catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

359: I Could Live in There

The greatest sales pitch for a gaming PC that we’ve ever inadvertently made.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Intro
  2. What computer is John using?
  3. Catalina update
  4. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
  5. Casey discovers AudioQuest
  6. MagSafe wanging around
  7. Mac Pro engineering
  8. Future of iMac Pro?
  9. Sponsor: Kolide
  10. Mac Pro fan noise
  11. Mac Pro Boot Camp
  12. Mouse & keyboard
  13. Way too many cables
  14. Mac Pro PCIe cards
  15. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  16. #askatp: Full-res photo sharing
  17. #askatp: Swift is a 🍆
  18. #askatp: ATP road trip
  19. Ending theme
  20. Post-show: The Microsoft Store

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ John Hi. Time of year. Merry Christmas, everybody. Yeah. Oh, my word. Are you

⏹️ ▶️ John home or are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you upstate? I am home for one day. Just you? Me and Tiff are here and then we are going to Cancun tomorrow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning. Oh, nice. I’ve never been to Cancun or Mexico,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually. Neither have I. Those are mostly good things. We discussed this on an earlier show, Casey, but you’ve forgotten already.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does ring a bell. Yes, yes, yes. It does. It does. It does. It does.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does. It does.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does. It does. It does. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco does.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does.

⏹️ ▶️ John It does. It does. Yes, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, yes. Now I’m remembering. It’s all coming back to me. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like five of Casey and only one of them is on the show at any given

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey week

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and then the next one shows up. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like those TV shows where twins trade lives with each other and they have to coordinate what each person knows.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never know, John Craig. You’ll never know. Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re the one who knows my middle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco name

What computer is John using?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, what computer are you using this week? Damn it, Marco, you took it from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John me. I was about to ask.

⏹️ ▶️ John On my Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yay!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, wait. What monitor? They’re both Mac Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did the same joke both weeks and you had different reactions both times. I’m on my Mac Pro. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the joke. Does it have small holes or big holes in the front?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine big.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything old is new again. All right, what year did this Mac Pro come out? Is this Mac Pro old enough to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vote? No, not vote. Is it old enough to know not drive? I don’t know. Is it ancient or is it not?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a 2019 Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John 2019 and it’s set up and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey running

⏹️ ▶️ John in 2019. We did it

⏹️ ▶️ John 2019 Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you using your your ancient monitor or are you using something else?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using the PlayStation monitor Cuz that’s all I got

⏹️ ▶️ John cuz my other one hasn’t shipped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey destiny has been it’s been given a backseat You’ve said to destiny. No, thank you. I have more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John important

⏹️ ▶️ John Not entirely. We’ll address and follow up. Okay. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So a certain somebody I know sent you an early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey birthday present since your birthday is coming up extremely soon. Why are you not leveraging that to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use your ancient monitor?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because A, my ancient monitor by the time I got that thing was already packed up and

⏹️ ▶️ John put Raiders of the Lost Ark style into my attic

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not

⏹️ ▶️ John easy to get at. And the The second reason is that monitor was non-retina, and I just can’t do that to my

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t blame you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what do you have now, like a 4K 24-inch kind of thing? Yep. I’m actually kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised they make the 4K monitors that small, because it seems like nobody wants that, like except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac nerds, but it seems like everyone, like the entire PC and gaming worlds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want 4K resolution at much larger sizes, but nobody seems to want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco retina scale.

⏹️ ▶️ John It feels so tight to me. Like, and obviously it’s bigger than the other monitor I replaced, but you know, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John used to the 5K iMac and this, everything just feels so much bigger on this screen, you know? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know 5K is not that much bigger than 4K, but I’m just like, wow, is that how big my browser window

⏹️ ▶️ John normally is? Why is everything taking up so much? Like, the screen seems so short. I don’t know. Anyway, I will

⏹️ ▶️ John be happy when I get my real monitor, but for now, it’s 4K.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that has not even shipped yet, is that correct? Has

⏹️ ▶️ John not. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey other

⏹️ ▶️ John people are getting scary messages that say that their shipment has been delayed. But so far

⏹️ ▶️ John I have not received that notification. So fingers crossed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I should update you on my computer situation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, go ahead. Wait, what? There shouldn’t be an update.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, there shouldn’t be. That’s not a good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s me. And where would I be if not with? No, I’m just kidding. Everything’s fine. Oh, God.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I was so afraid you messed with the RAM or something. No, not yet. Don’t KC up this computer, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep all liquids and third party RAM away from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. No promises.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, everything is good. I will say though that I realized that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the three of us is now running Catalina. Does that mean I can too now?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I replied to you in Slack. You don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to. I have to, I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have no choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John My machine doesn’t run anything earlier than Catalina. So I’m stuck, but you don’t have to upgrade. You can just hang out

⏹️ ▶️ John for a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco while.

⏹️ ▶️ John But dad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve been running Catalina on my laptop all week as I’ve been moving around. As I’ve been using it for a week, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reminded why I don’t have it on my desktop yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, all kidding aside, tell me why, because I feel like any of the bad experiences I had with Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were really the hardware that I was running on, not the software. Because on my MacBook, it’s been fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t think of anything that’s been particularly wrong with it, although naturally I’ve been using my MacBook less and less recently.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what What has reminded you of the bad, what are the bad that you’ve been reminded of?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had two, maybe three issues so far. Two and a half issues so far. Number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is just the annoyance of all the stupid permissions dialog boxes. Like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for God’s sakes, I let this app that I just opened access the downloads folder or the desktop or whatever. It’s like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just put files there. That’s what I want. Like, it just feels like Windows Vista,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I never actually use, but it feels like it It feels like what people say Windows Vista was like. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant barrages of permission dialogues that you just think, I mean, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well trodden ground, I don’t need to go over it, but like, could there really have been no better way to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? Was this really worth it? Was this really the right design for the security of the system?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it just doesn’t, it seems like this is, this is gonna be looked back on as a mistake.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s one big problem, it’s just the annoyance all the permissions everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then problem number two which I’m not sure is a Catalina problem but I sure as hell hope it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I seem to be getting frequent keyboard input lag

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new keyboard which has me slightly concerned but I’m hoping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like software because it isn’t all the time and I haven’t been able to pin down when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it happens exactly it isn’t just in one app but I am definitely seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard input lag and that is extremely concerning. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like a software issue, so I’m hoping that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this sounds familiar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right? Yeah, right? And I forget, that was with Catalina, wasn’t it, on your old weirdo iMac?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was definitely with Catalina because that’s where it is right now. It has Catalina on it right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall in this long and sordid tale if I had seen that in Mojave or not. I do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember that I had intended to downgrade to Mojave at the point in which I said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screw it all, I’m just going to get an iMac Pro. So I’m not sure. I can’t recall. Somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have to remind me where it was in the timeline, this terrible, terrible timeline that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was seeing the input lag and if it was in Mojave as well, but I don’t think it was.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. All right. Well, so anyway, so I am seeing significant keyboard lag sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the built-in keyboard with nothing else connected. And that is extremely concerning. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping that’s a software thing that gets resolved. And then finally, the touch bar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems buggier. Which is funny, because it doesn’t seem like they’ve actually done anything to it. Like, it doesn’t seem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is though, because it’s smaller, because of the escape key.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, right, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, I’m serious, I’m not trying to be funny. No, you’re right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, it seems like the software side of the touch bar seems pretty much unmodified

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from where it has been since 2016. Which is funny, like, if they’re gonna keep saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how nice it is, and that they’re not going to give us an option to not buy it. They’re also not making it any better,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, you know, I have issued that. But anyway, it’s I have to more frequently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the whatever the kill all command is that that like reboots the touch bar because it either gets stuck

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on something or it has an empty gap in the little control strip area or something like it’s just.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Function keys, man, like they they worked every time I just. Well, did they stop? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey did. Like, why, why Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why take something and make it worse and make us use it? Like, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, ugh. Even if the touch bar worked 100% of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still would prefer function keys, but the fact that it doesn’t work 100% of the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the fact that it goes to sleep all the time, which I also, like, it turned something that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one tap into two taps, because you have to wake up the touch bar first and then tap the pause button or the brightness button

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Like, I just, ugh, please, Apple, give us more touch bar free

⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. I’m sorry. Anyway, so those are minor issues. Other than those issues, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually have been extremely happy with the 16-inch as I’ve been traveling and using it more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still love everything else about it. It just does seem like there’s these weird little software glitches with Catalina.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m dealing with the permissions stuff too, and in particular, the strain of it really

⏹️ ▶️ John bothers me is like apps that were there like recent semi-modern apps but not quite

⏹️ ▶️ John modern enough to know that Catalina was a thing and on first launch like these are installing

⏹️ ▶️ John apps that I didn’t have or reinstalling them whatever on first launch they have some kind of first launch experience whether

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s prompting you to set something up or even if they’re just trying to run an auto updater because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John launching an older version of an app that needs to be updated there that process

⏹️ ▶️ John is not accounting for the fact that the OS is is also gonna throw stuff up in your face about permissions and often they fight with

⏹️ ▶️ John each other. Like the app expects to be able to do a thing on first launch, but it can’t because it hasn’t been given permission yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you have to sort of pick which one of the dialogues you want to do or do you wanna go back to system preferences and try to give permission?

⏹️ ▶️ John But when you give permission in system preferences, it requires you to quit the app, but it could be in the middle of the first run setup.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just a mess figuring out, all right, what state are we gonna be in? Can I trigger the first run experience

⏹️ ▶️ John again? Do I have to go through it again? Has it already done it? Have I already signed up or registered or updated or downloaded?

⏹️ ▶️ John Half the time the solution is, you know, to throw the app out, reinstall,

⏹️ ▶️ John go to system preferences proactively and add it to full disk access so you just don’t get asked about it. But then what if it’s asking about something

⏹️ ▶️ John different that doesn’t have to do with full disk access? It’s quite a long road now. But the one thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John Catalina is doing to me, and it’s like, this is a custom tailored bug just for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to be the only person

⏹️ ▶️ John who cares about this bug in the entire universe. So I don’t know if you know this about me. maybe you have

⏹️ ▶️ John seen me use my computer. I try mightily, as documented

⏹️ ▶️ John in 15 years of Mac OS X reviews, I try mightily to get the Finder to behave

⏹️ ▶️ John how I’m accustomed to, like not as a browser. Like windows for each folder,

⏹️ ▶️ John no sidebar, no toolbar, just that’s, I’m not against the browser. Sometimes I will

⏹️ ▶️ John open a browser window, so to speak, because the separation is not clean and has never

⏹️ ▶️ John been. But anyway, I try to get my Finder windows with nothing on them. This is something that almost nobody ever does,

⏹️ ▶️ John so this is probably a problem they don’t have. But two, you can do this now, you’re on your Macs, go to the Finder,

⏹️ ▶️ John and pick a folder, and try to make the window as I described. Maybe you don’t even know how to do it, because

⏹️ ▶️ John it never occurs to you to do this, but just try it. Status bar on or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off? On. Okay, so you basically only have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top bar and the status bar below it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But when you say top bar, what do you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Like the title bar, sorry.

Catalina update

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like controls in the name of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the folder.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. So that’s how I try to have my windows. And of course, the Finder in Mac OS X has always had no respect

⏹️ ▶️ John for me setting the state of any window because it doesn’t associate windows with state

⏹️ ▶️ John and folders and yada, yada, all right? So right now, I’m looking at my Documents folder. It’s in List View. It

⏹️ ▶️ John shows documents on the top. And then it’s got the status bar that says how many items and how much space is available. And then it’s got headers

⏹️ ▶️ John or name, date, modified, size, whatever, and then a bunch of folders, right? This is how I want

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much all my Finder windows all the time. This is how I set all my Finder windows all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Catalina Finder, if I have a bunch of windows open like this, I can

⏹️ ▶️ John watch it happen. I’ll, you know, I’ll be working in one window or I’ll switch to another app and I’ll come back to the Finder.

⏹️ ▶️ John On its own, without me doing anything in the Finder, I’m not dragging anything into the Finder,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not activating the Finder. I haven’t just done something in the Finder, just literally on its own.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll say, you know what? You’re getting a toolbar. and all my finder windows will spawn toolbar spontaneously

⏹️ ▶️ John without the finder even being active. I swear to you, I’m doing nothing in the finder. I’m not sending in an Apple event for another

⏹️ ▶️ John app. They will spawn toolbars. The first hundred times this happened, I’m like, I must be going insane. I

⏹️ ▶️ John swear, I just hit that toolbar with command option T. How does it have a toolbar now? In fact, I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at documents right now. I’m gonna go back to Chrome. I’ll just hang out in Chrome. We’ll see maybe by the end of this

⏹️ ▶️ John episode, that window will have spawned a toolbar. They come back and I can’t get rid of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they refuse to stay dead. They just keep coming back.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you wouldn’t think, like, well, who cares? You know, I made the toolbar icon only. I actually make it text only

⏹️ ▶️ John to make it even smaller, but I don’t want the toolbar there. And by the way, it screws up the size of the window. So if you have an icon view window, like my

⏹️ ▶️ John applications folder is icon view, and I have it sized and set up so I can see an integer number of icons

⏹️ ▶️ John and rows

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John columns,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But when the toolbar comes, the bottom ones get cut off, right? Because it doesn’t push the view down.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve never, I have literally never seen this bug in any other version of Mac OS or Mac OS X,

⏹️ ▶️ John where the view changes in currently open windows behind your back

⏹️ ▶️ John before your very eyes. I’ve seen it happen. It animates in. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what is going on?

⏹️ ▶️ John I cannot figure it out. It’s driving me batty. So far, no input lag

⏹️ ▶️ John issues or anything like that. So yeah, it’s just permissions and then the finder, just really,

⏹️ ▶️ John really sticking it to me for no reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so sorry, John. The struggle is real.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just realized, when I had my keyboard input lag, I was using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Bluetooth Magic Mouse, which I normally don’t use a mouse with my laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at this time, there was one. This shouldn’t affect the built-in keyboard, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be related to the bug, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. I saw a much better performance I put my trackpad in wired mode rather than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wireless mode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Unfortunately, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really use the mouse in wired

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. That is true. That is very true.

