405: The Benevolence of the Powerful

19 Nov 2020

First impressions of M1-based Macs, Casey’s cutting-edge purchase, and hell freezing over at the App Store.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: Why are we recording early?
• Follow-up:
  • Casey’s watch band
  • youtube-dl is back on Github
    • Github works with ICE, which is gross and should stop
      • Feel free to tell Github this is gross
    • Github’s statement about youtube-dl
    • EFF’s counterargument to the RIAA’s claim
      • Donate to the EFF
  • M1 chip name predictions (Overcast link) (via Cameron Deardorff)
  • ARM Macs and Touch
  • macOS 11.1 is in Beta
  • McGurk effect
    • Explainer Video
    • Text-based TikTok (via Erik Berlin)
  • Casey’s weird discovery
• Casey got new watches
  • Gruber’s sizing pictures
  • Studio Neat Material Dock
• M1 Mac Performance
  • Initial Benchmarks
  • M1 emulating x86 is still silly fast
  • Panzarino’s unxip’ing Xcode
  • Nilay Patel’s tweet
  • AnandTech’s review
  • Snell’s Xcode benchmarks
• M1 MacBook reviews
• App Store Small Business Program
  • Six Colors Summary
  • US taxes over the years
• Post-show:
  • Casey is begging for help on FB8893003. Please, Apple. Please.
  • John’s iPhone 12 Pro cases sitrep
    • SENA case

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

Chapters

1. Marco got COVID
2. Follow-up: Casey’s Watch
3. youtube-dl is back!
4. Marco won “M1” prediction
5. Big Sur designed for touch?
6. macOS 11.1
7. McGurk effect 🖼️
8. Sponsor: ExpressVPN
9. Casey and iCloud Photos
10. Casey’s new Watch
11. Sponsor: Linode
12. M1 Mac performance
13. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
14. App Store commission
15. Ending theme
16. Casey’s green-bubble family
17. John’s case update

Marco got COVID

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we are recording at an unusual time for the second consecutive week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What’s going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s my fault. Uh, because I got COVID.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is super unfortunate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don’t want to make a big hairy deal out of it because fortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uh, I’ve been lucky enough that I’m recovering well and no one else in my family

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got like actual noticeable symptoms really. Um, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s what’s going on. but I’m almost done with it. And I basically just, you know, normally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t know whether to even mention this publicly or not. It’s kind of embarrassing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certainly to be a liberal person who thinks they’re responsible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and to get COVID, there’s some degree of shame in it and embarrassment in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. But I decided to tell everyone anyway, just in this very quick

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, before we get started on all the tech BS that we normally talk about, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I thought it was a lot safer than it was to be in the place that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was, occasionally go into a restaurant and stuff. We live in a small town

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where there were previously zero known cases total. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I was going into everyday life with a risk profile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as if it was very safe. And fortunately, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost no one in the town got it. As I had to make all those phone calls to everybody,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is not a fun thing to do, saying, hey, I got COVID and I saw you sometime last week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you might want to get tested. I was under the continued assumption in my mind that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was still at the same risk level as I was in the summertime. And the reason I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this publicly on this show is that I want all of you out there to not make the same mistake I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and assume that you’re currently at the same risk level that you were at in the summertime. I haven’t been paying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough attention to what’s been going on recently. It is everywhere right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anything you were doing to keep yourself safe in April, you should be doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. Things should be way more shut down than they are based on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number of cases, exposure everywhere in huge parts of the, at least the US. I haven’t been paying attention

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the much of the rest of the world yet. Be careful, be more careful than you have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all summer because what’s out there right now is way riskier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and in way higher numbers than you might have been assuming these last few months. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco please everyone, please be careful. Like we’re lucky. It seems like, you know, I’m almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco done with it. It seems like no one else got it from us. Thank God. If any of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things went a little bit differently, it could have been a lot worse. And so please learn from my lack

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of accurate risk assessment and really be very careful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I, you know, we’re heading into Thanksgiving. My family has canceled our plans for obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasons. A lot of people are doing the same thing. I would suggest considering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that because again, we’re, we’re lucky that our symptoms were mild

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that we didn’t seem to infect anyone else along the way, but that could have been very different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So yeah, please, everyone, please be careful out there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just want to add that I don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of. Like, I think that, you know, despite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the measures that we’ve all taken to try to do what we think is right, we’re like, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess that every single person, probably in the entire United States, maybe even in the world, has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in scenarios where the only reason they didn’t get infected is because nobody around them was infected. Like, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is very difficult to sort of never put yourself in a situation where you might get infected, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of us are relying on basically luck to say, well, that one time when I hung

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out in too close quarters for too long while walking the dog with somebody, the only reason I didn’t get it is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my neighbor, Jill, didn’t have COVID, right? Or the only reason I didn’t give it to Jill at that point is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t have COVID. Nobody is 100% safe 100% of the time. So we’re all trying to do the best we can. And the fact that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got unlucky, unless you’re doing something egregious like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to bars every night, which you weren’t, I think you shouldn’t feel ashamed of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, it’s bad luck. We’re glad you pulled through, right? And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of us, if you think, oh, well, that happened to Marco, but he wasn’t careful, nobody is careful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough to be sure that they’re not going to get it, unless they’re just living like a hermit and literally never leaving. And then even then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who knows? So if you think you don’t have to worry about it because you’re not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a dummy like Marco, Marco wasn’t a dummy, and it can happen to you too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I was a little bit of a dummy in the sense that we had been going to indoor restaurants sometimes because we thought our town

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was safe. And the reality is, through all my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco contact tracing that I’ve been doing, I have found almost nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else who had it at all. I have my likely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco risk narrowed down to like one interaction with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one person who had it that lasted about a minute. And that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as far as I can tell, is the most likely place I got it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s that easy. Like, that’s all it could be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But see, the thing is, a little light doesn’t go in on your ear that tells you when you’ve been infected. So you’re just guessing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s the best you can do. Like, every time I go to the supermarket, I think, look, I’ve been going to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supermarket that’s where the food is. And we do have to buy food. But there are other people here and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to stay away from them. And everybody’s wearing a mask in my town. So like we’re doing all the best we can. And we hope the ventilation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is good. And we’re spaced out in line and we’re doing all the things but the bottom line is I know just like for a fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I was unlucky, and I pause too long to get the peanut butter and the person next to me breathed out real hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they had COVID like you know, it’s it’s just luck of the draw. You don’t get it instantly from one little germ longer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the longer you spend the more confined places like we kind of know what the risk profile is, but I don’t like any of us have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of life where we can say, I’m never going to go to the grocery store anymore. I’m never going to go outdoors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore. I’m certainly not living that way. I’m doing the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can within the constraints that I have. But for example, my wife goes to the office because she can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work from home at her job. And they’ve allowed people to go back in the office in limited amounts or whatever. Every time she goes into the office,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she’s bringing home everybody who was in that office with her in socially distant mask scenarios, so on and so forth. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unfortunately, there’s no way to have zero risk, which is why I feel like you were doing more or less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the best you can. Maybe you slacked off a little bit on going to the restaurants, which was a thing you didn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to do or whatever, but I don’t think you should feel shame about that because the shame is not a useful thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s certainly not a great feeling, I’ll tell you that, but and I and that’s the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the shame of having to admit to myself and others that I got this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco knowing that I didn’t have a a 100% perfect safety record was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something that I underestimated. I underestimated how bad that would feel and how much of a fool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would feel in retrospect. Like, oh god, I got it. I can’t believe, why did we have to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a restaurant? I can’t believe, even though, by the way, it seems like I didn’t actually get it in the restaurant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s very strange. And if you think the system will save you in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some way, will work for you in some way, will tell you when people have it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can tell you at least in New York, that’s not happening. Guess how many contact tracers have gotten in touch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the county health departments? Zero. Guess how much good the contact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tracing app on my phone has done? Zero, in either direction. I wasn’t notified of any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exposures, and I have, as far as I can tell, no way to submit my exposure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m lucky that I live in a small town, and I know everybody. And so I’ve just been calling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody and messaging everybody. And I contacted the mayor and the fire chief and everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh my goodness. Because it’s a small town. Everyone knows each other. Everyone knows me. I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone. And so I was able to get in touch with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably almost everybody who I would have seen that week. And the only reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I found any other case of it was that some of the people I contacted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco told me, oh yeah, we got it a couple days ago. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thanks for letting me know. And that’s it. And so like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, the system is overwhelmed in so many ways, and the system is not going to save you here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, you know, take matters into your own hands and be way more careful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than you think you need to be. And no place is safe. Place, even if you, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me, made the stupid decision that your small, isolated town with almost nobody in it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be reasonably safe since you never heard of anybody there getting it? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco someone’s gotta be the first. is be very, very, very careful.

Follow-up: Casey’s Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up. I don’t know if, speaking of editing, this happened to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cut in the edit or if it just wasn’t in the spot people expected, but we had a lot of people reaching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out asking, hey, you never said what watch you were wearing, Casey, when it took—or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excuse me, what watch band you were wearing—when it took a dive off of the roof of Aaron’s car and cracked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey itself on the pavement. I did say it. It is quite possible it either hit the cutting room floor or I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we might have gotten in like 17 different tangents, as we are wont to do, And so maybe it wasn’t exactly what you expected.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In all fairness, I recorded and edited last week’s show with 101 degree fever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it might not have been my best editing job ever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, exactly. So if you wanted the answer to that question, you could have listened to the bootleg and you can get access

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to that at atp.fm. But to directly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey answer the question, I was wearing, I always forget the name of it. It is the original like OG sport

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey band, not the solo loop or the sport loop or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it is. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sport band. The sport band. So the one with the clasp. I cannot recall a time, and I wear the sport band

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey almost always when I have a watch on and I have a watch on almost always,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I cannot recall a time that one has ever just fallen off of my wrist like that, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I swear to you, it did. If either one of you two knuckleheads told me this story, I would’ve been like, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I swear to you, that’s what happened. So yeah, it was the traditional sport band. It’s never happened to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey before. And I don’t expect it would ever happen again, but it was just colossally bad luck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So it is what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Million and one shot, doc.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly. I’m sure that’s a reference. I don’t know what to. All right.

youtube-dl is back!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey YouTube DL, my beloved, my beloved, beloved command line app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s back, baby. It’s back on GitHub. This is such great news. This is extremely great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey news. So let me get the, uh, let me get the kind of compulsory disclaimer out of the way. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I love GitHub, but GitHub has some troubling aspects to it. Um, most specifically, they continue to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey work with the United States. Really gross. Um, what is the immigrations and customs enforcement? I see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} But they do? Yes. In what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey context? I think they do on-prem for ICE or something like that. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not 100% sure, but my understanding, maybe I’m wrong. That’s gross. But my understanding is they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been doing this for years, they have been called out on it, and they basically said, tough noogies don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey care. And that’s super gross. And I just want to start out by saying that right out front.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But leaving that aside, which I I know it was not easy for everyone, but for the purposes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of this conversation, we’re going to leave that aside. Uh, I am super pleased and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excited about their response. So they put a blog post up a couple of days ago as we record, and it is called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey standing up for developers, colon YouTube DL is back. And in this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they talk about how it’s, it’s a lot here and it is worth reading. It’s not that long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a post, but there’s a lot there. Um, but basically there was a DMCA takedown request that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was, and jump when you’re ready, fellas, that was citing a specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey clause that makes everything for GitHub a little more complicated. And I don’t know if it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pertinent what that clause was, but suffice to say, they had to go through a lot more process than normal. And working,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess, with the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they came to figure out, oh, actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is not really a reasonable request. And so once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there was a GitHub commit, which we’ll put in the show show notes that fixed the thing that the RIAA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was most upset about. Once that commit took out the code that the RIAA was, or really the URLs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the RIAA was upset about, GitHub re-established or reinstated the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey official YouTube DL repository as though it had never left, which is super, super excellent news. I’m really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really excited about this. And beyond that, GitHub has said, we’re going to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the way we handle these sorts of things. We’re going to give more advanced notice. We’re going to give developers a chance to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey react to the, to, to, to the takedown requests and, and perhaps fix the actual problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And they’ve also said that they’re creating, or if not creating, then they’re funneling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a million dollars into a developer defense fund in order to help developers who can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really fight off the entire recording artist industry of America, recording, what is it? RIA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recording

