362: Xcode in Anger
24 Jan 2020John tries to use Interface Builder.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- That's the Microsoft logo, you fools
- Removing the Dropbox Finder extension
System Preferences→Extensions→Dropbox→Finder Extension
- Pro Display XDR display profiles
- Logitech G305 mouse review
- Jonathan Mann on his post-WWDC song
- Front and Center update
- Marco's iMac Pro update
- Apple acquiesces to the FBI regarding encrypted iCloud backups?
- Xcode layout hell
- Post-show Neutral: What cars would we each take on a cross-country trip?
- 🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨
- Casey's answer
- Marco's answer (and backup answer)
- John's answer
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Chapters
- Football
- Windows vs. Microsoft logos 🖼️
- Dropbox Finder extension
- XDR display profiles
- Logitech G305 mouse
- Sponsor: Casper (code atp2019)
- As It Happens: Song A Day
- Front & Center updates
- iMac Pro dust update
- Sponsor: HealthIQ
- iCloud backup encryption
- Sponsor: Clear (code accidentaltech)
- Xcode layout hell 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Road-trip cars 🖼️
Football
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m actually going to need you to wait a few minutes until I finish what I’m doing here. I’m doing something extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You paying more bills?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no, not tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Deep cut. No, that is a deep cut. No, I am entering the Virginia Tech football schedule for this fall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a very important business.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where are you entering it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In my calendar. Anyway, we can get started. I don’t know. I feel glum. I feel glum
⏹️ ▶️ John What, the traumatic brain injuries in a football game that you’re into watching? Is that why you feel glum?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s like that, is it? I’m not hitting them in the head. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Wow. Hey, for what it’s worth, I’m weaning myself off of football. I – Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like you are. It seems like you’re preparing to settle in for another season. Steve McLaughlin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weaning myself off of football by entering every single game that my home pods play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into my calendar. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matz No, I’ve weaned myself off the NFL because the NFL is terrible. Even leaving aside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey football as a terrible sport, which I’m not debating is terrible, The NFL is particularly and uniquely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible, and it just so happens that my favorite NFL football team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is also terrible. And so that was a really good time to just wean myself off the NFL.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s like saying, like, I give up alcohol except beer. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s… Yeah, it’s baby steps, baby steps, man. Not really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t smoke weed. I just listen to Phish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very different. You know it. Meatball132. Ah, haha!
Windows vs. Microsoft logos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should probably get started with some follow-up. Blake Walsh wanted us to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we were not looking at the Windows logo on one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s mice. We were actually looking at the Microsoft logo because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a perfect square rather than whatever you call that other object, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slanty on the top and the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is amazing. This is like, okay, this is not the Windows logo. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft logo. You can obviously tell the difference because the Microsoft logo is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically straight, and the Windows logo is basically the same thing in italics. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, totally different. Same thing, but slanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here, this is a little inside baseball, but when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one is a podcaster, especially doing a nerdy podcast, one will receive all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorts and manner of feedback. And nerds often, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not always, are not the most socially adept creatures. And sometimes the feedback comes across deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obnoxious, even if it really honestly wasn’t meant that way. This is one of those times where I think it really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could have been one of those like, ooh, this could go real bad. You know, like, hey, you idiots. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Windows, that’s not the Windows logo, that’s Microsoft logo. What’s wrong with you? But no, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, Blake Walsh, for writing that line ever so deftly. And this was well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done, well executed. I was happy to receive this. This was quite funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t the only one to send it, though. A lot of people sent this feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just so happy that, like, obviously, you know, a company like Microsoft, when they they change their logo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a small process. And I can imagine all the board meetings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and design reviews and research surveys and branding exercises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all led them to finally come up with, here is a square with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two lines forming gaps that make window panes. This is going to be the Microsoft logo. And then, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we need a Windows logo. Go through all that same process again, And then they come out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a new logo, by the way. It’s been a logo for years. And I’m familiar with the Windows one from all that time. I
⏹️ ▶️ John spent watching the Windows 10 installer run.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think what threw me on the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse, other than me just being old, is that I’m used to seeing the new Microsoft logo
⏹️ ▶️ John in its color form. Like it’s a play on the old, you remember, think back to Windows 95, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows logo, it’s like a wavy flag with these little pixelated squares coming off the end. and that
⏹️ ▶️ John wavy flag is cut into four pieces and the four pieces are different colors, right? The modern Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John logo is a play on that where it is flattened out, because flat versus the puffy whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s era design. And the colors are slightly different and muted or whatever, right? But that’s what it is. Like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, when you look at it, it is four squares stuck to each other, right? But if you know the history of the
⏹️ ▶️ John logo, you’re like, oh, I see how that’s kind of a modern simplification and refinement of what I knew to be the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John logo. but it’s not the Windows logo, it’s the Microsoft logo. And then the Windows logo itself looks more like a window.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s perspective skewed, so it looks like a window on the side of a house. And I think there’s a color variant of
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe, but anyway, you see it in Windows itself, surprise, when you’re watching the installer and
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re logging in and stuff like that. I actually don’t think the logos are that bad. It is just very,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the black and white version, there’s really not much to it. And you really need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more character, I think, to pull off a monochrome logo. Like the Apple logo is pretty darn
⏹️ ▶️ John good, let’s just say. And it looks good in color, it looks good in its original rainbow stripes, and it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John good in monochrome. And also, you know, it’s got a strong outline. This does
⏹️ ▶️ John not really have a strong outline. If you didn’t even know it was a company logo, you know, and you saw it on the mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, I think it would just be invisible. The Windows logo does look like more like a logo because it is perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John skewed. So I think that’s not actually that bad. But both of them require you to have sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of a cultural knowledge of the history of Microsoft and related
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to get anything from it. Whereas you don’t have to know anything about Apple, the company
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand the, I mean, this is the cultural significance and, you know, American significance of the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John biblical significance of the Apple and with the bite out of it and everything like it’s all there in the logo. You don’t need to know
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s Apple computer and Steve Jobs worked on an orchard and all that other stuff. So anyway, not every company
⏹️ ▶️ John can be Apple but I don’t think Microsoft is I think these logos are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually not that bad and I certainly like the Windows logo better than the weird wavy flag Windows 95
⏹️ ▶️ John one which was very dated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course you would say that.
Dropbox Finder extension
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell us about how you get that darn Dropbox icon out of the Finder, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Situ Shah wrote in to tell me how to get rid of the Finder extensions. It’s not like a preference in Dropbox anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like you disable Finder integration. I had totally forgotten that there is an extensions preference pane, because I’m not reviewing
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS anymore, and I forget about these things. And in it, there is a whole list of all sorts of extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is one category called Finder. And if you go to the Finder extensions, I have a bunch listed here that
⏹️ ▶️ John are mostly just the Apple built-in ones. Oh, that’s just the Finder of things. There’s Finder and Finder Extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that that’s confusing. Anyway, I have OneDrive, Dropbox, some Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, Expand Drive, iCloud Drive, and also Dropbox. And so I disabled
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox. In fact, I unchecked every single box in the Finder Extensions thing just to cover
⏹️ ▶️ John all my bases. Did that fix the problem? No, it did not. I’m glad to know that this is here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it didn’t fix it. But while I was in here messing with this stuff, I was like, what else can I turn off? Can
⏹️ ▶️ John I just stop anything from extending anything to see if I can find out what this problem is?
⏹️ ▶️ John I scrolled down the sort of source list on the left-hand side and I clicked on Quick Look, which is also a thing in the Finder.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are Quick Look plugins when you can, you know, select the file in the Finder, hit space bar, and it will preview it and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have plugins that understand different file formats and everything. And when I clicked on the Quick Look
⏹️ ▶️ John sidebar item in this preference pane, in the background, all my Finder windows
⏹️ ▶️ John instantly spawned toolbars. Just clicking on the quick look. What? Just clicking on the
⏹️ ▶️ John item, like not actually doing it. Let me see if I can do it again. This happened right before the show, so it’s fresh in my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, let’s get this and let’s see there. If I click on quick look, yep, did it again. Reproducible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just clicked on quick look and all my finder windows, boop, popped in toolbars.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s some weird stuff going on here. Investigation continue, but I’m glad to know
⏹️ ▶️ John that there is some, I’m glad to know I have some kind of reproduction. I’ll probably try to make a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John of this and send it to Apple in vain.
XDR display profiles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, anonymous Pro Display XDR presets. John, tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Pro Display XDR, if you please.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not, the presets aren’t anonymous. This is an anonymous source on Pro Display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that what I said? Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I immediately glazed over when I see Mac Pro Talk. So my apologies.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not Mac Pro Talk. You can use this display with Marco’s laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not with my iMac Pro though, so it’s dead to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you can just at 5K, right? I think that’s right. Yeah. Anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was asking the questions about the display, like sort of profile presets. One of them was called Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR P3 1600 nits, and one was like Apple Display P3 500 nits.
⏹️ ▶️ John What was the deal with those? So here is an anonymous source giving a fairly authoritative answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s basically what you would expect. In the default Pro Display XDR P3 1600 nits one, it can display
⏹️ ▶️ John up to 1600 nits of HDR content, but it’s only when it’s showing HDR stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac OS UI renders in SDR with a maximum of 500 nits, and you can control that brightness
⏹️ ▶️ John with the sort of brightness slider and the buttons on your keyboard or whatever. But it composites
⏹️ ▶️ John any HDR content into that same scene. You can see this really well if you get the Arial screensaver,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like the Apple TV, a slow motion flying over cities
⏹️ ▶️ John movie screensaver. Someone ported that to the Mac because all of those video URLs are publicly accessible.
⏹️ ▶️ John The video files are public accessible URLs on Apple servers, so someone made a screensaver ahead of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of them are 4K and HDR. So when you go to the screensaver preference pane, the whole rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of your screen is SDR, because the entire Mac UI is SDR, but this little tiny window is HDR, showing
⏹️ ▶️ John you a preview of what the screensaver is gonna look like, and it’s like this little tiny portal into a brighter
⏹️ ▶️ John world inside your monitor. It’s really freaky. Although it does make me wish
⏹️ ▶️ John they should update the Mac OS UI to be HDR, like somehow. So then the next, you know, remember
⏹️ ▶️ John how amazed we were at Aqua? Like, wow, look at this UI. It’s like a movie interface and everything squishes and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is like composited and there are soft shadows and you can see through stuff and let’s slow motion genie
⏹️ ▶️ John a playing movie into the dock. The next step of that, the next wow factor is HDR UI. You heard
⏹️ ▶️ John it here first. Ha ha ha.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arial, that screensaver is very good by the way. It’s my preferred screensaver if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just gonna put up like family pictures or something like that. It is very, very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and one more bit on the display stuff. So the SDR preset is there if you want to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who want to see what content will look like on an SDR display, right? So sometimes you want, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you know, creating content that not everyone has an HDR television or monitor or whatever, and you want to see what it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John look like. So the SDR preset is tailored for that. And this person suggests that
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’re doing that, unless you are trial running content to make sure it looks okay in SDR, just leave it on the default
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what I’m doing p3 1600 nits I love the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of running the aerial screensaver especially on an XDR because you have the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole original idea of the screensaver of like let’s you know make your screen and do something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know gonna keep it in motion and everything so it doesn’t get burn in or whatever else so basically like you know literally try to conserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screens lifespan and meanwhile you’re gonna do something that requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloading hundreds of gigs of video and then playing it, playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDR video, so that the screen actually uses more of its capacity while
⏹️ ▶️ John idling. But it still keeps the thing in motion. So if you’re worried about image retention or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not keeping the same image. It changes slowly, but enough that the image changes on the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And it’s only 33 gigs, by the way. I know because I downloaded them because
⏹️ ▶️ John so much disk space. Disk space. This is going to be like when we talk about taping things, you realize, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John our disk space. What the hell is disk space?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Poyer It’s almost as bad as somebody abbreviating pictures, PICT.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Mueller No, that’s totally unrelated.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Although people are going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John and why is disk with a K? It really annoys me when people don’t understand disk with a C versus disk with a K when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ John computer technology, because you just you see it all the time and it’s very consistent. But people, people, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess they’re not that observant. And by the way, all this knowledge will be lost like tears in rain.
Logitech G305 mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me John about your Logitech G305 light speed mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you don’t mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about the mice in the last episode, but I didn’t have that one. I now
⏹️ ▶️ John do have it. This, I was motivated to get it even without actually trying
⏹️ ▶️ John it in person because I’m like, I’m never getting it at the store. I’m never going to actually go to Best Buy and try to, you know, try the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let me just get it. Mostly because I heard from a lot of people who are fans
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has a higher refresh rate Like it does a thousand samples per second
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other ones are like 500 or something It’s like, you know It’s a very high sampling rate for games so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do fast motion with the mouse and it can keep up with it And you know, I won’t lose track of where you are and all the other good stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is like a It’s not like a high-end gaming mouse. It’s like a low-end one, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got the same shape as my beloved old crappy MX 300 slash
⏹️ ▶️ John Logitech USB wheel mouse thing It’s so clearly like the same plastic molds, but like with a
⏹️ ▶️ John modernized front It’s kind of like when they put a new, you know, front face on a model of car with
⏹️ ▶️ John sure on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John totally different. Anyway, I got it. I’m using it right now The absurd thing
⏹️ ▶️ John which is kind of explicable when you you know, you can explain it But it
⏹️ ▶️ John still seems a little absurd is remember I installed like the Logitech software that I was saying really was really cool and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Manage all your devices and add settings and put it in the cloud and all that stuff Well, the gaming line of mice has
⏹️ ▶️ John its own software that is totally unrelated to the consumer side. It has its own website too, by the way. If you go to logitech.com
⏹️ ▶️ John and look at all the mice, you won’t see a single gaming mouse. You have to go to like logitechg.com
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. They have all their gaming brand where everything is, you know, black with RGB LEDs in it and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t even like cross-promote it seems like. It’s just two totally different bins. So here I am over in the
⏹️ ▶️ John G-land and I got this G mouse. First of all, it’s incredibly light. I know this is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with mice. People take out the one AA battery and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John people put in a lithium battery which is lighter or they get one of those adapters that lets you use a triple A in a double A space
⏹️ ▶️ John just to save weight. The new trend now is gaming mice with holes in them, like sort of cheese grater holes,
⏹️ ▶️ John like mesh plastic to be just incredibly light. So this thing is very, very light. It kind of makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has more momentum. Although I do wonder with the lightness thing, if you watch people review gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John mice on YouTube They’re all about weighing them on their little food scales to find out how many grams they are. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes less force to stop a mouse from moving in one direction and move it into another. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can change direction more quickly with less effort with a lighter mouse. Totally makes sense. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John question the assumption that being able to change direction with very
⏹️ ▶️ John little force is necessarily good given the vagaries of the human motor
⏹️ ▶️ John system. Like, a little bit of momentum in terms of when your mouse is headed in one direction
⏹️ ▶️ John and you try to slow it down and bring it in another direction to correct. I’m not sure, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just imagine you were doing it with an invisible mouse, a zero-gram mouse. I’m not sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the best performance for gaming. I think a little bit of the momentum is good to smooth
⏹️ ▶️ John out the twitching of your tendons. I don’t know. Anyway, gamers love light mice. So it’s very light.