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Casey discovers AudioQuest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to quickly drop something in the chat room and I would like you guys to look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this. I stumbled across this earlier today and I thought it was hilarious. What I’ve put in the chat, in case you can’t see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, this is AudioQuest Diamond USB cable, type A to type B, 0.75

⏹️ ▶️ Casey meters, which is 2.6 feet. So this is a cable that goes from the traditional

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB that, you know, your lightning cables always used to come in, to one of those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big, chunky USB things that, like, a printer would take in. The connectors have names, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said A to B, but that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Come on, man.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it means anything to anyone, it’s listeners of this show. Although,

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t type B come in two different shapes?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s the micro B, which is that weird, like, double long skinny rectangle thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Three different… Is that micro? Because it’s no smaller than…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s mini B. Well, there’s mini… There’s three shapes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I rest my case. A, but A

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody knows. Anyway, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, this cable, AudioQuest Diamond USB cable, type A to type B, 0.75 meters, 2.6

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet. I haven’t looked at mono price, but I would assume on mono price this cable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is $4, something like that? If that. If that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the kind of cable that when you’re going through your cable bin and trying to clean it out, you just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw away like five of these. Because you just have these around. Like they come with everything. They call them

⏹️ ▶️ John printer cables nowadays, which is funny.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey definitely. The

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco history of things that have

⏹️ ▶️ John been called printer cables. In this current moment in time, this is what people call a printer cable. Exactly, exactly. You can find it under that name

⏹️ ▶️ John on Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it would appear that this kind of cable, and maybe Marco can fill in for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this kind of cable is occasionally used for audio purposes. And I can tell you that certainly the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey XLR box that I’m using to speak to you right now takes in a USB type B,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the big kind of chunky one. And on the other end of that is currently USB type A. But what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey started me down this search was me thinking I have all these USB-C ports, maybe I’ll just get a USB-C to USB-B.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I think I have that right. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, so that is an example of a piece of audio equipment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that perhaps would use one of these style cables. But I don’t know what else there is. Maybe, does your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey DAC use this, Marco, or anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that? This is the kind of cable that any USB DAC that is or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John USB

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound card that is, you know, that is not super portable, like a desktop one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of cable that almost all of them would use.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m speaking to you right now through a cable just like that. In fact, one I just bought new. I’ll have some cable follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ John related to this, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also speaking to you through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John actually two of these.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them’s going to my main DAC and one of them’s going from my microphone interface to the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so all three of us are speaking to you through one of these cables. Now, mine very well may be a Monoprice

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable, which by the way, Nietzsche in the chat has pointed out on Monoprice, $1.27. I have been procrastinating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in telling you that this exact cable on Amazon.com, $599.95. This is a USB cable that is less than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three feet long, $600. And sure, I look at the reviews thinking, surely that can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. ridiculously expensive but it sounded really good. Five stars. Listen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this USB cable before making judgment. This last one continues. So I’m amazed at how many people left bad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reviews without ever listening to the cable. It’s…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ah, what the hell? Huh? Hold on, a ladybug just landed on my… what? Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John First, the cricket was killed with an iPad 2. 2019 ladybug massacre. Do

⏹️ ▶️ John you have any devices heavy enough to kill a ladybug anymore, my girl?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, there it is. Yeah, a 30 watt USB-C power brick. There you go. They’re pretty small.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, so I just wanted to point out $600 for this friggin cable. Why? Why?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite review is one star subject line, all capital, LOL,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco period. I

⏹️ ▶️ John said they put the period and capitalized it. I like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Review text, LOL, period. 17

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco found this helpful. I’m going to that helpful. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is, I mean… Oh, audiophiles, you’re so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy. There are some places where cable quality matters,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but way fewer than most people think, and the ceiling of how much it matters

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is usually reached at far lower of a level than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything marketed to audiophiles. This is all mumbo-jumbo BS, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, audio sound quality is famously easy to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fool. Just similar to like wine tasting. There’s all sorts of like wine gadgets that are mostly placebo effect as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. But you can also kind of argue that like, that you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco placebo effect is real. And you can say like people who pay a lot of money for something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then think it sounds better are getting their money’s worth. Like if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they pay something ridiculous, and then they get enjoyment out of it, even if it’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fake, they did pay to get a better experience, and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are tricking themselves into believing they are getting a better experience. So you can kind of argue that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works, but yeah, this is all BS and it’s not really changing anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like how you’re trying to move on real quickly from you killing a ladybug. One of the cute bugs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco. It’s not cute when it lands on your hand as you’re trying to use your computer. All

⏹️ ▶️ John right, well, listeners, let Marco know how you feel about killing ladybugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t we have a surplus of them? I think we do. Aren’t they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco invading the entire continent? Isn’t it actually a big problem in a lot of places? I don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it actually is. Yeah, I haven’t the faintest.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, maybe we should start with some follow-up 20 minutes.

MagSafe wanging around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew Woods has some information about MagSafe connectors that I don’t even understand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why we’re talking about this. What did I forget this time?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because there was like the cable that was hooked up to my old monitor that split into multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John cables, it split into mini display port and USB and also there was the MagSafe ones you could connect your laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John right to it. And I was like, I don’t like that magnet wanging around because I’m trying to,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, I don’t have anything connected to but. Wanging

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco around. Wanging

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey around.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I didn’t want to have like this powerful magnet touching my electrical cables and everything like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it turns out that in MagSafe, that part, the part that like connects to the laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ John does not actually have any magnets in it. It’s just a ferrous block of metal, so I shouldn’t have worried too

⏹️ ▶️ John much about it being near other cables. So that’s good to know. The magnet’s on the computer side,

⏹️ ▶️ John not on the cable side. You still have to find a place to put it, and it is kind of heavy and, you know, flopping

⏹️ ▶️ John around. But anyway, I just thought that was worth throwing thrown in there in case people wondered mag safe

⏹️ ▶️ John magnets on the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am unable to find a definition of Wang as a verb. You just heard it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You gotta use context clues. Marco closest I can find is wangle, which means

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wang is the is going to be the new yeet to obtain by persuading others to comply,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco such as I think we should be able to wangle it so that you can start tomorrow or I wangle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitation to her party. But wanging around does not appear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to be an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual

⏹️ ▶️ John word. Take that dictionary and yeet it over here and then I’ll wang it over to Casey and we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco set. from wanging around.

Mac Pro engineering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before we move on, it just occurred to me, I have two questions. One-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Did we just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get banned in England?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One, Marco, have you ordered a Mac Pro yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so, but I am not confident about this at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, December is coming to a close as we record this, and therefore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that 6%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incentive is coming to an end.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, here we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also just got a whole bunch of gift card credit to the Apple Store from trading in a bunch of old devices. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here we go. But I still haven’t ordered anything and I’m not going to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, okay. Good. I got you there. Now, would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you tell us if you had,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked, I mean like I wouldn’t volunteer it necessarily, but if you I wouldn’t lie. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I, I really, again, I, my, my opinion remains I’m, I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely happy with my iMac pro and there is nothing about it that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in dire need or motivation to upgrade. Like I’m very happy with it. And like, if it’d be different if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, constantly hitting its limits, or if I bought too small of an SSD

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it, or I needed more RAM, if there was something like that about my computer that I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco itching for an upgrade, I would probably do it, even though I shouldn’t. But the fact is, none of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is true. I’m extremely happy with everything I have in my iMac Pro currently. I’m not pushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of its limits yet, and so as long as that remains the case, and as long as it still continues to work properly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna keep it the way it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, good, I’m glad. I’m surprised, but I’m glad. All right, moving on. John, tell us about setting up your Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I did finally decide to set it up because I had the time to do it and I had a gap in my podcast schedule, which is basically what

⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking for. And the earlier episode, you’d reminded me about the HDMI connection, so I’m like, I can just

⏹️ ▶️ John bring my PlayStation 4 monitor over. So I began the process of setting things up.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I said this last show, I decided not to do ethernet. I decided to do direct

⏹️ ▶️ John connection of one, took the SSD out of my old Mac Pro and connected it to my new one.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that went by, surprisingly quick. The magic of SSDs, they’re very high bandwidth. I put it in a,

⏹️ ▶️ John not the fastest external case in the world, but it was like 10 gigabits, which is 10 times better than one

⏹️ ▶️ John gigabit now, isn’t it? I don’t know how fast it actually went, but anyway, it didn’t take too long. I used migration assistant,

⏹️ ▶️ John everything seemed fine. I spent a long time deleting tons of 32-bit

⏹️ ▶️ John applications, sadly, but God, so many of them. Installing application updates,

⏹️ ▶️ John getting stuff to work, but for the most part, It has been pretty smooth. A couple of things I want to talk about

⏹️ ▶️ John in using this thing. The first is like, all right, these days, computers don’t get that much faster

⏹️ ▶️ John year over year, especially desktops. So we’ve talked about this many times. You’re lucky if you get a single digit percentage increase

⏹️ ▶️ John in single core performance. Maybe you get one with more cores, maybe you get one with less, but it’s not like it was in the 90s

⏹️ ▶️ John where your new computer that you buy a couple of years later is like twice as fast, right? But I was replacing a 10-year-old computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you would think this thing’s going to seem a lot faster. You

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco would hope.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it absolutely does. I mean, just if you wait 10 years, the computer seems a lot faster. Not only does

⏹️ ▶️ John it seem faster, it also seems faster than my rice 5k iMac, which granted is also old.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this computer probably isn’t, it might not even be faster in single core. I haven’t even compared it to her old iMac, but

⏹️ ▶️ John yes, it feels faster. But the thing I feel the most, and this is part of the most fun of having a new Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, and Marco has touched on it in the past, is the effect of having so much

⏹️ ▶️ John more storage and so much more RAM. Because these days, Unless you

⏹️ ▶️ John spend a lot of time doing things that are very CPU intensive, like all you do all day is encode or

⏹️ ▶️ John decode video and it takes a long time and you’re waiting on the computer. These days, the thing you will feel the most

⏹️ ▶️ John is the removal of previous limits. And if you’re replacing a computer, probably the limits that you had have to

⏹️ ▶️ John do with RAM or disk space, both of which were smaller many years in the past, either because you always kind of buy a computer

⏹️ ▶️ John for the same price, or, you know, and then the storage goes up year over year, or usually when you replace it, you

⏹️ ▶️ John want to replace it with something bigger. So this has so much more RAM than my other computer. Like, it basically has infinite RAM. I keep looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at the RAM diagram. I don’t think I’ve hit quarter full, right? So I may have overbought on the RAM, but the point is RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John no longer exists for me. It’s just an abstract concept.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t care about it anymore. And you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Chrome, right? That’s saying something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can keep Chrome and Slack open at the same time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I haven’t really, yeah. So RAM is fine. And then storage. I went from a one

⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte SSD to four. And granted, I brought over my entire photo library, So I immediately

⏹️ ▶️ John used half of that four terabytes. So I’m slightly over two terabytes, but still my disc is half

⏹️ ▶️ John full. And this is after living for many years on the ragged edge of the one terabyte.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was so close to the edge of the one terabyte that I didn’t even have my own photo library on it. Like not even an optimized

⏹️ ▶️ John storage mode. I just literally didn’t have iCloud photos enabled because I just ran out of room. So

⏹️ ▶️ John having that breathing room and just feeling like, you know, I was doing some stuff where I was copying some things around. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I can copy, you know, a couple of 500 gig files on here just temporarily.

⏹️ ▶️ John Why not? I have so much room.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I brought

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco them over,

⏹️ ▶️ John copied from there. Like just the luxury of having all that extra space. And you can have

⏹️ ▶️ John this extra space with a Mac mini to be clear. You don’t need a Mac pro to feel these effects. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m getting at. Just get a new computer or, you know, on your existing computer, add more RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John and more storage, like humongously more, not 5% more, but like double, triple, quadruple. Feels

⏹️ ▶️ John super awesome. So I’m enjoying that. The next thing I experienced with this is I, when

⏹️ ▶️ John I was setting it up, I had the opportunity, I had no reason to go inside it, but come on, you get a Mac Pro, you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gotta

⏹️ ▶️ John look inside. So I took off the case, which was

⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly difficult. I mean, it was, granted it was up on a high desk, but like you have to pull it straight off and straight

⏹️ ▶️ John up, and there’s a lot of friction there. And you have to keep, you know, you just wanna like yank

⏹️ ▶️ John it off like voila, but you have to pull it exactly straight, otherwise it doesn’t come up, and it goes very slowly. And also

⏹️ ▶️ John I echo what other people have said about the turny thing on the top, like the little handle that you turn.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like metal on metal inside there. It’s not scratchy or scrapey, but it’s not smooth either.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is, you know, I’m assuming machined aluminum against machined aluminum. So it is not a particularly pleasing

⏹️ ▶️ John untwist. It’s a little bit like you would imagine aluminum rubbing against aluminum, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Which is probably good for precision and fit, but it’s not good for feel. Not that this matters in the grand scheme of things, but lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of people commented on it and I agree. But it is very precise fitting.

⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I got it off and I’m looking around inside it and yes, it’s beautiful in there. Lots of YouTube videos

⏹️ ▶️ John out there that show sort of teardowns. And in particular, one thing I took note of

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly after seeing these videos, like I had been telling people about it, you know, people in my family,

⏹️ ▶️ John anyone else who’s interested, my children who don’t wanna hear about it, but anyway, that

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just like a tower computer, it’s very neat inside there. and I had been referring to it with the same language as I had talked

⏹️ ▶️ John about my Power Mac G5, or the G3 for that matter, or my Mac Pro, 2008 Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John that everything sort of fits in and you don’t see any cables flopping anywhere. Like all the cables and everything are routed

⏹️ ▶️ John so that it looks like just, you know, this, everything is perfectly fit. Like that if you were, if you could manufacture

⏹️ ▶️ John everything to be exactly the right length and, you know, sort of hidden behind things. Like if you looked at those, you know, my old Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John or the G3 Tower, it’s hard to even find like where they routed the cables So they put them

⏹️ ▶️ John like behind the motherboards and up through little plastic things and just, you know, it looks beautiful and clean.

⏹️ ▶️ John And of course this Mac Pro is all color matched and it’s all black inside there and it’s very sleek and cool looking.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing I hadn’t realized until I’d seen people like actually disassemble this computer down to the studs like I fix

⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever, is that as far as I’m aware this computer has

⏹️ ▶️ John no cables inside it. So how do they connect the components? Like, I mean, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John got, for example, it’s got a bunch of fans. Surely the fans connect with little cables to power the fans, otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ John how the fans get power. The power supply, that’s gotta plug into

⏹️ ▶️ John something with power, right? But if you think about it, first of all, a lot of things in this are card slots.

⏹️ ▶️ John The SSDs, those are not cables, those are, they go into little connectors, right? You’ve seen what those like. PCI cards,

⏹️ ▶️ John like the, you know, or the video cards, those goes into connectors. Again, no cables. And because of the MPX

⏹️ ▶️ John module, they don’t need like a cable from the power supply to power the GPU because they have a second connector. they get all the power through

⏹️ ▶️ John the slots. The CPU, obviously no cables there. There is no hard drive, there is no

⏹️ ▶️ John optical drive. The USB ports, again, on a card, so no cables there.

⏹️ ▶️ John The fans, where you think, surely this is the place where they have to be cables. No, they have like these,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, contacts, essentially. There’s contacts on the fan assembly, there’s contacts on the motherboard,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they like, you know, mechanically friction fit against each other to power them. The power button and

⏹️ ▶️ John the ports on top all sort of go go down and do pressure fit contact things. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John this is so over-engineered and ridiculous and awesome and I love the inside of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it and I just think about it and it makes me smile. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the other nice benefits of having a machine like this. It is better designed

⏹️ ▶️ John and more beautiful inside than the Mac Pro in the same way that the Mac Pro was better than the

⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G3, G4. The G5 and the Mac Pro are similar, but this is like the next

⏹️ ▶️ John step up. Like everything in it is custom and beautiful and color matched and

⏹️ ▶️ John has, I don’t know, I love it in there, I could live in there, could make a little apartment design

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. It’s amazing. I should have found one of the better links. I forget who it was, but

⏹️ ▶️ John somebody had a really good, just like literal disassembly of, let me take all the pieces out. iFixit did it as well, but they did

⏹️ ▶️ John it more towards an eye of repairability. This person was just doing it to say, look at how this thing is put together. I was super impressed

⏹️ ▶️ John by it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I too found a couple videos that mentioned the whole no cables inside thing, And it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blew my mind. I’m like, wait a minute. Yeah, there aren’t any cables

⏹️ ▶️ John in there. And by the power supply, I mentioned it briefly, it goes into like a slot type thingy too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it doesn’t have a cable, it’s just into a slot with connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, it was probably not necessary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to design this way. Like, you know, when, as the pro community

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people who wanted this computer to exist, as Apple was taking its sweet ass time making this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer and developing it, we were all saying like, just ship a PC tower.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that hard. Like, it isn’t, like everyone else does it and it’s fine. And if you want to do something fancier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, great, but just ship a PC tower now while we’re waiting. And you know, that’s not really Apple’s style. They’re not going to like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote just do things the way everyone else does them for better and for worse. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time that it took them to develop this computer, because again, like I have a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good sense of how and when this thing started with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different things we’ve heard and picked up over time and things we’ve been whispered and everything, it really does seem like the development

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this project started very shortly before they held that MacPro round table.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it wasn’t already in the works for three years before that. Like they had started

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fairly recently before that. And so it basically took them about three years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to develop this. And this is why, because they didn’t just do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tower, and this is also why it costs $6,000. Like, they really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over-engineered the crap out of it, and it took them three years, and they’re selling it at a very high base price

