376: Monogamous Gaming Lifestyle
30 Apr 2020Dropping Dropbox, gaming on the Mac Pro, contact tracing, and “fixing” Casey’s unbroken house.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey makes his life [more] difficult for himself
- Dropping Dropbox
- Follow-up:
- COVID-19
Contact TracingExposure Notification - iOS 13.5 Improvements
- Google Making its own Chips
- ARM chips in Macs
Sponsored by:
- ExpressVPN: The fastest and most reliable VPN. Get an extra three months free with a 1-year package.
Chapters
- Casey’s Complexity Corner
- Dropping Dropbox
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- John’s W5700X
- Half-wheeled scheme: no go 🖼️
- Magic Keyboard magnet strength
- Jump-starting a car
- Contact Tracing API
- iOS 13.5 beta improvements
- Google making phone CPUs
- ARM Mac CPU rumors
- Ending theme
- Fan 3 🖼️
- Game Bar
Casey’s Complexity Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had a dumb idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to know when my garage door has been left open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the evenings. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s something that does happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t the whole purpose of your, you know, smart home garage door opener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to alert you to this? Like, when you mention that you got one of these smart garage things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably three years ago, I believe you specifically said this is what it’s for, is to alert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you if you leave it open unnecessarily. So is it not doing that in its own app or automatically?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, here’s the thing. As with everything in my life, nothing can ever be simple. It always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to be difficult. So I did have the Chamberlain MyQ add-on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost daughterboard, if you will. And so what that is, if you’re not familiar, is it’s two pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a, I can’t think of the term, but it’s like a thing you stick to the back of the garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door so it knows whether it’s up or down. It has like, I don’t know if it really has an accelerometer, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like mercury switches in it or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Such that- Chances are an accelerometer is probably cheaper these days than mercury.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably right. I don’t even know, but you get my point. It’s something that sticks to the garage door so it knows if it’s down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say vertical, or if it’s up, which is to say horizontal. And then there’s another box And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that basically proxies a network request to RF.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can come in via the Internet and say to this box, I would like the door to open, please. And then it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emits the same radio frequency signal that a traditional garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door opener that you hold in your hand would emit, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. So you can add it to almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any garage door opener. And I had that for a while and it was great. Then when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at WWDC two years ago, maybe even three years ago now, our garage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door, which had ever, ever, ever so slightly buckled, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buckled and it wouldn’t open or close anymore. And so when I came back from WWDC that year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and again, this is like two or three years ago now, I decided that, or we decided to get a new garage door.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with that became a new garage door opener. Now I thought to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey self, you have this new fancy garage door opener. you have the opportunity, I should say, for a new fancy garage door opener. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t you get a new fancy garage door opener where all of this functionality is built right in? You don’t need the little dingus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the door because it’s the garage door opener is fully aware whether the garage door is up or down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the garage door opener is internet connected. Everything will be peachy and great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As it turns out, the particular vendor that we used for our garage door sold us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most awful smart garage door opener in the world. So it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an app. And it is possible I might be able to configure that app to alert me whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the garage door is open when I go to bed. But the app is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad that I don’t trust it to do so. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have gone down the path of trying to man in the middle this thing with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charles on the phone to see if I could figure out their API and just kind of work this out myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, the one and only thing the Linear Pro Access app does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well is some sort of certificate pinning or something like that, such that I can’t sniff it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Charles. Like, I’m talking a bit outside my comfort zone at this point. I’m not entirely clear what I’m talking about, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem clear that Charles doesn’t want to show me what I want to see. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? Well, I’ve got a hammer and it’s called the Raspberry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pi. And everywhere I look, there are nails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ve decided, the only reasonable answer is to get two more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Raspberry Pis. Because why would I use the one I have when I can get two more?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be fair, they are so cheap that you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. That’s the thing is I don’t need like the big honking Pi 4 that I have for like, I don’t even need that for Pi hole,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s what I’m using it for. And I don’t need it for my VPN. Like I probably use the one of the Pi zeros for any of these things. But I do want the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pi 4 for emulation, as we talked about a few episodes back. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought to myself, well, I could get a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless or Zero W, whatever they call it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is literally $10 for the board. This is an entire Linux computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for $10 plus, you know, potentially plus shipping and so on and so forth. So I thought to myself, what I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do is I can put a Pi Zero somewhere near the garage door and get one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those magnetic, I forget the term for it, but one of those magnetic switches where there’s a piece on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garage door and a piece on the door frame, right? And when those pieces are very close to each other, the circuit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is closed. And then when the door moves away, thus the door is open, the circuit is opened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then what I can do is in my bedroom, I can put a second Pi zero,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I can hook that up to an LED and the LED will come on when the door is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open. This is flawless. And so this afternoon, I started writing Python
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the first time in probably 10 or 15 years. And I figured out how to do multicast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UDP between two computers. Like I don’t have any of the Pi zeros yet. I haven’t actually committed anything yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of financial investment. But I could send UDP messages between the two computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that they can talk to each other. And then just before the show, I figured out how to flip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the GPIO, which is to say one of the pins on the Raspberry Pi that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use for input or output. I figured out with Python how to make it go high or go low, which to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair is extremely simple, but I’d never done this before. And so now I’m looking into like, okay, how do I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the sensor side, what script do I need to write such that it’ll see when like the voltage is falling or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps if the voltage is peaking. And so I can get a call back and interrupt, I guess, in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out, okay, now I need to send this multicast message to the other Raspberry Pi. And I am sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there is an infinitely simpler answer to this. However, the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I’m not terribly keen on is having to wire something from the garage to my bedroom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is silly because I won’t mention publicly that the bedroom is literally right over the garage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t want to have to go through walls and whatnot in order to wire everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why not just put two $10 computers, one on either end, and poof, it all works via the magic of wireless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just install two $1 mirrors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because what am I going to do, cut a hole in my floor or stick one out the window?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, do basically like a periscope kind of arrangement. Have one out the window that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you can see that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angled 45 degrees and then below it have another one angled 45 degrees that looks at the door.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean I guess I could, but that’s no fun, man. It’s not as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun. It’ll work 100% of the time. Never need software updates. Doesn’t depend on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, and it’s just no fun. And a lot of people are saying, well, why not use Homebridge? Well, I’d love to use Homebridge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there is no Homebridge interface for linear garage door openers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is for the Chamberlain MyQ that I used to use. And before everyone asked, we’ll just use the Chamberlain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MyQ in concert with the linear ProAXIS. And number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I don’t want to do that. Number two, I gave the MyQ away. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco either way, I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so in my effort to use a Raspberry Pi for even the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that it is so unbelievably unnecessary for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have considered doing exactly this. And you can’t put any of this in the show because I don’t want to get well actually for the rest of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Ryber in the chat has an even better suggestion. You can just use one mirror. If you install it at the end of your driveway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could just look at that and then you could see, You know, you wouldn’t see it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as closely as my Prism setup, but it would be even easier. You could probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it on your mailbox as long as you screw it on instead of stick it on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Possibly, yes. Although, given our last week’s conversation about the Homeowners Association, I’m sure they would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things to say about a mirror showing up on my mailbox. Anyway, I just really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to, all kidding aside, I have every confidence that I could do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without any sort of computing hardware whatsoever, probably have some sort of magnetic switch and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a power supply and an LED and wire that all through the house some way, somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it would be way more reliable and it would probably work forever. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, it just seems like less fun. And one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes the Raspberry Pi so appealing to me—and presumably an Arduino would work for this too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t have any experience with that personally—but one of the things that makes us so appealing to me is the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just doing something that’s unusual and different for me. Like I never play with hardware. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think both of you potentially are certainly, Marco, you’ve played with hardware a lot more than I have with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your RFID scanner that you did a couple of years back. And I’m sure there’s other, other examples I’m not thinking of. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like all your retro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gaming stuff. But nonetheless, this is just, this is an itch I’ve never really scratched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I kind of want to try it just to see if I can do it. And it may end up that it doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for beans. Maybe there’s something that I’m not thinking of that will cause it to not work at all. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll be deeply unreliable. Or maybe I’ll just realize, okay, this is really cool. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having this LED in the room that shines when the garage door is open, but why do I need two internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected or well, network, intranet connected computers to do this? I could just use a couple of fricking wires.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t debate that there are better ways of accomplishing this goal, But I do debate if there are more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun ways of accomplishing this goal. So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steven Puckett Never underestimate the smart home for the ability to introduce needless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity and unreliability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should and always has been very simple tasks and roles of objects in your home. Jared Polin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, it’s so true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like, all kidding aside, if not a prism scenario, if you had to do something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey involved some amount of electronics. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. How would you solve this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chris Bounds I just don’t leave the garage door open. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey first of all, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often are you leaving the house right now? Jared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Polin Well, that’s true too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chris Bounds Yeah, I just, I mean, we have a garage with, you know, with an electric door and we, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, move the car into it when we arrive, and then we close the door behind us. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want to leave, we open the door, back the car out, and then close the door and then leave. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin But that’s the thing is that oftentimes we will open the garage door for the purposes of letting the kids play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe even pull a car out so the kids can play in the garage and the driveway. So I take your point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re not, our cars are not leaving the driveway very often, but the cars are leaving the garage semi-often.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And occasionally the cars won’t leave the garage, we’ll just open it up, play for a while, come in and maybe just leave it open because there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was no compelling reason to close it at that moment. And it’s very rare, truth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be told. I think it’s only like three or four times a year that we have left the garage door open overnight, but it annoys me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this would be a neat way to fix it, a neat, uselessly complicated way to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That will sometimes mostly fix it for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly, until something breaks. A very good question also from Ryber in the chat, do I have any old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone jacks in the house I could piggyback off of? I do in general, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t anywhere in the vicinity of the garage that I’m aware of. So it’s a good idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no, I don’t think I have anything. So I am not looking for, I am not necessarily looking for input about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, because really it’s an excuse for me to do something stupid. I acknowledge it’s stupid. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acknowledge it’s uselessly complicated, but I think it would be fun. But so what, so other than just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not forgetting, you haven’t really given me an answer. Is there any electronic equipped way that you would consider doing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Or John, but I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start with you. I don’t think, I mean, so, okay. One thing I’ve wanted for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which, which could solve this problem, but it’s not really meant to be like a fixed thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve wanted basically something that was, it’s almost solvable by a baby
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor. And I don’t know if this exists. I’ve looked around a little while and couldn’t find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I want is a battery-powered camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can stick somewhere with a suction cup, like a GoPro, you know, like, you know, a small battery-powered camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can move around the house easily, and a small video monitor that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can show what’s on that camera live and they’re both portable wireless and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, we just have batteries and the idea here is sometimes I need to keep my eye on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something and it’s somewhere around the house or something, but it’s not always the same place. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one example might be if you’re doing a load of laundry, I would stick the camera in the laundry room looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the machine so you could see whenever you want, how much time is left, what’s the status of the machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Similarly, if I’m like roasting coffee and I wanna like, you know, go, you know, do some work during the boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first 10 minutes of it. Or if I’m like, you know, cooking something in the oven or on the grill that takes a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have a thermometer. Yeah, they have wireless thermometers, they suck. And I have a nice wired one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could just like, you know, have this looking at the thermometer screen and I could be in the office watching the video screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that, common needs. And there’s lots of like IP cameras and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you run an app on your phone. that all is garbage and it sucks and I hate it. I’ve tried those, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. And what I want can almost be solved by a baby monitor, except that usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera side of it is AC powered only, and then the monitor itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of free to roam around with batteries. And I want this product to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the internet at all. I want it to just be based on RF. Like just give me 2.4 gigahertz, just like good baby monitors are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s just instant, there’s no service involved, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no giant latency, there’s no service fee, you know, just a freaking piece of hardware. And hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so cheap these days, I assume that has to be easily possible, but I haven’t looked too much into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Anyway, that same thing could do this if I had one in the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I just closed the garage door.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and generally speaking, we really are pretty good about this. This isn’t like a chronic affliction, but it’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, I don’t know, it happens once in a while, This would be a fun little challenge to see if I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix it. This is very MacGyver-y, but for those of us who are old, a very MacGyver-y solution, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’d be fun. John, you’ve been very quiet. I can hardly wait to hear how you would solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need a Raspberry Pi to let me figure out how the hell to get logged into our stupid IRC server with my supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John registered Nick. I can’t. It’s because of this new IRC client.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a disconnection between me and IRC. I do slash Nick and put
⏹️ ▶️ John a name in it, and it’s just like nothing happens. Sometimes something happens. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John driving me nuts. For your garage door stuff, just close the garage door, Jay Casey. Just, you don’t have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. How much do you have to remember in life, really? Make sure both of your children are accounted for. You have two
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, so count heads. One, two,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one, two. That didn’t work on Home
⏹️ ▶️ John Alone, man. Remember to feed them. Remember to clothe yourself, bathe,
⏹️ ▶️ John do all the things. Do you remember to close the front door to your house? Or do you leave that open a lot too?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no. Close, yes. Lock, very rarely we forget to lock it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we just gotta climb the ladder of things the KC has to remember. He remembers to close the front door, not always to lock
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The garage door is still working on the remember to close. What I would look for is a solution for
⏹️ ▶️ John this that would just, instead of being like, let me know if the garage door is open,
⏹️ ▶️ John just close the garage door at the time in which you think the garage door needs to be closed for the day, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John time that is. Like I have a thing on my lights that says just turn off all lights at like
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain time. And I’m like, look, the day is over. And if I’ve somehow forgotten to turn the lights off, just turn them
⏹️ ▶️ John off, right? And I know that is complicated because it’s like, well, it just has one button. And when you press it, when it’s closed, it opens. And when you press
⏹️ ▶️ John it, when it’s open, it’s closed. But I believe in your ability to solve this problem. That’s what I would do. I don’t want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John if the garage door is open. I just want it to close itself if I’ve left it open.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even have a garage door opener, by the way. Mine opens with the power of muscles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Because it’s broken or because that’s the way it’s always been? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John broken, yes. Spoken like someone who lives in a development made in the 90s. No, not because it’s broken, Casey, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there has never been a powered way to open and close my garage door.
