411: Are My Instructions Not Clear?

30 Dec 2020

Please attach a sysdiagnose to hear about Casey’s endless bug, John’s PS5 review, and Marco’s first VR on the Oculus Quest 2.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Casey’s MMS problems and Apple’s bug-reporting black hole (FB8893003, FB8952395)
    • sysdiagnose
      • Settings → Privacy → Analytics & Improvements → Analytics Data
  • More on Fitness+
  • HDR photos
    • Settings → Photos → View Full HDR
  • Screen brightness
    • iPhone 12: 625 nits typically / 1200 nits max
    • iPhone 12 Pro: 800 / 1200
    • displaymate.com indicates 825 nits in full-white image
  • iCloud Photo Downloader (via Matthew Smith)
  • OWC Thunderbolt Hub requires Big Sur 11.1
  • Big Sur Update
    • SMC Reset
    • SuperDuper
  • AirPods Max audio settings (via Matthew Taylor)
    • Settings → Accessibility → Audio/Visual → Headphone Accomodations
    • Tune Audio for Brightness, Strong
  • AirPods Max “fat lightning” connector
    • Teardown
  • AirPods Max Shield Case
  • John’s iPhone 12 Pro case
    • Previously
    • Now
  • The ghost of Marco’s computing past
• The ghost of Marco’s computing future
• Siracusa’s Playstation 5 review
  • Destiny
  • John’s Windows on Mac Pro adventure
  • Nintendo Land
  • Astro’s Playroom
  • iOS 14.3 adds PS5 and Amazon Luna controller support
• Marco’s Christmas gift
  • Beat Saber
  • Eleven: Table Tennis
  • Pong
  • Walkabout Mini Golf
  • SUPERHOT VR
  • Half-Life: Alyx
  • Valve Index
• Post-show: More on the PS5

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

Chapters

1. Intro
2. Please attach a sysdiagnose
3. Fitness+ follow-up
4. Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home
5. HDR-photo follow-up
6. iCloud Photos Downloader
7. Thunderbolt follow-up
8. Big Sur upgrades
9. AirPods Max tidbits 🖼️
10. John’s iPhone case
11. Sponsor: Boxcryptor
12. Marco’s workstation 🖼️
13. John’s PS5 review
14. Oculus Quest 2
15. Ending theme
16. More on PS5

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Knows what’s happening?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh again?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Fix it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what is happening plug it on plug? Pro mic oh I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know. What did you do last time did John plug it and then plug it back in?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What do you think goes on over there and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you get for adding to follow up and one minute before recording time Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I like hold on. All right, not on the backside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. This is extremely not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just unplugged his ethernet cable. Keep feeling around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back there. Yeah, it feels like audio.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} That’s better. Hey, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right. Hold on. Let me I don’t know what the hell happened. That weird. I had to unplug it and plug it back in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I just rebooted my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac. That’s what I just told you to do. All right, stop adding follow-up. The window for that is closed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, it’s happening. It’s happening. Hold on, let me hit record. Okay, should be recording now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A lot going on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, yeah, I mean, you know, the holidays, it’s always a busy time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. And we have a lot to get through, so we should probably start. But I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we haven’t had any witty banter yet so far. Do we have any witty banter?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t have any Woody Bander until you include a cis diagnose.

Please attach a sysdiagnose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So my MMS bug that I am so in love with, uh, it had struck me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey during the very last episode, like literally as we were recording the very last episode of the show. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I talked to a couple of people on the inside about it and basically was told

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey both gently and not so gently. Look, if you don’t get us a six assist diagnosed, there’s nothing we can do. So what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey assist diagnosed. So my extremely limited understanding is that basically there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a log file or like buffer, ring buffer, something that exists on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey devices. And if you hold all three buttons on a modern iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so the volume up, volume down, and lock buttons, if you hold them for about a second,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then it will trigger a sys-diagnose. And what that basically does is it takes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of the logs that are in memory or on disk or what have you, I would presume in memory, but I don’t know for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sure, and it will dump those to the iPhone’s file system. And you can get to them in Settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And my phone is locked up. That’s cool. Settings, I think it’s Privacy, App Data. Seriously,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Settings is just freaking locked. What the heck? We can get to it somewhere in Settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can AirDrop that to your computer. And then you can attach that to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a feedback, once the thing formerly known, the artist formerly known as Radar. Settings, Privacy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Analytics and Improvements, Analytics, Data. And then you can search for SYS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And these things are usually multiple hundreds of megabytes. And I can understand the conundrum, right? You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, Apple needs to be able to find something to dig through other than just looking through code to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey figure out what’s going on. And they’re not exactly going to have me drive my iPhone over to Craig’s house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what you gonna do? But I had one bug, I’ll put the bug links, or I’ll put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the bug numbers in the show notes. I had one bug that Apple closed and then reopened probably because of all my catching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and whining. And then I made another bug. Both of these have cyst diagnosis. So Apple people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I love you. Wouldn’t you mind just going ahead and taking a look at this for me, please? Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m gonna do the cardinal sin of being a person on the internet. I’m gonna bring up something that I got in trouble for in a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey place, because apparently I really like punishment. And at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same time, this was all going on. This was literally Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that I was finally grabbing cyst diagnosis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right when it was happening. I also noticed that my beloved Synology

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Drive client, which is the Synology version of Dropbox, their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey icon on Big Sur, if you use their quote unquote minimalist icon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is to say their monochrome icon, their icon on Big Sur in dark mode is super duper bright white, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is like the world’s most ridiculously silly aesthetic bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that affects nothing functionally, but it’s really annoying on my laptop. And so I filed a bug, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was like the 23rd or something like that, saying, hey, can we fix this icon in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey certain setting on this certain OS on this certain machine? That’d be great. And I was expecting them to be like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whatever, dude. Leave us alone. I was getting replies from them Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Eve, Christmas Day, the day after, constant replies about something that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the dumbest bug in the world. It does not matter. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m getting all these replies from Synology, Like it’s their job to keep their customers happy. Imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that. They value customer sat. And so it was startling to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because A, I didn’t actually expect a response from Synology at all. B, certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not on a time that most companies, not all, but most companies are probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on a skeleton staff or perhaps off entirely, as Apple is. And sure enough, I’m getting replies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nonstop. And it’s just so striking how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quietly hostile bug reporting is within Apple and how actively great it can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a company who really cares. And so with that bad mouth thing aside, hey, fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my bug please, that’d be great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’ve invoked my time delayed rage by putting the word cyst diagnosis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in follow-up and I must now add my most recent complaint about it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s a bug that I’ve been tracking. It’s a bug that I saw in one of my apps, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bug in my app as far as I can tell. I saw it in the Big Sur beta. I made a sample

⏹️ ▶️ ^John project that just puts a window on a screen and just demonstrates the bug, right? I even put a little cute little bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John icon on it, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} here’s a sample project

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with very little code, like, you know, 20 lines of code reproducing this bug.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I sent it to Apple during the Big Sur beta. Of course, they sent it back after like a week saying, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need a cyst diagnose, sure, whatever. They did also ask him, by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, upload the sysdiagnose and also tell us what time you captured it. I’m like, seriously?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, like, surely the time is in the sysdiagnose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Isn’t it a giant log?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. Right, and not only that, but I think the file name might have a date in it, and then of course the metadata for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file itself has the date in it, but whatever, fine. Here you go, Apple. Here’s the sysdiagnose. I ran my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sample project, which is attached to the bug report, And sure enough, when you follow the instructions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and run my sample, build and run my sample project, it triggers the bug, and then I capture a sysdiagnose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then I noted the time, and here it is. And then it sat there for like a week or two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and new betas came out and it didn’t get fixed. And then they send another thing in that bug that says, can you please capture a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sysdiagnose and tell us the time that it came out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And this is like a month in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, oh my God, listen. And I did the cardinal sin, which is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I tried to communicate to whatever this is that’s replying to me as if it’s a human, because I don’t know that it’s a human,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And I said, listen, here’s another, I did it again, I did it, I said, here’s another cyst diagnosed, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the time I captured it. And then I said, like, why are you asking me the time that it was captured? Can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not reproduce it? Does the sample project I included not work for you? Like, that’s valuable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data. He would say, hey, guess what? We can’t reproduce this, right? And I said, I’m running it on the DTK,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because at this point I had sworn off Big Sur on my main computer. I was able to reproduce it on both, but by this point, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no more big Surma Mac Pro. So I said, like, what’s the problem? Can you not reproduce it? Like, are you having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trouble reproducing it? Are my instructions not clear? Should I capture like a screen capture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video of me showing what it looks like? In fact, I took photos of my screen in the original report and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said, because when I tried to take a screenshot, it triggers like a refresh effect, which fixes, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a cosmetic bug. It fixes the cosmetic bug if you take a screenshot of it for whatever reason. And I included that info in the original bug report

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I took photos of my screen and I said, here’s why I’m sending you photos of my screen and not screenshots. Like I was so helpful and it’s like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John month in. I’m like, what’s going on? No reply. And anyway, Big Sur came out and my bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not fixed. Still no reply on this bug. That’s all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. It’s so frustrating. It’s so incredibly infuriating. And then to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me at the same time get responses from Synology on Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey day. Like I’m not advocating that Apple should be working on Christmas day. That’s not my point. My point is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of all the days in the entire calendar that you would have expect nothing, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was Christmas Day. And here it is, I’m having like almost an active conversation on their bug tracker on Christmas Day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s preposterous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and just to give a, like the reason,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most likely reason that you’re having that experience is, it’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s one of scale. Synology has far, far, far, far, far fewer customers than Apple. has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a tremendous volume of feedbacks coming in. Apple also has a tremendous amount of money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, so on and so forth. But like when you’re a smaller company, you can afford one of your advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that you can afford to have better customer service. It’s part of what lets you grow into a bigger company. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not excusing the fact that Apple is slower on responses. In some ways, it’s explicable, even though it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it shouldn’t be because they have all the money in the world. But as we talked about in the past, it’s not actually as easy as you think it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to convert money into human resources and productivity. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was that easy, business would be a lot easier, and there’d be a lot more of them, and they’d be a lot more successful. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we all attached our cyst diagnosis, Apple, so please communicate about our bugs. Sometime, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m saying within six months or a year. I’m not in a hurry. It’s a cosmetic bug,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The same story plays out over and over again. We hear from Apple people, or we talk to Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people, like WBC or whatever, and they always tell us the same story. your bug reports

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really matter, please file bug reports. It really helps, it really does get things fixed or helps us vote on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things or whatever. But the experience of being an external developer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reporting bugs to Apple, has always been and continues to be horrendous. In fact, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems like it’s getting worse as the company is getting bigger and scaling. It is so often

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apparent that whatever screening process screening process the bugs are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know are going through like at the at the first levels it doesn’t seem to work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much if at all and actually like communicating to developers we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seen this we’ve taken this seriously we pay attention to it and your time creating this bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco report writing it all up creating sample code etc that time was well spent like no that the process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does not communicate that at all it communicates the opposite it clearly communicates over and over again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the vast majority of developers that I know, myself included with all my experiences, you are wasting your time by doing this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And you’re better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off if you just wait around for other people to do it and that way you don’t have to waste your time doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Because like that’s, that is what their actions actually show and I know their words say differently and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bet they truly believe that we should be doing this and I bet they truly intend for this to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be good. Just like I always intend to do all my homework. I always intend, I have the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco intentions. and answer email. Yeah, I have the best intentions to be productive and to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do all my homework, answer all my email, floss every day, lose weight. And you know what? About

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two-thirds of those things happen. And usually the homework and the email aren’t very high

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the list. The experience of filing bugs with Apple just has shown me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over and over and over again for years and years and years, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth my time to do. And not only that, but it almost seems actively hostile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very few of the reports that I, of the bugs I report, ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get any response at all. They just sit there open forever, with no comments ever put on them. Like, they just sit there open. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, well, why did I even file that at all? Some of them eventually get assigned as a duplicate, but that’s actually very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rare. Almost everything that I file just sits there forever. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a response.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the response, the vast majority of the time, is you didn’t report a cyst, or you didn’t have a cyst diagnosed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco therefore we’re closing this bug. Or please check it to see if this is fixed in the latest version.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. Yeah, another thing they don’t do themselves. Yeah, checking whether it’s closed, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that’s something you have to do. I mean, in most ticketing systems, you want the person who opened the ticket

