403: A VCR for the Internet

05 Nov 2020

John’s bottom-covering issues, the AirPods Pro repair program, RIAA vs. youtube-dl, and what we hope to see at Apple’s event next week.

Episode Description:

• The ATP Store is back until 14 November!
• Follow-up:
  • Casey is aware of the National Radio Quiet Zone
    • Verizon map
    • AT&T map
  • Apple leather case covers the bottom, which chaps John’s bottom
  • Moving 2-Factor Authentication to new phones
    • Google Authenticator’s changes (via Michael Koziarski)
  • Reminders and Big Sur
  • “Alexa” and “Siri” and using new hail words (via David Kenny)
    • Saoirse Ronan
  • John’s 2x-camera usage
  • iPhones and USB-C speeds over Lightning → USB-C cables
  • Apple extending Apple TV+ free trial to February 2021
  • John’s too-long Apple Maps directions
  • What are Xcode xip files, anyway? (via Zev Eisenbergboo)
  • “Small percentage” of Xbox Elite 2 controller problems
  • “Small percentage” of AirPod Pro problems
    • Earwax type: The myth
    • Ear candling
• youtube-dl, DMCA, and the RIAA, oh my!
  • GitHub warns about forks
  • Casey’s overview
  • 99 Percent Invisible: The Lost Cities of Geo
  • Concert for Charlottesville
  • Jack Valenti
  • youtube-dl History
  • DeCSS
• Apple’s “One More Thing” Event
  • Bloomberg Coverage
  • hishnash’s tweet
  • DMA
• Post-show:
  • Mario Kart Live Home Circuit
  • Trailer
  • Velan Studios
  • Anki Drive Demo
  • Lakitu
  • Nintendo Labo
  • Mario Kart 64: The Quest for World Record Perfection

Sponsored by:

• Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
• Away: Start your 100-day trial and shop Away’s entire lineup of travel essentials, including their best-selling suitcases.

Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

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

Chapters

1. ATP Store 🖼️
2. National Radio Quiet Zone 🖼️
3. Bottom-covering issues
4. Follow-up
5. AirPods Pro repair program 🖼️
6. Sponsor: Away
7. RIAA vs. youtube-dl
8. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
9. Apple event next week
10. Sponsor: Linode
11. First Apple-silicon Macs?
12. Ending theme
13. Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit 🖼️

ATP Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t want to talk about politics today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m going to tell you that the way that you can celebrate this theoretical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hopeful maybe win for things that the three of us consider good and right in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and democracy in general. The way you can celebrate that obviously is with capitalism. So we should tell you that the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey store is back, baby. ATP.fm slash store. This is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} to be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last. You’re the master of self-serving transitions. That’s what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} here for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So anyway, ATP Store is back, atp.fm.store. It will be back until the 14th of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey November ATP time. That is not this upcoming Saturday, if you’re listening to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in your real time, but it is a week from Saturday, the 14th of November. The reason we did this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is because we hope, but do not guarantee that those in the US will get this stuff before the holidays.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hope, but not guarantee. So what do we got going on here? We’ve got an update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the Monochrome Pro Max shirts. John, would you do me the pleasure, please, of explaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what these are and what’s different?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sure, this is the shirt we have that has silhouettes of all the different Pro Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over the years, not all of them, but some of the different Pro Macs over the years. The original one was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John six color, well, originally a five color design with the Apple colors that eventually became a six color design when the 2019

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Pro was released. And we also had, went back when it was a five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac design, a line art version of that, where it’s instead of them being colored

⏹️ ▶️ ^John silhouettes, they’re little line drawings of them, and they’re actually also a little bit more to scale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we updated the monochrome version of that shirt with line art that features the new Mac Pro. So now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both of our Pro Max shirts have six Macs on them, and the monochrome one is for sale for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first time. So check that out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, and as with before, you can do with or without wheels, wheels as they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey run you an extra $4. So I’m sorry about that. We’ve got the monochrome Pro Max shirt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with or without wheels. We’ve got the standard six colors ATP shirt. We’ve got the ATP hat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’ve got the ATP embroidered zip hoodie, which is excellent. In particular, I very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much like that. So you’ve got about 10 more days as we record this to go and get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your merch. ATP dot FM slash store. You will hear this one more time. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have to. It’s required by the contract between the three of us. I have to tell you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every single time we have a sale, I make the same speech. Listeners,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please go and do the order now. Visualize where you’re going to be if you’re driving, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nobody is because we can’t leave, or if you’re walking, which not many people do because we can’t leave, or if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} you’re doing anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just visualize where you will be at that future time and visualize yourself going to atp.fm.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so you’re not the person that tweets at me two minutes after the store closes saying, oh when does the store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey close? I think I might have missed it. So, don’t be that person. Please, if you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to buy stuff, do it now. If you don’t want to buy stuff, that’s fine. That’s totally fine. But if you’re going to buy stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do it now. Celebrate capitalism because that’s the American way. atp.fm. store.

National Radio Quiet Zone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And speaking of capitalism, let’s start some follow-up. So, it’s so funny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being a host on the show because there are times that I genuinely just miss the plot on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something and I don’t even consider something. And then there’s times that I think, well, what about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing? No, that can’t be it. And I don’t say anything. And then the entire internet comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to say, hey, hey, hey, did you know about that thing? So listeners, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am aware of the national radio quiet zone. Thank you for reminding me. I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well aware of it. And actually, anyone who told me, hey, if you heard of the National Radio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Quiet Zone, you have now received demerits. You want to know why? Because if you really were a Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey completionist, you would have known that months ago I was on the delightful Fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fact podcast with our friends. And I was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the whole premise of the show is to talk about fun facts. And if memory serves, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was with Alan filling and for ARIC, and guess what my fun fact was? The National Radio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Quiet Zone. So yes, I’m aware of it. If you’re not aware of it, however, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is very funny and very interesting. It’s this big swath of land, basically on the West Virginia-Virginia

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey border that ostensibly, in certain, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the entire swath of land, ostensibly you’re not really allowed to have like cell phone coverage, but realistically there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like a town or a section or something like that, it’s been a while since I’ve spoken about it, where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, really locked down. You can’t have portable phones, you can’t have cell phones, you can’t have radios.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s because they have these extremely large and complicated radio telescopes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on these mountaintops over in West Virginia. So that’s why some people have said, well, maybe that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why Verizon has this huge dead area in between West Virginia and Virginia. And yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey buy that in principle. But if you look at the two maps, which I put links in the show notes, maybe if Marco is kind, he’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey put them in the chapter art. But, um, if you look at the two maps side by side, the difference between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the AT&T map and the Verizon map is still pretty stark in my personal opinion. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do agree that that might be the national radio quiet zone might be the difference or might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be that might be the issue there, but geez, it still seems like there’s a big difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between AT&T and Verizon. Also, you should all be Casey completionists. What the hell’s wrong with you?

Bottom-covering issues

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, I’m sorry about your bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, as I feared and as I expected, the Apple leather case for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new line of iPhones does indeed cover the bottom of the phone. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not gonna help me with my bottom covering issues. The good news for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco, maybe, is that there is a Apple leather case available for the mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well, something that I hadn’t done in the past for the SE and the other small phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if Marco doesn’t mind the bottom cover, he can try out the Apple leather case. As for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have ordered a couple of third-party leather cases that don’t cover the bottom of the phone and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll report back in when they show up and I try them out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, just to get ahead of all the feedback, are you willing to put links in the show notes or would you rather wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey until you have received them before you even link to them? Because you know that we’re gonna get asked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, no, I’m intentionally not telling you which ones. You know why? Because why would you buy a case that I haven’t even told

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you was any good yet. Like if you care about my opinion, then wait to hear my opinion. If you don’t care about my opinion, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy the leather case you wanna buy. Like there’s a million of them, right? So no links, no names. In fact, I don’t even remember which two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I bought. There was like seven of them that I had open in tabs. What I can tell you about it is- You? No. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I left that window open so when they arrive, I’ll remember which one I bought. I guess I looked through all your seats. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my criteria was leather, mostly kind of like the Apple leather case. so no real textured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leather that looks like rumply ostrich skin or whatever. Like just, you know, if you’ve seen what the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leather case look like, especially the black ones, they’re very sort of uniform grain. So as close as that as I can get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Open on the bottom, you know, thin like Apple’s leather cases are. Lays, looks like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lets the phone lay flat on the table, so it evens out the camera bump. Fits the 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro obviously. And metal buttons, or plastic, metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or plastic buttons that stick out from the leather. Like what I didn’t want were the leather lump buttons and so many really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good looking cases had leather lumps where it’s a leather case and then the buttons for volume and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power are just like lumps in the leather but aren’t themselves, like there’s no cutout for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the buttons or anything. It’s just kind of like a lumpy part. And I’ve had Apple’s leather case used to be like that. I had Apple’s leather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case that was like that. Do not like the leather lumps. So either two cases with metal and or plastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buttons, both of them black, both of them leather, both of them open on the bottom. I will report back. And then when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I report back, I will give you links, including, even if I don’t like them, then I’ll give you links, so then you’ll just know what I’m talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m actually, I’m curious to see how this ends up, because like I’ve been an Apple leather case user ever since they made the phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unholdable with the iPhone 6 forward, and the Apple leather cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, the current ones, and even the old leather bump ones back then, they’ve always been the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco best available that I have been able to find. I’ve never found a third-party leather case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for an iPhone that was as good as Apple’s. And Apple’s aren’t even like amazing, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just decent. And it seems like no one else is able to make better ones. It seems like the best thing anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has ever been able to say about other cases is they’re cheaper. But I’ve rarely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if ever, found one that was like really nice and Apple’s cases,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have yet to find anything that is as nice as theirs. That being said, I decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back, John, when you were tweeting a couple weeks ago, looking at cases and getting suggestions from people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of them caught my eye, I thought it looked all right, and so I pre-ordered that one for the Mini, which I haven’t even been able to pre-order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet, but I figured, I plan to try the Mini caseless, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I actually occasionally will probably want a case anyway, and that was before I knew Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was gonna make their own leather ones for it. So I decided to pre-order that one, and so we’ll see, I’ll be able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco compare, because I’ll probably also end up getting Apple’s, because Apple’s are probably gonna come in better colors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the one I ordered only came like in black and brown. And so I couldn’t get like a red one. So I’m gonna,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if apples comes in red, I’m gonna get apples and I’ll have both and I’ll be able to compare, I’ll let you know. But I honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would be very surprised if any other cases are as nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as apples in just how nice the leather feels, how good the buttons are, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well and how closely it hugs the phone without being too bulky or too thick. That’s what I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanna see. And so many of them also are just incredibly tasteless with their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco logo placement. And the one I ordered doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem to have a logo visible on the back and I’m very happy about that. So we’ll see too. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this one looks like the best third party one I have seen, but I also know this is the kind of thing you kind of just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to like put it on your phone and feel it to really know how good it is. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll see. You can bleep this out on the episode marker, but which one did you order? I don’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re all the same. Yeah, I have the same trepidations about it because I’ve never bought a third party leather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case. And the problem with all of these is like, you know the product photos can be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John far distant from the product you get. It’s almost like food photos on like menus of fast food

⏹️ ▶️ ^John places. Like, okay, right. So that’s the picture. But then if I take the thing that I ordered and hold it up next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the picture, it’s like, no, right? So I don’t know how much to trust these pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I, you know, that’s why I ordered multiple cases. Cause I’m like, well, you know, these multiple cases still add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to less than Apple’s one case. At least with Apple’s one expensive case, you’re like, well, at least I know what I’m getting. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cause I’ve got the leather cases before. I kind of know what I’m in for and I’ll just bite the bullet on the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the cost. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} we will both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John report back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Real time confirmation. It was the case, that one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got to bleep that out now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess. Cause I don’t, I don’t, all I, all I can say is that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one that made me want to order it and try it, but we’ll see when it gets here. If I can have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t even know how long it’ll be before I have a phone. We’re gonna be able to start ordering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone 12 mini this Friday morning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who knows, and the Macs too, but who knows when I’ll be able to actually get one to arrive here. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a big question mark. If Apple is as supply constrained as they appear to be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if the mini has a whole ton of orders, as I think it probably will, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could be one of those things where like I get in there on a minute two and it’s backordered by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six weeks. So we’ll figure it out. I’ll try to get one somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, if you would like to hear what Marcos said, you can always go to atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash join and listen to the bootleg where it will not be bleeped. Yes. Just saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The bell happens live, but the bleeps are put in in editing. So the bootleg never has bleeps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yep, there you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go.

Follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, John, can you tell me about two-factor authentication and moving it between devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, your cursor is blocking the letter of this person’s name. Whose cursor is that? Oh, I guess that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} was mine. Sorry. Who’s the blue cursor? Oh, it was an eye. Isn’t it weird that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the cursor, like, it was blocking the eye? Yeah. Anyway. They call it the Eyebeam. Michael Kozarski wrote in to tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us that the Google Auth app that I was complaining about the other day about my phone setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changed its method of storing items. It used to do it in the keychain, but now it doesn’t anymore. but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old keys that were created before the change are grandfathered in. So every time I upgrade to a new phone and some subset

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my two-factor stuff is still in the Google Auth app, it’s because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re the ones that were created before this app changed from storing things in the key changes, storing things just locally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s not a random set, it’s the oldest ones. And that kind of makes sense now that I think about it. It just seemed random because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I changed the order around, right? So there wasn’t actually the top whatever, it was just a subset of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So anyway, yeah. And on the two-factor stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got a lot of advice about what I can do to make my setup less painful, aside from the dozens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and dozens of people who had to tell me that I should use Authy or 1Password, which I predicted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the show, but it did not stop them. I know you said on the show that you don’t wanna hear about 1Password,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but have you considered 1Password? I’ve considered it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Welcome to 80% of all feedback ever. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was by far the most popular suggestion. And all these people are right, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of not helpful. Everybody said, hey, if you print out the QR codes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you set up your stuff for the second time, then when you get a new phone, you can just rescan all those same QR codes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John True, but to implement that strategy to save myself trouble next time, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need a time machine, because I didn’t do that. So yes, you’re right, I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have done that. And it would have been smart, but telling me now just makes me feel bad because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know I’m in for the next time, which I’m resigned to, like I said, like I’ve decided by not using a CloudSync thing, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signing up to do this all over again. Maybe next time I will print out all the QR codes, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly, that makes that process even worse because now I have to like take little screenshots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and do printouts and make sure I write down what thing that belongs to and it’s, well, actually I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even do that because the QR codes usually embed that information. But anyway, tune in two years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from now when I set up an X phone to hear me complain about this again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nice. Oh goodness. Can you tell me about what’s going on with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Reminders and your Mac?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, this is some good news for me. I’m told by a reliable source that Reminders

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will no longer wake my Mac up from sleep in Mac OS Big Sur. Hooray!

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, I haven’t experienced this for myself, but I am, again, told reliably that this was a bug that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been fixed. If you recall, my complaint was my computer would be dead asleep and then reminders would pop up a notification

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it would wake my Mac up just so I could see the reminder on the screen. Even when I wasn’t in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room with it, so on and so forth. And I do not want my big, hot, noisy, expensive 2019 Mac Pro to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wake up just because a reminder came up. And I also didn’t want to disable notifications for reminders on my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because when I’m on my Mac, I do want reminders, notifications to pop up. I just don’t want them to wake my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac from sleep. And now, reportedly, they won’t. Well, that’s very exciting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for you. I’m actually kind of excited that you can actually upgrade your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey OS in a timely fashion or at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, can and will are two different things. You know, let’s take it easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, fair enough. Considering all of our audio software won’t work on Big Sur and Day One probably anyway, so. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not that I’m grumbling about that at all. Anyway, moving on, can you tell me about what’s going on with Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the name of their tube? Or I guess not the name of their tube, but their hail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, this feedback is from David Kenny, who tells us that he is one of those families that has a child whose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name sounds a little bit like Siri, and in fact is Siri. So we’re talking about this with Alexa,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where it’s good that you can rename Alexa’s hail word to be like computer, Amazon, or I forget what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the choices are. But you have some number of choices. We were saying, wouldn’t it be great if Apple’s dingus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had different names that you could call it too, just in case someone has a child named Siri. So David says, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John niece’s name is Shirsa, which is spelled S-A-O-I-R-S-E,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a name that you would never know the pronunciation of except that it’s also the name of a famous actress who’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a bunch of really good movies that you should definitely see. I enjoy her work. Shirsa

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ronan is her name. Anyway, she goes by Siri for short.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And he says, not infrequently in their house, my phone will give me confusing food recommendations when someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has yelled at my niece to come for dinner. Everyone who lives in that house has disabled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hey Dingus on all their devices just to avoid this problem. But if you enter this home, beware, because the name will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yelled into the air and your devices will activate. So there you go, Apple. Please save

⏹️ ▶️ ^John David Kenney’s family.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. Can you tell me, John, about your favorite lens on your camera?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not my favorite lens, but I did beat Marco’s percentage. We were, you two were discussing how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John often you use the telephoto lens, the third lens on your iPhones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I thought I had used it a lot and I did the little search in Apple photos. This is on my iPhone XS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I use the 2X camera almost exactly 25% of the time, 25.01% of the time. That’s way higher. So I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like 16

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something, right? Yep. I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to crop out that background. It’s all about cropping out the background.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. And can iPhones do USB-C speeds or not? What’s the story there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nope, I screwed this one up. I had mentioned in passing the other day when John was talking about how slow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} was it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, one of you was talking about how slow an iTunes slash Finder backup was of an iOS device,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you’re using a USB-A to Lightning cable, and I said, hey, you should’ve used a USB-C to Lightning cable, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those have USB-3 transfer speeds. And it turns out this was correct for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the two iPad Pros that actually had Lightning had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lightning and were iPad Pros, but not even all of them. I think the original 9.7, I think was 2.0 still, but the 12.9 was 3.0, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 10.5 became,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was also USB 3.0, and then they went to USB-C. And apparently iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have never had the extra data pins required to actually give USB 3 speeds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the lightning cable, even with USB-C cable. So, turns out that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. And then we enter the ancient follow-up section, but stuff that’s been pushed down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the document for sometimes months. Uh, we are happy to report two months late that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple has decided to extend Apple TV plus free year trials through February of this upcoming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey year. Uh, ostensibly this is because COVID delayed, uh, shooting second seasons of, of some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the early shows. I think I’d heard rumblings probably on upgrade, uh, that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, for all mankind was close to done. I think, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the morning show is starting up now, if I recall correctly. You should listen to Upgrade for that stuff. They cover it way better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we do. But anyways, they’re going to extend the trial for those of us who bought phones or other devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey late last year through February 2021, which is great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I believe. Yep, I got the extension too. I was excited about that. I’m just saying for people, if you don’t know this is happening,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John check in your devices. You might have a couple months free of Apple TV+. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Also, I know this is very old news, if you fly in the same circles as the three of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us or pay attention to what we are saying and our friends are saying, but Ted Lasso, get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on that. It’s what you need right now. It’s happy, happy TV. It’s good times. I don’t care if you like sports or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I was listening to a certain top four episode earlier today, because I’m a bit behind and…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anyways, if you like sports or not, please, please, please give Ted Lasso

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a try. It’s very good, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} wholesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You skipped an item earlier. Did I?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe I should number them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, no, you’re right. I did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right. Not that it really matters, but it’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, tell me about your two long Apple Maps directions, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was many shows ago. As Casey said, this is an ancient follow-up. It’s just bubbling up to the top now. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was using Apple Maps versus Google Maps. And I got frustrated because Apple Maps suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gave me a route that told me it would take an hour and 45 minutes, when really it should be like 20 minutes. And I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understand it. I did it multiple times and it kept giving it to me and then Google gave me the correct time. Many listeners

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were going to say, I’ve had something similar happen. And what happened to me was that Apple Maps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decided that I should have walking directions instead of driving directions, which would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of explain the time difference, I suppose. Although I’m kind of surprised that it thinks I could even walk it in an hour and 45 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s for the environment, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. At the time I didn’t check to see whether it was giving me walking direction, But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is a plausible explanation to me. It doesn’t make Apple Maps any better, considering Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maps should know that I drove there, unless it thinks I can walk very fast. And it probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even did the, you parked your car in this location thing, but then it gives me walking directions back. Come on, Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we have this next piece of follow-up from Zev Eisenberg, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to give you a hint as to how old it is, it was listed in our show notes as Zev Eisenboo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because presumably this person had put in one of those god awful Halloween

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} themed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m following the instructions, which is you must use the Halloween name if people use it on Twitter. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to shame slash honor them. If you use the Halloween name on Twitter and you give us feedback, your Halloween name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be in the show, Zev Eisenboo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, so tell me what Zev Eisenboo had to say. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fantastic. It’s like the same rule where if somebody has a typo, you have to read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it as it was typed. Mm-hmm, yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is about the Xcode zip files, XIP, not ZIP. We were talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about them and how they take a really long time to decompress. Actually, after that show, a bunch of people were like, oh, if you don’t wanna spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that time, do it from the command line with this thing and it won’t take so long, because then it won’t have to do all like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signature verification crap. The command line way is not worth describing, because yeah, it skips the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signature verification, but then it does it when you launch the app anyway. You cannot avoid the signature verification. It’s going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can split up into two pieces. one, decompress, two, verify when you launch or do them both at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once. And that’s what Zev was writing to say. He was saying that the zip file is Apple proprietary sign compressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file. Not sure if it’s the same compression scheme as zip, but once it’s unzipped, the app is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also unquarantined. So you don’t have to then have Gatekeeper look at it. So the quarantine attribute,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s also removed. You know when you like download something from the internet and the first time you launch it, it’s like, oh, this file was downloaded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the internet. You sure you wanna launch it? Uncompressing a zip file by double clicking it in the finder,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does the compression and the signature verification. And once it does all of that, it also removes the quarantine attributes. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good to launch after that. And you can’t avoid as far as I know, either one of those steps, unless you disable gatekeeper, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can just choose whether you want them to all happen at once or split them up into two pieces.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah.

AirPods Pro repair program

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then John, I presume, would love to tell me about the Xbox Elite 2 controller. Speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Cotton Bureau, isn’t that what Cotton Bureau sent you for their ad spot a while back?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. This was part of their sponsorship they gave us with Xbox Elite 2 controller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to try out and I reviewed it in a ad read slash product review in the tradition of our toaster stuff a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back. And I noted that some of my friends who had Xbox Elite controllers of various vintages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had complained about reliability issues, which is kind of depressing when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you buy like a, I forget if it was $180 controller or something, very expensive controller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wouldn’t expect that one to have reliability concerns. And I was speculating that maybe it’s because it was such low volume that it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get the same testing. Anyway, Microsoft has apparently addressed this. And they’ve,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s amazing they use the same language. Here’s the quote from their document. We’ve received claims that a small percentage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of our customers, it’s always a small percentage, a small percentage of our customers are experiencing mechanical issues.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, what percentage does it have to be for a small not to apply? Like, is 80% a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sign? I don’t know what the reliability are, but apparently this is legally approved message for every reliability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem, including Apple’s AirPod Pros, which also have a repair extension program now, in case you weren’t aware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} A small percentage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Apple’s AirPod Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, oh God, did I tell you that that actually happened to me? No. And it happened, I literally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so this is the thing, we never actually talked about it on the show, but there has been a widespread problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for AirPod Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think you mean a small percentage, Marko? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where it seems like they develop a rattle or a static noise that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco often is correlated to motion or noise cancellation. It basically, it kind of sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something has come unglued inside and it rattles around, especially during bass frequencies or during movement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’ve heard from so many people who have AirPod Pros who have not only gotten them replaced for this, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have gotten multiple replacements because this seems to just kill them after some amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of time or some amount of usage. And it’s funny, it’s just like the butterfly keyboard responses. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you get a replacement AirPod Pro, but it seems like the replacements end up getting the same problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So what you’re saying is this just actually came out that they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco launched a service program where they say that a small percentage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey course it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. A small percentage of AirPod Pros have a potential issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if they’re manufactured before October of 2020. And so there’s a service program

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that if you’re having this issue with one or both of your AirPod Pros, you can get them replaced for up to two years after purchase, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is nice, because we’re about to reach the one year anniversary of their launch, if we haven’t already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so the first ones are gonna be falling out of warranty soon otherwise. But it’s good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re basically giving a two year extended warranty on any of them purchased