Dropping Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So remember that Mac Mini that I was going to order for my Studio B upstairs? Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah. Got that in, long story short I had to return the first one, I had a problem, but I got the second one in today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, installing, setting everything up. I, for the first time in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up a completely new installation of Mac OS without importing from anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without importing from your previous laptop or anything like that. And I had to install from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the first time in a while, Dropbox. Now Casey, I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have not had the Dropbox app installed for some time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, a few months now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it had been a while since I had seen the fresh install. The way I run Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, first of all, reluctantly. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I run it without its stupid kernel extension. So I don’t use Smart Sync or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the other stuff that requires the kernel extension. I don’t give it accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full permission over my entire system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, pause. How do you not install the kernel extension? Is there a point at which they give you the option not to?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, okay, carry on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I don’t install the stupid kernel extension because I don’t want… That sounds crazy to me and it’s not worth the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk and instability that could introduce. Dropbox is not a company that I trust to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good software. Simple as that. And also, so I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no extension, no accessibility full access, because again, it has no reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need that, in my opinion, for the things I needed to do. And there’s also a dialog every time you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reboot, usually, where it tries to get you to give it your system password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a dialog box that looks like the system password dialog authentication box, but isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but isn’t. Basically, it’s tricking you. And it’s horrible security practices, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I never give it that password. On a fresh installation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this fresh, they have made it harder than ever to achieve this setup. Lyle Troxell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not surprising. Paul Matzko The stuff they do is so misleading,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so incredibly unethical. It’s just so many dark design patterns.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installation without giving them full access to your entire system at the kernel level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and giving them your admin password and giving them accessibility full permission to look at everything you’re doing in the system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s absurd. So I have never in my life been more angry at Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I am this morning and today. I’ve decided I’m done with them. I am going to quit Dropbox. So I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask you Casey how you’ve done it so far and how it’s working out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because really like it’s just malware at this point. Like it is more invasive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your system than most malware would be. Most malware wouldn’t have the guts to do what Dropbox does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s so bad. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, I’m literally, I’m so offended by the horribleness of what Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does and how much it tries to insert itself into every single part of your system for reasons that mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit them and not you. That’s, it’s just absurd. And so I’m done. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the world after Dropbox like for you? How did you get there have you been finding it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is important to understand the context for what I’m about to say, which is, as I’ve said many times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last couple of months, one of the best worst things that has come from all my computer problems is that my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers are basically ephemeral at this point. I could lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them and really, I’m sure I would, I don’t doubt there’d be some file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere that I would miss. I’m sure there would be. But in the grand scheme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things, I would be fine. Like if this iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just took a dump right now, I can’t think of anything that I literally could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not live without. And I do have backups, but at the same time, even leaving those backups aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t think of anything that I would be like, oh no. You know what I mean? And that’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my laptop. And other than not having a phone, it’s really the same in my phone too. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my phone, I would lose a couple of weeks worth of pictures potentially if they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my photo stream, but that’s about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You still aren’t using iCloud Photo Library?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, because reasons. We can belittle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco We can belittle me about that another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. I deserve it, but we’re going to set that aside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My computers don’t really have anything extremely critical on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. The only stuff that’s really, really critical that is on my computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is either in a Git repository that is synced with GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or in Synology Drive, which is my replacement for Dropbox. Now, Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive suffers from the same problem as Apple TV. When I say Synology Drive, I can be referring to one of 34
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different products and 75 versions of those 34 different products, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infuriating. But there is a client that you can install on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS, and the UI is not stupendous. looks like it’s a Java app or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But the good news is, I never see the UI for the most part. I see the little thing in the menu
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar and that’s it. I never really see the UI. I never really interact with the UI. Because why? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just magically is part of Finder, like Dropbox used to be back when it was good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back when they didn’t give a shit about work chat or whatever the stupid things are that they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s like Evernote, which also went down the toilet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very similar to Dropbox in the days of yore when Dropbox was still good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not perfect. The iOS apps in particular, they function fine, but their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration with the iOS Files app is very janky from what I can tell. To be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair, I haven’t tried this in a few months. But as an example, I am a super nerd, and I like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep a log of every time we put gas in our cars. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, Marco, some of us put old liquefied dinosaurs into our cars and that’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we propel them. I know that’s very barbaric, but some of us are still living in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And— That’s not the part that sounds like the past. The part that sounds like the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you’re keeping a gas log? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s one thing if you get—if, like, it’s part of your work that you, you know, get reimbursed for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey fuel. No, no. That’s not true for you. Nope, nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. All right. So anyway, so leaving that aside. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what I’ll do is, occasionally, I’ll be on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco some of the open tangents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. I know. God willing, we’ll forget all of them, including me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what I’ll occasionally do is, especially if I’m with Erin and she’s filling up her car, I’ll want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take my phone and go to my numbers spreadsheet that is stored in Synology Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and edit it using the Files app. So I’ll load the Files app, go into the Synology Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey section, find the numbers file I’m trying to edit, open it up in numbers on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or iPhone, and like eight times out of 10, I’m looking at a several version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old version of that file, because I think that was the last time that the files app within my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS device opened it. Does that make any sense at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that kind of sucks. So if you’re relying on integration with the files app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last I checked, not great. But for Macs and for the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive app on your iOS device, if you’re not involving the Files app, it works pretty much flawlessly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably should be a little clearer about what it is. It’s basically hosted Dropbox where the host is your Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all your files exist on your Synology, it’ll replicate them between all your devices in real time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it seems to, as far as I can tell, work extremely reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that capacity. The only downside I see, well, there’s two I suppose. One, you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which friggin thing you have to download and what you need to install in the Synology to get this version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Drive. And it’s very frustrating in that regard because there’s, so to speak, not literally, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive, Drive Plus, drive the hardware device, drive the software, drive the old software, drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new software, drive for iOS. You know what I mean? It’s like the same thing as Apple TV. Oh, with Apple TV, the hardware Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, the software Apple TV, plus the service. It’s preposterous in that regard. That’s the one downside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downside is files app integration iOS is a little, uh, uh, but other than that, like, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re just viewing this from a keeping my max in sync perspective, and then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every great once in a while, I’ll look at something in the Synology drive app on your iOS device, chef kiss. It’s good to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why I haven’t done it already. The question I really need to ask you too, is are we going to choose, choose to move to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud shared folders to pass MP3s between each other? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I don’t trust it. I just don’t trust it. It had such a rough launch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s gonna need even more time of it just being boring and working for everybody all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I will really trust it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well then, you can do what I do and load Dropbox.com every time you need to upload a file. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s how I do it. I do not have Dropbox installed on any of my Macs. It might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my iOS devices. It’s been so long since I’ve touched it, I don’t even know to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well on iOS it’s safe, right? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the advantages of the iOS extreme security sandbox approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you can trust that there’s not that much bad stuff that any app can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you wanted to get rid of it, you could just delete it and it’s all gone. But you know, like, you know, I as a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that the Dropbox iOS app can’t do almost any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff that I have a problem with. Like it really can’t do any of it, actually. It’s, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little ability for it to do anything that would even be remotely shady on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet on the Mac, it basically behaves like a rootkit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like one of the most popular pieces of software in the world. It’s just, and it’s gotten worse and worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the good thing is, they have recently rewritten their sync engine. So whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before, it would just consume one entire core when you’re like doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else in the file system that isn’t even in the Dropbox directory, like unzipping a new Xcode in your downloads folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, it would just consume one core. And now, they’ve made it so that it can consume multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores of your computer when you’re not even doing anything with Dropbox. Delightful! Yeah, so they’ve really expanded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scope of the amount of resources that can suck from your computer for no good reason. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting rid of it. I’ve already decided I’m done. The only question is, what do I do to alleviate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these needs for it that I’ve had?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and the other thing I’ll say with Drive is that I haven’t explored doing any sort of public
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file sharing. So I don’t think it would be easy for you and me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share or the three of us to share files unless I like had you guys or I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey created accounts for you guys on my Synology, which I mean I can, but it seems a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overkill. And then you would have to like point drive, because it seems like you can point drive at several different destinations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concurrently, and so you would have to point drive at my Synology at our shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder, which again, like we can do that, but it’s nowhere near as easy as Dropbox, where you basically say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take this folder, share it with that email address and just make magic happen. Because again, back when Dropbox was good, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was one of the great things about it. You could just say, share this folder with Marco and John and poof, it’s shared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that I do miss, although in my case, the only thing I’m ever really sharing with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone, I guess because I’m a jerk or because I work alone, is files with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two, or files with Mike. And I’ll just go to the Dropbox website for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this may seem like a dumb question, but why don’t we just use like FTP?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I have a server. I have many servers actually. Like why don’t we just, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just like set up a folder on my markers and org server and just set up like an SFTP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server there and that’s where we put our files. Like is there, you know, like obviously this kind of solution doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for people who need to interact with a whole bunch of other people. But for us, we were mainly interacting with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same very small handful of people who are all nerds. Like, why don’t we just do that? I mean, you certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doesn’t the Finder have native integration? Like, couldn’t you literally have a thing in your Finder sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just was, we’d just call it the ATP Dropbox or whatever, and it would just go there? Wouldn’t that work?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re afraid of using the Dropbox software and you want to use the Finder’s FTP integration? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ha ha ha. You make a good point. I don’t know if that still even exists, but I would really not
⏹️ ▶️ John trust that code. I would use Transmit or something, and then I’d have to launch another app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I would use Transmit, too. But it would be nice if there could be, of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many different protocols that Finder does support for various network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and internet shares, it would be nice to use. Does WebDAV, is that still a thing that exists? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey using WebDAV. It does exist. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist. Yeah, so maybe we could just do whatever the heck WebDAV was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still am not entirely clear. SFTP is the homegrown solution, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. It gets annoying for if you’re not just using it as a literal Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, where you’re just dumping things in the two way singing and the always liveness
⏹️ ▶️ John is the feature you want. I mean, you can use one drive for Microsoft. Google has a solution. There’s all lots of companies
⏹️ ▶️ John make products similar to Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But see, I feel like if I’m going to like finally leave the, the, you know, the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience and network effect of Dropbox, I don’t think I really want to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to another thing. that’s just like it, also run by a giant enterprise-y company that wants probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do more stuff with my system, at least now, if not in the future. So like, first of all, I’m not going to install Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. Because even trust issues aside, I’ve heard nothing but horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about Google’s system demons that you have to install for things like their photo uploader and stuff like that. Everyone says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, they do. Or they did a year ago anyway, I can’t speak of recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean maybe they’re better now, but probably not, right? Just like, maybe iCloud Drive is better now, probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not super keen on that. And yeah, Microsoft too, it’s like, Microsoft probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does a better job than Google, but I can’t imagine it’s good necessarily, like in absolute terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if I can avoid having some kind of always running persistent demon by one of these giant companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has a lot more interest than just syncing a folder, I’d rather avoid that if I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I like looking at something like either just using the Dropbox website or using Transmit’s built-in Dropbox client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality. that still works, I got to investigate that. Or, you know, using just like an FTP server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather do options like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if all you were doing is sending MP3 files with iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared iCloud folders, I personally would be fine with trusting it as long as that was not the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place that these files existed. You know, so as an example, when I upload something to Dropbox, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am uploading a duplicate of that file to Dropbox. So if Dropbox just went poof in a cloud of smoke,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not like that file disappears. You know, and if we made a gentleman’s agreement that we weren’t moving the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy of our recordings into the iCloud shared drive, but rather a duplicate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, whatever. I don’t think that would be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Copy, not move. No, it would be a problem because the problem would happen is that you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John copy it into there and then you’d go to sleep and then Marco would be like doing an all-night edit and your file
⏹️ ▶️ John would have been corrupted or half-written or overwritten itself or missing entirely and
⏹️ ▶️ John then he’s trying to wake you up for you to try again to copy it because your copy didn’t work. And of course you don’t see those because you’re asleep and have
⏹️ ▶️ John do not disturb on and then you wake up in the morning with 20 frantic messages from Marco who couldn’t make the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t the potential for that the same no matter what option you pick?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, because that’s the whole thing with iCloud Drive that half the time like your files disappear or were there
⏹️ ▶️ John briefly and aren’t there or replaced with older versions themselves or disappear entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John stop updating on your end. But that’s the whole thing, like the reliability aspect of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John because Casey thinks he’s successfully copied it and it looks like it’s done, doesn’t mean it shows up on your end. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole, you know, occasionally you have to like sign out of iCloud and nuke all your data
⏹️ ▶️ John and log back in. And you know, that’s that debugging procedure, especially if you use iCloud photo library, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ever want to sign out of iCloud on your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mac. Oh, forget it, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so that’s, you know, oh, I don’t know why it’s not syncing. I copied it into my side and then Mark was like, well, I don’t see it over
⏹️ ▶️ John on this side. And then, you know, no, no, no to iCloud drive. SFTP yes, iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, for what it’s worth, I would hope that Marco would be privy to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least aware enough to call me twice in short succession if he needed to wake me up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get this file in an emergency.
⏹️ ▶️ John never do that. And then you’d still have to get the file. You’re like, well, I copied it. What else should I do? And then you’d say, I don’t know, let me
⏹️ ▶️ John just try Dropbox. And then it would sync and then get your file.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. I should say that a lot of people, when I was exploring this before I started running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology Drive, to my recollection, and I’m seeing it a lot in the chat, other than the like Google Drives and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Office, Microsoft Live, whatever thing that Microsoft does, a lot of people said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both NextCloud and OwnCloud. To be clear, I know basically nothing about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either of them, but I did hear a lot of people say that both of them are very good. So if you wanted something, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was not self-hosted, or I’m assuming they’re not self-hosted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They very well may be. It ultimately doesn’t matter. If you’re interested in this Marco slash listener, look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up yourself. But those are other options. I think personally for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us, yeah. I would be okay to try iCloud Drive, but I would also be perfectly find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SFTP or SEP or whatever somewhere.