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to agree that it’s closed, but in the Apple system, you have to actually check whether it’s closed. They don’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you, we think this is fixed. I mean, they do eventually. If they actually fix it, they say, we think this is fixed, please confirm. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they also do is, we have no idea of this fix, could you just test it on the latest beta to tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me if it’s fixed or not? And I did that for every single big survey that came out, every single one. I tried it and said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yep, still can reproduce it. But they weren’t even communicating to me at that point. Like if I had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recommend a way to make the system better, that’s easier to apply money to is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just need someone who’s an actual human being communicating more. So, for example, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a bug like mine where I, you know, I found it in my program, but then I made a sample project or whatever. it is entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John possible that it’s still my bug because my sample program is still code that I wrote. And so if I’m doing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fundamentally stupid because I’m an inexperienced Mac developer, the possibility is that I’m wasting Apple’s time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they’re gonna go reproduce it and say, oh yeah, I reproduced it, but it’s not actually our bug, it’s your bug because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s a problem in your program. And that’s me wasting their time. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the problem of being Apple. You have tons of developers and they send you reports and you have to, I got to deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with this. This isn’t a bug, this isn’t a bug either. this is just someone complaining or whatever, right? So it’s gonna be low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John priority and it takes work to do that and it’s costly or whatever. But the problem with silence is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if that’s actually happened already. For all I know, they reproduced the bug with my sample program,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looked at my sample program for two seconds and said, oh, this dummy has a bug in their program. And they’re just never gonna tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that to me, ever, right? You need to communicate, over communicate Apple, say, okay, we’ve accepted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your thing, okay, we’re looking at it, okay, this human looked at it at this time, okay, we have reproduced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, we haven’t, We could build your sample program, we couldn’t. Where, you know, what number are you in the queue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like at the deli counter? Like literally anything, any kind of communication that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John convincingly human that communicates the status of your bug in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system. And in the absence of that, our minds just spin off and say, I’m being ignored. I feel like it’s a, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passive aggressive or whatever or they don’t care, which may not be true, but we’re just not privy to what is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going on behind the scenes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s extremely frustrating and I feel completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey handcuffed because this is a bug, just to quickly reiterate, where myself or Aaron are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey straight up not receiving text messages. My internet communicator is not consistently communicating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the internet, which is very frustrating. And I feel like this is a pretty critical bug. I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that people have to be working on Christmas or whatever. I’m just saying it’s a pretty critical bug. And as far as I’m concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m just throwing things over the wall for them to laugh and incinerate them. It’s very, very frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your bug, Casey, I’m pretty sure they know about it. Like, they already did that one thing where they said, oh, we think we’re help. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was in the release notes for an iOS release. Now, the fact that that didn’t fix all the problems is bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I don’t think they’re unaware that this is a problem. Like, your report is surely one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thousands that complained about this. And that’s the other problem where it’s like, OK, we’ve got a team working on this. Would you rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that team spend its time writing the same thing in 1,000 bugs, or would you rather them just fix it? We all just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want it to be fixed, right? But it feels like when you’re the one who submitted the bug and they come back and say, we need a cyst diagnosis,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, ah. Like if, for example, a human communication could be, hey, we’ve got a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of reports of this problem and the team is working on it. And then, oh, and by the way, if you can give us a cyst diagnosis, it might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John help. But honestly, we have 5,000 bug reports of this exact bug and they’re probably never gonna look at your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cyst diagnosis. Maybe don’t put that last part, but just say like, hey, we know this is a serious bug and the team is working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it, which I think is almost certainly the case, you know, in the case of this bug. But you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know that because they didn’t write it in the bug report.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. Well, and it says on the top of Feedback Assistant for this particular bug, recent similar reports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey none.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} And here again, on that thing, well, that doesn’t mean anything. Even just categorizing and grouping them, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just doing that task of identifying the 5,000 reports of this one bug and grouping them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a big task to do. And obviously, Apple is not staffed to do that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, and it’s also not like the people who are fixing the bug are the same people who are triaging all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} things, separate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people, yada yada. It’s just, all I’m saying is on the outside it feels very frustrating. And in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end, especially with like a serious bug like Casey’s, we all just want it fixed. And so it’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you could, you can just shut us up entirely by just fixing the bug and then we’ll go away. Exactly.

Fitness+ follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So now that I’ve besmirched Apple and guaranteed that this bug will never get fixed, let me tell you something nice about Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mostly. I have done a little bit more with Fitness Plus. Still really like it. A couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of quick thoughts that I had since our discussion last episode. One of the things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I both like and don’t like about it is that there doesn’t seem to be any real like continuity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between workouts. One of the things, and again, I’m comparing to Beachbody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because that’s what I’m familiar with. With Beachbody, you have like a program. So I done this boxing program called 10 rounds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And basically the idea is they take you from never having boxed before in your life, hello, and teach

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you the very basics of how to box, like different punches and different moves you can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and stuff like that. And that was I think a six week program with five

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey workouts per week if I’m not mistaken. And you go over the course of the program from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not knowing anything to knowing a little bit. And it’s It’s nice to have that kind of continuity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And one thing I’ve noticed about Fitness Plus is as yet there’s none of that real continuity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now on the flip side, that’s actually kind of nice in a way because it’s very easy to just drop into any trainers, any workout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and just do it. And that’s that. And again, I like that there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are workouts of varying lengths. So there’s 10-minute workouts, 20-minute workouts, 30-minute workouts, et cetera. And I like that a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey too. But I also wouldn’t mind to have a little more continuity and be like, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, Greg is going to take you from not being able to lift a one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pound weight to being, you know, to dead lifting 350 pounds or whatever. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, it would be neat to be able to have that kind of continuity. That being said, one of the things I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do like is that it seems that they’re constantly updating the app or the workouts with new workouts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is super awesome. And in Beachbody, you know, by comparison, it’s like an iOS release, right? Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they have an entire program that lands all at once, generally speaking, and that’s And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that particular trainer will come back in six months to a year with another program that they just drop all at once.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s really nice to have Apple Fitness Plus having regular updates. And it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like this is still going on as we speak, which is great. I still think the information architecture is kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of janky. It’s not terribly easy, or maybe it’s just me, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not terribly easy to find the workout you want. And, for example, I wanted to do a strength

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey training workout yesterday before. and I wanted to do it and I wanted to focus on my upper body

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it seemed like there wasn’t really, it either wasn’t accurately telling me what these workouts do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or basically all of them were total body workouts, which is fine, but I would have liked to do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey concentrating more on my arms and chest and back and stuff in this particular day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it didn’t seem that that was available, but again, maybe that’s a Casey problem. Finally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I did do a workout with Aaron, simultaneously with Aaron on our Apple TV. This is the first of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the app-enabled Apple TVs. You know, the first with the sweet remote that we all love so much. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perhaps I did something wrong. I don’t know, but when I started it, it basically said, okay, who’s doing this workout?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is it Casey’s Apple Watch? And I said, yeah. And then started the workout, and that was that. So there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was no integration whatsoever with Erin’s watch. Now she does not have a user on the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey TV. The Fitness Plus trial is associated with my Apple ID. So I can explain away why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this would be in a thousand different ways. And it’s not unreasonable, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would have been really nice if it could just detect, oh, there’s another Apple Watch nearby and there’s only one other. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like we’re in a gymnasium where there’s 500 in the before times. You know, there’s like one other Apple Watch nearby.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Shall I offer it to that person? And that just did not happen. And that’s kind of too bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Maybe we need an M1 or whatever it is. Or not the M1. What’s the U1? What’s the proximity one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco U is the ultra wide band that is mysterious and seemingly unused. Yeah, exactly. It’s the AirDrop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco animation chip. Right. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe the next Apple TV that’s coming in five years, maybe that’ll enable this sort of feature. But that kind of bummed me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out that basically what she had to do was just start a workout and she couldn’t see any of her stuff on the screen, which again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t necessarily take issue with. I mean, I’d like it if she showed up as well, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey begrudge them for only concentrating on one person. But even just starting the workout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey automatically and pausing it automatically would have been really nice. Before we move on from this very quickly, Marco, have you had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a chance to do any of these yet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not yet, for various boring reasons, but I do intend to do them soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I really, really am interested to hear what you have to say, particularly about the rowing stuff, because I haven’t tried any of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that.

Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. Subscribe

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HDR-photo follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey An anonymous Apple employee writes, you’re absolutely correct that Photos UI in an iPhone 12 applies an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDR boost to captures that were captured in HDR capturing hardware, like iPhone 12 captures.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey On the technical side, this is achieved by storing a 2D 8-bit single channel grayscale image within

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey each HEIC file. This auxiliary file dictates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how much HDR boost, and that’s in quotes, should be applied to each pixel when an SDR source

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is viewed full screen in the UI. This ensures that the original file is always SDR and remains compatible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the outside world while also allowing in-ecosystem devices and displays to apply a quote, HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey boost quote, over them if they’re capable of doing so. And you can see this in settings, photos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey view full HDR. That’s pretty cool, I didn’t know that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that also explains that we were wondering like, do they look blown out or weird on other devices? And they do it in this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, fairly clever way of like if a device doesn’t know about that boost file, it just ignores

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and just looks like a normal photo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s super cool. With regard to iPhone 12 and 12 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screen brightness, Apple says that the 12 has 625 nits max brightness in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey typical modes and normal modes and 1200 nits, who boy, in max brightness for HDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That was the iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 Pro by comparison is 800 instead of 625 for typical use and the same 1200 for HDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And displaymate.com indicates that it’s 825 nits when it’s full screen with white image.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I wish displaymate had a little bit more info, but basically like we were wondering how high do the phones go? So Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this info, they don’t go up to 1600. And the next question was, can they do that 1200s on a full screen? And displaymate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says, no, if it’s full screen white, it’s update 25. So they’re pretty darn good. Like there was a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of reviews on YouTube of like, if your iPhone was a television, it would be like the best television ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made in terms of color fidelity and HDR and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, it’s six

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inches, so it’s not really great as a TV. Unless you put it really close to your face and that it’s fine.

iCloud Photos Downloader

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, that’s me when I don’t have my contacts in. Oh, goodness. All right, and then Matthew Smith

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes in, in episode 410, there was a question about backing up iCloud Photos when you don’t have disk space

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to accommodate your entire library. My problem is that I no longer have a Mac at all. This led me to a project called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iCloud Photos Downloader. Ah, yes, this has been recommended to me several times. It’s written in Python and uses Py

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iCloud to call the iCloud APIs to download photos. It supports two-factor auth and only needs to re-authenticate on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the interval that Apple sets. And Matthew writes, I believe it’s currently two months. So it can be set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up as a cron job or to run as a given interval. I recently did a fresh poll of my entire photo library, which is over 30,000 photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and videos, and it completed in under a day. Subsequent jobs complete very quickly using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the hyphen hyphen until hyphen found option. I don’t think it preserves any library database

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey information, but it does preserve EXIF data. So it is useful as a raw file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey level cloud to local backup that can be backed up to anywhere you want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I put this in here because this is a solution for people who don’t wanna deal with the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff but just want their data down somehow. But I would caution people that stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this where it’s like, oh, someone made a Python script that uses APIs to get my photos, that can break at any time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because Apple is not trying to make sure this maintains compatibility. And the second thing is, if it doesn’t do like database

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information, which is like, hey, if you edit your picture, crop it, adjust it, rotate it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John add keywords to it, like any of that stuff, it seems like this has no idea that that happened, because it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pull any of the database info. So what you’re just getting is the original raw capture. So if that’s what you want, and you don’t mind it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe breaking sometime in the future, this is a cool option to look into, but don’t think of it as just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a complete solution to the idea that I just want a separate download

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my full iPhoto library somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed.

Thunderbolt follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can you tell me about information that I missed from friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz? You should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never skip the paragraphs I put. No, it’s not true. Sometimes you do have to skip them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I put a lot of stuff in the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes in case he usually wisely condenses them as needed. But there was one bit of info that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did get skipped over, which I think was important. We were talking about the OWC Thunderbolt stuff last time, the hub and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dock, Mark ordered the dock. One key piece of information, which you may miss if you go to the website

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking at, is that it requires not just Big Sur, but it requires Big Sur 11.1. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know why it requires it, it just does, but if you’re not updated to Big Sur, or even if you have Big Sur, but you don’t have the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John latest, you can’t use that ODBC stuff, so be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aware. Yeah, my understanding is that 11.1 added support for whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new Thunderbolt controllers or chipsets are used in a lot of these. Goshen Ridge. Oh God, really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that what it’s called? Yeah, it’s called Goshen, yeah, that’s my memory. Goshen, is everything a ridge? Goshen something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess, yeah, so anyway, Mac OS did not support this until 11.1.

