452: It's Totally Leashed
14 Oct 2021An alleged lack of FOMO, third-party Windows app stores, a better Dropbox life, why progress bars are hard, and our hopes and dreams for next week’s Apple event.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Apple Watch preorders
- Follow-up:
- Dutch watchdog finds Apple App Store payment rules anti-competitive
- Microsoft store to allow third-party app stores
- Matryoshka doll-720p-RiP.mkv
- Yo dawg
- MTV’s Pimp My Ride
- Thomas Q Brady’s adventures with his iPhone 13 Pro
- Regarding bugs in your pasta (It’s not about the pasta!) (via Sharon Linne Faulk)
- Apple’s “Unleashed.” Event
- Marco’s new Dropbox setup
#askatp:- Why are progress bars so hard? (via Derek Aldridge)
- What’s a good automotive blog? (via Tom Jacob)
- Does John maintain his old hardware? (via Sean Cohen)
- Post-show:
- The search for John’s backup winter hat
Sponsored by:
- Mack Weldon: Radically-efficient wardrobing. Use code atppodcast for 20% off your first order.
- Hover: Find a domain name for your passion. Get 10% off your first purchase.
- RevenueCat: Powering in-app purchases and subscriptions for thousands of the world’s best apps.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Check out our store to get some sweet //////ATP merchandise!
Chapters
- Casey’s FOMO will come
- Dutch watchdog vs. Apple
- Windows third-party app stores
- A waterproof iPhone
- Sponsor: RevenueCat
- Pasta bugs
- Apple event next week
- Sponsor: Hover
- Maestral
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- #askatp: Progress bars
- #askatp: Car blogs
- #askatp: Maintaining attic computers
- Ending theme
- John can’t find a good winter hat 🖼️
Casey’s FOMO will come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, how’d you do on the watch ordering or not ordering? Did you manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to resist ordering a watch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so we should start with follow-up. No, I’m kidding. I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not order a watch. I really truly did not. It is very much on brand for me to have ordered a watch, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not. You know, sitting here now, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not feeling enough FOMO yet, which is a very unusual occurrence for me. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure the FOMO will come, title, but I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, I’m okay. And I was actually talking to my friend, Steve, about this. And he was saying that he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the idea of you having like therapy to cope with your FOMO.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I was talking to him because I wasn’t sure if he and his wife had ordered watches or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was talking to him about what his plans were. And he had said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I don’t really like any of the colors of the aluminum that much and that’s kind of put me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this impasse where I don’t really know what to do. And I was thinking about it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I haven’t done like deep research on the color profiles or anything like that on these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new watches, particularly the aluminum, but… Well, you couldn’t until ordering. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey There was no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were no pages up that would tell you what combinations there were, how much they would cost. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It was so weird the way they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did it. It was, it seems like a really fairly bungled rollout, but nevertheless, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I am not overwhelmed in, in, in a bad sense. You know, I’m not really overwhelmed by any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these colors and I’m not a fancy lad that wants one of the fancy watches. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s wrong for anyone else. It’s just not for me. So because of that, I just, and there was nothing compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I felt like I needed to have. So no, I didn’t order a watch yet. I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closing the door on it happening sometime between now and the next watch, but sitting here now, I have no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plans to order one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But… You’re going to be lined up at the Apple Store at 10 in the morning on Friday. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be. That’s true. That is a fair point. I kind of thought of it as like, well, it’s all over and done with, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I suppose I could go on Friday morning and see how my luck holds out. But I know, how’d you do? Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you order four watches? Ten? One?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only two. Oh, okay. I feel good about neither of them. So first of all, I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it is interesting what they did with the aluminum colors this year. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way they introduced starlight to replace silver. I don’t know if starlight’s gonna end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up looking silver in real life, but one thing I can definitely say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a, like the way it looks on the website does not look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a silver replacement. It looks like a separate color. But that being said, in person, it’s probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be more subtle than that. So maybe in person it’ll just be like, oh, it’s just like silver. And anecdotally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far, the most common Apple Watches I see being worn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by people out in the world are black by a long shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no way, no way. It is absolutely the bog standard silver,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aluminum or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see silver more in women than men, but men it’s like overwhelmingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black and women it’s like half and half maybe. Like, but it’s- Black is by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most common color I see on people. And it’s always aluminum.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is bananas to me. Now I have to pay more attention. Maybe you’re right. I just haven’t paid close enough attention. But my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gut, which is, you know, super scientific, tells
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s almost entirely silver watches with anything other than silver being a very rare occurrence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. So maybe it’s a different area. Maybe it’s something about New York versus Virginia. I don’t know, but-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island versus Fire Island?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No comment. If I were to guess, I would say almost everything’s aluminum and like 10% of them are black,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe like 2% are other colors. John, do you pay attention, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which one of us is crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my experience matches yours. I mostly see the regular standard silver as the most
⏹️ ▶️ John common one, although I do have to admit that I’m probably looking at people’s watches a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco than Marco is, because
⏹️ ▶️ John have no interest in watches. But yeah, if I had to guess what the most standard one is, it’s silver. And I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the website when you’re mentioning the starlight thing. I’m gonna guess that in real life, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have a real difficult time telling Starlight from Silver without having them literally next to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope so because it does seem like that is a very popular color and it to to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a generation where you just can’t get that anymore would seem odd. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re probably right. So I would look at the color. Oh, and just also anecdotally, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes see black stainless steel on like higher end models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think I’ve ever seen silver stainless steel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides on my own wrist, which is the one I always get. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else wearing that outside of an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conference. And even then, it’s not common.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Colbert No snark. How can you tell the difference? Like just looking at the stainless steel versus the aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matt O’Leary You can tell. It’s highly polished versus being matte. It’s like it’s shiny versus matte. So it’s not even close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not even close. So like and that’s and it scratches like hell because it is very polished But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is it is a high polish finish And so it’s like it’s like a looking in a curved mirror as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you know the silver looks like an iPhone So it’s it’s a very very different finish But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I like the stainless steel first of all I I just I like that because it’s shiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t I’m not gonna candy coat that it is shiny, and I like it But also I find that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like Apple watch color schemes that have a lot of contrast between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the black top screen crystal and the case color. So the case color should ideally be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like bright or light in some way for my preferences. That’s why a few years back I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the white ceramic one. If they still made white ceramic today, now that I’m wearing it like every single day, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have bought that this year because I love just that high contrast look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like when it looks like just one continuous blob, where it’s just like black watch with black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crystal, like that, I don’t, I don’t love that. But that is a very popular look anyway, so this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I went with stainless steel but that being said Literally later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that day when I was I was running some errands on the mainland that day and literally later that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day I happened to be in an Apple store picking up some 30-pin dock cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for reasons. I’ll get to some other time What which they still sell? Yeah, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in an Apple store, and I I happened to see the titanium in the case and I thought, oh, that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks pretty nice. So I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet. I’m probably gonna stick with the steel, which is what I’ve always had. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only reason, I’m telling you, I’m not super excited about this generation. The only reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting it is because the reviews and some more of the photos and videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are coming out of it are confirming my suspicions that developers of watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps who are concerned about their design should probably have one of these screens because it does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are, There’s like new layout guides, as I mentioned last week, that you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco align text to and everything, but text isn’t the only thing on my screens. And I have a lot of controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the screen, and I also work on a couple of complications for various things. So I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of want, I need to have one of these screens. And so I can’t just pass up this whole generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I could get like a cheap watch and, you know, have like a cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing watch, well, cheap, it’s all relative, have a less expensive testing watch, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep my stainless steel Series 6, but I have so many devices, I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have extras. So that was my thinking there. So I’m just gonna replace my Series 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a Series 7 in either steel or titanium, whichever one ends up working best for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’ll be it this year. And I don’t feel good about having spent this much money on something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a huge upgrade, but here we are. I did start sleep tracking, but that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be probably temporary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you unpack this 30 pin adventure or are you going to just tease us and then walk away from it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re the worst. All right. Let’s just move on to some followup. Now this is going to be eating at me the rest of the show. Thank you for
⏹️ ▶️ John No one asked me if I ordered any watches. No one cares about my watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You didn’t order a watch except maybe for Tina.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I used my, I finally used my DTK discount
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco successfully as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So it was pretty cheap. Uh, once you take 500 bucks off, she got the gold stainless
⏹️ ▶️ John cause that’s what her current one is and she likes that. Cool. I’m sorry, John. Genuinely. And she did with the
⏹️ ▶️ John dark cherry leather something or other. That’s what she picked as her band choice. Not that there were many choices, but that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely dropped the ball on that, John. I’m sorry. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John should have asked you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the shipping dates were bad. So it’s like not coming until like mid-November or end of November. Who knows what.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seemed like I was able to my my steel one I got for day one, which I was I was surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I was, you know, hitting refresh over and over again. I was there at minute one, but I was surprised that steel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was available still on day one, because that never happens usually. Yeah, and part of the time barrier was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like you said, Marco, which one do you want and which style? I don’t know what is available.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, you don’t know. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we had to spend precious minutes, like she had to spend precious minutes deciding, and I really emphasize,
⏹️ ▶️ John like make sure you decide, because I don’t want, like, I can’t easily like undo the order with the DDK thing, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have to go through that again. So just really decide this is the combination you want. And even then it was like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John she was at work at that point, I was going through the things and she was like, I was like, you want the small size, right? Yep, this is what you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, the material. This is the strap size, right? Oh, did you know, by the way, that there is a strap
⏹️ ▶️ John choice? Do you take the small medium or the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco medium large?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t know, go check my existing straps. So they look like small, medium, right? AppleCare Plus or not AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus? Pay all at once or pay monthly? It’s a surprising number of options when you’re not the one ordering it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, but anyway, we got through it. And in theory, our watch is coming someday.
Dutch watchdog vs. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re a Dutch watchdog has found that Apple’s app store payment rules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are anti-competitive. So this is kind of in the same spirit as what was going on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what is going on in Japan, amongst other places. And the Dutch antitrust authority
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has found that Apple’s rules requiring software developers to use its in-app payment system are anti-competitive and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ordered it to make changes. Whoopsie-dipsie.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ll see where this goes. I mean, there’s been a lot of challenges.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, like every country is doing it now. There’s a lot of peer pressure. It’s like, oh, Japan’s doing it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John US is doing something. Everyone is, anyways, it’s, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about this many times, but this is not what Apple wants. A bunch of individual countries coming up with their own set of rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is why like, you know, when for Apple to continue to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invite regulation and court decisions and things like that from governments by their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most egregious, anti-competitive behavior, I think is a strategic mistake. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna really, if you’re gonna do things that are so egregious that governments will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the need to regulate you, they’re not all gonna do things the same way. They’re not all gonna make the same decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s going to be bad for Apple in the long run, and probably bad for Apple’s users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. Because it’s gonna be this weird fragmented system where certain things are allowed some places, certain things not in other places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s gonna it’s it’s it’s not a good place to be. Apple’s strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far has seemed to be, well, we can pretty much do whatever we want. So we will and shut up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s, that’s not really going to hold for much longer. And it already isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you know, they’re, they’re just going to slowly lose control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over their own platform in some small and some big ways because they refuse to yield
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And so people will yield for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it amused me by the way, if you read this short article, that the complaint was from the people who make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tinder, Match Group, which I don’t know, it just struck me kind of funny. There’s enough smoke here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s definitely a fire brewing. And I really think Apple is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to act on this. If I were to wager a guess sometime in the next six months, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole thing is really getting away from them in a very bad way. And Apple does not want all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these governments, you guys said, to dictate the rules for them. They’re going to want to get ahead of this and get everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just, shh, shh, shh, shh, it’s okay, we’ve got this, it’s okay. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think that that time is coming.
