353: Modern-Day Dialup
21 Nov 2019Solving Casey’s conundrums, one at a time.
Episode Description:
- Neutral: The inevitable death of the stick
- Paperlike 2 (note: order from Kickstarter to get Paperlike 2; their website is currently only selling the first-gen)
- 16-inch MacBook Pro follow-up:
- Pricing
- What did Marco buy?
- Phil Schiller on a 14" MacBook Pro
- Keyboard repairability
- Incremental improvement for Macs
- Motorola Razr Returns
- Casey's Catalina Catastrophe
- Casey's Computing Conundrum
#askatp- When is a language ready for use on servers? (via Bastian Inuk)
- Can Marco track total listen time for an Overcast account? (via René Ferguson)
- Could Adobe's iOS apps be used as a basis for ARM-native apps? (via filteq)
- Post-show:
- Reconcilable Differences #102: Preparing the Way
- John's UPS
- John's "pigtails" - one and two
Sponsored by:
- DoorDash: Let dinner come to you with DoorDash. Get $5 off your first order of $15 or more with promo code ATP in the app.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Get 10% off your first order.
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a $20 credit with code atp2019.
Chapters
- Casey’s creative choice
- Neutral: Unsolicited gifts 🖼️
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
- Paperlike 2 🖼️
- 16” pricing, buying
- 16” keycap replacement
- Making laptops better
- Lakefield and cellular
- Sponsor: Fracture
- New Motorola RAZR
- Casey’s problem
- Sponsor: DoorDash (code ATP)
- #askatp: Language ready for servers
- #askatp: Total listening time
- #askatp: Adobe & ARM Macs
- Ending theme
- Politics are gross
- Preparing the Way
Casey’s creative choice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Modern hyphen day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Don’t put a hyphen in dial-up though, I don’t think. Let’s check that. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because modern day
⏹️ ▶️ John is a modifier of dial-up. I know, but I mean, like, dial-up I think might be a hyphenated word.
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta look. I didn’t think about that. Uh, see, Wikipedia has it with a hyphen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We can just choose not to, you know, that is something we could do.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’m just making sure without is even an option. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Dictionary only has it in the hyphenated form.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I’m just, I’m looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s usually my reference as the dictionary app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think you have to have a hyphen. I think without the hyphen is not a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is hyphens run wild. The hyphens do not own you, gentlemen. Just choose not to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s going in without the hyphen.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can’t just make up your own words.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Modern hyphen day space dilop.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, dilop is apparently not a word. If you don’t put the hyphen there,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pens are going to all email us and say, you know, dilop is not a word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t think anyone is going to email us. Oh, you kidding? Challenge accepted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, yeah, I think, I think we can get away with that one without a single email. Actually. I think I’m on Casey’s side of this bet. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we would hear about it from anybody. Just Chris Pepper listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultimately, John is going to go in and change it out from under us anyway. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about it. Just be correct. Why would we not, why would we intentionally not be correct? What are you making this stand about? What are you,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you proving?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m proving that I am better than a need to make the hyphen gods happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John What makes you better? There’s no such thing as hyphen gods, so what are you trying
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to say? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am choosing! I am making a creative choice. I am making a creative choice to not use the hyphen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you expressing with that creative choice? That I think it’s… the hyphens… too many hyphens. You think there are
⏹️ ▶️ John too many hyphens? That’s what you’re expressing? This is the hell you’re gonna die on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would argue that it I think if email lost its hyphen, which it did like forever ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would classify this as similar. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like dial-up lived and died without ever losing its hyphen Like it’s not it’s not gonna lose
⏹️ ▶️ John hyphen now because who the hell ever talks about dial-up. I like it is it is a fossil We just did
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you should put the hyphen. We are fossils.
Neutral: Unsolicited gifts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to lodge an official complaint to the group, please. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey received an unsolicited package in the mail today, and Marco, you seem to have sent me the incorrect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M6. You have sent me but a mere model as opposed to an actual M6. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to officially file a complaint with the board that you have sent the incorrect-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M6. I literally can put it in my pocket, which means it is considerably too small. I mean, what is this, an M6 for
⏹️ ▶️ John last year’s model. Why you got to send that back?” I said, no, I’m sorry, the 6 isn’t the thing anymore. It’s the 8 now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, all kidding aside, Marco sent me a BMW hat, which I already have one just like it, as did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, if I’m not mistaken, because I believe I got it from driving school. You sent me a mug and you sent me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a model M6. I believe that was it. I think so. Which was very kind of you to move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your shit from your house to my house. Now I have to deal with it. But be that as it may,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you bought the i3, they just threw random swag at you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Like when… Cool. Yeah. For TIFF’s recent i3 release, they gave us this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag on the way out of just a whole bunch of random BMW stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s all last year’s BMW stuff. That’s why they’re getting rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And we thought, well, we don’t really need any of this stuff, but it would be funny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just mail it all to Casey. So that’s what we did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you so much. You know how much he loves BMWs now. Exactly. Exactly. Speaking of your poor car. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just saw something flipping through a magazine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we be more specific? Whose poor car are we speaking of?
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s poor car. I saw something flipping through a magazine today that seemed to indicate to me that the
⏹️ ▶️ John the new Golf R will only come with an automatic. Oh, no, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pronounced golf That’s what I saw in a graph in a chart You know, I don’t I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John set in stone yet But that seemed to be the the indication of this chart The other thing I learned is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John default transmission for the Golf in Europe is a stick. Still,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the new generation one. That’s what you get if you don’t select any options.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing is, here in America, if I were to actually, I’d be very curious to hear you guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you would say about this. But my question is, what is going to be the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car to get rid of the stick? And to me, I know John, you’re going to say the Civic, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think if I were to wager guess, I would say it’ll be either the GTI or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Jeep Wrangler of all things. And I really mean that. John, I’m assuming you’re going to say the Civic? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to say the Civic. I think it’s going to be some weird, expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John not exotic car. To give an example, I forget which car it was. Some car from some company, it might be Aston
⏹️ ▶️ John Martin. One of those type of brands is introducing a new model that
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with a stick, a new trim level of an existing model where they just keep making different different revisions of it. And one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John revisions is like, and this one comes with a stick and it’s just totally out of left field. And it’s only there to satisfy a few weird
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Like it’s not even presented as a performance thing. Like that type of thing where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason for this but you’re already buying an Aston Martin. It wasn’t Aston, it was some other car company but you’re already buying a car
⏹️ ▶️ John for like 200 and something grand. And we keep making new trim levels every year cause we don’t want to have to, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a long gap between the years. And so we make the one that has the pinstripe and the one with the big wing and the
⏹️ ▶️ John drive one and then the convertible one, and then eventually they make one with the stick, and that’s gonna be the last car that’s gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ John a stick. It’ll be an expensive novelty for very rich people on very expensive cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, that’s a fair answer. If I were to now move the goalposts and change it to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car that a regular human can buy, what would you say? In the US. In the US, in
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the, is the Civic still available with stick? No, it’s not, the Civic is not, if it was gonna be a Honda, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like the Fit or something, but I’m thinking about when the, if the economies of scale will get to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re not going to do that either.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You gotta figure like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Civic Type R would probably be a pretty good candidate for that. Cause it’s like, it’s a pretty high selling, I think, car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like the audience would want it to be stick for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s also aspirational and it aspires to, you know, a very fast automated
⏹️ ▶️ John manual or a very fast automatic, because that’s what the exotic cars all have. So it is, you know, the Ferraris don’t have them anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Civic wants to be a little mini Ferrari. So I feel like it’s going to go that way. I’m going to go out of
⏹️ ▶️ John left field and say some Mazda, like the Miata.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. Okay. I can buy that. I’ve never driven a Miata. I’ve heard they are phenomenally fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are extremely slow, but phenomenally fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think only Marco can fit in one, unfortunately. The three
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of us. They are very small. They’re very small. They’re not big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, back years and years ago when you were living in the dark ages and using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dead dinosaurs to move you around from town to town. Some of us chose to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a transmission that required you to have three pedals. That’s what we call a stick. I know this is hard for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to remember now. If you remember those dark, dark, terrible days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you were to guess which American affordable car would be the last car to have one of these just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horrible devices, which would you guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just did. I guess the Civic Type R. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be my final guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think like, because it would be something that’s like, I think we’re almost out of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period now where like people would just get it out of cheapness. Like there’s only, are there any cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left in the US that have a stick as the base model just for cheapness?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I think the Fit still does. To give an example, I’m, you know, like lots of it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still happening now i think your answer marco should be the surprise answer which you probably don’t even want to hear but
⏹️ ▶️ John electric cars are starting to come with transmissions and if one doesn’t already come with a manual there will
⏹️ ▶️ John be an electric car with a manual transmission as absurd as absurd as that sounds too i’m pretty sure i’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John there is one now as well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think there was a must there was like a one-off mustang if i’m not mistaken that they put a stick in
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah yeah that’s what it is it wasn’t not the maki but there was some like like electrified Mustang that had a manual
⏹️ ▶️ John transmission. Yeah, why they have transmissions for the same reason that gas cars have transmissions to
⏹️ ▶️ John more efficiently put the power to the road. Like the Taycan,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t do it. The Taycan has a two-speed transmission. It’s not manual, obviously, but it has two speeds. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when you go highway cruising, your engines can be going at lower speed and it’s more efficient for battery power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it that much more efficient?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it shifts at like 60 when you’re flat out, yeah. Oh. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the possibility of electric cars with manual transmission does exist, and so you should predict the last car that’s gonna have one
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be, I mean, it still fits in my model of some novelty expensive car, I just didn’t say whether that car would be electric or not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel the shift like you can in a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s the same thing, it’s just a power source and some kind of clutch that you actuate with a pedal with your left
⏹️ ▶️ John foot, and then you, the whole nine yards, different gear ratios, and yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why would you want, I see, look, the whole reason I like a stick or a DCT is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transmissions are terrible and the best transmission is no transmission, but if there’s gonna be one, I wanna decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it does, damn it. But like, if you have a type of drivetrain, like a pure electric,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for the most part doesn’t really need a transmission, why would you add one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, as I said, you’re adding it because it’s more efficient. You get better mileage, like the two-speed and the Taycan, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get better acceleration numbers because you have shorter gearing, you know, from a standstill,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you have more efficient highway cruising because it’s taller gearing. It’s the same reason the gas cars do it’s exactly it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why doesn’t Tesla use the exact same setup setup
⏹️ ▶️ John that they they’re not using they’re using like half the voltage that the Ticon is using
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s all sorts of things about Tesla’s original electric system that are different about the Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ John one So the trade-offs Porsche is making allow it to charge faster allow it to be slightly more efficient allowed to have slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John better performance I’m assuming the next-gen Tesla stuff will do all the same things because everyone’s going to that whatever it is 800 volts
⏹️ ▶️ John Setup, so it’s just sort of a generational thing doesn’t mean they’d have to have a transmission And it just, you know, there’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage to it. Like simplicity is the advantage of not having one, but you get some range
⏹️ ▶️ John and performance benefits to having one. It’s only two speed, right? It’s not like there’s 900 gears or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only reason you’d have a manual is like I said, to satisfy weird people who want to shift themselves. It’s massively less efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John than letting it shift yourself. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When they, if they only have two gears, can we bring back the turbo button that computers used to have?
⏹️ ▶️ John but then what would it do that downshift
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco into the lower
⏹️ ▶️ John gear? Because I think you can’t, if you’re over like 60, you can’t be in the lower gear in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Taycan. Like, it’s, you know, that’s the end of the gear as far as, like, I don’t, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John you would press the button to make it do, because it’s not really going to make you go any faster in any real situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can make you go slower, you could force it to upshift at 30, and then all of a sudden your car has, your car has worse performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man. I hope that day is coming. Not at all soon, but it could be coming. The reason I was I was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confused about bad news for my car is because my car is actually currently at a body shop because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got lightly rear-ended a week or two ago. And so I, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey young person in a, what is that unremarkable Jeep? Like a Compass or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of them. There’s a lot of unremarkable Jeeps right now. Fair, fair, fair. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, we were at a stoplight. I was, it had just turned green. I was just about to take off and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey felt like a very subtle bump in the back To the point that I honestly had thought I had stalled. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subtle it was. And then Aaron said, we just get hit. And I stopped and I realized, oh yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes we did. And so because Virginia is a lovely, wonderful state,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, Commonwealth, strictly speaking, that does so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John many things right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does so many things right, except we are monsters and require a front license
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plate. And so the screw, one of the screws that was holding this individual’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey front license plate onto their car, kind of not punched a hole, but sort of kind of punched a hole in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paint, I guess you could say, of my bumper. And so, yeah, that’s a thing. And it’s been at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the repair shop for a day and a half, and supposedly it’s almost done. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John most people just live with that, you know? No. Well, it wasn’t my fault. I saw a picture of it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very small. You’re going to pay for the entire repair yourself, because there’s no way that’s… No, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John not. You don’t have any deductible?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have a deductible, but this individual bumped me and so in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a very young person. And so I think their parents and they concluded
⏹️ ▶️ John they just gave you some money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, in order to alleviate dinging their insurance, which is also selfishly good for me because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want this car to be forever tainted on like, you know, Carfax or something like that. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t think that kind of incident goes to Carfax like seriously, people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco should put a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show. We’re talking you about a tiny nick to the paint the size of a dime.