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through or until October of 2020, which was last week. So.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it makes it sound like they figured out the problem though, because they’re cutting it off as saying, but okay, from this point on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we figured it out. And if you got one that was manufactured before this point, you get a two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year warranty. But after this point, you don’t get a two year warranty because presumably we figured out the problem and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gluing that thing in better or whatever the problem was. So unlike the butterfly keyboard, I have some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John confidence that they’ve actually figured this problem out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope so, but they also said the same thing about the Vertify keyboard. How many times did they quote improve that thing for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco service or reliability issues? And I think only the very last generation one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has seemingly not had massive major scale problems. And this is one of those things where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m pretty sure, like when Apple says a small percentage, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the time when Apple says something, you can usually believe it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there might be some lawyering in some of the wording or some tricks with like, you know, making things sound better than they are. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the most part, you can usually believe it. When they say a small percentage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of their hardware of a certain type has a flaw, that is usually BS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I don’t know if they intend it. Maybe they’re like, well, you know, we only hear about this much percent through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the service channel or anything, but like usually that means all of them have this flaw. And you know, maybe just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe most people don’t hit it, But like there are some kind of flaw that caused this and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just have this flaw with the way they made them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You gotta invoke Merlin’s credo that if you don’t use a product, it usually works pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To give an example, my wife has AirPod Pros and I asked her, this is a repair program. I’m like, have you had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this problem? Like, cause what I wanted to say is like, you should really, really use your AirPod Pros more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that you can induce this problem so that we can get a free replacement within the two years. Because if you really lightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use them and the problem appears in year three, because you barely use them. That’s not great, right? So just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use them now. So if you like Apple may be hearing from, you know, Apple says it as if a small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John percentage have the problem, but Apple hears about a small percentage. And again, what is small is small 1%, 5%,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 10%, 20%, whatever. But how many people have our pod pros, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just don’t use them that much. And so that this, this problem never occurs, because maybe it only occurs after the first, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John x 100 hours of use or something like that. Or maybe it only occurs if you have the gooby earwax

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead of the dry earwax. That’s the thing looking up. Wow. Anyway, who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is quite a sidetrack on my Xbox Elite 2 story, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} hey, guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what? If you have an Elite Series 2, your warranty has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been extended. It’s been extended from the terrible default warranty on this product, 90

⏹️ ▶️ ^John days. Come on, Microsoft.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Is that even legal? $180 controller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has a 90-day warranty? Come on. It’s been extended to one year. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. So if you have an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use it a lot in the first year. So if it’s going to break, you will break it and then you’ll get a fresh one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh my. Oh, and one more thing on the AirPod Pro thing. So I actually, I had to send mine in. Coincidentally, I didn’t know there was a service program coming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I literally sent my first one in for repair like two days before they announced the service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco program. Nice. It is a really kind of like overwrought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and adorable way to when you when you have to send in or exchange or get get a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco replacement AirPod that it comes in a it comes in the same size box

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as like or like a replacement iPhone would You open it up and then there’s a little inner box and inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the inner box There’s a little tiny cardboard flap that holds the single AirPod like in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this nice little presentation thing and there’s a little card that comes with it that tells you, you unfold the card and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it depicts for you how you’re supposed to take out this AirPod from its package and put your old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco AirPod back into it and re-tape it and send it back. It’s like the most cool Apple thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just one of those things that you don’t usually see, unless you’ve done it yourself, you don’t usually see Apple’s service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco side of things. And it’s pretty fun. Because it is as Apple-y

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as you could possibly imagine. super over-designed, amazing packaging.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s a pretty fun thing to see. And the AirPod one is truly something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not at all surprising. I had to go look through, find a link for this earwax thing. And I found what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thought was a reasonable page, but then I was like, oh no, I’ve given bad information because the top of the page

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is earwax type colon the myth. And then it describes what I just said about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sticky versus dry earwax. I’m like, is it a myth? Is this like a Snopes thing where it’s like, here’s the myth and then here’s the reality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I scrolled down quickly to the conclusion. And the conclusion is, unlike most of the human characters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are used to demonstrate simple genetics principles, wet versus dry earwax really is controlled by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one gene with two alleles. Well, then why did you say it was a myth at the top of the document? Anyway, we’ll put the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John link in the show notes if you want to learn about earwax. This is the only tech podcast that will give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John earwax links. Just let it be known.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m so, so excited. Did you guys get caught up? I’m going to regret this, but here we go. Did you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey caught up in the ear candling thing that went around in the early to mid aughts?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I’m guessing yeah. I’ll give you one guess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Did you? Oh yes. So if you weren’t around in the early to mid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey aughts, there was, I presume this was in the granola-like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey natural remedy world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My first job when I was 15 years old was working in a little natural food store co-op

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing. And we sold those, and this was like 1997. And we sold them in the store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they just looked like these giant cones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It took me a while of working there to even know what they were. But eventually, I had to restock

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the shelf at some point, and I had to put some up there. I’m like, oh my God, that’s what this is?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a weird thing. But anyway, it’s older than you think, and you are correct that it does come from the hippie

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco region of things. But sorry, continue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so this was brought to me by my then girlfriend, and she

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wasn’t particularly granola-less. I don’t know where she got this, although the area in which she grew up was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super granola from what I gather. But anyway, this was a super, super hippie area

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of very rural Southwest Virginia, which seems like they would not meld, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sure enough. Anyways, the idea is you take this, I don’t know, like six or eight inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing that’s like, It seems like it’s almost like rolled up and dried up gauze from my recollection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now I’m trying to remember something that happened 15 years ago. So, you know, my facts may be wrong here, but suffice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to say, you stick this thing in your ear and light it like a candle. So you’ve got one end

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey inside your ear and the other end is literally on fire. And then if you’re smart, you’ll like put,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’ll like stick to this quote unquote candle. Again, not like wax. It’s like more like paper, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will. Um, but anyways, you will stick this, this candle through like a plastic or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m or paper plastic plate or something to catch any of the flaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey drippings, if you will, that are coming off of this candle as it’s burning down. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the theory is you burn it down as close as you can get to your ear before it starts to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey burn you. And then if you unroll what’s left, you can look inside and see the little bits of earwax

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have been sucked out by the candle burning. And I tried this at the time because I was, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really dumb. Now I’m just only… Now I’m only a little dumb, then I was really dumb. Anyways, I tried it and I was like, holy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crap, look at all the earwax that came out of here. But as it turns out, when I thought about this many years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey later and did like two seconds of research on it, it turns out that, yeah, all that earwax

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is just the candle itself crumbling. And so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John believe Margo just figuring this out. It’s like every kid magic trick, but like, that came from your body,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dude.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, yep, yep. So anyway, so we’ll put a link in the show notes that shows, this is on Wikipedia, you can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not only the remnants, which is their first image, and then you can also see somebody doing the candling, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey scroll a little more. My recollection, having not read this Wikipedia page

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in 15 years, is that it’s complete and utter BS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And so, yeah. Do not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stick things into your orifices and set them on fire. This includes cigarettes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. And also, medical note here, it’s not actually, you’re not supposed to actually remove all your earwax.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know the details, but yeah, do some research if you care. But yeah, that’s a thing. That’s the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco God, we’re going nowhere good. Yeah.

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RIAA vs. youtube-dl

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know what’s next in the show notes. Can we I would like to pitch a quick

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rearrangement, which I know is going to drive John nuts. Can we just get the YouTube deal thing out of the way real quick? I don’t think it’s gonna take very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} You’re so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John angry about your toy. So you should be. Can you actually make it quick?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I can because I actually don’t have that much to say about. Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let’s see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So a week or two ago, I forget exactly when YouTube DL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was punted off of GitHub. of GitHub because of a DMCA request by the RIAA. So that was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whole bunch of stuff that may or may not have made sense to you. So let me back up a smidge. YouTube DL is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a thing I’ve been espousing for years and it’s a command line tool that you can use to download

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey videos off of YouTube. But it also does way more than that, way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way, way more. And you can point YouTube DL at almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any URL and you can get it to download whatever video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is being played at that URL. And this can be used for nefarious purposes. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you could, I don’t know, download a TV show or something like that if it’s presented in such a way that YouTube DL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can download it. But you can also use it for a ton of legitimate uses. And as an example, one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the things I’d heard, and I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but I’d read that a lot of news

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey organizations will use it to capture footage to then rebroadcast later, which presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they get the rights for and so on and so forth. but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey easiest for them, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} maybe. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} easiest for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair. It’s easiest for them to just say, hey, we’re gonna download this ourselves and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’ll give you basically the source video. It’s not like it’s taking a screen capture or anything like that. It’s actually going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and getting the source, you know, MP4 or what have you. And it was punted from GitHub

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because of a DMCA, what is that? Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that was an act that basically said that if you are a, please correct me, gentlemen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you’re a copyright holder and you see your copyrighted material somewhere, you can tell the people hosting it to pull that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off their servers. Is that-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Among other things. I mean, I think what you’ve given is like a functional definition, but my recollection of the actual law is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that basically it’s illegal to try to circumvent copy protection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The thing you need to know is that it created a mechanism and a justification by which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco copyright holders could file claims against websites or web hosts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or anybody involved in the web hosting chain called DMCA takedown notices that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically say like, I assert that I’m the holder of these copyrights and this person at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this URL is infringing upon my copyrights and therefore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you the host are required to take that down or I can sue you. This takedown

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco procedure is very problematic and very vulnerable to issues.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s a story for maybe another day, but it’s a horrible system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but we haven’t come up with anything better yet. But it’s horrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, you know, GitHub decides to punt YouTube DL, and I didn’t really dig that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey into the why, but I think what had happened, and it really doesn’t matter, but I think what had happened is somewhere in like a unit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey test or something like that, they had a link to a YouTube video that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was like a music video or something like that. So the RIAA, which is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Recording Industry Artists of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} America? Association of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco America. The same people who sued for Napster and all the other things back in the day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So the RIAA said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We see this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey URL to something that one of our member companies has rights to. So this is BS. Take it down, man.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And GitHub, As much as I do love GitHub, it has a host of problems, and this is not even the biggest.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey GitHub, of course, doesn’t really have a whole lot of choice. I don’t think it’s a matter, but immediately

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} just say— They don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They have literally no choice. They have to take it down, or they will get sued. That’s it. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is one of the reasons why the DMCA is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problematic for anybody who hosts content. There’s basically nothing they can do about it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can do something like you can file a counterclaim to say, like, no I believe this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this should be here but the way mechanically this usually works in practice for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lots of various like pragmatic and legal and protection reasons is if you have any kind of copyright

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dispute with something online you can you if you get a if you get a claim and you don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that claim is valid you generally still have to take the thing down while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you argue it out if you are going to argue it out you have to take it down in the meantime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if If you don’t, then they will go up the chain and they will go to your host, or they will go to your domain registrar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they’ll keep going up the chain until someone takes it down and forces you. Because the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, imagine, and obviously things are a little bit different for GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, this is the big company

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, but if I get a claim, if something is on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overcast.fm slash something, and somebody has a problem with it, if I’m lucky, they’ll first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco send the claim to me, and I’ll be able to either comply and take it down or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I might argue with them, hey, no, this is legit. But then if they don’t get the answer they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want, they’ll go to Linode, my host. And if they don’t get the answer they want from, and Linode will come to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and basically be like, look, we don’t wanna deal with this, you deal with this, and let us know when it’s dealt with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everyone up the chain will do that same thing. They’ll go to the domain registrar, they’ll go to ISPs, they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go to anybody who’s involved in the transmission of that content to the world, until

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s taken down, basically. At no point do you have an opportunity to say, like, in any way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really matters, this is fair use, or this is not actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a valid claim, or I don’t even know if you have the right to make this claim.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco At no point does any argument have any room to be heard or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any time to be considered. There is no arbiter of any of this. It is just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you file a DMCA claim against a thing, and it will be gone from the internet within days. The worst

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that can happen is, if you are filing that fraudulently, and if you put in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your actual contact information, somebody could theoretically sue you by making a, for making a false

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco claim. But in practice, like, so much about copyright

