435: A Strong Number Four
17 Jun 2021Our childhood sports achievements, plus a ton more from WWDC.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- Universal Control & device arrangement (via Andreas Beyer Bowden)
- More from Viticci
- Center Stage
- Object Capture quality
- macOS Monterey Live Text (OCR) works with captchas too!
- App Library in the dock is optional
- Safari 15 and Reload Button
- Universal Control & device arrangement (via Andreas Beyer Bowden)
- Many macOS Monterey features are Apple Silicon-only
- A trip down DOS gaming memory lane
- Disk Utility has been updated in Monterey! 🎉
- Monterey lets you
Erase all content & settings! - How iCloud Private Relay Works
#askatp:- How is being a developer on Apple Silicon? (via Abel Demoz)
- What year will be the final year of macOS on Intel? (via Ralf Krakowski)
- How do the low-power M1 cores use only 1/10th the power of the high-power M1 cores? (via Brian Pirie)
- Post-show Neutral:
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Chapters
- Sports
- Universal Control
- Center Stage
- Object Capture
- Sponsor: Linode
- Live Text
- App Library
- Safari, Reload, and accepting change
- Sponsor: Secret Sauce by Wondery
- ARM-only Monterey features
- Macs suck at games lol
- Disk Utility
- Mac Erase All Content & Settings
- iCloud Private Relay
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Apple Silicon as a developer
- #askatp: When macOS drops Intel
- #askatp: Low- vs. high-power cores
- Ending theme
- Neutral
Sports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m enjoying a wonderful vanilla cream house seltzer right now that I had to open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the pliers that are still in our fridge from whenever that intro that we did to our show with Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like six months ago or at least
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be you’d be like all buff from the rowing now you should be able to just crank that sucker open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually I actually my arms all messed up right now for other reason but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah what happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it’s I’ve had some shoulder rotator cuff challenges over the last.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been working through it with a PT friend, so we’re getting there, but I currently have this black tape on my arm, this rock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tape that makes me look really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does it there. That’s not from trying to open the Salsa, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, maybe. I mean, I guess I can’t fully be sure what the root cause was. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I opened so many Salsas over the last five years that I just, I’ve wrecked my whole left shoulder,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s all that Major League pitching you’ve been doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that’s, that’s especially with my left arm, since I’m right-handed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not to I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that I’m not a baseball player. I was for one year in school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was actually held back in T-ball for an extra year. That was fourth grade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grade, I played regular baseball. And I’m pretty sure I got one hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the entire year and did not play baseball after that.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many at bats though? Because if that was your only at bat, that’s a great average.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far more than one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you say that. I’ve told the story somewhere on the internet before, but when I was in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fifth grade, this was toward the height of me being interested in playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basketball. At my very best moments, I was a passable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basketball player. I was never good, but when I had a good day, I was passable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our fifth grade—so this is not middle school, this is still elementary school in the States,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our fifth grade school team, which in and of itself was weird to have a school team in fifth grade, but be that as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may, it was, you know, a school team that would like travel to other schools and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play basketball against them and stuff, which is usually something that doesn’t happen in America until you’re older, at least for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school affiliated teams. So anyway, I tried out for the fifth grade basketball team,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is about the most athletic thing I think I’ve ever done in my life. And I tried out and I made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the team and then I moved like two weeks later. And it wasn’t until I was an adult that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized, wait a second, they knew full well I was moving this entire time. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was totally a pity acceptance, wasn’t it? You don’t know they knew you were moving. I think they might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, but I’m going to claim that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you move in order just to get away from that team? Do you think the team paid off your parents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure they did not. It is possible, but I’m pretty sure no.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s pretty permissive. Fifth grade basketball teams probably pretty much let anyone on who shows any sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of desire to be on the team. So I don’t think they knew you were moving. I think they just basically take everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, certainly my fifth grade baseball team was pretty permissive. If they let me on there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you have a fun sports related story, sports related failure, perhaps you would like to share with the group?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, my quote unquote career sport was tennis, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John brutal in the same way that Microsoft used to be where everything is force ranked. So if you were going to be on the
⏹️ ▶️ John tennis team, the players are pitted against each other to determine the rankings.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s no question about where you are in the hierarchy. And if you want to play at all, you have to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John the top four or whatever. Like not that, you know, depending on what school you went to, maybe they only had like four
⏹️ ▶️ John or five courts. So only the top four or five people are gonna play period. So if you’re number six on your team, you’re just not gonna play
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. And the only way for you to get higher is to beat the number five person. So that’s the crucible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aren’t sports great? I mean, the funny thing is, sports weren’t even the most emotionally damaging part of my school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career, but they certainly didn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love tennis. I mean, the first year I played in junior high, no, I didn’t get to play in the matches because I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like number six or number seven, but I worked my way up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you played in junior high, but you did not play in high school?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I played in junior high and high school.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Were you varsity in high school?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was good at tennis. I am having a seriously difficult time imagining any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the three of us doing varsity anything. I’m very athletic. Oh, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am. Well, more than us. Oh, let’s put it this way. I’m very coordinated. Uh, team sports
⏹️ ▶️ John I was less good at, but that was mostly because I didn’t have a lot of confidence for reasons that you would imagine. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but no, I was good at tennis.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, not, I wasn’t number one or two, but you know, I was number four, strong number four,
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally a number three in high school. In a team of four? No. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. Cruel. Yeah. No, Tiff and I just rewatched Freaks and Geeks. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time I’ve seen it in probably five to 10 years. It’s been a while since then. I’ve never seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s a fantastic series.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I rewatched it like three months ago, coincidentally. I rewatched it because The Incomparable
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna do a show about it, and they said, hey, you should rewatch this. So I did, and then I just forgot about the episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John and other people aren’t anyway, but I saw you say that you were rewatching it, and I assume you’re not, didn’t do it because of The Incomparable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s weird that we both just rewatched the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series. I think I did actually do it for The Incomparable, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Were you on that episode?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They haven’t recorded it yet, but man, that show, not only does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hold up, and not only is it great, and it has a whole bunch of famous people in it that weren’t that famous at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, so you get to see them when they’re super young. You get a 16-year-old Seth Rogen. Like, it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool, but man, that show is painful to watch. Like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a nerd growing up, as we all were, Wow, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there is some deep pain when watching that show. Sounds great. I mean, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody watching that show is going to look at these three characters and be like, well, that’s us. Like, that’s like, you know, obviously it’s me, you know, me and you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which character do you think you are, Marko, though? Because I can tell you which one I was more or less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think everybody would say you were Bill. The only thing is I I’m unclear whether I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be Sam or Neil. I definitely have seen have some overlap with with each of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem with Sam is he does get together with an unrealistically more attractive girl
⏹️ ▶️ John for a plot point in the season.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and that sure as hell was not going to happen to me in high school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Exactly. I mean, it works in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show because of how that turns out, but practically speaking, not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So that’s why I think I’d be, realistically, I’m probably more, more a Neal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my rewatch, since it’s not going to be in the episode, I’ll give you my tiny capsule summary. The only thing that really changed from
⏹️ ▶️ John my first watch when I watched it when it actually because I’m old. The only change from my
⏹️ ▶️ John rewatch is I felt like the main character, Lindsay, is that her name? The main character’s motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John was not well sketched out. And it’s not the fault of the actor, it’s mostly the fault of the script.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the arc that they wanted her to go on, but a lot of the time she just seemed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John going through the paces of the script because she had to and her motivations were not clearly outlined. But other than that, everything was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never once looked at it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it depends on who you’re identifying with in the show, but like if you’re identifying mostly with her little brother and
⏹️ ▶️ John their friends, then maybe you don’t care about that. But she really is the heart of the show. And the problem is a lot of her, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what she does, it’s not unmotivated. Like the show says things in it, like here’s why she’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but it’s never really on the screen. It’s just like, they’ll drop a hint on it here or there, and then she’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John act under the influence of that one hint for three episodes. It’s like, what are you really, what are you really trying to do, Lindsay?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, it’s not. She just felt a little bit like a leaf in the wind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch how I soar. That’s a reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I was doing the Forrest Gump thing. I should have said feather.
Universal Control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a lot to do. We should stop goofing off and let’s start with some follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is back because it’s not Keynote Week. All right, so let’s talk about universal control and device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arrangement. A lot of us were wondering, you know, when you do this universal control thing, which is like Synergy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was slash is, where you have one keyboard and mouse attached to one computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s controlling multiple computers, then how does it know if, you know, say you have an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an iMac, which side is the iPad on? And I think this was actually discussed in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the talk show, if I’m not mistaken, but we also got feedback via Andreas Baier-Bowden, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently saw or received an email from Federighi, which reads, this is Federighi’s words,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you move to an Edge, we default to assuming you are moving to the most recently active device that is nearby and not yet, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paired. So if you turn your iPad and put it next, turn on your iPad, excuse me, and put it next to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac and then move the cursor as I did in the demo, we will assume that you were attempting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access that iPad versus say another Mac that you had not interacted with as recently. And once you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote connected, we remember that arrangement. There is of course also a displays arrangement, system preferences pane,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we’ve designed the features such that using these sorts of settings should generally not be necessary. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it works, and I haven’t tried it, this is Apple at its best. When it’s using like some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really smart inference, maybe, I’m not sure what word I’m looking for, but it’s using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evidence based on circumstance to figure out what you want before, or without you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to explicitly tell them. And I think that’s super cool. And if it works well, it’s going to be very
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a magic trick where once you hear how it’s done, you’re like, Oh, that is clever, but that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as complicated as I thought it would be. Like they’re essentially, they’re essentially letting you, the user, tell them where things
⏹️ ▶️ John are. Now it’s not perfect because if you do that, first of all, once, once you
⏹️ ▶️ John know how the trick is done it’s trivially easy to confuse it but second of all you’re basically just picking whether
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer is left right or maybe even up or down from where you are but you’re not really picking the exact height that the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is joining to others so you’re gonna kind of get the default I haven’t I don’t have enough systems running these
⏹️ ▶️ John and this new stuff to do this but I’m interested to see like so once you do that it shows up as a display like
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the displays panel and then you could arrange them after that I don’t it’s not entirely clear to me because I haven’t seen this demoed
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the magic trick of how they do this is very clever. And it’s like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes for a good demo. And in practice, it will sort of magically just work for people who don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how it works and it’ll be super impressive. And I suppose there are a couple of failure modes where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll get messed up. As long as there’s a place where you can go to like, oh, arrange it the way you want, like the displays panel,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Federighi says. This is very clever, very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, some information about initiation from a friend of the show, Federico Vatici.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Universal control can only be started from a Mac running Monterey. You cannot start dragging the pointer from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPad towards a Mac. It only originates from macOS, and then you can move it around freely
⏹️ ▶️ John This falls into the same category as my snarky tweet during the WWDC keynote, which is, get an iPad. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a great accessory for your real computer. Oh, brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in the keynote was like, from your Mac, here’s what you like. The iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John can, you know, help your Mac out in various ways, right? it was so clear that the Mac was like in charge
⏹️ ▶️ John and even in universal control. If you’re on your Mac, yeah, you can bring your cursor over to your iPad, but you can’t take that stinking
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad cursor and bring it over to your Mac. Anyway, maybe this will change one day. And that’s mostly just
⏹️ ▶️ John snark because obviously iPads are incredibly powerful and amazing and I love them. But it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a change from the norm to see kind of the Mac taking center stage. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about that in the last episode, but I think it’s worth reemphasizing the sort of unspoken theme of the keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is that features now come across all of Apple’s platforms, because all of the barriers to stopping that from happening have been
⏹️ ▶️ John knocked down one at a time, right? It’s the same chip architecture, it’s the same framework, SwiftUI, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we have the catalyst to bring UIKit onto the Mac, and so all of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John resources towards like, we’re gonna do a new thing, now they can essentially do a new thing, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that new thing is, once, optimize it for their own chips, write it in a framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that they know runs on all their platforms, you know, within reason, obviously, so you’re not gonna write something that runs on,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe on the watch to fix with you as well. But anyway, they can literally do one thing and have
⏹️ ▶️ John it everywhere. So almost all the features that rolled out as part of WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John are on all the platforms. And that hasn’t happened in a very long time. Granted, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John varying degrees of jankiness, depending on how mature, whatever it is that you’re doing, is it a catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ John app? Is it a Swift UI app, both of those things have limitations versus a pure AppKit app on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it gets, at least this year, we’re not like, oh, well, this feature is available
⏹️ ▶️ John here and here. But either the Mac doesn’t have it at all, or the Mac has a worse version of it in general.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they’re rolling out something new, it is available and the same everywhere, which is refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ John and a big payoff from the many years of transition that Apple’s been going through.
Center Stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m sure there are examples of that not being true, like Center Stage is a great example of that not being true, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, quick aside, I had a FaceTime call with somebody with a new iPad that was using Center Stage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and holy smokes, that’s super cool. Even on the quote-unquote receiving end, on the viewing end,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was super cool because as the friend of mine that I was speaking with was walking around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit or gesturing with his arms, it would zoom in or zoom out or pan or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you in order to keep what was relevant in focus. It was super duper neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And whenever it is I get around to upgrading my iPad, which I’m not planning on doing as I sit here now, I’m really looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to having that. Because is that on both sides iPads? Is that correct? Or is that only on the big boy? No, it’s on both. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did it look like unnatural when it would do the movements or was it kind of subtle and smooth?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looked unnatural in so far as it was something you don’t expect to happen on a FaceTime call, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not look unnatural in so far as like it’s zooming at twice the speed you would expect or that it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like whipping to the side and then stopping short. It was very gradual, very appley.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was not, it wasn’t distracting as a movement. It was distracting as a, holy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap, I understand all the work that’s going in to make this work and this is amazing. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s weird that some of the remaining differences almost sort of come down to hardware. Like why don’t the Macs have
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTime? Why are the Mac cameras so much worse? Or even just with center stage, like why is that on
⏹️ ▶️ John these iPads and not other ones? Like what is it that the center stage requires? And we’ll get to that later in the topic section about what
⏹️ ▶️ John features require what things. But there is still a remaining hardware gap, but in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of major applications or even major features, one example I think is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Focus, that’s on the Mac too, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which one is Focus? Oh, the Do Not Disturb on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John steroids. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I believe that’s on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no way that that would have been on the Mac if it came out like three years ago. Just no way, because it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously phone-centric, but now it’s like, why not put it on the Mac? because
⏹️ ▶️ John we can write it essentially once in one of our cross-platform frameworks,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it makes sense to be on the Mac, and it’s actually not that much more work. So let’s go do it, right? And even
⏹️ ▶️ John last year when the iPhone got widgets, but the iPad didn’t, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the excuse there? Those are like practically the same platform, even though you renamed one of them iPadOS, like it used to be just
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. Like, why didn’t the iPad get it there? And that was kind of, it seemed like tied up in the iPad multitasking stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John where that whole suite of things wasn’t ready and they didn’t just want to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John just widgets on the iPad or whatever. So there’s always like, how are things prioritized and how many resources
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have and what can you hold till last year? But in general, technology-wise, we’re finally getting to a place where
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason why something might not be on a less popular platform is no longer that, oh, we’d have to write an entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John new app using AppKit if we want that on the Mac. So that’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John much effort. Nevermind.