Windows third-party app stores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Microsoft Store is going to allow third-party app stores. This is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confusing for me to parse, partially because I haven’t used Windows in a long, long time. But if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand things correctly, in the Microsoft App Store, you can then, from within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, download or will be able to download the Amazon and or Epic Games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stores, if I get that right. And then from within there, you can obviously buy and install software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, they’re being a lot more forgiving, which would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when you’re the third place app, the distant third place app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the kind of things you love. And Microsoft, you know, this is more blood in the water. It’s like, we’ll do what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google won’t do. We’ll let you have your own store within our store. Hey, why not? We just
⏹️ ▶️ John want people to buy things from the Microsoft store. And it’s not that weird. Like, if you think about it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the, like in the pre-app store world, where we didn’t have these single company controlled
⏹️ ▶️ John places where everyone got all their apps. If you got a Mac, you could go download Steam and Steam itself
⏹️ ▶️ John was its own little store. Now imagine instead of just downloading Steam, you got Steam itself from a store because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically the equivalent of just downloading it from Valve. It’s not a thing that people are unfamiliar
⏹️ ▶️ John with. Like the advent of Steam and sort of like these storefronts for vending in this case, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John games, is something that people became accustomed to and is its own problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam wields its own power over the gaming industry in a strange way or whatever. This is just sort of a, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John call this? Nesting dolls, Matryoshka dolls,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s only the pirated dolls. Yeah, what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so old I can’t remember the… It’s Yo Dog, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an old, I couldn’t decide whether it was Hey Dog or Yo Dog. So yeah. Yo Dog. So
⏹️ ▶️ John app stores themselves are problematic for reasons that we have discussed at length in this program.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gaming app stores, like Epic Game Store and Steam are also problematic. And you can and if you nest one inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John other, I think they multiply. I have to consult my mathematics textbook to find out how you if you
⏹️ ▶️ John multiply the probabilities or do they get raised to the power of it anyway. This
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of thing where Apple is and other game stores like game stores, other app
⏹️ ▶️ John stores like Google and Apple, they’re sort of silently agreed upon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Practices are coming under the eye of various governments. And there’s Microsoft saying we
⏹️ ▶️ John have a thing, a store, too. and we’re nicer than those guys. Look what we allow. But I just
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to underscore that beneath all of that is like, well, okay, so you’re allowing this in your store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then within Steam and Epic Game Store is itself a reaction to Steam flexing its power when
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam was like the biggest and baddest game in town. Epic was like, we’re not like Steam, we’re the good game store.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, every one of these game stores just wants to be where Apple and Google are. So
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t forget that as you download your store from your store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also kind of sucks, like as a user, like, I mean, I’m not a windows power user enough these days to care to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually fix this, but every single time I boot up my computer, my gaming PC, I have to dismiss like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four different stores, login screens. Oh, here’s steam. Now here’s Gog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now here’s the, whatever the razor thing is. Oh, Microsoft has some updates for me. It’s like, there’s so much crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. It’s and I don’t even, I mean, we don’t even necessarily free from this on the Mac, you know, in smaller ways. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have my Adobe updater running in the background. and now I have my iZotope updater running in the background. It’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come on. Like, I just, I hate having to first get a store for my store, and then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the downloader from my store for my store, and then the downloader gives me my app from my store for my store, and it’s like, oh my God, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me buy the app and download the app directly, for God’s sake, like, make this easier. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this is one of the many reasons why I kind of hope we don’t enter that world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS, because we can see on the PC, like, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of mediocre and annoying that world becomes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the flip side of that is what everyone on a PC would say. It’s like, yeah, but if I want a game on PC, I can go get it wherever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is like the war between, you know, Epic and Steam of like trying to get the game developers to sell there and Epic
⏹️ ▶️ John will take a smaller cut, but then they want the exclusives and Steam is flexing its power to take more
⏹️ ▶️ John from game developers than game developers think is worthwhile. And then it’s the question of who gets promoted and all that other stuff. But as
⏹️ ▶️ John a user, if you’re on a PC and you want to play what we call a PC
⏹️ ▶️ John game, you can get it. Whereas if you’re on the Mac, you’re like, oh, well, if you’re on the M1, you know, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam hasn’t, none of the games have come over to ARM and 32-bit, the deprecating 32-bit killed a bunch of games
⏹️ ▶️ John too. And you know, can you even get that game store in your thing? Like it’s, you get both. You get
⏹️ ▶️ John the freedom to choose from all these different stores, but if you really do, it sounds like in your case, I actually want something from GOG and something
⏹️ ▶️ John from Steam and something from Epic. Now you’ve got these three storefronts on your
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. And in general, the way they work is like, you can’t, as far as I know, maybe someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who was an expert who knows better, I don’t think you can delete Steam and still play games from Steam, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you get a game from Steam and you say, okay, well now I’ll just uninstall Steam because I’ve got the game. I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna go the way you think it’s gonna go. And so of course they also want to auto update and
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the being thrown the login screens and stuff like that, I’m sure it’s something that you can go into Windows and as people
⏹️ ▶️ John are saying in the chat, just disable the auto start items or whatever the equivalent of login items is on Windows, not to be bothered
⏹️ ▶️ John by them. But yeah, that’s the price of access to all the things is all the
⏹️ ▶️ John things have access to you too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I don’t, having some kind of, what in mobile is called sideloading and what on computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just called downloading apps, like that is fine in the computer world. Again, I think in mobile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a huge fan of that prospect, but in the computer world, I’m fine with being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download software directly from the vendors. That’s great. What I don’t like is having increasing amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of middle people in the way. Like that sucks. And what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry needs is not more middle people. You know, it’s nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s nicely integrated with the system. You know, we have the app store, we have the Microsoft whatever store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s nice for like, you know, technical convenience sake. But otherwise, I don’t want a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different app stores that I have to, that are all launching and running in the background and running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own DRM schemes and their own auto updater. And like, it’s just a pain. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s burdensome. And that’s just not, I don’t think we’re necessarily in a better place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that doesn’t make the world better to have four different app stores on Windows. Like that sucks. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better off having just direct downloads. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it better in some ways. I mean, if you think about why Steam became popular, because it was solving a real
⏹️ ▶️ John problem that people had. Do you remember when PC games were all their own individual installers and how much of
⏹️ ▶️ John a challenge it was to get, say, the three games you wanna currently be playing, both installed, all
⏹️ ▶️ John three of them installed working on your Windows PC at the same time, because they all have their particular requirements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That wasn’t the problem. The problem was all their terrible DRM schemes that would install root
⏹️ ▶️ John on your computer. Or which drivers they want to work with, or what their updater is and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. So Steam came in and said, hey, you don’t have to worry about that. You’re no longer at the mercy of every single individual game developer’s
⏹️ ▶️ John attempt to make an installer and an updater. Steam will handle all of that for you. And that’s why users flocked
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. And then, of course, enough users flocked to it that it gave Valve a tremendous amount of power. And that’s where these problems
⏹️ ▶️ John all come in. It’s like every one of these things that was introduced was solving a real problem for somebody.
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually, if you become the biggest or the only game in town, it’s like you start seeing dollar signs. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John now you start turning the screw on everybody. And developers start to not like you. And then you realize, hey, we
⏹️ ▶️ John have game we have game players over a barrel, because of course, you need steam, because if you want to play games on a PC, you need steam, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to do individual installers for every game? Ha ha, no one’s wants to go back to that. So now you start messing with developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and throwing more ads in their face because you show it gets them to buy more stuff, right? So this stuff does go bad, but in
⏹️ ▶️ John general, it comes from a place of some kind of progress. Like I remember the first time I used Steam, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wow, this is so much better than dealing with individual games because every game was different and they were all at
⏹️ ▶️ John a varying quality and Steam sort of was a level playing field from the user’s perspective. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was one application, one place to deal with all your game stuff. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ve got the Epic Store. So now you’ve got two places and the reason Epic Store exists is because Epic wasn’t happy with Steam
⏹️ ▶️ John for very good reasons. And sometimes users aren’t happy with the same scenario you’ve got too. And I’m not sure the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is beyond like altruistic things of like, you know what, there should be a standardized way to deal with installs and
⏹️ ▶️ John updates and so on and so forth. And it should be developed and supported by the OS vendor. But why are they motivated to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that? Because if they’re going to do a lot, why don’t they just make their own app store? And then they would have all the power. And you get an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John or Google type scenario more or less. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an inevitable series of events. But I think we get there by individual companies
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things that for various, for various moments in time, users and developers did
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and then it just turns bad. And then we get the reaction to that and just the wheel turns, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the expression might be. That’s it. Yeah, I got it. Nailed it. Casey style.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of wheels turning, can we just go back a step? Did you, what was your opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, of MTV’s Pimp My Ride? Because I feel like you’re going to say that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hated it, But I’m hoping against hope that you found something delightful within it.
⏹️ ▶️ John MARK MIRCHANDANI Can you tell me how this is connected to anything we’ve discussed so far? COREY Yo dawg. MARK MIRCHANDANI
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, sure. All right. I’m not sure I watched any entire episode of MMR. I must have. I must have seen
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire episode once in a while. But I mostly know the meme from the internet, you know, connected thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John its connection to Pimp My Ride. I could not have pulled out of a hat if you hadn’t reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. COREY Oh, it was so delightful. It was trash, but it was so delightful. Did you see it, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course not. Oh, Marco hasn’t seen it. Don’t you know the meme? It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey car show. Well, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of allegedly. Nevertheless. All right, well, we’ll move right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone. That’s a little disappointing, but that’s OK.
A waterproof iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to share a hilarious and delightful story that a listener sent us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thomas Q. Brady sent us a link to a blog post that they put up with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to their adventures with a brand new iPhone 13 Pro. Now, it is worth reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the blog post because I thought it was very, very good and very funny, but the extremely short version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Thomas was tubing with his family and oopsie-doopsies, his brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 13 Pro slips out of his pocket into the water. in like a river or some such.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we pause for a moment and think about the idea of I’m going tubing and I’m gonna go and I’m gonna keep my phone in my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ John right away. Right away I’m saying maybe this is not the best life choice. Like I know people always want to be with their phone but when you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John tubing on a river, maybe that’s the time to think about not bringing your phone with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This would have been a more appropriate time for a GoPro but you know, that’s neither here nor there. Nevertheless, Thomas writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next morning I took a backup phone to T-Mobile to get a new SIM card. I told the T-Mobile salesperson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my tale of woe and he and his colleague said, you should talk to that Man Plus River guy. They told me of a YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey celebrity that apparently now lives nearby and does scuba diving sessions looking for treasure and or people’s lost items.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like the beginning of a movie. It’s like, oh, you got to go down to old man Peabody. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, there should be a monster in the river that eats him or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. But anyway, so long story, slightly shorter. The Man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus River guy, whose name is Dallas, goes searching and searching and searching and eventually scuba tank runs out of air and he says, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the heck with it. I’ll grab my snorkel and then he goes snorkeling to search and search and search and search. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he came up with the phone. But what amazed me was, and this is now reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Thomas’s blog post again, the phone was still on. The battery still had 20% charge, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks in part to a shortcut script that automatically enables low power mode when the battery falls below a threshold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m holding the phone right now. There aren’t even any visible scratches. The only quote unquote defect I could find of any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the moment when it was found and now, is that the speakers weren’t working. I could barely hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything when I tried to play music or make a phone call. As they’ve dried out, even those seem to be coming back. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera lenses, screen buttons, all fine. I took it to T-Mobile to get the eSIM reactivated and told them what had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened, that it had been underwater for 26 hours. They looked at the water damage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sticker that’s apparently visible from the SIM tray door. It’s a white sticker that turns pink if it gets wet, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how they determined water damage. It was white. So 26 hours underwater. I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely clear on how deep, but 26 hours underwater and it basically works no problem. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thomas goes into a little bit about the, what’s the IP rating? I forget what it stands for, but basically the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rating as to how it can protect against ingress of dust and water and stuff like that. Is it an ingress protection?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t know. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like IP 60, whatever, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So the iPhone 13 Pro is IP 68 rated. Six is the maximum amount, which is according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Wikipedia, no ingressive dust, complete protection against contact.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As in, so it is dust tight, so no dust should be able to get in it. And then the eight indicates it’s water
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rating. Eight is the second best, which it reads water can enter, but only in such a manner that it produces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no harmful effects. Now there are limits to how long it can be underwater and so on and so forth. It cannot be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blasted by a like powerful jet, which is the most strong rating. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how cool is that? 26 hours underwater, some random YouTuber, well not random, he’s a very popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTuber, but some YouTuber ends up finding it underwater and the thing is still on and working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no problem. I just thought that was such a cool story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s pretty great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I watched the most recent of the Man Plus River YouTube videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not the video that will presumably eventually go up about Thomas’s phone, but it was just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general video about somebody looking for a class ring that was lost in like a lake or something like that. And it was delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes and if you have 15 minutes to kill, I recommend it. So you should check that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re going to lose your phone underwater, it’s probably a good idea to do it when it’s brand new because that’s when all the seals presumably are at their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco rather than like a year later
⏹️ ▶️ John when you accidentally left it on the dashboard of your car sitting in the hot sun and like baked all the rings and the rubber is hardening
⏹️ ▶️ John and things are becoming unseated. So there you go.
