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

361: A Button in the Thumb Shelf

In-flight entertainment, Ethernet drama, restless Macs, and sanding off a Windows logo.

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. Trouble in paradise
  2. In-flight entertainment
  3. iPhone camera ergonomics
  4. Jumpy mice
  5. Photo-sharing
  6. Game controllers
  7. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
  8. Rackmount Mac Pro
  9. TrueTone on XDR
  10. Ethernet wonkiness
  11. Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
  12. Finder toolbar battles
  13. Low Power Mode for Mac
  14. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  15. John’s mice
  16. Ending theme
  17. John’s trackpads

Trouble in paradise

⏹️ ▶️ John Were you bitten by a radioactive spider? Speaking of spiders? Because you could be gaining superhuman

⏹️ ▶️ John hearing abilities. Can you like run much faster and leap higher than you could before as well?

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you see through walls?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my goodness. Imagine what a curse it would be to get superhuman hearing but only for fan noise. Only for

⏹️ ▶️ John fan

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco noise.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco already have that. I was going to say that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is John. A

⏹️ ▶️ John superhuman vision but only for dead pixels.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am having a slight problem with my iMac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course you are. Of course you are. Coincidentally, I actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have had a slight problem with my iMac Pro, which we’ll talk about later. But Marco, tell me, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible tragedy has befallen your iMac Pro that’s going to necessitate a replacement with a Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say necessitate, but it did kind of make me think, hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course it did. Things that make you go, hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve started hearing the fan a lot more often. It started

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to spin up a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to audible levels. Oh no. So I’ve had the computer for what, about two years now? For

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first 23 months of ownership, I never heard the fan spin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, not a single time. Recently, every time I do a big build

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Xcode, it spins up very noticeably for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Really?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming it’s probably just full of dust and I don’t really know how to clean it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. I figure like, you know, obviously besides taking it to an Apple service provider, which I don’t want to do is maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I like take it down from my desk and blow compressed air through its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exhaust vent, my theory is maybe if I blow canned air into the exhaust vent, it’ll force all the dust

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crap out the intake vents.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you should look at that. You should take a look at the geometry of the inside of that thing to before you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I should yeah Radar ski in the chat says it’s full of sand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spiders well done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I’m hoping this is easily solved with dust But honestly if it’s if this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just how this computer is now I’m gonna be very upset because one of the things I love most about this computer is I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never hear it and Now I hear it frequently and that’s that’s very very annoying,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s a very recent thing So I’m assuming it’s something I can I can hopefully fix

⏹️ ▶️ John remember I told you that my Mac Pro is louder just at idle then

⏹️ ▶️ John and I Mac at idle because the fans are not like Behind a solid thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Mm.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, you

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t and now the fact that that that audio never changes As far as I could

⏹️ ▶️ John tell my fans have literally never spent any faster than idle ever Doesn’t change the

⏹️ ▶️ John fact that there is sort of a higher low level idle hum So I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John sure if the Mac Pro solves this problem for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, like if they had updated the iMac Pro, I might have ordered it to fix this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, they haven’t. Because yeah, like if I was gonna, if I really, if for some reason this problem can’t be fixed,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if my iMac Pro is just getting flaky because it’s two years old, which it sure shouldn’t, but you know, it wouldn’t be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time that happened to an iMac, then I would honestly, like looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the current lineup, I think I would still honestly just buy another iMac Pro. I would just feel bad buying two of the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation. But yeah, this is probably something that’s easily fixed, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I sure hope so.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The tough thing about it is, you’re still on Mojave on that, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whoop in the chat says, this is the computing equivalent to, my ashtray is full, new car time.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you could fall into the category of, oh, compressed air, is there anything you can’t fix? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope, I mean, we’ll see. When it comes to Apple hardware, compressed air is the cure-all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John follow it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up next to you. Do I have to hold my iMac Pro at a 75 degree angle? That

⏹️ ▶️ John is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John different tech note for what angle you have to hold the iMac Pro at. Goodness, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even want to think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the funny thing about this is, for a fleeting moment I thought, well, could this be software? But you’re still on Mojave, aren’t you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have not changed my software setup at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you never know with Apple these days, which is really unfortunate. In fact, somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointed out to me, or maybe I saw, I think it was a Insta story that MKBHD put up a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day or two back, where he was exhibiting the janky and laggy mouse movement

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was seeing on my old iMac. And he was seeing this, if I recall correctly, on either the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a 16-inch MacBook Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And I just- That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a laptop. Was it a laptop? John, defend your honor there. So anyways, I saw that and was like, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I really need to hold off on the Catalina upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it was in a slack, because when I saw that video, I was like, oh, I’ve never had this happen to me, because I thought,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I have had like cursor jumping around, like when I tried to use the Bluetooth mouse with my wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, but it did not look like that. Like that was like very smooth motion, but delayed

⏹️ ▶️ John by like half a second from the input motion. And I have not experienced that. I’ve experienced it

⏹️ ▶️ John where you try to move it and it jumps from one place on the screen to another instead of moving a smooth line, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that is very weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that is one of the things I saw when I also saw the machine gun trackpad. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ah, very weird. Well, Marco, I’m sorry to hear that your iMac needs to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your iMac Pro needs to be replaced with a Mac Pro. But I’m glad that this difficult time where you didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a justification for it is now over.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if there was either a new iMac Pro or an Apple 5K display,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would make this a lot more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tempting. Oh, I feel so bad for you in your time of woe.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I had some interesting iMac problems, which we’ll talk about later. but we should start with some follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as per the rules.

In-flight entertainment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, tell me about AirPods and in-flight entertainment systems, if you don’t mind.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so last episode I basically said how much I love the AirPods Pro and how I really don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan on bringing any other headphones on planes for the foreseeable future because they’re so good and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much smaller than full-size noise-canceling headphones that the travel benefit of the small size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the performance of the noise-canceling is fantastic. And I still stand by that. They’re great. But a few people wrote in to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, what if you want I listen to the in-flight entertainment system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically like one of the reasons why they still carry headphones that can be wired

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they like to plug in and you know watch movies on the little screens that are on the in-flight thing and that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly valid opposing idea. I just never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought about it because I never do that. I always bring my own entertainment like I bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either an iPad or a laptop or both and I will watch videos on that if I want to watch something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just never really came up for me, but that is a totally valid thing. Now there are little Bluetooth transmitting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dongles that you can get for like 20 or 30 bucks, plug into the headphone jack

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the airplane, and they will broadcast a Bluetooth signal to a pair of Bluetooth headphones that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have. I have never used one, and I’m not sure whether the AirPods could pair

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it or not, because I don’t know how the pairing really works there. So that might be a solution,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can’t really speak for it. but certainly for non-AirPods Bluetooth headphones, those things are always fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But most of those headphones also can be wired optionally, so you’re better off just doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it were me, I think I would probably bring my AirPods or AirPods Pro and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then bring one of my 84 old ear pod, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, corded ear pods.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My first several iPhones. Like that’s not the most enjoyable way to watch anything on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a plane, but if I am slumming it to the point that I’m watching the in-flight entertainment, then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point, all bets are off. Because I’m like you, Marco, not only do I likely have a computer, but I certainly have an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad that has certainly used Plex to sync a whole bunch of media that I thought I would enjoy on the flight.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, this is not a problem that I find myself having, but it is an interesting point nonetheless.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, it’s funny, like we’re at this point technologically where, you know, not only does whatever you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you wanna bring with you on your laptop or iPad or whatever, not only do you probably have better stuff that you enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better and you probably have a bigger selection available if you prepared at all. But also the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is likely to be not only not only larger but also better quality like those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens and airplane seats are so bad there. They must be like TN panels like they have terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewing angles and terrible contrast and they just look terrible and they’re so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unresponsive and yes I know I’m supposed to listen to the in-flight announcements

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But rarely are those correctly volume leveled to the content that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plays back on the in-flight entertainment system. So usually what happens is if you turn the volume up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to hear speech in the movie you’re watching, then if there’s a pilot announcement,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like blows your ears out. It’s so loud. Right? And so, you know, it’s very hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use that and have a good experience. So it’s much better to bring your own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. as long as you prepared and you have any device, any modern device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has a screen. I’d rather even watch a movie on my phone than watch on the In-Flight Entertainment System. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much the quality difference matters to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely agree with you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. The only thing that the In-Flight Entertainment screens are for is, in my opinion, is either to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off if it’s a dark flight or if it’s a light flight to show the map.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep. You and I are of the same mind, my friend. Completely agree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, this is a small thing. Two little notes that I have. My recent flight, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flew on JetBlue. First time I’ve flown on JetBlue in a while because they don’t usually go where I want to go. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of JetBlue seems like a series of ads now. It’s one of those many,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, American airlines that now during the flight, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-flight crew comes on and makes long announcements that are credit card offers. Oh yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This seems like it’s crossing a line. You know, so not only are the people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking credit card offers to you using the same announcement system that they speak important flight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco information and critical instructions. But then also then they walk down the aisle holding up this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like brochure and offering it’s like and you can tell the flight attendants don’t want to do this like you know you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you can see in their eyes like they’re doing this because they have to they don’t want to do it that’s not their job it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t be their job but their job is making them do it right and so that’s that’s ads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then on the in-flight screen i just want to watch the map screen if it’s going to be on just show me the map screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but nope it cycles through it’s showing the map screen maybe 10 seconds out of every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute and the rest of the time it’s cycling through like billboard ads on the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no wonder we bring our own screens now the in-flight screens have gotten so bad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well the screens to your point a few minutes ago the screen quality was never good even when they were brand new yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah the the content is also terrible these days uh a friend of the show jelly just sent me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s basically in-flight push notifications. I think it’s completely accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So well done,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chad. I think it was Virgin America that they actually had seat-to-seat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco messaging. Yes. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey their remotes had the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey keyboard on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John back. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because this was right before everybody had their own smartphones and everything in their pockets anyway all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And right before, everybody had Wi-Fi everywhere and everything. And it was just like the coolest thing in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world for a year when Virgin America first came out and you could message someone else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like, you know, like if you were sitting separately from some other member of your family or party, you could like message,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, send this message to 16C. It’s the weirdest idea. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a weird idea, but it was very interesting. You know, I have to point out, I don’t remember what airline

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was and honestly it doesn’t matter, but on a couple of the flights I’ve flown in the last year, there’s been some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal, I think via T-Mobile, but it doesn’t really matter. Some way, somehow,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could send iMessages for free, even if you didn’t pay for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-flight Wi-Fi, which I thought was extremely cool. That was very, very nice. And it just reminded

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me again that half, well, like Aaron’s entire side of the family is on Android, which kind of stinks. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for those of us who are on iMessage, that was really, really convenient and really nice. And I thought that that was a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very nice middle road between screw you, give us 15 to 25 to 35 dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for in-flight Wi-Fi and you know, oh yeah, everything’s free, weee! You know, I thought it was a very good middle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the road.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, to complete Travel Tips corner here, this is one thing that like as SSL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has become more and more universal on websites, it has actually become somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder to find a site that is never SSL so that if you’re in a captive portal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi thing, like on many planes. I had to actually do this because like normally the Apple Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing should detect when you’re in a captive portal and it should put a little slide up thing up that lets you log in or click the accept button

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever you have to do. Sometimes that just doesn’t work for whatever reason whatever like Apple’s test page it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco detect that it’s a captive portal or whatever and so you have to you know go type in like you know google.com or whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you know it’ll it’ll capture that and redirect you to their login page you can log into the Wi-Fi. Well you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do do that anymore with SSL everywhere, and most browsers won’t even attempt to go to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google.com because it’ll use HSTS or something. And so there’s actually a site, neverssl.com,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is never served over SSL. So if you’re on a captive portal and you need a site

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know will redirect you to the login page, go to neverssl.com.

⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that cool? MARK MIRCHANDANI That’s very good. Or you can go to alwayshttp.com if you prefer

⏹️ ▶️ John the reverse logic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, glass half full, half empty, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s very good.

iPhone camera ergonomics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Henrik Helmers had a very good point. This was with regard to our conversation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode about how Marco and I don’t really feel like there’s any point to our big cameras anymore. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a summary. You get the idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey God,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco please don’t email us based on that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey summary.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, please don’t email us. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco dramatically oversimplified

⏹️ ▶️ Casey summary. Yes. But anyway, the point being, Henrik pointed out in their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spot on, the ergonomics of the iPhone as a camera is very poor. I would argue the iPhone has worse ergonomics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than any physical camera currently for sale. I don’t know if I wanna take that bet or not, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly the point, the broad point is absolutely true that the ergonomics of trying to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey physically operate the iPhone as a camera is not great. But I stand by what Marco and I were saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that for 80 to 95% of my use cases anyway, it’s the best camera I have these days.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an area for possible improvement. I mean, we know that the battery case the camera activation button

⏹️ ▶️ John to launch the camera app which is a step in the right direction because when you need to quickly take

⏹️ ▶️ John out your phone and use it as a camera it’s a it’s a tricky skill it’s a tricky thing to

⏹️ ▶️ John become good at it’s a small object that’s usually that’s pretty uniform and smooth

⏹️ ▶️ John around all the edges you may have to tap something on the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen if you don’t want to use like the volume button shutter or whatever but depending on how you have it oriented you might

⏹️ ▶️ John not know where all that stuff is going to be. By adding affordances

⏹️ ▶️ John for quickly being able to launch the camera app and use it to

⏹️ ▶️ John take a photo, that makes the phone a more valuable, more useful

⏹️ ▶️ John camera. And I think you can do some of that without making like the phone, making it phone the phone camera

⏹️ ▶️ John shaped. Like the if you just I mean, we’ve talked about a dedicated camera

⏹️ ▶️ John button for years, but you know, not just the one that launches the thing, but a dedicated shutter button, other than

⏹️ ▶️ John using volume, and maybe multiple buttons. I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of

⏹️ ▶️ John a newly shaped phone or a newly shaped phone case maybe that reflects

⏹️ ▶️ John the reality of our phones. Well, it’s kind of like, you know, Mike, Pearlie, and many other people in their pop sockets.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, the reason that’s so popular is it’s better ergonomics for using the phone in a particular

⏹️ ▶️ John way, not for pictures in that case, but just, you know, for very large phones being held in one hand safely

⏹️ ▶️ John and securely, right? It’s not something you couldn’t do before, but people are willing to buy basically

⏹️ ▶️ John a little outfit for their phone and dress it up for its new role

⏹️ ▶️ John as, hey, iPhone Pro Max, you’re a giant, but I can hold you with one hand now because I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got a pop socket. I can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John something like a smart connector or other kind of sort of smooth contacts on the Naked Robotic Core that is the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John that allow you to put on basically a camera case that has more

⏹️ ▶️ John grips and shutter buttons in various places so that you could

⏹️ ▶️ John take out your phone blindfolded, point it in a direction and take a photo. You can do that today,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it takes a little bit more fumbling. I feel like I could take out my big camera and point it in a direction,

⏹️ ▶️ John take a photo easier with blindfolded than I could with a phone. And certainly more securely, like

⏹️ ▶️ John if I was timed and said, we get it out quick and point in the right direction. and do it all blindfolded.