Object Capture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about object capture and the quality thereof. Object capture is the thing where you take a zillion pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a 3D object and then do magic and mathematics, and then suddenly you get a 3D model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming out the other side. Somebody anonymous, because they’ve since deleted their tweet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if they’re trying to remain anonymous, writes, I work in motion production, live action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and animation. And while this certainly isn’t ready for final production quality, the ability to quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mock up a quote, good enough quote concept is actually quite valuable. So even if this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a perfect representation, it’s still useful to have. And that’s not particularly surprising to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Since seeing Apple’s demos and the sessions on it and all that other stuff, lots of just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John users, individual people have been posting their experiments with using this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to say, every one that I’ve seen is way more impressive than Apple’s demos, which is weird. Usually Apple picks
⏹️ ▶️ John very good demos to show off their feature. So we’ll put some links in the show notes. Matt Waller did a
⏹️ ▶️ John scan of a plush baby Yoda toy. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the object capture of it looks amazing. Because it’s a challenging shape. It’s not, you know, it’s fuzzy. And it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John weird pointy things with the ears and the clothes and everything. It looks amazing. And someone else posted a pineapple.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what a whole pineapple looks like with those little pointy little tendrils that come out the sides? They did an object capture of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it looks fantastic. Like you wouldn’t think, you think it would just melt all the little things together and that just look
⏹️ ▶️ John like a flat football with a pineapple texture on it, it doesn’t. So yeah, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John these things will need to be touched up, but the more examples of this that I’ve seen, the more impressed I am at how good
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get with this. Now, back to Marco’s point of like, oh, well, this would be cool to share an object with somebody, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like you just have to take too many pictures for that to be feasible. Like you have to take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of pictures and there has to be a huge amount of overlap. So you have to like take a picture and then move like a little tiny bit
⏹️ ▶️ John and take a picture and move it a little bit and take a picture and your pictures have to have like 70% overlap between them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think you’re gonna want to spend five minutes slowly walking in a circle
⏹️ ▶️ John around some object just to send it to someone in a message thing. If you could take one or two pictures and send something
⏹️ ▶️ John that might be conceivable. For now I think it is basically, you know, amazing results if you’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to put in the time from hardware that everybody has. So it is lowering the barrier to entry but it is not to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can take two photos of, you know, a couch that you’re looking at and then have to give someone a 3D model they can spin.
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Live Text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you know that in Mac OS Monterey, the what is the live text, the OCR thing that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing now? It works on captures too, because why wouldn’t it? Which is super neat.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fantastic. I mean, to be fair, that will put a link to someone’s video like the capture they’re doing is not one of those challenging
⏹️ ▶️ John of people are posting impressive results of like, oh, live text, like pulled text off of my laptop screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s viewed at this incredibly oblique angle. In general,
⏹️ ▶️ John humans are impressed when computers can do things that would be difficult for humans to do, but very often they’re not difficult for computers to do
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, they’re just the strengths and weaknesses are different. But yeah, Live Text looks pretty good and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John impressive where it’s able to pull text out of.
App Library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have good news, which I did not even look into myself, to be honest with you, but Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aiton writes that the app library in the dock is optional on iPad OS. Though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to Jason, there’s no good reason to turn it off. I actually have left it on so far and it hasn’t bothered me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve barely used my iPad since putting the beta on it. So, you know, take that for what you will.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, the setting is right next to the other one that I turned off, which is show suggested and recent apps in the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not surprised that you turned that off. All right.
Safari, Reload, and accepting change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, I know that the world was shocked, devastated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even, when they saw the new Safari toolbar and realized everyone’s favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safari extension may not be long for this world. Please tell me, please John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me the reload button, like a phoenix rises from the ashes to live again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and last episode I thought like, well, there is no more toolbar. It’s just like, because they put the tabs up there,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, in Safari 15. the tabs and there’s some fixed buttons and that seemed like that was it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking about on the Mac right now, not on the phone and not on the iPad. I was like, well, there’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so much for my reload button. Right. And the absurd thing about it was that there, it doesn’t appear
⏹️ ▶️ John to be any reload button. The only place you had reload was like in the address bar, there was a little dot,
⏹️ ▶️ John dot, dot on the far right. And if you clicked on the dot, dot, dot, a menu would pop up and then you could select
⏹️ ▶️ John the word reload from that menu. And I saw this in WWDC sessions. So you’d be watching a session
⏹️ ▶️ John and the person in the session would have to reload a web page. And to make it clear, because it’s a video,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they just hit Command-R, it wouldn’t be clear to the viewer what they’re doing. So you have to do something visually on the screen to show that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John reloading. And so in one of these, it was one of the Safari videos, the presenter had
⏹️ ▶️ John to reload a web page multiple times to show changes. And every time they did it, they had to click on the three dots,
⏹️ ▶️ John move the mouse down, click reload. Click on the three dots, move the mouse down, click reload. And it was so painful to watch. It was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness. We really need to have an always visible reload button. So of course I installed Monterey on one
⏹️ ▶️ John of my… Actually I installed an external hard drive and booted from that because I didn’t want to script one of my computers because all the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John in the houses are still used, at least until my kids eat out of school. And so what the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John was, so first of all, there is still a customizable toolbar. You can custom, and now you’re fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John with the tabs for space, but you can in fact customize the part to the left of the tabs and shove as
⏹️ ▶️ John much stuff up there as you want, stealing space from your tabs. When you do the customized toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and the sheet comes down, reload is not among those choices. So you don’t have a choice to
⏹️ ▶️ John put a reload button in your toolbar. And there also is, you know, the reload button that is currently in the
⏹️ ▶️ John address bar in Safari, that’s also not there. All you get is the three dots from which a menu spawns and you can click reload.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good news is that my Safari reload button extension still works. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John run it on Monterey, it runs just fine. I didn’t even need to recompile it or anything. It just works as is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you can put a reload button up there. The bad news is, presumably in order to save space,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I understand why they did this, because again, the toolbar is now fighting for space with the tabs because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all on the same line. They changed the back forward buttons to be quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote smart, so that there is no forward button
⏹️ ▶️ John until you’ve gone back. So instead of it being a back forward, like a less than and a greater than sign, it’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ John less than sign. And then if you ever go back, suddenly the greater than sign appears next to it
⏹️ ▶️ John because now you have a place to go forward to, which means that the back forward button, which used to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John pair of things, now changes size depending on if you have some place to go forward to, which makes
⏹️ ▶️ John everything move around. Like I understand why they did it to save space, but it just looks not great to me. I don’t like when
⏹️ ▶️ John things squirm around, as established in the past show with the squirmy soup of rectangles.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t like it when buttons change size in the toolbar, and I just don’t think it looks unbalanced.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing that’s, this is a minor point, but when you put a button on the
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar in current Safari or in Safari 15, they make you supply like an image for the
⏹️ ▶️ John button and there’s a limited number of formats you can make it, but every format that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John tried, every way I’ve tried to make this image, it basically uses it as a template image
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have control over how it positions the thing vertically. I tried putting empty space above
⏹️ ▶️ John and below to like move the thing around and it’s like, nope, I’m going to find the edges of the
⏹️ ▶️ John blackness in your monochrome picture, and that’s what I’m gonna consider your border to be. And that’s a concern to me, because
⏹️ ▶️ John when the lonely left hand, the lonely left hand sign is next to my reload button,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reload button, if you know what it looks like, it’s like a circle, an incomplete circle, but then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an arrow on one end of it, and the arrow sticks out beyond, the top part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John arrow sticks out beyond the diameter of the circle, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So what you’d want, visually speaking, is the center of the circle to be aligned with the point
⏹️ ▶️ John in the less than sign. You know what I’m saying? But that’s not how it works, because as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as Safari’s concerned, the height of that graphic is not the height of the circle, but it’s the height of the circle plus that little stem
⏹️ ▶️ John that sticks out. So it shifts the whole thing down. So when I just see that less than sign, and then my reload button shifted down
⏹️ ▶️ John to be slightly below the less than sign, it’s very upsetting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still glad to have a reload button. you know, and I’m living with it, but I’m still,
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent a long time rebuilding that application with differently sized and shaped buttons to try. The only way
⏹️ ▶️ John I can get it to work is to have a non-transparent background, because then it thinks my image is the size of my
⏹️ ▶️ John image. But of course, if you have a non-transparent background, it looks awful, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m sorry, can we play this back? The same man who has superhuman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hearing when it comes to extraordinarily small and quiet fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will do anything to get fans out of his house, is the same person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who can’t just hit Command R to reload a tab and must have an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offset icon on the
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar. Don’t make me tap the sign, Casey. Yes, I know Command R exists. I tried to preempt that in my
⏹️ ▶️ John tweet about it. I have to put it in the same tweet, because if you put it in a follow-up tweet, no one will ever see it. That’s true. Yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Command R exists. Sometimes I’m using the mouse. Sometimes the mouse is near there. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I like to click on mouse buttons. Like the GUI exists in addition to, yes, I know about Command Arm. I absolutely know about
⏹️ ▶️ John it and I do use it. But sometimes I also click the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button. I mean, in and of itself, that’s fine. I just, I’m flabbergasted that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone who is as particular as you would be able to look at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all day, every day, look at this offset icon and not be driven mad, whereas-
⏹️ ▶️ John It was offset in the previous version of Safari too. It just, it’s more, it’s emphasized more due to the
⏹️ ▶️ John tighter spacing and I think the smaller less than sign, so it looks a little bit worse. It was, the same problem existed
⏹️ ▶️ John before, this is not a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the good news is if you want to go back to the old style tab bar, there’s a way to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, someone discovered like this feature, feature flags, plist somewhere in
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS. And it’s, I put the XML for it in the show notes to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John the keys are. So the key is unified bar, it’s in like the, you know, library preferences, feature flags,
⏹️ ▶️ John domains, Safari.plist. I’m presuming this is like a temporary thing for Apple messing with feature flags. And the reason I say that is because
⏹️ ▶️ John a unified bar is the key, and then the value is a dictionary. And some of the keys of the value
⏹️ ▶️ John dictionary, one of them is called disclosure required. And then there’s a string that looks like UUID.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that makes me think that the way they do feature flag, for people who don’t know, the parlance
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple about whether you as an Apple employee are allowed to know about a thing is are you disclosed
⏹️ ▶️ John on that thing. So a lot, you know, it’s like an Apple. If you’re not working on Safari, you you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be disclosed on the new Safari, so there’d be no reason for you to know about the new Safari. And in your builds of
⏹️ ▶️ John Monterey, if this disclosure required field didn’t have this special UUID in it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t show up on your version of Monterey, or wouldn’t be enabled on your version of Monterey. And I presume they
⏹️ ▶️ John trust their employees not to hack in and try to figure out what resources are new in Safari, or whatever. This is my
⏹️ ▶️ John guess. I don’t know any of this for a fact, but this is what it’s for. But the fact that there’s a disclosure required
⏹️ ▶️ John field with a string that looks like UUID makes me think this is part of how they control
⏹️ ▶️ John showing new features in Safari to other people inside Apple. Obviously it’s not controlling anything
⏹️ ▶️ John for us, but what it means is that you can disable this feature and go back to the old one, just
⏹️ ▶️ John because they still had that code in there, maybe for the non-disclosed people for a while. I presume it will eventually go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it will go away before release, but if you really, really don’t like the new Safari and you’re using a beta,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a way to turn it off for now. Just keep in mind that kind of like every Chrome flags feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that I used to rely on, it will eventually disappear and you’ll be forced to use the new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Yeah, but you know what? Like I feel like, you know, like on principle of that, like there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that Apple adds where they make some change that I don’t like, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old behavior is still available through either a checkbox preference somewhere or some kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plist hack like this, or, you know, a default write command or something like that. And I used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think like, well, I might as well adopt the new thing immediately because one day they’re going to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this ability to use it the old way and I might as well adjust on my terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now rather than later being forced to. But now I think, you know what? Some of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things never go away. I still haven’t switched over to their quote natural scroll direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still scroll the old direction and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you serious? You monster! Me neither. I’m never switching it. Here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? they’ll do something new that people don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the natural scrolling is an example where Apple said, look, enough people like it the other
⏹️ ▶️ John way that we can’t really get rid of this. Natural scrolling has been around, what, five years?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Seven years? Way more than that. Way more. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like 10. And it’s not a big deal, it’s easy to switch, and why not just leave the preference? So that’s the right call for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tappy tabs, speaking of Safari. They tried a different tab arrangement, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just the press or whatever making a big stink about it, And Apple just kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of wimped out and said, ugh, we’re getting a lot of bad reviews for this, so maybe we won’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple’s going to stick with the Safari design because they’re a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more gutsy now than they were. They have more courage now, I’d say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they don’t. I mean, they have, I hate to bring this up, they have a different design leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the current design leadership has shown a lot of willingness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to respond to feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I watch more of the sessions explaining the new Safari. As I said in the last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the new design is that Apple has signed itself up to a bunch of readability
⏹️ ▶️ John challenges because they explicitly are allowing the content of the web page to essentially color the user interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s now up to Apple to make sure that no matter what color the interface is, that
⏹️ ▶️ John the elements that are part of the interface are visible. You have to still be able to see the buttons. you have to be able to read the address bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John They gave an example in one of the sessions because actually like Safari 15 will do a smart, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is again all on the Mac, it’ll do a smart thing where it’ll like pull a color from the webpage up, but you can also from your webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John explicitly specify what color you want that to be. So on my website, I immediately specified that it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John UI colored. You just specify white and it stays UI colored. Anyway, you can specify
⏹️ ▶️ John the color and in the presentation, the Apple person said is like, you can specify pretty much any
⏹️ ▶️ John color, But Safari will stop you from specifying certain colors. And they gave an example.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you specify the color of the toolbar in Safari should be the same color as the close widget,
⏹️ ▶️ John effectively making the close widget disappear, yeah, they won’t let you pick that color, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the kind of special case code they have to be. Like you can’t make it red of the stoplight, you can’t make it yellow, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t make it green, right? If you make it too dark, they have to switch the text to be light on dark instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of dark on light. Like all the same challenges as the menu bar, which they also decided to make translucent and pull
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff through. And the menu bar changes from light text on dark to dark text on light, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what’s in the background of your thing, right? So now they’ve signed up for that challenge on a
⏹️ ▶️ John per web page basis, because you can change that color, not just per site, but per page.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of fun, you know, kind of fun design element where you can make your, and you can also do it in light mode and dark mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You can do lots of fun things. But as Marco said last episode, sometimes the content people care