Sponsor: RevenueCat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Revenue Cat. If you are an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or web developer, you’ve probably either actually implemented in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and subscription handling in some form, or you’ve heard about it or will need to do it and are kind of afraid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And implementing subscription handling and in-app purchase is usually a big pain in the butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Revenue Cat, quite simply, is created by developers for developers to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really, really easy to build and manage in-app purchases and subscriptions on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android, and the web. I’ve done this the old way without Revenue Cat, and I can tell you from experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a huge pain. There’s all sorts of weird edge case handling, testing is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard, and you gotta have server validation and all this stuff, and subscriptions make everything even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complicated. It’s a pain in the butt without Revenue Cat, honestly. If I was building a new app today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would use Revenue Cat to handle all of my in-app purchases. of friends who have lots of other developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have in fact, thousands of the world’s best apps use revenue cat to power their in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app purchases, you just do a few lines of code in your app, and then revenue cow provide payment infrastructure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer analytics, data integrations, all this giving you time back from dealing with those edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases and all the updates across platforms you need to do all the time. Join the 1000s of developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who use revenue cat to power your in-app purchases and subscriptions at revenuecat.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, that’s revenuecat.com. Simplify your in-app purchase handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by just using them instead. It’s really good. I’ve heard lots of great things from lots of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check it out, revenuecat.com. Thank you so much to Revenue Cat for making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s really hard easy and for sponsoring our show.
Pasta bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Sharon Lynn Falk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes with, do you want to handle this, John? This was with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey larvae in, what was it, like dry pasta? So Sharon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, any wheat-based product, this is so gross, any wheat-based product can harbor weevil larvae.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They will hatch if it gets warm and humid. I learned this living in Florida and turning off the AC when I went up north for three weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I refrigerate my flour. And Sharon provides a link to pets, pests,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hero.com where they talk about what bugs are in my pasta and which ones are safe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to eat, which was super
⏹️ ▶️ John great. I don’t think the link was from Sharon, but a lot of people sent in suggestions of different insects. I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John find a page of list them all. You’ve got your green weevils, your rice weevils, sugar ants, flower beetles. Think someone
⏹️ ▶️ John had some Mediterranean, like European moth thing. You can read this page and Yes, it does cover things such as how
⏹️ ▶️ John do I know if there are weevils in my pasta? What happens if I cook and eat pasta with weevils in it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Read the page to find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. How about if there’s any doubt? Don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, seriously. Yeah, that’s the good. I mean, the thing of pasta is not that expensive. If you don’t want to eat bugs, don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re probably fine. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God. I’m very disturbed right now. All right. Can we move on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we move on, please and thank you.
Apple event next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let’s talk about what’s going on on Monday. You guys doing anything fun?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, hopefully, this is an
⏹️ ▶️ John for once the like the announcement, like the, you know, the send a little picture and a word or whatever to like
⏹️ ▶️ John announce the the event to various people when it’s happening. And this one is
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely straightforward. I feel like the event is called unleashed with a period not an exclamation
⏹️ ▶️ John point, Jaws. And the little animation that accompanies it is like an Apple logo with
⏹️ ▶️ John what look like speed lines kind of coming at you. As Todd Vizzieri will tell you, this is not a proper
⏹️ ▶️ John Star Wars-style hyperspace starfield thing, but it’s clearly inspired by a similar thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Jaws, Greg Joswiak of Apple tweeted a little animation
⏹️ ▶️ John with this thing. And the text of his tweet is, unleashed! These next six days
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to speed by. So, fairly straightforward, no complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John reading here. Apple will announce things that are fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s exactly what we expect. And they’re going to apparently emphasize the fact that they are fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what is unleashed? Hopefully the M1 will be unleashed by
⏹️ ▶️ John adding more of it and putting an X on its name or whatever. So this is exciting. This is presumably the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac event that we’ve all been waiting for. We talked a lot about laptops in the last show. Maybe they’ll also introduce
⏹️ ▶️ John those AirPods, the regular AirPods that don’t go in your ear canal that we talked about for the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John event, but that didn’t show up, but still are apparently a real thing. Who knows, but all I care about are the
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. Bring on the Macs. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed. I’m so excited. This is actually earlier than I would have guessed this event would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking more like maybe end of the month. So this is very promising. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming this is most likely the Mac event, which I think by all means, it certainly looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to be the case. I am just so looking forward to this. You know, we talked last week about the laptop rumors in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ve talked in the past shows, it just, I really want to see what is the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step in the M1 or the Apple Silicon progress? Like, how do we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broaden these chips into the higher end products? You know, I personally have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-time M1 user for almost a year now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this chip, this chip and this is the lowest end one. Like this is the most likely the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowest and worst Apple Silicon chip that will ever be in a Mac. It’s leashed. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not a leash. It’s totally leashed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to get rid of that. And in some ways it is like, you know, I, you know I’ve been using 16 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of RAM this whole time and I could really use more of that. I talked about, you know, the, I mean there’s only four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high speed cores. I would love more, more than, you know, more than that for the performance cores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just cannot wait to see like what is the story here? And this might not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the entire story, as we’ll talk about next week, you know, whatever we get and then whatever we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still need to get. You know, we’re expecting things, we’re expecting the laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, the MacBook Pro. What we don’t really hear any rumors about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell, for anything imminent, is the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has more, you know, like the bigger chip. We’re not hearing anything about Mac Pro options, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miniature Mac Pro that was rumored.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac Mini, there were a set of enhanced Mac Mini rumors. Remember the one with the magnetic, I don’t know if we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it on the show, but it’s like skinnier and has a magnetic power cord, just like the new iMacs does, and it would have an M1X in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t know if it’s rumored for this event, but there were a round of rumors about that. The Mac Pro, as usual, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing, where it’s like, you know, other than they’re like, oh, it’s a half-size one or something, something like that. So the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, no one is expecting this event. I don’t think people are expecting the Mini either, but at least there’s a solid
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor and renderings and feature set that supposedly is in the new mini. But yeah, this event,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they say unleashed, like, you know, they’ve already done with the M1 Macs, released the Macs that most people
⏹️ ▶️ John buy. The M1 MacBook Air, as somebody says. But if you don’t know anything about Macs, you just want a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know you want a laptop because who uses desktops? Which one should you get? The M1 MacBook Air, it’s amazing, just buy it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the higher end things, for the people who care about their computers being unleashed the MacBook Pro is the
⏹️ ▶️ John computer that, you know, It’s like Apple sells two Macs, the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. And every
⏹️ ▶️ John other Mac is like weird special interest groups like us
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anything to care about at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so this is the MacBook Pro event. And that’s all they have to do is put out those MacBook Pros, hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John as described in our previous thing. Everything else, like, oh, I’d like a new Mac mini. It’s like Apple’s like, yeah, everyone always wants
⏹️ ▶️ John a new Mac mini. We’ll do it someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I think the large iMac is also a question mark. Yes, yes. Because they do sell a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good number of those. And so, you know, that I think what we need to complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Silicon picture is the big iMac, the pro laptops and the pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktops, whatever that means. And I don’t know how much of that we’re gonna get yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the rumors about the Jade C chop and Jade C die thing from a few months back, if those ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being correct and looking at what they did with the M1, I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the high-end Mac mini, the MacBook Pro and the big iMac will all use the same chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the M1X or whatever, the M2X, the M+, whatever that’s called, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all three of those product lines use the same processor. And then the only question is whatever the Mac Pro might use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which might be like two or four of those same things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I think it’s perfectly fine. Like kind of like it was fine for the M1 to be used everywhere it is, as we pointed out in the past. It
⏹️ ▶️ John shows every machine that has an M1 is happy to have it and it is appropriate for it, including the iPad. Like it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those things that you listed, the high-end PowerBook, the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, the quote-unquote big iMac, and the faster Mac mini, those can definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John all be well-served by with the variability of the GPU. So again, the rumor is you can get one with
⏹️ ▶️ John more GPU cores and less, right? But in general, the CPU is like, I don’t know, go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to our previous show where we talked about these rumors, right? That one feature set, including the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John limit, including the rumored RAM limits, can serve all of those machines fine. because if you get a big iMac and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, but the big iMac can only hold 64 gigs of RAM. It’s like, well, it’s not the Mac Pro and the Mac Pro isn’t out yet, but that’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John for the big iMac. If it has 32 GPU cores and the normal big
⏹️ ▶️ John set of CPU cores and maxes out at 64 gigs of RAM, that feature set is
⏹️ ▶️ John also fine for the MacBook Pros and the Mac Mini would love to have. I mean, I don’t know if the Mac Mini will
⏹️ ▶️ John get it or deserves it or whatever you wanna say because the Mac Mini is often neglected, but it would fit fine
⏹️ ▶️ John in that machine as well. And it fits with what we know of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rollout, which is let’s just try to use the same chip in as many places as we can. And I think I would be happy
⏹️ ▶️ John with that whole thing. But for this event, I’m actually only expecting the laptops and anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else I get is gravy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the laptops are obviously the most likely. I bet we’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least either the Mac mini or the big iMac and probably the Mac mini, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be surprised if we got any desktops. I think they are the most likely. I’ll be super surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we get anything that’s not like just straight up computers. You know, I’ll be surprised if we get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods. Personally, I’m hoping for AirPods Pro because I think it’s time for me to get a set and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m waiting and trying to resist up until the time that there’s a new version, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Nevertheless, I don’t know, I have this, what was it? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year old or two year old 13-inch MacBook Pro. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was this? It was 2020, so it’s a year old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was one day before the Apple Silicon transition began.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, basically, that’s true. Cause I got it for that keynote, didn’t I? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, I don’t have any problem with my laptop, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know why I’m more keen to update this than I am my iMac Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really would like to have a new 13-inch MacBook Pro. I know I’ve said this several times. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to give up on ports if I can avoid it. Just like a week or two ago, I had all four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports chugging on something. I think I had power, ethernet, phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there was one other thing I was using at the same time. I can’t remember what it was now, but I do occasionally use all four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ports, and so I would like to keep all of them. And I would like to be able to do stuff in SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in less than a calendar year, which would be super cool. But if there was a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro, then I’m gonna have a real uncomfortable conversation with Aaron about how I’m going to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my entire computing life in one shot. So we’ll see how that goes. But- I need it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my work. Well, and I can pull that card sometimes, but not always. Yeah. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what? Come to think of it, have I mentioned recently that you can go to atp.fm.fm slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you would like. Just going to throw that out there. But no, I’m very excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what’s released next week. I think it should be interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am trying not to get my hopes up that we are going to get the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long-time Apple user apology tour that we’re all hoping for with, you know, the SD cards and the HDMI ports and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth. But, oh man, I’m just, I’m excited to see what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do here because I feel like we really know so little And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are going to know so much more so soon. So it is not the longest six days of my life, but I am super
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s supposed to speed by, speed. It’s not that they’re going to be long. I have two big fears
⏹️ ▶️ John about this event. One we talked about in the past show, which is like, well, are they really going to do the thing with the laptop? Have they really turned
⏹️ ▶️ John a new leaf and are on a new strategy, like the rumors say, or is that just not true? Right, so that’s my one
⏹️ ▶️ John fear. For now that I’m into the laptops, but I feel like I hope that rumor is true. And my second fear is very
⏹️ ▶️ John specific. My second fear, and again, I haven’t been keeping up with the rumors on this, so I don’t know if it’s founded. Second fear is that they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John max out at 32 gigs, and I’ll be super sad, because I think that is not appropriate for all these machines. Maxing
⏹️ ▶️ John out at 32 is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the current MacBook Pro, the current big one maxes out at 64. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think they would replace the 16-inch with something that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower maximum RAM specs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope that’s true, but I’m just like, because we have these questions about, economically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much RAM can they shove in the unified memory thing. And we did a lot of stuff with the GPUs where
⏹️ ▶️ John I did a bunch of back of the envelope math to show that GPU power is within shouting distance