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of a dime, not even a complete ring. Yep, that’s pretty accurate. On the plastic bumper. Yes, it went through
⏹️ ▶️ John the paint to the plastic, but that’s it. It’s like a ring the size of a dime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure every car I’ve ever had has incurred damage like that. And like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leases that I would turn in and they wouldn’t even comment on it. I wouldn’t get charged. Like it’s that minor. Well, $500 later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be fixed. Yeah, so that’s not a $500 ding.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel you, because I have the same attitude towards things and scratches
⏹️ ▶️ John on my car. Of course I do, right? But I let them build up. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John bumper repair on my car, and I let it get pretty bad. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, large, big, scratchy regions where cement chips
⏹️ ▶️ John off the road and scratched my thing, and bumps from who knows what in the parking
⏹️ ▶️ John lot, and just all sorts of stuff that happens to my car when I’m not there. And I was like, all right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John my car is black, so I’m scraping through and making these horrible white paint for other people’s cars. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John it built up to the point where I could plunk down an obscene amount of money to get my plastic bumper
⏹️ ▶️ John repaired. But if you do it every time, that’s expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. But no, it really bothered me, and I wanted to get it fixed. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since I was bumped in the back, it’s pretty much guaranteed not to be my fault. And we actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did call a police officer, which I have a question about that in a second. We called a police officer just to see what happened. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gentleman was very nice, the police officer, but he basically looked at the car and said, that’s less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than, I think he said $1,500 worth of damage. And so I’m not even going to write this up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just suddenly- He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly an insurance adjuster. He knows it’s less than $1,500. Like if you drove a Ferrari, that would not be less than $1,500.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very fair. But anyway, but he didn’t write it up. And so he was just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, here’s a form for you to write each other’s information down and go away. What I don’t understand though is why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t the individual that bumped me get some sort of citation? It didn’t occur to me until after I had driven away and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all over. Like yeah, they didn’t do a whole bunch of damage, but they still bumped another car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like shouldn’t that individual have gotten written like some sort of ticket? If you’re a law enforcement officer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have information about this, I would like – not me specifically, just in general, I would love to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why this person wasn’t written up or given a ticket for having hit another car.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we know, many things are at the discretion of law enforcement officers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. I think that’s the answer. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, the I think the job of police officers largely is like, the world is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to shove all of their problems onto your plate. You as the police officer have to decide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what is worth my time and what isn’t. And what’s worth the paperwork. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like that’s probably why. Like, they probably get called out for every dumb little thing. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if they can get rid of some stuff, get it off their plate, I’m sure they’re very happy to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So I’m sure the officer saw what happened here, saw it was incredibly minor. And not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it not worth, like, filing a police report for the accident, it wasn’t even worth citing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the person because it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares? It’s not a criminal matter. They weren’t reckless driving. They’re not drunk. You know, like, It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s interesting. You don’t think that there was any law broken? I mean, they hit another car. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess that’s why I think your question is an interesting one. I don’t know. Like, obviously, there’s fault, and there’s the insurance,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s all sorts of you could sue the person and have sorts of civil cases or whatever. But the laws about
⏹️ ▶️ John driving are about obeying traffic signs and not being intoxicated and not driving recklessly and all that
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff. And there’s probably some law that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what about following too close? I mean, there’s a rule about not following too close, and this individual broke that
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t you weren’t you stationary like maybe i’m sure i’m sure somewhere on the books is the thing that says you
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t hit another car when if the car in front of you doesn’t go you don’t go either like that’s i’m sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in there but i don’t understand i don’t know what like how whatever whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest level of infraction is uh i would imagine this would have to be it and
⏹️ ▶️ John i don’t know what that’s called it’s not a misdemeanor i don’t i don’t know anyway that’s why i’m actually interested in the answer to this question of some
⏹️ ▶️ John police officer wants to riding because I have no idea what they would be cited for. Well, I do agree that
⏹️ ▶️ John you, as I think we discussed in a past show, the whole thing about driving is you don’t let the cars touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John goal number one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John talk about that here or was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so. That was a neutral, if I’m not mistaken. There you go. Don’t let the cars touch, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know what? I was trying not to, but apparently somebody- Takes two to touch. Thanks, dad.
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Paperlike 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP2019 for that $20 credit. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty, let’s do a little bit of follow up. Marco, you apparently would like to file a report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your own with regard to the Paperlike2. Is that a Kindle? I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good guess. No, we talked on this show about a year ago. I had tried out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen protector for my iPad called the Paperlike. I loved the way that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco felt because the iPad Pro has the feeling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when you first get the new one when it’s all clean and not covered in finger grease, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost tacky. Like you need like a kind of a smoother surface and like your fingers almost get caught in it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, you know, bare and such a large surface. But then, unfortunately, the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also has a fairly weak oleophobic coating, the thing that rejects finger oils. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since the iPad Pro came out with pencil support, apparently it’s been a thing that Apple has not been able to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And an oleophobic coating that is compatible with the Apple Pencil, that isn’t any good. And so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result is, any iPad since then is a fingerprint magnet, way more than the previous ones were. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the iPad screen is always just covered in finger grease. Anyway, so I was trying a screen protector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year called the paper-like that advertises that it feels like paper, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better, like a better texture for when you’re drawing with the pencil and everything. And I hardly ever actually do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I did like the idea of a matte finish screen protector because not only did it improve that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slippery finger feel and make it easier to like do swipe gestures and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also it seemed to lessen the fingerprint problem. The downside was that it kind of blurred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and added like rainbow light refraction noise to the picture quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad. So it felt better and it looked better when it was off because it wasn’t covered in greasy fingerprints.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when it was on, the picture quality was sacrificed too much. Like it was just, it blurred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the image too much and it had this kind of like rainbow refraction noise around everything. And so it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I eventually took it off, which again, immediately made it feel worse again. And it was really covered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in fingerprints. But I did take it off eventually Like I just didn’t find the picture quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-off acceptable. The Paperlike 2 has just come out. I batted on Kickstarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while ago and the reason I gave it another shot is that they specifically addressed that picture quality thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Kickstarter campaign materials for it. They basically said like we’ve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they basically created a nano coating texture. Very, very similar advertising to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple said they did with the Pro Display XDR’s anti-glare $1,000 option. Yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry to hear that you had to spend a thousand dollars on the screen protector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it turns out it was only I think it was only like 25 30 bucks on like that So it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is possible to do it more cheaply. I got it today. I have it installed and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far I am pleasantly surprised by it granted. I have not had a lot of time with it yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is a huge improvement in How much of the screen quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets reduced? but there is still some picture quality reduction. There is still a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of blurring and a little bit of that rainbow noise effect, but it’s significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lessened than the last generation one, and it’s much less than any other matte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen protector I’ve ever used before, which admittedly I haven’t used that many in recent years because retina screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of ruin them, but this does look very good. It does not look as good as the Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR’s anti-glare coating, but it also isn’t made of glass and a thousand dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, so, you know, to give them credit, like if you like screen protectors or if, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are interested in trying one paper, like two is actually, it seems to be the real deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m going to keep it on for a while. I, I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it longterm yet. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m at least going to keep it on for a little while because I’ve really liked the way it feels and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how it immediately got rid of all them, all my fingerprints all over my screen. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, yeah, I’ll report back in future episodes on whether I still have it or not, but I’m tentatively optimistic about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the one thing I really wish now, I would love to have this for the MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John has Tiff used this, tried it on your iPad or on hers? Not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m wondering what, you know, she does, I’m assuming, a lot more drawing than you do on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco your iPad. Way more. I’m wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John how it feels for the supposed intended purpose feeling like paper. Like you want it for the fingerprinty stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m interested to see if she likes it for the drawing parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I also just enjoy the way it feels on my fingers. Like that’s, it feels good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t have the screen all fingerprinty and that’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and also if you want, you could probably buy like nine of these and put them on your
⏹️ ▶️ John display XDR and save yourself a lot of money. Just try to ignore the seams
⏹️ ▶️ John and the part where the rounded corners don’t meet. Yeah, it’ll be fine. Totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m glad you found something that you enjoy.
16” pricing, buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me Marco about MacBook Pro pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? That’s not Marco’s topic, that’s mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was hoping that was Marco’s, but you know what? As I’ve learned many times and always deny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s always John, you guys. It’s always, always John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so last week when we talked about the new 16 inch MacBook Pro, we talked about almost everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about it except one item, which is the price. And the price is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting in that it’s not interesting. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this new 16-inch MacBook Pro has a
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger screen. It has much better speakers. It has a much better microphone. It has a much better
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard. It has a bigger battery in it. It has a better GPU. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same price as the one that replaces, more or less, I’m sure there’s differences in the models, but it starts at the same price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they didn’t increase the price. They didn’t say, well, this is a 16-inch, so it’s gonna be an extra 50 bucks, or an extra 20 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John or an extra 100 bucks. It’s more or less the same price, which is nice. And we didn’t mention it, and I thought we should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. This is one thing that we all got wrong in the guesses. Like everyone thought, because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really has been doing a lot of price raising in recent years, whenever they change a generation of a product, price usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes up. And in this case, it didn’t. We were shocked. You know, we were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure that it would be more expensive than the current ones that a common guess in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rumor mill was that this would actually sit above the 15 inch and the 15 inch would stay in the lineup for just for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price reasons. And that didn’t happen here. they just replaced the 15 with one that’s better. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same price. And additionally, the SSD capacities doubled. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the two configurations that are like the stock ones, like the $2,400 and $2,700 ones, used to be 256 and 512 on the SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now it’s 512 and one terabyte respectively. So they doubled the SSD sizes on both too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is wonderful because now, we’ve returned to the point now where like, I feel like I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confidently recommend the base model again. Like for years, I was saying, well, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the base model. It’s a great buy, except 256 on the SSD is pretty tight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t recommend that. Now, I do recommend, because 512, I think, is the minimum anybody should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I usually go for the terabyte on mine these days. But yeah, 512 is a perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine minimum. And so the base model is recommendable once again. So to have this new computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is substantially better in some pretty important ways, be the same price, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also give double SSD from where it was before. I know SSD pricing is really cheap these days. Yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, I know. But the fact that we have this now is pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I actually went to the local Apple store today to check out the new MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have one yet? We’re gonna talk about this later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna talk about this later, but I-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t you? I do want the new MacBook Pro. But here’s the thing. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a aircraft carrier compared to what I’m used to. And remember, I have the 12-inch MacBook. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not obnoxiously heavy by comparison. Now, granted, I didn’t have a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next to it to compare to, but just by picking up the MacBook Pro, it’s not terribly thick,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not terribly heavy, but just in surface area alone, like the footprint of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is just comically, comically large. And I just don’t know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want something that big, but I’ve been starting to have, as we’ve talked about, we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about later. I’ve been starting to have problems with the iMac again. And so I’m starting to wonder, you know, maybe I should just get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this 16 inch MacBook Pro and a LG 5K Abomination and just call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day and just stop having a desktop anymore. And I’m gonna need you to argue with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and convince me not to do that here in a little bit. But one way or another, the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is excellent. It is very, very good. It feels very much like the Magic Keyboard. It feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever so slightly less mushy to me. Again, I didn’t have a Magic Keyboard like next to it to compare,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but from what I could remember of typing on a Magic Keyboard, it felt slightly less mushy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was good. I don’t find the Magic Keyboard to be particularly mushy, but it felt slightly less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mushy. But it is very, very good and it felt extremely similar to the Magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keyboard. So based on 30 to 60 seconds with it, two thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, way, way up. I really like the keyboard and it seems like it’s exactly what we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always wanted, which which again, I mean, Marco covered last week, but now you have somebody else saying that, you know what, Marco’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you did buy one or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So I- Okay, so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went into the store and just bought the 2799 stock model. In like a perfectly ideal world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I would have gone 32 gigs and two terabytes for like future expansion, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know myself well enough to know a couple of things. A, I’m impatient. I wanted my own now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I still do have Apple’s review on it because I haven’t had to send it back yet. But when you have a review, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t want to like fully move into it. Like I didn’t want to like have to like transfer over certain activation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software licenses and stuff like that. Like there’s like a bunch of stuff that, you know, when you get a new laptop, you kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move into it fully and I didn’t want to do all that to the review loaner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowing that, you know, within a matter of weeks, I would have to send it back and do the whole thing again, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to get my own fairly soon. So I could really, you know, complete that move in process I only had to do it once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also, you know, I looked at the 13-inch MacBook Pro I’ve been using for the last year and a half.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only had 16 gigs of RAM and one terabyte, and that had been fine for me, for my laptop needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’d be different if it was my primary computer and I was doing heavy development work as my primary computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I might spec it up a little bit more. But 16 and one terabyte was fine for my needs. It was perfectly fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last year and a half. So I know that, A, that’s probably gonna be fine, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the time I have this laptop. B, I also know myself, and I know I’m probably only gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this laptop for a year and a half,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or whatever. Ha, that’s funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s very funny. If you make it a month and a half, I’ll be impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and the big test is gonna be when they do come out with this keyboard in a 13 inch, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be the big test, because I, too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at this thing and think, this is an aircraft carrier. This is way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what I am accustomed to, because I’ve been coming off the 13 for, as I said, for a year and a half.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m accustomed to a much smaller computer than this. That being said, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a 15-inch for years before that and liked it, so I might stick with it. Either way, 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one terabyte were fine with me and I wanted the eight core and that has the eight core. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am very, very happy with just that regular 2799 stock config and I was able to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very quickly. Like I got it on day one, so I got to move into it fully and here I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am. So, when I eventually wanna sell it to you in a few months, when the 13 inch comes out, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m gonna get a 13. Honestly, I genuinely think if they had come out with what presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be a 14 inch, we’re saying the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch with the new keyboard, et cetera, et cetera. I think I would have Insta-bought it the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day it came out, just like you did with this. Or maybe at most I would order a slightly different config, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they had a new 13 with a new keyboard, I would have already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought one. And I’m a little scared. Was it Jonathan Morrison? Did I get that name right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget who it was, but somebody did an interview with Phil Schiller on that day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and asked basically, hey, so presumably the 14 is coming out soon, right? And I forget exactly how it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was answered, but Phil kind of pumped the brakes on that more than I would have expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m a little nervous that that’s going to be like many, many months in the future, but we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s always a possibility, but I think his statement was I mean you have he can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not going to say that they’re coming He