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} industry. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Artists association,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} association

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of America. Although, I think maybe a different A word might be better filled in there most of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. Yeah, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey real. But the point is, GitHub is putting a million bucks of their own money, or Microsoft’s money, or somebody’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey money to start this developer defense fund. Again, I’m not saying GitHub is a perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey entity by any means, but I do think that this response, it’s not perfect, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s pretty darn good, and I’m really pleased with it, and I’m glad to see YouTube DL is back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, this shows a few big things. I mean, number one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can you imagine the crap storm that must have fallen on GitHub as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a result of taking it down to prompt this level of correction from them? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number one lesson is, if you make tools that a lot of nerds use,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your product’s main business is appealing to nerds, you better make sure you defend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those tools on your platform. But also, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is less about GitHub having a change of heart, and much more about the EFF having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made a really good counterpoint or counterargument about it. Really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco GitHub has gotten a lot of the credit for this, but the credit falls almost entirely on the EFF. They basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like on behalf of YouTube DL, filed with GitHub this incredible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, counterpoint piece basically saying, this is invalid with this legal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco precedent for these legally sound arguments. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you don’t support the EFF yet, please set up a monthly donation to the EFF.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t care how much you give them. Give them something every month though. They are so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco important to our industry for so many reasons. They have fought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in court many major battles that have benefited us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re listening to this as a podcast. They’ve helped us directly by fighting podcast-related

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco patent lawsuits and other BS people try to throw at podcasting. Chances are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our listeners out there, if you had to pick one good cause to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco donate to that was maximally relevant to your field as a computer nerd, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard to find something better than the EFF to add to your list of who you give money to every month. So please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco add them to your list. But that being so, and I also, you know, some charities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have like, you know, different kind of mixed bag records on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things. You know, maybe you can feel good about some of the stuff they do, but not all the stuff they do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t think of a thing that EFF has been on the wrong side of. Like, I just can’t. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are so above board and they, like, if you are a nerd,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chances are they represent your beliefs and priorities very well. So give to the EFF.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, so yeah, what happened here basically was the EFF stepped in and said, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason that the RAA picked that said that the DMCA applied here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t actually apply. Here’s a whole bunch of evidence to back that up. GitHub, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, undo this, please. And I assume that was part,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of many parts of the crap storm that GitHub was receiving that made them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really turn around on this. And so it’s a great victory, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think, for lots of things here, but in particular, we owe a great deal of thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the EFF.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, agreed. John, no thoughts? I’m surprised.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, everything came out well. I think the most important role of things like EFF, I also give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money to them is because in our legal system, if you’re just like the developer of YouTube DL,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is disproportionately onerous for you to try to fight this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why you need something like the EFF, who is staffed with, you know, they have money from people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who give them money, and they’re staffed with people who do this type of fighting all the time. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the experience. They have the expertise. They have the money. They have the time, right? It’s a countervailing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John force against the RAA, which is like, All we do all day is find people and tell them to stop what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing, because they’re infringing on our rights or whatever. Sometimes they are infringing on their rights, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not. But when they’re not, it’s so hard to fight back in any way. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too much, right? And I think some credit goes to Microsoft slash GitHub for being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open to the EFF’s argument. Because in the end, EFF can fight the battle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but Microsoft’s on the line, or GitHub’s on the line for hosting the stuff, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they also have to have sort of the corporate will and and or the the savvy to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it’s really it’s a really bad look if you’re supposed to be like a haven for developers and then you just let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them get screwed by the RAA right so it’s some combination of pragmatism but also some amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of being willing to read the F argument and go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it even though there are plenty of gray areas and you can say whatever you want but until it’s tested in a court

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who knows right? So I give some credit all around. I’m glad this came out the right way. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so ridiculous though, like when we were talking about it, that like I kept thinking there was something I was missing about circumvention,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like, nope, I wasn’t missing anything. It was just, it was just literally like the dumbest possible thing you can imagine. You’ve got URLs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to copyrighted videos and your read me and your test suite or whatever. And you know, that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ridiculous. So I’m glad in the most extreme ridiculous case, uh, we have enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people fighting the good fight to turn this around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. No, this is very good news. I’m I’m very excited about it.

Marco won “M1” prediction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it was John last week had asked for somebody to find for us where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was that we did predictions on chip names and Cameron Deardorff came through with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey link. So John, who’s the winner?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s Margo. He nailed it. He got the exact name, M1. When were we discussing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this? Part of the reason we couldn’t remember it? 2018.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} October

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 2018 was one of the many recurring conversations we had about RMAX and, you know, and said, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do we think? It was an Ask ATP, actually. What do we think it will be called? I think Cameron’s the one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who sent in the question. And my guess was they would just keep going with A’s, because hey, A for everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A for Apple, that works. That was not the case. Marco came in with the M’s, and he was so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John convincing that both me and Casey were like, yeah, now that you say it, that seems like the obvious thing to do. Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also mentioned R as a possibility. But by the end, I think Marco had turned all of us around and said, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John M. And that was my recollection of it. It was like, didn’t we say M was like the most obvious one, but I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remember who had come up with that. And it was Marco. He also predicted letter suffixes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John M1, C, M1, S, M1. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the time I said, they haven’t used Z yet, cause they hadn’t yet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} but now they’ve used Z.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there you go. 2018, M1 predicted by Marco. Well done, sir. All right.

Big Sur designed for touch?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, tell me about ARM Max and Touch, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was a big story because there’s lots of interviews with Apple execs about the new M1 Macs, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna talk about them later too. And one of them, this is where was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it? It was in the Independent? Yeah, it was Craig Federighi and John Ternus, and here’s a quote from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CFed. I gotta tell you, when we released Big Sur and these articles started coming out saying, oh my God, look,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s preparing for Touch. I was thinking, whoa, why? We had designed and evolved the look for macOS in a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we felt was comfortable and natural to us, not remotely considering something about touch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So lots of people are citing that and saying, all those stories you said about Touch Max coming because Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like spacing things out, here’s CFED saying, yeah, we did the spacing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it wasn’t because of touch. And that he was surprised when people kept, you know, thinking we were preparing touch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that not remotely considering something about touch was the money quote here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, here’s the thing. Lots of people have cited the idea that Apple says one thing and the next year they do something different or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this is different in nature because it’s not saying that we think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John touch is a bad idea at all. In fact, this doesn’t say anything about the future because Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never gonna comment on future products. So Federighi’s not saying we’re never gonna make Touch Max, we think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a terrible idea. What he is saying is when we did all that stuff to Big Sur, we weren’t doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it because of touch. Now, we’re probably not gonna have time for this topic today, but in probably the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John episode we’ll talk about this. The obvious question that comes to mind might have to read that is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, if you weren’t doing that for touch, then why the hell were you doing it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t make any sense. Otherwise, why am I gone so far apart in the menu bar? Why is everything so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John huge? Anyway, we’ll talk about Big Sur later, but I’m willing to take Federico’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John word that the changes in Big Sur were not remotely considering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something about touch. Like I find it baffling I can’t think of any other reason to space things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out like that, but that’s what he said, and I see no reason for him to lie about that. Because like I said, he didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say there are no Touch Max coming, he just said the Big Sur changes were not because of Touch. Time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will tell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can also point to, like, so many of the issues I have with Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are things like hover states. There’s way more, like, things that are hidden by default, and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to hover somewhere to to get them to be revealed and different modes that expose themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on hover and stuff. And that’s something that just doesn’t work with touch. There is no hover with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a touch screen. So if you were designing something for touch, you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never in a million years use hover states for anything. Whereas hover states feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Alan Dye’s favorite tool to use to hide anything, to solve any design problem. So they’ve gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way in the opposite direction actually with this. So really, this is not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UI design for touch. This is just a bad design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, more on that in a future episode, probably, because I think we do have more to say about it in specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John details. But yes, that’s definitely true.

macOS 11.1

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, what’s the next version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John macOS? We discussed this on the show a while ago, and I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve got another instance, I can’t remember what the hell we said. But so here’s the question. It used to be macOS 10 with the big Roman

⏹️ ▶️ ^John numeral X, you know, 10 thing, right? And then eventually they dropped that and it was just macOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they, in Big Sur, they changed the version number from 10 to 11, right? So it’s macOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Big Sur was macOS 11.0, right? And as we’ve discussed in past episodes, The question

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is then, does Apple stick with macOS 11 for a while? Because they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really brand it as 11. We know the version number is 11, because we could find it, although there was that point where 10.16 was in the mix

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well. And we’ve discussed that in past episodes as well. But the question was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do they stick with 11, like they did with 10, and do 11.1 next year, and then 11.2 the year after that, and 11.3 the year after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that? Or do they switch to an iOS style numbering scheme where macOS 11.0

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this year, and then next year is 12.0, and the year after that is 13.0 and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We think we have the answer to that question because Apple just released Mac OS 11.1 beta,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which means they’re probably going to spend the next year doing 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, and then next year, they will do 12.0.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there you go. Problem solved.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m glad they’re doing it this way. I think it’ll make things a lot simpler to conceptualize and discuss

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and market, even though it is gonna be a little bit weird that they’re gonna be offset from iOS forever now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like it’s never

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} gonna match up. They could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skip numbers and catch up. You know, they could sync them up if they wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I guess they could, but I don’t think they will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They did it with iPadOS. iPadOS, the very first version of iPadOS. coincidentally exactly match the version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of iOS.

McGurk effect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How did we get to, where did we end up? It was the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, buzz off from the reporter. Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Um, okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So last week or maybe, uh, in the weeks prior, we talked about a viral clip where a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a reporter had allegedly said a four letter letter expletive and then off,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because that’s what the little video viral video had captioned it as. But in reality, if you close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your eyes and listen, he said buzz off and there is apparently a name for this. It’s the McGurk effect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I should have known this because I learned about this from my brother when he learned about it in school. And I just couldn’t pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the name from my head. Now the McGurk effect, technically we’ll we’ll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video and the Wikipedia

⏹️ ▶️ ^John page explaining it. Usually the demonstrations are you see a human being’s mouth moving and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouth makes like an M or an F sound. And depending on what the mouth is doing, the audio sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an M or an F because our brains are trained to, uh, you know, look at the way people’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouths are moving to figure out what it is that they’re saying like we don’t it’s not a thing that we consciously think about but it happens right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um but the more general case and the one i was talking about with the brainstorm green needle thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is you don’t need to see anybody’s mouth moving it is merely audio and like in the buzz

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off slash f off clip text is the sort of the nudge right because the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text in the f off video said f off and because we know how to read and could see that text it made us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hear an f instead of a b be. And there someone sent a really, really good variant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this. And you two probably haven’t looked at this. But I invite you now to both look at this. It’s a tick tock.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it plays some audio. And it has let me count them 12345678 different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, eight different things that they’re saying, okay, this audio, which one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of these eight different things do you hear? Listen to this audio in this tech talk, and look at the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John item, and you will hear the first item and look in the second item, and you will hear the second and look in the you will heal a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John third. If you think it’s a trick, look at them in random order. Go in reverse, random, whichever one you were looking at,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the audio you will hear, because our brains are weird. Please try it now. ♪ For life, for life,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for life, for life, for life, for life ♪ Oh, this is not how I saw this going. This is like a techno thing. What is going on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just listen to the audio. What is happening? Pick any one of those things to look at and look at them in turn until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Guys, my brain is broken.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I mean, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work without the visual aspects.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my God, my brain is broken. I don’t like this at all. Isn’t it upsetting? This is deeply upsetting. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t, this is the worst nightmare I’ve ever had in my life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh my God. It’s deeply upsetting. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terrifying. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} geez.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} messed up. Why did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you do this to me? Why did you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} do this to me? It’s like those optical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John illusions that no matter, you know, that even once you know the trick, you cannot see it the right way. Cause our

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brains just like, no, that, that one is in shadow and that one’s in light. And they’re clearly not the same color. and it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can show yourself as the same color with, you know, like convince yourself with a little cutout and a piece of paper. When you take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it away, your brain’s like, yeah, no, you’re never gonna see them as the same color. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} this is one of those things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, we know how to read and we’ve been doing it our whole life and you just look at one of those words and you will hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. As clear as day, you’ll hear it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is deeply upsetting. Listeners, if we haven’t already, if Marco hasn’t already piped it into the episode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t click the link, don’t do it, because it’s nightmare fuel. Oh my God, that’s so terrifying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow, that’s wild. That is very cool, but extremely terrifying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And now that we’ve embedded TikTok in our show, it is time for TikTok to die. Like that’s now like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the boring old people have come in and taken it over and now it’s no longer relevant to young people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco government is bored with that so don’t worry about it.