⏹️ ▶️ John about is in fact their tabs and not the web page, or at least on equal footing, that they care about the tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John and the webpage, and tying the two together in sort of a unified design thing may not be what people
⏹️ ▶️ John want. Like, sometimes you do want a clear separation between here is the Chrome of my application,
⏹️ ▶️ John which doesn’t change colors or shape or wiggle around or do any weird stuff and is always readable, and then here is the content
⏹️ ▶️ John of the webpage. And Apple, their current design direction is, minimize that bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it as small as possible, put everything on one line, so they all have to fight for each other for the same amount of horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ John space. They even had a thing where they’re saying like, oh, make sure your page titles are short and put the important stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John up front, which is a general good practice for web design, period. But the reason it’s even more pressing in Safari 15 is,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what, your tabs have even less space for a given window size because they’re fighting with the toolbar.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I used it a little bit. It’s not terrible. I will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get used to it probably, but it’s a design choice that I wouldn’t have made. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John sincerely hope that websites don’t adopt the thing where you can colorize that top
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar thing because that’s not really what I want. And by the way, now that really matters because if you don’t want that, speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of options, there is an option in Safari’s preferences to say, hey, don’t let websites do that. Just like, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s called, they should have put a screenshot in it, but you get a checkbox that says, even if a website says that the top bar should be black,
⏹️ ▶️ John just ignore that, and then that will just keep the top bar the same color all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like we keep relearning this lesson in our industry. Like we keep unlearning and then having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relearn. You know, we shouldn’t allow arbitrary colors and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from user content or web content to be under and behind and through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI because it causes problems in lots of edge cases. And not even edge cases, lots of just common cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we had Windows Vista forever ago with its translucent everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve had the history of translucent backgrounds inside bars and toolbars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything in Mac OS and in Windows and everything else. And we keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relearning this lesson over and over again. Oh, it actually is better to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Chrome of the interface be mostly or entirely opaque
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it actually improves legibility of critical interface elements. When are we going to finally stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fighting this fight? We keep unlearning it. Every two years, somewhere new, we have to fight this fight
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, to Apple’s credit, they have gotten over the many years. way, way better at this
⏹️ ▶️ John than they used to be. If you just go look through the history of a Mac OS X reviews from 10.0 on, it was one of my first complaints. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John watch as the years went on, Apple got, Apple, you’re right that Apple keeps going back to that well, cause they want it, they want it
⏹️ ▶️ John so bad. And every time they do it, they do a better job. Even the menu bar, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John OS released, it was a Catalina or whatever, and they first rolled out the current menu bar thing. The first few
⏹️ ▶️ John iterations of that in the beta, I mean, I filed bugs on it myself and people had screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, like look at this menu bar, it’s totally unreadable. and they made adjustments. Essentially, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has become an expert at figuring out how to solve this specific design problem, mostly because they keep signing
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves up for it. The sidebars, the menu bar, the Safari toolbar, they’re way better at
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like it’s rare that you get a case that is completely unreadable like it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, it is a challenge and it’s kind of a war of choice, right? And so it’s clear that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere or groups of someone’s over the past decade or more inside Apple really want this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want like your desktop image to color your windows and have the personality
⏹️ ▶️ John come through. Like I understand why aesthetically it’s a desirable thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a difficult problem. But Apple’s pretty really good at it now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also they give you lots of checkboxes to turn it off. So window tinting, that’s a checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ John in general preferences that I assume is just gonna stay there. Sidebar tinting was also a checkbox thing. Like not just a PLS
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but like they actually have GUI to turn this off. and Safari, same deal, a checkbox turned off. The default
⏹️ ▶️ John is all that crap to be on, and a lot of times people aren’t gonna find those checkboxes so if you see someone complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about their computer being hard to read, and you just go through those preferences and check, check, check, check, the people be like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John why wasn’t it like this to begin with? Which is, to Marco’s point, why maybe that brass ring that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going after, maybe isn’t really worth pursuing because what are you even doing? It’s probably worse for most people,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I will give Apple credit for doggedly pursuing this stupid goal
⏹️ ▶️ John and being probably the best in the industry at doing it, even though the result is still probably worse than just
⏹️ ▶️ John having everything be a normal color and be readable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, I’m still stuck on YouTube monsters not using natural scrolling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You know, I am the middle child of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast. I am the middle child of this podcast by birthdate, but I am easily 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years younger than both of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Natural scrolling is not an old young thing. I’m surprised that Margot doesn’t use it because he uses a trackpad now. Natural
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling doesn’t make sense if you if you still use a mouse wheel, which I do. If you use a
⏹️ ▶️ John I can understand why people like natural scrolling. And it is two separate settings. By the way, you can have natural
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling on your on your trackpad and on quote unquote unnatural scrolling on your mouse. That’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s two separate settings. But yeah, if they the reason I think they leave that checkbox there is there are enough
⏹️ ▶️ John people that will just never get used to it. Enough people probably inside Apple who just like just just leave the
⏹️ ▶️ John checkbox. It’s not it’s not going off your back. It’s really easy to do. It’s just like some negative number flip somewhere in in some code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Absolute monsters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and going back to the reason I brought that up is I feel like, the original thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, as soon as they change something that you don’t like, just adopt it quickly, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go for it. That way, you’re not surprised later. Well, I recently decided, you know what? I’ll be surprised later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fine. If they give me an option to turn Safari, like if this option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was discovered in this plist thing, if this sticks around or if there ever is an exposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GUI option to turn Safari back to the way all web browsers have looked forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? I’ll use it because I want my tabs to have the full width of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window to expand into their tab list because so often I have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tabs in one window that they start collapsing the little text down and become icon only,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s worse. And so I try to then keep the number down because I like being able to see part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the the title of the text because that’s useful UI. And if the tabs end up having like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thirds or half of the space they had before total, that’s gonna significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impede the usability of this browser. And so if there’s some setting to just change it back, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, I want that setting. And if they take it away in five years, fine, I’ll reevaluate then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But until then, I might as well enjoy it the good way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but in this specific case, the quote unquote setting isn’t even like a plist in the Safari plist,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is like disclosure required in the feature flags plist. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder how long that’s gonna stay around or be functional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, honestly, that probably won’t even make it through the beta, but if it does, and I hope it does, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will probably end up using it that way. Now, the real question is, can you somehow hack the iOS Safari to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not suck as much as it does right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in the beta? You know, I don’t know about that. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t, I’ve mostly just been messing with the Mac ones, but I am curious to see what the
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS ones are like. In principle, I feel better about the iOS changes, but I will have to try them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I should clarify, iPad’s not too bad. I don’t love the iPad version, but it’s not as bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone version is what’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Strong disagree, strong disagree with you there. iPad is mediocre at best,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iOS I actually think is very good. I like having the address bar down at the bottom so you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as like a second home indicator, affordance, whatever you call that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, speaking of the address bar on the bottom, That’s another one of the focuses of one of the sessions.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’ve got the address bar on the bottom, but if you think about it, if you scroll, the address bar collapses
⏹️ ▶️ John to that smaller version, and then moves up to be floating to the bigger version.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when it moves up like that, it can possibly block what is at the bottom of the webpage, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on how you scroll. And so they have special,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are settings in CSS that you can do to make it aware of when that button appears so your webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John will scoot up out of the way of the UI. And it’s like, oh, come on, Apple. It works, you can do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it’s adding work for web developers that basically no one’s gonna do except for people like me who have nothing better to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make a change that only, maybe Safari, mobile Safari’s so popular that they’ll make the change anyway, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like, the UI of your web browser makes
⏹️ ▶️ John me have to change my website to accommodate for it? That is backwards. It should not be that
⏹️ ▶️ John way, it should be the other way. However my website is, your browser should accommodate because my website is
⏹️ ▶️ John the show and your browser is supposed to be the Chrome. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, they never actually, that’s wonderful wishful thinking that the entire web’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow make this work. The reality is, we’ve seen for how long? Over a decade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as iPhone users? Whenever you see a web view or a web page that opens up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ve put something in the bottom 44 points of the viewport
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you just can’t tap it. Because if you try to tap it, the toolbar comes up, right? And this has been a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. You can’t rely on the entire internet to update all of their designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of time to work around some of these UI hacks that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco puts in every iPhone. You know, a lot of web developers will do it right, but even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if 95% of the web pages you visit do it right, that 5% is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bother you. So to add even more little custom Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behaviors that interfere with web content, in order to have the web content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flow around the background of a toolbar, doesn’t seem not only worth it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also it just doesn’t seem pragmatic. I think that’s going to break even more pages than the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing did. And again, and I keep asking for what? I don’t mind the concept of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the toolbar at the bottom. I think that’s an interesting thing to explore. There are some challenges there, But given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how phones are really big and everything, that’s an interesting thing to explore, I think, for the UI. But the way they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implemented this bottom toolbar with those two different modes and the giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drop shadow around the large mode of the address bar and burying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, it’s just, I feel like this is like version 0.2 of this design that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t have made it out of the lab and needs some more iteration, a lot more iteration.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did this with the hardware, too, if you remember. This was also in the same session where they reminded people of a thing that’s been there for years now,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is when they added the notch to the iPhone, a hardware feature. Now, if you’re looking at a webpage and you rotate
⏹️ ▶️ John it and you turn it into landscape view, you can’t really have the webpage getting stuck under the notch. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what they do is say, okay, well now when you rotate it into landscape, the actual edge of the Safari quote unquote window is
⏹️ ▶️ John clearer than notch, right? But then sometimes it looks weird because now it looks like you’re not using the full width of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So there is a feature again in Safari with CSS where
⏹️ ▶️ John a basic CSS feature, right? To say what is a safe area insets or whatever, but there’s a viewport directive
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can use to make it so that your background extends into the notch while keeping your content clear of the notch,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And most of these features, if you look at them in the abstract, like, well, this is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John a feature for Apple’s notch. It’s more like a feature of saying essentially, where is a safe area for me to draw my content versus
⏹️ ▶️ John where is an area where my background could go? And that is a generic feature and web standards are supported and I
⏹️ ▶️ John applaud all of that. But if you look at the sum of things that Apple has done to make lives more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John with people running websites, sometimes purely in service of its own particular devices or its own particular design,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, Marco, there are lots of ways to do a bottom navigation bar that don’t have this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, right? Lots of them. But part of the problem is like when you’re a designer, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you look at the solutions they came up with, when you have a design like this and it’s like, okay, this design has problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you solve those problems, quote unquote solve those problems by like, oh, here’s how we can do this with an existing CSS
⏹️ ▶️ John standard and some directives, and just do this and the webpage and blah, blah, blah, and then we can make a WWDC session about it and explain to people how to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. You feel good that you’ve solved those problems because you have done a clever thing. You had some problems and you
⏹️ ▶️ John solved them, but you also made the problems. The problems are there because of the design
⏹️ ▶️ John that you picked and so while it feels good to solve those problems and it’s cool when you can come up with a generic
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism to solve them that it doesn’t just solve your problem but solves this entire class of problems, you still think, well, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just did a normal bottom toolbar, that might have been better. Now there’s this trade-offs for a regular bottom toolbar too because it wouldn’t be as high
⏹️ ▶️ John and as big, like I understand, you know. It’s a little muddy and we’ll all live with this thing for a while and see how it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe we’ll never be able to go back to the old one where you had to reach way up to the top of the phone to do anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird. But anyway, my website is update. Everything I just mentioned, my website is update to accommodate.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you ever look at my website when I put a post on it once per year, everything will work great on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You update the website like in its design and technical stuff more than you post on it. Way more often.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because it’s probably like a once a year thing. I still haven’t done dark mode. That’s the one thing I don’t support. And mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t, it was just too much effort to try to come up with a good dark mode, uh, color scheme. And I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of don’t like the idea of websites turning dark and dark mode. I kind of like my website to look the same all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sorry. I’m sorry for blinding every blinding everybody in dark mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. I have never been in, I have never been in opposition with you two more than I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tonight. You are, you are, but you both have had a string of impressively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong opinions this entire episode. I don’t know what to do with myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John you run in dark mode?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I run dark mode when it’s dark outside. I don’t run it all the time, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh no, that’s the worst. I don’t like my things to change like that. Like I know people, I understand people are into it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I run it on the phone, but not on the, not on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it all the time on the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I, I, on the phone I do auto switching, but on the, but on everything else I’m light all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe when you get older and start losing your night vision, uh, you’ll like dark mode less, But I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I should I should come up with a good dark, but actually coming up with a good dark mode color scheme Is much
⏹️ ▶️ John harder than you think it is Apple again Apple does an amazing job of this a lot of their dark mode color schemes
⏹️ ▶️ John are fantastic and it’s like a you really have to like understand color theory because if you like take the eyedropper and
⏹️ ▶️ John sample the colors you’re Like that’s the color they’re using that looks awful, but then you look at it in the UI like oh it looks right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know It’s the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you you know All the optical illusions if you like have a piece of paper that covers up the whole picture except the one little square
⏹️ ▶️ John where the color is, the color looks nothing like you thought because that’s how color, our perception of color works. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John coming up with a good dark mode color scheme is difficult. If I could come up with a good one for my website, I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ John put in a dark mode just to satisfy people but I personally don’t use it.