⏹️ ▶️ John My camera is camera shaped. It’s very easy to see where all the buttons are. I don’t need to look at them. It is not

⏹️ ▶️ John symmetrical in any way. It’s very clear where the gigantic lens is pointed and where the shutter button is and whether it’s on or

⏹️ ▶️ John off and all that other stuff. Not true at all. The phone, you’d have to take it out and feel around with it to find

⏹️ ▶️ John where the camera is, make sure it’s facing the right direction, make sure you know is the camera in the upper left, upper

⏹️ ▶️ John right, lower left, or lower right corner, because sometimes that matters when you’re taking a picture. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John look forward to, I haven’t been keeping track of the rumors, but I look forward to a future iPhone, maybe not

⏹️ ▶️ John this new redesign, but maybe the one after that has the ability to be more camera shaped.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one can dream.

Jumpy mice

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Scott Simpson and jumpy mice. John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you tell me about this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re going to talk more about mice later. But I remember when I first got my Mac Pro, I was saying

⏹️ ▶️ John how I’d hooked up the little Logitech dongle RF

⏹️ ▶️ John receiver thingy. And when I put it in the back of my computer, it was getting terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John signal. My cursor was jumping all over. Instead, I used that little Apple USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ John to USB-A adapter, which is like three or four inches long, and put the little

⏹️ ▶️ John RF dongle in that, and it worked. And I was doing it, I was putting it on the top ports, like instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of being around the back, I was putting it on the top. In retrospect, I should have realized that like, the one

⏹️ ▶️ John and a half foot distance between the back of the computer and the top of the computer surely is not accounting. You know, that

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t explain the incredible difference in signal quality that I was getting. So here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the actual explanation, and I find this depressing and somewhat infuriating.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is an Intel paper.

⏹️ ▶️ John Intel, the company largely responsible for USB. It’s on their website.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if those people did it, but anyway. It’s a study showing that the noise generated by USB 3.0

⏹️ ▶️ John data can have an impact on radio receivers whose antennas are placed close to a USB 3.0 device

⏹️ ▶️ John and or USB 3.0 connector. We will put the link in the show notes. It’s a PDF. We apologize for the PDF.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it is straightforward. I like to do a bunch of tests and say, here, if you put something

⏹️ ▶️ John near a USB 3 port that has data going through it,

⏹️ ▶️ John the act of the data going through that port will cause interference with things on a similar spectrum. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John that explains why my little Logitech turd thingy wasn’t working on the back of my computer, because

⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? It’s right next to a USB 3 port that was connected to my external SSD,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know? And similarly, I have other USB 3 devices and an external hub or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s bad. if you’re coming up with a standard, make sure that

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t cause radio interference for other things. And it’s not just the devices, the ports, the ports themselves, if they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not well shielded or not ridiculously well shielded, even the devices, the experiment where

⏹️ ▶️ John they were like wrapping the external SSD in tinfoil or some kind of foil to try to keep the noise,

⏹️ ▶️ John the USB 3.0 generated noise from coming out of that. I feel like this is the type

⏹️ ▶️ John of thing you you should figure out before you release the standard to the world. If you have and it’s 3.0

⏹️ ▶️ John only, it’s apparently not 2.0. So here I am with a bunch of USB 3.0 devices

⏹️ ▶️ John coming out of the back of my computer. And that’s, that’s why it was different when it was on the top, because the signal, the

⏹️ ▶️ John interference decreases rapidly as you move away from the, uh, the port or

⏹️ ▶️ John the device. So being on top of the computer, it wasn’t like it was closer to the mouse. It was farther from the USB 3.0

⏹️ ▶️ John point that had a lot of data going through it. So if you’re wondering why

⏹️ ▶️ John you get bad signal for your little RF receiver for your Logitech mouse, or you’re getting other weird

⏹️ ▶️ John behavior, and you have a bunch of USB 3.0 peripherals and or cables, read this paper

⏹️ ▶️ John and see if any of the solutions they recommend help you. I just like knowing what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going on, but boy, this is, I hope USB 4 doesn’t have similar problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure it’ll have even better and newer problems for us to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John contend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. have problems with out

⏹️ ▶️ John of space. USB 4. No space.

Photo-sharing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about photo sharing. A little bit more follow up there. Mario Panagetti says, you can send

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud photo links to people with non-Apple devices. Instead of adding the photos to the library, they’ll just get a zip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey download of all the photos. Am I testing Android phones? Don’t always know what to do with this. Surprise, surprise. Andrew

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Elliott writes, also it creates a public web page viewable by any browser which expires within 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. And finally, Jared Counts writes, I recently sent some photos to my wife via iCloud slash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage. If she opened the link on her phone, she could import directly into photos. So opening the link on her Mac showed a page with a download

⏹️ ▶️ Casey button for a zip file, as Mario had mentioned. So all a little bit more feedback on photo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing, which was in Ask ATP a couple of weeks ago.

Game controllers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John this is something about destiny don’t care. Let’s talk about rack mount Mac pros. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not about destiny It’s about a ps4 controller

⏹️ ▶️ Casey still don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John you do care

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey someday. I care someday

⏹️ ▶️ John One of your children is gonna complain that they want to use their ps4 controller to play Minecraft on one of your Macs You’d like

⏹️ ▶️ John You’d be glad you heard about this Me saying that like I had my

⏹️ ▶️ John Ps4 controller which was working fine in Windows 10 with Steam and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was paired, it was working, it could navigate the interface, but as soon as I launched the game the game couldn’t see it because the game

⏹️ ▶️ John itself had its own notions about connecting to the PS4 controller and I had to

⏹️ ▶️ John plug it in. Well apparently there is a wireless adapter that, kind of like the

⏹️ ▶️ John the RF adapter for a Logitech mice, that makes your computer think that it

⏹️ ▶️ John has a wired PS4 controller plugged into it, and really it’s got a little transmitter

⏹️ ▶️ John or receiver pair that make that happen. And apparently if you buy the one from Japan, it’s cheaper. So

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link in the show notes. If you’d like to use your PS4 controller wirelessly with

⏹️ ▶️ John your quote unquote PC or Mac and bootcamp in a game that insists that it

⏹️ ▶️ John must be a wired connection, this will fake it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I will say as much as I’m giving you junk about this, I was trying to use,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I don’t remember the name of the emulator, but I was trying to use a Mac-based emulator to emulate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey software that I had acquired a while ago and that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongly resembled software I used and played as a kid. And anyways, I tried to hook

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up my Nintendo switch controller via Bluetooth to my old iMac was the last time I tried this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was a pain in the hindquarters trying to get that to work and even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it did, like it was still a little bit wonky. So I thought about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying like one of the blessed controllers that Apple supports.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s at least a couple, but maybe this would be another solution to my problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John The PS4 controllers will just pair directly to your Mac, I think, with no anything. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re talking about like the made for iPhone or whatever, the ones that work with iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John devices. Right. But with a Mac, I think both PS4 and Xbox controls will just pair.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just you go and put them into pairing mode go into Bluetooth you connect and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right I think the problem was I was doing with the switch pro controller and that’s where I fell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in my face That’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John one of I think that’s not one of the ones that’s on the list of things that just get supported out of the Neuf

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Rackmount Mac Pro

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about Rackmount Mac Pros, if you don’t mind.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re available. The slow rollout of the Mac Pro continues. It’s not complete,

⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the next step. The Rackmount Mac Pro that has been on the page for a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you could never actually click the configure button. Now you can click configure and

⏹️ ▶️ John really the options look basically the same except that it starts at $6,500 instead of starting at $6,000. You can look at a gallery

⏹️ ▶️ John which has a grand total of three pictures. It shows the front which has a bunch of holes and two smaller handles for pulling

⏹️ ▶️ John out the rack. It shows the side which looks to, or you know, the cutaway which looks like it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John the same motherboard with the same components in the same places with a couple of extra things thrown

⏹️ ▶️ John on the front. I’m not quite sure what they are. I hope I fix it gets one of these and tears it down but I can’t maybe it’s just dead space

⏹️ ▶️ John in front of it I don’t know and then finally it shows the back which is a little bit weird I mean

⏹️ ▶️ John first you can see how much wider it is than the regular one but second the back does not

⏹️ ▶️ John have the same scalloped cheese grater hole pattern instead it just looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like it has a much more sort of you know previous

⏹️ ▶️ John generation cheese grater pattern. It’s just a flat piece of metal with a bunch of holes punched in it,

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of very tiny holes punched in it. So if you want to pay $500 for a bigger Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that can fit in a rack, now you finally can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a very important question. Does this count as the 2020 Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean maybe. I wonder, I guess if you buy it, it probably does, they probably do consider it the 2019 Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John Like what is the name of this product even let me see what it says on the page

⏹️ ▶️ John It just says Mac Pro like surely there is some Way to differentiate

⏹️ ▶️ John it in Apple’s official literature is it what kind of Mac do you have you don’t just say you have a Mac Pro Because if you come with this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, it’s probably just like it like, you know They don’t give the wheel configuration its own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product name like this it’s probably considered still the Mac Pro, it just happens to be in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco radically different case.

TrueTone on XDR

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about Pro Display XDR True Tone if you don’t mind.

⏹️ ▶️ John One thing I forgot to talk about when talking about my Pro Display XDR is that it comes with True Tone. I’m so out of the loop

⏹️ ▶️ John on other options. Does the iMac Pro or any of the iMacs have a True Tone option?

⏹️ ▶️ John No?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have Night Shift, that doesn’t count. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think for True Tone, obviously you need the sensors. Yeah. And maybe those just don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey exist. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I guess you could use the camera? I don’t even know. Anyway, the XDR has True Tone. has

⏹️ ▶️ John True Tone, and so playing with the monitor when I first got it is one of the things I considered. And,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what’s both of your positions on True Tone on all your devices that support it, mostly iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John devices?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it. I use it wherever it’s supported. I find it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite subtle, and I’ve never really noticed it. I used to use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one, Night Shift, I used to use Night Shift a little bit more. I think it’s now disabled on my stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, Night shift used to be a much bigger effect, but yeah, True Tone, I don’t really notice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So I just leave it on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so on my iOS devices, I use True Tone all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of one of those things, like when it first came out, I was like, do I really want something trying to mess with the colors

⏹️ ▶️ John based on what it thinks about the environmental colors? Isn’t that gonna look weird sometimes? Wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John I rather just have the screen just do accurate colors all the time, regardless of my ambient

⏹️ ▶️ John light? but I don’t know, I guess I just went with it figuring that

⏹️ ▶️ John if I enable it and I don’t notice any difference, that means that the light hitting my

⏹️ ▶️ John eyes in contrast to the surrounding light,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not optimizing for the accuracy of what is emitted, I’m optimizing for the accuracy of

⏹️ ▶️ John what gets to my eyeballs which includes some reflected light and I don’t know. So anyway, I leave it on and I’m fine

⏹️ ▶️ John with it. But on this thing, I’m like, well, I’m gonna be editing photos on here, Do I want this thing messing with the photos? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve tried it on and off. And it’s the type of thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where if you turn it on, you very quickly stop noticing that it’s on. But

⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as you turn it off, you’re like, wow, that’s a big color difference. And usually it’s shifting it more

⏹️ ▶️ John blue, right? So you turn it off and it looks bluer

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than normal.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Like I think I’m gonna end up leaving it on,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s definitely like a different vibe. like a fight. You know, the thing is it

⏹️ ▶️ John has a nice fade effect too. It doesn’t just switch immediately. Like I just turned it off and I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ John everything is blue. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. And when I turn it on,

⏹️ ▶️ John like for a second, things start to look a little yellow, but then everything acclimates and

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s a little bit of a conflict in my life here. I think I’m probably just gonna leave it on,

⏹️ ▶️ John edit all my photos with it on. I think if like on a sunny day with all the windows open or

⏹️ ▶️ John the blinds open, that it’ll basically be the same. But at night with this weird artificial lighting on. And the second thing is

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s two different presets that come with this, like in the color profiles below.

⏹️ ▶️ John One says Pro Display XDR and then in parentheses P3-1600 nits.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one says Apple Display P3-500 nits.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve tried each one of those things. And other than, I assume, the top preset

⏹️ ▶️ John being able to go to the maximum 1600 nits when you play the HDR content and the bottom one not, I

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell what the heck they’re doing. So I’m just leaving it on the default.

⏹️ ▶️ John It came out of the box set to P3 1600 nits, and I’m just leaving it on that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no thoughts about this whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, neither do

⏹️ ▶️ John I. This is the thing about HDR, I mean, this is my first HDR experience. I know, technically, the iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ John have HDR, yada yada, but like this is my first display that has HDR that you can really notice,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially in Windows, which handles this terribly. When I try to play Destiny in

⏹️ ▶️ John HDR and then like get the game to switch back to the quote unquote desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John in Windows, when it goes into HDR mode, like the entire like non-HDR

⏹️ ▶️ John content, like just your icons in Windows or whatever, looks like washed out and gross. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it changes the colors of that to support HDR. And so you can sort of catch a glimpse of what

⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the world would look like in HDR mode, but when you leave the game, it switches out of HDR

⏹️ ▶️ John mode in Windows and goes back to like regular display so that white stuff looks white again

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of everything looking like a gray haze over it. The Mac handles it much more gracefully. So when I play

⏹️ ▶️ John HDR video, I can tell that the brightest whites in that HDR video are so much brighter than

⏹️ ▶️ John any other white that’s been on the screen before that. You can narrow

⏹️ ▶️ John the gap by cranking the brightness up to max, but you do not want to do that. I mean, I think we all know on these modern displays,

⏹️ ▶️ John do not, on modern desktop displays, putting the brightness at max will burn your eyeballs

⏹️ ▶️ John out. Don’t do that,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the HDR, like I don’t think there’s a way to get it to display like an all

⏹️ ▶️ John white text edit window at 1600 nits, unless you put that in a movie,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I think the display will never, that, you know, it’s not high, the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John desktop experience is not high dynamic range far as I’m able to tell. Only video is that

⏹️ ▶️ John and that means only video is going to reach those peaks of 1600 hits. At least that’s my understanding. If somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John who actually knows stuff about reference monitors and HDR displays and

⏹️ ▶️ John and MacOS specifically has any guidance or something I can read or answers, please

⏹️ ▶️ John right into the show and let us know.