⏹️ ▶️ John given the size of the rumored things and so on and so forth. But I don’t know what factors are involved in the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And the fact that the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John is even available with eight bothers me, right? Because I just feel like it’s not appropriate. But then that makes me think,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, maybe it’s really expensive to do that, you know, the unified memory architecture. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there, I have seen a couple of rumors bouncing back and forth over the past months of like, will it be 32? Will it be 64? So
⏹️ ▶️ John those are my two fears. The laptop things aren’t true and they haven’t really turned over a new leaf, which will be sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or that the high end, you know, that any of these things, that the laptops, the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac mini, the new unleashed chip is still leashed to 32 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what would you be most excited to see? Like if we really do get the apology tour,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the SD card that we may or may not be getting the most exciting? Is the death of the touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most exciting? Like if you could choose only one, what would you choose to make you just overjoyed?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When the current M1 series of laptops, they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swapped in the M1 guts and left pretty much everything else the same. And what that has resulted in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a almost ridiculous surplus of battery life. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they replaced the more power-hungry Intel guts with the more efficient M1 guts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but didn’t change the battery sizes. And so as a result, my MacBook Air has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous battery life and also no fan. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome, I love that. My fear is that they will, or have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken the opportunity, now that they have, quote, surplus battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they decided to make them thinner and lighter and shrink those batteries down a bit. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they haven’t, because having this MacBook Air with its ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life has made it so that for the first time ever, I rarely need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about my laptop’s battery life. I can bring it, if I’m going on an overnight trip somewhere, or even a weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip somewhere, I can bring my MacBook Air, have it just in my backpack, occasionally pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out and use it, and just never have to think about it and never have to plug it in for like that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip. If I left it upstairs, you know, for a couple days, I know I can go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and use it and it’ll be fine. It won’t be discharged or it won’t be at like 10%. It’s been amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a laptop that has battery life that’s more like an iPad in that way. You can kind of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not think about it for a while. And actually it’s honestly better life than my iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just, it’s great. And so I hope whatever they’ve done with this next generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of laptops that we hope is about to come out. Obviously, I hope they’re good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we went through all last week, all the different things that we hope they come with and everything, and that all sounds great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they haven’t shrunk the batteries by too much. I’m sure they’ve shrunk them by a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they haven’t shrunk them by too much, because this is such a great situation we have now with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops, where we finally have great battery life for the first time, literally ever in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop. All of their claims in the past, they’ve never panned out to be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life in a laptop, ever, ever, ever. They’ve always been okay, maybe decent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them have been pretty poor. It’s never been great. Now it really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hope this wasn’t a one-time fluke like during this transition. I hope they actually keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this standard up of having this good a battery life. So that’s honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be like my stretch goal of what I hope to see. That’s assuming they haven’t screwed up anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. But I think when Apple designed this last generation laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the 2016 release, that was a long time ago. That was deep into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unedited Johnny Ive era. That was, I think, some of their worst products were came out of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era. And this is a very different time. Again, that was 2016 that those came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is significantly later and hopefully they have learned. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the products they have designed more recently than that have pretty much gone on an upward trend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’ve been better by a lot. And so I expect great things here. I don’t expect this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a compromised product line or a controversial one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I expect this to be great and boring. It should be amazing, and it should not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any kind of massive drama. It shouldn’t require the bags full of dongles that we all been carrying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They shouldn’t have any kind of massive missteps like the butterfly keyboard or the touch bar. I expect them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really great laptops that are just normal in, like, once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy them and you’re over the newness of it, it should just feel like a great normal laptop. You shouldn’t have to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about any XYZ part of it that’s like stabbing you in the back every time you use it. It should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be a great computer. That’s what they used to release on a routine basis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I’m pretty sure, I’m confident, that they have the skills and the direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the humility in this area to do it right this time. So that’s what I’m looking forward to also.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some confidence that they’re not gonna mess with the battery too much, if only because they’re, I mean, with
⏹️ ▶️ John this Unleash thing, I hope they’re really putting in enough hardware in there that
⏹️ ▶️ John at maximum tilt, where everything going off, it will really eat battery, right? And so I think they’ll still have great
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life for people who are just tooling around on them or whatever, but if you really wanna exercise all the stuff they put in, I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still gonna have to put in similarly sized batteries just to handle that, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the aggressive case. Maybe not so much on the 14, but certainly on the 16. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and looking at the rumor renders, who knows how accurate they are. If it’s thinner by a millimeter, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like, and you mentioned they kept the battery the same size as the MacBook Air. I think they might’ve increased it a little bit because
⏹️ ▶️ John the, like the logic boards shrink a little bit for these ARM things as well. They were already tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Intel things, but they’re even tinier now because everything is shoved into the system on a chip, right? And that makes,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually makes a little more room for battery. So who knows how it’ll come out. If the rumored ports are true, they’re gonna eat in some
⏹️ ▶️ John space, but then the logic board is gonna be smaller so you get some space back. So I think also
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the supposed new ethos is not just give people ports they need, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s get off of that thin and light thing. And arguably Apple has learned that lesson
⏹️ ▶️ John even on the laptops a little bit with like the discontinuation of the MacBook One And
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that over the past few years, like the new 16 inch MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t lean heavily on even making that thinner, not that they really could with the Intel chips, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this, if they were gonna lean on something to make it thinner, like I feel like we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see that in the M2 MacBook Air next year, right? Because that’s the machine to do that on, that makes sense. But for the big
⏹️ ▶️ John honking 16 inch that’s gonna be unleashed, I hope they still stick with essentially the biggest battery they
⏹️ ▶️ John can legally fly on a plane with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forgot about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, Casey, I do have an answer to your question that’s not crappy. What would be my most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind-blowing thing is if the 14-inch was fanless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s interesting. I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John expect that. That’s not appropriate,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? You think that’s appropriate for the 14-inch MacBook Pro to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fanless? Mm. I don’t think they will do it, but I would love it
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you just want an M2 MacBook Air, because if you want a fanless, If it’s gonna be unleashed,
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the leash is the lack of a fan because you have thermal throttling and you can’t clock it as high or whatever. Unleashed means
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a fan. So if you don’t want a fan in your thing, Apple will have computers you can buy, but I really hope the 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but you know. The current, the M1 MacBook Air, which is fanless, and it’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 computer that is fanless, it actually is not that much less performant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the ones with fans in actual use. Like if you look at, you know, the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benchmarks and workload and load testing and thermal testing, it actually doesn’t get that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower than like, you know, the Mac mini or the 13 inch MacBook Pro that has it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t have 32 GPU cores. Like I feel like the delta between full tilt and idling is gonna be way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough. And also in all fairness, you know, the Mac mini that I’ve been using as my desktop for most of the last year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a fan and I’ve never heard it. And so maybe this is just, you know, wishful thinking, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air that is fanless, as we mentioned, that’s an old case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design. That design was never made to be fanless. And what they did, what they had to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it fanless, so there’s these regulations with safety, with laptops in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco countries that the bottom of the laptop that touches your skin in much common use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s on your lap, that can’t get above a certain temperature with sustained use, just for safety
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and comfort reasons and certain regulatory reasons. And so the most obvious way, if you were going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool a laptop down passively, and you have this giant metal underside of it, the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obvious thing to do to cool it would be to bond the heat generating surface of the processor to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that metal surface, because it’s like a giant metal heat sink, basically, as the exterior casing of the laptop. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of those thermal limits for comfort and health and stuff, you can’t really do that. So what they did with the MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the teardowns of it, it basically has like an air gap. Like there is a heat sink inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop that does not touch the exterior of the case. It just basically heats up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat sink and then the air that’s in there. And, you know, but air is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insulator, largely thermal. Like it’s not a great way to cool things passively. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they redesigned the case of the laptop, I think there are other places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could dissipate heat. Maybe the screen lid, maybe, you know, some parts of the top decking that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are away from the keyboard. I don’t know, but what I’m saying is the M1 MacBook Air, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fanless, is in an enclosure that was never meant to be fanless. If they design a new enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that from the start as a goal, they could do it differently and they could potentially dissipate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more heat. Again, I don’t think they’re doing this for the 14 inch. I don’t think they would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would love it if they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, you just described the M2 MacBook Air rumor. It’s gonna be a case designed to be fanless from day one. It’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have higher thermal limits than the current one because it’s purpose-built for it. it’ll probably also be thinner and lighter. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2, if they crank it up, might even dissipate more heat than the M1 does,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because now they have the headroom, because they have a better case. But we’ll see, there’s only so many places you can chuck that. The place
⏹️ ▶️ John I mainly remember the heat going is, especially with the original PowerBook G4 and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John would be the piece of metal between the function keys and the screen, like the piece of metal on the lower
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the case, that would get so hot. It’s basically the right place to do it, because you tend not to touch there,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not touching your leg, it’s radiating into the air, but man, I think we get, probably even on modern laptops, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John just reach slightly above the keyboard to that metal, if you’re really working your laptop, that’ll get warm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to have, first of all, no regressions, because you never know with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, like modern Apple of the last year or two doesn’t seem to want to step backwards like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a few years ago often did, but nevertheless, I would like no regressions. But the other thing I think I would like in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spirit of Unleashed is, let’s get rid of those limitations that seem silly at a glance, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to be holdovers from the M1 seeming to be a largely iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey design, or a processor built for iOS. And so an example of this is the limit of 32
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs RAM, or is it, no, 16 gigs RAM, I’m sorry. They’re currently limited to 16 gigs RAM in the M1. And I believe it’s still true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s only one external display, except maybe the Mac mini, is that right? Or did I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John make that up?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because you can, like, that’s what they say on their specs page, but it’s so easy to make, to connect more than one
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor with these various adapters and dongles and stuff, which is not great, but it’s not an actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a compromise, it seems, right? That you need to go like USB-C to HDMI and HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a monitor, and then you can go direct USB-C to a different monitor or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John there are other ways to do it, but it’s more annoying than it should be for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so I feel like those seemingly arbitrary limitations, or the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that seem to be because it was born as an iOS chip, I would really love for those to go away. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I mean, I almost never connect my laptop to a monitor. And in fact, if I do, it’s usually sidecar. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a physical monitor at all. And actually, if I ever do, it’s usually a television because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m using it to like watch a movie, you know, when I’m traveling or something like that. So it’s not something that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really fix a need for me, but it’s just in principle, something that I think is unfortunate. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t lived with 16 gigs RAM in a long time. And I know that it’s not, you know, it’s not all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apples to apples on the M1 Macs, But I would really, really find it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difficult to buy a professional, an allegedly professional computer in 2021, in late 2021, with only 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs RAM. Like I feel like I would want at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least 32, maybe even like John was saying 64. I don’t know. Um, so yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think those like seemingly arbitrary limitations is what I would love to see go away. And, and in two ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I’d like to see more than two ports. Again, a seemingly arbitrary limitation that is applicable to the laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least, that I would like to see go away. And if they can accomplish that, if this is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chip that is built for desktops, or at least behaves like it, whether or not that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the actual history of it, I think that would make me the most happy. John, do you have any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you love laptops so, so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I think I expressed everything I wanted to say last week. I just hope that the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John about the new Ethos are true and that these laptops really embody them.
