410: The Comfort Is Killing Me

22 Dec 2020

Casey’s Fitness+ review, Thunderbolt hubs, Big Sur upgrades, HDR photos, and a generous stack of M1-powered waffles.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: Living the M1 lifestyle
• Follow-up:
  • AirPods Max
    • Battery situation (via Barney)
      • Snazzy Labs video
    • Smart Case ∆s
      • 9to5mac
      • Apple Support
  • Turns out, like the Pro Display XDR, the LG UltraFine 5K does have a fan. (via Joseph Duffy)
    • Also, it has been revised in the past.
    • Tinus’s tweet
  • Chrome bug report and comments
  • Jonathan Dietz continues to school us on chip packaging
  • …and Thunderbolt hubs/controllers
    • OWC Thunderbolt Hub
    • OWC Thunderbolt Dock
    • OWC interview about TB4
• Casey has tried Apple Fitness+
  • BeachBody on Demand
  • Peloton
  • Wii Fit
  • Ring Fit Adventure
• All three of us are having dangerous thoughts
  • Ars Technica on Time Machine backup times
  • BitBar and SwiftBar
  • SF Symbols
• #askatp
  • Why do HDR videos look so great but HDR photos… not? (via Chris Lenart)
  • Is there a way to prevent an application from stealing focus in macOS? (via Wes Chamness)
  • What’s the best way to back up your iCloud Photo Library if it can’t fit on your Mac?
    • EXIF data
• Post-show: Living the M1 lifestyle (reprise)
  • The best laptop ever made

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

Chapters

1. The M1 lifestyle
2. Follow-up: AirPods Max
3. Follow-up: Ultra… fine 🖼️
4. Follow-up: Chrome badness
5. Follow-up: Chiplets
6. New Thunderbolt hubs
7. Sponsor: ExpressVPN
8. Fitness+
9. Sponsor: Flatfile
10. Upgrade to Big Sur?
11. Sponsor: Linode
12. #askatp: HDR photos vs. video
13. #askatp: Stealing focus
14. #askatp: iCloud photo backup
15. Ending theme
16. The M1 lifestyle (reprise) 🖼️

The M1 lifestyle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m typing away, blazing away, podcasting away on my 13-inch screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That sounds super fun. I’ve begun some light travel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the sense of, you know, going from the beach back to regular life for a couple of weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So when is the iMac Pro due back? Do you have any idea?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s mattering less and less as I get used to the M1. Oh, here it is. Here it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I haven’t heard back yet. The estimate still has, I think, another week on it at least.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Being that it’s Christmas week and I’m sure shipping parts and getting people’s hours

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is all tricky this week. I told them no rush anyway, but it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surprise me if it’s actually another week or two after this. But ultimately, man,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time… So I’m using the M1 full time this whole week and doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my regular work, doing some coding, doing podcast editing and stuff, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is so fast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Stop, I don’t wanna know, I don’t wanna know, stop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s almost deceptive, you don’t realize how much faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is at a lot of things, because it’s hard to quantify and benchmark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of the things that are faster about it, but what you notice, stuff that is, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every Mac you’ve gotten for the last 10 years, certain things have just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been slow the whole time, or certain animations were always jerky. Certain processes were just always,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you get a new Mac and it’d be maybe a little bit faster, but not that much faster. And then with this, certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco navigation through apps, like navigating in Logic, zooming in and out of waveforms, and all my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sound editing programs, it’s just faster, like way faster, going from a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few frames a second to 30 or 60 frames a second, massively faster at certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things. I’m feeling, I think what I’m feeling is all that memory bandwidth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that’s what’s going on where it seems like the throughput

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the system in certain ways has massively improved because certain tasks that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, and I mean I don’t know that much about the low-level CPU design stuff, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, in general terms, modern processors are starved for things to do because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the time they’re waiting on something else. They’re waiting on memory access or, you know, or IO

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or network or just God knows they’re waiting like they’re waiting so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they can’t frequently use like their full power or their full capabilities 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the time or even close to 100% of the time, because they’re so often waiting on some other subsystem to give them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the data they need and keep them fed with instructions and data, you know, to process. And it seems like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1 architecture is just significantly better at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keeping that CPU fed with stuff to do and with the data it needs. And I don’t know whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the unified memory, whether it’s the memory bandwidth, who knows what it is, but whatever, well, they know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know, but whatever it is, it makes a significant difference. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s, I think, part of the reason why these feel so fast. They don’t, if you look at the benchmarks, you can say, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s whatever it is, like 30% faster single-threaded, similar to machines XYZ at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco multi-threaded stuff. But it feels like more than that because significant architectural

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things have changed and you can feel it in a lot of apps. And that is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, what’s going to get me to most likely stick with this full-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and probably trade in my iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not to prolong our usual pre-follow-up diversion any longer than it needs to be, But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the one test that I saw that a lot of people posting videos about, you mentioned it as well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is zooming the timeline in Logic. So people know Logic is an audio editor. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can imagine it as having a bunch of horizontal stripes that show audio waveforms stacked on top of each other. Those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are all the different tracks. So you have multiple people on a podcast that have a lot of different audio tracks. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John zooming on the timeline is like showing smaller and smaller portions of time in the same width of your screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or bigger and bigger portions of time. And if you look at that task,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, so it’s like rectangles of color with little waveforms in them. So it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like graphically intensive. And you might think, well, like that should always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John zoom in and out quickly. Why would it ever take a long time? But if you watch people doing it on their,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, tricked out Mac Pros with gigantic GPUs that crush the little, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the integrated GPU and the, even in the M1 MacBook Air, you’ll see it being kind of jerky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, you see something like that, it’s like, okay, well, it’s not GPU bound because here’s this machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with this monster GPU that’s being jerky here. So it’s not like we’re waiting on the GPU to do something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The GPU can do this, no problem. It’s probably not CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bound, you would think, because this is a fast CPU. So then you start looking for things like Marco was talking about, where like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every component in this system can do this job well. I mean, you can run like an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 4K game that’s doing these amazing graphics of, you know, 100 frames per second, surely zooming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some rectangles with some little lines in them is not taxing any part, but it’s the combination of pieces.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s somewhere in this, in the connection between, okay, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is logic drawing the timeline? How does it draw the little squiggles that represent the waveforms? How does it redraw the timeline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things? And how does that communicate? How does that turn into drawing calls? How does it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John affect memory access? And, you know, just how all the pieces fit together. Obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the, you know, on Intel Mac Pro or on an iMac Pro and other systems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s some kind of hitch in that chain of things just because it’s like, well, you know, zooming the timeline,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it works well enough. It’s not like before Marco got this M1 and a MacBook Air, he was like, oh, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John edit in Logic, the timeline zooms too slowly. It was just a little bit jerkier and you didn’t know it was jerky until you saw,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, look, now it’s not jerky anymore. And that type of thing makes me think, it kind of makes me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think of the Pro Workflow team, they talked about things like this where, what was it, some dialogue that was taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too long to come up, do you remember this story? The Pro Workflow

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} team said this story about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were doing something in some video editor, something that’s like, every time I do this thing, I gotta bring up this dialogue, and it takes three seconds to come up, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understand why I’m waiting three seconds. And it turned out to be, I forget the details of the story, but it was something you would never think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of. It was like a bug in the video, in the GPU driver that was causing a dialogue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to take a long time to appear, because, I don’t know, it was spinning his wheels doing something, and they, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the pro workflow team had people saying here, here’s the thing that annoys me in my workflow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find out what the deal with this is and fix it. And they tracked it down into something that no one ever would have thought of, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they fixed it. Well, it seems like with the M1 Macs, yes, they are faster and everything, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for something like this, where you know the hardware on any modern Mac should have absolutely no problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John zooming a timeline full of tracks, right? Especially since like on our podcast, it’s not 700

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tracks, right? It’s a small number. So you know, it’s not like the hardware is too weak.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s so it’s not the M1 advantage of it being a faster CPU and it’s not the integrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graphics versus the discrete because the discrete stomps all over it. And in the case of the Mac Pro, it’s not memory bandwidth because Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has tremendous memory bandwidth, much more than the M1 MacBook Air as we talked about in a past followup. But what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is is how everything works together. And when Apple makes all the things, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can make sure much more easily and confidently that everything really does work together. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in fact, I’m not even sure they would have to do this work for the M1 Mac, because you know, on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices, and they’ve been killing themselves for a decade or more now to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make what started out as being relatively slow CPUs and GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show good animations on a dinky little phone on battery power, right? So they’ve already put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in all of that work to get rid of all the hitches and the video drivers and the GPU and the CPU and the way redrawing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John works and all that other stuff. And when, and you know, I’m not saying they just didn’t have to do anything for the Mac, because apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they did have to fiddle things around in terms of texture formats and special instructions on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John M1 that aren’t on the iOS ones to handle stuff that Macs do that iOS devices don’t. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finally really controlling the whole stack and not having to rely on third parties for anything means that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any kink that’s in the system either has already been ironed out or can be ironed out pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easily. And so that’s that’s what it makes me think when I see. I wish we could, we had a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John link to this tweet or whatever, but the animation showing, here’s the most powerful Mac money can buy zooming the logic timeline.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here’s the $999 MacBook Air zooming the logic timeline. And you know it’s not power, it is just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, that thing where people are like, only Apple can do this because they control everything. It’s like, well, what’s the benefit? Someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually asked us this once and asked, what’s the benefit of Apple controlling everything? And I am going to chalk this up in that column

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and saying when Apple controls everything and when they’re using a tech stack that they, that came up on a, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, that was used to build phones on much weaker hardware, I think you get results like this. This is totally speculative, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is my guess. All right, so let’s do some follow-up. See, now if I do a big diversion, all of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sudden we’re all ready to get the follow-up, yeah. I know. That’s the secret.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just got to ramble myself and then be like, God, can we get the follow-up?

Follow-up: AirPods Max

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so we have some information about the AirPods Max, and we start with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some information from Barney, who writes, some clarity on your discussion tonight on the battery situation of the AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Max. Both batteries are housed in the right ear cup and use the yoke to conduct and pass the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey into the left ear cup. And our friends at Snazzy Labs have a video that demonstrates this. We’ll put a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. I mean, last show we realized that obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there has to be an electrical connection because because as Mark pointed out, there’s only a charging port on one side. So, yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John electricity’s gotta get to the other side somehow. I was surprised to see that both batteries are in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single side. You’d think they’d split them up for weight purposes, but I guess it’s offset because I think all the electronics are in the other side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, the electrical connection between the ear cups is kind of interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Snazzy Labs video didn’t zoom in too much on it. I would have liked to see a closer picture, but it was described as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being kind of like brushes, like brushes on an electrical motor, you know? like little metal things pressing against other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pieces of metal, so that the yoke, the big stainless steel tube that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use to adjust that goes over your head, that thing, that goes into the ear cup into like this ball jointy kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of thing. And then there’s these little brushes apparently that rub against that stainless steel yoke

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s used to transmit electricity to the other side. I mean, this was just described

⏹️ ▶️ ^John verbally and shown at a distance on the video, but we will put a link in the video and you can check it out yourself. But it’s interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both batteries in one side, Pretty weird, and you look at the batteries and they’re actually pretty small. So I guess it’s pretty amazing this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets 20 hours of battery life from these two postage stamp size battery packs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, headphones don’t need that much power. I mean, Bluetooth headphones for a while have existed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and even with like the most, you know, ancient ones with the most ancient battery technology,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weight was never a big problem with Bluetooth headphones. Like they’ve always been able to be made pretty lightweight because they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t need very big batteries. Oh, by the way, speaking of these Apple AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro Max, I think I have decided to return them. They’re just, like I tried them earlier today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they would be perfect for what I’m doing right now. Like I’m, you know, away from my primary office for a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of weeks and, you know, wanting to get work done, having to record and edit a podcast. And so I brought them, intending to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use them a lot. And I used them all day today. And I just, they’re just not, the comfort is just killing me. I can’t do it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, as soon as I put on any other wired headphones, they’re great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I just don’t have a place in my life where I really want amazing sounding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but uncomfortable wireless headphones. And if I’m going to plug them in and use a wire,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not only can I do that with other headphones, but it’s better with other headphones because the wire is not so short and not in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way. Like with this one, if I’m at a desk using a mouse next to the laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the wire is just completely in the way because it goes down from the right ear cup into the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco side headphone jack on the MacBook Air And my mouse, that’s between the computer and the mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you were right-handed. So it’s just constantly in the way, and the cable’s too short, so I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loop it around the back of the laptop and go around the left side, it’s too short for that. And so I just like, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m gonna use cabled headphones, I’d rather have it be a more convenient cable and a more comfortable headphone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so the only way these would be useful to me is if I really needed wireless, great sounding, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco uncomfortable bit full-size headphones, and I just don’t. For all of my wireless contexts, the AirPods Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I guess Apple is one for three on Marker Armament satisfying AirPod products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Because the original AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} didn’t fit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your ears right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the AirPod Pros, but these ones, it’s for the same reason, a comfort factor, and I guess secondarily the wire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. By the way, people who are wondering why Marker keeps talking about the wire on the Apple wireless headphones, it’s because he’s talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitoring during podcasting where you need to be connected by a wire for zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco latency. Exactly, yeah, or editing, where it’s really awkward

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and frustrating to try to edit audio when the play head in Logic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a few seconds, is like a half second ahead of what you’re hearing in your ears. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very annoying. I’ve done it. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} good though. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, you could get an extension cable for the wire, but really I feel like that your main complaint, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would characterize you, you have two main complaints. One, they’re not comfortable on you, which is the same complaint you have with the original AirPods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that I feel like is a thing potentially Apple can address with better ear cups or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then two, I think what your real problem is, you already have tons of headphones that you spent years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finding ones that you like. So it’s really a difficult competitive environment for the AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Max to come into. If you don’t already own three or four favorite set of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over-ear headphones that you like, maybe the Max will have a better place in your life. But for Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s stiff competition.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I mean, if all you need is wireless stuff and if you mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t need or want the AirPods Pro, like if you want something bigger than the AirPods Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you never really need to use it wired, then they’re great. Like again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m kind of regretting how bad they feel on me because I love the way they sound. And I like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco functionality of the AirPods integration and smartness and everything. That’s all great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s for me, it’s just about these weird physical things about it. So, I’ve heard from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of people and seen a bunch of reviews where they say, these are super comfortable. So if that’s you, great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you think these are comfortable, awesome. Good for you. I’m proud of you. I’m happy for you. Enjoy them. I’m going to enjoy my AirPods Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and my 770s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Tiff isn’t interested in them either. Has she given them a fair shake or no?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not yet. I’m going to see, you know, we have a bit of time, so we’re going to try that in the next few days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But, you know, most of what she does with headphones is also podcast related. So I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the results are going to be different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s fair. Alrighty, and then have you done extensive battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey testing on the Smart Case purse, underwear, whatever, for the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you’re about to return?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, because it takes three hands to get them in and out of the thing, and I only have two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Delightful. Well, nevertheless, just FYI for the headphones that you’re soon to return,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the AirPods Max Smart Case makes little to no difference with regard to battery life as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey per 9to5Mac and from Apple’s own support documents.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the Apple support document puts the details in here explaining like exactly what the timings are in the low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power mode. And there is a difference between when it goes into super low power mode when it’s in the case of versus when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of the case. And Apple doesn’t really spell this out, but if you look at it, you’ll see that what the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, is that when it goes into ultra low power, you can’t use Find My anymore, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you just leave your headphones somewhere, you want them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stay in regular low power, not ultra low power for a longer time. So you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use Find My to find where you left your headphones, whereas I guess Apple’s assuming if you put them in the case and put them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away, that’s more of a deliberate move, so that you’re done using them and you’re putting them away. At least that’s my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thinking on the logic and the different times. But either way, even in the middle low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power mode, it takes a long time for the battery to drain. So unless you’re gonna leave them there for days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not a big deal. So you look at the timings yourself and see what you think, but these things already have all day battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life and if you don’t plan on leaving them unattended somewhere for days and then picking them up later,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think you have to worry about it.