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a very fancy design, they did things the best way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the most economical way, they’re gonna sell this thing in very low volumes, and so they have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make up all their R&D costs with low volume. So if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to amortize out the cost of all that development and engineering per unit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to do it over fewer units, so each one bears more of that cost. And not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mention the fact that they leave their healthy profit margin. So there’s a reason why this machine is so expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a reason why it’s so nicely made inside and so nicely designed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it has no major flaws, and so far no one seems to have found any. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem really awesome. Now we can argue, and many people are, whether that’s the right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision. Whether they should have made this crazy fancy thing that kind of maybe had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be very expensive depending on how it’s designed and how they’re budgeting for it and everything. Like, yeah, they probably should have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a cheaper one, but if you are willing to swallow these costs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like this is a really awesome computer. And pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only reason I don’t have one yet is because I don’t have any need for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this upgradeability at the moment. But if I did, like our friend Stephen Hackett bought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and he’s been documenting the various upgrades he’s done to it so far. And it started out with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a storage upgrade. He bought that drive enclosure thing that goes in the top slots and put some SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. And that’s just really cool that you can do that. And right now I don’t have the need for more internal storage than what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have in my iMac Pro. But if I did, the ability to just pop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a bracket with an SSD on it from Amazon or like a PCI card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an SSD module on it. Like that’s awesome. And I don’t know if I’ll ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need that kind of a great ability again, but if I do, I’m going right to the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John More on that later in follow-up about expandability in the Mac Pro. But for now, let me say,

⏹️ ▶️ John this strategy that you just described of like making a very nice tower, Apple has always

⏹️ ▶️ John done that strategy. It’s just that time marches on, tech marketers on an Apple gets better at it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is a fairly linear progression from the G3, G4, the tower,

⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite, El Cap tower case to the Power Mac G5 slash Mac Pro cheese

⏹️ ▶️ John grater case to this case, taking a detour into the trash can. In terms of

⏹️ ▶️ John how many components are there, how much does it look like a PC? How much can we hide the cables? Like what can we

⏹️ ▶️ John do to make this accessible with a door and what’s on the door and what’s on the case and how easy

⏹️ ▶️ John is it to remove things and what kind of tools you need. They have always tried to make a computer like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just they’re getting better at it and tech gets better. Like, I don’t think you could have made this computer

⏹️ ▶️ John for any reasonable amount of money or even a slightly unreasonable amount of money back when

⏹️ ▶️ John the blue and white G3 was made, but they did the best they could. Like that case was amazing. It’s like, wow, you can just open

⏹️ ▶️ John it up, pull this handle up, look at the side and here’s all the components. And first of all, there were so many more components and many

⏹️ ▶️ John of them had to be like commodity, they had optical drives and hard drives, Apple does not make. So there’s a limited amount you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t want to make that proprietary. It just so happens that in this technical error, they can do this

⏹️ ▶️ John type of design. It must have, you know, when they were talking about it, like, oh, we’re going to do this and that. And it’s like, well, wait a second.

⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have any of those things that we absolutely have to have a cable for. So why do we have to have cables for anything

⏹️ ▶️ John like forget about routing them cleverly behind things so they’re not in people’s faces and they look needy. We make them the right lengths. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John do we need cables at all? That wasn’t the case on the earlier computers, but they’ve always tried to

⏹️ ▶️ John custom engineer and arguably over-engineer. Like that’s what Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John users like. I mean, it’s kind of a tautology and a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s true. People who buy

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs and like that type of thing, you know, these tower computers that are accessible and cleverly

⏹️ ▶️ John designed, it’s something that people like and are willing to pay for. And in this

⏹️ ▶️ John case, I’m hoping that this design has not sort of gone too far and like sacrificed

⏹️ ▶️ John reliability for aesthetics. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past. It could be that this is

⏹️ ▶️ John more reliable than having cables everywhere or it could be much worse and those connections corrode and we’re all going to be sad and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know I’ll sell this sooner

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco rather than later to

⏹️ ▶️ John get an ARM Mac or something. Time will tell. But for now I appreciate the engineering involved. It is aesthetically beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ John and from an engineering perspective it just pushes all my buttons.

Future of iMac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also, I think that seeing quite how over-engineered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, just engineered this product is, suggests to me that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a one-off. That this is not intended to be a short-term

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product. Like I don’t think they would have put this much effort and this much development into this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product if it was going to be like one and done, like just a temporary patch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until the arm transition or you know they just want to satisfy people once and then never update it like I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think that’s what happened here because if that was their goal I think they would have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco done a much smaller scale job on it it wouldn’t have been this custom it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have been maybe more like the old cheese grater or something like it wouldn’t have been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much new custom high-end development and design but it is and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that suggests to me that this This is a product category and form factor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re intending, at least at this moment, to keep around for a long time. It does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco raise the increasingly worrisome question for me of, will the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro ever be updated again? Because I look at this and the more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think about it, the more I think that the iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was intended to be the long-term thing. they changed their mind and made the Mac Pro instead,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco released the iMac Pro as it was, but are now not gonna put any effort into it. Because why would they? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every iMac Pro buyer is somebody who, if the iMac Pro didn’t exist,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be very likely to buy a Mac Pro instead. And so it seems like they have a severe cannibalization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle to never update the iMac Pro again, which I would be very unhappy with.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I agree with that, because an iMac Pro is an all-in-one system. everything is ready

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go right out of the box for about five grand, right? That’s where it starts or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is it six? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, right? Yeah, five grand. So you can have for $5,000 a completely functional

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer, which is to my eyes and amongst anyone I can think of, probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the upper limit of what an average person would do even for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people like us that are independent professionals, right? I don’t think most normal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey independent professionals would look at a $7,000 to $15,000 computer purchase and say, oh yeah, them’s the brakes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think, I understand what you’re saying, Mark, when I’m not feeling confident about the iMac Pro getting updated,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I wouldn’t necessarily say that the Mac Pro is taking that spot in the lineup. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the iMac Pro has a very clear spot in the lineup. The question is whether

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not Apple cares.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well yeah, that’s the thing. I’m not saying that there’s no room for it, but I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way Apple developed the Mac Pro, I think they’re going to want people to buy it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re going to want to funnel the iMac purchasers who are going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iMac Pro upmarket into the Mac Pro. They’re going to want to upsell us, basically. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough of us will come along for the ride that they will, because most of the people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know who have iMac Pros right now didn’t have Mac Pros before, they had regular iMacs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the regular iMac is also a damn good computer. Right, so I think what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might see is, hey, why don’t we just split this market up and down,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, that people who really need the Pro hardware, we want them to now buy our higher-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro, and those who don’t want to or can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend that much money on it, they’ll be well-served by our consumer iMac line. Like, I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree with that statement, but I think that’s what Apple very well might want us to do. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about it, so we’ve heard from a couple people now, I think, I haven’t verified this, I’m sorry, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the next processors that would go in the iMac Pro are out by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel. Like, I think they’re available, they’re out. Somebody said they’re also a lot cheaper,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, than the current ones, because Intel’s getting a lot of competition from AMD recently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they’re competing on price a little bit with some of these lines. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently, we have what we need to have an updated iMac Pro, and it hasn’t happened

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. And I was thinking, I mean, this is kind of a cynical thought, but why would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple update the iMac Pro right now? Because if they update the iMac Pro anytime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, it’s probably gonna make their brand new Mac Pro look bad. Because it’s probably gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beat it on single thread, and it’s at least gonna perform extremely well, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna almost certainly give it a really good run for the money for value because it does now, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless they dramatically raise the price on the iMac Pro, I think it will continue to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a way better value than the Mac Pro. And so if they released a new iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime soon, I think it would make the Mac Pro look bad. And if you follow that logic, like okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that kind of makes sense why they wouldn’t update the iMac Pro now, but why would they ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco update the iMac Pro if that’s the logic. So again, I don’t know if this is how they’re thinking, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s likely that this is probably what’s going to happen. I think the iMac Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be updated again, and that makes me very sad to think about.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why, unless you have some info that I don’t, I’m not as pessimistic as you about that. I mean, and getting back to your other point

⏹️ ▶️ John about the Mac Pro being the case being designed for like a long-term, like if you look at Apple’s tower

⏹️ ▶️ John case history, they’ve gotten a lot of mileage about all of them, again, starting from the G3,

⏹️ ▶️ John Yosemite style case. I know it’s confusing because it’s an OS. But anyway, the case with it looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like a Square with handles coming out at an angle and it was all plastic and had the door on the side

⏹️ ▶️ John They used essentially that same case design although they changed the colors blue and white g3 then the g4

⏹️ ▶️ John Then what quicksilver mirror drive door like they got a lot of mileage out of that They

⏹️ ▶️ John did a lot of surface finish changes like car models do by changing like the front rear fascia, right? but otherwise it’s basically the same

⏹️ ▶️ John chassis and then of course the cheese grater Launched with the power Mac g5 and they kept

⏹️ ▶️ John using it right through the Intel transition Basically the same case with different ports and stuff On the front and the back

⏹️ ▶️ John and they changed the fan holes and changed all the internals But that case lasted a long time and this case

⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they continue to make tower computers They’ll keep using that straight through the arm transition if they have one,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know It’s it if you look inside that case, there’s plenty It’s a good design that can support basically any kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of computer that has a motherboard and stuff stuck into it So it is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very versatile

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they’ll keep going with that. The iMac is another example. We’ve had essentially the same iMac design

⏹️ ▶️ John ever since someone came up on stage at an Apple keynote and said, Friction stir welding. And I remember how many years ago that was,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though the iMac Pro is totally different on the inside and shares zero parts with that original iMac that shipped

⏹️ ▶️ John in this case. You look at it from the outside and you’re like, Yeah, if I made a mold of that case, it would basically be the same as

⏹️ ▶️ John that first one. Right. And so they got a lot of mileage out of that case because it was, you know, hard to design. I think an

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac redesign is coming if they do it Porsche 911 style, they’ll redesign the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John And they won’t touch the iMac pro and Mark will be like see I told you they’re not making an iMac pro They just came out with

⏹️ ▶️ John the new iMac and it’s it’s got you know It looks different and whatever the hell but it’s an all-in-one computer and they

⏹️ ▶️ John it is a different physical case But there’s no new iMac pro and i’m sad but when Porsche comes out

⏹️ ▶️ John with a new 911 They don’t launch with the 911 turbo, right? They just give you the Carrera 4,

⏹️ ▶️ John 4S or whatever and then you wait and then the turbo comes out and same thing with the BMW in the 3 series like the M3 doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John launch with the new generation In fact for some period of time if you get an M3 you get the previous gen because the new gen isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John out, right? So maybe the iMac Pro ships later in the new form factor. Obviously, I think the iMac is

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna stay around I think it’s due for a redesign I think they’re they’ll keep making an iMac Pro just because

⏹️ ▶️ John they either have to make a new iMac Pro or they have to make a non-obscenely priced monitor because is

⏹️ ▶️ John no one who is buying an iMac Pro is gonna be upsold on the Mac Pro if the only monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John available is that thing or the LG. So I still have more faith in Marco, let’s say, that the

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac Pro will be updated, even if the iMac gets redesigned and the iMac Pro doesn’t come with it. I

⏹️ ▶️ John expect the iMac Pro to come later.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope so, I really do, because I just, speaking for myself, there’s no way I’m gonna be pushed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a Mac Pro, it’s just not happening. I would get a Mac Mini and a crappy LG monitor before I would get a Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You

⏹️ ▶️ John just get the other iMac. But the reason people got the iMac Pro though is because the iMac Pro is the best

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac. Like that’s, it’s not because it’s fast, not because of Xeon, not because of ECC, it is a better iMac. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cooling system is better. Like, and apparently it’s reliability is better so far.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is it because of the Xeon and ECC? Probably not. Probably just because they put more engineering resources into better designing

⏹️ ▶️ John the cooling system and drop the support for the spinning hard drive that let them have the bigger fan and yada yada. We’ve talked about this before.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the best iMac. It just also happens to be darker colored and have a fancier

⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and ECC RAM. But like, I really hope in whatever the next iMac is,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll share, even the plain old regular 5K iMac or 6K iMac, whatever the hell, whatever they call

⏹️ ▶️ John the base iMac, I hope it inherits all of the good sort of runtime performance characteristics

⏹️ ▶️ John of the iMac Pro, even if it doesn’t have a Xeon or any of that stuff in it. That’s my hope for the model. And when that comes

⏹️ ▶️ John out and there’s no new iMac Pro, I still hope and believe that there will be a subsequent iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that will be sort of the all-in-one sibling to the Mac Pro. I think there’s enough

⏹️ ▶️ John differentiation for Apple to do that, and I don’t think they’re going to try to upsell people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just surprised when you brought up the 911 that you weren’t making a joke about how the iMac will always and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever look the same, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like 911’s do. Look

⏹️ ▶️ John what I meant. 911’s evolved too.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It gets

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and wider every year.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Almost every year. one plus 10% every year.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you doing about Time Machine in your Mac Pro, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is one thing about my setup experience. I’ve got all this data on here. I copied the photo

⏹️ ▶️ John library from a different SSD, because remember, photo library is an external SSD, and I had to copy it over. At first I was like, oh, I’ll just sign

⏹️ ▶️ John in to iCloud and it will sync this stuff down. But iCloud does not sync your projects,

⏹️ ▶️ John which sucks. It syncs your photos and your keywords, and it syncs a lot of stuff, but not

⏹️ ▶️ John everything. And in particular projects, like I do all those photo books, iCloud does not sync those. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John had to actually physically copy my iPhoto library, iPhoto library, whatever they’re called, my photo library,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is on an external SSD. I just brought it over here, hooked up to this one, copied it over,

⏹️ ▶️ John launched it. Then I have to allow iCloud to get itself in order and be like, oh, what

⏹️ ▶️ John are all these new pictures? I feel like I need to upload these, but it doesn’t, so it has to go through all of them. So I was doing that

⏹️ ▶️ John and then of course I’ve got Backblaze or I had to inherit my backup history on Backblaze. I

⏹️ ▶️ John know you don’t need Backblaze, you don’t need to re-upload everything. This has a lot of the same data as my old computer. I didn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I didn’t have to like transfer the license, it thinks, it basically thinks this is my old computer so I had to let Backblaze run. I’m like, all

⏹️ ▶️ John these things will take time. Those things finish relatively quickly. The photos synced, Backblaze is

⏹️ ▶️ John all set, right? Everything’s good. Time machine. Now I don’t have an internal

⏹️ ▶️ John time machine drive yet. I’m still letting Stephen Hackett be the pioneer

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco here and figure out what the good

⏹️ ▶️ John internal storage solution is. Again, more on that a little bit later. But I have my Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ John where my old Time Machine backup was for my Mac Pro, with a very long history because I had a generous amount

⏹️ ▶️ John of Time Machine space on there. And I didn’t want to lose all the history, so I had Time Machine inherit that backup history.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Time Machine’s like, okay, I’m doing that, and I gotta go through all your stuff, and then plus you have all this new stuff for me to backup because

⏹️ ▶️ John this photo library’s new, and it’s like a gigabyte, a terabyte photo library that I’ve gotta deal with.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, Time Machine’s got a lot of work to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine has been running on this computer for like four days, five days.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is not completed yet. It is showing me new

⏹️ ▶️ John kinds of progress messages that I’ve never seen before. If you see Time Machine goes, does like preparing

⏹️ ▶️ John to back up and then backing up and backed up X amount of Y, you can look at the preference pane

⏹️ ▶️ John in Time Machine and it will show like a little message underneath a progress bar, you can look in the

⏹️ ▶️ John little menu and see what it shows. It has given up trying to give me any progress other than

⏹️ ▶️ John telling me how much it has backed up. So right now it is saying backed up

⏹️ ▶️ John colon 1.41 terabytes. It doesn’t give me x out of y, it doesn’t give me percentage,

⏹️ ▶️ John the progress bar in this preference pane is indeterminate. It is doing work, occasionally I peek at it with FSC usage

⏹️ ▶️ John to say back up D are you doing anything? It’s totally doing stuff. In In fact, for the past day or so, it has been wandering

⏹️ ▶️ John over all of the individually stored messages that outlook shoves in some obscure folder. Like it makes one

⏹️ ▶️ John message for each email, uh, one file for each email message, man. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John been going for a long time. I made the mistake after the first day of trimming the exclude list and time machine, and it was

⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, I have to start over. I trimmed from the exclude

⏹️ ▶️ John list directories that no longer exist. Like, I don’t know why they were in there. It was like my PS4

⏹️ ▶️ John movies folder back from when I was using a DLNA server

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with my PlayStation 3. Like I

⏹️ ▶️ John had lots of, I’m like, oh, I don’t need that. I’m just going through everything, getting rid of old stuff, let me trim that. Time Machine

⏹️ ▶️ John says, stopping backup. I’m like, oh no, it says repairing backup.