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Casey and iCloud Photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, I have a weird discovery that I’d like to walk you guys through. And this came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from me doing my middle of the month, taking all of my photos off my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tea ceremony. And so if you recall, the process by which I do this is I use photos, although as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it turns out, I could use image capture. I use photos to create a new photos library on my Mac. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have it download or import all of the photos on my iPhone. I then export the unmodified originals.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then I run my bespoke Swift command line app to send those to the Synology, renamed and filed as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I see fit. And then I will typically use image capture to go into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my phone and just bulk delete the photos that I don’t want, that I’ve just imported.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Makes sense so far. So I went to do this, and I couldn’t delete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any of my photos in image capture. And for the first time, and I don’t I recall ever having seen this before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indexed to Casey Lewis’s iPhone, it had a little cloud icon. I thought, huh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well, that’s weird. I wonder what that’s about. But I was on my laptop at the time, which I just upgraded to Big Sur,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so Big Sur. So I thought, okay, I’ll just try again the next time I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at my iMac Pro. So the next day I sit down at my iMac Pro and I go do the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I go to hook up my iPhone to image capture and I look and it’s got a cloud icon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Huh, well what’s that about? Do you guys happen to know what that’s about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you not have your phone set to download all originals to your phone? Do you have it set to optimize storage?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t use iCloud photo library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you use photo stream? Yeah, do you have photo stream on or off?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do, but it’s always been on. That’s always been the case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Huh. Is your phone still downloading stuff from the iCloud backup and it’s not done yet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I use the once called iTunes, now called Finder backup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, it’s a cloud icon. Clearly it’s trying to talk to you. If only the people who made this computer had some way to communicate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with you other than tiny icons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, tell me about it. So here’s the thing. So I thought, huh, let me look into this. So I go into, where did I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go? I went to settings, I went to photos. Huh, there’s this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey section called iCloud Photos and it’s on. And I don’t remember turning that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on. So, hey everyone, I’m using iCloud Photo Library now and I didn’t even realize it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I think what had happened was during launch day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget specifically what it was, but I remember in the haste of like, you know, switching phones and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey downloading everything and so on and so forth, I got told that, oh, my iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is running out of storage. And I’m starting to use iCloud these days, not for iCloud Photo Library, well, I am as it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey turns out, but I didn’t know it. But I’ve been using iCloud for things like my GIF wrapped library, which is not that big,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I’m putting more and more stuff in notes, I’m putting stuff like Solver documents in iCloud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so I’m using more iCloud than I had been. And so in the haste of just getting through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this day of transfers and so on and so forth, I said, OK, fine. Just give me the $1 plan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Whatever. Fine. And I guess maybe during that process, it decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to opt me into iCloud Photos. Maybe I tapped something and I didn’t realize it. I’m not here to say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple did anything nefarious. But it was just funny to me that apparently, unbeknownst to me, I am now using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iCloud Photo Library for all my images going forward. So the next step, which I haven’t done yet, is to actually embrace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it and set up a proper photos library on my Mac and start sucking in all the stuff from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Synology and so on and so forth. But given the amount of grief I’ve gotten about not using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iCloud Photo Libraries, imagine, or Photo Library, imagine my own surprise when I go to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey settings screen and see, huh, I’m using iCloud Photo Library. Who knew?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Your accidental activation actually has a nice side effect because within your current workflow, the thing where you take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your photos off your phone once a month, during that month, the photos, if without iCloud Photo Library, are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just on your phone. So if you drop your phone into a lake halfway through the month, you lost 15 days worth of pictures that are on your phone. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now, those are in the cloud for you. So there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also love that you felt so strongly against iCloud Photo Library that all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it took for you to literally just change your mind about it and move to it was one setting having been changed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I mean, he didn’t do it intentionally. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco literally just toggle it off with two

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} clicks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not the real library, though. That’s the thing. That’s just the pictures he takes on his phone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And baby steps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s baby

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} steps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} And so I still need to- It’s like, you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at a picture of conviction here. Like, I’m not gonna use iCloud Photo Library, dammit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Unless I accidentally turn it on and I’m unaware

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} of it. Yeah, I guess now I’m all in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t consider this honest to goodness buy-in until I do what I described a moment ago, which is I take all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the photos from the Synology, make a duplicate on my iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and that’s a big thing that you should really think about and plan out. But in the meantime, what you’ve unintentionally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done is improved your current system by shoring up one of the weaknesses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is true. That is true. So I thought that was quite funny. Please do not give me any more grief about it. The point was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have a good laugh with me and then everyone be quiet, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Okay, moving on. Thank you.

Casey’s new Watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have some other new things in my life. I ordered new Apple watches for Aaron and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I and I wanted mostly since I know these watches are old now and nobody cares

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wanted mostly to talk about a couple of things first of all have you guys ever done the courier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey service? That’s I thought new in the last like six to twelve months, but maybe it’s older than I realized Are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you familiar with this at all?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I sure wish my area had it now now. Yes, I bet you do. And they don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They did. I have used it for an Apple TV once, but I have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can tell you right now that as of this past week, they do not offer the courier service in my area for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either phones or laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I didn’t try phone or laptop, but I did try the, you know, now one or two month old Apple watch series six

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I was going to buy, you know, Aaron one and me one. And I was looking at the shipping options

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and depending on what band you get and what model you get, the shipping was anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between very quick and not for a month. And so what I did was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was looking at the different options and I realized, wait a second, it said same day delivery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that. And I was doing this in the morning time. So I thought, huh, let me see what that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is. And so sure enough, do you guys happen to know how much this is? Because I do, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was expecting it to be far more than it actually was. Do you know how much this is, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think when I did it for the Apple TV, it was something like eight bucks. It was absurdly cheap for what it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was $9. So I spent darn near $1,000 on Apple Watches. You bet your ass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m gonna spend $9 to get that thing couriered over to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So yeah, so I ordered, I don’t remember exactly what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time it was, but it was somewhere around eight or nine in the morning. And the nearest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey available delivery window It was like four in the evening or afternoon. And I think it was four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to six. I think I have that right. And sure enough, at like 4.30-ish, the courier,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I start getting notifications in the Apple Store app. And I start getting text messages from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple saying, hey, the courier has been assigned. The courier is picking up your thing. The courier is on its way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Actually, in the Apple Store app, they had a live map, much like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey many of these delivery services these days, to show exactly where the courier was, which was super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Interestingly, a no touch option did not seem to be allowed. They specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said in several different places that somebody needed to be there to pick up the order. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very young gentleman came to the door. He had his mask on, I had my mask on because I knew he was just down the road a minute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey before because I was watching him cruise to my house like a stalker. And so anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he just handed me the bag. He didn’t ask for ID or anything like that and then went on his way. And interestingly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there were a couple of interesting things about this. First of all, they gave me the standard, like very, very wide Apple store bag, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not very deep, very, very wide because it’s part of these watch boxes that are huge.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I guess because strictly speaking, it had been shipped, they had two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of those huge gigantic, like lithium ion battery, be careful, stickers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on them. You know what I’m talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Health. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the UN 234 notifications or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} they are. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget. You know what I’m thinking of. I forget exactly what it is, but yeah, those like big red and white ones. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I looked at the sticker, and sure enough, apparently it was Postmates that delivered it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which was interesting to me because I had no idea Postmates was in my area. I thought it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was still only in the New York and LAs of the world. I didn’t have a clue that it was all the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out in Podunk, Richmond, Virginia. But apparently Postmates was what delivered it, and it was easy peasy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It went really, really well. And I would definitely do that again for $9 if I’m spending

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the kind of money I was spending today, or a couple of days ago. So it worked out really nicely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Very, very quickly about the watch. The watch hardware we’ve covered is very nice. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey blood oximetry, whatever, pulse ox thing. It’s nice to have that on my wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, that’s good. And it’s very good for Marco. It’s good for me too. I got the, is it the Solo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Loop, which is the sport band without a clasp? Is that what it’s called? Solo

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Loop?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, did you get the size right on the first try?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I did. Whoa! Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. First of all, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ordering, you know, literally two days ago. Uh, and so because of that, I have, I have had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey everyone’s like, um, refinements to their strategy that I’ve been made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey privy to, you know, so like, don’t get it super duper, don’t get the little paper thing, super duper tight on the wrist, just get it kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tight on your wrist and more than anything else. I’ll have to dig up this link for the show notes, but, uh, groobers, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you have in a sport band, you know, the, the class sport band, here’s what you’re probably going to want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the solo loop and that was spot on for both Aaron and me. And that worked out really nicely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I am, I believe a six in the sport band or excuse me, in the solo loop. Um, and I think you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I, Marco, we’re in the same, uh, hole in the, in the sport band. So on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey smaller, cause I’m using a 40 millimeter watch on the smaller of the available sport bands.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey When I classed it, it would be two empties and then where the pin goes. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know this is hurting you to not use the right terminology. I’m so sorry, Marco. empties,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like they’re beer cans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, you know what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} saying. Yeah. And I think you and I were the same size. No, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the, I have one empty followed by the pin, but I too am a size six in the solo loop. But honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I haven’t been wearing my solo loop. I’ve been back to my regular sport band. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey interesting. Why is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know if it’s just like the way the sizing works on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me, but the sport band is just a little bit more comfortable for me. and I find the loop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a little hotter because the sport band, because it has the little excess tail that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tucks under it and because it has the whatever nine holes in it, or if you can even go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even holier if you’d like with those Nike ones, there is some degree of ventilation that you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you don’t just have a one inch wide strap of rubber on your entire wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have small gaps where it pushes off from it because of the spacing of the tail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the holes let some air in or whatever. And so it’s just, it’s slightly more ventilated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the regular sport band. Like the Solo Loop almost fits too well. And so as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a result, I find the Solo Loop less comfortable. I also find just the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way it works out with sizing for me right now, that like sometimes during

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some parts of the day, the Solo Loop size six is a little snug for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my comfort, but the size seven’s way too big all the time. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’m maybe possibly like a little bit between sizes on the solo loop, whereas the sport band

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just works out better that way. And one of the great things about the sport band is like if you find yourself between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two sizes, you always have the option of subbing in, if you’re one of the middle sizes, you have the option

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of subbing in like the long or the short side, if both of them can kind of fit, because then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the different length of the excess tail will actually give you a slightly different fit between each