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disputes on the internet, if any claim is made, it’s gonna be taken down, it’s gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not gonna go to a court. It’s not going to go to a judge while it gets hashed out. It’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hit somebody, either an ISP or a host or something, who is like, I don’t want the liability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of dealing with this if you’re wrong, so just take it down. So it’s forced to be taken down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, things do work differently when you’re somebody the size of GitHub slash Microsoft. Obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things are a little bit more complicated. But if somebody as big as the RAA sends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a DMCA claim, which is implicitly a legal threat. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco RAA is pretty litigious. That’s basically its entire role in the world. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like when you get that letter, no one’s gonna argue. No one’s gonna give anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a time to be like, hey, do you think this is fair use? Explain to us why and we’ll consider your claim. Nope, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gone. No matter what it is, it’s gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, so GitHub takes down not only the official YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey DL repository, meaning it takes down all the source code for YouTube DL. But apparently, the RIAA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just conveniently decided to look at a whole bunch of forks. A fork in this context, if you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey familiar, means basically a copy of the source code. And so YouTube took down a whole bunch of forks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey FloatyPotatoes in the chat, which is a great username, by the way, pointed out, we’ll put in the show notes, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apparently GitHub is threatening to ban anyone who re-hosts the source for YouTube DL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on GitHub, which I had not seen until it was mentioned in the chat room. So basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the source disappeared from GitHub. Now, the good news is that source still exists

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of computers all over the internet and all over the world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Last I’d looked about a week ago, the website was back up, although it was at a different URL.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Downloads are still up. But the source,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d heard something about it having been moved to Bitbucket or some other GitHub equivalent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget exactly where it was. Uh, but one way or another, it is still apparently a thing. There was a release

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just a couple of days ago, but it just really bums me out that this, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tool, which certainly can be used for nefarious purposes. I’m not arguing that it can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be used for nefarious purposes, but it also can very well be used for honest and good purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I use this thing constantly. And it’s, it’s just really sad to me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s been taken down by a bunch, a bunch people who seem to be acting like jerks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s funny because just today I was listening to the, I think it’s today’s episode of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 99PI about GeoCities. And one of the things that they talked about briefly was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey archiving all of GeoCities prior to it being shut down by Yahoo. And YouTube DL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is like a great tool for doing exactly that. You know, I’ve talked, I don’t know if I’ve talked about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that on this show, but I think I’ve talked on Analog about how Now, when the godawful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things happened in Charlottesville shortly after Trump got elected, arguably because of Trump,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a few weeks later, Dave Matthews had organized this six or seven hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey free concert as a way to raise money and just do a nice thing for Charlottesville because Dave

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Matthews was originally from there. It was broadcast live and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I recorded it using YouTube DL. I didn’t have to pay to get access to it, but I recorded it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that six and a half hours, whatever it is a, to the best of my knowledge exists on no other computer on the internet. Now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that may not be true, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist anywhere else. And B is a phenomenal fricking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey concert. And it’s like, it’s, it’s a, it would be a real shame if a tool like YouTube DL didn’t exist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anymore because it would, it would make it either. Impossible or intolerably inconvenient

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me to be able to do that sort of thing. And this isn’t just about me. This is about thousands and hundreds of thousands maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of people who use this tool for doing legitimately useful and good things. And so I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have that much to say about it other than that. I’m super bummed that it got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey taken down off GitHub. And I hope that this doesn’t last forever. I hope that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they find a new home for it or resolve whatever the issue is with our, with the RAAA so it can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be put back on GitHub. Because it’s just, just because a tool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can be used for bad, doesn’t necessarily mean that the tool itself is bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now just don’t ask me about guns.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Anyway, that’s my thoughts about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean, and that’s, I have so much I could say about this. I love that you told John that we’d be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing this quickly because that’s not gonna happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s so many angles that we could take with this. I’m not surprised this happened. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think it was like an unjust thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I use YouTube DL all the time for many of the reasons you just said. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally a incredibly useful tool. It’s great. It’s one of those tools that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost every nerd should have and know about. And they aren’t the only ones who provide this kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you, it turns out, wanting to download videos off of YouTube is a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco common request. And so there’s all sorts of like websites

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and tools and apps and stuff that will like generate a download URL for you or will download the file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for you if you like paste in a YouTube URL or browser extensions that’ll do it like because ultimately you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your browser has to download the video to play it so it’s it’s not that hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make apps or things to extract these video files for like standalone downloads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And all YouTube DL is is an engine with all all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these, as Casey mentioned, it’s an engine with rules that will be able to extract videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out of webpages and download them in various formats and then merge them into different ways and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be able to combine the best audio codec with the best video codec or things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is a tool that has lots of legitimate uses. It is also a tool that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is primarily used, I think, for personal fair use uses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, well put.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Copyright law is pretty poorly understood by most people who comment on the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But generally speaking, and fair use is not well codified.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s more of a set of precedents and vague guidelines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are open to lots of interpretation. But generally, it is considered fair use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make a copy of something that is copyrighted by somebody else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for yourself. if you had it in some way, and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are saving it for yourself, generally that is considered fair use. There’s lots of exceptions to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, but that’s been a reasonably established principle. Things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taping a video off of TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is where I come in with my old man story.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} because there was a court

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco case. It was a big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this is from my childhood, something I remember about. It’s the exact situation. This is YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DL for the old, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the combination

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what you both just said. Casey, it was a live concert that you wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take in what we call in the old days, time shift, which is, you wanted to save that thing for later. Marco, thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fair use having a personal copy for yourself. Here is Jack Valenti talking to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John House of Representatives in 1982, and I quote, I say to you that the VCR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman at home, he says in the typical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 80s, in typical 80s sexist analogy ways. That the VCR was like the Boston Strangler,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but Jack Valenti was representing the MPAA, which is the movie version of the RAA, right? We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t let people at home have a device that allows them to make a local copy of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are broadcast on television. It will destroy the movie industry. People being able to rent movies and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch them in their house. Movies will be dead, and as we know, after the 1980s, we never had movies again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the movie industry never made any more money. Yep, that’s right. YouTube DL is 100% a VCR for the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s so dumb that we have to fight these same things over again just because computers are involved

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, well, and the DMCA makes this more complicated because the DMCA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made it illegal to circumvent encryption schemes or copyright protection schemes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or anything that stops you from getting it, which as Marco pointed out, you have to have the video already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like this is the whole thing I talked about on the show ages ago, where I forget, it was Lessig or whatever, was talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about DRM in general is like going through the whole public key encryption thing with Alice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Bob, you know, and there’s someone in the middle trying to eavesdrop and how they use encryption to stop that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from happening. And you go through the whole big thing so people understand what public key encryption is at a basic level. And then you say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the problem is, what we’re actually trying to do is stop Bob from getting it. And you’re like, but wait, I’m giving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to Bob. Like the whole point is Bob has to get it. Alice and Bob are using encryption to exchange information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The video was coming to me so I can see it with my eyeballs and hear it with my ears. But you wanna stop me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from having the video? You just sent me the video. You can’t stop me from having the video if you just sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me the video. Because if you stop me from having the video, I can never see it. It’s like, well, we want you to see it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t actually have it. Like, don’t take it after we give it to you. That’s what YouTube DL is doing. Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because YouTube DL cannot give you video as far as I know. I don’t know if there’s any nefarious things, but I’m pretty sure YouTube DL

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cannot give you video that you can’t already see, right? So like if there was some password

⏹️ ▶️ ^John protected site that you can’t get into, you can’t point YouTube DL at it and it will crack the password for you and get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the video. It only records, again, as far as I know, video that you can already see. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just time shifting. It’s just the VCR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Literally all it is doing is it’s an engine that has a bunch of like built-in heuristics and rules.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re like, all right, well, if you’re looking at a page on this domain name, extract this element, follow this script, and take this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco URL that’s in this element. Like it’s that kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so so yeah, obviously in 1982 the DMCA didn’t exist. Once computers came, our lawmakers had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even less of a grasp on them and the lobbying groups were even more powerful. And they managed to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this terrible law passed because otherwise computers would be the Boston Strangler for insert whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And, you know, like it was the exact same argument. Like you can’t let people be copying stuff willy nilly. Napster will destroy the music industry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yada, yada, yada. And, you know, so now we have things like streaming, which definitely didn’t destroy the music industry and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are totally illegal. Anyway, this law is dumb and this YouTube DL takedown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is dumb and YouTube DL is the VCR for the computer age

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the VCR should not be illegal and neither should YouTube DL. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that being said, it would be better for them if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they renamed their project and made it like, although it is kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of funny, like YouTube wasn’t the one filing this claim. Right, right. They’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just call it YouTube VCR, it’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, like if anything, they have a trademark claim. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, YouTube doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think because they probably know it would be a losing battle to try to fight these tools.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And YouTube has a local download option on iOS. Yes, but it’s only premium accounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s protected. Anyway, it’s a whole thing. But there are lots of tools

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are used mostly for piracy that have legitimate uses. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want them to survive out there in the world, you have to not play up the piracy angle too much in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco names or your marketing material. You know, people will figure it out. Like everyone’s gonna know, like if they rename it to some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco generic name, media DL, who cares? Rename it to something that isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco YouTube DL and remove any really incriminating comments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or test cases from the source code and you can put it back up somewhere and it would be okay, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was surprised to learn that the complaint was that it had a link to a video, because I just assumed that what had happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was, it was like, I know there’s lots of examples of this, but like, so the DMCA is written

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so broadly that if you do literally anything to discourage people from like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting your content after you gave it to them, essentially, like if you put like a piece of string on the door

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tie a little knot in it, said, now if you cut that string with a scissor, DMCA takedown, because that was there to prevent you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from going through the door that you just went through, but you cut it with scissors so you can’t do that, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So DVD encryption, the CSS encryption on DVDs, right? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DCSS. Right, DCSS, cracking that would fit in a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lines of Perl code that would fit on a T-shirt, making that T-shirt essentially illegal because it’s now allowing people to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John circumvent, well, I don’t know if the T-shirt was legal, that was the joke. Anyway, the whole point is, but it’s so easy to break, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s so, you know, your encryption is so bad and me cracking it is just so I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make my own fair use personal backup copy of this DVD that I bought yada yada yada It’s like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t care the law says if you do anything to circumvent something that’s stopping you from getting the thing that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gave you already DMCA Doesn’t say you know, I think there is an exception there for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like well I think that there is some exception for you know I don’t know if it’s personal use or fair use or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever But it’s it’s always been interpreted so broadly and no one can afford to fight these legal battles Anyway that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as Marco was saying it’s like well, even if you’re right, do you really want to spend time? fighting this giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corporation going through the courts and all that other crap and most people in the end don’t. A couple people tried in the beginning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it was, you know, anyway. I thought the YouTube DL must have had somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it one of its sources the equivalent of DCSS which is like some trivial code to break something that’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John broken for years and years that everybody knows is not really stopping anybody. It’s like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John piece of string on the door that’s like well you just get a scissor and you cut it and then you can get the thing. But if there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really is no code like that anywhere in YouTube DL that makes even worse because I think things that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let you decrypt DVDs, ooh, are, you know, should be legal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though the DMCA says that they’re not. But if this thing was doesn’t have any of that, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just simply, hey, don’t figure out which element of the of an HTML

⏹️ ▶️ ^John page to extract the URL from or don’t watch network traffic to figure out what URL to that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s even worse. And I think the the interpretation would be like, well, You know all those redirects

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the web page and all that? Those mechanisms are there to stop you from downloading it. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, are they really? Or is that just the way a web app works? It’s like, well, it’s to stop you from having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it after we gave it to you. We say it is, so you can’t have it. DMCA takedown. Super dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The smart way to do this kind of thing is to have tools that are more discreetly named,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to not put anything too incriminating in your source about specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cases like, oh, this is made to rip off this one version of this YouTube video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has a password on it. Maybe not accommodating those cases. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to accept the fact that when you’re in the piracy tool business,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and again, I know I’ve said already, there’s lots of legitimate use cases for most of these tools, including YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco DL, and I use it all the time. But when you’re in that business, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to be pretty careful. It’s a lot like if you were doing, if you were in some kind of like illicit business in real life, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re like, you know, selling drugs, I would imagine, or, you know, God knows, you know, selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bootleg VHS tapes on the corner, who knows? But like, if you’re doing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s like in a gray area of the law, you kind of have to be on the run all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It kind of surprises me how long YouTube DL was able to get away with what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it does right there in public on a large, big company-owned site. you have to either be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really careful to always appear 100% legitimate if you’re going to do this kind of thing, or you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to be prepared to be on the move and just be prepared for a game of whack-a-mole with whoever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your stuff is stealing from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I should have just looked this up, but isn’t there like a security researcher exception to the DMCA as well? Some crap like that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s such a sloppy law. It’s weirdly broad and…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They just claim to be security researchers. Here’s a tool for security researchers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. Like every definition in the DMCA is extremely vague. So it’s very hard to like…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So the practical definition is even if you are 100% right, if you have to prove that in a court

