387: It Might Not Be as Cool as You Think
16 Jul 2020Guess which host likes the Big Sur UI redesign?
Episode Description:
- ATP Membership Update!
Please consider joining, but we’re still cool if you don’t. 💙- Bootleg feed is live!! Some details:
- We may @$*&%ng swear
- No ads, chapters, or audio quality
- Show notes appear for each bootleg once the episode is published
- Bootleg feed is live!! Some details:
- Pre-show:
- Is FaceID working better with 😷?
- Beta stability
- Follow-up:
- 🚨 ATP Mugs are not dishwasher safe! 🚨
- USB4 vs. Thunderbolt 4
- ARM Mac rumors
- An iPad Pro is an ARM Mac, right?
- Casey’s nameLiss computers (ugh. –ed.)
- Casey’s defense of Big Sur’s look-and-feel
#askatp- What is up with Intel, anyway? (via Steve Lederer)
- Could one replace an actual computer with an iPad/iPhone, particularly for relatives?
- What on earth is up with the grille on the new 4 series?! (via Gavan Shanley)
- Post-show: 2021 Ford Bronco
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Fully: Workplace furniture designed for health, flow, and balance.
- Notion: Stay on task, find what you need, and collaborate efficiently, all in one place. Get 10% off a team plan.
Chapters
- Bootleg feed launched
- Face ID recognizing masks?
- Current beta quality
- Sponsor: Notion
- ///ATP mug care
- Thunderbolt 4 vs. USB 4
- No touch-screen rumors
- iPad Pros as ARM Macs?
- Sponsor: Fully
- Casey’s computer names
- Casey likes Big Sur 🖼️
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Intel’s failure
- #askatp: Grandparent iPads
- #askneutral: BMW’s new grille 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Neutral: New Ford Bronco 🖼️
Bootleg feed launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the first week that the bootleg will be up. Well, we’ll talk about that later, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no, no, I actually have something to say about that. It occurred to me moments before starting the show when I was reinstalling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Call Recorder as my backup recording, you know, for the 95th time in the last two weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keeps disappearing. It occurred to me that of the three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far and away, irrespective of what computer I’m using, it is my recording that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fails most often. it’s not even a contest. And I would argue that it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically something that I have done, you know, there’s no like negligence, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. Oh, come on. Come
⏹️ ▶️ John on. I would argue. Steven Poitras Weren’t there at least a couple times where it was kind of your fault? I mean, not that your fault that it failed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that maybe your fault you didn’t have a backup, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because something’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to go wrong and, you know, maybe that’s not going to be your fault, but that’s why you have like backups and redundancies, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Ross Well, maybe, maybe. And certainly spilling water on the computer that was broadcasting is a problem, and that was my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was all you the third party ram. Don’t forget about that one. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey was yes, yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, yes, my point. However, gentlemen, is that given that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am the one that typically causes the problems, be it delivered or otherwise, if the bootleg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is ever not there or ever late for any reason, even if it’s just that you want to go to bed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately for some reason, if it’s that one of us did something weird, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t matter, no matter what, I’m gonna be the default fall guy. And to be honest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of deserve it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But why are you the fall guy for the bootleg? I mean, you’re saying if your audio gets like, chopped up into multiple files
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or something, like, why is that on you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or just in general, if something goes south. Now I guess, in theory, with Marco’s fancy, fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pants, self-degrading setup, then hypothetically, as long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Marco can see me, it’s not a problem. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the beauty of this system, is that this system is immune to your audio being messed up. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like whatever happened during the call. Like this is like, you know, the call during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show that we broadcast over the live stream, like this is the bootleg, period. I don’t need your audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create it. It is being created as we speak. And as soon as we stop recording, I can upload it and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I know is it’s gonna be my fault whether I want it to be or not, and I’m already sad about it. It hasn’t even happened yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I guess this is a good time to tell our members that now the bootleg feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is live. It is in your member control panel. There’s a second feed you can add.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s basically replace slash RSS with slash bootleg and that’s how it works. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the member panel if you wanna have like little like quick adding actions and it’s up. It is now a member perk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You will now get the bootleg which is the recording of our live stream that is broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully, unedited, exactly what was broadcast over the live stream, that is now available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you as a podcast feed. The downside of this is that you get Skype audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality and you don’t get any fun edits that will, you know, make the show sound better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove talkovers and everything, maybe add some sound effects here and there. None of those edits will be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The advantage is that you get to hear anything that we thought was too bad to keep in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You get to hear all the meta discussion of things like, At the end, we start talking about what titles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pick and everything like that. You can hear whenever Casey Brickson says, all right, programming notes, should we do Ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or not? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get to hear any time Casey swears. And also, you get the show earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this way because we try to publish it within a few minutes of ending the live broadcast instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the edit, which takes me about half a day, usually goes up like the next afternoon. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a option now for our members. We appreciate all our members. that’s going very well, the whole membership thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. So we appreciate you all very much. And if you want to become a member, you can get the bootlegs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed now. And if not, we’re still cool. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely. I gotta tell them about the show notes too, and the bootlegs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, so there’s a few implementation details here. So the thing is, we do the show notes during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the editing process. When the bootleg first goes up, it will have the right title, but it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have show notes yet. Oh, it also doesn’t have chapters. I don’t know if that matters to any of the bootleg people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but probably not. that again that happens during the edit. So when the bootleg first goes up there’s no show notes but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I did was the bootleg episodes are just they have the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IDs and everything in the feed as the published episodes and so once the episode is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco published the bootleg gets updated to have the correct show notes description
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else not chapters that would require readout on the file so that’s not really possible easily but during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first like you know 12 hours or so or 18 whatever it is of the bootleg before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I publish the edited show it has no show notes but they will appear later if you happen to listen to them later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additionally if we have an episode where there is no live broadcast like sometimes if we have like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know an Apple person on the show we won’t do a live broadcast just to make them more comfortable and then we’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish the edited show those will still go in the bootleg feed so if you want to subscribe just to the bootleg feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can and you won’t miss an episode if we happen to have one that wasn’t published live. You’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the edited version instead of nothing. Similarly, if your membership expires,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feed will be updated. You will still get the published versions of each show and they’ll be all just be prefixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their titles to say like, hey your membership expired, here’s a link to renew them. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a fully functional feed for people who want to listen solely or primarily to the bootlegs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can basically subscribe only to that feed and you won’t miss an episode even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either your membership expires or we publish an episode that doesn’t have a live broadcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I thought the way you thought through this was both unsurprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the detail you got into on this, but also really refreshing and great that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you covered a lot of the edge cases that either I was worried about or hadn’t even thought of in the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place. And yeah, I think it’s important to stress that there will be times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one of us, maybe You never know might use a colorful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expletive adjective etc in order to explain something So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not the sort of thing you may want to listen to in front of children Additionally, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re downplaying The deftness and and the skill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you bring to the table as an editor That’s not to say that the bootleg feed isn’t useful. It’s not that it’s not interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think in a lot of ways some of the best moments of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a result of Marco doing very surgical, precise, and clever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edits. And so, I encourage all our members to certainly give it a try. It can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurt to try it. But I wouldn’t fault any of you if you thought, well, you know what, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait the extra, you know, half a day to a day, and get the pristine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey canonical version of ATP that Marco has sweat over. over, in some cases literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is sweat over editing and making as perfect as we can possibly make it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is a very cool perk for those that are interested, but just like membership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, if you’re not interested, that’s cool. We’re just happy you’re listening at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, you know, what you get from an unedited show, it sounds cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re like a super fan, you want to hear more of us, we are honored. It sounds really cool. It might not be as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool as you think in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey practice because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot like DVD extras, like the cut scenes, right? And you watch them and you’re like, Oh, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reason that was cut. It actually wasn’t as good as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John rest of the movie. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, so there is some value in editing of like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you might get more of the stuff before and after of us like messing around or doing administrative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work or something. It might not be good. So, You know, the main benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the bootleg seems to be people who want it quickly because it does get you the show about half a day earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So and depending on what time zone you’re in, that could be important for like your your weekly routine or commute or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there is a lot of value to people getting it sooner and that’s seemingly primarily why people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this kind of thing. But if you want it because you think we’re like withholding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of amazing content from the main feed, I assure you that’s generally not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because usually, usually if something is very good, we leave it in the show because it’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for all three of you neutral super fans out there, if there’s ever a time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco will cut something from the show, it’s typically some sort of post-show neutral that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often but not always I bring up and often but not always is indeed trash. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are one of the three neutral neutral super fans, now is your opportunity. sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to be a member and use the use the bootleg feed you might enjoy that just a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and one other clarification if you do sign up you don’t get all the historic bootlegs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever in the past like it’s basically from this point forward i think they have like two or three of the last episodes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there but like there’s not a whole archive just because i haven’t kept them all so we’re starting from basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing to think about for the bootleg i don’t know if this is a plus or minus listeners can decide but like
⏹️ ▶️ John when we do the show you know I don’t know, we talk about topics, especially if they’re difficult or
⏹️ ▶️ John controversial topics. And if we say something that we don’t want in the show, it gets edited out,
⏹️ ▶️ John we take a run at a topic and we change our mind and say something different or whatever, right? But that’s all in the bootleg,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if you listen to the bootleg and one of us says something stupid,
⏹️ ▶️ John check to see if it’s in the edited show. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s not, if it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s us going, oh, I said something stupid. and then we would go back and we’d try it again, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like people make mistakes, right? What I’m kind of afraid of is people listening to the bootleg and getting really mad that we
⏹️ ▶️ John said something, and it’s like, but that’s the point of editing. Like we made another try edit, and if you listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to the show, like maybe we cut out that whole segment because we thought our take on it was bad or wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John or changed our mind. Like that is what editing is for. By seeing the unedited one, you were getting a peek
⏹️ ▶️ John into the process of creating a thing. We’re letting you in on that. we don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be yelled at for making mistakes on our way to hopefully putting out a show.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can yell at us about the actual published show, people do that all the time, but I feel like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like, you’re getting to see a private thing. Obviously we stream it live to this tiny group of people who’s able
⏹️ ▶️ John to listen live, thank you live listeners in chat room, but now that we’re releasing the bootleg
⏹️ ▶️ John to potentially more people who can listen to it at their leisure, keep in mind, we’re inviting you into
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of this private space where we build the show that we then published. Lots of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make it to the show because it’s not good, but sometimes it makes it there because we talk about it afterwards and you say, you know what, we should just
⏹️ ▶️ John cut that whole segment because we don’t think, we’re not happy with that, we don’t want that to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the published episode. But guess what, it’s gonna be in the bootleg. And our discussion of it might not be in the bootleg, because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well I heard it in the bootleg, but you didn’t say anything about it then. We continue talking after we go off the air too, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, keep that in mind, please be nice to us, we’re inviting you into our little recording
⏹️ ▶️ John booth. providing a larger group into our little recording, but the chat room of course is always good to us and never says anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good point. Because like, we know part of the edits that I perform are like, for instance, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we say, Hey, what about that thing? Like what? How does that thing work? And then like some of us, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speculates and how something works. And then it turns out we were totally wrong. I will usually cut that if I can, if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like break any conversation around it, or any future references that that went back to it. Because I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have something in our show where like we just kind of waffled around for a minute and all of us didn’t know what we were talking about and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were all wrong and that doesn’t have any value to listeners. So like usually something like that happens I will try to cut it if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can. But other you know other things are might be things like social or speech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco habits that we’re trying to get better at. So for instance saying guys for everything. We’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really trying hard to be you know socially responsible, inclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as possible and so certain speech habits things like saying guys or unnecessarily making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gun reference by like using certain vocabulary. I try to edit those out if any of us slip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and say that. Matt Stauffer Using the wrong pronouns
⏹️ ▶️ John for a person. Brian Stauffer Right. Matt Stauffer
⏹️ ▶️ John all trying super hard, but we suck at it, me in particular.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So we edit that out. We fix it in
⏹️ ▶️ John post, right? But during the bootleg, you’re going to hear us mess up, right? So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the bootleg promise between us. You will be forgiving of our mistakes in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John for being able to see them all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, it’s a fun little member perk. I don’t expect this to be a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I would be shocked if we get more than like 100 people subscribe to the bootleg feeds. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those of you who are out there who actually want the unedited raw live stream feeds and can’t listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live stream directly, here it is. It’s now a member perk. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And keep it down or John will have to turn that car around.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want bumpers? Fine, here’s a bumper. Nice. We’re such jerky Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs-free iPhone 4 bumper
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco people. That was so great. We should cut this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing out of the show because we sound ungrateful. No. No. No. See?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The magic of editing, ladies and gentlemen.