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can’t say that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re coming
⏹️ ▶️ John and the harder you press on that question the more forcefully he has to say Not he
⏹️ ▶️ John has to not say that they’re coming He has to say we sell the butterfly one in this one right now We
⏹️ ▶️ John are continuing to sell the butterfly because that’s the truth And if you keep pressing he keeps having to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John over and over again, it makes you start thinking Oh my god, they’re never gonna replace it, but they will it’s just a matter of time Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be way too long and we may be angry in two years screaming that the MacBook Air still doesn’t have this
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard But he can’t he literally can’t say anything differently now So I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw that too and it didn’t make me feel any better or any worse about the prospects Just people want to be reassured and that reassurance
⏹️ ▶️ John is not coming from a company that is currently selling butterfly keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m starting to lose faith that the 13-inch replacement will become 14 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The kind of thing that usually leaks pretty far ahead of time these days usually through Ming Chi Kuo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when display panel sizes and resolutions change. And for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we expect to be launching in less than a year and probably less than six months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that we haven’t had a display panel leak about a 14-inch display panel coming out soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is concerning. And in fact, I believe Ming-Chu Kuo or one of the common rumor mill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people has even said recently that it’s gonna be 13.3 still. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing it’s actually probably not going to go to 14, which I hope I’m wrong because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love for it to. But it doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, or at least if it is in the cards, they have dramatically improved their secrecy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around display panel leaks, which previously were leaking all the time very
⏹️ ▶️ John reliably. Yeah, I haven’t seen any rumors of a 14. Like the only reason we’re talking about 14 is because it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be cool and it’s what we all want. But like what I’ve never besides wishful thinking on our part and the fact that it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like a cool idea. I haven’t seen anything about it. So that’s we’re still treating it as a thing that Apple should do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, I don’t know what the lead times are on panels. Maybe there’s if the thing comes out in eight months, maybe there’s still time for a panel
⏹️ ▶️ John leak, but who knows? But yeah, it’s firmly in the category of cool thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we think Apple should do and not the thing that we think Apple is going to do necessarily at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And to be fair, like I’m not bent on it being a 14 inch like if they came out with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exact same panel like you’re saying, Marco, the new keyboard and presumably slightly better internals, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would still insta-buy that too. I’m not hanging my hat on an additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch of display. I’m hanging it on the new keyboard because as it turns out, as I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving, well, Aaron was driving me to Apple because I have no car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying to do some work on my adorable and the H key was sticking and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was one other key that was sticking and I’m just thinking to myself, It’s probably for the best that I don’t have my business credit card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on me because I might have pulled a Marco right then and there, which is- I never have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with the butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, I’m sure I can take compressed air to it, but I didn’t have compressed air handy in the passenger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John compartment.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just held his notebook out the window while they were driving.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right. At exactly a 70 degree angle. At a 75 degree angle, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. Now, I have to ask you though, Marco, these are two interrelated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey questions. I was going to ask, do you think this will be the computer for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all trips to the beach, only weekend trips to the beach? But given that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t spec up the RAM to 32 gigs, I’m guessing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will use this for brief trips, but then still use your ridiculous carrying case for your summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is my plan, is like when I’m out there for the whole summer, still bringing my desktop, just because I want a desktop. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want like the giant monitor. You know, I want all the power. I want no fan noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want 100% reliability. For me, I love having a desktop out there for that large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco span, but this will make it so that I am much happier and more productive when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going somewhere for two months. You know, when I’m just going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a weekend or for a week or when I’m going other places. You know, I do, in other parts of the year, I do go to other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places sometimes. Decreasingly so, maybe, but I still do go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like for WWDC. There’s all sorts of times when I travel where I need to or want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work done that I can’t bring my iMac Pro on trips like that. And this will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be wonderful for all of those other trips, even if I don’t use it full-time for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my like, you know, big summer move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. Yeah, I don’t know, I just keep wrestling with, should I just, you know, ditch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac entirely and just get one of these and a monitor? But we’ll see, we’ll talk about that in a minute. We’ll see you next time.
16” keycap replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, before we do that, let’s talk about keycap replacement. And apparently there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news about this. Peter Wells tweeted at the two of you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said that he asked about repairability. And Phil said that if a key gets stuck, you can pop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it off and replace it. What a novel idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Serviceability. Wow. And there’s a demo video from iFixit demonstrating that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically was like they’re tear down the thing and looking at the keyboard and talking about it. But, you know, they took it apart. They looked at the mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John inside it and they were comparing it to like the magic keyboard and looking at different pieces and Lo
⏹️ ▶️ John and behold not only can you pop off a key cap and put it back on what they did was they popped the key Cap off of the magic keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and popped it right on to the 16-inch MacBook Pro Fits just fine now the key caps on the magic keyboard are a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit taller like they’re thicker, right? So I probably wouldn’t replace all the key caps and close the lid because I think they would probably
⏹️ ▶️ John hit into the screen or whatever But just goes to show exactly how close those mechanisms are to each other despite
⏹️ ▶️ John Them being different because it’s not at an angle and them having whatever these stabilizing pins blah blah blah The fact is they popped
⏹️ ▶️ John off like the command key and off of the 6-inch MacBook Pro and put on the one for the Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John So there you go it you know, it is as close to the Magic Keyboard as it can be without being
⏹️ ▶️ John the Magic Keyboard And you can indeed Open up in a single key and
⏹️ ▶️ John put it back on now all that said as someone like I said who has Pop the keycaps off, I just switch Apple keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and put one back on you can screw this up rest assured Like, there are still delicate parts in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, you could, you know, if you have experience and know how to do it, you’ll be successful. But if you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I can do this, let me just rip this thing off. They’re very small, tiny pieces of plastic,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you bend or break one of those little tiny pieces of plastic, you need a new tiny piece of plastic. Which is still a
⏹️ ▶️ John possibility for repair, and that’s great and everything. But don’t be, uh, too cavalier about ripping
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing apart. The good thing is that an Apple repair person, who presumably has vast experience taking off keycaps
⏹️ ▶️ John and putting them back on, We can do this for you, so yay for repairability.
Making laptops better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, take me on a trip down memory lane with regard to mics and getting better over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just a thought I had, you know, thinking about our last discussion about
⏹️ ▶️ John the improved microphones and speakers and stuff like that on the MacBook Pros and how cool it was and how it wasn’t really top
⏹️ ▶️ John of mind because we were all focused on the keyboard and everything else but it’s a nice surprise. I know I’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this before on ATP but, you know, with the show running this long I don’t feel too bad repeating myself because two of you have probably
⏹️ ▶️ John forgotten about it by now too. But I can’t remember if I did talk about it. But I, as
⏹️ ▶️ John an old person, I like to sort of wax nostalgic about a particular period in the history of the Mac, like right in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John when the Mac first came out. There was this brief period of time. Well, actually, there was a longer period of time that you’re both familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with of the PC industry. But for the Mac specifically, there was this brief period of time where the Mac was brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new. In the beginning, there was one computer. It was called Macintosh, spelled out completely. And that was it. There was no
⏹️ ▶️ John qualifiers on that. There was no designation because it was literally the only one Macintosh
⏹️ ▶️ John right and then new ones came out the 512 and the plus and the SC and all that stuff right
⏹️ ▶️ John during that initial run of like a new machine would come out and then another one and then another one for a while there
⏹️ ▶️ John every new Mac that came out was better than its predecessor in pretty much every
⏹️ ▶️ John way and every aspect of the system would get improved because we were sort of in that era of computing the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John was faster there were no GPUs you don’t have to worry about that it had more ports the floppy drive was bigger, the flyby
⏹️ ▶️ John drive was faster, the screen was a little bit sharper, the speakers were a little bit louder, the sound chip had could do, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John higher kilohertz or higher bit depth or whatever. Everything about it was better. The keyboard was better,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse was better. It was like, and that continued for like three, four or five models, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on when things bifurcate into the Mac two and the color and everything and how you count that. And that just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because that was a formative time in my life, and I was super into the Mac and everything, it seemed like that’s the way computers are. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John time new one comes out, it’s better than all the ones that came before it. Because why wouldn’t it be in every aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John that it could be? Obviously, there’s some aspects that are the same or whatever, but there were certainly never any regressions. And in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could touch it, or if it affected your experience with the computer, it got better. As we all know, now,
⏹️ ▶️ John that has long since not been the case, new computers come out, and they improve in the
⏹️ ▶️ John few ways that are the most important, but other parts stay the same for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in general, like referring to your experience and our collective experience of the PC industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you were to graph anything having to do with like the advance of computers in the beginning, going from
⏹️ ▶️ John like the first personal computers to maybe like the 2000s or something, there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John big run up where like every computer is so much better than the one that can be for it. Moore’s law is in full effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got weird out singing parody songs where the entire premise is the idea that you get a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and then before you even take it out of the box, it’s obsolete because some other computer you can get for the same amount of money is like twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast. That doesn’t happen. We wait three years now for a computer that’s 20% faster. There’s lots of reasons for that. We discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the show. But all this is to say is there was a period where everything seemed like it was improving.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there was an expectation from the consumer and an excitement from the consumer that if I get a new computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, the speakers are going to be better. Of course, the microphones are going to be better because this is this year’s model. And that was last year’s model. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John year, they have a way to make insert component here better. And the speakers and the microphone are things that
⏹️ ▶️ John I interact with. So they should be better. our modern era, especially on the Mac line,
⏹️ ▶️ John we accept the idea that, for example, the webcam, as we call it, which is a ridiculous name, the
⏹️ ▶️ John front facing camera on our Apple laptops, will just go years and years without getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And not because it’s reached any kind of limit. Like very often the camera is poor quality and low
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution and has bad dynamic range and the lens is not great. And
⏹️ ▶️ John but every year we’re not like, I can’t believe they didn’t upgrade the camera this year. We don’t even mention it because it’s one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things that we consider to be in stasis. Now you could say that’s because it’s good enough, but honestly it’s not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you look at the front-facing camera on the phone, which itself doesn’t change every single time to be fantastically
⏹️ ▶️ John better, but it does try to keep pace. The front-facing camera on the iPhone has been improving,
⏹️ ▶️ John albeit more slowly. And so our discussion of the mic and speaker has made me
⏹️ ▶️ John reflect on how, not how complacent, but how I’ve gotten used to the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that certain things don’t change. Even when we, you know, we touched on this this last week saying like, Oh, now we can get back to, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, uh, lobbying for a face ID on max or whatever. I, I would like to see
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I would like to see now that now we’re getting everything we want to, you know, we want even more in the sort of, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John revival of the Mac is exactly what they just demonstrated on, on the 16 inch MacBook pro and improvement to systems
⏹️ ▶️ John that we had basically given up on. Like Marco says, he wasn’t even thinking about laptop speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John being better and the microphone, whoever thought about that getting better?” And now, now,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s, it’s reawoken me and say, yeah, why shouldn’t the front facing camera on laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John be better every once in a while? When’s the last time that changed? I, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and you think, oh, you don’t use it as much. I actually use it all the time. When, when I’m like teleconferencing with people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John in different geographic regions of my company, I’m using video and what’s what video
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera that’s in my computer. It, it affects like how I present myself to my my coworkers
⏹️ ▶️ John and if it can handle the darkness in the room or it keeps changing like it’s exposure level because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s getting confused by like bright light coming through the window or whatever and the same thing with the microphone. I found I sound echoey and distant
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, those are all things that can and should be improved. So I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what my point here is except that I am now ready for more changes like the one that is half and 16
⏹️ ▶️ John inch. So I’m happy that Apple did that and they should be a little bit scared that they did it because now I’m just getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of the things that I’m so happy to be back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this now. For these last few years where we’ve had the keyboard being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this huge problem for a lot of people and being this huge thing that we hated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was hard to look at anything else about laptops and to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a wish list or to really be able to focus on how else could they make technology get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better and how else could they improve these things that we use every day? because there was this huge, it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like when your house is on fire, literally if your house is on fire, it’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look at the bathroom and be like, I’d like to remodel this. Like, it’s like, you have to deal with the fire first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, and so it’s now, you know, the keyboard fire is being put out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the big one, it’s already out. It’s gonna be put out on the smaller ones, we hope soon. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that the fire is being put out, it allows us to then finally revisit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else about it, anything else, besides the primary input mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being incredibly controversial and having a high failure rate. So I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much looking forward to a return to that kind of normalcy. And yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they’ve advanced enough in recent years. Because who knows what they were doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Regardless, their heads weren’t on right for a while, and it seems like now they put them back on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would love things like, as I mentioned before, cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think there might be some movement there. I mean, we’ll get to this. There was a thing somewhere on a document that I saw about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But like, I think it is long past time to have cellular on laptops. PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops have had it for a decade. I don’t know why Apple has resisted so far. I’ve been told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there have been good reasons. I’m sure there are good reasons, but that doesn’t mean they’re insurmountable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there is enough of a will, They can get past things that have good reasons. Other stuff, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this, as John said, like, is this the best webcam that we can have, really? Because the webcam on it is still really crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to- Stop calling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, the FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John camera. Front-facing camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the front-facing camera is still really crappy. It hasn’t advanced at all in a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. The front-facing camera on iPhones is way better than the one on a $2,400 MacBook Pro, and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure that that’s right. You know, I know there’s different depths and everything. at different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price things, but. We just wanna see progress, like. Yeah, I still don’t think we’ve solved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ports and SD card problem really. You know, we’ve kinda kicked the can down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the road a little bit, but the problem is still there. I still think that the ports that are on the laptop should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be such that most people don’t need a single dongle, and I don’t think we’ve reached that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s all sorts of things that I think we can improve. I think battery life can always be improved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we are just now, I think we are barely on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right side of that, where like, most people, most of the time, will have just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely enough battery life, but I think we can do better than that. And there’s still too many cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like, you have to be really careful, otherwise you won’t have any battery life. And you know, I still think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need software support for things like a true low power mode for Mac OS, which I blogged about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a year or two ago, but I still think, you know, give us a low power mode that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disable turbo boost, that can turn off spotlight indexing and photo analysis, and a whole bunch of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power-sucking things on macOS that if you need to get through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a six-hour flight and actually be doing something like Xcode or something that’s actually taxing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery, and you have no power on that flight, you can put your laptop in low power mode and be relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confident that you’ll make it. You know, there’s all sorts of stuff like this. And for so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, the tech industry has been so focused on what’s next, what else, what’s the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of computing in the way that they kind of have declared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop and desktop style computing as dead, but we’re all still doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single day for much or all of our work. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s about time for not only Apple, but for much of the industry to refocus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the kind of like regular or old style computer and be like, how can we bring this forward?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How, you know, how much can we put into this? For a while, we thought this was the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was done. Turns out tablets and phones and everything were mostly additive, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these computers that we all thought were done, aren’t done. We’re all still using them. So let’s keep moving them forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the PC industry has actually been moving forward on all of these fronts, because the PC industry is not just one company. It’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John one company fades, another company rises, you know. But there’s lots of innovation there. You