⏹️ ▶️ John In In terms of limitations of the system on a chip, that’s another thing we mentioned briefly last time and I’ll reiterate now.
⏹️ ▶️ John The expectation, and I think it’s a reasonable one, is that these are not, like, this is, this is like, it’s the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John from the M1, but more of it. Right? So it’s not like, oh, it’s totally different, whatever they call it, whatever they end up
⏹️ ▶️ John calling it, don’t get distracted by the names, but we keep referring to like M1X implying, it’s like, it’s M1 guts,
⏹️ ▶️ John but more stuff. And on that end, the idea that they’re going to fix weird limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John that were present in the M1 and they’ll fix them in these, I’m not sure that we should be
⏹️ ▶️ John expecting that just because like this is following, this is what Intel has always done. Like the first chips that come
⏹️ ▶️ John out are not the Xeons with like the new cores of the new architecture, it’s the smaller and cheaper ones and they build up to the Xeons. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what Apple’s been doing. You release the small one with the M1 cores and all that other stuff and then this
⏹️ ▶️ John one is going to be the big one, but it’s gonna have the same or similar M1 cores and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would imagine the same or similar IO or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that’s stopping them from doing multiple displays easily. Hopefully that’s not something that’s inherent in the architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John and hopefully it was just that, you know, they would have added, needed to add more, you know, lanes to some bus
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere or something and that’ll be solved by this one. If the chips in
⏹️ ▶️ John these Unleashed things really are like, oh, all new cores, if it’s like the A15 cores, for example, or
⏹️ ▶️ John the A15 GPU cores, which as we covered in past shows are actually different as well, I will be very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John by that. And what it will do is it will make the M1 seem like this weird stopgap, right? They just had to get something
⏹️ ▶️ John out the door ASAP. And so they gave you the M1, but really they were working on these unleashed ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that essentially have A15 cores in them. I don’t expect that right now. I’m still fully expecting these to be
⏹️ ▶️ John M1, but more, which will be great. M1’s a great chip, but I think that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John dictates the feature set, whatever stuff that was, if it is M1 guts, whatever stuff they
⏹️ ▶️ John planned on with the M1 guts, you’re gonna get that, but just more of those guts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as a final question, before we move on, And let’s start with John. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this chip going to be called just for bragging rights? It’s an assuming there’s only one chip, which maybe there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t be, but what are they going to call this chip that they’re announcing Monday?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I, I again have not been keeping up, so I’m just going to go with the boring old M1X. And we’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s we’re already trying to make the shirt for it. So please
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco let it be called
⏹️ ▶️ John M1X because it’ll save us a little bit of work. But yeah, I can call it whatever the hell they want. But M1X is
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m thinking of it as in my mind for the reasons I just stated that I expected to do the M1. but extra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also going M1X because, you know, we talked about this before. You know, a lot of people think, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this should be the M2 or the M3, but I think that’s what the future years chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines will be. I don’t think the, you know, bigger core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the M1 will be called the M2. I think the M2 is next year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips or, you know, it’s like the chips that come out next spring that are based on the A15 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and it’s possible, you know, one thing that we haven’t talked about, it is possible that they might skip M1X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and these new chips might be M2 based in their naming, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the new chips will use A15 cores instead of the A14 cores that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, or the A14 based cores that are in the M1. So it’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, this might, that like M1X might never exist and that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M2 goes in the, you know, most of these things, or maybe they start out with M2X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we get the M2 in the spring with the MacBook Air update that’s rumored, who knows? But I think the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely outcome here is this is the M1X, and it’s based on the M1 cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from last year, but more of them in larger chips, and that the cores that are based on the A15 updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year are possibly coming in future products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s gonna be M2 or M2X or something M2 derived. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that for a couple of reasons. First of all, the M1 was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roundabouts of this time last year. And second of all, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, A15, right? In the new phones? There’s so many of them, I can’t keep track of them. So the A15 in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new phones, as we’ve said plenty of times, is not an earth-shattering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference from, you know, the 14 that preceded it. And what if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip team, which we know has suffered some losses over the years, what if they were focused on these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new chips for these new computers? And so I’m going to go out on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limb and say that this is going to be a bespoke computer chip, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just something that was derived for an iPad or an iPhone chip. And it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be called M2 or M2X or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of the A15, one thing that is a possibility here is like, because the Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John are in such low volume compared to the phones, it’s possible that these unleashed
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, whichever, whatever cores they use, might use the new, whatever was it for, N5P
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like the new refined TSMC five nanometer process that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John using for the phone chips. And I say that just because the volume is so low. Like, why not? Why
⏹️ ▶️ John not use, if there’s, you know, you can just carve out a tiny little sliver of spare capacity, and I think I just saw some rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple was stepping down it’s iPhone orders because of whatever. And you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need much of a percentage miss on iPhone prediction to say, oh, now we have
⏹️ ▶️ John access, we have enough capacity to cover all the MacBook Pros. Cause most people don’t buy MacBook Pros. They just, they buy the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops, right? Those are the big sellers. And in the grand scheme of things, the numbers are so small compared to iPhones that
⏹️ ▶️ John I really do hope that these chips are built on the new process. Because as we talked about last week,
⏹️ ▶️ John part of what makes the A15 good is like, oh, you get a free five, whatever it was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John five or 6% clock speed increase for no increase in power because we improved the process. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a great example of unleashed. Oh, we get speed for free and we don’t burn any additional heat. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John please put that in the MacBook Pros and then also crank it up even higher. So I really hope these use the new process
⏹️ ▶️ John just to, you know, goose them a little bit more regardless of what chorus they use.
Sponsor: Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Hover, my favorite place to register domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names. Hover is a jumping off point for a ton of entrepreneurs and they want you to start your business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your own domain name. This is always where I start. Whenever I’m starting anything new, first I figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I want to call it and then I go check domains and trade marks and all that stuff. Hover is where I go because Hover can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me what domains are available across over 300 name extensions to choose from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when building your brand online. So no matter what you want to build, there’s a domain name waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You’ll also find excellent support available to answer any questions you might have, and their support team is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not trying to upsell you on anything. All they do is work hard to get you up and running. With free Whois
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy protection, a clean UI, and monthly sales on popular top-level domains, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super easy to see why Hover is a popular choice for people starting all kinds of businesses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, their support is amazing. They offer domains and email to pair with your domain, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over 300 names to choose from, so you can find whatever you want to find at Hover. I’ve personally used Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many, many years. I have only great things to say about Hover. Again, just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You’ll see their search, their interface, it’s all fantastic, and it’s respectful of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So get your domain name and many more at hover.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get a 10% discount with that link on all new purchases. Once again, hover.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP for a 10% discount on all new purchases. Make a name for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Hover. Thank you so much for sponsoring our show.
Maestral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Marco, you have in the show notes something very interesting. Marco’s new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox setup. Tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is a pleasant little surprise. People a few weeks ago started recommending to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new Dropbox client called Maestrol. And it is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open source Dropbox app that that runs on Macs and Linux. I’ve been using it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I uninstalled Dropbox from my Macs and I’ve been using it on Mac and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Linux on a server that I run that hosts my blog, because it’s a Dropbox-based blog engine. And Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever ago, they had a Linux CLI version of their client. It broke constantly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my blog just hasn’t worked for a while. I’ve had to write things by R-Sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and SCP and it’s been a mess. And so anyway, So I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had this running now for the last couple of weeks, and here’s some reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might want Maestro. So first of all, it is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very basic. It does not support some of Dropbox’s more modern and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broader esoteric features that, if you first got to Dropbox because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a folder that syncs, this does everything you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you if you came to Dropbox for its collaboration features and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, let me suck all the pictures off of every device you plug in like that kind of stuff. I don’t think it does any of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what’s great about this? So first of all, Dropbox is native app as far as I’m aware, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still not Apple Silicon compatible or not compatible, but it still runs in Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it still is not compiled for Apple Silicon. Again, I could be wrong there. They always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, oh, there’s a beta you go here. Even then, I’ve tried that and it’s still always running Intel binaries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Dropbox app on your Mac today, if you have an M1 Mac, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running Rosetta, that might be the only Rosetta app you’re still running, at least continuously. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overhead number one. Number two, Dropbox recently is an Electron app. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’ve discussed, that has a very large disk and memory footprint. To give you some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, after I did my laptop first, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had Dropbox running on my desktop, and I restarted both machines, they were both fully synced, and their memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco footprint, Dropbox was using 740 megs of RAM. My goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Maestro was using 118. The Dropbox app, disk space wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was 421 megs. Maestro’s app is 45 megs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s 10 times smaller on disk and what is it, like five times smaller in RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very lightweight and that to me, for something that is running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continuously on my Mac, on all my Macs all the time, it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have removed a small burden that was just constantly pegging one CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core for some reason or just the amount of RAM that’s using is inexcusable, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Maestro is great for that. It is Apple Silicon native as well as Intel native.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Linux version I’m now running is also great. Was super easy to install. It’s a Python based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, so you need to install some weird Python stuff, but it was in modern package manager, so it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s configurable. You can tell it where to put the folder and everything. The only things I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found that were lacking about it, it didn’t transfer over things like whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my shell scripts were executable and certain, whatever extended attributes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Max tell it like this bundle is actually something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you shouldn’t show the file extension on. So like any logic file I have in there will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show the.logix extension that normally shouldn’t be shown. So there might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like some extended attributes stuff that it’s not transferring properly. But as a file transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, it’s been fine. It’s been fast. The shared folders update just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t found, I don’t think it has any kind of like, right click for share link integration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Finder. So that is one downside. If you use that a lot, personally, I don’t need that very often. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens, I can just go to the Dropbox website and just get the share link there if I really need it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t that big of a loss for me. But it’s been great. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my computer, I mean, this is probably psychological, but I feel like my computers are faster and less burdened. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if nothing else, I trust this. It’s a very simple open source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And Dropbox with their own client software, I do not trust them at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Dropbox app has declined over the years to be both technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less sound and far less efficient. And also to be creepy and to try to take over more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more parts of my system in weird ways. They try to play tricks to get you to give them your root password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They play tricks with accessibility stuff. weird what they do and we’ve talked before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I really have been so turned off by what Dropbox has done with their client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps in recent years and Maestro really removes most of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s nothing bad about Maestro at all. It works well. The things it doesn’t support are things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really use and so it’s great. I can recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Looking at their Linux documentation and they talk about raising the limits for iNotify which lets me know that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using iNotify for their change detection, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, by the way, if you don’t have iNotify installed, it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install it for you. So install iNotify tools in your Linux box before you install Maestro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Learn that one the hard