Sponsor: Secret Sauce by Wondery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Secret Sauce, a podcast from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wondery. In the Secret Sauce series, hosts John Fry and Sam Donner explore
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ARM-only Monterey features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk more WWDC stuff and let’s see what wrong opinions you two have about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this stuff. There are ARM-only Monterey features only on Apple Silicon, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a bummer. So the following features are listed in some fine print
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as being as requiring a Mac with the M1 chip. Portrait mode, blurred backgrounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and FaceTime videos, live text for copying. Oh man, real edit. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey realize that. Keep reading,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you feeling about it? Live text for copying and pasting, looking up or translating text within photos. An interactive 3D globe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the earth in the Maps app. More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which by the way, those maps are crazy cool. I was impressed by that when I saw it in the keynote and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the beta on a test 11 pro and on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day-to-day iPad and those maps are incredibly cool. Text-to-speech in more languages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish. device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offline. And finally, unlimited keyboard detection, which is previously limited to 60 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per instance. That’s a bummer, particularly the maps thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the live text thing, I think are super, super bummers. That’s too bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is quite a mixture of features, many of which were kind of headlining features, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John people might be surprised to learn if they’re not on Intel. Now, obviously, like this is on Apple’s web page, and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a little footnote that says they’re not available on Intel. Maybe that will change before release, but it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just how it is in the beta and we can guess. They did put it on a web page. Like it’s it’s an apple.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ John mac os slash monterey hyphen preview. So it’s not a public web page where they’re saying, hey, if you got an intel mac, don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Some of the features have a plausible, if still frustrating explanation,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Uh, the portrait mode, blurring, facetime video, whatever, right? That features
⏹️ ▶️ John that were developed for ios devices and for the neural engine on the
⏹️ ▶️ John arm chip and all and all that stuff. Yes, they could rewrite it so it worked on Intel. But at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point in Apple’s transition to ARM, how much effort do you think Apple wants to spend rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ John something for Intel, you know, to be GPU powered or to use, you know, Intel’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, SIMD instructions or whatever, right? There’s lots of ways you could do this. It’s not like Intel Macs are quote unquote incapable of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The neural engine is pretty amazing though, but still. You could do it on, you know, on Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. But Apple doesn’t want to have to invest time in writing that. Like a lot of the frameworks that they used to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it are probably, you know, Apple neural engine frameworks because this feature was building on
⏹️ ▶️ John work that was done when this was only ever going to ship on something with the neural engine and all that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I mean, it’s disappointing. It’s not actually a technical barrier, but you can understand why Apple wouldn’t want to invest
⏹️ ▶️ John the time to make an Intel version just as they’re flushing the rest of the Intel Macs down the toilet, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So sad, but understandable. Some other ones though, you’re like, does this require anything
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with the ARM, you know, with ARM, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John system out of chips, or is it just that they had finished working code that works in ARM and they didn’t even bother even
⏹️ ▶️ John like recompiling and dealing with the issues? And one example of that is the app Globes
⏹️ ▶️ John view. Apparently there’s a way to re-enable that feature with a debug flag and it works just fine
⏹️ ▶️ John in Intel Macs. So maybe, maybe it has bugs on Intel, maybe they didn’t want to test it on Intel, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it all kind of gets into the sort of the corporate horse trading of like, what does Apple deciding to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John its time on? And it seems like any time spent on things just for Intel Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of below the line, as we say in the business for Apple these days. With the possible exception
⏹️ ▶️ John being the newly revised Mac Pro tower that supports the Nvidia 6900 video cards
⏹️ ▶️ John that has been rumored for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with the new, if they come up with the new, you know, with the new Xeons and everything, if they come up with new Intel Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John with the new Xeons and new video cards, but still you can’t do like the globe map thing on Intel Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s quite a mixture of corporate priorities. But I suppose the priorities
⏹️ ▶️ John for the SuperDuper Pro group and their customers are very different than the priorities of everyone else. But it is gonna make people feel
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointed. Like if live text doesn’t work, and it’s like, oh, I saw that, you know, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I see people doing that on their Macs. Why can’t I do it on my Mac? Oh, you’ve got an Intel Mac. What’s Intel?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like people don’t know why they can’t do it. It just seems like a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, everyone should have our Macs, but Apple’s not gonna give everyone one of those for free. So I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope that Apple kind of changes its mind on at least a few of these and puts in the work to
⏹️ ▶️ John make an Intel version of these features because I don’t think it would be that much work. And even though Apple’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be selling Intel Macs pretty soon, people can have them for a long time.
Macs suck at games lol
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just kind of funny to think like, you know, back when we were all in middle school, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we’d be talking, oh yeah, do you play the latest, you know, Doom or whatever? And you know, the one kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be like, oh, I have a Mac. And I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you poor kid, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s- You sweet summer child. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your games suck. And like now, like, you know, eventually Apple moved to Intel, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same processor PCs we’re using, you can install Windows on it and everything, like the maximum compatibility with everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they left that world and now we feel bad for the Intel Macs. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t do this new feature. That’s too bad. We really have come full circle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s because the Apple’s new big thing is the phone new big thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s where all the action happens. And so it’s like all the cool features happen on the phone and if the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John can benefit from that great, but if it can’t because it uses the wrong kind of processor, oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s the whole reason they did the transition to begin with. I remember, speaking of Mac and Doom, I remember playing Doom
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac. What was it? It was like, it was a Doom port to the Mac, which was not a good port, and it was many
⏹️ ▶️ John years after Doom was, you know, obviously out on the PC. And there was some kind of thing that you used for
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS that gave you like, you two will tell me, what was the weird PC networking
⏹️ ▶️ John that Doom used for a deathmatch? IPX?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco IPX. IPX, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it was a Mac OS IPX extension, so you could play Doom deathmatch against people
⏹️ ▶️ John on PCs through the world’s jankiest network stack that somehow is like a house of cards. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, I don’t even know if it was, I guess it had to be TCP IP. Because TCP IP used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like an extension. It wasn’t built into the operating system back in the day, so like trumpet windsock
⏹️ ▶️ John days, when it was like a thing that you would get for your computer and add on so you could get on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the framework was terrible. And I’d already played Doom for years on my friend’s Pentiums and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was kind of pointless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing is, through this entire circle of having the wrong processor, then having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right processor, now having the wrong processor again, games on the Mac have always sucked and still have still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck and will always suck.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that shows that the hardware is not usually the main barrier, but there was a time in there when
⏹️ ▶️ John we are on Intel and you could get Nvidia GPUs when, yeah, it was still a grim situation, but
⏹️ ▶️ John at least you could just boot into Windows and have the same stuff. You got the same processor, you got the same Nvidia graphic
⏹️ ▶️ John card, you got the same Windows, and it would run at the speed that you would expect a PC that you built for one eighth of the price
⏹️ ▶️ John run that same game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So since I’ve made fun of you two for being old, let me make fun of myself for being old. I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vividly having friends bring their like mini tower to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tower computers and their 8,000 pound CRTs to my house to have sleepover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a quote unquote LAN party. But this was during the days of DOS. And so it wasn’t a LAN party. It was instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like two computers would connect to each other with what you would think is a serial cable. But oh, no, know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you remember what it’s called, Marco? A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. With a null modem cable. And so you could play against each other, because there was no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, any sort of networking at that point. I mean, I’m sure it existed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it wasn’t on DOS or anything like that. And then fast forward a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a lot of these games on DOS, like Doom, for example, supported the aforementioned IPX networking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t know where or how that ever existed for real. but apparently it was a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere. But, and I’ve talked about this several times on the show over the last few years, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember getting a piece of software called Kali, K-A-L-I, and I’ll put a link in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco show notes. Oh, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey huge. Yeah. And so what it would do is it would emulate an IPX network, like a local IPX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network, but it rode on top of the internet, on top of TCP IP. So it was like a combination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this like network facade, as well as a like game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey match system. And I’m sure There’s a better term for that with kids these days, but I don’t know, that’s what I called it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time. And so you could find, like, and I remember playing Descent with this all the time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would figure out on the internet a group of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people to play Descent, and you would find these rooms in Kali, and then you would connect, and then it would fake out the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPX network so you could all play each other. And this was applicable to many, many, many different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DOS games, and in Windows as well at the time. And it was amazing. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shareware, and I remember I asked dad if I could have his credit card to spend like 20 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one time to have a license in perpetuity, which I don’t have that information anymore, but I guess if I wanted to download
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kali again, I think it’s still valid. But anyways, it was just amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so wild how far we’ve come from bringing these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceedingly heavy computers and extremely heavy monitors upstairs to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house, where we had these no modem cables where we would and eat too many Doritos and play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games against each other. See also when we would play point-to-point via modems. So you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have your modem call the other person’s modem, and you could play point-to-point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a local area against each other. It was so barbaric, but at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the coolest thing in the entire world. And it was a miracle that we could get it to work. Golly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now it’s like, thinking about that, it’s so ancient and preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even though I had Macs during all this time and never owned a PC, everything you’ve listed, I’ve done.