Follow-up: Ultra… fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, Marco, I know that you are the world’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey biggest superfan of the LG UltraFine 5K. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have bad news. As it turns out, it also has a fan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This, I haven’t been able to verify this yet. Have you seen like any pictures?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I looked for it before the show because I said, well, I don’t have one of these, so I can’t look for myself. But I said, surely there’s a parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John diagram online and I could not find anything. So I was hoping Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} would be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to confirm this, but I have no reason to doubt Joseph Duffy, who sent this in, saying that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John UltraFine does indeed have a fan in it somewhere, and you can see it when the stand is removed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, once I get back to mine, I intend to check this. I think that’s the most hilarious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing ever, if that’s actually true. It’s, you know, one more, I guess, one more vote in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the XDR category, or one more vote that both of these monitors suck. in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A noise has not been your complaint about the LG 5K. And you also mentioned that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LG 5K was revised in 2019. And we talked about this earlier off air. You said that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the older revision rather than the new one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, there’s actually been like four revisions of it, but only two like kind of official versions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The very, very first one where this hero number ends in A, that was the one, if you remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back when the UltraFinds first launched in 2016, they had wifi interference problems and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they quickly like recalled them and like added shielding around them and then they released the B

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version that already has the shield that basically shipped with the shielding. Mine on the back says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A-B which I think means it was originally manufactured without the shielding.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The shielding was retrofit to it and then it was sold. I think that’s based on my research I think that’s what that means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And those are all the ones that were that the video signal had to be Thunderbolt. It could not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a USB-C display video signal. It had to be a Thunderbolt video signal. And so it was never compatible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with iPads or like the 12-inch MacBook or anything like that. And so a couple years later, they released

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a revised version that used a new generation Thunderbolt controller from Intel. I think it went like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Alpine Ridge to something else Ridge. I’ve lost track of the Thunderbolt controller names, but anyway, it used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a different Thunderbolt controller and it could take USB-C 5K input from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad Pros. And that’s, I think the serial number’s like N and L or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco K for that one, something like that. I don’t have that one. So mine is the first generation model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is fixed for the shielding, but it does not have the newest Thunderbolt controller. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possible that new ones are more reliable. Maybe they’ve fixed some of the glitchiness of the ports, but based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on what I’ve heard from people who are reporting in their opinions experience with this monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the last couple weeks, it sounds like most of them are not very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reliable. There are frequent problems with image retention over time, with the electronics inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dying over time, with the backlights dying over time. So it sounds like it’s just kind of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an okay to mediocre monitor for a lot of people. It’s not just me. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I got a new one, maybe some of it would be fixed. And actually my current plans,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, probably involve getting at least one additional one for various practical reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so we’ll see how that goes but anyway there are multiple versions and I have the first one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just to read out the actual serial numbers it’s 27 MD 5 KL is the 2019 revision and 27 MD 5 K a was the original

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one and according to an article that will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John link in the show notes another upgrade of the the current 2019 L version is that it also has 94

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watt power delivery with Thunderbolt port so you can charge a connected MacBook while you use it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, mine was before the MacBooks went up in power, so it supplies, I think, 85

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watts max. Also, there is a firmware updater. Yes, I have run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I have the latest firmware. Still sucks. Probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the fan control. And speaking of that, Tinnitus writes in to say that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco, even after a month of usage, I didn’t even know that the XDR had a fan until I listened to last week’s episode of ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we’re sorry for telling people listening to the show that their XDR has multiple fans, not just one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I have heard from a number of people, I don’t know if they want to be named, but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heard from a number of people who use XDRs who have basically said, either you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notice the localized dimming at all, like what you said, John, in regular use, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some people have said you do notice it when you have like a 100% black background on something and then something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has to go over it, but that that’s relatively uncommon and easily fixed by making, Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have like a desktop background, you shouldn’t have it be pure black. Well, I don’t have that. I run my Mac in light mode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a light blue background. So like it’s, so that I’m, I wouldn’t be likely to see, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I still, it’s hard for me to get over the localized dimming thing. I really don’t like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I am very suspicious of reports of people thinking they can see the haloing with their naked eye. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll tell you why. Go get an OLED TV, bring up a pure black background and put some white text in the middle of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. With your eyes, you’d be like, wow, look at all that haloing. and you know the OLED’s not doing haloing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because individual pixels are controlled, but your eye sees haloing because it has bright light from these thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John letters that blooms out. It’s always gonna look a little bit bloomy because that’s how things look to our

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eyes when there’s something bright white in the middle of a black background. Actually detecting the little square,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of, you know, the haloing due to the dynamic backlight is much more difficult to do with the negative. I don’t doubt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people can do it under the right conditions. I’m just saying I’ve never seen it in real usage and I know that whenever they test this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on televisions, they always have to screw with their camera settings because it’s very difficult to see with the naked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eye.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Real time follow up from the chat room, Shappi has put a link in to a picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the fan in the LG 5K.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yep, there it is. Okay, I guess it does have a fan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is that the A revision or the B revision though? I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Can’t quite see the serial number from the sticker. I believe they said earlier that they have the same version as me though. So it’s probably the A.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, usually Thunderbolt, I don’t know what the needs of modern monitors are in terms of like their internal circuitry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but Thunderbolt specifically, Thunderbolt controllers have usually run really hot. Like if you ever had a Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disc enclosure or anything like that, they almost all have fans because they run really warm. Like I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying out the last week or so, I have the CalDigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt. Oh, it did come in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hub, yeah, yeah, I have that. I have a couple of minor issues with it, like the ethernet port just doesn’t work and that’s actually a fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco common problem if you look at reviews. Oh, cool. And yes, I’ve tried all of the support. I’ve tried their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco firmware updater. I’ve tried all the different things you remove your network configurations and you re-add it and look for the Thunderbolt port 0

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or whatever, yeah, I’ve tried all of it. Trust me, I’ve tried all of it. It doesn’t work. Simple as that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you look at reviews, a lot of people seem to get these things with dead Ethernet ports. Anyway, other than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, it works fine, so I’m going to decide what to do about that later. But in the meantime, I will say that the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing is a giant block of aluminum and it gets noticeably warm. And again, this is true

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all Thunderbolt gear I’ve ever seen. I’m assuming Thunderbolt chips just run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hot. They just seem like they’re complicated things, and they’re non-trivial to implement,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so they just run hot.

Follow-up: Chrome badness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, John, your favorite pet project, Chrome is bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What’s going on with that now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, this was actually, I think this update actually had been put out last week, but we just didn’t get it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the show. So there’s obviously a bug report, probably multiple, but one main bug report of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at Chrome where they’re trying to get people to perform a series of steps to do diagnostics to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to track this thing down. And if you are a developer and you ever had to deal with bugs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this, you know how frustrating it can be to have a bug that is widely reported that you can’t reproduce

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that you also can’t even think of any reason why it could be happening. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here from Norberg at Google.com is this comment that we’ll link to in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I thought was a funny glimpse into a frustration that I think most programmers have felt. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says, at this point we have still not been able to reproduce the issue. We only have guesses as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to what might cause a Windows service performance issue that apparently occurs when none of of our binaries are running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and is reported to be resolved by removing a software package that does not present a UI. Ouch. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, that sounds passive aggressive, but it’s just like- Sounds? I mean, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also just frustrating. I mean, you can, like I said last time, you can think of all sorts of plausible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ways that this could happen. For example, you think your thing’s not presenting a UI, but actually it’s using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some kind of off-screen buffer as part of some Apple framework that you don’t even realize you’re using and the Windows server is freaking out redrawing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. You could be dragging a bug in the Windows server, right? Like all I can say we can take from this is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Chrome folks are on it. They are just as frustrated as everybody else in the totally non-reproducible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nature of this. And I would also say that if you look at this issue, I don’t see a lot of action and movement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in narrowing it down. So I’m not sure how much progress they’re going to make on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phantom bug. And unless until unless people start really giving them until someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can reproduce it or reproduce it at least once and give them some kind of diagnostics, it’s going to It’s gonna be difficult to track this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one down. So I will be following this issue just to see in three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or four years if anything ever comes of it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} if you wanna follow it, we will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the link and you can see how it goes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think ultimately, like the best way for this to ever be resolved, if it’s going to be resolved, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Apple engineering to be able to get a machine in their hands that exhibits this issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco consistently and then, you know, just like sample it or whatever they know how to do so that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can figure out what is this coming from? Whether it’s one of their problems or whether it’s one of Google’s problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s gonna take Apple engineers to figure out what the problem is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I think I have faith in the Chrome engineers that if they had access to a reproduction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they could figure it out pretty quickly whether it’s their problem or Apple’s problem, right? Because they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the source code to Chrome and they have the source code to Keystone and if they find out that everything’s fine until we step into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple framework and then it goes nuts, they can say, well, that’s not us, right? And they don’t know what the problem is but at least they know, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not us. I feel like the other point about this is if you are willing to believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the Chrome developers are being forthright in this public bug report, which I have no reason to believe they’re not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that they’re not doing anything, Chrome is not doing anything, and they say, oh, it must be that really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sneaky thing we’re doing where we call this private API or inject some thing into some, you know, or do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some exploit, like, they’re not saying, yeah, it’s that super dangerous, risky things we’re doing and we’ll look into it. They’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, we don’t think, you know, they haven’t mentioned anything like that. So I really doubt that they’re doing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very strange and nefarious. So it’s just be a plain old bug where it’s like, oh, we made a mistake in our program, like as in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a plain old bug, or a bug that they are triggering elsewhere in the system, or neither of those things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is also in contention.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so.

Follow-up: Chiplets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Honorary fourth host of ATP at this point, Jonathan Dietz has written in with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some more clarification. Multi-chip module, MCM, or multi-chip package,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey refers to placing more than one silicon die on the same organic substrate. Intel, AMD, and Apple have all been doing this for years. A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey chiplet is an informal—that is delightful. It’s almost like—

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} It sounds delicious. Chicken with the gum.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it was chicklet. Is that what you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} said? Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, yeah. I was trying to remember what it was called. A chiplet is an informal term for their relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey small dies resulting from the disaggregation of a system-on-a-chip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey These smaller dies can then be combined into various configurations using a high-speed interconnect fabric and either conventional substrates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or silicon interposers to create

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey multi-chip packages. AMD successfully executed a chip-like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey strategy with their Xen architecture. Breaking up a system-on-a-chip increases the total die area, power consumption,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey latency, and complexity. The only reason why AMD went this route was because they were broke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then conversely, Apple has currently preferred access to the most,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey excuse me, Apple currently has preferred access to the most advanced manufacturing process available and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the capital and engineering resources to help TSMC climb the yield curves if it comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to that. They’re not going to give up on any of these benefits of integration until they are forced to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, this was a response to previous feedback we were getting about multi-chip modules how awesome they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are and how you can, you know, you don’t have to make one big chip. You can do these multiple things. And this, the clarification is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what, the multi-chip modules is different than chiplets. Chiplets is what AMD is doing, but they’re only doing it, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being broke was hyperbole. It was a paragraph here that Casey Skip that gave more detail about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the bottom line is AMD was not in a position to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chips that are all on a single die, despite the fact that that is better. It’s better in terms of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as you said, Power consumption, latency, complexity, everything about it is better, except that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is harder to get access to that processor or whatever. So if you’re thinking that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s solution to making a chip for the Mac Pro based on the ARM architecture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is to do chiplets, that seems unlikely. And if you’re thinking it’s gonna be multi-chip modules,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the thing that Apple and Intel and AMD have been doing for a long time, and it’s subtly different than chiplets. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, Apple, I think it’s putting it mildly say Apple has access to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John preferred access to the most advanced manufacturing process. Apple has all the money, right? They have, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently have the best chip designs. They have tons of money and they have partners that want that money from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. So they are first in line to get all the good stuff. The only thing holding them back is something we talked about in previous shows with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, uh, what was it called? Risk production. Apple can’t really do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because anything they need chips for, they probably need millions of them. And so you could, they kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of, Apple kind of has to wait until the process is ready to make millions of something, whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a small upstart competitor could in theory, a small upstart like say Microsoft, which sells

⏹️ ▶️ ^John relatively few Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} servers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for pieces of hardware, that scrappy little upstart Microsoft, maybe they could get access to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a better process technology a little bit sooner than Apple. But even that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doubtful depending on how ironclad Apple’s contracts are about preferred access to the good stuff.

New Thunderbolt hubs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then Jonathan Dietz continues to school us, this time with regard to Thunderbolt hubs and controllers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey OWC is taking pre-orders for a four-port, one upstream, three downstream Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash USB4 hub for $150. That should be shipping any day now. This is possible because Intel is finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey making a Thunderbolt controller with more than two ports. The controller in question is the quote, Goshen Ridge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey JHL8440 Thunderbolt 4 controller. And so there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey couple of links to the Thunderbolt Hub, the previous Thunderbolt doc, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey also there’s an interview with OWC about Thunderbolt 4, which I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey presume John has provided for us, including a nice convenient timestamp. So we’ll put that in the show notes too. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Thunderbolt 4 is confusing. We talked about it before and how it’s really just Thunderbolt 3 plus a bunch of things that you have to satisfy. So you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch this interview if you want to get the gory details, but you know, for many past shows, many years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve been saying, why aren’t there any good USB-C hubs that multiply the number of USB-C ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This isn’t that, but this is kind of that for Thunderbolt. So if your computer has one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Thunderbolt port and you want more than one Thunderbolt port, you can buy this hub

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like an old-fashioned USB hub, you plug in one thing into your computer and what you get is a box

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with three of those same things on it. And again, the only reason they’re able to do this because Intel finally made a Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controller that does that. In theory, now that Thunderbolt is open, anybody can make a controller that does this, but the Intel ones presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the best that you can get. So there are many more options. And also, it’s not just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this $150 hub. There’s also one called, what is it called? The Thunderbolt Dock that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SD card reader and ethernet and all the other stuff in it, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these are ODC products, but they’re just basically wrapping around an Intel reference design. And I suspect you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see more of these coming out. So your CalDigit TS3 thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you have, Margo? Yeah. may be, I mean, this is certainly newer. I’m not sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll be better, any more reliable, or less reliable, but it is certainly more capable in that you can actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiply some of your ports now. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} may,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for some people, solve some of their connectivity problems a little bit better than existing solutions. I ordered it this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John morning. Which one did you get, the hub

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} or the dock?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I got the big dock thing because it’s very similar to the CalDigit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in its general capabilities. And if it works, I’m gonna send back to CalDigit and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep that thing. but it’s so hard to know what this stuff, because I’ve had so many reliability issues