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of law, it takes a lot of money and time that most people don’t have or want to deal with, especially when the on the other side

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, you know, industry group or whatever with essentially comparatively infinite money and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. Everything’s stacked against you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. Yeah. So looking at the Wikipedia page for YouTube DL, The RAAA request

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey argued that YouTube DL violates whatever section the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and also some German copyright copyright law since it circumvents a rolling cipher used by YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to generate the URL for The video file itself with the art which the RAAA of course considered to be an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey effective technical protection measure Since it is quote intended to inhibit direct access

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the underlying YouTube video files thereby preventing the piece of string on the door Yep, thereby preventing or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey inhibiting the downloading, copying, or distribution of the video files. Now, that’s funny because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know how YouTube DL works when we looked into it, but my very limited understanding was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way it works is it basically, as you guys described, downloads whatever web page. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oftentimes when it comes to YouTube, you’ll see it say like it’s grabbing the JavaScript from YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to presumably execute to do whatever it needs to do to get the actual video file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey URL. So I think you’re right, John, it is the string on the door thing. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, man, it just seems really, really thin to me, which of course doesn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because of all the reasons Margo described, but it just seems like a really thin claim

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me. That’s how the web works. They send you the code and then your browser runs it. So if it’s like they send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you the JavaScript, it comes to your browser, it is received by your computer, your computer executes it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then, you know, it’s again, they can’t, how can they stop you from having the video they’re giving you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to give you the video, you can’t see it and hear it. So it’s like, but, but that’s it. You can just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see it in here in the context that we let you never know. And which was exactly the same way with broadcast television

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until we have another VCR, which as we know, ended television.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, that took longer than I expected. I’m sorry. But, um, but no, it’s like, it bums me out that this happened, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not too worried about in the grand scheme of things because this code is everywhere. And I’m sure like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it may not be as easy for me to find a either the code or an executable, but I’m pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey confident that I will still probably forevermore be able to find this code and or executable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because there’s so many people that use it for so many varying and different reasons. And so it’s a bummer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I don’t view this as the end of YouTube DL. And honestly, at least for now, until YouTube, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, changes the way their site works or whatever the case may be. Uh, it, it still works, you know, even the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one, one or two month old version still works for almost everything. So I’m not too worried about it right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But nevertheless, it does bum me out that this is a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Well, I mean, it even still works to the point where, like, the other day, it has a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way to update its definitions, you know, YouTubeDL-U as the command line argument.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you occasionally have to do that if you haven’t updated it in a while, and you go to download something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s like, oh, sorry, we can’t parse this page. Try running this update thing. That still works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco works like it’s wherever it’s pointing to in the in the version of the binary I have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco server is still up and so I was able to even update the definitions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the like I think it was yesterday the day before it was very it was sometime in the last few days very recent when I did this and it works just fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you know I think it’ll be fine it just probably won’t be on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on github or any you know major big-name you know source repository

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco site but good thing is that that GitHub is not the world. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is yet another benefit. This is one of the things I was thinking of earlier when I said we could take this in a lot of different directions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sorry, John. This is one of the things where the more diversity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have in the infrastructure of the web and the companies that you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use in certain ways, how many companies are there to upload type of content X, Y, or Z,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the more diversity we have, the better. If The prohibited content in question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was, say, a video, and YouTube prohibited you from uploading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that video to YouTube. That’s a pretty big hit if you need that video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be seen by a lot of people. Like, if you need a popular video to be seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that can’t be on YouTube, unless it has naked people in it, it’s not gonna get a lot of views.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re lucky that, like, source code is pretty easy to host. Git itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can be hosted anywhere you want. It takes some work to set up. And GitHub offers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco niceties like the pull request system that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prohibitive probably to set up on your own. But source code existed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before GitHub. Collaborative editing of source repositories

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and change requests and branch editing, this all existed before GitHub.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even today, there are other places that you can do it. Granted, not a lot of them, but there are other places you can do it. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still set up your own server to do it. And that is possible only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the world of hosting code somewhere for collaboration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not super locked down. GitHub is big, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the social aspect of the collaboration and stuff like the pull request system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is a pretty big hit to lose GitHub for that. But we are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lucky that in this instance, the open web is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able to host this stuff and is still able to serve this role for this, so that there is no one place

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can go to block something from existing on the open web. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good for diversity here. And this is yet another reason why we should defend this kind of diversity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whenever it is threatened.

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Apple event next week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s basically what we have to talk about today, right? So, uh, SKTP, none of you are going to jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on me about this. Not a one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, are we supposed to talk about the Apple event coming up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s going to be max and there’ll be fast. I mean, I’m supposing that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey basically the story. I don’t mean to sound like negative or anything. It’s just, I don’t know. I just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I’m sure there’s There’s gonna be some new Macs. I bet they’re gonna look pretty similar to the Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we got today. And I bet they’re gonna be really fast. So John, I presume you as the resident old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey man of the three of us have plenty of thoughts and opinions. So please take it away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why aren’t you excited about this, Casey? I’m excited. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I’m excited. It’s not about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac pros. This is the event. I mean, Apple’s been having an event a month for the past couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of months, right? I can’t wait to see what the December event is gonna be. Ha ha. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our Macs, we’ve been talking about them for a long time. It’s my most anticipated Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardware product of the year. It’s coming last and I’m super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John excited. Yeah, you’re right. They’re probably gonna just be laptops. So the rumor is it’s gonna be a 13 inch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, this is from Bloomberg. They say a 13 inch and 16 inch MacBook Pro and a 13 inch MacBook Air. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like a lot, but sure, why not? All those machines are plausible machines. They’re all gonna go ARM eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously I want an ARM laptop, so I can buy one and stop being nagged by my family

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about getting an extra computer. Well, at this point, my daughter has really gotten addicted to the 5K iMac, so I’m not sure I’ll be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to kick her out of this room, but I think it will. But anyway, I’m excited about our Macs. I’m excited about these Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m much more excited about these than I was for the phone, certainly than for the HomePod mini or anything like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. So yeah, this is what I’ve been looking forward to. This is gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my reward slash dessert after the stress bath that this week has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so far. So next week, the invitation has an Apple logo with six colors shining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from behind it. It says one more thing, which is, you know, like a joke on the fact that they’ve already had two events

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and oh, by the way, there’s one more event in 2020. And I’m glad there is, cause this is what I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John waiting for, you know, for a long time now. The other thing related to this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s in the same Bloomberg story. This is not about the Apple event next week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but just, hey, let’s just throw in all the things that we think we know. It’s a quote from the article. Apple engineers are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John currently developing a new Mac Pro that looks like the current design at about half the size. And they have one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of these nonsense lines. It’s unclear if the Mac will replace the current Mac Pro or if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s an additional model, right? So- Covering your butt. Yeah, it’s like, well, it could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be this or it could be, yeah, you’re right, you’ve outlined the possibilities. Good job. A smaller Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that looks like the current design, presumably an ARM one. We’ve been talking about what it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take to replace the Mac Pro with an ARM computer in relation to GPUs and slots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all this other stuff. And can they or will they make an ARM computer that uses a discrete GPU?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Can you replace the Mac Pro if you don’t do that? Because how big of a GPU can you shove on a system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a chip? We talked about the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X that have a system on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chip with a CPU and a GPU all jammed into one and how powerful they can be. The short answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that don’t worry about the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a quote-unquote integrated GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If that sounds crappy to you, do not worry. You can’t, it is technically possible to fit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a fairly amazing GPU on an ARM system on a chip using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s tech stack. Will they put an amazing one in there or just put a so-so one? We’ll see, we have to see what they release. But I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no technical barrier in a 16-inch power envelope and form factor to having a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really good GPU on the system on a chip that rivals or exceeds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any discrete GPU that Apple has used in its laptops, right? So don’t worry about that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it comes to the Mac Pro, oh, well, you know, I can have, you know, these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John giant, extremely hot, you know, 400 watt GPUs inside there. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not gonna put that on a system on a chip. So this has to support discrete GPUs. And if it does, what brands will they be?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And will it have slots and yada, yada, yada. Now there’s rumors of a smaller one. I think the Bloomberg story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spun this into, okay, well then maybe it’s like a Mac Pro, but a Mac Pro that has an integrated GPU because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so much smaller. And it’s like, what the hell? It’s not a Mac Pro if it doesn’t have any slots because the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John point of the Mac Pro is to be a computer with slots. You know, it’s just like a really big Mac Mini at that point, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine, if you want to make a really big Mac Mini, cool. People would like that computer. But anyway, this is a very confused rumor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only reason I included here is because there was this tweet that I saw from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hishnash. I can’t tell if that’s a nickname Or maybe it’s a scary Halloween name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apparently, there are already ARM64 Afterburner PCIe card drivers in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the betas. And the driver kit APIs make it clear that there will be ARM Macs with PCIe slots. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re wondering, will any ARM Macs ever have slots, it seems like, based on drivers that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are in beta versions of the OS, that that will be the case. Now, it doesn’t mean, like, just because you see PCIe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drivers, I think a lot of things in the current Macs are actually on PCIe buses, but maybe they aren’t slots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the fact that there are drivers for Afterburner, ARM64 drivers for Afterburner, and Afterburner

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that card that you can stick in the Mac Pro that does, there’s FPGA card that does all that 8K

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video stream decoding, whatever, makes it seem like some point a year or two from now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there will be a computer with an ARM processor that’s a Mac that has PCI slots, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of them at least takes the Afterburner card, right? So I’m not holding my breath for an ARM-based Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro this year or not even next year, but the year after that, it would be cool to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. And in the meantime, if Apple wants to release a little miniature computer with a bunch of holes in the front

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a huge price, it has maybe one or two slots, that’d be cool too. An integrated GPU, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know quite what that machine would be, but I’m intrigued by the half-size Mac Pro rumor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you look at the Mac Pro, and you look at how the space in the case is used,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you are gonna still have a computer that supports large PCI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slots, which is what you need for like big GPUs and stuff. Like if you still want to support those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you want to have like maybe support for more than one large PCI GPU, which seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be one of the biggest reasons the Mac Pro exists. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s still a requirement, I don’t see how you make it half the size. Because again, like you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at how the space is used, most of the space in there is to accommodate large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PCI cards. The only way they can make it meaningfully smaller is either to stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accommodating those, which I don’t see them doing. They were pretty clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when they made the new Mac Pro. They were very clear in both public statements they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gave and in statements they made to various press and in little mumblings from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the people who were in the demo room and everything. They were very clear that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really are in this and they’re in this for the expandability, the modularity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they love supporting multiple GPUs and all these PCI cards and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. Like they learned, they learned from the trashcan Mac Pro that people didn’t want something super integrated and small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that product. They want something big and expandable that can take a bunch of cards. And Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wasn’t gonna save them, they learned that too. Like they just, they learned, okay, you know what? Cards it is, that’s what pros actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need and use in this market, so that’s what we’ll give them. So I can’t see them abandoning that, even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also have a hard time understanding like how will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ARM CPUs work with third party GPUs? Cause I don’t, I don’t know enough about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like hardware engineering behind that. And like, I assume they figured it out, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know that’s certainly a big question mark. And it would not surprise me if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco none of the laptops have non Apple GPUs in them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. There’s no, there’s no reason. Like, cause like I said, if you’re just looking to match or exceed the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John discrete GPU power of Apple’s current laptop line, there’s no reason you need discrete, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unless they really wanna go big and have some fancy new AMD GPU that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so much more powerful than what they could fit in the system on a chip, but honestly, I don’t see that because in a laptop form factor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have your power envelope and if you have to spend it somewhere, right? And you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have some sort of minimum CPU that you have to include just for it to be considered a good laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? you get more bang for your buck by putting the rest of your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power spend on that GPU inside the system on a chip. As soon as you put it in a discrete package

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere else on the board, that’s more power that you’re bleeding on the interconnects and everything, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why would they ever go discrete?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and do we know, I mean, I assume, are the RMACs all gonna have unified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco memory?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, that’s what we’ve been talking about, like, you know, what does that mean in this context? So we were talking about in terms of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the discrete GPU, right? Because yeah, all the ARM Macs will have quote-unquote unified memory,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which means there’s not a separate bank of RAM only used by the GPU,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? That all, it’ll be like it is on the phones and the iPads where it’s just one big pool of RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some of it’s used for video crap, some of it’s used for just regular programs and stuff, but it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you get a gaming video card and on the card itself is GDDR6