⏹️ ▶️ John So normally I stop Time Machine when we record podcasts because I’m paranoid, but I’ve got 12 cores

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no way in hell I’m stopping it. So Time Machine has been running this entire time. And since this is the first recording on

⏹️ ▶️ John this computer, I’m hoping everything will go off well, But just so you know, I have been running a time machine backup this whole time,

⏹️ ▶️ John which shouldn’t cause this computer to break a sweat. Um, and speaking of that,

⏹️ ▶️ John so I’ve got this computer here. It is on my little end table thingy. So it is up off the ground

⏹️ ▶️ John about two and a half feet dish. Um, it’s a, it’s a lower level table than

⏹️ ▶️ John my desk, but it’s higher than the floor. When I mentioned that I had my

⏹️ ▶️ John power Mac G five and various points where Mac pro on the desk next to my monitor, but it was just

⏹️ ▶️ John too loud. Power Mac G5 was way too loud, and I had a chirping power supply that was bad. My Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, in general, was quiet, but it was still too loud to have on my desk. This computer is

⏹️ ▶️ John quieter than my Mac Pro, my 2008 Mac Pro. Definitely quieter

⏹️ ▶️ John than my Power Mac G5. It’s not quieter than my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ John 5K iMac when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not doing it. Interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the 5k iMac is basically silent if it’s not doing anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously as soon as you do anything the 5k iMac makes a racket, right? But if you’re idle,

⏹️ ▶️ John the 5k iMac is almost entirely silent. At idle, sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John not on the floor but raised up sort of, you know, I can reach I can touch it with my left arm

⏹️ ▶️ John barely, you know, like I’m touching it with my left arm now without moving my body but barely can reach it. It’s right there.

⏹️ ▶️ John It makes a noise that’s kind of like imagine like the wind

⏹️ ▶️ John moving through like a deserted grand central station after the apocalypse terminal

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ John not but not a strong wind just kind of like or it’s not like the uh

⏹️ ▶️ John the this what do they call it uh marco would know this what’s it called room noise what is it what’s that called

⏹️ ▶️ John an audio

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco engineer

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah room tone yeah there you go it’s not the same as the star trek room tone or the sci-fi ship

⏹️ ▶️ John room tone but it’s very complex. But it’s really low volume,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like, you think at first, like, am I hearing anything? But if everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John else is really silent, you can kind of hear. Like, even with my headphones on,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can kind of hear it. But it is like all the stuff I talked about of, like, randomizing the fan blades, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it has no discernible frequency. And it is very sort of, it’s like the most inoffensive. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not even fan noise. It’s like air noise. Right? If it was under my desk,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it might be entirely silent. So, so far I’ve had it up here

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m probably gonna keep it up here because I don’t mind it, because like it’s the type of noise that if you’re not concentrating

⏹️ ▶️ John on it, it disappears entirely. For about 20 minutes today,

⏹️ ▶️ John earlier today, I figured I really need to stress this thing because I’ve been messing with it in Backblaze and running a time machine has

⏹️ ▶️ John been running and I’ve been deleting stuff and copying things and installing programs and whatever. But I need to like see what this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, So I ran a handbrake thing for 20 minutes. Saw all the 24 threads, 12 CPU cores

⏹️ ▶️ John being pretty much pegged. It

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t make any different noise, like ever. The noise that I just described

⏹️ ▶️ John to you, that’s how it has sounded the entire time I’ve owned it. They don’t even spin up when

⏹️ ▶️ John you boot. Like, I don’t know what these fans sound like if they ever get loud.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure the volume has never increased and there’s nothing I can do to it to make it increase.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve played Destiny on this more than that in a little bit and it sounds the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not sure, I was sometimes like, is the computer on? Like, and in this way it is like the

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac Pro, but more so. Like, I honestly, I, let me tell you how deep, I installed

⏹️ ▶️ John iStat Manus. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, whoa! Can I see the fan RPM?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was like, tell me, are the fans spinning any faster? Because it would make sense that I don’t hear any noise

⏹️ ▶️ John if the fans are not spinning any faster because they’re the only moving part in the machine. Like there’s no hard drives, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no optical drives, like only, there’s only three fans and then a blower fan in the back. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John four spinning things in here. And I don’t know, and iStatMenu couldn’t make heads or tails of this

⏹️ ▶️ John computer. It gave me a bunch of temperature stuff, all of which was like ridiculously cool. I couldn’t get any fan RPMs

⏹️ ▶️ John out of it. I’d have to buy it a register. Anyway, I installed it. You know. That’s what I always do with

⏹️ ▶️ John iStatMenu. So I install it, I’m like, all right, I want you to stop now. And the only option is to uninstall. So I can’t figure out how

⏹️ ▶️ John to make this thing make any more noise. So the noise that it makes, like I said, so much quieter than my previous towers,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like an iMac at idle is still more silent than this because this is moving

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of air through it somehow, magically.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am a little bit disappointed that you can hear it at idle though, because the iMacs that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has made in recent years, especially the iMac Pro, are so damn quiet.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because the fan is on the other side of you. That’s what it is. Like you have a screen between you and the fan, whereas these fans,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like open air headphones. Like these are open air fans. They’re right there. Like huge openings

⏹️ ▶️ John are in front of them. There’s no way, like if they’re moving air through it, you’re going to hear it. Whereas in the iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all just like behind you. Like I bet if you turned your iMac around and stare at it that

⏹️ ▶️ John way, you’d hear it at idle. But you don’t, you stare at the screen side. The closed back,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a closed back Mac, I have an open.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I think I would have to keep it on the floor for that reason because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m spoiled now. Like now that I have had, you know, basically silent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMacs for, jeez, six years, something like that, five years, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now ruined and I really don’t want to ever hear my computer again.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think you would like it on the desk like next to you, I get mine as off the side of the desk.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like if this was one foot farther away or it was under the desk, I wouldn’t be able to hear it probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good, and especially because like, it’s such a massive thing that I think almost everybody, myself included,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not keep it up on anything. Like I’d keep it on the floor. So it wouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ John a problem. I’m keeping it up, I mean, I said for, you know, because the floor is a dangerous place for a fancy computer, but also because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to look at it and I like to look at it. It may eventually like graduate to slash be relegated to the

⏹️ ▶️ John floor later in its life. But for now, I’m happy to have it up here so

⏹️ ▶️ John I can look at it and appreciate it. Cause it is like, like a lot of new cars that look kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John weird when you first see them Cyber Dark excluded, which will always be weird. I

⏹️ ▶️ John This is really grown on me and just having this in your house is a beautiful thing to look at which again is one of My one of my

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of fitness criteria for having a Mac. I enjoy I enjoy looking at it. I enjoy seeing it there

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s a nice thing to have in your house

⏹️ ▶️ John So more more setup stuff I know Casey used to joke

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the Mac Pro We’re gonna be talking about the Mac for over such a long time

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ John how much is there to talk about it?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John now concede that Casey was correct. Mostly because this setup process

⏹️ ▶️ John is never ending. I don’t even have the monitor yet. This is gonna get dragged out. I feel like it’s not entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John my fault, but it’s partially my fault.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John your fault. No, because if I had everything, I could get it all out in one show, but you’re gonna be hearing more about this stupid Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro for a while now, I’m sorry. But hopefully I’m touching on topics that are at least educational and interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s one that is not Mac Pro specific, but it’s, well, you’ll see. So.

Mac Pro Boot Camp

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got this thing. It stole my PlayStation monitor. I want to play Destiny I can

⏹️ ▶️ John of course just bring the monitor back and forth and I did that a couple times That’s a pain you gotta go into the desk and find a stupid power

⏹️ ▶️ John brick for the LG monitor and then you know, it’s just Carry it over and reconnect it and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a pain and I and I did want to also play Destiny on this computer to see what it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John to play at more than 30 frames per second because as I noted the last show for People don’t know, Destiny on PlayStation

⏹️ ▶️ John runs at 30 frames per second, Destiny on PC runs at whatever frames per second

⏹️ ▶️ John that your computer can run it at. There’s some speculation about how crappy the base video card is, what

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be able to do, but I wanted to try it. So to run Destiny on this Mac, obviously I need to install Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John To install Windows I need to do bootcamp. Bootcamp is always sort of this mystery, we’ve joked about

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s still being supported, you know, would it run, does it still work? is

⏹️ ▶️ John apparently still supported. When I ran bootcamp assistant

⏹️ ▶️ John it wanted to install bootcamp partition on my

⏹️ ▶️ John my boot drive basically and I didn’t want to do that because I have

⏹️ ▶️ John not even done setting up my boot drive and time machine is running and I don’t want to repartition it and I didn’t know what it was gonna do

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like no I don’t don’t touch don’t touch my 4 terabyte SSD leave it alone that’s just that’s mine I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want Windows taking any of that space that’s a precious commodity, I enjoy having a lot of it,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want you messing with that. I’m gonna install bootcamp on an external drive, which is exactly what I had in my

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. I had a whole, I had a hard drive mechanism in there that was my bootcamp, my quote-unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John bootcamp partition, but it was whole drive, right? That was ages ago, like, you know, 2008 I installed it. I had Windows XP

⏹️ ▶️ John on it originally. I think I might still have Windows XP. Anyway, I need Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John on this thing. I have an external drive. I hook up an external SSD. I’m gonna be fancy. I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John temporary I’m just gonna use it to see how destiny runs I Goat, you know, I connect them to the SSD.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an external USB C connected again 10 gigabits per second, but it’s plenty for playing destiny

⏹️ ▶️ John and I go launch boot camp assistant boot camp a system is like You have an external

⏹️ ▶️ John drive attached to your computer Get that crap out of here and then relaunch this program. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John and not did it say I can’t install I can’t install bootcamp or windows

⏹️ ▶️ John on external drive. It said, you can’t even run this program if external drives are connected to

⏹️ ▶️ John your computer. I’m pretty sure I unmounted the drive

⏹️ ▶️ John and it still said, looks like you have external drives connected to your computer, you gotta get that crap out of here. I’m like, it’s unmounted.

⏹️ ▶️ John To physically disconnect it, but like, but here’s the thing, I want to install bootcamp on an external

⏹️ ▶️ John drive and bootcamp assistant is like, Nuh-uh, no, you are not going to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, what? Like, I guess I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so many times I’m like, oh, why don’t I just go through the system and let it do it to my boot drive? I’m like, but you know what, no, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John how to get rid of that partition. I don’t know what it’s gonna do. Will Shipley just had a question on Twitter right before the show, he

⏹️ ▶️ John was like, does it do the APFS volumes thing where you can easily add and remove volumes to

⏹️ ▶️ John an APFS container, like you know that whole thing, like how easy it is to add them and they share the space? And I was like, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t wanna find out. Like it made it look like it was gonna partition, like there would be the APFS container and then

⏹️ ▶️ John there would be like the sort of a, you know, GPT partition level thing. And then there would be the, like, I didn’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John find out and I was like, but it would work and it would be fast. And I’m like, no, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna figure out

⏹️ ▶️ John how to get Bootcamp installed on an external drive. And thus began probably

⏹️ ▶️ John the worst computer battle experience I’ve had in the last five years, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John the last 10 years. I can’t, nothing in memory was worse than this experience.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, and as many of these things do these days, it starts with, you know, you do a Google search because surely someone else has had this

⏹️ ▶️ John problem. And boy, Google searches come up with a lot of results which is usually

⏹️ ▶️ John a blessing and a curse because it shows lots of people have this problem but if there was one answer, they’re feeling

⏹️ ▶️ John like there’d be fewer results. So we’re gonna put a bunch of links in the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes. I put, yeah, a bunch of links to things that I found in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John None of these links had a procedure that would work for me to accomplish

⏹️ ▶️ John the task. I’m going to put them all in there though just to show you kind of what’s involved.

⏹️ ▶️ John And what’s involved, and the solution that I actually did do is like a modified mix

⏹️ ▶️ John of these, but it more or less starts with installing

⏹️ ▶️ John VirtualBox. What? Which is a bad sign. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Which is because the free version of VirtualBox, like there are ones that use VMware too, and I own a copy

⏹️ ▶️ John of VMware, but VirtualBox is free. If people don’t know, it’s an emulator that runs like x86 OS’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John VMware. So you can install Windows and VMware, you can install Windows or Linux and VirtualBox, and it runs like

⏹️ ▶️ John natively on your Intel Mac alongside your other thing. Anyway, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John also you can get yourself to a situation to a situation

⏹️ ▶️ John where the virtual Windows machine thing that’s running

⏹️ ▶️ John inside VirtualBox views your external drive

⏹️ ▶️ John as if it is like the one and only internal drive and can

⏹️ ▶️ John install Windows onto it so you end up creating like a VMDK

⏹️ ▶️ John virtual disk thing in raw mode against your unmounted drive using the device This is all

⏹️ ▶️ John command line stuff. Using your drive’s device number, which is a terrifying experience when you’re typing. Anytime

⏹️ ▶️ John you find yourself typing slash dev slash disk something

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in Mac OS, it’s like, oh my gosh. Let

⏹️ ▶️ John me just take this opportunity to reiterate one of my rules of computing for young

⏹️ ▶️ John people and old people, like do not type things on the command line. Do not type process

⏹️ ▶️ John IDs. Do not type device numbers. Do not type things on the command line. Because you know what happens when

⏹️ ▶️ John you type things? You get typos. kill minus nine PID and you type out the PID,

⏹️ ▶️ John oops, you killed init, because you put a space before the first one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Device numbers slash dev slash disk five, oh, I typed four instead, I just deleted

⏹️ ▶️ John my boot drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John running all this as root, right? Do not type things, copy and paste. Copy and paste

⏹️ ▶️ John and also confirm, because you can copy and paste and think you copied, but really you didn’t, you pasted the previous one, but yeah, do not type

⏹️ ▶️ John things. So I’m carefully doing this, and then I’m running Windows as the virtual machine. I have a legit copy of Windows 10,

⏹️ ▶️ John a Windows 10 ISO that I purchased and downloaded for this purpose. And you can make that

⏹️ ▶️ John be the optical drive for the virtual box thing. And you go through this whole procedure

⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to type in your, in VirtualBox, type in your Windows product key.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t allow copy and paste. There’s no copy and paste from the Mac world. So I typed that Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John product key so many times that I almost have it memorized. It’s one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco things that I

⏹️ ▶️ John may remember portions of that Windows product key. Oh my god, I typed it so many times.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did have my college Windows XP key memorized. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good thing to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I also installed it on a lot of computers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, you follow the procedure in one of these things, and they’re like, use VirtualBox,

⏹️ ▶️ John get the thing set up as a drive, partition it with DiskUtil, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John reformat the partitions during the Windows setup process, and do a custom thing, and type in your Windows key,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then let the Windows 10 installer run, And this is my favorite part of the procedure that I ended up doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RM233FR4RH, JP89H,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget the rest, damn it. I was hoping

⏹️ ▶️ John I could do that. No free copy of Windows XP for anyone listening. Sorry, you almost got it, but not quite.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you know the checksum rules, maybe you can figure out what the missing numbers are. And you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to run the Windows installer and the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco instructions say-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did I say 2PRQQ? That was in there somewhere. the

⏹️ ▶️ John instructions say, when it says, uh, we need to restart windows,

⏹️ ▶️ John like after like all the little progress steps go, power down the virtual box thing. So like hard

⏹️ ▶️ John power off, like hit the red button, red window widget on the thing. And it’s like power off because you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want it to continue the process. You want to sit at the thing. It was like, at this point you have.