Face ID recognizing masks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, okay, I feel like I kind of have to whisper this because I don’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody nobody tell Apple okay and nobody tell like Mac rumors but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it just me or is face ID starting to work with masks?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought I saw that today and then I decided I was crazy and so I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was wrong. I thought I’d accidentally left my phone unlocked and then when I went to use it I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mask gone because I was picking up some barbecue takeout and I didn’t and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t have the week should actually explore this because this is the only good barbecue based on vinegar in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the country. Don’t fight me because I’m right. North Carolina barbecues trash at Marco Arment on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you disagree. But anyway, the point being,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I lost my barbecue place and COVID I’m really sad. Wait, what? My barbecue place is gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one back at home Yeah, it’s gone. Oh no, I don’t know if I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to see you in the next 15 years, but I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day that you and I could go. Because I’m not a connoisseur, but I do really like barbecue and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to try yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m really upset.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that genuinely bums me out. I’m really sorry to hear that. You know, I think I’ve told the story on the show before. Now we’re on like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tangent number seven. But hey, welcome bootleg people. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Declan and I, when he was pretty young, would do like baby gym. It’s a place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Romp and Roll, but it was basically like, you know, baby, not even gymnastics, just like baby gym
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. And he and I would do that on Sunday mornings. And then we would go to one of my favorite barbecue places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the area and do lunch together. And we did this like every week. And we did this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably six months or a year. And one day, I don’t know, it was probably a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year or two ago now. It was the whole family. We were going to go into this barbecue joint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it just had suddenly closed out of nowhere. And I kid you not, I cried a little bit. I was so upset.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, the good news is it was a very small local chain and so there’s actually another one almost equidistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my house, don’t be creepy, from the one that closed. So we can still get our fix,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s so funny that this restaurant, which in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scheme of things, even though I would argue it’s excellent barbecue, in the grand scheme of things like it’s a barbecue joint, who cares? But this restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had like such a defining moment or section of my life that I spent my time, you know, with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my son every Sunday morning or Sunday lunchtime with him. And it just up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disappeared. And what really chapped my hindquarters was like six months ago, I said to Declan, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, do you remember us going to Romp and Roll? And we would go, we would go get Q and it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And it was like, and we do that all the time. Q Barbecue, just literally the letter Q.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m not shortening it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was worried about that. Sorry, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Going to get the cue. We were going to the establishment named
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Q. That’s better, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you remember we used to go to Q all the time? We used to get barbecued, just you and me, and he looked at me and blinked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple times. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean? And I was just like, oh no, it’s starting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kids don’t remember that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, it’s starting. This thing that was so pivotal for me that involves you, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just have zero recollection of it. It’s starting now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five and a half years
⏹️ ▶️ John ____ ____ Do you remember my stories of my mother saying, you know, making memories for my children?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the same deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with my son. Although my question for you is, did you do a romp and roll with Michaela?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not nearly as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Second child. Second child.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I can give you a thousand and five reasons, but second child is the
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a thing that I did with Alex with a similar memory in place or whatever and asked him about
⏹️ ▶️ John it years ago and he has no recollection. I should have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco taken more pictures. My
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is Alex, like it was, it was like when, you know, cell phone cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John slash iPod touch cameras were bad and I never, you know, I don’t have lots of pictures of it. I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John today I would have a hundred pictures of it. That’s, that’s one good thing my daughter gets is because she was, because she was born later.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have many more of those pictures, those casual things, but yeah, I’d go to a place with him practically every single
⏹️ ▶️ John day and we have this routine and he has no recollection of the routine. So it’s just for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. Anyway, we are so far, this is my fault, we are so deep in the tangents, I don’t even know where we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to start. Where did this come from? You were talking about barbecue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it turns out that, so masks, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Face ID and masks. Yes, thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, wow, did we get deep on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Holy smokes. Pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t tell whether this is a side effect of the way Face ID works, where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco training itself. Because like, so, okay, the way Face ID, and I don’t know if Touch ID worked this way, but at least the way Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID works, I’m pretty sure, is that if it fails to recognize you and then you input your passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feeds that into the learning algorithm of like, okay, it didn’t recognize you, but this is you as verified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the passcode. So learn that this is you and try to get better next time. I think that’s how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm, I don’t think so because you could, that would make it learn random crap. I think what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John is every time you successfully unlock it, like there’s some distance you are from the ideal thing that it thinks it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for. And there’s some, you know, leeway to say, well, it’s not exactly what I was looking for, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John close enough so you can unlock. I think those unlocks adjust the model, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if the failures did it, because then you just like pointed it in the dirt and then unlock it with your code and it’d be like, I guess you
⏹️ ▶️ John look like dirt now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have it learn based on failures because failures can fail for all sorts of reasons. I think it’s the successful unlock, same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Touch ID, successful unlocks that are within the margin of error, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it allows it to evolve over time. I guess, I suppose it’s the same way, not that anyone’s iPhone batteries last this long, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same way it would work if as you aged, right? You’re always within the margin of error and slowly, gradually you were changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the model. That’s my guess. I don’t know for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Or things like, you know, your beard gets longer or something, right? Like, yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So, so there is some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some like, you know, learning aspect to it where if it fails, but then you unlock it, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were as close or it’s something, so there are some element of it worth learning. So I don’t know if it’s that, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly learning what I look like with a mask and accepting it. But it started out like I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one masked unlock like two weeks ago and I was like, how did I do that? Wait a minute, was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a fluke? And I couldn’t get it to happen again. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John mask material? Because it’s IR, remember? So maybe you have an IR transparent mask.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but it wasn’t, I’ve been wearing mostly the same couple of types of masks for most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just fish masks all day. Mostly fish masks, yeah. Like if I’m in like a higher risk place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if I’m running, like if I’m in a high risk place, I have the KN95 things. please don’t at me. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m in the, if I’m doing like a running kind of thing where I’m gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sweating a lot in it, I’ll use a disposable procedure mask, like one of those square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones with the flaps, because those, I don’t mind messing them up and after a few uses I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can throw it away and not feel bad because I have a box of 50 of them or something, so it’s not a big deal. I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess up my fish mask with sweat too unnecessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just hope people are picturing a giant scaly fish on the front of your face when they say this. when you say fish mask,
⏹️ ▶️ John baby fish mask, sweeping the nation. Another movie Marco hasn’t seen from his list from five years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, it started out with like one unlock, and I’m like, wait a minute, that just did it with a mask, and I couldn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to happen again. And then like the next day, it happened again. I noticed that like, if I would hold the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone from certain distances from my face, or certain angles, it was more likely to succeed than others.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Over the next couple of weeks leading up to about now, it just started working more and more often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now my phone unlocks with a mask, I’d say probably about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half the time that I try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now you’re on iOS 14 though, aren’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re on the beta. Yes, and so I thought it might be that, but I heard from some friends who are using 13.6, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new 13 branch, I’ve heard that it’s happening there too. So here’s the thing, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, did Apple quietly tweak the algorithm to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more accepting, which I think would inherently also make it less secure, why they probably wouldn’t want to talk about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or is it just a coincidence that my phone and many other people’s phones seemingly are starting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn what you look like with masks on and starting to accept it, not intentionally, but just as a result of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the algorithm works?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is very interesting, and I don’t have… I don’t really know one way or the other, but I will say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on only my own anecdata, so I could be dead wrong about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there have been several times when I’ve had my mouth area, This is like pre-mask, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the before times when we could see people. I would have like my mouth area covered up by, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like maybe I’m laying in bed and I have the blankets up really high because it’s wintertime and so like part of my mouth is covered or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. And I feel like there’s other examples, but I can’t think of any at the moment. But basically when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lower, say, quarter or third of my face has been somehow occluded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yet face ID would still work. Now this is not exactly the same as having a mask on, but it’s similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I remember thinking to myself, I feel like this is mostly about the eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think it is actually just the eyes because if you look at the videos we saw back when Face Eddie was first put out, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John see the big, you know, the IR dots all over the people’s faces. And it’s like, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does look at the eyes and everything like that to find the features and distances and angles between them and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But it’s also the contours of the face. That’s the whole point. You can’t feel you can’t fool it with a picture of yourself. You have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have, you know, a 3D model of your face like it’s this whole amalgam of things right so to the degree that
⏹️ ▶️ John the mask changes the shape of your face like it’s not like it just cares about your eyes and your eyebrows and your
⏹️ ▶️ John nose it cares about the whole shape of your face if the mask is form-fitting or if it’s within
⏹️ ▶️ John the margin of error I can imagine eventually learning oh it seems like this face is all rumply and
⏹️ ▶️ John flat on the lower part and then it just would come to accept that although some people remember when we first started
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing masks people tried to train with the masks and that didn’t work so maybe Maybe what they did was tamp down
⏹️ ▶️ John its sort of face normative coding where it
⏹️ ▶️ John expected everyone to have a mouth, right? And it said, look, if you don’t even see a mouth, something has gone wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John so try again. And now it’s like, you know, lay off on that. If they trained it or if, you know, that’s the way to try it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John erase your face from face ID and train it with a mask. And if you can train it with a mask and it works 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time, it probably means they changed whatever part of the algorithm that insisted on
⏹️ ▶️ John finding something that looked more like a mouth and it’s okay for it to just be a blank down there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The rejection of masked faces from the training screen might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a different set of criteria than what the learning algorithm of face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco permits. So like maybe it won’t let you train yourself with a face mask, but it will let itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn into that direction over time because that’s like that’s what I’m seeing is like it didn’t work at first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried all the training methods back, you know, a couple months ago when people started first experimenting with that with like, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fold it in half or whatever, like try all those different things. I couldn’t get it into work, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been using the same phone with face ID repeatedly with masks for months now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re slowly starting to work. And so that’s why I feel like it’s probably a learning algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but because I have recently installed the beta, then I kind of felt like maybe, you know, maybe it’s a 14 thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t know. I’m happy it is this way because it’s one of those things where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be better for all of society right now if it was more convenient to wear a mask.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Face ID working is one thing that’s within Apple’s control to affect that pretty strongly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yet, they’re not gonna get everybody to wear a mask by simply making this one change, but it removes one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more element of friction to wear a mask. And if for all the people out there who aren’t wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them or who are doing the kind of, you know, like the chin strap thing, which is not wearing one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because something about it irritates them or annoys them and they’re like, I don’t want to do this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any small thing that anybody can do to make wearing a mask easier and more universal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more accepted will have strong dividends here. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have intentionally tweaked the algorithm to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just accept that more, but you know, they would probably have to reduce the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mathematical security of it to do that because they’re reducing the amount of data that’s recognized as valid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they would probably never be able to really say that publicly, because they would probably get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially trashed by various communities for reducing the security of it. But it’s best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the world if they do this. So I’m not sure whether this is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an unintentional learning algorithm thing, or that they are slowly tweaking this over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that is kind of like the most pragmatic thing them to do, but they could never talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m gonna have to keep an eye out on this, especially with 13.6. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m crumbling on the beta on my carry phone. I think it’s gonna happen sometime in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beta or two. Like if we get three or four down that aren’t complete disasters, then I’m gonna probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commit because I’m a big wuss. And I’m not going anywhere anymore. I’m not going anywhere.
Current beta quality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will caution you. Now, so. Oh, yeah, steer me straight, steer me straight. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ve had the beta since day one. Like, I put it on my main phone on day one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we’re in beta two, and the public beta, I believe, just started for iOS. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, but it’s not like super amazing that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to really have it for any real reason. So there’s not a lot of like upside to it, and there are still downsides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, sometimes I have to reboot my phone to get web views to work in any app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or there does seem to be some kind of change to the way things are fetched over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network in certain conditions. Sometimes apps that fetch images or whatever over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the network will just stop until I either force quit them and restart them or reboot the whole phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something’s up with network fetches and connectivity and stuff like that. I don’t know what it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, but it’s persisted throughout betas one and two. And so there are little things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that like yeah this is actually really good for a beta 1 and a beta 2 compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you know past years but it’s still very much a beta. You shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still shouldn’t install it unless you have a pretty good reason to because there are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beta bugs. It doesn’t work as well as you think it should yet because it is still really early. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re not really itching to install it for a particular reason that you know it will make better in your life or that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to for work, I wouldn’t recommend it still.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so here’s the thing. I want, I don’t want to get specific about it, but I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have all of my health kit data in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test device. And currently my test device is Aaron’s old iPhone X, which is not logged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. I don’t believe it’s logged into my iCloud. It’s not logged into really anything. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could log into iCloud and then it would sync up all my health data. And that is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easiest way to do it, but I’m trying to be a good boy and not put iOS betas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway on iCloud. And so, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any good way of exporting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and importing health data as far as I’m aware. And so I kind of want to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Carry phone so I can get all that data, but I know I shouldn’t. But I think you’ve scared me enough to at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep me as a good boy for at least another couple of weeks. But guaranteed, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only a matter of time before I cave, because I’m a big wuss.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like, it won’t be the end of the world when you finally do. You’ll see the same thing I do, which is like, yeah, it’s fine most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but oh, every like, you know, every couple of days you’ll be reminded, oh, this is very much a beta still.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, I would, in particular, I would not recommend it on the Apple Watch. That is in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit of a rougher state. In particular, the battery life area is still pretty rough on the Apple Watch, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also had occasional issues where like, the face of the watch will just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freeze for a while. including the time part of it. Oh yeah! Yeah, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of important. So yeah, I’ve had more issues with the watchOS Beta than with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS Beta, but neither of them are like fatal, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely not recommended that you install them install them unless you have a really good reason.
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///ATP mug care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you tell me about the mugs that everyone is getting but I haven’t gotten yet? Please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we when we do our sales, we have like the store page was like a landing page at ATP FM
⏹️ ▶️ John and that leads to the cotton bureau site where you can buy stuff and we have descriptions of the product or whatever. And you know, the deal is like
⏹️ ▶️ John you order your stuff and then the sale ends after some period of time and then all the stuff gets manufactured
⏹️ ▶️ John based on how many orders we got and then we ship it. Like that’s the way we do these things. But one of the side effects
⏹️ ▶️ John of that is that after you order something and all the pages you know go away, like we take down the store page and
⏹️ ▶️ John we say we’re not having a sale now and all that other stuff, you can’t, if there was like
⏹️ ▶️ John information about the products that were there, you can’t go back and reference it. Which usually doesn’t matter because what are
⏹️ ▶️ John you referencing, right? But this is the first year we sold mugs and a question a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John have about the mugs is that people were asking when they were ordering them, hey is it microwave safe? And so we
⏹️ ▶️ John had that information. But another piece of information that now that people have the mugs, they want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John is, is it dishwasher safe? And I want to tell you, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re hearing this either before you got your mug or before you washed it, these mugs are not dishwasher safe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not put them in the dishwasher. They will burn your whole house down. No, they won’t. They’ll be fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the logo will probably come off. So don’t put your ATV mug in the dishwasher. Wash it by hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I hope the people who like the show enough to get a mug
⏹️ ▶️ John far into the episode and hear me saying, don’t put it in the dishwasher because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you put it in the dishwasher it might destroy the logo and that’s the whole reason why you bought the mug. So wash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fair, it is a very nice mug otherwise. However, yeah, I mean I’ve been a fan of novelty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printed mugs for a long time and I always hand wash my favorite mug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever my favorite mug is for that given year or two, I always hand wash it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had mugs that I didn’t hand wash and with any printer, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much any screen printed mug, and these are screen printed, but pretty much any screen printed mug,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you put it in the dishwasher on a regular basis, like if you do it once you probably won’t notice anything wrong, but if you do it on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis, the logo, printing will start to either fade or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run or both and so it you know it’s just an effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printing thing so hand wash your mug if you care about it if you only intended to use it for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months maybe you might get away with dishwashing it then but yeah I wouldn’t recommend it
⏹️ ▶️ John it is microwave safe though you’re fine to microwave it just don’t put in the dishwasher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is all we should make a mug addition that is not microwave safe because it’s gold foil on
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah that’s that’s the the caveat about the mugs if we had used the metallic
⏹️ ▶️ John ink it wouldn’t be microwave safe although it might put on quite a light show but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we did not use metallic
⏹️ ▶️ John ink so it is microwave safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also like man we we sure we’re not great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at logo design and the look the rainbow ATP logo that everyone loves uh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wonderful because it looks really great but from a like merchandise design perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s terrible because it requires like eight colors to print
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Incredibly it’s the most expensive logo ever made.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. It’s like the apple logo.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was telling the story of like when apple originally had the rainbow logo on its hardware when they were first manufacturing hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wanted to put the rainbow logo like on the apple 2 because it’s so expensive like every additional
⏹️ ▶️ John color you add adds complexity and cost and it just it’s like can we just put just a solid
⏹️ ▶️ John color silhouette but of course steve jobs insisted that it had to be rainbow striped. Yeah, if we ever do mugs
⏹️ ▶️ John again, we might do a monochrome one. We might, we have all sorts of things we might look into, but that’s, that’s for a future date.