Ethernet wonkiness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so things seem to be mostly good with your new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pro, but I see the following in the show notes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, Mac Pro Ethernet wonkiness, quote. And coincidentally, I have iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet wonkiness that I’d like to discuss after you’re done. But tell me, is there trouble in paradise, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John My Ethernet wonkiness is, it’s a quick one, but it’s a thing that people, the other five

⏹️ ▶️ John people listening to this show who have Mac Pros may run across.

⏹️ ▶️ John So my Mac Pro, like most of my desktop Macs, I just turn off Wi-Fi because I want wired connections

⏹️ ▶️ John for everything. I don’t want them bothering sending their signal, transmit and receive signal out into the air.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just get off Wi-Fi. Don’t need it. Don’t want it. You don’t use AirDrop then?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or Apple Watch Unlock?

⏹️ ▶️ John No. I mean, you know I’m not using Apple Watch Unlock. I don’t wear a watch, right? And AirDrop, No, no,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use AirDrop. I don’t hand off, I don’t want the little icon sliding up next to my dock, I don’t want any of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m assuming that your previous Mac Pro was not AirDrop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John compatible.

⏹️ ▶️ John My previous Mac Pro did not have Wi-Fi. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest turning it on for AirDrop, because if you do the little network preferences

⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority list and just put the ethernet first, all your networking stuff will still go over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet, but leave the Wi-Fi on for AirDrop. Yep. I’m airdropping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything photos anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like sometimes like yeah sometimes I’ll send a photo from my phone to my Mac if I want it like immediately there like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without any waiting for sync sometimes tiff or I will airdrop things to each other’s computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it occasionally like you know if the network isn’t working right or if we if it’s just faster if it’s from iOS to the computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah there’s lots of times where I use it

⏹️ ▶️ John no I don’t think I have occasion to transfer anything from iOS devices to my Mac that’s not like already there

⏹️ ▶️ John through some sync process but I’ll keep it in mind if it ever comes up I certainly have the capability now unlike

⏹️ ▶️ John my previous computer. But anyway I connect to Ethernet the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro has two 10 gigabit Ethernet ports. I personally in my house have

⏹️ ▶️ John an 8 port switch that’s the same 8 port switch that I’ve been using with my 2008 Mac Pro. It’s not as

⏹️ ▶️ John old as my 2008 Mac Pro because I think it replaced at some point in its lifetime but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John a new switch. It’s old enough that I can’t get a replacement that looks like it, because I needed

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of switches. I think when I got the Synology, that wasn’t that long ago, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It wasn’t that long ago, that was almost seven years. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco three years old then.

⏹️ ▶️ John When I got that, I said, oh, I want to get some switches. I’ll get the same one that I’m been using with my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John here, and I couldn’t find it because they changed the models around or whatever. So anyway, it’s a pretty old switch is what I’m getting

⏹️ ▶️ John at. You know, but it’s a gigabit ethernet switch and like, you know, it’s a dumb switch.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s what, what could have changed since then? Well, something about

⏹️ ▶️ John this switch and the existence of 10 giga ethernet do not get along with each other.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I mean, it makes sense because when I bought the switch, 10 giga ethernet did not exist as a standard over

⏹️ ▶️ John copper as far as I’m aware. So it kind of makes sense that this, which wouldn’t expect

⏹️ ▶️ John that anyway. when I connected everything up on my Mac, and one of the things I did was a speed test

⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure that I had everything working the way I wanted and my internet speeds were terrible, at

⏹️ ▶️ John so incredibly slow and so incredibly close to 100 megabits, that it immediately became

⏹️ ▶️ John clear to me that my interface was probably set to 100 megabits. And sure enough, I went into the ethernet hardware settings

⏹️ ▶️ John and it was like, hardware speed, and it had selected 100 megabits, which is the wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John choice. And so basically what it comes down to is, in the negotiation between

⏹️ ▶️ John my ethernet switch and my mac they could not see eye to

⏹️ ▶️ John eye and i think my ethernet switch said fine i’m just defaulting to my slow speed so i went to 100 megabits so i just

⏹️ ▶️ John manually set it to gigabit and problem solved but if you also have a

⏹️ ▶️ John semi-old ethernet switch connected to your 10 gig ethernet be aware that they may not be friendly

⏹️ ▶️ John with each other and you may have to do what i did which is just manually set it to gigabit and then lo and behold

⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of megabits a second up and down to the internet. Problem solved.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me tell you my tale of woe because I’ve had a stressful 24 hours. And let me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you the extremely short version that Marco can drop in if he ends up cutting all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I thought that my iMac Pro’s Ethernet port was broken. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought the Eero was broken. And it turns out that possibly seemingly because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my Mocha bridge, bridge, everything was falling down on its face. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as I disconnected the Mocha bridge from my switch, everything came back up and everything was fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the longer version of the story, and this is where Marco will do the fast forward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound effect, but the longer version of the story is that I noticed that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my iMac Pro wasn’t connected via Ethernet and I thought that was very odd. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started trying to troubleshoot and I I thought that, okay, this is weird because the iMac just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is refusing to pull an IP. It’s seeing that thing that everything is connected physically, but it won’t pull an IP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I restart my Eero, I restart the switch, which like you, John, is a gigabit switch I’ve had for probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey five years or something like that. Nothing seems to be making a difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, then I eventually think, all right, well, screw it. Thankfully, my Eero base station, the parent,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, Eero base station is right there. And so I plug my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac directly into the Eero and that works no problem. It immediately pulls

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an IP address. Everybody’s happy. So I decide that the switch is broken. So because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey old, even though there’s no real intelligence there, you never know. So I decide to Amazon Prime

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now myself a new switch, which by the way, the fact that you can do that and within a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours it shows up still blows my mind even though this is like a five-year-old thing, but be that as it may.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I eventually get this new switch in, I plug everything up, and I’m ready to go. I’m excited.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That must have been the—oh, no, it’s not the problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. And I don’t recall the exact timeline. At some point in this struggle, I decide to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a diagnostics on the iMac, and the iMac says, no, no, no, everything’s great. But I don’t really trust that because my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last iMac said, no, no, no, everything’s great when it wasn’t. So I’m starting to get really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset at this point. And then I guess it was around now that I realized, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the switch can’t be the problem because it’s brand new. And that’s when I plugged into the Eero and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like, okay, it’s something about the combination of the switch and the Eero.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I start blowing up Eero support via email saying, without actually saying, I would like a new one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday, please, because obviously this thing is jacked up. And they didn’t put me through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entirety, I don’t think, of their, is it turned on kind of tech

⏹️ ▶️ Casey support rigmarole. But what they eventually said was, which I didn’t think of myself,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t think of it, but they eventually said, unplug

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything from the switch except your iMac and try that. And sure enough, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when everything worked. And if this by some miracle actually makes it in the show, I would love to know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from someone who knows more about this than me, why would the MoCA bridge cause everything to fall

⏹️ ▶️ Casey down? So if you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s an acronym something over coaxial, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey media over coaxial or something like that. I don’t know. But anyways, I still have TV service

⏹️ ▶️ Casey through Verizon Fios. And the way that our set-top box gets the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV guide, or whatever you want to call it, is through the internet. But the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way the set-top box is connected to the internet is via coax, the same cable that the video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes through. And in the past, this was fine because my Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey issued router also got its internet via coax or once I got Gigabit,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it had a coax port on it. So even though the internet was coming in via Ethernet in the newer router,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it still would connect to coax so it could give the set-top box or boxes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to the internet. Well, what I did was because I didn’t want to use the Fios router anymore and I really like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eero, which is a past sponsor probably future sponsor, but I really like them. I decided

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to use my hero. And so I got this thing called a Mocha Bridge, which is basically you plug coax into it, you plug Ethernet into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and it, guess what, bridges the two networks. And I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is about this Mocha Bridge that caused everything to fall on its face. But since I have unplugged it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything’s been working great, except of course, it’s a top box. But if you know more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this stuff than I do, I would love to know how that could be a thing, other than maybe the bridge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just needed to be like restarted or something, but I don’t understand how that Mocha Bridge could have taken down

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my whole darn network. So if you know, and if this actually made it in the show, I would love to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. So please do let me know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never trusted those Mocha Bridge things. I don’t like the idea of Ethernet over coax

⏹️ ▶️ John along with video signal. Just always seem janky. That’s why I’ve always wanted just like a box that’s on the wall of my

⏹️ ▶️ John house. Then what should come out of as an Ethernet cable and nothing else. soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which is what I have now. And I do when everything works, I actually do like the Mocha

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bridge. I have a fairly old one, and I don’t recall what generation it is. But my understanding, having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly looked into it, is that you can actually get gigabit or near gigabit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speeds over more modern Mocha Bridges. And that’s really important for someone like me who is too lazy to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey run Cat6 throughout the house, but really would like to have an Ethernet drop across

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house. Now, in my actual circumstance, I only use the Mocha Bridge for the purpose of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey set-top box. But if I wanted to go – like my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey office is in the upper right corner of the house, if you will, and the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family room is like below it and halfway back, and the kitchen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is below it on the opposite side of the house. So if I wanted for some reason an Ethernet drop in, say, the kitchen, I could use Mocha

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bridges to get that Ethernet drop. I already have one that usually is plugged in up here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the office, and I can put a second one down in the kitchen, and then I have an Ethernet drop right there. And so in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sense, it’s super convenient because I just ride on the stuff that’s already in the walls. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something has gone very, very wrong with this, and I don’t understand what, and it’s kind of driving me crazy. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. So thank you for indulging me, and we’ll see if this actually makes it in the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about your sleep-wake battles if you don’t mind please.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is another thing about, I don’t know, all new computers, most new computers in my life. That’s one thing

⏹️ ▶️ John I appreciated about my 2008 Mac Pro, and the thing, a thing that I hate about most laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ John sleeping and waking. My Mac Pro, my previous Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it had energy saver settings where you could say do you want it to wake for network access, and you could do scheduled wake

⏹️ ▶️ John and sleeps. I think those are are basically the only options. And you could also say when the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John goes to sleep and how long at idle before the computer goes to sleep.

⏹️ ▶️ John And all those settings worked all the time. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but anyone who has a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John or another Mac that they have these issues with, that’s not, you don’t take that for granted. Like the settings

⏹️ ▶️ John I had on my old Mac Pro were never sleep by yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John except during the schedule. The schedule was wake up at like 3 a.m. and then

⏹️ ▶️ John I had backblaze scheduled to run then and then go to sleep like an hour and a half or two hours later,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if you just left my Mac awake all the time, it would eventually cross 3

⏹️ ▶️ John a.m. and do its thing and then it would hit its scheduled sleep and it would go to sleep, right? But otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ John it would never automatically go to sleep. So that’s so I could have like long running downloads or other sorts of things. And

⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, all those sort of long running operations should already keep the computer awake, but sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t, especially in the old days. So it was just nice to be able to have a computer that I knew would

⏹️ ▶️ John act in a predictable way. And when I put it to sleep, which I did frequently, I never shut

⏹️ ▶️ John it down, but I wouldn’t just leave it running all day because it’s a big thing that uses a lot of power. I’d put it to sleep when

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not using it and it would just immediately go to sleep and it wouldn’t wake up

⏹️ ▶️ John until either that 3 a.m. wake up time came or until I came back and woke it up. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John not necessarily true of laptops. So this new computer has more settings than the old one did. It

⏹️ ▶️ John has all sorts of other things that will wake it up. Some of them are sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John revealed in the UI. Like it’s got PowerNap, which I think my other thing didn’t have, that lets it like

⏹️ ▶️ John wake up silently and check for email and do time machine backups or whatever. I don’t know how silently it does those wakeups.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s got startup after power failure. I think my old one had that. And then it’s got wake for network access

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, the hard disk sleep option, all that other all the good stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John But with this computer, I was having a bunch of issues where I’d put the

⏹️ ▶️ John computer to sleep when I walked away from it, just you know, my old habits from my old Mac and I’d come back

⏹️ ▶️ John in the room a little bit later and I’d eventually realize that the computer is awake.

⏹️ ▶️ John The screen is still black, but the computer is awake. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John this led me to a couple of realizations. One, despite what I said before about the fan noise,

⏹️ ▶️ John every time I would come in here, I’d be like, is my computer awake? I put it to sleep. Is it awake?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I couldn’t tell unless I walked up to it and put my ear

⏹️ ▶️ John like right in front of the grating on the front of the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like somebody who sleeps with their eyes open. Are they asleep? Are they alive?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they breathing? Put your finger under their nose to see if they’re breathing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And this is like what I was saying before. It’s like, well, when the computer’s on and it’s idle and I’m sitting in the chair here,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, three feet away from it, like I I can still hear it, but when I’m doing sleep-wake testing, sometimes I’d be

⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in the chair, like I’d be on my work laptop in the same exact chair, but I’d put the Mac Pro to sleep,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’d just be on a laptop. And then I’m like, did the Mac Pro just wake up?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I wouldn’t be able to tell for sure unless I got up out of my chair,

⏹️ ▶️ John went over to the computer and put my ear to it. The same chair that I’m sitting in right now. So despite

⏹️ ▶️ John me saying that at idle you can hear the fans, Apparently you can’t hear them well enough for

⏹️ ▶️ John me to determine with certainty whether the thing just woke up or not

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so they’re fairly quiet now like I said, I think if you if you made me bet like, all right I’m not letting you

⏹️ ▶️ John get up from the chair place your bed. Do you think it’s a wake or a sleep? I think I could mostly tell I think I’d have maybe 90%

⏹️ ▶️ John success rate, but it’s borderline So that’s one point of that. The second point is why the hell is my computer working out, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyone who has dealt with this before, with a laptop or otherwise, hopefully knows all the many

⏹️ ▶️ John things that can wake your computer up. I’ll link to a good article by Howard

⏹️ ▶️ John Oakley in the Eclectic Light Company, which is a great website for Mac nerdery, but this

⏹️ ▶️ John is one of those topics where, if you Google for, why is my Mac waking up?