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pair of holes. And so like sometimes you can kind of fake a half size by swapping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out to the different tail. You have no such option like this with the solo loop. You know, whatever size it is, that’s the size it always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, period. So if it fits you well, which it sounds like yours does, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great. But I’m unfortunately not one of those people. And so I’m very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally fine to be back on the regular sport band with the pin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like the biggest difference between the solo loop and the regular one is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the solo loops necessarily are intentionally elastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, it has to get big enough for you to get your hand through it, right? And so once you, you know, the material itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is pulling at you. If you have solo loop size so that it doesn’t press against you with its elasticity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s too big, right? It has to actually be against your skin in most places. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a solo loop that is against your skin, unless you are extremely lucky, is actually, its elasticity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is pressing it against your skin. if you get a regular thing sized the right way, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like a regular thing that doesn’t have as much elasticity, if you get that sized right it doesn’t feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the elasticity of the band is causing it to squeeze your wrist, right? It’s whatever hole you put it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s not going to get it’s not trying to get any smaller than the hole you put it in, whereas the solo loop is always trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get like a little bit smaller if it’s snug on your wrists, so I can imagine as someone who can’t stand having anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on their wrist that even that just tiny bit of elasticity makes it feel like the band wants to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smaller than it is, and that can be annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, mine fits ever so slightly looser than I would prefer, because I actually prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it to be a little bit tighter, but it’s not to the point that it bothers me or that I notice it most of the time. Getting the watch on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and off is fine. I use the Studio Neat dock, one of the original Studio Neat docks, so I don’t have any issues with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey laying it flat on the charger because the charger is held upright. All in all, I really like the Solo Loop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is a lot lighter than the the sport band, which in and of itself, I mean, day to day, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really notice, but you can tell the difference if you’re paying any attention. But I really liked the Solo Loop more than I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey expected. And hypothetically, the next time I wash Aaron’s car, my watch won’t go catapulting off my wrist, which would be an improvement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Very quickly, the brightness of the watch, I feel like I do notice, particularly in the daylight. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey otherwise, it’s just, it’s very nice. And it’s worked out real nicely, and I’m really glad to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey blood oxygen readings taken all the time, because I’m super paranoid. So yeah, so hey, you know those watches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that came out like two months ago? You should probably think about getting one. They’re pretty good. Who knew?

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M1 Mac performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s move on and talk about M1 Mac performance, if we can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please. So since we’ve last recorded, embargoes have dropped, geek benches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have been, or geeks have been benched, I guess I should say. And as it turns out, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is saying, holy smokes, these things are fast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So break this down for me, one of you, maybe we can start with Marco. Are these really that fast? Is it possible for these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be that fast?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It sure is, and they sure are. And it’s amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you know, I was kind of extrapolating in last week’s show based on the A14 scores

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in Geekbench, you know, and then knowing that this, that the M1 had twice the performance cores,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically trying to extrapolate, like, what do we think the performance will be? And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was roughly correct, but it’s actually even better than I predicted. I think I didn’t predict quite how high the single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco core would be, but regardless, it’s so much better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of us would have assumed that this could be in this power class basically. You know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1s that we have right now, we basically have the same computer in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco three different enclosures. Like, it’s not that different between the Mac Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air that we have. They all have the same processor, roughly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they all just have different thermal characteristics, basically. The peak performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the MacBook Air is the same as the other two performances, and then the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Air just, it thermally throttles down. If you push it really hard for more than a couple of minutes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll start getting a little bit slower. But even in its throttled-down state, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Air is still faster than, I think, almost every laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or if not every laptop that Apple’s ever made.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So it’s worth going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through the actual numbers here just to like, you know, we have preliminary numbers last time. It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone submitted these numbers, but who knows if it’s real or whatever. And they looked like they were in the ballpark. So we believe them, but now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have the official numbers and it’s correct. So speaking of Geekbench, single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John core MacBook Air is almost 1700, 1687. And that varies. So we just round up to 1700, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The previous champion single core performance was 1200 and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change for the the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} five K IMAC with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the low core counter or whatever. So single core, it’s big, right? Multi-core as Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John predicted last time. The only things that can beat it are the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that either have more cores or are much bigger and hotter CPUs with the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of course. So the only thing faster and multi-core is the IMAC pro the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the five K IMAC with eight course Right, which means that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the MacBook Air with no fan is basically faster in CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than any Mac laptop that Apple has ever sold. Right, we were worried about maybe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John won’t keep up in multi-core, nope, it does, don’t worry about that. One of these articles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from Mac Rumors did the thing that we were talking about, was like let’s try an M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, but with everything emulated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Silicon emulating x86 is still faster than every other Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} in single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John core, right? Just, you know, that’s how big the lead is in single core. When you add the overhead of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emulation, nope, it’s still the fastest Mac ever. So if you’re worried like, oh, I’m gonna get an M1 Mac, but if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use mostly programs that haven’t been ported, they’ll be slow. No, they will still be faster than literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every other Mac in single core ever. Like the Mac Pro, anything, name any Mac at any price.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s ridiculous, right? I like a Matt Panzarino tech crunch did the benchmark

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we were asking for, which is what about unzipping although he should have spelled zip with an X on X IP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What about unzipping X code? Is it fast at that? And we were wondering, is that IO bound? Is it multi threaded,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah? No, it’s super fast at that. The M one max are the fastest max you can buy if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your goal is to unzip multi gigabyte X code things. They’re taking it somewhere around five minutes whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Mac Pro is taking 10 minutes. It’s it’s really ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The disk speed, our predictions on that were more or less correct as well. It’s basically twice as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast as the old one because as Marco said last week, the old one was slow. The old one wasn’t great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SSD, right? But even just compared to the best SSDs available in other Macs, the M1 Macs have really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IO performance. So if you’re waiting for us to get to the downsides of these machines,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t hold your breath because they’re exactly as impressive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we thought they would be. And honestly, I’m, this is like third degree

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backlash to the backlash to the backlash. I still remain surprised that people who are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not in the Apple industry are surprised because it’s like they hadn’t been paying attention. It’s like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John haven’t been listening to ACP for five years, right? Every time a phone would come out, we would look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone And the beginning was like, let’s make fun of John’s 10 year old computer by saying, oh, I got a new phone and my phone has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a faster CPU than your than your 2008 Mac Pro. Right. And then eventually it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new phones have faster single core performance than any of our Macs. And then eventually it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new phones have faster single core performance than any Mac you can buy at any price. Right. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all happened. Right. So to think that they were going to use a Mac that was somehow slower than that didn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any sense. We always knew it was going to be like this. It’s just a question of how much and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to what degree. Right. And so, you know, it still doesn’t take away from the performance. But that’s why I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you see some of the stories where people’s initial reaction, kind of like the initial iPhone reaction from Blackberry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I think Gruber said it was like, this can’t be real. Like, if you’re not paying attention to Apple, and you just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just tangentially catch wind of this story. And they’re like, Apple releases a new Mac laptop with no fan that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is faster than any Mac laptop ever sold. And it costs $999. Like, Whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s ridiculous. It must be some custom tailored benchmark thing. Nope, they really, really are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that fast. Some more fun stuff from Panzer’s review. One of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tests was rendering five minutes of 8K video at 60 frames per second. The M1 MacBook Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used extremely little power to do this task. Just 17% of its battery was used to output an 81

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigabyte 8K render, right? So they rendered this thing. This is not about like, we’re not saying time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because timing was good too, but it’s saying how much battery do you use to render out this 8K file.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The MacBook Pro, yes, this is the M1 MacBook Pro, not the MacBook Air, used 70%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of its battery to do this. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel processor could not even finish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the task on one battery charge. So it used more than 100% of its battery. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is where we talk about performance. It’s like, yeah, but does performance really matter? Battery life matter? Not only is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing doing things faster, it’s doing them with hugely more battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is Neil I. Patel saying that someone in his life, I’m assuming it’s his wife, Becky, or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not, says, I purposely bought Becky a maxed out Core i7 MacBook Air a few months ago because she

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has to run one Windows app for work. This i7 MacBook Air scored 2867

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in Cinebench with the fans up running at max the whole time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The new MacBook Air just silently scored 6800. So like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I’m going to get you a maxed out I seven MacBook Air because you really need to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s you’re getting like two to three times the score in a computer with no fan. It’s ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Two more superlatives and I think I’ll be done. I tried to pick out the most ridiculous ones. This is my tech. This will put this link in the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes. And it’s a great article if you want to read about a deeper dive into what the CPU can do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They were doing an attack in typical fashion. They’re doing all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every benchmark you can possibly imagine. They’re somewhat limited by which Beck benchmarks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are natively compiled for arm at this point, but they were doing the best they can, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this is a comp, you know, and and I tech is not just comparing them as other Macs are saying like, industry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wide, what is this like? Right? Alright, so the 20 then they’re doing the Mac Mini in this case, 2020 Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mini is at least 50% faster than the 2017 MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 56 560

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the base mark GPU benchmark. So that’s a MacBook Pro with discrete GPU so they’re benching this the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mini against you know the biggest GPU not the biggest GPU but one of the discrete GPUs in a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro the newer Macro Pros will do better of course but keep in mind that this is an integrated GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the entire chip drawing less power than just the MacBook Pro CPU never mind its discrete GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so it’s not it’s not even fair to compare these because not only does this thing draw less power than the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro or the discrete GPU that it beat what they’re just comparing is the power of of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SoC to the power of just the CPU. They’re not even adding in the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used by the actual GPU that they’re benchmarking in. So any sort of power comparison that you see for these M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macs, where they say, oh, the M1 was using this amount of watts, and then this computer’s CPU is rated at this amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of watts. But the GPU, if it’s a discrete GPU, is a whole other chip that has its own power draw.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s fairly ridiculous. And finally, this is SPEC, the SPEC Benchmark, S-P-E-C, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John caps, SPEC 2017. This is comparing it against a CPU that actually beats it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some way, right? In the overall new spec 2017 integer and floating point charts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Silicon M1 falls behind AMD’s Zen 3 in integer performance. However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it takes an undisputable lead in the floating point suite. While AMD’s Zen 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still holds the lead in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the 49 watt range, while Apple M1 is using seven to eight watts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Good grief. So the only CPU that could beat it was using basically 50 watts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? More than five times the power draw to barely edge it out in integer performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but still lose to it in floating point. The M1 is absolute monster. Every single Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that uses it benefits from it in exactly the ways that you would think. And the battery life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is 100% real. So if you had any reservations about these Macs for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John performance, noise, heat, temperature, battery life concerns, I would say you can put them by the wayside. The compatibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John issues and so on and so forth still exist, but wow, these are good computers. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, but do we know that? Because none of us have one, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We both have them. Didn’t Marco, do you have one? I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it for about two hours now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve had it for a couple of days, so I can give you a little bit more,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, impressions of it. Remember, this is gonna be the homework laptop, so I’m not actually gonna be the one using this, but of course I am the one that set

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it up. So I did have time to use it during the setup process, which actually is fairly instrumental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if you can think of what it’s like when you set up a new Mac laptop, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are a bunch of parts of that that are actually fairly stressful. Migration assistant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself, if you’re using that, which I did, can be fairly stressful to the computers involved,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Depending on how you do it and, you know, like how they’re connected over the network and how much stuff you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so on and so forth. But it’s not uncommon to hear the fans spin up when you run Migration Assistant on a laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously I didn’t hear that on my MacBook Air because it has no fans. When it was running Migration Assistant,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I picked it up and put my hand on the bottom to feel if it was warm. It was room temperature.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There was no discernible difference in temperature whatsoever from feeling the bottomless thing during Migration Assistant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I also ran software update because like whatever it is, 10 point, 11.0.1 came out, this machine didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ship with it. So it needed to run software update. When you run software update, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uncommon to hear your Mac laptop’s fan spin up, but this has no fans, so you didn’t hear that. When it was running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software update and installing the operating system or update thing, I felt it with my hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it was room temperature. Like, you know, it’s not to say that these things can’t get warm. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s plenty of YouTube videos you can watch. It’s like, okay, now I’m going to run this massive CPU GPU benchmark for 20