Big Sur upgrades

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, we talked last week about now is the time to do the big Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey update. Man, I wish I’d thought that one through before I started. That’s all right. The big Big Sur update. So…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How the turntables.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, I have not done any Big Sur updates. To recap, my MacBook Pro has been on it for a while now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but the iMac Pro I haven’t touched. I will soon, but I just haven’t gotten to it. Marco, what have you done?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I have solved this problem in a different way. But suffice to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say, I am now running Big Sur on all of my Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. I am very, very curious to hear about this later. John, what’s your situation?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did what I said. I picked this week-long gap in my podcasting schedule, decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now is the time to bite the bullet and do the update after doing many, many backups. I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update for the most part went well, except for, I mean, this would have been an update where it would be disastrous to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a non-computer nerdy person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff. I did the update, everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seemed to go fine, and then I went in to, you know, give some app permissions because some app needed some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John permissions that it didn’t have, whatever. And I go into the security and privacy thing. I guess this is already off into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer nerd land because who else knows to do, anyway. I’m in there and it’s like, oh, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give this app access to whatever, enter your password, and enter my password, and it’s like, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sorry. It does the little dialogue shake. I’m like, did I mistype it? Enter my password, no, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, look, I just logged in with this password, right? So I try all the things, all the Mac OS X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lore of like, well, I don’t know if you guys remember this, occasionally it still does it. It’ll bring up a dialogue that asks you to enter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your password. And it wants your account password, like your Mac account password, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For a while, Apple would let you have it synced with your iCloud one, but I don’t think they even let you do that anymore. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would put in the name field, sometimes it would put your full name and not your username,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And sometimes that dialogue would reject your username or password.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you didn’t delete your full name, John space Syracuse, delete that and put in your username,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then it would let you through. So I tried that trick and that didn’t work. Logged out back in, restart, so on and so forth. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John logging out and back in with the password that it’s asking me. Like, look, I’m logging in with this password. I know it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my password. I changed my password. Cause hey, you know, sometimes maybe you just need to change my password.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nope, still wouldn’t take it. So that’s not a good start. Like you just do an OS update and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing would accept it. like sudo wouldn’t accept it from the command line. Like my, anything that wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to elevate my permissions thought that I just did not know my user account password, the one I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just logged in with. And it’s always scary because I’m always afraid like I’ll log out or restart

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it just won’t let me back in period. And that’s a really bad situation. But then I did some Googling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then Googling says, oh yeah, this happens all the time. Of course. It’s been a problem since

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Big Sur beta and the solution is an SMC reset. this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} why,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why is it an SMC? I don’t know. And by the way, SMC reset, I don’t have the link for the show, it’s maybe in case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can find it, but SMC reset used to be simpler, but now that there are so many different Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are, you know, Intel Macs before the T2, after the T2, then the ARM Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then there’s desktop versus portable. You may think you know how to do an SMC reset, but it actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John varies a lot based on what kind of computer you have. So I would recommend not trying to memorize how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do an SMC reset, but always going to the most recent Apple support document that takes you to this like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone tree. It’s like, what kind of computer do you have? A desktop or a laptop? Does it have an ARM processor, an Intel processor? Does it have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John T2 or does it not have a T2? And then finally you get the instructions on how to do an SMC reset on your computer. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did an SMC reset on my computer and suddenly it took my admin password. Not a great start,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but in the grand scheme of things, not fatal. As for the update,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re talking about it, there wasn’t any software that I was missing. One I was forgetting was SuperDuper. I knew

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that SuperDuper wasn’t updated for it, but I had already sort of resigned myself to it and hadn’t thought about it for a while. Partially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’m leaving my SuperDuper update on Catalina for now, just as my like ultimate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backup, because I’ve already replaced all my other Time Machine backups, so I wanna have one Catalina backup in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And partially because I do have Carbon Copy Cloner as well, and that can do an update, albeit I think it does a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John full update every time, which is kind of crappy, right? So I’m still waiting for SuperDuper to update, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Big Sur does not make it easy for SuperDuper to do the stuff that it does due to all of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changes. And then the big feature I wanted out of Big Sur, which is faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John incremental time machine backups on APFS. I think I talked about this when I tried it on the betas. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just as fast in the release version and incremental time machine backup to a spinning disk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running APFS was done under six minutes, 345 seconds total, which sounds super slow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until you know how slow it was before. Before we measured like half an hour or an hour just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to figure out that it didn’t really have much to do. Six minutes is glorious. So I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very satisfied with the increased speed in my time machine backups. And otherwise I’m just hanging out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in Big Sur and everything’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nice. I did not peg me as the slacker of the three of us. I’m very surprised, but here we are.

AirPods Max tidbits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, Matthew Taylor writes with some AirPods Max audio settings. Marco, you did return

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them. Is that correct?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I have simply transferred them to another member of my household. Now, Hops has a really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expensive pair of headphones. No, Tiff likes them, so she’s keeping them. Good deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so Matthew writes, while this will certainly not solve Marco’s AirPods Max discomfort problems, I wanted to share a set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of off-the-beaten-path tweaks that, in my experience, dramatically improve sound quality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Matthew writes, go into settings, accessibility, audio slash visual, headphone accommodations. And lo and behold,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there are a number of AirPods Max sound settings. I personally, says Matthew, prefer tune audio for brightness,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey strong. This is utterly transformative for my favorite New Order tracks and it’s easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to hear the difference by rapidly toggling headphone accommodations on and off once the tune audio mode is set.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Only Marco could tell us how this affects Phish.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can indeed tell you how it affects Phish because I actually tested these settings. Oh, good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for like if people who are hard of hearing in certain frequency ranges want to be able to hear their environment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better say like to have people like if they want to hear people speaking nearby more clearly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than they would hear with unmodified sound input then this can help that because it there’s basically settings like boost the mid-range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that I tried these settings and I found them to be probably very useful for that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purpose but the settings are fairly aggressive I think a little too aggressive to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used for general music listening. Like I think if you’re expecting this to sound to make music sound nicer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’ll be a little bit harsh to do for that. So feel free, you know, anybody out there you want to try this, feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco free, but I wouldn’t count on this if you’re kind of on the fence about whether these are for you. I wouldn’t count on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as something that would make or break that decision unless you have a specific accessibility need that these would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Quick real time follow up on that previous item someone in the chat room asked. Apple juice says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought APFS wasn’t recommended for spinning disks. I know we talked about this before, but just a quick repetition. APFS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is slower than HFS Plus on spinning disks. So that’s why you hear it not recommended,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the new Time Machine uses, as far as I know, special features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of APFS to be faster. And I think actually I’m big sure that may be your only choice for a Time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Machine backup destination. So that’s why, even though it’s a spinning disk, I’m going with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John APFS. And the second thing is when people ask me, hey, I’ve got a new spinning disk attached to my Mac, Should I format

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it as HFS plus or APFS? Even though I know it will be slower, I usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell people to format it as APFS just because it has more features like snapshots and so on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And in my experience, it is more reliable than HFS plus. Now, granted that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experience is not very long because APFS hasn’t been out of the Mac for very long, but that’s why I’m recommending that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I usually preface it by saying, are you doing something high performance or whatever? But even though it’s slower, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still in general recommend using APFS on spinning hard drives, unless you really, really need the extra performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tell me about the AirPods Max fat lightning connector. What is this about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I don’t know what it actually is. I linked to the iFixit Teardown, but they didn’t go to this level of detail. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from a tweet that somebody posted. We’re talking about how like electricity is sent through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the yolk, the little metal thing that goes over your head to the other ear cup. And it’s like some kind of brushes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something, according to that snazzy video that like touch the metal thing or whatever. someone yanked the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little yoke out of the ear cup. And what you see in the end of it is something that looks like a tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fat lightning connector with two contacts. It’s super weird looking. I mean, it’s not really a connector. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just the internals of the device. But I just think it’s funny that like the DNA of Apple’s products

⏹️ ▶️ ^John penetrates so deeply to parts that you will never see unless you literally like tear it apart. Like you’ve got the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John digital crown in the same photo. It’s like, oh, that’s from the watch. And then when it comes time to make some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of connector that you’re never going to see. This is part of the internal structure of a thing. It ends up they end up making something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, well, we’ve done connectors like this before. Why not just make it the same way we make lightning, but fatter?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there it is, this cute little two prong fat lightning thing that is inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of your earphones. Check out the picture in the show notes and or show art chapter art.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. And then somebody has stepped up to the plate to make the case we always wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, there was the first third party AirPods Max case I’ve seen. and lo and behold, it is just a regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case. Now, obviously the case maker can’t change how the AirPods Max fold,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s just a hard case. They just took a hard case and wrapped it around that shape. They put it in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little magnets to make it go into super low power mode, right? That wasn’t apparently too hard to do. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it zippers around the entire thing. It’s got a little handle, it’s got storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the inside, and it’s got a little pocket on the outside. So look at that Apple, it wasn’t so hard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For 500 and something dollars, you too could have included a case that actually encases your headphones instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of whatever that weird thing is that you included. And this is only a hundred bucks. I mean, yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an expensive case, like, you know, and it’s fancy or whatever, but like, it doesn’t have to be, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just look at the Sony case or the Bose cases. They’re not the fanciest things in the world, but it’s just a plastic shell with a zipper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around it. It’s not rocket science.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’ve already ordered this because even though I am giving the headphones to Tiff, she needs a good case too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Everyone deserves a good case. And yeah, this is from Waterfield Designs, you know, sfbags.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’ve been around forever making products for pretty much everything Apple sells and they’re pretty high quality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve had a few of their things before and they’ve been very good. So, a hundred bucks for something from them is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty reasonable.

John’s iPhone case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And speaking of cases, my final iPhone 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case finally came. I ordered this over a month and a half ago and it just came in the mail. It was from overseas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know, shipping is all weird and COVID and yada yada. So don’t blame me for this, but that’s what I’ve been waiting for. So previously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had the Apple Silicon case that I talked about in a past episode and then the Sena leather case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I talked about in a past episode. And now finally, this is the, oh, let me look up the name of this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Olexar leather iPhone 12 case. And it’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other cases that I ordered. It’s got an open bottom, so you can see the entire bottom of the phone, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can swipe up from that edge. It is black, it is leather, it has buttons that are made of metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that poke out. They’re not little leather lumps. It doesn’t have any markings other than the brand at the bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What I did was I looked at it before I decided to put it on my phone and said, am I gonna take off the center case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and put this one on? In general, I tried to only put a case on my phone once just because I feel like they get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John loose as you take the phone in and out of them. And this one looked good. The buttons…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let that go by?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s fine. The buttons were more recessed than the Sena case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they were not textured like the rough texture that I complained about then. So it’s more like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple leather case. Like if you look at the Apple leather case, it’s actually like, if you look at the volume buttons, is actually a little trough in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side of the case where the volume buttons are. So they don’t, it’s not like there’s a case and then buttons stick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out from that. There’s a divot and in the divot are the volume buttons. The volume buttons still stick out farther

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the case itself, but not as far as you would think. And then, you know, the power button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the other side. So I put it on. The leather is nowhere near as tacky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the Sena case. The Sena case is the tackiest leather case I’ve ever seen in my life. Like out of the box,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s already super grippy. Like I said, it also, the Senate case, seemed like it scratched easily. It was very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John soft. That’s part of what made it tacky. But I did like that feel. This one feels a lot more like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the Apple leather cases, but it feels, I was like, is this leather or is it plastic? It feels very hard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this is the type of leather case that’s gonna take a while to break in. I smelled it and looked at the label. So is this actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leather or did they just send me a plastic case that I just got ripped off? Pretty sure it is some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of leather or it’s plastic with a leathery smell on it. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re fooling me, but anyway. The price

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suspicious. Yeah. Yeah, it’s super cheap. Like it was like 30 bucks or something. 17. 17, yeah, whatever it was. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. I don’t think it’s plastic because it’s too soft to be plastic. It smells like leather.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It feels like leather. It’s, I don’t know. Anyway, I put it on the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is not as slippery as the phone by itself. It’s not as tacky as the Sena case. The volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buttons are in fact metal and the power button are metal and they’re black. Fit and finish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is what you would expect from a, was it 17 euros or 17 bucks? 17 US dollars. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right, the volume button fit and finish was not that great. The lower volume button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuck out way more than the higher volume button, and it was like on an angle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I was like, can I live with this? Can I live with one of my volume buttons poking out more than the other?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The answer was no, I couldn’t. So I took the phone out of the case, and then I slowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scratched away at the underside of the volume button that stuck out more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this is another reason I think it’s leather, because as I’m scratching away at it, like if you can imagine taking a little metal thing and scraping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away at leather, you know how like leather like resists, like it doesn’t, it’s not like plastic, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John felt like leather on the inside too. So I scraped away a whole bunch, put it back in, and now the volume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down button sticks out only slightly more than the volume up button no one but me would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever be able to tell. Anyway, so this is the case I’m using now. It is by far the cheapest case that I got,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it is also the closest to what I’m looking for. It is the most like the Apple case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but with no bottom on it. So for now, I’m sticking with this case. And I already knocked the phone off of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nightstand onto the floor with this case on it, and it seemed to protect it pretty well. So I’m doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, doing pretty well. I went back and looked at all my iPhone case tabs to see what other alternatives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are out there that I might be interested in buying, and none of them really stood out to me. I know there are lots of other options, but all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them had something about them that I like worse than this case that I have on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it now. So, I guess this is it. Until and unless this case totally fails

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something terrible happens to it, I’m sticking with the super cheap Olexar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case and I’m not really loving it. Oh, and one more thing about it is it has like a little plastic ring around the camera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s almost entirely flush, but not 100% entirely flush. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you lay it down flat on a hard surface, again, no human could tell this, but if you lay it down on flat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a hard surface, you can move it like a half a millimeter at one of the corners. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll deal with it. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel like that’s a good one on your gravestone. I’ll deal with it. It’s fine.