⏹️ ▶️ John And especially if you know something about how to debug it, and you start Googling for the words that involve debugging it, you will find so

⏹️ ▶️ John many results across like decades. Right, this is a common problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John The solutions vary, the tools for looking into the solutions vary a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ John lately. The PM set command line tool is your

⏹️ ▶️ John friend, I think, you know, PM set minus G log, giving you a log of the sleeping

⏹️ ▶️ John and waking and PM set minus G assertions to see, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ John your problem is that your Mac won’t go to sleep even though you tell it to go to sleep after five minutes of inactivity, you can see who’s keeping it awake

⏹️ ▶️ John and why, Every time your computer wakes up, those logs will say a wake reason, why did I wake

⏹️ ▶️ John up? And the wake reasons will say very obscure text that you will then type into Google and find a million people

⏹️ ▶️ John whose computer are waking up with the exact same thing. If you have a more recent Mac or more recent OS, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John see that the wake reasons have information redacted for privacy reasons, which is a new

⏹️ ▶️ John innovation to try to keep like private information out of the logs, but it is not particularly helpful

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re trying to figure out why your computer is waking up why might your computer be waking up well there’s Wagon network

⏹️ ▶️ John access but you can just uncheck that checkbox and you’ve got that solved and by the way I never have that checked just because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have any especially for any computer that there is any route to that computer from the internet

⏹️ ▶️ John like say you’re running like a Plex server on something and you want it to be accessible from the internet there is a way

⏹️ ▶️ John from the internet to get to that computer if that is the case and you have Wagon

⏹️ ▶️ John network access available you put it to sleep it’ll wake from network access in three seconds because things are port scanning

⏹️ ▶️ John the internet like 24-7. It is a hostile environment. If you wake on network access,

⏹️ ▶️ John somehow, some way, that wake-up packet will go flying through. I don’t understand how it can do that because I wrote a little

⏹️ ▶️ John program to send the wake-up packet and I think it has to be sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ John handcrafted and I didn’t think you could get to it from the internet, but anyway, maybe it’s my hostile

⏹️ ▶️ John environment in my house. My experience has shown if you do wake for network access, your computer will never sleep for long.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be like a parent of a baby, right? It’s an infant. You’ll put it to sleep and it will

⏹️ ▶️ John be woken up. So I suggest if you want your computer to stay asleep, not enabling that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth devices. Bluetooth devices love to wake up a computer. Why? Beats the hell out of me.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the reasons I have Bluetooth turned off on my computer most of the time. Bluetooth, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John are they just lonely? Are they glitching? Are they, did someone nudge

⏹️ ▶️ John a mouse? Is there some kind of vibration? But if you’re trying to debug this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing of like, is a Bluetooth device waking up my computer? Turn off Bluetooth. Then at least you eliminate that

⏹️ ▶️ John problem, hopefully, by turning off Bluetooth. USB devices of all kinds

⏹️ ▶️ John love to wake up your computer. Again, why? Why are they waking up your computer? I don’t know. Static electricity.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, somebody nudges them. Solar flares. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John bugs in the firmware, like external hard drives, USB hard

⏹️ ▶️ John drives that the thing tries to spin down when they’re idle but then like wake themselves back up like if

⏹️ ▶️ John you know and you’ll see like wake reason HID USB blah blah blah and you’re like what does that mean

⏹️ ▶️ John what what is waking up my computer why won’t you stay asleep again much like infants why won’t you sleep

⏹️ ▶️ John no just leave for more than 30 minutes you’re killing me so anyway I went through

⏹️ ▶️ John that procedure with this computer over the course of the first week I had it did eventually get to the

⏹️ ▶️ John point where I am now where when I put it to sleep it stays asleep until the scheduled wake up time

⏹️ ▶️ John but it did take going through all this stuff for moving I had a USB hard drive that was always

⏹️ ▶️ John connected and I said you’re not gonna be always connected I’m only gonna connect you when I need to boot

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey from

⏹️ ▶️ John boot camp and otherwise you’re gonna sit on a shelf turned off Bluetooth disabled

⏹️ ▶️ John awake for network access found a bunch of other programs that were

⏹️ ▶️ John putting in assertions that were keeping it from idle sleeping and so I think I’m mostly okay there’s this other

⏹️ ▶️ John thing by the way called dark wake which is where I think it’s where it wakes up but doesn’t turn the screen on I think that’s this

⏹️ ▶️ John affiliated with power nap sometimes you’ll see a dark wake anyway p.m. set minus G log

⏹️ ▶️ John will show you the sleep wakes and I was graphing them there is another stuff like the real-time

⏹️ ▶️ John clock and was it MDNS resolver or whatever that thing is the thing that was discovery

⏹️ ▶️ John D we got changed back that wakes your computer every two hours

⏹️ ▶️ John to do some real-time clock maintenance something yada yada like but anyway since you have a log of these events,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can graph them and see when is my computer waking up and when is it going to sleep? And it has

⏹️ ▶️ John been improving to the point where I feel like it’s an understandable predictable cadence

⏹️ ▶️ John It will sort of wake up without turning the screen on and do some kind of maintenance Thing that I’m pretty sure I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John stop it from doing. I don’t understand what real-time clock maintenance means other than perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, synchronizing the real-time clock with an NTP server? I don’t know what the hell it’s doing But occasionally it

⏹️ ▶️ John wakes itself up every two hours briefly and does a thing and goes back to sleep But as long as it mostly stays asleep

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I’m happy with it. So I Don’t know what if this is gonna help anybody except

⏹️ ▶️ John to let you know that if you are having problems with your computer Waking up when you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John it or problems with it Going to sleep when you command it to or letting

⏹️ ▶️ John it go to sleep from idle There’s a world of pain out there but it is possible to

⏹️ ▶️ John defeat it with a little bit of effort and process of elimination. Kind of like Casey with unplugging everything and

⏹️ ▶️ John turning everything off with his various routers and that story that you may or may not have just heard in this podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is one of the things about desktop computers that I feel like sleep-wake battles

⏹️ ▶️ John can be won because the environment that they exist in is controlled in some way. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John constantly on the go connecting to weird networks and having all sorts of weird peripherals and docking things. sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John in one place with one set of stuff connected to it, it is a winnable war. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the variety of things that think they need to wake or half-wake up your Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John has grown over time and now I feel like it’s just barely manageable.

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Finder toolbar battles

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about your Finder toolbar battles.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s that toolbar that kept popping up in the Finder that I would dismiss and it would reveal itself again.

⏹️ ▶️ John As I look at the Finder windows in the background now, both of them have the toolbar visible, despite me hiding the toolbar in both

⏹️ ▶️ John of those windows at least five times today. They’re back. The theory on this, and this was my

⏹️ ▶️ John theory as well, but I didn’t know how to test it and didn’t know how to fix it, was that various third-party

⏹️ ▶️ John apps that can add toolbar buttons to the Finder toolbar could be

⏹️ ▶️ John causing this to happen. One of those apps is Dropbox, which I believe, let me go to Customize Toolbar

⏹️ ▶️ John and see if I can see it here. Yeah, there’s a Dropbox item in Customize

⏹️ ▶️ John Toolbar. I don’t have that item in my actual toolbar, but it’s in the Customize sheet,

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think something about the interaction between whatever that plugin is lurking inside Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Finder is causing Dropbox to do something that triggers

⏹️ ▶️ John the Finder to show the toolbar in all the open windows. I can’t really uninstall Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ John because I want to use Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you can. I’ve done it. I’m Dropbox free.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And it’s in terms of client

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app anyway. Yeah, then you gotta use the web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you using the transmitter or the web interface?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Web interface. And the only time I ever really use it is to send you or Mike files.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’ve got that thing going on in your Synology, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not

⏹️ ▶️ John ready to do that. I use Dropbox not just for podcast stuff, but for personal stuff as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what the Synology thing is for.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, not attractive. But I would like to

⏹️ ▶️ John find a way to disable the Finder integration. That used to be an option in many versions of Dropbox ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was a checkbox that says, do you want Finder integration? I think that also applied to the little badges, but now there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an official Apple-supported API for the badging so there’s no more checkbox because it’s not a hack anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the toolbar thing is also not a hack, it’s also an official API, so this may be

⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of Catalina bug. But anyway, once again, asking for help. If anybody knows,

⏹️ ▶️ John A, if it actually is Dropbox, I suppose I could uninstall it and find out, so I should just do the experiment myself. But if

⏹️ ▶️ John it is Dropbox causing my toolbars to appear, and B, how I can stop Dropbox from insisting

⏹️ ▶️ John on putting that toolbar button there that I’m never going to put on my toolbars because I don’t like toolbars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, John. No.

[Low Power Mode for Mac](http://(https://marco.org/2020/01/13/macos-low-power-mode-redux)

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, you had an interesting post just a couple days ago about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro mode and low power mode. Would you care to talk to us about that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that John and I now both blog so infrequently. And Casey, I think you’re getting there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We blog so infrequently that every time we post a blog post is worthy of discussion on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ John show. This topic was in the notes before you blogged about it because

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was hilarious that there was a rumor that the thing that you’ve always wanted, low power mode, that the rumor was that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was doing the opposite. Oh, you want low power mode? How about high power

⏹️ ▶️ John mode? What do you think of that? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Yeah. So there was this rumor from 9to5 a few days ago about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in a Catalina beta, there were some string references found that suggest that Apple is working on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something called possibly pro mode, which would be a way to temporarily enable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher performance. And it would kind of suggest that maybe it might have to do with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco raising the fan speeds to basically increase the thermal output. So presumably, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern laptops and computers, modern processors are limited with a certain thermal limit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you apply more cooling to them, they can usually get more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance or at least longer sustained peak performance before having to throttle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speeds closer down to the base clock speed. Intel turbo boost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically lets the CPUs burst way above the the advertised clock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed much of the time that they’re in use and in fact the advertised clock speed like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco under normal operation that all that is is the minimum that they’re guaranteed to be able to sustain under indefinite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco load but a lot of times even under a constant load modern

⏹️ ▶️ Marco processors can sustain way above their base clock, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can sustain way, way above it for a really short time. And so if you apply more cooling,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they can sustain higher performance levels for longer times during busy workloads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s what I assume Pro Mode would be doing, and that’s a frequent demand, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the video editing crowd for MacBook Pros. That’s a very,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very common request of YouTubers or other video producers who were using MacBook pros out in the field, they want to render

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff as quickly as possible, and there are times when they don’t care about fan noise, they just need something to be done quickly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you know that would ideally benefit that crowd. But what I want is indeed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the opposite. I want what I’ve been running on my laptop for a while now, I want a first-party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution. On my laptop I’ve been running Turbo Boost Switcher Pro for, I don’t know, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four years now? It’s been a while now that I’ve been running this, and what I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love about it is is that it lets you disable turbo boost completely. And you can also automatically disable it based

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on whether you’re on battery or not. So you could like automatically disable it when you’re running on battery,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then when you’re plugged in, it automatically gets enabled. I’ve actually usually just kept it disabled

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. And then if I really need high performance, I go to the menu bar and toggle it, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco toggle it back when I’m done. But that’s becoming less and less common that I actually need that higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance. And the rest of the time, It may seem weird that I am buying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a processor that’s capable of significantly higher performance than what I ended up limiting it to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s actually really, really nice when performance is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your highest priority to have a laptop that is much more pleasant to use in other ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when you disable Turbo Boost, you lose a lot of your single-thread performance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be up to half of your single-threaded performance. Multi-core performance gets reduced a lot less because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re using all the cores, Turbo Boost can’t boost as high anyway. So using all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cores with Turbo Boost disabled, you’re looking at maybe losing about a third of your performance, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on the processor you have and how many cores, et cetera. But anyway, multi-core is not affected as much as single-core

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what’s great about this is that the laptop, when not using Turbo Boost,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs significantly cooler because the maximum wattage is significantly capped,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way lower. You can look at my blog post for all the actual numbers here, but it runs way cooler

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that also means that the fans almost never spin up. It’s almost impossible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the fans spin up when TeraBoost is disabled. In fact, I heard from a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people who like playing games this way because it keeps the fans from just going crazy when they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaming. Windows has a control that I think does this. There is like a slider

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Windows is like performance or battery life. And I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s adjusting, but people pointed it out as a thing in response to this. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when you run disabled, so it runs way cooler, it runs way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quieter, and you get way more battery life. So you are giving up a good amount of performance, but a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of times that’s not noticeable. Like most of the time I run my laptops this way and it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, most of the work I’m doing on a laptop is casual work like email, web, social

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, with occasional bursts of Xcode productivity. And when I’m doing that, I can get through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole cross-country flight using Xcode and not worry about the battery, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually will last the entire flight pushing it with Xcode without a problem when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turbo Boost is disabled. So it’s a wonderful way to have a laptop. And the reason I ask for it now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, and therefore, I figure like, hey, while you’re in there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while you’re making an option for pro mode, this would be a perfect other end of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slider. Give us low power mode. iOS has low power mode. People

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it all the time. It’s a great idea. Because the point I’m making in the post is like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these trade-offs of power and heat versus performance and battery life, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chooses one balance of those trade-offs for each product generally,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fixed in stone forever. And sometimes I want peak performance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes I don’t care about battery life, but sometimes I want the laptop to run cool and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not burn my legs and not make my hands sweaty, and I don’t wanna hear the fan spinning up constantly, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already need the battery to last for a whole cross-country flight because the power outlet in my seat is broken. Like, there are times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I want a different balance. And normally Apple does not let us control

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that balance of performance versus everything else. iOS’s low power mode is one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only times they’ve ever given us a control over that, that we can say on iOS, you know what, right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I care more about longest battery life possible than everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being exactly fast, exactly up to date with background updates and stuff like that. Like they give us that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco control. And there’s lots of software stuff you can do as well, which they do in iOS low power mode. Stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, you can disable photos indexing, You can disable Spotlight, you can disable software updates,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes downloads, a whole bunch of stuff that Macs do automatically in the background, even when they’re on battery.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If a proper low power mode could actually turn all those things off, in addition to modifying Turbo Booster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or CPU thermal limits. Anyway, so on iOS we have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one switch that we have low power mode, and that’s great! We need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sometimes. seem to like it, it seems to be a great success, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s no real major downside to it there, that obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one fixed balance of performance versus other factors doesn’t fit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody all the time, so it’s nice to have a control. So on the Mac, if they’re gonna add

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a control in the other direction, like making it, you know, pro mode, this is the perfect time to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also add this one, add low power mode. It seems like they were making it work in a similar way where like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t really leave it that way all the time easily you’d have to like turn it on and then automatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns itself off tomorrow or something like that like that’s fine I could deal with that and the reason that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m that I’m caring about this now is because turbo boost switcher Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably going to stop working later this year with whatever the next version of Mac OS is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it shows this warning on Catalina of like this developer needs to update this because it won’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work with a future version of this of Mac OS which of course means probably next year’s version, this year’s version.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m I’m concerned that this utility that I’ve been using to approximate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low power mode that I like the effect a lot is probably going to stop working in about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year. That’s why I’m hoping Apple will add this because a proper low power mode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac OS has all the same benefits that it does on the iPhone. Also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently, I haven’t verified this, but people have told me that it’s not even on the iPad yet,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that I think also would be a good addition. Like, we have batteries on all these devices. Pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that does not plug into the wall should probably have a low power mode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have nothing to add other than to say I completely agree with you. And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is needed. I think low power mode is needed, and I also think, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey low data mode, which is also available on iOS, you know, something that you can approximate with Trip Mode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think both of those are long overdue and I really wish both of them existed and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sad that neither of them do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, and by the way, there are other options if you’re willing to disable system integrity protection.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not. That’s, I think, not really an option. So, rule those right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out.