⏹️ ▶️ John has the side effect of making it feel cheap. Because, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John stereo components and all sorts of other things, tungsten cylinders, if they’re light,
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel cheap. Like it feels like there’s nothing in it. Because guess what? There’s nothing in it. The plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John is thin, the thing itself is light, it feels cheap. It glides really nice. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got four feet on the bottom, I think. Let me see. Yeah, four feet. Plus it’s also, oh, it’s got a little turdy
⏹️ ▶️ John fifth foot at the very tail like a little dot and it’s got a little bit of the nonstick stuff non-slip
⏹️ ▶️ John non-slip the slippery stuff around the sensor so maybe six feet anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John glides really smooth tracking is unbelievable it comes with its own new little dongle it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work with the with the Logitech unified dongle comes with its own little dongle the light speed dongle
⏹️ ▶️ John which looks exactly the same but it’s totally different it also comes with an extension cable to extend the dongle away from
⏹️ ▶️ John your interference having USB 3.0 peripherals. It’s mostly just to get it close to
⏹️ ▶️ John your mouse. It’s like a very long, thin cord that you could snake from your computer and put it presumably like right
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of your laptop. Like it’s got like little feet on this little dongle thing that says, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a USB extension cable but with little feet on it so it can be just like an intramural thing. So you’re getting maximum signal strength
⏹️ ▶️ John on your wireless mouse. And it really is shaped like my old mouse. So it’s like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John old friend, let’s come back. But it’s got two side buttons on the the side and because it’s shaped like my old mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no place for those side buttons to hide so I kind of feel them by my thumb because they’re right on the flat side of the mouse and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know they can’t they’re not perched up on the top of it or whatever and then the scroll wheel finally the scroll wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John is plasticky rubberized stuff it is better than my ancient mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not in the same league as any of the metal wheels it feels cheap it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes more noise when it turns here listen to it you know you can hear it
⏹️ ▶️ John and it you know There’s no free spinning. There’s no ratcheting. There’s no different modes the button where the ratcheting
⏹️ ▶️ John You know switcher thing usually is changes DPI so you can change to like less sensitivity when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sniping or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, why would you want? Okay, because when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John zoomed in and sniping and you want to make fine adjustments with larger motions of your your hands You know, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess yeah, that’s the thing I mean it comes it’s such a prominent feature on the gaming mouse lines
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can configure up to like maybe five or six or seven different DPI
⏹️ ▶️ John levels and configure exactly what they are and then cycle through them and have like keys to swap to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when you hold down shift, it’ll swap to one and then the other one will be the default and you can hit the button to cycle through them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The software is very complicated and very gamery. So, and both of them, by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, the original Logitech options software installed like a local web server or something that I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John disabled. God knows what it’s doing. This, I haven’t even looked at what this gaming thing I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John installed, actually I looked at the package content. They use pacifist, which is a great program you should check out. It lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John open any.pkg file on the Mac and see what’s inside it. And then probably
⏹️ ▶️ John it will let you know where it’s going to install them. Like what is included? Are there any launch agents
⏹️ ▶️ John or launch daemons? Files going into application support or
⏹️ ▶️ John files going into user local.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I looked inside of this one and had a bunch of drivers for like force feedback wheels,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s their Logitech gaming software period. It’s not just for this mouse. So if you, I buy any Logitech gaming peripherals that
⏹️ ▶️ John works with this. So now I have two large wads of Logitech code running. And oh, and by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, this mouse, the drivers that come with it, there’s like a menu bar icon, a Logitech gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar icon. And I think if you quit that thing, all of that software that goes with the mouse just goes
⏹️ ▶️ John away. And then the mouse is controlled by, you know, just macOS. And it feels different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the Logitech software that’s controlling it has a bazillion settings and it feels different when you use it
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. And when you quit the software, the whole mouse feels different. So I kind of feel like I have to run the software when I’m using the mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be a deal breaker for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t mind when software like writes settings to the mouse and then you can quit it and the mouse kind of retains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those settings. I don’t mind that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has that feature. Like there is memory on the mouse and it’s also you can save them on the internet or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in my brief experimentation, even when I write the settings to the mouse and when I quit the software, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the acceleration curves are different because you can customize that too and the OS’s acceleration curves
⏹️ ▶️ John are different as well. I realized I’m also running SteerMouse. I turned off SteerMouse for this mouse so I think it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John using Logitech software. None of them feel bad. With and without the software don’t feel bad but it feels a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ John with because I spent a lot of time tweaking the DPI settings and everything. Yeah, and I know what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying about it being a deal breaker. Like how many drivers and the menu bar icon is not monochrome by the way, it’s bluish.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like, ugh. Oh, another deal breaker for me. Yeah. But that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is my, this mouse is closest to what I was looking for in terms of the shape.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it literally, it almost is, I bet it’s the same damn plastic molds. Like the buttons are different, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s what I was looking for with the slide buttons aside. And I’m kind of glad to have a gaming mouse because if
⏹️ ▶️ John I ever do any gaming, like boot into Windows and try playing Destiny once I get a better
⏹️ ▶️ John video card or whatever, I’ll probably use this mouse because the 1,000 hertz polling stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of the configuration options for this and presets for different games and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it, it’s good, but for my day-to-day stuff, I think I might be back to my
⏹️ ▶️ John current winner, which is, I think now still the Microsoft Precision Mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because here’s the thing, when I use the Precision Mouse, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John knobs in cars on toasters and stereo equipment, it feels expensive. I’m sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of what I know to be objectively a very stupidly expensive computer. And when the things I touch with my
⏹️ ▶️ John hands also feel expensive, I’m like, ah, I’m sitting in front of my expensive computer. When I use this mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, what is this am I using? This feels kind of janky and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John lightweight and like I could crush it with my fingers because the plastic is so thin. It doesn’t feel expensive, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid. It’s like, how do you, why do you care? But that’s an important part of the interface. I mean, think if you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John like a car with a nice leather wrapped steering wheel versus a car with a shiny plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John steering wheel with like plastic mold seams on it. Doesn’t really matter how great the car is. If you take
⏹️ ▶️ John and search your favorite car here, whether it’s a luxury sedan or a sports car, and you slap on
⏹️ ▶️ John a steering wheel from like a 1984 Chevy base model, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not gonna feel as good. Even though the car is the same and has the same performance characteristics and the same ride
⏹️ ▶️ John and the same handling, it feels worse because the thing you’re touching feels cheaper. And that is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John the experience of using the very light gaming mouse with my very heavy
⏹️ ▶️ John and expensive computer. And also, you know, the scroll wheel just feels way better on the Microsoft one. It is my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll wheel. I’m very addicted to it now. I do like the lack of a thumb shell on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I’m going to give this one a few more days just because for all these mice I want to use them for multiple days and not just pass judgment
⏹️ ▶️ John after a day of use. But that’s my judgment so far on the Logitech G305 Lightspeed.
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As It Happens: Song A Day
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms and conditions apply Thank you to Casper for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wanted to call your attention to podcast by front of the show Jonathan man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called as it happens song a day and This is a podcast. He’s doing chronicling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Him creating a song every single day You know him because he does the closing theme for the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And some of you also know that there’s stuff that happens after that theme which we’ve talked about on and off over the last several Years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, the episode that came out this week. I don’t know what number it is. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s about the post WWDC episode from this past June
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which includes tweets from Me and I think Marco and John if I’m not mistaken and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it certainly includes tweets from some of us. And it’s a quick 15 minutes on the nose and I listened to it earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s quite enjoyable. So I just wanted to point you in that direction if you wanted to check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the whole process of writing songs, to me as somebody who has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never done anything even close to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like magic. And I think one thing the Jonathan Mann shows is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get surprisingly good at that if that’s what you do and you practice. Like that’s what he does. been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco practicing by writing songs every day for, I mean, how long has it been? Like 10 years, 9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, something like that? He’s gotten really good at it and it’s really interesting to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his process and that’s what this podcast does. It explains, it’s him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking through and you can kind of see how these songs get made and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find that fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up, over 10, January 2009, my mistake. There you go. How did that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine writing a song, much less a song a day for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is that, 11 years? Good
⏹️ ▶️ John grief. And more importantly, doing anything once per day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like literally anything. Like, you know, especially if it’s something that requires some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John effort. Like, I mean, I suppose you all brush your teeth every day, but that is a lot less work than coming
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a new song, words, music, and recording it that has never existed before. And then the next day you got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it again. It seems even more like magic when you don’t possess that skill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front, but yeah, even if I had to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post a tweet on Twitter every day, even that, that’s the most nothingness nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all time. It’s like the biggest thing that feels like something but isn’t, spoiler to all your Twitter protests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there, it’s nothing, but that takes nothing, nothing at all, and yet doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day for 11 years, it would be nearly impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as somebody in the chat room just said, I’m not sure I poop every day. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s a pretty good summary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least not every day for 11 years. You
⏹️ ▶️ John might want to get more fiber in your diet.