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⏹️ ▶️ John ready to start the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up 39 minutes in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, technically that was Mac Mini follow-up for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me, how is your new video
⏹️ ▶️ John card? It’s big. New video card is big. First, you know, we’re waiting for this package
⏹️ ▶️ John to arrive. It got delayed again. It actually came today as opposed to like almost a week ago
⏹️ ▶️ John that I expected it to come. And I knew it arrived today hearing it like land on
⏹️ ▶️ John thrown from the curb. I’m not sure from how far away this thing was thrown, but it like landed
⏹️ ▶️ John on my doorstep so loudly that I could hear it across the house. I’m like, I guess my package is here. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John God. Thank goodness for Apple’s very sturdy, very cool packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ John know and double boxing and anyway it seems to be intact. When I was
⏹️ ▶️ John installing it, I’ll just reveal it now, this is the Radeon Pro W5700X with 16 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a single GPU it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD’s newish GPU architecture but it’s a workstation-ish card.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway you can look up the specs. So it’s it takes up I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s for you. It takes up four slots on the back of your poor PCI slot That’s how high it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the card just goes in one. It’s an MPX module So it’s got PCI connector and then it’s got this other connector
⏹️ ▶️ John that it gets like power and other crap through Anyway, there’s two of those things inside a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John There is an MPX slot at the very very bottom and then kind of in the middle ish. There’s another MPX
⏹️ ▶️ John slot Those are the only two places in the computer You can put one of these MPX modules that has the two big honking connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, right? Lots of other PCI slots are plain old cards, but these MPEX modules can only go in those two spots. So
⏹️ ▶️ John right away I’m faced with the decision, do I put this thing in the bottom slot, where my
⏹️ ▶️ John old 580X was, or do I put it in the middle? So first I took the
⏹️ ▶️ John 580X out, so now there’s nothing in there. And I’m looking at the options, and I’m like, hmm, if I put it
⏹️ ▶️ John at the bottom, like it’s right next to the power supply, maybe it would be better
⏹️ ▶️ John if I put it in the middle, because then it would be like power supply, empty space, big honking GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John empty space, CPU. You know what I mean? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided to do that. I took out all the little spacers, which are really cool by the way, the little black covers for your PCI slots. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John are nice. Those will be worth a lot of eBay someday. I’m going to save those for my
⏹️ ▶️ John kids’ college fund slash retirement. And I put it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle, but once I had it in the middle, I realized it’s not really well lined up with the middle fan
⏹️ ▶️ John like the I was hoping you would like the middle fan would blow directly onto it but it was more like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John catching like either the top or the bottom of the middle fan and I didn’t really like that so I took it out
⏹️ ▶️ John after putting it in the middle I took it out of the middle and I said alright you’re gonna go on the bottoms you only got a choice
⏹️ ▶️ John so I put it in the bottom and that seemed better lined up with the bottom fan the bottom flannel
⏹️ ▶️ John fan is blowing like right on the new GPU and so you know even though it’s up against the power supply, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John best option. Which is interesting because if you think about, you know, the three fans are sort of evenly spaced in the front
⏹️ ▶️ John of the computer. The top one is very well aligned with the CPU heatsink. It’s that big
⏹️ ▶️ John giant fan and then your CPU heatsink. But the bottom two are not really well aligned with any of the slots.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so I’ve got the thing in the bottom. And then I’ve got the 580X outside the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna pack away the 580X in the packaging that the big one came in and just put it in my attic, but I was like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me try sticking it in this computer too. And of course I only have one choice of where it goes, the other MPX
⏹️ ▶️ John slot, which just so happens to be, you know, basically touching the thing. So it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John 4U thing, and then the 2U, even the 580X is 2U, because both of these GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John have gigantic front to back, top to bottom heat sinks, right? There,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s no fans or anything in there. They’re just all giant heat sink vents. So I put the 580X back in,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell, close the whole thing back up, turn everything on. The absurdity
⏹️ ▶️ John of my computer now is that if you look at the back of it, I have by my
⏹️ ▶️ John count 10 places where I can plug in monitors. 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can drive 10 monitors, like no problem. I’ve got two GPUs in there and I can drive 10 monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John off this thing. I think, I don’t know, how many 6Ks can I can do? I think I can do three 6Ks
⏹️ ▶️ John and then seven 5Ks maybe? case maybe? I don’t even know. Anyway, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an absurd amount of places where I can plug in monitors and I have one monitor to
⏹️ ▶️ John plug into it. The interesting thing is I can plug that one monitor into a lot of different places.
⏹️ ▶️ John My new video card comes with four thunderbolt ports on the back, right? Plus one
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI. So I have the four places just on that card where I could plug in the monitor. I assume all those
⏹️ ▶️ John ports are the same. I hope I’d have it in the fast one. Anyway, Then the
⏹️ ▶️ John 580X interestingly has no Thunderbolt ports on the card itself whatsoever, it just has two HDMI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I have the whatever, three or four Thunderbolt ports that are
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the little I-O card. And apparently I can plug in my
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Display XDR into any of those ports as well. And when I plug it into those ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John the W5-5700X runs the monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though I’m not plugging it into the card, now with both GPUs installed, if
⏹️ ▶️ John I stick my monitor into any port that is not directly
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 580X, then the 5700X wins and gets the monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is confusing to me because I was like, what if I want to run my 6K monitor off the 580X? there’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to do that. Period. I, you know, I can drive other monitors off of it, connecting it directly
⏹️ ▶️ John with HDMI, but anyway. So I’m not quite sure if I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John keep it in this config. It’s running this way now, my monitor is actually connected directly to the
⏹️ ▶️ John 5700X in one of its many Thunderbolt ports. Seems fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t seem like it’s any louder. I checked the the fan speed with a beta version of iStatMenu
⏹️ ▶️ John that shows me fan RPMs. They don’t seem to be any different than they were when I just had one GPU in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John running iStat
⏹️ ▶️ John menus? I’m not running iStat menus. What I do with iStat menus is I install
⏹️ ▶️ John it, check the fan speed, and then I uninstall it because that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey only way to really turn it. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s a giant switch in their settings thing. You can turn it all off with a master switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t check because I don’t have it installed anymore, but I’m sure you can’t ever actually turn it off, off,
⏹️ ▶️ John off. Only uninstalling
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco does. Anyway, it’s not installed anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I took screenshots of fan RPMs and graphs and everything. Maybe I’ll try it differently with just one thing in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m assuming the 580X is literally doing nothing now because it doesn’t have any monitors connected to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not being asked to do anything. And I’m hoping there’ll be some piece of Apple software, video toolbox
⏹️ ▶️ John that Handbrake will use.
⏹️ ▶️ John something somewhere will use this extra GPU that I have in my computer. If not, it’s just sitting there probably
⏹️ ▶️ John wasting electricity. So too bad. So what did I do with my fancy new graphics card? I booted into Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was an adventure in itself because of course I boot Windows. It shows the little
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 10 logo, you know, the blue teal logo that Windows 10 shows on boot. Then the little
⏹️ ▶️ John teal logo disappears and nothing ever appears on my screen ever again. So that was great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to think, and this used to be true, that Windows has to handle all sorts of weird
⏹️ ▶️ John exotic hardware. So worst case, it’ll just like fall back to VGA or some crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, look, I can’t make heads or tails of any of your hardware. I’m just going to fall back to the safest of safe, safe
⏹️ ▶️ John modes and just, you know, just show you something on the screen. Windows 10
⏹️ ▶️ John under boot camp anyway, does not behave that way. I actually looked at Microsoft support articles for like, hey, what do you do
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve got Windows 10 and you just you turn it on and you get a black screen? And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of solutions for, you know, here’s how you turn on safe mode booting out of, you know, they all require you to be able to see something on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just have a black screen, their solution is, it’s a very scary support document. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hold down the power button for 10 seconds and then until your machine reboots. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as you see anything on the screen, hold down the power button again for 10 seconds and then your machine reboots. And then as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ John you see anything, like it makes you like force, forcibly turn the thing off, like three times in a row.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then supposedly a real Windows computer would be like, oh, I see you need, you want to be in Windows recovery mode and then you have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of options. But despite me doing this very abusive thing to my computer, it never went
⏹️ ▶️ John to it never went into Windows recovery mode. Like I was I was holding down the power button as soon as I saw the Windows 10
⏹️ ▶️ John logo up here. All it did was make it was make it angry. It never actually put me into WinRE
⏹️ ▶️ John or Windows recovery environment or the hell it is. So that didn’t work for me. So then I had to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John good old fallback, which is connect a crappier monitor through a different interface. I connected my 4K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John through HDMI. Lo and behold, that worked. Then I downloaded AMD’s new bootcamp drivers for my newly
⏹️ ▶️ John installed GPU, which again, I’m kind of surprised Windows didn’t like find for me or
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t fall back to some default graphics driver. Like just get me to the point where I can launch a web browser and do it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, that didn’t work. So I installed the new drivers, which is nice that AMD had on their site. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the new drivers for, uh, you know, the newly released, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John 5700X, W5700X that you have in your computer. And it’s specially designed for bootcamp,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. So that’s all that problem so I can boot into Windows and why was I putting into Windows? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John could play games and of course, what game do I care about? I want to play destiny. I played destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John You know through Steam that I already had installed and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer to the question of whether it can run destiny 2 at full 6k
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution with all the settings on high at 60 frames per second with this card is no it cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John that is above the capabilities of this card. It’s okay, you get like 30ish frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I was kind of sad to not be able to do that. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John best MPX module that I can get for less than two grand, and it still can’t quite hit 60
⏹️ ▶️ John with the highest settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now how does that compare, like I don’t follow the PC GPU market that well. Suppose you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had like a 2080, 1080, what’s the big Nvidia card? That could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John definitely do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Okay, so what does one of those cost, like 400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so. Or maybe 600 if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a fancy one, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, so basically what you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that this $1,000 workstation-ish card for the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot achieve gaming performance that a $400 gaming card could. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I don’t think that gaming card could drive the Pro Display XDR at native res, period, because the only interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Pro Display XDR is Thunderbolt 3, and they don’t have Thunderbolt 3 out, so that’s always the problem. That’s why I’m in this
⏹️ ▶️ John situation, is I wanna drive this big fancy screen. So anyway, I turned it down to 4K, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly fine for Destiny. Like honestly, the assets in the game probably don’t stand up to much more than 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I turned it down to 4K, and then I turned all the settings to max except for a few of them. So it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a hybrid of the max setting, and I turned the foliage draw distances on high instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of highest or whatever. And that’s locked at 60 frames per second. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s pretty close.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s really close. So just like, you know, you know what it is like with PC games, the super duper ultra settings
⏹️ ▶️ John no one should ever run them because you cannot really discern any discern any visual distance between
⏹️ ▶️ John the super ultra settings and the merely high settings. So I have everything on high with half
⏹️ ▶️ John the settings on highest at 4K in HDR and it looks and plays great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like especially the HDR with all the, you know, Destiny’s got all sorts of lighting effects for explosions and
⏹️ ▶️ John space magic and all sorts of stuff like that. It looks amazing. It’s really very impressive, you know, because I haven’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John done HDR gaming before so it’s very impressive very sharp very fast and the
⏹️ ▶️ John first Crucible match I played I ended up randomly
⏹️ ▶️ John landing on a team with emtashed who is a semi-famous
⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny youtuber slash streamer and we both had crap games and that was exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John He only got three more kills than me and our team lost. I did much worse than he did but
⏹️ ▶️ John But seriously, he should be getting way more than three more kills than me in a match. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my video card stuff. So far so good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll continue to investigate the weirdness, see if I can actually get the 580X to run my screen if I wanted to. Because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing I was thinking about. It’s like, well, if I’m not playing games or I’m not using something GPU intensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember the 580X doesn’t have display stream compression and the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy new video card does. which means that my USB ports in the back of my monitor are now faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re now USB 3 with the new video card or the USB 2 with the old one. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John so far so good. For the most part, I’m happy with it. I’m still debating my options,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I had some good fun. Oh, and I re-signed up to Apple Arcade just so I could play
⏹️ ▶️ John through Sayonara Wild Hearts at 6K. That was really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is Apple Arcade? Are we following that at all? Like, is there anything good on there that, like since launch?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never played it. Most of the games, If you look through the games, there are no bad games. All
⏹️ ▶️ John the games are like, this is a good quality implementation of this type of game. The question is, are you into
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of game? And there’s a wide variety of games. They’re not, you know, just as you’re usually like racing games and platforming
⏹️ ▶️ John games. There’s lots of very interesting games. I think that it’s a bargain. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John for $5 a month, you get access to a pretty big collection of games that are mostly pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And remember, none of them have in-app purchases or anything like that. I think it’s a great deal. But it depends, you have to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of gaming lifestyle you are leading. I am at this point mostly in a monogamous
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming lifestyle where I’m just playing Destiny. I’m just waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ John Last of Us Part II and a few other sort of flagship once every year and a half type games that I will divert
⏹️ ▶️ John myself into. But if that’s the type of gamer you are, maybe Apple Arcade doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense for you. But if you graze or if you’re just like, I’m just in the mood to see what a game is, like I just did today. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to try some games on my, um, on my new fancy GPU on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where do you find Mac games? Basically nowhere or Apple arcade. And I went
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple arcade and guess what? There’s a ton of Mac games because Apple arcade forces these people to make their games run on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. And the games are all pretty good. Like it is, it is a lot like the consoles
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple has a hand in selecting and managing the games
⏹️ ▶️ John that appear on the platform. And I’ve played, you know, maybe 10, 12 Apple arcade games, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John when it launched. And today I just had the urge to play one again. And, you know, I ended up going to say in our wildcard just because I hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John played it in ages. And I really love that game. Five bucks, five bucks. And now it wasn’t five bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to play that one game. I have access to the entire library until the end of the month again. So I think it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John deal if you are the type of person who doesn’t just play one or two
⏹️ ▶️ John games all the time. It seems that a lot of people in our circles have been falling
⏹️ ▶️ John more into the, if not monogamous, then you know, sort of serial monogamous
⏹️ ▶️ John type of strategy where it’s like, oh, everyone’s playing Animal Crossing or, you know, the Armit
⏹️ ▶️ John family is playing Minecraft, you know, or like rather than sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicating a week or two to one game and then a week or two to another game, you know, something like that, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is more of a thing that do when you were a kid because you basically burn through a game in a week or two
⏹️ ▶️ John or finish it. Whereas now, I think most adults are looking for like
⏹️ ▶️ John a lifestyle game where you, if you have any gaming time, you know exactly where you’re going to spend it and you have
⏹️ ▶️ John some fun and then you set it aside and you come back to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thing that has me concerned about Apple Arcade is that everyone has basically said that exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing about it. Oh yeah, the games are nice. They’re, you know, good games. But I’m not hearing about many specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games. In fact, I haven’t heard of a single specific game after the launch that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says, oh, you gotta play this one game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s because most of the people you know are playing some single game. You’ve certainly heard a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about Animal Crossing, right? Lots of people are just playing Animal Crossing. They’re not playing anything else, right? Sayonara
⏹️ ▶️ John Wild Hearts, by its nature, is a short game where it’s not like an ongoing type of thing. It just is a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John number of levels, and you play them, and you’re done with it. So you heard about that at launch, but now everyone has played it. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are, I think a lot of the games in there are like that. You can play them and finish them. And once you’ve played them and finished them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re done. The thing that the key value proposition for Apple Arcade is you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a bunch of individual games, you pay $5 and get access to all of them. So your value
⏹️ ▶️ John for that $5, if you, if you finish one game, you’ve got your $5 worth for the
⏹️ ▶️ John month, right? If you try 12 other games, you’ve gotten way more than your $5 worth, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you just have to know, is that a thing that you’re ever gonna do? Or are you just gonna play one game? You know, I just paid $5 just to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a single play through an album, whatever it’s called, the album mode or
⏹️ ▶️ John the mode where it just plays straight through that pauses between levels. That’s worth $5 to me right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I pay similar amount to rent movies from iTunes and play them for the same amount and watch it for the same amount of time I just play this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just gotta remember to cancel because I’m probably not gonna play any of those games because I’ll be too busy playing Destiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say we finally started watching the morning show on Apple TV+. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first Apple TV Plus show that I’ve actually watched. And it’s pretty good. I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ John You should try For All Mankind after that. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s probably next on the list. Yeah, like, you know, it’s here I am, like coming very late to everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I finally watched Apple TV Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, it’s not bad. just started watching Defending Jacob, which is notable because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ostensibly shot
⏹️ ▶️ John in and around where I live. And it’s fun to watch as a resident to say, that’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know where they’re actually shooting over the like, that’s not where I live. You know, lots of lots of fake signs, lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John made up names. It’s kind of a depressing show about murder and
⏹️ ▶️ John school aged children or anyway, so maybe not your cup of tea. But I started watching that just for the hometown
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect of it. And because I remember when a bunch of roads around me were closed down for filming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had heard that the stars of the show, the stars of the show was Chris Evans and
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, Captain America, yeah, I had heard that he wasn’t going to be here. So don’t bother
⏹️ ▶️ John coming to the set because Chris Evans isn’t gonna be here. They’re just shooting some other scenes or whatever, which is, either it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lie or they composited him in because I saw some scenes shot, I’m like, I know where that is. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Chris Evans standing there. I could have gone by and waved to him, but I didn’t. That was a while
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it could have been green screen. It’s really hard for me to tell. I could have Todd look at it and tell me, is Chris Evans actually there?