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with various USB-C hubs and dongles and everything. It’s been such a mess, it’s such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a cheap, crappy category for the most part. And even before that, many people, including me, have had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hard time in the past finding reliable USB hubs, even, just regular USB hubs. It’s a product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco category that is full of a bunch of garbage and a couple of good ones, and often it’s hard to know what the good ones are without just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying them for a few months. And then you know, oh, did this one that got great reviews, like did it actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work for me reliably? Or was it garbage after a few months, like so many of them are?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I eventually did find a good USB-A hub, but of course then, once you know it’s good, they don’t make it anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, I’ve had this, this is why I hate hubs so much, and why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have so often preferred the desktop livestock, because with desktops, usually you either don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hubs because they have enough ports, or you can get away with fewer or smaller or simpler hubs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s more ports on the desktop itself where you can plug in your most critical stuff that can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flaky. And then you can put your iPhone charger or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the USB hub. And Thunderbolt promises allegedly to get a lot better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at this. Thunderbolt products that actually have the logo and are officially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco licensed and approved, those go through significantly more testing than most other stuff does,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially most stuff in the USB ecosystem. And so to be Thunderbolt certified means something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m hoping that Thunderbolt versions of these hub products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are significantly more reliable and have a much higher chance of being good long-term than just USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones. But the downside is that of course, not only are they much more expensive and they’re usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significantly larger, and I think almost all, if not all of them, require external power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s all significantly less convenient for any kind of mobile setup or mobile needs. but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they also, they all have like this massive bandwidth stuff and so they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relatively few ports and like when I look at what I actually plug into USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ports, the only thing that I really plug in that needs massive bandwidth is a screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everything else, like everything that’s not a screen is like a keyboard dongle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the cable that runs to my iPhone for Xcode development or like like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my sound stuff, but sound stuff is all usb two point oh at the hardware level.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It doesn’t need three point of speeds for anything like that’s most of what i’m plugging in and so it almost feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wasteful to get a thunderbolt port multiplier slash hub thing when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like oh you can get forty gigabits per second for all this put like yeah, but i’m going to be using that to charge my iphone like that’s that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} really what that’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be like or it’s going to be running this like usb two point oh sound module. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not, I don’t need massive bandwidth with a small number of ports. The laptop gives me that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I need almost no bandwidth with a huge number of ports. I just want those ports to be USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for like cable convenience reasons. I don’t even need them to be USB 3 half the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, but you know, if this is what I have to do to, you know, to get a bunch of ports is get one of these $250

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thunderbolt dock things and have it actually work well, then I’ll take that. That’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an acceptable compromise if that’s my option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so this is, I mean, the big deal about this is that it actually does have more than one USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connector shaped hole on it, right? So it multiplies them, but as you said, it’s a waste because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t need the 40 gigabits from those ports. But if you just think of them as, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of them I need 40 gigabits and I’ll connect to something, my monitor, whatever to that, but the other two I don’t. but just think of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as low speed USB-C shaped holes and they’ll work fine for that purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I actually have a little bus powered Thunderbolt SSD, which actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does use some of the bandwidth, maybe not all 40 gigabits, but it’s nice to have that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love bus powered drives because I hate those power adapters and everything. And USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a nice connector for them. And having it be Thunderbolt instead of actual USB gives it a higher bandwidth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over it. and this, to let everyone know if you haven’t followed the link already, the dock thing that Marco got has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three Thunderbolt 4 ports on it, gigabit ethernet, and then it has three USB-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ports on the back and one USB-A port on the front, plus an SD card, plus a headphone jack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And yeah, it does have an external power adapter. So it’s got a lot of ports on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if they all work reliably, like having four USB-A shaped holes on it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that should solve all your low speed needs. And then you’ve got three of the high speed ports, one of which is a monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’ve got two of those free for any random other USB-C shaped peripheral or for, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster stuff if you happen to have a little portable drive. So it looks like a pretty good product. I have an ODBC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB-C dock at work where I haven’t been in ages. And it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flaky and slightly unreliable, but only during the connect disconnect. Once

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything was set up and working, it was very reliable, but since it was, I’m using it with a laptop, if I was constantly connecting and disconnecting. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so, yeah, I would hope that the Thunderbolt one would be more reliable than my USB-C one was, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still have affection for it because when it was working, it did give me all the ports that I was missing and it was nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m hoping, because like, if, you know, the whole promise of Thunderbolt is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to help laptops have most of the benefits of desktops. Like, that’s the whole benefit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here is like, okay, we gave up a lot when the laptops went to USB-C. Gave

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up a lot. But the promise is, oh, now you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of your quote legacy ports to be built into the laptop because you can just turn this one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amazing universal port into whatever else you need with these commonplace adapters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and things. And I mean, there’s a lot of problems with that logic, especially when you realize you don’t always have your adapters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with you or you don’t have the right adapters and they all cost money and all this stuff. But that entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco promise, the upside of that promise is predicated on the assumption that these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco adapters will exist and that they will work and they’ll be reliable and there will be an ecosystem of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good ones to buy. And that’s been really hard to actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have happen in practice. It almost never has happened in practice. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if the Thunderbolt ecosystem is now finally getting to the maturity and to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a broad offering of products to actually make that dream come true, then great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If this can make our laptops work better and we have to use them more like desktops, which a lot of people do, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fantastic. I just, I hope we’re there because we keep being promised this and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keeps not quite happening for a lot of people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One day, one day. Imagine they had like different cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with different ends for when they serve different purposes. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Imagine if you could just look at a cable and know whether it would work or not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That would be so awesome.

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Fitness+

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would like to tell you a story. I have tried Apple Fitness Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ooh. And I actually kind of really liked it. And now I don’t know what to do with myself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is not perfect. It is not without flaws. There’s nothing that is so perfect that it cannot be complained about. Hi, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I actually really liked it. Now, Marco, as the more prolific exerciser of the two of you, have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you tried this yet at all?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have not had a chance yet, no, because of all the various logistical things that we’ve been doing. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I heard it launched, and I’m actually looking forward to trying it. But first, I want to hear what you have to say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, so Apple Fitness Plus is their new exercise video streaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey service thing. I believe it is part of the most expensive, what is it, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One? I don’t even, I can’t even keep it all straight anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s the Apple Two bundle. That’s right, that’s right. And it’s I-I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new I.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s pronounced E.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The Apple E. So anyway, so it is, if you were to do it as a standalone thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s 10 bucks a month or 80 bucks a year. And if you get a new Apple Watch, you get three months for free. And guess who got a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple Watch just a month or so back. So I started my free trial. I don’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off the top of my head specifically which exercises I did, but I’ve done it two different days and I’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a sum total of I think five workouts. And the workouts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like leaving aside some of the integration, which is, I think the more interesting stuff to talk about, and we’ll talk about that in a second,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the workouts, uh, I thought were pretty good, uh, for context. And I think I’ve talked about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey briefly and or obliquely in the past, but, uh, Aaron has gotten considerably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more into her personal health and fitness over the last couple of years and has been a very devout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exerciser. Uh, and has typically been using this service called Beachbody on demand. And you might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know Beachbody because of P90X several years ago. Um, you might know them because they are definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a disgusting, dirty MLM, a multi-level marketing thing like Mary Kay and things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that. However, their exercise videos, taking only the exercise videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and nothing, none of the BS around it. Uh, they’re actually, I, I, in my personal opinion, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not a doctor. I know nothing about health. They seem pretty good to me. And I’ve done a couple of different programs on there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I’ve really liked them. So if you can leave aside, oh, become a coach, become a coach, become a coach,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sign people up, sign people up, sign people up. If you leave all that aside, which if you’re just watching the videos, you don’t really see any of that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I actually like them. And typically the programs I like to do are more like lifting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey weights with a little bit of high, what is HIIT, high impact? High intensity interval training, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey believe. There you go, thank you, that’s it, that’s it. So I do those sorts of things. I recently completed a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey boxing themed program, which is a very not casey thing to do, but I actually kind of liked

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it. Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it the opposite of unboxing? You take electronics and you put them into boxes? Yeah. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right. That’s right. So anyway, so that’s the context

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for which I’m coming to Apple Fitness Plus. I never have had a personal trainer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, I certainly have no interest in it with all the COVID stuff going around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And in a perfect world, I’d love to have a personal trainer, but I’m too cheap and too scared of the inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and too scared of other people. So I’m just doing this in a very amateur way. You know they can do it over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey video chat,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} true. This is what we’ve been doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like Tiff and I, like our trainer moved before COVID, but we’ve been still using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco him just over FaceTime. It’s like an Apple commercial before they even had their own fitness thing. Like we had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple watches, like he can see the stats and we do workouts over FaceTime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s totally fine. And we’ve been doing it for like a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I probably should look into that at some point. But again, I’m just trying to establish context. So I came to Apple Fitness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Plus, a very amateur veteran of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a specific flavor of workout video. And so I thought, well, this seems on the surface like it’s effectively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey equivalent. And so let’s take a look. And once you upgrade to the latest version of iOS, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Fitness app, you can go in. And there’s a new tab in the center called Fitness Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And once you’ve enabled your free demo or if you’ve paid for it, then you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just basically a list of exercises. And I don’t love a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the user interactions and setup in the fitness app. Like it’s good,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but not great, which is very typical of Apple these days. However, once you pick a workout, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my case, what I was doing is I was using my iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hooked up to their 70 or whatever dollar it is, USB-C to HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dongle, and then HDMI into my TV. And I’m doing this all because this is in the bedroom where we do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an Apple TV, but it’s one of the like OG pre-installable apps, Apple TVs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know what I’m talking about? Like with the old remote, the old silver remote. And the reason I have that in the upstairs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m saying all this because I don’t wanna get email. The reason I have that in the upstairs is because we have a 1080, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey semi-modern Apple TV downstairs that is hooked up to our 4K TV. And as I’ve complained about several

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey times recently, I’ve been waiting for over a year to get the Apple TV that’s surely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to be refreshed tomorrow. and surely will have been refreshed tomorrow for every tomorrow for the last 365 tomorrows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I’ve been waiting to get a new 4K one for downstairs and the 1080 will get bumped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey upstairs and then I won’t need to do all this junk with my iPad and so on and so forth. Because Fitness Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does have its own dedicated Apple TV app but nevertheless, that was my setup. So I have an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad connected to a TV and I’ve got my watch and I went in and I selected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a workout and I knew that this is the way it was supposed to work But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of a sudden my watch buzzes and I look down and it says, okay, you know, I forget exactly what it was, but it’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Strength with Greg. And it shows that on the TV, it shows it on my watch and I hit play on my watch. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sure enough, the TV starts playing again. It’s really my iPad and it’s all integrated. You know, I control it with my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey watch. The TV changes. If I pause on the TV, the watch pauses its workout. It already knows what workout I’m doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t have to go in there and say, well, I’m doing a strength workout and blah, blah, blah. It immediately knows not only that I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a strength workout, but I’m specifically doing strength with Greg for 20 minutes. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty neat. I like that so far. So then I start the workout and up in the upper left,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can see, you know, like the progress in terms of time through the workout in certain workouts. You can see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget what they call it, like a little bar that indicates basically, are you a worse exerciser

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than the other people who have done the same exercise or are you better? Yeah. Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is motivating, but also a little unnerving. And especially because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the one I did that did have this bar, I wish I could remember the name of it, I forgot to write it down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I was like all the way on the good end, which is really surprising because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not a terribly fit person. I mean, I do work out pretty much every day, but I’m still not the most terribly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fit person in the entire world. And so I’m all the way on the one end, which makes me wonder…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think you’re significantly more fit than the average Apple test engineer is what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} you’re saying. Well, maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or is it that I’m unfit and I’m working so darn hard in order to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey keep up that it’s like, wow, you’re kicking ass over here. Because meanwhile, I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, dying or whatever. But anyway, but you know, so they do this workout. And of course, it’s like this beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like Apple commercial basically in terms of the set and the staging and in the workouts I’ve done, it’s typically like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey main host, if you will, the trainer. And then there’s two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other trainers in the, you know, in the background and they’re not like fill people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, they’re not like the red shirts from Star Trek. These are like other actual trainers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just like dancing in the back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, yeah, but they’re, they’re, they’re other, they’re other like legit trainers. It’s not like there’s only the one star

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then those knuckleheads off the street. Like these are other stars in the context of Apple Fitness Plus, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they’re doing somebody else’s workout instead of leading their own. And so I start the workout, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see the progress in the upper left and in the upper right, I see my rings, which is such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a dumb thing. But I got to tell you, it is super fricking satisfying as you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doing this workout, watching your green ring go further and further around, watching your red ring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go further and further around. It is deeply satisfying. And it’s updating, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perhaps not real time, but near as makes no difference. It seems as though it’s real time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I’m just doing my thing, doing my exercise. And you know, the, the host or the trainer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was there. I’ve had a couple of trainers now and they’re, they’re good. They’re varying levels of cheesy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is to be expected in various levels of like synthetic happy, which is to be expected, that’s not unusual.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, but they’re good and they’re personable and mostly relatable. And, and I, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enjoyed them and I enjoyed the workouts and. And in and of itself, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you’re doing something to move your body and this thing is successfully making you move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your body, and I’d say it’s a success. But where it gets really freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool is during the workout, they say something like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your heart should really be racing or your heart rate should really be spiking right now. And sure enough, the heads-up display

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that shows your heart rate highlights your specific heart rate. Instead of showing your current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey heart rate of 120 beats per minute or whatever, it says, okay, your current heart rate’s 120 beats per minute. By the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your lowest heart rate was 70 and your highest heart rate was 160. I’m making up the numbers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but you get the idea. And this is changing on screen, like perfectly, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the trainer saying, oh, your heart should be spiking right now, or your heart rate should be spiking right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s such a dumb trick. It’s such a stupid thing. And really, I don’t feel like it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey technically challenging a thing to implement when you own the whole widget, but gosh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if it isn’t so cool to see as you’re in the middle of this workout. It’s just very, very, very cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then another time, the host, I keep calling them hosts, I’m sorry, the trainers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the trainer was like, oh, you should be closing those rings right about now or something like that, I forget what they said. And sure enough, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the rings in the upper right-hand side of the screen, they get much bigger and they start showing you, or highlighting the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you’re very close or whatever the case may be. And if you close your move or exercise or whatever rings as you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey working out, it does a whole animation and like sparklies and whatnot to call to your attention that, hey, you’ve finished your exercise ring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I, the integration is so cool and it is so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s so silly but so neat that if I smash the space bar on my iPad Pro to pause it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sure enough, like I said a minute ago, the Apple Watch workout pauses. And when I’m used to doing these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Beachbody workouts, it is not a difficult thing to hit pause on both my watch and my iPad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it is so convenient not to have to, like it’s so dumb. I know it’s dumb,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s so convenient. And then they also have really, really good music, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not surprising from Apple. One of the funny things about the Fitness Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey workouts is that as you’re selecting them, if you’re looking through the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey title cards, so the super, super small view, like the gallery view. So for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey example, I’m looking at, try something new, strength with another trainer, which is strength with Sam, 30 minutes pure dance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so you see right there on the tin what kind of music it is. And then you can drill in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you see that it’s Sam Sanchez, it’s 31 Minutes, Pure Dance. Apparently it was new today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’ll need a mat, dumbbells, it’s Total Body. And then if you scroll down a little bit, it has one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different songs. And they tell you exactly which songs they are, who they’re by. And they give you a nice little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing to listen to Apple Music if you were an Apple Music subscriber, which I’m not, because as much as Spotify is evil,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really like them. So nevertheless, you can play the music that they play in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the workout right there in your phone or your iPad. And additionally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they do like a little card, like a YouTube style card on the top of the screen when the music changes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And all of it was just so incredibly, incredibly well done. And I really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, really liked it a lot more than I thought I would. I have some complaints about the UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the phone, in the iPad in terms of selecting a workout, But any questions on the workout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey itself or any thoughts about that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do they have a jam band version?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No one can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dance to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nobody can dance well to that. Unfortunately, um, they do have some like, um, some like chill.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I got to forget the other word for a down tempo is, is a genre that I can’t define well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I really like this is like massive attack or zero seven. And I, and I went searching for some of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just based on music, not based on the exercise. And unsurprisingly, the only exercises that had that kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of music were like yoga and stretching and stuff like that, which is perfectly fine, but not what I was looking for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the time, which was a bummer. But no, no, Joe, no jam band stuff that I was, that I saw. Although one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the workouts I did see has never going to give you up as the first song in the workout, which I thought was quite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey funny or whatever the Rick Astley song is, you know what I’m thinking of?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s one of the limitations, at least you can tell me as a limitation. I think it is. That’s been, uh, bothering me a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit about this, especially with the onscreen prompts and everything is that you can only, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only works for one person at a time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right? That is my understanding. Coincidentally, Aaron and I had planned to do a workout together today and we just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t get a chance to. So I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I am almost positive that that is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That I think whoever is the assigned account. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for Aaron and me, you know, the Apple TV is signed into me by default. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think having not done this, that other Apple watches in the vicinity would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pick up the correct workout, but the things that are shown on the screen are specifically for me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and my watch, as far as I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that seems like the biggest gap for our version too. And it’s not like people have giant gyms in front of their televisions, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very often, especially in these quarantine times and everything, one of the things that can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motivate you to work out is someone else who lives with you also encouraging each other to do it. So if some