Front & Center updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, why don’t you give us an update on Front and Center? You’ve been hot and heavy with the updates, my man. What’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So, uh, first I’ll start off with saying thanks to everybody who purchased Front and Center.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it is only people who listen to the show. Cause, uh, my experience has shown that no one who
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t listen to me explain at length what this thing does, understands what it does, which is not their fault. It is a weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a weird program. That’s hard to explain half of the difficulty of releasing. this is trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain to people who are looking at it what it does so that if they decide that they
⏹️ ▶️ John think they want it and they get it, they won’t be surprised by what it does or doesn’t do. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it got a lot of press coverage on the first day from, you know, all my friends. It was nice. I thank all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. And as you would expect for an application like this, which is, like I said, probably the most trivial application
⏹️ ▶️ John that could actually exist on the App Store and not get rejected, That one day of coverage
⏹️ ▶️ John resulted in the vast majority of its sales. Again, thank you to everybody who bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, you know, the sales dropped off to nothing. And so my plan has always been, as I discussed, to eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John raise the price from $2.99 in my deterrence pricing strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because I just don’t, like, after, basically after sales dropped to zero, I don’t want anyone accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John buying it on an impulse and being disappointed because it’s difficult let’s explain,
⏹️ ▶️ John and people don’t read text on the internet or in the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just see the icon and see some screenshots and think they know what it does, and then they get it, and then they’re disappointed because it doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John what they want. So I want to keep those people away. I don’t want people to buy it and be disappointed. So I raised the price, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, today. Today I raised the price from $2.99 to $4.99 to keep away the riffraff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And don’t worry, this is not affecting sales because they’d already dropped nothing, so it’s not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, it did much better than I thought. Obviously the press coverage helped. Apple sponsored, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John not sponsored, put it in their little top, or their editorial section where it’s like games that we, or
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that we love right now on the Mac App Store. So I’m very thankful for that. I got to look at the sales graph
⏹️ ▶️ John to see, the first day of coverage is like, 99% of the sales or 95% of the sales.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then the sales go down like a rocket. And then when Apple added it to the apps we love,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little tiny lump. which I appreciate, I appreciate that lump, Apple. Thank you so much for that lump,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s better than zero. But it just goes to show the, you know, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store is not a place where people visit every day, whereas say Daring Fireball
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco people visit
⏹️ ▶️ John every day. So if you’re featured in Daring Fireball, you will get way more sales than if you are featured
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac App Store and the Games We Love section, or an ATP for that matter, because
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously us talking about it in the show really helped. And again, thank you to everyone who bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can buy sponsorships at atp.fm.com. Atp.fm.com. Sponsorship.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not even, you got it wrong again. It’s atp.fm.com. Sponsor. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco geez, I never go there. I never have to sponsor the show. Yeah. I can promote my stuff for free. Ay
iMac Pro dust update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, speaking of your stuff, have you bought a Mac Pro yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so last episode. Right? Yeah, last episode I had mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was having trouble with my iMac Pro for the first time ever, that I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable fan noise when doing things that just heated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the CPUs a little bit, and that I had spent most of the last two years using this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never hearing any bit of the fan at all. And I heard from a couple other people who had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar problem or had heard of other people having a similar problem. At the time I thought, let me just try blowing out the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume it’s dust that’s impeding the thermals, and so I’ll try blowing it out. So I brought it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the garage very carefully on my lap on the floor with an air compressor and tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blowing it out. First blowing out into the intake, or into the exhaust so it would blow stuff out the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intakes and nothing really came out of it. And then I tried blowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the intakes themselves at various angles and a couple of very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pieces came out but nowhere near what I was expecting. And then I vacuumed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the intake holes to kind of finish up but so I, but you know obviously can’t really tell what came out of that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t seem like there was a lot of dust in there. But I can tell you that before the cleaning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idle temperature was about 10 degrees higher Celsius than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the cleaning. Wow. I did a quick little benchmark running Cinebench and looking at the fan RPMs over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And the iMac Pro usually idles around 1100 RPM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s when you basically can’t hear the fan at all. Before the cleaning, it would be at 2400 RPM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by about 45 seconds into Cinebench. And after the cleaning, 45 seconds in, it was still at the idle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed of 1100 RPM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the highest it ever got before the cleaning was about 2500.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco After the cleaning, the highest it got was 1500. It took 68 seconds to get that high. And even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s only very slightly audible. So I consider it a success, even though it doesn’t appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as though a lot of dust actually came out of it. But maybe I just, maybe I moved it around in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there just enough. I don’t know. Or maybe there was some dust in just the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. I don’t know. but whatever it is, it now is significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better thermal performance and it seems to be either back to normal or close enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to normal that I no longer notice it, so success.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what you need on your computer, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Access to the inside. Way bigger holes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, honestly. And more of them, way bigger holes and more of them. Yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely, while I did solve the problem and while I do still love this computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This that this moment did make me wish for a tower so I could just like like because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No real access to the insides of this thing unless I do heavy disassembly like taking the screen off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’m not going to do So I I do wish at that moment I wish I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac Pro instead But that moment alone is not enough to make me actually ditch my setup and buy a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the popular mechanics article was talking about this was the you know Exactly how widely spaced the heatsink
⏹️ ▶️ John fans are and the things in the Mac Pro I mean obviously the holes in the front are big and we talked about them not having a dust
⏹️ ▶️ John screen because they want their fans to be able to run more smoothly and pull the air through. There’s a very large holes in the front
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Not difficult to get air through it, but then once the air gets into there, and I suspect this is what’s going on inside your
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, if there are any kind of heat sink fins, the closer those fins are together the more
⏹️ ▶️ John able they are to trap dust and get clogged up. Like the fins are really far apart in the Mac Pro. I don’t know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like a centimeter apart, but they look like you could fit a pencil between them. Like they’re not like you’d expect heat sink fins
⏹️ ▶️ John to be, you know, sort of stacked close together. And that’s not like the previous Mac Pro or the Power Mac G5, which had
⏹️ ▶️ John very closely spaced fins in which I often blew out with compressed air because they really did clog
⏹️ ▶️ John up. So I’m glad you used the Apple and the
⏹️ ▶️ John 2010s and 2020s solution of compressed air to fix your computer. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like normally, if you’re designing a heat sink, normally you want as many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinly, very thinly spaced fins in the heat sink as possible, so you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much surface area as possible for the air to blow over, so it can cool as well as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so normally, you do design them really close together. And I don’t know how much dust plays into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the engineering of these things, but clearly on the new Mac Pro, they thought of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So you have these very widely spaced fins on these heat sinks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you do give up some density of surface area, Although you also have a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer path for the air to go through total, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s why they can’t do this in the iMac is because the reason it works at all in the Mac Pro is they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John eight inches long, each fin, right? So you can get away with having fewer, but there’s not a lot of room back there in the iMac. So just to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the enough surface area to cool things, maybe they need to have them more closely spaced.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or all I know, maybe there aren’t even any fins in there. It’s all heat pipe stuff. I’m not actually, I don’t actually recall what’s inside that thing. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John point is, there’s not a lot of space in there. So your options are limited. They obviously did an amazing job on the cooling system,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it seems more vulnerable to dust. We’ll see how this Mac Pro does. And how old is your
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? Three years old now? A little over two. And we’ll check back in two years. Well, I can say that
⏹️ ▶️ John I did blow out dust from my 2008 Mac Pro, but never from the CPUs. I was always
⏹️ ▶️ John just blowing it off of my third-party video card that had its own GPU cooler that just made this terrible dusty mess
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. I never took compressed air to the CPUs. So I guess they survived dust,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wasn’t because there wasn’t dust trapped in there. There’s plenty of it. Like I said, the dust started to weld
⏹️ ▶️ John to the inside eventually. You can go to the attic and pull it, like you do with any Mac Pro, you’re like, oh, it looks dusty in
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And then you run your finger across it and the dust doesn’t move. It’s just like textured metal now, metal
⏹️ ▶️ John that has been textured with dust. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my goodness. Oh man. Do you go up there and cuddle your old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is it good riddance? No, but I did, did I send you a picture? I did refactor everything
⏹️ ▶️ John up there. I got rid of a lot of big boxes, rearranged stuff. We’re still working on the attic.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a whole other side that is a gigantic mess. Looks like a bomb went off, but my side is looking pretty good lately.
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iCloud backup encryption
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a big brouhaha this week about iCloud backups, encryption and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whether they really give a darn about privacy or not. And as chief summarizer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in chief, I will do my best to summarize. Gentlemen, please feel free to interrupt me if I go off the rails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a Reuters article just a couple of days ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying in summary that Apple had planned to do end-to-end encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backups and then either pre-flighted it with the FBI or somehow got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the FBI’s wind of it and the FBI unsurprisingly said, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nope. And then Apple did an about-face. Now what does encrypted end-to-end mean? What that means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if there’s a backup of your phone that resides on Apple’s servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is encrypted from the time it leaves your phone, then—and I’m deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oversimplifying, to be clear. But anyways, if it’s encrypted from the time it leaves your phone with keys that only you have, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means Apple would not be able to, say, crack that backup open and send
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your iMessages to the FBI. Now obviously there’s good and bad that comes of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s good in that that’s hyper-private. It’s bad if you are a terrorist or do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible things and should be investigated for doing those terrible things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a lot of different ways to look at this. There’s a really good post on Strategory this week, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe was the free post. If it was, I will put it in the show notes. But one way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or another, there’s a lot of different ways to look at this. But there was also a lot of debate as to whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not Apple really acquiesced to the FBI Or if that story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Reuters was all kind of wrong and backwards. And there was a series of really good posts on Daring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fireball about this as well. Is that a reasonable summary? Again, I know I’ve oversimplified,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m trying to do this in less than 16 hours. Does that sound about right?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s close. I mean, I feel like the reason I put all the Daring Fireball links in there is I think Gruber did a good job
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of trying to make sense of the various stories, all of which could be true at the
⏹️ ▶️ John same time, but not really getting the whole picture in particular, I think his most salient point was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that Apple would consider doing a thing, but then go and ask the FBI what they think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, not because Apple, saying is that Apple wouldn’t ask for permission, but if he’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John why bother? You know what the FBI’s opinion is. You think they’re gonna, FBI’s gonna go, oh no, you’re good, go ahead, go do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Like, you don’t have to ask them to know. Law enforcement always wants access to this. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John situation in which this topic would ever come up and their opinion would be different. So the idea of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing this information to them for their opinion or approval is completely ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t change the fact that Apple knows their opinion. The FBI probably expressed their opinion
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple many, many times. That may have factored into Apple’s decision. Now, the other articles
⏹️ ▶️ John that Guru put in here are about interviews with Tim Cook from some of them from years ago, discussing
⏹️ ▶️ John this very thing. it probably related to previous security blobs and
⏹️ ▶️ John FBI asking for access to people’s phones or whatever. And the suggestion was
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re thinking about doing end-to-end encryption for your backups.
⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the reasons, this is Apple speaking or Tim Cook, one of the reasons I haven’t been doing it is because, in case you didn’t mention this, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is actually, this sounds like corporate BS, but it’s actually probably a real thing, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John when people don’t know their passwords and their data’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gone, and it’s only in Apple’s backups, if Apple couldn’t give them their backups, people
⏹️ ▶️ John would be angry. Even if, as Gruber suggested, I’ll just make it optional, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make it the default, but for people who care about security, let them enable it. Everybody thinks they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna forget their password, right? Oh yeah, I want the maximum security. And then they forget their password,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they wanna get their data back, and they go to an Apple store, and they say, I don’t remember my password,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you just give me my data? and they’ll be like, sorry, we can’t, like you turned on super duper encryption. And the customers
⏹️ ▶️ John will be sad. Whether or not the customers are angry, some of them probably will be angry because people are people,
⏹️ ▶️ John but universally they’ll be sad. Oh, those are, you know, I’ve lost all of my data. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really everything because things like photo that appear on the web aren’t part of this, because if there’s a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can go to to view your photos and anybody can view them there, it’s clear that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has the ability to decrypt them because they’re showing them on a webpage, but for other stuff, for your
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts, for your text messages, for your notes, for anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has on their server, any kind of data in any of your iOS applications, if it really was end-to-end encrypted,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be a customer service and user experience negative. And
⏹️ ▶️ John only Apple knows the extent of that because only they know exactly how many times they end up with customers
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t remember their iCloud backup password and their phone fell in the lake and they wanna get a new phone and they say, okay, where’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all my data? They’ll be like, oh, well, just log in with your Apple ID, and they’re like, oh, I don’t remember that. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if Apple didn’t have the ability to say, no problem, because you’ve been doing iCloud backups,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can get your data back for you. If they didn’t have the ability to do that, customers would be sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not sure what the solution here is. I think the whole government angle is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John irrelevant because we know what the government’s, we know what law enforcement position is, and we know what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s position in general is, And I think one of the reasons that Apple’s position
⏹️ ▶️ John is not hard-line like encrypt the entire world is this customer service angle. The other side
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is also Apple’s probably sick of legally fighting with the FBI over this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is definitely a factor. But I think to frame it as
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sacrificing your security to appease the government is a simplification. It is not factoring
⏹️ ▶️ John in, like I said, what sounds like corporate BS, but I think is a real thing. The the the wild card
⏹️ ▶️ John in this and Gruber also posted about this is that Android the world’s most popular mobile operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John Or at least if you use Google services Google does offer end-to-end encrypted backups
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure the FBI hates that they do that too, but it’s not as big a news story Maybe because Apple’s not involved
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I think eventually Apple will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John implement this somehow some way and And at least give it as an option, but right now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it hasn’t been for years if you’re in the sort of Security circles. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ John news. I think we talked about on this show last time we talked about the FBI thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it the San Bernardino shooter FBI thing or whatever? The fact that the phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and the device is all encrypted and locked away But if you’ve been doing iCloud backup Those are also encrypted but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has the key and can give them to you and the stats and the latest thing is like Apple Apple does that thousands of times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like law enforcement asks for backups and Apple gives it to them because they have like a warrant or whatever, like they comply with
⏹️ ▶️ John the law because they have to. If Apple couldn’t comply because they were encrypted, then they couldn’t comply.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that would be a different story. And that’s what they’re fighting over. But I know of the billions of Android
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, I’m not sure how many of them actually use Google services and use their backup services. So maybe it’s a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a small portion. But anyway, it’s a complicated topic. And the right thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably to offer end-to-end encryption, but I kind of understand why Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John been waffling for so many years to do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s such a complicated topic in practice for so many reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of this goes back, like we were talking maybe a month or two back about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the complexity of Apple dealing with China and other, you know, big world governments where they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell products, or they don’t necessarily have to, but like they basically have to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a very, this has a lot of overlap with that. Of like, we’re dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just Apple’s technical abilities, but we’re dealing with Apple having potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large clashes with the countries in which they need to sell phones and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own country that they are based in. Because encryption is really tricky with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco law enforcement. And there’s lots of different encryption laws all over the world with what kind of encryption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is even legal in different parts of the world. There’s always going to be this friction between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality of encryption and law enforcement because as John said, like law enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a job to do. Their job is to allegedly solve crimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time and that is most of the time what they do. But they also have a culture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of feeling entitled to everything, to any possible thing that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even lead to evidence, anything that might maybe contain a little bit of evidence, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really feel entitled to look through your phone. As encryption gets better, their ability to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that is going down over time. As various security gets better, as security holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get patched and hopefully not too many more made, it’s getting harder for them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access what they consider evidence they are entitled to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so of course they’re going to go to the public, they’re going to make a stink in public,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to try to scare people because throughout all of history it’s been a proven strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you want people to give up their freedoms, scare them. And they will usually give them up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more easily. And so they make all these crazy threats in public about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, you’re enabling terrorists and all this stuff and or helping drug dealers and they drum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up these, these, you know, big big, hefty terms and labels and scary things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to make a public case, try to convince lawmakers maybe, to maybe change what the laws are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of this has anything to do with the tech, really. It’s all like political. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very hard for us as tech commentators to fully understand that world and to be able to really say like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, they should definitely do this, or they should definitely not do this. Most of it goes way above our heads. Most of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is happening behind closed doors or as part of more complicated strategies that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we aren’t really thinking of or knowledgeable about. So it’s so hard for us to say, yeah, they should definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have full encryption, because if they do offer full encryption, they are taking a very big risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that will provoke the government into making full encryption illegal. And there’s lots of reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t want that. Because keep in mind also, the legislators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not only people who are incredibly financially bought off for the most part, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the law enforcement complex is a very big complex in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco country. So they’re a very powerful lobby. It’s also really bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco politically to ever show yourself as being soft on crime at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just like, again, like another hack that works with people. It’s like, you can’t ever say as a politician that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like being a little bit soft on what criminals can do. So the reality is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re at a very, very dangerous point where we’re very close to this kind of encryption becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco illegal. And to even the US, the country that allegedly has freedoms, asterisk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asterisk, asterisk, even we are very, probably very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to outlawing this kind of encryption at all. And to requiring companies like Apple to build in back doors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our law enforcement agencies so they can spy on brown people when they cross the border. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so complicated. I know that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually has their head on straight with matters like this, even if they’re doing things that we see as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unpopular or even when they’re doing things that we see as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capitulating unnecessarily to an oppressive government, whether it’s somebody else’s or ours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in the long run, in retrospect, we can look back on what they’ve done and usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can say, okay, that was probably the right move at the time. So I’m willing to give them the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit of the doubt when it comes to stuff like this most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if they’ve made a decision that doesn’t seem quite right to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this arena, in the area of like dealing with big governments basically, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably had good reason to do it or they didn’t have a choice. And we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complain all we want about that. We should because the reality is our freedoms are getting eroded at an alarming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate. But that’s not really Apple’s fault. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are much bigger issues in our own society and government that need to be addressed. That’s where the real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is. And if Apple is being forced to really toe a line here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably not Apple’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you just being an apologist? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you know me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know me. I’m known for never criticizing Apple. Fair, fair, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Like you said, it’s so tough and I’m so torn. And it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out I was looking, the Stratechery piece is not free for this week, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of too bad because it’s a really, really good piece. And the gist of it without doing near as good a job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Ben did is that, hey, there’s many different ways to look at this and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there’s compelling arguments on every side of it. Like I could make a compelling argument that nobody should be able to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encryption in case you are doing something naughty because I’m not doing anything naughty.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you couldn’t. You could not make a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John argument. Well, okay. You could make a bad argument for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fine, fine, fine. Just, you take my point. That is that, you know, I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons why one would desire for less encryption. I don’t agree with them, but I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Marco said, like, you know, he was saying fear, but it’s like, you know, appeal to emotion. All the logical fallacies you can
⏹️ ▶️ John think of are things that motivate people to argue for dumb things like no encryption anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I think Marco was really getting to the heart of it. It’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something less than the absolute right thing as a long-term strategic
⏹️ ▶️ John play to prevent even worse things from happening, which unfortunately in this country in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re in a precarious situation. It’s like, you should really be playing the long game a little bit and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t make a moment-to-moment decision of always doing the right thing, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John has a high chance of triggering a much worse calamity in the very near future if I do. Like, in
⏹️ ▶️ John some respects, when slash if our actual United States government
⏹️ ▶️ John was functioning in a reasonable way, each of the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of parties involved in any sort of governmental issue should
⏹️ ▶️ John be, and it’s like the pro-workflow group in Apple, should be lobbying from their position. Law enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ John should be doing everything they can to get every strap of evidence. That’s their job.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should try as hard as they can within the bounds of the law. They’re always going to want
⏹️ ▶️ John more data. They’re always going to want like that, but that is their interest. Like that’s what they’re supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John There has to be a countervailing force, which is okay. On the other hand, people have rights and they
⏹️ ▶️ John elect representatives to protect those rights. So as strongly as law enforcement tries to
⏹️ ▶️ John get all the data and personal information from people, equally strongly, our laws and representatives
⏹️ ▶️ John should be protecting the rights of the people from the overreach of law enforcement. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like two groups with different interests, like, you know, coming
⏹️ ▶️ John together, balancing each other, checking each other’s power, right? Right in this
⏹️ ▶️ John country right now, checking each other’s power is not working quite the way it’s supposed to. So we’re in a dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ John situation where things could go downhill very fast. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John in this situation, you know, and again, companies want to make as much money as they can protect
⏹️ ▶️ John their data from the government, you know, like be able to make a pitch like Apple saying we are the privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John company will protect your data because that helps them sell more devices and you know, whatever. Like they have an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has interest as well. If Apple were to lobby as strong as possible for its interest
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we are going to end to end encrypt the entire world and middle finger to
⏹️ ▶️ John the government because the system of balances of the government itself is not in
⏹️ ▶️ John a healthy state right now that could very easily tip things. And so I feel like, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is all more fear-mongering. Oh, if Apple end-to-end encrypts, that means they’ll outlaw encryption. I don’t think that’s true at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? All I’m saying is that it’s not a slam dunk to say, oh, it’s obvious Apple should just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, say screw the government and encrypt everything immediately, right? Because there are potential consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John to that. And it’s worth at least considering them. Now, I think my personal opinion is, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should absolutely end-to-end encrypt everything. They should. The government will be mad. They should do
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a tactful way. They should have done it years ago. They shouldn’t even be waiting. Google already did it. Apple should have already
⏹️ ▶️ John done it. That’s my personal opinion. But I do understand that every point when Apple had to make that decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about, even if it was years ago, right? Thinking that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s the customer service angle and also as one of the sources and the routers,
⏹️ ▶️ John routers, I always say routers, Reuters story said they didn’t want to poke the bear.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, we just got through this big fight with the government. We do have to deal with the government. That’s the worst corporate slime. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, so you’re going to screw your customers because you want an easier relationship with the government so you can make more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s mostly true, but there are other angles to that exact thing that I just said that are
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly more altruistic than the most cynical possible angle. So in
⏹️ ▶️ John this case, I think Apple did make the wrong call many times over and continues to make the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John call, but not by a huge amount. Right. I’ve, I’ve, I grow tired of people who are like
⏹️ ▶️ John stridently, like, who really believe that, you know, companies like this
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, whoever is in this kind of conflict with the government should always be taking the hardest of hard line
⏹️ ▶️ John positions. If you are one micron off of the absolute hard line position, you’re dead to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a more reasonable position to take
⏹️ ▶️ John when the system that we’re all sort of playing in the sort of the game rules and like the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of balance of powers and structure of the game rules is such that that is a reasonable thing to do. But we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not anywhere close to that right now. And a hard line position in one or two areas can very quickly lead to
⏹️ ▶️ John worse things. And again, I don’t want to be fear mongering about that. I just think that’s the thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Is factored into Apple’s decision to essentially do the wrong thing
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple times over by a small amount. And that’s before getting even getting into like, OK, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John then Apple has to sell products, has to Apple does sell products across the entire world and everyone else has different
⏹️ ▶️ John encryption laws and how do you deal with that? It’s complicated. It makes you not want to be the CEO of Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside having to stand next to Trump at a Mac Pro factory and
⏹️ ▶️ John ugh, just the depressing episode. Who put this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic in the notes? Yeah, and I have much more of a problem with that Mac Pro factory thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I do, and the whole thing with the tariffs. It’s one thing if Apple’s trying to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make more money off of tariff BS. or not pay as much taxes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I have absolutely zero respect for Tim Cook on those fronts, none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatsoever. But when it comes to standing ground on things like privacy and encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s doing a pretty good job. And so when it comes to stuff like this, I do have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give him the benefit of the doubt that yeah, if it’s about tariffs and ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple can either cheat the tax system to make more money, even though I know cheat is a loaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word because it’s what all corporations do, but if Apple can loophole the tax system to make more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or avoid tariffs that many other companies have to pay, like that’s just slimy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have zero respect for how much effort Tim Cook seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be putting into things like that. But privacy stuff, it’s pretty solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I do give him credit for having a lot of credibility on that front. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have their reasons for the decisions they make or don’t make around encryption and privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way it interacts with governments. I would also say, we’re focusing a lot on the government angle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, don’t forget the customer service angle on this as well because I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger than people realize. People do forget their passwords all the time and need Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help to get back into their stuff all the time. And as we lock down security better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with things like two-factor and end-to-end encryption, we do cut off avenues for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to have a way out. And we try to tell people, okay, here’s some recovery codes, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have iCloud recovery enabled for certain things, whatever. But the reality is, we’ve heard from people who work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple stores all the time that it’s heartbreaking how many people come in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot get their data recovered and lose pictures of their children or whatever because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they forgot a password and they’re locked out of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single day, probably in every Apple store in the world. And so. And indeed. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And so like, that is such a huge factor. It wouldn’t surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me if that’s a major factor in Apple decision making in this area. Just to leave them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an out, because if they didn’t have that out, how many more people every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day would have that horrible outcome?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I actually finally got around to replacing my iPhone 11 Pro if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall, I shattered within like 12 hours of receiving it. And I was at the Genius Bar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it Tuesday, I believe, and I was kind of listening to what was going on as I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey waiting for a restore to go onto the phone and just generally killing time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I even spoke to the Genius I was working with. And the Genius I was working with, they had said that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you know, this happens a lot. Because I’d asked, do you have to break hearts often? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget, I don’t think I phrased it in that way, but basically, how often do you have to deal with people who have lost their photos forever?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the genius said, you know, it happens a lot and it breaks my heart every time. And this is why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I constantly tell people, you know, you got to have backups, you got to have backups, said the genius. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I’m watching the different discussions happen around me, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was clear that pretty much nobody that was there was excited to be there, which isn’t really surprising, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least half, if not three quarters of the people that I saw were dealing with potential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data loss problems. And they were devastated because of it. I don’t know. I didn’t hear any like specific sob stories about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wedding pictures or baby pictures or anything like that. But it’s not a hard thing to imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yeah, I think you’re exactly right, Marco, that I would be stunned if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple made this end-to-end encryption the default, if it happens at all. I would be stunned if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it the default for exactly that reason, for customer service reasons because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that leaves all of the responsibility of the customer. When you’re a company as big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Apple, I would wager that a lot of your customers are probably not as—I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to find a word better than smart—responsible as they should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, it isn’t about intelligence. People screw up. No one’s perfect. We screw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up too. Everyone screws up. It’s nice when you screw up really badly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nice when somebody can come in and save your ass. And if you don’t leave a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way for that to happen, you’re playing with fire.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have security concerns, like even with Apple’s stuff in its current state,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do iCloud backup. You can turn off iCloud backup and then your device will be your device and it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John the only place where your stuff is unless you back up locally to your computer, which you can still do in Catalina through the Finder and yada
⏹️ ▶️ John yada. If you are super security conscious, Apple still does give you the tools to
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you want. But I think, you know, and speaking of customers being said of the Apple store because they lost their stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the introduction of iCloud backups made that better, both because people had the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John have their pictures someplace other than just on their phone, which was a failure mode before iCloud backup where someone would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, my phone broke. Well, where are my pictures? Well, can you get them off the phone? It’s like, the broken
⏹️ ▶️ John phone? The phone in the bottom of the lake? Not really. All right, so introducing iCloud backup really helped with that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because it would put them on a server And for the people who did remember the passwords, you could just get them off of the server.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t remember your passwords, Apple could still get them off the server because they had the ability to decrypt it because
⏹️ ▶️ John they had the key for it or whatever. But if Apple really wants to make fewer said customers, we’ve talked about this a million
⏹️ ▶️ John times, more space for iCloud backups. I don’t know how many people who was like, oh, I don’t want to enable iCloud backups because it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John fill up because I have too many photos or whatever. It’s like, yeah. And I was like, well, just pay a couple of bucks a month. People don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay for backup space. So fewer people do iCloud backups, Therefore, more people
⏹️ ▶️ John have the potential to lose data if they drop their phone in a lake because it isn’t backed up, independent of
⏹️ ▶️ John remembering or forgetting your password. Anyway, like I said, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple absolutely should introduce end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups,
⏹️ ▶️ John if only as an option, and I think they will. Eventually, it’s just a matter of time.
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Xcode layout hell
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, one of my favorite things to see in the show notes is something that I don’t entirely understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I know there’s a good story. And the next line item in the show notes is as follows, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xcode layout hell, end quote. John, I I presume this is you, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve had some bad experiences with Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a sort of companion to my, you know, just follow-up item about how Front and Center was doing. So I have been
⏹️ ▶️ John in Xcode doing development. I’ve done 10 releases of Front and Center in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which is too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s all going through the App Store?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. The Mac App Store has not a lot of traffic going on, it just things sailed through. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John the very last update did take several days, and then the very last day took like 48 hours to
⏹️ ▶️ John propagate too, so it was really long. All right, so I always keep thinking like, oh, maybe they do, you know the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, lots of companies do this where like, your first whatever, your first widget from the widget company
⏹️ ▶️ John comes through really fast to make you have a good impression of the company, right? Like they prioritize new customers on their first
⏹️ ▶️ John widget or whatever their thing is. So I was like, oh, well probably on your first submission to the App Store, you jump to the front of the queue so
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a positive thing. But then as I did my second and third, I’m like, well, am I eventually gonna get like
⏹️ ▶️ John throttled? Like, am I gonna get on a blacklist? Like, this guy puts out a new release every day. Put him at the back of the queue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question. I think I praised it in the last episode, but
⏹️ ▶️ John my review times have continued to be very good. Granted, my app is incredibly simple, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not requiring lots of deep scholarship to figure out whether it should be approved or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the review times have been fast. Anyway, I put out 10 releases. That’s too many. Again, more rookie mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, how about you just get it right before you put it out? I know, but like, I, part of it is mindset. Having
⏹️ ▶️ John never put in anything on an app store that’s mediated by a company before I’m in the mindset of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m a service side developer. You can just, you can deploy five times a day. Like it’s just, I’m used to
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m just used to the idea of sort of iterative development. And of course it can always be a little bit better. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John soon as you have a, an improvement, you put out that small improvement to, you know, because why sit on that
⏹️ ▶️ John small improvement? Well, the reason you sit on it is because app review takes a long time. if you spend your whole time waiting for app review, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I need to get in a different mindset for doing things for the app store and just chill a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John work more on the thing before I release the first version, and then maybe batch the updates
⏹️ ▶️ John in more ways. It’s difficult because the first ones, there’s a bunch of bug reports and things that are critical to get out and stuff like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. All this is to say I’ve been spending a lot of time in Xcode, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the first time I’ve actually sort of used Xcode in Anger to do anything real, under any kind of pressure of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, there’s a bug. I need to get fixed and figure out so on and so forth. And surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the new experiences of using modern Xcode, where the last time I used it, interface
⏹️ ▶️ John builder was separate, and then maybe the last time I used it before that, it was called project builder. Oh, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah. There’s the Swift stuff, and we talked about that before. But of all the things I didn’t think would drive me
⏹️ ▶️ John nuts, it is laying out the controls in my one stupid window,
⏹️ ▶️ John my dinky little application. It’s like a couple of pop-up menus, labels, checkboxes, and some text.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s it. And having played with Xcode before and played with Interface Builder
⏹️ ▶️ John and seen a million WWDC things like, Oh, you just drag the controls out of the cool little palette and there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of grids and snapping and it’ll just put them into your view and you’re, you’re good to go. That
⏹️ ▶️ John has not been my experience of using Xcode. Like I, the
⏹️ ▶️ John layout I want to achieve, I feel like I could achieve more easily in Photoshop or Illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John than I can in Xcode. Part of it is the lack of zoom, which I already complained about, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s little tiny retina pixels and there’s no way to actually zoom in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xcode interface builder thingy on the Mac. Apparently in iOS you can zoom, but not on the Mac. So I’ve been using the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen zoom, sort of control mouse wheel or whatever, but that just makes the pixels a little chunky or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But really, it’s like Apple has, I’m sifting through the
⏹️ ▶️ John rubble of every layout system that Apple has introduced over the past several years. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all available at the same time, and you can mix them together, which you should not do. So it took me a while to learn that lesson. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do not mix springs and struts in auto layout, because you’ll drive yourself insane. The
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of a WYSIWYG editor, hey, just put the controls where you want, in the window, right? And then you
⏹️ ▶️ John run the application, and your controls are all over the place. It’s like, what’s the point of WYSIWYG if the control’s gonna shoot off
⏹️ ▶️ John off into some other direction? Like, it’s not there in the thing. Like, ugh, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John driving me insane. And then once I eventually resigned myself to say, look, stop trying to be fancy.