⏹️ ▶️ John They just put him in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I thought Morning Show was good. I thought For All Mankind was even better. And those are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only two I’ve tried. But I enjoyed them both.
⏹️ ▶️ John I watched Sea, which is a little bit silly, but if you like that kind of thing, it’s fine.
Half-wheeled scheme: no go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s keep ourselves in macro corner. Do you want to tell me about your wheels and feet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and heights and angles and things?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this strategy of putting wheels on the front and feet on the back or vice versa So you have something
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can wheel but that doesn’t go anywhere until you pick up the feety part Jeremy Cox did
⏹️ ▶️ John some measurements based on stuff on the product pages and Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John the wheels are about an inch taller than the feet So if you were to do that, you’d have roughly a four degree slope
⏹️ ▶️ John But more importantly it would look and feel awful because the feet on the Mac Pro are totally flat So they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be like on an angle just touching at the edge. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to make an adjustment You need basically one inch heels on your feet To get a level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Yeah, I love the illustration that they provided to have to make that the chapter art or something It’s really cool to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh yeah, that would be way too much, like way too big of a slope.
Magic Keyboard magnet strength
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right. So we have some feedback about the iPad magic keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Berkler writes that they just tried it out again, was actually impressed how hard they could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bang on the space bar and provided a video. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing is like very precariously perched with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only the iPad portion on a table. And, and the entire keyboard is dangling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in thin air, but because of physics and counter levers and whatnot, it’s somehow, and I guess all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the weight is in the back, so it’s somehow staying afloat, but this, oh, this is stressing me out just watching this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, I think the video, you know, be impressed like, wow, how stable, but all this is doing is emphasizing exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how lopsided the weight distribution on this thing is. Like it is so heavily back-weighted again, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is why they can’t tilt the thing back any farther. All of the weight is, starts basically
⏹️ ▶️ John where the keyboard ends. And that’s why you can get away with what’s shown in this video. You should definitely watch it to realize
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how back-weighted it is. It’s not tippy, it’s not gonna tip over
⏹️ ▶️ John backwards, but all of the weight is on that end, which is, don’t try this with
⏹️ ▶️ John your laptop because you will have very different results and be very sad very quickly. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, if it’s not clear, this is not the weight distribution that you want for a laptop. You would
⏹️ ▶️ John rather have the weight low and flat to the ground like in a car or like in Marco’s car. The big,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the big heavy battery is at the bottom, low and wide, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t, if Marco’s battery was on the roof of his car, it would be like this keyboard.
Jump-starting a car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John Not-Syrcusa writes in that alternators, guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? They do generate alternating current. They’re used in cars because they’re smaller and more efficient. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to Tesla, as in Nikola Tesla. And a simple rectifier circuit converts AC to DC for the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera. A DC generator would be larger, heavier, and less efficient to low RPMs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Craig Weber also adds, a generator produces DC directly through what’s effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mechanical bridge rectifier, but less efficiently.
⏹️ ▶️ John So cars all the stuff inside your car is running on DC, but your alternator is making a C
⏹️ ▶️ John briefly before it’s converted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed and then King T bird writes always ground to the alternator bracket or a similar point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the engine is that will bypass the battery? This is in the context of jumping a car to the same ground the starter uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trust me It makes a huge difference in the current delivered without passing through a dead battery, especially a shot battery
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I haven’t thought about like if your battery is totally fried. Obviously mine wasn’t totally fried I was able to start it by going through the battery But again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I today I actually replaced the battery I looked for I still didn’t go to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked in the user the owner’s manual It’s done with that part But while I had the engine bay open, I’m like is there some post
⏹️ ▶️ John where it wants me to ground in here? Is there something I could see a couple of nuts that in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John could be used for but nothing labeled as like a grounding spot And practically speaking my
⏹️ ▶️ John two little clampy thingies If the if the positive one is on positive
⏹️ ▶️ John the negative one doesn’t reach very far It’s not like I can go across to the other corner of the engine and find something to clamp on to so
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s some Post for me to put it. I still couldn’t find it Oh, and by the way when I did the replacing my
⏹️ ▶️ John battery today This is the first time I’ve ever successfully done this thing that I always think about doing I don’t even know if
⏹️ ▶️ John this is true of modern cars But I used to be annoyed with my older cars that when I replaced the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John the car would like forget all its settings I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no Ram essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John and all your radio presets would be gone and all your your preferences and settings and everything would just be gone. And that annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John me because I’m like, I don’t remember when I set this thing up, you know, six years ago, right? So this time I said, I’m not gonna let that
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. I don’t know for a fact whether my car has NVRAM. I’m hoping it does, because it’s more modern, but I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to take the risk. So I very carefully used my battery charger and clamped it onto the little thingies and
⏹️ ▶️ John then disconnected them from the battery. Keeping current flowing through the car while
⏹️ ▶️ John I swapped out the battery. Then I put in the new battery and very carefully put the little things over and screwed them on and I disconnected it.
⏹️ ▶️ John As far as I can tell, everything worked and I didn’t lose any info and I have a shiny
⏹️ ▶️ John new battery. Oh, and speaking of my battery, it came with a little round sticker on it that says 3 slash 20 on the
⏹️ ▶️ John top. And I don’t know what that is supposed to be. It’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John March 2020, right? Maybe it’s a sticker that says like that’s when this battery
⏹️ ▶️ John was manufactured or something. I don’t know what the purpose of the sticker is supposed to be. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I noticed the sticker at all is because it was like a reddish sticker, there was a little crescent moon of
⏹️ ▶️ John a green sticker poking out from underneath it.
⏹️ ▶️ John peeled off the red sticker and underneath the red sticker was a green sticker that said 1 slash 20.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just put the 320 sticker next to it. So now my battery has two stickers on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least the thing underneath didn’t say like 4 slash 17. So
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure my battery’s fine. Car starts right up, battery’s fully charged. Everything’s great.
Contact Tracing API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We didn’t get a chance to talk about this last week, but Apple has released contact tracing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, exposure notification in, what is this? iOS 13.5,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that, whatever came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco out today. Yeah, 13.5 beta. Yeah, 13.5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, there’s some stuff in settings that will allow you to turn on or off COVID-19
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exposure notifications. And that is the thing where the iPhone will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the background, it will communicate via a Bluetooth low energy and kind of, if I understand things right, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, I’m here and I am code one, two, three, four, and I’m oversimplifying here. And then it will listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to other phones saying I’m here and I’m code five, six, seven, eight. And it will keep a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of database or tally of who it’s seen for a certain duration of time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if a central health authority finds out that, Oh, five, six, seven, eight has,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has coronavirus, you can look up all the people who have, who have been tested positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and compare who you’ve seen with who is tested positive and say, oh, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around them at some point, I should probably self-isolate quarantine and then maybe even get tested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This at a glance seems pretty solid. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pleased with what I’ve seen. To be fair, I haven’t looked into this deeply. It seems like in order to write an app that leverages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this API, you need a certain certification. What’s the word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m looking for? for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entitlement. Thank you. Yep. You need a certain entitlement, uh, which presumably Apple will not be giving out willy nilly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I dunno, at a glance, this looks pretty good. Marco thoughts about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean it’s, you know, contact tracing or, you know, explosion notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty important part of controlling a pandemic and dealing with it. And so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for this is very high. The fact that Apple and Google work together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to develop a standard that both that both Google-powered Android phones and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iPhones could both use and talk to each other is really remarkable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so just that alone, the fact that they worked together pretty quickly and developed this thing that they could both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swallow and were willing to do for all the people out there who have either platform, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really impressive. And if you look at the actual design of the system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously you would think, all right, well, if the phones are gonna be passively creating identifiers with each other all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they’ll keep some kind of history of what other identifiers they’ve seen, and then they’ll be able to notify,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I’ve seen identifiers 10, 15, and 20, so notify them, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I now have the virus, they need to know that they were exposed to me. You would think this would be a privacy nightmare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the way they’ve designed the system is both simple and pretty clever, to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a bunch of short-lived random tokens, and they’re all stored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locally on device. There’s no real persistence, no persistent identifiers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no real tracking possible beyond a 15 minute window of any one particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identifier. So it’s actually, if you look at the system, I can’t see any problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the system as designed, at least any big problems, like any kind of massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy violation or creepy tracking potential. they’ve done a really good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect, like oftentimes what happens with standard bodies or tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards is Apple basically designs the whole thing and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands it to the other party. And it’s like, this is now our standard. That happens a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I hear and, and you know, like things like USBC. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently, you know, Apple frequently does stuff like that. And it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what happened here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is a very Apple-y kind of system. And I can’t imagine Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming up with the system, you know, if they had, if they were, you know, at the drawing board. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, it looks very good. It isn’t, you know, out to the public yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a bunch of complicated questions of things like, should it be enabled by default?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, should your phone be broadcasting these identifiers by default? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certainly a slight privacy angle to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think the system is so well designed that I would argue that yes, it should be on by default because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the privacy implication is so tiny, like the scope of potential privacy risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so small and so minor. And if it’s not on by default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everyone, it’s far less effective. You might as well not even do it if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t on by default. So I’m hoping they end up with that. I think that is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan right now. Maybe there’ll be some kind of one of those set up wizard screens when you first boot up 13.5 that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might ask you and just be defaulted to yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But hopefully it is totally up and up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on by default and everything else. And hopefully the same applies to the Android platform as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is certainly the question of how the heck Android phones are getting a large scale software update in any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of reasonable amount of time. I assume, I don’t know anything about this, but I assume that this is part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Google Play services thing where like Google kind of has this library of stuff they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can update on a much more frequent basis compared to the actual OS of all these phones that never get updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s most likely there. So yeah, hopefully this is, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this system can get deployed soon and enabled by default on a lot of different phones because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would really be quite effective at achieving this. There’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that they have clearly considered or been made aware of and addressed in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. Like for instance, you wouldn’t want to be able to just spam everybody by saying like, I got the virus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the virus, even if you didn’t, and be able to spam all the people who were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near you for the last week or whatever and have, you know, scare them all or have them all go to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tested unnecessarily or whatever. So like, they’ve thought about stuff like, okay, only public health authorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be able to notify or to be able to submit the thing that says this person has it for sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So there’s all sorts of concerns that they’ve been seemingly addressing pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some countries, there was this whole drama with certain countries, I think France was one of them, where they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t want this kind of approach that was totally passive. They wanted only an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the user would be launching and keeping in the foreground and keeping their phone on with the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all the time for it to work. And it’s like, that’s no, that’s not going to do anything. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no-go. So, although I think most of those countries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to be coming around that this is actually the better way to do it. So anyway, from what I can see so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks really good. If you wanna hear more detail about how it works or read more detail about how it works, there’s a good article on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NS Hipster about basically the whole API, what it does, how it works, why it’s important,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s pretty safe, like privacy-wise. So we’ll link to that from the show notes. And otherwise, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a great thing that they’re doing. I hope it gets deployed widely and quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a lot of the, when we talk about security in other non-virus related contexts,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re always talking about the classic trade-off between convenience and security. Lots of stuff that has
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with security is inconvenient. You just wanna get to the thing. You don’t wanna have to say okay to a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of permission dialog boxes. You don’t have to enter a bunch of passwords. You don’t want your password to have to be long and
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated, basically security and convenience are opposing forces and you have to trade one for
⏹️ ▶️ John the other. And that’s a difficult trade-off because we all just want convenience. We also want the security, but day-to-day,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just want the convenience. For the virus stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of same trade-off still exists. Marco was just talking about having to leave an app turned on and everything like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would be quote-unquote more secure because you’d be aware that you’re doing it, but it’s ridiculously inconvenient, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the real trade-off here is efficacy versus security. The
⏹️ ▶️ John more this system respects your privacy, the less effective it is. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine a system that totally violated your privacy, that would be way more effective. To give just
⏹️ ▶️ John one example, nowhere in this scheme that Apple has come up with is location information
⏹️ ▶️ John used anywhere, period. Like the random identifiers that are sprayed out, they’re just random identifiers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody knows where anybody is. There is no location and information recorded or exchanged whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ John All it knows is that you saw this other device that sprayed this number
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Doesn’t know where you are when you saw it. I don’t even know if it knows the time of day when you saw it. It’s just merely like
⏹️ ▶️ John exposure. Have you been exposed? Did you get this number sprayed at you from
⏹️ ▶️ John this number, so on and so forth. The fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s voluntary and that you have to go through this whole big procedure to submit the fact that, to
⏹️ ▶️ John assert and say, I actually, I’ve got it, I’ve been diagnosed, they tested me, I’m positive.