⏹️ ▶️ John For now, everybody, please enjoy your mugs. Indeed. Except for Casey, who didn’t get his yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not yet. It’s coming. It’s coming. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not yet. Wait, what? So, okay. You don’t drink coffee. What, what do the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you put in mugs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, you want to get the merch for your own thing. In fact, I’ve, I’ve realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’ve talked about this, but I’ve realized over the last few months, particularly since I stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving the house, that basically my entire wardrobe is ATP t-shirts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at least during the summertime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I am that guy that is wearing my own band t-shirt everywhere I go now because I have so many of them because I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy, I buy at least one of every run. Like I didn’t get the edition way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back when because I’m a fool, but I got a different, I think I got the sport shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during that run, for example. And so I have all these ATP shirts and I just wear them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constantly. And I wanted a mug because I think they look great and I wanted to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a copy of the thing that we made. But beyond that, when it gets cold, I love me a hot chocolate. Hot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chocolate is delightful. And so that’s what I’ll be putting in there. And that’s at least a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting than water. Right, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m drinking nothing out of my mug. Although at work, back when I used to go to work, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a mug that’s got my company logo on it that I got as part of your welcome your new employee,
⏹️ ▶️ John like first day package of stuff 11 years ago. That’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John our company logo. We’ve had a logo redesigned since then or whatever. And so it was a point of pride that I got
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the super old mugs. But anyway, I would drink water out of my mug at my desk. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done that for a decade. Water, I’d come in in the morning, I’d get my mug, I’d go into the little kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John area. They have little water machines there that’ll give you both ice and water. and I would fill it
⏹️ ▶️ John up with water, bring it back to my desk, that’s all I do all day is refill my cup, mug with water. Why was I using a mug? Because they
⏹️ ▶️ John gave me a mug and it’s got the company logo on it. But when I’m at home, even though I have these mugs, I don’t use them, I just use regular
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses. I got the mugs because my daughter uses mugs for various tea concoctions
⏹️ ▶️ John that she’s into lately. And also I just wanted to have, like Casey just wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John have a copy of the mug or whatever. And me being me, I got one for my daughter to use and then
⏹️ ▶️ John I got one for me to keep pristine, it’s up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in the attic now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then my wife wanted a mug too. And so we have three mugs. So my wife’s got one,
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter’s got one, and I’ve got one in the attic. Most of the merch that I buy, I don’t tend to wear on my own shirts. I have a
⏹️ ▶️ John million podcast shirts from other podcasts. That’s mostly what I wear. But I do want
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much one copy of most of the shirts that we make. And so they’re all neatly folded in the attic, including the edition,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I will sell to Casey for a huge amount of money when I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s true, you should do that. It’ll be a pristine, never worn,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if it weren’t for you sharing, at least with us, I don’t think they were shared publicly, but you shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the two of us, I don’t know, maybe around the time of the Mac Pro, I believe, you shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with us photos of your attic. And I’ve seen it, and there’s a lot of stuff up there, but it’s not nearly as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad as I had envisioned. But the way you talk about it, and the way you talk about how your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house is supposedly crumbling, I am surprised that your attic has not become your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second floor. And you know, it’s like the attic just hasn’t fallen through and has taken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the place of the second story of the house because you have, you, it sounds the way you talk about it, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have so much stuff up there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s a lot of stuff. Like you saw the picture, it’s things stacked basically to the ceiling, to the angled ceiling. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not enough stuff has left the attic. We need really most of the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John up there is like baby and toddler stuff that we need to get rid of. But on the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John side of things, it’s just boxes and boxes filled with computer hardware. Now my Mac Pro is up there too, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a big. So I was gonna give you crap about using a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee mug as your work water cup, because it doesn’t hold that much, like for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water cup. But then you said, all I do all day is go back and refill it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a. Oh, I see. Yeah, like, cause I always felt bad. Like I was gonna say, I always felt bad because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t smoke. I’m like, that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it turns out I don’t feel bad about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, I didn’t have anything in the workday back when I had a real job that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would, you know, give me an excuse to get up and leave my desk on a regular basis. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I too would, you know, drink a lot of water, but I was using like, you know, one of those big like 20 ounce. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I realize if I was just using like a 12 ounce coffee mug that would have been way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I could get up and refill it twice as often.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mostly just sipping it. Like I would fill it in the morning and then I wouldn’t have to fill it up again until like lunchtime
⏹️ ▶️ John or after lunch. So I’m not guzzling it down. It wasn’t so I could take more frequent trips. It’s just, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I had. And you know, a mug is a pretty stable vessel, right? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s short and squat on the desk, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why does that matter?
⏹️ ▶️ John At work I did not practice the thing of keeping the drink on a different level than my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John back when I had a desktop it was because the desktop was under you know was on the floor and the drink was on top and they
⏹️ ▶️ John were on opposite sides that was all set now I’ve got a laptop and I had the laptop on the
⏹️ ▶️ John same level albeit at the far other side of the desk because I got my drink by my right hand and the laptop would be way over in
⏹️ ▶️ John the left-hand corner but anyway I’m at home now and I’m using water glasses and everything is fine.
Thunderbolt 4 vs. USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. All right, John, tell me about Thunderbolt and USB4, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this topic is always confusing. It will eternally be confusing, not the least of which
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are cables that look the same on the outside and have no markings on them but behave incredibly differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last show, we talked a little bit about USB4 or Thunderbolt 3 and 4, and I was saying a Thunderbolt 4 doesn’t get any
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, but it has some different constraints than Thunderbolt 3. And apparently, I
⏹️ ▶️ John got some things wrong about USB4 versus Thunderbolt 3, imagine that because it’s so confusing. Jonathan Dees wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ John with some more information. So what he says is, while USB4
⏹️ ▶️ John is conceptually based on Thunderbolt 3, there are material differences regarding implementation such as signaling rates and coding schemes,
⏹️ ▶️ John et cetera. According to the USB4 specifications, interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 products only
⏹️ ▶️ John optional for USB4 hosts and devices. This is where you get into this whole world of like, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this port and this cable and this thing. Like there are lots of things in these specs that are optional, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So USB 4 being quote-unquote the same as Thunderbolt 3 is not really true It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that USB 4 can optionally be interoperable with Thunderbolt 3, but doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily have to be Which is just maddening, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so interoperability is enabled by using the USB type-c Thunderbolt alternate mode
⏹️ ▶️ John The bulk of the USB 4 spec explains how USB 4 works and a single chapter is devoted to covering What would you need to do differently
⏹️ ▶️ John in order to be compatible with Thunderbolt 3 products? Thunderbolt 4 on the other hand is the same protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John as USB 4 Now you’re probably already confused. So Thunderbolt 3 different
⏹️ ▶️ John USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4 same right Thunderbolt 4 used before the same but
⏹️ ▶️ John With mandatory support for Thunderbolt 3 interoperability. Let me read that sentence again Thunderbolt 4 on the other
⏹️ ▶️ John hand is the same protocol as USB 4 but with mandatory support for Thunderbolt 3 interoperability So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a Thunderbolt 4 port You know it’s compatible with Thunderbolt 3 because that’s a mandatory
⏹️ ▶️ John interoperable thing. If you have a USB 4 port, you’re not sure whether it supports Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ John or not. Anyway, Thunderbolt 4 uses USB 4 as its primary protocol, but Thunderbolt and DisplayPort alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John modes are also required. We will link you to a PDF if you want to read more about this spec. All I
⏹️ ▶️ John can say is, expect more confusion about what the USB-C shaped holes on the sides of your Mac do. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s already said in that we did talk about last week that They’re gonna support Thunderbolt on their Macs, which
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t be a surprise. Will it be Thunderbolt 3? Will it be Thunderbolt 4? If Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ships a USB 4 port that is Thunderbolt 4 compatible We can just call it a Thunderbolt 4 port because if
⏹️ ▶️ John we called it a USB 4 port We might not know if it has Thunderbolt 3 compatibility, so they’ll call
⏹️ ▶️ John it We’ll get on the other side of this eventually, but you know not
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next Five years I guess in the meantime time Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ John is still the best because it has compatible with the most things but the
⏹️ ▶️ John top speed of Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3 is exactly the same so you’re not getting a speed advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we will be revisiting this topic in the future when the ARM Macs come out and we can figure out what the hell the
⏹️ ▶️ John ports actually do but for now let’s move on.
No touch-screen rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of ARM Macs, the rumors haven’t mentioned touch screens yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there are some other things that have been mentioned, including the thought that the 13.3-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro with a form factor similar to the current 13.3-inch MacBook Pro could be the first one to get an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM-based chip. That sounds wonderful as someone who just bought one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is like in the last show we were talking about the potential ARM Mac hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you were the least optimistic that we would be getting something radically. I think maybe if we have that eventually, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the first crop of ones will just be, look like the current Macs, but have different things on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there was a little, another crop of these rumors, like, oh, which ones are gonna be the first ARM ones? Maybe it’s gonna be a 13 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Previously, there were rumors about a 16 inch and mini LED screens and all sorts of hardware rumors.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when these went around again, I think because most of the people in the tech sphere had been listening to podcasts like ours,
⏹️ ▶️ John where we were discussing the potential features of ARM Mac hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone commented, Hmm, more rumors and still nothing about touchscreens. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s because, I don’t know, like the parts leaks are from the panel
⏹️ ▶️ John source but not the digitizer thing, if those two things can be separate, like, I don’t know. Maybe it just hasn’t come out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the longer these rumors go on and we still hear nothing about touchscreens, the more it seems like Casey is right and that the
⏹️ ▶️ John first crop of RMAX won’t have touchscreens. I still don’t understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, unless it was some kind of emergency and they just wanted to ship and somehow couldn’t do it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it would be so much cleaner. That’s why everyone has been talking about it on their podcast, including us. So much cleaner to ship the first
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM to the Mac with touchscreens because then you have from day one, oh, you know all those Macs that can run iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPad apps? Yeah, they’re all touch. So no problem. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John confusion about, well, how the hell do I use this iPhone app on my Mac? Oh, it’s a touchscreen. They’re all touchscreens.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the ARM ones are touchscreens. And the Intel ones don’t have to be because they can’t run iPhone and iPad apps. Like it would
⏹️ ▶️ John just be so clean, such a clean break of like the old world, where the Macs couldn’t do this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new world when they can. And for all the other reasons we’ve listed and we’ll talk about more later maybe. But
⏹️ ▶️ John these rumors so far aren’t mentioning it. And it made me rethink something I said in the last show where
⏹️ ▶️ John I said like, these are Macs are gonna come. It’s not like they’re gonna have, when we’re talking about the touch bar, it’s like, it’s not like they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have a separate T2 running the touch bar and then another arm
⏹️ ▶️ John system on a chip running the whole rest of the system. Why would they do that? It would be so wasteful. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re really shipping a line of RMAX that are basically just like the Intel MAX, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we swap out the Intel CPU and maybe the discrete GPU for a system
⏹️ ▶️ John on a chip, but everything else stays the same, maybe they come with a touch bar. And maybe that touch bar is run by the T2 for
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons I was mentioning in the last show of why they wouldn’t do it is like, they don’t wanna have to re-architect it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John T2 runs this different OS that runs the touch bar and it’s on a little separate computer that communicates with the main computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if, you know, it’s, they’d have to re-implement all of that if they want to keep the touch bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John because these are the Macs that are basically just like the old Macs, but different guts on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they would ship, like, it would be so gross to have an ARM system on a chip and also a
⏹️ ▶️ John T2 in there. But if these, if these rumors that don’t mention
⏹️ ▶️ John touchscreen and just keep talking about, you know, sort of models similar to our current models are true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe like, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t want that to be the case, but it’s more of
⏹️ ▶️ John a possibility now than I thought it was. The rumors also mentioned a quote unquote, all new
⏹️ ▶️ John form factor design, which is in the future, the 2021 models, right? So that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, okay, well, this first crop are not like that, but the second crop are the ones that have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the rounded corner screens and the touch screens and all that other stuff. I don’t know. We’re still far
⏹️ ▶️ John away from ship dates. All we know is that the first ARM-based Mac is supposed to ship before the end of the year, so just assume like
⏹️ ▶️ John December, or holidays or whatever, I don’t know. It’ll be a while still. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be keeping my eye on these rumors, but the fact that the rumors never mention touchscreens has really dumped
⏹️ ▶️ John a bucket of cold water on all my optimism from the last show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure we can actually really read much into that because the rumors so far about whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future Mac hardware is have been so thin.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re all over the map. They’ve predicted like every possible Mac you can imagine in every size been predicted at
iPad Pros as ARM Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about iPad Pros becoming like an ARM Mac of themselves?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is some feedback from Remy Vachon. Since they announced ARM Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John officially, I’ve been thinking about the fact that the iPad Pro with a keyboard and mouse is very close to being an ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac on the hardware side. This is assuming, like I said in the last show, that they make these ARM Macs that have
⏹️ ▶️ John almost all the features of an iPad, a curved screen, a touchscreen, all those things,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I’m thinking about the possibility of Apple letting users install Mac OS on iPads, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro ones. If Apple releases a new ARM-based Mac with a touchscreen, rounded corners, cellular antenna, et cetera, that does sound
⏹️ ▶️ John an awful lot like an iPad Pro. I just can’t picture the idea of going to an Apple store, having the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the new ARM Mac next to each other with almost the exact same hardware feature set, the only difference
⏹️ ▶️ John being that Apple forbids you from installing Mac OS on the iPad, and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John install iPad OS on the Mac, right? We think the hardware is gonna be similar. We think that the Mac system on
⏹️ ▶️ John a chip, especially for the low to mid end laptops, is going to be based on the same design as
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad system on a chip. If not, it’s not gonna be exactly the same, but what are the A14 core,
⏹️ ▶️ John that design we think is gonna be used in Macs as well. If they all have touchscreens, obviously the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John would have more RAM, it would have more storage, it would be bigger, it would have an attached keyboard, a lot of this stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware wise, like the distinction we’ve been making so far, it’s like, oh, well the Mac can run all the stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can run iPad apps, it can run iPhone apps, It can run Mac apps. It does all the things. That’s why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. That’s what differentiates it. But if you’re looking at an iPad and saying, okay, but why can’t this
⏹️ ▶️ John run all the things? One excuse would be, well, that iPad has six gigs of RAM, and that’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to run a lot of Mac apps, right? So I think, to answer the question here, why
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t they let you run macOS on the iPad? It’d be tight. You’d have to give the iPads a lot more RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John at which point you’re just basically turning into a Mac. The second thing is that macOS Farm
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be adjusted to run on whatever Mac ARM hardware Apple ships,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be some effort to make macOS run on iPad hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some additional effort, right? Because iPads aren’t exactly the same as the ARM Macs are gonna be. A lot of the guts are similar, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not exactly the same. There are things that are different about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The hardware is different, in particular the power tuning or whatever, like all the stuff they’re gonna do with power
⏹️ ▶️ John The arm max it’s going to be different than what’s done on the iPads Just because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the batteries are bigger and there’s different expectations by battery life and all that stuff but the main reason I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is Product line differentiation like everything I just talked about results in a price difference and a capability
⏹️ ▶️ John difference And that’s how you segment your product line so the max cost more. They’re bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re heavier like for the most part all this is true. They have more stuff more storage more RAM Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they have more options to configure them. We’ll see about that, like if they have different CPU options or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how you segregate a product line. Now, it may seem weird that like, oh, why do they have a whole different
⏹️ ▶️ John OS? But the whole point of this platform unification is, yeah, they have a different OS, but they look kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. And you can run iPad apps in both places, it’s just that one has more. The Mac, you can run