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} one person’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} not in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mood, they make the other person do it, but you can’t kind of do the workout together if the feedback’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only going to one person, or if it doesn’t track both of them or whatever. So it’d be interesting for you guys to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try that, to see what happens if you try to do it with two people in front of the television. When

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you did the BeachPod things, did you do them just by yourself, or did you do them with Erin?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Almost exclusively by myself, and she’ll be downstairs with the TV in the living room, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the good Apple TV, and then I’ll be up again with my iPad upstairs. We have done them a couple times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey together, specifically the early boxing workouts. We had done the first few together, and then for uninteresting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reasons ended up not being able to complete them together, like finish the program together. But Beachbody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has no sort of integration of any kind. In fact, from my limited experience, and again, basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all I do with the Beachbody app is go in, pick a workout and do it. Like I don’t explore the app or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But my limited experience says that there’s no real integration with the Apple Watch. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seem to really acknowledge that the Apple Watch even exists. It’s just a straight up, it’s like Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for exercise, right? which is ostensibly what Fitness Plus is, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fitness Plus has the music integration and the workouts, and the Apple Watch integration and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all that, whereas Beachbody has none of those things as far as I can tell. Now, conversely, I’ve never done anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with Peloton, and I feel a little scared bringing up Peloton because I feel like they’re really, really devout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fans, and I don’t wanna upset any other groups. I’ve already ticked off Tesla and Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I feel like on the scale of like totally fine to Tesla or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Joe Rogan being the worst, like Peloton on this scale is not very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high ranked, but they’re also not zero. That’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s fair. But so anyway, I have not done anything with any Peloton. Everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know who has one and I know a handful of people that have a Peloton device now all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey love them. Like not just a little, they love them. And my limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey understanding is that that there’s some amount of integration there, but again, I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one, I’ve never tried it, so I don’t have any particular facts to share, but I think that there is more than zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey integration with Peloton.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Paul Matzkoff Yeah, I’ve tried one for like two seconds once. I too have a few friends who have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them and they all love them. They have remarkable customer loyalty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and seemingly customer satisfaction, as far as I can tell, just anecdotally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably the most direct alternative or competitor to this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But Peloton requires you to buy the bike, which is not only a pretty large commitment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in terms of you better know that you’re gonna like it, but also it’s a ton of money up front and takes a ton of space in your house. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it’s really like, it’s much more of a thing to get into than what Apple’s doing, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ll take the stuff you already have and maybe like move the couch back a bit so you have some space to move around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and do this thing, which is significantly easier to get into, even though it might not reach the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco levels of competitiveness and lifestyle change that something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Peloton might. This is more like the entry level version of that probably, but that’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably where there’s the most room for improvement and where Apple can make the most difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m actually, I’m very much looking forward to trying this. I don’t know how much I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use it because, I see, I do the, Tiff and I do the FaceTime with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the trainer twice a week and many of the other days of the week, that’s when I do my rowing workouts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So what I can see this, where I can see this being useful is maybe, maybe like one or two days

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a week, instead of rowing, I do this. Or if we are, you know, once we can travel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, if we’re traveling and, you know, maybe we do it on those mornings, but we can’t easily do the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things or, you know, whatever. So I’m looking forward to just having this as an option that’s always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ready, that’s always there, so that if I need it, or if I feel like doing it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t have to schedule with anybody. I don’t have to rely on having any particular equipment with me as long as I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have my Apple Watch and any of my other devices that can play the video stuff, then that’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do share John’s reservation about not having multiple people in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the room support. Because Tiff and I often work out together. And to have this be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so individual, I hope that’s only a version one limitation and not something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they intend to keep that way long-term. maybe maybe they didn’t want to pay the in a purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tax, and so it has to be an individual to individual experience being transmitted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know remember no nothing no one remembers that from like two months ago. Anyway, I tried it was a good joke

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway. No it wasn’t so I noticed I’m curious to get your take on this case with the experience of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. One of the things that people have reported so far that I don’t know I hadn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really thought about how they would do this, but I was kind of assuming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the feedback loop would exist in some way and be a little bit more dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with like what they say on the video versus how you’re actually performing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it sounds like that’s not the case. It sounds like it’s just a static video and the video is the same no matter what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re doing and it’s just overlaying your stuff on top of it. Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is my impression. I don’t know that for sure. And since I have the floor, let me give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little bit of real time follow up on a couple of things you just mentioned. First of all, I believe that you do not have to buy a Peloton bike

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anymore. I think it’s like obviously state or it’s, if my understanding is that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really designed around having the actual device, but I thought that you could actually bring your own device

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Peloton. So you set up like an iPad in front of your own bike or something like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it does work from my understanding, but the integration obviously is not there the way they’re used to. And it’s not really meant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for that, but you can do it, I think. Second of all, you spoke about rowing And one of the categories

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in Fitness Plus is rowing. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} looking here, rowing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Josh, 30 minutes, upbeat anthems, rowing with Anja, 20 minutes, upbeat anthems, rowing with Josh, 20

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey minutes, throwback hits, rowing with Anja, 10 minutes, hip hop R&B. So you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey absolutely, whenever your rowing day is next, set this up on your phone or your iPad or what have you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and pop in your beloved AirPods Pro and you could row with one of these trainers. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would really encourage you to try that. You know, in the same way that I think I was predisposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to like Fitness Plus because it’s slotting into a very defined space in my life, right? I’m already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doing workout videos basically by myself, uh, as it is, you know what I mean? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t have the multi-person concerns, not to say that I don’t echo, but you know, it’s, it’s not an, it’s not a need that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think I have to fill because Erin typically has her own workouts, which are typically much harder than mine to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do by yourself. And then I have my workouts that I do by myself. And so for me, it’s not a big deal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but, um, but I basically wanted something that will show me decent exercise videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and that I can do for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes on an average

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey day. And it’s worked really well. And actually something I didn’t bring up. And one of the things I really like about it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey typically when I’ve done. These beach body exercise, I’ll go through a program. And so typically, you know, every exercise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will be 30 minutes or 40 minutes or what have you. And it’s the same trainer every day. And it’s a slightly different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing every day, but you’re doing the same basic idea. You know, with the boxing program, you’re boxing every day. Now, maybe you were doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, these moves this day and those moves that day, but it’s always boxing and that’s fine. It’s not a complaint. But one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the things I really liked was the second day that I did fitness plus workouts, which was a couple of days ago. I basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just went in there and said, well, you know what, I’m going to start with a little strength training. And I did, I think a 10 minute strength workout, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I did a 10 minute hit workout, and then I did a 10 minute core workout and I kind of made this like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I almost felt like I was a link, you know, cooking at the little pot in, in, in Zelda game. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, I was making my own recipe of my own workout and, and I actually really liked that. I liked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I could, if I wanted to do like a 30 or 40 minute work, you know, strictly hit workout or strictly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey strength workout, but it was really kind of nice to be able to just mix and match. And there’s nothing in Beachbody that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey prevents you from doing that, but that’s not really in my experience. It’s not really what it’s meant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for. It’s meant for, you’re going to do this program, you’re going to do it top to bottom, start to finish, and you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do it in the order that they expect you to. And I’ve mixed and matched it before, but it’s not as nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And a lot of these programs are 40 minutes, and I only have but about an hour window of time that I’ve allotted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for exercise. So I’m not exactly gonna mix and match two 40-minute workouts in an hour, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know what I mean? And so, yeah, for that reason, I’ve really, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enjoyed it. I feel like you actually had a specific question for me 20 minutes ago, but I’ve already forgotten what it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was about whether the staticness of the videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} is something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a problem, or does it feel like you’re just doing this in the void? Because one of the big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco advantages of Peloton, and I don’t know how the other systems do it, but one of the big advantages of Peloton is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has this live class mechanic and these leaderboards and everything. So there’s all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco live and dynamic functionality so that you get feedback about what you’re doing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it can be called out by an instructor or it can be integrated into some other functionality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you’re a competitive person, which I’m actually not at all, but if you’re a competitive person, there’s angles to that that can appeal to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you and everything. With version one, this seems a lot like you’re just alone in the void,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? Like, is there anything to like draw you in besides your own satisfaction?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Not really. So there’s that red line that I spoke about earlier, but literally all it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is an icon on a line. You know what I mean? So it’s not what you’re talking about. It’s not like, oh, good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey job, Blista, for doing that. Really good work. That’s a throwback if you don’t know That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I’m talking about. That’s a throwback. But there’s no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually Casey’s Apple ID as well. Don’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} him. No, no, it’s not. No, it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But anyway, but no, there’s no like calling out or anything like that. To the best that I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the videos are completely static. There’s no real editing or modificate like real time modification.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So if you’re, you know, if you’re heaving on the floor and clearly not doing the workout, they’re not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yell at you or anything like that. The tough thing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a trainer, especially in a workout video, is that for me, it’s a very, very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very fine line between being like the life coach and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being like synthetically upbeat. Be like, yeah, you can do this, man, you can do this. You’ve got it, just give me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey three more. And like, it’s really easy with me to just go way off the deep end on that, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me to just find it super gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Those are crappy trainers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and then you can have like the super clinical, like three more reps, two more reps,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one more rep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Those are also crappy trainers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then, right, exactly. And so there’s this very fine line where you have some amount of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enthusiasm and some amount of like personality, but not so much that you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh my God, like relax with this, you know? And I actually felt like the trainers have walked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that line pretty darn well. They’re not exceedingly like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super crazy bubbly for the most part, um, but they’re not robots either. And they’ve, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dripped in like just enough of their personal histories as you’re doing these workouts, um, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you kind of start to see them as people and not just trainers, like as an example, Greg mentioned like offhandedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that he used to live in New York and now he lives in LA and he made some mention about like some crappy apartment he had in New York or whatever the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey may be. And like, obviously I don’t remember specifically what was said and it doesn’t really matter, but that’s nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have this human connection with these trainers so that you feel that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people and no, they’re not saying, you know, you know, let’s just pick it up or, you know, Oh, great job

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on this one, but, but at least there’s, there’s enough personality to them that you can tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they’re people. And actually, interestingly, I forgot to mention, if you go looking through the fitness plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app or the fitness app in the fitness plus tab, as you find a trainer, it they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talk about like their brief history and whatnot. And prominently is a link to their Instagram account.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you can presumably follow them on Instagram. And so, and also I should note, uh, I’d heard rumblings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I forget where, that they were instructed to learn at least the basics of sign language.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So they could like greet or, or say goodbye with sign or say thank you with sign, with American

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sign language, which I’ve seen a little bit of, which I thought was really cool. Also, there’s a pretty diverse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cast of trainers, which is great. And one of the strength training exercises I did was with Amir, who,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, had lost one of his legs due to an accident. So like, here it is, I’m huffing and puffing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doing these leg workouts with two perfectly functional legs, and this guy is down a leg

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and is still instructing, which I think is super cool. Like, I don’t know, maybe that’s lame or not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very woke of me, but I think it’s cool that they have people that are differently bodied that are able to not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only participate but instruct on these workouts. And it’s been really great. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some British people on there. There’s a handful, obviously a bunch of Americans. Those are the only experiences I’ve had so far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very well could be, you know, other cultures and whatnot. But again, I’ve really, really been impressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with it. I don’t know for sure if I’m gonna stick with it, but it’s a pretty good chance that leaving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey aside like iCloud storage and all, and Apple Music and all the other things that come with the bundles, I would probably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m almost sure that I’m gonna pay for at least Fitness Plus because I’ve been really, really impressed with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the short time I’ve spent with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And when do you just give up and get the whole bundle?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I mean, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When do you just buy Apple too?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I probably will, to be honest, but I haven’t sat down and like, you know, looked at it and looked at what I do and don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want from the bundle from the bundle and see if, see if it’s worth it. But my, my expectation is I probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will do exactly that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. You’re probably already, uh, in the, in the, in the black in terms of how much you would spend based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that stuff, especially if you start factoring in, uh, iCloud backups of kids, iOS devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which will become more important

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} as they get older

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and get actual data. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. we talked about it before when it was first announced and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John released, but just hearing you talk about it again, it reminds me of what a weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technological middle ground this is, right? So we have things like Peloton, which is kind of a different thing, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can put that aside. But for all the tech and controlling this whole tech stack, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this really is as Casey described it, it’s like a fancied up version of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John VHS aerobics videos my mother would do. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’d rent the VHS tape or buy it more likely, you’d stick it in and you’d have the instructor encouraging you to go on and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s the same tape every time. Now obviously this changes, right? And they have different instructors and different classes so it’s better than just that one tape