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RAM with some huge bandwidth directly connected to the GPU, and that’s what the GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uses, but then, because that introduces a problem of, okay, well, how the hell does anything get in the quote-unquote video RAM?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it has to be sent there from elsewhere. So it probably read from disk or something into regular RAM and sent over the PCI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bus, or you’ve done some DMA thing where it travels over some bus and gets into the card, then the card uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but oh, actually, you need some more textures now, so you have these textures and replace those old textures, and there’s a lot of traffic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back and forth, and one of the advantages of unified memory architecture is you don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bring the textures from storage into one place and then send it to another place to be used.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s just like, you just put it into memory and then it’s available to both the CPU and the GPU. So if they both need to reference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, you don’t need to have two copies, right? And there’s a bunch of memory syncing parameters and crap like that. But in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, there are some speed advantages to having unified. The advantage to having discrete is you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a RAM that is tailor made to the use case of a video card, which means lots of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, high bandwidth. you know what you’re going to be reading. You’d be reading like textures and geometry data

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and crap like that, right? It’s not, you know what purpose the RAM is going to be used for. So you can make RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has higher bandwidth or, you know, a lower latency because it’s closer to the GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff like that, right? So there are trade-offs there, but I don’t think that’s a technical barrier. And for laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would put money on the fact that they’re going to be essentially like big iPads, where it’s the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John architecture, but more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and like, and I’m pretty confident. Like, I think we all are 100% confident

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s probably gonna kick butt in the CPU performance department. They’ll be very competitive. They have CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco performance pretty well covered, I bet. GPU performance is a question mark,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, for a lot of it, especially at the high end. We know Apple can make great GPUs for iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco class devices, because they have been. So we know that, like, we’re pretty well covered for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the laptop category that used to use integrated graphics, so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until this point. That would be like the 13 inch category, the also even like the cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMacs use integrated graphics, the Mac mini, like we know things that used only integrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco graphics before, Apple will be able to cover that need pretty well, we think with their GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We don’t know if they could make GPUs that are competitive with that high

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco end yet. And that’s like, I was initially guessing that the GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco development might actually slow down the high-end product release cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the ARM transition such that I was expecting the first few ARM Macs to only be the ones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have had an integrated GPU so far. So it’ll only be the 12 slash 13 inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size category there in the laptops, plus the cheap iMac and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac mini. Like that’s what I was guessing. If they are actually, if this report is correct, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, it’s Bloomberg, this is a big if, let’s be honest. But if this report is correct, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a 16-inch MacBook Pro is gonna be included in the first batch, that’s a significant move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because that product does use high-end GPUs. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they can actually be competitive already with high-end GPUs with their own design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not use discrete in that product, that’s gonna be significantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notable, beyond all the other stuff that’s gonna be notable about this. So I’m very curious to see that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hate the discrete GPUs in the big laptops. They are hot, they are buggy, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco burn up the battery like crazy, and the whole system is buggy with switching between GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a big pile of hacks, and if we can get away from needing that, that’ll be much better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m very interested to see that product. And then I’m also interested

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with this report here. It doesn’t mention the 12-inch coming back, and that surprises me as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I again, I would have and previously did guess that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 12-inch would return as one of the first ARM Macs like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would launch with, I never thought it would be the only one, but I predicted that would probably return

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I think they’re gonna wanna show off how awesome it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re saving all this power and yet have this great performance. And I think they’re gonna want some kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco statement Mac that they couldn’t make before. but maybe that isn’t ready yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, maybe the 13-inch MacBook Air will be fanless.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ah, maybe. I mean, that, yeah, that actually, you know, from a practical point of view, that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what they should do because that’s such a popular computer already. So to make it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably significantly faster and fanless and possibly get a boost in GPU performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which usually has been historically pretty rough on that computer, you know, that could be significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, just think of it like an iPad Pro that’s a laptop, right? Because iPad Pro gets 10 hours of battery life, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one complains about the CPU speed, and the GPU is pretty darn good too. So there you go, that’s a fanless MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air. All you have to do is the form factor stuff. And maybe you could have an even longer battery life depending on how big the battery you can fit in is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, you know, we’ll see. Like, I don’t, the reason I thought this rumor was optimistic is it was saying there’s gonna be three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new Macs, right? Your concerns about the 16-inch MacBook Pro, like I said, technically speaking, Apple absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can put out a 16-inch MacBook Pro using its A14 system on a chip-derived

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac chip, because the GPU is easy to scale up. You just add more execution units, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’ve already got an architecture that works. It works great. It supports all the features they need. You would just need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scale it up, which means you need to make a bigger chip, you know, more power, so on and so forth. But like, think of, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think of the power envelope. The power envelope of a 16-inch MacBook Pro with a fan in it is so much higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the power envelope of an iPad Pro with no fan in it, right? They have the room to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only question, and again, it’s like, well, how big can you make a quote-unquote integrated GPU? look at the PlayStation 5,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can make it pretty darn big. Look at the Xbox Series X, right? Obviously those are bigger power envelopes than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the MacBook Pro, but still I’m saying like, it’s not integrated, doesn’t mean you can’t make it that big. The only question is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will Apple make it that big? Because scaling up the integrated GPU that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your first go is aggressive, right? Maybe the first line of them will be, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the 16 inch, we put a bigger GPU in it, but it’s more like the A14Z,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know what I mean? Like it’s not, we didn’t go whole hog, right? On the first go out, we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to knock it out of the park with a gigantic, you know, 16 execution units to use Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parlance or whatever they’re calling execution unit, right? Or 16 core or whatever. They said like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the A12Z was an eight core GPU. And I think that’s the biggest one they’ve ever shipped. The A12X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a seven core, but only because they allowed one of the cores to be disabled if it was bad, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s really the same chip, but just an eight core chip. If they put out a 16 core chip and you just scale that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up linearly for doubling the execution units in it or doubling the cores or whatever, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a very competitive MacBook Pro GPU. Because remember, MacBook Pros are not gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptops. They have never come with the GPU that’s setting the world on fire in terms of laptop performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PC gaming laptops come with much more powerful GPUs. Apple doesn’t have to match that. They just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to match their previously shipped top of the line 16-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Pro discrete GPU performance, match or exceed? I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plausible that they can do that with a modest, conservative iteration, expansion of their current design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they can knock it out of the park with a very aggressive, much larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system on a chip for a laptop and have something that is, if not competitive with PC gaming laptops, at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster than any Mac or Pro Apple has ever shipped. So I think what I’m looking for, if there is a succeeding at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all, is it’s a question of will. What does, you know, as in like, does Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to do this? Is this something Apple is trying to do or are they just taking it easy on the first round?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then, you know, the 13 inch and all those things, that’s no problem. Like they get to ship what they have and everyone will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be happy with it and it’s not a big deal. It’s only, we only care about the GPU stuff in the high end. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not looking at for it to be a technical marvel. I’m looking at to see what is Apple willing to do? What does Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually consider performance? Maybe the pro workflow group has had an influence on this. We’re saying like, look, Don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bother making a 16-inch MacBook Pro an arm if you can’t, you know, totally thrash your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current GPU performance in your 16-inch MacBook Pro. We’ll see.

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First Apple-silicon Macs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what do you think is going to be first? Because I agree that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adorable, you know, the original 12 inch MacBook, I think that is the one that, that strikes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me as most obvious as being a good candidate for an ARM Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And certainly the part of me that it still misses that computer, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do, um, I don’t want to have to plug in more than one thing at a time, but I still miss it. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, I would love to see that gain a port or two or three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and get, you know, uh, about 800% more power. So that does seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like a really obvious first candidate, but I mean, I would be very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey surprised as you guys have mentioned, if a 16 inch gets it first, do you, do you really think that’s a possibility? Let’s start with Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. The 16 inch to me is a big stretch for this. I agree. I hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they do it. I think that would be awesome. And keep in mind, you know, Tim did say the announcement that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they plan to complete the entire transition in two years. So, you know, I was assuming,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as I said, I was assuming that the large GPU high performance things would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the second half of the transition. But if they can plant the 16 inch now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s a huge move. And that would be very interesting to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Someone in the chat room is yelling 16 inch MacBook Air. So that’s the real question that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t know, right? Because these are the first ARM Macs, right? And although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is a safe assumption that they will use A14-ish system on a chip, as in whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that core is and whatever that GPU design is, it’ll be some evolution of that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? That’s a reasonable, safe assumption. Further enforced by the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that all of Apple’s iPhones just use the A14. Like it’s great to be able to just manufacture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one thing and design one thing and you have to be multi purpose. So whether or not they call this the M something or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X something or whatever naming scheme they come up with, whatever the code name is, I don’t know the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, but whatever the code name is for these cores, they have code names for all these things like cycle and typhoon, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re all storm based names. And whatever the code name is for this GPU design, those are their building blocks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you can take those high efficiency cores, those power cores and those GPU cores.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you can and you know, and all the IO, plus whatever else you need to make at a Mac, right with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Thunderbolt stuff and or whatever, and build your Mac GPU from those parts, right? It doesn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sense for them to make an entirely new core and entirely new GPU or whatever. But given

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those parts, you can build lots of differently sized things. And the real question is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what appetite does Apple have to really use those building

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blocks to make very different things? If they have a big appetite, they’re like, great, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna do like four high efficiency cores and six, you know, or you know, six high efficiency

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cores and four power cores plus a 16 core GPU. And we’re gonna launch the 16 inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro this thing and it’s gonna kick butt because that system on a chip would look nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like anything in any of their phones or iPads. If you looked at the die, you’d be like, oh, I recognize those high efficiency cores

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and those power cores and I recognize those GPU cores, right? But what a monster this is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like this is heck of a, you know, new design job to make this whole new chip, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s like, boy, that’s a big investment for something that’s gonna sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John relatively nothing compared to the iPhone, right? And they use the same A14 across

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all their iPhones. So they have this one chip that they make for their best-selling product, and then the Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are gonna get like these bespoke, like the 16 inches gonna have one chip, and then the 13 inches is gonna have another,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and maybe the Air will have another. That seems unlikely to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least on a first go. What seems more likely to me is every single one of these Macs will have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very similar looking chip that looks an awful lot like the same chip they’re putting in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their iPhones that will soon be in their iPads, that’s already in one of their iPads. It’ll look very A14-ish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there won’t be a huge diversity. They’ll look different than the A14. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some of them will like literally be A14s under a different name, don’t look like on the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 13-ish thing or whatever. That just seems like so much more of a, smart

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of Tim Cook style parts sharing. Let’s not rock the boat too much. Let’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to do something totally new because it just seems weird to me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would not try, you know, on the very first set of computers that they would not try to reuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as much as possible from their iPhone. It was part of the benefit of bringing the Macs to ARM is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, we’ll just get, we’ll get more bang for our buck out of this. But the Mac is, I’m gonna say a sideshow compared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the iPhone. They did have 30% year over year growth because everyone’s gotta be working from home and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that’s great for the Mac. But boy, that would really be shocking and pleasantly surprising to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me if they said, you know what, we have three totally new chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for our Macs and none of them are exactly like the A14 and one of them is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unlike the A14. I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even believe this rumor that they’re gonna have three laptops. I just want one laptop. I’m happy with one laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are you getting it? Yeah, I mean, yeah. But the thing is, if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 16 inch, I’m gonna be like, oh, come on. Because I don’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy my, this is like a homework laptop, not a homework laptop, a school laptop, because all school is remote now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for my kids. I don’t need to buy a $2,000 computer so they can run Zoom, although, based on how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fans spin up when they use Zoom, who knows, but I would prefer that Apple release

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 13 inch MacBook Air Type of laptop and it would be fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if that thing had just a straight-up a 14 in it Perfectly fine Give me a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air with an a 14 and 10 hours of battery life sold day one if they release a 16 inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro with weird compromises because it’s got a 14 it’s got an a 14 chip in it with Not beefy enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GPU and they want to grand for it. I’m gonna be a little yeah So this is this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the test how much when we see this event how much investment does Apple want to put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the system on its chips for Mac? We have no idea because Apple has never made its own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John processors ever for the Mac, unless you kind of count the PowerPC because they were part of the AIM Alliance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What does AIM stand for? Do you guys remember? Apple, Intel, Motorola?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco AOL, Instant Messenger?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, IBM, IBM. God, how did I get

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} wrong?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I’m an idiot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Good