⏹️ ▶️ John what- I guess it is mostly an Apple problem. Yeah, so we’re obviously, we’re mostly focusing on Apple. But that’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John nature of a single company versus an entire rest of the industry. Because if a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John company stops really trying to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John PC notebooks, someone else will come and eat their lunch, right? Whereas Apple stops really trying, because they have
⏹️ ▶️ John such a differentiator with the OS and the whole platform and all the other things that we’ve talked about, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John less competition. There’s less pressure on them to change. So they can leave the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera on their laptops the same for five years, six years? How long has it been the same? And
⏹️ ▶️ John no competitor is going to steal that customer because no one else sells Mac laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does make me happy. As you mentioned earlier, Marco, it makes me happy that we are now finding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these sorts of things to grumble about rather than one of the two primary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey input mechanisms for the computer not working very reliably. Like this is definitely a
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a terrible flash earlier today about thinking of like, wouldn’t it be funny slash horrifying
⏹️ ▶️ John if the next thing was that a Mac laptop came out and the trackpad was unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, imagine how bad that would be, John. We’re gonna talk about that in a minute. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John external one. And that’s a software problem anyway, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s like, imagine if an iPad, every iPad that came out for three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half years, one minute out of every hour, it just wouldn’t recognize touches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they kept releasing iPads for three years, they kept doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t the iPhone 4, one of them had like a flex cable issue where it would have, what was it like, it was like home
⏹️ ▶️ John button disease or something where like the table would disconnect from like the touch sensor and it would stop accepting touch
⏹️ ▶️ John input or something. iPhone 6, I believe. Well, yeah, whatever it was, that was like a one-time problem and they fixed it by like fixing
⏹️ ▶️ John the cable or whatever. But yeah, stuff like that happens occasionally. But yeah, it’s just, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John none of them will be this kind of long nightmare. It’s like, well, the trackpad works most of the time. Occasionally you’ll swipe on it
⏹️ ▶️ John and the cursor will move, but that happens to like one out of every 10,000 swipes. It’s not a big deal and we’d all just slowly be going mad
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next three years. No,
Lakefield and cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you made mention of somewhere in the document there was some sort of chatter about cellular laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, guess what? It is right after what we just covered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about Lakefield’s system on a chip and cellular laptops, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s an article from NN Tech talking about some new Intel chips that incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John some cellular tech in them. And the article talks about a particular model of some
⏹️ ▶️ John Samsung thing. And it says, you could always put cellular in x86 notebooks, but then you’ve got to put separate
⏹️ ▶️ John chips and take more power. and of course they cost more money or whatever. So here’s something from Intel to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it easier for you to efficiently and presumably less expensively put
⏹️ ▶️ John cellular in a laptop. And again, PC laptops had cellular forever. This is just something making it
⏹️ ▶️ John easier. But it’s making me think that regardless of which direction Apple goes, we keep talking about their ARM transition, if
⏹️ ▶️ John and when that’s ever going to happen. And of course, if it did, you would presume that bringing cellular along with that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be really easy because Apple has a lot of experience making very powerful system on chips based on the ARM architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ John which have cellular capability, even though they also have separate chips and yada, yada, yada. But anyway, even if they stick
⏹️ ▶️ John to Intel, it seems like Intel has products in the pipe that could help some of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops have cellular capability with more power savings
⏹️ ▶️ John on less expense than even before. So the number of excuses for Apple not to have cellular continues to dwindle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is good news. You know, and just to hopefully get in front of all the people that are going to write us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, well, why don’t you tether? Having done that in the car today, Let me tell you, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. I know we cover this a lot, but people always ask, well, why don’t you just tether? Tethering sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not nearly as convenient. It is way more convenient to turn the machine on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instantly have a connection of its own rather than having to wait for it to realize it doesn’t have a connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then wait for it to realize you have a phone nearby. And then often, but not always, it will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart enough to offer you, in Catalina anyway, offer you that connection on your phone or even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mojave, you could, you know, go into the Wi-Fi menu and drop down and grab your phone from the list,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s still many more steps. You’re now depleting two different batteries. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as darn convenient and I don’t understand why people get such a burr up their butts about us not liking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tethering. Yes, I do tether a lot on my laptop, but if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could, I would love to have a cellular laptop. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really don’t enjoy people constantly saying, oh, it’s just Yes, we get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t want to. That’s the whole point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and like, you know, just because a solution is good enough for you doesn’t mean that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one could possibly want a better one for themselves and for their needs and priorities, right? Like, it’s all—when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people say, like, just tether, it’s—they’re saying it, like, defensively because they just tether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fine for them, so why can’t it be fine for us? for us. And, and, you know, again, like it, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that a lot of people never never understand, but like, just because you don’t need something doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that no one needs it. Right. Or just because your priorities say this is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t mean that other people would make the same choice. Right. And in the case of tethering, like, yeah, tethering is fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s your only option, uh, which currently for laptops made by Apple it is. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when we went from, you know, we’re all old enough, everyone listening, we’re all old enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the three of us, to have been around when broadband came out. And more importantly, to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been around before broadband came out. And one of the big changes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened when you went from dial-up to broadband, yes, it did get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton faster, but it was also always connected. You were just always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online. Your computer was just always online. As opposed to having to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a thing in your menu bar or whatever and say, connect to the internet please, wait a few seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then have it connect. That’s exactly what tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Literally, exactly what it is. You’re basically doing modern day dial up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are having to go to your menu and go to the thing and say, dial up my phone please, like tether up my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please, and wait a few seconds, and then you’re on. It is totally different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be out there in the world and to pick up your iPad or your iPhone with cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to just be online. You’re just on, that’s it. You just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open it up and it’s online. Like simple as that. Totally different way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of operating. And that is why I want this in a MacBook. There’s so many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I will take my iPad out into the world instead of a laptop, primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of cellular. Because it’s just easier, it’s just always on, it’s just there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want that for the Mac as well. and it totally transforms the way you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a portable device, whether it can have cellular or not. And yeah, not everybody will pick that option, not everybody will want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the extra plan or whatever. It’s fine, but you know what? A lot of us will. We know that because the PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world has had these for a decade. People buy them. It’s like, this is not a hypothetical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been around for a long time, and people buy them. And any argument you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly make about why the MacBook Pro shouldn’t have cellular available,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say the exact thing about the iPad. And the iPad has had cellular on literally every model they offer since day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, almost 10 years ago. So clearly, there’s some reason why they haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to put it on a Mac yet, but clearly, it should be there if they can do it. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just hope the time that they can do it is coming, because the need has not gone away, the need never will go away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s well past time.
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New Motorola RAZR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, fractureme.com slash ATP for wonderful glass photo prints. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to Fracture for giving us lots of gifts to give to people, decorating our house, and sponsoring our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about the motorola razor. So when I was a young lad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a motorola razor and I loved that thing. I thought it was amazing. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a new one now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of cellular, we talked about, I think, last show or a couple of shows, we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John like foldable phones, but like they’re regular size phones, but they fold the other way, like, you know, like a flip phone, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Motorola Razr. Well, Motorola being the savvy slash desperate business that it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot of brand equity in the Razr. Lots of people have fond memories of their Razr, as does Casey, I imagine, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a cool thin flip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, right? It’s the only phone Motorola is remembered for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s a good, there’s also the StarTAC and stuff, but you know, and there’s a lot of brand equity in this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, the brand equity and everything about it is wrapped up in the idea that it is a thin phone that folds in the way
⏹️ ▶️ John that a Razr folds, right? So they are making a foldable phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that is very much like the size and shape and proportions of the original Razr, except that
⏹️ ▶️ John when you open it up, ta-da! OLED screen, a bendy OLED screen is inside there. And it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John one camera that is facing you when it’s closed and is facing away from you when it’s open, and it’s got a chin just like the Razr and the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole nine yards is even like a weird nostalgia mode where it will put on the screen like graphics that look like the
⏹️ ▶️ John old razor number pad and stuff above it and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if this is a good phone, but this is more or less exactly what I was talking about in terms of like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fun of making a phone that really does fold to be small and it’s fun to like flip open and close.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is as good and an attempt at that as I can possibly imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got the brand equity, it’s got the good feelings and nostalgia associated with it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John size and shape and form factor are nice in that they are very much like the thing that it is aping, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also are reasonable for a modern phone when it’s open. Like it’s not a ridiculous size
⏹️ ▶️ John and shape phone, it’s not really skinny or really broad or whatever. The chin is a little weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this phone intrigues me. Obviously the folding part is the most difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John part and you still have the problems of the screen dies because of the folding and if If you look at the hinge, it’s very similar to the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So I’m not sure if this is going to stand up to heavy use or how delicate it’s going to be or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And whether the sort of the usefulness of being able to make it that small makes that much
⏹️ ▶️ John of a difference. The biggest enemy of this phone is probably the degree to which
⏹️ ▶️ John our world and society has accommodated phones. I know on
⏹️ ▶️ John women’s clothing, there continues to be a very terrible lack of reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John size pockets. But in general, I think the trend in clothing for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John is for the pockets to either a start existing on women’s clothing if you’re lucky and be
⏹️ ▶️ John be big enough to accommodate a smartphone because we all do
⏹️ ▶️ John have smartphones. And if we buy a piece of clothing and find that our smartphones don’t fit in any of the pockets,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will not have good feelings about that piece of clothing. So maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ John the time of this phone is actually already passed and we don’t even get that small, but maybe it will appeal to people who
⏹️ ▶️ John still think phones are too large and awkward in their pockets. So I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John this was this is this to me. This is the most interesting folding phone that I’ve seen. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to buy one, but I want other people to buy them and see if they like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s actually what anybody wants. Like it’s a cool nostalgia thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think you’re really solving a problem that people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by having the phone fold and get really thick.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Razr isn’t that thick. That’s what I like about it is that it is like the whole thing with the Razr is look can you believe how thin this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is and this foldy one is also thinner than you would expect a folding
⏹️ ▶️ John phone to be. It’s not thin, right? It’s still thick, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t know. Like do people really need their phone to get shorter just in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one dimension but twice as thick? Like I don’t it doesn’t seem like that’s the the right dimension
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be folding on. Not to mention, of course, I don’t think for a second this is gonna work. Like, I don’t think for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gonna be durable. And the hinge, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think we’re nowhere near the point where anybody has solved that. So the fact, like, so I don’t think for a moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going to last more than like three flips before you have a bubble on your screen or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even assuming that it did, I don’t think this is solving a problem people really have today.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know people do have problems with phones in pockets. Because I do. have like there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ John pants that I wear that the phone fits okay in one pocket but if it’s in another pocket I can’t sit down because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m afraid it’s gonna bend or like get damaged in some way right and and I have relatively big
⏹️ ▶️ John you know man pockets right women’s clothing that has either fake pockets or ridiculously small pockets
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe this is literally the only phone that will fit in one of those pockets because the problem is usually pocket depth and also
⏹️ ▶️ John like you know how much it stretches out anyway I don’t know like I don’t like I said I don’t I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a super pressing problem or more people would have been making smaller phones to begin with. And the trend is the opposite direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it could be that one of the reasons big phones became so popular is people
⏹️ ▶️ John find a place in their life for the big phone, whether they put it in their purse or they put it in their backpack or
⏹️ ▶️ John have an inside pocket on their coat or something. But I’m still intrigued by the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John because the sort of monoculture of all phones being basically the same size
⏹️ ▶️ John and shape and us trying to accommodate them, I do find it a little awkward because there’s really no good place
⏹️ ▶️ John for an item that large in any of the typical pants pockets that people
⏹️ ▶️ John might have. And so it ends up going in a bag or something like that. And I don’t know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem I kind of sort of have. So that’s why I’m not entirely willing to dismiss it. But I think you’re right about the durability
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is the first attempt at this and I’m sure it’s gonna be a little wonky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see. I also, I just think it’s, I think the fold state is too thick. I don’t think people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually going to want that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe. I was trying to look for what the measurements are. It doesn’t look to me as thick as the Galaxy Fold.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m comparing it to in my mind. I’m comparing it to other folding phones. And it also doesn’t look so thick that I think you would stretch out
⏹️ ▶️ John your pocket uncomfortably. And it’s like, well, it fits fine depth-wise, but it’s so thick. And of course, I say this as someone
⏹️ ▶️ John with a giant wallet, so maybe I’m not the best judge. Bye. We’ll see you next time.