⏹️ ▶️ John The old ways are best. This window is not resizable. Pixel perfectly place every
⏹️ ▶️ John control and just never have it move. Even doing that is driving me insane because like, oh, what if you want to add another control?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just make the window taller and put the new control. Oh, when I do the auto resize, the subview is on somewhere because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging something down. I get to hunt through the thing and turn off all the springs and struts and everything. And then I’m in there trying to line stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John up. There are guides in Xcode, like, but there’s also grid snapping and there’s also guide snapping and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also snapping to controls, trying to give you the proper spacing between things, trying to let you align
⏹️ ▶️ John the baselines of text, but then being off by like a half a point, right, like one retina pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I got to go in there and put put fractional numbers in the positions in the text fields 10.5
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of 10 because they’re not lined up even though the guide snapping says they’re going to be. It’s like, Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my god, this should be so much easier. Like this should be like a grid, it should be like, snap, snap, snap,
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything should be just chunky gigantic 16 by 16 point grids or whatever you know it
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be impossible for things to be off by one pixel but it’s not not only is it not impossible it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John practically impossible not to have things off by one or two pixels and I just want to do things like I want this
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the same distance as that like I wish I was an Omni graph I wish I was in Photoshop I wish I was an illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish it was in any other application it lets me put things on a canvas and align them in some sane way
⏹️ ▶️ John other than this hell that is Xcode’s interface building. This is one window,
⏹️ ▶️ John one tiny little step. Now granted, I’m terrible at this. I’m bad at this, I’m a beginner, I’m a novice, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing, I have fundamental misunderstandings of how things are supposed to work, but I’m not entirely ignorant, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like the thing I’m trying to do, getting back to the Swift thing, easy things should be easy. What I’m doing is an easy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a fancy program. It’s got one stupid window with some controls in it. It should be so
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to do the right thing and get a correctly laid out window there. There are places where you have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions about subjective aesthetic decisions or whatever, but in general, it
⏹️ ▶️ John should be impossible to have things like one pixel off misaligned because you sneezed when you were trying to move something.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I am really struggling with that, struggling to the point where I’ve got Xscope, which
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way is an amazing application from Icon Factory that lets you sort of overlay on your screen rulers
⏹️ ▶️ John and guides and frames and all sorts of other things. I’m there zoomed in with Xscope,
⏹️ ▶️ John lining up every single thing by single retina pixels, making sure, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna send this to the app store. Are all the freaking colons lined up on my labels? Oh, that one moved the hairline, I
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta move it back. Are the baselines all in a text line? Oh, this one’s aligned, but that one’s not. How is that possible?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are these things exactly this number of points away from each other? How many points is it supposed to be? I don’t know, but when I drag
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I see the little guide and it snaps that, but sometimes it doesn’t show the guide. So when it doesn’t show the guide, I have to measure
⏹️ ▶️ John the other gap and say, If the guide was visible, it should be this far apart. So this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
⏹️ ▶️ John eight retina pixels. Let me move it eight retina pixels down here. Oh, you can’t use the arrow keys for that because it doesn’t do the half pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, it’s driving me insane. I don’t know how anybody does any substantial application with Xcode interface building.
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer is, of course, oh, you can just do it all in code and then you put the exact values in. Why are you bothering with a GUI builder? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried that approach for a few things. Like I’ve tried, I’ve tried a lot of things. The spoiler
⏹️ ▶️ John for the future, I’m already working on my next application I’m using SwiftUI. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I tried doing it programmatically. I tried doing it with auto layout. I tried doing it with springs and struts. Trying
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it with SwiftUI. I’m sampling everything to see if anything is easier, but
⏹️ ▶️ John thus far, again, caveat, I’m bad at this. I’m a beginner, I don’t know what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it should be easier to do these simple things. And so my overall thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I was surprised that this is the thing. Of all the things about making an app,
⏹️ ▶️ John and App Store Review and Swift and all the APIs and of all the stuff, it is laying
⏹️ ▶️ John out the minuscule GUI in my tiny trivial applications that’s driving me up a wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so sorry. I hate to tell you, but it doesn’t actually get easier the more
⏹️ ▶️ John you have. You’re like the opposite of the ad campaign of Margot Armand, it doesn’t get better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it really, when it comes to like, using Apple’s various layout systems to try to make correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking interfaces without that much effort, it actually doesn’t get better. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just trade in one hell for a different
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not doing anything fancy. I have no custom controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it isn’t about that even. Like, custom controls don’t actually make it that much harder. It’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a tremendous amount of legacy, you have a tremendous amount of complexity, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have UIs that are used by people who are mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experts in them, and therefore, or rather, they are designed by people who are mostly experts in them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very unintuitive to beginners, first of all, as you have found already. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto layout is extremely complicated. The interface for making auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout constraints and dealing with them in Xcode is hilariously obtuse, although so is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of Interface Builder.
⏹️ ▶️ John to object to that. Like, I know how to use the GUI now. I know how to use it. The auto layout itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is inscrutable, but the UI for doing it can be figured out. It’s just not obvious, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Good one. Yeah, so there’s all that, right? Then you also have the problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, first of all, you have these many different systems that all have different behavior. So you have the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto-resizing mask, springs and struts system. Then you have auto layout. Then now you’re doing SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is its own brand new thing, which is both completely different and also incredibly immature still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have many different problems that you’re juggling between these three different systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of them are great. And people have such different opinions that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever I think or Casey thinks is probably gonna be different than what you think, John. Like for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do everything in code for the most part. That’s not great either. It just has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides that I’m willing to tolerate more than the alternatives downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, I feel like, let me start by saying I’ve never done anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the, never written anything for the Mac. So I can’t speak to your particular foibles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to writing Mac OS software, but like vignette uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storyboards and I’ve survived. Like it’s fine. I use auto layout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it mostly works just fine. And yeah, I, I mean, auto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layout’s weird, man. It really is, but I don’t think it’s entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inscrutable as with all things Apple lately, the documentation is hot garbage and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very unapproachable. I don’t think it’s inscrutable though. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree that Interface Builder is very, well, I keep, I mean, obviously it’s not Interface Builder anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laying out an iOS app is very weird. I wouldn’t say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard necessarily, but it’s very, very weird. And the way that IB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does things is very unlike any other visual sort of designer I’ve used in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past. And there are definitely times that things are, are hard to understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I get error messages that I can’t really make heads or tails of. Like those things all do exist. I’m not saying you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely wrong or full of crap. Like your lived experience is factually your lived experience, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I get the feeling up until what Marco said just a moment ago, I got the feeling that you’re both saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IB is hot garbage and is unusable, and I don’t think that’s really the case. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got its own set of tradeoffs. And Marco, I like what you said a moment ago about how you do everything in code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that also does indeed have its own set of tradeoffs. And that’s fine. Like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that works for you, man, then stick to it. You don’t need my permission to keep doing that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you certainly don’t need me guilting you into using IB. For me, I like laying out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these things visually, and it’s easier for me to reason about it visually than to do it in code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve also found that IB is much easier to tolerate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you either have an extremely small team or a team of one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, like when I was at WorkWork, when I had an actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real job, I eventually got to the point that we were passing around some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of trinket, I forget what it was, to kind of claim who was using the storyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever nib at the time, time, which is absolutely barbaric. I mean, it was like using exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checkouts and Perforce way back in the day, which is also barbaric, if you ask me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what we needed to do. So yeah, I’m not saying interface builder is perfect, but I also don’t think that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a complete utter disaster, at least with iOS. Again, I’m not trying to argue with you, John, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS. Mac OS may indeed be that bad of a disaster. But on iOS, I mean, it works for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. It’s not perfect, but it works for me. I mean, it’s not completely worthless.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think iOS has it a lot easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I completely agree with that. It is significantly harder to make a well-laid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface on the Mac than it is on iOS. Because for lots of reasons. I mean, the Mac is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complicated. There’s way more UI usually to a Mac app. Like iOS apps tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have significantly less UI. There are fewer standards that you’re supposed to comply with on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, making a Mac app is, or making a great Mac UI is significantly harder
⏹️ ▶️ John UI. or even just a reasonable looking Mac UI. Here’s the thing about the Mac versus iOS. And on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have this giant blank canvas that is a window that can be any size, any shape, and you can put a billion
⏹️ ▶️ John things on them and you can put them anywhere. Like there’s really no precedent
⏹️ ▶️ John for that in iOS because in general on iOS, you’re, you know, first of all, you’re usually full screen or half screen or quarter screen
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And you’re using controls and things that essentially define
⏹️ ▶️ John bounding boxes for themselves. You’ve got a table view. table you has rows within the row. Maybe you have some freedom to lay
⏹️ ▶️ John things out, but there’s like a thing on the right and a thing on the left and you can align them and you can have padding and that’s about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that is incredibly constrained compared to here’s a gigantic gray window. Throw these 900 controls
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. And that’s what you really need the tool to help you. All right. What should the margins be on this
⏹️ ▶️ John window? How far away should a label be from its pop up menu? How wide should the pop up menus be? How much space should there be between
⏹️ ▶️ John them? If you have to group them, how should you group them? Should you group them with white space or you group them with a bounding box? If you make a bounding box, is everything get
⏹️ ▶️ John nested in that view or should not be nested in the view. Once they’re nested in multiple views, can you align things in? They’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be aligned if you’re in a good Mac design, things in these little gray boxes should be aligned with each other, like the label should all line up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t actually align them with the tool because you can’t command click or shift click items that are in
⏹️ ▶️ John different bounded views. So you could take them out of the views. But then every time you try to move them, they re nest themselves into the
⏹️ ▶️ John views like the tools are not helping and you really need help from the tools because you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John help from the controls themselves. They’re not things nested inside each other. They don’t tend to go
⏹️ ▶️ John from edge to edge and define sort of regions or whatever. I’m not saying that iOS is not easy
⏹️ ▶️ John because iOS has its own weird set of problems with device orientation changes in different sizes and things you can’t control
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But in general, the controls on the Mac, it’s like just a bunch of Legos. You just dump them out onto
⏹️ ▶️ John a carpet. It’s like, make sense of that. And that, like I said, that’s where you really need the tools to help you. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the tools aren’t really fighting me, but they’re not doing me any favors. That’s why I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John accessibility, you know, the screen zoom and Xscope to get in there and zoom. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard that in storyboards on iOS, you can actually zoom in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Xcode itself. You absolutely can.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which would really help when you’re trying to get things lined up. But even with that zoom, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, with the grouping, that’s a real thing that I’m doing. Like, because even in my SwiftUI app, I was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I have other windows that I was starting to do in SwiftUI. I was like, how the hell do
⏹️ ▶️ John you do regular controls in SwiftUI? And I was like, oh, let me just, I’ll just do this one the old fashioned way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I have SwiftUI and a storyboard in this new application. And for the storyboard based view,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do actually have a bunch of controls that I decided to group with sort of, I don’t know what they’re called, but like these boxes, these little
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of recessed, darker gray regions that you’re familiar with on the Mac. Like if you go into,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at it right now, in system preferences in the extensions pane, there’s a sort of source list on the left. There’s like a table
⏹️ ▶️ John view, a scrolling table view. On the right, there’s a detail view, and that’s sort of recessed in a little well.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wanted to group the controls in those boxes. But once you do that, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use the alignment tools in Xcode to align things across those boxes. So you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a guide, but then when you put the guide in, how do you place the guide so that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly positioned so that the thing you already know you snap to the right distance from the field,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you place the guide so that it is in place with the first set of items? Because you can put the guide and
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeball it, but then when you try to move the thing, you’re like, Oh, actually, that guide is one pixel off where it’s supposed to be because
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing just moved and it shouldn’t have moved because it was already aligned.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not helping me as much as I feel like it could. That’s all I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in many ways, if it goes the way it’s, I think, supposed to according to plan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI should really help this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a whole other show about SwiftUI. Let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Oh, I’m ready. My body is ready. Let’s do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It should, in theory, provide more like standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groupings, standard layouts for controls across the platforms, including the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that I think is what we’re really lacking is like as you mentioned, like the controls basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a lot of this work themselves. With SwiftUI, if it fulfills the promise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you should have significantly less of this work to do manually. That being said, that’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to go into all the SwiftUI thing now, but if you go to my website,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to hypercritical.co and look at, I keep updating, as I release new versions of front and center, I keep updating
⏹️ ▶️ John the screenshot on the website. So it keeps being, anyway, the screenshot you see there is the
⏹️ ▶️ John current version. So look at that dialogue, right? Or you can just launch front and center, which I know you’re all running and check the preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I bought it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John normally. Yeah. Anyway, if you look at this and think about what Marco just said about SwiftUI, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that these controls come with canned metrics and that there’s some cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John nature where it’ll put the right control for the right thing. There’s nothing as far as I’m aware so
⏹️ ▶️ John far in SwiftUI that would help with a window like this because this window I think is…
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s not perfect, it’s not great, it’s overwhelming because I have to have all this explanatory text.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the fault of my application, it’s not the fault of Xcode. Me making an application is hard to explain so I gotta be all wordy.