⏹️ ▶️ John cables, Kali. Just because I didn’t have a PC doesn’t mean I wasn’t around people who had them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I was there as technical help to do what Margo has described, to spend the first hour and a half just trying to get everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the map and get everything set up and get the connections to work. Or get us to call on the phone and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, we’re gonna call you now, okay, hang up, all right, hang on. And then have to do the modem thing. Oh, it was a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, I miss those days. I don’t really want to go back to these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do miss those days quite a bit. And Marco, you did a fair number of honest to goodness LAN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parties in your day, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, actually, because in our little group of friends, three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us had some concept of a home network, like Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiring running somewhere with multiple computers. But mostly it was us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bringing our giant tower computers and giant heavy CRT monitors to to each other’s houses and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugging in somehow to some kind of ethernet situation. I mean, these days it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much easier because these days most kids have laptops instead of desktops so even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your gaming performance on a laptop would be inferior to desktop performance, it would still be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far more useful for bringing to your friend’s house and playing together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention the fact that wifi exists which back then it was just barely starting to come out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of us had it. So, oh man, we had so much fun. To
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go from not being able to play computer games with each other in the same room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the first time we experienced that was such an upgrade in fun and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in coolness. I still remember those early games. I mean, the very first one we played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was Doom. We didn’t have a null modem cable, though. And one of my friends,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his parents had two computers they both were like, you know, computer-using professionals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they had two phone lines, because again, they were professionals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lyle Troxell Oh, so you would dial it yourselves? Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, by lacking a null modem cable, we used one computer to call the other one, tying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up both phone lines. Lyle Troxell Yep, yep, yep. Adam Which, naturally, that did not last. The parents were not super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pleased with us tying up both of their phone lines for, you know, indefinite amounts of time to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doom. But man, we do have it a lot better today, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those times were very fun as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s funny you bring that up because we had two phone lines for most of my childhood, which made us pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoiled. And the reason we had it was because my dad, when he came home, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often living on the computer. We were talking about this just a couple of weeks ago, continuing to use Profs, which was this terminal-based email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution. And he would be on the phone, dialed into IBM for hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the evenings. And if we didn’t have two phone lines, like it would be a mess, but dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would go to bed pretty early because he always woke up early. And so there were a couple hours at night that I would be awake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the second phone line would be empty. And so it was not unusual to have a late night gaming session with one of my local
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends where I would dial that person or they would dial me or what have you. And it’s also funny too, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how it is today, but when Marco and I were in college, and I think John, you had a similar experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with different games, but when And Mark, when I were in college, Counter-Strike was really big, and Quake 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 3 or something, I forget which one it was, but one of the Quakes was really big. And as Neil __
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat points out, college dorms were just LAN parties across several rooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I played an unreasonable amount of Counter-Strike, both against people in my own dorm and across the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was at college. And again, I miss those days. They were so fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you had some sort of collegiate networked gaming experience, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean with the Mac people you could do like AppleTalk networks with the phone net thing, right? So it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little adapter that lets you use phone cord to type There were a lot of Mac and not a lot but like there were there
⏹️ ▶️ John were Mac games There were only Mac games that use AppleTalk networking and only AppleTalk networking
⏹️ ▶️ John to do their network gaming So if you wanted to play those games you needed an AppleTalk network and nobody had an AppleTalk
⏹️ ▶️ John network Like there were some schools you’d hear the stories of a school like yeah, this school is so bought into Apple stuff They have an
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleTalk network in their dorms. You’re like an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco AppleTalk network Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, we’d have to make our own in our school. We weren’t that lucky slash unfortunate, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on how you view having an
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleTalk network in your dorm. AppleTalk is cool for lots of reasons, but not so cool
⏹️ ▶️ John once the internet came out. I can tell you that. But yeah, Ebola was the old one. But when I was in school, we were playing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was Ambrosia Software. I never knew how to pronounce it because no one ever said these words,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was no audio on the internet. But it was A-V-A-R-A. It was either Avara or what? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like a 2D chicken Walker mech 3D rendered
⏹️ ▶️ John and you would shoot projectiles out of the other 2D chicken Walker mechs in a 3D rendered world. So it was, it was flat
⏹️ ▶️ John shaded, no textures, but polygons. And so it was like 3d first person online shooter
⏹️ ▶️ John and your, your movement direction was independent of your view direction. Um, so it was novel in
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. And you were sort of controlling a, you know, a little vehicle things. Anyway, uh, we
⏹️ ▶️ John do that over Apple talk or over various versions of Apple talk tunneled across various things throughout the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John labs. because to be able to run that, you needed a bunch of Macs that were powerful enough to do 3D stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly in the days before 3D cards. You needed actually a pretty fast CPU and a fancy color screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John which a lot of Macs didn’t have because they were black and white, a lot of the older ones, and also an AppleTalk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bolo is a video game initially created for the BBC microcomputer by Stuart Cheshire in 1987. You know that guy. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that guy, and then later ported to Cheshire, by Cheshire to the Apple Macintosh. No fricking way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Stuart works at Apple now and is Mr. Discovery, well, not Discovery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the, the MDMS responder. ZeroConf, Rendezvous. Yep, yep, yep. That was his baby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he’s still at Apple as of just a couple of months ago anyway. So that is super wild.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize that was Stuart. That’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. You could find people to match against by going to the chooser where you chose your printer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No way, that’s absolutely bananas. That’s super cool. Well, see, now I feel old too and now we’re
Disk Utility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now that I’m in a better mood and don’t hate you two anymore, tell me what’s exciting about Disk Utility, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything. Disk Utility has been updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this an area where you really want excitement? Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you really want exciting things in Disk Utility, I mean, last time they touched it, it was not
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Yeah, well, that’s the problem. They changed Disk Utility, I forget when, a couple of years ago now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they changed it by essentially, like, it seemed like it was almost like it was an all new app. Because the UI looked all new. But all
⏹️ ▶️ John people really cared about was, hey, where is this feature that I used to be able to do in disk utility, it’s not there anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the interface was new and looked clean and was quote unquote simplified, but a bunch of features were missing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And slowly but surely, most of them have come back. Some of them haven’t, some of them have
⏹️ ▶️ John left just because of the massive change in the way Macs boot, especially the M1 Macs. Like even on Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, they’ve been changing the way they boot to adding the T1 and the T2 chip and all that other stuff. But then with
⏹️ ▶️ John the ARM-based Macs, the boot process of Macs is totally different and much more like it is on, as you
⏹️ ▶️ John can imagine on the phones and the iPads. and that impacts what you can and can’t do with Disk Utility. And of course, APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, which changes everything about the file system and how it works. And for a while, Disk Utility
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have the features to, didn’t under, they couldn’t do all the things that APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John could do. So you’d have to do them from the command line. And it’s been a long time coming, but anyway, Disk Utility is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more features. And this year, finally, in Monterey, if you open up Disk Utility and
⏹️ ▶️ John select in the sidebar, one of your APFS volumes, you will see at the bottom, a new little section of
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI that shows you, ta-da, all your snapshots. And not only does it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco show you your snapshots,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can add and remove snapshots from a GUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that, you don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ John TMUtil anymore. And it also has a bunch of columns, you can customize the columns and show more of them, but some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the columns that are included are something called Tidemark and Private Size and
⏹️ ▶️ John Size. And if you mouse over these things and get help about them, little tooltip will explain what they mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is trying mightily to explain how much extra space
⏹️ ▶️ John is taken up by this snapshot. If I deleted this snapshot, how much space would I get back?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has to do with, well, what is the delta from this snapshot to the previous one? And what is the tide mark
⏹️ ▶️ John of the largest allocation byte, you know, used by this
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshot? The definitions are complicated and it’s not particularly clarifying to the average person, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you really wanna know some more details, now there is an actual GUI to show you information about snapshots.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope people don’t send other people here to say, hey, if you can’t install my software, open disk utility, go
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the snapshots, select everything and hit the minus button. But at least that’s better than telling them, go to TMUtil,
⏹️ ▶️ John delete local snapshots and then type a date in the special format. Like, it’s less fraught than
⏹️ ▶️ John going to the command line. So I’m glad to see disk utility expanding to finally start to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John expose a lot of the functionality that has been in APFS. Now, if only the Finder could do a better job of telling
⏹️ ▶️ John us how much space is really free on our disks, we’d be making some progress. baby steps.
Mac Erase All Content & Settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when there seemed to be a convergence of macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iOS, a lot of Mac fans, including me, got really nervous because it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad things could come here. You know, here be the dragons. But there are some things that seem really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool that have been integrated or brought from iOS to macOS. And here’s one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently macOS Monterey allows you to erase a Mac without needing to reinstall the operating system. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super cool. Seemingly in system preferences, there’s an option to erase all user data and user installed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps from the system while maintaining the operating system currently installed. Because the storage is always encrypted on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac systems with Apple Silicon on the T2 chip or the T2 chip, the system is instantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and securely erased by destroying the encryption keys. Very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was many years and coming because like if you remember the path the Mac has traveled,
⏹️ ▶️ John first it was just like a Mac and you had a boot disk and everything was on and if you erase the disk, everything was gone. And then they put the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system on a separate partition and then they said the operating system is on a separate partition, it’s read only. And then they said the operating system is on a separate partition,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s read only, and actually you’re booted from a snapshot that’s cryptographically signed. And at that point, you basically
⏹️ ▶️ John have parity with iOS, which, and this is what Apple says on their webpage, the phrase they use is a phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John that should be familiar to iOS users, people who are familiar with iPhones or iPads, erase all content and settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s been an option on our phones forever. You know, oh, if I wanna like get rid of my stuff on the phone, say
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna give this phone, hand me down to my kid, I want my stuff to be off it, you just do erase all content and settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what that would be doing on your iOS device is essentially throwing away the encryption key for
⏹️ ▶️ John the user data section of the storage. It didn’t, you didn’t have to reinstall the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system because on iOS, the operating system was sealed off somewhere else. And now the Macs are like that too. And now you get the advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you can essentially wipe your Mac just as fast as you can wipe your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Extremely cool stuff. All right.
iCloud Private Relay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about iCloud Private Relay and how this all works.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think when we talked about it in the keynote episode, it was like, oh, this seems kind of like a VPN. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s subtly different now. There’s been a lot of articles about this. But I think it was worth touching on briefly. We’ll put a link to Jason
⏹️ ▶️ John Snell’s article where he explains it well. So to recap what a VPN is, a VPN
⏹️ ▶️ John is like when you can, and you can have a VPN for subsets of the network or the whole network. But essentially, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to tunnel your traffic over this secure connection through some servers that we control. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of people’s workplaces use them. So, you know, you can tunnel into your works internal network.
⏹️ ▶️ John Normally, all of your internal work stuff would be completely invisible because they use internal IP
⏹️ ▶️ John addresses that are not publicly routable. But if you get on the VPN, it will make a little secure tunnel with your
⏹️ ▶️ John authentication credentials so that on your home from your home network, when you’re working from home for a year because of covid,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can actually get on your works internal network. That’s what a VPN is. And like I said, a VPN, you can say, OK, every
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of traffic that goes to and from my Mac over the network goes through the VPN, or you can have,
⏹️ ▶️ John say, only for this subset of addresses go through the VPN. You have some flexibility, but that’s what a VPN is.
⏹️ ▶️ John People use VPNs for non-work purposes to essentially disguise where
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re coming from, disguise who they are, where they’re coming from, because from the perspective of,
⏹️ ▶️ John once you go through the VPN, the VPN is the thing connecting to the rest of the internet, and the rest of the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks, I’m getting a connection from whatever this VPN is, but they don’t know who you are as part of the encryption. So you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John it seem like you live somewhere where you don’t if you go through a VPN that’s in a different country. As far as the servers that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re connecting to are concerned, it looks like you’re coming from that country and not where you really are, so on and so forth. iCloud Private
⏹️ ▶️ John Relay is not a VPN, but it’s aimed at trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John preserve your privacy while you browse the web. So here’s the description of how it works. Instead of using a VPN, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially one single proxy that you go through, iCloud Private Relay uses two separate
⏹️ ▶️ John parts here. One called an ingress proxy, and the one called the egress proxy. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the ingress proxy is managed by Apple. And that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that hides your IP address. So you connect to the ingress proxy and the ingress proxy sees your IP address because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re connecting to it. There’s no way, unfortunately, if again, if you’re not on a VPN, there’s no way to avoid that. The ingress
⏹️ ▶️ John proxy sees your IP address. But the ingress proxy doesn’t see what you’re trying to connect to
⏹️ ▶️ John because that has been encrypted on your Mac and sent over the wire. So the ingress proxy says, okay, well, I know this person’s IP
⏹️ ▶️ John address and then I have this encrypted packet that says where they’re getting to, but I don’t know what’s in that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it passes this information on to the egress proxy, but when it connects to the egress proxy, the egress
⏹️ ▶️ John proxy says, who’s connecting to me? And it sees the IP address of the ingress proxy, because that is
⏹️ ▶️ John who is connecting to it. So as far as the egress proxy is concerned, oh, I’m getting a connection from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s, you know, ingress server, right? Oh, and by the way, here’s the content.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s this encrypted packet of telling me where I’m supposed to go. And now apparently, somehow, in a way that hasn’t been explained anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve seen, the egress proxy has the keys to decrypt
⏹️ ▶️ John the place where you’re trying to get to. And so it decrypts the place where you’re trying to get to, say apple.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it connects to apple.com and gets the information and the data flows back that way. So it’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to split up the information so that one place knows your IP, but not where you’re going. And the next place knows where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going, but not your IP. And Apple pitches this as privacy preserving
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple runs the ingress proxies, but it doesn’t have to run the egress proxies like it farms them out to third parties,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And you can imagine how there can be a public private key exchange over this whole route where you could get it so the egress
⏹️ ▶️ John proxies know how to decrypt the thing. But here’s the problem. Apple keeps pitching this as like, well, with the VPN,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to really trust that VPN provider because they see all your traffic. Like everything goes through there, right? They have all the keys to
⏹️ ▶️ John the kingdom. And in this thing, you don’t need to trust anybody because Apple knows one thing and doesn’t know the other and the third party knows
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing and doesn’t know. But the problem is you have to trust Apple. Like in the end, with all this stuff, you have to trust Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is the one telling us that, oh yeah, on your Mac, we’ll encrypt where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to get to, and then we’ll send it along. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s the one deciding to do that encryption. They could choose not to do the encryption. They could do the encryption and then send the keys somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else or use a well-known. Like, in the end, you have to trust Apple because they’re writing the software that implements the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple could know all this information. Apple is telling us, and I 100% believe them, that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not doing that, that they are literally encrypting it and passing it on, They can’t, you know, because Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to know this information. They want it to be secure. But in the end, you have to trust Apple or rather
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say Apple is hacked and someone puts a backdoor in their operating system. It would be trivially easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to get access to all this traffic because again, Apple’s operating systems and frameworks are the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones implementing it and deciding to encrypt this stuff, right? So the thing I’m curious about is actually the key exchange of
⏹️ ▶️ John how does the egress proxy, how does the egress proxy have the ability to decrypt the encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John address to get sent along to it, while the Ingress proxy doesn’t have that ability. I’m not sure how that key exchange works,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t think it’s been explained, but either way, that’s what it does. And the second thing that’s different about this in a VPN is,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, what’s included in this? Is it all network traffic? Is it a subset of the network? It’s even more specific than that. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John things that Apple says are included are browsing from the Safari web browser specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it seems like some of this is implemented in whatever framework Safari is using. When you go to connect to a web page, Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John itself, or some frameworks that it’s using, Rather than making HTTP connection to the target website,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to encrypt what you’re trying to get, I’m gonna connect to an Ingress server and pass along whatever packet in whatever format
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Ingress server, and you know, like Safari or some framework is doing that. The other thing that’s included is DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John queries, which makes sense because if you don’t see where people are browsing, but you see what they do DNS lookups for, you still
⏹️ ▶️ John know where they’re browsing. Oh, they did a DNS lookup for www.apple.com, but then I don’t know what webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John they went to. They probably went to apple.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So they’re tunneling the DNS queries to the private relay as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are lots of other ways to secure DNS too, by the way, but this is what they’re doing. They’re tunneling it over this thing. And they will also
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the private relay for what they call a subset of app traffic, by which they
⏹️ ▶️ John have explained that they mean plain HTTP, so non-HTTPS traffic, right? So apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John if any app tries to make a plain, unencrypted HTTP connection, it will go through private relay, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And here are the things that it doesn’t apply to. Doesn’t apply to LAN connections, so anything on your local network in any form,
⏹️ ▶️ John private relay doesn’t do. Doesn’t apply to private domains. I’m not entirely sure what they mean by that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe just like domains that are not in the public DNS, but are just privately routable. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe that’s internal,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Doesn’t apply to network extensions VPNs. Apple still supports
⏹️ ▶️ John VPNs. You can run a VPN and also use private relay. Like the VPN is a separate thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I assume that if you ran both of them, either Private Relay wouldn’t go through the VPN or it would go through
⏹️ ▶️ John the VPN on its way to hitting the Ingress server, you know what I mean? Like, it’d be interesting, like if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a VPN that makes it look like you’re coming from a different country, would it use the Ingress server in that country? Because that’s the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about Private Relay, it’s intentionally not making you look like you come from a different place. So it will use an Ingress server