Sponsor: Boxcryptor

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Marco’s workstation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Earlier tonight, I read a fascinating tweet and it was as follows,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey selling my iMac Pro 10 core, 64 gigs RAM, 4 terabyte SSD, Vega 56. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just replaced the screen and logic board. There’s a 90 day warranty, similar use config, sell for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey such and such, and I want such and such. This tweet, this fascinating tweet written by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco Armand. What’s going on, man?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, like it says on the tin. My iMac Pro is sold,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boxed up, will be shipped out tomorrow. I got it back from Apple tonight. It’s fine, it’s perfectly working order as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far as I can tell. They did indeed replace the logic board.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You got it back tonight? Yep. And within an hour and a half, two hours, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have boxed it up and prepared it to be sold? Correct. Oh boy. All right. What’s going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, you know, without boring listeners with too much of the past details, you already know that I had my iMac Pro in for service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because of, you know, dramatically increased fan noise recently. Apple indeed diagnosed the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem as something with the fan controller on the motherboard probably, and so they replaced the entire logic board

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the display as well for unrelated reasons. They said they, there was a small chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the corner and it wasn’t noted on the way in, and so they weren’t sure if it was my fault or their fault, so they replaced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the display. Great! Well, that’s kind of nice. That’s really nice. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, when you go without an Apple desktop for a while, you know, I’ve been without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it for about, I don’t know, a week and a half, two weeks, something like that. And so, you know, I had to get used to life without

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. You know, I’m not going to just stop needing a desktop. So I basically moved in to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my MacBook Air, my new M1 MacBook Air. And not full, I didn’t transfer everything over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because there’s, first of all, not enough space to transfer everything over because I don’t have four terabytes in this MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care because it doesn’t exist yet. And so, you know, I have like I have a small minimal setup here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I’ve been getting along with it just fine. And I’ve really gotten used to, as I mentioned I think last week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just how fast a lot of things are on this machine. It is so good and before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, I’ve been kind of away from my main desktop situation for about a week, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before that I was doing all my work on this for about another week. And so I’ve done all the heavy lifting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve had it connected to the ultra fine screen, you know, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big desktop work. I’ve had it, you know, run it in clamshell mode for there. In the entire time I’ve had it working

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there so far, which admittedly was only a week or so, clamshell mode was 100% reliable. That’s impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t have a single problem entering or leaving clamshell mode, connecting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or disconnecting the cable and having anything, you know, wake up correctly. Never had an issue with sleep and wake for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, just regularly, you know, wake up when I get there in the morning. There was zero problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with clamshell mode. Never had a problem with heat or thermals because, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s already pretty low heat, and there’s no fan to go crazy anyway in the MacBook Air. I realized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this week of using it there and now this week of using it separately, you know, away from a desk,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m fine with this. This is what I need. I just need more screen space and a keyboard and mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have that there and, you know, I have the Ultra, fine. I don’t love that part of it, but otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I love this setup. When you send in an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desktop for a repair these days that requires a logic board replacement, you’re gonna get it back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco blank. And sure enough, I did. I expected that. I expected that would probably happen. I, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I made a backup and everything, but… Resetting up a computer is a lot of work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s a lot of time. You know, I’ve already had to set up this new one. That’s enough time right there. And then if I want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reset up the old one or any other desktop, I have to then clone everything back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m going to lose probably a day to the cloning process or the, you know, the reverse cloning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco process itself, followed by all the apps that are going to break because this is now a new motherboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with a new serial number. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it’s going,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything that uses DRM is going to break and have to be reauthorized, reinstalled. Like it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it’s just, it’s a big pain to do all this. And you know, this is why, again, like when, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people, whenever I have problems at, you know, every three years, I have problems with my desktop that, that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, I want to get it serviced and everyone’s just bringing it into Apple, just bring it in. What’s the big deal? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a big deal. This is a huge pain in the butt to, you know, it’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of time that you lose. It’s a lot of, you know, not only are you have to be without your computer for two weeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe, but you have the transfer process, you know, there and back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, you know, not only physically bringing it into the store and everything, which itself is time and hassle and effort, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like having to move your data off of it and then move your data back into it when it’s over. Like that’s a big pain in the butt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a huge cost and time. And frankly, I’m busy. I don’t have time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be doing that very often. I really don’t want to take that burden on unnecessarily. And this is why, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as much as I’ve loved using iMacs as my main desktops for these last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six years, it’s really frustrating whenever I have to bring it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the screen and the computer are one piece and I have to bring the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing in for a problem with one or the other, but probably not both in these cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far. And then I have to be without my main computer. And when my screen is my desktop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also have less flexibility with like, what can I do in the meantime if I have to bring this thing in for repair? You know, if I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a separate screen, like the Ultra, fine. Then I can plug my laptop into that and basically just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco resume my setup. Like change almost nothing else, which is what I did here. Like I basically changed nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else, kept the same keyboard, mouse, desk, speakers, everything else. Just moved this monitor into that setup,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco moved the iMac away, and it’s really nice to be able to just plug in a laptop. You know, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tiff has to come into my office to record a podcast, she can just plug her laptop into it and I can take mine out and bring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it upstairs. So there’s lots of nice little bonuses to having a more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flexible setup where those components are separated. That was always the whole appeal for me of a Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In addition to having the super fast performance and everything, having the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco monitor be separate from the computer, whatever form that takes, whether it’s a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a laptop, having those things be separate has significant benefits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sometimes. And for you, it might not be all the time. For me, it wasn’t all the time. But sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has massive benefits. And it’s during those times that I always curse myself for getting these iMacs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re great at all other times. But when you run into a problem with one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these parts and you have to have the whole thing sent in for service, that’s really cumbersome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but your laptop has a screen attached to it. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} thank you. I’m using it right now, actually. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if something goes wrong with that screen, you will have to actually bring the whole laptop in. Obviously that’s easier than bringing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your iMac in. But I’ll also say that if you’re getting a Mac Pro because you think it’ll be easier to bring in just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the computer part, I have bad news for you there. That’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I got an email from listener Matthew Taylor almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a month ago. Dear Marco and ATP, you guys got this too, but I’ve been talking with Matthew

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and there a little bit. But anyway, they say, Here’s what I suggest for Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Buy a second M1 MacBook Air as your main work machine and use your existing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Air as your lightweight, fun Mac. Number two, buy the Pro Display

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco XDR. If you need more ports, buy the CalDigit TS3 Plus dock.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sell the LG 5K. After repair, sell the iMac Pro. Then, wait until all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dust shakes out over the next six to 18 months on new high-end MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pros, and buy whatever you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want then. Matthew is using this setup, the MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the Pro Display XDR. And it’s apparently phenomenal. The best Mac experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco imaginable. Zero noise, ultra fast, gorgeous, tons of screen real estate and plenty of expansion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then later, this other thing that stuck out to me, all Intel Macs are rapidly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depreciating assets. We’re experiencing a once in a generation quantum

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco leap in speed and capabilities. And that kind of infected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my brain. And I’ve been thinking, you know, this is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is all like on level. Like this is totally correct. As soon as you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the M1 stuff, if it fits your need profile,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is amazing. And I understand there’s a lot of people for whom the M1 stuff does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not fit their need profile yet. I totally get that. You know, if you need more than 32 or more than 16 gigs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of RAM, you’re out of luck for now with this stuff. If you need like super high end GPU performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe if you’re like a video editor or something, this is not going to be great for you. You know, if you need more than two terabytes, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not great for you. If you need a laptop with a bigger screen, the 13 inches, again, not great for you or more than two ports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, like there’s huge holes in this lineup that are not filled yet. If you need to run Intel stuff, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you need to run windows like those, The needs for Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco machines are still going to be best served by Intel machines for a while. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my needs are none of those things, for the most part. Like, yeah, I would like more RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would like more disk space, but I’m getting by just fine for now on 16 gigs and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster in lots of things I do. In the worst case, you know, a few things are slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slower, like when I have to launch a Rosetta application that’s fairly large,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fairly large like Adobe Audition or Photoshop, yeah, it takes a couple extra bounces on the dock before it launches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Once it’s open, it’s fine, it’s fast. Like so it’s, you know, it’s not, this isn’t that big of a deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And in every other way, this machine is actually either the same or way better for me and for what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do. Again, as I mentioned in the past, I love desktops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I will probably return to desktops fairly soon. But for right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, I feel like this really is a like once in a generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of time where right now, the best computer Apple makes for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most people, unless you have one of those special needs is the MacBook Air,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which has almost no downsides at all. Like there’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even a fan, and I hate fans. By the way, we’ve had a couple of people write in to say that not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only does yes, the LG definitely have a fan, but also apparently like the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple Cinema display also has a fan. Apparently it’s fairly common for monitors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have, for big monitors to have fans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Thunderbolt display had a fan. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} think it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was funny you’re describing the ideal setup of a fanless MacBook Air connected to a monitor with multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} fans in it. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but anyway, I’ve always hated fan noise. And in recent years, I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spoiled by computers that didn’t make much fan noise for the most part. And so I’ve loved that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I don’t ever really want to go back. But when I’ve tried going laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only or laptop primary in the past, things were different. Clamshell mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sucked. And like all Intel Macs, clamshell mode still sucks. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as many of you out there know, because you do it, it works most of the time, but working

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the time is very different from working every time. And so far with the M1, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco works every time. And it’s glorious. And you know, also in the past, laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were significant compromises in performance. Or if you push them at all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they would sound like jet engines next to your desk. And those things aren’t true with this laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And before, you know, there would be like significant downsides with things like ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and another expansion. And well, if the Thunderbolt stuff ends up being reliable, Like so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco far, early reviews of the new OWC thing are very positive. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even the CalDigit thing that I have, people say like, you know, the Ethernet port and sound ports are apparently a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit buggy for some people, myself included. But everything else about it, which is most of what I’ve been using it for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone says is rock solid. So it does seem like it’s possible to get good Thunderbolt stuff these days, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if the Ethernet on the new OWC one is solid. And so it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the reasons why I have not liked laptop only setups or laptop primary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setups in the past, most of those reasons are not there anymore or at least are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco significantly reduced. And it might only be for the next six months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know this is a unique time maybe in six months when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know new maybe new M1 Macs or maybe new M whatever based iMacs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will be out by then, or the 16-inch MacBook Pro will be out by then, or I don’t expect whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new rumored Mac Pro is, that maybe that’s gonna be a significant later than that, but in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a couple years, maybe I won’t wanna be using a MacBook Air. In six months,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe I won’t, maybe in six months, I’ll say, oh man, this new M1X-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iMac or whatever is so good, I’m going to relegate the laptop back to secondary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco status. But right now, during this period, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the only computer I want to use. It’s that good. And I totally love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using it. And when I have used it with the monitor and the keyboard and mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s been just as good as a desktop for my needs. You know, I just, I could use more storage space.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s about it. I also looked up the trade-in value

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the Mac Mini that I bought earlier, I think early 2020 for Studio B upstairs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which we’re not using anymore because of our different situation now. We’re not using Studio B anymore, so this Mac Mini’s just been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sitting there. This is where the LG 5K came from. It used to be the monitor for this Mac Mini. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the trade-in value for it on Apple’s trade-in thing is like $650.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can get a new, and it’s low, it’s only eight gigs and 512 gig storage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can get a new M1 Mac Mini that is also eight gigs and is also 512 storage for like $200

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more than that. It’s not much more than that. So I’m gonna trade this in too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I already filled out their form earlier tonight. I’m trading this into Apple. I’m gonna trade it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I order myself an M1 Mac Mini to serve as a home server. And that’s going to solve my large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco storage needs for now. I’m gonna do, you know, my laptop only has one terabyte and it’s too late

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to return it and two terabyte ones are back-ordered until February. Anyway, I’m gonna do exactly what I told