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you could in theory keep buying new tapes, right? And Peloton is slightly different and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then they have the live classes but a lot of the, you know, the live classes aren’t every moment of the day so there are, you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pre-recorded ones as well. But now I’m thinking of something that is at the other extreme,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have the VHS tape on one side and at the other extreme is not Peloton, certainly not Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Fitness Plus, it’s something like Wii Fit, right? Where it is entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interactive because it’s a video game. And if you do start lagging and slow down, like the whole point is constant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feedback. You’re doing this poorly or you’re doing really well or keep up with this or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. And you know, granted there’s rubber banding and all the other gamification things they use to try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John match your skill level. But it is 100% interactive with what you’re doing in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you don’t do the exercise or don’t do it well or satisfactory, there’s no question about it. Whereas if you put in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a VHS tape and you just get tired and sit in front of the tape eating Oreos, the tape doesn’t know. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It just keeps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing, right? And Fitness Plus, it sounds like what they’ve done is, well, it’s like the VHS tape,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we have an overlay of your info and we can highlight it at certain points. Which is kind of a shame because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a very basic choose your own adventure style interactive thing where like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John depending on how well you’re doing, the second half is either more intense or less intense, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even something as simple as, it looks like you’re really slowing down and struggling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based on the accelerometers in your watch. So we will cut to the part where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we slow it down and give you some encouragement and tell you what to do if you’re having trouble, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, modify, make it a little bit easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, exactly. Like there’s, I’m not saying go full Wii Fit because that’s obviously it’s not people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on video, it’s computerized thing. And, you know, even the things like where they, with the balance board, where you’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do some exercise and they’re showing you where your center of gravity is and everything like that. You can’t have that level of interaction with actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John humans who at some point have to be in front of a camera because you can’t have them do every possible thing that they might need to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you can have some sort of, some sort of, I don’t know, like what do you call it, dialogue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tree or whatever, where depending on what you’re doing as detected roughly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the accelerometer that you’re wearing on your wrist and your heart rate monitor or anything like that, have a few branching paths.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, maybe they do that because Casey’s only done a few of these and if they do it seamlessly, you might not even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notice if you just stay within the happy path it could be. They do do those divergences, but I feel like that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interactivity is exactly what Apple should be doing along with what they’re already doing, which is, hey, let’s integrate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the devices we already have. And the multi-user thing, because like Peloton, I mean, whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have the bike or you get your own bike, it’s only one person on a bike. So you gotta have two bikes no matter what. And once you have two bikes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s instanced, right? That’s their sharding mechanism. You got two bikes, you got two screens, you got two Pelotons, you’re fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The whole point of this one is, you got one big TV, And especially if it doesn’t do any forking, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have two people in front of it. Like, I know it gets more complicated when you have multiple people in front of TV and how you can adjust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to multiple people or whatever, but that I feel like is the challenge. That’s the middle ground between full interactive Wii

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Fit, where it’s a literal video game that’s reacting to you in real time, which is difficult to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And by the way, Nintendo does have their Fit Ring thing, which is a similar type of exercise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not that kind of exercise. It’s a similar type of endeavor of interactive fitness. But you’ve got that way over there and you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got the total non-interactive VHS tape over there. And in the middle of this do-at-home, technologically-powered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John workout is something like Apple Fitness Plus. And I feel like they need to move more towards the interactive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side of things, to not necessarily the gamification side of things, because I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Peloton may appeal to a different type of personality than Apple Fitness Plus does, but certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone can benefit from something like a workout being tailored to them better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s why you might pay an actual human to help you do workouts, because they’re literally a human

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and watching you and saying, okay, I can tell that you’re struggling or here’s what you’re doing. No computer program

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or pre-taped forking path thing is gonna do as well as an actual human, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wanna do better than the VHS tape.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and something that Marco said earlier, I think is extremely astute, which is that some of these, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like the HIIT exercises, those typically don’t require any sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of equipment at all. And if you’re the kind of person like me that when you travel or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that was called when we went to other places, is it called travel? Is that what it was called? It’s been so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey When you travel, you could hook up to like a hotel TV and do a HIIT session or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and do that with nothing but the stuff you already had in your go bag, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really convenient and really cool. And again, you could do this with Beachbody just as much you could do it with Apple Fitness+,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I don’t know, I really enjoy the flexibility of it. I keep obliquely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mentioning some complaints. I don’t love the information architecture within the app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey At the top, it shows all the different kinds of exercise you can do, and then it shows you more of what you do, and try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something new, and new this week, which is fine. And they do have a beginner section, which is great for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have never done this sort of thing before. But I don’t know, I don’t love that when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trying to figure out something to do, I’m just blindly clicking around. I feel like it would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool if I could, for example, filter by how long I want to spend, which I can do once I decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what exercise I want to do, but everything starts with what exercise do you want to do? And then you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey figure out, okay, who do you want to do it with? How much time do you want to spend? Et cetera, et cetera. And I wish there was a little more flexibility in that regard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but all told, the app is not bad by any means. I don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that when it’s on the iPad, hooked up to a TV, it’s using mirroring. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey presenting on the TV. So like if I hook up Plex to the TV, it’s taking up the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey entire TV. Whereas I’m getting the vertical letterboxing when I use Fitness Plus because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just mirroring the iPad display to the TV. It’s not playing properly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And something that I’ve heard a lot of people complain about that I haven’t tried myself is that AirPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey either doesn’t work or is similarly, what is it, pillbox, pillar box, whatever it’s called. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel there was something else that somebody had said that they had tried where they got audio only, but no video, presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because of DRM. I tried taking some screenshots And of course, all I got was the HUDs, the heads up displays because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the video was DRM’d and so it was blacked out, which is really frustrating. But in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the grand scheme of things, like again, I was definitely predisposed to like this because I’m taking something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that isn’t, you know, a hundred percent by Apple, but it’s largely doing the same thing. And I’m replacing it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that is a hundred percent made by Apple. They own the whole widget top to bottom. And of course I enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. Of course the production value is ridiculous. Of course the music is not only well chosen, but you know, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good quality. It’s not just some silly canned music that they bought from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shutterstock of music or whatever online. It’s all extremely well done, extremely pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey extremely well shot, et cetera. I was predisposed to like this, and guess what? I really like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wonder if they can use Apple’s market power and connections to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get a couple of occasional guest trainers that are celebrities

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} of some kind. Can I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have Joe Pesci talk me through a workout? Or like Eddie Vedder.

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Upgrade to Big Sur?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I was looking through the show notes doing my pre-flight pre-flight a couple hours ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I noticed something interesting in the show notes. And it reads, John is thinking of upgrading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Big Sur. Talk him out of it. That was really interesting to me because I am thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of upgrading to Big Sur and would like someone to talk me out of it if necessary. To quickly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey set the stage in my, for me, my laptop, my MacBook Pro is on Big Sur and has has been since

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shortly after it launched, but my iMac Pro is not. It is still on Catalina,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or whatever the hell it came before Big Sur. And so I haven’t upgraded it for fear of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey messing with something that’s mostly working. John, what is the bit new shiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that is getting you to ask this question?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As you before we get to that, Marco, are you thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} of upgrading to Big Sur? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John already using it now in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco M1, right? Yes, on the M1 I’m already using it. On my iMac, I was not using it, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I even told the AppleCare people, like, if you have to do a reinstall, please keep it on Catalina if you can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that being said, I am also torn on this issue. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, for most of the last month or whatever it’s been that I’ve had the MacBook Air,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been going back and forth. Like, when I still had the iMac also, I was going back and forth between the iMac and the MacBook Air. So iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Catalina, MacBook Air on Big Sur. And whenever I would go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Catalina, I wouldn’t miss anything about Big Sur. Like, it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem weird, everything didn’t look ancient or outdated. There was nothing about Big Sur that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I missed when I would go back, absolutely nothing. Which, honestly, Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a really weird sideways move. Some things are a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better, some things are a little bit or maybe a lot worse. Like, it has a lot of weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rough edges in its new design, which I’ve complained about many times. It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a weird OS. And a lot of things just don’t work as well. A lot of things work slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better. It’s just, it’s weird. And so, but I think it’s telling that when I would go back from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, go back to Catalina for a while, there is like nothing I would miss about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, see also the touch bar. Like, I have the exact same feeling of the touch bar. It’s like, I can use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. It’s fine, I guess. I don’t prefer it. And then whenever, now that I’m on a laptop that doesn’t have the touch bar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t miss the touch bar at all. Not even for a second. There is nothing about the touch bar that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco miss, now that I don’t have it anymore. And so, looking at Big Sur, it’s not that great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco honestly. However, that being said, also using Big Sur,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s functioning, I’m able to use it, I’m not constantly hating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, it’s fine. And Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not great. Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has always been a train wreck. The entire, like I’ve had so many problems with Catalina over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this past year that I’ve never had a previous, for instance, Mac OS, just in terms of general system stability, performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I don’t think it was Google Chrome at fault. All sorts of craziness with Catalina that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been awful and it seems like it’s a very, it’s an OS full of weird subsystem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bugs and performance problems. And Big Sur still has some of that, no question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But Big Sur is the one they’re actually working on right now, I’m pretty sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Catalina has stopped receiving any meaningful engineering attention.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so when you already, when you have a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rough OS release like Catalina was, and the engineers all move on a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco later to the new version, and there’s no more bug fixing happening to the old one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the strongest reason to stay on the old one would be if it had reached a more stable point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than the new one. I don’t think that’s actually happened with Catalina. I don’t think Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco late Catalina’s latest version. I don’t think is any more stable than Big Sur. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no fewer problems with Catalina and it’s like, you know, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is point 4.5 whatever it’s reached. That is just as stable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or buggy to me as Big Sur, you know, 11.0 and 11.1 have been. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t think there’s much reason to stay on Catalina because Catalina wasn’t very good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and never reached that good or mostly good point that you expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an OS to reach once it’s being replaced by a newer OS. It never reached that point. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re not really taking any steps backward because Catalina never went forward.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So from that point of view, I say the update doesn’t actually matter that much. The main

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco areas that has affected me are simply its design changes, which again, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are a mixed bag, many of which are significantly worse, some of which are fine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and some minor functionality changes, like the way, like stupid stuff, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way searches now work differently. The standard, like, you know, Command-F to find stuff in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most apps now works differently and is clunkier. The Command-Option-F, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the main search box in something like Mail or Notes, now works differently and is clunkier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And in Mail, it even searches different things by default. So there’s stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, with the built-in apps or the built-in UI widgets, that are still a little bit rough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the OS as a whole, Big Sur seems not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worse than Catalina in stability and system services

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and performance and stuff like that, in my experience. So your mileage may vary, but for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s kind of a toss up. I’m not super motivated to update my iMac too big, sir.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I also don’t really know what I’m waiting for because Catalina is not good either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s kind of my question about, you know, I guess the heart of what I was saying. What am, what am I, what am I waiting for? Why have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I not upgraded already? Am I afraid that I don’t want to upgrade because I have software that’s not compatible? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, I don’t. Um, am I afraid that like, you know, there’s some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing new feature that I need that I desperately wanna have, not really, but like, well, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two main threads here. One of them is like what Marco said. Big Sur is where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the development’s happening. New versions of Big Sur are coming out and each new version brings with it hope that whatever it is that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John annoying you will be fixed or better, right? But, and the second thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is new features that I wanted, which I’ll get to in a second, but getting back to the original question, what’s stopping me?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Upgrading is a pain in the butt. takes a long time. If it goes wrong, you have to restore it from a backup. That takes a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just a whole thing, right? And given my podcasting schedule, there’s never a good time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to like, destroy my computer accidentally, right? I already did that once when I had the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, coincidentally, the Big Sur beta that hosed my firmware that took me a million

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years to figure out that was a big disaster. That’s a pain. So my thinking and the reason this topic is in here, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, over the holidays, I’ll probably have a big hole in my podcasting schedule because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one wants to podcast around the holidays. So that’s a good time. Finally, there’ll be a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time for me to dive in and upgrade. And my thinking is the same as Marco’s. Like, it’s not, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not quite the same. Like the whole idea is like, I don’t want to leave because everyone’s telling me that Big Sur has stability problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s new, but Catalina is rock solid. Well, my experience with Catalina hasn’t been rock solid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it hasn’t been bad either. But on the flip side of that, I have Big Sur running in the other computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this room, and I don’t have any problems with that in terms of features or stability either. So it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like a lateral move in terms of stability. Normally you would think the OS that’s been out for an entire year would have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really settled down and gotten solved and the new one would be flaky. And in my experience, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one that’s been around for a year, stability and features and everything and bugs seem fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so does the one that just came out, Big Sur. And is it because Catalina never really got that stable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or is it because Big Sur actually is very stable and it’s 0.0 and 0.1? I don’t know, but either way, It doesn’t feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a risk in that regard, right? The UI stuff I know is gonna annoy me because it annoys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me on the other computer that has Big Sur on it, right? But I do know like this is the end of the line for Catalina. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe it’ll get security patches and new versions of Safari and that’s it, right? And you know, every once in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a while, I’ll see like a program come out that’s Big Sur only and I’ll be like, oh, I can’t run that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not on the latest thing. So I’m getting that itch to go to the latest thing. And as I mentioned before, the new features that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually care about, the things that are making me want to go to Big Sur, one of them, Casey just put in the notes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’ll steal it from, the new version of Messages. It’s always annoyed me that the Mac version of Messages couldn’t do all the things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And yes, I know it’s weird and has UI issues or whatever, but I wanna just get that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John updated in the hopes that, again, that’s where all the development effort is happening. Mac Messages has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not had much development effort poured into it over the past couple of years, and now that it’s newly, what is it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is it Catalyst, I forget.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, now that it’s newly Catalyst, I’m hoping that’ll get better. But the second one, this is gonna sound dumb,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s gonna be predictable for me. The main feature that’s making you wanna upgrade is that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think about what my big Mac Pro does most of the time and mostly what I have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John babysit it doing is, cause I’m not using it for hours a day. I use it during podcasting and I use it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John during the day to do my own computer stuff or whatever. But like, unless I’m in a big project, unless I’m working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on one of my apps or I’m trying to make a Destiny video or whatever, but most of the time the computer’s just kinda like hanging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out doing its thing. But one thing it does do every day, every week, every hour,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, is it backs itself up, right? And it’s not backing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up a lot because I’m not producing a lot of new data each day, but I do wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a recent backup. So every week it does a super duper clone and every whenever it does a time machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backup to two different locations. And it’s been annoying me how long it takes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do an incremental time machine backup of my four terabyte drive with a whole jillion files in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I have seen from personal experience that Time Machine in Big Sur, because of it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking advantage of new APFS features, is much, much, much faster. In fact, this is way down in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I need to scroll to find it. We’ll put a link in case you scroll way down to get this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ars Technica in its Big Sur review from ages ago did a benchmark of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how long does it take to do the initial backup and then an incremental backup in Catalina versus Big Sur,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the difference is pretty big. For a local backup, the initial backup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John took 44 minutes in Catalina and 16 minutes in Big Sur. This is apples to apples, same computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same number of files, same everything, right? A local backup took eight minutes on Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and two in Big Sur. I’m assuming these numbers will scale proportionally. And a network backup was one hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and 52 minutes versus one hour and 15 minutes, right? So Big Sur is way faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at doing incremental backups. This is important to me because one of the things I have my computer do is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John while I’m asleep It wakes up at mounts one of my internal hard drives does time machine back and goes back to sleep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I’m looking at how long that’s taking and I’m like jeez like it takes a long time or sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s another backup already running and it tries to stop that backup and that takes a long time and the cleaning up step

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is taking a long time and I’m like What I wouldn’t give for my time machine backup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know speeds to be cut in half like because they just seem unreasonable and I know I have a lot of files

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I understand that just like the main problem is like it’s spending most of its time figuring out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What is it that I need to back up and you can see it especially when I when I do my like nightly one because there’s more stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s built up the preparing to back up step and especially since it’s doing to a spinning disk the preparing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to back up step is like I Need to figure out what changed since the last time I did a backup and then eventually it figures it out and it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Hundred megs of stuff and writes 100 megs of stuff fairly quickly Not as not as quickly as you would imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you think copying 100 megs of stuff would take two seconds but a reasonable amount of time. I think it spends like 10 to 20 times more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time figuring out what needs to back up. And that’s exactly where the new version of Time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Machine and APFS on Big Sur excels in that it has a more efficient way to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what has changed since the last time I back up. At least that’s my understanding of what’s making it faster. But either way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the benchmarks show that it’s getting way faster. So that’s probably the most demanding thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my computer does. Again, when I’m not editing video and not compiling an exode, Doing backups is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most demanding thing that, and I don’t notice the demand, like my fans don’t get any louder, my computer doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get any slower, but what does happen is I notice a little time machine icon, like it is right now, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little arrow in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} menu bar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what it means is, oh, I was gonna put my computer to sleep when I got up and left it, but I should just let it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finish its backup. So I don’t put it to sleep. I just leave it and it’ll, you know, I don’t have it set to go to sleep by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself. I’m like, I’ll come back later when it’s done with the backup and I’ll put it to sleep. And I come back later and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s still not done. And then I go back and I have lunch and take the dog for a walk. And I come back later and it’s still not done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, oh my God. And then I just give up and put it to sleep. But now I haven’t completed a backup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s frustrating to me. So Big Sur is attracting me with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John APFS accelerated time machine backups of all things. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the messages app, I suppose, and other new apps. And so I’m tempted to take this holiday