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff, and then more. Why can’t I run Mac OS on the iPad? Because the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the machine that lets you do the more stuff. That’s what the Mac is for. So I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too confusing. Like I can see how you can squint, especially if you’re looking at the lowest end, lightest
⏹️ ▶️ John weight Mac laptop and the highest end heaviest iPad and start seeing a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of crossover there. But there is a worthwhile distinction between them. The
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad presumably would get better battery life. It would be simpler, right? It can
⏹️ ▶️ John only run iPads apps. It can’t run Mac apps. And that’s a feature because the people who want an iPad don’t want the complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS, right? So I don’t think this will be a problem, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John from a technological perspective, it seems a little bit weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it also is just so, like the way you design the hardware is just so incredibly different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, think about like the weight balance of, you know, if you have an iPad and a keyboard and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouse, or whatever, the iPad has to operate independently of everything else. So it has to be able to be detachable. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to have all of its computing guts, the battery, everything all in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablet itself. So in that kind of like fake laptop configuration, all in the screen side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a Mac where the screen is not detachable, at least not if you want it to keep working, they can put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff in the bottom and the weight balance is totally different. And, and it’s, if you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it on your lap, a Mac laptop is way more comfortable and pragmatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most ways than, and I’ve had with a keyboard stand and a mouse or something because it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s designed to like sit in your lap, it has all that weight in the bottom and the screen lid is super thin and light and doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tip forward or stays in your lap and varies.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the weird thing about this though. Whatever you’re saying is true, but you could say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what the Mac is for. And of course the iPad is for the thing where you’re gonna touch it, but touching
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen of a laptop like the Mac is better than touching it on the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John and the keyboard because when you’re touching the screen, you’re potentially tipping it, right? And so the more weight you
⏹️ ▶️ John have in the base, the better it works as a touch screen. I know everyone likes their magic keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Actually, we just got one of those now, too, and it’s kind of neat, right? But, and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use your iPad by touching the screen but it would actually be a better touch screen if all that weight
⏹️ ▶️ John was in the base. It would bounce around more, though. But it’s less tippy, like it wouldn’t bounce around
⏹️ ▶️ John more. Like, assuming the hinge is just as stiff and I think it is, there’s less danger of it tipping over. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s a big deal anyway. I don’t think people are tipping over their iPads. Like, people don’t accidentally poke them with all their
⏹️ ▶️ John force and they go flipping over, right? but in the grand scheme of things, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably be better if, I mean, I don’t know, maybe there’s also the inertia thing of like, well, it has more
⏹️ ▶️ John mass so it’s harder to get moving, but if you get it moving, you can tip over, I don’t know. Either way, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that move of like, mostly using touch for a screen that’s mostly vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John is not ideal. Like when people have their iPads in that case, it’s because they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the keyboard and the trackpad, and yes, also the touch thing at the same time, But like, they’ve decided when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in that configuration that they’re not really doing touch primary. Right, that’s the whole point, the whole reason
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard is there. It’s the whole reason everybody likes the trackpad. It’s because I’m saying, okay, when I’m in this mode, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly gonna be using touch. And the other factor I would throw in here is convertible Macs, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John none exist now, but once they can run iPad apps, that’s on the table for Apple to pick up at any point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Convertible meaning that they can fold over and become a tablet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and honestly, I think that would be really cool feature set to explore for them because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the PC industry did that a long time ago and not everybody needs it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not everyone uses it, but it is kind of cool for the people who do want it. And, you know, it’s like we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to fantasize about what if somebody made a computer that could flip around and be a tablet. Like, nope, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been doing that for a long time. We know exactly what if and it’s, you know, specialized but pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool for people who want it. I think the bigger challenge to this, to like, you know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is iPad and Mac stuff so different is you know John you kind of breezed over it earlier but just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t fully appreciate until you think about it quite how low-end iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware is in a lot of ways compared to Mac hardware and not in all ways you know like things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know processors are going to be you know processors and iOS hardware out now are very competitive with Macs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure you know they’re gonna continue to be for for the foreseeable future into the ARM Mac world. iOS devices tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have significantly better cameras front and back. You know there’s other other you know hardware things where iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices are competitive or better than Macs but the highest-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices cost as much as the lowest-end Macs and that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all because Intel is greedy. That’s part of it sometimes but like that’s not most of the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the reason is Macs have way more memory, way more disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space, way more expansion ports, PCI lanes, throughput,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controllers, peripheral support, so much more stuff in them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than iOS devices. And iOS as an operating system is optimized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this like, you know, super low resource environment because it was made for the phone first. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s optimized for very low RAM, very low disk space, you know, super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited multitasking, you know, very, very limited app resource controls to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure apps aren’t burning too much of your battery or using too many resources or whatever else. Very, very strict controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that stuff. Macs aren’t. Macs have a lot more software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variability, a lot more hardware support, much higher ceilings on all the various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources that are available to them and for most of the hardware resources. It’s a whole different world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and while you could technically probably make an iPad run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS, like if you were Apple, it would be a really low-end Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t think Apple wants to make the high-end version of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other product line attempt to behave like the worst low-end version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different product line. I think Apple would rather have the really great iPad be a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, and then if you want a really great Mac, you can buy a really great Mac. And I don’t think they want to make the iPad look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad by making it try to be a bad Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wouldn’t burn through that battery so fast if you ran Mac OS on it. Like it would just be a bad experience but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the main thing is the complexity of Mac OS is not a plus on the iPad. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that especially for you know I think all iPad customers appreciate the things they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to worry about on the iPad that they do on the Mac and bringing that experience over to the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and also having terrible battery life and all the other things you mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Small screen too. Yeah. Like the biggest iPad they sell is the size of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smallest Mac screen they sell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So anyway, I think this differentiation is not going to be a problem in the short term, despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that I feel like it will be an homogenous family and you will have to explain at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s easy to explain. It’s like the biggest one that can do the most is the most expensive and
⏹️ ▶️ John the one with the most variability, that’s the Mac. And then you step down to the iPad and the phone. Like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes some sense. It’s just that we know the details of it and we, you know, the historic names like, well, this one’s called Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS and that one’s called iPadOS. But like, this is something people forget. I see lots of these articles, especially when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John from people who are not, they’re not sort of technical articles, but they’re just coming from a consumer’s perspective. And they’re saying, boy, it must be hard
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to have three different OSs. We forget this, but we shouldn’t. Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is all based on the same technology as Mac OS X. It’s the, you know, the stuff they got from Next.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the mock kernel. It’s the BSD layer. It’s Darwin, which is Apple’s open source. Like, that’s underneath all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them, right? It branches once you get up to the higher levels, and there’s different frameworks, There’s UIKit versus
⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit, but even that is kind of merging as we’ve discussed in past shows. But it’s not three entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John different OSes. Even though they have different names, just like, a good example is iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS and iPhone OS or iOS or whatever. Those, they
⏹️ ▶️ John changed the name of one of those. It’s still the same under the cover. Like there’s not seven different kernels. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not totally different OSes from the ground up. Apple has effectively a
⏹️ ▶️ John unified base OS model across all their products, even the watch, like everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s just what’s built on top of that, how much stuff is built, which framework’s there, whatever. So they’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ John in a pretty good position from a technological perspective for family unity. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that from a marketing perspective, they look more different than they really are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I think that it’s worth remembering is that today the DTK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the what A13X, A12X, I always get the name of it wrong, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the same thing. A12Z.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Which is from everything we gather, very, very close to modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads. But I don’t think that the first shipping Mac, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve talked about this already, but I don’t think the first shipping Mac is going to have an A12Z or maybe not even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an A13Z. And I’m not talking about the name as much as I’m saying, I think it’s going to be a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different CPU that’s going to be considerably faster and considerably more powerful, especially if these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forthcoming Macs have fans, because there is not an iOS device that I’m aware of that has a fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can do some very different and interesting things if you are able to cool a lot more aggressively.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, I think today, in terms of components, it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basic ingredients across an iPad Pro and this DTK, but I think it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be quite a bit different once real honest to goodness Macs ship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not just a developer transition kit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’ll be A14 based. Like all the new iPhones are gonna be A14. And when we say A14, we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the computational cores, but the number of cores and the size of the GPU, GPU is very easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to scale up because you just add more execution units because they’re sort of, you know, they’re facing an embarrassingly parallel problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can imagine the system on a chip on the Macs, like they have a power budget. And like you said, Casey, decide is this gonna be a fanless
⏹️ ▶️ John model or is it gonna be one with a fan, they can just basically choose. They can pick a power envelope and they
⏹️ ▶️ John say, what’s the biggest system on a chip we can fit in there? How many A14 cores can we fit in there? How big can
⏹️ ▶️ John we make the GPU? How much power and everything does the Thunderbolt stuff that’s gonna be built in there add
⏹️ ▶️ John to the system on a chip? Like, they can just do that math, right? The reason I’m excited about them is that math
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna work out to be a much better machine than the Intel ones that we have now. That’s what’s exciting, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has complete flexibility to basically make whatever kind of Mac they want and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they choose, it’s gonna be so much better than what they have now. And like you said, certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John better if they go with something with a fan, that’s gonna be so much more capable than the fanless
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads or whatever, just because they will spend that power budget on more CPU cores, more GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John execution units, more everything, higher clock speed. Like, they’ll spend it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you will reap the benefit of that. It’s hard to see now because we’re like, how well our current iPads are faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than our Macs and it’s all depressing. It’s like, yeah, because they’re using Intel chips. Like, that’s not gonna be the case. If you, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just took the A12Z and put it in a system with a fan and overclocked it, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t think that’s what the DTK is doing, but even if you took that two-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John chip, it would be better. And when the A14 comes out, I fully expect these Macs to kick
⏹️ ▶️ John major butt. Or be fanless. Like, because if the first one introduces the adorable replacement and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fanless, It’ll be plenty fast, way faster than any Adorable has ever been.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not hard. Yeah, exactly. It’ll be embarrassing if the fanless Adorable replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John is faster than the highest-end MacBook Pro. That’s going to be embarrassing for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So that factors
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to send out first.
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Casey’s computer names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s it for follow-up. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course not. Of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John What has Casey named his computer? Oh yeah. Last show we had some homework
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was for Casey to stop having his hard drive be called Macintosh HD and stop having
⏹️ ▶️ John his computer’s name in the sharing preference pane be Casey’s MacBook Pro and to give
⏹️ ▶️ John his computer a name. It has a big one name and then you just name your computer that and the sharing thing you name your boot hard drive that
⏹️ ▶️ John So Casey, what did you name your computer slash computers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s see here. So Apple menus system preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John your homework while it’s being collected Casey’s iMac Pro You don’t have it you don’t because
⏹️ ▶️ John the second item here is if you have not done this homework We will suggest names for you. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel free. That’s totally fine to suggest
⏹️ ▶️ John names Well, you don’t have any of that. You have lots of things that you’re interested in. Can’t you think of some kind of name that you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s my suggestions for naming your computer and your hard drive. If possible,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick a name that is short-ish, because long names, they don’t look good on the desktop if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have your hard drives mounted on the desktop. And long sharing names don’t fit in the sidebars. And it’s just generally unwieldy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people prefer them to not have spaces. I understand where they’re coming from. but one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the beauties of being on a modern computer is that you don’t have drive letters and you can have names with
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces in them and the world doesn’t end. So you don’t have anything, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you shouldn’t be on the nose, like it’s not just the name of your favorite band or something like that, but like you name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’ve ever named any of my cars, like any sort of real name. Like I will call, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I called the BMW the Beamer or the BMW, but I’d never had like Susie or
⏹️ ▶️ John Beemer would be a perfectly good, if you were still into BMWs, B-E-M-E-R would be a good name for your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and your hard drive as an example. Cari McCarface, yeah, there you go. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a little long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only good suggestion I have heard, which came from Jelly, and I think one or two people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter, was using characters from the Hunt for Out October, so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, of Ramius being perhaps the iMac Pro, for example. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a need for cutesy names for any of this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not cutesy, it’s just a name. Why, why do I need it? For the same reason you give names to anything, so you can
⏹️ ▶️ John identify it at a glance without reading.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, like, KC-S iMac-Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does actually uniquely identify the machine. It’s just a bad name, but
⏹️ ▶️ John work. If you have multiple MacBook Pros, it’s a problem. And if you have like Casey’s Mac Pro, Casey’s iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, Casey’s MacBook Pro, at a glance those aren’t easily distinguishable. You name them after Hunter Red October
⏹️ ▶️ John characters, it would be way easier to distinguish them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like. No, because then I won’t remember which fricking one is
⏹️ ▶️ John Ramius. But you will. Do you remember what you named your kids? Like once you give something a name. Once
⏹️ ▶️ John you give it a name, it has the name. You know what I mean? It’s not like you have a hundred computers in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John You called your Synology like Synology or something. You’re not confused about what that is. Like, you just, you have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of Macs, you give them names. I think the Humphrey Red October theme is a good idea. Okay. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John emoji names is another possibility, because we live in the modern world, you could give
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your computer-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What, exploding-head is one of my computers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be better than KC-SIMAC-PRO. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exploding-head would be better than that. I will disagree with John. I do think that if you can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to not have spaces, that is more graceful because all the contexts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which it will, you know, use that in a way that it can have spaces like a host name, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll automatically create one. Um, although you can set the host name separately from the computer name,
⏹️ ▶️ John It just adds, it just adds hyphens. Like it’ll, it’ll take care of that for you if you have spaces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s ugly. Like if you can avoid that, that’s better. So having a sink, having your computers have a name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is lowercase and free of spaces will make will make it appear the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere. And that has a certain appeal to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, agreed. Yeah, all mine don’t have spaces in them, just are very short. And you know, my theme,
⏹️ ▶️ John I use the Legend of Zelda theme, my boot drive and my computer are Link, which is four letters
⏹️ ▶️ John long and has no spaces. And I have my icon as a little icon of Link.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you feel on capitalization?