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ASCII ATP writer last week to do about large photo storage. Right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t have any Macs that are signed into my iCloud account that have all the photos on them, but I’m gonna use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new Mac Mini to do exactly that with an external hard drive. It’s totally fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So now I will make my primary computer not have all the photos on it, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine, as long as I have something with all the photos on it, I’m fine. I’m gonna try to live on one terabyte as my primary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computer, which is not gonna be incredibly simple, but with some discipline,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’ll be totally reasonable to do. Many people out there do it. I’ve lived on that before on my primary,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it’s been a while, but I have a bit more fish since then. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll be fine. And that’s gonna be what I use for now. And I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see, again, I’m not gonna make any promises. I know myself well enough to know that as soon as Apple releases something better and faster, I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rationalize getting it. But for now, I’m going to do this exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setup. I’m going to have this MacBook Air, and I’m going to bring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the LG 5K back from the beach because I hate it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that will be my non-beach monitor at my alternate setup here. And at the beach,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m going to buy another LG 5K. Just kidding. I ordered the XDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was going to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lost a tremendous bet with myself. Oh, okay. All’s right in the world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I, uh, the thought of you not setting money aflame for the fun of it is just so foreign to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me. So, okay. The Pro Display XDR. Now I am a little, I am a little surprised though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Can, can you tell me why? I’m trying to figure out a way to phrase this question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t actually take any particular issue with anything you’ve said. It’s obviously your right to do whatever you want. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think it makes sense. But if you like desktops so darn much, first of all, why don’t you marry them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, but no, why not get like, like why not use the Mac Mini as the primary and use the Air as a satellite?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I might do that. So the Mac Mini, the M1 Mac Mini is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna arrive because I ordered it with the storage I should have ordered on the first one. It’s not gonna arrive until like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mid February.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh, that’s a bummer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I basically, I ordered it with the max out configuration, first of all, because it wasn’t that much money because this M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff is fantastic. Second of all, I wanna leave that option open. So like I got a configuration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that leaves that door open so that if I want to, when the Mac Mini arrives,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can make it my desktop. I do like having two computers. Like, it is nice for, in other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways, you know, as much as I was talking last week, how nice it is to just have one. Like, there are advantages to having two as well. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are advantages to having a desktop that’s always plugged in, always set up, you know, always has all your Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your SSH connections open, and all the windows are in the right places. Like, you know, there are certainly advantages to that, and I’m gonna see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how that goes over time. But for now, my plan is to keep the laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as primary, But, you know, I’ll reevaluate that decision when the Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco arrives in February. But until then, I’m fine with it. And either way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m going all M1 and external monitors,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s going to be it. Because it’s such a nice setup. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more mobile this year than in the past. Looking forward at how our family plans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to live for the next few years, we are probably going to stay fairly mobile for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a while. And so I have a need for more mobile setup than I had before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is just working so darn well in so many ways. I’m really enjoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. And so that’s it. And, you know, we’ll see what happens down the road. Maybe I’ll get the mini Mac Pro that Mark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Gurman thinks exists. But until then, I’m going to have, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a laptop and a Mac mini serving all of my needs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have two sets of questions for you. One, how did you not manage to find a way to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a non-gold MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this equation? Like you give that one to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} TIFF, you order

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the non-gold one with two terabytes. Like is that not in the mix somewhere? What’s happening

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that front?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If my gold one terabyte model was still under the holiday return

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, I might’ve considered doing some kind of a swap like that, but it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not a swap, like an additional, an additional non-gold MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, the gold’s not really that big of a problem for me. Like, it’s a weird color. I knew that going into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. In certain lights, it looks a little more pink than what I would prefer. In certain lights,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it looks weirdly orange, which is kind of cool. Like, it’s a weird color, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I still like that because I don’t get excited at all about the silver or the gray at all. Like, I look at those and I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is the same old computer that I’ve seen a million times, that I’ve owned a million times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so having it be this weird orange, pink, gold thing makes it seem new,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even though it’s kind of an odd color and in certain lights I don’t like how it looks, it at least looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fresh and new, which it is on the inside. And it’s kind of nice to have the outside, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, convey that to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, and second set of questions, nano, non-nano, and did you get the stand?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I got the stand and I got non-nano because I was a little concerned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the cleaning aspect of it, of the Nano, and I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using a glass-fronted monitor in this exact position for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six months, and it’s been totally fine, so I don’t expect to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need the Nano texture where it’s going.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, so this is the law of conservation of fans in your office. You get a computer without them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get a monitor with some, we’ll maintain the same amount. Yep. Well, this all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds good, because I feel like as you change computers, six months or whatever from now, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be able to like pass things on. So the laptop that say you decide you wanna get something else, whatever that something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else may be, that laptop can get passed down very easily to be useful as a small light laptop for anyone else in the household

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who wants to use it or even just for you to use as your lightweight computer. And then you can rotate in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, a beefier Mac mini or a half-size Mac Pro or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even if you get an iMac, right? You could still have the iMac and still have this big screen to use the big screen to hook up to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of the laptops that’s floating around, right? So you have a lot of options now with these modular components. I still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think you have a little bit of a risk area in the hub zone. I mean, I know you’re working

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that. You got the ODSC one coming. We’ll see how that goes and the CalDigit and everything in the mix,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is why maybe an iMac will be attractive because maybe by the time that comes down the pike, you’re sick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of dealing with Thunderbolt and hubs and stuff. And you’re just like, ah, just gonna get the new iMac because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a touchscreen and it’s really cool new design or whatever. But we’ll see, I think you have a reasonable path

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forward for all your weird computing needs. Now that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finally gotten over the hump that took me a while to get over as well to buy the horrendously expensive monitor that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very big.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I’ve heard from other people who have it since last week as well. And everyone who I’ve heard from says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the same thing. It’s fantastic, just do it. Like, just buy the thing, it’s great. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I still don’t feel good about how much it costs, but I will move past that as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do with every Apple price.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’ll be painful. And the good thing is, when Apple comes out with a better monitor, it will be like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John six years from now. Like when the OLED Apple display comes out, it’ll be so long from now, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because they have proven they do not update. Remember we were waiting for them to come out with new monitors? Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what was the biggest one? I think the 30 inch went away. I don’t know if you guys were

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in the scene at this time, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 30 inch went away, And we’re like, well, when are they gonna replace the 30 inch and just years would pass and nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would happen. Then eventually we just forgot the 30 inch ever existed. And it was like, well, the 27 inches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are out, but I think they’re probably gonna have new displays. This was in our time. They’re probably gonna have a new 27 inch soon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that just never materialized. Or when it came, it was just like the Thunderbolt one, but it was the same exact display

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with just weird pigtail stuff. Like the good and bad thing about the 6K

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is I feel like it is a product line that Apple, that when Apple obsoletes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, they’re gonna take their sweet time. Because they’re just gonna keep selling this thing for the same exact price, long after all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the technology in it is outdated. And then finally, at some point, after the next round table in 2027,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll be like, oh, here’s the new, you know, micro LED, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not micro, what is it? I get confused.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} What’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one where every individual pixel is an LED?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, that’s micro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, or nano or

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} something. I got it right then, okay, yeah. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s the new micro LED 8K display, and that’ll be like 2030. So, despite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this monitor being ridiculously overpriced, at least you will have a long period of time to let

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that overpricedness soak in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the only thing that will really annoy me is if they really do release

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a 5K 27 inch monitor for like $2,000. I was just thinking that. In like six months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The odds of that happening are actually much higher than them replacing the 6K with an 8K or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if that happens, I think you’ll be fine because you’ll be like, yeah, but now I’m used to 6K and if we go back to 5K, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel small. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, when I first got my monitor, at first it felt so big I didn’t know where to look, and then like a half an hour later, it’s just normal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now if I look at it, I go back to my wife’s 5K, I’m like, oh, look at that, how do you get by with this small screen? So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, you just get used to having the extra real estate. And so when they come out with the 5K, you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel bad that it’s like less than half the price or whatever, and you would have been perfectly happy with it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now you’re not gonna be happy. It’s like, why would I get a smaller screen?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, yeah, probably. Well, because I will be coming back periodically to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the place where I’ll have the LG 5K. And also I have to do some work on that periodically. So that’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’ll remind me every like, you know, every every month or two, like, oh, crap, this look, look at how small this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s gonna be worse in other ways. Like, I can tell you that your your pro display

⏹️ ▶️ ^John XDR will not shake when you type

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it better not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the $1,000 stand on it. Okay, see, as someone in the chat room pointed out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got an XDR last year, Marko, and this year, 2021 is your year, so start saving now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t, I, I’m thinking to myself, man, in so many ways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what Marco is describing is very appealing, like leaving the money aside just for a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, I think for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey either reasonable or unreasonable reasons that I would prefer a 13-inch MacBook Pro. I’d really like four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ports and I don’t mind the touch bar. Like Like I don’t actively like it, but I don’t actively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dislike it either. And so I’ve already been kind of planning that when the direct

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey replacement for my current laptop comes out, which would be a 13 inch four port MacBook Pro, I’ll probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go ahead and upgrade it. But I’m hearing you talk about the Pro Display XDR, and I’m hearing you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talk about the one computer lifestyle, which was my lifestyle for a long time. And I just keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thinking, man, that does sound good, But I cannot imagine being able to justify

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to myself spending, what, $7,000 on a computer monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much less sending it through the family CFO, who would have very strong opinions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about this particular idea. So yeah, I just don’t see it happening.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But if you would like it to happen, listeners, atp.fm.com join. May I strongly recommend. It’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be a great idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, seriously, Casey, for you, I would say, suck up your pride,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sell the new 13-inch, and get this Air instead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s, you know, I don’t think it’s about pride. It’s just that I don’t mind being wrong about having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gotten the laptop. I think the laptop was a good purchase and I made it at the right time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey needed to make it. I just, I have convinced myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for, you know, right, wrong, or indifferent that I don’t want to lose the four ports. Now, if you start quizzing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me about how often do I use all four ports? You know, is this really a problem? The answer is almost never a no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I really, I really don’t love the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey losing what I’ve got. And the same way you were talking about not loving the idea of going from 6K to 5K, like, could you go from 6K

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to 5K one day? Oh yeah, absolutely. You could. But do you want to? Eh, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not. I would love to have four ports on this thing. Like that, that is something that I do miss.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would love to have four ports. And if there is ever a 13-inch 4-port

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco model that I hear is totally silent in practice, maybe I would switch to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or maybe I will go back up to the 16 someday, I don’t know. I do like the big size frequently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, you know, we’ll see how that goes. But this, like, and I think it is important to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clarify, like, and for, you know, for you and for anybody else who’s bought an Intel Mac recently and kind of now regrets it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, we had no idea. First of all, First of all, we had no idea when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco each product line would be updated, and we had no idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how much faster things would be even on the low-end machines. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} knew the ARM chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were fast. We knew they were fast in the context

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a phone or an iPad, and we could see the Geekbench scores and we could say, wow, these things are pretty competitive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with desktops and single-thread stuff. But I don’t think anybody had any idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the public, you know, as buyers or as commenters like us on podcasts, we didn’t have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco idea that, you know, when you were buying your 13-inch, what, six months ago?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steven Horwitz Yeah, it was, it was like late May, early June.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Charles Kovacs So like, you know, seven or eight months ago, we had no idea that in seven months from then, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be this radical improvement in the lineup that would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so massive to that exact product line or to a very similar product line as that one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You couldn’t have known. The good thing is, right now, these things are all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still worth money at resale because a lot of people still need Intel stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you don’t, you can take advantage of this time and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get a whoopsie, undo. Let me undo my Mac Mini. purchase

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I made earlier this year I am literally trading it in for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost the entire price of a new one that’s way better than it. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a good time to have some recent Intel Mac hardware to sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and to not need anything that the current M1s can’t do or don’t address very well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like again if I was like doing video stuff where I need not only big screens but also like tons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of of multi-threaded GPU performance. These are not great for that kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you have a Mac Pro or iMac Pro at your disposal instead, those are better for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I don’t do that. I did briefly once, but I don’t do that now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And for what I do, this is fantastic. And for many people do, this is fantastic. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really is, as Matthew Taylor’s email said, this is a once in a generation jump.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is a really massive shift in the industry. I do agree that Intel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Macs are rapidly depreciating assets, or they will be soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So much is better on the M1 already. And I also think that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has the best of intentions. They’re gonna keep supporting the Intel Macs for a while, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whether your Mac is on Apple Silicon or Intel is going to be a line in the sand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for software updates and compatibility down the road. We don’t know when,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how far down the road that’s going to happen, but a Mac bought today that has an Apple chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in it will get software updates and will probably be useful to people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a longer period of time than an Intel machine bought today. So it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a distinction that I think has great value over time in addition to just how much nicer they are and things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like heat and noise and stuff like that. I do think this is worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taking advantage of if your needs can be met with these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I hear you. And it makes a lot of sense to unload one or both of my computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now when they’re still worth a lot more. But I don’t know. I don’t change computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like I change underwear, unlike some of us. So I’m reluctant to do anything at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey moment, especially since I would be getting something that is sufficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but not what I really and truly want. Like I’m the kind of person that I’d rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wait for what I really and truly want, even if that ends up costing me a little bit in a loss of resale

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey value in the thing that I’ve currently got.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right.