⏹️ ▶️ John A you have taken your actual external drive connected to your Mac and convinced the VM that it’s one of its virtual drives

⏹️ ▶️ John and it has installed windows on it to the to the point where now your Mac can boot from it. Oh my goodness. So you’re basically

⏹️ ▶️ John using VirtualBox instead of the bootcamp assistant to do that. There’s also this other step where you download

⏹️ ▶️ John the drivers for bootcamp, which they actually do make easy in the bootcamp assistant. You can download just the drivers and put them on like

⏹️ ▶️ John a fat 32 USB key and then copy them onto the thing. That’s a side, that’s part of it more or less worked.

⏹️ ▶️ John But this part of it’s like, do this procedure, set up this disk, which is a pain because you have to unmount it and

⏹️ ▶️ John then it gets auto-remounted and then you have to unmount it again and then set up the virtual drive and you can’t give it the same

⏹️ ▶️ John name twice because it thinks it knows about the virtual drive, but the UUID is different. And it’s a whole bunch of details that make it more complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is, I did this fairly unty procedure many times and then I would reboot my Mac and hold on the

⏹️ ▶️ John option key and it would not see my external drive. Like it wasn’t an option. It would just show

⏹️ ▶️ John my internal drive, the external drive would be connected and it would not show it at all. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ John like, what, but I’m doing what it says and people saying there’d be, I tried the VMware

⏹️ ▶️ John approach and similar type of things. Like my Mac would not see that external drive. Like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s lying to me about the partition format. Maybe it shouldn’t be master boot record. Maybe it should be GPT.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it should be a FAT32 versus NTFS. And just, I went around

⏹️ ▶️ John and around in circles forever in this trying to get it to the point where the thing would even see my external drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John This took many, many hours alone to convince myself that I was at the point

⏹️ ▶️ John where I thought I was right. And then there was one instruction, like I found the comments on one of those articles, like pages of comments. And one of them is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John everything in this article works up to step 36. That was one. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not

⏹️ ▶️ John a joke. Up to step 36, and then it says, you’re supposed to do X, Y, and Z, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John turns out what you’re supposed to do is when you get to that step in the Windows installer, delete all your previous partitions

⏹️ ▶️ John and then just let the Windows installer run and it will create the correct partitions for it to be bootable. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a lie, and this person is wrong. Oh, no. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I was at the point, because he’s basically saying, the instructions say to do this, but instead you should do the opposite. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I was at the point where I’d done this so many times and was so familiar with what it was trying to accomplish, I read

⏹️ ▶️ John that comment and I had, speaking of Galaxy Brain, I had that moment, it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco could be like the dramatic

⏹️ ▶️ John music. I looked at that comment and I said, if I do the opposite of this comment,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I bet it will

⏹️ ▶️ John work. So I did the opposite of the comment. Instead of deleting

⏹️ ▶️ John those partitions or whatever, I set them up the way the comment said they shouldn’t be and I left them

⏹️ ▶️ John there. I’m like, this has to be it. Like I’m like, I figured it out. I figured it out by

⏹️ ▶️ John reading an article that’s wrong and then reading a comment and then knowing that I have to do the opposite of the comment,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though the comment says, hey, I read the article and it didn’t work and I had to do something different, do the opposite of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I was so proud of myself. I’m like, this is awesome. This is gonna work. And then I rebooted and it wouldn’t see

⏹️ ▶️ John the drive. Oh no. Healthy OmniKey, it just does not see the drive. And then this is where

⏹️ ▶️ John being old is bad. This is where being like Casey who doesn’t remember what happened previously on the show. Like, in my memory bank somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John was the information I needed to figure out the final piece that I needed to know. Because at this point I had installed Windows 10 like a

⏹️ ▶️ John dozen times. I’m an expert Windows 10 installer. I’m an expert virtual box,

⏹️ ▶️ John virtual machine setter-upper. I did all sorts of other experiments by setting up multiple virtual machines and having one talk to the other.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did lots of stuff. I’m like, this should work. And further

⏹️ ▶️ John Googling tickled something in my mind. I’m like, wait a second. So do either of you not remember, People who are

⏹️ ▶️ John listening to this are shouting right now. They’re shouting at me right now. They all know what my problem is. Do you too? You too also

⏹️ ▶️ John know this information because we talked about it in ATP, but then we all forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, didn’t I create an external boot disk to play

⏹️ ▶️ John inside? Yeah, but what is the key piece of information that I’m missing that’s thwarting me? Assume, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John the correct assumption I can tell you right now, that I had correctly put the bits on that external

⏹️ ▶️ John drive. What’s my problem? Why is this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not working? Is it a weird Catalina thing that it’s not booting some kind of unapproved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got it. Remember when we discussed this back like, it was actually when, not Catalina, but like the T2. Remember when the

⏹️ ▶️ John T2 Max first came out and we just talked about the T2 Max? Oh, is it a T2 thing? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is it that we know about the T2 in terms of security?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that would be why like some people in the comments would have this issue and some people wouldn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they had a new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac, they would have this issue.

⏹️ ▶️ John No one in the comments as far as I could see had this particular issue. They were just arguing about how to get the bits onto the disk and they were all wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John and so was the article. But I eventually got the right bits onto the disk. But the T2, like the reason you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John take the SSD out of the Mac Pro and like just put it in a third party one is because it’s paired to the T2

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s paired to the T2 so it can have a secure boot environment where it boots knowing that what

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m booting from is a known good secure disk that has had system integrity protection that is keyed

⏹️ ▶️ John to the T2, you know all that crap?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? I love, I hope nobody at Apple who works on all that crap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or do you summarize it that way?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically trying to, like we have discussed, and I’ve made this exact analogy many times, the

⏹️ ▶️ John assumption used to be that when you have physical access to a Mac, all security bets are off, because you could just boot

⏹️ ▶️ John from an external drive and you own the thing, right? Assuming the disks aren’t encrypted, whereas the assumption with the iPhone has been like,

⏹️ ▶️ John even if you have physical access, it’s really hard to get in. So the Macs with T2 are trying to be more like iPhones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you have physical access, if I encrypt the disks and put a firmware password on, you shouldn’t be able to just, oh, I’ll boot

⏹️ ▶️ John from an external drive and I’ll be able to run hacking software and try to crack your thing. Like T2 Max

⏹️ ▶️ John will not boot from an external drive, period. Like there’s a security

⏹️ ▶️ John setting in T2 Max that says, hey, should I allow booting from an external

⏹️ ▶️ John drive? And if you don’t turn that on, it will never see an external drive that you’ve just installed Windows from

⏹️ ▶️ John and it will never boot from it. It will never even show it. And that was the final piece of information. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I boot into recovery mode and I go to the setting and it says, hey, do you want this Mac to be able to boot from external drive? and I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John yes, yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past literally 10 hours. It’s like 3

⏹️ ▶️ John a.m. at this point. I’m like, yes, boot from the external drive and I reboot, hold down the

⏹️ ▶️ John option key and there it is. There it freaking is. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco God.

⏹️ ▶️ John My boot camp disc and I boot from it and Windows 10 launches and I’m in Windows 10 and I can’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John anything because it doesn’t see my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that aside,

⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth, this is my first Mac that I’ve had a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard because they came in the box

⏹️ ▶️ John And I really like this keyboard. This is my favorite keyboard feel. The key layout is still… I wish the function keys were far

⏹️ ▶️ John away from the numbers, but I like the big escape key. I really like these key switches. The mouse I hate.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve used it for a week now. I knew I would hate it. I still hate it. Anyway, maybe I’ll talk about them a little more later. But

⏹️ ▶️ John when you reboot into Windows, it has no freaking idea what input peripherals are. So I had to get a wired mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John and keyboard, connect them, so I could type in my username and password and blah, blah, blah, then get it to pair

⏹️ ▶️ John with the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. and every time I reboot into Mac OS it’s the same deal. But other than that, I was so relieved.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, if you have a T2 base Mac and you are trying to install

⏹️ ▶️ John anything on an external drive and boot from it, be re-advised as discussed

⏹️ ▶️ John on past episodes of ATB that we all forgot about. It’s a setting. You have to allow

⏹️ ▶️ John external booting, otherwise you can’t boot from an external drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s my boot camp battle. It was long and terrifying. And anything

⏹️ ▶️ John that involves like a 30 minute, you know, install process as your sort of iteration,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, step size, it’s just bad. Like even if I only did it like 12, 13 times, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like forever. And each time I was just banging my head against the wall. So, well, the end of that story is I installed

⏹️ ▶️ John Steam, installed Destiny, ran it. The answer to the question is

⏹️ ▶️ John this crappy Radeon 580X. It can run destiny

⏹️ ▶️ John at like 90 frames per second in 1080 and 4k. Alright, but

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in 4k It gets more than 30 frames per second, but it dips below 60.

⏹️ ▶️ John So luckily destiny has lots of settings on PC So I basically set the screen resolution to 4k and the render

⏹️ ▶️ John Resolution to 75% and that gets pegged at 60 frames and I have a 60 Hertz monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway So there’s no point in being faster than

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I did get to play destiny at At 4k at 60 frames per second a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s really good. I love the wider field of view. It’s super smooth I enjoyed it. I didn’t enjoy playing against PC

⏹️ ▶️ John users and mouse and keyboard because they kill me a lot But it was fun

⏹️ ▶️ John The other there was more battles in this with with steam by the way because I Have a PlayStation controller

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve paired it with my wife’s iMac to play on like GeForce now and then and the stadia that I’ve talked

⏹️ ▶️ John about in the past. I’m like, I’ll just pair my PlayStation controller with this windows 10 computer that I’m booted into

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll be able to play destiny with my PlayStation four controller on this and I pair

⏹️ ▶️ John it and it works fine and I’m moving it. I’m using it to move around the steam user interface.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I know steam sees the controller every time I launched destiny, all it sees is the mouse and keyboard. I’m like, I just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I use the controller to launch this game.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Steam knows about the

⏹️ ▶️ John controller. I can customize the settings in steam. Why, Destiny, do you not see the controller?

⏹️ ▶️ John I was still in that, you know when you get in that mindset after you’ve battled with a computer for, this is the next day at this point, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I went to bed at like 3am, this is the next day, I’m like, now I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get the controller to work. I tried mouse and keyboard, I suck so bad at mouse and keyboard in Destiny, there’s just too many controls,

⏹️ ▶️ John I cannot handle it, I am garbage. So I’m like, well, back to controller for me. I couldn’t get it to see, I was

⏹️ ▶️ John so just distraught that like nothing on a computer will work for me ever again. Like, that’s it. Last night

⏹️ ▶️ John was all I gave all I had and I succeeded but now, now nothing will ever work.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I think people who play Destiny on PC know the answer to this question and would be

⏹️ ▶️ John yelling at it saying, you dummy. Yes, of course the PlayStation controller works in Steam

⏹️ ▶️ John and your PC recognizes it and it’s paired, but Destiny does not use Steam’s control thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John It does its own thing and Destiny has no friggin’ idea about Bluetooth PlayStation controllers you have to plug the

⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation controller into your quote-unquote PC where the USB cable and

⏹️ ▶️ John Then destiny sees it and so yes I finally played destiny with a controller at 60 frames per second at 75%

⏹️ ▶️ John resolution on a 4k monitor. That was good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This entire segment has been the biggest Advertisement for just getting a gaming PC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that I think we’ve ever had

⏹️ ▶️ John well this this Segment is an advertisement for getting your monitor shipped to you at the same time as your computer because I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t plan on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco playing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a PC

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna play on my PlayStation, but this thing is hogging the PlayStation’s monitors I want to play it I like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just such a pain to carry it back and forth like I did it a couple of times and it’s just Yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not going to

⏹️ ▶️ John use this as a gaming PC. I’m not going to reboot into Windows 10 I came from a little bit more familiar with Windows 10

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way doing this which is not as terrible as I thought it Was gonna be But I’m comparing it to

⏹️ ▶️ John like Windows 7 and 8 and XP I suppose. I don’t have much experience with Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I got Steam installed on it and I ran a game But yeah, not recommended. All this is to say is the

⏹️ ▶️ John 580X is a garbage gaming card and yeah, I look forward to my next GPU.

Mouse & keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you using for peripherals other than this PlayStation controller?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so like I said, the keyboard, I would like to keep this. It annoys me

⏹️ ▶️ John that, like, I don’t think… The solution that I’ve seen recommended to me is unpair it for

⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac before you reboot into Windows, and then maybe Windows will pair with it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I wish it was the case that when I rebooted into Windows, it would remember that it was paired with this one. It

⏹️ ▶️ John would just, you know, like, I wish I didn’t have to do anything. I wish I could just reboot and then it would it doesn’t matter I’m not gonna be reading

⏹️ ▶️ John into Windows anymore But having done it like a dozen times trying to fight with this thing It annoys me that I can’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ John so I kind of wish this keyboard could be wired because I don’t care if my keyboard is wired like the I have

⏹️ ▶️ John little Wire guides under the desk like it doesn’t affect my life, but I really like this keyboard So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna use the wireless keyboard, even though I wish it was wired And I think maybe one of you can confirm I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ John if I were to plug it in with the lightning to USB thing that’s just power,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? No,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, I believe it makes it a wired keyboard. Does it? Yeah. All right, well I might try that then if I can get a cable long enough to

⏹️ ▶️ John reach my computer because the one it comes with is not gonna reach like under the desk and you know, through the woods to grandmother’s house we

⏹️ ▶️ John go or wherever. But I would like to try that because I think that would make my life a lot easier.

⏹️ ▶️ John The mouse, do not like it. And for a new reason, like I’m having,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t like it, I’ve been using it, I don’t like it because it’s low and it’s not, you know, it’s not shaped the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like it. But you weren’t gaming with that mouse, are you? the magic mouse?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, no. I was gonna say like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the magic mouse, but I would not game

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with

⏹️ ▶️ John it. The thing I did actually try it like on the first launch to, you know, I just try getting stuff work and

⏹️ ▶️ John something I’m pretty sure this is physically impossible with this mouse, but it didn’t occur to me until I tried to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John People who don’t know the the apple mouse looks like a piece of sushi. It has one

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey flat surface on top

⏹️ ▶️ John of it, like just the top surface is one continuous thing. There are no seams or gaps in it anywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it does handle right click because it senses where your fingers are like it’s got a touch surface on top. So if you click

⏹️ ▶️ John on the right side of the mouse, that’s right click. And if you click on the left side, it’s less quick. But every time you click the whole mouse surface goes

⏹️ ▶️ John down, right? There is no, it’s just one big button. So in destiny,

⏹️ ▶️ John I get right in the game and I go to 80 s and then I go to fire and the default, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, key bindings and setup is 80 s is right. Click and fire is left. Click 80 s

⏹️ ▶️ John for you to or listening. I have no idea. I’m talking about his aim down sites. I thought it was ads because destiny as a game where

⏹️ ▶️ John you aim down sights and then right- Right click for ads.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ John cannot right click to ADS and then left click to fire on the Apple mouse. Because as soon as you right click

⏹️ ▶️ John to ADS, the button is down already. Oh. You can’t left

⏹️ ▶️ John click, because it’s in the middle of a click. You’re holding it down. Now you can do right click toggle

⏹️ ▶️ John ADS. I thought maybe it would be touch sensitive and I could tap the left side of the mouse while holding the right, but that didn’t seem to

⏹️ ▶️ John work. Anyway, it’s not a gaming mouse. That’s not why I don’t like it. The reason, the new reason

⏹️ ▶️ John that I dislike this mouse, other than the ergonomics, which alone would be like, they don’t match the way I want to use a mouse, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But the new thing that’s driving me nuts is, it’s like the Apple TV remote. The way I just go and grab

⏹️ ▶️ John my mouse, I end up accidentally swiping the thing, and my windows are scrolling all over the place, and I’m activating

⏹️ ▶️ John mission control, and I’m like, it’s like my computer is haunted like my TV. Like every time I try to pick

⏹️ ▶️ John up that remote, it’s like, why is it fast forwarding? Why did it skip around? What is it doing? Did it go to the next episode? because my

