️ John able to log into it. And I went to the payment method thing, I’m on the phone with the person,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, how do I remove a payment method because I had seen that my other one didn’t give me an option. She’s like, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should have an option for none. I’m like, I don’t. I just have my two choices are credit card and PayPal. And again, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do this in three different interfaces. So you can do it in iTunes. You can do it on the web. You can do it in system preferences.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, and she was like, well, you know, let’s, why won’t it, why? Because I had a different app ID where I did have
⏹️ ▶️ John the none option. Why don’t I have the none option in this one? So she was like, oh, well, if you have any subscriptions,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t pick none. Like if you, if you’re pay for iCloud storage or something. So we figured out where my
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription I go there. I’m like, Nope, no subscriptions. Like, as you would expect, like, this is a testing Apple ID that I use for
⏹️ ▶️ John review. I never subscribed to anything. I’m not getting a monthly bill. There are no subscriptions. Why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, why can’t I, what is the unwritten rule that’s preventing none from appearing in the payment
⏹️ ▶️ John method pop-up menu so I can free up this Apple ID, right? I could have changed it to PayPal,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I wanted to, you know, actually just remove it. I don’t want any payment method being on this. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I just bogus apple ID that I had. So then, then
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I offered this, it wasn’t even offered to me, but I said, wait a second, this apple ID is also the
⏹️ ▶️ John organizer of a family. You know, you can have the apple family thing, right? And again, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s part of a family is because I needed to make screenshots for an OS 10 review. Right. And I understand this is an edge case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, Oh yeah, that’s it. If you’re the organizer for a family, you can’t ever get rid of a payment method, even though you’re not being charged for anything
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like great. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will just dissolve this family. And then I won’t be the organizer for a family anymore, and then I can
⏹️ ▶️ John remove my payment method. And so I go to do that, and it’s like, how do I get rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John family? Like, well, you can’t get rid of the family. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John like… You’re stuck with the family you have, John. You have to take the family members
⏹️ ▶️ John out of, like, the organizer can’t, like, dissolve it. But if you are a member of the family, you have to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can remove yourself, right? So I go to the Apple ID that I have as a member of the family
⏹️ ▶️ John is another fictional Apple ID, and it’s one of the ones that I counted, but it still didn’t add update. I log in as that
⏹️ ▶️ John one, which was difficult because it was so old that it said like, your password’s too insecure, and you have to set up security questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to log into it, I had to remember the password, and then it asked me the existing security questions. It was a whole big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually got into it, but this Apple ID is a minor. This fictional Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID is a fictional minor, because again, to make a family thing for screenshots to show the sort of permission
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or whatever. And minors cannot remove themselves from families. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you can do with a minor is the minor can request to be transferred to another family
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can request that they
⏹️ ▶️ John transfer to another family. But I didn’t want to transfer this fictional child to my actual
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID family. So what are my other options? I said, well, you can just delete that Apple ID. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, great, let’s delete the fictional child Apple ID. But again, assume that nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John will work. So you can’t actually do the Apple ID as a minor, but you can request it to be deleted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the organizer will get your request and can approve it. So I requested, I went to the organizer, I saw the
⏹️ ▶️ John request, it came in the form of email and says, if you want to approve this removal, click this link, I click this link, I get an error page.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nice. Because even though in theory, you can delete an Apple ID, in practice, you can’t actually delete an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID because that feature just doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? Beats the hell out of me.
⏹️ ▶️ John At that point, their literal answer was, maybe something’s down. How about we call
⏹️ ▶️ John you back in an hour and it might work? Wow. Needless to say, needless to say an hour
⏹️ ▶️ John later it still didn’t work. I still have another callback scheduled with them or whatever, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it frustrates me that there are many features of the Apple ID system that allow you to view,
⏹️ ▶️ John edit, delete, like all sorts of things that you can do. And yet so many of them, I just
⏹️ ▶️ John assume they won’t work and they don’t. And they don’t work for inexplicable reasons. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you think you have an explanation, just one more thing waiting for you. Like deleting Apple IDs, as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell, it’s not a thing that actually happens. Like you can’t, there are features that say they’re going to do it, but the end
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of them is an obscure error message that gives you no further action. And then I have not penetrated
⏹️ ▶️ John to the level of the support where someone can say, I’ve figured out why it’s telling you you can’t delete that Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I got to the middle tier where they had ideas about why I couldn’t do what I was doing, but that just led to more things that didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m very frustrated with this, despite the fact that it’s not particularly pressing and I did get new credit
⏹️ ▶️ John cards issued after my stolen one so I was able to add a brand new credit card number that hasn’t been used in supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs. The situation is mostly resolved but I’m going to continue to pursue this because I do want
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete that Apple ID and once I delete that Apple ID I do want to remove the payment method from the other Apple ID that I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to keep. Like I want to see the features work. If there’s going to be screens and menus and other features
⏹️ ▶️ John for these things, they should do the thing that they’re supposed to do. They shouldn’t all
⏹️ ▶️ John dead end like in a bad text adventure and obscure error messages that let me make no forward progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why didn’t you say, I’m John Syracuse and I want this fixed properly?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not, I’m not mad about it. It’s not the fault of any of the people on support, but like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bad system where there are all these sort of unwritten rules and obscure things that, you know, nobody knows
⏹️ ▶️ John about. Like, how many people do you know in the Apple world that know that there is a limit on how many Apple IDs a
⏹️ ▶️ John credit card number can be associated with. And if you hit that limit, you will get totally obscure error messages that don’t tell you anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the error messages I was saying was saying invalid payment method, like it was an incorrect credit card number. It’s like I’m being gaslit
⏹️ ▶️ John by the system here. And as far as that limit, what is the limit? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. And what are those eight Apple IDs? I don’t know either. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good system. And so I haven’t penetrated down to the bottom level of support. maybe on
⏹️ ▶️ John our next call, because the next call is gonna be, where last we left, you told me perhaps in an hour I’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete this Apple ID. Let me tell you, it’s two days later, still can’t delete the Apple ID. So let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John defeat that. If you need to pass me down one more level, or up, I don’t know which direction I’m going, send
⏹️ ▶️ John me to the person who’s gonna let me know, hey, I wanna delete this Apple ID, and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a thing I can make happen, so let’s work together to make this happen. Let’s not get off this phone call until this Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John is deleted. This Apple ID that has no purchases ever, never had a payment method, it was entirely created
⏹️ ▶️ John in like, you know, 2015 or whenever when families came out to do, to make a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John review screenshots, I want to delete it and it’s apparently not a thing I can make happen. So let’s just stay here
⏹️ ▶️ John until we can get it done. Please don’t tell me to try again in an hour. I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So did you guys set up two factor on your developer accounts yet? I heard the deadline was extended to the 27th, so you don’t actually have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it for another week, but I suggest you maybe start now.