⏹️ ▶️ John and anyway, but set that aside. Just imagine it was two tabs, two pop-up menus, four
⏹️ ▶️ John check boxes. Like, forget about all the other crap. Trying to,
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI doesn’t give you anything that will help you lay out these controls in a Mac-like way. Because there’s 17
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac-like ways you can lay out these controls. And the one I’ve chosen
⏹️ ▶️ John is partly, like this is part of the things in Mac, it’s partly aesthetics, it’s partly like artistry, which
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds highfalutin, but it’s like, There are tons of different ways to do it. You are sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John expressing the personality of your application, and by extension yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John in what you decide to do. There is no generic standard way to lay
⏹️ ▶️ John out these controls because they’re not just controls. They have semantics in your application.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to sort of try to provide some kind of visual
⏹️ ▶️ John hierarchy that expresses the meaning of the controls to the user.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that, not only do I not think SwiftUI would help me lay out this dialogue,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I could lay it out in this way with SwiftUI without a ton
⏹️ ▶️ John of work. Because I’m using SwiftUI in my new app for I think what its strengths are. Like when you use SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a lot like doing web development, right? It feels more like that. It feels like using CSS, right? Because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, right down to like, you know, dot padding or whatever, and then alignments, and HStacks
⏹️ ▶️ John and VStacks, and it is very much like doing web work, where in the web in general, you sort of define
⏹️ ▶️ John these regions, and then you style them, and it’s HStacks and VStacks and lists and
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever are like divs and all those other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just tell me what the elements are, and then you can style them with some other, you know. But that,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to make a web page that looked like this dialog, it would also be a little bit tricky, because things
⏹️ ▶️ John really are sort of lined up down to the pixel based on
⏹️ ▶️ John spacing and visual weight. I mean, I’m not particularly happy with the result. It’s too busy, I’m not sure about those
⏹️ ▶️ John lines, the spacing is a mess, but at this point, I just don’t ever wanna touch it again because anytime I touch anything, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John just cascades into this giant mess and everything’s misaligned, right? So I’m terrified of this stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like, for example, the space to the interface and startup regions of checkboxes, I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John them to be separate because they’re kind of two separate things. One of them is about hiding and showing icons. The other one is like, what do I do
⏹️ ▶️ John when I start up? How much space should there be between those two sets of check boxes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does anybody know? I can tell you for a fact Xcode sure as hell doesn’t know. Because it does not give
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you any guides.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, if you want to have a space there, how much space do you want? You can choose it down to the retina pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much space do you want? God forbid you have multiple groups because then they should all be spaced by the same amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you do that in Xcode? Have fun zooming in and trying to make sure they’re the same space. like the tools
⏹️ ▶️ John for sort of laying out groups of like, this is not, they don’t, doesn’t do it for you. You got to do this yourself down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the pixel. And again, with SwiftUI doing it, if you like, I spent a lot of time wandering through
⏹️ ▶️ John the preferences dialogues of like every application on my Mac, third party and first party. There
⏹️ ▶️ John is a huge variety out there. Like it is, and again, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the expression of the personality application that comes through in the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John lay out their preferences. And sometimes you can look at it by age. Like if you go through system preferences, you’re like, you can date them
⏹️ ▶️ John by like, oh, I remember when this was the way we used to do Mac UIs. Like this hasn’t been touched in five years, this hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John touched in seven years, you know. It’s, you can really feel that if you’re familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John with the way things are done. But then you’re like, all right, well, how should I be doing it now? And that’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John asking a question of like, what kind of song should I be making now? What’s good music now? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, that’s up to you to do. Like you, there is no like, I just want to know how to make a song. Like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John are people making songs today? Like, the same thing with apps, right? I just feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the tools should at least sort of help you sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John align your, yeah, I’m trying to give an audio analogy, to align all of your various tracks
⏹️ ▶️ John in Logic. Like, you know what I mean? Like, Logic doesn’t make the song for you, but it makes it easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to have multiple tracks and cut and remove things from them and align them up. And like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping I don’t have much experience with Logic, but anyway, that’s what you want the tool to do. The tool’s not making the song for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the tool is letting you sort of know, like, can I make a one
⏹️ ▶️ John second gap between these things? And can it always be one second? Yeah, because the tool has a way for you to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit different in that, you know, there are standards for standard spacing of stuff. Like, for example, the distance
⏹️ ▶️ John that the label is from the checkbox, Xcode does that for me. I don’t have to guess that, right? The distance from the
⏹️ ▶️ John label to the, like the left side label, S-code has a snap for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has snaps all around there. And because you can’t zoom, like, am I aligned with the baseline of the text or am I aligned with
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom of the checkbox? They’re about one pixel away from each other. Make sure you’re aligned with the right one. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John very sort of persnickety. So, I mean, all this is to say is app development is hard, surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Person who doesn’t do app development finds it difficult, surprise. Like, this is not, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a condemnation or anything other than just myself and my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey poor choices
⏹️ ▶️ John and not learning this stuff better before I started using it. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John app development is hard And I’m surprised, I mean, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised because the programming part, I’ve been programming
⏹️ ▶️ John for 20 mumble years, right? That, you know, programming is just programming, right? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John finding the right APIs and fighting with sandboxing and stuff like that is a little bit tricky, but in the end, it’s not much
⏹️ ▶️ John different than fighting with like, you know, browser APIs and all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that I’ve done in my actual career. Like programming is programming, but GUI stuff and having to use tools
⏹️ ▶️ John and having to decide, do I want to do it programmatically? Do I want to use SwiftUI? Do I want to use auto layout? Do I want to use springs
⏹️ ▶️ John and struts? Do I want to throw up a web view? Like people make all sorts of decisions in their applications for good or for
⏹️ ▶️ John ill. And so, you know, I’m kind of, maybe I’ve gone off on the deep end where
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the ability to do all of those things badly. And I’m taking a tour of all of them and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all the different ways they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all bad. Or that I’m bad at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s like, as usual, the hardest problems in computer science are choosing your GUI framework, fighting your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools and visual design. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so true. a visual design, why is there a crossfade between the two tabs?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is not, this is the great thing. Like one of the, I get a lot of, you know, having having GUI
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and getting bug reports and not being able to actually communicate with the customers. One of the bug reports I got was I click
⏹️ ▶️ John on the tab, like there’s a general tab and exclude tab. I said, I click on the tab and nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was, they didn’t even say that I click on the tab and it doesn’t work or something like that. It was very,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you imagine, very terse thing. Thing is, that control, that tab you control,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, it’s inscrutable to be able to, I didn’t even go into this, but it’s very difficult to get that to work, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a control. Like, you just make that and you add tabs to it. I have zero amount of code.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not controlling that. You can programmatically make that tab group and control it yourself, but I’m not. I’m using the widget from
⏹️ ▶️ John the little library in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the interface
⏹️ ▶️ John builder. It does that. I can change the animation to be on or
⏹️ ▶️ John off or whatever, I’ve just left the default. So that fade you see is the default action. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t, like there’s a checkbox to turn it off and there’s like a pop-up menu to pick what kind of animation you
⏹️ ▶️ John want. But I’m pretty sure that’s just the default. I sure as hell didn’t seek it out and add it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So. I assumed you did seek it out and add it because I can’t recall ever seeing this crossfade. I mean, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it exists somewhere, but I cannot recall ever seeing this crossfade anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s weird. But anyway, I’m not controlling that. So when they say, hey, I click on exclude and it doesn’t work it’s like, but I didn’t, I didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John that work. That’s part of the control. But the thing that drives me nuts about this with storyboards is, so you’ve got the window
⏹️ ▶️ John in the storyboard, right? And then you’ve got the view, which is a second rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John with a line coming from it in the storyboard view. Then you’ve got another line from that view box
⏹️ ▶️ John to the tab control, which shows the two tabs. And then you’ve got two lines coming from that,
⏹️ ▶️ John one for the contents of the left tab and one for the, and that’s a lot of boxes for everything that’s gonna be a single window. And the thing that was
⏹️ ▶️ John driving me nuts is, when I click from the left tab to the right tab, I don’t want anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to move. In particular, I don’t want the tabs that I just clicked on to move. So you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the views so they exactly fit in the same size box, so that when you switch from one tab to the other,
⏹️ ▶️ John the tabs don’t move, and the darker gray rectangle, the inset thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John also doesn’t move when you change tabs. I must’ve spent hours doing that, mostly because I didn’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it that’s determining the size of these things? You can control them down to the pixel in Xcode. I had them
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the pixel matching, but then I started measuring them when I ran it. I’m like, yeah, I have everything down to the pixel matching,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when I run it, it’s like three pixels different. So what is determining the size?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this is just ignorance on my part, but surprising to me that you would think, oh, see this
⏹️ ▶️ John window you see in this screenshot? That’s exactly what you see in Xcode, right? Nope, that is not what I see in Xcode. What
⏹️ ▶️ John I see in Xcode is this big, giant, sprawling thing and storyboards with lines between them, and none
⏹️ ▶️ John of those boxes are the same size the box you see on your screen right here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John non obvious to a beginner, let’s say easy things should be easy. And Xcode easy things are possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the one of the bigger challenges also that you have here, which you were talking about earlier is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you’re trying to make quote, like, like a correct looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac interface basically like you’re trying to make like, you know, the right style, using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right spacing, using the right controls for things, but in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is kind of poorly defined. Like on iOS, it’s all over the place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it always has been, so it’s kind of okay. The Mac, I feel like Mac enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like us have this idea in our head of like, what a Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be, or what’s like a good Mac app, or what’s like a native Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John style. What should a song sound like? That’s the idea we have in our head. What should a song… We know it when we hear it. We know when we hear
⏹️ ▶️ John a good song, we know when we hear a bad song, we know when we hear an old song, we know when we hear a new song. But it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, well, how do I make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco song? Right. And when it comes to making a quote, Mac-like Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or a native Mac app, we have this idea of the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things it should have, the kind of way it should look. But all these little details,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them are not codified anywhere. Most of them are not in the HIG. They’re not like, there’s no standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone kind of just fuzzes around and does what they think might look right. And there’s the secondary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but significant problem of not only are the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of developers who make good quality Mac apps seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty small, but that number seems to be going down over time, not up. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look around, Apple can’t make a great Mac app to save their lives anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s getting more and more rare to see it out of anybody else either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meanwhile, you have a lot of Mac apps coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just total random garbage, or just basically web apps that are wrapped in a UI or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, that just throw away any concept of there possibly being a right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to do these things. Like, of all the apps that we use every day, how many of them are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote good Mac apps? I bet all three of us have Skype open right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least two or three of us probably have Chrome open right now. We have Slack open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, how many of these apps have anywhere near what you would call a good Mac interface?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s getting increasingly rare that this is gonna become one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost skills that there’s just very few people left not only doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but who even will know how to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean there’s Mac-like, which you mentioned that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have metrics for all this stuff and the Hig just tells you vague stuff, but the original Aqua
⏹️ ▶️ John Hig had metrics for everything, like down to the pixel, because that was before
⏹️ ▶️ John points and pixels, but they had, it was very, I wish I could have an old copy of it, maybe I do somewhere, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it would show you dialogues of like, this is how far the okay button needs to be from the left, this is how far it needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ John right, this is how wide it should be, this is how much white space there should around the labels on buttons. This is how far the buttons should be from each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, this is where the text should be, this is where the icon should be. It was like, nailed down. For
⏹️ ▶️ John the basics anyway, not for a complicated window like this. And I don’t even think the original
⏹️ ▶️ John Aqua human interface guidelines told you how far apart the checkbox should be. And on classic Mac OS, there were
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer controls and it was simpler, and your layout options were fewer, and they did define
⏹️ ▶️ John the metrics more precisely. But on the Mac today, there are the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote Mac like Mac apps, which is just a totally drifting target as you noted, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then there are other applications that bring their own thing like slack and other applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that say we are Yeah, we’re quote unquote native applications, but what we’re basically bringing
⏹️ ▶️ John is a web style UI and the web has its own aesthetic with which I am very familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And bringing that on the Mac doesn’t feel Mac like, but But at least when I’m in those applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel the groove of that song genre. I’m like, okay, you’re a web UI. I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I use web UIs. Are you a good web UI or are you a bad web UI? I’m not confused into thinking you’re a Mac UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re like web-like. Things like Chrome are like, well, you’re not really web-like, you’re not really Mac-like, you’re your
⏹️ ▶️ John own weird thing. And then there are things like, you know, speaking of good Mac applications, all of us are probably running right now, Audio Hijack.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing in the Higg that’s going to let you make Audio Hijack. That’s an example of saying we have a problem that we
⏹️ ▶️ John think we can solve with an interface that is undreamt of by Apple. That’s an example of how do you write
⏹️ ▶️ John a song? Sometimes no one’s giving you any guidance. You just got to make up your own thing. And if you do
⏹️ ▶️ John it really well, you get something like Audio Hijack, which we use and we would say feels quote unquote Mac-like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know if there was any standard controls in the entire application. So it just goes to show that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to use standard controls at standard spacing with standard fonts and all that other stuff to be Mac-like. It
⏹️ ▶️ John really is more abstract than that. But I totally agree that I was mentioning going through system preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John and being able to sort of date the time that UI was made by how it looks right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That the modern face of like canonical Apple Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John applications or canonical Mac applications that Apple hasn’t been the standard bearer for that
⏹️ ▶️ John for years. Like there are still great Mac apps like I think Safari is greater than Mac, but that’s not a new application.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new applications that we have recently are, you know, stocks and voice memos and on these Catalyst apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and they are not good Mac applications. They’re not good iOS applications, they’re just not really
⏹️ ▶️ John good applications, period. Rewrites of existing applications, like the Notes application is good,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is more like Audio Hijack than it is like Safari in terms of making up its own UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John So really, like that center that used to be there, the sort of center of like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s bundled applications show you what a Mac app should be like.