⏹️ ▶️ John We had all those stories where the Mac Pro came out where everyone was trying to configure the most expensive Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John if this pro mode feature ever does actually ship, I can’t wait to see people seeing how fast

⏹️ ▶️ John they can burn the battery down from full charge by

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey enabling pro mode and doing some sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of CPU intensive thing, giving it more thermal headroom to run sustained

⏹️ ▶️ John at higher frequencies for longer. Yeah, it’s kind of weird, I mean, I understand, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, whatever, the pro apps team, what’s the name of that team? The pro workflow group.

⏹️ ▶️ John There you go, I mean, I’m sure they’re saying, exactly like you were saying, like sometimes, you know, I’m in a situation where

⏹️ ▶️ John even if I’m on battery, I want maximum power right now to get something done ASAP. I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John if my battery is depleted by the end of it. So it’d be great if I had a mode that would

⏹️ ▶️ John remove the limits on the fans, because historically, even on their laptops, Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John favored throttling down the CPU and everything the CPU and

⏹️ ▶️ John everything, rather than running the fans at screaming speed all the

⏹️ ▶️ John time. And a lot of times if people do temperature sensing, they’d say like, it’d be great if Apple ran their fans a little bit faster

⏹️ ▶️ John and sped them up a little bit sooner because it seems like stuff’s getting pretty toasty in there and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like too toasty, but Apple’s sort of in balancing that equation, thinking, well, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John balance a little bit more in favor of noise. So I see how the Pro Workflow Group would

⏹️ ▶️ John say that balance is not really the right balance for us. So can you give us a mode where we crank it up? But

⏹️ ▶️ John it is really amazing that, you know, if this, again, if this rumor is true, to even think

⏹️ ▶️ John that they would do this and not do low power mode, because like, is there

⏹️ ▶️ John the non-pro workflow group saying, everybody wants more battery life on their laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like everybody wants that. That’s why it’s on phones. Like it is not an uncommon desire to say, boy,

⏹️ ▶️ John I wish this laptop had more battery life. Maybe the optimistic take is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, don’t you worry about that because when the ARM laptops come, you’re gonna have more battery life than you know what to do with. But

⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t really make much sense because the phones are ARM and they have low power mode. So I really, really

⏹️ ▶️ John hope low power mode comes out, is a higher priority than this,

⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite of low power mode. Like it seems like the priority should be low power mode first,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then kind of like the Mac Pro. For those weird pro people, yeah, okay. The, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, a lot of it they call it pro mode in the strings, by the way. Like, they can call it like battery sucking

⏹️ ▶️ John mode or drain your battery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode. By the way, too, like, there’s also a problem of like, all the modern

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end, like, large laptops, like the 15-inch and the 16-inch, when you run them at full blast,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually draw more power than their wall adapters can supply,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so they actually will slowly deplete their own batteries even when plugged in. So I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure you would want a pro mode that would make that even faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, cause all that would do would be suck more power and again, it wouldn’t be able to keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up from its own wall wart. And so you would have the situation where you would be draining

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your internal battery faster. Faster. I mean, maybe again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe you want that. But I think my concern with this, as you were just kind of alluding to, is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has seemed on a number of occasions recently that the pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflow group that Apple seems to be designing their pro products for these days

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not be as diverse as it needs to be. We talked about this a few weeks ago, that it certainly seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple is basically designing computers for video editors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s great, there are a lot of video editors out there, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not their only customer segment. And video editors have very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different needs than almost anybody else. And so I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that their product direction reflects the needs of lots of types of customers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that they aren’t only prioritizing basically what YouTubers want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that would be unfortunate. And I don’t think they are that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrow-sighted, but certainly sometimes it seems that way, and some of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the directions, some of the products do seem that way, but this would be an area where like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that John’s right, I hope they have heard not just from video editors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who say, please let me crank this laptop even faster sometimes and burn my battery even faster,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also from literally everybody else who would be like, hey, you know what, most of the time I would like more battery life, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe not have it be so hot and loud.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like this constituency of pro users was neglected for so long that they

⏹️ ▶️ John did the right thing and made this pro workflow team to get their

⏹️ ▶️ John own sort of in-house microcosm of that constituency to find out how

⏹️ ▶️ John they can make things better for them. And I don’t think it’s just video editors. Like, you just look at the Mac Pro thing, they had audio

⏹️ ▶️ John editors with a big soundtrack and they have photographers and they have 3D artists, right? but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John basically all of the types of applications that really can use all the power available if

⏹️ ▶️ John you just give them more of it. Despite that, as we’ve quoted many times, and they

⏹️ ▶️ John say in their keynotes, that developers are our number one pro customer, but developers are not represented well, if

⏹️ ▶️ John at all, by the pro workflow team, it seems. But the other side of that is like, yeah, so I

⏹️ ▶️ John want, I think of the pro workflow team as like lobbyists. I want them lobbying for the wild stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ John they need, right? But there needs to be like,

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason you needed to make that is because that’s a constituency that you weren’t paying attention to. So form this

⏹️ ▶️ John group, presumably, you were paying attention to everybody else before that. But

⏹️ ▶️ John now it seems like you have this vocal, powerful group within the company

⏹️ ▶️ John lobbying for exactly what they’re supposed to be lobbying for their needs. And whatever everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John else’s needs are either like maybe the company thinks, oh, we don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John any sort of in-house constituency for that because that’s just everybody else. And that’s just us. That’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John our product managers. We know what we need to do. But it seems like the voice of

⏹️ ▶️ John the customer, like the non-pro customer, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a disconnect between, I think, what sort of the mainstream non-pro Mac customer in particular

⏹️ ▶️ John wants out of Apple’s products and what they’re providing. from everything from low power mode to number of ports and

⏹️ ▶️ John convenience to battery life and all that stuff. Price. Yeah, price, another

⏹️ ▶️ John good one. Whereas on the phone, I think the non-pro constituency is very well represented.

⏹️ ▶️ John They made the phones bigger and thicker and have more battery life and actually made them cheaper. Like if you look at the recent

⏹️ ▶️ John trend in iPhones, it’s so clear that the sort of non-pro regular person constituency

⏹️ ▶️ John has been getting things that they like. And the things that we wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John many years ago they’re delivering on now. So I don’t think that’s a problem in the phones, but when it comes

⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac, I’m happy that they’re catering to the pro things and making this crazy computer that

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sitting in front of, but it’s clear that the rest of the Mac line could use a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit more. I don’t think you need to make a non-pro workflow team. I think that should be just a function of the whole rest of

⏹️ ▶️ John the product org, but I think there’s still a disconnect there. I think they need to have a meeting of the minds

⏹️ ▶️ John with the mass of their regular non-pro pro customers to get on the

⏹️ ▶️ John same page about what they want. Like, considering looking at the 16

⏹️ ▶️ John inch, but really that’s, that’s a pro product as well. And yes, it does have a bigger battery, but mostly for

⏹️ ▶️ John the needs of pros. And speaking of that, of draining the battery even when on power, did they, does

⏹️ ▶️ John the 16 inch come with higher wattage power brick than the, uh, the 15

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch? Yes. It went from 87 to 95, I believe 96. And can it

⏹️ ▶️ John still outrun that? You’re saying that if you take the 16 inch and you crank it without any special tweaks you

⏹️ ▶️ John can outrun that power adapter?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t heard specifically on the 16-inch whether it still does that. I know the 15-inch is before it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the recent ones could do that indeed. You have to, I believe, stress the CPU and the GPU,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is pretty easy to do if you’re doing something like a video in code.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So anyway, I think we still need, we don’t need a roundtable

⏹️ ▶️ John and we don’t need a non-pro workflow group, but I think we do need

⏹️ ▶️ John a closer connection between the desires of the mass of non-pro customers

⏹️ ▶️ John and what Apple’s non-pro Mac groups are putting out.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you’ve been taking a tour of mice and keyboards and things, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have put four different mice, mouses in the show notes, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m having a problem. And if you wouldn’t mind, can you explain to me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it is you can steadfastly and adamantly and petulantly refuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have an LG monitor with a little LG logo on it, but you can have these four f***ing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey abominations on your desk and be okay with that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t make a mouse that I like. Apple makes one mouse, I mean in different colors,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? right? But that’s the only mouse they make is the little sushi thing. It’s really low

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t like a low mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I understand that. But these are hideous. How can you be so upset about the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG display and look at these and be like, yeah, okay, that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, you aren’t supposed to look at your input peripherals as you’re using them. Whereas you are looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at your monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but still, I mean, Marco, if you haven’t yet, you need to look at these links in the show notes because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh boy the Microsoft one isn’t bad but it has a Windows logo on it and every other one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is pretty bad if we’re saying that the bar for bad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the LG logo on the front of the display then these are all hideous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the LG logo is the least of the ultra fines problems.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like so what we’re looking at here is three Logitech’s and a Microsoft mouse and these aren’t even even like the super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lit up RGB LED kind of like super gaming mice, those I think are a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit tacky by design and that’s what that market wants and so that’s fine. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are fairly pedestrian looking mice. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MX Master is the bulkiest, most complicated looking one and even it has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fairly tame design aesthetic compared to its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market of mostly gamers for PC enthusiasts, like, is this actually a pretty tame looking option?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I don’t think this is that bad. I’ve seen way worse mice. In fact, Tiff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco owns a way worse mouse that we bought to match her ridiculous gaming PC that has like, you know, RGB lights and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course. No, the Microsoft mouse I actually think is pretty decent looking, but it has a Windows logo on it, which I thought would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just absolutely infuriate the John Syracuse of 20 years ago or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, actually, you could sand that off I bet pretty easily. Like a lot of times, I did that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My car has little USB ports in the center console that you can plug in for either music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or actually you can record the footage from the cameras as dash cam footage onto USB.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I got one of those little tiny, almost like flush USB drives for it, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little, and it was a Samsung one and it had Samsung written across it and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was such a small thing. I was like, I don’t want my car to be screaming Samsung out of this little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB thing. And so when it came, I got some sandpaper out of my garage and I just gently sanded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the logo and it was fine. And so I have a, now I have a blank USB stick in my car and it’s wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is like, we never think of that as an option. Like you can just slightly modify some hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t maybe like, or you know, something about it. Like you can just grind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that thing off or sand that thing off. And usually it’s fairly unintrusive and everything’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so I feel like John could theoretically just sand off this Windows logo of this mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would probably be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. All right, with all that said, John, tell me about all of these mice and what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you do and do not like from them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here’s where I’m coming from. I’m coming off of, you know, I was using a 10-year-old computer and I think the

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse I was using was even older than that. Maybe, maybe not. It was an MX…

⏹️ ▶️ John not even an MX300. I was using originally a Logitech Wheel mouse. It didn’t have a product name.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There was no image or

⏹️ ▶️ John anything like that. And I think it was replaced with an M300

⏹️ ▶️ John model that was basically the same size and shape that I got off of like eBay or whatever. I wore

⏹️ ▶️ John out some part of it and eventually had to buy another replacement. But the shape of

⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse was what I wanted. It had straight sides and

⏹️ ▶️ John it was somewhere, it was higher than the Apple mouse, but lower

⏹️ ▶️ John than some of the really big sort of palm filling giant snail mice,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And had two buttons and had a scroll wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when I was looking for a replacement, I was like, well, all right, this mouse is kind of old, new computer, reconsider

⏹️ ▶️ John everything. Let me look at some new mice. I was mostly shopping based on shape,

⏹️ ▶️ John but when I started shopping around for mice, modern mice that are not like 10 years old.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know I used the Apple one right and I didn’t like it and when I was shopping for new

⏹️ ▶️ John ones I very quickly came to the conclusion that if you’re shopping in sort of the high end

⏹️ ▶️ John of consumer mice, not getting into gaming mice quite yet, but just the high end of consumer mice, they

⏹️ ▶️ John are all better than Apple’s mouse. Like full stop. Now I know

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t like the logos and I know you think they look weird but here’s Here’s the thing, stuff that goes in your hand

⏹️ ▶️ John very often looks weird. Look at the TiVo remote. Look at most OXO things

⏹️ ▶️ John that you can buy. I’m like my weird cheese grater. Look at hand tools. It’s not a beauty contest.

⏹️ ▶️ John Semi-fruity doesn’t win you anything. It’s got to fit in your hand, which is not symmetrical and is lumpy

⏹️ ▶️ John and weird and has five appendages and one’s coming out the side. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, you’re not going to make a perfect, you know, conical section or

⏹️ ▶️ John this beautiful solid. it’s not going to be ergonomically good. So that’s one thing. So yeah, they look

⏹️ ▶️ John weird and they are weird shapes, but they are shaped to fit your hand better than Apple’s is shaped to fit

⏹️ ▶️ John your hand if you don’t use it in exactly the way Apple wants you to use it as sort of like a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that is barely there beneath your hand, which is not how I use a mouse. I kind of grip it from the side with my thumb on

⏹️ ▶️ John one side and my pinky and ring finger on the other side and the two things on the top,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Second thing is that the controls themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s lots more physical controls on these non-Apple mice. Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is the elegant solution of just the entire continuous service and it clicks down and it’s really nice and it’s a touch service, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a beautiful, elegant Apple solution, but it has limits as discussed last time. You can’t hold down the right mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John button and click the left mouse button because it’s one big mouse button, surprise. That’s limiting in games and

⏹️ ▶️ John in weird, complicated apps. It doesn’t have a scroll wheel, it has a scroll gesture and I don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ John that as I described it the same way with the Apple TV remote where when I go to grab the mouse, I don’t want any

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental scrolling happening because my fingers brush the touch-sensitive surface. I don’t like thinking that it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John live beast that if I pet the wrong way, something’s gonna happen on my screen. I like physical buttons.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what you’ll get on most of these third-party mice. And in particular, the

⏹️ ▶️ John physical controls on the expensive third-party mice are nice. We talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about this in cars or on toasters. Knob feel, button feel. How do the controls

⏹️ ▶️ John feel? Do they feel cheap or expensive? Do they make lots of noise? You both remember the scroll wheel on my old mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John You could hear it in lots of recordings. You know, I don’t have it in front of me so I can’t spin it for you, but it was very noisy

⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t feel good and was kind of gross. We’ve come a long way there. So that’s what I was shopping

⏹️ ▶️ John based on. And my thought process was try to find something more or less same size and

⏹️ ▶️ John shape as my other one, but that has a much nicer scroll wheel and some good buttons. And I was open to

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of Bluetooth and a lot of them are offered in Bluetooth, but I wasn’t, you know, wedded to it. I did want, I like the

⏹️ ▶️ John idea of not having a cord because my previous mouse was corded only and it was kind of hard snaking that cord

⏹️ ▶️ John onto my keyboard tray and I was like, you know what? I can just get rid of that cord and not have to worry about it at all. It’d be

⏹️ ▶️ John nice if I could be wireless, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. So I got the Microsoft, what is it

⏹️ ▶️ John called? Microsoft Precision Mouse. It’s also called the Surface Precision Mouse, which is Microsoft’s fancy mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John I tried it in the Microsoft store, I talked about that before. I got it in black, of course, got to go with the pro thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I got the Logitech Marathon Mouse M705, which was a

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of middle of the road, not super high-end Logitech mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so that was my other, and I also had tried that in like, I think I tried it in like a Staples or something when I was buying

⏹️ ▶️ John school supplies for the kids and I remembered the model. So, you know, again, I highly recommend going to a store

⏹️ ▶️ John and trying these things before you, you know, buy based on a picture or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I did look at the gaming mice and I see a couple of contenders there, particular Logitech

⏹️ ▶️ John G305 light speed looks like a mostly RGB less

⏹️ ▶️ John or RGB light mouse that I’m looking at because it

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it’s about the right size and shape but I’m not gonna buy it until I’ve gone to a store

⏹️ ▶️ John to hold it I think Best Buy might

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have it but

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t had a chance to go to the store so I don’t have that mouse so we’ll put the link in the show it’s anyways you can look at it but in particular

⏹️ ▶️ John the gaming mice concentrate on the sensitivity of the sensor and all sorts of stuff having to do

⏹️ ▶️ John with the DPI and for gaming or whatever and they you know Working on lots of surfaces and not having lag and those

⏹️ ▶️ John are all good things too Like I even though I’m not buying I’m not buying it for gaming I like the idea of that

⏹️ ▶️ John and I can tell it with it sort of like my old janky mouse as an example Good

⏹️ ▶️ John sensors good optical sensors versus bad ones You can tell the difference when you’re using them like in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of resolution does it have and what kind of surfaces? Does it work on or whatever? and then finally

⏹️ ▶️ John Somebody from Logitech apparently listens to this program because a package came in the mail today That had a little handwritten

⏹️ ▶️ John note that said I don’t have it in front of me. It was like Hello greetings from Logitech.