⏹️ ▶️ John The process of doing that, A, it’s voluntary, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, because again, that’s better for
⏹️ ▶️ John privacy, right? If it was involuntary and if you tested positive,
⏹️ ▶️ John you had no choice and they would submit your thing, worse for privacy, better for effectiveness, because
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point someone would be like, oh, I don’t wanna submit that, right? And then you have to go through some process,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you have to know about and the doctor has to know and you have to come together and do all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John If instead, this is one of the things the other country was talking about, let’s say that it sprayed out
⏹️ ▶️ John your location and a bunch of identifiers in times of days and it was all collected into one global
⏹️ ▶️ John server somewhere so that some central authority or government had tracking information
⏹️ ▶️ John in real time of every single person and where they are 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and what other
⏹️ ▶️ John things are in the vicinity, and it connected up involuntarily to all their private health information and so as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John as someone tested positive, no participation needed, we would just connect all the dots and find all the people.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be way more effective and a privacy nightmare. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John used to, we’re talking about, oh, convenience, privacy, trade-off, and you can have debates about it or whatever. This is a whole different
⏹️ ▶️ John ballgame because it’s a similar set of trade-offs, but on the other side is like public
⏹️ ▶️ John health, right? Your inconvenience, no matter how inconvenienced you are, you probably don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John die. You know, some of you know it probably doesn’t die, which is part of the reason these
⏹️ ▶️ John countries with, I think, better governments, with citizenry that has more
⏹️ ▶️ John faith in its government, were pushing the system. They said, well, why won’t you just let us
⏹️ ▶️ John report all this information centrally to the government automatically? Because that’s the purpose of government, to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that individuals can’t do. The collective, as elected by the people,
⏹️ ▶️ John responsibility is to serve the public good. And it is
⏹️ ▶️ John entrusted to serve the public good through the system of government that we have, right? So why
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t we want to collect it? And Apple and Google are like, no, we’re not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Our system is completely anonymous. You can’t track people. There’s no location. There’s no central
⏹️ ▶️ John authority or whatever. It’s on-device information. All those privacy-preserving
⏹️ ▶️ John things make it less effective, but protects against
⏹️ ▶️ John what we know would happen in the United States, is that some giant corporation would eventually get this information or it would leak out of the government
⏹️ ▶️ John or it would end up on a bunch of servers on the dark web or whatever. Inevitably,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would get out. We can’t even keep our credit information secure. There is no way to have that
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable pile of information in the United States and not have it get out to bad actors, let alone
⏹️ ▶️ John before you consider whether the government itself is a bad actor and stuff like that. So it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and Google are doing what they can within the parameters that that present themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, and the final bit is that this isn’t even out yet. We’re talking about iOS 13.5 beta. 13.5 presumably will be out in the next week or
⏹️ ▶️ John two. But there is a question of,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time this actually gets out, and by the time actually people upload their phones, how much value can it deliver?
⏹️ ▶️ John And how much is that value necessarily constrained by the dire environment
⏹️ ▶️ John in the United States, and in general across the world? Like to have to sort of code
⏹️ ▶️ John for the worst case scenario and say, we have to be very aggressive or protecting your privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we know it will make this effort less effective than it could be. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I, I think they’ve probably made the right trade off cause it is a, it is not an ideological trade
⏹️ ▶️ John office. It is the trade offs. They’ve made recognize the realities of the
⏹️ ▶️ John world, but I feel bad for the countries that are essentially doing better than us and have more faith in their government
⏹️ ▶️ John because we can’t afford to have a system like this
⏹️ ▶️ John that works well in the best of cases but is a disaster in the worst of cases because so many
⏹️ ▶️ John places in the world, including the US, are the worst of cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, assuming if it’s on, if it’s not on by default, are you two going to turn it on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t see any downside to it personally. Like more data is good. I don’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to, like, I don’t want to know if I’ve been potentially infected, but I really want to know if I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially infected. So yeah, I would absolutely turn it on. I am not, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently in a position where I think it’s worth running the beta, especially since it doesn’t appear that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s any like health organizations that have released an app for it as far as I know. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but no, I definitely will turn it on once the opportunity arises when, when 13.5 is out for real.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing about this is whenever there’s any technology involved in health, there’s the danger of the magic thing of
⏹️ ▶️ John technology, especially people who aren’t into technology. I think it’s whatever that’s saying of like, if you, if you’re actually a programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that all software is horrible, but if you’re not, you might think it’s magic. Um, so part of what this
⏹️ ▶️ John system has to do is decide what counts as exposure, right? It’s not just, Oh, I received a communication
⏹️ ▶️ John via Bluetooth of this identifier because that could happen when you drive by somebody in a car, right? You probably
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get it from them. There is, they have to decide how long do you have to be within
⏹️ ▶️ John proximity of this thing to count as an exposure? Because practically speaking, again, if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you walk past each other on opposite sides of the street on opposite sidewalks, you’re not probably not going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John affected. Mostly from what we know of the transmissibility, you’re probably okay on opposite sides of the street. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you hang out in an elevator for half an hour, you’re probably going to get it right. So somewhere between there, this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this system has to decide what counts as exposure, but because it’s technology, they’re going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, I got an exposure notification. That means I was exposed. Well, maybe. Or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they were a little bit conservative with the exposure and really they made it
⏹️ ▶️ John like a two second gap and really you walked past someone at a 12 foot distance and were within
⏹️ ▶️ John range for them for two seconds and it counted as an exposure. Or if you don’t get a notification, you’re like, yay, I wasn’t exposed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, or maybe they said it so you had to be in close proximity for somebody for five minutes and you were in
⏹️ ▶️ John proximity for four minutes and 30 seconds and you got it, but you didn’t get the notification. So keep in mind that
⏹️ ▶️ John even when working as designed, this isn’t necessarily an imperfect system. All we’re trying to do is help.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is better than not having the system, but it is not, like anything else we’re gonna hear,
⏹️ ▶️ John a complete solution to the problem. If you get notified, this doesn’t mean you’re sure you have it. If you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John notified, it doesn’t mean you’re sure you’re not. It just adds more information than you had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say for all of you listeners out there, this is a thing where the question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of whether you enable it shouldn’t even be a question. Yes, enable it. Like, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you actually look at what it does and how it works, it’s a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there should be no controversy about it. There should be no real concern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what it’s doing. And it will only work if everybody enables it. So, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable it. Like, research, if you’re concerned, research what it actually does, and you’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ll see, as I have, by looking into the actual protocol, what it’s actually doing, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. Like this is one of those cases like vaccines where like the only people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are gonna be afraid of it and not do it are people who have less information, willfully or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you actually look at what it’s doing, it’s a no-brainer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and of course it’s software. There can be bugs and so on and so forth, but like in the grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone company already has so much more information about you than you can ever possibly imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, yeah, enable us. It’s a no-brainer. If you’re listening to this thing, to get advice from people
⏹️ ▶️ John who know stuff about technology or we’re telling you because of what I just mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ John how incredibly limited this is and how preserving it is of your privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the reason why you should just do it by default. It’s a no-brainer.
iOS 13.5 beta improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also in 13.5, there are group FaceTime and FaceID improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had the time to look into this myself, but my limited understanding is you can, or I guess when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it detects that you’re wearing a mask, it will not wait near as long trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out whether or not this is your face and it will just immediately show you a password prompt. Did I get that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll scan your face. Like, it’s still doing the face scanning, but rather than just saying, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to to recognize his face and trying to recognize his face. It will take a break
⏹️ ▶️ John if it doesn’t immediately recognize your face and say, okay, I didn’t recognize the face, but does this look like a face
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s wearing a mask? And I’m not sure how it does that. It could do it with a depth sensor, looking for like a, basically a person
⏹️ ▶️ John without a nose and a mouth, or it could do it with the camera, looking for a big region that doesn’t look like a face or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, who knows, could be some machine learning. But anyway, there’s some magic that basically says, if I don’t recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John a face, the next thing I’m gonna do is try to recognize a mask. And if I recognize a mask,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I’m gonna fall back to passcode rather than keep trying to recognize the face, which is smart thing to do and some
⏹️ ▶️ John fast work from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like in the Face ID training thing, when you’re registering your face with it, it has a thing, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you tried to do the second appearance as one with a mask, which I’ve tried and many people have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t work for most people, it seems, certainly didn’t work for me. But what it does is if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing a mask or a half folded over mask or whatever trick people tell you might work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the face ID registration thing says your face is obstructed. Like it actually has that as a status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can, it can detect and show you. It’s probably using that exact same logic to see like, all right, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your fate, does this, does this look like a face, but one that is obstructed? Yes. Then immediately failing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to the passcode screen, which, you know, face ID is the way all modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones authenticate, you know, with the exception of the very, very, you know, old slash new S E
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and previous models. But like all those aren’t, I wouldn’t call those like modern iPhones, like all the modern iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Face ID as their only biometric authentication method. This is not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a great long-term solution and we’re gonna be wearing masks for a while. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some countries are gonna keep wearing them as they have been for, you know, lots of conditions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not all the time. Some professions require their workers to wear masks all day, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, or much of the day. And I don’t think the mask thing is gonna go away in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few months. So I think this is a good stopgap to make the current situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little less crappy, but this is only a temporary solution, I think. So it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s buying some time. I hope the real solution ends up being either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new line of phones that has Touch ID and Face ID somehow, and will let you have some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of setting that says, like, all right, whichever way you recognize me first, just trust that and go, and or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a setting on Face ID that makes it less secure that basically doesn’t check for your mouth and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, all right, recognize me by my eyes and my forehead and yeah, that’s less data points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s gonna be less secure, but I’ll take that trade off. Because right now, the alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, like, I’ve been using an alphanumeric passcode forever and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to switch to a number passcode this past couple of weeks because every time I have to go shopping with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mask on and everything, I can’t use my phone very easily and typing in a alphanumeric passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks when you’re wearing gloves, potentially, And it’s certainly inconvenient to have to do that every time you’re checking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your shopping list in the grocery store. Ideally, Apple has to find some way to make their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biometric authentication on the iPhone work when people are wearing face masks. That is the only good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term solution here. So whether it’s re-adding Touch ID and having it be simultaneous recognition,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s giving an option to have Face ID have probably less security,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but have it operate with a mask on, that’s the real long-term solution here. And we don’t have that yet, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they’re working on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The lead times on getting a Touch ID back into the phone are too long for them to do it as a reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John to the virus because it either been in their roadmap for years or it hasn’t been. We’re all hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John that for years that they were gonna bring it back as under screen, and I’ve always been saying under screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John either whole or half screen Touch ID where you don’t even have to have your finger in a specific spot.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there was no rush for it when we were talking about that where it’s like, oh, that would be a cool thing to have in the meantime, Face ID is fine. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a little bit more urgency, But if that’s, the reason they haven’t been doing that is one, cost,
⏹️ ▶️ John and two, my understanding is that the underscreen ones are still not as good as the dedicated one
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has on the SE in terms of how secure it is, how many points can it pick up,
⏹️ ▶️ John how easy it is to read your finger, yada, yada, right? So maybe three or four years from now,
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID will, if they start now, three or four years from now, Touch ID could make its triumphant return
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath our screens of our iPhone 27s or whatever the hell. Um, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess 11 plus three or four is not 27, but do your
⏹️ ▶️ John math, you know, with Apple’s naming, you know, I take it back.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s no reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John 27 with Apple’s naming screen. But yeah, in the meantime, other solutions like Margo suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John are much easier to do quickly, uh, weakening face ID by only doing your eyeballs or your forehead,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe a little bit too weak. The one that has sprung to mind immediately to me and it would help Apple sell more stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John have better linked unlock with your Apple Watch, kind of like they do with Mac OS, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the watch doesn’t suffer this because it’s always touching your screen, so it can be used as a proxy key to say, as
⏹️ ▶️ John long as you don’t take your watch off and as long as your watch is unlocked, if you pick up your phone and try to open it and it’s close by your watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John then your phone will unlock automatically too. Given how well that works or doesn’t on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, maybe they need to work on that feature a little bit, but I would think that that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be more secure than eyeball face ID. I suppose they can do retina scans, but again, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another five to 10 year timeline for them to come up with that amazing technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, the group FaceTime in 13.5 beta, you can optionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn off the enlarging of whoever’s speaking. Now I’m familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this in principle, but I have not experienced this myself. And to be honest, almost any group call I’ve been on has been Zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not FaceTime. But my understanding is, especially once you get like three or four people involved with a single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FaceTime call, is that this gets real annoying real fast. So now there’s a switch where you can disable the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enlarge the face of the speaker feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean this is true like on Zoom calls as well. Zoom has this wonderful option called grid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view and I’m not a video chat expert. I don’t know how many other platforms have this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the idea of if you have a conference call or video call with you know more than a handful of people, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know normally what these platforms would try to do is may have like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big rectangle for like the primary person and then a bunch of smaller rectangles for like everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then basically detect and switch whoever was talking the loudest any given time they would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown as the big primary square and then when if somebody else’s are talking it would switch to them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out this is kind of annoying a lot of the times and having just a basic grid view where everyone is the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just no matter what when people are talking like the arrangement stays stable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a lot better in a lot of of conditions. And so this is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that that will now become a possibility for the FaceTime video chat, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think. Am I interpreting this correctly, that that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John this means? I don’t know if that’s like, I think we’re all correct on the thing they’re reacting
⏹️ ▶️ John against, which is the current implementation, which I have used. And the current implementation is trying to be an apple-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John version of what Margot just described as the default for Zoom or lots of other things, where
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole screen gets taken by whoever’s talking, and then there’s a smaller version of other people. That’s what face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John does now, except for instead of having it be like big and everything else, it gradually
⏹️ ▶️ John moves between those phases. So it’s just a bunch of floating boxes. And as you start to be the dominant talker,
⏹️ ▶️ John your box gets bigger and bigger, but never quite as big as full screen. But then if someone else goes, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller and that other box gets bigger. So it’s trying to be a smooth, dynamic version of the very binary.