John’s PS5 review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We got to move on because we’ve been told that dad is going to be real upset at us if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he doesn’t get a chance to talk about his new toys. So John, the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has finally come. We cannot procrastinate anymore because you said you were going to do it this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tell me about your PlayStation 5, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I forget if we, if I talked about that I wanted to do the PlayStation 5 review before the end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the year in the bootleg or the regular show, but it is the thing I wanted to do. I’ve had a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PlayStation 5 since launch. Yes, I’m very lucky to get one. Thank you very much to a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John listener who helped me out in this endeavor. And I wanted to talk about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t give you a super comprehensive review for a couple of reasons. One, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John consoles launch, there’s not always a lot of games that take advantage of them, or not a lot of games, period.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And two, even if there were, I wouldn’t be playing those games. But I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what my experience has been and why I got it to begin with. Why did I even want a launch PlayStation 5?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wanted it for one main reason. I play Destiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time, I’ve talked about that before. I got my fancy Mac and this big fancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen and my big fancy video card, partly so that I could play Destiny in a way that I hadn’t played

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it before, play the PC version of Destiny. The PC version of Destiny has two things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my old PlayStation 4 Pro did not have. Well, a couple things. One, uncapped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frame rate. The PlayStation 4 versions of Destiny have been capped at 30 frames per second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the PC version has not been, so the PC version will play it as fast as you can possibly play it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And two, HDR. The PlayStation 4 version of Destiny I believe did support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HDR, but I don’t have an HDR monitor connected to my PlayStation 4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my ridiculously expensive aforementioned Pro Display XDR turns out to be an HDR display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I spent a lot of time and energy getting Windows 10 to run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Destiny through Steam on my HDR monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at high frame rates, at high resolution. And we talked about this on past shows, I couldn’t get it to run well at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 6K because my video card is just not strong enough, but at 4K I could get comfortably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over 60 frames per second with HDR and it was pretty super cool. The other thing that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PC version of Destiny has that the console version does

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an adjustable field of view. And that’s basically like how wide you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see. Like if you had a 360 degree field of view, you could see everything in front of you and in back of you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all on your flat screen, right? And if you had a very narrow field of view, you could just see the stuff that’s right in front of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you. So it’s, if you kind of think of it as like a fisheye lens, the wider the field of view, the more things look kind of fisheye, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um, the where this becomes irrelevant for console versus pc is the narrower the field of view

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fewer triangles are in view and the fewer things need to be drawn by the gpu

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so a higher field of view all other things being equal uh takes more you know computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power to display and just like the uncapped frame rates on pc the pc platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have variable hardware and if you have really beefy hardware you can do things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have more pixels and higher frame rate and yes a bigger field of view. So up until,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the PlayStation 5, my choice was I could play on console at 30 frames

⏹️ ▶️ ^John per second with the whatever the default field of view was, like 75 degrees or something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or I could play on my quote-unquote PC at 4k 60 frames per second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and up to a field of view of 105. And the reason, by the way, the reason you want a wider

⏹️ ▶️ ^John field of view is if you’re playing PvP, which is what I play a lot of, a wider field of view basically gives you better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John peripheral vision, so you can see more, you have a better situational awareness of what’s going on around me, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to my left, what’s to my right, because it is giving you a wider, literally a wider view of the world in the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitor, right? So, I wanted a PlayStation 5 because I knew,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based on Bundy’s announcement, that the PlayStation 5 version of Destiny was going to offer higher

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frame rates than 30 frames per second, minimum of 60 frames per second up to 120 frames per second

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the PVP mode for a slight downgrading graphical quality and adjustable field of view

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and also HDR. So, and what do I do with my console

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time? I play Destiny. I do it all the time, right? So I got my PlayStation 5 basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I could continue playing the exact same game that I’d been playing in PlayStation 4 but now I get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to play it at 60 frames per second at 105 degree field of view and if I had an HDR monitor I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could be playing in HDR. I don’t have an HDR monitor. I didn’t buy one because as far as I’m aware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are no monitors available right now that support HDMI 2.1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is what the PlayStation 5 outputs at and are HDR, IPS and support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 120 frames per second from the PS5. You can get an OLED TV that does that but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the smallest they come in is 48 inches and that is way too big for the place where I play this. I have a 27 inch display here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right so I’m still waiting for someone to put out a 27 inch IPS HDR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John panel with a nice stand that’s not ugly that does 120 frames per second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So right now I’m just playing at 60. Good luck with that. Oh, they’re coming. They’re absolutely coming. Like there’s a market for this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The only reason it’s just because HDMI 2.1 is so new that only the new Xbox console, the PS5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supported all the other consoles didn’t because they were previous generation, right? So these monitors are coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re probably going to be expensive, but whatever. but for now I’m dealing without the HDR.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s what I did when I got a PlayStation 5. I was like, great, I have a, I had to wait actually for another Destiny update and there was a recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expansion to Destiny, right? So this is my new Destiny playing machine, which is a boring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to use a new console, but it wasn’t boring to me because this is what I’ve been waiting for. And it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean that my Mac is retired from doing this because my Mac can also crank up the graphics a little bit higher than the PS5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can and there are other games that I play on it and the Mac is still the only thing with HDR display, but in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I get to play Destiny better. That said, the PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes with a game already installed on it. I don’t know if it comes with the game disc if you buy the disc one, but I got the digital

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, so there’s no disc drive in it. And it came with Astro’s Playroom installed, which is more of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a tech demo, if you think kind of, well, people have been comparing it to Nintendo Land, but I think it’s even more slight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than that. Nintendo Land came with the Wii U to sort of demonstrate the new capabilities. Astro’s Playroom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a cute little platformer from Sony where you just make this little robot guy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hop around and do platforming things. And all the levels are filled with Sony

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nostalgia. Like there’s lots of little robots that are acting out scenes from famous PlayStation games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the background and everything. And what you collect at the end are these shiny, high fidelity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John models of Sony hardware. And then you get to put, you know, it’s a very Sony type thing. But the whole point of this is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John demonstrate The capabilities of your new console, and in particular, the capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the new controller, the DualSense controller. They’re really stuck on the dual shock. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was the dual shock two, three, four? Was it always dual shock? I forget what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now it’s DualSense. And I’m sure you’ve seen reviews of this controller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you keep up with the console space. You may think, okay, so it’s a controller with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different motorized little thingies inside it. So what? Right, that’s why Astro’s Playroom is here, Because I’m not sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much third-party games are going to take advantage of all the features of this controller. Certainly Destiny 2 doesn’t take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John full advantage of it. And in fact, I have Rumble turned off in Destiny because it messes with my aim in PvP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But Asterisk Playroom is a… First of all, it’s a fun little game to play.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re a Sony fan, the nostalgia thing really works. But it is an amazing demo of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the controller. The controller, basically the things that it has in it that it didn’t have before are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fancier vibration motors, bigger, fancier vibration motors. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think about it as the difference between like the vibration motor and maybe the iPhone 3G,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? I think that was the last one to have the little motor that turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a semicircle weight attached

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} to the end of the axle. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what used to be in most controllers, right? And of course in modern iPhones we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the haptic engine which is that linear, whatever the hell it’s called. Yeah, it’s more like a speaker driver. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in the DualSense, but either way, it’s a more sophisticated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of vibration thing that you can programmatically control to a much finer degree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s got that, and then it’s also got motors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are able to resist you pulling the triggers, which sounds like something you would think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would like break or like, well, you know, you can’t stop me from pulling the triggers with these tiny little motors. Like, how is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that even gonna work? Like, it’s basically like when you pull the trigger, it turns a little, through a series of gears, it turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little corkscrew gear on the axle of the motor, and that’s it. And you control electricity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the motor to oppose that force, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s, and it’s also, what is it? It’s got a touch pad on, and it’s got a bunch of little things, got a microphone built in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s got a bunch of other features, but those vibration and trigger haptics are the main additions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But because both of them are able to be controlled so precisely by the game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Astro’s Playroom demos this very well. You can make experiences

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that feel different than they did with previous generation consoles. So Astro’s Playroom has you run across

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sand and ice and rocks and jump off of things and land on things. And all of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just like, okay, well, we’ll make the vibration motor vibrate a different amount. How can you make vibrating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a different amount feel like ice versus feel like sand versus feel like mud? They managed to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, obviously you’re still holding a controller. You don’t feel mud on the bottom of your feet. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not VR, right? But it is way better than the old haptics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it is fun. It adds an element of, you know, immersion to the game. And then the trigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John resistance, I thought would be annoying, but it’s kind of amazing how much it feels like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s a hardware feature. Like, oh, suddenly my controller has a stop midway through where you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to press real hard and then you go through the stop and it gets easy, right? You can do things like that where they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not, you know, they haven’t mechanically changed your controller, but it feels like now it’s a two-step controller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or a three-step one. And now it’s hard to press, and now it’s easy to press. Like, you know, they have a thing where you have to control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the triggers to control these paws of a robotic monkey. And every time you reach and grasp

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for something and click onto it, it becomes easy once you grab it, right? Very cool features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are basically, it reminds me of the Wii U, and it’s like, all right, technologically, it’s not that amazing. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a controller with motors in it, but it’s an experience you haven’t had before while playing a console game. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wii U had way more of these. It’s a console that almost nobody used. And it’s a shame because I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nintendo Land on the Wii U was an amazing demonstration of a ton of different fun mechanics

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in games that had never been seen before and haven’t been seen since. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how many games are gonna take advantage of this, but Astro’s Playroom demonstrates the potential

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it to be super cool. Like to give a recent example, if The Last of Us

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Part III was a thing that ever existed. Like that type of game, I can imagine benefiting immensely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from this type of controller. So it’s not in such a gimmicky, you know, fun way as Asterisk Playroom, but just sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John woven into the way the game plays. It would be super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And speaking of the controller, iOS 14.3 beta is how old the story was. According to iMore, the beta had support,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John added support for the PS5 controller to iOS. I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tested it with 14.3 release, but I assume that it’s in there. So you could always use the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not always, but in the past versions of iOS, you could use the PlayStation 4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controller with your iPad or iPhone, and I’ve done that several times, and now you can use the PS5 controller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Those are the only games I’ve played on the PlayStation 5 is Astro’s Playroom, which I finished and it was fun,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and tons and tons of Destiny. So the only other thing I have to add to this review of the PS5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to talk about the controller, my favorite thing in the world. Not the parts that I talked about, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the controller as a controller. So aesthetically, it’s like the rest of the PlayStation 5 where they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to do a two-tone thing where it’s a white shell wrapped around a black interior. I was worried about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that because that’s entirely an aesthetic thing. There’s nothing mechanically about, it’s not actually a white shell wrapped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around a black interior. That’s a design element. And I don’t want additional seams or gaps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or here’s the shell and here’s the interior on the controller because that’s not, it’s just gonna make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it uncomfortable, right? So I was worried about that and also they changed the shape subtly from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the DualShock 4, whatever the PlayStation 4 controller was, and I love the PlayStation 4 controller shape-wise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought they did a good job. This is a different shape, but this shape is also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good. They managed to keep the seams away from where my hands go on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controller, so the fact that they have a, you know, black interior and white exterior. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is… not… not relevant to how I hold the controller, which was a relief.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Um… They did something clever with the buttons. Uh, if you’re wondering if the layout’s changed, it’s the same layout

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the DualShock 4. As all the DualShocks. So the D-pad is where the analog stick should be, but whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know. It’s… it’s the way it’s always been. The buttons are still in an exact diamond shape, the two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John analog sticks are in the same place, like everything is the same. So no real movement of the major control elements, but the buttons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, I think they did this for aesthetics But it’s smart design wise as well. The buttons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are clear which looks cool the reason it’s smart design wise is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Each of the buttons has a particularly the buttons on the right side this triangle circle X and square, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those symbols are Underneath a clear piece of plastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the symbols are not printed on the top of the clear piece You can see them by looking through the you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Four millimeter thick piece of clear plastic which means that no matter how much you press these buttons You’re never gonna wear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the symbols off and that’s a problem with lots of controllers now Most people use the controllers don’t need to see the symbols

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But your control looks crappy if after a long time the X is slowly wearing off because you have you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then alien acid Stuff coming out of your fingers and we all know people like this and something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can’t help like how acidic Or is the ooze that comes out of your fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just look at someone’s laptop keyboard look to see if the e key is slowly Disappearing right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even just the keys being polished or whatever it’s same thing with game controllers if you are unlucky and have that type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Hand secretions you’ll wear the symbols off your control that doesn’t look good. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solve the problem. You’re never gonna wear these off They’re under they’re under a really thick layer of clear plastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The actual plastic of the controller The bottom half, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t realize this until I got it in real life, the bottom half of the controller is textured plastic. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John textured in this a little bit too cute way that Sony textured the PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John console itself in that you know, it’s white plastic and it feels a little bit rough, but if you zoom way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way in you see the roughness is not just a random stippling pattern. It is those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John symbols which have become part of the PlayStation brand. Triangle, circle, X, and square. There are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, thousands and millions of triangles, circles, Xs and squares, tiny, tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones, making up the texture of the plastic. It’s very clever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s very cool, but you can’t see it unless you zoom way, way in. Texturing just the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bottom half is nice because texturing for grip is good,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like it is rougher, right? And so I’m kind of glad that the part where my,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, where I’m pressing the buttons, I’m not scraping my finger against a rougher plastic on the top surface, because the top

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surface is not textured. So that’s a nice touch. The only problem with the texturing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, and the fact that the controller is white, is that where my fingers contact the textured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bottom, it is slowly removing dirt and grime from my fingers and depositing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it onto the white controller. So this started out as a white controller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and now it’s a white controller with some slowly darkening smudge marks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from my human fingers rubbing against the bottom of the controller. They do make a black version of the controller now too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and this will be far less visible there. I think the white controller looks cooler. Maybe I’ll have to actually wash