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minutes at a time. How hot does it get? It does get warm, but A,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not nearly as warm an Intel laptop and be the thermal thought throttling penalty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this MacBook Air seems to be about 15 to 20% in worst case scenario, as measured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by work output. So one of the ones I saw was doing like a Cinebench benchmark, and I did the same benchmark over and over and over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and over again, to see how the performance dropped. So the first one was about 15% higher than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the 10th run, right. And remember, that 15% think of that 15% you’re losing for thermal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John throttling in light of how much faster this MacBook Air is, then all those other of the things we just listed before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s almost nothing. And then the MacBook Pro and the Mini don’t throttle at all, seemingly. Not only did the MacBook Pro and Mini not throttle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at all, supposedly, but the fans apparently are so low RPM that you can’t even hear them. Gruber claimed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to literally have never heard the fan, which is a claim that I can understand as a fellow old person with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco’s Airport Extreme that he gave me, that has a fan in it, ostensibly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I literally cannot hear it. Like, you can make everybody in the house be totally quiet and I can shove my ear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like up to the thing, I can’t hear the fan. So I’m willing to believe that there is a fan, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it can’t be heard by 40 something year old people in a normal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John house, right? So it’s all pretty amazing. The thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Craig Federighi was bragging about in the thing, in the keynote about wake from sleep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I tested that. And it’s like, the thing about that is, I have a work laptop I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use all the time. When I lift the lid on my work laptop, the screen comes on instantly. So I’m like, well, what do they mean by wake

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from sleep instantly? The problem with a work laptop, it’s all locked down, right? So I have to type in my password

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or use Touch ID or whatever to unlock it anyway, right? Because if you close the lid, it locks up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So I’m like, when I lift my laptop lid, the screen always comes on instantly. So how much faster can that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be? The thing that I had not accounted for, and I mostly blamed on weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work stuff where I have to connect to the VPN, and I don’t know what I was blaming on, but I just assumed, oh, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just always slow because of work stuff. But whatever it is, on this new MacBook Air, the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is blowing me away is how fast it unlocks with Touch ID. I’m in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work laptop, I’m forever putting my finger on the Touch ID thing and then just waiting. And my finger is just on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. I’m like, come on, come on. See that my finger’s there. See it, see my finger, see it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unlock. See my, oh, there it goes, okay. My finger spends so much time on that Touch ID sensor on my work laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’m waiting for the computer, like the screen is on. I lift the lid, the screen is on instantly. And I see my little face and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the little thing It says type your password or use Touch ID. And I put my finger on the thing immediately, and then I gotta wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the computer to get around to deciding to scan my finger. This MacBook Air, it’s like if you brush your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finger against the thing, it unlocks. Like, it is always ready to read your finger. It’s like a phone. You know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when we had phones with Touch ID? You’d take out your phone and put your finger on the Touch ID thing, and it would unlock instantly. You wouldn’t wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around with your thumb on the Touch ID sensor going, come on phone, come on, come on, read my finger. Ah, there, it unlocked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is like that, and it is glorious. Do you have it there with you right now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, my kids have it. Next time you have it, try changing the screen resolution. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what should I, what do you, is it non-native? It’s instant. There is no flash,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s no fade through black. What? It’s just boom. It’s as if you’re resizing a window.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I gotta try that. Yeah, I didn’t, I mean, I set it up for them, just to finish my story. I did the migration system, put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the stuff on it, everything worked flawlessly. All the software, like I ran, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John launched the first Intel app, it’s prompted me to install Rosetta. I did, it installed it, it ran, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compatibility has been 100% perfect. Even before I started downloading the, you know, ARM optimized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versions of various apps, I’m sure there are caveats for like, you know, depending on what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app you use, maybe it doesn’t work that way. If you’re doing development work with a bunch of Uniski stuff and none of that is ported like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Those are all absolute valid concerns. But for my specific use case, which is have a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that kids can use to do schoolwork on, you would never know this wasn’t Intel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is so fast, everything runs fine, and it’s just like, my kids were looking at it, they’re like, why’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get another one of the same laptop? I’m like, it’s not. It’s not. It couldn’t be any different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think they’ve noticed that the fan isn’t there, but if your kids are on Zoom all day,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fans kick on, right? It’s just annoying to have the fans going and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have that not be an issue and not have it get hot, because it shouldn’t be. All they’re doing all day is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re using web browsers, They’re in Zoom, they’re maybe launching Google Docs or Microsoft Word,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s all they do. This is super light work. I should never hear the fan on that Intel one, and I do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this one, no fan, very fast, I love it. Thumbs up, right up until the kids drop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down the stairs and break it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ha ha! We have some real-time follow-up from Jason Snell who says, and I’m quoting, holy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hell, that display resolution changes instantly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m telling you, like, it isn’t something you do very often, but it’s like, you know what it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from all the other Macs, you know, it fades to black for a second, all the windows like reload and pop into a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco place. Like it’s, you know, clunky, it takes a few seconds. For some reason, this is now instant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s just, I don’t know, this is-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s so weird because it’s not as if iOS devices have a specially optimized path for resolution change because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never, I mean, I guess they do when you change the zoom factor, but that’s like just- Doesn’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of Springboard restart when you do that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t know. Well, I’m, here’s the thing, like all bets are off in terms of what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the expected behavior of a Mac is. Because as I tried to express to my kids, even though it looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same on the outside and it’s got the same keyboard and a very similar screen, what’s inside is like entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changed. It’s not just that they took one chip out or replaced it with a different one. Everything is different. All those chips that control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the IO and the RAM, like you can just compare the motherboards. I’d be surprised

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if there’s only a handful of chips that are in common for things like Wi-Fi or whatever, but who knows, right? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just an entirely different machine. It’s, yes, it’s very much like an iPad shoved into a Mac’s case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But that’s a good thing. And so the sort of performance characteristics,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or what’s slow and what’s fast, or what it can do with what amount of effort, it’s just an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely new set of rules that we’ll just have to get used to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s, to me, the most shocking thing about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far is that there seems to be no catch. Like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything about computing and so many things in life is trade-offs, and you know, you gotta,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, to get this thing, you gotta give up this other thing, and oh, well, we made it faster this year, but the catch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it runs super hot, or, you know, we raised the price or whatever. Like, there’s so many catches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time we make any kind of progress. And this just doesn’t seem to have any.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I guess the catch is you can’t virtualize Windows right now, which for many people is a really big deal, and for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many people doesn’t matter at all. So as long as that is not a problem for you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there seems to be pretty much no other catch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, there’s the time-based catch, which is like the people who have Unix stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, oh, Docker’s not ported, my Unix stuff isn’t there, I can’t use Homebrew or whatever. Like, that is all true,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we also assume that’s only temporarily true, because that was true when they went to Intel, it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John true when, you know, not for the Unix stuff, but when you went to PowerPC. Those ports will happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to wait for them. Oh, Photoshop’s not out for arm yet. But like there’s a beta for it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, homebrew says it’s not going to have a version out for a while. Docker doesn’t. But but like we imagine in the next year, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care about this, which is, you know, not not the general use case of just especially for a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air of just using GUI apps, but if you care about the Unix stuff, that will take a little while to come. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not like the machine is like you have to buy a new Mac, then, right, the software will come eventually, and you’ll have it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you desperately if you spend all day using Docker and Node or something, don’t get one of these Macs and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be freaked out that you can’t use Docker and Node. But if you buy one of these Macs now and use it for web browsing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and email, in a year, it’ll do all that stuff and it’ll do it super fast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and the only other major downside is that not the entire lineup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has this as an option yet. If you want a desktop with a built-in screen, like an iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you want an expandable desktop, like a Mac Pro, or you want a 15-inch laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or 13 inch with all the ports and everything, like they don’t satisfy those needs right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they will, like give it a year. And I think we’re gonna have almost all those major needs solved. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I bet by this time in 2021, we’re gonna have the 16 inch, we’re gonna have the iMac, like we’re gonna have most of the range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco covered. And you know, yes, there’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco machines with more than 16 gigs of RAM, like they’re gonna get to that. But it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far there’s, And what John just said, that’s a big thing. You know, having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the software be a little bit shaky for a while as everybody adds compatibility to everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to take a while. It always does. You know, this is the nature of a transition. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on day one, it’s really good. And it feels unreal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The amount of speed you get out of these things, like just to add one more little benchmark, I did some overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco build testing. and on my 10 core iMac Pro with 64

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gigs of RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Don’t tell me this, because we have the same computer, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} tell me this. 10 core, 10 core, 64 gigs of RAM iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plugged into the wall, it’s like 160 watt CPU, 56 seconds to build overcast clean.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So 56 seconds. On my new MacBook Air with no fan, it takes about 39 seconds. Why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do you do this? And when it thermally throttles, the worst I could get it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be was about 49. So in the worst

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco case scenario, throttling, it’s only 12% faster than my 10-core iMac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And in the more common case, it’s more like 30% faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, hold on right there though. You paid, and you don’t have to give me an exact figure, but somewhere around like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey six or $7,000 for that iMac Pro? Yep. And how much was this MacBook Air? 1400 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something like that, 15, something like that. God

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bless. I know the iMac Pro is a little older, but golly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And here’s the thing about the $1,400 MacBook Pro, the $999 one probably wouldn’t do that any slower.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I mean, the only difference is half the RAM. Every other part of it is the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed. The CPU is the same speed, the RAM’s the same speed, the SSD, you know, like it’s, that’s why the $999

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, not that I recommend people get that, they should get 16 gigs of RAM if they can possibly afford it and they should, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. But like, it is, that’s the amazing thing about this. That’s the thing we learned from all the people testing. and we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wondering, oh, is it clocked higher? Is it this or that? It seems like the answer is no. All of them have variable clock speed as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adjusting for temperature or whatever, and you can get readouts on what they are, and it seems like it’s around 3.2 gigahertz throttling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down to like 2.8 or whatever. But they all do that, and the only variable is cooling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the penalty for cooling, as Marco noted, the penalty is you are only 12% faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than your giant 10-core iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} instead of 30%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster. Right. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’d take that. that’s fine because I love not having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a touch bar. And so that’s currently a very nice thing right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I took this out of the box about two hours ago. I ran Migration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Assistant to transfer things onto it. I installed a bunch of software.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I ran these benchmarks. And I installed big software like Xcode and Logic, like massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco installations, many gigabytes of downloads and unzipping, and yes, unzipping Xcode, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these massive operations, running these benchmarks, I must have run it nine or 10 times at least.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I haven’t plugged it in yet. I haven’t unwrapped the power brick yet. It’s still in the box. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco currently, and I’ve had it sitting here with the monitor on, full brightness, because I only rock that way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the battery is still at 60% full. Do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you remember during the setup, by the way, like Mac OS, if you’ve set up a Mac recently, it throws up a notification

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that says, oh, since we’re just setting up your Mac, things may be less responsive until we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finish this optimization process. What they’re basically telling you is like, photo analysis D is gonna run and spotlight indexing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is gonna run. And they put a notification in a couple years ago or whatever that tells you that you may notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some degraded performance. And it’s like, no I won’t. Because normally you’d think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh I’ll hear the fans spinning up or things will feel slower or whatever. And that just never happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the dialogue was there, the notification was there, but none of the effects that I could feel were there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the supposed like, and it’s like, oh, I’m doing spotlight indexing now, so your things might be slower. It was amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Brian D. Yeah, I’ve also been totally ignoring when, like for instance, when you run migration assistant, it suggests

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you plug it in. And then also like when you install Logic, it says you should really plug