Casey’s problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That wallet is gigantic. All right, let’s finish up, follow up, hopefully.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let’s talk about my Catalina problems. So if you recall, I got my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac back like a month ago and then pretty much immediately put Catalina on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I’d gotten back from Disney World, which is just briefly after. And shortly after putting Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it, I started knowing this was an upgrade from Mojave. I started noticing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my trackpad, which is my primary pointing device these days, would occasionally just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignore my input and it would ignore clicks and eventually those clicks would find their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to the trackpad and it would be like a machine gun. It would fire all these clicks, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, all basically at once. And I asked, you know, are people seeing this or is it just me and am I crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh my goodness, apparently I am very not crazy, or at least not for this reason anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a lot of people reached out via Twitter and said, oh yes, not only are they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having latency issues with their Apple mice, but a handful of people actually said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that other brands, especially Logitech Bluetooth mice were having latency problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then one person, Will Bishop on Twitter, wrote in to say that he has had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the machine gun issue on his MacBook Pro’s touchpad, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply alarming. So I don’t know what’s going on here. I still maintain that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like it’s a software problem based on no facts and just gut feeling, but I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what to do about this and it’s really, really bothering me. And it’s bothering me to the point that I really am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to feel like this iMac is now cursed and I’m thinking about replacing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. And so to move out of follow-up and perhaps into a new topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me again why I don’t just want to get a 16-inch MacBook Pro and just hook up a monitor to it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just be done? This way, I will always have my one and only computer with me all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never have to worry about going back and forth, although truth be told, I don’t typically have a problem with that, but still, it’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice to have everything right there with me all the time. Uh, the only real problem I have with this and the ACE in the hole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’ll get you guys to convince me to stick with an iMac is I don’t have a good answer for Plex. I was casting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around on Twitter to ask, Oh, can I just get raspberry pie and put Plex on that and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that serve, you know, my, my media to me. And people said, yes, as long as you’re direct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing, that is to say you don’t have to change the format of anything that it’s playing, because if you have to transcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and change the format of what’s being played on the fly, the Raspberry Pi will fall on its face.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’ve been looking into some other alternatives, including the, what is it, the NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like that? I think it’s- Oh, yeah, don’t do that, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no. Well, I’m exploring options. But in summary, and let me start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with John. John, why don’t I want a laptop again? because I feel like right now a 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop with a monitor may not be too bad. So talk me off the ledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Laptops are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not sufficient. I don’t have those
⏹️ ▶️ John They make all sorts of noise. They get hot. Just imagine using your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John but having to constantly hear some tiny little fan screaming. Yes, you can attach a bigger screen, but then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly plugging and unplugging it, and then you just end up using the smaller screen, which is not as good. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with pointing devices, then you’ve got these Bluetooth devices that you constantly have to repair
⏹️ ▶️ John or make sure are properly connected. A desktop is the right solution for a fixture
⏹️ ▶️ John in your house where you’re gonna do things on a big screen and for things that you want to run all the time, like Plex. Like a desktop is the right
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. Now, your current desktop may be flaky, but the solution is not, I don’t need a desktop anymore. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John say, if your BMW’s engine exploded
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and you decided to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a Jeep. That’s what you’re thinking of here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. You may be upset with
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW, but it’s like, does that mean what you want instead is a totally different kind of car
⏹️ ▶️ John that is nothing like the one you had before and that will solve all your problems. That said, I don’t think you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a laptop. I just think you should have a laptop and also have a desktop. And if your current desktop is flaky
⏹️ ▶️ John or dying, I also think it’s probably still software related, but anyway, get another
⏹️ ▶️ John better, newer desktop and let that be your desktop and then also have a laptop and there’ll be peace in your kingdom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, in a perfect world, I would just, where money doesn’t matter, I would just buy an iMac Pro and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy the 14-inch that doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need an iMac Pro. You just wait for the next regular iMac revision where they make it better, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then just buy that one and have your new laptop with a good keyboard and everything will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi, Cass. I mean, I don’t know. I just, I feel like I could just solve everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one shot. I could just solve everything right now and just get the obscenely large 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then get a monitor, and then all my problems are solved and so I want to watch anything on Flex, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you’d have like this big, don’t you remember what that was like? You got a desk full of cables, you got a docking station,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a Thunderbolt docking station or a USB one, and sometimes it’s flaky and you plug your monitor in. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John living that life right now. I have a 15 inch laptop that I plug into a monitor and
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard and a mouse, and it’s not great. Like I would prefer to have a desktop and a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John because sometimes you need laptops to carry your computer around. But when I go to my desk, I hate having to plug the thing back in. It kernel panicked
⏹️ ▶️ John twice this week so far unplugging it, because I had the temerity to unplug it from my docking station while the lid was closed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I open it back up again, the thing is booting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sometimes it’s booting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes I get to see the cool multi-language kernel panic thing. Like, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a good experience. It’s not as reliable, your computer aside, as a desktop, where the monitor is always attached.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the keyboard and the mouse don’t go anywhere. They’re always right there. I’m a huge desktop fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they are good things. And it’s sad that your desktop is haunted, as we discussed last week. but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t recommend that you go all laptop. I recommend that you get a desktop and a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do wanna say that I wanna hear Marcos two cents about this, but- You will. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I will, but I don’t know, like maybe, I think the biggest problem I have is, my current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking is, I’ll get an iMac Pro and I’ll get like a 13 or 14 inch MacBook Pro, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John way more than I want. Stop getting
⏹️ ▶️ John dime-sized NICs repaired on your-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I didn’t pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. You can just take that money. It’s good for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s exchangeable for goods and services.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, yes. It’s too late, but I do take your point. And, you know, I think the ace in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hole, which I think I’m probably taking Marco’s line here, is, you know, this is for my work. And I don’t mean that in the ha-ha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny way. Like, legitimately, this is for my work. And so if I’m going to spare no expense, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reference, John, on anything, I should I should probably be sparing no expense on my computer or computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless, it just kills me to think of, you know, my current thinking of a 5,000 plus dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro and then like a two to $3,000 MacBook Pro. Don’t get an iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John What makes you think you need an iMac Pro? You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t. And that’s where I was going with this is, as much as I want an iMac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I really need an iMac Pro? I probably don’t. And if I don’t, then I can save myself some decent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. I would have said, I haven’t looked into this, but I would assume I can save some money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I would still recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for the next revision because the 5k Mac is fan is louder and shoutier and
⏹️ ▶️ John not as nice inside as that macro. So like, presumably there’s a revision coming to the plain old iMac eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that one, hopefully we’ll learn many of the lessons of the iMac pro but still not be as expensive. So you might want to wait for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if I get a Mac mini john? Is that okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because then you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, that would solve your plex
⏹️ ▶️ John But you still don’t have like the the desktop, the place in your house where you can sit down or your computer is always
⏹️ ▶️ John already there and already configured for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you to be using it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also happens to be on all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And for the record, I don’t want to buy a Mac mini for Plex purposes because it’s just a tremendous amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John only Plex. Now, to be fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use Plex all the time. Like if there was anything I was going to spend money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, it would be making my Plex life happy. But hundreds and hundreds of dollars for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac mini just to run a Plex server seems stupid. All right, Marco, you’ve been very patient. I appreciate it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve all my problems for me by spending my money. This is your favorite thing in the world to do. Now is your moment. Spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my money, please.”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m torn, honestly. I totally get your dilemma here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you first posed this question, the answer I was drafting in my head was, just get the 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just go all out. Because you’re right, it would solve a bunch of problems. It would create a few more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some. I also ran through in my head,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get a Mac mini. It doesn’t even have to be a modern one, it could be an old one. Just get a Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your Plex needs and then that frees up your laptop for everything else. And I was thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do often talk about getting work done while mobile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You talk about getting work done in the car when Aaron’s driving on a longish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip. You talk about bringing your laptop to grocery stores to work, I guess, in the produce section, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You talk about going to the library with your laptop. You talk frequently about taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your laptop out and actually doing development work on it. So you’re doing significant work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a laptop frequently. So a decent to good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop has to be part of your setup. So that’s a given. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have a good laptop of some sort. The way you talk about working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the car concerns me for a 15 or 16 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Could you, in the way that you frequently work in the car, would a 16 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to fit in your lap and open up fully?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think so. I think I’m also overblowing car work. It’s not that often that that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just so happens I was in the middle of doing something when we needed to go somewhere, so I was like, oh, screw it. I’ll just bring my laptop with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and do it in the car. I don’t think you’re overblowing grocery store, which by the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the little cafe area in the grocery store, but I don’t think you’re overblowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco grocery store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not just like sitting by the pile of avocados?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no. I don’t live in California. So you’re not overblowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grocery store or library work because I would say one to two days a week, pretty consistently and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally more, I will go to a grocery store or library or even a Starbucks or something like that and get work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. So I 100%, 100% agree with you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a decent and or certainly better than what I’ve got laptop needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the mix. And unfortunately, the one I think I want is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 13 inch or 14 inch MacBook Pro that has the new keyboard. I really feel like that will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tick the most boxes in the laptop side of the world. Now I also agree with John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think this is where you’re about to go, Marco, that I I do actually really like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMac. I really, really do. It just, it seems like it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey redundant if I’m going to be getting a very new and very fancy MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel like I can justify it as not entirely redundant if I’m willing to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 13 slash 14. I don’t know how willing I am to feel it’s redundant if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get a 16 tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the thing. So, John is right. Using a laptop as a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a number of ways in which it sucks. And I do think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should at least no longer have your current desktop. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, having an iMac is a great thing. Having your iMac might not be a great thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you might want to revisit that at least. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least that being said, your current iMac in a, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, relatively decommissioned state where you just keep it in the corner somewhere with the screen off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do everything a Mac Mini could do. Plex-wise and everything else, it’s probably reliable enough for that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually that’s such an obvious answer that I have to be honest, I didn’t even consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, you know, I could just leave this as a server in a closet or something. It’s a very large, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unwieldy server, but it could serve that purpose if I really wanted it to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who’s gonna buy it after we’ve been talking about it? Like, this is- Right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John put a sign on it that says, not haunted.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you do kind of have a Mac mini already, in the sense that you can just use your old iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that role, as long as it continues to work well enough for that, which is probably a pretty long time. I think what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have to decide is how great do you want your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop to be? How big do you want your laptop to be? That’s really it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want a really nice, fast, big screen laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the times that you do work on it, like if the 16 inch size works for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a pretty strong argument to just get the 16 inch tomorrow and be done with this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have it and don’t have a desktop and maybe get the LG monitor at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future to have that be your desktop setup, but are you working a lot at your desk? It sounds like you are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, yeah. I mean, I would say, again, three or four days a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m at my desk, and one to two, very occasionally three days a week I’ll be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work somewhere else. So if I were to optimize for anything, I should optimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it sounds like really the best combo for you is probably some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of iMac and a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what I think as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Yeah, and the fact that you can’t get the one with the keyboard that’s any good for probably another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months or so, you’re just gonna have to wait, I guess. Or, compromise on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and get the damn 16 and spend a little more than what you wanna spend. Although, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you spec up a 13, it isn’t that much cheaper. Honestly, like if you spec up a 13, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do this on the current pricing today, because you can be pretty sure the new one’s not gonna be cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you can go and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, except if I want like a one terabyte hard drive, that could be cheaper in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it is in the 16 now, right? Because they doubled all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSDs like you said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, okay, so here, let me see. So 2.4 quad core, you’re not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low CPU, you’re getting the good CPU. You’re getting, let’s see, so even if I just leave the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same, 16 gigs of RAM, they come with 256, you said you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabyte? I mean, my adorable is a half terabyte and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. So if this wasn’t serving as an all the time computer, then it would probably be okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so let’s assume they double this to 512 as well, which I don’t think is a safe assumption, but let’s assume that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then just to go to 16 gigs of RAM, you’re looking at $2,000 for the 13X today. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming that you don’t want the fast CPU or the terabyte hard drive, SSD, excuse me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you went to the 16 for 400 bucks more, you would get the bigger screen, the better speakers, the much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery, 50% more CPU cores, and you could have it today. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you could have it right now. You could have that extra six months of working with it. So, those all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have value. So you have to decide, like, if you’re gonna be spending something like $2,000 on a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway in six months, would you rather spend $2,400 and have it today and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be better in a few ways? Admittedly bigger and heavier, but better in some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big ways. As I mentioned, that glorious screen space, like that’s a pretty compelling option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just say screw it and do it now. Because this is part of your work. Again, it’d be different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were on a super budget crunch and you weren’t doing like professional paid computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, like that would be different. That isn’t your situation. So if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were you, well I did just go and buy one. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would strongly consider just getting the damn 16 inch today because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 14 or 13 that you want doesn’t exist today, won’t exist for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably half a year, and in the meantime, you could be using this. The price difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think is huge. The portability difference is significant, but that’s up to you whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that matters or not. I will say, when I was packing up my 13, and when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was closing it down, packing it up for, I sold it to somebody, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed that size. being a 16X user now for a week, man, that is a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. And in the future, I might go back to it. But I’m super happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I type on the 16, I’m super happy that today I chose this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will gladly spend $2,700 to use this for the next six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of a butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also wonder, you know, a couple of things I haven’t considered is it’s not like my Adorable necessarily just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey die in a puff of smoke. I mean, it will still be around if I really need the portability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that much. You could use that as your Plex
⏹️ ▶️ John long as the keys continue to work
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on it. Hey, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need the keys, it’s just your Plex server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I don’t think it would be quick enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know you were joking about it. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very powerful CPU for transcode. Exactly. I mean, I would like to give this one to Erin, but it’s not like she’s urgently in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John new computer. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants a computer with a broken keyboard? I’m sure she would love that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than one that’s been underwater four times. But be that as it may, I don’t know. I also wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if maybe the right answer is I get the 16 and maybe don’t get it as baller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I would have if it was my only computer. Yeah, get the base model. You know, either get the base model. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really struggling with the idea of 16 gigs of RAM, but we can argue about that another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But either way…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using it on my laptop for the last year and a half and all time before that until it was eight gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been fine. If you were going to go all out and make this your your primary computer, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing all your Swift stuff, and all that, then maybe I’d go with 32.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re going to commit to the plan of having a laptop and a desktop, don’t spec up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop too high and don’t make it too expensive. I think the base model, $2,400, or the slightly up $2,700 one that I got,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think are really good buys for what you get. And if you keep it relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable, I think that’s the way to go. Because the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it sounds like, again, the right solution for you is probably a laptop and a desktop. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question is whether you buy a laptop that’s a bit more than what you need now, or whether you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ideal theoretical one probably six months from now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also wonder if I could pull a Marco, and which I, oh God, help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, because I’ve made so much fun of you for this, but could I get the 16 now, and understand I’m gonna take a little bit of a bath on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but resell it in six months when the 13 comes out. because if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it nicely, if I keep it well. Don’t spill too much water in it. Don’t spill too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much water in it. By the way, Black Friday’s in like a week.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s true. See, Casey, you know this intellectually, but I think it’s my place to remind you of it once again.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it becomes top of mind. You are in a situation where you come on this podcast with the two of us and you
⏹️ ▶️ John ask us for advice about what you should buy. You should be immediately suspect of any advice
⏹️ ▶️ John that Margo gives that compels you to buy something immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you should
⏹️ ▶️ John be suspect of any advice that I give that tells you to wait. Honestly, what position are we in?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who is always like,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s always going to say buy it immediately. He always buys it. And I’m waiting 10 years to buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. So really, all of our advice is so massively
⏹️ ▶️ John polluted by our sort of respective positions on these strange different strategies.