⏹️ ▶️ John fingers brush the touch-sensitive surface. This is not what I want on a mouse. Looks nice,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s black and sleek. I think it’s a beautiful piece of art. I don’t want to use it as a mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in all fairness, I disabled most of those gestures the first time I set up a

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. Even just horizontal scrolling, like swipe sideways or swipe vertical for crying out loud. Like I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John disable scrolling, right? I’ll go to grab the mouse and in the act of grabbing it, I

⏹️ ▶️ John will scroll my window two lines that I didn’t mean to do because my fingers just hit it. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna use this mouse. So I’ve been in the market for a new one and I have ordered two mice, two mouses, two mices.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I tried both of them in person and I couldn’t really decide if either of them,

⏹️ ▶️ John if I would like them, but I’m going to give them both a try. I got an expensive one and a cheap one.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping I like at least one of them because it’s been slim pickings. Like these, these are the least objectionable

⏹️ ▶️ John mice that I have found. They both have things about them that I don’t like and I’m not really a fan of, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think hopefully one of them will be okay. I have coming to me the Microsoft Precision Mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is Microsoft’s current normal

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not like super gamey.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. But it’s also their fancy one. So it’s got the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco talked about where almost every mouse that has a score wheel

⏹️ ▶️ John has this feature where it’s either in clicky mode or free spinning mode. Oh, they all do that now? Yeah, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John not all of them, but the nice ones do it. In fact, Microsoft sells the same mouse without the

⏹️ ▶️ John mode switch that just is clicky. Anyway, it’s got one of those. Logic has a name brand for it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the switch that switches the two modes is really nice and satisfying, which I enjoy. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John three side buttons that I hope to never use. It’s got a left and a right button, and it’s got that

⏹️ ▶️ John little flange off to the left. Like if you know the logic, the MX Master has like a huge shelf over

⏹️ ▶️ John there for you to like put your rest your hand on or some shopping or groceries. this has a tiny flange

⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m like you know what I’ve never used a mouse with the flange this flange is very small I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John find it particularly objectionable if I just pretend it’s not there and grip the sides of the mouse maybe it’ll be fine so

⏹️ ▶️ John that this is the fancy mouse this is like 70 bucks so I’m getting this one

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it’s Bluetooth which may or may not be an issue depending on how Catalina Catalina’s Bluetooth issues evolve for you

⏹️ ▶️ John too so far I haven’t seen any of the stuff you’ve described but I’m on and look out for it. And the other one is

⏹️ ▶️ John the Logitech Marathon Mouse M705, which is one of the cheaper Logitech

⏹️ ▶️ John mice. It’s also one of the simpler ones. I think it also has the mode switch wheel,

⏹️ ▶️ John less satisfying. It has two side buttons instead of one, and it also has a small flange for your

⏹️ ▶️ John thumb. And it’s just generally like, this is 30 bucks. It’s a $30 mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is not Bluetooth, it’s Logitech’s weird RF thingy, which I actually kind of like, because

⏹️ ▶️ John my experience, that RF thing that you use is rock solid and doesn’t interfere with

⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if it’s for a desktop, those are way better, honestly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so, I mean, you don’t have that choice on the Microsoft one, it is Bluetooth or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John so I got that one. My plan is, whichever one I don’t like, I’ll try to pass off the other one to my

⏹️ ▶️ John wife because she has a Logitech wireless mouse now, but it’s one of those portable ones, right? And I always thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ John silly for her to use that at her desk. It’s like one of those little, It’s miniature, it’s like 75%

⏹️ ▶️ John of a normal-sized mouse. Oh yeah. I don’t mind it, but anyway. So I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John keep you updated on those too.

Way too many cables

⏹️ ▶️ John mice. Um, and also the final thing I’ve ordered is way too many cables

⏹️ ▶️ John for what got so many things. Well, this is, this is the problem when you get new things. I did the whole,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the preparing the way and the new power supply just ripples outward. Like I mentioned this on a,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on a

⏹️ ▶️ John past, on a past show, I want everything to be braided in black.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want any white cables. I don’t want any plastic cables. I don’t want to buy anything

⏹️ ▶️ John sold, bought or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco processed. Like I just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want everything to be black braided cables. Why braided? Who

⏹️ ▶️ John cares about braided? Braided cables appeal to me because they are less

⏹️ ▶️ John kinky. Oh boy. Like if you have a typical plastic cable, it comes to you in a package, it’s usually

⏹️ ▶️ John tightly wrapped in either a circle or an oval or whatever, and you sort of unfurl it and those kinks

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of stay. And you can kind of, it’s like, well, are these kinks ever gonna go out? Probably,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes, eventually, but then you might sort of bend in new kinks, braided cables in theory

⏹️ ▶️ John remain supple and able to sort of flow and don’t, they don’t come with, you get out of the package and you just string

⏹️ ▶️ John it out and it hangs pin straight, straight down for like six feet, right? That never happens with a plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John cable. And then in theory, if you use them for a long time, they won’t pick up kinks

⏹️ ▶️ John from the other places. Oh, I said in theory again, I’m sorry, phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh man. So black braided everything. So any cable that I had in my life that

⏹️ ▶️ John was not black and braided needs to be black and braided. Of course, the computer

⏹️ ▶️ John comes with a black braided power cable and a black braided USB-C to lightning cable to

⏹️ ▶️ John charge, to harpoon your turtle

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mouse and to

⏹️ ▶️ John charge your keyboard. And that sort of began the whole thing. So I have a black braided

⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C to USB-C for my portable hard drive, another black braided,

⏹️ ▶️ John a black braided USB-A to B to connect my existing black

⏹️ ▶️ John USB hub, like a black braided speaker cable to connect my speakers and going

⏹️ ▶️ John a little overboard. I mean, cables are cheap. Like when you’re buying expensive computers, like I can get a cable for $5.

⏹️ ▶️ John I should buy two of them. They’re $5. And so I did. So I’ve been buying

⏹️ ▶️ John cables.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not entirely in the braided cable lifestyle. I have a few here and there, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they not just wrap like a cloth braid around the same rubber that every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other cable has on on the outside?

⏹️ ▶️ John So, first of all, I think no. I think they don’t. I think the braiding replaces the rubber.

⏹️ ▶️ John The second thing I worry about is that they are less well-shielded than the other ones. You know what’s used? A foil wrapper,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then inside of the actual conductor is each of which is separately insulated, and then around that they have plastic. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all the same except the outer plastic is replaced with braids. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I honestly don’t know anything about cables, and these are all like $5. So I have no idea what the hell I’m buying.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I did buy a Thunderbolt 1 that was like 30 bucks or whatever because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John pre-buying for stuff that I think I’m going to get. Like I think I will eventually have some high speed external

⏹️ ▶️ John SSD peripheral thing. But yeah, I’m assuming that is the

⏹️ ▶️ John only difference is A, aesthetics and B, how the cables flop

⏹️ ▶️ John basically. I’m hoping there’s no C, interference susceptibility is worse. I’m hoping that’s not true.

Mac Pro PCIe cards

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else about the Mac Pro, John?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Are we

⏹️ ▶️ John done? No, we’re not. Sorry, one more

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John my God. This is not for me, though. This is from, I’ve been consuming lots of Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John content, as you can imagine. There’s lots of good YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey videos about it. Yes, so am I,

⏹️ ▶️ John apparently. Yeah, well, you mentioned something. So Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs

⏹️ ▶️ John had one of the many videos that’s like, hey, I got this Mac Pro. What the hell can I put in here? And a lot of these YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John channels are not Apple-specific, so they have tons of, you know, essentially PC hardware hanging around. we will

⏹️ ▶️ John put a link in the show notes to this particular video. He said, let me just shove some stuff in there and see

⏹️ ▶️ John how it goes. So the first thing he stuck in was a USB card

⏹️ ▶️ John to put a bunch more USB ports on the thing. And that didn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ John because there was no drivers for it. He’s looking around inside the case for power connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ John Most PCs have SATA style power connectors coming off the power supply. That is not the case in the Mac Pro, Which is why

⏹️ ▶️ John you there’s that $80 Belkin thing because they’ve got a proprietary power header on the motherboard So you can add cables to

⏹️ ▶️ John your previously cable this Mac like there are no Molex, you know style connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no place in there except for the Apple proprietary place To connect the thing so anything that requires power

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to get at least that power You know cable thing from Belkin,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is the only one that makes one for now Or have something that’s power through the slot There’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John Pegasus Drive Bay thing that Stephen Hackett bought. It’s $400 for a bracket plus an 8TB hard drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John Stephen said that hard drive is incredibly noisy, so that kind of turned me off. Like I wasn’t a fan of buying

⏹️ ▶️ John that anyway, but I certainly don’t want a noisy spinning hard drive in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that comes with its own power thing. You do have to buy it. I think it comes with its own thing

⏹️ ▶️ John too.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It does,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. PCI Express cards that you put M.2 SSD

⏹️ ▶️ John or NVMe things in That worked right out of the box It’s a tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ John PCI card that connects into your PCI slot and it’s got a tiny little M.2 slot where you put one of Those

⏹️ ▶️ John little NVMe sticks in there stick not included

⏹️ ▶️ John Work fine. No drivers. You can boot from it You buy an NVMe SSD for however much they cost

⏹️ ▶️ John these days and you plug it in there. The card itself is $13 $13 $100 for

⏹️ ▶️ John each wheel on this machine. But if you want to, you put an NVMe SSD in there for $13

⏹️ ▶️ John you can do it and then you could spend $400 on a two terabyte NVMe SSD and for $413 you have

⏹️ ▶️ John two terabytes worth of very fast bootable stuff. He also tried you got

⏹️ ▶️ John two SSD cards which is the standard for like those enterprise over provisioned SSD things.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that didn’t work even though it had worked in previous ones and it turns out that it’s It’s because Catalina is missing drivers for

⏹️ ▶️ John the Intel U.2 drive that he tried. But that’s $50 for the card if you want to get one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John fancy enterprise SSDs. You just need to use a mechanism that has drivers. Mojave had drivers for this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but Catalina doesn’t for whatever reason. He did a bunch of RAM upgrading and saw the cool

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM slide advisor thing that tells you, hey, you got your DIMMs in the wrong place and put this one here

⏹️ ▶️ John and put that one there. So that’s a cool feature and app if you ever want to upgrade the RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, I probably don’t because I’ve already got tons in here. Black magic video capture card. Hey, it worked

⏹️ ▶️ John magically, even though it’s more or less PC hardware. That worked fine. Sound Blaster.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who was it?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Which one are you talking about? Sound Blaster? Yeah, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. They still make products, apparently for PCs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the bigger shock is that they’re still in business.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And he bought a Sound Blaster card and put it into his Mac and the Mac was like, Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you also buy this external box that they have and you use it in Windows, then it works.

⏹️ ▶️ John And a bunch of other people have tried other things in it. So right now, in the absence of any

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro specific products like the Pegasus thing that Apple sells, and like I’d imagine third

⏹️ ▶️ John party, Apple specific vendors will sell, you can try shoving in

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of PC hardware. Some of it might work in Windows and some of it might work in Mac OS. It’s somewhat hard to

⏹️ ▶️ John tell, but I am excited that literally any of it works with no drivers and no awareness that just plain work

⏹️ ▶️ John like that PCI Express thing, because that basically means if you want to have a bunch of internal SSDs, you can buy those little

⏹️ ▶️ John NVMe sticks and just slap them in there. Like they have cards that hold four of those NVMe sticks and you can

⏹️ ▶️ John mount it as a single drive and get insane speeds if you can afford all those, that NVMe

⏹️ ▶️ John storage. And the card itself is like nothing. So, although one of them I did see had a fan on it, which was a little upsetting, but

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, of course. I am excited about putting things into

⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac Pro and I am plotting what those things might be, but I’m not in a rush because it seems like the video card options,

⏹️ ▶️ John that was another thing, lots of people were trying different video cards in there. Video card options are not currently great.

⏹️ ▶️ John As we’ve discussed in the past, I want something that’s an MPX module if possible, so I’m just waiting. The final thing Quinn Nelson of Snazzy

⏹️ ▶️ John Labs talked about, which hadn’t occurred to me, but looking at all the pictures, but I know I had been thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John about it the wrong way. Even after I’d taken the case off my Mac Pro, I didn’t realize this, but obviously we’ve said before,

⏹️ ▶️ John when you take the case off, the computer powers down like you can’t have it turned on there

⏹️ ▶️ John there is there’s a literal physical power disconnect thing that if those contacts

⏹️ ▶️ John are not touching from the top of the case down to your Mac it will not run the power will not be connected the circuits

⏹️ ▶️ John will not be complete right so you have to turn your Mac off to take the case off but what people

⏹️ ▶️ John might not have mentioned people realize now that they have them is not only do you have to turn it off you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to unplug every cable from the back of your computer because the case in the back

⏹️ ▶️ John is not like like a U shape, like there’s a bar on the bottom. And so as the case comes

⏹️ ▶️ John up, that bar goes, choo, choo, choo, choo. And if the cables are in the way, it will block them. So you have to unplug

⏹️ ▶️ John every single cable, the power cable, all the USB cables, your display cable, any cable that is connected

⏹️ ▶️ John to the back of his computer needs to be unplugged to take the case off. Which is kind of a shame because you’re like, okay, fine, the power

⏹️ ▶️ John has to be off, but do I have to unplug all those things? Because if you have a lot of stuff connected, especially you have cards installed,

⏹️ ▶️ John like lots of people put in different video cards and then you can have all these monitors connected, you can do all sorts of cool stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta disconnect all of those. And like, if it’s like on a desk or in some place

⏹️ ▶️ John deep, like it’s hard to see back there and they might like slide down and you like, just

⏹️ ▶️ John not convenient at all. But it’s so clear that Apple does not want you mucking around inside this thing when

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s anything close to being plugged in or turned on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doesn’t that also make it so that it’s not grounded anymore?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s one of the many theories I’m working on is I’ll keep it plugged in so it’s grounded, but you should also

⏹️ ▶️ John have a grounding strap Separate from that like it doesn’t mean you can’t plug it back in after you get the case off you could plug the power cable

⏹️ ▶️ John Back in it just means it has to be out to get the case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off Yeah Because like I was always told like Keep the power supply plugged in with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re working inside of a PC because then it keeps it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John grounded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm, and then you have you know extra ESD protection through the case.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I suppose you still we haven’t seen the repair guide for this computer I imagine it might still tell the repair

⏹️ ▶️ John technician to do that, but I Don’t know. I need to go unplug everything because otherwise that case is not coming off

⏹️ ▶️ John And also there’s also you can look at the picture. We’ll put in the show note of the tweet. Someone was mentioning the

⏹️ ▶️ John The BNC connector that’s poking out here. I think that’s what it’s called That’s from the black magic card. Someone said hey, do you have 10

⏹️ ▶️ John base 2 Ethernet on that thing? But anyway, they if you have a long enough connector poking

⏹️ ▶️ John out of the back of your computer It could be that you can’t get that well I suppose you couldn’t get the case on then because you’d insert the

⏹️ ▶️ John card and then when you try to put the case back on It wouldn’t go down because it would hit the connector But that’s not the case

⏹️ ▶️ John it clears the black magic card obviously but I can imagine there might be some card somewhere that expects you to

⏹️ ▶️ John expects to be able to stick out the back of your computer as long as it needs to and that’s not going to work in

⏹️ ▶️ John this.

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#askatp: Full-res photo sharing

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Squarespace. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, now that we’re done with follow-up, let’s start the show. All right, well, we’re out of time, so let’s move

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on to Ask ATP. Dimitri Tabacro writes, my relatives and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have iPhones and we use iCloud photo sharing. It was working fine until my father decided to print some photos from one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared albums. He is not able to get full res images from shared albums, only images resized

⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to about 2048p. Am I supposed to send zip files to my parents so they can print photos?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, why does it appear the photos are downloaded to the local device before adding them to a shared album?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can’t Apple do this process on the server side? It’s very inconvenient when I want to share a lot of photos from some trip when those photos

⏹️ ▶️ Casey already exist on the cloud. It takes up to tens of minutes, fails often, and so I have to share photos by batches.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope you’ll help me so I’m not going back to Google Photos slash OneDrive. I don’t use iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Photo Library. I do use iCloud sharing, but only very sporadically. So I haven’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey personally run into any of this. John, I think you’re the heaviest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey user of this stuff out of the three of us. Any solutions?