⏹️ ▶️ John You either get the whole screen or you’re one of the background bit players, right? But I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John is there, all right, so is the fix, what is the fix for that? Is the fix for that just a grid? Maybe, I haven’t seen any
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshots to know whether it is. The fix for that could also be just a bunch of little
⏹️ ▶️ John floating boxes, but they don’t get any bigger. But, you know, I think a much more apple-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to this, and one that actually would be used by people who find themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John in a situation, I know because I’ve done lots of family group FaceTimes, you just, direct manipulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? People know what they want to see at any given moment. Now it’s annoying to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John manipulate it manually, but for example, very often someone is showing something. Look, some kid is holding up
⏹️ ▶️ John a picture they drew. That’s what you want to see. But at the same time, someone else is talking saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s so nice, when did you draw that? What is that supposed to be? Or what, you know, like, the
⏹️ ▶️ John one talking is not the one you want to see. So you need the person who’s using the interface to be able to say, I know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want to see. I want to see the picture. And have them do what everybody knows how to do with their phone, which is pinch to zoom. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John grab the picture, grab the thing you want to see, make it come to the front, pinch to zoom, chuck it into the corner, like
⏹️ ▶️ John direct manipulation. And to go along with the direct manipulation, you need to turn off the sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, non-direct manipulation, the sort of, I didn’t touch anything, but things
⏹️ ▶️ John are moving around and changing anyway, right? So if you just start with a grid view and let people sort of zoom and shrink
⏹️ ▶️ John as needed, I think that’ll cover basically every use case without having any sort of machine learning, artificial
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence, noise canceling, whatever, whatever. And it’s better than grid view because in grid view,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more people you get, the smaller everybody becomes. So if you get 12 people on a call and you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John see little Susie’s picture that she drew, it’s too damn small. And then if your only option is zoom
⏹️ ▶️ John Susie to full screen or make Susie a thumbnail, then you’re back to the zoom thing, which is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s passable. You can either be full screen, you can choose what you want to be full screen, or you can be one of the little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. But sometimes you want something that’s kind of in between. So I really hope Apple just lets us directly manipulate
⏹️ ▶️ John those little floating people. And then, you know, if there’s any auto manipulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll have it to be very gentle and have some way to sort of reset back to a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John grid type mode. But yeah, I don’t like the floating and the zooming and the changing. I find
⏹️ ▶️ John it very annoying. I find it hard to keep track of things and people keep moving around and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a fan. And the other thing that I’m not a fan of is trying to set up a group FaceTime call. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody in your family has Apple devices, is way more of a pain than it needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ John due to like the way of Apple’s various messaging applications
⏹️ ▶️ John in general are not good about letting you sort of select how you want to contact somebody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we have contact entries in our address book or whatever and everybody has
⏹️ ▶️ John 5EM mail addresses and one of them’s an Apple ID, but this person’s Apple ID is also their hotmail address.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this person’s Apple ID is their Gmail address, but this person has a Gmail address, but that’s not their Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, you know, when you want to contact somebody in the FaceTime app, very
⏹️ ▶️ John often you have to like, be very careful to say, okay, when you bring this person in, don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John their Gmail address, but this person use their Hotmail address, but don’t use their phone number for this person because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not on their phone device, they’re on their iPad and the phone number isn’t, it’s just like, oh my God, figure
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. Like I’m in FaceTime and I wanna do a FaceTime. Like whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna take to do a FaceTime, do that. And I just wanna pick the contact.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna have to know which person I should pick a phone number for and which person I should pick an email for and which person I should
⏹️ ▶️ John pick their Apple ID for. And very often what will happen is you’ll do it and like, oh, my phone is ringing
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not on my iPad. But I don’t want it to be my phone. Can you send it to my iPad? It
⏹️ ▶️ John just, setting up the call is half the challenge. It’s easier to set up a Microsoft Teams
⏹️ ▶️ John meeting for crying out loud, because at work, everybody just has one work email, and it’s the works domain, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no question about who you’re connecting to, but with home people, with all the different things,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s annoying. It’s the same thing I used to complain about in messages, where messages would be split up and I wanted them to be grouped by person,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you’re like, well, where’d, you know, they all have that preference, like, where do you want your message to first come from? Do you want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John come from your phone number? Do you want it to come from your Apple ID? Do you want your Mac to listen on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco number, but you’re going to do that when
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone is in proximity? It’s too confusing. Like too many of the implementation details are exposed,
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation details that we don’t care about. So in a context where Apple has a fighting chance of knowing what
⏹️ ▶️ John we want, you’ve launched the FaceTime app and you’re trying to do a FaceTime, just
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out which way in the giant contact entry for this person will result
⏹️ ▶️ John in a successful FaceTime and do that. I don’t know, I know it’s a difficult problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, it’s frustrating. And then once you get on there, their heads are all changing sizes and
⏹️ ▶️ John floating all around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the struggle is real.
Google making phone CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of struggles, Google’s perhaps struggling with chips right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s a rumor in Axios that Google is readying its own chips for future pixels in Chromebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is following the Apple playbook as Google’s off to do and they’re supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working with Samsung to make their own CPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe it’s taken this long. I mean, we’ve been saying for years and years and years that Apple has the
⏹️ ▶️ John best chips in their phones. They’re the most powerful. They’re the, they use the least power. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just, everything about them is amazing. And it’s not by a little bit. It’s not like, oh, they’re one or 2% better.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re hugely better than the competitors’ phone chips. You would think the competitors would feel
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of pressure to say, we need to match this. But instead, just for years and years, they’ve been willing to outsource it to
⏹️ ▶️ John having Qualcomm make their system on a chips for them. And the Qualcomm system on chips have, you know, taken more power
⏹️ ▶️ John and not been as fast. Like the one thing Qualcomm has been doing for them is letting the
⏹️ ▶️ John non Apple phones have like little spec wars. Like, look how many cores we have and all sorts of other things that sound
⏹️ ▶️ John good on paper, but in practice, their CPUs use more battery and are slower than Apple. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what the hell’s the point of having umpteen cores if the end result is a slower phone that, you know, takes more power
⏹️ ▶️ John to run, right? So finally, it seems like, I think this is the first rumor I’ve seen, the first
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of substantial rumor I’ve seen of Google saying, you know what? We should just make our own chips because Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John sucks and they’re not doing the job and we can make, we can do what Apple does to make a chip that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose built for our phones. Because Google has all sorts of interesting machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas, and they’re building their own hardware, as we talked to Chris Lattner about this, all their TPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other kind of hardware they build for the data centers for machine learning. That’s exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does in their phones. They put that neural engine in there designed to help speed up the things that they know they wanna do. When
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple rolls out FaceTime, they have hardware that’s going to help them do FaceTime better. When Apple does portrait mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have hardware in their image processor that helps them do that, right? It’s a big win to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google is the other big player in the phone industry, so they should totally make their own chips. So we’ll see how they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I’m not actually that hopeful about it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google’s experience so far with hardware has been mostly middling. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pixel phones recently have been pretty good in camera stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a mixed bag and other stuff. Their heart is not in it, clearly. Like they don’t really prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware. They’re never gonna be very good at it. Maybe they can do a passable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job, but they clearly are not that into it. In the same way that Apple isn’t into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much other stuff that they do a passable job. It’s like, you know, like we were talking about earlier, iCloud Drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is not a great company for that kind of service, for that kind of product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re gonna consistently do kind of a half-assed job. Things like iWork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco document sharing, collaborative document editing, in any kind of competition for Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apps. Apple’s heart is not in that. They do a pretty poor job of that most of the time. They have some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of passable solution, but it’s nothing compared to the company that cares more about it, which in this case is Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So going back to this topic, Apple cares a whole lot about making really, really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware, especially really good mobile phone and mobile computer hardware and chips and everything. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a really good job of that. Google doesn’t want to do that. they’re doing it because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being competitively forced. The same way Apple’s being competitively forced to have iWork collaboration features. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple doesn’t want to do any of that. Like, they’re just, they’re doing it kind of reluctantly. And that’s how this feels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels like Google is doing this, you know, whatever this chip move is, reluctantly, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t really have any other choice competitively for this really important market. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re going to do great things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you might be underselling the Google Pixel phones. From everything I’ve understood, their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras are at least as good as iPhone cameras, if not better in certain cases, for stills. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, from everything I’ve gathered, the iPhone is still leaps and bounds ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s because of software, though, not hardware. Like, Google is really good at taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pedestrian camera sensor and getting really good output out of it just using software enhancements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not really, like, a hardware thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My very limited understanding is that the Pixel phones are legitimately good phones. And arguably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until very recently, the only good Android phones. And I think recently that’s not the case. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a while there, certainly when I was still traditionally employed, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our Android team would swear by the Pixel phones and say they’re the ones that are great, and everything else is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of garbage. And now I think that that’s changed a bit. But yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Pixel phones, certainly a couple of years ago, were very, very good, and arguably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as good as iPhones, if not in certain cases, better. I mean, I think a lot of people prefer the still cameras on the Pixel phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And whether that’s software or hardware, I mean, it’s still ultimately the experience of these cameras. Some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought were better, and I haven’t tried an Android phone a long, long time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say that their hardware is mediocre or just bargain,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, not even bargain basement, but it’s not just run-of-the-mill stuff you can grab on a store shelf, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to speak. Some of it is very good from what I’ve gathered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what Google’s heart is not in is building phones. Forget about system-on-a-chip. Their heart is not
⏹️ ▶️ John in building phones for a variety of reasons. Potentially, it’s like, well, if they want to be a platform vendor, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Microsoft thing, why didn’t Microsoft make PCs for a long time? It’s like, well, PC makers would be mad at us if we made a
⏹️ ▶️ John PC. Microsoft got over that eventually. But still, Microsoft volumes are low. So yeah, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John gives you Android for all your billions of Android phones to them. And hey, we also make phones. But
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t sell too many of them Samsung, so it’s not a big deal, right? And why
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the case? Maybe because they don’t wanna anger their vendors, especially in the beginning, they wanted to get traction and not say
⏹️ ▶️ John they were competing with them. But maybe also Google just, you know, doesn’t have the expertise
⏹️ ▶️ John in manufacturing. For a while, they outsourced the construction of their Pixel phones. I don’t know if they still outsource
⏹️ ▶️ John all of it, and not just like to Foxconn like Apple does, but Apple is intimately involved with the manufacturing process
⏹️ ▶️ John of all its products, including its phones, with lots of Apple employees and technology and everything going into
⏹️ ▶️ John the manufacturing process. Google, my impression, is way less involved than Apple in the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John of its phones. So if it ever wants to be high volume, high quality, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to dedicate itself to the manufacturing of the phone. So I’m not sure if they wanna do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if they’re going to do that. But the system on a chip is different. Google is totally into
⏹️ ▶️ John building silicon chip hardware hardware that has synergy
⏹️ ▶️ John with what it wants to do with software. Again, those TPU things with the machine learning, you know, like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not designing, well, maybe they are, we don’t know about it, but as far as we know, Apple is not custom designing its own hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John for the data center down to, down to the CPU. Google is doing that purpose-built hardware just
⏹️ ▶️ John for its machine learning stuff because that has synergy with the software stuff that it’s doing and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a consumer product so you can, you know, fill it all in. So there is a potential that Apple, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google could say, hey, if we build our own system on a chips or our phones, we can make something
⏹️ ▶️ John that fits our needs exactly. And we could continue to be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not super into manufacturing phones and continue to sell only a small number of these Pixel phones to discerning people
⏹️ ▶️ John who want a phone that has the trade-offs that the Pixel phones have. But it’ll be good for us because we can build into these system-on-a-chips
⏹️ ▶️ John these certain features that help other Google features. Potentially they could sell the system-on-a-chip to other Android
⏹️ ▶️ John vendors, or the other route they could go, and this is what I was thinking with a Google making phone system on a chip is,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than making a powerhouse competitor to the top line A-series chip that Apple makes,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead, make a pretty okay chip that is
⏹️ ▶️ John able to run Android and Google stuff very efficiently,
⏹️ ▶️ John with very little power consumption, and with very low cost, to allow the creation of a Google
⏹️ ▶️ John phone that is way cheaper than any iPhone, could be slower than an iPhone, Like, kind of like, imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John something that is, you know, I can’t say it’s like the iPhone SE, because the iPhone SE has
⏹️ ▶️ John the best chip in the market, and it, which is a weird thing, but you know. Like, a phone that
⏹️ ▶️ John is acceptably good, but way undercut anything that Apple could ever put out. And it’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that, because in the Android market, if you get like a cheaper Qualcomm chip, it’s so dog slow. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t get the top of the line one, it’s so dog slow, and it’s probably not great with power, and that’s, you know, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine Google making a different set of trade-offs than Apple makes. Like having dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John processors with a few important things that make a Google phone impressive, but otherwise giving a middle of the road chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses very little power and has good enough performance to allow it to sell Pixel phones
⏹️ ▶️ John at a way lower price. And that could make it so that Apple, and so they keep saying Apple, so that Google could
⏹️ ▶️ John distribute across the world way more phones than they do now that we would look at and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s an okay phone. But suddenly Google becomes a volume distributor because they’re able to sell this phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and undercut everybody else. And they still outsource all the manufacturing, and if you look at it, you’re not super impressed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the industrial design, and the camera is fine, and the software on it’s good. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are things that Google can’t do because they’re stuck using system-on-a-chips made by
⏹️ ▶️ John other people who have other companies that are A, not as good as Apple at it, and B, make trade-offs that are not the same trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ John that Google would make if it was designing its own phone. So when I envision a Google system-on-a-chip
⏹️ ▶️ John for a phone, I keep thinking of a good enough cheap phone
⏹️ ▶️ John for way less money rather than a flagship Apple destroying phone. But who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, but in, in this phone market, I’ve always kind of been baffled by the way Google does things
⏹️ ▶️ John from the, you know, from their decisions about the trade off between being the platform owner and also selling your own phones right down
⏹️ ▶️ John to exactly how long they’ve gone dealing with third party chips that are obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John massively inferior to what Apple’s putting out and just sort of like not doing anything about it. So now it sounds like they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something about it, so we just got to sit back and see
ARM Mac CPU rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of building your own chips, this flew by in a big way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week or two ago, but the ARM Mac is coming, or so we’re told.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman says, what do you say 2021? Apple’s going to start shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of its own Mac processors based on the A14 and the next iPhone. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of these will be much faster than the processors in the iPhone. Apple’s preparing to release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least one Mac with its own chip next year in 2021, the initiative to develop multiple chips codenamed Kalamata
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggests the company will transition more of its Mac lineup away from the current supplier Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TSMC is going to be building new Mac chips at five nanometers. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first Mac processors will have eight high performance cores codenamed Firestorm and at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four energy efficient cores known internally as Ice Storm. Very good, very good codenames. I very much approve of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Apple is exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In some Macs, Apple’s designs will double or quadruple the number of cores that Intel provides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The current entry-level MacBook Air has two cores, for example, and the CalMatter project has been going on for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several years, surprise, surprise. In 2018, Apple developed a Mac chip based on the iPad Pro’s 812X processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for internal testing. That gave the company’s engineers confidence they could begin replacing Intel Macs as early as 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like with the iPhone, Apple’s Mac processors will include several components, including the CPU and GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the one side, this is very exciting, very interesting, and very cool. On the other side, I’ll believe it when it happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’ve been talking about this for ages, but there are a few more details in here. We’ve got a code name, Kalamata. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good. So now we can talk about this effort if that code name is real in some
⏹️ ▶️ John way, rather than just saying Apple’s ARM transition. We got core counts, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the core counts are surprising. You would expect that there would be more cores than
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel, just because if we look at how many cores are in our phones today, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be a surprising number for a fanless Mac that fits in your hand. Right, again, with the MacBook Air having only two cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and our phones have, what do they have? They have like the two high performance ones and the four slow ones. I forget what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco has. I know what you’re saying. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s four and four now. I don’t know. It depends on the model, but yeah, I think we have a lot of cores now.