⏹️ ▶️ John yet, it doesn’t mean either one of us is particularly wrong. So I don’t understand how you can even take any
⏹️ ▶️ John of our advice. You have to add so much salt to all of it. It’s like, oh, great. Marco’s telling me I should buy immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks I should wait. No way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re so right. So out of curiosity, Marco, you don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you were to just stick your thumb in the wind, how much do you think you could resell your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exact computer for, which you paid roughly $2,800 for? How much do you think you’d resell that for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around WWDC this upcoming year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe $1800 to $1500 at the worst. Alright, so you’re saying it would be about $1000 to lease
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop for 6 months. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you generally figure like, you know, if you’re going to resell something like that and if you’re going to do it through, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively reasonable channels, you’re going to probably lose 30 to 50% basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, but you don’t, like if you spec up with certain options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get less of that back on resale than like the base price. Upgrades shrink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down way faster in their value. So that’s yet another reason to stick with one of the lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models and not super spec it up too much. Because like right now, if you were to go boost up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to eight terabytes for, I believe it’s $2,600, something like that, which honestly is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad price for what it is, and you were to resell that in six months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t get $2,800 back for that eight terabytes. You would get very little of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade increment back. So again, stick to the lower ones. This is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is not a bad idea. This is not unheard of. People do this all the time. It’s fine. Like, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally buy a 16-inch now and sell it in June
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have lost maybe 800 bucks or something, like something in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ballpark. Which again, is not a small amount of money, but you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be getting value out of this that is directly related to your work. You don’t have to do this, you can keep working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your Adorable and your broken iMac until the springtime or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hope that a 13 inch comes out that is what you want, but that will then only solve your laptop problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will still have a desktop problem. It’s like only one of these problems is being, you know, delayed here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, your desktop problem, I don’t think you’re going to have a quick solution on because I don’t think anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else is likely to be released this year. And they don’t tend to update IMAX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on such a short schedule. They just updated the non pro ones. Uh, what was that about? Four or four months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago or so, three or four months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. Like you’re not, you’re not on a super, you know, soon schedule for the regular iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iMac pro seems to be, you know, Intel related, who knows when the next Xeons are out for it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then who knows how long Apple will take to update to them, if ever. Those are two giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions that I don’t think we have any idea what the answers are yet. So, your desktop question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not gonna be solved by a new product release in the near future, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all likelihood. So, I would honestly strongly consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previously considered option for the desktop, which is the ReFurb iMac Pro, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still an Apple’s refurb store for $42.50. Not a bad computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that price. I, if I were to have to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new desktop today, that is still what I would buy. Even after the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro comes out, if I had to make a quick replacement, I think I would still even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy the iMac Pro in that scenario. It’s that good. And it’s that well suited to my needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think you would appreciate it too because as much as you say, well, I don’t need a desktop, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a super pro iMac pro desktop, you do like a good desktop. The iMac pro is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good desktop and you do like your FFMPEG. You do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole lot of transcoding and a whole lot of Swift UI building and stuff like that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that really is hard on the CPUs. I wouldn’t say everyone I know needs an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro or would even benefit from one or would even notice the difference from a regular iMac to an iMac pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would. It would also be likely to work for a little while longer than your current one, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I still think for your desktop solution, I would still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly consider an iMac Pro if you’re gonna have a desktop. For your laptop, I think it’s a separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussion. I honestly do. It’s up to you whether you wanna buy a 16 now or wait for the 13 with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good keyboard, but you need it now, and you won’t take too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of a bath if you decide to buy it now and resell it later. So, yeah, it’s up to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. See, this is the problem with talking to you, because now I feel like I’m about to spend $7,000 on a new computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and then talk to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey John, you’ll spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing. Well, I appreciate the advice, guys. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to make a decision on something soon, because this is untenable the way it is. But, aye. you
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#askatp: Language ready for servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, that’s $5 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app from the App Store and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enter promo code ATP. Let dinner come to you with DoorDash. Thank you so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to DoorDash for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP and let’s start with Bastien Innoc who writes, today I learned Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Prime Video or parts of it is built with server-side Swift. question is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when is the language ready for server-side production in our respective opinions?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll start by answering this by quoting someone. I heard this on a podcast years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, and it seems so obvious in retrospect, as all great ideas do, but somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once said that you never want to be the biggest client of anything. You never want to be the biggest installation. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that. Yes, I know. I can never tell with you. This time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew. This time I knew. There are many times I do
⏹️ ▶️ John I was about to yell at you, but you were just, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. No, I was setting it up, John. You took it from me. You stole it from me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no, my faith in you is so shaken. How long am I going to let him
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey go through this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should be offended, but I don’t blame you at all. Anyway, so yeah, Marco, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember, I think it was on Build and Analyze that you had said, you never want to be the biggest client of anything. And I think that that was really astute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that that’s true. So as long as other people who are far, far bigger than you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are using whatever the particular technology or language or what have you that you’re looking at, then that’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the get out of jail free card, if you will, but that’s a really good litmus test to figure out is this really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working or not. And, you know, if you hear about, say, I don’t know, Twitter using, I don’t know, say, Ruby on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rails, and you hear about it, oh, I don’t know, say, failing constantly, maybe Ruby on Rails isn’t quite ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But since I’ve stolen your answer from you and parroted it back to you, Marco, do you have anything else you would like to add?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends on what your needs are? What are you trying to get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your server-side language? Are you using something that you’re mainly doing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you love new languages and you’re kind of a language nerd or you’re a Swift nerd, you want to use server-side Swift because you just like Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much and it’s more of like an experimental thing or an exploratory thing or a learner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new skills? In that case, do whatever you want. It doesn’t really matter. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that scales easily, I won’t use the word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scalable really because because scalable is not really a thing. It’s how easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something scales, basically. Lots of languages can scale well or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poorly, depending on the choices you make and the resources you have. It isn’t that certain languages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are scalable or not. It’s just that certain languages make that easier or harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a question of that, but for me, with server-side languages, My server-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code exists as a supporting role to what I really want to be doing. What I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to be doing is writing the app. And the last thing I want to be doing is messing around with my server stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like doing it, and I really don’t like the idea of… You know, because server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff kind of has its own schedule. It’s kind of its own beast. And so server stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can invent a need for attention at any time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could be asleep or on vacation, or you could be really busy with something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, and server stuff can say, Hey, hey, I just exploded, fix me. Like my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, and so for me, I want my server stuff to be as low needs, low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintenance, high reliability as possible. And for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of priorities, which again, may not be your priorities, but for that set of priorities where my server stuff is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like This kind of like supporting, you know low-profile task
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I just I don’t want my server stuff to be exciting I’m not looking to learn a bunch of new things with my server stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not looking for experimentation my server stuff I just want to do the most boring thing possible. So it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can stop thinking about it for that I would say server-side Swift is still too young.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s it’s changed too quickly. It’s too young and I would not use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet because again my priorities are not I love Swift so much and love new languages so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much they want to be cutting-edge like that’s that’s not me I want my server code to go away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically I want I want to write it and forget about it and and that’s mostly what I can do with the old boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff I use so again it depends on your priorities though but that those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are mine I would say that again the the not being the biggest user or something Very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very solidly good advice still. Because you want to use the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like Facebook and Wikipedia and like you want to use whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big sites use because it’s just easier for you. You have tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of resources available to you if you have any questions. You probably won’t have anything break. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably won’t be exceeding the capacity of anything. You know you’re not going to hit scaling limits in all likelihood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with whatever you’re doing if like Wikipedia is using the same thing and they aren’t hitting the scale limits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, so like there’s all sorts of benefits like that. Also, big companies tend to use stuff that’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old for all these reasons, right? Or because they themselves are old and they built their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure back when these languages were new or whatever. And that’s another huge advantage. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing something that’s old, it’ll be included in repositories for Linux package managers. It’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tons of stack overflow answers. Like it’ll just, the tools will be mature, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frameworks won’t be changing very often, the language won’t be changing very often. There’s huge advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all that. That if you really are writing server code to support something else you’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you don’t want to be spending 100% of your job doing the server code, pick the older boring stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift on the server is not that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Pauls All right, old man. Tell us what the real answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Paul Wiltz So I see questions like this. I always think that what they’re looking for is some kind of line that a language
⏹️ ▶️ John has to cross, or a litmus test to say this language is ready for server production.
⏹️ ▶️ John This ready is not. When is when is a language ready for server production? And there’s not there’s not actually one answer
⏹️ ▶️ John to that question, especially in this day and age of, you know, public cloud, scalable infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John and microservices and all the other things that are trends and, you know, whatever, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John are a fact of service side development life. In many cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could find yourself writing a service that’s a small service that does a particular thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and that certain languages are better suited to that particular thing than others.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the thing that you’re doing doesn’t need to be tremendously high traffic, if it does a simple task,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it can scale simply horizontally, if your main scaling problem is not the language but is
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact the data store or whatever, you may find yourself looking at a weird language,
⏹️ ▶️ John a language that’s not even used on the server too much. Hopefully you’re looking at it because it has some
⏹️ ▶️ John characteristic that makes the thing that this particular server is going to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John better, faster, easier, more efficient by some large amount. Not just like, oh I think it’s cooler
⏹️ ▶️ John and I want to try it or whatever. In cases like I’m describing actually do come up.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you say, well you know Facebook uses this so I should use it or Amazon uses this so I should use
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you’ll probably be fine, right? It’s not like you’ll you’ll have a big
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. But especially if you are a small business or a startup or a single person
⏹️ ▶️ John or somebody for whom money makes a difference and especially if you’re running stuff in a public cloud, which
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably are if you’re, you know, a small person using a
⏹️ ▶️ John language that can be 10 times more efficient in terms of you know, CPU time
⏹️ ▶️ John memory or whatever can save you actual money paying for your AWS bills or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you want to use go, or Erlang, or yes, even Swift, for
⏹️ ▶️ John your real production server does this one simple thing that you have a really good reason to use it for, it
⏹️ ▶️ John may actually be worth dealing with the immaturity, the lack of tools, lack of documentation, so on
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth, as long as it is actually feasible. So I feel like the only line is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it feasible to use this language, assuming all those other things I described are correct, like that you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John are picking the right language for the job. It has real measurable advantages, and it’s not just your random personal preference. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say if you’re a single person shop, your personal preference and skill may actually be one of the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ John factors because it’s like, well, this is the language I know the best, and so I’m going to write the best thing in it or whatever. I’ve seen this happen
⏹️ ▶️ John in real world scenarios, and it’s like if the organization is healthy, it is right
⏹️ ▶️ John to question this. Why is it that you think you need to use Haskell? And those answers need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John convincing. But if those answers are convincing, it’s usually not disqualifying
⏹️ ▶️ John if like, well, nobody actually uses that on the server and the tooling is terrible. That may be true, but it may still be the right language
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. So what Margo said is like the writ large, like, you know, if you’re going to just use this as
⏹️ ▶️ John like your blanket language or some big thing in a general scenario, that’s fine. But I have
⏹️ ▶️ John over the past, let’s say seven years become much more convinced that it actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John healthy and smart to actually suffer the slings and arrows of an immature language that
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote isn’t ready for production if you have a specific single purpose for it and like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said with small services these these days, you may find yourself in that scenario more often than you think.