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And believe me, I’m washing my hands before I use my PlayStation 5. I’m not going in super dirty, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that like the texture is rough enough to slowly exfoliate, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, gently exfoliate your under controller fingers, adding a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John darkening mark there. The fact that the controller has a microphone built into it and a mute button on it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is great for people. Like it lowers a barrier to entry of like, I don’t wanna have a headset, I don’t wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use like a little earbud. Those little earbud that came with the PS4 was always so delicate and so easy to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John break. You just wanna be able to play right out of the box. If you don’t care about audio quality or whatever, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got a microphone there already. The Astros Playroom does the same thing from the, who did this first? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Switch? No, I don’t know. So whatever Nintendo console first did the thing where you blow into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John controller and like a fan spins on the screen. Do you guys remember that? No. I’m sorry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to ruin this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t, I’ve never heard of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The surprise and delight for some. So sorry, maybe it was the DS. Sorry to ruin the surprise and delight, but there’s like a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John party games. I think maybe it was on Nintendo DS. And it’s at one point you’re confronted with like a pinwheel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like those little kiddie pinwheels, you know, and to progress you have to blow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s because the DS or whatever it was has a microphone on it, and once you figure out that you had to blow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in real life and the microphone picks up the static of you blowing, it’s amazing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Because it’s a very simple trick, a simple gag with very simple hardware, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first time you figure that out and it works, you’re like, wow, this is magic, and then you eventually figure out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how they did it. But I can’t remember who did it first. There’s lots of examples from later Nintendo history.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m thinking it was probably the DS. But anyway, Sony does it on the PS5 too in the Astro’s playroom,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only they kind of ruin the surprise by telling you, blow, blow into the controller. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, you know, it’s a little bit better with a handheld because the handheld has to be in front of you where the controller is in your lap. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do kind of have to tell you to pick the controller up. Having a mute button on the controller is nice too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s got built-in rechargeable batteries instead of replaceable, which I like. I like it to be built in and sealed. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little recharging nubbins so you can put it in this little recharging dock or you can just plug it in. It’s USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yay, finally. And the console itself has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB C ports and USB a ports including USB a ports in the back Which is nice because Sony’s wireless headphones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still require USB a port But you don’t want to see that sticking out the front. The USB C port is faster I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bought a new USB C thumb drive to transfer my destiny recordings that I make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John videos out of why Because for some reason Sony thinks the only way to get data off a PlayStation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is through a thumb drive It’s connecting to the network. What year is this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where’s my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} computer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John These are full-fledged computers. Please let me transfer data from my PlayStation 5 directly to my Mac. They’re like, nope.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Would you like to write it to a USB thumb drive? So that’s why I have to get like the fastest possible USB thumb

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drive to max out the speed available on the fastest USB port

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the PlayStation 5. But these videos are huge, so. And you can record in 4K now, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is nice. I don’t think you can record it over 30 frames per second. I have to look at the captures to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what frame rate I’m getting from but that’s another Potential advantage of the new console if you manually initiate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a recording you can record it 4k if you don’t manually initiate it It’s just always recording right? It’s always recording like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a 30-minute buffer or whatever Which is a great feature that debuted in the PlayStation 4 and I still use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you don’t have to think about recording It’s just after something cool happens in the game You just say great and you said let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capture that the PlayStation 5 has more granularity of how much you can record it’ll say like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you want me to capture the last five minutes last 30 seconds the last 30 minutes whatever so you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to constantly make these videos that are a fixed length long like I always used to make 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minute long videos even if I just wanted the last 30 seconds because that was the only option available unless you went to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the preferences or whatever so yeah PlayStation 5 my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John review is thumbs up if you want to play destiny and play it better than you were playing it before The PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does an amazing job. Oh, I guess one more thing fan noise PlayStation 5 is huge. LOL

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you get for that hugeness is The fan noise is less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than it’s less than the original PlayStation 4. It’s less than the PlayStation 4 Pro It is both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quieter and less annoying. It is not silent. You can hear it It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a humongous fan in there, but the humongous fan makes a more pleasant noise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at a lower volume And I never see my PS5 because it is hidden away underneath

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the desk that I’m playing on But it is massive so measure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whether you have room for this stupid thing in your life, it’s massive and it’s not particularly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attractive But I don’t really care does the job. So anyway PlayStation 5 you should go out and buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one I think they’re available in stores everywhere. Ha ha ha Not that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know. Oh, well good. I’m glad we covered that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. And you guys should pick up some PlayStation 5s as soon as you can, because they’ll be very important for when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we do the ATP Plays Destiny Together member special sometime in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John distant future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When that happens, I’ll pick one up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. You can get the PlayStation 5 Slim, which will be slightly smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’ll be a 1U rack mount case. It’s slim. Bye.

Oculus Quest 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, you have gotten some Christmas gifts that you’d like to discuss with us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, so one gift that I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ostensibly for my kid, but it’s kind of like a family gift in practice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a family of gamers. I did not get a PS5 for anybody or have one given to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because we don’t really want one yet. But we’ve been kind of curious about VR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a little while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we are a family of me plus gamers. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we tried VR back years ago at XOXO in Portland.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We went to somebody’s office who had the, I believe it was the HTC Vive, it was one of the very first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mainstream VR headsets that was available. And we tried it for like five minutes and just like punched some boxes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around in some kind of demo room or something. And it was interesting. But that was the only experience I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with it, really. Our family was curious about it. And again, Adam and Tiff are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty heavy gamers. I’m kind of a casual, sometimes gamer. And so I decided,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had heard amazing things about VR, but the thing that always turned me off about it was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need for a gaming PC. Some PC that you either had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a long wire that was wired to, that you had to make sure you don’t trip over the wire, get it tangled up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in your arms or whatever, which doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Or I know people have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tried things like building backpacks that have the PC in the backpack so you don’t have to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the long wire. But instead you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have it. That sounds safe. Yeah. Because people never fall down when they’re using VR, right? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That seemed like a solution that, you know, if that works for you, great, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that wasn’t gonna work for us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like those backpack vacuum cleaners, you know? Yeah. You use if you have to vacuum a large place but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t want to be lugging behind the canister. You just put it on your back and with the same amount of noise, too. Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. And I figured also that wouldn’t have a good chance of working on our eight year old kid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very well either. So yeah, we ruled that option out for now. And we weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna build an entire gaming PC desktop just to try to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if we like VR or not. Because I didn’t know, our family is sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sensitive to motion sickness. So I’m not gonna invest in a giant desktop PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gaming rig only to find out five seconds into gaming, oh, none of us can do this because it makes us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all motion sick. Anyway, so I decided, I had heard about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Oculus, not the Go, what’s the other one? The other wireless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oculus thing. Their names, I keep forgetting. Is it the Quest and the Quest 2? Is that the one? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Quest, okay. So I had heard about the Oculus Quest earlier this year. Our friend CGP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Grey got one and was raving about how good it was. and I looked into what that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was, and I learned that it’s a VR headset that is self-contained, that there’s no wire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that runs to a PC, it is just self-contained, and it runs lower-end but usable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware in the helmet. And that sounded great to me. That sounded exactly like what we were looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for, for like, we want an entry into the world of VR, but we don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the big, full-sized rig, and we don’t really care that much about the hardware trade-offs required to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get that. So, great. There was a downside in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook owns Oculus and they made this decision that I’m still not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sure why they made it but Facebook decided to basically end Oculus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accounts sometime soon and require all new purchasers of these VR

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco headsets to use Facebook accounts to manage the headset itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to log into the headset, to use it, to manage all your purchases and all your online gameplay and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to require a Facebook account for VR headset is as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco baffling as it sounds and has angered many people to the point where if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you look at any review of the Oculus Quest or Quest 2 it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filled with people who are super angry about this and are refusing to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their Oculus hardware or refusing to buy new Oculus hardware as a result. Frankly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know why it’s worth it for Facebook to continue and not relent on this front, but they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco continuing and not relenting on this front so far. So anyway, again, I don’t know why. It seems to make no sense to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why Facebook would continue to push this for seemingly very little gain,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and for a gain they don’t really need. Anyway, they are. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you don’t have a Facebook account, or you don’t wanna tie

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your Facebook activity to this piece of hardware that needs to know it for no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reason, then this is not for you. And I understand that. I didn’t have a Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco account for a while, but I did keep using Instagram. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no difference there. And so I tweeted about this the other day. I’ve decided that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I recently needed to recreate a Facebook account for various real life purposes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are not interesting to the show, but I had to make a Facebook account. I realized like I’m being stupid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. I’ve continued to use Instagram this entire time and I’ve been like I don’t have a Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco account But like that that makes no difference if I’m using Instagram. I wasn’t achieving anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by not having a Facebook account I wasn’t making any kind of real stand about my politics or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my privacy by not having Facebook but having Instagram So I decided well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I needed a Facebook account for some real-life reasons So I’m like, fine, I’ll just create a stupid Facebook account,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’ll put nothing in it, except for the bare minimum that I need to get this stuff done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I had one, and so I could connect it to the Oculus hardware. So, that was not a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for me, but if it’s a problem for you, I understand completely. Anyway, so I decided to get the Quest 2,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which was released a few months back, and had great reviews, and I couldn’t find- besides the Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, I couldn’t find anything wrong with it in the reviews. So we got it, gave it to Adam on Christmas morning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He absolutely flipped his mind. Like, he was so happy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, he basically exploded. Um, and so it went very well as a gift, and then the family got to play

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, and I’ve had, you know, maybe four days of playing with it so far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between various members of the family, and I had some very early impressions I’ll go through fairly quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Um, number one, motion is a bit of a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, the motion sickness or motion nausea is a bit of a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for at least me and Tiff and a couple other people who have tried it in the household, like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, family who have tried it. And I don’t think it’s going to be a huge problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that, like, I can still use it, but I can’t find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any settings between, like, the little eyepiece moving bits or the head strap or anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t find any way where everything on screen is sharp.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can get some things sharp, some of the time, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t get it so that everything is sharp. And it seems to just be like maybe just a fit issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like the little like eye spready spacing things. It’s not a continuous setting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where you can set exactly how spaced apart your eyes are. It’s like just three notches, like just three fixed settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so maybe my setting is between them, I don’t know. but for whatever it is, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get it to a point where it is sharp. And that makes it so that sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I use it, even just doing simple things like looking around the menus makes me feel a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sick and I have to stop. But sometimes I can play it for a half hour straight and have no problems at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all. So I haven’t quite figured out, you know, how to manage that well yet, but it might just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be, I just might not be compatible very well with either VR as a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or this particular hardware?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, one of the problems with motion sickness in VR is that the hardware is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet fast enough, and certainly is the case for a mobile thing like the Quest, right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anytime there is a mismatch between what your eyes see and what your inner ear feels, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you get motion sickness. So if the images on the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lag even by a frame or two when you move your head just like a half an inch, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a mismatch that your brain can detect. If you have faster hardware at a higher frame rate, that’s more reactive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with better, you know, alignment with, you know, whatever it’s using the, whether it uses the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accelerometers or cameras or there’s all sorts of different ways to try to orient yourself. But like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s, in any VR hardware that’s available now, there is some lag between you moving your head

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the image changing on the screen. And they try to make that lag as small as possible, but any lag at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all has the potential to introduce motion sickness. So even if you had perfectly in focus stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fact that what you’re seeing in front of you is a couple milliseconds behind what your head is doing and may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not exactly match what your head is doing, depending on how the orientation detection

⏹️ ▶️ ^John works, that’s your formula for motion sickness. So I don’t expect that to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go away for a long time because you need very, very fiendishly fast hardware and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very accurate head tracking to eliminate that essentially.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I think that’s probably part of the problem. I think another part of the problem is just like the design of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of the games I’ve tried is such that you just keep like, it keeps like popping you to different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco places, you’re moving to different places because you can’t walk there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, there’s a reason for that. It’s like in general, keeping your body

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still, they’re actually trying to help you. I mean, yes, you’re right that you can’t physically walk because you’ll hit the wall of your house,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But they’re trying to help you not be as motion sick because if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John standing still, but what you see in front of your eyes is like a roller coaster ride, that’s a huge mismatch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between like, I’m not walking anywhere, I’m standing still, why am I suddenly gliding forward really fast? So they teleport you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to a different place or whatever. They’re trying to get you so that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the game, your virtual avatar is also standing still just like you are to just try to do a better match between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s on screen and what’s happening.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and so that’s why the games that work really well are things like Beat Saber. everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco recommended Beat Saber. I’m okay at it, Tiff is like amazingly good at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco She’s really enjoying it. I’m okay at it, but it’s fun. But what’s good about Beat Saber is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, your virtual character is standing still and stuff is coming at you that you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to like deflect or whatever. So that kind of thing makes sense. Another one of the games that I’ve really surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enjoyed is 11 Table Tennis, which is just a really well done ping pong table simulator.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s, and you’re, so in ping pong, you are standing in a small square area,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making small movements while stuff happens in front of you. And it replicates that perfectly. Like you don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco move your body that very far in ping pong. You can just move within that small, you know, few square foot area on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the floor that you’re standing in behind the virtual ping pong table and it works. And like that, by the way, the game is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so delightful. Like you like wake up and you’re just in some guy’s apartment and there’s a ping pong table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s it. It’s just, it’s such a fun world and it’s so well done. Like the sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the ball hitting things, It’s perfect, the way the ball’s bent, it’s an incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well done game. Highly recommend 11 Table Tennis if you’re a VR person. And I haven’t even played anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco multiplayer yet. I can imagine it would be even more fun if you were playing against a real human instead of the AI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco torso that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} play against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John normally. That was one of the most fun motion control games I played. Not VR, but for the PlayStation 3,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sony had motion control stuff, the ones that look like a glowing lollipop It’s like a black stick with a glowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ball on top of it. And I think, was it Rockstar that made the ping pong game? Some big name game company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made a motion control ping pong game that used those motion control things as the paddles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it was perfect for the same reason you said, that you’re standing in front of the TV and the thing you’re holding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John might as well be a ping pong paddle. Like instead of a paddle on top, it has a glowing ball. And it just worked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so well for like, even though it wasn’t VR, it might as well have been VR because on the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the table and the ball’s coming out of the screen at you and you wave this controller and it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing. It was the best simulation I’d ever seen. I’m sure VR is even better, but I remember