⏹️ ▶️ John For a Mac application, I’m saying eight high performance and at least four energy efficient cores. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the core counts are going to be very high. And the whole thing of like, that they did it one
⏹️ ▶️ John based on A12, Excel gave them confidence that they could replace Intel. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t give them confidence. They knew they could, like the benchmark numbers for the A12 that they got three years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago when the A12 was developed. Like we all have confidence. We all know they’ll do fine, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we keep comparing our iPad and our phone processors against MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John and these fanless handheld things with, you know, seven hour battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John are destroying the max and single core and being competitive and multi-core. And the only reason losing multi-core is that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have so many cores. If you doubled or tripled the number of cores, these will be amazing processors.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m, you know, I’m very excited about these chips. Also, I think the other interesting part
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fact that they’re going to have integrated GPU now for a laptop application. You say that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John given, right? Because you want a system on a chip type of thing. You want all the energy savings of having it all in one. and you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want discrete GPU. There is a question of how beefy
⏹️ ▶️ John a GPU can you fit in a system on a chip. At what point do you have to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John a discrete GPU and would Apple consider making it a discrete GPU or they just continue to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD discrete GPUs in that scenario? To get an idea of how beefy
⏹️ ▶️ John a GPU can you fit in a system on a chip, look at the next generation consoles. Look at the Xbox One and the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 5. They both have essentially system on a chips that have AMD CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and AMD GPUs on one big thing. And those GPUs that are in there
⏹️ ▶️ John are pretty darn good, right? It’s just one big honking chip, but those GPUs are
⏹️ ▶️ John not embarrassing. Arguably they may be better than my stupid $1,000 video card that I just installed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t looked at the actual benchmarks, but it’s pretty impressive. Now, granted, those are big or whatever, but when
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re talking about, hey, what kind of ARM system on a chip can you put in an iMac? Could you make an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro without a discrete GPU? I think it’s plausible,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially, you know, if it’s a GPU custom tailored to whatever Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks people are going to be doing with an iMac Pro, like Final Cut Pro stuff or whatever, and not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John tailored to gaming performance or something like that. You know, for the laptops, it makes much
⏹️ ▶️ John more sense, but for the desktops, I’m still curious. Like, so this just has hints of like, well, they can make,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even higher core counts. How many cores could they fit in the power budget of my giant 2019
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro with these huge fans? With no fans, you can do an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. If you have three gigantic fans plus a blower
⏹️ ▶️ John in this huge case, how many cores could you fit in there? That you’ve got the 28 core
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel thing now that costs a whole jillion dollars. I’m pretty sure that you could do like a 64 core
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM CPU for a similar price and power budget.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, not that Apple’s probably gonna make something that big, but boy, that would be a hell of a machine. So I continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to be very excited about Apple’s efforts in this area. And I’m, you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John glad to see that the rumors are for 12 core things with eight high
⏹️ ▶️ John performance core and four energy efficient cores. And I’m also excited that, you know, this again, makes sense if you think about it, but it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ John to get some kind of information. But they’re going to use low power cores. Like you think, oh, on the phone, they have to do that because, you know, it’s a handheld device
⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada. But it makes perfect sense to do it in laptops as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, Apple’s main Mac they sell is laptop because this will make it so Marco doesn’t have to run
⏹️ ▶️ John his little turbo disabling thing. It will just run the energy efficient course almost all the time and reduce power
⏹️ ▶️ John consumption and heat and fan noise in the whole nine yards and only only even turn on the
⏹️ ▶️ John high performance course when it’s called upon to do something big. So boy, these this first
⏹️ ▶️ John line of ARM laptops is going to be a hell of a thing. to predict.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really am looking forward to this. Same. Like I was so happy to see this report because we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expecting our Macs are probably somewhere near the you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the near term for a while now. I believe we did some kind of bet on the show about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we would see the first ARM Mac and I believe I said possibly this year. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this report is true I’m a little early but not by much. I’m just so excited about this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know everything John said like I I think we’re going to have a significant improvement in performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per watt. And that’s always one of the most exciting metrics and advances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can make in computing. Making large advances in performance per watt enables new form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factors or makes existing form factors way better. It enables things like the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which normally to get that kind of performance would require something larger than what could fit on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist until fairly recently in computing history and now we can do that, right? are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing, iPads are amazing, all with these extremely low power chips that can run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these very tiny batteries for many hours at a time while also powering these giant bright screens and cell radios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and GPS antennas and stuff like that. So like we’ve made some incredible progress in that area and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever there’s new progress to be made it’s a big deal. The laptop area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been lagging behind the iPad area pretty badly in this department. There is a lot that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big beefy Intel architecture is going to be better at for the foreseeable future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like, you know, I don’t think we’re going to see a Mac Pro that has a bunch of expansion slots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can run various like PC and Mac hybrid hardware cards that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to run an ARM CPU. Like that, I think anything that’s going to involve like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt high performance bandwidth, you know, external stuff, or any kind of pro-hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration, things like, you know, cards and Thunderbolt devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably going to stay Intel-only for the foreseeable future, if not forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least, you know, until those technologies are not used anymore. But most Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers are laptops. Most laptops don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt 3 for anything, and most people never have a single Thunderbolt peripheral.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So most of the time, most people using most Apple computers, most Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather, would be totally fine to be served by this. So even if they kept like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iMac Intel and the Mac Pro Intel, they could still have really awesome laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using ARM and that would still be a wonderful thing. The GPU issue I’m actually very excited about because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again look at most Apple computers sold, we know about two-thirds of them are laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we, I don’t think we know the model breakdown among the laptops, but I think it’s pretty safe to assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most laptops sold are not the 15 or 16 inch class. And if that, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can assume that, then it literally all other models don’t have discrete GPUs. Everything else besides the 15 to 16 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is using integrated GPUs. So to have something really good with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome, you know, Awesome integrated GPU performance and power and size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paired with an amazing CPU That is this new architecture that you know very power efficient and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s awesome that covers the vast majority of Apple’s computer needs That’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be great. And I will be the first person to buy that arm laptop. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know I could use
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone Yeah So the screen GPU use case like even though it’s a tiny corner of the market
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a corner of the market that Apple just recently entered with a big splash and presumably wants to continue to be a contender
⏹️ ▶️ John in, they’re selling Mac Pros where you can get four discrete GPUs. Is it four? Maybe can
⏹️ ▶️ John you do eight? I forget how many you can put inside this thing. You can put a lot of discrete GPUs and they’ve made it a point of saying, and
⏹️ ▶️ John look, we have, if you’re using some specific Apple software, we will use all those GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if Apple wants to stay in that market and if Apple actually wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to transition that market to ARM anytime soon, they need to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco solution there. The
⏹️ ▶️ John solution could just be just keep using AMD. Like that’s fine. It’s a perfectly good solution. Like their GPUs are great. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t want to deal with that. But for, like Margo was saying, for every other use case, like there is no problem
⏹️ ▶️ John building a system on a chip with a good enough GPU for even the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John end MacBook Pro. Like that’ll be fine, right? And plus all those machines all have eGPU support if you
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really need some beefy box outside. And as for bets,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did a search and I don’t know what bet Margo was talking about. The only one I could find, this is a reminder,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll come up in my calendar again so we won’t forget, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on Wednesday,
⏹️ ▶️ John July 1st, Marco contended sometime in our past
⏹️ ▶️ John that the vast majority of models Apple sells will have scissor keyboards. I think he’s gonna win that
⏹️ ▶️ John bet. I think he already has one. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I, yeah, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John did win that bet, didn’t I? I don’t think anyone was betting against him. I think it was just a prediction, not really a bet. But anyway, July
⏹️ ▶️ John 1st, we will revisit and confirm. Who knows, maybe they’ll go back to butterfly across the board.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, unless the 13-inch MacBook Pro sells way better than we think it does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ve already won. But even that, I think, like, rumor-wise, I’m pretty sure even that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said to switch over, like, any minute now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I’m excited. I really, really hope that this is a thing. And maybe it’ll be terrible, for all I know. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t be able to run anything on it. Maybe it’ll be an absolutely dreadful experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But sitting here now, where the future is infinite, it does sound amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t have any particular angst against Intel, but it certainly seems like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just killing it in the A-series CPUs for mobile stuff. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stands to reason. They may be able to do an okay processor for a computer. And I just, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to see, I would love to see the output of that team.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsor this week, ExpressVPN. and we will talk to you next.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even mean to begin, cause it
⏹️ ▶️ John was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The Anti-Marco Armen,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to accidentally Tech
⏹️ ▶️ John Podcasts, it’s so long.
Fan 3
⏹️ ▶️ John So I was talking about the fans in my Mac Pro and using iStat menus
⏹️ ▶️ John and during the show I realized I had a question about
⏹️ ▶️ John the fan thing. I was looking at my screenshots in the iStat menu thing. They show the fans.
⏹️ ▶️ John They say one of the fans is the blower fan, which is that one that’s on the side kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, like it cools like the RAM slots or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. And it’s a differently designed fans like a I don’t know. It looks like more like a water wheel for air and power. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco else. It’s called a blower, actually. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And then there
⏹️ ▶️ John are the three fans in the front. And iStatMenu labels them Fan 1, Fan 2, and Fan 3. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to determine if me having two GPUs now taking up six
⏹️ ▶️ John slots, the height of six slots in my thing, is that making the bottom fan run
⏹️ ▶️ John more? Because that’s where the two GPUs are. There used to be one little skinny GPU there, and now there’s one gigantic GPU plus
⏹️ ▶️ John the skinny one. But it occurred to me, I don’t know which one is fan one, fan two, and fan
⏹️ ▶️ John three. So I did a bunch of Googling, and as you can imagine, this is not an easy Google query
⏹️ ▶️ John to formulate, because, you know, anyway. Like, I couldn’t find anything telling me whether fan
⏹️ ▶️ John one, fan two, I didn’t even know if those were official Apple names. And I, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought maybe fan one is the top, fan two is the middle, you know, the only thing I was sure about is fan two is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the middle one,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Other than that, I couldn’t figure it out. Yeah, so I wrote to the developer, And I said, what’s fan
⏹️ ▶️ John one, fan two, and fan three? And I also said, is there some place in the app where I could have figured this out? Because I figured maybe they have a diagram
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere that I couldn’t find. And so if you take a look on the Slack channel, it’s a picture I just posted.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the picture that was attached to the email that I got back from the guys that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey made it. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is making me uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at- And so what the email says is, in our testing, please see attached,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve concluded that fan three is the top fan. So the photograph is
⏹️ ▶️ John of a Mac Pro with a wooden stick poking into it. The wooden stick presumably stopping the top
⏹️ ▶️ John fan and then seeing which one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero. That’s, I was going to suggest, why don’t you just hold your finger on the axle of each one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I would never have done that to my own, because that’s probably gonna burn out a motor at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want to do that if you don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that to my Synology recently, because I was down there, I was down in the basement long enough to be
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyed by the Synology fan noise. I’m like, is one of my fans going bad? Let me just stop one of the fans just to see
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s the one that’s making the noise because there’s multiple fans. And boy, the fans in my sonology
⏹️ ▶️ John are very powerful. They snap the toothpick right in half. I stuck a toothpick in there to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop the fan. They were like, toothpick?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Forget about that. Anyway. You’re supposed to stick a finger on the axle of the fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I was doing it without disassembling it, so it’s kind of hard to get it to be grating. I couldn’t really. So I’d use a tooth.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. But yeah, I would not have the guts to try this experiment. So thank you, iStatMenu
⏹️ ▶️ John developers for destroying your own Mac Pro to let me know. But honestly, it’s your software. You should be able to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out whether Fan 1 is the top one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco without doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this. So yeah, like I said, the answer is that Fan 3 is the top fan, but then he says they’re probably going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll think about renaming them to make it clearer in the actual shipping application. This is still a beta that has Mac Pro support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, I can’t speak for the beta, but in iStatMenu that I’m running, if you open the preferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s global on the left at the top, and there’s a pause button next to it. If you pause that, iSTEP menu stops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s what I was referring to. Sure it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go run kexload and see if the kernel is dead. Oh, god. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my god. Oh my god.