⏹️ ▶️ John I like this question because it highlights many failings of iCloud.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like all the major failings of iCloud sharing things. This is true in things that a lot of people don’t realize

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not a computer nerd into these things, that shared albums don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John share photos at full resolution. You might not notice that, and you’re like, I’ve got the picture, and you give it to your relatives,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re happy to have the picture, but if they ever try to print it, like in a photo print, especially if they wanna make like an eight by 10,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not happening. Like they’re not high enough resolution for that, which is a shame. Like I understand

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple does it to like save space and whatever, but this is a decision that was made many years ago, and they should revisit

⏹️ ▶️ John it because then the next question is, okay, well, whatever. The shared albums is just so people can see them on their phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John What if I wanna give the full res ones? What do I do then? There are tons of ways to do it, but none of them

⏹️ ▶️ John are part of Apple’s photo experience, except maybe like AirDrop or iMessage.

⏹️ ▶️ John And even iMessage, I’m not sure if it downscales. I think there’s a preference for downscaling somewhere in the iMessage settings.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can email them. My solution is usually to use Google products, as in I put them in Google

⏹️ ▶️ John Drive and send them a link. It really depends on what the person on the other end has access to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like if they don’t, if they have Apple things, I know I can use that Apple Mail thing where

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t actually attach it to the message, it puts it at like a public iCloud link. You know that feature? It was in like

⏹️ ▶️ John Sierra or something. I hate those. And it’s, I always try to do that and people in my family always

⏹️ ▶️ John yell at me mid-sentence and say, don’t do that, it’s too big to be an attachment. I’m like, it’s not gonna actually attach it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the point. It’s going to just, it’s gonna put it in iCloud, then it’s gonna send them an email with a link and then they’re gonna click

⏹️ ▶️ John the link. Like I like that system because it gets around the attachment stuff and you know they’re getting the full res thing, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it is easier and better if you know everyone on both ends do Apple stuff. iCloud, I know iCloud. Google Drive,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you just put it into Google Drive, Google Drive just thinks it’s a file, you can make a public link that can download the

⏹️ ▶️ John file. The web interface to Google Drive will try to be clever and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, this is an image, I can present this to you. You have to tell, this is the annoying thing, you have to tell them like, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John just click on the image and like right click or drag to your desktop or whatever. Go find the download

⏹️ ▶️ John button, which is a download facing arrow. Like you have to actually not let Google Drive

⏹️ ▶️ John try to be nice and like decode the thing for you. You just want the file. And so the zip file, although it’s stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John to zip JPEGs, which are already compressed and you won’t save space, at least that will make it so that

⏹️ ▶️ John everything in the chain understands like, I don’t know what this is, it’s just a file. I’m just gonna send you all the bits, here are the bits, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to worry about attachment stuff. So if you put that zip file in Google Drive and have people download the zip file, and hopefully Google

⏹️ ▶️ John Drive doesn’t crack the zip file open for you conveniently. See how complicated this is? It shouldn’t be this difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing about copying it down to the device. He’s right. Like Apple does have it. Why,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to send it to somebody else or add it to a shared album, do you have to bring it down to the device

⏹️ ▶️ John then put it back up to the shared album? It’s both in the same place, but that’s, you know, I don’t know if it’s a privacy thing or

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to do it server side. There’s lots of inconveniences for people with bad,

⏹️ ▶️ John slow connections or not a lot of space on their phones. Have to end up fighting with Apple’s photo system. So

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I don’t have a great solution to this. There are tons and tons of mediocre solutions, most of which I get by with, but I really

⏹️ ▶️ John wish Apple would do this better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we also got a question from Todd Vaziri, I don’t know, in the last week or so, saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, when is family-based, like, shared photo libraries ever going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a thing? And, oh, do I ever want it to be a thing, but I don’t see that being a thing anytime soon.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about that a lot. His question, he listens to the show, so he knows, like, his question was not,

⏹️ ▶️ John how can we do that? It was like, are there any indications, as in any birdies or any hints anywhere. Is there any

⏹️ ▶️ John hope saying, yes, Apple is going to address this need? I haven’t heard anything, but

⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve discussed in past shows, Apple has taken many steps over the past decade

⏹️ ▶️ John to prepare for that by having families and iCloud photo library. Like all those are prerequisites.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t have any actual information about, oh, in the next year or two or three, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to roll out this feature. They desperately need to, and they have laid a lot of the foundations. I just haven’t heard anything rumor-wise.

#askatp: Swift is a 🍆

⏹️ ▶️ Casey J.K. Cross writes, I remembered Marco saying something like, Swift is such a dick in an episode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few months ago. As someone who has been writing almost exclusively in Swift so far,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been wondering, would you please elaborate on that statement, Marco? And I would just like to say, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey implore this to happen. I didn’t bring this up at all. I didn’t even put this in the show notes. So I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to get in a fight with you. I mean, to discuss this with you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? I mean, it’s a matter of style and preference. I mean, lots of people like dicks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just have different preferences, I guess. That’s totally okay. You know, there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are trends and waves in programming languages. And we’ve gone throughout the history

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of programming languages. We’ve gone from, you know, very strict to more flexible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages, more dynamic languages and now we’re kind of in a wave that’s swinging back towards very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strict languages, very like you know super strictly typed and everything and this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Swift is. You know Swift is extremely strict and rigid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and picky and like in in the way that like you know some languages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t require you to differentiate between like levels of integer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco precision like you can you can cast a 64-bit integer to a 32-bit integer context transparently and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother you about anything and that’s the kind of thing that where Swift will generally bother you about stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not the only language that does this and things like this. This is not the only thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a dick about but just as I am using Swift which honestly I haven’t been doing a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of recently because I’ve been working in an existing Objective-C code base so I’ve been mostly writing that but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I write Swift I’m it just it just nitpicks everything I do to death in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that I understand what it’s doing I understand that it wants everything to be explicit and correct

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, but it just, in a way that is not logical or, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, or factual, it is, it is just, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s being a dick to me. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I understand what you’re saying. Obviously I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very different opinion about what is happening and why it’s happening. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even as someone who quite likes Swift, it is extremely picky. I don’t really see there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any two ways about that. It is very picky. It wants you to do things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the safest way possible. It wants you to be as explicit as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To me, Objective-C is much happier shooting from the hip and just pew, pew, pewing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all over the place. And that’s fine. I think for certain developers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s how they prefer to work, and that’s great. For other developers, that’s Not as great. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that the thing that bothers me about Swift is to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes, the language nerds have not only gotten hold of it, but I’ve performed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hostile takeover of it and, and I feel like early on,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, in the first couple of years of Swift, it had a lot of these jerky tendencies, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was workable. And, and decisions were made pragmatically relatively

⏹️ ▶️ Casey often. And I wish I could cite a specific example, and I can’t off the top of my head, but I try to keep up with the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey general gist of what’s going on in Swift evolution and the general kind of trends and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on in Swift. And even as someone who I think is more language

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerdy than your average developer, and I am not bad at all, I’m just saying more than your average developer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I appreciate the nuance of a lot of languages.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t care for the direction Swift is going, which is let’s let the academic language nerds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just go bananas and eschew any sort of pragmatism whatsoever. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that that’s not literally what’s happening, but that is what appears to be happening to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And man, I do not like it. I do not want it. And I do not like it. And I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that frustrates me. That frustrates me a lot. And that is where I think Swift is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking a turn for the worse. But I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. John, do you have thoughts on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this?

⏹️ ▶️ John I do, that’s why I put the question in.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay. First I wanted to hear about Marco’s assessment of Swift’s dickishness.

⏹️ ▶️ John My own assessment of it, like I spent my career programming what they call dynamic languages,

⏹️ ▶️ John which are the least dickish of any,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco depending on how you look at it. If you

⏹️ ▶️ John ask someone of a dickish language, they will say the opposite. But like, yeah, in Perl,

⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript, anything goes to the nth degree, right? That’s the beauty

⏹️ ▶️ John and some would say the curse, right? My impression is that what I thought Marco was saying when he said Swift

⏹️ ▶️ John is such a dick like I I Thought I understood what he was saying because I feel the same way about

⏹️ ▶️ John statically typed languages. Basically any language that has a

⏹️ ▶️ John Strong complicated type system that you have to participate in I find it annoying

⏹️ ▶️ John to be writing a program and for it to say your program is cool and everything but like

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the exact type that that says it is you’re like, oh my god They’re trivially convertible to each other and I know

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing is always going to be in this range and it’s fine It’s like yeah, but I’m the language and you I can’t I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna take your word for it You have to actually make the types match for me any

⏹️ ▶️ John amount of brainpower and time I spend dealing with the type system Annoys me

⏹️ ▶️ John for other people types are your whole program I’m my problem is solved by defining

⏹️ ▶️ John types once I’ve defined the correct types the problem practically solves itself furthermore I cannot

⏹️ ▶️ John be reassured that anything I write is remotely correct in any way if I am not assured that all the types

⏹️ ▶️ John are matched Up down to the nth degree because that helps you makes me feel comfortable that it well my logic

⏹️ ▶️ John might be wrong But at least I know all the types thread through the system and that makes me feel reassured Lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ John have that as a big security blanket and they flip out in any language that isn’t that strict and they’re like

⏹️ ▶️ John How can I use this language this I don’t know if it’s an integer or a string How do you write anything that works and yet

⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic companies and millions of lines of code? have been produced and work just fine

⏹️ ▶️ John without that. And those people can’t even imagine how can you have millions of lines of anything with quote unquote no

⏹️ ▶️ John types, even though there are types, but not the types they’re interested in. You know, strings being coerced

⏹️ ▶️ John into numbers and vice versa, nothing will ever work and that’s just not true, right? So that’s the divide.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think languages that appear dickish to people who are accustomed to working in a sort of a loosey-goosey

⏹️ ▶️ John language are like, oh God, don’t make me tell you again about the types. I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John or like, why can’t I just have this thing as a bucket of things that all conform to this protocol? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not allowed to have that? Oh, then I have to figure out some other way to do it. Just like, just take a bunch of things of type ID,

⏹️ ▶️ John like an objective C, like just, you always wanna just have that out to say, I don’t wanna deal with types, just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, and so that’s my impression of the decontextualization and non-decontextualization divide, which is, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John an accurate assessment because depending on which camp you’re in, the other side is a dick of saying like, oh, you’re just gonna let me

⏹️ ▶️ John pass a string to this thing that takes a number and you’re gonna give me an answer and not say anything, you’re gonna let me call a method and you have

⏹️ ▶️ John no friggin’ idea whether that method exists? Oh, sorry, you’re gonna send a message and you don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if that

⏹️ ▶️ John thing can

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco even

⏹️ ▶️ John receive

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ John message? How does that even compile? You don’t know that this thing has a foo message

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re just gonna let that compile and I’m gonna find out at runtime that it doesn’t have a foo message? How can you write anything in

⏹️ ▶️ John this language? Obviously, everyone knows you can’t write anything useful in Objective-C because you can send a message. You can send

⏹️ ▶️ John a message to nil and it’s a no-op, what the hell? You’ll never be able to make a successful

⏹️ ▶️ John commercial system in this language, as we all know, there will never be any

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco successful product

⏹️ ▶️ John or company based on a language that acts like this without static types, nothing works. Obviously, you know

⏹️ ▶️ John which side of this I fall down on. Swift tends to be more dickish in that way.

⏹️ ▶️ John As when I wrote that long thing about Swift when it first came out, which I smuggled into a Mac OS X review, because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the forum I had for a lot of my writing, I described all of that, but my perspective

⏹️ ▶️ John on it then, and still mostly now, is that Swift is dickish in this way

⏹️ ▶️ John to a much greater degree than Objective-C because that’s how it can figure out how to make

⏹️ ▶️ John your code run fast. And its ambition was to be expressive and able to write cool programs,

⏹️ ▶️ John but also as fast as it can possibly be, like a systems programming language. Like you could write an

⏹️ ▶️ John operating system in it. Like it is, you know, you should never have to resort to C because this should be just as fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s no way a language can be that way unless it knows down to the minute

⏹️ ▶️ John detail exactly how everything is set up and the fact that they match up. It needs to know that method exists

⏹️ ▶️ John so it knows that it can call it so it doesn’t have to do like a method table lookup or a runtime check and no

⏹️ ▶️ John runtime coercion. It’s not like you have to know everything that it does down to memory allocation and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and with arc, you know, anyway, that’s one reason it’s like that. But I think swift also, this

⏹️ ▶️ John gets to Casey’s point. I again, I’m you to use the language way more than I do.

⏹️ ▶️ John I read about it, but I’m not actually using it. But my impression from reading about it of the debates among the language

⏹️ ▶️ John nerds, as you derisively called, but those are my people as far as I’m concerned, which may sound weird based on what I said there,

⏹️ ▶️ John but my people were like the pearl language nerds was a different breed of language nerd. But anyway, based on those conversations,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think what they’re trying to do is say, swift needs to know about all the crap in the program

⏹️ ▶️ John so we can make an efficient and so it can turn runtime errors into compile time errors and help

⏹️ ▶️ John you in that way to make a secure, more correct program that runs really, really fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we don’t want it to bother you that much. We don’t want it to be so dickish. That’s what type inference is about. And half

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Swift stuff is, how can we make it so you can write something that looks simple,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the compiler can figure out what it is that you meant, and whether it’s valid without having

⏹️ ▶️ John to ask you cast this to that or reassure me that this conforms to that protocol, or

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t say anything about types at all. And I’ll figure it out like the whole type inference engine and you know, all the

⏹️ ▶️ John type erasure and the protocol system and all their generics and we don’t hear it. They’re trying, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ John to make a language that has all the attributes of the, you know, the, the, I forget what the

⏹️ ▶️ John pro people used to call it. They something in bondage. Uh, it was a sex analogy. I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John Nerds in the nineties. Anyway, the bondage and discipline languages that want you to say everything

⏹️ ▶️ John about the types you want to get all that performance. We don’t want you to have to deal with that. And I feel like that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re trying to do pragmatically. Like the number of times they change the string system, they need it to be efficient. They need it to not

⏹️ ▶️ John have to go through conversions. They need it to like to be able to efficiently get

⏹️ ▶️ John offsets and split and join strings without you having to worry about all the Unicode stuff, but they want it to be really fast under

⏹️ ▶️ John the covers. So that’s why they get rid of UTF-16 behind the scenes, even though that’s what Objective-C’s NSString

⏹️ ▶️ John used for all those years, because it was back when UTF-16, they thought would be the thing, right? And for backward compatibility,

⏹️ ▶️ John it was gonna do that, but they changed the system again and all the different methods to get offsets and indexes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And just, I see the Swift language people trying to make Swift less

⏹️ ▶️ John of a dick, while also making it blazingly fast and convenient to use and expressive. Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re failing to a degree that Casey feels like he’s getting put upon by new things. That’s why I wish

⏹️ ▶️ John you had some more concrete examples, you know, where you feel like it’s getting more dickish, not less. But

⏹️ ▶️ John for sure, Swift is on the bondage and discipline side in terms of the compiler needs to know what the hell’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John on, right? But I think they’re trying to be much less dickish. And they have the whole dynamic dispatch thing they

⏹️ ▶️ John added for Python support and everything like that, where you can actually call a thing that you’re not sure exists at runtime, but they try to do it in an efficient

⏹️ ▶️ John way. And maybe it’s easier to be a fan when you’re not forced to write programs

⏹️ ▶️ John in the language. And maybe someday I’ll write something significant at Swift and then come on the program and complain about all the dickishness