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} grief, I’m a moron.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, IBM, and Motorola teamed up to make the PowerPC processor and it was really cool. but those are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this reminds me of those days only Motorola and IBM were gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not gone, but you know what I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t believe I got that wrong. My dad worked for IBM for 30 years. How did I get that wrong?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s because IBM’s already an abbreviation or acronym or whatever. Abbreviation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not acronym. Initialism, I believe. Yeah, there you go. Anyway, so I’m curious, do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either of you think that this event, not Arm, Max, and General down the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco road, But do you think this event, we will see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other changes to the lineup, significant changes to, you know, externally visible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco factors or not? Because like, when you look at the Intel switch, the earlier Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco machines didn’t look significantly different than the PowerPC machines they replaced.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like the differences became more obvious over time and like, you know, there were like more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco physical changes, more exterior visible changes over time. but the first batch didn’t look that different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m wondering, like, do, like, are they gonna take this chance now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make big statements with the hardware changes, you know, beyond just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco changing the guts, or might that come down the road? And I’m thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specifically about, like, significant form factor changes, you know, like not only taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the existing cases and stuffing them with new guts that are faster and cooler and get better battery life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but maybe making things thinner and lighter as they tend to do, or changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco major things about ports, which hopefully not, because that would probably result in fewer of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Silicon can only have one port. We’ve seen that for years. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or, you know, or other things like one little ray of hope,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco multicolored ray of hope I have is on the event invitation. It shows a not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quite rainbow, but a multi-colored light behind the Apple logo. And I was thinking, there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that rumor two years ago or last year that they were considering bringing back a rainbow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple logo. And what if they did something with these colors as some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco light up logo on it? Like, I understand this is a stretch. I honestly, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is likely. But wouldn’t that be fun? Like, wouldn’t it be cool if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ARM Max had some kind of like notable, visible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware change about them right from day one. And this is ignoring other possibilities like them being touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screens or things like that, which are also big possibilities. But like, do you think we’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything like that? Or do you think that might come down the road if ever?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the touch screen Mac thing, I think is looming out there and will be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it’s not announced on these first set of Macs, we’re all just waiting for the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shoe to drop, like that whole iMac is due for a redesign, the Surface Studio is out there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so touch is a thing to watch for. But setting that aside, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mentioned a fanless 13-inch MacBook Air. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple’s going to release an ARM-based Mac to replace the MacBook Air, there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no reason that it has to be any faster than the iPad Pro. I don’t think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For that price class and for the MacBook Air, their cheap, small laptop, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not for pros, it’s supposed to be thin and light, blah, blah, blah. Why would you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use the same four factor as the current MacBook Air? Like, because you don’t need a fan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, you don’t need it to be faster than the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plenty fast. Maybe the RAM is putting you over, maybe I’m underestimating how much heat is put out by the RAM, because you do need more RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a Mac. But if there is a form factor change at all, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laptops that are introduced, I think the only form factor change you’re gonna see aside from touchscreen possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a Mac in the lineup that was previously not fanless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John becomes fanless because it can. And that may be a minor form factor change as in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they just cover up the fan holes and it’s the same case, or it could be a more major one as in they slim it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down because they can, right? I don’t anticipate for this first round that the 16-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Pro will change significantly just because these computers are already so elemental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, especially the 16-inch MacBook Pro, it’s like, well, it’s a rectangle with the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside it and with no room for anything else. And it’s gonna be the same stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s gonna be a motherboard and a bunch of batteries and a track pad, right? And maybe the touchscreen will change the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John form factor a little bit. But beyond that, I don’t see them redesigning that case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the very first line of Pros, but I would not be shocked if we saw slightly redesigned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case for the 13-inch. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. I… I keep arguing with myself about it as I’m listening to you guys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I… My gut tells me they will not change the form factor in any significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way. And I think the most likely change is what John just said, that things that once had fans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will have fans no more. But I can make some pretty passionate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey arguments for them to change the form factor, factor for them to make a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey splash and try to take away any reluctance anyone has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in upgrading. And by saying, you know, Hey, you know, you’re going to get this new chip and this sweet new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey design. And so people who maybe don’t care about the chip will want that sweet new look.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think if it were me, what I would rather do is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reincarnate, you know, the adorable and say, not only can you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a 13 inch MacBook pro with our chip that runs better, cooler, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But remember that old thing, which of course, I would never say that old piece of garbage slow thing, but effectively,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remember that old thing that had trade-offs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Don’t forget the keyboard everyone loved.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so do you remember the old thing that had trade-offs that had a different keyboard and it wasn’t really as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} fast? You’re so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Trade-offs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different. Well, no, I’m saying that’s what Apple would say. If it were me, remember this piece of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that we made all of you buy, especially that Casey guy who loved it even though he shouldn’t? Anyway, that guy’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an idiot, but moving on, you know, but yeah, they would say, oh, remember that machine with all those trade-offs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And now because of Apple Silicon, you don’t have to have any trade-offs anymore, except

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it only has one port, but you don’t have to have trade-offs in power. You don’t have to have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey old keyboard. You have this beautiful machine and it has only one port, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s so fast now. And the screen is better for reasons and so on and so forth. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I could totally see them doing that. And so I think if I were to wage your guess, my number one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guess is they aesthetically little to nothing changes. Number two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey aesthetically little to nothing changes, but they add like a 12 inch or 11 inch or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, something that is not currently in their lineup. And then my final,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my least likely guess is that, yeah, they just rip the bandaid off right now and make everything look different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What about in colors? The 12 inch, what are the 12 inch coming? gold, silver, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John space gray? I think that’s right. Pink, there was a pink.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah, there was a pink one. I was gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say pink, and then I thought I was wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I was thinking of the new iPad Airs that come in colors. It’s totally a thing they could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do with their, they have done before with their smaller laptops. It’s an easy way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make a little bit of extra sale. And the fact that they were willing to do it on a relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John low volume, again, compared to the iPhone product, shows that they’re not afraid of the inventory management

⏹️ ▶️ ^John difficulties of having a bunch of different color choices. So yeah, if you wanna spice things up a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheaply, it doesn’t, you know, you don’t require a whole new redesign just whatever this process they have of anodizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or coloring their aluminum, make a pink one, make a gold one, make a blue one and make a green one, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that’s, people like that, why not do it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I would love more fun color options for the laptops, especially like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the fun color options were only ever for their smallest and lowest end models. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do pros not have the ability to have fun?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. Well, as discussed, apparently not, because look at the phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I mean, I agree with you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, but the phones at least got a midnight, whatever. What is it? Was it a midnight green and then Pacific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blue? So those two tints. Space green and space blue. That’s exactly what we’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} on the Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where it was like, whatever it was, rose gold or, you know, space gray. Those are just as subtle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the current pro phone colors. That’s all we’re asking for. We’re not asking for the product red MacBook Air, which would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be awesome. but that’s not what we’re asking for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Why aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we asking for that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, because the laptops are so big, putting a very saturated color is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quite a statement and it may be difficult to sell those in large enough volumes to make it worthwhile. I feel like a subtle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tint on, you know, something as big as a laptop is reasonable. Although a black one would be cool,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we’re all open to color choices. That thing you’re talking about, Marco, with the rainbow Apple logo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did somebody do a mock-up where it was like, It was like a black Apple logo on the back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the screen of the laptop, but then coming from behind it and shining out around the edges

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was rainbow colors, right? I mean, it doesn’t really make much sense if you think about it, because one of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they got rid of the light up Apple logo on the back of their things is because the screens got so thin that there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really is not enough room to have the light shining out in both directions there, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re not gonna sacrifice thickness to do that. But who knows? You know, the kids love their RGBs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And you can chuck a bunch of those inside a computer and make it cool looking. Johnny’s not there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore, no one’s gonna stop you. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, so my final question on this, Marco, are you and I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey especially you, getting a cellular Mac next week?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I hope so. Honestly, I don’t think so. I think if cellular was coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Macs, we would probably have seen people noticing bits and pieces

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the support for in the software betas that we’re having these days. And I don’t think I’ve heard anything about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. So probably not, but I wish we would.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What about the fact that Mac OS 11.0, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see anymore, and now the new betas are 11.01, and everyone assumes 11.0 is the ARM-only build?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe we just never saw that build. Maybe it was never distributed to developers, and maybe that’s the one that has the Face ID support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the Face ID on the Apple laptops, and the cellular support, you know what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean? I mean, I would love that, but Apple has not been good about that kind of thing recently, of like keeping 100%, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, hiding things from the betas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They did it with the iPhone. They did the same thing with iOS, right? Where like the builds jumped for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers and then like 14, all right, so in 14, not that there was a lot of new hardware on the iPhones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but things about like the Dolby Vision or whatever didn’t leak because we never got the build with the support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the Dolby Vision stuff because the only devices that supported that were the phones that hadn’t yet been released and they like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John branched off the tree and said, okay, this is the going forward. This is the tree that’s gonna go manufacture. What was it? 14.1 is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be released on the iPhone 12s, right? And then developers are gonna start on 14.2 beta.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, you could be right that they’re just bad about hiding these things. But it seems that that strategy, that new strategy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, hey, cut the build for the dedicated hardware and then jump the developers to the next one that still lacks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that stuff and merge it in later, may be helping them hide stuff from us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean it’s possible but ultimately I don’t think it’s likely. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s much more likely that they are as good as they’ve been recently with that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of thing which is to say they tend to hide most stuff but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regularly slip up and let little trickles of things out. So I’m guessing we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t have cellular yet but I would love to be wrong on this. I hope I’m wrong about this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What I mostly hope is, I know this is kind of a tall order given the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year that everyone’s had. Maybe they had to hold certain things back or push certain things until

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version 2 or whatever. But what I really hope ultimately is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there is something else besides the guts are much better about whatever the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lineup is. And I know that the guts are getting a lot better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better. Like it’s, it’s not a small thing. So that itself is going to be exciting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I hope there’s also just something else, some, some other like wow factor that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco makes the products cooler looking or, or cooler feeling and makes you even happier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to use them. And gut upgrades can do that to a, to a large degree, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and in certain special ways, like as John mentioned, like if they go fanless where they weren’t before, or if they’re much cooler to type

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your hands, don’t get hot. you don’t have to run utilities like turbo boost switcher to make them not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suck. Like that’s all nice and that’s all big stuff. But I hope there’s something else that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can do that we couldn’t do before or some new physical thing about them that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks or feels great or something like that beyond just their faster and run cooler.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I give them a little bit of leeway, like I said, for this first round of things, but come after this transition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is done and it’s the second round of RMX, they’d better have Face ID, right? They’d better have cellular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like there’s no more excuses for any of this stuff. So, oh, we can’t do Face. It’s like, figure it out. Like everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re using, your phones can do it. Your iPads can do it. Like they can do cellular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just it’s the same system on a chip. You’ve got all the stuff, you’ve got the cell modems. It’s like, just make it happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like this is supposed to be, as far as I’m concerned, one of the payoffs of this should be that all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those features that we haven’t been getting on Macs for a long time, finally comes to Macs. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s gonna be very frustrating to me if we’re like five years into the ARM transition and not a single Mac has Face ID.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just, it’s, I’m warning you now, ATP listeners, you’re going to hear me get increasingly angrier about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this over a long time scale. Us?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I give them some leeway for the first few years, but at a certain point, you need to put Face ID in a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for crying out loud. And I’m not gonna be screaming about the touch thing, right, because you mentioned like, I want it to be cooler in some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way. Touch is, we haven’t been talking that much about that one, but we talked about it a lot more about Big Sur and how it is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting the Mac ready to have touch as a piece of input. I’m ready any time for that, but I’m also willing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say, if you don’t wanna do that in the first round because it’s too confusing and you want them to seem familiar, like whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not gonna be screaming about touch in five years, I will be screaming about Face ID in five years because please,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very effective argument. All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can go to atp.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you’d like to become a member, you get all sorts of cool benefits. Thank you everybody and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tech Podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Broadcastin’ so long