⏹️ ▶️ John We we like the show enjoy so someone from logic sent me a bunch of logic peripherals for free

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why I also have a Logitech MX master 3 sitting right here.

⏹️ ▶️ John They also sent bonus item the magnetic camera

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that attaches to the top of your Pro Display XDR, and I’ll talk about that a little bit later. Oh, that’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they also sent a Logitech keyboard. But mice first. The thing I

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think about when I bought these mice, it didn’t occur to me until I got them all in my house and started using

⏹️ ▶️ John them, but I’m telling people listening now so they think about it as well, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe no one cares. The underside of the mice. Who, whoever

⏹️ ▶️ John looks at the bottom, who cares what’s in the bottom of the mouse, right? It’s like the sensor’s down there, but other than that, like, there’s no,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m in the store, I’m looking at them, I’m feeling the buttons, I’m feeling the wheels, I’m feeling the shape, and I’m not looking at the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ John of the mouse. I should have been looking at the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the mouse. I see the bottom of mine sometimes. You do,

⏹️ ▶️ John sure do. And then you stab it in its belly button. But you know, without

⏹️ ▶️ John looking, I mean, maybe you know this because you do charge it like a harpoon turtle but without

⏹️ ▶️ John cheating and looking what’s on the bottom of your mouse what’s going on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down there? There’s a switch to turn it on and off there’s a charging hole and then there’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two long like rails of anti-skid material that I have to scrape all the gunk off of sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah so I mean you know because you’re cleaning it also because you harpoon it but yeah that the apple mouse has two long

⏹️ ▶️ John vertical strips that go down the sides of the mouse two parallel lines of slippery material or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah it I clean some stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of those and I just

⏹️ ▶️ John put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them

⏹️ ▶️ John in. Yeah. I should have looked at my old janky,

⏹️ ▶️ John ancient Lydotec mouse. Because one of the things I liked about that mouse that

⏹️ ▶️ John I quickly found is how it feels sliding across my mousing surface. Mousing

⏹️ ▶️ John surface is just a, it’s an Amazon Basics mouse pad at this point. Like, mouse pads is a whole other

⏹️ ▶️ John issue. I really need to get a bigger one, but my keyboard tray is oddly shaped, so it’s a pain. I might have to buy one and cut it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it’s just like, I don’t know, mouse pad material, regular mouse pad material. It’s very thin. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those thick ancient mouse pads from the 90s, right? It’s very thin, but in the end, it’s a rubbery thing with kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John like a fabric surface on it. That’s what I like to mouse on. I’m open to other mousing surfaces, but history

⏹️ ▶️ John has shown, as I’ve tried many different ones, this is what I like. The way the little

⏹️ ▶️ John feet or whatever, things on the bottom of your mouse slide across that surface makes

⏹️ ▶️ John a big difference in how a mouse feels. And if you’ve never looked down there or never made

⏹️ ▶️ John that connection, if you have a mouse that you really like or really hate, it could have something to do with

⏹️ ▶️ John how it actually interfaces with the surface you’re sliding it across. My old Logitech had four

⏹️ ▶️ John feet, I think they’re Teflon because it’s like a fairly slippery looking plastic, four little

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny ovals of Teflon at the four corners of the mouse. It was a fairly normal shape, sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of rectangular mouse with a rounded back, just four little things. And the mouse was very light.

⏹️ ▶️ John All of that meant that it slid very easily and silently. I know Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John is rolling his eyes when I’m talking about the noise in my space.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Stay with me

⏹️ ▶️ John here. The Apple one has way more contact

⏹️ ▶️ John than the four little points. And I think it’s also heavier. So I don’t, you know, we need

⏹️ ▶️ John to get Dr. Dreng here with coefficients of friction and all sorts of other stuff. But like spreading the

⏹️ ▶️ John weight across a larger area is good, but having slipperier materials is also good being lighter

⏹️ ▶️ John weight is even better. Anyway, all this is to say I did not look at the bottom of any of the mice

⏹️ ▶️ John I got and I should have. So, for example, the Microsoft mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John You look at the bottom of this sucker, instead of having some pads or rails,

⏹️ ▶️ John it has the entire perimeter of the mouse, like all, like around the entire edge, sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of the outer edge, just one big long continuous trail that goes around the entire outer

⏹️ ▶️ John edge of the bottom of the mouse and that is the slippery stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech mouse has five pads four

⏹️ ▶️ John big triangle two big triangular ones at the back two squarish ones at the front and a fifth

⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s kind of off to the side where the little thumb thingy is. The MX

⏹️ ▶️ John Master 3 has two vertical rails not as long as the Apple one but one on the left

⏹️ ▶️ John and one on the right and then it has two semicircles on the front and the back. All this makes a difference,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it factors in with the weight of the mouse as well, in how it feels and how it sounds going across the surface. The Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse in the beginning, I put it down on a mouse pad and I slid it and I’m like, oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not going to work. It was hard to slide and it

⏹️ ▶️ John made like a noise,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like

⏹️ ▶️ John fingers scraping across fabric. And I was like, am I imagining things? I took my old mouse, I put

⏹️ ▶️ John it down and I moved it, total silence and it moves really easily. Put the Microsoft mouse on it, much harder

⏹️ ▶️ John to move and makes noise. Should have checked that but I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech mouse, the Marathon, not as quiet as my old one,

⏹️ ▶️ John but quieter than the Microsoft one. But I didn’t, you know, live

⏹️ ▶️ John and learn. I didn’t look at that, but I still wanted to give them all a fair shot. So one thing I learned

⏹️ ▶️ John by giving them all a fair shot is, There is a break-in period for a new mouse where the slippery

⏹️ ▶️ John junk on the bottom of the mouse gets slipperier. Today,

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Microsoft mouse, if I feel with my finger that little slippery rim, I think it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ John slippery. I think it’s been slowly been polishing it. It doesn’t change the weight of the mouse and it doesn’t change how the weight

⏹️ ▶️ John is distributed on the pad, but it does change the sound and the feel. It gets slipperier.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have a feeling that my 10-year-old Logitech mouse or even older than that, the

⏹️ ▶️ John really old janky one, probably is way slipperier now than it was when I bought it. Kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like if you buy a car and two years later you get better at 0-60 times. Like, you break the thing in, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So, I wasn’t going to reject these mice for the tracking, but I did want to note

⏹️ ▶️ John that the most important thing I learned from this experience so far is that is a factor. Consider it

⏹️ ▶️ John and test it and look into it and also consider that it may change over time.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing is, you know, getting back to the physical controls, the reason, probably the main

⏹️ ▶️ John reason I got this Microsoft Precision Mouse is because this scroll wheel is fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now I know scroll wheels are passe and everyone wants to touch surface yada yada. I’m not into touch surface, I want a wheel. This is a metal

⏹️ ▶️ John wheel that feels like an expensive knob

⏹️ ▶️ John in a car. It’s got two modes, it’s got the ratcheting mode and the free spinning mode. free spinning mode it feels like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John on a ball bearing smooth as glass right solid smooth sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John a textured metal wheel the button that switches modes has this

⏹️ ▶️ John satisfying electromechanical thunk I don’t know if I can get on the microphone here let’s see

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco probably not going to be able to hear

⏹️ ▶️ John that but anyway we heard it a satisfying thunk where you can feel like something

⏹️ ▶️ John electrically activating and moving into place and moving back. And when it goes into

⏹️ ▶️ John ratchet mode, the ratcheting mode feels like an expensive car knob with like the little,

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can feel like the little, I forget what they’re called, the little notches. Detents, I

⏹️ ▶️ John believe. Yeah, there you go. But it’s not noisy. So here, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna scroll the scroll wheel. Like this is like literally, you know, my finger is practically touching my microphone.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you should hear nothing. Nope, nothing. Total silence, which is amazing. You know, my

⏹️ ▶️ John old mouse, you could hear it when it, from the, I’d scroll it and you could hear it in the next room. Brr. But you

⏹️ ▶️ John can still feel the little notches, right? It’s not the freewheeling

⏹️ ▶️ John scroll wheel thingy, like the logic thing that I’ll get to in a second, where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John spins and you can just give it a spin and like a roulette wheel, it’ll just spin and spin and spin and then you stop it with your finger.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Microsoft mouse does not do that. It has smooth and ratcheted, but in smooth mode, It’s totally smooth,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing impeding the movement, but it does not freewheel spin,

⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s damped, right? So if you flick it, as soon as your finger leaves the wheel, it will stop moving,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s the Microsoft Mouse. Shape-wise, it has the

⏹️ ▶️ John little thumb rest flange, but it has a very small thumb rest flange, you know what I’m talking about, like on the bottom of

⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse, there’s this thing that sticks out of the side for your thumb to go on. Not really a fan of that thing, I’d just

⏹️ ▶️ John as soon do without it, But I bought the Microsoft one because I’m like look if I’m gonna have a thumb thing Let’s get a really tiny thumb thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve mostly gotten used to it It still bothers me a little bit but not too much It’s got this mouse has

⏹️ ▶️ John flat sides The buttons are really solid the side buttons which I mostly hate and will never use

⏹️ ▶️ John are very thin and out of the way and They don’t touch any part of my hand when I’m using the mouse, which is nice

⏹️ ▶️ John I do kind of appreciate having them there I can imagine using that has three side buttons instead of just two which

⏹️ ▶️ John is nice and the mouse wheel clicks in for the third button.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing that I learned from buying all these mice, and I learned with the Microsoft mouse first,

⏹️ ▶️ John is that Bluetooth is garbage.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t like Bluetooth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, God. Here we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John go. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? How is it

⏹️ ▶️ John actually noticeable? Maybe it’s my environment. Maybe it’s because my tower

⏹️ ▶️ John computer has bad antennas and is far away. But the Bluetooth signal from this Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse to my computer is not good enough to get smooth mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John moving all the time and it’s not some Catalina thing where it’s freaking out like it’s it’s fine most

⏹️ ▶️ John people wouldn’t notice but I can totally notice that the tracking is not great occasionally you get

⏹️ ▶️ John a little hitch I don’t know what the problem is but I think it’s Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe it’s this mouse because I tried the mouse on my wife’s computer too which presumably the Bluetooth is closer there

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a 5k iMac and then we’re right in front of it with the mouse and it was mostly fine

⏹️ ▶️ John but it had a couple of hiccups. She rejected it the first time it had any kind of tracking hiccup. She’s like, get this thing

⏹️ ▶️ John off my computer. And I don’t blame her. Like when you move the mouse, it should move the cursor

⏹️ ▶️ John in a direct one to one connection. There should be no hitches, especially if your computer is idle and she’s not on Catalina.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Uh, and so, and she has had other Bluetooth peripherals, you know, that

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t pointing devices like Bluetooth keyboards and stuff like, yeah, the only reason I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John rejected out of hand is because I’m coming from a world with wired mice which never have this problem at all

⏹️ ▶️ John right and also because of Logitech so the Microsoft mouse I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John get the logic stuff in a second but the Microsoft mouse in Bluetooth mode unacceptable

⏹️ ▶️ John luckily the Microsoft mouse comes with a very very long thin

⏹️ ▶️ John USB cable that you can connect to the front of it and it becomes a wired mouse and in wired mode

⏹️ ▶️ John no problems No hitches, no nothing. On the other hand, now you have a wire attached. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting, you know, the fact that I can just plug and unplug it at the point of the mouse, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s such a thin, long cable is kind of nice because when I have my work laptop here, and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John working, but I have my computer sort of behind it, I can use the mouse with both. I use it in wired mode with my Mac, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John when I unplug it, it’s paired with the laptop, you know what I mean? On the same keyboard tray.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, more Logitech stuff on that in a moment, but I like that arrangement. So

⏹️ ▶️ John for a while, the Microsoft mouse was my winner using it in wired mode

⏹️ ▶️ John because the ergonomics were right. I love the scroll wheel. The buttons were great. The shape was pretty good. The thumb

⏹️ ▶️ John flange wasn’t too low. I was breaking in the little pads in the bottom and I didn’t have to deal with Bluetooth because it was plugged in.

⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech. Everyone knows Logitech has their own thing going on with,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, before Bluetooth, they had their own little wireless RF dongle. You’d stick

⏹️ ▶️ John it into a USB port, and the mouse would communicate with it. And as far

⏹️ ▶️ John as the computer was concerned, it’s like there was a USB mouse connected to it, but really there was no wire there. You know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like USB, but there’s no cat. You two won’t get that. That’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John a literary reference, not literary. Literary historical, it’s a highbrow reference, much higherbrow

⏹️ ▶️ John than like 80s movies. Oh my goodness. Our listeners will get it. You can look it up after. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John my wife has been using Wireless logic mouse with her computers since the 2011 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Air I Haven’t you know I’ve been using wired peripherals,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’ve seen people using at work and Let

⏹️ ▶️ John me tell you Logitech again disclaimer they sent me a bunch of free stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John So take this with the grain of salt if you want But this is my opinion before they sent me a bunch of free stuff as well

⏹️ ▶️ John that stupid little RF dongle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is rock solid. Yeah, it always has been. That’s like one of the great reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use Logitech stuff, is that those little RF dongles are way better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than Bluetooth, and usually they also usually lead to much longer battery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco life in the mice, and it’s just like everything about them is better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is fantastic. You would think, isn’t this janky? Isn’t this like a non-Apple, non-Elegance

⏹️ ▶️ John solution? Shouldn’t everything just be Bluetooth? It’s built into your computer. The answer is no. That Logitech RF

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is amazing. Now, setting aside the USB 3.0 interference

⏹️ ▶️ John crap, which is not Logitech’s fault, it’s probably Intel’s fault, right? Setting that aside,

⏹️ ▶️ John that stupid little dongle, which now is microscopic, it just, it is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you A-B tested me with a wired connection versus that RF thing, I’m not sure I could tell the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John It does not stutter, it does not switch, the battery lasts for like seven years in your mouse, It

⏹️ ▶️ John is unbelievable. So, and in general, I tend to like Logitech

⏹️ ▶️ John mice. I mean, again, I’ve been using that older Logitech mouse for 10 years, right? So I’m predisposed to like

⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech. The tracking was just, it was just unbelievable, right? This, the Marathon

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have a USB connection, so I have to use the wireless one, but like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, I was like, well, Logitech has this down. They’ve cornered this market

⏹️ ▶️ John until Bluetooth can match it. I should just not even consider Bluetooth mice. The mouth and mouse, specifically

⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse wheel, not as nice as the Microsoft one. It’s one that does

⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling sideways by tilting the mouse. Do you remember that mechanism? Mm-hmm, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ideal.

⏹️ ▶️ John It has a ratcheting mode and it has a smooth mode. The smooth mode is very smooth. The ratcheting mode is ratcheting,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also a rattle here. It’s more fully, listen to this.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey When you shake

⏹️ ▶️ John your mouse, you shouldn’t hear anything. You shake this mouse, you hear something. It’s because there’s a lot of play in the mouse wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ John The buttons are okay. The shape is pretty good, but it’s got a little bit of an overhang where your

⏹️ ▶️ John thumb goes instead of having straight sides like the Microsoft one. It’s got two side buttons instead of three.

⏹️ ▶️ John The feet and the sort of the scrolling action, or the, I don’t know what you’d call it, the mousing

⏹️ ▶️ John action is better than having the perimeter, but it is also breaking in. I think these pads are not even Teflon. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like weirdly textured. So I think they’re intentionally slowing it down a little bit and I can do with it being a little more slick.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in the competition between these two mice, which are the first two that I bought, the Microsoft one was winning, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I was using it wired. Finally, the Logitech sent the MX Master 3,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I know as the mouse that destroyed Mike Hurley’s hands through RSI. That is the

⏹️ ▶️ John reputation that I, what do you know about this mouse? Mike Hurley had one and it hurt his hand. That’s what I know about

⏹️ ▶️ John this mouse. And you know, I know that it’s been around for a while. Lots of people have it, you know, and so on and so forth. It’s their,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s their fancy mouse. This has the thumb shelf to end all thumb shelves. I don’t know what they

⏹️ ▶️ John are expecting you to put on there. I don’t know how big people’s thumbs are. I knew there’s a button in the thumb

⏹️ ▶️ John shelf. A couple of the logic mice have like this button down there. I don’t need a button in the thumb shelf. This thumb

⏹️ ▶️ John shelf is so big, I could fit like three fingers on it. Like I was intentionally avoiding this mouse and

⏹️ ▶️ John not getting it, because I’m like, all right, I can handle a thumb shelf, but not that thumb shelf, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John As it turns out, the gigantic thumb self is a problem, but it was not the

⏹️ ▶️ John first problem I noticed. The first one I noticed is that the thumb shelf and the whole wraparound thing of this mouse is

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of textured with like a scalloped kind of corduroy type texture that I do not

⏹️ ▶️ John find particularly pleasing. Can you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only pet it in one direction?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you can’t. I mean, it is kind of unidirectional, I don’t know. Like the contour

⏹️ ▶️ John lines, like on the bottom of a blue whale, only on a mouse. I would prefer

⏹️ ▶️ John it if it was smooth.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the idea that you think people will have seen a blue whale.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone knows what the underside of a blue whale looks like, when you see it in the encyclopedia with the big, like, vertical,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, corduroy stripes, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess that listeners of this show might actually be more likely to know what an MX Master looks like than the underside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a certain type of whale.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some people know what animals look like, Marco. Anyway, the MX

⏹️ ▶️ John Master is a very high mouse. It is the highest one. It is also the one that rotates your hand most

⏹️ ▶️ John towards the hand shape grip. It’s not a vertical mouse like a lot of people make vertical mice that you

⏹️ ▶️ John put your hand on it the same in the same Position is you would perform a handshake like vertically that is better

⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomically than turning your wrists inward That’s why keyboards are tilted and that’s why you know split keyboards yada yada,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So Ergonomically, I’m thinking this is probably better for hand position than these other

⏹️ ▶️ John mice I do understand why Mike might have had our issues because the MX master

⏹️ ▶️ John has like It’s got a scroll wheel but it also has a horizontal scroll wheel by your

⏹️ ▶️ John thumb and it has two buttons by your thumb and then it’s got the main two buttons and then it’s got the gesture button

⏹️ ▶️ John down underneath your thumb. It’s got a lot of controls and if you try to work all the controls it’s a little bit…

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to be a little bit of a contortionist. You can mostly ignore the other controls if you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want them because it’s so high like the wheels up above your hand.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the scrolling action on this, better than the cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech mice in terms of the smoothness of the pads moving across them. Not as smooth as my old mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ John but definitely smoother than the Microsoft mouse. Again, I’m talking about physically scraping across the thing. The scroll wheel on this one, this is Logitech’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fancy scroll wheel. It is metal, it is solid, it has the same sort of silent

⏹️ ▶️ John ratcheting feel as the Microsoft one. a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit less stiff. I still think Microsoft has the best scroll wheel on the market right now that I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ John but this one has the thing where if you spin it real fast it will auto switch from ratcheting mode to

⏹️ ▶️ John free spinning and this has the momentum where it will freely spin and keep spinning till

⏹️ ▶️ John you stop it. In my experimentation, because the other Logic Mouse also has that mode,

⏹️ ▶️ John I found that I don’t really like the free spinning mode where you just give it a spin and then stop it when you hit where you want.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the way I like to work. I tried to get used to it over the course of a couple weeks and I couldn’t but I am still

⏹️ ▶️ John playing with the Logitech one where it’s mostly ratcheting, but you don’t have to switch modes itself. It’ll auto

⏹️ ▶️ John switch the modes for you I’m using it wireless. I’m using it with the the little

⏹️ ▶️ John wireless dongle in recent decades I don’t know how long ago this happened probably five years ago, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech had changed their little RF dongle to be what they call a unifying receiver Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John you just need one of those little turdy dongles and you use it with any number I don’t know, there’s probably a limit, but any

⏹️ ▶️ John number of Logitech peripherals. And this is good because if you

⏹️ ▶️ John have multiple mice and keyboards or whatever, you could pair them all with that dongle, you don’t need five USB ports,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they come with some software to manage that, which I actually installed,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re like, oh my God, you bought hardware and you installed drivers for it, don’t do that. Like if it works without

⏹️ ▶️ John the drivers, by all means, do not install any third-party stuff. And I know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I hear where you’re coming from there, That’s usually my ethos, but well, first of all, I, I disobeyed that

⏹️ ▶️ John by buying steer mouse for the first two mice to mess with the tracking, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John adjustments. I don’t know if you remember the software. It’s a, it’s like a USB mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John setting, Swiss army knife where you have, you can assign all the buttons on basically any mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can control the cursor by adjusting the acceleration to like four decimal points

⏹️ ▶️ John and sensitivity. And there’s like window snapping and there’s, and you know, You can switch through different settings for different mice

⏹️ ▶️ John and save them and you could let the system control the mouse or let that you Know it’s very flexible piece of software I highly recommend steer

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse despite the fact that a little mouse icon is horrendously ugly and they should have someone draw a new one For them because

⏹️ ▶️ John is uglier than all the mice that are on my desk. I don’t it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like a tampon Let’s just say it looks like a plastic applicator tampon,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey please steer mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John change your change your icon to something else So I already installed that and I found

⏹️ ▶️ John it extremely valuable for trying to adjust the tracking to make them all feel Good like

⏹️ ▶️ John to make them all feel like the Apple mouse basically in terms of acceleration curves and everything and surprisingly They don’t out of

⏹️ ▶️ John the box if you just use them without any drivers but for the MX master I Installed

⏹️ ▶️ John the crazy Logitech thing. That is a very wide

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tampon

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know some people Yeah The Logitech

⏹️ ▶️ John software is called Logitech Options. It has a terribly ugly icon, but the interface is actually pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John nice. I put a screenshot of it into our Slack thing. It shows you nice photos of the devices that are hooked up to your computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you click through to them, and it lets you customize the buttons, and lets you change the scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. You can change the sensitivity at which the wheel switches from ratcheting to freewheeling. There’s a whole bunch of other options.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have different things for scrolling and pointer speed, and different settings for the, like everything

⏹️ ▶️ John you would imagine. As far as I can tell, it has not destroyed my computer. The app seems to be well-behaved.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the tracking on this mouse, again, I can definitely say with this MX Master,

⏹️ ▶️ John I could not tell the difference between this and a USB-connected mouse. There’s no way I could tell. It is buttery smooth,

⏹️ ▶️ John perfect precision and control, no matter how fast I move the thing, it is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Shape-wise, I thought I was gonna hate this thing because of the giant thumb shelf and because of how high it is. But in practice,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of getting used to it. Here’s the one big downside, and this has a little bit to

⏹️ ▶️ John do with my setup here. The gigantic thumb shelf. There is a little pad, again, the bottom of the mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John One of the slippery pads is under the thumb shelf at the edge. Because my

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse pad is not quite big enough, occasionally I will mouse to the left edge of my mouse pad

⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m traversing my gigantic monitor. And the mouse, as far as I’m concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ John has not left the edge of the mouse pad, right? Because my thumb is still well within the

⏹️ ▶️ John perimeter of the mouse pad, but the stupid shelf sticks out so far that the shelf

⏹️ ▶️ John has left the edge of the mouse pad and now has fallen down like a millimeter. And when I try

⏹️ ▶️ John to move it back, the little pad thing on the thumb shelf catches on the edge of the mouse pad, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible, which is another reason that A, this thumb shelf shouldn’t be as big, but B, I need a bigger mouse pad

⏹️ ▶️ John so that I can make the mouse pad extend all the way so it hits the edge of my keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that way I will never be able to get the thumb shelf off the edge because before that happens the

⏹️ ▶️ John thumb shuffle will hit my keyboard. So yeah in this

⏹️ ▶️ John competition right now I’m using the MX Master just because it is the newest one and I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John give it a fair shake of using it for you know a week or so to see. My

⏹️ ▶️ John previous champion champion was the Microsoft Mouse again if you don’t know what a good knob

⏹️ ▶️ John on a toaster feels like or a good knob on a car feels like or a good scroll wheel feel like go to

⏹️ ▶️ John a Microsoft Store and and feel the scroll wheel on the Microsoft Precision Mouse. Whoever made this scroll

⏹️ ▶️ John wheel deserves a raise. As for the Windows logo, it’s the new Windows logo, which everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John knows, but if you don’t think about, the new Windows logo is literally a square with a vertical line and

⏹️ ▶️ John a horizontal line going through the center of it. That’s the logo. It is so generic.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is so generic that it is very easy for me to look at this and absolutely not recognize

⏹️ ▶️ John that as a Windows logo. It’s also gray on a black mouse, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, but you know, you know what

⏹️ ▶️ John it really is. Well, I don’t, here’s what I’m gonna say. This is a good peripheral. This is a good mouse. We talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John this before. Microsoft has made and continues to make good peripherals. I, there is, you know, this mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John is better than Apple’s mouse. Full stop for, unless you like very low mice, right? If you like very

⏹️ ▶️ John low mice, this now sucks because it’s higher than the Apple mouse. Right? But it’s just plain better. It is ergonomically

⏹️ ▶️ John better and it’s easier to hold. It has more affordances. It controls on it. like

⏹️ ▶️ John the click feels higher quality than Apple’s click on its giant mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good product. Like I don’t, you know, Microsoft makes a good product. They deserve to have their logo

⏹️ ▶️ John on this mouse. The MX Master is a bit of an abomination. It has a bunch of crap sticking out of it that I’m never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John use, but the scrolling on it is great. And the final thing is, Logitech

⏹️ ▶️ John has, as part of this weird software that I installed that I hope I’m not gonna regret, They have a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can use multiple computers with the same set of peripherals

⏹️ ▶️ John and transparently switch between them. So you can bring the mouse to one edge of your screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse cursor, and it will leap onto another computer screen. No KVM

⏹️ ▶️ John switching, no anything like, literally the same mouse on two computers. Which you would think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s great, because sometimes you’ve got your work laptop and your home thing and you’re trying to do both at once and you don’t have two mice and I don’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John use the trackpad, but it does that magic using networking. And I think when

⏹️ ▶️ John my laptop’s on the VPN, that whole system won’t work. So I’m probably not gonna bother trying with it. The keyboard they sent,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is gonna probably drive Marco up a wall, but this is definitely a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s too much

⏹️ ▶️ John key travel. Ha ha ha. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my

⏹️ ▶️ John word. There’s too much key travel. I mean, you know, I’ve been using the Apple aluminum key. I used the Apple extended

⏹️ ▶️ John two for years, and then I had RSI issues, and I found that the Apple USB keyboards with

⏹️ ▶️ John the very short, light travel, like the original Apple aluminum extended

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, I found that better for my RSI. And since then, I’ve been a big proponent of these Apple monitors that

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t take a lot of pressure or distance to press the keys, because that’s better for my RSI. With the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John extended two, I was hitting the keys too hard and it really exacerbated things, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m now on the keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, which is the Magic Key Switches, which I love. I like these

⏹️ ▶️ John key switches. These are my favorite desktop key switches I’ve ever used in my post-RSI era.