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s nearish to you. So it won’t be like, they won’t be able to pinpoint you, but they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to tell, like the example they gave us, like they’ll be able to tell that you’re somewhere in the Bay Area, but they won’t be able to pinpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John you in the same way they could if they had your IP address, because the Bay Area is a big place. And I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John the farther away from big cities you get, the bigger the potential area where you could be
⏹️ ▶️ John is, because I’m not sure they have 7,000 Ingress servers in Wyoming, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the network extensions are things that are used to see network traffic as it goes by and filter it. All that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John still works with private relay. That stuff, it doesn’t obsolete them, it doesn’t replace them, they still function.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, if you have some configured proxy, it says, okay, well, they already have some other thing they need to go through, so
⏹️ ▶️ John private relay can’t work because you have to go through the proxy, right? The interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John bit towards the end of the W3C session about this was like, for all you people out there, because anytime you say
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about networking, everybody who has to like support Macs in the enterprise and businesses is like, oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is this gonna do to all, like, no one’s gonna be able to get to the intranet and everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna break or whatever, so the question is, hey, what if you run, the example they give,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are an enterprise or education customer, and you don’t want private relay
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in your network, and I can imagine there are a lot of people who work in education and enterprise who
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want private relay because it’s just another headache, right? Here’s what you can do, here’s their suggestion. So the first
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, step one, block the DNS resolution of Apple’s Ingress servers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because, you know, like Apple systems will try to say, I need to talk to an Ingress server, let me look
⏹️ ▶️ John one up by name. Presumably, Apple’s gonna give you a list of the DNS names of all their Ingress servers, So basically
⏹️ ▶️ John block the DNS of that, because if you control the network, you also control DNS and make sure you’re, it makes it unresolvable, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you’ve blocked that DNS, Apple’s devices and operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John will still try to connect to private relay, but they’ll fail. And when they’ll fail, you get a message.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we have a screenshot up here in the notes that says that they can only give, campus Wi-Fi isn’t compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John with iCloud private relay. You will not be able to access the internet unless you turn off Apple private relay
⏹️ ▶️ John for this network. Turning off private relay means this network can monitor your internet activity, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ John will be prompted to turn off private relay when you are on this specific network, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John on your work’s Wi-Fi. And if you say, continue without private relay, then every time you connect to your work’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi, it won’t even try to use private relay. But then when you’re elsewhere, it will use it. So basically, private
⏹️ ▶️ John relay is essentially on by default for everybody who has this feature. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John only way to stop it is if you own the network, make it not work. And if it doesn’t work, the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John will say, I see it’s not working. Do you want me to just not try on this network anymore? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty bold of Apple to do this. It shows their commitment to privacy. It’s pretty weird in that the privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John still depends on you entirely trusting Apple, but I can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John rolling out features like this, I always, I find terrifying, like, I’m terrified by proxy, like I’m terrified
⏹️ ▶️ John for them because boy, you can just break everybody’s stuff so easily if you mess this up
⏹️ ▶️ John in even the smallest way. And I’m sure network admins are not relishing the idea of having to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this kind of came across my radar pretty quickly because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me that my beloved Pihole, which is a DNS server that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s never gonna stop being funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a hilarious name. The Pihole that I run in the house, which is a DNS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server for the house that will block advertisements and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trackers and things of that nature. Well, that’s going to be in conflict with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the private relay. So for a minute there, I thought I’m going to have to go in on all the devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and go ahead and disable private relay for myself on anything. On
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything I want to use in the house. It looks like that’s not the case. I can just on the pie hole, I can tell it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not resolve these servers, and that should fix me up. So I’m pretty excited to
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Why will it not be compatible with it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because the whole idea is that it, the way the Pi-Hole works is it’s a DNS server,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? So maybe I misunderstood private relay, but the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John within the forum- I think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John bypass your DNS server.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly, and I’m pretty sure that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty confident that’s the case. If you make your Pi-Hole have a publicly routable IP address, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure, yes, that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re right, but I would also argue like with all the stuff that Safari is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing with its own built-in like tracker blocking, then the difference between what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting from PiHole versus that is really then just like ad, full on ad blocking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like maybe it’s worth it, maybe not, but you know, maybe you could shift that onto the software side and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do ad blocking extensions in your browsers
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can run, yeah, you can run those network extensions that I mentioned, ad blockers. Like, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why PiHole is more attractive because you run that in one place and it works for all your devices, but
⏹️ ▶️ John all Apple devices support, you know, network extensions that block ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Totally, but you know, what Pi-Hole also blocks is other things like the Amazon tube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phoning home, my television phoning home. And yes, we can have discussions about whether or not I should have an Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tube or whether or not I should have my TV connected to the internet, which actually at this point, maybe I shouldn’t since the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been updated and has all the 4K goodness
⏹️ ▶️ John How are you blocking that from the Pi-Hole? Just by blocking the DNS lookup? Because if you know where they’re trying to connect it to, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you just block that in your router, essentially? Let’s say, don’t allow connections
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey from- That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively what I’m doing now, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m doing it in the Pi hole.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re doing it from DNS. You’re not blocking the connection. If they knew the IP address, they could connect, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ John flaw in your system, because for all you know, these TV manufacturers are gonna be hard-coding a list of IP addresses in their stupid TVs, so they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to do DNS lookups.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, everything you said is accurate, but I like the fact that even for the non-technical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users in my home, they are getting the benefits of all this without having to do any work. The benefits slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breakage. Uh, yes, but I’ve tuned it such that it very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rarely breaks for Aaron and she, and she has a shortcut, you know, like an Apple shortcut in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to turn the pie hole off should, should she need to. And she just says, you know, it’s how to shut your pile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She knows exactly how to shut my pie hole, John. It’s that’s exactly right. She
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has so many ways of shutting my pie hole. I cannot even begin to tell you how many years we’ve been married. We’re coming up on our anniversary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is 14 years this year. So she knows very well how to shut my piehole, don’t you worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but this going back to this feature, I, I, uh, I, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am very interested to follow, you know, the direction this is going because so much of tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and privacy protection falls down at the IP address level, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of it is like, well, we can, we can block trackers and we can block, you know, certain access things and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cookies and all this other stuff, but creepy companies can still form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty reliable identification for us based on IP address. And we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in the podcast space, all the podcast trackers and everything like there’s that’s just kind of like this, this unavoidable hole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our privacy that like the IP address is always like, here’s where it falls down. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, you know, a lot of people are using VPNs for this purpose, for this purpose and everything. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like the, like the one big wall that keeps us being tracked a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I think most people would want or find reasonable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have Apple taking such a big step towards removing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as a trackable data point for a large portion of users, that’s a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step. And that affects tons of stuff. Like going back for a second to the podcast business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going to massively break podcast analytics and podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad tracking. And as podcasters, we should definitely be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit apprehensive about going into this. However, first of all, we don’t have a choice, so here it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is breaking it in a good way. I think this is going to be very destructive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a large part of the advertising and tracking and stats collecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. But where we are afterwards, once the dust has settled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once people have figured out how to do things like count unique podcast downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a reasonably approximation way without using IP addresses to identify uniqueness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the rest of the ecosystem as well, all the different ad trackers and everything, some of them will die or have things made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder for them. Oh, boo-hoo, here’s this tiniest violin. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once the dust settles on all of this, a year or two or three down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even assuming that maybe Apple goes even further with this in the future and expands it to more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfer types, like more network transfer types and more apps and everything else, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna be in a really good place because the IP address as a tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanism will become so much less useful and we really need that for privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole industry, society, like we really need that because we still have people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there arguing that IP addresses are not personally identifiable information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore shouldn’t fall under the protections of various privacy laws and everything. And it’s total BS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s total garbage. Every data broker can reverse look up an IP address to a person. Like that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data’s out there, it’s so easy, it’s trivial, it’s cheap for people to get it if they want to. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IP addresses absolutely are personal information and are extremely trackable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely exploitable for creepy reasons by creepy people and companies. So to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big chunk of that is a very good move for the internet and for society as a whole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so as much as it will cause a lot of disruption in the short term,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longterm, this is gonna be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good for privacy, but when you talk about the internet as a whole, coming from the perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John of a networking, like if you’re a network engineer, which I am not, but just in general, like trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John funnel everybody’s traffic through, Like if you didn’t know about the privacy thing, you’d be like, what are they doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, cause these, these ingress and egress servers, you’re going to have to have a lot of these and they’re going to have a lot of traffic
⏹️ ▶️ John funneled through them and it is not the most efficient way to get data from point A to point B. It is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s a Rube Goldberg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine. Technically you’re right, but the way this appears to be implemented is with CDNs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is actually really clever if you think about it. It’s like, so, and one of the things Apple talks about in explaining this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sessions and everything is that this largely doesn’t break region detection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why is because they’re using basically CDN endpoints
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over the world so that you’re still gonna come from your approximate region. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be like a city size granularity or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Central Ohio maybe, like instead of your exact neighborhood with your cable company or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re still gonna be nearby. And if you think about like using CDNs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like the nodes in the system is actually really clever because Just by the nature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you know what you need to deploy modern CDNs like you have endpoints everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have tons of them all over the place and so if all you’re doing is going to the nearest CDN node
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only are you not going very far and not only are there tons of those around the world to help share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the load But also, because it’s a node of a popular CDN, it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even already have the content you’re looking for in its local cache. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a short trip to go from you to the, you know, egress node, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the egress node might not actually have to go very far to get your data in the first place. It might even be local. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think ultimately this is probably going to prove to be pretty effective and pretty transparent
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what you described is basically why it won’t be a complete disaster from day one, hopefully.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, I mean, it’s not as secure, this is that weird fish nerve that goes through your body, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s also not ideal. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you are connecting to something that would be much more straightforward to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe it depends on where you live. Like, I connect to servers, some of which, you know, are local in the
⏹️ ▶️ John area, and going to the CDN first, even if it’s a CDN that’s also in Boston, and then going
⏹️ ▶️ John out of that CDN to a server, it would be more straightforward for me to go right to the thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? Like it’s not as circuitous as, Oh, I have to go to, I have to go to London and then back to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to some server in Boston. But sometimes if the thing you’re trying to get to, like, you know, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John CDNs work is because stuff that’s on the CDNs is farther away from you for them to CDN. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not necessarily the case when you’re doing this because everything goes through the private relay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when you’re browsing in Safari, right? as opposed to just the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John are closer to you because they are in a CDN, right? So, CDNs in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at them, you’re like, okay, this makes some sense because if the CDN didn’t exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’d take a different route, but they’d have to go farther. They’d have to go more hops. They’d have to go geographically farther to get this because
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual servers in California, now they got it from CDN that’s like 10 miles away from them. That’s good thumbs up, even though it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks a little bit weird. But this one, it’s not quite as clear a win. And because CDNs, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, have been built up so much, it will probably be okay. This capacity is probably there. Like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John never says this, but like the reason the egress servers are third party is because if they weren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would have to have thousands and thousands and thousands of servers all over the world. And guess what? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what CDNs already do. So that’s why it’s a third party provider. I don’t know how, but they don’t say, it could be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably have contracts with every CDN that would give them a time of day all over the entire world. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John you really have no choice to even just make this feasible at all. And it’s also why they’re not routing everything through
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But just doing Safari DNS queries and playing HTTP, given the number of devices they
⏹️ ▶️ John have in the world, is a lot of traffic. So I imagine there is a big red button somewhere inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, metaphorically speaking, to say, let’s turn off iCloud Private Relay, because
⏹️ ▶️ John everything is broken. The internet doesn’t work. We’ll fix it in the next release.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to clarify, it’s not just HTTP traffic in Safari. It’s all Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I said and, and not and, in. So it’s Safari, it’s everything in Safari, every DNS query,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also any plain HTTP running app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Yeah. So the only, so like, you know, like Overcast will be able to use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the downloads of podcast episodes that are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco served over HTTPS, which is, admittedly, most of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can screw up our own stats for us. That’s nice. Thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Ours are served through HTTPS. Thank you very much. All right.
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#askatp: Apple Silicon as a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. It’s been a while since we’ve done it. Abel Demoes writes, How’s Marco finding the transition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple Silicon as a developer? Has anything in Marco’s tech stack broken as a result of Apple Silicon? I’m hesitating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make the jump because I hear that homebrew is janky on the Apple Silicon Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Homebrew has proven to be no less reliable for me on my Apple Silicon Macs than it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been on all my other Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you have such homebrew problems. I really don’t. I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. I’m not trying to say you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holding it wrong. It’s just, it’s funny to me because I really do not have homebrew problems and you are constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaining about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once I set it up, it works as long as nothing has to get touched. Now, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, you need to install something else or change something or update something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at that point, the entire thing breaks. And the only solution usually at that point tends to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove everything in homebrew and reinstall it. Like I have a shell script that that I maintain for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly reconfiguring my homebrew stuff, even that, I usually can’t just run it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, six months later or a year later, because it doesn’t work if I just run it. But I can at least use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to copy and paste one command at a time and see how it fails and modify and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edit the file so that hopefully next time I can just run it, and of course I never can. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, other than my homebrew drama, which is going to expand now because, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if you saw the news on Twitter today that macOS Monterey no longer includes PHP at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’ve been warning you on the command line for a few releases now, like, hey, you should stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using this. It’s going to be removed in a future release. Well, it’s removed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, what they say about PHP specifically, if you run php dash dash version,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just say PHP is not recommended. That’s it. Just like broadly
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, in general, it is not recommended. The other ones they do say, Oh, you should get a different version or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. So PHP’s gone, which other ones are gone? Because I think Perl and Python are still there, or Python 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think anything else is removed as of this version. PHP is totally gone. Perl and Python,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, are still showing those errors, or those warnings, rather, but I believe they’re still there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there’s something about Python being, it’s like 2.7, and that’s apparently ancient now, but anyway, I don’t know anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So going back to the question, Apple Silicon as a developer has been largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I really have had no downsides to it besides the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain very long compiles, I’m cranking away at those cores and I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more cores. Other than that, it’s been totally great. I don’t think I have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other problems really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exciting. I really want to get myself a new laptop as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many times. I do not want to give up any of my four ports. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want a big one, I want a 13 or 14 inch or what have you, and I really want to get a new laptop. But then if I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new laptop, then my iMac Pro will be slow and ancient and I don’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco either. So. Then there’s the monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation because there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey big iMac yet. Then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the monitor situation because there’s no big iMac yet. Yeah, it’s just a mess. It’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess. As soon as they release that 40 core Mac Pro, I’m in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you are. The best thing is going to be when the new 40 core Mac Pro comes out, but it doesn’t support the Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh God. The resale value of just drops through the floor on them after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving right along.