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it into a power source before installing Logic. And I just ignore those and plow right through and then it’s done 45 seconds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco later or something and the battery has lost less than 1% of its charge. Like it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so far anyway, are not extraordinarily expensive. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey extraordinarily fast. And even for the software that isn’t updated for it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is not the journey from PowerPC to Intel from, you know, a decade plus ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Even stuff that’s still compiled for Intel is just as fast as it was, if not faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is the no-compromise computer, isn’t it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you know, again, with the compatibility concerns, but yeah, like, the future looks extremely bright.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like one of the great quotes from one of, I think it might’ve been in that independent article with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Federighi and Ternes was, I think it was Federighi saying, you know, the interviewer asked them about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what do you think about these new computers or whatever? And the quote is, we overshot. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} we had a goal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we were trying to make something that’s at least this good, and it turns out we overshot. We made something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, it’s not like this was, this was their target and they met it. They, you know, because this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, they didn’t need to make these this good. There’s no reason for the cheapest Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they sell to be faster than the most expensive laptop they sell. Like, why would you even make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that as a goal unless you’re being super ambitious, Steve Jobs style or whatever. They just wanted something that was better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than Intel and had a bright future, but these things are phenomenal. And it shows the most in these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cheapos, right? Because here’s the thing, when they make the high-end ones, don’t expect the high-end, like the current MacBook Air is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much faster than the previous one. The new Mac Pro is gonna be way faster than the old Mac Pro, but the margins

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will narrow, I feel like, potentially, depending on how they fudge, you know, benchmarks with special like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John FPGAs or whatever, right, because it’s, you know, it’s more impressive when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sub $1,000 thing is like the fastest Mac ever in single core than it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when the $6,000 one is, because the $6,000 one is gonna be the fastest Mac ever by a large margin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you expect that, because it’s $6,000. We talked about this with the, you know, which Macs do you think they’re gonna roll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out first? And we always framed it as like, well, if they roll out the low end, won’t it be embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Apple if their cheapest Mac is faster than their more expensive one? And here we are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And yeah, in some respects, it is quote unquote embarrassing that the cheapest laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they sell can do a whole bunch of things way faster than the most expensive one. But I think, I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is willing to endure that to say, but yeah, but we sell that computer too. Like that’s us too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, we’re not afraid of embarrassing our current products with our new products,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially since we’re going to replace those other ones soon anyway. And we’re not worried about, oh, well, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one’s ever going to buy a 16 inch because if you need whatever, 64 gigs of Ram or a four terabyte or an eight terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SSD or whatever, or you need to run some Intel program, you can’t do that on these because those are, these are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the low end models. So you still have to buy that. Like kind of like how they still kept selling the, uh, the trashcan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John max. Some people needed them for certain things that they needed to do. And even though we felt like that computer is a dud,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re still able to sell some of them. And obviously Apple wants to replace them ASAP, but whatever the calculus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that was in their head, if they had rolled out the top end first and gone down, it would have like saved this sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of weird situation we’re in where how does it make any sense that your slowest computer is now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your fastest computer? I don’t understand, it doesn’t make it, but you know, we’re all fine with it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I’m telling everybody I know, who’s like, what computer should I get? I kept telling them to wait, and now I just want to like send out the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carrier pigeons. Fly, go buy MacBook Airs, they are amazing. Your weight has paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off. Buy these computers now because the MacBook Air, I feel like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like the best performance deal of Macs that have ever existed and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will probably never be beat because we will never have this discontinuity from we were so slow for so long and then we made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this huge leap, and on the cheapest Mac that they sell that has a screen. I’m sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Mini, I keep excluding you. I know you’re cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, this, and this to me, like this feels kind of like when we got SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the sense that like in my computing life so far, there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only a very small number of performance jumps where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you first use something, you’re like, whoa, like you actually really notice the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that does not happen very often. You know, usually we get incremental progress. We’re lucky if we get a processor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s like, you know, 20% faster than the old one we had from a few years ago or whatever. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s hard to, in computing, it’s hard to have major jumps like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. It doesn’t happen very often.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s kind of like in the days with like 286, if you had a 286 and you got a Pentium, you got that kind of jump, right? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cause in the early days we had bigger leaps, but it’s been a long time since you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go from like your 386 to your Pentium and have your hair blown back. And this is like that again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. And the only time I can think of in recent memory that we had a jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this was when we went to SSDs. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to SSDs was a very like long and painful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and expensive transition in many fronts. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they were expensive. Like you had an SSD, you had to get a tiny one and they cost a whole jillion dollars. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was amazing, but the reason it took so long is because they cost so much money. You’re like, well, but I’ve got a lot of data. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t get an SSD. This is like if SSDs came out and they were cheaper than spinning hard drives for the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of bytes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, cheaper and way faster. Because that’s, like my first SSD was 160 gigs. And so, you know, I had like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, you had to like split it up. You had to have like, all right, we’ll have the SSD for like the OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maybe like, you know, the cache folder for Bridge or Photoshop or whatever, and then you’d put your main data

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your hard drive so as not to take up all the expensive SSD space. And you had all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hacks and everything, and it was a long, painful transition before we, and many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people still haven’t fully made the transition because it’s so expensive still. SSDs are still way more expensive than hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco drives even today. This is on that level of a transition in terms

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of how meaningful it is to the performance and balance of these computers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco except the downside is way less, way, way less. And the downside will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally gone within probably a year. Like, you know, the main downside is basically what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco John said earlier, like, yeah, not all the software works yet, but that’s gonna be gone soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not works, not all the software works at maximum speed. Some software doesn’t work at all, like for the Unix stuff that needs to be compiled,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you know, regular Mac programs, if you’re listening to this and you don’t know but Unix is don’t worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it, right? Cause regular Mac programs, you don’t need them to do anything. Just run the Intel versions, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. But this is just such an incredible gain. This is, oh, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so like, just as a Mac fan and as a fan of computers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is so exciting to me. I’m so happy with this. It has blown me away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I will, you know, once the big ones come out, I do still, I think, want to be in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 16 inch size class for my laptop needs. So once that comes out, I will probably go back to that size,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I am super excited for this to progress

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and to keep going, you know, to see what the rest of the lineup looks like. Super excited now to replace my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac whenever the time comes, which I was not excited about before, but now I very much am.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m very much looking forward to this time and it’s a great time to be a fan of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One other fun benchmark that Panzer did was, he did an app launch thing, which is the thing that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usually do in Mac OS X versions to see if they would brag about improving app launch or whatever. So he’s got a dock lined up at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bottom of his computer with a ton of apps in it, like spreading the whole width of his screen. And he just takes his cursor from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right to left and goes click, click, click, click, and clicks each one of the apps, right? And just goes from one end to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other and launches all the apps, right? And they bounce like once, like one bounce done, one bounce done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like as he clicks behind him, the apps are all finishing as his cursor moves along.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s phenomenal. It’s like, how are they launching that fast? Why? What is the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it just the CPU? Is, I mean, is the SSD a little faster? Maybe stuff got pulled into cache, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only got eight gigs of RAM. Like it’s inexplicably fast. Like it’s phenomenally fast. Now, some of that is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new computer effect, right? And some of it is you’ve launched it before you get cached or whatever. But I can tell you from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long experience of doing that exact experiment, I’ve never seen performance like that, even on SSD Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So whatever Apple’s doing, keep doing it.

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App Store commission

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love it like this is the week that Apple has lowered the App Store Commission and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it were an hour and a half in before we get to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so let’s properly introduce this just today this morning even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as I woke up which usually these things seem to happen later in the day Apple is announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that if you meet certain qualifications and in certain circumstances and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if this and if that, that you can, as an app developer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get them to only take 15% cut off of your sales rather than 30.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the short, short version of this is it’s for small businesses that earn up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to a million dollars per year. But there seem to be a lot of, well, what abouts and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh, waits and so on. But at least at first and on the surface, this is a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey welcome change and one that I’m quite surprised to see Apple make.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that quite surprised is putting it lightly. I mean, I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been saying for years as as many Apple commentators and developers have, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no chance they’re going to ever lower that commission from 7030. No chance at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve been trying to talk you down on that ledge because every time you bring it up, I say, well, they did lower it to 8515 for subscriptions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you’re like, yeah, but So, you know, like the explanation, the obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explanation is, what’s changed recently that Apple would be doing this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} The app stores have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running for so long and they haven’t ever changed their cut. And in recent years, they did the 85-15.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then very recently, you know, just today, they did this thing. Hmm, could it be the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John congressional attention they’re getting? Could it be the antitrust lawsuits against Google? Could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it be, you know, companies like Epic having big fights with them? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, sometimes, especially very fervent Apple fans don’t like the idea that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is any sort of countervailing force to Apple, whether it be government intervention or companies like Epic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making a big stink and throwing tantrums and filing lawsuits. But without

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pushback, Apple, as evidenced by the many initial years of the store, is not motivated to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything. And now there is a little bit of motivation, and we see a change, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, and there’s a lot of details to this that are worth knowing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the gist of it, that most developers are now going to have 15%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco across the board, is really quite something. Like that, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, and this is not the kind of thing they would have decided over the weekend. I mean, this is the kind of thing, this has probably been in the works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a few months, if I had to guess. And this has a meaningful impact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the stock perception for their services revenue. Now that being said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so all that is to say it’s a big deal. That like, it isn’t just like Apple, you know, out of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goodness of their heart just giving us more money. They are also going to take a hit to a degree in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they make a lot of money from App Store revenue. But the way it’s structured

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that only developers who make less than a million dollars a year get this new commission.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you make over a million dollars a year through the App Store after they’re cut, then you’re still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco paying 70-30 or the 85-15 on the year two and above subscriptions, just like before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it turns out that the App Store has very much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a long tail effect for revenue. So if you look at the total amount of money that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is gonna keep at the end of the day, most of that money comes from a small number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of very, very big, very profitable companies and apps and games and stuff. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple, like this is not a huge amount of sweat off Apple’s back, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the money they make from the App Store are from the Epics and Netflixes and HBOs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the world. It’s from those massive companies, and the commission on all those things is not going to change,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because those companies all make way more than a million dollars a year from the App Store. What this does change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is for that giant long tail of developers like me who make less than a million dollars

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a year from the App Store, we just gotta raise basically. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is something that I never would have expected Apple to do because quite frankly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they didn’t need to. There has been all this pressure on them for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco antitrust regulation and everything and all the big companies that are gonna apply this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pressure to them, they’re not getting this cut because they make too much money. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this won’t help them at all. And I don’t think this will relieve a lot of pressure from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple with the regulatory stuff, honestly. I think the only way to relieve that pressure is to allow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other forms of in-app purchase in apps. That’s it. Like anything short of that is not going to relieve that antitrust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pressure. But that’s something I think that would cost Apple way more than this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because all those big companies would do it. And then Apple would lose all their revenue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a very shrewd move for exactly the reasons you said that it makes a lot in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terms of number of people. It makes a lot of people happy because there are way more developers making under a million

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dollars and to be clear, it’s under a million dollars in profit, not revenue, that way more than making under a million than over,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So number of people who are happier today, huge number. It doesn’t cost Apple that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money because they make most of the money off of the whales like the big the big profit makers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And those two things like in you know, know, when we’re talking about antitrust and stuff, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is the, you know, legal aspect of that. But there’s also the political and optics