⏹️ ▶️ ^John break slash week slash whatever to be the time when I do all my last backups

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and do the big update and hope I don’t hose myself and find out all my,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, programs that might be broken, even though I think there aren’t any of them, there’s always one or two hiding somewhere and deal with all that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff and update it. And I was hoping one of you would tell me, don’t do it because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is 11.1 even out yet? Yeah. Anyway, I haven’t heard anything bad keeping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me away and I do want faster backups. I’ve just been afraid to bite the bullet. Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s attracting you to it besides messages?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So messages in part because it’s, oh yeah, 11.1 is out, huh? Messages in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey part because it is so kind of messed up on Catalina, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have come to really, really like, I forget the name of, it’s called pinning in the user interface,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I don’t know if it has like a marketing name, but I’ve come to really, really like the thing in iOS 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and in Big Sur where you can put a group or you can move someone so that they’re always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the top of the messages list, always. So for example, on all of my devices except my iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Erin is the very top of the list on messages. Always, always, always. She will never move because I’ve put her

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there. And then I have like a handful of other people. It strikes me as very, what was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it like top nine or whatever on MySpace? I would never really

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} use MySpace, but you know what I’m thinking of? It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that you would put your bestest friends up there and that was like very political from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I gathered. Well, anyways, it’s kind of like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have the it’s top six on the phone and I do the pinning as well

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} and here’s the problem you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell me if you have this problem as well so I put my family as the top I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my wife and my two children and then I have my parents and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s one spot left oh that’s the worst yep so who gets and you don’t want it to not be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John symmetrical mm-hmm so you could pick another relative but then what I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see you think you’re ranking them it’s like okay well my family should be there first, because that just makes sense. I message

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. And then for the next rows, do you prioritize people in terms of your relation? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, it should be my parents or something like that? Or do you put people there who are the people you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually message more often?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey For me, I have nine now in my phone. And it’s funny you say that, because for the longest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time, I had six. I have Aaron, a group chat that’s between my parents and Aaron

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and me. My three brothers, or excuse me, my two brothers, or three of us total, my two brothers and myself. good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My two brothers and myself, that’s the top row. And then the two subsequent rows are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey almost entirely group chats, but generally they’re just the people that I’m constantly either wanting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to send things to or just happen to talk with all the time. And so that represents

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the next two rows. But it’s funny that you bring up the empty space thing because for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I felt like I wanted to move from two rows to three rows, so from six to nine of these pinned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey messages, but I couldn’t come up with an even three

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} for what I wanted on the new row. So I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t do it until I finally came up with what I felt like was the good next row

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of people, you know, or of group chats as I think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} key.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The other thing about doing it based on frequency is if you really do message them frequently, they’ll be at the top anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right below the pin ones, because that’s how it prioritizes. So I spent a long time trying to figure out who should be in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these top ones. Like I feel like you have to put your own family as the top, top ones just because, like, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, you do message them all the time, and like, why not have them be static? But everything else, it’s harder, because I have group chats too, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, yeah, but they’re always at the top anyway, because they’re active, so why do they need to be pinned? And group chats have a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of icon, it’s not just one person’s face and everything. It’s actually causing quite a problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s like home screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} rearrangement for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} don’t get me wrong, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love this feature, I’m glad it’s there, because I like having the known place where you can touch things, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very flexible, and it really tickles the sort of, whatever, the part of my mind that wants things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be like arranged symmetrically and have no blank spaces and whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And you know, somebody in the chat is saying pinning an entry in a list is rather boring as a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac OS release feature. Like on paper, I understand the point, but this genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has been extremely nice and I’ve really liked having it and having it consistently across all my devices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey except my iMac Pro. Now, with that said, Even though I do love messages on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Big Sur, one of my favorite bugs, almost as much as the MMS bug,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I’m still fighting here and there, is if you happen to be on a Big Sur Mac, and if you hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Command N in messages to create a new message, and type someone’s name, like for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ll type Marco. Then if you hit Enter, because it drops down,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it highlights Marco’s phone number, which I will read now. No, just kidding. It highlights Marco’s phone number,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you would hit enter in order to actually compose the message to Marco, at which point the first responder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey should be the thing at the bottom, potentially, or at the very least you could tab to the message space at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the bottom. But what ends up happening in Big Sur is that when you hit enter, it just clears it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’ve hit this every time. Every time I have to create a new message, I have to do it like two or three times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, every time. You can click on the list and clicking works no problem. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey try to arrow around, it doesn’t work. And if you try to just hit enter and accept the top answer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it doesn’t work either. And it drives me

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} crazy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But other than that, I really like messages on Big Sur. And so that’s one of the things I’m really interested in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think, had I properly done any research, I probably could come up with some other examples. But you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is even dumber than the messages thing. I really, really have come to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey BitBar and its recent, I’ll call it a replacement, although it’s not really called SwiftBar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is basically a re-implementation of the same thing. We’ve talked about this in the past, I believe. But basically, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey run shell scripts and it will put the results on your menu bar. I really, really like it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it really works for me. SwiftBar in particular is really nice because it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey completely rewritten and it seems to work a lot nicer. Well, one of the features in SwiftBar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that you can use SF symbols, which is this font that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey provides in order to let you use like these different glyphs that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in place of like emoji, for example, it’s similar to emoji, but not exactly the same. It’s mostly about like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things that you would find in a user interface. Oh my God, it’s the new Wingdings. Yeah, in a lot of ways, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it really is. But anyways, one of the features in Swift Bar specifically for Big Sur is that you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use SF symbols. And so those work really, really nicely because I like to have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey monochrome menu bar. And when I use emoji, which I could do in Bit Bar and I could do in SwiftBar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Catalina, it’s adding color in a place that I don’t particularly want color. Yes, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a dumb thing to get worked up about, but hey, have you met us? So anyway, well, I really like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you can use SF Symbols in Big Sur, and so I would really like to do that and the corollary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of putting all my devices on Big Sur is that then I could stop all these, if I’m on Catalina,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey emit emoji, if I’m on Big Sur, emit SF Symbols and clean up all my scripts, of which there’s only like three of them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but still, that would be nice too. And it’s these dumb things that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know I don’t really need any of this, but it would just be nice to have it. And, and so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, I’m thinking that since none of you are doing what I wanted you to do and tell me for the love of God, don’t do it, then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey probably be doing it sometime in the next week or two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. I think the reason all three of us are thinking about it is because no one is saying, oh my God, don’t, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John upgrade. It’s going to hose everything. None of your software will work. It’s incredibly buggy. Everything will break. Uh, it’s super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John annoying or whatever. It’s like, it’s a known quantity. Like, we all have Macs that run it and, you know, as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco would say, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, like, I’m using it full time for the next two weeks and have for the last week. And yeah, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, it’s, I don’t love certain parts of it, but I didn’t love Catalina either. And therefore, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’d rather at least be on the one that they are still working on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, same, same thing with the messages thing. It’s a catalyst app with weird, inconsistent, non-Mac like behavior,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you know, they’re not working on messages in Catalina. And that thing has a bunch of weird behaviors too, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John though it was a Mac app and it’s missing a bunch of features. So even though the one in Big Sur is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, buggy and strange, they’re going to keep working on that. I hope that’s the hope anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. And also like a different way to look at it is like holding on to an old OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is itself. It’s kind of a friction point. Like it’s hard. It’s harder to do that over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There are things that will require the new OS that come out of time. Apple certainly pushes it hard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like holding on to the old OS over time becomes its own, like downside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and its own amount of work. And so there has to be a good reason that you’re holding on to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And with, you know, if you’re just on Catalina, if you’re on something older than Catalina, there’s lots of reasons, but just going from Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Big Sur, there doesn’t seem to be any strong reason besides the UI annoyances

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Big Sur. But those aren’t that big of a strong reason, and there’s, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’d rather be on the one that they’re fixing the bugs for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Apple’s really working on me with this release, because not only do I have the red badge on system preferences that I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get rid of, because apparently you have to install an MDM thing to use the software update dash dash ignore thing. Apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that only works if you have like a mobile device management profile installed or something, which is annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But on top of that, there’s a bug in Catalina slash the Catalina Mac App Store where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it shows apps like, hey, there’s a new version of Keynote. And so I have two updates that it wants me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John install, but they’re for Big Sur only things. So I can’t get rid of those update badges in the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menu either, because the Apple menu says, you have two new app updates. And if you go try to update either one of them, it says, you can’t install this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s for Big Sur. Like, okay, then stop showing it to me. And because apparently Catalina is not getting any more bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fixes, I don’t know if anyone’s ever gonna fix that either. So I have multiple daily badges. If I peek in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Apple menu, I’m reminded, and down in my dock, there’s a little red number one on system preferences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it was tricky, sometimes it’s, you know, like there was a software update recently, or a security

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update for Catalina, right? And that’s in system preferences. and I don’t know if I would have ever seen it because I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still just show to one. And when you go there, you have to make sure you don’t click the thing that says, hey, update to Big Sur,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that’s the only button that’s visible. And then this is a little like text, like a little blue web-like link that’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there are also some other updates that you might wanna look at. And those are the ones that update Safari and update

⏹️ ▶️ ^John security or whatever. So just being in this weird limbo state with Apple nagging me to update

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is annoying me. And so I feel like the path of least resistance is probably to bite the bullet and go Big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sur. We’ll check in next week to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} if any of us have had any disasters, if anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has had the guts to actually do this, or are we still just thinking about it?

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#askatp: HDR photos vs. video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Chris Lenart writes, HDR video on the iPhone 12 is phenomenal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Videos look amazing and they pop so much more than photos or non-HDR video. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why don’t HDR photos get the same treatment? iPhones have shot HDR photos for years, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they don’t look nearly as stunning. I wish my photos looked as good as the HDR videos do. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am not the right person to ask about this, and I’m glad to have you two around. I don’t feel like I notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDR in video really at all, which is probably because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not aware of what to look for. The only thing I noticed is the rest of the screen dimming as I’m watching an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDR video. So what is it that I should be looking for to see this pop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or to see what makes it so much better?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not the rest of the screen dimming, it’s the thing you’re watching being brighter. I know it seems like the same thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reason I put this question here is because it’s an interesting overloading of the HDR term, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HDR video, when we talk about that, the easiest way to think about that is if you think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-HDR video as having a brightness level from like zero to 100, where zero is black and 100 is white,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? HDR video in very oversimplified terms is like, now imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the white went to 200. You’re like, wait, it’s already white at 100. How can it be more white? Well, it can just be brighter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? I mean, like turning up the brightness on your screen, right? So say you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got a white screen and on HDR and the white

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is brightness level of 100. Imagine you could turn the brightness up even more and it would be 200, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s more to HDR than that. But basically the dynamic range between the brightest thing on the screen and the darkest thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is wider in HDR video, right? And the darker is not, on OLED is not gonna be darker than black.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, you know, none more black, right? But the brightest is brighter, which is why when you watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HDR video when it has some sunlight or highlight or sparkling thing or whatever, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the rest of the screen got dimmer in comparison because the bright highlights are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much brighter. Like to compare like the UI, I’m like on my Mac that I’m looking at now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the UI on the Pro Display XDR using Apple’s profile is 500 nits, nits is a level of brightness,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? They show the whole UI in 500 nits. So if I make 100% white, it’s white

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at a brightness level of 500 nits. but this screen goes up to 1600 nits. If they did the UI in 1600 nits,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’d burn your eyeballs out. Like, you know, you don’t wanna be looking at, at like white terminal windows and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John white web pages at 1600 nits. It’s too darn bright. I think a lot of us have had, especially in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the days of LED backlights, monitors that you could buy, especially like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John third-party monitors, where you could turn the brightness up way brighter than anybody ever wanted. It’s like, oh, I can’t, it’s like staring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the sun, right? But for video, where you’re trying to watch something cinematic or whatever, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reason HDR looks so much nicer and better is, you’re not putting, it’s not like a white web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John page that’s on the screen in a movie, it’s like, you know, a sunset, and the little sun part of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is super bright, and that looks more sparkly and bright, and that’s why HDR video is more stunning. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photos, Apple used the same exact word for the similar reason for photos when they introduced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HDR, smart HDR photos, but that’s a slightly different kind of dynamic range. So when you’ve got,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re taking a picture and you want to expose a sensor to some light, if the sensor doesn’t have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John light hit some part of it, that’s just black, right? If you’re lucky. If the sensor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but sensors can only take in so much light input. So after a certain amount of light over a certain amount of time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually the pixel just says, I’m just white. I’m overloaded. This is how much light you can send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me, right? And that, you know, in film parlance, that exposure of saying, how big, how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John light are we letting through the aperture and how long are we exposing the sensor to that light?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like a piece of film, if you just take in and expose it, open the aperture entirely and expose it to light and just hold

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it there for 15 minutes, everything’s just gonna be white, right? Because it’ll just be completely overloaded, like whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John film or a sensor or whatever, right? And that dynamic range that sensors can handle, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can handle this much light input before I go full light, and of course black is just black, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes when you’re taking a picture, like a person standing in front of a window, The window has bright sunlight coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through it. And so you take a picture and the phone has to figure out, okay, if you want to see this person’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John face, I have to expose so I get enough light from this person’s face so that you can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And that means I have to keep the shutter, quote unquote shutter open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a certain amount of time to gather enough light from this person’s face so you can see their eyeballs and their nose and their mouth and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But once you’ve done that and correctly exposed their face, the light coming from the window behind them has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overwhelmed all the pixels that it had hit in the sensor. And now the sky outside that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks blue to human eyes looks totally white in the picture. So the sky is what we call blown out, overexposed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the sky was so bright that it totally overwhelmed those pictures. But you needed to leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the shutter open for that long and expose it to that much light so you could see the face. If you did the opposite and exposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just for a short period of time so the sky looks blue, the person who’s standing in front of the window, their face looks like it’s totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in shadow and black and you can’t see their face. You’ve surely seen this in photos. If you take a picture of somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in unfavorable lighting and you expose it wrong, either the sky is blown out or the person’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John face is too dark, right? HDR photography is a way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s kind of like exposure bracketing, which I think we’ll also put a link in the show notes to this thing, is where they do multiple exposures.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One where they leave the shutter open a short amount of time to get the blue sky, and then they take another picture where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they leave the shutter open a long amount of time to get the face, but now the sky is white. And sometimes they do multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exposure, multiple pictures at different exposures, one right after the other, and then computationally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John combine them so you have a blue sky and a person’s face that you can actually see that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in shadow, right? But, think about what I said before. None of that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything necessarily to do with, oh, make the white brighter than it was before. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about exposing a camera element variable amounts of time and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then combining it into a single picture. So you get a higher dynamic range as in, oh, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you had exposed it long enough to get that face, now the sky would be white. But if you expose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it short enough to get the blue sky, now you can’t see the face. We’re gonna do both of those. So you have, you were able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the pixels be more, have a larger dynamic range, make them not be so sensitive, like, oh, these poor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pixels, they get so much light in them, they just blow out entirely, right? And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s why, especially if you’re looking at smart HDR photos on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone that predates having HDR capabilities at all, the brightest thing in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John picture is still just gonna be that white at a level 100. Hopefully it will look better and that things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will be exposed better and things won’t be blown out and you’ll be able to see all the things you want with the computational photography.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But they use the same term for it, HDR, but it doesn’t necessarily mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the whites can be at a level 200 instead of a level 100, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s why it’s confusing about, oh, I had a quote unquote HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John picture, but it doesn’t look as impressive in HDR video. Chances are good that that picture that you took, the brightest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John element in that picture is only, whatever, 500 nits or whatever level that the camera is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking that picture at. Whereas HDR video, depending on the video source, the brightness can go up much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brighter. Now, the final thing I’ll say about this is that HDR video is complicated by the fact that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HDR standard, like all the various, you know, Dolby Vision or HDR10 and HDR10+, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole bunch of standards for HDR video. The standards go up to brightness levels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’m pretty sure no actual man-made device can do. No $30,000 reference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitor, no nothing, because they go really, really high. Like, they’re not as bright as the sun, but I think it goes up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to like 30,000 nits or some ridiculous number, right? That’s how bright you’re allowed to go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But when you make video, like make a movie or whatever, the person who makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the movie can choose what is, how bright will the brightest element on this screen be? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you look on YouTube, you’ll see tons and tons of videos of people saying, okay, so a new version of the movie