⏹️ ▶️ John way. This is a problem I think we talked about years ago, or maybe I wrote about in my Mac OS X articles.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem you’re faced with is, let me know when something happens with these files, and it’s a lot of files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could do it with polling, which is just, I’ll just check constantly. Did anything change? change or anything change and that is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John inefficient and destroys your battery and you don’t want to do that. Nobody likes polling. So you need some sign of OS facility
⏹️ ▶️ John that says how can I tell when crap has changed in the file system without constantly polling. I notify
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the many features that does that on Linux. I guess it’s the one they chose here. It’s fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John modern and basically what the kernel know because all I owe all local I owe goes through the kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you can say hey kernel if anyone does anything to any of these any files anywhere, you’re gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John involved in it. And so just so you know, this set of files, tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John if anything happens with them, call me back, you know, or whatever. And so now you don’t have to pull, you just have to wait for anybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John does anything to the file system, their code will eventually enter the kernel and the kernel will say, oh, I’ve got, if this is one of those files you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be watching, oh, then send that notification. So it’s efficient, it’s good, right? But as you can imagine, you can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel, hey, kernel, if anything happens to any of these millions of files, let me know, because now the kernel’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I have to keep track of these millions of files and every time I do anything to a file, I have to check if it’s on his list of millions
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a paint, you know. So there are limits in the kernel. There is not unlimited kernel memory, lots of fixed buffers, whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why there is a limit in Linux that you can adjust to say, how many
⏹️ ▶️ John events am I allowed to have? How long can the queue be? How many things can we watch? So on and so forth. So if you have a really
⏹️ ▶️ John big drop box, as this documentation says, you may need to adjust those. The reason I bring all this up is, on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, there is no iModify. The Mac has its own multiple facilities for getting changes about
⏹️ ▶️ John files. One of them is FS events, which is what spotlight uses. And I think Dropbox uses as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also KQ, which is kernel Q, short for kernel Q, which is similar to notify.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s at least one other facility that I’m not remembering the name of. But on
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the sins of Dropbox on Mac OS is that historically, and I think still, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John done what is described as drinking from the FS events fire hose, which is it just kind of wants to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just, I’m gonna hook into FS events. I just wanna see everything that happens
⏹️ ▶️ John in the sort of the least discriminating way possible. FS7 isn’t that granular,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if like, instead of saying, just tell me what happens to the Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. It’s like, nope, I’m gonna watch the fire hose. And so literally every single piece of file IO that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens in the entire system, the Dropbox application, at least in the past, and I’m not sure about right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory had to watch at least go by and go, nope, not interested in that one. Nope, that’s not for me. That’s not in the Dropbox folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, not for me, not for me. And that can be expensive, even though it’s mostly just like seeing notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John go by, getting sent to it and disregarding them. That’s why you might, if you go into activity monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John see like DBS, FS events D, or whatever the hell that process is called, not burning your CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John but using CPU. And you’re like, Dropbox isn’t doing anything. Why is it using any CPU? Oh, it’s watching every single
⏹️ ▶️ John file system event go by. So I do wonder what this apparently Python based
⏹️ ▶️ John thing uses on Mac OS to watch for events. It’s probably not polling, cause that
⏹️ ▶️ John would be terrible. It could be using FS events in a more limited fashion. It could be using KQ for
⏹️ ▶️ John all I know, or it could be using that other one that I can’t remember that Mac OS has. And that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not a programmer and I think about these things, but it’s like, oh, I just want to fold to the sinks. Isn’t that easy? This particular
⏹️ ▶️ John problem of, hey, let me know when something happens so I can do a thing is actually one of the harder problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you have millions of files in your Dropbox, your choices are like the naive
⏹️ ▶️ John choice of like, Oh, I’ll just check all the files. Well, checking a million files is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. When you’re done checking, you just got to start checking again. But in the time it took you to check, tons of things could have happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s incredibly inefficient. So you have to use some kind of OS provided facility
⏹️ ▶️ John for checking for changes without polling. All of them have limitations and caveats and costs
⏹️ ▶️ John to using them. It’s better than polling. It’s better. It’s not as costly as polling, but there is some cost. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that is one of the main challenges of making a good magic folder
⏹️ ▶️ John that syncs across the network is finding a, a, you know, efficient way to
⏹️ ▶️ John check. And also you want it to be reliable. You don’t want to miss events. If Marco, you know, put something in
⏹️ ▶️ John the folder and says like, and then he sees the little, you know, maestral thing sync,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and it’s like, oh great. It synced my change and it’s done. But what if it didn’t? What if it missed something? because it’s event watching
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism missed that event or it got dropped off a queue or whatever. Like that is the hard
⏹️ ▶️ John problem here. And so Marco said he trusts this. And I think what he meant was, I trust it not to be creepy and do creepy
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but I’m not sure if I trust it to not accidentally miss a file.
⏹️ ▶️ John As awful as Dropbox is, it has so many users and it’s such a big company. I have some confidence that if there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John systemic problem where they’re missing updates or whatever, they’ll notice before I do and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John get it fixed. Whereas this thing, if it’s missing and or mangling files in some subtle way, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure. And I might be the first person to discover that and I don’t want to be that person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s interesting though. And if I was running Dropbox on my machine, I would definitely be installing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this right now. Just very quickly, if you happen to be one of the 10 people who have Synologies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that listen to this show, what I’ve been doing, God, you really did get a fiber slap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that just for Synology or is that FFmpeg too? Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you want to be the slide? Just Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, I cannot believe you actually got a Fiberslide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you happen to be one of the lucky people that own a Synology, then you can use Synology Drive in combination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Cloud Sync, I think. One of Synology’s major problems is that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible names for things and then rename them to similar things 85 times a year. But suffice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, Synology Drive is like Dropbox, but it’s running your own little private cloud, and then you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology Sync with your actual Dropbox such that your actual Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a subfolder within your Synology drive. And that’s what I’ve been doing for like two or three years now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the suggestion of a listener and it’s been working great. So you can also take that approach where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have to have anything Dropbox at all happening directly on your computer. It’s just pushed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off to the Synology to handle it for you which I also recommend, but this maestral thing is certainly a lot more accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for most of us. So that’s top tip.
⏹️ ▶️ John That Synology thing is probably using iNotify as well. that tends to be the most modern. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John iNotify is on Mac OS now. Maybe that’s the one I can’t remember. Someone suggested Epoll, but I think that’s just Linux. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, either here or there, I’m not saying any one of these mechanisms is bad or good. You know, you should or shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John using FS events. You should or shouldn’t be using iNotify or KQ or Epoll or whatever. You just need one of them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them are tricky. Like it’s not straightforward to make sure that you are
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient and reliable and you know, don’t have weird corner cases or bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. and in the magic folder that syncs, it’s really easy to end up with corner cases. And this is kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that Merlin always harps on about. If you have a Dropbox with 100 files in it, you’re fine no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s fine. But if you have a Dropbox with 4 million files and like terabytes of data and you’re using selective
⏹️ ▶️ John sync, suddenly the problem gets a lot harder and the odds of you encountering an issue go
⏹️ ▶️ John up a lot. Like almost any of these systems we described will work fine if you are a light user of
⏹️ ▶️ John folders that sync. But I don’t know how much you guys use, but I’ve definitely been pushing up against not
⏹️ ▶️ John being particularly light user of Dropbox. I don’t like it, but that’s just, this is the world we live in. I keep
⏹️ ▶️ John coding more and more stuff in Dropbox, which I’m sure Dropbox loves, because it’s convenient to have it accessible everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because I still don’t trust iCloud Drive. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. I mean, for whatever it’s worth, my Dropbox is, it’s just under seven gigs, and it’s 13,000 individual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco items. And because the reason why my entire blog CMS is hosted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my Dropbox, and so there’s like at least one text file for every single post that’s ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been on my site. And so there’s a lot of files and folders and images and stuff like that there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I can say this worked really well for 13,000 files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are seven gigs. One other thing that I forgot to point out that you might want to use Maestro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the way it works, the mechanism by which it works is it’s just using Dropbox’s API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a result of that, Dropbox recently introduced changes to their plans and stuff to make more people buy the paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version that the free versions now have like a computer limit of how many computers that can be installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on before you have to upgrade to the paid plan space regardless. And this does not count towards that limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just an API client. I don’t know how long Dropbox is gonna let that go. They might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a problem with that, I don’t know. But it’s probably not gonna be a big enough deal for them to care. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are running against the limit of your device count on a free Dropbox plan, this might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help you out there as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So someone in the chat room posted some links to the source And they have an unfortunately named file called
⏹️ ▶️ John polling.py, but it’s in an FS events subdirectory. So it looks like they’re using FS and some Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently they’re using this watchdog Python module that uses
⏹️ ▶️ John inotify on Linux. On Mac, it can use FS events or KQ. And you can choose the implementation if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, but I’m assuming based on the directory name that they’re choosing FS events, which is honestly probably a reasonable solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, on Mac OS, I feel like FS events is the most likely to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John working thing. And I know I say that, and then people are like, oh, what about that bug when you switch user accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mac and then all of a sudden Spotlight stopped working? Yeah, FS Events does occasionally have issues. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I can’t search my mail because FS Events is hosting some weird way.
⏹️ ▶️ John FS Events probably is not as reliable as iNotify on Linux is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John given the choices available, I think FS Events is probably the right choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, also, I had this on my desktop, which is a multi-user desktop. I have an account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this and so does Tiff. We both do our podcasting from this. So she has Dropbox installed on her account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that she can like, you know, drop her podcast files into it to transmit to ongoing needs. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have Maestro installed on both accounts and it works great to sync both of them. Mine with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Dropbox, hers with her Dropbox. Never any problems there either. So I can say once again, here’s another great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing about it, works fine on multi-user macOS, which is not something I can say for lots of things, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch unlock. Mac OS itself barely works, but damn it, Maestro does.
Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon, my most worn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand of clothing. Look, you’re busy, so stop thinking about what you want to wear, just embrace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mack Weldon and their radically efficient daily wear system. This is a selection of clothes rooted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in smart design, made with performance fabrics and built to work together. From breathable t-shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and polos to stylish button-ups, shorts, pants, underwear, and beyond.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weldon makes it easy for you to dress for work, leisure, play, or wherever life takes you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I personally love Mack Weldon clothes and I’ve been wearing them for years. Years ago I replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my underwear with their silver line of underwear and just today I got more because they released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a silver, I believe it’s called HD, that’s made with even softer materials and it’s even nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m so happy I wear those every single day. I also have lots of their socks, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their shorts for both working out and for kind of you know, walking around town. I have their sweatshorts, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have many of their long sleeve things. Now that we’re going into fall, long sleeves are really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice from Mack Weldon. I personally love both the long sleeve tees, but my favorite are the warm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knit. It’s like a waffle knit shirt. The warm knit long sleeves are really, really awesome from Mack Weldon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, all summer long, and whenever I’m working out, I’m wearing a Mack Weldon silver t-shirt, because silver t-shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically can never stink, because they have natural silver fibers woven throughout them. It’s just, this is an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. I love their clothes. They are sturdy, they’re built well, they last a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, they’re designed well, they fit well, everything about them, shopping is easy, like it’s an easy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great company to fill all your needs for your clothes. So, buy some time right now with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mack Weldon’s Daily Wear System. For 20% off your first order, visit MackWeldon.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP Podcast. Enter promo code ATP Podcast. That’s MackWeldon.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP Podcast. promo code ATP podcast for 20% off. Mack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weldon, radically efficient wardrobeing.