⏹️ ▶️ John They may be simple, text, edit, mail, Safari, Finder, but here it is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at them all together, they have a family resemblance, they look like Mac apps, and they’re kind of the standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like, you know, if you made an iOS app in the old days with just Apple standard controls everywhere with the standard
⏹️ ▶️ John spacing and everything. You’d look at it and you’d say, well, it’s not, you know, it’s not anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at, but I look at that and I know that is the beating heart of iOS, then branch off from
⏹️ ▶️ John there. That doesn’t really exist in the Mac anymore, and Apple is not doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of bring it back. I think maybe the peak of that was like when Apple was making the iLife applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s a suite of fairly complicated applications that take the standard Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, take the standard Mac design flavor and riff on it a little bit because they used custom controls and they use all sorts of weird stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they defined a sort of, here’s what Mac apps look like today. Even if it was, oh, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John giant brush metal windows and have a bunch of glossy buttons on them. That was the thing for a while and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John had many examples of it. And if you want to make an application to look Mac like during that era, you could pull up
⏹️ ▶️ John every application in iLife, look at every single window, and just look at them and say, make something that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and you will fit it in on the Mac today. If you go to a modern Mac, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John no set of Apple applications that you can open and crib off of and make something that looks like the Mac. You’d open them
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d be like, these are all made by the same company in the same decade? Like, seriously, go look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John preference dialog boxes from like seven first party applications from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and compare them to each other and see how wildly different they are. It’s a little bit of the Wild
⏹️ ▶️ John West today. It’s not to say there aren’t good ones out there, but it’s definitely the beating heart
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac user interfaces. I’m not gonna say it’s exploded and spread all over the place, but it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say. Well, and I think that’s the same problem Windows has had forever. Like, one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows app UIs are all over the place, I mean, there’s multiple causes for this, but one of the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons is that there was fairly weak leadership from Microsoft, from the platform vendor and the major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco application vendor, there was fairly weak leadership from them on what a good interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the platform is. And for a long time, Apple had really strong leadership in that area on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform. That’s one of the reasons why third-party software on the Mac tended to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than third-party software on Windows, or at least nicer. There was strong leadership and a strong concept of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is a good slash correct Mac design to make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now, I think Apple has the exact same problem that Microsoft has had forever, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple itself is not providing strong leadership in that area anymore. And they haven’t for a little while now to the point where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said earlier, Apple can’t design a Mac app to save their lives. Apple can’t seem to design an app anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save their lives. Like, Apple seems to be really incapable of making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good interfaces anymore. Whatever their current software design, whatever goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that, when’s the last time Apple made a great UI?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been a while. Like, there’s a reason why most of our favorite products from Apple are things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like AirPods that have no UI. That, you know, they’re just not making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great UIs anymore. And they’re really good at making junk drawer style things where like you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sweep everything off the table and you still have tons of complexity, it’s just buried.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they call that simplicity or minimalism or whatever. Like, the apps are still horrendous to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. Things are still very unintuitive. There is no standard for anything anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Different teams in the company that make different apps follow seemingly totally different UI conventions and standards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or no standards whatsoever, music. So like, there are so many just like random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad designs coming out of Apple these days. They are providing no leadership whatsoever anymore on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes a good UI. And so, we’re gonna have this problem. We have it on all their platforms, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standards are fairly eroded or gone at this point. And we all are just kind of fending for ourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out, is this good? Is this good? And every company has a different opinion of what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it’s mostly, like I said, mostly true for new apps, because a lot of their existing apps, even existing apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that have been refreshed, like I said, notes before, reminders, there is a family resemblance
⏹️ ▶️ John to them, but they’re not, to your point, they’re not new apps. Like, where is the new app that Apple came out with? Here’s this new application
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple. like examples and other of their catalysts, but like setting a catalyst, they made new apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that either came with the Mac or purchased separately for doing stocks or podcasts or TV
⏹️ ▶️ John or voice memos or whatever. Those were just new applications from Apple. Like we don’t see that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We see, okay, well you’re continuing to refine Safari. And I think, again, I think Safari is great. And if you want to look at a screen that has
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of complicated UI in it, that Apple does a pretty good job of wrangling, the Web Inspector in Safari, they add
⏹️ ▶️ John features to it all the time. It’s very complicated. It’s a developer tool. And they do such a great job of taming
⏹️ ▶️ John that complexity in a reasonable Mac-like looking UI, right? And Notes and all these
⏹️ ▶️ John other applications that have the toolbar with the monochrome buttons and the title barless windows
⏹️ ▶️ John where the toolbar buttons are alongside the window widgets, like, that’s, if I had to try to pinpoint some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, faintly beating heart of modern first-party design,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be to look at how Apple has redesigned a bunch of their bundled Mac applications to have this
⏹️ ▶️ John family resemblance. And then we can debate, like, the second thing is, okay, if that’s where Mac design is at,
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly, those three or four applications that have some kind of family resemblance that
⏹️ ▶️ John are trying to say this is what a Mac app should be like, then we can say, is that a good way to be? You know, again, getting back to
⏹️ ▶️ John brushed metal. There was clearly a way that Apple was saying first parties apps should be. Was that a good way
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to be? Or was that kind of not really, you know, as timeless as
⏹️ ▶️ John they could have wanted it to be, right? I, you know, I could, if I was, you know, I was still writing Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John interviews, I probably, I think I maybe did get into this when they first did the thing of like removing the title bar and merging
⏹️ ▶️ John it with the toolbar and doing transparency and the vibrancy layers and the sidebars and borderless windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and hiding the scroll bars and all that other stuff. Like lots of decisions that have been
⏹️ ▶️ John presented as Mac-like, you know, new
⏹️ ▶️ John directions in Mac-like design, defining what it means to be the Mac, even when they’ve been very strong,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes haven’t been the best decisions. Again, it’s like the group
⏹️ ▶️ John of songs that you can tell are made at a certain time and a certain moment in history and have a certain feel
⏹️ ▶️ John and are in a certain genre, but aren’t great songs. So I do have some complaints about even
⏹️ ▶️ John the commonalities that I find in Mac UI, which is why I think the standouts are, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m staring at it on my screen, things like Audio Hijack, which are like, we are going in our own
⏹️ ▶️ John direction and we’re just gonna make a great UI, period. And it will feel Mac-like because the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John make it have the Mac in their bones and understand sort of the underlying ethos.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t have to actually use any standard controls. And it doesn’t actually have to
⏹️ ▶️ John look like Safari or Notes or Reminders or Contacts or anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a good Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Clear, Casper, and Health IQ. I’m gonna talk to you.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Anti-Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental Tech podcasts
Neutral: Road-trip cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We haven’t done an Ask ATP in a couple episodes because we’ve been a little chatty, but there was a really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really fun one that we thought we’d do as like a neutral after show. And so Matt Rigby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, if the ATP crew were to take a Top Gear style road trip in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey separate cars, which is probably the only way we could survive, what three cars would you choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for something along the lines of a cross country trip? Like, so the implication that Matt is getting at here, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that this isn’t like, you know, down the road or anything like that. The three of us are driving in separate vehicles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily halfway across the country. Now, I have an answer, which I am—I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my answer. I’m not overjoyed with it. Would you like me to tip my hat and just start, or would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you prefer to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first? Is it a Jeep Wrangler?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it is not a Jeep Wrangler. Oh, that’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John interesting thought, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no. It should be as punishment for thinking about buying one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you imagine, is there a worse punishment than being forced to drive a Jeep Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like, how wide is the country, like 5,000 miles? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John animals look like or how big the country is, that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So wasn’t it just recently that- How much could a banana cost? Wasn’t it just recently that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a new cannonball run record of like 24 hours or something like that? It was preposterous, whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they broke the record that was made and widely publicized on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John like five or ten years ago. I forget what the new time is though, but yeah, it was broken by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot. Steven Powell Yeah, because Alex Roy did it, Al Troy did it and that was like the— Paul Sherman Thirty-two hours or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something? Steven Powell —something like that. It was in the M5 too, and it was the, it will never be beat time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then like a couple of years ago, that got beat. And then I think just in the last six months to a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was another new record. Preposterous, I tell you. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I’ll just go ahead and go first since none of you seem overenthusiastic. So I was thinking to myself, all right, I’m going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the car for a very long time. I’m going to want a car that probably can do a fair amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of self-driving, but I don’t want an electric car because I don’t want to have to stop all the time to charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you back up a little bit? You’re going to want a car that can do a fair amount of self-driving. Could you please unpack
⏹️ ▶️ John that statement for me?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there are degrees of self-drivingness. So for example, my Golf R, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ping pong inside the edges of a lane if I just let my my hand off the wheel, which I would never do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just saying like it is capable of keeping me in a lane.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That sounds terrible. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would get very angry about it. Oh, it’s a terrible approach. Like I would never rely on it. I’m just saying, strictly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, it would keep me in a lane if I really, really, really needed it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Boinging between the two dividing lines. That’s not really self-driving. Aaron’s car does a fairly decent job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least on the highway anyway, of full-on self-driving. Like you have to keep your hands on the wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like on a Tesla usually. And it’ll actually stay dead center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the lane. It’ll follow appropriately if people in front of you slow down, and it’ll speed up again if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they speed up, et cetera, et cetera. And then to me, I actually think the best self-driving that I’m aware of is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Tesla. And as much as I love to poke fun at Teslas, their self-driving suite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for lack of a better word, is really and truly incredible. So I would want something that’s along the lines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Tesla’s self-driving capabilities, but I don’t personally want to do this trip, this hypothetical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trip in a Tesla. Is that fair, John? Yeah, you can continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. OK. So I want a gasoline slash petrol-powered car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t actually, I didn’t even think about diesel, but I don’t think I want that, especially since in America, it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John prevalent as a
⏹️ ▶️ John self-driver. The kids will do the thing where they pull their arm down. They want you to honk the horn. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if that happens in other countries. But anyway, so I want a sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I want a coupe, although a coupe is an acceptable answer, I suppose. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want a luxury barge is what I want. And the obvious answer to this question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is some sort of ridiculous S-class. But now, to be fair, I haven’t driven a Mercedes, a modern Mercedes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really in probably 10 plus years. But I returned to Old Faithful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really Old Unfaithful, actually. I returned to BMW and I thought to myself, well, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would I get from BMW? And so this has actually been in the show notes for several weeks. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several weeks ago, I actually built myself a 2020 750i xDrive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sedan with, of course, the M Sport package. This is zero to 60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in under four seconds in a sedan that’s probably as long as my house and weighs about twice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much. And the MSRP as built, we will put a link to my build in the show notes, $111,500 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this 750i xDrive sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, my theory is this will kind of self-drive to at least some degree. It will be comfortable. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is large, plenty of room for whatever luggage I might want to bring. And it’s just nice. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly agree with a lot of what you have said.