⏹️ ▶️ John Capital L, because it’s a proper noun, monster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because Link doesn’t have any other uses anywhere in computing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But like, it’s Linky. You look at my desktop, there’s Link. He’s sitting there, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my time machine backup. My time machine backup is Ocarina. Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Not only do you have your hard drive as an icon on your desktop like an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey animal, but you changed the
⏹️ ▶️ John No, like a Mac user is what you mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Of course you change the icon. That’s part of the fun. Once you pick like whatever, Ramus
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, what is it, Typhoon or whatever. Like you just, if you pick Typhoon, for example, What’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the name? You’d get a Typhoon class submarine icon. Ooh, the subnames. Subnames is good. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John good. You’d get the icon of the Typhoon class submarine, a really good looking icon of that, and you’d put that there,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’d show your volumes on your desktop so you can look at that every day. Like, that’s the identity of my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the top right corner where the boot hard drive is, is a little picture of Link, and underneath it, it says Link.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my super duper backup is Hyrule. I’ve got a drive
⏹️ ▶️ John called Zelda. Like, there’s a lot of single, fairly short names in the Zelda universe and lots of really
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome icons that you can apply to them. Anyway, we’re trying to help you, Casey. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have some fun. Give your computer a name. Let it be a free elf.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, to be fair, nothing would be more Casey than to name your computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after, like, you know, mediocre 90s movies that only you care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hunter Racktober is a good movie, come on. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it 90s? I think it was 1990.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, Hunt for October, good movie, check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. You know, I wasn’t really on board until, it was 1990 by the way, I wasn’t really on board until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said I could change the icon, well, two things. You said use the subs, not the characters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which okay, I think I can get behind that. But then saying like if I could find good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I can’t, I’m sure, but if I could find good icons. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re out there. I have a vast icon collection, ask me, I can see if I can help you out. I do choose based on what kind of icons
⏹️ ▶️ John I have. I have a bunch of good Zelda icons, so that definitely factors in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you say the subs, is it like, you know, meatball, turkey, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey talking about here? Yep, that’s what we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. Yes, that’s exactly right. Yeah, go ahead listeners and find me some really high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quality Hunt for October icons in the year 2020 for a 30 year old movie and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me know what you come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with. Well see, the thing about modern, it used to be harder back when they were pixel art, back when there were 32 by 32 pixels in the classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Maco days, because then you had to have an actual icon that somebody made, but icons are so big and so high res now
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you can find a good, like photo with a transparent mask on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John that can work as an icon, depending on the photo. You might have to massage a little. It’s obviously not as good as an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John hand-drawn Icon Factory icon, although Icon Factory occasionally does do icon sets for popular movies.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for all I know, they did a hundred at October one, and you can just grab some of those. Check iconfactory.com for more
⏹️ ▶️ John info on that. But if you can just find a good photo of your submarine
⏹️ ▶️ John and quote unquote shrink it down to 1024 by 1024, which is the largest
⏹️ ▶️ John size icon on Mac OS these days, you’re good to go. Like, and you know, you have to make sure it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John turn into mud when you scale it down to 48 by 48 or whatever size you have it on your desktop. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a lot more options than back in the day when you had to actually have a 32 by 32, 256 color pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John grid that somebody painstakingly made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if I could have a my cousin Vinny theme.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a whole lot of work for something that really does not bother me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sorry it bothers you. You should call your hard drive clock have it be a high-heeled shoe
⏹️ ▶️ John clomping on a wooden plank. There you go, biological clock. Mm-hmm. It’s ticking like this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John got the shoe, you got the, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short. What is even happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my goodness. It’s a movie that Marco saw, that’s what’s happening. Well, I didn’t. You haven’t seen My Cousin Vinny? What?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve been over this like a hundred times. Weird holes in your media. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we have it on DVD somewhere we used to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Marco’s seen like six movies, but it’s weird when one of the six movies he’s seen is not one of the movies that you’ve seen because you figure he’s…
Casey likes Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. All right, so now that we’re done with follow up, you want to do some Ask ATP?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we have one more thing, one more actual topic here that I want to hear about. It’s another Casey topic. OK. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur thing? Yes. All right, so there’s a bunch more WWDC stuff, most of which we’ll probably skip over. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that Casey mentioned in a couple of past shows and factors into this topic that’s been on the WWDC list, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John how Big Sur looks different. And Casey mentioned on a past show that he
⏹️ ▶️ John loves how it looks. He wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I wanna hear more about that. Casey, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve been running Big Sur, you have that on another drive or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been running it pretty much full time on the MacBook Pro actually. It’s the dual boot setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think it was Jowkit had advised with, and I’m sorry John, I’m getting this wrong but what is it, different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volumes rather than different containers or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John something like that? Different
⏹️ ▶️ John containers or different partitions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well anyway, so I did that on the MacBook Pro. I do have it on a physically separate hard drive for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac Pro and I think I booted to it like once and that was that. Which iMac Pro is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was Casey’s iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Pro. Oh, okay. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for asking. I’m glad we could clarify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so yeah, so I’ve been running it almost full time on the MacBook Pro and please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t wanna hear an email about this, please no, but I think it looks really good. I really honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. There are problems, there are absolutely problems. I am not saying it’s flawless. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks really good. I think it looks modern without completely losing what makes the Mac the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it just looks like somebody has taken some time to freshen things up a bit. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like when you, when your kitchen maybe isn’t spotless, I don’t know if either of you can relate to this, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your kitchen isn’t spotless and then you take the time and you just like really clean it nicely. You clean it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up well, you get under the, you get, you get around the burners, you know, cause we have a gas stove. You spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time to scrub around the burners and you clean off the countertops and spray the countertops down. You just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you don’t just swipe it with a paper towel like you do when you’re rushing between kid issues, you actually properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clean it, and your kitchen, it just looks good. And that’s what I feel like Big Sur is. It just looks good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As long as you’re not looking at sheets, you know, the pop-ups that once were sheets and now are God knows what.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as long as you’re not trying to figure out what the active window is. Oh, and you’re not looking at the battery icon and system preferences. As long as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not doing any of those things, it looks really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is your favorite aspect? You know, I get what you’re saying about it looking cleaner, but how does that manifest? Is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what aspect of it do you feel looks cleaner more modern? Is it like, I mean, I can name some attributes
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Like, I feel like it’s brightened up. Like most of the places where there was gray in the earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the OS are lighter gray now. Is that part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about? I think so. I think to some degree. I also think that I really like the simple iconography.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, for example, I’m looking, oh, see, I can’t talk to you about this because now you’re going to yell at me about having the Finder sidebar open,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do have the Finder sidebar open. I like the the Finder sidebar. And I think the iconography there is really good. You know, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks very SF symbols-y, which I like.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. That’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I, I, I like the way that looks. Um, the freshened, like something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as simple as like the way an external hard drive looks when you plug it in, like the iconography there looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice. I do like that it’s brighter. I like that it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems to have lost a lot of the texture, which generally I think is good, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in certain cases is very bad. Like everything looks more like lines than it does like things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think I like that. And I think it’s certainly very trendy. But that does cause problems from time to time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like I said, one of the things that really drives me nuts is that I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it, even after running it almost full time on one of the two computers I use very often. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been doing a lot of work on this particular on the MacBook Pro lately because I’m doing some stuff for iOS 14.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I only have have the Xcode beta on Big Sur on the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. So I’ve been spending a lot of time in it, the time that I would normally spend on the iMac Pro. So anyways, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things that drives me nuts all the time is I can never tell which frigging window is the active window because I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference in tint or whatever is nowhere near strong enough to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious which one is the active window. That really, really annoys me. Is it a sheet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an action sheet, is that right? That used to drop down from the top of the, probably from the title bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it does not. Am I, is that the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Yeah, it’s just called a sheet and now it dims the background. All right, close your eyes for a second. Stop
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at your big sir computer. Uh, is the active, what distinguishes the active
⏹️ ▶️ John window without looking? What distinguishes the active window from the inactive window?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m going to cheat because I was just looking at it a minute ago, but what I was going, what I would have said up until a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute ago was that the active window is darker, but I don’t believe that’s true. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in big Sur, the active window is like white and the inactive windows are darker, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did I get that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I I’m not in front of big Sur, so I don’t remember, but like historically speaking on the Mac and in
⏹️ ▶️ John most of Apple’s interfaces, uh, the things that are not active
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, the phrase we often use is dimmed. Uh, that can mean a bunch of different things. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John inactive buttons are quote unquote dimmed on the original Mac. The dimming of menu items famously was like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they I use the Chicago font. The reason it looks like it does is because they had to dim them on a monochrome screen so you could knock out
⏹️ ▶️ John every other pixel but still be able to read them because there was no gray scale, right? So dimming meant
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, the regular menu items that are active, they’re black, like the text is black.
⏹️ ▶️ John What they were trying to do is make the dim ones gray, right? And so you could still
⏹️ ▶️ John read them. It didn’t have gray, but you can still read them, but they’re dimmer. Same thing with the background windows. The front
⏹️ ▶️ John most window, whatever the look of the OS was, it was that, it was fully saturated. if it was pinstriped,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was the platinum, you know, Copland look or whatever it was, that was the
⏹️ ▶️ John front most window. It had maximum contrast, it was, whatever style it was, it was there.
⏹️ ▶️ John The windows that were not the front’s most were sort of dimmed, meaning
⏹️ ▶️ John less saturated, maybe lighter colored, maybe the reeds is lighter colored, maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have pinstripes, right? But in general, they were lower contrast, less detailed,
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to be faded as if in a fog. Same way things farther away in real life get dimmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the sort of physical analogy they’re going for so that it became clear that the focused window
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one that is, that doesn’t have fog in front of it essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Big Sur, they kind of stick to that a little bit. I’m not, again, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at it so I don’t recall offhand, but my recollection is the front one is brighter
⏹️ ▶️ John white than the backgrounds, but you can say, well, that means the background ones are dimmer, but really what happens in
⏹️ ▶️ John real life is that the fog tends to make things less saturated, lower contrast,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s, you know, I don’t know. It’s certainly not a change in detail.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s certainly not like the front one has more sorts of intricate detail. Like you said, it doesn’t look like a thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t look like a plastic or metal bar. There are no pinstripes, there are no grooves, there are no
⏹️ ▶️ John grippy things. It is very sort of line art, solid thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the same problem. Like, maybe it’s because I’m used to all those years and decades of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the dimming thing. But I think it’s really, it’s more profound than that. And that we expect things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are, we expect the active thing to be more saturated and detailed
⏹️ ▶️ John than the inactive things. And it’s such a close contest. Like I can’t even recall off the top of my head what the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John is. My recollection is they’re not as different from each other than you would think. And one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, even whatever difference does exist, It’s possible to argue that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually dimmer or more distant or more fogged than the active window. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just different, but not that different. So anyway, you’re sitting in front of it. Go
⏹️ ▶️ John make a bunch of text edit windows. Tell me what distinguishes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back ones. So I’m actually, I’m using Finder at the moment and I have two Finder windows open. The one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is active, the sidebar looks translucent to me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s got a little bit of color to it because I’m using the default Big Sur background, but it’s translucent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know, the, the stoplight in the upper left, whatever you call them, they’re obviously red, yellow, and green.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, the title. So I happen to be looking at a folder called development that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the title blends into the column icon or the, the columns. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no clear delineation between the title of this window, which is the folder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name, which is development. and there’s no delineation between that and name, date, modified
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the foreground window you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about? This is the foreground window. Now, by contrast, the background window,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sidebar is the same color as the title. The title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does have a difference between the whole title area, so the title and all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the icons on the toolbar and name, date, modified size, kind. So in the inactive window,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sidebar is the same color as the title bar, and it is different than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name, date, modified size, kind, etc. In the active window, the sidebar is translucent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a very different color than the title bar, and the title and toolbar do blend into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name, date, modified size, kind, etc. That I really don’t care for. I really, really genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that it’s very difficult to tell what is active and what is inactive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s too much stuff in that window. I think what you need to do is hit Command-Option-T. Because you can imagine, that’s why I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John text edit as having a window. Because in the minimal case, all you’ve got on a window is a title bar. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no sidebar. There’s no controls, like a text edit window. You’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a title bar. All right, I’ll open text edit. All right, all right, all right. Hold
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Because that’s what you have to distinguish. Like in text edit, when you make a new document twice, there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John in the front called untitled2 and the one in the back called untitled1. And the only thing you have to go by, there are no
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. There’s no sidebars, no nothing. You have to white document window that I presume is white in both cases, is all you
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me. And then you’ve just got the title bar and the little window widgets. So what does that look like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the differences are that the inactive window is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darker color and like the title area. I’m sorry, let me try that again because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the, the composition area, you know, where you actually type into text edit, that is identical as far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I can tell, or I think it’s identical. It’s hard to say. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. All right. Another one I haven’t seen. Anyway, so the title area
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the active window is lighter and the stoplights are colored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The inactive window, the stoplights are not colored and the title area is darker. But otherwise, they look identical.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about the text? Untitled 1 and Untitled 2, is the text black in both cases?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m sorry. That’s a good point I had not considered. Untitled 2 is the active window right now. It is black.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Untitled is inactive. It is more of a gray.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a little bit of dimming, but it’s a little bit reversed in that the title bar of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco foreground window
⏹️ ▶️ John is brighter, is whiter. So this is the problem, whiter versus brighter. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John as things get farther away and they go into the haze, they do get whiter. They never go completely
⏹️ ▶️ John white though, probably. So bright white should say to us foreground, but
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing the darker window in the background is, I don’t know, I don’t wanna belabor this because
⏹️ ▶️ John we do wanna get to Ask ATP, but I wanted to hear what you liked about the thing. Maybe next week
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll talk about all the things I don’t like about it and we’ll go into more detail about that, but for now I think it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I wanted to get your opinion just because I don’t hate it. Like I said when we
⏹️ ▶️ John first talked about this, I pretty much always like it when they change the way macOS looks just because
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not to my taste I know they’re gonna change it in a couple years anyway and I just like things like Casey with the laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just like it when they change sometimes. It’s kind of cool. particularly married to any look. It’s just that Big
⏹️ ▶️ John Sur seems like it might have more on fourth era than normal, but it’s still early beta. They can still change things. They won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guarantee it. You never know. Like the leopard title bar, leopard menu bar, rather. They changed
⏹️ ▶️ John it due to complaints during the beta. It’s been known to happen. We’ll see how it goes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think we’ll talk more about this next week. I just wanted to get Casey on record with his undying love for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coolest that is Big Sur. I put in the chat, and I’ll put in the show notes, the two text edit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey windows next to each other and it’s a little screenshot of it and you can check it out for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s already the chapter art. Thanks, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knew? Now we need to teach Casey that chapter art needs to be square.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh yeah, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John he put them side by side. Have you ever seen Overcast? Have you ever played a podcast, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I wasn’t planning on it being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m sorry. Marco, he’d
⏹️ ▶️ John alternate between them every one second. A, B, A, B, A, B.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I see it. Looking at this picture now, much more efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco than having Casey describe it instead of actually looking, we should have
⏹️ ▶️ John done this earlier. Yeah, there is definite dimming. Look at the toolbar items. I forgot that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to say text edit because I thought the windows was simple, but I totally forgot text edit has a stupid toolbar too, doesn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I was expecting it to just be like a bare window with a title bar, because that I feel like is, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s dim. There’s definite dimming going on. I see it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is better than windows that have toolbars, like the regular Mac kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toolbar where it gets integrated in the title bar. Because that I feel like, you know, the alert sheets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the alerts and the sheets are two areas where I agree with most of the criticism that they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massively worse in Big Sur. But one area that I don’t, I’m not hearing a lot of criticism about that I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep running into in usage of, you know, just being kind of horrible, is the way toolbars are treated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for apps that have like regular standard, you know, AppKit toolbars where you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco group of things, You can show icon or text or both, and you can customize it with the customizability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the regular style, you know, AppKit toolbar. I think in Big Sur, they look and work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way worse, both in the iconography style, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, yet another example of something that maybe it looks good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a screenshot in marketing or something, but does not work well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for usability and real-world use. And I also find that the new design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of basically having very few, like, dividing lines or anything like that, and certainly no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, make title bars of rich applications that have a lot of functionality, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of which is in toolbars in AppKit. It makes the title bars really get very crowded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get very hard to visually distinguish where stuff is and what these buttons are supposed to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there seems to be a bigger difference than usual with this design between how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks in idealized screenshots and how it looks in reality, when people actually have real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps with real content running on real devices and real screens. This design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not survive contact with the user nearly as well as previous designs have.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some previous designs. Many of my Mac OS X reviews had sections demonstrating
⏹️ ▶️ John this exact thing where I’d show the beauty screenshots, sometimes Apple’s own beauty screenshots or my own
⏹️ ▶️ John beauty screenshots, and then I’d say, this is what it looks like when you’ve got a bunch of windows all over your screen and then you’d be like, Oh, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember I think in the very, the very first, maybe it was, maybe it was a public beta or maybe it was the very first release.