⏹️ ▶️ John I tried the Logitech keyboard and those keys have so much travel. I felt like I was going on

⏹️ ▶️ John a journey

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey every time I pressed the key.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have as much travel as the Apple Extended 2. Like I’m not saying it’s like that, but compared to the Magic Key,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I just felt like I was putting in so much work. I don’t have the kind of time to wait for these keys to go down.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the key caps are oddly shaped. Other than that, the keyboard is, and also the keyboard has like a kickstand on

⏹️ ▶️ John the back where it’s like cranked up and that’s exactly the wrong thing for a keyboard to do. It should be level or tilted away from you even.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it weighs a ton, it is made of metal, but most importantly for the multi-computer scenario, that keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John has three dedicated buttons where you can hit those buttons and it will cycle through three different computers, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John using this Logitech like, you know, software and these unified receivers or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if you go all Logitech and if you do not have one of your computers on a VPN, you can use a single keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John and a single mouse interact with three of them at the same time by pressing buttons on the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John to switch what the input is and by just moving the mouse between the screens which is not a thing that I’m particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John interested in but I’m glad that feature exists and I have to say so far using

⏹️ ▶️ John their software that they installed that hopefully is not destroying my computer it’s really straightforward

⏹️ ▶️ John to use and other than the ugly icon it seems kind of nice I don’t know I mean maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll maybe next be able to compensate a lot of tech software is destroyed my computer but

⏹️ ▶️ John so far I think it’s actually pretty nice and then finally finally

⏹️ ▶️ John the camera the you know because my six umpteen bajillion dollar

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Display XDR does not come with a camera of any kind but Logitech will sell you one for

⏹️ ▶️ John what is like 200 bucks or something it’s expensive anyway it’s a quote-unquote webcam

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s 4k I had a few curiosities about this. One,

⏹️ ▶️ John how do you have to connect it to your computer so that it works? And

⏹️ ▶️ John two, how is the interface between like, how does it physically connect?

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I know they said it’s like magnetic or whatever, but how does that work? Like, is it just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John because the monitor case I’m assuming is aluminum, which is not particularly magnetic. How does it actually connect? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John so the physical connection, as far as I can tell, and I really don’t want anyone

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell me otherwise because then I’ll have to take out a tape measure. It’s like on the smart cover

⏹️ ▶️ John thing on iPads where like there’s magnets in the device and also magnets in the cover

⏹️ ▶️ John and they line up with each other. So it’s kind of hard to get a smart cover on the wrong way. Like it just snaps

⏹️ ▶️ John in and you don’t have to worry like, oh, is it off? Is it shifted? It just, it goes into position, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John you bring this camera near the top of this monitor monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John and it just magnetizes right to a spot that I assume is dead

⏹️ ▶️ John center in the monitor, which I find extremely pleasing. And please don’t tell me if it’s not true.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I think that’s the only place that goes on. I don’t think you can put it on the left or on the right. I think it only magnetized in the middle.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, second thing is connecting with the cable. It’s USB-C. There’s a little USB-C port in

⏹️ ▶️ John the back of the camera and you could connect that all sorts of places. I can run a cable from

⏹️ ▶️ John the camera to the back of my computer to the top of my computer but also to the USB C ports that are

⏹️ ▶️ John on the back of my monitor ah but with the base video card the

⏹️ ▶️ John Radeon 580 X those USB ports are only USB 2.0

⏹️ ▶️ John because all the high-speed lanes in the connection between the computer and the monitor being taken up by the

⏹️ ▶️ John non display stream compressed video so all I’ve got left is USB 2.0 is that sufficient

⏹️ ▶️ John for 4K video, the camera comes with a tiny little cable

⏹️ ▶️ John that connects directly from the camera and is just long enough to reach any one of the three

⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C ports, which I super appreciate because cable management is an issue. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a tiny, beautiful, purpose-built cable. One is right angled, uh, the

⏹️ ▶️ John connector is a right angle for going into the back of the monitor and the other one goes in, or maybe I’m reversed. Anyway, it’s, it’s like a perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ John sized cable, plugged into the back of the monitor. I think it’s working. I opened FaceTime,

⏹️ ▶️ John I saw myself. I think I was in 4K, it’s really hard for me to tell.

⏹️ ▶️ John The camera tilts, which is nice. The monitor is so big that I have to tilt the

⏹️ ▶️ John camera down, even though I ergonomically adjusted it so that the top of monitor is directly aligned

⏹️ ▶️ John with my eye line, right? That’s where I have it lined up. Even doing that, maybe I’m just slouching all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, but I had to aim

⏹️ ▶️ John the camera down to get a view of myself and not the view of the room behind me. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John aimed down a little bit. The only way the whole physical setup could be better,

⏹️ ▶️ John one, if the camera was smaller, because obviously it’s a little comically large for what it’s doing. I don’t know what the hell is inside that

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but it’s like, come on, you can build, granted, a crappier camera,

⏹️ ▶️ John but a so much smaller one in the 5K iMac, so much so that you don’t even see that it’s there, and now I have

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing sitting on top of my monitor. That’s a little bit overwhelming. And two,

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone should see this one coming. I would like it better if the tiny little purpose-built cable that came

⏹️ ▶️ John to connect this camera to the back of my monitor was Braided in black. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got it braided in black make everything braided But anyway, I I will accept this merely

⏹️ ▶️ John black but not braided cable because it is the perfect length. Oh my word, so

⏹️ ▶️ John And then so the the gaming mouse I’m interested in because of the high DPI and because the shape of it is the closest

⏹️ ▶️ John to My old mouse, but I haven’t tried that yet. So I’ve been sitting here with this computer

⏹️ ▶️ John with multiple mice. I think I’ve had at least three mice sitting on this desk all connected to the computer

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time for you know multiple weeks now. I’m not sure when I’m ever going

⏹️ ▶️ John to pick a winner and retire one but right now it feels like the Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse is probably still in the lead but the MX Master had a few days in it and it’s really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the lesson here is that if you haven’t looked at the world of third-party

⏹️ ▶️ John mice look at it because there’s some good stuff out there. Uh, and you may be

⏹️ ▶️ John surprised to find something that,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, to your

⏹️ ▶️ John reaction, both of your reactions, looking at the beginning of these things, they are homely looking. They’re not,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not like sleek or beautiful, but some of them really are

⏹️ ▶️ John good. A knob feel is a thing. Mouse feels a thing. And in particular,

⏹️ ▶️ John non Bluetooth connections of your mice is also a thing. Uh, do not turn your nose up at it because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s old tech. It’s old tech that works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will also add very briefly here, you mentioned during your keyboard segment that it would probably drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me crazy that you were saying you wanted a keyboard with less travel. I actually just by coincidence,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened to between last week and this week, change my keyboard temporarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually use the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, not the Surface Ergonomic,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sculpt Ergonomic. That is a split black keyboard with a gap in the middle and elevated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the front. So it’s by far my favorite ergonomic keyboard and I’ve been using it for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of years now. However, there is one fatal flaw with the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. After a while, it just kind of flakes out and then you gotta replace it. Like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no coming back from it. Like after a while, like keystrokes will start like queuing up or getting missed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something and you can change the batteries and you can move the receiver around and it just never fixes itself. You just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to replace it. Fortunately, they’re only about 60 bucks. Mine last about two years. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wore out the current one I was using, went to the closet, had to get the next one, but I thought, well, now that I’m replacing it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gone through this kind of self-improvement kick for the last couple of years, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things that I mentioned on the show is I tried to eliminate myself from being able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, from having to say, oh, I don’t like an entire class of food. So now I can eat seafood, for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I used to go say, I don’t like seafood, and that would make it hard to go to certain types of restaurants, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hated that limitation, and so I’ve slowly worked to like eliminate my limitations as much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible. And one of the things I thought was, now that I’m in better shape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I’ve ever been in, you know, I have like regular exercise, my arms and wrists are in better condition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they’ve been in, maybe I don’t need a split ergonomic keyboard anymore. I would love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to just comfortably use any keyboard again and be able to join this like, you know, mechanical keyboard revolution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everyone’s going through and everything. And I happen to have in my closet for years, a Philco

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Magistux 2 10 keyless mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches. I bought it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago thinking maybe I would try it then, tried it for about a week, started getting sore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put it in the closet. So I thought now that I’m between keyboards while I replace my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sculpt, let me try that again. And sure enough,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sculpt has scissor style keys, laptop kind of travel scissor style keys.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Philco, of course, has the big mechanical Cherry MX keys, so like, you know, big full travel.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It felt weird to me to go back, because I’ve been using scissor keys

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my desktop and my laptop full time for over a decade.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s been a very long time since I’ve used full, big, ka-chunk style keys.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it really did feel weird to me. And I ended up putting it back not because of the travel, although

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t give it enough time to get used to it. I gave it less than a day. But because I kept hitting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wrong modifiers and everything, it means I realized that the Sculpt has kind of ruined

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me for placement of what it is labeled as the Alt key,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what functionally behaves as the Command key, the key next to the space bar that modifies your commands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It lines up its Alt key almost below the E, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most keyboards align that key below the W or bridging between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the W and the E. And so I realized I’ve actually kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my muscle memory of my left hand hitting command slash alt and all of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the keys on that side like W, E, for window closing, stuff like that, it was all off. I kept like accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quitting my apps because I was hitting Q instead of W and everything. It was crazy. And so I had to switch back just because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that was too much of an adjustment for me. Like that and the key travel, It just felt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really weird to me. So I’m kind of ruined now, and now I kind of feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scissor keys are my full travel keyboard. And I mean, again, really, they have been for over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decade. I have to be honest with myself. But I wonder if that will ever transition further.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I wonder if I will slowly get used to the lower and lower travel scissor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco key switches that Apple’s moving towards over the years, and maybe eventually I won’t care, and I’ll be like, yeah, bring me the butterfly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I hope not. Oh, my goodness.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll be ready to type on glass.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, exactly. Is there a lower limit to what we will get used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to? Honestly, I think the butterfly keyboard might have shown, like, oh, yeah, okay, there is such a thing as too far.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple had a patent on a negative travel keyboard where the buttons actually bulge out at you. Yeah, they hit you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see that one? They did have a thing where the screen bulges so you could feel where the keys are, which is basically negative

⏹️ ▶️ John travel if they don’t go in, like it reaches out to touch you. Anyway. Yeah, mechanical

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards do feel like I used, you know, the Apple extended to I used from,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the release of the SE30 all the way up until

⏹️ ▶️ John I think my blue and white G3, just that same keyboard I’ve extended to. And then I switched to USB

⏹️ ▶️ John full travel keyboards, and then I switched to the lower travel ones. But yeah, it does feel weird to go back. It feels

⏹️ ▶️ John like, like I said, it feels like you’re going on quite a journey to get each key press. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Why am

⏹️ ▶️ John I feels like you’re using your whole arm? It’s like really and you know again technology marches

⏹️ ▶️ John on I’d I’d still vastly prefer this Whatever key switches are in this magic keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John that came with an iMac Pro vastly prefer that to the butterfly switches and by the way, I just got my

⏹️ ▶️ John 2017 MacBook Pro back from repair at work and you know I’m assuming they did

⏹️ ▶️ John a total keyboard replacement because I think that’s the only way you can repair these things But my spacebar is back

⏹️ ▶️ John it they didn’t replace it with the membrane one as far as I can tell I think you’re not even able To replace it with the membrane one because it feels

⏹️ ▶️ John the same as it did but but yeah this You know, I didn’t never really

⏹️ ▶️ John seriously considered a different keyboard I really like this one that came with the Mac Pro and it the key travel

⏹️ ▶️ John has got to be like a Third or a quarter of what it was on the Apple extended to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe less maybe I’m you underestimate it. Oh Oh, I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ John one thing I forgot to mention about the Logitech ridiculous software that it comes with. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John this mouse has a million different settings on it, well, so cool things this thing does. It has

⏹️ ▶️ John settings for each of your devices and you can also use per application settings and it syncs them all

⏹️ ▶️ John to the cloud. So no matter what, you know, they have some kind of cloud service. No matter what Mac you hook

⏹️ ▶️ John up to or any computer, Mac or PC that you use this mouse with, it will remember

⏹️ ▶️ John your preferences for how the buttons work and how the scroll wheel works and how the tracking works, which is great, like not having to sync

⏹️ ▶️ John that up. It’s a great use of the cloud. And the second thing is, it comes with a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of saved sets of like, here we’ve customized the things for this app,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I’m in Chrome now, and if I do the horizontal scroll wheel, it switches between tabs.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what all the settings are, I didn’t look at them. Like it prompts you and says, hey, do you wanna try all these settings? And I was like, you know what? Why the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell not? Like it has ones for Photoshop, it has ones for a whole bunch of different common apps where it tries to make all the

⏹️ ▶️ John various buttons and stuff do things that are interesting and useful in those apps. Obviously you can customize

⏹️ ▶️ John this yourself. Again, maybe why Mike got RSI. Maybe he had a logic setup where he was doing all sorts of commands

⏹️ ▶️ John with it or whatever, but I like the idea that they do most of that work for you and sync it all through the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John and have sort of a third party sharing of things. SteerMouse has that too, by the way. There’s like, hey, here are

⏹️ ▶️ John settings that other people found useful for this particular mouse in terms of acceleration and sensitivity that works with,

⏹️ ▶️ John And I would try other people’s settings that are rated with star ratings or something and see

⏹️ ▶️ John how do other people have it set up and do I like it. That is technology that’s above

⏹️ ▶️ John and beyond like what you would think of in the old days of you connect a mouse to the computer and it is what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so much beyond that now. And I’m proud of Logitech for, I expected

⏹️ ▶️ John their software to be garbage and I expected their mice to be kind of clunky and these

⏹️ ▶️ John things feel really solid and their software seems pretty good has useful features. I know again

⏹️ ▶️ John I know it sounds terrible because they just sent me a bunch of free stuff but this was my opinion before they sent me the free stuff as well. Take it

⏹️ ▶️ John take it as you will.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week Squarespace, Linode and Mack Weldon and we will see you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next time.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental. John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. You can find

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John 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

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A-N-T-Marco-Armin

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to,

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, tech podcasts so long.

John’s trackpads

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t get a chance to say this in the show, but I don’t understand why you don’t just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do what I did, which a year or two ago would have seemed like heresy.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope I pronounced that right. But anyways, It’s pronounced hearsay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, hearsay. It would have been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hearsay. But anyways, switching to the magic trackpad, which I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John actually surprised- I hate trackpads. Oh my God, you should have had them in the show. No, trackpads

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never. John, no, no, John a year ago. I completely agree with you a year ago I am I am probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more devout my hatred a year ago of trackpads than you are but now I’m I’m happy

⏹️ ▶️ John with it I’m never switching to attract that’s one of the reasons I hate laptops I I grew up

⏹️ ▶️ John with mice the way other people grew up with walking like

⏹️ ▶️ John Try like dragging your body across the ground by your teeth. No, I’m always going to

⏹️ ▶️ John walk I am always going to use a mouse for things that are mouse like oh my god

⏹️ ▶️ John I hate track. I understand why you have to have one on a laptop because it’s a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the only

⏹️ ▶️ John reason everyone will ever use one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow John I’m telling you a year ago. I would have been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John more

⏹️ ▶️ John developed an accessory like how marker uses it Yeah, then you’re like a two-handed thing. This is my swipy pad and this is

⏹️ ▶️ John my mouse, but no

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m a big fan. Left hand trackpad, right hand mouse. Big fan.

⏹️ ▶️ John but I got the cursor is controlled by the mouse.