#askatp: When macOS drops Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Ralph Krakowski writes, what year do you think that Apple will release a version of Mac OS that no longer supports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel? It’s a good question. I would say if it’s 2021 now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say 2026 would be my guess, in about five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that’s aggressive actually. I think it might be even later than that, but I think 2026 is the earliest. 2026, hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually did a little bit of preparation for this question, because it’s been in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey notes for so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, oh, oh. So here’s some background on the most recent transition. The Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John transition was announced at WWDC 2005. The first Intel Mac shipped in January 2006.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first Intel only Mac OS X shipped in August 2009. So it was three years
⏹️ ▶️ John and seven months after the first Intel Mac. So we go to ARM. Transition was announced at WWDC 2020.
⏹️ ▶️ John First ARM Mac shipped in November of 2020. So if we fast forward three years and seven months, that
⏹️ ▶️ John pins it at pretty much exactly WWC 2024, Apple announces the first version of
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS that does not support Intel. That’s if they exactly follow the Intel transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John The question is, are they gonna transition faster than they went to Intel or slower? And it’s a complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John question because they seem to be going pretty fast, but there’s still that nagging rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John of the revised Intel Mac Pro, and it’s like, maybe everything will be converted, but if that Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is still hanging around, they can’t ship a Mac OS that doesn’t support it for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t, I don’t know, I would say 2024 is when you should like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the, whatever, I don’t know the betting terms. Like, I feel like that is probably, I don’t even wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s the earliest thing that could happen, because they could do it three years flat. Like, I think there’s a pretty broad range,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think Apple will be, will have all of its line converted, except maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro pretty darn quickly. And they seem to be moving very aggressively, again, witness the features
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not supported in Monterey on Intel. And again, seemingly not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a thing about the betas, but they put on their public web page information for customers that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, yeah, this isn’t going to be on your Intel Macs. So maybe 2023 is
⏹️ ▶️ John conceivable for when this could happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to go with you, Casey, with about a five-year time scale. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John makes some good
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to look up the dates because in your mind you think, oh yeah, it was probably like five years after, no, three years and seven months after
⏹️ ▶️ John the first Intel Mac. That’s when they, here’s the thing, that’s when they shipped the first Intel version,
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel version of Mac OS X. That doesn’t mean that’s when everyone upgraded to that version, especially back then people didn’t upgrade as
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly, right? So there was the question, it was like, when do you think they will release that version?
⏹️ ▶️ John But on that day, suddenly your Intel Macs don’t puff, go up in a puff of smoke. How many people are still running like
⏹️ ▶️ John High Sierra on their Macs right now? I know Apple pushes the updates much harder than they used to,
⏹️ ▶️ John but practically speaking, a lot of people just keep running the old operating system and they just live with that badge on their system
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences and dismiss those annoying nags. You’ve seen people do it on their phones too. Somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John people are able to weather the storm of Apple’s constant messages
⏹️ ▶️ John for trying to force you to update and they just won’t do it and it just becomes part of their life is just dismissing those dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes. So yeah, the day Apple releases the first macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t support Intel isn’t the day your Intel Mac, you know, melts down to nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Your Intel Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John In case he’s multiple Intel Macs, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? Yeah. No, and I think, you know, like, it’s hard to estimate this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one hand, Apple does usually support old Macs for quite some time with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software updates. Like, the lifetime of Macs and software update support is pretty long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Often to the point where you, but you probably shouldn’t update to the new one, but you can if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the other side of this is that when Apple has moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on to a new something, like a new technology, a new paradigm, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are very fast to drop the old one, to drop support for it, to pretend like it never existed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to move, quote, move forward. And that’s a wonderful euphemism for like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly drop support for everything old. And so, combining those two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conflicting factors, you know, when nothing major has changed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the Intel line has gone along, supporting new Intel Macs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old Intel Macs in the same software release, isn’t that different? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Apple Silicon transition is so significant and there’s so many interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and major differences in how the hardware works and the hardware’s capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re gonna be more aggressive with this. I think it’s gonna be a shorter time span than we
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem is the question is asking about macOS specifically and like, they’re not gonna release
⏹️ ▶️ John a version of macOS that can’t run on their still being sold Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro probably, so if the Mac Pro is the wild card here, if they do revise that machine, it takes them longer than we think
⏹️ ▶️ John to come out with the ARM one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have, like, I don’t see them shipping a new, announcing a new version of macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC and this will run on all our Macs except for our very latest Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, they would just pretend like they don’t sell it anymore. Like they would just, they would show a big slide on screen that showed all the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs and just that’s just missing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine to drop older models. Like they always do that. Oh, this won’t run on your, you know, 2014 iMac or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but to drop literally, because this is in a scenario where they don’t have the ARM Mac Pro yet. So there’ll be literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the newest Mac Pro available, unsupported. So I just, that’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that makes me think might actually make it to WWC 2024 before doing this. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John they continue with their current pace, they could do it sooner than WWC 2024. WWC 2024 is just like it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much down to the month exactly the gap that they had with the Intel one. So maybe that’s the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the range. But I agree with Marco that they could definitely go earlier. And the thing is, they move fast
⏹️ ▶️ John when they can, obviously, in certain things like they move, they moved as fast as they could with Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it practically speaking, it took a while for Swift to develop. And also they can’t drop quote unquote drop
⏹️ ▶️ John support for objective C because half their operating system is written in and half their apps are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco written in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like they can’t do that, but they very quickly move on. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where when Swift was announced, all the WWC slides had to have examples in Swift as well as objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C, right? It they’re very clear, like this is the new thing. And unless something very
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible happens, Swift is going to be it. And it just takes a while to come. And so with hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s even easier. It’s like, look, arm is the new thing. We all know it, it’s awesome, everybody loves it, it’s going great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the sooner we can forget about that Intel stuff, the better. And the thing is when you don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you quote unquote no longer support it, those Intel Macs keep working. They can live out their
⏹️ ▶️ John natural life and eventually just be even older and slower than they are now. The operating systems they
⏹️ ▶️ John have are fine. It would be nice if Apple maybe extended its security
⏹️ ▶️ John update interval a little bit longer for the Intel Macs, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like just to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know you’re not going to get any more OS updates, but practically speaking your Mac works fine. You can continue to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it and maybe we’ll give you software updates for one extra year, We’ll see.
#askatp: Low- vs. high-power cores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Brian Pirie writes, in all the speculation about Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high-end Mac processors and the number of cores of different types, I haven’t heard much talk about what the performance difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is between low power versus the high power or high performance cores. In broad strokes, how do the Ice Storm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cores use only one-tenth the power of the Firestorm cores?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a pretty simple answer. They got less stuff in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John have some link in the show notes to comparison of the Ice Storm and the Firestorm cores, but these are all super-scalar
⏹️ ▶️ John designs, which means they have multiple units that do a thing. So a unit is like a thing that can add numbers together, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs, modern CPUs don’t have just one thing that can add numbers. They don’t have just two things
⏹️ ▶️ John that can add numbers. They have like six or seven things that can add numbers. And those are just for the integer numbers. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John how many floating point units do they have? How many load store units do they have? Right. The the
⏹️ ▶️ John low power cores have fewer execution units, fewer things that can add fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John load store units, fewer, fewer floating point units. If you think of those things as like the little machines that do the math
⏹️ ▶️ John that a computer does, it just has less of them. And so it takes less power to run them. It’s like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you think, I mean, it’s weird to think of this, but if you think about a car that have like 17 different V8 engines,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like the Adders, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John like five V12 engines, those are like the SIMD engines or whatever, right? How much gas does that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing take? And then you take another thing that has two V8s and one V12. It just takes less gas
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re running less stuff. It’s the same thing with electricity execution units. the most important way is that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just have less stuff. And in fact, sometimes depending on the things they have, there may be some execution units that the low
⏹️ ▶️ John power ones just don’t even have at all. I don’t think that’s the case with Ice Storm versus Firestorm. I think they can all execute the same
⏹️ ▶️ John instructions, but they have fewer units. They may also be clock lower. When you have fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John units, you need less machinery, shorter pipelines, lower, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John execution windows. Like there’s lots of things that you can do. Like the associated machinery needs to keep track of fewer instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in flight at any one time. And that also shrinks the amount of essentially circuitry you need, which shrinks
⏹️ ▶️ John the amount of electricity you need. So that’s what it is. And people say like, oh, I don’t want my stuff running on the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John slow, the ice storm units. They’re only slow compared to the Firestorm ones. They’re plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t know if this is how low power mode works, but imagine you could have a low power mode for your Mac. They
⏹️ ▶️ John would turn off the high performance things and just run your Mac entirely on the quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote high efficiency units, I wonder how many people would tell. If you’re not like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John executing, you’re like encoding video, or doing a big compile or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably wouldn’t even notice. Like, that’s why I was talking about the auto, sort of auto low power mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John The high efficiency cores are plenty fast. Like, if you benchmark just the high efficiency cores against
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever old Intel Mac you’re using right now, it may embarrass them, right? So don’t worry too much about
⏹️ ▶️ John using the slow cores. In practice, that is an effective use of resources because when you’re just clicking around
⏹️ ▶️ John on web pages, nothing’s happening until you click. And then for brief fractions
⏹️ ▶️ John of a second, maybe the high power ones could come into being and do something and then go back to sleep. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yay for ice storm units. They’re probably what most of us are gonna be using most of the time while the computer sits around for the dumb human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Wondery. And thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to our members who support us directly. You can join at adp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at 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, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check the podcast,
Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ John The Bugatti Chiron has two V8s in it, basically. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a V16, but all you did was just take two Volkswagen V8s and just shove them,
⏹️ ▶️ John weld them together into one giant engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Serially, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the, what is it, it’s the W16, because it’s the two Vs make a W. Oh yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right, that’s right. It’s not serial. It’s not parallel either. They’re interleaved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also takes a lot of gas. What was the stat on that? It wasn’t that. It was the, what was the one before the Chiron? The Veyron. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Veyron. that it could run at full throttle for 12 minutes before running out of gas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Since we’re in a post-show neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, goodbye, everybody. It’s nice having you. Marco and John and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I were talking in our, as the industry calls it, our super secret private channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And did you know, gentlemen, which I know you two did, that the brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Tesla Model S, the whatever version it is that has plaid mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero to 60 in under two seconds. Contested,
⏹️ ▶️ John contested highly. Well. Because I don’t think anyone has measured that and there’s like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John search for it on YouTube, you will find some YouTube channels explaining how engineering wise it
⏹️ ▶️ John is extremely unlikely that that is true, unless you, you know about rollout, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that where you like get a little bit of a roll and then stand on the gas?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s like, so if you search for rollout on YouTube, you find some explanations for it. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with limitations in like
⏹️ ▶️ John roll out. Yeah. Yeah. Nicely done. Limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John in instrument technology on the drag strip from back in the day. Like you had
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wanted to say, race these cars and give them times at the end of the drag racing. Drag racing has been around for
⏹️ ▶️ John decades and decades. And we didn’t have good technology for saying when has the car like
⏹️ ▶️ John started to go? So they use essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco light sensors, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would be like, so when the light is, if hitting the sensor, you’re not breaking the beam. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re at the starting line, right? And they wanted to say, or actually, no, I think they had you break the beam,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then when the beam is continuous again, you have passed it, right? So you would break the beam, or I don’t know the details, I’m screwing it up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom line is that for some period of time, your wheel will be rolling past the beam,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And during that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whole time your wheel is rolling,
⏹️ ▶️ John that beam is blocked. And only when the wheel has rolled enough to get
⏹️ ▶️ John past the beam does it connect again, right? And so that amount of time when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going from zero to my wheel has rolled around enough to be past the beam,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t count against your, like, whatever your time is, your quarter mile time, your zero to 60 time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the tradition of allowing that rollout has continued so that in every car magazine, when you see a zero to 60 time,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the time it took from the car stationary to the car going 60, it’s the time it took
⏹️ ▶️ John after the car had done its rollout, and then from, because the car is already moving,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the clock starts when the wheel is already moving. So you get essentially zero to
⏹️ ▶️ John one, two, three, four, or five miles an hour for free. And that’s just tradition from like, every car
⏹️ ▶️ John magazine does that, because otherwise you couldn’t compare the zero to 60 times across decades, right? And so they just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. And so any zero to 60 time you see, you might have to ask the question, is that zero to 60
⏹️ ▶️ John or are you going for rollout? And even with rollout, some people are saying that sub two
⏹️ ▶️ John with street legal tires, no matter how much power you have, it’s kind of a friction
⏹️ ▶️ John situation. You’d really need just the right road surface, because you could have infinity power.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a question of how quickly can you transfer the power to the road. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen actually any measured Plaid Pluses, sub twos. And most of the supercars that you see, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the videos for the Rimac and the Vera, I think I’m getting that name right. Have you seen those? There’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of them on YouTube. It’s like a 2,000 horsepower electric supercar.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s ridiculous. It does not lack horsepower. I think it has like 2,200 pound feet of torque or something. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco motors, one for each
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel. And it weighs like an eighth of the Model S, right? The problem is, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John turn that power into making a car go forward? And it’s surprisingly difficult with street legal tires
⏹️ ▶️ John on regular roads. But even that, it was running like 8 and 1 2nd quarter miles, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenal for a street legal car, if you know anything about drag racing. And it was 0 to 60s
⏹️ ▶️ John were in the very low 2s. Breaking through the twos really
⏹️ ▶️ John does not come down to how much power do you have, or even just how light your car is. How
⏹️ ▶️ John much traction can you get on the ground in that short period of time? And then whether or not you’re accounting for rollout, or how you’re accounting
⏹️ ▶️ John for rollout. So it’s mostly academic. But the bottom line is the Model S Plaid is an extremely fast car that
⏹️ ▶️ John will, as Marco has said multiple times, make you feel like someone is punching you in the face when you accelerate in
⏹️ ▶️ John it in an unpleasant way that you probably won’t want to repeat unless you’re trained to be an astronaut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s so true. It’s funny though, I’ll let you guys decide whether or not you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to explain the context here, but I was building a Model S just for fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for fun, and there are not very many options these days, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in most cars I find extremely frustrating. In this context, I actually don’t really mind. But one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option that I really wanted to see that I didn’t see was the option for a f***ing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steering wheel, because that thing has the stupid yoke here in the United States