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would like to suggest an after show and I would like to talk about video games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am in for this because not because I’m especially super into them, but I just want to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why you want to talk about them because you’re not usually super into them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. So, very, very brief recap of my video game history. I grew up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Nintendos for pretty much my entire life. I had,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think every system except the GameCube, you know, through adolescence and then adulthood,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t pay attention for a long time around the GameCube era. I had a Wii, which we used mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey casually for, you know, the sorts of games that the Wii was really good at.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then we got a Switch not too long after it was brand new and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I play it occasionally. I really enjoy the Switch quite a bit. I don’t play it that often,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and usually if I am playing it, I’m playing something with Declan. But, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do think it’s a really great system. As someone who is no longer a connoisseur,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s a really great system, and I think it’s a very clever system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Declan has been slowly getting into video games. Well, left to his own devices, he would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just play video games nonstop, but we, you know, are still in the perspective, and he’s still of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the age that we pretty severely limit his video game playing. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he really likes Mario Karts and to a lesser degree other Mario properties.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And as it turns out, his birthday was a week after Mario Kart Live Home Circuit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey came out. I think that’s the right name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, that’s out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I want to hear about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So if you’re not familiar, I will try to put a link in the show notes to the trailer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that came out a few months ago. And it is worth very quickly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you’re in a position that you can do so, it is worth very quickly pausing the podcast and watching this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two-minute trailer. But I will describe for you, I will paint a word picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of what this is all about. So this is a game for the Switch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s something, I think it was like $100 or something like that. because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s not only a game, it’s also a physical remote controlled car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like an actual real life, you hold it in your hands, remote controlled car. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it also has a series of cardboard gates for lack of a better term,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey basically little like kind of sort of arches. And the premises is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you set up, there are four of these gates and you set, you set these gates up around your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey home and then you put the cart on the ground and after you’ve paired

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it with the switch and as you’re driving in the game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re driving the remote controlled car in real life and the remote controlled car has a little camera on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you are seeing the perspective of the remote control car as you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey racing through your own house on the switch on the TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phenomenally cool. Will it last more than 20 minutes? Is this going to be like a flash in the pan? You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh, that was really clever, but I don’t care anymore. Maybe, I don’t know. But it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is Mario Kart in real life. Now, if we wanted to, if we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had a second switch, which we do not yet, we could get a second switch and we could get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like another $100 setup for like Luigi, if you will. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and we could race two physical carts against each other in real life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is the coolest thing. So Declan and I started playing it or, well, really he started

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey playing it, but I helped him set up the course. The, uh, the distance that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cart can work is less than I would have hoped. I understand why it’s broadcasting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey video at hopefully at least, you know, 20, 30 frames a second, maybe as much as 60 frames a second. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s doing this through the air. And I think it’s actually doing this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey via like a peer to peer airdrop style wifi network. I think, I am not confident about this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I’d read somewhere, something about wifi reception, but it also says you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be within like five meters of the switch. Um, so, so our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey downstairs, which Marco was seeing, but, but John hasn’t, although it’s been a long time for Marco, um, basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our, our living room is adjacent to our playroom, you know, the kids playroom. And then if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were to go and go out the playroom, you’re at the front door. And then if you do a UE,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re going down a hallway, and then you can come back to the living room. So what we did was we made a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey circle, if you’re an oval, I guess I should say, of the downstairs. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it worked OK at that distance. But when you were at the extreme edge of that oval away

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from the switch, it complained pretty much every single time about, oh, the video, the connections

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey poor, the video got real choppy, the latency on the commands to the RC unit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was definitely really bad. But when you limit it to being slightly closer and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey through several walls, it turns out it works really well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So it is the first time that I can remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seeing augmented reality, which I consider this to be a flavor of AR. It’s the first time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve seen this and gone, holy smokes, that’s amazing. It is such a cool game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is such a cool technical demo. I mean, the game is fun, don’t get me wrong. I’ve only played it a couple of times because Declan,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unsurprisingly, he’s been kind of bogarting it, but it is a very fun game. But just as a technical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey demo, it is so incredibly cool, and I cannot recommend it enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I just wanted to bring it up because it’s very unusual, as Marco said, for me of all people to want to talk about video games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I just think this is such a well-executed, awesome, awesome toy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and video game that I just couldn’t help but bring it up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will point out also that like many things for the Nintendo switch, including the switch itself, uh, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is currently seemingly backordered everywhere. And if you actually want to order it from somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like Amazon right now, you’ll look at, you’re going to pay like $500, but the actual price of it is $100.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Uh, you’re right, Casey. So keep an eye out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you want this, like keep an eye on things and don’t, if you’re thinking maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I should get this for my kids for Christmas or something, you might wanna get that sooner rather than later if you can, because I think it’s just gonna only get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco harder to get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. One of the fun things about this game, or this is kind of like the old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying of like, 20 miles an hour on the water feels like 60 miles an hour on land,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right? Yes, yes. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so these cars, when you’re looking through the camera and driving them, it feels a lot faster than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it actually is. If you look at the actual car driving on the ground, you’re like, is this a racing game? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they seem like they’re going pretty slow. And in case I’m correcting you wrong, but I believe the 50cc, 100cc,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so on and so forth translates into the speed of the physical car as well. Is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} true?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I’ve only tried it very briefly, but yes, that’s correct. And while I’m thinking of it just very quickly, if you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hit by like a banana peel or something, you don’t spin like you would in the traditional Mario Kart game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but your kart stops. You can drift using the cart. Now, what that really means is it’s like altering the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey steering angle that it’s asking the, um, that it’s asking the cart to execute, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still doing a drift. It was well, a quote unquote drift in the real world and in the game. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s, it is extremely, extremely well done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And it feels like when you’re looking through a little camera, you feel like you’re going way faster because things are coming up on you. It’s like when you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get low to the ground, you move at a slow speed. So it’s taking advantage of that. Um, and that, that’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some of the limitations I’ve seen lots of the video reviews on YouTube is like it does not deal with hills

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, so if you construct a course in your house that involves hills the game is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Particularly the game doesn’t understand them and the game doesn’t really like them It’ll work Okay As long as you get something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have traction on If you’re used to playing mario kart and shooting people with mushrooms and in case you’re running Yes, like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that stuff is still there obviously the mushrooms and you know turtle shells and all that other stuff Those are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John virtual like that’s the ar aspect of it but the car is real, the arches are real, your house is real,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the turtle shells are not real, the mushrooms are not real, you know, all that stuff. But in the real game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you hit someone with the shell, you can’t, I mean, I don’t know if there’s, if it’s no clipping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatsoever, but you can go past them slash through them on your way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to victory, whereas in real life, these cars are actually fairly big. And if you hit someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a turtle shell and they come to a dead stop in front of you, You’ve got to steer around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. If you don’t, you will hit them because they are a physical thing and so are you and so clunk right? So you may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to adjust your Mario Kart strategy and skills. Like there are limitations like that that you can understand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s only four gates. You can’t set them that far apart. If you play against computers, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the computers take perhaps a more direct route between carts than you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had intended because you made a cool serpentine course, but they just know where the gates are. So the computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cars will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, that’s slightly true. So the way it works is when you set up these gates,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then what they have you do is on the screen, I forget the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey name of the character, but like the little floaty guy, little floaty toad-like person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will come down and put paint on your tires on screen. And then what you’re supposed to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is drive the course. Well, if you make it like super serpentine and whatnot, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey records that, and it factors that into the course. So it’s not just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going through the gates, the gates or the guide posts for sure. But it’s also, you know, what was, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was the route that you took as you were driving? And that also allows it to do things like have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a figure eight or, you know, there’s courses that loop back on themselves or what have you. Um, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, it, to some degree takes into account, you know, those, those serpentine motions, but you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey still not wrong that it, it’s not going to be perfect. And, and the other thing that, that where it falls down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot is, you know, so we set up a couple of courses where there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were obstacles off to the side. So maybe there were like cardboard building blocks or there was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the kids’ chairs, you know, one of those poofy chairs that everyone has for their kids. And a lot of times you would see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a player, a computer player in the game, like inside the chair. You know what I mean? Like it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do a good enough job of figuring out that’s an obstruction that it shouldn’t be driving in front of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nevertheless, it is, it is extremely well executed and I cannot believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how cool this is. And apparently if I read it right, it was all done by like Velen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey studios or something like that, which I think is some video game maker somewhere in upstate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey New York, if I’m not mistaken, Albany and Troy, New York. And, uh, and I’ve never heard of them before, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looks like they did pretty much all the work on this. Um, and I went poking about their website and it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they really, really like C and C plus plus people, but it strikes me as the same as your early

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey job, Marco, where it’s like, see if we can see plus plus if we have to, which is fine, but was very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very surprising to read for a video game, or at least it was surprising to me anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was surprised they didn’t get the Anki drive people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So yeah, exactly. Right. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like, I mean, Pokemon go was the same way. I forget what company that was, but like Nintendo’s on the lookout for companies that have cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gaming ideas. And then they say, you know, join with us and you get to use our incredibly valuable properties,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you get to have Lakitu as your little paint person. Is that who it was? It’s not, they’re not a toad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} They’re a little… Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey McLaughlin You know, you took my joke from me. You took my joke from me. I was going to say real-time follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} from J Siracusa in the chat. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey indeed. It is indeed Lakitu. I couldn’t think of the name. Paul Matz He’s not a toad person. He’s a little turtle. Steve McLaughlin I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sorry. I’m old. Forgive me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Paul

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Matz Anyway, yeah, like taking a game property, taking a game idea and putting Nintendo properties

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on top of it and then allowing Nintendo to manage your creation of that game to make sure it’s fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and be able to use their hardware and you know Have access to their customer base that’s willing to shell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out a hundred bucks for this game thing I don’t know if you ever used a labo stuff. Did you ever try that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know of what you’re talking about, but no I did not use it. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cardboard thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like it’s like a physical it’s another same idea Like you say you have a switch and you can also buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these physical toys essentially that interact with the switch in some way It’s not as impressive as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an AR type thing, but you could build these little moving things that work with the Switch. And they looked fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and interesting. And I always just imagine kids destroying that cardboard, that very, very expensive cardboard. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, this is what Nintendo is the best at. Find things that might be fun and try them out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, yep. I just, I cannot recommend this enough. It is super cool. And everyone should try this at some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it fun if you just get one or do you think you really will need two?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is fun with one. it would absolutely at least double the fun if not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more so if we had a second. But the problem is for us, we only have one switch in the house. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that there’s probably going to come a time that a second switch will enter the house. But sitting here today, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only one switch. And it’s understandable, but unfortunate that it’s a one-to-one pairing, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I said earlier, between switch and cart. So we would have to get Declan either a switch or or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mini switch light, whatever it’s called, in a second car to pair with it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey again, it’s super cool. I haven’t had enough time with it to be able to talk about some of the other features it has,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I know that it has some amount of progression, both in terms of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the character can wear, but also in terms of the things that you can do. So as an example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right now, the only thing we can do is have sunshine or basically the existing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey atmosphere in the house. but you can in the, in the game, you can make it rain, or you can have your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey house underwater, you know, and so on and so forth. So I’m looking forward to trying stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But either way, I really thought it was a super cool game and you should at least,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even if you’re not interested in video games at all, you should really, really, really seek out that trailer, which I’ve put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the show notes. It’s only a couple of minutes and it is, it gives you a really good idea of what it’s like, and it is crazy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is interesting that you were just talking about Mario Kart because just last night as a way to distract myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I watched a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot of speed running videos and a lot of these retro gaming dissection videos and I watched what I think is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of giant bloated monster version of a particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John genre where it describes a subsection of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the speed running world and it usually is this genre videos that describes like person A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got this record, then person B came back and beat their record, and person C was, you know, like, it’s the kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the horse race for who’s gonna beat whose record, you know, in a speed running thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is a 47 minute video. Oh!

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Entirely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely, in that format, entirely about speed runners and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mario Kart 64. Wow. And like, I’ve watched the shorter videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on similar things of like, Here’s the person who was trying to do a thing with the speed run and we thought this speed run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would never be broken and Look at this speed running golden. Eye. There’s a lot of Nintendo speed runs. I watch but anyway I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, how can you sustain this for 47 minutes and There you go. 47 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of speed running. It’s it is a fascinating video. It takes you on a journey. It is it too long? Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s too long. Right, but that’s why I felt like it’s a fun version of this It’s like extended to the maximum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like there’s plenty of data there It’s just I don’t know if it’s gonna hold your attention to 47 minutes, but last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John night again I was looking for something to distract myself. I Recommend watching it. I’m not going to spoil

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything about the video I recommend watching it because I feel like you have to go on the full 47 minute journey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John To be emotionally in the place where this video is trying to take you by the end But if you just want to watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of people doing ridiculous things in Mario Kart 64. Check it out.