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came out or say some recent movie, a Marvel movie who just came out on Blu-ray and they have an HDR edition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they will measure, okay, well, we play this whole movie and during the course of the whole movie, here is a graph of the brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John levels and they can say, hey, this Marvel movie, nothing on the screen is ever gonna be higher than 600

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nits. So if your TV can do 600 nits on, on, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s different, if you have an OLED, it can’t do that brightness on the entire screen, just on a smaller, but anyway, they can tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t go over 600. Sometimes they’ll give you an HDR movie where the max brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not really any brighter than the non-HDR version, because that’s how it was mastered. And it’s like, well, why did they get to label

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that as HDR? Like, oh, well, you can see there’s this one little thing that for a second goes above the levels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the SDR video, but it’s not that impressive. Whereas other movies will say in this one bright scene, it goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up to 1200 nits, right? That’s baked into the video that you’re getting because the video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tells you how bright, based on the HDR standard, each thing should be, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I have no idea what the capabilities of the phones are, what is the maximum brightness of the iPhone 12 screen?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you have to always match that up with, okay, what the video that I’m looking at,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how encoded in that video, what is the brightest element that it’s trying to display? And as long as this thing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to display a brightness that is within the range that the phone actually can display, you’re getting the full experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But chances are it’s possible that you’re watching a video that has a maximum brightness of 1200 nits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the phone just can’t do 1200 nits. And so you won’t see that, right? So HDR is complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, the only final question I have for two of you, because I don’t know the answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this one, do the new iPhones with HDR screens take photographs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in which the brightest element can be brighter than the non-HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things? In other words, can I take a photo of the sun and when it gets displayed, the sun in the photo will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be encoded as a brightness level of like 800 nits or something that’s higher than it could have been normally?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know the answer to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t think so. Yeah, neither do I.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I don’t think so either. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the case. Yeah, and I’m not entirely sure because you can take HDR video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with that same sensor. So it seems plausible to me that that could be done, but in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the challenge in photography is not, hey, how bright can I make the brightest element? The challenge is how can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I correctly expose everything in the frame so you can see what you need to see? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you really don’t want the bright sun blowing out everything in the foreground in a photograph, whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re taking a movie of a sunset, maybe that is what you want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s also, there’s a few other concerns with photos that have nothing to do with the sensor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, they actually might. So one concern is video is lower resolution than photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so it’s possible that the sensor or the image processing pipeline might be able to do a certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco degree of HDR bracketing to get the super big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco range. That might be possible to do on video, but not photos or to do it quickly or to do it without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other trade-offs. Other practical concerns might be like, I don’t know if the storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco format, like does HEIF and HEAP, do those support the storage of HDR data? What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are their existing standards in place like if a photo is shot in HDR, but then it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco viewed on a non HDR screen Are there standards in place for the file formats and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco display pipelines and everything to? Display an acceptable version of that without it looking like it has the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrong gamma set like it has like it’s super dark or super Gray like is there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is there the infrastructure in place to do that? But then also from a practical standpoint the way HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco video is displayed on on iPhones and the Pro Display

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco XDR is, as you said, John, like these displays can peak

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a second or two or for part of the screen at this higher brightness than usual,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it can’t sustain that forever. Or if it or, you know, in the case of an iPhone, like if it did sustain that forever, you might have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco battery problems because like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s it’s area, it’s not time period. Like so the way it’s rated is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an OLED TVs, they can do their maximum brightness on a 10% window they call it where 10% of the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is white and that’s where they can reach the maximum brightness and as you go up from more than 10% of the screen being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John white the maximum brightness goes down down down until like on an OLED screen uh how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many nits does it put out when it’s 100 when it’s just entirely white from edge to edge versus how many nits does the white

⏹️ ▶️ ^John square put out when it’s a 10% and there’s a big range there but still at 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s higher than the SDR the usual SDR television level of nits that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would comfortably watch them at. So the XDR is similar in that it can only do 1600 nits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a limited range, which is strange because it’s not an OLED, but I think the 100% coverage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is still like 1200 nits or maybe it’s only 800. But either way, it’s brighter than you ever want to look at, trust me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You do not want to crank up, like, there’s a reason they put it in 500 nits. And that’s 500 nits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maximum, by the way. So that’s 500 nits if you have the brightness turned up all the way, like on your keyboard if if you hit the brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, that’s 500 nits. So I’m not even looking at 500 nits now because I do not have my brightness on max because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s nighttime, I blow my eyeballs out, right? So you don’t have to worry about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it won’t be bright enough for you, except maybe when you’re watching like a movie or a television or whatever that actually tries

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put elements on screen that are that bright. But at a certain point, movies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the sun are one thing, but there’s a reason we don’t go outside and stare into the sun. because you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to be literally as bright as the sun, we’ll all go blind. So we do want it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a more dramatic experience, but we don’t want to actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John damage our eyeballs. So there is a balance there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I can imagine there’s all sorts of complexities with applying this to photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where you have to consider things like what if someone sets one of these photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as their wallpaper? Does it have to always show that brightness?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interesting. You know, what if they put it in a widget? What if they display a photo like this and they just leave their screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on and they leave their phone on the desk, full brightness, and they leave the screen on for a while? Like, what happens? Does it dim after a while?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, there’s all these like UI and practical considerations so that anywhere that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not seeing HDR applied yet, it might just be because Apple still wants to figure that stuff out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they have to wait for like the HEIF standards body to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get the next encoding standard out to specify dynamic range properties in photo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco formats or something like that. There could be lots of other reasons besides straight up hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ability on why you might see HDR in videos before you see it in photos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or in different ways, or in limited ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I talked about this when I first got my XDR, way back when, about going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the screensaver in system preferences and seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the screensavers that plays video and making it play HDR video. And what you would see is the little preview of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen saver in that tiny little window. And that tiny little window is HDR. There’s a whole article at Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recently about they have some acronym for this. They call it EDR or whatever. But basically the ability to have a screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is essentially a regular quote unquote SDR Mac monitor with maximum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 500 nits. But then in any region, any individual region of the screen they can say, but in this region

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna show the full HDR range, right? And that’s their software stack that’s allowing them Obviously the hardware can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, you know, because you can make anything on your brightness you want. But the display driver software, Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software stack is able to handle this situation. And it looks freaky because your entire screen looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John normal, but then there’s this little tiny window that looks almost like surreal, where like everything is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brighter in that little tiny window as it shows like an Italian countryside. Like, wow, it’s like a portal through my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plain computer monitor into the real world where everything is bright and sparkly. And it’s kind of cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t actually know the answer to this again, and maybe people will write it and tell us, but I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that my iPhone 12 Pro is able to take pictures with a higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dynamic range than the UI is displayed in. Because when I go through my photos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you look at them in the UI, it’s like whatever sort of 500 equivalent, whatever the iPhone UI is shown in, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, subject to your brightness settings, yada yada. but like in the UI and like a scrolling table view, I see my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photos, but when I tap on one and it shows the photo exclusively on a black background,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do think it suddenly becomes brighter. And yes, I know it’s on a black background, so of course it looks brighter to you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I think there’s like a little flash where it goes from SDR to HDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just be imagining it. It’s really hard to tell with my eyeballs. The other thing is that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the maximum brightness of the iPhone 12 screen is not that high. Like it’s not 1600 nits, I’ll tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you that. Like OLEDs in general have lower peak brightness than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LED backed LCDs, right? So the phone is OLED. There’s no way it’s getting to 1600 nits,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think. Unless it’s way easier to make them brighter in small things and just for battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life reasons. But my monitor has LED backlights and that can get much brighter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So maybe the HDR is not that much brighter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the SDR on the phone, but I think the camera actually is taking pictures. And because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple end to end, when I bring them into photos on my Mac, I think it’s the same deal, where when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking at them in the UI of photos, they look like normal photos. Like they don’t look blown out, they don’t look weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But then when I put them full screen on a black background, maybe it goes into HDR. So more work needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be done here, but sorry for this long answer, Chris. But the reason I put this in there is because I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know the answer to your other question, which is why the heck, haven’t we had HDR photos for a year? And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a different thing. That happened before any of us had HDR screens. That was basically taking multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exposures and combining them with computational photography to make a single picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you get the bright thing exposed and also the dark thing exposed so you can see all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it, which is kind of a view that never really happened in real life because when you look with your eyeballs, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you look at the person’s face, your pupils dilate so you can see the details. And at that point, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sky is blown out. But if you look at the sky, ah, your pupils constrict again. And now you can see the blue sky. That’s, you know, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s, that’s the way our eyeballs work. Looking at a real scene. When you have a photograph, what they’re trying to do is say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get the constricted people view of the sky and the dilated people view of the face and put them in one picture. And that never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really happened in real life, but that’s what we want to see in a picture so we can, you know, get the benefit of it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that happened long before we had HDR video or anything. And it was called the same thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s the dynamic range they’re able to to show the sky was really bright and the face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was really dark, but we got a photo out of it where you can see everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Real-time follow-up, this is totally doing HDR in photos. So I got my 12 mini here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m looking through my photos, like just some recent sunset photos. And when you have the sun

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a picture, like a sunset, it’s the difference is very obvious. So as soon as you, when you’re swiping through the photos in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Photos app, before it’s like, you know, been on screen for a moment, it’s SDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then when you have, when you open one up to like, you know, full screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you pause for a moment, it like brightens, it fades up. And it’s pretty clearly doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a transition from an SDR version to an HDR version. And like, it looks like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco entire tone map of the picture changes and it is dramatic. So it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it looks way better when it loads in and it’s definitely significantly brighter than the turning screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the whole screen does not change brightness. Like if you look at the other UI elements on screen, they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco change brightness, just the photo does. So this is definitely doing HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with photos on not even the 12 Pro on the 12 Mini. So it looks pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The tricky part is you do need to have a picture where there was something in the picture that was brighter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than can be represented. Cause I was just looking at some indoor pictures and they don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that or they do that to a lesser degree because generally indoor is more dim, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way you want it to work is, yeah, the sun and sparkles are super bright, but if you just take a picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like, you know, I was taking a picture, we’ve been taking pictures to put in for our Christmas cookies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and paprika, which we use to manage our recipes. So if I put a bunch of Christmas cookies on a plate and take a picture of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John under indoor lighting, nothing in that really just, oh wow, it’s so bright, because guess what, the cookies weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sparkling like the sun, they were just in indoor lighting. So it helps if you get an outdoor picture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In the Mac version of photos, on Catalina anyway, I’m not seeing any kind of pop in full

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen, but also I see that there’s still a UI when I try to go into full screen, showing me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the little explore bar on the bottom. So I’ll investigate a little further. I’m glad that you see them pop just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I do. I couldn’t tell if it was an optical illusion based on the black background, but it makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it’s totally a thing. And so not only is it very, very visible when you have a sunset or something, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have the sun in the picture, it’s also very visible when you have your example from earlier. if there’s a window in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco picture and it’s an indoor picture. Like I just had two where like the window brightens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up as it loads, as I’m taking a picture of like my home pod and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the window in the corner goes whoop, like it’s a super bright.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s interesting. I just found a photo in my camera roll that does that. I was standing in the garage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the girls were on the edge of the garage and so behind them is the outdoors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I’m standing kind of sort of on the indoors. And yeah, when you tap on it, you see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it kind of fill in and get even brighter. And you’re right, I always thought the rest of the screen was getting dimmer, but it’s very clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in this particular example. And I’m not gonna put it in the show notes because for several reasons, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know if it would work, but nevertheless, as I tap in, you see that the picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shows up in like a standard range, like you were saying, Marco, and then all of a sudden it fills in and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gets considerably brighter with the high dynamic range kind of turning on after just a moment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think actually, I think it shows it. You don’t even have to go to a black background. If in the grid of photos, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking at like a highlight on my son’s back from shining in from the window, and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks dimmer there than when I just tap on it once, and now it’s HDR, but the background is still white.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I tap again and the background turns black and I don’t see a change. So I think it’s just the zoomed in view that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Actually, that was a shoot. That was a video I was looking at, not a photo. My bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We will continue to experiment, but I’m pretty sure that the phone, It’s the same sensor taking the video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the photos, and I’m pretty sure it’s trying to do as much HDR as it can. Like subject to the two things I said before, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number one, how bright of a brightness is encoded in the source material?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can choose that as the director of a movie or as the person who writes the camera app or whatever to say, look,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m never going to put in a picture that demands a higher brightness than X number of nits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Number two, can a device you’re showing it on actually show that many nits,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So those are the two things that combine to figure out what the picture is actually going to look like when you look at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So for all I know, this phone could be encoding something that’s 3000 nits, but I just have have no devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that can show that.