⏹️ ▶️ John that I just described. But I feel like Swift is trying to not annoy you with the type system,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s never gonna give up that type system. It loves its types.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think, again, I wish I had a more concrete example just like you said, but I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like so much of the stuff I see in the newsletters that I read and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. And I’m not deep into Swift Evolution, so it very well could be that there’s plenty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of pragmatic people arguing the way I would argue, and I just don’t see it. But so much of the stuff I see flying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey around is super esoteric, really weird stuff that I as a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional Swift user, a commoner, the common folk like me, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey care about, will rarely see, none of that stuff matters. And so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stuff that I think once ABI Stability came in in Swift 5,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was, once the ABI Stability train had reached

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the station, I feel like all of Swift Evolution just went to, all right, my one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey super nerdy language thing that nobody else gives a flying fart about, that’s what we need to perseverate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on right now. And some things have gotten better, like codable and decodable,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or codable, encodable, decodable, I think that’s right. a while since I’ve written any of that stuff, which is basically JSON encoding and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey decoding. That was an absolute win. And that came in in the last couple of years. And everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and their mother had written a JSON parser in Swift. And some of them were good and a lot of them were crap.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But with Codable, a lot of that was brought into the framework

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. And I think that that works really, really well. And it was really well abstracted in the way that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of Objective C shines. Like there are things about Objective-C and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Foundation that bother me. And I’ve said this example before on the show, and I’ll say it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, coming from C Sharp to Objective-C, there was, I believe, if memory serves, it’s been a long time now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was one date time class in C Sharp. And that did anything related to dates. And then I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Objective-C and there’s date, there’s like NS date and NS calendar, and some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey series of classes and objects with regard to time, and it all seemed friggin’ overkill. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, it was really just that it was properly abstracted and that time is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey friggin’ hard. Who knew? And I think that, you know, the codable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff in Swift, I think that that’s properly abstracted. And if you want to do something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey super basic, it’s actually very straightforward to do. And if you want to do something really esoteric and weird, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doable. I just wouldn’t say it’s straightforward. And that’s a great example of things going the right way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But so often I feel like there’s just weird decisions with regard to weird

⏹️ ▶️ Casey corners of the language that oftentimes bubble into my world, either via newsletters or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually into my code, that I’m just like, come on, people, this is not something we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to worry about. Like a silly example of this was like the removal of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey preincrement post increment operators

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John plus plus. You’re going to bring

⏹️ ▶️ John that chestnut back.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, it was years ago. I don’t think that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John good supporting example of what you were describing. That’s more of a bike shedding thing. I would say a better example,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think this is a beneficial attribute of Swift, is they will take multiple runs of this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John How many times have they changed strings? They tried it, they tried it again, then they tried it again.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s good. They should not have stuck with the first one. The first time they didn’t get it right. No, it was garbage. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they keep trying. Sometimes, and even the codable stuff, I think they took at least one other run at that type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John or they keep changing equitable and hashable stuff, because they realize people use them, and there’s some things that are

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more annoying, or they add features like the default initializers, and it becomes easier to write certain things, and they

⏹️ ▶️ John redo them. It’s annoying for people for source compatibility, and so on and so forth, but I think it’s the right call.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you didn’t get strings right the first time, don’t be like Java and be like, nope, we did strings, that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s unfair to Java, but other languages. Other languages evolve more slowly, let’s say, than Swift,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think one of Swift’s advantages is their willingness to rip everything up, and the fact that they implemented so much in the standard library that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the quote unquote language. They can say, hey, we’re not changing the language that much, we’re changing the standard

⏹️ ▶️ John library, which is mainly how people use the language. But no, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John a fan of the process and I think they’re headed in the right direction. They are the only criticism, it’s not a criticism,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the thing that is not to my taste is they are doing this in a language that is pot committed

⏹️ ▶️ John to efficiency. Like, that’s how I always think about it. Like, what I want, if I ever have

⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with bondage and discipline, you damn well better run fast. Like that is the only reason

⏹️ ▶️ John I will tolerate this kind of garbage, because otherwise I’ll just write it and I’ll write it in JavaScript for crying out loud. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna run slow, no way I want to deal with your types. But if you deal with types, this is all me, the programmer,

⏹️ ▶️ John doing work so that you, the compiler, can make this thing run as if it was written in assembly. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what I want out of, out of this language.

#askatp: ATP road trip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Tom Bornholdt writes, I had a dream that I was road tripping with the ATP crew.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To ensure the dream’s accuracy, if the ATP crew took a road trip together, who would be driving, who would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be in shotgun, and who would be in the back seat? Uh, let’s have Marco start with this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will go next and John can finish this out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John would be driving. Because there is no way in hell that Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I would want to drive with John as a passenger.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have driven with me as a passenger, both of you, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but not for a long road trip.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John All right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. That’s a lot of pressure, and you’re going to have opinions, and it’s not worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s like selling you an old computer. Like, no, bad

⏹️ ▶️ John idea. Yeah, you two would never have opinions about driving, I’m sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not a bit. So John would be driving, and then the question of opinions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would come up, and Casey would have much more opinion than I would. And so Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be in the passenger seat and I would go in the back. Also they’re both taller than me so I can fit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the back more easily with my shorter legs and so I would just go in the back and you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look out the window or dick around my laptop or whatever and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would talk cars and I would try to I would zone out probably fall asleep and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the back I can fall asleep without them noticing as easily.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well that’s an interesting point. Okay, so I started with there was no way, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that John wouldn’t let anyone else drive. But then I got to thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think John would enjoy just spacing out, just like you were saying. I think John would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy just spacing out. I don’t know if John’s capable of it, especially as we’ve heard his airplane passenger

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tendencies, but I think he would enjoy it. So I think a happy medium for John would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey riding in the passenger seat and Aaron has driven John, like a mini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey road trip. It was like half an hour I think each way, something like that. I was not in the car at the time. And I don’t remember her coming back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey traumatized, so I consider that a good sign. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would want to drive, but in all likelihood I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have said, and so now I’m cheating because you’ve gone before me, I would have said that, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would have been more opinionated about being the one in control and I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a comparatively more passive person and I would resign myself to the back and Marco you would drive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although hearing what you said a moment ago, maybe I would switch you and me. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not sure. John—

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who’s car are we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving? It’s an indeterminate, some crummy rental

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. Oh, I’m definitely not driving that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remember gentlemen, the rental car is the fastest car in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, the rental car probably has a CPT so John won’t drive it either. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John, what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ John So when I see my interpretation of this question, you know, there’s lots of things left unsaid, but like road tripping, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think of that, if it’s a question worthy of considering, like who’s gonna do what, and it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John some road trip, I’m thinking of like an epic road trip. And in very long road trips, the dynamic, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve ever been on one of these, especially with people who like aren’t your family members and you haven’t been on road trips before, is such

⏹️ ▶️ John that a few things are true. One, it is basically impossible,

⏹️ ▶️ John and even if it is possible, it’s a terrible idea to have a single person drive. So I was assuming that we would all take

⏹️ ▶️ John turns driving, because if you’re on a really long road trip, it’s dangerous for one person to drive for like, you know, 12

⏹️ ▶️ John hours in a row. Like, and you have three people in the car and three people who can drive, you should change

⏹️ ▶️ John drivers. Second thing is that however you might start the road trip, when hour 27

⏹️ ▶️ John rolls around, it’s a different vibe in the car.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone is comfortable with each other to the point where even after 27 hours in the car, a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I would never even consider doing, I would be open to, which is like sleeping in the backseat

⏹️ ▶️ John while someone else drives. Which you’re right, that normally I would not, if someone else was driving,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would have to be mentally backseat driving the entire time to try to keep myself alive. But at a certain

⏹️ ▶️ John point, you’re just like, everyone’s exhausted, you need to sleep because it’s going to be your shift to drive for another four hours.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, all of a sudden then I’m in the backseat and I’m asleep and Mark was in the front, but he’s asleep

⏹️ ▶️ John too. And then it was, but the person in the practice sheet should stay awake to keep the other person awake. And you’re rotating drivers and you’re stopping

⏹️ ▶️ John for food. Like a different set of rules engages at a certain point in a road trip, in which case

⏹️ ▶️ John this question takes on a whole new dynamic. And I feel like that’s how all road trips have to go. Is that you

⏹️ ▶️ John rotate drivers, you rotate seats. The person in the back is sleeping. And that’s, and the

⏹️ ▶️ John person in the front is there to assist the person who’s driving. That I feel like it’s how it has to go. For a shorter

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Yeah. Like, and that’s, I mean, obviously you’re both considering short, but for a shorter trip,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably want to drive. I don’t think I’ve ever driven with Casey. I said, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know if he’s a maniac. He might be.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I hear a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John about, so I’ve driven with Marco and he drives fine. Like I would, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, obviously I would be backseat driving from the front seat, right? You know, like I do with any, literally

⏹️ ▶️ John anybody else, but I wouldn’t have any particular objection to Marco driving. I don’t think he’s a dangerous or a reckless

⏹️ ▶️ John driver. Casey might be dangerous or reckless driver. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I would definitely, and Marco nailed it before, I would definitely want to be the passenger seat. It’s a legroom issue. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, this is heightism, but yeah. You can get more legroom in the front. So Marco, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like would have a higher chance of being, depending on the size of the back seat, if it’s a tiny back seat and everyone would be uncomfortable that you should rotate,

⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah. I would like to be in the passenger seat or the driver’s seat. And also for car sickness, I need to

⏹️ ▶️ John look out the front window. You can do that from the back seat, but it’s harder. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably be driving The longer the trip gets, the more I would be very open to passenging

⏹️ ▶️ John because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I would be tired of

⏹️ ▶️ John driving. But then I would be backseat driving from the passenger seat and then in a really long trip I’d be sleeping in the

⏹️ ▶️ John back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode and Collide and we will see you next

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anti-Marco Armen S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to accidental Tech Podcasts, so long

Post-show: The Microsoft Store

⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot to mention that when I was trying out mice, I had occasion, my first ever occasion, to

⏹️ ▶️ John go into a Microsoft store. It’s right near the Apple Store in my mall.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there was lots of people in there, surprisingly. Really? Not as many as the Apple Store, but there was

⏹️ ▶️ John at least, you know, one person per table display area kiosk thing, which is way

⏹️ ▶️ John more than I’d heard stories of. And again, it wasn’t packed like the Apple Store where every table had people around it shoulder to

⏹️ ▶️ John shoulder, but there was people there. I went in to feel the mice as you do. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I get you know I think they had all of them set up so I mean it’s just their current

⏹️ ▶️ John product line but that’s how I got to try them out. One of them was actually connected to a computer so I got to use it and mess with the tracking.

⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously the computer is running Windows yada yada. The only thing I was disappointed is they didn’t have any

⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox Elite controllers out anywhere. I wanted to try one of those. I’ve never used one in person. I

⏹️ ▶️ John thought it’d be cool to try. Maybe it’s because the things come off magnetically and people will steal them out of the store. I’m not sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway It was pretty nice. People there were nice and helpful. Two thumbs up for the Microsoft Store.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never seen the Microsoft Store in my mall have more customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than employees there.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This

⏹️ ▶️ John definitely had more customers than employees.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually, at least two or three of the employees at the Microsoft Store are playing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Minecraft booth that’s set up, because they don’t have anything else to

⏹️ ▶️ John do. Yeah, this thing had a booth that was set up. It was a Disney Plus booth, like the one right next

⏹️ ▶️ John to the hallway, you know, the mall thoroughfare or whatever, the one right next to there

⏹️ ▶️ John was like a bunch of seats, I guess it had previously been used for like VR or something or whatever. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John it had a big Disney Plus thing and they were showing episodes of the Mandalorian or whatever. It’s like, is there some deal with

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and Disney for them to sell Disney Plus subscriptions? I don’t understand what they were demoing, but that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John it was. There was tons of Xboxes set up too and kids playing games. Maybe that’s why, maybe it’s like kids who wanted to play games and their

⏹️ ▶️ John parents were just milling around. I don’t know. The Surface Studios were there. I still think that’s really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Has that gone anywhere? It’s a cool idea, but I haven’t heard a thing about it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since

⏹️ ▶️ John launch. I would love it if Apple made an iMac like that. Gigantic touch screen

⏹️ ▶️ John that can go down to like drafting table mode and up into regular 5K screen mode. If the hinge

⏹️ ▶️ John feels good, the form factor looks cool, it’s underpowered, it’s overpriced, we’ve talked about it. But that’s an

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting idea. Yeah. I mean, it runs Windows, so there’s that. But other

⏹️ ▶️ John than that, I looked at that and then I looked at the iMac and the iMac looks like a previous gen product. It’s like, oh yeah, I remember when computers used

⏹️ ▶️ John to be just like an L-shaped foot and then a screen. There was no touch screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. I mean, that’s how, like, when I was in the Microsoft store like looking at laptops last year, that’s how I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fell in love with laptops too. Like when you saw like the super skinny bezel laptops with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that one with the pop-up camera and the F and keys. Like, it really does make a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of Apple designs look very dated by comparison. Which is funny, because it used to

⏹️ ▶️ John be the opposite. Or at least less daring. Yeah, well, it makes them look more conservative. I mean, you look

⏹️ ▶️ John at anything in the Microsoft store when you see Apple’s design from three years ago. Like the reason all their keyboards look like

⏹️ ▶️ John they do and like they’re, you know, they borrow so much from Apple’s design aesthetic, but they’re so much

⏹️ ▶️ John more daring.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, unfortunately it’s more than three years ago though. Like it used to be that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC designers looked, it looked like PC designs looked like Apple products from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two or three years ago. Now it looks like PC designs look like Apple products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey 10 years ago. In two or three years?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I don’t know, yeah, I guess, yeah, you’re right. It’s like the other

⏹️ ▶️ John direction. The keyboard aesthetic of this current keyboard, like that it’s sitting in front of me now,

⏹️ ▶️ John the flat keys on the thin key frame thing with the very squared off edges and like

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, Apple pioneered that aesthetic in their laptops and it spread through Microsoft’s products. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the aesthetic Microsoft has of like the gray on gray, rectilinear brushed

⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum thing owes a lot to Apple. But then Microsoft takes that ball and runs with it. Like the Surface Studio,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, The fact that it just was like a big screen, like what do you expect screens to look like? The fact that it has a black bezel

⏹️ ▶️ John around it, it looks a little bit iMac-y, but that chrome hinge is like a remix of the

⏹️ ▶️ John arm on the flower iMac thing. And then the

⏹️ ▶️ John little case is like an oversized Mac mini in a different color of beige. Like, you see how it’s a kind of a mishmash,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then the Surface stuff is Microsoft’s own thing that if anything, Apple has followed

⏹️ ▶️ John along a little bit in sort of squaring off the edges on the iPads and stuff. I don’t know. It’s it’s a good mix and I think Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft like has taken up residence as a semi premium

⏹️ ▶️ John PC vendor because I’m not gonna say the most premium PC vendor because there are fancy PCs and there are ones with different aesthetics

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the you know alienware origin or whatever all these gaming PC makers are and some of that stuff is really

⏹️ ▶️ John cool, too But that’s one of the reason the modern is Microsoft mice a mouse I tried it and I’m like, you know what this

⏹️ ▶️ John these buttons feel good This wheel feels solid. This mode switch feels satisfying.

⏹️ ▶️ John Seemed like a quality made peripheral and it was priced like one. Like it’s not a $30 mouse. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m optimistic that I would actually like that product when I get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, Microsoft has always been really good about input devices. Like their keyboards and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mice have always been really rock solid.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I hated the, you know, the beginning, the Microsoft’s first peripherals, their first mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John and their first keyboards. I hated those with a fiery passion. They felt cheap. They weren’t shaped the way I wanted them,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the new ones are more premium. They feel solider. They cost

⏹️ ▶️ John five

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco times as much. They’ve amplified

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves. But those old peripherals had a particular style, and tons of people loved them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, how many people had Microsoft mice on their PCs for years and years? It was like de facto,

⏹️ ▶️ John the standard mouse that you would see on anyone who cared anything about mice. You’d get the Microsoft one. PC

⏹️ ▶️ John vendors ship them. So, you know, they’ve just sort of moved up market a little bit.