#askatp: Progress bars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Derek Aldridge writes, you commented on a recent show that one of the hardest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tasks in computer science is creating an accurate progress bar. I’ve watched a lot of bad progress bars over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I believe that it must be really difficult to do well. But why is it so difficult?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was thinking about this before we recorded, and the answer I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use was going to rely on like spinning platter hard drives, and that’s obviously not something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we need to worry about quite as often anymore. But I mean, look at if you were to download something from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Internet, how do you know how long that’s going to take? If it’s going at a megabyte a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, will it be a megabyte a second in 10 seconds? What if it goes from a megabyte a second to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 100 megabytes a second to one-tenth of a megabyte per second? There’s no real way to predict
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. That’s just one silly example of why, especially when you have any input or output,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, any sort of I.O., it gets really hard really quick and you can’t really reliably make predictions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, John, I’m assuming you put this in here. Do you have a more scientific answer than that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the type of question that if you’re a user of a thing, it seems mysterious and
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. Like, it seems like such a simple thing. I just want to, you know, see a bar and I want it to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John a progress bar and I want it to fill in some reasonable progression. Like, I don’t think people
⏹️ ▶️ John demand like you were like suggesting is that like that there are no jumps or stutters or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but progress bars are so bad, like they’re not even close to being correct,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it seems like, you know, they’ll spend an hour for the first two pixels and then jump to the end in two seconds. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s really far off and not something that you can blame on, like variability
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a disk speed or internet connection, right? But the reason it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John weird to people is it just seems like it should be a straightforward thing. And the way, it doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John weird to programmers because if you’ve ever had to program a progress bar, you immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why they are crappy, right? Because what you’re asked to do with a progress bar is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, know the future. And you can’t know the future, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, but not only can you not know the future about how things are going to go, very often you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know what it is you’re going to be asked to do. Think of like an installer
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, right? The installer knows roughly what it has to do, but if there’s any step in the installer that
⏹️ ▶️ John involves like cleaning things up or preparing the way for a thing or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t know what you’re gonna be faced with. Say you are upgrading something and you have to clean up an old version.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t know where the old version is installed or if there are seven old versions that you have to get to.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even know how much work you have to do yet, right? So very often the first job
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a progress bar is like, well, if I wanted to make this progress bar reasonable at all, I need to essentially do a pre-flight
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, how much work is there for me to do? I know my job is uninstall X and install Y,
⏹️ ▶️ John but how big is X and where is X? And how fast is the disk that X is
⏹️ ▶️ John on? Is X even present at all? Are there 17 copies of X, right? I don’t know any of these things. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know what I have to do yet. And so you’d have to go out and wander and say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I take the time to like, or say, you know, your job is to like delete a bunch of stuff. Should I take the time like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Finder seems to and count how many files are in the trash first before
⏹️ ▶️ John I even start the progress bar? Because otherwise, like empty trash is a good example. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should know what you have to do. Why don’t you just measure the speed of the disk and just do it? It’s like, well, how many files are in the trash? Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John counting the files in the trash can be really fast, or you might have literally four million
⏹️ ▶️ John files in the trash. Counting four million files takes a non-zero amount of time. Now, how do
⏹️ ▶️ John you show the progress bar for counting four million files? You probably don’t, because you don’t know how many you’re counting, so how can you put up a progress
⏹️ ▶️ John bar? You have to count before you can even know how to put the progress bar in. And this cycle just repeats
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just a fractal itself. It’s just nested thing within thing. You don’t even know what you have to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John let alone how long it will take to do it. Now try making a progress bar. Like the boot process of a computer is similar, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is why for various times in the history of macOS, macOS has essentially had a progress bar that’s just like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t pay any attention to what we’re actually doing during the boot. Just show a progress bar that lasts roughly the length of time
⏹️ ▶️ John the last boot process lasted. And if we get close to the end and we’re not done yet, just make it slow down. Like it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John fake. Like they don’t even try. because what you will find if you try to program this is pre-flight
⏹️ ▶️ John is often the most expensive thing you’re going to do and it’s better not to pre-flight and it’s like don’t prepare to go
⏹️ ▶️ John just go don’t prepare to move out just move out from Spaceballs or whatever right and that’s often what they do they say
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna try to prepare because I know if I have to count up all the things or meticulously
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out the list of things that I have to do that might take longer than doing the thing and no one wants to wait twice as long
⏹️ ▶️ John so the progress bar can be slightly more accurate just start going and just start filling the progress bar. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if there are five steps in this installation progress, then have the progress bar, I’ve done step
⏹️ ▶️ John one, I’ve done step two, and I’m said, it doesn’t matter if step three takes two hours and step one and two take 30 seconds, which is just how we
⏹️ ▶️ John decided to do it. You know why? Because we can’t pre flight this crap. And you know, so it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is understandable as soon as you try to implement it. But from a user perspective, it’s like doesn’t the computer know what it’s doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or how long it’s going to take? And the answer is no, the computer doesn’t know because humans don’t know because it’s unknowable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Figuring it out, knowing it, is often one of the most expensive things you can do and just slows everything
⏹️ ▶️ John down. Nobody wants that. So that’s why I don’t use empty trash in the finder. I use rm-rf from the command line
⏹️ ▶️ John because rm-rf does not preflight that crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the most John thing I’ve ever heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also add other reasons that progress bars are often so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of, these days, network involvement in the things that we are waiting on progress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bars for. are networks potentially fickle and unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things might fail in the middle and have to be retried, bits of data might not make it and have to be resent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things might time out, but also when you’re operating over the network, you’re dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two unreliable conditions, your end of the network, where you might be like moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a cellular connection, or even just moving throughout your house on some weird wifi setup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somebody might turn a microwave on next door and blast out the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that makes all your devices like reconnect and have problems. So there’s, you know, you have your own unreliable network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you have whatever’s going on between you and whatever server you’re talking to. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that server could be, could have like spiky performance depending on the load that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s bearing at the time. So there’s all sorts of unreliability there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, I would add, to provide a progress report back to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user is more code. Like you have to, for most operations that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would write as a programmer, that you might want to display a progress bar for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of those operations, in order to make them get progress updates and display them to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user, that’s significantly more code and sometimes more complicated code than just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the code just saying like, all right, fetch this file, now write it out here. And then fetch this file, then write it out here. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that while also providing progress on that transaction or on whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operation you’re doing is more work and more complexity. And for most things, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it, unless something’s going to take a reasonably long time every time. And so most programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of skip that part and just say, all right, write the file here and tell me when you’re done. And that’s it. So those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the many reasons why this is hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some common programming practice, which I think is a pretty good one, is do a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and then basically say, if I start doing a thing and it turns out it’s taking more than
⏹️ ▶️ John X seconds, now go and throw up a progress bar, which I think is usually a good UI, because if it happens
⏹️ ▶️ John instantly, very often, especially in the olden days, but maybe less so now, it would take more
⏹️ ▶️ John time to instantiate, create, and display the window with the progress bar in it than it would
⏹️ ▶️ John do to do the actual thing. So still to this day, lots of applications, lots of good
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac applications, will just try to do a thing when you ask, And only after 1.7 seconds elapses or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever their timeout is, they’ll say, this is obviously gonna take more than 1.7 seconds. So
⏹️ ▶️ John throw up a window, put a progress bar on it or whatever. And I think that’s right. Like it’s kind of once you pass that threshold of this
⏹️ ▶️ John happens instantly, you need to give some kind of feedback. But if you tried to throw the progress bar every time, it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be like visual noise. If the operation is so fast that by the time the progress bar is drawn on the screen, it just zips to 100% and disappears,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s wasting everybody’s time and it’s flashing crap on the screen. One more question in the chat room about this
⏹️ ▶️ John was, in the specific case of counting up files. Like why doesn’t every directory just keep track of how many files are in it
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on up the tree so that you would never need to count files. You would just ask the top level directory, hey, how many files are under you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like it makes a lot of sense, again, until you try implementing a file system. That’s actually pretty hard to do
⏹️ ▶️ John because that would mean that every time something adds or removes a file, everyone’s fighting over updating the count of files
⏹️ ▶️ John and you really need that not to get out of sync because if it’s out of sync, it’s useless to you. You need it to be in sync
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, but you don’t wanna pay the contention over it for it. That said, APFS, as we have discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John on past shows many years ago, has this feature, ostensibly, where it does have a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep track on a per directory basis how many files are in it. Remember we were talking about when this feature was rolling
⏹️ ▶️ John out, it’s like, this’ll be great, because now when we go to the storage screen on iOS, it won’t take a year and a day to show us what’s using
⏹️ ▶️ John all the storage, because it won’t have to crawl the whole file system, it’ll just know this. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what happened to that feature. I’m not, macOS doesn’t seem to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s still there, maybe. I mean, iOS’s storage screen also is just as slow as it ever
⏹️ ▶️ John was. Maybe for other reasons, I think that is still a feature of APFS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like part of the great features that is like, we found a way to do this that doesn’t cause huge amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John of contention and it actually has adequate performance. So we’re going to, and what that means is you can do this fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, fast directory file count thing. I think it’s there. I think the APIs are still for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Probably someone will find it and send it to us and we’ll have them to show us next week or whatever. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is, if the OSs and the software don’t use it, if like the common APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use it, doesn’t really matter that feature is good. So if that feature does exist and is reliable, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope more parts of Mac OS and iOS start using it. If it’s not reliable, please continue not to
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. Right, because it’s really important for the answer to the question
⏹️ ▶️ John of how many files in this directory to be accurate. Not so much for the emptying the trash
⏹️ ▶️ John finder, Just, just empty it, please.
#askatp: Car blogs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Tom Jacob writes, what’s a good car blog to read to keep up with the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in car technology, preferably one that plays nice with my favorite RSS reader, NetNewswire? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really read any, to be honest with you. I just get my news through people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Slack or through Twitter. I’m assuming, John, that you have some good answers for this, though, so tell me, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really, we’ve answered this one a couple of times that people have asked every few years. I’m still a old
⏹️ ▶️ John flutty dutty. I still get Car and Driver magazine on paper and I read it on paper and I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Car and Driver does have a website and they do have an RSS feed, but it’s not good. It’s not a good
⏹️ ▶️ John RSS feed. Like it has like the title and then like
⏹️ ▶️ John not even the description, but it’s got the title and maybe a few words and then a link to the article. So technically
⏹️ ▶️ John it works within that newswire. But yeah, if you’re looking for a car magazine,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like Car and Driver. Jalopnik is another website that I often find myself going to, but honestly, I don’t know enough
⏹️ ▶️ John about the website to recommend it specifically. I just do know that on Twitter, kind of like, Hey, see, I see links there
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally and I go and read them. But in terms of the writing about cars that I
⏹️ ▶️ John can relate to that I think is not entirely scummy and slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John less, uh, anyway, I don’t know. Anyway, car and driver, that’s my suggestion. They have a website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to read auto blog years and years and years ago and then mostly gave up on it. And if I were to choose one I’d probably choose Jalopnik,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t really read anything with regularity. I do watch a couple of YouTube channels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve given up on Doug DeMuro. I just found that I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like his style anymore. What is it? Straight Pipes is pretty good. Savage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Geese is good. I personally really like Regular Car Reviews. I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a very polarizing channel. Not everyone will like it, but I really, really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Those are three off the top of my head that I can think of. But I don’t know, John, do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any that you would like to add? I know you do a lot of, there’s a lot of rebuild ones that you enjoy, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Alex on Autos is
⏹️ ▶️ John less objectionable, let’s say, than even Savage Geese. I would say, I enjoy Savage Geese as well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John their opinions don’t always match up with mine. But Alex on Auto is very sort of straightforward. It’s kind of what I think of as like
⏹️ ▶️ John a spiritual successor to Motorweek, Owings Mills, Maryland, 21117. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, Motorweek is
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still on. It’s still on. They’re still doing it. But if you wanted to see like a YouTube-ized version of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John Alex on Autos, he does very thorough, very long explorations of cars. He’s got his own weird
⏹️ ▶️ John opinions as well, but it’s less about him and his personality. And I think his format is more like Motorweek.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like, look, we’re gonna sit in all the seats. We’re gonna look at all the things. And it’s, you know, anyway. Doug DeMuro
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely a thing. Very often I just go on there to see the cars, but yeah, he’s definitely got a shtick.