#askatp: Stealing focus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wes Chamness writes, is there a way to prevent an application from stealing focus within Mac OS? For example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I launch an application to do tasks, but I return to the one I was working from, the newly opened application steals the focus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and averts my keyboard input. A couple of examples of this that I’ve experienced, the freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey surprise video in Skype. For bootleg listeners, it is not uncommon for me to be in the midst of typing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when Marco initiates the call, and me hitting the spacebar hits the default button in Skype, which is stolen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey focus, which is start the call with video on, and it drives me bananas. And I don’t know if this is related,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I am a devout Spaces user, so I have multiple virtual desktops pretty much anytime I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey using any of my computers. And oftentimes, and this has persisted across several machines, across

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey several OSes, I will swipe, you know, do the three-finger lateral swipe to go to a different window and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make it active. And then all of a sudden, after I’m done, the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screen will bounce back to the screen. the display will bounce back to the screen that I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on previously going back to the app I just left for reasons I’ve never understood. So yeah, how do you fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this guys? Cause I wish I knew. So in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John general, you can’t, this has been a problem forever. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it kind of makes sense in that, as you can imagine in a GUI operating system, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are calls that you can make in the various GUI frameworks to bring Windows to the front. This is a really important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the operating system. and you couldn’t write applications if they couldn’t do this, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because, hey, what if you’re gonna bring up, someone hits Command S in your app and you have to bring up a save dialog. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want that save dialog box to be in front and have the input. Therefore, there must be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John APIs to make a window, bring it to the front and give it the input. Once those APIs exist,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apps can call them. And when apps call them, they do that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so if an app says, hey, me, bring me to the front and give me the input, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what happens. And yes, it’s annoying when you’re doing something else and some other app is like, no, wait, me, me, me, bring my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John window to the front, give me input. And you’re like, well, shouldn’t they not be able to do that? Doesn’t it know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not the front most app? But like, sometimes there’s legit reasons for them. So the APIs do exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And since they exist, apps will call them. There is no magic system level way to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that happen. Apple could build one with some weird heuristic and set of rules and configurable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. but in general, what we’re relying on is application developers to not make their apps do things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are annoying. It’s like if you download an application and it just emitted a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loud honk every five minutes, you’re like, is there some way to prevent that app, apps from emitting a sound every five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minutes? It’s like, yeah, well, apps can make sounds, and in general, you shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make your app just honk every five minutes, but if you have an app that does that, your only recourse is to complain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the developer or stop using the app. And so this thing in general is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of those annoying things that apps shouldn’t do. And the only way it can really be the fault of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS is if the app tried to do something like three seconds ago and you switch apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and because something is so slow, the app, you know, finally, the system call finally gets through the framework and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS finally services it and says, oh, I’m bringing that to the front for you. But in between that time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it initiate that, and now you’re in a different app, right? It’s not easy to prevent entirely. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always the fault of the app developer but in general, it’s an antisocial thing for apps to do. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are many antisocial things for apps to do. This is not a problem that can be solved by any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John individual developer, and it’s really not a problem that can be solved by Apple. So the solution is, if an app keeps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing that, complain to the developer or stop using it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yay.

#askatp: iCloud photo backup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Finally, Anonymous writes, what’s the best way to back up my photo library? I use Apple Photos. I pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey increased storage, so it backs up to iCloud. I’d like to have a physical backup as well, but my photo library is larger than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the storage space I have in my MacBook Pro. What’s the best way to get the library onto an external drive? I’m guessing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t use Time Machine in this situation. I don’t even want to talk about this. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} triggered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because my situation is so awful. So one of you, please handle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. I got it. I got it. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The answer here is, if you don’t have a machine that can fit your entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photo library on it, then obviously you can’t back it up because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you don’t have a copy of it. Now, there are lots of ways to get a copy of it that can fit on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One way is you can use an external drive and you can relocate the system photo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco library to be on that external drive. Now, granted, this is a laptop that this person was talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that’s kind of inconvenient if you ever go anywhere, so that’s that’s not a great solution. You can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the solution, which I have seen and done where you can like duct tape

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a drive to the screen lid that’s just always plugged in, but that’s also not a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solution, but it does work. You lose a port, but it does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work, but another another way to do this. If you at all can get yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco another Mac that can always be on and that can have a giant external hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put into it. Old Mac minis are great for this. I know this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know an expense and the good thing is it doesn’t need to do much of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It only needs to be able to run macOS, run iCloud photo library in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photos app, be logged in like to your iCloud account, and then run Backblaze or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Time Machine or whatever however you want to back it up. Be able to run that. That’s a great solution. One that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used myself many times where like, and one that I’m actually using right now, because right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I currently don’t have a working desktop that has enough space to fit my photo library. And so I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the, you know, limited optimized storage version on my laptop. And then over there in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a closet is an ancient Mac mini running, I think high Sierra, or maybe even low Sierra,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I forget it’s it’s not recent at all. But that’s running iCloud photos, and it’s backing up to backblaze.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s it downloads the entire thing onto a giant external hard drive and it’s wonderful. That is the solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would recommend if you don’t wanna like, you know, junk up your laptop with external drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or deal with anything complicated like that. If you can at all find or if you already have an old Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that functions, that can have a big drive plugged into it, put the photo library on that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and back that up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and if you want, like, if you don’t have a second Mac and you just wanna put it onto an external drive, you can do some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shenanigans by making another user account and making the system photo library for that account be logged into your Apple ID,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but be on an external drive and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff like that. That’s like, there are ways to kind of get around this. But the bottom line is you need to have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you need to have enough hard drive space somewhere where you can store it. And if that place is only a disembodied external

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drive, that’s not going to do you any good unless you’re constantly connecting that drive to your one and only Mac, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Otherwise it’s not getting any photos onto it, right? And if you’re gonna constantly be connecting to your Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why not just make that your photo library, right? So if you don’t wanna deal with the multiple accounts, which I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not, honestly, I’m not even sure if it will get angry at you if you do that, but in theory it should work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Having a second Mac sounds like, well, it’s that big expense, but like you could just wait until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get a new Mac and then your current Mac becomes that second Mac, right? And the good thing is you don’t even, as far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I know, you don’t even need to run photos on it. You just need to have, like Marco said, be logged in. I don’t know, actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you even need to be logged in? You have to set up the account with your Apple ID, but the advantage of using iCloud Photo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Library is that Apple makes it basically that background demon as part of the OS, and they will just run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the background and constantly be pulling down photos from iCloud if you tell it to get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John originals. And then the contents of that Mac become backupable by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any service that can read the file system, right? So you don’t have to do anything. Like I do this in my house. Like my wife’s computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used to be the computer that had the family photo library on it. Now I do it all on my big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fancy Mac Pro, but I didn’t turn it off on hers. hers is still set to keep originals.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So even though I’m doing everything on my Mac, I know that anything that goes into that library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually appears on her computer. She doesn’t have to do anything. She doesn’t have to launch photos periodically. She just exists

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having a Mac with her because it’s on her Apple ID. And anytime

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I go over to that computer, and by the way, they’re on an external drive in her computer, it’s an iMac, but still the photos are on an external drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anytime I go over to that Mac and I launch photos, the photos are already there. Like I don’t have to wait for the past,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, three weeks of photos to download or whatever they already did in the background and she hasn’t been running photos. So I think it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pulls them down by itself. And of course that computer is being backed up. And when that computer gets backed up, it backs up the external

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard drive and it’s all part of the whole big backup Vortex thing. Right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s like, in some ways it sounds, you know, onerous to have to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a second Mac just to be to babysit that external hard drive, but it actually is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a pretty good solution. Like it’s the type of like extra redundancy that you get for free. especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have desktops. If it has the hard drive space, just have an account signed into the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ID with iCloud photo library turned on, set to download the originals, and now you have a little bit of extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John peace of mind, assuming you’re also backing up that computer. And even if you’re not backing it up, if you had three computers in the house and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two of them were doing that and neither one of them was backed up, you still have two extra copies of all your photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on those two computers if they’re stationary and they have enough hard drive space and they’re just sitting there downloading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the originals all day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because the point is like once you have the iCloud photo library like fully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a Mac, it’s just a bunch of files in a bundle. And so even though it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco organized in the best way, sorry Casey, it is still, like you still have your pictures there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as randomly named garbage files. Like the data is still there. And if you ever needed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to reconstruct like a nicer folder structure from them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could do, you could pull data out of the XF data from the files and you could actually have a script that would make all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that stuff. So there are options for that if you ever needed them. But yes, the point of step one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is somehow get a computer set up so that it can fit the entire iCloud photo library

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on one of its disks somehow, and then go from there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and in case people don’t know, this is since iPhoto and the current version of iPhoto,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you launch the app, if you hold down the option key, it will give you a dialogue that says, what photo library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you want me to look at? I think you can also just double click the photo libraries in the Finder, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, option during launch on photos is how you get it to use different libraries. So if you did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move your library to an external drive and you launched it and it’s like, hey, I don’t know where your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John photo library is, like you can pick the new one or whatever, but like option is how you can switch between them. And I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen also lets you pick the quote unquote system library, and that’s the only one you can use with iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Photos on that account. Correct. Yeah, so don’t forget about that one. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tricky with this whole, like hold down the option key. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to hold down the option key usually between the time that you’ve launched the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the time that the app has finished launching. Sometime in there. Sometimes if you hold down the modifier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before you open it and you end up doing an option double click or an option click, that can end up doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird things. It’s not really for option, but for other modifiers like command, command shift, command

⏹️ ▶️ ^John option, you can accidentally do weird stuff. Like if you command option click on an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app in the dock, it’s not gonna do what you think. Right, I was just trying to launch the app, I’m holding down command then option, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it opened the enclosing folder. It’s like, I know, just. So launch the app and then quickly hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down option. It’s a little race you can play with yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or just move the photo library and then launch the app and it will freak out and ask you where the heck it went. So you can also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just do that. And this is also, that’s the same trick by the way that whenever I am setting up a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I want it to only use a certain amount of gigs for the photo library,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I create what used to be a sparse bundle. Now I’m using an APFS shared volume with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a size quota. And so you can say, all right, 50 gigs. I’ll let you use 50 gigs. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I make a volume called photos. It’s an APFS shared volume, so it shares the space between my main disk. I cap it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at 50 gigs, and then I move the system photo library to be on that virtual disk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then it will never exceed 50 gigs. It’s great. It’s a wonderful little hack. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thank you to our sponsors this week, Linode, ExpressVPN, and Flatfile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly at atbit.fm slash join if you want to join.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can 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, Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse, it’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t mean to I’m too accidental Accidental Tech

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Podcasts So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long

The M1 lifestyle (reprise)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what is going on with your monitors man?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I’ve made some decisions, not the ones that you want yet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I basically decided so here’s what’s going on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know that I’m a desktop person at heart. I love desktops. I always have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I always will. Right now though, I’m at a point in my life where I’m doing a lot of bouncing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back and forth between two places. I am really appreciating this new laptop that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have. It’s very, very good. Like, it probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco qualifies to replace the 2015 MacBook Pro as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the official best laptop ever made. I only haven’t named that yet because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s still young. I gotta give it time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. I think because they haven’t come out with the 15 inch M1 or 16 inch M1. Once they do that, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll pull in the lead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not sure. Honestly, I love the 13 inch for so many reasons that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are likely and the air specifically that are likely to stay 13 inch air only.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So number one, being fanless. I love that. And I know that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, no one’s hearing the fan much on the 13 or the Mac mini. I know that, but the fact that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will never hear the fan, period, no matter how old it gets, like that’s very nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also, as I mentioned earlier, really like not having a touch bar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really, really like it. I love that I can just reach out and hit one button.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So often I am making minor adjustments to volume or brightness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or things, and just being Being able to just reach out and tap a button is so much nicer than having to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hit that little touch target on the touch bar. Wait, first, oh sorry, the touch bar fell asleep because I’m watching a YouTube video.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Gotta tap it first to wake it up because I don’t even know where to tap exactly until it’s on. Then I can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at best, do one more tap if I do the tap and hold thing, you know, to drag it around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The touch bar, ugh. But so I love not having that. I love the fanless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nature of it. always kept me away from the previous Air, like they fixed the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and now it’s super fast. And so because they fixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much about it and they brought elements of it up to a level that is fine for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right now this is my primary computer and the only things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I really miss about my iMac Pro are the screen size,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which I can fix somehow, whether it’s the 5K or the XDR, whatever the ports, which I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe hopefully fix with one of these new Thunderbolt docks. We’ll see how that goes. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fact that it’s like always on and always like in the same spot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with all the windows in the same spot with the same size windows like that is annoying when I’m going between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like plugged in mode and unplugged mode. It is annoying that all my windows have to change sizes and they they move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around to different places. And then when I get back to the big screen, they’re all they’re all too small and like in the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco corner for some reason. Like, and yes, I know there are utility apps that can help me with that. So which I might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look into. But so you know, there are parts of it that I don’t like just being a laptop hybrid setup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But a lot of the things about what has irritated me about previous laptop setups before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is either greatly reduced or gone with this new setup. Just because the hardware has gotten so much better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. And and this hardware is really so far satisfying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my needs. Like I have not hit anything where I’m like, man, this is terribly slow. I need I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need the bigger one. And if the bigger ones come out, and they have like roughly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same cores, but just more of the high performance ones, which would basically mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very similar overall performance and very similar single threaded performance, but just higher multi threaded performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m actually not entirely sure how much I would go for that based on the value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I get out of this being like small, light and fanless. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really like that. And having no touch bar, very much like that. Like I really don’t see myself going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a bigger laptop in the near future. This I’m just loving this too much. And so the only thing is whether I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got a desktop or not, and that’s still up in the air. For the desktop side of things, I am very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much into, at least for the time being when I when I have this kind of mobile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need, I I am really enjoying having it just be a laptop. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fact that we left the beach for a couple weeks and I’m able to just take my computer home,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not in a giant carrying case with wheels and have to unplug a whole bunch of cables.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Unplug one cable and take this little tiny laptop in my backpack and I just have my computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I have all of my stuff on it and it’s all set up. So there is a lot of benefit to this lifestyle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so with so many of the negative parts of laptop universalism like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, with so many of the negative parts of them reduced or eliminated with modern hardware, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think I might try it for a while. There is significant value here to me. And so if that is the case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think what I’m gonna want for a while at least, again, probably not forever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but what I’m gonna want for a little while is a monitor at the beach, a monitor here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a laptop I bring between them. Maybe a Mac Mini I bring between them, I don’t know. That could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also work. But the current Mac Mini, it’s basically the same computer as this plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a fan, but it has all the same limits. It’s still 16 gig or two terabyte limit. So that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really buy me much. It does add the ports, it does fix the port situation slightly. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ultimately, I think I’m better off just sticking with this MacBook Air, just using this for a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and having a monitor, keyboard, mouse setup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wherever I need to be. It’s a lot easier to replicate that than it is to haul an iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back and forth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wonder to a degree if a Mac Mini would work in this scenario.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It totally would, but why? It’s not better enough than the Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s the problem, exactly. That’s the problem I’m struggling with is other than fixing your ports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not sure what that really buys you in the grand scheme of things, and it takes away being able to use it on the boat or in the car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or whatever, anywhere that’s not a monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I don’t need that. On the boat, I listen to podcasts, I drive the car, But the fact is, if the Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could go to 32 gigs of RAM and four terabytes of disk, we’d have a different story on our hands. But it can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, that doesn’t really buy me anything. Like, that doesn’t really lift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough limitations off of me. And frankly, I’m not feeling a lot of limitations. Like, really, screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size and the port situation, that’s it. That’s the limitation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m feeling. And those are actually addressable. Like, as much as I complain about the LG,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s working for me for the last week. I did everything I needed to do. It’s fine. The ports on it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just don’t use the ports on it, and the screen wobbles like crazy, and I hate every minute of looking at it. But other than that, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s not that expensive, relative to all this other hardware. It isn’t that much money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I wanted to get a second one of those and have the two locations just be LG 5Ks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and keyboard and mouse, and that’s it. I could totally do that and have an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mobile situation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a good excuse for you to try the new revision of the 5K. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have thought about that, honestly. Like, this is the direction I’m probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to go. Or, I could get an XDR for the primary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco place that’s used more often and put the 5K in the less used place. But, because then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t need to buy a new 5K. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big step up in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco price. but same number of fans apparently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I know, we only saw one fan in the LG, there’s definitely more than one in the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year. Oh no, really, don’t tell me that, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, multiple fans, but they’re all silent, just like apparently the one in the LG that you didn’t know was there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You need to, yeah, just put your hand behind the monitor, see if you can feel air coming up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ah yeah, once I get back there, I definitely am going to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe it’s got a fan, but it’s entirely blocked by the stand. Yeah, right. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just futilely blowing air into the back of a piece of plastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Or it’s already full of sand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, check for spider eggs.