⏹️ ▶️ John The title bar of inactive windows in very early Mag OS 10 was
⏹️ ▶️ John super translucent. Like it was like, I don’t know, kind of like the, the glass appearance that windows
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Like it was very sort of clear frosted glass, but very translucent. So if you had a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of overlapping windows, you have the one in the front was opaque and you could read the title, but the ones in the background, because they were so
⏹️ ▶️ John translucent, the text of the names, if they overlapped in any way, it just became a complete jumble, right? And that’s what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about. It’s like, okay, you got one screen, one, you got two windows, you’re active one and you’re inactive one and beautifully arranged in
⏹️ ▶️ John a screenshot, it looks nice. You get a bunch of windows overlapping and now you can’t tell what the hell anything is, right? So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a new problem, but it is like the fact that it’s not a new problem shows that Apple should have learned this lesson.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s repeated itself many times over. Yosemite had a similar problem. Like, and I would encounter this
⏹️ ▶️ John when making screenshots because I’d always have to make that choice. am I making a beauty screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John to demonstrate a feature, or am I making a screenshot to show you the failure modes? And like in Yosemite with all
⏹️ ▶️ John the transparency, I did both. I did a beauty screenshot to say, look, this can be a really beautiful OS. And then I did the
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly screenshot to say, if your backgrounds are unfortunately colored and it pulls them through into your UI, and all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John your app has a bunch of color coming through that you didn’t plan to, and it makes it hard to read and gross looking, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of frustrating to see them recycle these same mistakes, but I think they have learned, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if you go through my reviews, The specific
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mistakes they
⏹️ ▶️ John made, they’re not repeating. Like, except for maybe the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. But like things like the translucent sidebar and all that stuff, they’ve worked really hard on the algorithms
⏹️ ▶️ John to defend against the worst of the failure modes. But it’s still, you know, kind of frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that, like, yeah, but to what end? Why do you continue to pursue this? What benefit are
⏹️ ▶️ John we getting as the users? And the same thing with the toolbars that you’re just mentioning, like the distinguishing characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ John that anchored that design before are now missing. And so you’re trying to make it coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John within this design, but then what’s the benefit that we get? I mean, the benefit is presumably like uniformity with iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other benefits that are not like, oh, it makes this app easier to use, it’s just that makes it like a family resemblance.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I see where you’re coming from, looking at some screenshots. This is a problem, I wish I could be running
⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur during the podcast, but I’m not Casey, so I’m not gonna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I’m not doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either. A different computer, it’s a different computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I mean, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t have a- It’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey’s hyphen MacBook hyphen Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think I have another computer that can boot this. Big Sur is on an external drive. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I can boot my work laptop. But like I said, next week I want to talk about this more. I’ll either take a bunch of screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ John myself, or I’ll have another computer running Big Sur that I can look at and poke at things. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I didn’t want to make this go negative. I just wanted to hear what Casey liked. But next week, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably Marco will go in more in-depth about where Apple has screwed things up. If Apple hasn’t already fixed it by
⏹️ ▶️ John then, right? Yeah, they won’t have. I’m just wishful thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I think in general, it just feels like a nice fresh coat of paint. And like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have problems with it. The alerts, the sheets, I’m sorry. The sheets are so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At first, I was like, why is everyone so upset about the centered text on these dialogues? But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone should have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not good for reading.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so bad. Why aren’t all books formatted like that? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought everyone was getting grumpy for no good reason. But no, everyone was right. and they should have been grumpy because it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all right. No one reads text and dialogues anyway. Apple knows that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. Well, that’s a perfect example. Like, if you’re going to show a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a perfect idealized dialogue, you can make the text only one line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it’s only one line, it’ll look OK if it’s centered. But as soon as you have a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dialogue where that text wraps onto a second line, it instantly becomes worse. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a problem with almost every Allen die software design I’ve ever seen, where it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good in the screenshots and it just does not survive the real world. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works worse once it gets to the real world, once it gets to real content and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-ideal circumstances, real apps. It seems like he designs for screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and only for screenshots. And I don’t know how to teach a designer that user content matters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s… I don’t… It shouldn’t be my job.
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#askatp: Intel’s failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Letter writes, could you explain what Intel has been struggling with in recent years? How can Apple be so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at making chips and meeting goals? What went wrong at Intel?
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel just needs to get good, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John know. So we’ve talked about it on, if you haven’t been listening to ATP for many, many years, long time listeners know
⏹️ ▶️ John the main answer to this question. But just to reiterate, Intel’s biggest problem was they
⏹️ ▶️ John were delayed and are now very far behind with their next process shrink. So part of what silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John chip manufacturing has been powered by is every couple of years, we’re able to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John little transistors on the chip even smaller. And that has many benefits. You can fit more of them in the same amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John area. They generally use less power. If you look at the very first microchips,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Intel 8080 or whatever the, I forget what the name of the first one was, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of transistors in them is minuscule. And the size of the chips relative to that number is fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John big, right? So I can’t plot real numbers, but it was like thousands of transistors in a chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could hold in your hand. And then eventually, you could fit millions in that same size, and eventually billions in that same size. And of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, you can make the chips bigger and all that stuff. So shrinks, that’s what we call them. Shrinks are really important.
⏹️ ▶️ John The shrink that Intel missed on was they were making 14-nanometer chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like the feature size. There’s no standard way to measure this. So basically, you can imagine the smallest feature, the distance between
⏹️ ▶️ John two of the smallest things 14 nanometers, which is very small. They were going to make a shrink down to 10 nanometers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they missed their schedule for that. They said, well, we’re gonna, you know, here’s our 14 nanometer chips, and in a couple years we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have 10 nanometer chips, right? They had this whole big roadmap, and then their deadline came and went, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have 10 nanometer chips. They said, oh, we’ll have them next year, and next year they didn’t have them either. Oh, we’ll have them next year, and next year
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll have them, and they didn’t have them either, right? They’ve been stuck on 14 nanometer for a really long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. They have 10 nanometer chips now. I think Apple is shipping them, but they are way past the schedule when they were supposed to quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote supposed to have them. That was Intel’s big lead that they could make chips
⏹️ ▶️ John at a smaller feature size reliably and economically. They were like a generation ahead of the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole rest of the industry, right? While Intel dropped this ball and wasn’t able to get
⏹️ ▶️ John their next process shrink on time, the rest of the industry caught up and eventually surpassed them. So So
⏹️ ▶️ John Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, TSMC, is now shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John chips that are, quote unquote, 7 nanometers. Complicated by the fact that Taiwan Semiconductor 7 nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ John is comparable to Intel’s 10 nanometer, but all you have to know is that the competition event essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John caught up. These new Macs, I think, are going to come with 5 nanometer chips, right? Like the A14 is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be 5 nanometer, I believe. TSMC 5 nanometer design, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel doesn’t have anything that can compete with that right now that size. So anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the main place that Intel fell behind is the process size. The second thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is Intel has had the benefit of x86 but has also
⏹️ ▶️ John been saddled with x86. x86 has tons of historical baggage. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make them fast
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. It just means that implementing a compatible compliant
⏹️ ▶️ John x86-64 chip is way more complicated because the feature set has so much,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the instruction set has so much historical baggage. So there’s whole features on Intel chips that are taking up diaspace
⏹️ ▶️ John and power, granted not a lot, but some, but really it’s like the complexity of verifying will this be
⏹️ ▶️ John compatible with all that existing x86 binary software that’s out there. ARM is a simpler architecture,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s simpler to do that. I don’t want to get back into the whole RISC-CISC debates of the early
⏹️ ▶️ John 2000s, it’s not actually that big of an issue and internally a lot of chips work the the same, but all of the things being equal,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is more straightforward to deal with a simpler architecture like arm than it is to deal with x86 64. Like if you had a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John group of silicon designers and you can design a chip and here’s your budget and here’s your amount of time and so on and so forth
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can choose the instruction set. Would you like and would you like to choose x86 64 and it has to be compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John with all that existing software? Would you like to choose arm and has to be compatible with all the arm software? They’d pick arm because there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer edge cases, less weird stuff, less historical cruft, right? Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that’s such a big factor, but it is a factor. Uh, and the final thing is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a company that’s in the lead, technologically speaking, has no right to be in that lead forever. A company
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a group of people. People get old and retire. New, uh, employees are
⏹️ ▶️ John hired. The landscape of hiring changes. Where are the smartest and best people
⏹️ ▶️ John going? Uh, you know, what is the educational pipeline to for producing
⏹️ ▶️ John those people? Do they want to work at Intel where the where the things are located? Do they want to work in the
⏹️ ▶️ John United States at all? Where are the brightest minds in the world? Are they all in America or all the elsewhere? All
⏹️ ▶️ John that changes over time. So it’s not inconceivable that just even if none of the other stuff that I said was true,
⏹️ ▶️ John that over the course of many decades, the best chips and the designers in the world might
⏹️ ▶️ John not be at Intel anymore, they might be someplace else. They might have left to start a startup that Apple then bought.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? You know, Apple bought PA semi and got a lot of talent. Maybe some of those people came from Intel. Apple bought
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel’s cell modem business, if not their employees. I don’t remember. But anyway, like the personnel,
⏹️ ▶️ John human beings, who are the best group of people who come together in gel under the right
⏹️ ▶️ John leadership, in the right conditions to create the best chips. I think all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff combines to the point where Apple is unquestionably making the
⏹️ ▶️ John best quote unquote cell phone chips, uh, system on a chips,
⏹️ ▶️ John than anyone in the world, and Intel is not. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not here to instruct Intel on how to catch up, but they have lost
⏹️ ▶️ John a lead over the course of many, many years with a couple of easily identifiable strategic
⏹️ ▶️ John errors, but lots of much smaller, harder to pin down, sort of intangible
⏹️ ▶️ John things that have all added up to put them in the position that they’re in now. So bummer for Intel, but good for
#askatp: Grandparent iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Justin Barron writes, I’ve really been enjoying ATP and wanted to know your take on how the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 14 announcements affect the ability to replace a computer or laptop with an iPad or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, specifically for aging parents or grandparents. Maybe connect an external monitor, mouse and keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What would you do here? I don’t know. It’s so hard to make any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of recommendation like this because it all depends on what people are doing with it. My dad is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a grandfather and he’s extremely technically savvy and I don’t think he would be happy with just an iPad. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my grandparents, they do have a PC, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never talked to them about because I refused to do any sort of tech support for it. They have other people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they can talk to about that and I’m also a terrible grandson. But be that as it may,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do have, I think it’s my iPad 3rd gen, whatever the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Retina iPad was. Basically, that’s just a FaceTime appliance. But maybe they’re using it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than that, and I just don’t know it. And the only thing they really wanna do with a computer is look at email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and look at news and so on. So for them, they probably would be just fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an iPad. I don’t think they would need an external monitor. They probably wouldn’t even need a mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just maybe a keyboard of some sort. So it all depends on the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think there’s any easy way to make any sort of recommendation. Now, Marco, I thought you were doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this with your grandparents, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s sort of, yeah, I mean, it’s changed over the years. So, first of all, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you’re connecting, you know, a monitor, keyboard, or mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever needs, like if that’s a requirement, if you need like keyboard, mouse, external stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say go for a laptop at that point. Like, you know, like go for a, you know, Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s designed first and foremost to be a laptop with keyboard or mouse or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a trackpad or whatever as opposed to making that work with an iPad somehow because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally speaking like you can do all that stuff with an iPad but it’s just a little more seamless when it can be like a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrated thing generally a laptop again needs may vary but that’s I would recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going that direction like use the thing for its best for and iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think for the most part, like, you know, setting all that aside, I think iPads would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still be my recommendation for simplified computer devices for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe elderly relatives that need things to be simpler for whatever reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My grandfather, I recently, he’s now 96. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to shop for a cell phone for him recently and it was unbearable because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all he wants is a phone that he can use, reasonably, and he’s 96.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He doesn’t hear very well anymore. He doesn’t have a lot of fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motor control in his hands. You want what you’d expect for a cell phone for a 96-year-old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want big buttons, easy to see, not a lot of complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was shockingly difficult to find something like that. All of our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options were terrible in various ways. The one we went with is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just kind of less terrible than most of the other options out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only reason that we had so few options was because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone world has matured and progressed so much and the functionality of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones has gotten so rich and complex now that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no more simple phone. Like no one makes one. There’s a few companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of try to specialize in this area, try to make things that are kind of simple, but they’re not as simple as you would like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They aren’t as accessible as you would like. They all have significant downsides, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly because the market is so mature and so developed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what everybody wants in most of the market is competing on features. Everything needs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get bigger, better, faster, you know, and do more all the time. So if you’re the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person looking for something that does less, you have very few to no options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The fact that like the, when the iPad first came out, it was a great option for like your grandparents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer because it was so simple. There was almost no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to screw anything up in a permanent way. Everything it could do, because it couldn’t do that much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything it could do was significantly more understandable than the problem set of like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers were doing at that at that time. And so one of the reasons why iPads were such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular choice and such a good, you know, occupant of this role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they were so much simpler. But part of that was because they were, you know, a simpler design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a big part of that was because they were new and young. And today iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS is way more complicated than it was in 2010.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so today, if you want something that somebody can understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really needs things to be very, very, very simple, it still is probably the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option there, but what you want doesn’t really exist anymore. Like the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablet or computer for someone to use who has very low needs and just basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to like use Facebook and get baby pictures from their grandkids or whatever, like that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist anymore. And it’s a shame because that market is still there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And granted, it’s probably shrinking, but it’s still there. In the same way that the market for a very simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flip phone with big numbers and it doesn’t have a volume rocker on the side where they can hold it and accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mute themselves. There’s lots of potential market for stuff like this and it just doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the market’s too mature. And the same thing, unfortunately, is true for computers now and tablets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That all being said, I still think that an iPad is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the best choice for this kind of role. If they don’t have needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’ll have to venture into like, iPad power user territory, like, if they have needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are like, okay, well, sometimes I have to like, you know, get this file off of this thing and then do this thing with it, like, okay, that’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop will very likely be simpler. If anything they ever have to do involves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multitasking, or a shortcut, or a web service to take an API thing to transform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing. There’s lots of crazy hacks that iPad users have to jump through to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power user stuff on it. If this person has to do any of those things, get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop instead, it’s easier. But if they can use iPads, in the ideal case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with multitasking disabled, and just basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage of the built-in apps, then that’s still the best choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Leave it to me to read the question as usual. This is, I was asking
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and iPadOS 14 changed the ability of it to replace a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco laptop. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it makes that big of a change. It says specifically for aging parents or
⏹️ ▶️ John grandparents, but to go off of the stuff that Marco was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are many aspects of computing that need to be tailored to people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John aging and have the disabilities that come with aging. In general,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it takes a lot to recommend a computer over an iPad when you get to the extremities
⏹️ ▶️ John of age, just because, as Marco just noted, you can disable things
⏹️ ▶️ John like multitasking and multitasking gestures on the iPad that simplify it greatly.