⏹️ ▶️ John right, that’s a good start. I don’t agree with the grill on that car. That’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing I don’t agree with. That’s fair. That’s very fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, we’ll never lose sight of you in the rear view mirror, Casey. with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the gigantic grill gleaming behind us. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, like one of the critical questions here is, is electric really an option?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so, you know, this depends on a lot of the details of the implementation details. Like, are we sticking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together, Top Gear style?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. Because if we’re not sticking together, we’re not going to sit around for you while you sip coffee for 45 minutes while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like, you know, I love driving the Model S and I’ve driven it for lots of long highway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trips. I drove it today on a long highway trip. I love it, but there is the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that about every four to five hours of driving, depending on how you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving, you’re gonna have to stop for about 40 minutes. I personally, in my life, owning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these cars for now almost four,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half years, whatever it is, I find that totally fine. I hardly ever have to actually do it in practice because I hardly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever take drives that are longer than that. And on the rare occasions I have, I have found it pretty pleasurable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, because that is about, usually after about four hours, I wanna stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about a half hour anyway, just to get some food or take a quick rest, you know, whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know the Top Gear rules. You stop, we just leave you behind. Sorry, later, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so for me, if you guys would actually wait for me, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, Model S. No question at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. Okay, so slow down. Why not the X? Not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John say you’re wrong, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curious. who wants to drive around in a shoe? It gets less range, first of all. Yeah, first of all, I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less attractive. It also gets less range.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fair enough, fair enough. You get a sunburn on his head. You have to wear his hat the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in the car. I mean, the Model X is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also excellent. It’s very similar in many ways to the Model S, so really, I would be perfectly happy with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, but I would be happier with the S. So really, the question becomes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the style of driving we’re doing? Are we going across the country on the interstate highways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or are we not using the interstate highways? Are we going to be somewhere crazy where there’s not going to be any superchargers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundreds of miles around?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, that’s the thing that worries me more, because you would know the supercharger network better than me, and I’m glancing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the map that’s at tesla.com slash supercharger. And it certainly does seem, just looking at the supercharger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey map, that there are some east-west passages that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearly have superchargers, pretty much the whole way across the country. But there’s one that looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like looking through North Dakota, which I don’t know why we would go through North Dakota. But if we chose to go through North Dakota,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks like there are some superchargers coming soon. But there is a long swath of road where superchargers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not there today. So I hear you, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accept the answer with the caveats you’ve given. But I would also be curious, have you thought about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’re done with the electric part, if there is a gasoline or diesel-powered option that you have considered, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. I mean, what the diesel? What do we care about diesel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for? Diesel will be terrible on a long road trip because you’d have to wait until you found a diesel gas station. Across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the US, that’s not going to be every highway exit. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s plenty to define diesel, but I don’t want to listen to a diesel engineer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that long. It’s pundit like an American. Anyway, carry on. So, carry on. So, any other thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your electric? The whole appeal of gas is that you can stop at any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exit off of the highway and pull in directly off of the ramp and there’s going to be a gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco station there and you can just get gas and be done in 10 minutes. Diesel makes that not always the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in America. I know, you know, other countries it’s much more common, but like in America, you, you know, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in a very dense area, you might, it might take you a few exits before you can find a station that has diesel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you might, it might not even tell you and you just kind of have to guess and try a few until you find one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not nearly as is common. So anyway, so yeah, I think if you’re going to go with any kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, burning fuel in America, you go with gas. Um, but I still would really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically prefer electric because the self-driving is so good and, and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a very comfortable car for long trips cause I’ve taken many long trips in it and I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because for me, like long trips are optimizing for comfort and ease of driving. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, you know, you, you, you want something that’s going to be nice, that’s going to be fairly easy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re also not gonna get too bored with the car in because any car gets boring on a long highway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip, but you at least wanna have some fun with it. So that’s why I didn’t even think of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a big old Mercedes boat because I find them really boring and they just kinda don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get my gears revving, I guess. So for me, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one pick was the Model S with the caveat that only if we’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna like stick together with the supercharging. If not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had to get a gas car for that purpose, I think I would go back to the M5. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I haven’t yet ever seen the current generation one, and I certainly don’t love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of its automatic transmission, despite what everybody says it being so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close enough to good. But that’s, I don’t love the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, I’m skeptical. But anyway, I did also take a lot of long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road trips in the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In more than one country.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco In like three different countries. Well, no, three or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two countries here and like three or four there. Is that right? Something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that? Yeah, something like that, yeah. So like, I’ve taken many long trips in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve driven thousands of miles on the highway in the M5 and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very comfortable, you know? Because it’s similar. It’s a large sedan. It has a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cushy interior features. It has the butt massaging seats. So there’s all sorts of features like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It has radar cruise control. So, because that’s to me, if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna give me self-driving that’ll keep you in the lane, my minimum for long highway drives of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality, if I’m gonna make a pick like this, is it has to at least have adaptive speed cruise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John where it has the radar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look at the car in front and everything. It has to at least have that. So if we’re having these things, to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question, It’s the Model S first with the asterisk of electric waiting periods. And if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to wait with me and I need to get a gas car, I’d probably go for the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, you’d have an accord. And that’s the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad to hear that both of you have come around on the notion that if you’re taking a long trip,
⏹️ ▶️ John the most important thing is to be comfortable. Because now you’re old and have old person butts.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you want your old person butts to be
⏹️ ▶️ John pampered. So no one’s like getting a Ferrari Daytona and just being like, yes, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to drive that for 25 five hours because it gets old real fast and it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John worth it. So my choice is the one you both kept talking about and dismissing because you are wrong. The big old Mercedes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The big old Mercedes. Check your show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Now it is the, what do they call it? It’s the AMG
⏹️ ▶️ John S63. It’s faster than Casey’s BMW. It is undoubtedly cushier
⏹️ ▶️ John and more luxurious. And the thing is, that’s what I want for a long trip. I want to feel like I’m driving in the
⏹️ ▶️ John living room. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it to be ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John comfortable. I don’t care about the handling, right? I mean, having power is great. And this thing has plenty of
⏹️ ▶️ John power. You know, it’s like 3.5 seconds to 60 huge top speed, like, but being comfortable for a
⏹️ ▶️ John long period. So yes, all these cars have heated and cooled seats and butt massagers or whatever. But the Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ John ones had the reputation for being the most squishy, the least sporty, let’s say, because
⏹️ ▶️ John even though the car is incredibly powerful, they’re big, squishy seats, beautiful materials all
⏹️ ▶️ John over the interior. Burled walnut is what I selected for mine because I’m just a traditionalist. Yes, it’s cliche
⏹️ ▶️ John but it looks really nice. Everything is nice and leather. It smells good. You have good visibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have, you know, their dashboard is a nice big screen but not like a Tesla screen. It’s more like just a regular large console
⏹️ ▶️ John that happens to be a screen. It’s got a heads-up display and I bet it’s really quiet at speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet it’s very comfortable. I bet if you’re as solid as a rock and you can go down straight highways
⏹️ ▶️ John at high speed. Now I’m going to depart from both of you on the whole requiring
⏹️ ▶️ John electronic assistance. I don’t want any of that because I tend not to trust
⏹️ ▶️ John it and all of my long road trips have been taken in cars without any of that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and other than basic cruise control so you don’t have to hold the accelerator pedal down
⏹️ ▶️ John for hours at a time, other than that I don’t need any other assistance. I’m sure this has them. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean all cars have them and everything like that. And I wouldn’t do things like turn off the emergency
⏹️ ▶️ John braking system so that like, if you’re gonna rear end the car in front of you and you fall asleep, it will stop the car. Like they all have that
⏹️ ▶️ John now. I would leave that on. I’m not saying I would like, I got to turn off all the electric nannies cause I’m gonna, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to drive it all myself. No, I would leave on like the emergency things, but things like lane keeping, cruise
⏹️ ▶️ John control, and even maybe even radar detecting cruise control, be where you have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause the thing is about long trips is I want to be engaged enough to make sure I
⏹️ ▶️ John am paying attention. I can’t let the car do too much. So even though this car has them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t use them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You say that, but have you experienced radar cruise control because radar cruise control is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it is, but I feel like that is, for me personally, that is one level of engagement
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a little bit too, you know, it’s removed too much. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with cruise control and especially if you’re going on long trips, Like there’s not, you know, you’re on the open road. There’s nobody around
⏹️ ▶️ John for miles. It’s not as if you need it. And if I’m in traffic or whatever, I mean, remember, I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ John ever owned stick shift cars. So if I’m not constantly shifting in traffic, that already is fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to be doing that, right? So I maybe, maybe over the course of
⏹️ ▶️ John long trip, I would come around to a radar cruise control, but I would definitely never do line keeping. I am very down
⏹️ ▶️ John on lane keeping just because, I mean, if you know how the lane keeping stuff works, For the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part, GPS, you know, highly accurate GPS maps aside, the car
⏹️ ▶️ John has no idea where the road is other than by looking out in front the same way a human
⏹️ ▶️ John would and trying to figure it out. And humans are better at that than cars by a long stretch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Driving in Massachusetts where sometimes you will come upon a road that has 20 sets of lines going 100 different
⏹️ ▶️ John directions, some of which lead off into a ditch, I fear what a lane keeping system
⏹️ ▶️ John would do when faced with that. You’re hoping it would just throw up its hand and start beeping or something, but if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one clear set of lines slowly leading off into the ditch, I have a feeling the car is going to take that route and it’s going to kill me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I say no to lane keeping. I say yes to big, luxurious, fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet Mercedes. I actually considered going in the only other direction I considered going in was picking like a
⏹️ ▶️ John classic for my childhood Mercedes because I took a couple of long road trips in my
⏹️ ▶️ John friend’s father’s 80s Mercedes, which is how I came to my Mercedes love. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I was always just amazed at how solid it felt and how quiet it was and how squishy the seats were and
⏹️ ▶️ John how fast he drove in it. And that always, you know, that sort of like gave me my childhood impression of Mercedes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, the 80s Mercedes were not particularly good looking, but they were smooth
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were solid and they were quiet and they were surprisingly fast. And the modern ones, I’m not sure if the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are continuing with that tradition, but everything I’ve read about them makes me think that more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW users still slightly sportier in the large car, not in the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ John car market these days. But in the large car market, BMW feels the need to be tougher
⏹️ ▶️ John and stiffer suspension. So the M5, especially the M5 competition, is probably a much
⏹️ ▶️ John more harsh ride than any of the S-classes. So that’s why I’m going with my tried and true Mercedes S-class.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so since I am the oldest and have the most old person butt
⏹️ ▶️ John and need to be cradled. I think that by the time we arrived at our destination, my
⏹️ ▶️ John body would have the least wear and tear despite being the oldest and the creakiest. And I even selected a model
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was building it that has like the rear seat heaters and coolers and everything so that on the way back,
⏹️ ▶️ John you two can just ride in the back of my car
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and we’ll all be comfortable and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John just ditch those other two lesser cars and not wait for Marco to have to fill up his battery again and just
⏹️ ▶️ John drive back in quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A genuine question, and I think I know the answer. Why not the wagon? There’s no S-Class wagon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, I’m sorry. No, S-Class. You were correct. I’m sorry. I was looking at the S in E63 S wagon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, you are correct. I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was actually considering one of the coupe options, because I’m like, oh, I’m not going to have any people. It’s us driving separately. But I threw
⏹️ ▶️ John out the big backseat for you two, because I know you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to want to get out of
⏹️ ▶️ John your uncomfortable car. You are going to want to get out of your uncomfortable cars. I got the wireless charging and the rear seat option, so you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John put your phone down when you want to charge it, and the screens. You’ll be all set back there. there was a thing called like
⏹️ ▶️ John what was it in the options it was like something bucket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a there’s an option to get a cd player in the glove box for a hundred and thirty dollars I didn’t pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one or for five thousand dollars you can get something called magic sky control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s the little stars in the sky no here no no it’s not it’s it’s like electronic tinting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the sunroof glass ah there
⏹️ ▶️ John you go because the I don’t I didn’t I didn’t pick that I don’t like that either. Comfort box. What a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco comfort box. Add to your
⏹️ ▶️ John driving peace of mind when carrying smaller items in the trunk. Oh, I thought this was like in the console. I see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey picture. Oh, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no. A box in the trunk to hold smaller items so they don’t rattle around. It’s only $350. I did not choose it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the total price of mine is fairly reasonable considering how much luxury nonsense is in this car
⏹️ ▶️ John and performance stuff. Again, it’s faster than Casey’s BMW. I think it’s also better looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John total comes to, I picked good wheels and I picked like the blacked
⏹️ ▶️ John out light package so there’s less chrome. I think it’s 151. It’s pretty reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a golf arm more than my Phantom BMW for God’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sakes. I mean, we’re all picking cars that you could like, you can get a pretty good house in Ohio for this amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but this is more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than a house in Ohio. Well done, well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is all wheel drive, is that right? You know, I didn’t even look. I think it is. I’m not confident I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct, though. I feel like that’s a must for a cross-country trip. Because we also have to think about what kind of conditions are we driving through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here? Are we driving across the bottom of the country, where it’s going to be pretty warm, and therefore we might want things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sky control? Or are we going to be going across the top of the country?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what time of year is this? Are we going across the northern part of the country in the winter? Because that’s going to possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change my pick to some kind of giant monstrosity thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, actually, another thing to think about, John, is I don’t think you have CarPlay in this, whereas I do, probably wireless,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care. I don’t care about CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I almost picked the weird fancy 3D surround sound thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for the fancy speakers, and I decided that stock speakers are probably fine. I just listen to podcasts anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. It’s like, what are we listening to that’s gonna use the fancy, like, you know, Burmester high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3D surround sound system for $6,400?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, these are all good choices. I’m not surprised by any of them, if I’m honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But… Yeah, they’re all kind of boring choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, but that’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you reach a certain age and you’re gonna be in the car for hours, you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be comfortable. Yeah, exactly. That’s why I didn’t consider any kind of comedy option or fun old car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna pick a DeLorean or anything. It’s like, what you really want, yeah, it’s like you want a comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car that’s gonna mostly drive itself on the highway, at least with cruise control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re gonna want all the creature comforts of good climate control, good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cushy ride, great visibility. Quiet. Yeah, quiet. And that’s actually quiet is not great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the M5. The Model S is way quieter, and I’m sure your S-Class is quiet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. I also thought about things like with a gas car, like you want a car with a long range, so you don’t have to stop as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fill up. So you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like a really big gas tank.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, no, it
⏹️ ▶️ John really isn’t. No, most cars do have big gas tanks. Like doesn’t the M5 have like a 25 gallon gas tank or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something? They had to add a giant gas tank to it because it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John incredibly inefficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the mileage isn’t great, but that’s the thing about these cars. You can just add, adding a bigger gas tank is really
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to do and extends the range by a ridiculous amount. Because there was some, I think it was one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Engineering Explained videos recently that was comparing like the range of a bunch of electric cars and everything and saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here’s the long range Model S and here is like, I forget, maybe it was a Camaro or something. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. It was some terrible, a car with like terrible gas mileage. And it’s like, so the long range Model S gets more
⏹️ ▶️ John on a fill up than this terrible like Camaro So it’s like if you wanted to extend,
⏹️ ▶️ John but here’s this other car that had like, you know, it was the thing was it wasn’t a cord or something like that. It had a very long range
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was like a wimpy four cylinder. It’s like, well, the electric cars can’t match this range. It was like 800 mile range
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. How much more battery would you have to add the electric to match this range? And it was like, well, you’d have to add another 5000
⏹️ ▶️ John pounds or something. It was ridiculous, right? And then it was like, how much weight would you have to add to the Camaro
⏹️ ▶️ John to match the Ranger? Like, you had to make the gas tank like six gallons bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It was nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because the energy density of gasoline is phenomenal. And making the gas tank bigger weighs
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. And putting the actual gas, it’s like, it was ridiculous. It
⏹️ ▶️ John really just hammered home the energy density dichotomy between gas cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and electric. Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t all go electric, but like, boy, gas cars have it easy. So if you have a gas car with bad range,
⏹️ ▶️ John know that that is entirely chosen based on interior space concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe if it’s a sporty car, a little bit of weight. But really, gas
⏹️ ▶️ John is lightweight, energy dense, and it weighs nothing when it’s not in your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If only there were no other problems with it. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know. All right, so final question, since we are running long. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone who is just filthy rich said, I will literally buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these cars. And you decide whether or not we can keep them afterwards. But I will buy all three of these cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad I picked the most expensive one. Yes, exactly. I will hand you the keys, and you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to film or record or do something to chronicle the trip. But I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fund the trip of the three of you to go from New York to LA. Would you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Does it have to be video? Does it have to be LA?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, and no. Fine. No, it does not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it does not need VLA and no, it does not have to be video. Golly, tough crowd today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like to do video well would cost way more than these three cars are worth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that would be a hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doing video well is a giant pain in the butt and takes a lot of people and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know. Yeah. Assume that whatever it is, it’s no impact on us. Like if it’s video, there’s a film crew that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handles everything. We just have to be the talent, as they say. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably do it just for the life experience, as long as it wasn’t a race, because I don’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be rushed or going fast or anything like that. Yeah. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone’s paying for it, I would go as slow as possible and stop at every stupid tourist attraction and just hang
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and make it an entire… I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I was assuming I’d get time off work, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what I mean. Well, thank you. What’s the babysitting situation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, that’s the other… I was thinking to myself…
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact tolerance of our respective spouses to have us gone for
⏹️ ▶️ John what amount of time doing what exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. You’re doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why? I have always wanted to do like a cross country road trip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amen. It’s road trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God. I would love to do a cross country road trip. I think that would be incredibly, incredibly fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John And fly back, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Probably. Oh yeah. You’re not driving back. Bye.