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being impressed that the good match between what can you do while standing in front of your TV holding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a stick and that kind of game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I was highly amused the fact I was sitting there thinking like, you know, the first video game was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pong. And then, I’m thinking like, what did we do back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then with the hardware we had then? now we’ve made this incredible, these incredible advances

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we’ve come to the point now where we now have pong. Again, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way better in all these different ways. But we’re still playing the same game. Everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a remix. So anyway, so ping pong is awesome. Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco golf putt putt, we’ve got walkabout mini golf, that’s been pretty fun too. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does have the issue where you keep having to like teleport to your ball. but you pull the trigger and it teleports you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be right in front of your ball. And you can walk around within that spot, but it’s a mini golf course, so you hit the ball

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s gonna move more than a few feet away, so you’re gonna have to keep teleporting after every stroke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so you teleport to your ball and then you gotta reorient yourself. Where am I? Oh, here I am. You look around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, the water’s behind me now, or whatever. So it’s a little bit jarring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to move around like that. We haven’t yet tried any driving or flying games

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because that I think I fear the motion component of those. I did try, there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a nature film thing where it’s like, you know, view this cool nature documentary in 3D. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seemed like you’re underwater and looking at all these fish swimming by. And I couldn’t get through that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it wasn’t, like the, I think the screen resolution wasn’t good enough or it wasn’t sharp enough or the motion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the camera moving was too weird. That one made me feel sick. So I had to stop that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the games where you’re just like standing still and stuff is happening around you, those seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay for me so far. But I can’t play it for that long. But I will say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between Beat Saber and ping pong and mini golf so far, that have been kind of the hits among the family,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve been really well received not only by the gamers, but also by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the non-gamers. We had parents play and they enjoyed them too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it wasn’t weird for them. It was just like, oh yeah, I just put this thing, oh, I’m in a golf course, okay. And just start playing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It reminded me a lot of when the Nintendo Wii came out in, what was it, 2006? Like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanksgiving and holiday season, I saw much of the same effect of like, you brought the brand new Wii

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over to your family’s house and you had like your parents and your grandparents playing these games and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco having similar kind of experiences where you’re kind of like semi-virtual with the Wiimotes and having motion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control of these virtual worlds on screen and they had broad appeal. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it was also largely a novelty and it wore off quickly. And I think so far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that’s probably what’s going to happen with us and VR. I think this is really fun,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I haven’t yet found the killer thing that I think we’re going to be doing for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a long time. It seems like it’s really good for certain kinds of games, and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that good for a broad type, for a broad variety of games. At least not yet, or maybe not with this hardware,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or maybe just the software hasn’t caught up yet, who knows. But it’s really good for like this small segment of games. Like we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have our Wii Sports, like we have, that is covered. But I don’t yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if we’re gonna really be able to move past that anytime soon. And so I think what’s gonna happen is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think we’re gonna play with it a lot for like a month, and then it’s not gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of use. But I could be wrong, but I kinda get that feeling so far, that this is really fun, this is a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new, cool experience to have right now, but I don’t see a lot of lasting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power in the software library, at least what’s available for the Quest.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is a subset of PC VR stuff because it’s not running on Windows, it’s not running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Intel hardware. It’s running on the embedded hardware in the Quest helmet, on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Quest platform. So this is not all VR. But I have a feeling this is much of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is probably a decent representative sample of what’s out, the kind of things that are out there. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not seeing a lot of that depth yet. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough, or you know, it’s only been a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco days. I also, when I was asking for recommendations, I did not, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specifically said, please no like shooting games, because I don’t want to get into it now, but I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into shooting games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You should try Superhot. It’s not the same type of shooting game. And speaking of shooting games though, has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using this made Tiff more interested in playing Half-Life Alyx, like getting beefier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John VR hardware to do that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We haven’t really talked about it yet. I mean, we’ve always been mildly interested because we’re such big Half-Life fans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was looking at it just like yesterday morning, it’s like, hey, how easy is a valve index to get these days?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I noticed it did have a little like finger adjuster thing to adjust the eye spacing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a variable manner instead of these three fixed spaces that the Quest has. So I thought like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Quest might be better with me because I think if I can get VR gear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that fits me better, where like I can have a full field of vision that’s sharp across

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole thing every time, I think I would have fewer motion issues, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think I like it enough to necessarily make that jump right now and get the PC for it and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because ultimately, one thing I love about the Quest 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is even though it’s Facebook behind the scenes and that’s really gross, it is a really nice experience to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this thing be all in one. Like the hardware is well-designed, the software is all integrated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like their storefront’s all integrated with it, and all the games work really well with their boundary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco detection and stuff like that. There’s no hardware to put around the room.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You don’t have to have little emitters around the room or sensors around the room. You just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco put the helmet on and put the controllers in your hand and that’s it. It senses the room for you. You draw where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want to stay and it makes you stay there. There’s no other wires. That’s all really nice. The experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of using that is very, very good. And I think if I went into any of the more powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PC based solutions for this I think all of the rough edges

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the experience that aren’t that nice would irritate me Possibly more than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco value I would get out of the additional hardware of the PC stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Real-time follow-up as Tiff. Do you want to play Half-Life Alex more now that you’ve played on the quest her

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer was absolutely Exclamation point so I think you know what you have to do Oh crap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, so one thing I did order, they sell a cable that’s basically just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fiber optic 16 foot USB 3 cable with active

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco transmitters on both sides. But yeah, they sell a link cable that you can actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use this headset as a PC headset for compatible software, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that means. And so I bought the cable to try that out to see if we want to go down that route. And if it ends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up being really cool, maybe then I’d order the the valve index, you know, if it needs to be better. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m going to explore that avenue. But I don’t I don’t know necessarily how that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to go or how much of a priority that is with current hardware. Because TIFF wants a new gaming laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but ideally, like it would have the new RTX generation of GPUs that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t seemingly available on laptops yet. So we’ll see how that goes. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thank you to our sponsors this week, Boxcryptor and Techmeme Ride Home. And thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you to our wonderful members who support us directly. We want to thank you very much for your support this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We just launched a membership program this summer. You’ve been wonderful to us so far.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you for your support. If you want to join as a member, atp.fm.join. Thank you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental, oh it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was accidental And you can find the show notes at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John atp.fm And if you’re into 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-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, check podcast so long.

More on PS5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Minor controller follow-up of things I forgot. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are two tiny buttons on the PlayStation 4 controller. One of them is the share button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and one of them is like the options menu button. They’re like the tiniest buttons you could possibly imagine, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good idea because they’re not important buttons for gameplay, they’re just for like menu functionality. They’re in exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same place as they were before, but previously they were tiny sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lozenge-shaped buttons that had dents in them, like little swimming pool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dents, right? And now they are just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John straight-sided lozenges that are flat-topped, and it’s a downgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The little dimples that they had before felt good. You’d feel for the little dimple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’d press the little dimple. It was a great tiny little button. Now, they’re just little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tiny, sharp edged, flat sided, pill shaped plateaus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Downgrade, why would you do that? I mean, again, I think it’s aesthetics. These are more sort of regular geometric

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shapes. It’s not bad, they’re fine. Like you feel them, they work. They’re not hard to press, nothing like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s like a minor downgrade on a button. And it is a button that you hit a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially in Destiny, you hit the options button a lot. And I hit the share button a lot to capture things or whatever. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s kind of a shame. And then one more software thing I forgot to talk about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how to describe this but the PlayStation 5 software UI is a lot like the PlayStation 4 one only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with more, not with more ads, but with more, more promotion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like when you turn the thing on, when like it boots in or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is always this line of squares by default that is where your cursor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is active, which is fine except that That line of squares is filled with crap that I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about. Here’s the latest game that’s available on the PlayStation Store. I don’t care. Here’s a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of stuff that happened recently in the games you’re playing. I don’t care. I don’t want to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of that stuff. Now it’s one tap away from going away and doing what you’re doing, but I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not need and it’s not, they’re not actual, I guess the game thinks are actual ads. It’s not like it’s advertising Viagra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something. It’s all PlayStation related and it is relevant to what I’m doing and what I’m playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for most part, but I don’t need to see that in my face. I wish there was a way to get rid of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People have mostly been complaining that it takes now more taps to put your PlayStation 5 to sleep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you have to first get off of that menu onto another menu. In general, the menus are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better than they were on the PlayStation 4. They’re more logical, they’re better organized, they’re graphically better, but that whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that stupid bar is that has your default input focus that is constantly filled with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff that it thinks is relevant to you, plus some advertisement for a game you’re not interested in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that gets a big thumbs down from me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the whole direction that so much of our hardware has gone and software has gone in recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco years of just turning everything into a promo fest and a vending

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco machine, it really runs me the wrong way, but it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cat’s out of the barn door on that one so badly that there’s just no going back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, in the Sony’s case, I understand what they’re doing. It’s stuff relevant to games that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing and like even just the one square they put for like a recent game that came out Like it makes sense. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a game console and you would want to see that stuff on the screen It’s just that there’s just no way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get out get rid of it Like you should be able to say okay fine But don’t show me that like kind of like you can with Apple stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t show me Siri suggestions Don’t show me results from the web don’t you know like to control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of the default Sort of quick complete stuff because that’s what they’re trying to do is like we think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these are the three things you’re most likely to do. And sometimes they’re right. Like sometimes if I just did a capture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the square to the right is the capture that I just made. That’s probably what I’m gonna go for anyway, if I wanna trim it or look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at it or whatever. Like that makes sense. It’s a lot like auto-completing, but the other ones, like there’s just a lack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of control. I think they just need more settings to trim that down. Like in other places they expanded. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said, when you do share, you have a menu where you can pick what, you know, how long you wanna share. It’s kind of like the opposite of what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did in Big Sur with where you can’t snooze the notifications for different amounts of time. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John added that in the PlayStation 5. That’s the direction it should go. And before it was like, pick a length and every time you save a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clip, it’ll be that length. And PlayStation 5 is like, but why not just in time give them a list of like seven

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different preset lengths? Why not? It’s a tiny little menu, put it in there. It’s like, oh, so nice. Look, I don’t have to go change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the setting. It’s just in real time. I can say snooze for five minutes. People don’t know what we’re talking about. In Big Sur,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when notifications come up, calendar notifications, you used to be able to snooze them for a certain period

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of time in a pop-up menu. And now, what does it do? Now you can just say later and you don’t get to pick the length?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it used to be you’d have like, you know, 15 minutes, one hour tomorrow, something like that. And now it just snooze

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or not snooze. And I think it’s something like 15 minutes and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And you can imagine complaining like, well, but I don’t like those three choices. I don’t like 15 minutes, an hour and a day. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wish I could have 90 minutes or whatever. And maybe the next version you think they’d expand it and make customizable. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead they said, no, how about no options? How do you like that? Right. That playset in five.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So in general, it’s going in the right direction. but I think they need a little bit more flexibility. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even mind being like, not advertised to, but sometimes you do wanna know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, there’s a new update available, whatever, like that type of information just in time. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John zero flexibility that I found so far to change that. And they’re usually good about this. Like Sony has tons of options for everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They even have an option of like, by default, do you want the microphone to be muted when you start playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or not muted? And the default is not muted, but I changed it because I want the default to be muted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I’m not accidentally on microphone if somehow I connect through audio and I didn’t mean to. They’re pretty good with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John options, it’s just that the UI is a little bit, getting a little bit pushy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well because none of those options make them less money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even think that’s what it is. I understand the advertising of the game thing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in general Sony tries to give you, not allowing you to mute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the microphone by default, it would be like, oh more engagement and get people involved, but they don’t. They understand it’s a privacy thing. They’re actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty good about that stuff. There’s a huge list of privacy settings about who can see what you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whether you’re online what games that you play your triumphs and you could for all those different things. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very granular You can say nobody can see this only my friends can see this only my close friends can see this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Friends of friends it’s a lot like Facebook in that regard, but the defaults are actually pretty locked down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So much so that usually have to dive in there and sort of open things up if you want people to be able to find You to play with you online

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, you should definitely get a PlayStation 5. But before that, you should get something that can play Half-Life Alyx because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tiff wants to play.