⏹️ ▶️ John The biggest weakness that I feel like iOS devices have specifically that is not changed by iOS 14
⏹️ ▶️ John or any of that stuff is that, and we touched on it earlier, the biggest one is 12.9 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if any of your issues have to do with fine motor control or vision, having everything compressed
⏹️ ▶️ John into a 12.9 inch diagonal thing that you have to semi-precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John manipulate is not great for either one of those things. My own mother, who
⏹️ ▶️ John still has good motor control, but has terrible vision, ends up using, she has an external
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor, a much larger external monitor that she either connects her iPad to or her Mac to,
⏹️ ▶️ John like she just basically needs a bigger screen. If she could get an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John with a 27-inch screen, like the whole drafting table thing, and if that thing could be put into, I keep thinking of Addy’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is an older version of this, but if there was a simplified interface that she could get where it mostly just
⏹️ ▶️ John made the elements on the screen bigger, like she would use that device
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would find it much more valuable than any, like the simplest phone, the simplest iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of those can get around the fact that they’re just small. So you gotta hold them real close to
⏹️ ▶️ John your face or like if you have bad vision and can’t see things that are small. Yeah, you know, she cranks up the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John tech size, she changes the resolution to have everything, like she’s doing all the things and it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has those accessibility options, but in the end, no substitute for cubic inches, as they say in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey world, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You need, sometimes you just need a big honking screen. And in that respect, Macs are just
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more capable. They’re multi-resolution, you can have monitors of any size, you can choose how big you want the
⏹️ ▶️ John elements on the screen to be by checking the specific resolution that you want it to be displayed at. They’re worse at dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John text than a lot of applications, although it depends, but they’re better in terms of the input flexibility. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think there’s a ways to go here, but in terms of technological complexity, macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and any type of computer like that has so many more places that people can go wrong that I just feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John if they wanna have any fighting chance of surviving and not screwing stuff up, an iOS device,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite all the things I just said about the size limitations and everything is a much safer bet. And I don’t think any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the enhancements they’ve done to iPadOS have made it so that iPads are now so complex that it
⏹️ ▶️ John flips that equation. It’s still absolutely true. Like people, you’re never gonna be able to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John mounting a disk image to someone who’s 90 something years old who does not know or
⏹️ ▶️ John care about technology. They don’t wanna learn it. Like Marco was saying, they just wanna see pictures of their grandkids. So what you really
⏹️ ▶️ John want them is like, the biggest iPad you can get for them with nothing on the home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen except for the three icons they have to pick that launch, maybe make a shortcut for them that launches directly
⏹️ ▶️ John into the photo stream that has the pictures of the grandkids on it, right? Like that’s all they want. Maybe they don’t even want to web browse.
⏹️ ▶️ John You really have to know what they want to do. But the point is, there’s very little they can do by stabbing their fingers at the iPad screen that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna like break it. Whereas there’s a million things, let me tell you, there’s a million things they can do to
⏹️ ▶️ John screw up their Mac. I’m in the middle of a fairly long tech support saga with my mother
⏹️ ▶️ John about her Mac right now. Like, Macs are just so much more complicated still than iPads and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about things like OS updates or Macs getting too old or what’s gonna happen to all the audio
⏹️ ▶️ John books that I ripped from CD that are on my Mac with an optical drive. Like, just things like that
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get their foot the door so far on the iPad and that is a blessing.
#askneutral: BMW’s new grille
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You made a car reference earlier, so let’s round the show out with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of neutral Gavin Shanley writes, please give us a bit of welcome distraction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this week Although this was written like three months ago and talk about the new BMW 4-series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and its questionable grill What do you guys make of it? I
⏹️ ▶️ John Mean this this this picture that we have it we’ll put it in the the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes or the show art or the chapter art or something like that. This picture I feel like paints this grill
⏹️ ▶️ John in the most flattering possible light in that I feel like the picture
⏹️ ▶️ John works hard to minimize it. Having the European proportion license
⏹️ ▶️ John plate going right through the middle of it makes it so that from a distance, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly, you can be forgiven for thinking, oh, it’s just a double kidney grill
⏹️ ▶️ John on a BMW And it’s actually not a bad looking BMW. It’s sporty, it’s a coupe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s modern looking design, like it looks pretty good. But then you look closer and you realize, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John that grill like goes from the top all the way down to the bottom and the license plate is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle of the grill. What is this, a Lexus?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Is this an Audi?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is this? And those kidneys are less kidneys and more like potatoes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there. Like there, there’s the, I don’t know, like robo
⏹️ ▶️ John potatoes because the, the, the corners are sort of squared off, chopped off Battlestar Galactica style.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just. I put a link in the chat, it’ll be in the show notes as well. To CarDriver, you know, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we know so far about the 2021 BMW 4 Series. Look at this. Look at the grill.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? See, yeah, the picture at the top of the link you just put is a less flat angle because now from this angle,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see not only is that grill really big, but it protrudes like a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John like pig nostrils. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like on a little, it’s on the surface of like a pimple that’s sticking forward from the thing. And this hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John the case. Like the BMWs that we love, like if anything, the grill was like underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John an overhang, sort of tucked in or at least flush with, but another trend to make the front of the car pointy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this trend, which is sort of sweeping the industry, I mentioned Lexus and Audi,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Toyota is doing it now, of having just massive front, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if you want to call them grills, because most of the time it’s just like hexagonal or diamond-shaped plastic pieces,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just a huge, gaping maw, as if suddenly we’ve created engines that need way more
⏹️ ▶️ John air intake, but they don’t, so most of it is actually blocked off, right? So there’s just a little section where the air goes
⏹️ ▶️ John through. is weird, and it’s especially weird that BMW is
⏹️ ▶️ John hopping on that train because BMW’s characteristic, their branded characteristic is the double
⏹️ ▶️ John kidney there, the two little openings, which have changed size and position and moved all over the place, but that’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John branding. Other car companies that are doing this, that’s not a really big part of their branding. Lexus is trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it part of their branding, right? But they have different brand identifiers that
⏹️ ▶️ John are not so focused on the grill, where they have the flexibility to change the grill around to follow trends, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John still looks like a car of that brand based on other characteristics. So it’s kind of weird that BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John is chasing a fad and allowing that fad to infect the most important visual
⏹️ ▶️ John branding element of their cars, which is this front part here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t even know if it’s the most important. To me, I see these giant girls. And Lexus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be forgiven, because Lexus is a company that is run by very boring people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to make exciting cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, arguably they started this trend too. Like I think they were first out the gate with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. Or Acura even. Acura’s had a grill problem for a while. But like, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, you know, BMW is holding so tightly to the kidney grills being this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly important thing. They must have the kidney grills. But, you know, we’re, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate to be, you know, electric car guy all the time, but like, we are rapidly in a world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and definitely heading towards more of one where cars don’t need front grills nearly as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all anymore, and BMW is going in that direction too reluctantly, finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly, late, and poorly, but still they’re getting there. Are they going to hold on to this thing forever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like is it a BMW if it has a kidney grill or is it BMW if it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car? Like that seems like the thing they should care about more and that’s the area they’ve been suffering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent years more than they should. Like why do people buy BMWs? Is it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a two-piece grill on the front? Not really. People buy them for lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons. That isn’t a big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I agree with that because I think a lot of people buy BMWs because they want to be seen getting into
⏹️ ▶️ John But no one’s going to know this is a BMW though. Like, like I, I, there’s the, the, the thing that Marco laid
⏹️ ▶️ John out is like, there’s no, there’s no trade-off between those two things. They can make good cars with kidney grills and bad cars with kidney grills. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even think it’s an electric thing because the beauty of the kidney is You can make it super tiny like it was on the H50.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can make it huge like it is here. It doesn’t, there’s nothing about the kidney that requires air to enter it at all. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John two chrome shapes. Like you can put it on the front of an electric car and if you looked at it, people were like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it doesn’t look like the kidney anymore. Sure, of course, the kidney is all about the shape. You don’t need any actual air.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t need to be a grill. It is just, it’s like a logo. It is a slightly 3D silvery
⏹️ ▶️ John logo. Like sometimes it’s body colored. Like I feel like that visual branding can survive the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John transition, no problem whatsoever. Unlike, for example, the Lexus thing, which is all about being open to the air because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not part of their branding. But yeah, they have to keep that grill because it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW without that. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John disagreeable. No, they absolutely have to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it, right? They absolutely have to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It doesn’t have to be big or be small or be wide or be tall. They have many options. Look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the history of BMWs. They have moved that thing around all over the place. It can be minimized,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be maximized, but they have to keep it because they are wedded to that as the
⏹️ ▶️ John visual distinguishing branding characteristic. It’s like saying you’re gonna have a Mac without an Apple logo anywhere on it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t make any sense. You have to have it. You know, wherever it happens to be, whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John happens to look like, if it’s a rainbow color, if it’s big, if it’s light up, if it’s opaque, if it’s shiny, can
⏹️ ▶️ John have an Apple logo on it. That’s how you can tell it’s a Mac laptop, for instance. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the kidney’s going away. I just think they need to, at various times they’ve incorporated
⏹️ ▶️ John it into their designs in more or less successful ways. And this one is where they’re following the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John trend of the bigger grilles, which as Mark pointed out doesn’t make much sense if we’re going towards electric, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a deal breaker in the end. But like it’s not serving their grille well. Like from
⏹️ ▶️ John most angles this looks less attractive. It draws attention to itself in an unflattering
⏹️ ▶️ John way, which is a shame because I think the rest of the car is a reasonably nice shape. So And the headlights
⏹️ ▶️ John are nice, right? And the rest of the front is fine, and the wheels are nice. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a terrible styling error for BMW, except for their treatment of the kidneys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. And I was looking into this briefly, and the M340i,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I believe is the equivalent of my car, but 10 years newer, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally 10 years newer, It is 3,800 pounds, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obese for a car of this caliber, but it’s not light.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it is $67,000 for a 3 Series.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I remember, and maybe I have this wrong because this was 30 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I remember my memory of reading like Car and Driver in Road and Track or whatever when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was eight years old or thereabouts, was that supercars of the day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would get into the low four seconds to get to 60. So like a Lamborghini Diablo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think was somewhere around like 4.1, 4.2 seconds to 60. If I’m wrong it’s no big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s something along those, something along those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines. I think about eight more seconds to a breakdown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well there’s that. Actually I’m not sure this BMW would do much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twelve more seconds to a replacement clutch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah right. Well no, no clutches anymore. None of the three series get a a six speed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in America anyway, which is another terrible thing. But anyways, the M340i, 3,800 pounds, $67,000, zero to 60, 3.8 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3.8 seconds to 60 miles an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is super car fast 20, 30 years ago, and it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blisteringly quick today. And I don’t remember off the top of my head how fast Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your, your, your Tesla will get to 60. I don’t doubt it’s faster. There’s no doubt in my mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s faster, but is it that much faster? I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s can only do it three times, then it needs to rest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s also true. That is also very, very true. And last I heard, Marco, you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very anti-ludicrous mode. So what is, no, there’s something more than ludicrous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t it? Yeah, because I don’t get like the P version. I get the long range version. So what I currently have is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 100D, which I don’t know how fast it is, but it’s, yeah, it’s faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I need it to be. That’s for sure and I’m very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just paste it into the chat and also in our slack the 850 in case You don’t remember what that look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is probably the most minimized Although the the the I ate is pretty minimized.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe it’s just stretched out But anyway, this is probably the tiniest has gotten it So I don’t honestly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know if air was allowed to enter those I suppose it was it might have all been coming from the bottom But
⏹️ ▶️ John this was the time when when cars having very pointy fronts was sporty So they just took a BMW and
⏹️ ▶️ John they made it super pointy. And like, oh, but we gotta have the kidney. And so they did, there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just this tiny, two tiny little, and I remember thinking at the time, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was kind of embarrassing for them because they were like, well, you have to have it because it’s our branding, but there’s so little room for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And they’re like, ah, we can fit it. And so they did, they made it a little, tiny little nostrils in the front of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks a little bit silly, but looking back on it with now decades of hindsight, I don’t think it looks bad. I mean, it looks like a
⏹️ ▶️ John car from the 80s or the 90s, Like that’s what it is, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t look bad, right? When we look back on these cars, they will look like cars of
⏹️ ▶️ John their time. I’m not sure in the end, 20 years from now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we hold the 850 versus these fours, I think I’m gonna like the 850 better,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just from an aesthetic perspective, just because I’m not big on the giant gaping maw styling
⏹️ ▶️ John trend at all on any brand. And so I’m also kind of not gonna like it on the BMW. It can
⏹️ ▶️ John be made to work, I think. I think Audi has had the most success just because they tend to break it up with a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John horizontal lines. And so it tends to be a little bit more coherent, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant scoop thing, even if it’s all blocked off, it’s still not great aerodynamically. And I feel like it looks less slippery.
⏹️ ▶️ John This 850 looks sportier because it has lower frontal area. It is a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John car, it is sleeker, and it cuts through the wind better because it’s not a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John vertical wall trying to plow through the air. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I’ve said this a thousand times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ll say it again. This was not my theory. I’ve heard this before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But everyone always says that the BMW that you own is the last of the good BMWs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really think that for me, the E90, which was the late 2000s, early 2010s, like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before electric steering, before they started really removing the six speed. Like I really think that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey E90 might’ve been it. And actually I really, really, really liked your M5, Marco. What was that an F10?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? F10 M5. Yeah. Which shared a lot, a lot of, it shared a lot of the nice aspects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the E series, uh, without going too far into the worst parts of the F series.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But either way, I feel like the super late aughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early to mid 2010s, That was when I think BMW really lost its way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And last I recall, they haven’t used the ultimate driving machine in quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while. And if you look at your average BMW, I would argue it’s not the ultimate driving machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, there are definitely very good BMWs to this day. I mean, again, this M340i, 3.8 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I can’t get over how fast that is. But your average, like 320i that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see running around where I live, like it’s, I’m sure it’s nice, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t say it’s the ultimate driving machine or anything like it It’s just it bums me out, you know in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that and I think I’ve said this before on the show I as a kid, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really enjoyed Sony stuff, you know Like I had a walkman an actual honest-to-goodness walkman and then I had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diss man an actual honest-to-goodness This man after you know after the walkman and Sony said we had a Trinitron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV Which I think we just spoke about fairly recently, you know all of this stuff was so good at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was and I loved Sony so much and Now like I could not possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care less about Sony I can’t even think of the last Sony product I owned much less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there’s anything in the house now And I feel like BMW is has fallen or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I if BMW has fallen out of favor for me in a very similar way like I was Maybe I was obsessed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I was obsessed but I was darn close to obsessed if not obsessed and in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the trip that you and I went on, Marco, that was at the pinnacle. That was before my car exploded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every 10 minutes. And I loved being in Munich and going to BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Welt and seeing all of the BMW history. And every part of that trip was so amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now I would be flabbergasted if I ever owned another BMW for the rest of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ve never owned a BMW, so I can’t be infected with that. The one that you owned is the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some favorite eras of BMW and I think honestly this current crop
⏹️ ▶️ John of cars is on the upward trend They made some very bad choices for a couple of generations
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re trying to correct them setting aside the styling everything just sort of sort of the feature set and how they they do things
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re They’re getting better and Sony I know what you’re talking about the disillusion of Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John because they were sort of kings of the world at A certain point and then sort of were dethroned and lost their
⏹️ ▶️ John way But Sony does does still make some good stuff. You’ll forget of course the PlayStation is Sony That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty darn good game console and you know, they they didn’t win the last console generation just on a
⏹️ ▶️ John fluke Sony is very good at a lot of things even the TVs they make even though they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John LG panels and their OLEDs and all sorts of other realities a Lot of the stuff they do their strengths
⏹️ ▶️ John are evident like their image processing is best in class of all the televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John You know again, they can’t they’re not innovating in the panels anymore so they can’t really compete on that front, but they can compete on
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the computery stuff. Same thing they’ve been applying to their cameras. Their lenses are surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John good in many cases, and their electronics in their cameras are the leaders for certain aspects,
⏹️ ▶️ John for certain applications. So I think their cameras are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pretty good, and I have one,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So. Sensors, their sensors are amazing. Yeah, right. A lot of people use their sensors in other cameras and other applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the panels that they buy from LG, they are making sensors, right? So Sony still has its strength, and I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good example that a once great company can do things that are great again. I feel like Sony’s strengths
⏹️ ▶️ John have never really changed. The things they’re good at are things they’ve always been good at, and things they’re bad at are
⏹️ ▶️ John still basically the same. But it’s just like, well, how many hits do you get?