#askatp: Total listening time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rene Ferguson writes, Hey Marco, do you have any way to track total listen time for an account in Overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just finished listening to ATP’s entire back catalog. My goodness, Rene, that must have been
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I agree. I’m not sorry. You’re doing it right, Rene. Good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so Rene would like to know, having finished the entire ATP back catalog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and with their previous podcasting habits, they’re curious to know how much of their life have How much time have they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent listening to podcasts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t tell you. I can tell you what Overcast saves on your, like on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco database table that saves like your episode progress, which is by far my biggest database table.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It saves on each episode that you’ve interacted with, it saves the current timestamp and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s been completed, but it doesn’t save how much time you spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to it. So like if you skip parts of it, I don’t actually save that information anywhere. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that, like on the database level. So all I know is I can tell you, and actually you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this for yourself if you go to the webpage, if you go to the account section, you can export OPML
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this kind of custom extended format that I implemented. So you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco export all your data. That is all the data I have. That’s it. I can tell you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of episodes you completed or you marked as played in some way with Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can’t tell you how much actual time you spent listening to them. Regardless, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your question of how much of your life have you spent listening to ATP is probably too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. But I appreciate it.
#askatp: Adobe & ARM Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I. And then Phil Tech, I think is how I’m supposed to pronounce this, writes, is it reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to assume that the release of these new Adobe iOS apps could be used as the basis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for native applications on ARM-based Macs? Yeah, we’re all waiting for that. You know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going to happen, isn’t it? I’m going to buy the 16 and I’m going to resell it for the 13. And then six months
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that, they’re going to come out with the ARM-based Macs. I’m going to be real upset. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Matz Joined the
⏹️ ▶️ John club. I’m going to be in that same boat, only I’m going to have a way more expensive computer without an ARM chip in it. it. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is true. But again, that’s all the more reason why, like, it’s okay to buy one now that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t spend a ton of money on, like that you don’t spec up like crazy by the fricking base model or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one right above it. And then you can still resell it for not that much money. And again, by the way, Black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Friday is coming up in a week and there’s probably going to be some kind of like, you know, get $100 or $200 off kind of deal. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t even tell which one of us is the devil on your shoulder
⏹️ ▶️ John You have two devils on your shoulders, and they’re just in different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outfits. I was thinking like the angel and the devil on the shoulder thing. I also, I couldn’t. But then which one is the angel? Neither of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I couldn’t make the analogy, because I couldn’t figure out which was which.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You’re both so mean. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear you. Anyway, John, is it reasonable to assume that these Adobe iOS apps could be used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the basis for native ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John apps? Thanks to the specific wording of this question, the answer is yes. It is reasonable to assume
⏹️ ▶️ John they could be used as the basis for a native app. absolutely could be and that is reasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they probably won’t be. So it’s not reasonable to predict that they will be. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is much more predictable that they will take the existing x86 applications and port them to
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM just the same way they ported them from 68k to Power PC to Intel, yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say there is probably somewhere, like some part of the effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Adobe to bring their like, you know, quote, real apps to iOS. Some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of that effort had to be removing any remaining assumptions in the code about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code architecture and instruction sets and byte ordering and stuff like that. Now, granted, again, you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the PowerPC transition happened, so like, they probably already went through a lot of that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could have still had some of that in there that was added maybe since the Intel transition for new types of features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or new engine modifications that were like custom optimized just for Intel, just for x86 whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if they have modernized a lot of that code or gotten rid of those assumptions for the arm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build of like the core code for various things, that would that would still help a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an arm tradition on the Mac as well. But I don’t really, I don’t think we really know enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the state of their code before and whether that kind of thing still had to be done to really say for sure whether whether it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has any relevance here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we know like the UI of the iOS ones is not the full UI. So as the right basis of I feel like it’s like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to start a project. It’s going to you’re going to start from the desktop app. Right. Of course, the whatever components that are at
⏹️ ▶️ John the core that they’re, you know, messing with or whatever, though, I imagine at this point, having done so many ports
⏹️ ▶️ John of different architectures, what they’re actually doing with the arm thing is finding the place for this platform, specific code and
⏹️ ▶️ John adding an arm implementation of it. Like, I really hope at this point, after two architecture transitions,
⏹️ ▶️ John there isn’t code lurking somewhere in the in the core of Photoshop engine
⏹️ ▶️ John that rely because what we rely on, like is someone accidentally re-added something that relies on PowerPC or
⏹️ ▶️ John relies on Intel. I really hope that’s not happening, but who knows. But anyway, as the basis of makes me say, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John where are you starting from? And I think they’re gonna start from the desktop version of those apps because there’s just so, the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John version is what’s gonna be on the desktop version of the ARM Macs too, right? It’s gonna be that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Fracture, and DoorDash, and we will see you next.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A-N-T-Marco-Armen S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to accidentally Tech
Politics are gross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re not going to talk about that terrible Trump in the Mac Pro factory thing, are we?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unless you want to. I don’t want to. And that’s all I want. I want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that we addressed this, but it’s gross and I don’t want to think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. All right. Well, by saying it’s gross, you’ve now addressed it. Good job.
Preparing the Way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concur. So I’m curious in the notes it says John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is preparing the way and I think this is a reference that I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey first time. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. I did not and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume this is a reference to the Rectif’s famous refrigerator episode which for anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has not heard it it is a masterpiece and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey should hear it. It is. Where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John is preparing for the delivery of a new refrigerator he has to prepare the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in his house of of, I guess, getting the older refrigerator out of the way and preparing the house to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the fridge enter through it. So John, it says you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preparing the way. Am I to assume that you are preparing the way in your office for the new Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised Casey didn’t get that because we’ve actually talked about, we talked about this in a past episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that was going to happen. It’s happening. It is now happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit of yak shaving involved in that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m starting to sort of stage my purchases, right? You don’t wanna wait until last minute. You don’t wanna wait until any day, any
⏹️ ▶️ John day once December starts. The order form could be up and then the process begins in me trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out, but who knows? I didn’t wanna have the Mac Pro arrive and not have the way prepared.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to, as I said, I need to, this is the time to reconsider all
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that are connected on above and under my desk because everything must go
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new thing is coming in. Does anything stay? Do I keep any component of my old system? If not, what do
⏹️ ▶️ John I replace it with? And there’s a lot of components besides the computer and the monitor. You’ve got the mouse, the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the power accessories, the little power strip things, the UPS, the various tables
⏹️ ▶️ John and chairs. What about the whole desk? Maybe I need a whole desk. I joked about, I need to get a new house
⏹️ ▶️ John for my Ferrari or whatever, but this is the time to consider it. This setup has been here since I moved into this
⏹️ ▶️ John house like 18 years ago or whatever. If I’m gonna reconsider something, now’s the time to reconsider it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m also, by the way, part of this reconsideration. I don’t think I mentioned this on a past show or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a really long time ago. My Mac Pro was sitting on the floor right now to my left, as you
⏹️ ▶️ John do with a tower computer. For a long time, my Macs were always on my desk. Even when I
⏹️ ▶️ John had tower Macs, I had one of those fairly awful, what model was it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it a Quadra? It was one of those quadras that wasn’t really a quadra, I think, or maybe it was, maybe it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John a Performa, that I thought there was a Q in the name. Anyway, I can’t remember, but it was a tower and it was on my
⏹️ ▶️ John desk, because that’s where my computers had always been. Like it used to be the monitor was built into the computer. So of course it would be in your desk
⏹️ ▶️ John and even, you know. Anyway, when I got my Blumewhite G3, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John on my desk to the left of my monitor. Apple would display it that way. When they showed like the advertising stuff, they would show
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the Blumewhite G3 next to the weird monitor that matches it and they’d be right next to each other. like they’re both
⏹️ ▶️ John on your desk. Let’s see what else I have on my desk. I think when I got my
⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G5, which looked very much like the cheese grater but had different boards and stuff on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried putting that on my desk. I was like, no. It was just too, the power supply was squeaky,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fans were too noisy, and it was just monstrous. Like it was bigger than the blue
⏹️ ▶️ John and white G3 that it replaced, right? And since then, my computers have been on the floor. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the floor is a dangerous place for a computer. Lots of things happen on the floor. Children are on
⏹️ ▶️ John the floor, things roll around on the floor, the chair is on the floor, vacuum cleaners
⏹️ ▶️ John are on the floor. Lots of things potentially whizzing by, near or towards
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer. My Mac Pro, as I think I’ve mentioned at
⏹️ ▶️ John least once before, has a big, shiny kind of chip taken out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of the side case that extends past the front, right? That little piece right there. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John shiny because it’s like anodized aluminum, but it’s been dented and sort of like messed up in such a
⏹️ ▶️ John way that now it’s like the shiny aluminum is shining through. Pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a vacuum cleaner strike. Or a meteor strike
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. It’s upsetting. The prospect of my umpteen bazillion
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar shiny new Mac Pro with special machined weird holes that
⏹️ ▶️ John make people grossed out on it, Getting dinged by a vacuum cleaner bothers me. So part
⏹️ ▶️ John of preparing the way is I was thinking, where is this new computer gonna go? Is it gonna go on the floor,
⏹️ ▶️ John right where my old computer is? Maybe if it had wheels, I was thinking the wheels, I could like wheel it out of the way
⏹️ ▶️ John better when the vacuum comes along or something. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. So I don’t think I’m gonna put it on my desk because it’s still pretty big. I was looking at the measurements. It’s not as big as the cheese
⏹️ ▶️ John grater, but it’s still pretty big. So I probably don’t want that on my desk, although it really does depend on the fan noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John To the left of my desk, since I moved in here, has been a tray table.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tray tables that we got when we were married, because I guess you need tray tables, and they’re already useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s been there because it was like a little table that fit, like my desk doesn’t extend all the way from like the bookcase
⏹️ ▶️ John on one side to the wall, and the other is a little space, and it’s just big enough for the tray table. And I put it there when we
⏹️ ▶️ John moved in, mostly on a whim. The UPS is below the tray table.