⏹️ ▶️ John 539, I can never remember the stupid channel. What’s the 539, M539 Restorations? Yeah, that’s my guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. That’s my, the one and only car rebuilding
⏹️ ▶️ John channel that I will endorse. It’s the guy, I think he’s like, is he Croatian or
⏹️ ▶️ John Slovenian or something? But he lives in Germany. M539 is because he likes the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5. Yeah, the E39 M5 is his big
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s got a bunch of them, rebuilds all BMWs. He
⏹️ ▶️ John is amazing and great and I love all his rebuilding and I know so much about everything that will fail on BMWs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is basically everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Many things. Oh, BMWs from the 80s and 90s, that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I know you’re going to have a lot of answers for this, so please do share.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don’t, I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read a car blog on a regular basis. Yeah, I think like what keeps me out of needing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be in that in that world or wanted to be in that world is like, I love my electric vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition so much. I don’t really care about what goes on in the non-electric world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I care a lot about the electric vehicle options out there, but the problem is, most of the electric vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage out there is about Tesla, and even though I love my Tesla Car 2 Drive, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last thing I want to do is follow Tesla news and discussions. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garbage fire. So I don’t want to go anywhere near that, And so there’s just not much for me there most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course. All right.
#askatp: Maintaining attic computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And moving right along, let’s see what we’ve got next. Sean Cohen writes, hey, question for John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He always talks about his old hardware going up into the attic. How often does he power anything on, check that it works, et cetera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had my own experiences recapping classic Mac hardware, reflowing solder joints, refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heat sinks, and so on. Does John actually maintain all of his hardware? Smiley face.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently we’re doing all repeat questions this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, this is another
⏹️ ▶️ John one we answer every few years. It’s time for it to come up again. We have to re-solve the question. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer to the question is no, I absolutely do not maintain it. Things are in the attic. Surely, some
⏹️ ▶️ John huge percentage of it just all have blown capacitors and are leaking all over the place. Occasionally, I do take
⏹️ ▶️ John things out and turn them on and test them. And so far, I’ve been lucky. But I do absolutely nothing to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John them, other than trying to do the minimum possible climate control to my attic where they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it is a finished space, but it is not heated or cooled other than through it by windows in
⏹️ ▶️ John my efforts. So yeah, everything up there is just slowly rotting. And when I finally move out of this
⏹️ ▶️ John place or deal with that stuff, it’s going to be a bloodbath.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great. All right. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mack Weldon, Hover, and Revenue Cat. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can join atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 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 mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long.
John can’t find a good winter hat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I’ve been really excited for this. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s up with your winter hats?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a winter hat. I don’t know where it came from. It might’ve been my dad’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is… Oh my gosh, John. A lot of things in my life
⏹️ ▶️ John I own and don’t know where they came from and they also might’ve been my dad’s, but they’re just, they’re old and I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s what I used to call a chicken hat. Do you know what kind of hat I’m talking about? No. No? If you look at it from the
⏹️ ▶️ John side, It’s kind of like, um, let’s see, it’s got angled sides and a flat
⏹️ ▶️ John top. Right. What? So it’s like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think, I think of a house
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about, think of a house, right? It’s a square with a triangle on top of it. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cut off the tip of the triangle on top. That shape you’ve got now that’s the shape of the hat. And when you,
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you, and when you put it on and when you put it on, if you look at someone on the side, you will see that shape.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, is, so does it have a rigid shape or is that just like cloth that drapes over your head? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is cloth, but that’s the shape the cloth is. You’ve probably seen this hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know if I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. We are definitely going to need a picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to Google for when he’s not actually called the chicken hats and I had to just Google winter hat and try to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey winter hat that looks like a house. I hear that if you just type something into Google and not think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, I should try that. Winter hat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is great program.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It doesn’t look like it’s shaped like a house. The chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room is going through actual pictures of chicken hats and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John probably not what you’re-
⏹️ ▶️ John I know if I have a chicken hat it is not going to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How old would you say if you if you might have gotten this hat from your dad, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old do you think your current hat is? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how time works, maybe 20 years? 25? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have and are still wearing a 20 possibly 20 year old winter hat?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right well so anyway the the shape is not that important I’m just trying to describe the current hat that I have. You’ll see why in a second, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is this is the type of hat it is. I never really liked this kind of hat. I associated with my dad because he used to wear a chicken hat when we skied.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, it’s not called a chicken hat. Or maybe a rooster hat or whatever. But anyway, this is so somehow I came into possession
⏹️ ▶️ John of this green hat and it’s made of like kind of a felty type, not fleece, but kind of fleecy
⏹️ ▶️ John turtle furry type material. And given that it’s 25 years old and has not pilled, I’m going to say it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John resistant to pilling. Because I don’t know, I don’t know how it hasn’t built, but it hasn’t. But here is the key
⏹️ ▶️ John point about this hat. I was to give you this hat and you were to like put it between
⏹️ ▶️ John your fingers and squeeze it it’s like it’s like an inch thick like with the two halves of the hat together
⏹️ ▶️ John an inch thick and squishy it is a thick hat. No we’re not starting that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it is not that you can’t see through it it doesn’t have a mesh that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see through again it’s like fleecy type of material if I think if you shoved it up to your face and
⏹️ ▶️ John and tried to blow through it, no air would come out the other side. It is extremely thick, which means
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s warm. And I’m cold all the time, so I want a warm hat. I’m gonna pull this over my
⏹️ ▶️ John head, down over my ears, and I want it to insulate them from the cold. So thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John is a super duper important feature. And I’ve had this hat for years, I’m like, you know, I should try to
⏹️ ▶️ John find a, again, I’m not trying to replace it, I’m just trying to find a backup for this hat, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So I started looking around for winter hats a few
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. And every single hat I found is like the thickness of my sock
⏹️ ▶️ John and pretty much as like wind and like weatherproof it’s like, I can see through this
⏹️ ▶️ John hat. Like I can literally see sunlight through this hat when I hold it up to the light in the store. I’m gonna put this on
⏹️ ▶️ John my head, it’s so thin, it’s like paper thin and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s not gonna be warm. I need something that is thick and thick and squishy is nice too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s comfortable, it’s comfy to do that. I don’t want that skin thin thing. And I know I’m not at the majority.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most people don’t want a thick hat because then their head gets all sweaty and it’s gross. Like I get that. I understand why this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the popular hat, but somehow, somewhere, someone I think related to, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think we got this hat from REI maybe because I did a lot of investigating to try to find this hat, at one point made thick
⏹️ ▶️ John hats. And so now I’ve been on this multi-year in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing where if I’m ever in a store and they have winter hats, I go over to them and I squeeze them all and go,
⏹️ ▶️ John thin, thin, thin, nope, nobody makes a thick hat and I just move on. And I bought a bunch of additional hats,
⏹️ ▶️ John like beanies and knit hats and all this other stuff and like buying them from Amazon based
⏹️ ▶️ John on reports of how thick they might be. And they just were all incredibly thin. I went to L.L. Bean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been to all the various stores in person. Not like I’m hunting for this hat because I still have my other hat, but now I’m living in
⏹️ ▶️ John fear of losing it because if I lose this hat, like that’s it. I can never buy a winter hat again. And I’m not even picking about
⏹️ ▶️ John style. I don’t need it to be a chicken hat. I don’t need anything about it. I’m like, I just need it to be a thick hat. And there is literally nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s very disappointing to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first of all, I’m gonna guess that this hat is somehow magic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is going to be bound to you forever and that you cannot lose it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anybody who could keep a winter hat or any winter clothing item that is, you know, hat or glove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco category and not lose it for 20 years. Like, because these things rarely wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. I think they get lost long before that. So the fact that you’ve had this for possibly up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 20 years and you haven’t lost it yet, I think you’re good on that. I don’t think you’re gonna lose
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I mean, I don’t tend to lose things, but I think maybe a part of what precipitated
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like if it’s gonna get lost, it’s gonna get lost essentially in the house. It’s like, well, it’s getting cold again. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John go find my winter hat. And you realize I don’t know where in the house the winter hat is. And then you’ve got too much crap in your house and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John find it. So I think that is the scenario that prompted me to say, I should really have a backup. I did eventually find it and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure I know where it is now. I haven’t taken it out yet because obviously it’s still like 70 degrees here and I don’t need a winter hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re right that I’m not the type of person who loses things often, so it’s not an imminent danger,
⏹️ ▶️ John but after 20 plus years, I feel like I’m pressuring my luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would say also, the two areas you might wanna look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at are number one, wool area. I like the Smartwool brand for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both hats and gloves. They’re not super thick, but they are warmer than you expect because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do, I assume they’re using Merino or some kind of like nice wool, because I usually get itchy with most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wool and I don’t with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not wool and I don’t want wool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I’m saying that’s an option for higher weight to thickness ratio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Another thing to consider is if you look at the fleece category of hats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s many of them, that tends to be warmer also because it is substantially less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breathable than these kind of looser knits that you tend to see on the most common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter beanies or whatever they’re called, the part that has like, you know, they pulled down, you fold up the little flap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Usually like the fleece versions of them are significantly warmer. So I don’t know if you’re going to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that is the thickness that you want, but you can probably achieve similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warmth with some different fabric choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I just posted in the chat. I found the shape of the hat. It’s the wrong material, the wrong color, everything about it is wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the shape and I found it by searching for 80s. Wool 80s ski hat and it came up with
⏹️ ▶️ John 80s. Wool ski hat. So maybe it totally wasn’t 80s thing. So anyway, look in the chat. Do you see that shape?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And the whole idea is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you like your nose would be facing you to the left or the right, right? That’s how you put it on. You don’t put it on sideways. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is this is totally wrong because this is like a knit hat, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was going to say, if only you knew someone perhaps extremely well that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knits constantly, maybe you could make a custom bespoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John request. But you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t want knit because it is just full of holes. Yeah, that’s the whole thing. This, by the way, is this is the more extreme
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken hat. This is not the shape of my head. I just put it in the chat. But this is the more extreme chicken
⏹️ ▶️ John hat. And now you can see why it would be called the chicken hat. I guess. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John More like a rooster or whatever. I don’t know what this is my name for it, but like this, this is more exaggerated.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see how it’s got little things that poke out of it, but it’s still basically a triangle. The the first one I sent
⏹️ ▶️ John you is more like the shape of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re going to need a picture of you in the hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure you’ve seen me in this hat. You probably have seen me in this hat. It’s very nondescript. it is like dark
⏹️ ▶️ John green and that it’s all there is to it. There is no texturing or coloring anything like that. It’s just dark green hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of pictures of me in it. I’m sure because it’s literally the only hat I ever wear in the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good. Um, find one and we’ll make it the show, the chapter art for this chapter. If you can get it to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John by tomorrow morning.
⏹️ ▶️ John my, by the way, this is not my ski hat. When I went skiing, what I would wear, I went through a series of hats
⏹️ ▶️ John for skiing, but I eventually settled on a hat that looks like. I mean, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not really what it looks like, but I will send this to you. My
⏹️ ▶️ John ski had not stylish, but it is basically has it has a baseball brim
⏹️ ▶️ John and ear flaps. It’s this shape that I just put in the chat. Do you see that? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I use because the brim serve the purpose of stopping falling snow and sun shielding
⏹️ ▶️ John and my ski goals are going to the ear flaps. Keep me ears long and my ski hat, which I still have somewhere, even though I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seen it in ages. Like it’s actually insulated like a winter jacket. Like it’s made like a winter jacket where it’s like ripstop
⏹️ ▶️ John nylon with insulation between it on all the different layers. And underneath this hat, I would wear a fleece headband.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s fleece headband, ski hat, goggles over the hat to hold the hat to your head. This was the days before anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John wore helmets. I probably should have been because it’s amazing that I’m alive. But that’s my ski hat.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I still have that somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So have you considered a multi-hat approach?
⏹️ ▶️ John How would that, oh, taking multiple thin hats and just shoving them on top of each other, that’d be a mess. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to avoid the whole thing of like, I don’t want anything that’s itchy, I don’t want anything that’s weird. Like the beauty of the big thick
⏹️ ▶️ John hat is just, you just pull it over your head and it slides right on and it goes off and it’s soft and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John squishy and it’s warm and it blocks the wind and it has no moving parts. Like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not, there are no drawstrings, there’s no seams that are all, like I’m sure there are somewhere, but there’s no sort of visible seams
⏹️ ▶️ John or other things that get in the way. It’s just a green chicken hat.