⏹️ ▶️ John How are you leveraging your strengths to make good products? There’s a through line to Sony products that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is still there. BMW, I think, lost its way in terms of, like you were saying, the ultimate
⏹️ ▶️ John driving machine. I don’t know what the status of that marketing is, But bottom line is they took a diversion in two.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems like our biggest customers want kind of luxury cars and the enthusiast, the
⏹️ ▶️ John loud enthusiast, kind of like the Mac Pro users or the people complaining that Apple isn’t paying enough attention to the Mac. Apple’s like, ah, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John users, they just need some computers they can use. And the fringe group is like, no, we need, we want
⏹️ ▶️ John you to pay attention to the Mac and we want you to make this big impractical Mac Pro. And it’s like, we don’t need to do that, it’s stupid. So few
⏹️ ▶️ John people buy those. But you need to, in some respects, you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John set your sights on the fringe enthusiast users
⏹️ ▶️ John to not have your whole line lose its spirit and just become like, oh, it’s a German quote, unquote, luxury
⏹️ ▶️ John sedan that just starts to feel mushy and indistinct. It starts to be
⏹️ ▶️ John less distinguishable from your competitors. It’s like, well, now they’re all basically the same. It used to be, oh, BMWs were the sporty ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mercedes was the squishy ones, Audi were unknown or not competitors, VW
⏹️ ▶️ John were the cheap ones. And BMW had staked out that identity as
⏹️ ▶️ John the ultimate driving machine. They built cars based on that. And to the extent that they have deviated
⏹️ ▶️ John from that sort of mission statement, their cars have gotten worse, right? Like, they’re not bad
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, but people who want a BMW instead of a Mercedes or instead of an Audi are looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for that ultimate driving machine experience. And I think they’re finding their way back to that
⏹️ ▶️ John now. They really messed up the 3 Series for a couple of generations and are just slowly finding their way back.
⏹️ ▶️ John The 5 got mushy, but then got better. I think Marco’s generation was the return to form of the 5. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the current 5, by all accounts, is really good as well. The 7 has always been weird, because that’s the big Luxo
⏹️ ▶️ John boat, but if it’s supposed to be an ultimate driving machine, it’s kind of confusing. And the electrics, we don’t know how things are going to shape
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the electrics, but whenever one starts fueling their full line of electrics, will BMWs be the,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, a good example is Porsche with the Taycan. Is that how you pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ John it? I forget. I think that’s right. They’ve staked out. We make the sporty electric. We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John brag about how you can do zero to 100 to zero all day long and we’ll just do it. We’re gonna brag
⏹️ ▶️ John about our Nurburgring times. Like, I mean, it makes sense, that’s Porsche’s brand, we’re a sporty car, but then guess what? We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John electric, same deal. We’re doing the same thing. We are the sporty car company. If you want an electric car and you want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a sporty electric car, we’re gonna try to make that for you. When BMW goes electric, are they
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say we’re the ultimate electric driving machine? Is that what they’re gonna shoot for? Are they going to say, actually, for the electric,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all gonna be about hush, quiet, and long mileage or something or whatever. Like, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like BMW, like Volvo, they have it so easy. Like, Volvo is the safety brand, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy a Volvo, whoever owns them now or whatever, it’s like, it’s not a question about, what distinguishes
⏹️ ▶️ John a Volvo? Why would someone buy a Volvo? Safety, the word is safety. That choice has been made. If you buy a Volvo,
⏹️ ▶️ John you better make it a really safe car. You better invest money in safety because that’s your brand and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John who buys your car. You can change your mind about that and say, Volvo’s gonna be the sporty brand, but you’re gonna lose all your safety
⏹️ ▶️ John customers and chances are good You’re not gonna gain the sporty ones BMW Sporty sporty
⏹️ ▶️ John cars like they pioneered that that’s their brand you can decide to change it But
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll lose all your sporty customers now you’re competing with the other people who might in business spot already So I would advise BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John to get back that ultimate driving machine spirit as they have been and to maintain it through the
⏹️ ▶️ John electric era learn learn from Porsche It’s possible to do that. It’s possible to say
⏹️ ▶️ John there are a lot of electric cars in the market but ours is the one that’s sporty. Go with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small. All right thanks to our sponsors this week Squarespace, Foley and Notion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thank you to our members if you want to join up go to atp.fm join and we will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Neutral: New Ford Bronco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I haven’t had the time to look into this literally at all. I have spent probably 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds looking at this. But have either of you guys paid any attention to the new Ford
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bronco? And if so, can you give me the quick summary of it? It’s a big Tonka toy truck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for grownups. So it’s because it seems to me, I guess there’s like three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different trims or models or something. Like I guess there’s a two-door, four-door and then some sport model, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what makes that
⏹️ ▶️ John sport. There’s like six trim levels
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that go from 30K at base
⏹️ ▶️ John to 60K at the top. It’s kind of like the Jeeps in that regard in that it is a foundation for a car
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can mold to your tastes and budget. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And yeah, it’s a big, it’s like a taco truck. It’s like a toy
⏹️ ▶️ John truck with big knobby wheels and you know, and I was like, what do you want to use it for? Are you mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to drive to the mall? You can set it up that way, right? Are you actually going to go off-roading
⏹️ ▶️ John and use it to camp in, you can set it up that way. And you could do it all the ways in between, two door, four door,
⏹️ ▶️ John interior that looks like a luxury car versus the one that looks like, you know, it’s all vinyl and plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you wanna have a winch accessory? Do you wanna have a tent thing like it’s, it looks like a very versatile platform that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John squarely aimed at customers that this type of car appeals to. And it’s a great, I admire their flexibility because
⏹️ ▶️ John they know, look, some people are gonna buy this and they’re just gonna, you know, drive to the grocery store. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John has to serve that need. It has to be an okay car for doing that while also looking like a fun little truck.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also some people are actually gonna take it off road, so it has to be able to do that too. And to the extent
⏹️ ▶️ John that we can make it legit, as in like, oh, this really can go off road. Like this really can go up the side
⏹️ ▶️ John of a mountain and have a winch. That reflects down the whole rest of the line, legitimizing the person who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just taking it to the grocery store to saying, I have a Bronco too. And they can think in their heart of hearts, if I just change the wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John on this thing, I can go up the side of a mountain too, even if it’s not really true, because they didn’t get like the transfer case
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever features that allowed, you know, I don’t know. The truck details. I’m not into trucks, but I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John product looks like a good product for its target market. Again, not having read any reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s terrible quality and the engine stinks or something. We’ll find out. But just from sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John design and features that are available on it, looks like a pretty good job. And judging from
⏹️ ▶️ John the few people we know who are into trucks, mostly just Stephen Hackett, he seems excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Now, I’ve seen online lots of people talking about the Bronco. People who are into trucks and fantasize
⏹️ ▶️ John about driving around a big Tonka truck seem to be enthusiastic about it. So that’s, I mean, that’s what you hope for, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and from what little I’ve gathered, and I might be way off base, because again, I have not really looked into this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what little I’ve gathered, you can take the doors off, a la a Jeep Wrangler, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, like we can argue about whether or not that’s cool or fun or safe or whatever, but as someone who has experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it many, many times, I can tell you that I really enjoy doing that. So you can take the doors off. I guess there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like hundreds of accessories that Ford
⏹️ ▶️ John out with. You can take the roof off. You can put on different doors. You can get a hard top or
⏹️ ▶️ John a soft top. You can get doors with windows in the bottom of them. You can take the doors off. You can have two or four of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those. All of this seems extremely well thought out. Like somebody who actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cares about this sort of thing was leading the charge to make a Wrangler, not a Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey killer necessarily, but a Wrangler equivalent. And in the same way that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, I’m a single issue voter when it comes to cars and that is three pedals. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all, this has a seven speed in certain trims apparently, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John oh, heck yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the default. You have to, the automatic is an optional extra
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on the models that bikes have. Oh, be still
⏹️ ▶️ John my heart. You have to pay extra for the automatic, like the old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. Be still my heart. In 2021, a brand new,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asterisk, car getting a set, well, six slash seven speed, seven speed in this case, as the default.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bravo, bravo, Ford. Bravo indeed. Um, but no, I think that this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see myself buying a Bronco, but man, if I was still in my Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phase, I think this would be very interesting to cross shop very, very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed. And, and I just really think this is a very cool and different approach to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making a car where you have like, you know, this Tonka truck, like Tinker Toy sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing where you can make of it, whatever you want. And I love that. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, in the Wrangler world, from what I’ve seen, which I haven’t looked at this in a year or two now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you certainly could get some options from, from Jeep, but it wasn’t the overabundance of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Now, absolutely. There is a infinite world of possibilities with the Wrangler when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider the aftermarket, but for first party OEM stuff, I don’t think there was near as many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey options as, as you can get on the Bronco. And I just think this is super duper cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a reasonable way to reboot an old name. I just, from what little I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen of this, five stars. I am really pleased that Ford has gone this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, Marco, you could get one of these to drive on the
⏹️ ▶️ John beach. Well, maybe your grandkids can get a permit to
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right. Exactly. It’s true. You can. I was saying it was like a toga
⏹️ ▶️ John toy just because the proportions of this car of just like tall with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco giant wheels and a big
⏹️ ▶️ John ride. It looks like a toy car. Like It’s not the reason you don’t build real cars like that is because they’ll roll
⏹️ ▶️ John over if you turn too fast, right? But for off-road purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ John for performance cars, it’s all about being super low and having really low-profile tires. But for trucks, it’s like big knobby
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels like in your toy trucks in the sandbox because they look like cartoons of themselves, right? This looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John that cartoon, right? You can buy it with comically huge wheels. You can buy it
⏹️ ▶️ John with a factory whatever kit that raises it up So the ride height is like an extra foot higher.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like all those things are there to make it basically a worse car for taking to the grocery store
⏹️ ▶️ John by all possible measures. But I feel like the way it competes with the Wrangler is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like we were saying about it with the hose down interior and you said in the Slack, like, oh, just like every Jeep ever. It’s like, yeah, but this is just, this is a real
⏹️ ▶️ John car. Like it’s not, like a Jeep is like so utilitarian. They try
⏹️ ▶️ John to dress it up, but it’s always just noisy and rough and awkward and weird. And like, yeah, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not what it’s for. It’s a Jeep, right? the Bronco feels like it’s trying to say, let’s make a car
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you just drive it to the grocery store, it just feels like any other like mini SUV. It feels like a RAV4,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I’m not sure they’ve achieved that. I’ll have to wait till I see reviews, but it seems like they want to reach down to that segment.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you can buy the one that there are no winds whooshing by, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John no rattles, there are no creaks. The ride is gentle. It’s like you’re in a really tall tippy Camry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, make it work for that. but then also make it tough
⏹️ ▶️ John enough and built sturdily enough that if you outfit it the right way, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John actually take it off road and actually make it out of durable materials and rubber seal all of the controls
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can spray down the dashboard and nothing will short out, right? And offer it with vinyl seats. Like a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John it is just choices of options. Like I look at this and I think of, like imagine if Apple made a
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, to bring it back to tech for a second, made a laptop with this range of options, right? Like you can get the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant battery pack that’s water sealed, but you could also get the one that’s as thin as possible. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that’s the, the beauty of this product line. Again, if it’s this car is worth a damn at all, I haven’t read any
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews of it. If the engine is decent, if the transmission is decent, if it really is tough, if the reliability is
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, they seem to have built a platform that has a lot of flexibility. They can last
⏹️ ▶️ John them a lot of years and serve a lot of different customers and all that crap with those options. That’s all gold, right? Like I just asked
⏹️ ▶️ John Porsche, right? That’s just, you know, this car is expensive. Like it starts at 29 K. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get into this for sixteen thousand dollars or something right starts at twenty nine. So it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I Put myself on this as a big tangible I was trying to get it as this is trying to appeal to people who know what the hell the Bronco
⏹️ ▶️ John is Like the retro styling like Mustangs have been doing this for years like a modern car
⏹️ ▶️ John that evokes design character It’s not just like the kidney gorilla can be MW’s but like reminds you of
⏹️ ▶️ John a specific Mustang, right? For has done it with Mustangs for years. Oh this remind
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a a modernization of the 68 Mustang or whatever it is, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John see it, right? This is a modernization of, I think, the original Bronco
⏹️ ▶️ John design. Like, you look at it and you can see the family resemblance. It doesn’t look exactly the same. It’s not like some of the cars
⏹️ ▶️ John that have come out of American car companies. They’re really just giant, inflated, cartoon versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of an exact car from the past. But the Bronco is trying to specifically evoke
⏹️ ▶️ John the old Bronco. And every time I see that, I’m like, that’s cool and everything. And you’re gonna get those customers who are now
⏹️ ▶️ John older and have the money to buy a car that starts at $30,000 because they remember the original one. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John road is eventually a dead end. You need to always be creating
⏹️ ▶️ John new models that become that for the next generation. To give an example, the Acura Integra
⏹️ ▶️ John was a thing that did not exist. Honda made it. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John when those people get older, I fully expect someday Honda to come back and say, we’re going to, well, Honda doesn’t really do this that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you could come back later and say, hey, all the people who grew up loving the Integra, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John old now and have a lot of money, so let’s make a modern Integra that evokes the design of
⏹️ ▶️ John the 1992 Integra and get all those people to buy it for a lot more money, right? You have to always
⏹️ ▶️ John be creating new models like that. If all you ever do is go back to the past and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you remember that Bronco that everybody loved? Here’s another modern reinterpretation of it. That’s dead end.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will run out of things to keep reinterpreting. You have to always have new models that didn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John before. It’s like making new IP. You can’t just keep making Marvel movies forever. At a certain point, you have to have new intellectual property,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Star Wars was new intellect, believe it or not, once, was new intellectual property. It was not based on something
⏹️ ▶️ John that came before it, right? It was not based on a comic book. It wasn’t based on an existing franchise. It was entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John new. You have to do that every once in a while. And sometimes I wonder if American car companies
⏹️ ▶️ John are able to do that at all. Like Jeep is just gonna make new things called quote unquote Wrangler forever with round headlights
⏹️ ▶️ John and vertical slots in the grill. Like they’re just never gonna make it. I mean, the Cherokee, I guess, is a new
⏹️ ▶️ John IP, kind of. But I think this Bronco is great, but
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the next new brand name of, what’s the new
⏹️ ▶️ John IP for an American car company that 25, 30 years from now, someone’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be looking back with nostalgia and buying the much more expensive version of that? That’s what I worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about when I see things like the Bronco. But for what it is, it seems like so far a good interpretation of that.