Game Bar
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing I realized when I was playing Destiny is like a cool thing happened when I was playing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, how do I save that? Oh, I’m not recording all the time like I am in the PlayStation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Win for dedicated hardware. The PlayStation is always recording, always be recording. It is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John always recording. So I don’t have to remember before to record my gameplay. After I do something
⏹️ ▶️ John cool, I can just say, save that. And when I did something cool on my quote unquote PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t recording. As far as I know, as far as I know it’s not recording. I know Steam has some game capture
⏹️ ▶️ John recording thing that I managed to bring up, but it’s too late. It’s after the fact. So many
⏹️ ▶️ John overlays in PC gaming, so many overlays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, whenever I launch Minecraft on a TIS gaming PC, it tells me this thing about the Xbox game bar. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, what are you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing? What the hell is this? What are you
⏹️ ▶️ John doing? Why, what? It’s got a social thing. It’s got a bunch of stuff in there for like capture and stuff, so it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s like a system level, You know, or Steam, the way I’m using it. But it’s nice that there are sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John meta gaming products that no matter what game you’re playing can do a cool thing for it. But just, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so much crap on your screen. You’ve already got the game UI, and then you’ve got the Steam UI, and then you’ve got the game bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, when we were talking about my Minecraft, you know, starting, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to get a screenshot. Like, you told me to take a screenshot of what I had built and make it the chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art. So I’m running around, like, right before publishing the show, trying to get a screenshot. and I used the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game bar or whatever on the PC to just capture the screenshot. First of all, figuring that out was non-trivial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then to try to figure out, okay, where did it save the file?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As someone who doesn’t remember a lot about Windows, and I mean, the last version of Windows I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extensively was Windows XP, and that was a very long time ago, I had no clue where to even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin to look. It took me forever to find where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heck put this file. It was totally not obvious. Like it’s funny, as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I use the PC, I get a slight glimpse into like what it must be like to be a normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person using a PC like who’s not a computer nerd because I I’m so unfamiliar with this platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that lots of other people are totally familiar with. I feel like I’m such a noob and I don’t know what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing and everything is confusing. Nothing makes sense. I do everything very carefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gingerly because I don’t want to break it. Like right now, like we were we’re kind of alternating between the Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bedrock Edition, because we play some games that use that, and the Java Edition, because we play on a server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that uses that. And I have both installed, and I have both icons in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the start bar is called these days. Both of them next to each other, they have very similar icons. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to do is rename one of them to say Minecraft Bedrock Edition, and rename the other one to say Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Java Edition. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to rename things in this bar, and I just gave up. I’m like, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, fine, I’ll just know the one on the left is this and the one on the right is this. And it’s exactly the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of failure of computer usage that we as nerds, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see other people doing that and we’re like, oh, what a shame. They could be making this so much better if they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco held down Control and right-click this and hit F4 or whatever, and we know all those things, but no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one else does. Now I’m kind of getting a taste of
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah, I’ve been, my brief foray is into Windows 10, mostly just trying to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that the sound going to the right place and to make sure the drivers are hooked up and stuff like that. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 10, like the shell that’s covering the deep internal guts of
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows XP still lurking or Windows 7 still lurking under there or whatever, it’s mostly faking me out. Like I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the interface, but in general their search is good and I can find what I’m looking for pretty easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I installed the new drivers from a video card, of course like every PC thing there’s some weird ass application
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with the drivers, like
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD settings, and it’s like It’s weird, it looks weird, it’s got a custom UI, it’s like brushed metal, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all custom, everything. And it’s like, do you really need an entire, I guess AMD probably
⏹️ ▶️ John does for, you know, formerly ATI for their video cards, but like it’s this whole other world of places you
⏹️ ▶️ John can screw with your video card, including a tab that has some acronym that I didn’t recognize that as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ John you click on it, it says, warning, you can damage your monitor by changing these settings. I’m like, all right, nope, nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Not that monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what that is, but I’m not going to that tab. Like you can change everything in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco weird custom apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course I had that open at the same time as I had the Microsoft displays setting open. It’s like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John if I change like something over here? Like if I change the bit depth or if I change the resolution, will it reflect on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other UI? Probably not. So I just, you know, again, I gotta be very careful. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John back away, just close one of the applications. If you’re about to change resolution, just do it in one place.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, don’t even have that application running. The other thing, the only thing that’s driving me nuts about Windows in the brief time
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m using it is like, let’s say I download these AMD drivers. It’s the typical Windows browser thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where it gives you that dialogue that has evolved over the years but it’s still basically the same, which is the option is
⏹️ ▶️ John open, run, like what do you want me to do with this download, right? You know, one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the options is just like let it download. It’s okay for this download. The other one is like show me the folder after it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John finished downloading. And the final one is actually launch the thing after it finishes downloading. And I, you know, if it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading drivers, I’d just launch it, because if I don’t launch it, like Marco, I won’t know where the hell it is. So just run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what most people do, because they don’t know where the hell it
⏹️ ▶️ John is either. Right. But the running thing, I think it ran
⏹️ ▶️ John the unzip process or something. It basically threw me into an Explorer window that showed me a
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. I’m like, oh, well, I guess it extracted it. So I go into the folder and there’s setup.exe, right? I double-click
⏹️ ▶️ John setup.exe, and I’m always like, oh, I didn’t adjust the double-click settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I didn’t double-click fast enough, because I double click and it seems like nothing happens. Like nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, right? And so I right click and select open. And I must have
⏹️ ▶️ John done this over the time that I’ve had this Mac Pro messing bootcamp like five times. This
⏹️ ▶️ John happens all the time. What happens is eventually, like the thing is set up, you know, the setup thing comes on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and has the next, next, next button. I’m going to the wizard. Halfway through the wizard, I get a dialog box that comes up that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, another copy of this application is already running. That’s the second right click open happening,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The open takes so long to run, and there’s no visual feedback that, yeah, my first double click did
⏹️ ▶️ John work. And so did my right click open. And one of them ran, and I’m interacting. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John a second one finally launches and says, oh, I can’t run because there’s another copy of me running. If you’re lucky, that happens. If you’re unlucky,
⏹️ ▶️ John a second copy runs. And then you’re like, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. But I came to appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John the dock and the stupid bouncy icons, because if there is some visual indication in the default
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 10 UI that I have successfully double clicked a thing, I can’t find it. And if your
⏹️ ▶️ John thing doesn’t immediately throw a window up on the screen, you have no idea whether you successfully double-clicked it. That seems like a basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I have found, in my admittedly very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimal usage of Windows here, I have been able to find most setting that I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change or wanted to change. But the process of finding settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of soul-crushing because- It’s like web search. Yeah, well because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much complexity still in Windows because, you know, just a combination of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, lots, just lots of inherent complexity in what Windows is, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of legacy complexity in what Windows was and always has been. And so they have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of different levels and screens and modes and different settings, Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and panes and everything. Nobody can find anything, and they know this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so the process of trying to change the setting in Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels almost like a touch-tone menu on a phone. It’s like, all right, what kind of thing do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to do? Here’s a bunch of very long text descriptions that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read about all the different areas and modes you might want to try, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just like a wall of text everywhere you go that is not what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want, but it’s more like a pointer to what you want. It’s like explaining, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well, here’s the kind of category that we have over in this department. Click here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be quick linked over to that department, and we’ll transfer you there, and they can keep helping you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You click on that link, and then you go to the next department. Okay, here’s another giant wall of text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What kind of thing within this department do you want? And eventually, you go through two or three of those, and eventually, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opens up some kind of actual settings pane. It’s so weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is one approach. If you have massive complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and huge amounts of layers and layers upon layers of legacy and cruft,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one approach is to just throw walls of text at people to try to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to successfully navigate it, and that will work to some degree. It’s incredibly inelegant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does kind of sort of work. I guess a better approach would be just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to get rid of a lot of that complexity, but they don’t seem, like, the entire OS feels so designed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco committee at this point that that’s never going to happen. So I’m just enjoying the ride of whenever I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to change anything in Windows. Like, all right, how do I do it? Well, let me just go talk to the committee, and they will transfer me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the other committee, and eventually somebody will send me in the right direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John I appreciate the options on the game stuff, like that game bar thing that I mentioned I brought up. One of the things that it brings up is
⏹️ ▶️ John an audio panel that I would have killed for on my PlayStation, even. Like it’s an audio
⏹️ ▶️ John panel that said, here’s your master volume, here’s the volume of the Steam application, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the game volume, here’s the voice chat volume, here’s the mix between them. It was just like, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, that’s every setting I’ll ever want to change. Cause you know, when you’re playing a game, I don’t know, I mean, if you’re trying to play a game and you’re streaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have voice chat and like just one volume control is not enough. You’re always wanting to adjust all the volumes and
⏹️ ▶️ John all the different things. And here it was one little panel that had sliders for literally every single volume, including mixes between
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And on PlayStation even, which has settings for that, You got to go back to the system menu, then
⏹️ ▶️ John go into the thing and scroll down and adjust this thing here, but then make sure this chat is going through that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then in the game, it has its own set of settings. This had one little floating window, granted in this giant set of overlay
⏹️ ▶️ John things, that had all the adjustments on it. And forget about on the Mac. Mac, you would have no, you have like system volume
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s it. Maybe you have separate volume settings in the game itself. This was like, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John what game you’re playing, these are all the volume settings that you can deal with. I was very
⏹️ ▶️ John impressed. Everything’s better when it comes to gaming over on PC. Other than
⏹️ ▶️ John actually having to boot Windows, that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to be a challenge. Black screens, like I hate every time I have to disconnect my LG monitor from my PlayStation. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John such a pain with the stupid power brick and the power cord and getting an HDMI cable and dragging it over
⏹️ ▶️ John here and it’s just, just wish it would just work. Oh, and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John weird thing is, when I wanted to reboot, I set my startup disk to be Windows just because I was rebooting
⏹️ ▶️ John so many times and I didn’t wanna like have to hold on option to pick the drive, I just wanted to default boot off Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John but eventually I’m like, okay, well I’m done with that. I disconnected my Windows drive, put it away and then I boot and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m gonna boot back into Mac OS and it booted and it was like grinding my hard drive like crazy, like my spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive. Like, what are you doing hard drive? Like so much so that it couldn’t even, it was like beach balling and I couldn’t even get
⏹️ ▶️ John a right click to eject the thing. Like, why are you like, is it Spotlight trying to index
⏹️ ▶️ John my drive? Why is it even mounting? Shouldn’t it be auto? As I had a bunch of stuff set to not mount and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually I think I figured out that what it had done was booted onto my spinning disk super
⏹️ ▶️ John duper clone. Let me tell you, don’t do that. I mean, it worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that it took me a while to notice, but mostly what I noticed was that incredible noise. And it’s like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my boot disk. It’s grinding my boot disk. Because I think it was probably spotlight indexing
⏹️ ▶️ John or preparing a time machine backup of my boot disk. Boy, what a racket. So yeah, rebooted
⏹️ ▶️ John into the SSD. way quieter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, hopefully when this ARM transition finally happens, it will finally force you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just get a fricking gaming PC and separate these roles so you can stop doing all these
⏹️ ▶️ John hacks. Seems like I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco already have
⏹️ ▶️ John one, as evidenced from my Destiny gameplay experience today.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we know, that’s the only game that I care about playing, so I don’t think I’m all set on the gaming PC front. The only thing I could wish for
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I would like it if my PlayStation controllers were wireless, but that’s not a Mac specific thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s just a Steam thing. I haven’t quite figured out how to get that to work yet. But yeah, it was pretty good. The only problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is that A, cheating is more rampant on PC for obvious reasons, and that’s kind of annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And B, people are a little bit better on PC, and that makes me feel worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we know some people who are very extreme or specialized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or really good at certain things. Like our friend underscore David Smith. I think he might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the person in the world who has made the most apps for the Apple Watch, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who work for Apple on the Apple Watch team. I think he has almost certainly spent the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time total writing watchOS apps compared to probably anyone else in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think you might be the only person in the world who is using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 2020 Mac Pro as a gaming PC?
⏹️ ▶️ John not using it as a gaming PC, I played some games on it. And no, I’m not the only one playing some games.
⏹️ ▶️ John guarantee that everybody who has one of these things who doesn’t need it for legitimate purposes is playing games on it in Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think are there many people who buy this computer just for the heck of it besides
⏹️ ▶️ John Matt? I don’t think there’s a lot of them but we know how many people do you know? We know me, Stephen Hackett,
⏹️ ▶️ John Quinn Nelson, like that’s three people right there. Then you know it’s a small group
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not like they don’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You might be the only person using that computer as a gaming PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just played a game on it. I’m not using it as a gaming PC. I’m not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only person. No, like installing boot… what I mean by that is, you know, installing boot camp and running Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games on it on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a regular basis. Like I… before it wasn’t because my GPU was crappy. Now I have a decision. Probably mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going to happen is I’m going to continue to play on the PlayStation just because I don’t want to reboot my beautiful Mac because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John painful to reboot in Windows. But it was definitely cool. Um, and you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like Mac games I’m now much more interested it in two because now I have the ability to play them. But honestly, I don’t think there’s many
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac games that would challenge my gaming PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even the old GPU. I’m not the only one. But yes, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Maybe not more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dozens. I can’t imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Casey’s going to turn into a pumpkin. We have to let him go to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still here. I’m still here.
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. And you don’t even know if your garage door is closed. He’s got a lot of on his mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. I actually the funny thing is I can look on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app to see if it’s open or closed. So let me look Wait in this app is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. You can just open the app and check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I want a little LED that shines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole time that could have been
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution Now you have to cut this whole segment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god, it’s gonna drop this in
⏹️ ▶️ John end. You left out the most salient idiotic piece of information It’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to set up a phone with an old iPod touch with the app always running and point a camera at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey machine learning.
⏹️ ▶️ John The boot will knock over the fishbowl. The cat will chase the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fish. Clearly the easier way of accomplishing this. Why would
⏹️ ▶️ John anything else? Light the candle that’ll burst the balloon
⏹️ ▶️ John send the trolley on its way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said from the get-go, this was overkill. I said it from the get-go.