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aspect of it. And despite Apple saying, Oh, we charge 30%, that’s what everyone else charges.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a good thing to be able to say the next time they’re grilled, say, Hey, we, you know, 90%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of our developers just got their revenue share cut in half from, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from 30 to 15. And look at all these testimonials from developers who are happy and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Those optics matter, despite the fact that we all know what did Apple really give up? Did they give a ton of money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they gave up some they give up a non zero amount, but they didn’t do like what Margo said, oh, you know, you can use a different payment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John method to really cut into it, right. And so it’s good to be able to have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your quiver when someone starts leaning on you again. Now, all that said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the end, This type of dynamic where there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a company, in this case a tech company, that we think may have too much power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and is using that power to do things that are good for it at the expense of other people. That’s the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John government effort of, let’s look at these companies that have lots of money and lots of power, and let’s make sure they’re not making the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world worse for everyone who’s not them in some way. Antitrust is a specific instance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that, but in general, the government is always in terms of regulation, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If that activity of looking into it and asking them hard questions and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John considering what we might do about it causes that company to say, what about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What about if we do like this? And you look at it and go, yeah, that pleases me a little.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You haven’t changed the power dynamic because Apple was and remains

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the exact same position as they were in that they’re voluntarily doing that. They’re voluntarily doing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to try to avoid someone making them do something presumably worse. They haven’t given up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of any iota of their self determination by doing this. So if you’re worried that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company has too much power, they still have all that power. All they’re doing is being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a benevolent dictator of the app store and say, we bestow upon you an additional 15%. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you haven’t changed the fact that they are the only app store, they require the payment method, they make the rules,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can change the rules, none of that has changed. So fundamentally, and this is what lots of people are screaming about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fundamentally nothing has changed in the dynamic, but practically speaking, people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happier and people get more money. This is exactly why you do this move. Do it voluntarily rather than digging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your heels and refusing to change anything in the hopes of heading off something that could be much worse, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I think this change is great despite the fact that it will not help me at all because My apps don’t make any money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I really wish they could have done this back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the three days a year ago when my two dinky Mac apps made some money. But oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now maybe I’ll get $0.25 a week instead of $0.15 or $0.05 or whatever. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but this is going to make a lot of people happy. It’s a move in the right direction, but has still not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fundamentally changed the power dynamics. You could argue that the fact that they did anything shows that there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is some power on the other side of that. And that’s true. but relying on the benevolence of the powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a bad strategy long-term. And that’s the situation we’re still in right now. So I’m glad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we have some benevolence. I like it, it’s good. But I don’t like relying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that benevolence as the only thing keeping the situation from getting much worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, completely agreed. And that’s why, like, this doesn’t really solve many of the problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Apple’s position with the App Store. But it is nice. Like, to be on this side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it, It’s just a nice thing for them to have done. And I know it’s not, again, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco charity. I know this was to serve a political purpose, and it will serve that purpose very well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You think about the different angles of this. They’re now gonna be able to say, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the different small businesses and individuals, they’ve helped with this, and how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they contribute to the economy with all these small businesses. So as future antitrust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pressure, and government pressure, and regulatory pressure, as more stuff falls on them in that area,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re gonna be able to point to this and say, look at all the good we’ve done here for all these other small businesses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco At the same time, because they’ve made public these terms and they have this million

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dollar threshold below which you get the benefit, they’ve also kind of helped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco alienate anybody who tries to complain about it. Because if you complain about this, what you’re saying is I make more than a million

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dollars from the app store every year. And it’s kind of a bad look in PR in certain circles. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, it’s a very smart move what they’ve done here, and I’m just happy to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the good side of it. But certainly, the PR here, there is certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some utility to this for them that is not lost on them. And finally, while I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco am slightly complaining about things here, I love what they did here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the way they implemented it is a little bit odd to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and creates some weird incentives. So normally, the way progressive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taxation or progressive fees work, and this is the way U.S. income tax works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this way, is normally like if you say that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amount you make up to X is taxed at this percentage, and then anything above that is taxed at this percentage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Those are structured in such a way that when you cross that threshold between the two percentages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You don’t suddenly pay the higher tax rate on everything you made before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You only pay the higher tax rate on the marginal difference between that threshold and your total income

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there is no amount of money that you can like by making a dollar more in revenue you take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco home less total That that would be weird and we create perverse incentives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What they’re doing with this is kind of doing that in one way. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you cross a threshold for the rest of that year you pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the regular 70% or you know you get the regular 70% instead of the 85. So say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you cross a million dollars in October then in November and December you’re gonna pay 70 30 instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of 85 15 but you you know you still have the money you made the rest of the year for all the monthly payouts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that were taxed at the 8515 rate. But the way this program

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco works is you only get the 8515 on your first million

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you made under a million dollars in the previous year. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you cross a million, yes it is progressively taxed for the rest of that year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but then the entire next year you get 70-30 split.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if you end up making less than a million for that whole next year. So there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a weird incentive that like, if you are going to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit above a million, it’s basically if you’re going to be between 1 million and 1.2 million or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so, you actually have an incentive to maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stop making money if you’re gonna do that near the very end of the year. Because if like in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco December you’re gonna cross over a million, you’re actually better off pulling your app from the store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not, and just not making any money so that you stay under that threshold so that for the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco next year, you don’t have the higher tax rate on your entire income. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t, I’m not entirely sure why they have this structure, but this kind of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to make under a million in the whole previous year to qualify thing, because that creates this weird, perverse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco incentive. So I hope they iron this out. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, it’s that way because it makes them more money. Because they want 70-30 for the whole next year because they think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, you’re turning into a whale. Like what they don’t expect is to you to cross over to a million in the next year to make like nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, so they say, once you cross that threshold, you’re now in the category of the 70-30 people. And this set of rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes Apple more money than the one you described.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Exactly. Which would be more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fair. That’s the advantage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But like if they would just tax the first million at 15% and then anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco above that at 30, like that would be a much simpler system. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clear they know how to do that, because they do that for the first year, right, that you were just describing. It’s not like they don’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ability to do that because of some quirk of their accounting system. No, they do that for the year when you cross a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco million. Right, and I think Microsoft even does that. Like, there’s some other store that does that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for like their app store, or something similar to that. So, that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I don’t know why they aren’t doing it that way, which would eliminate any weird, perverse incentives to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not earn more money. But I hope that they have some very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good reason for that and that they can fix that reason and get rid of that weird limitation. Otherwise, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a very good thing and I’m very happy to see it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the other thing that this made me think of related to our past discussions about the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the cut and actual Apple’s past actions. And this has analogies in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John general government, not just the government of app stores. In the past, we’ve discussed the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea where, Netflix got a secret sweetheart deal So they didn’t have to pay 30%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because Netflix was huge. And they did this deal with Apple that was kind of an open secret

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, hey, Netflix is not paying 30% because they’re a big company and big companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get special deals with other big companies. And many times I’ve described that as that’s the way business works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s true. If you look at any kind of business, if you’re gonna buy one or two little widgets from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a company, you get a certain rate. But if you’re gonna buy 10 million of them, you get your own special sales team

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they schmooze you and you get a better rate and you can negotiate, right? Big companies have power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That power manifests usually in them getting better deals with other big companies. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every time Netflix or whoever got a sweetheart deal for the App Store, it’s like, hey, why don’t I get that? It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the whole antitrust thing of Apple saying we treat everyone the same. Like we know that’s not true. You treat big companies differently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I don’t think that’s outrageous or ridiculous because that’s true of everybody that Apple works with. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the companies that Apple works with, depending on the power of that company, whether it’d be a supplier for parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and how exclusive that part is or whatever. There are power dynamics between companies and it makes perfect sense for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big companies to get better deals, right? So one way Apple could have gone following the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capitalist business ethos is, you know, we’re powerful companies, we’re butting heads

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here or whatever. If there’s some big company like say Epic or whatever, whatever big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company you want, Microsoft, like whatever big company that is important to the app store, Adobe, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, that’s different because Adobe has its own thing going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} on, anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They could have said, okay, well, we need to keep these big companies happy. So let’s strike

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a deal with Microsoft to get Office onto the Mac and we’ll give Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a smaller cut, right? You know, and that type of arrangement that I’m describing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple has done at various times, you know, the Netflix example was real, but Microsoft was hypothetical, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the opposite of what they’re doing here. Because this is like saying, okay, on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the App Store, we take a 30% cut. But once you make more than a million, we take a 15% cut. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you make more than a billion, we take a 5% cut. That kind of progressive tax system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the more you make, the less you pay, it’s like the American income tax system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in reality, if not in law, but sometimes also in law. And that type of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system makes a certain kind of sense that we’re all used to, which is, oh, but they’re Netflix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Of course they get a deal. You’re not Netflix. You can’t negotiate a special deal with Apple to get a lower rate. Why should you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lower rate? And the argument from the people, from the little people has been, but Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can afford to pay more. The 15% that I’m not getting and Netflix is getting is the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between me being able to be an independent developer and me having to get a different job. Whereas with Netflix,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a question of what their stock price is and their profitability and so on and so forth, right? So that’s the argument we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always make, is like that percentage means more to the smaller person, which is why I think most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agree that a more reasonable and fair tax system is if you’re making barely enough money to survive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you should have a lower tax rate than someone who’s making gazillions of dollars again with the progressive tax rate. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your first million is taxed like this, but your million and first dollar should be taxed higher and you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cry poverty and say, Oh, but my million and first dollar was charged at 5% higher. I can’t live

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t that’s, you know, so that’s that argument. Like, we don’t cross these worlds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, oh, real life versus the App Store or whatever, but they do cross over. And what Apple has done here is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recognize that I mean previously had I don’t get to make this political, previously had a flat tax, ostensibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a flat tax 30% for everybody caveat, asterisk, double dagger, so on and so forth,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we say, right? You know, and one direction that could have gone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the big ones are big companies are going to bigger deals. And we’re going to codify that, like we’re not going to just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a special deal with Netflix, we’re going to say, look, once you make $300 million, you’re down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to 5% cut, because we want big companies to sell a lot’s in our store that helps our revenue, that helps our stock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John price. And for all the things that we talked about how this is actually like a very smart thing for Apple to do, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t really hurt them. Part of the goodness of this arrangement is the opposite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that. They’re giving the cut to the people who need it the most and the people who will hurt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple the least, like that’s right in there, but still, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re giving the cut to the people who need it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most. The most numerous people and the people for whom it will have the largest impact, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you think like, oh, a million dollars, if you’re making a million dollars, you’re rich. If you have a five person company, a million dollars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might not be enough to keep your head above water. So we can argue about what the right threshold is for a company selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software, right? But certainly for individual developers, if you’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a million dollars in profit off the App Store, you’re fine. If you’re a 20 person company making a million dollars a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off the App Store, maybe you’re not fine. But the trend is in the right direction. Like that line, the slope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, we went from flat tax to a line tilted. I’m glad the line didn’t go in the other direction,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which would be, you know, the big companies get the break. And feel free to make whatever analogies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to broader government you want. I’m trying not to be super political here, but I feel like you can make your own conclusions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t know. I feel like this is a thing that can cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple not a lot of money, but can reap incredible amounts of positive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey PR and positive feelings. So why not do it, right? You know, it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if all of the money is made on the whales, which I think you’re right, it absolutely is then. Yeah. Let’s give the little guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little boost and it’s really not going to cost that much. It won’t really change the bottom line. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey everyone’s going to think we’re so benevolent and so wonderful and so great. And hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some of the people who think we’re so great now are the people in government who are really looking up, looking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looking at our finances and wondering, you know, and looking at in our behavior and wondering if we’re being fair. Well, of course

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’re being fair. This is what you guys said earlier. Of course, we’re being fair. We gave more money to the little guys. What else could you want from us?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so, yeah, I think this is, this is something that should definitely be applauded without question, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is not a lot of effort to earn a whole lot of good PR. And if I’m an apple shoes, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have done the same thing, but I don’t know. I still feel like other more substantive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever that would

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} be. You know, bigger changes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. That,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other bigger changes would have been more useful, but I’m not going to kick a gift horse in the mouth. This is still excellent. and I applaud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them for doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and ExpressVPN, and thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you to our members who support us directly. You can do that at atp.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We will talk to you all next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Accidental, tech podcast so long.