⏹️ ▶️ John On top of the tray table is like my headphones, and like one of my camera bags and some spare cables
⏹️ ▶️ John and various other things are on. And it’s useful. It’s useful to have a little bit extended desk space.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is lower than my desk, which is also nice because you can kind of pile stuff there and the piles don’t extend up over the desk
⏹️ ▶️ John area. What I was thinking is, well, I gotta get rid of that tray table because I feel like it’s not the right tool for that job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also I’m looking at new UPSs and I don’t think any of the new UPSs I want will fit under the tray
⏹️ ▶️ John table. So I probably need a new table there. But once I get a new table, Could I put the tower computer
⏹️ ▶️ John on that table? And if I put it on that table, could I get a lower table so the tower isn’t like towering
⏹️ ▶️ John over me but also isn’t on the floor? So that’s what I’m considering. So as we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting here now, to my left is a new table that’s not a tray table. It’s like a piece of furniture
⏹️ ▶️ John that more or less matches my desk that does not fold, right? With sturdy,
⏹️ ▶️ John four sturdy legs, like it’s not, it’s stable. It is a viable platform
⏹️ ▶️ John for the new Mac Pro, according to the measurements on Apple’s website. So I could, and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit lower than the old one was, so I could put my Mac Pro there, keeping it out of the way. More importantly, this
⏹️ ▶️ John one has enough room for the very large UPS I just bought, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John much larger than the one that it is replacing. I bought a UPS that has fans in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John fearing whether, you know, is this gonna be a problem or whatever, but I bought it saying, look, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy it, this is preparing the way. Order it now. Buy it. Do all the research. I’ve done all the research and looked at
⏹️ ▶️ John all the videos for all the stuff. The stuff that is in my house now, I’ve been researching for
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know, a month. At my leisure, right? Finally got to the ordering point.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I got the UPS. I set it up. I plugged it in. Dead silent. Or my ears
⏹️ ▶️ John are terrible. Either way, I’m happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think usually, don’t the fans usually only run when it’s running on battery? Because I think they’re blowing on the inverter or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. Yep, that’s usually the case, but it’s not actually true that they only ever
⏹️ ▶️ John run when it’s on battery. They run when it needs them to run, like they’re temperature sensitive. And as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John as you go on battery, yes, of course, they kick on, but it’s also possible, depending on the model, for them to be running when you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John on battery. If they are running when it’s not on battery, I can’t hear them. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John router that you sent me. That has fans in it that are running all the time, I literally can’t hear them. So one of the few joys
⏹️ ▶️ John of aging, I cannot hear these fans. Nice. That passed my test. This is a,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it? It’s a 910 watt maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John UPS, which is vastly more capable than the one it’s replacing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to do, as I always do, like the watt calculation for like worst case scenario, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Display XDR, plus the Mac, and try to figure out, and then plus my speakers and
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell else I might have plugged in over here. And how much would that draw? And I just, it’s just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? Just buy the biggest one. it. So I’ve got that. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of my various surge protectors and power strips are things that I don’t have on a UPS, like my speakers and stuff, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t need to be on a UPS. And in fact, it probably shouldn’t be, because those things tend not
⏹️ ▶️ John to behave well on the simulated sine wave that the crappy UPS has put out. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John mine is a fancy sine wave one, so it’s nicer. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need all new power strips. I need all new little cables that adapt from the weird position
⏹️ ▶️ John that the UPS power things are pointing out to have the cables go in the right direction so I can
⏹️ ▶️ John plug all of the things in. And then there’s stuff back there that I don’t even know about. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John some cases full of optical media. Remember that? I have like folio
⏹️ ▶️ John cases of optical media. When I used to back up on optical media and I still keep it around down here because occasionally I need to pull something
⏹️ ▶️ John from like a really old disc and I have this big catalog of where they are. All this stuff is open for reconsideration. Luckily,
⏹️ ▶️ John the chair situation is handled. We covered that on the show already. Mouse and keyboard are still
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue, and I’m still researching. Keyboard, worst case, I just keep using my current one mouse. I really think I do need
⏹️ ▶️ John a new one. We mentioned that before. But I just wanted to let everyone know that this process has begun.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t want to tell you how much money I’ve spent already preparing the way, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John also going to say that I’m not going to count it in the calculation
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey system costs you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here we go. The reason I’m not going to count it look, every 18 years is okay to reconsider the furniture and
⏹️ ▶️ John part of your house. I think that is a reasonable thing to do. And this this same furniture has been I already reconsidered
⏹️ ▶️ John my chair and I’m not counting that as part of it. So anything I do in terms of like, oh, you bought new
⏹️ ▶️ John cable extender thingies, you bought a new ups like this is things that had to happen anyway. I bought a new ups
⏹️ ▶️ John for my old Mac Pro, at least twice. And I didn’t count that towards the price of the computer. So I’m not counting this towards the
⏹️ ▶️ John final calculation. But it is also a non trivial amount of money that I spent on stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s awesome. It is. I’m more, I’m very excited about this new ups because for
⏹️ ▶️ John all for many years, something
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no one’s ever said.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco For many years, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, I look at the fancy ups and I’d be like, yeah, but they all have fans and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so big. Like, do I want something like that big? I’m like, I can probably get away with a cheap ups. So as I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John in past shows, I have a massively undersized ups where if the power goes out, I have to,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said, panic shut down like, Oh my God, powers out because there is no time like this. This
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is can barely keep my Mac Pro running when it’s like not particularly stressed. My Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and my monitor are way beyond the potential power capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John of this UPS. And I always wanted a more powerful one, but they’re expensive, and they’re big, and they had fans, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John was afraid of them. And so I finally overcame my fear as part of the you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you buy a car and you somehow find it palatable to pay an extra $500 for some
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid option because the whole damn car is so expensive, like that whole relative price anchoring thing. That is totally
⏹️ ▶️ John happening with the Mac Pro. And I’m like, Well, if ever there was a time to consider buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a very expensive UPS is that honestly, it wasn’t it wasn’t that expensive, like the cheaper ones. It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t even twice the price of the cheaper ones. I figure this is money well spent. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the sine wave thing and did all the research on that and and everything, I was like, I don’t really need it, I’m not running audio equipment off
⏹️ ▶️ John of it or a CPAP or whatever, like, don’t really need it, but doesn’t hurt and it’s kinda cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John That actually took the most research. The two things that took the most research were the UPS and then
⏹️ ▶️ John the little dongle-y cable things that you use to basically
⏹️ ▶️ John redirect an outlet that’s awkwardly placed or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and the PowerStrip thingies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like pigtails, the PowerStrips, PowerStrip is the worst. That’s the one thing that I got, PowerStrip just arrived today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just a plain old PowerStrip that I’m gonna plug my speakers into and other stuff that doesn’t need to be on the UPS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trying to find a good quality one or whatever. And I needed ones where the plugs are rotated 90 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John to the strip. And I found one on Amazon. I ordered it, take it out of the box. The plugs are not rotated 90
⏹️ ▶️ John degrees. What? They’re the other direction. Right, so
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at any PowerStrip, just go to Amazon type PowerStrip. All of the ports are vertical. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the three prongs it has, two and then one on the bottom, and then two and then one on the bottom, like right down the strip, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I found one where they rotate 90 degrees and I bought it. Picture on the site just lies, it’s just wrong. It’s from the same
⏹️ ▶️ John company, it is the same color, it is the same size, it is the same shape, but all the ports are just rotated. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it was cheap, it was like, you know, it’s just a power strip or whatever. So I was gonna, I’m like, oh, I gotta return this. But it’s like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what? You could always use a new power strip. Like this is the thing we’ve talked about before, surge strips, like they do wear out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you have one in your house that’s been there for 18 years, you should probably just replace it anyway. So what I’m gonna do with this one that’s wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John is I’m going to replace it, but I did try to contact Amazon and say, just so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the graphic on the page for this item is wrong. That’s not what you’re shipping. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it at all. There is a model like that, but that’s not what you’re shipping. So I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to find the place where you do that. I just wanted to do it with like web chat. I didn’t want to call anybody. Oh, forget it. Because what
⏹️ ▶️ John I was, yeah. So I found a web chat thing, and it’s this weird, you know, automated system where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not talking to a human yet. Not only am I not talking to a human yet, I’m not not not
⏹️ ▶️ John licking toads. We’re not talking to a human yet, but I can’t type anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only choices I have at the bottom of the little window are bubbles with pre-selected
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons. What? Right? And so the first one is, would you like to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about an order? Like, you know, about a return? Like there’s a bunch of options. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone tree, but they’re presented as text bubbles. So when you click one, it goes into the chat window as if you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John said that, but you didn’t. You’re just picking buttons. It is a phone tree in graphical form. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I go through that, and I get to the point where I’m saying it’s about an order. Even their bots don’t want to talk to you. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had some good aspects, because when I go through the thing, it’s like, yeah, because this is like a new low of just some poor
⏹️ ▶️ John person in a call center doing 20 chats at once, like giving you 1 800th of their attention, right? But at least
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a real human. This is a phone tree, right? The only good thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, it’s about an order, it said, okay, what order? And it presented me with a graphical list of my
⏹️ ▶️ John recent orders. I’m like, this is so much easier than me copying and pasting the order ID, which I had already done, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just clicked on the item. I clicked on the specific item within the order. So now they know exactly what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to like send them the URL or anything like that or whatever. And then I get to the point where it’s like, do you want to return
⏹️ ▶️ John this or get a refund? And I didn’t, I didn’t want to return it. I didn’t want a refund. I just wanted to tell them, you have the wrong picture for this
⏹️ ▶️ John listing. And eventually I get to the point and says, all right, what’s your problem? type
⏹️ ▶️ John your problem here and I type up my thing. You know, it’s like two or three sentences about the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John and I send it and it says, okay, so now do you want to refund or to return it? And no, I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I pick the no option and it’s like, well, this interaction is done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. Yeah. See, have you, have you returned stuff to Amazon ever? Oh yeah, all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time because I, I think if you did, you would probably know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the, that it sounds like it was literally just taking it through the return flow because it asks you as like one of the return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options is why you’re returning it and it’ll give you the option of like the website description was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inaccurate. And I think that is the, that’s what you are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John reporting. It did give me that option. I did the bubble that said item was not as described or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the one I picked. And then it let me type freeform text to say what the specific problem was. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John it wants me to say, okay, now we’re going to give you a refund. And it says, but it had an option. It’s like, do you want to do a refund? Do you not? And I said
⏹️ ▶️ John not. And it said, okay, we’ve logged this case and blah, blah, blah. like all this, you know, so I think my feedback was quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John received just not by a human. And that’s the not reassuring part. I would have liked some human interaction for some
⏹️ ▶️ John human to say, okay, we’ll put this in the bucket where we put in all of the complaints about item not as described.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that’s where it’s going anyway. Anyway, to find what I should have done in the first place is what I usually do is
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought one of these strips for like my wife’s iMac. When we got over there, placing her search strip thing there,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does have 90 degree plugs. And I just, I found that exact model in her past orders. And when I was on, it doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it it anymore, but I bought it from a different place by the model number. And so, you know, it was cheap and I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will spend a lot of time researching a lot of things. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never spent this much time and effort on a power strip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, you should see how much
⏹️ ▶️ John time I spent on the little pigtail
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the worst part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I had like a drawer of those in my garage. Like I just well, so here’s the thing like it’s this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re wonderful, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean they’re all the same, right? You know what expensive UPS look like, you know, like expensive UPSs are differentiated
⏹️ ▶️ John from the cheap ones. They’re, they’re differentiated. It’s weird. They’re differentiated by the way like computers used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, uh, cheaper desktops for like flattening desk, but the towers were the fancy ones. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly fancier UPSs are all tower form factors. And instead of the plugs being on the top
⏹️ ▶️ John or the sides, they’re on the back, like where the ports would be on a tower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. See, I actually, I actually don’t like this very much because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like good UPSs in recent years seem to have gone from basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two car batteries next to each other in like a big rectangular like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Velveeta shaped log to tall skinny towers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big Velveeta shaped log was awesome because you could use it as a footrest under your desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you turn it sideways and it was so freaking heavy that you could like you know put your feet on it and push back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lean back without the the footrest itself moving at all. I do not endorse this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practice. I did it for years. It was wonderful. I had this giant enterprise-grade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APC UPS that I got on clearance site forever. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of date when I got it, but it was fine. It worked fine for years, and I had that awesome just car battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block under my desk that I could just use as a footrest for years. That eventually died, and I replaced it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some cyber power thing that is a very nice UPS, but is more of a skinny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tower, And you can’t do anything with that except just leave it there. Like you can’t use that as a footrest
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. Yeah, I’ve never had it under my feet. And in general, one of the criteria for
⏹️ ▶️ John my setups is no power thing should be in reach of my feet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can- Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John for the best. You can absentmindedly kick out plugs, kick switches. Like I just shouldn’t even be able to reach
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So then you don’t have to worry about that because you’d be surprised what your feet do when they’re idle. They can mess
⏹️ ▶️ John with things. But yeah, those skinny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towers, for the record, all of my power things are worth an easy reach of my feet and that has never happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you obviously don’t have like power strips with one of those little switches right on top of it
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s well maybe or maybe your feet can’t reach it. I keep making short jokes. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I understand the footrest thing too. It is good to have for us, but I think there’s better dedicated things for feet rest if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have one now. It sucks. It just scoots around because it’s like what I have now is basically like a like a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half log cushion. It’s like it’s like a semicircle extruded and it’s just like a cushion that scoots around on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the floor And it has like you know rubber dots on it They’re supposed to keep it in place, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work You need like one of those wedge shape things rubberized web shapes that wedges that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t move It has like the rubberized thing on the bottom, but it’s you know I mean I’ve had it for a number of years now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think the rubber is all like covered in dust now It just slides around hmm
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway those plugs in the back of the little skinny towers. That’s like the worst place to put a plug It’s not easy to get to the ports on
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of a tower Why are you hiding them? Like they should be The other ones where they were flat
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had the plugs all over the top that you can get at all of them easily So this is the one thing I don’t like about the expensive UBSs
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can solve that by these little pigtaily things that some some of them duplicate ports where they will
⏹️ ▶️ John Put a little thing into the plug and on the back of them will be another plug so you don’t lose that plug But then you have a little thing snaking
⏹️ ▶️ John off it Which you have to be careful with because the UBS can only handle a certain number of things in a certain Anyway, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John you manage all that it’s convenient And then they have other ones that like are different angles
⏹️ ▶️ John and you need some to come out of one side, some to cut out of the other. Like it’s a complicated thing. And the thing about these little
⏹️ ▶️ John pig tailing things is you can find tons of them and they’re super cheap, but you want to get one that is good and
⏹️ ▶️ John rated for the power you’re going to put through it. And this, you know, high quality and tight fitting and
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, complies with all the actual regulations. That isn’t some weird
⏹️ ▶️ John random unspecified rip off thing from some no name company. Right? So that’s, That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why it requires a lot of research because it’s like I’m looking for like the most expensive option, right? Like I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not want to buy from a company that i’ve never heard of for some random things that’s going to come
⏹️ ▶️ John out smelling like chemically plastic and looking flimsy like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John That can’t be the link between my horrendously expensive computer and my slightly expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John ups So I did spend a lot of time on that And we’ll see if I did a good job. I have I think all the pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John I need I haven’t started tearing out the old one because I don’t even have a new computer on order,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the process is underway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve Are we still under the delusion that you’re not getting the Pro Display?
⏹️ ▶️ John know yet. It’s a mystery. We’re in a period
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of uncertainty. I mean, I’m certain. Steve Yeah, same. Paul Only
⏹️ ▶️ John That much is clear, but you are not the person making the purchase, so that
⏹️ ▶️ John certainty does not count for much. And I believe my wife is also not certain at this
⏹️ ▶️ John a variety of reasons, the family, let’s say, is not certain how much money I will be spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like part of the reason why I’m pretty certain I’m not ordering myself a Mac Pro is because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that display. Because the only way to do it is to do it right. The only way to do it is to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the frickin’ Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John XDR. If you’re Marco, that is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The full $7,000 configuration with anti-glare and the stand. That’s the way to do it if you’re gonna do it at all. And I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that, so I’m literally just gonna not do it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you need two of them for your new laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or obviously, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could you not? How could you not, Casey? You’re gonna be the one buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Oh no, I am not getting that $7,000 display, no sir.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just think, you could have a really awesome mediocre desktop by having a laptop plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that display. You could have a $7,000 thing that flakily wakes up in kernel panic when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in clamshell mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How many MacBook Pros could I buy for the $7,000 I would hypothetically be spending on the display.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, three. Uh, do you think $7,000 buys a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable clamshell experience?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John not. I don’t think so either. That’s the ultimate luxury that none of us can afford. It’s not available at any price.