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s the only choice you have and I can assure you that may be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best automobile that has ever been produced but the chances of me buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one money no object the chances of me buying one with that stupid yoke on it are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero not approximately zero literally zero what are they thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean probably Nitza will probably make them change it after a bunch of people die from trying to use it. Seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Absolutely preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the one option that everybody wants them to make an option and they won’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. What do you think happens first? You can buy a new Model S with a steering wheel again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Apple improves the design of Safari and iOS 12 so that the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar is a little bit more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not, that’s not, I appreciate the humor you’re going for, but I think the better question is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will we get a full-size steering wheel as an option or perhaps a retrofit on the Model S,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or will Apple make meaningful changes to improve the experience for independent developers on their platforms?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or will they fix notifications on the Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are not equally impactful problems in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco world. No, they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to dismiss a stack of notifications like it was like two calendar notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stacked up and I had to click little X to make it form the clear all button and then click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that however and that’s hard enough in you know regular circumstances however through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some combination of what might have been a bug the top half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the clear all and X buttons was under the menu bar. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to click on only the bottom hat. Like it’s nearly impossible to hit these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco click targets reliably when they’re at their normal size. Try it when they’re half size.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. I just, I can’t, I can’t get over cause as much as I love to poop all over Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which has become basically my, one of my favorite pastimes, I particularly like the Model S in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general. Like I liked the three I’ve been in an X and I liked that quite a bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Model S money, leaving the incredible amount of money aside is, is a really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice car. I really honestly believe that I’m not, I’m not blowing smoke. It’s a really nice car. And if I had more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money than I have, I might even own one at this point, but. I cannot fathom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at that god awful yoke and thinking, yes, yes, I would like that, please. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds delightful. Just a no, absolutely not. And then if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the model S with the yoke, I don’t know what it does. The X have the yoke as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re going to, if they haven’t already, yeah, because those tend to get updated together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, right now, if I had to get a new Tesla today, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t just buy a used one, or buy my current one, which is what I’m going to do, but if I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get used, if I had to pick new, I think I’d probably go with a Y,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The X does have the oak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco God bless, what are they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking? So like, yeah, like the only, like the Y at least has a steering wheel. It doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dashboard, but at least it has a steering wheel. So like, I just, this is why, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why like I got to drive my car yesterday for the first time in probably almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month. And I was so happy driving it. Not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not driving, mind you. Regular, like the act of driving, I no longer enjoy because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually driving is running an errand and going through traffic And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost comical how much all of Westchester is always under construction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The same roads are under construction constantly. Like the roads, the main arterial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local traffic roads that are around my neighborhood are always under construction. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know why. There’s never a break. It’s not like they repave it once and then it’s done. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just always tearing up different sections of it for God knows what reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to remember if COVID made us all forget, but like the same deal around here. It’s almost like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I guess like they couldn’t do construction during COVID because you know, everyone was home and didn’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John people gathering together, but everything is under construction here. Every like, I think it is worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s not just that I forgot. Cause I’m, you know, well, I don’t know, it’s hard to say. Cause I’m going back and forth to school a lot because my
⏹️ ▶️ John kids aren’t taking the bus cause they weren’t taking the bus during COVID. I was driving them and just trying to find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John get to and from school with the everyday new construction hazards, like just totally
⏹️ ▶️ John blocking off or making miserable major arteries. Everything is under construction. I think it is like a
⏹️ ▶️ John hangover. The construction that didn’t get done during COVID, now it’s all coming due.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s a reasonable theory. It might be true for you, but for us, like even before COVID, I’ve lived there almost 11 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s always been like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John at least your roads are getting repaved. I think I’ve sent you pictures of my quote unquote road that’s in front of my house that is more pothole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, they’re not repaving it. That’s the thing. They’re like tearing it up to put different water pipes under it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever or work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gas leaks. Yeah, it seems like there must be some kind of like water construction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mafia in Westchester that they’re always tearing up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John water mains.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just call that the mafia.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they literally just like they tear up the same mains like every two years. I don’t anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was driving a lot yesterday and running a lot of errands and sitting in traffic and being frustrated. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m going to be driving a car, the The Model S is my favorite car ever. I’m so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with the one I already have. And when I look at the new one, no part of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes me happy whatsoever. Like they took away the color, the interior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color options I liked. They took away the sunroof that I like. They took away half the steering wheel and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the stalks. Like I just, I don’t want the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like getting a new one of those ever is not appealing to me at all. because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this car and that’s why I decided I’m gonna buy mine out like my lease is up in a few months I filed today for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buyout quote I’m just gonna buy it out because I just want this car to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t I wouldn’t I would get no joy out of the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and because when I bought it it actually was significantly more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they are now the price for to buy it out is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much less than it would cost for me to buy a new one with the options I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t even want to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather buy the one I have because it’s a better car. I like it better. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really, I will reiterate what I said last time we talked about this, which is I really do feel like my Model S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the last one they designed to be be driven by a human. The reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the current situation of auto driving technology is that you still have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive it like a human most of the time. And I certainly still do in the conditions I drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, like the world, the Northeast. We have weather and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible roads that are full of water main construction. And so I am very happy now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having decided, I’m not going to have to buy a new car this fall. I’m not going to make any decisions, or do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or take any risks. I’m just gonna keep driving the car I already have because I love it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing they’re currently making tempts me at all to make a different choice right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So start your clocks, everybody. This is me versus Marco. Both of us are in the same situation where we feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we can’t buy the new version of the current car that we love. And also that our current car is the favorite car we’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ John owned, which is true of my Accord. Accords don’t come with sticks anymore. So I basically can’t buy a new Accord. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I basically have to keep driving mine forever. The weird thing is, though, the car I’m looking to
⏹️ ▶️ John replace the Accord with someday is like someday if there’s an electric car that fits within my budget and that
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually like, I could consider that. I’m not a big Tesla fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m planning on running my Accord forever. And at this rate right now, Marco doesn’t see another electric
⏹️ ▶️ John car that he wants or another car period that he wants more than his Model S. So we are just both sticking with our current cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, if only there was a different luxury brand that had been making cars for a really long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that offered an electric version of one of their cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John has many more choices than I do, you have to admit, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yes. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely. The large four-door sedan that I find appealing that has a
⏹️ ▶️ John stick shift transmission, there’s like zero of those in the US. And I actually spent
⏹️ ▶️ John a while on those various auto used car sites, looking at used versions of my current car,
⏹️ ▶️ John just seeing what was out there and how much I could get them for as like a backup car. Like I should get, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John cheese grater. So it would be like a kid’s car. Like the kids could drive it or whatever. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like my teeth are growing, they don’t make anymore. I should keep buying black 2014 era stick shift Accord
⏹️ ▶️ John Sports and just have them in a warehouse somewhere so that each time I wear one out, I just take a new one out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I feel like that’s not a terrible approach. I mean, that can last you a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you actually want to do that, you know, whenever this car, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re done with this current car, you can, which is probably gonna be a while, it’s an Accord, it’s gonna last forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s extremely low mileage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, as every car has been for the last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, even before COVID, my car is a 2014 model, so I bought it in 2013. Guess how many miles are on my car?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So normally, I would say that’s about seven years old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’d probably be at roughly, what, 80,000, 90,000 miles? I’m going to guess you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high 20s, low 30s, if you’re saying so. I would have said 80,000 like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just implied. But given that you’ve already hinted that it’s extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low miles, I’d say high 20s, low 30s.
⏹️ ▶️ John And less than this does happen to me sometimes, unless I’ve been confused by my display, because you can switch between trip
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yeah, yeah. Those are whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m pretty sure I’m in low 20s. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my car I bought almost exactly three years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just recently crossed 10,000 miles the last couple of months. So, I hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How am I ahead of you? I’m at 19. I’m fine. You keep going back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, since it’s just the three of us and there’s nobody else around, can I tell you a little secret? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a really, really, really uncomfortable thought like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days ago. Was it white? No. You’re trying to buy a Jeep? No. Well, actually, yesterday I saw a Wrangler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with no doors on it. No, yesterday I saw a Wrangler with no doors on it and I had a very comfortable thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I want a Wrangler again, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Uh, I had a very uncomfortable thought just two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days ago. I’m starting to think it might be okay to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get an electric car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, because I’ve been, no, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to hear your propaganda. I don’t want to hear your propaganda, but up until just, you know, a couple of days ago I was thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, even though there’s a lot that appeals to me about an an electric car, I don’t want to give up the stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shift. And there’s no electric car that I think just like John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said a moment ago, that I’m interested in and fits my price range. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I still think that’s true, but it seems that the floodgates are opening and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opening slowly now, but I think they’re going to be opening ever, ever quick, ever more quickly soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s going to be just a tremendous amount of options on the market. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think there’s a better than 50% chance that my next car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be an electric. Now, I’m not planning to upgrade for two, three, four, five, six years. But I think it’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good chance that the next one I get will not have an internal combustion engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I interest you in a 2014 Honda Accord Sport with a stick shift for $8,000?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you see how I can get these cheese graters for $8,000? I can get my car. I mean, granted, that
⏹️ ▶️ John has 230,000 miles in it. But I’m saying like they’re in the range from like 7,000 to like 15,000 for my
⏹️ ▶️ John exact car. You could think
⏹️ ▶️ John of how many of these you could get for one Marco car. You just have a, just again, if I could fit
⏹️ ▶️ John them in my basement, I would just store them there. The problem was I’m looking at all these used cars and I look at them and I’m like, what does that car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like? A basement full of Honda Accords.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be amazing. What does that car smell like? Does it smell like cigarette smoke? Does it smell like someone spilled something in it? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always used cars, especially when they’re extremely high mileage, 230,000 hard miles in that car. But anyway, these are the
⏹️ ▶️ John stick shift ones, and they’re rare. Like when you, like I go to, I’m at CarGurus, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that just came up with Google, right? Transmission, and they have check boxes. Automatic, 123. Manual, eight. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of these cars in manual. But the thing is, they’re not apparently particularly desirable, so you can get them for
⏹️ ▶️ John less than 10 grand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, that’s wild. I mean, I feel like there’s like, so for reasons that I don’t want to get into, this shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s too long. I bought a brand new, well, new to me, Super Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is like a 30 year old game console. And I feel like if today you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can still go buy a 30 year old game console in perfect working and cosmetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order, like if we really, if you really want to buy a 2014 Honda Accord
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sport with a stick in 2040, like somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will probably be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John sell it to you. It’s gonna be hard to find ones that are not modified and
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in good condition. That’s the tricky thing about this. I mean, you should watch it, M539, the YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John channel. It’s great, and part of his problem, he gets old BMWs, and the problem is he
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want them to have been modified. So if anyone’s messed with them, it’s not as desirable. What you want one
⏹️ ▶️ John is just like, because that’s what’s desirable about them. You want it to be collectible, and you want it to be like it was when it was new.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Hondas in particular are extremely attractive to people who want to modify them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, the Accord’s not as bad as the Civic, but finding in 2040, yeah, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to find an Accord of 2014 and with the stick shift and you’ll be able to find parts for it and all that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every one that you find will look nothing like it did when it’s new. It’ll be modified in all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of ways, it’ll be all mangled, it’ll have parts replaced with non-original parts, and so what you really want is to find
⏹️ ▶️ John one that is, like, if in 2040 you had a mint condition like new 2014
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda Accord, it would be worth a lot. Like, because collectible is all about condition. It’s just like right now, if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But nobody’s looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it except you. Except, yeah, but to John, it’s worth like 80 grand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Think of anything in the world. Think of the Apple IIe, which was an extremely popular computer that made tons of.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had a mint-in-the-box, never-opened-before, perfect condition Apple IIe, that’s worth a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. Even though they made a ton of them. It’s not like it’s rare. They were all over the place, but it’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop lying to yourself. If you somehow, like let’s suppose some listener bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 2014 Honda Accord Sport with a six speed, it is six, not five, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, God, I got worried. So some listener has a 2014 Honda Accord Sport
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was put on blocks with five miles on the odometer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t put it on blocks, you have to carefully preserve it. If you just leave it outside, it’ll rot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the love of God, that’s the thing though. Like, do you really want what is almost a 10 year old car that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hasn’t been run in 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years? No, you have to take care of it. like a collector, that’s why they’re valuable because it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John takes effort to, you can’t just put it in the garage for 10 years. Again, watch the M539 channel. He buys
⏹️ ▶️ John cars that have been like, this has been sitting outside for 20 years and it’s grim. Like, let me
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you, right? It ran when we parked it and then we parked it for 20 years. To actually keep a car alive
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t drive takes serious effort because cars do not stay,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we talked about the gas and how that goes bad, but pretty much everything in an internal combustion engine
⏹️ ▶️ John should not be sitting, and even if it’s sitting in a climate controlled place, you have to do lots of things to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep it going. The rubber will just harden and rot out and all the tubes in there, you’ll have to replace all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not easy. And that’s why it helps if you have a manufacturer that continues to make those parts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a lot of times you can get a part for an E46. It seems to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone is still, maybe BMW is still making many parts for the E46 because when you buy them, it’s not like that
⏹️ ▶️ John part was made in the 90s because it would be rotted out just like the rubber tubes that
⏹️ ▶️ John are in your engine. They make new parts that are essentially OEM parts, exactly like the old ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but are still manufacturing them. So that’s why collectibles are valuable based on condition
⏹️ ▶️ John because finding one in like new condition 40 years later is like a miracle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Golly, I cannot imagine you, you know what’s going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you’re going to clear out your garage and it’s going to be pristine because you’re gonna find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that unicorn of a 2014 Accord Sport and you’re gonna park it in there so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have your backup cheese grater to your current Accord Sport.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really have room. That’s the problem. I don’t actually have room on my property for another car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would need to rent out another building to store my cheese grater cars.