Casey’s green-bubble family

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can you give me a moment to shed a little light on something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the verge of ruining my marriage? And I say that mostly jokingly, but not entirely. I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey complaining and moaning a lot lately about this weird issue that started for both Aaron and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I when we got our iPhones 12. And that is that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey many of our friends and pretty much all of Aaron’s family are on Android.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And And from what I can tell, when we are shooting SMSs back and forth between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of us and one other Android person, everything works great. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a lot of cases, we’re in these group messages, which I believe are, strictly speaking, delivered over MMS. And these group

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey messages are two or three iPhone people and two or three Android people. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey both of us are having consistent problems, wherein

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of us, well, we’re not always in the same groups, but oftentimes we are. So like family groups, for example.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And let’s say there were 10 messages sent, iPhones and Android phones. My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phone will receive five of them. Erin’s phone will receive seven of them. And they are, of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey course, not the same two batches of text messages. I don’t need to belabor the point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but Erin has been lighting me up about this justifiably because she’s missing messages from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey loved ones, from friends. She’s been lighting me up about this for the three weeks, whatever it is, we’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey our phones. I’ve been lighting up every Apple engineer I know saying, please fix this for the love of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey God. Erin is mostly jokingly threatening to buy an Android phone. I think she’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey joking. I’m not sure she’s joking. So if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a person who works at Apple, I will put a feedback in the show notes. Can you please, please do something about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because it’s driving me crazy. And I joke about it ruining my marriage. But seriously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is killing the two of us. Can you please do something about this? Please and thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is what Apple gets for not making FaceTime and Open Protocol or message like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the SMS system as we all know is primitive and old and weird or whatever. But because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is the sort of open standard of messaging, if your phone doesn’t work with it, your phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is broken. You’re like, oh, iMessage, iMessage is great. Yeah, but everyone doesn’t have iMessage. It’s like, well, why doesn’t everyone have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMessage? Well, it’s because it’s just an Apple thing. Well, if you want everyone to have iMessage, you can’t have it just be an Apple thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you don’t want everyone to have iMessage, you better make damn sure that the one thing everybody supposedly has, no, not WhatsApp,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the one thing everybody has works. And in our country, that’s SMS, the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lowest common denominator. Yeah, and so that’s crappy when bugs like that happen. And you can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why they happen. It’s like, well, but who pays attention to SMS? Like how many times are Apple employees using SMS? They’re probably using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMessage way more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s the problem. And that’s the thing that really bugs me about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is I feel like this is widespread enough, because like I said, I’ve complained about it on Twitter. And people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have said, I thought it was an AT&T issue at first. And then people on like Verizon and other American carriers said, no, no, no, no, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s Me Too. And then I thought it was an American thing or something. And then people in Europe were like, no, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no, no, no, it’s Me Too. Then I thought it was an iPhone 12 thing. And some people on like iPhones 11 said, no, no, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no, no, Me Too. But I talked to a couple of Apple people about it. And they were like, wow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I never send SMSs ever. And I’m like, oh my God, I cannot hit my face. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, the palm, I can, I got to face palm harder when I hear things like that, because it’s like, this is the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey issue I have with Apple is not dogfooding or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not dogfooding everything. Like, yeah, they dogfood iMessage, but they don’t dogfood SMS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or group MMSs or anything like that. You know, does anyone at Apple really and truly use their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tube and their assistant? Because anyone who has really and truly used their assistant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey knows it’s a piece of garbage compared to other assistants. Or maybe that’s the other side of this coin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is they dog food too much and they don’t see what the other side of the, of the, of the fence looks like. And they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see how much better the Amazon tube is than theirs. And it’s just, it’s very frustrating because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, you know, here’s a phone that is possibly my favorite iPhone ever and I cannot reliably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey receive messages from friends and family. And like it is an internet communicator. That was one of the three pillars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wasn’t it? an internet communicator, and it is not communicating. It’s driving me crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SMS isn’t the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} fine, fine, fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fine. And oh, and just to get away, just to get in front of everyone, no, I am not going to convince all of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friends and family to get WhatsApp. I don’t want WhatsApp.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I don’t use WhatsApp.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do not have the clout, the wherewithal, the desire to convince everyone else I know to use WhatsApp. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happening. Those are boil-the-ocean strategies. Any strategy that involves getting everyone you’re related to to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything related to technology is basically a no-go, unless you’re going to buy it all for them. And even then, even then, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were going to buy them all iPhones, I bet some of them would reject it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I’ve offered iPhones to like, so as an example, Aaron’s youngest brother

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is on Android. His fiance is on an iPhone. And I have offered to literally give him

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my 11, which I just got repaired. I think I mentioned on the show, I just got repaired brand new screen on it. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey offered to literally give it to him and he doesn’t, he’s not interested. He just doesn’t want it. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a couple of weeks ago, we made brief mention of this last episode, might have hit the cutting room floor. A few weeks ago, MyNameIsTee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the chat wrote something about what had ended up happening last week, but we didn’t have time for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. MyNameIsTee wrote, after show request for… Oh, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do this this time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} We keep bringing this up when we’re two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours into an episode and it’s like, Marco, please summarize 10 years of podcasting

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} in the next five minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fine. Let the record show I was interested to hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have four Fisherman’s Friend half-cough drops left. I can’t do a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco segment right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What you’ve got here, Casey, is what I call one of the topics that ends up getting pushed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down in the list. It’s a big topic. If we’re going to talk about 10 years of podcasting, you know, we’re going to need time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it. It’s also a little bit navel-gazy, and usually there’s more pressing news. So these topics, there’s a lot of them that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that that end up in the topic list, and they just end up getting pushed down over time. And by leaving this in after show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like each time, it’s like, this time we’re gonna be able to do it. Even if Marco was 100% healthy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two hours in is not the time to talk about, to summarize 10 years of podcasting. So my name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is T, it’s a tall order for us to tackle your thing. We’d have to really wait for like the summer when there’s no news,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we have so much frigging Apple news that we don’t probably have time to reminisce about being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcasters.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fine. I tried, I tried again. Nobody loves me, it’s okay. Do you want to just do…

John’s case update

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then or do you want to talk about your cases?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I need to just tell the people about the cases because they keep asking me about it. All my cases haven’t arrived, my iPhone 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases. I’m supposed to talk about iPhone 12 cases that have the bottom exposed and how much I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them and so on and so forth. But my order is like, I don’t know what’s taking so long. My one order said it’s supposed to arrive in 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^John business days, which I hadn’t noticed before and we haven’t reached 15 business days. So it’s not overdue yet, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t have all my cases. I have not found a case that I super duper like. I guess I can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a quick, you know, brief review of the one I have. I got the Sena case, S-E-N-A.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a leather case. It has an exposed bottom. It’s got metal buttons. The metal buttons are textured, but I knew that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going in because you could see it in the photos. Pros, the leather is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John super grippy and tacky. I love it. Like the Apple ones are always slippery when you first get them, and then they get broken in. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one right out of the case, very grippy leather. And of course the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is exposed and it’s good, and the corners look good on it. that are not fraying or anything like that. Cons,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the buttons are way too hard to press for me. If you like firm button presses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is your phone because they are super firm presses. Like if you’re worried about these buttons getting accidentally pressed in your pocket,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably not gonna happen with these ones. But they are so hard to press that I almost immediately took this case off and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John threw it away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One thing I noticed about that case in particular is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I got it, I noticed that when you look on the inside, like when you have no phone in it you’re looking at the inside of the case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which is all you’re doing, because you don’t have a phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, that’s why I had a lot of time to do this. The, like where the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buttons are, the inside of the buttons is the same material and seemingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the same thickness as the rest of the case. Whereas if you look at an Apple leather case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where the buttons are, there’s like a thinner, like rubber, kind of membrane material there instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the whole full thickness leather. So I’m guessing that’s something you need to look out for as like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how to make the buttons feel better and be easier to press or not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and so this is, granted, it’s a personal preference, and if you like stiff buttons, this is the one for you. I wanted them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be separate. Who likes stiff buttons? I don’t know, maybe, if you have accidental presses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot, you don’t have to worry about this, but like here’s how stiff buttons manifest to be terrible. Like when I have my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sitting on like the sideboard but I’m in the kitchen doing dishes, and I wanna turn the volume up, and Apple’s stupid AirPods don’t provide a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do that, I’ve gotta walk into the, I gotta walk into the-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Your watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does. Yeah, my what? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} don’t know. I know, I know, I’m just saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I gotta walk into the other room, and what I wanna do is just reach down. It’s laying flat, face up on a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John table thing. I just wanna reach down to it and press the volume button. Seems like a simple task, but if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it requires a ton of pressure, now I have to get a firmer grip, press hard, but make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure you don’t have your opposing finger on the power button, because you’ll take a screenshot, and it’s actually hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do. Now, not so hard that I can’t struggle, oh, my little muscles, I can’t do it. It’s just annoyingly stiff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to be able to just do it thoughtlessly and now I have to like concentrate a little bit. The second thing is the texturing on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the buttons is way rougher than I thought it would be. I thought it would be like kind of like a little bit rough or whatever. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanted them to be smooth. I’m like, oh, if they’re a little textured, that’s fine. But like, you could file your nails with this. You could probably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, you could probably escape prison with one of these things. But just like rubbing it on the bars, eventually you’ll get through.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Very rough texture and the buttons stick out sort of proud of the case a lot more than the Apple ones do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Apple ones are recessed a little bit. So, you know, not entirely recessed. They do stick out a little bit, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like the more recessed thing. And finally, in terms of the leather quality, even though the feel of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is great and it’s very tacky, which is what I want, the leather does seem to be, I don’t know, thinner,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or there’s less of it or less durable, because I’ve already got like some mars on the back of it, some scratches that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can see. And the way the leather bunches around the curves, like it’s not overall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as nicely sort of gathered. I put a link in the, I put a photo in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if we’ll put it in show art or whatever, but it’s like, it’s a picture of the Apple leather case showing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume buttons and the cutout for the ring silent switch. And the Apple ones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every curve is just smooth. There’s no like wrinkling or bunching, like in any of the curve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parts. Everything is rounded over, the buttons are recessed in a little rounded over area.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This thing, the ring silent switch, is like someone just took a razor cookie cutter and went

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} slam

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just cut out a slice. The edges are sharp and it’s just like, there is no sort of rounding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over of it at all. It’s just like they cut, they slice right through the thing. And so you can see all the different layers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the case. So that aspect of it is both. I feel like it feels a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit cheaper, probably is less durable and also doesn’t look as nice. That said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s still on the case because you know why? It’s got an exposed bottom and I like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did consider going back to the Apple silicone case because having used the swipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up on the exposed bottom for a while, I mean, I used it without a case for a while, so there shouldn’t be news. Like, isn’t it the same swiping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up from the bottom without the case versus an exposed bottom? It’s the same edge the whole time. But I have to say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even without a case, it is less satisfying than the old rounded over 11, just wipe up from the bottom. So I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the thought that’s like, well, you liked every other aspect of the silicone case better,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for the bottom swipe, and it wasn’t quite as tacky as this. So why not just switch back to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John silicone one? But instead I’m like, well, let me wait for my next leather case to come so I can try that one out, but it hasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arrived yet. So if you’re looking for me to endorse a case that I personally like, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has a bottom cut out and is made of leather, I cannot endorse the Senna case. But you might like it if you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rough metal buttons that stick out a lot and are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard to press. If you have one of those hand grip exercise things, like the springs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between the two grip lines that you put your hand around, you know? If you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those, maybe you’ll like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using these buttons. And maybe they’ll soften up more over time. They haven’t softened up so far. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I think this is not a bad case. It is just not to my taste. And it’s not to my taste in ways that I was not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to ascertain by looking at the pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or if you have to break out of prison.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah.