454: The Notch is Young
28 Oct 2021MacBook Pro and AirPods 3 first impressions, wardrobe functions, a mystery terabyte, and helping with homework.
Episode Description:
The ATP Store IS BACK! Grab your fancy new M1 Pro or Max shirts, winter hats, or classic merch until the end of the day on 12 November!
Remember, ATP Members get 15% off on time-limited sales like this one!
- Pre-show: Marco’s acquisition adventure
- Follow-up:
- APFS fast directory sizing
- Chris’ answer on StackExchange
- APFS File System Reference
INODE_MAINTAIN_DIR_STATS
- Anandtech on the M1 Pro & Max performance
- Gruber’s summary of the Affinity team’s findings
- The only benchmark that matters
- Johnathan Dietz Jr on Pro Display XDR @ 120Hz
- What about
Memory Pressure? - Marco’s Kühl’s pants
- APFS fast directory sizing
- John’s AirPods 3 impressions
- MacBook Pro impressions
- Post-show: Marco watches sports
Sponsored by:
- Earnest: Freedom of choice meets student loans
- Lutron Caséta: Smart dimmers and lighting control.
- Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial today.
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
- Picking up a MacBook Pro 🖼️
- ATP Store is back! 🖼️
- Sponsor: Memberful
- APFS fast directory-sizing
- AnandTech on M1 Pro/Max
- 6K/120 Hz over a cable?
- Sponsor: Lutron Caséta
- Memory Pressure
- Kühl pants 🖼️
- John’s AirPods 3 review
- Sponsor: Earnest
- MacBook Pro so far
- The Mystery Terabyte
- MacBook Pro, cont’d.
- Ending theme
- Helping with homework
Picking up a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me show you how I had to pick up my MacBook Pro today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here, I’m gonna put this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would you wait until we’re live to do something with the visual aid?
⏹️ ▶️ John First I was like, how you picked it up off the desk? I’m like, oh no, I get it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. So it’s been a bit of a storm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so listeners, what I’m looking at is what appears to be some sort of ferry terminal, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s taking up the majority of the center of the image. There’s a lot of water, water in places that it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appear that there should be water, including to the left-hand side of the image, there’s a different building with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steps leading down from what appear to be storefronts or something like that. And some or all of the steps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, not all of the steps, but either the steps are landing in water,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not intended, or the last couple of steps are underwater. So I’m gonna go with this is not by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a large storm coming through the Northeast and whenever there’s a very large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storm, our little beach town here, the downtown area floods like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But to get my MacBook Pro, I had to wait, first of all, for the freight boat to arrive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two hours late because the Great South Bay was not in good shape with 50 mile an hour winds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it somehow actually did arrive, I had to ride my bike with very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very tall boots through this water. Now, the water is tall enough that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire, whatever the wheel that turns that is on the pedal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of the chain, like not the back side, like the pedal wheel that is turning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was totally submerged underwater. Oh, cool. So that’s roughly the depth of the water.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was maybe, I don’t know, a foot deep, something like that. So I had to ride my bike through that. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, I did not bring a backpack to put the box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. So on the way home, I rode through this water while carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop box under one arm, riding a bike through foot deep water thinking, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, don’t drop it, don’t drop it, don’t drop it. Well, it shrink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrapped, it’ll be fine, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey don’t know. I guess it is, yeah, but. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish I knew, Marco, I wish I knew. We’ll get to that later.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least it would float if you dropped it, so you’d have a second to snatch it up. I guess, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be trickier if I wanted to return it later. What happened to the box?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they put the little pink, like the little things that turn pink in water, did they put them, I guess they probably are on laptops now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I’m sure, yeah, but yeah. Anyway, so I got it here safe and sound. I did not actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so people in the chat are asking why I don’t have a basket on my bike. Many people here have baskets on their bikes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a basket fan. I see the appeal from a practical perspective. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like what it does to the weight of the steering column or whatever they’re called on bikes because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically put all the weight up front. And so not only does it make it steer poorly when you have stuff in the basket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it also makes it steer poorly when you don’t have stuff in the basket because there’s just like this big metal weight on the front, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swingy thing, whatever it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ John The handlebar is not, it doesn’t need to be in there. They can put baskets on the back of your bike too, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’ve tried those to like, I had like the, oh God, the Pennier or however that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word, however that word is pronounced. I’ve had those bags before. That’s great, because then when you put stuff in them, the bike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco falls over. It’s wonderful. So my strategy normally is I have a giant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s from Ice Mule cooler backpack. And I honestly don’t use it for its cooler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco function. I use it because it’s a giant tube that fits on my back. And so whenever I go grocery shopping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bring that on the bike and it holds roughly one heaping grocery basket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth of items. Backpacks are my far preferred way to carry stuff on the bike.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I didn’t bring a backpack this time. So I should have and didn’t. But I got it home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe and sound. And there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, for the record, I would bike both underwater both ways to get my MacBook Pro, which honestly wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey due to come in today anyway, but at the rate we’re going may never show up. And we’ll leave that teaser for now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and talk about it more later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, unfortunately, the downside of this teaser is that because of the aforementioned storm conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the logistics of getting this laptop here today, I’ve only had it for like two hours. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not had it for a very long time. So my impressions will be extremely first impressions.
ATP Store is back!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The ATP store is back, baby. This is our holiday sale and it’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. So this is where we do the same thing every year, and I’m going to do it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re listening to this right now and you are interested in having merchandise to wear or to gift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between now and the end of the year, now is the time to do it. If you’re driving, pull over. If you’re biking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in water, maybe think about your life choices and then pull over and go to ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store. and you can get all sorts of sweet, sweet, sweet new merchandise. So let’s talk about what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve got. John, I’m going to start, but feel free to interrupt whenever you’re ready. We’ve got an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro shirt, which thanks to the intrepid work of Mr. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracusa, we now have an updated chip diagram on the back. But it’s not just that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also have an M1 Max shirt. And again, if you’re listening, maybe Marco can make this the chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey art. We’ll see what happens, but you should see the rendering of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back of this t-shirt. We almost needed to extend the length of the t-shirt to fit the M1 Max on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shirt. It is kind of preposterous and I freaking love it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think we’re gonna be able to do it for the Mac Pro chips, because we’re really pushing the
⏹️ ▶️ John limit of what kind of diagram can fit on the back of this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shirt. Can we put it
⏹️ ▶️ John people were joking about that. I said, oh, just shrink it, get it like silicon shrink, But the thing is, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually shrink these diagrams. And these are fanciful diagrams with just rectangles and stuff, they don’t really look
⏹️ ▶️ John like the real chips, but they’re representative. But you can’t just keep shrinking it because there’s a minimum line width
⏹️ ▶️ John and a minimal sort of gap between lines, and we were really pushing up against it here. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and we used to be selling, the on-demand M1 shirt is off sale for now, just so there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no confusion about what, these are like the real ones, the highest quality printing, the most expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Really selling it, John. You’re our best salesman. Seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the front of these ones, it says, the front says M1 Pro and M1 Max. I had made a design that said M1X.
⏹️ ▶️ John That turned out not to be the name on the chip. So forget about that shirt. Sorry, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this one, we were trying to figure out how to incorporate Pro and Max. And so we did it with like a badge. The badges are colored.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Pro badge is blue and the Max badge is purple because those are the colors that Apple uses and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sort of in in their event and marketing materials, like the pro is always glowing blue or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but of course it’s the sort of BMW style font or whatever, anyway. So yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the printing on the front with the pro or the max badge, and on the back you get a different chip depending on which shirt you got.
⏹️ ▶️ John So people can tell if you’re pro or max by looking at the front or the back. And as we described,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did this quote unquote sales pitch last time, these are extremely expensive t-shirts because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have too many freaking colors on them. Plus they have printing on the back. So every single color is another printing pass,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus there’s also a printing pass on the back. That’s by the way, why the
⏹️ ▶️ John blue pro badge is the same color blue as the blue in the M1 logo. And the purple max badge is
⏹️ ▶️ John the same color purple as the purple in the M1 logo. Because if we didn’t do that, we’d have to do even another printing pass that would cost even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You didn’t realize how well engineered our shirts are, but these are the engineering trade-offs that the three of us made.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I joke about like, I made this picture last time, I’m like, we’re sorry these shirts are so expensive, but they’re expensive for us to make because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of printing passes. And it was like our best-selling shirt we’ve ever made. So I don’t know what that means. Is it a Veblen
⏹️ ▶️ John good where the more expensive it is, the more desirable it becomes? But just so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John these shirts are super duper expensive. We did the usual joke that we normally do, which is the Max shirt is more expensive, because
⏹️ ▶️ John of course it is. Honestly, I think the Pro one looks better because the blue looks better than the purple, but the Max one is the fanciest
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So those are the Rainbow M1 Pro and M1 Max shirts. But just like last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have cheaper options that only have one color on them, which requires one printing pass front and back.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got the chip on the back, you’ve got the thing on the front, but it’s just one color. And those shirts, the shirts themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John come in like nine different colors, right? So it’s just like it was last year, if you remember, or no, last sale. If you remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 shirts, we’ve got the rainbow ones that are ridiculously expensive, that are our best selling
⏹️ ▶️ John shirt we’ve ever made for some reason. And then we have the monochrome ones, which come in all sorts of fun
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. And I think they’re really neat. You should check them out if you don’t want to spend money you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to spend to get a fully kitted out Max shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So, what kind of prices are we talking about here? So, this is all obviously American dollars. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 Pro Rainbow Edition, so this is a black shirt with, you know, all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inks on the front, that is $39. The M1 Max, you know, otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same, $42, because hey, it’s Max. It’s got to be more expensive. By comparison,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the monochrome versions are, What did we say? $32 for the Pro and $35 for the Max. So again, a little bit more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Max because you got, if you’re gonna flex, let’s flex. You know, you’ve earned that flex. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show it off. So we’ve got several different options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you. Those are all available. As with a couple other things we’ll get to in a second, they’re available till the end of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day on the 12th of November. Now, what else do we have? You know, I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a lot of regrets when it comes to this show. I regret that one episode where I had a little too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much to drink they were talking about the Mac Pro. That was many years ago and I haven’t drank on the show since.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But other than that, I don’t have a lot of regrets. I do, however, regret
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking John about his winter hat situation just an episode or two ago. And I believe this one is my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is anyone’s fault on my own, but I regret it because we had already thought about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing an ATP winter hat, which we are. However, we’re not doing a chicken hat. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really firing on all cylinders over here at ATP HQ. We do have an ATP winter hat with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an embroidered logo on it, which I’m really excited about and that should look really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea how much that is actually how much did we say that was going to be that is $32 as well again? It’s not cheap for us to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s embroidered Similarly an ATP hoodie. This is the same situation as before an embroidered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP hoodie I freaking live in this thing for like half the year That is $49
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then finally the classic ATP logo shirt This is black only on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey material, but then the rainbow front, similar in spirit to the M1. This is where the M1 shirt came from.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is also available as it almost always will be, I suspect, and that is $32 since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s nothing on the back or anything like that. So quite the spread for you to choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between. And again, this is where I say every time somebody says to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I forgot. I should have done. I should have pulled over. I should have listened to you, Casey, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t. And now, can you please open the store? Please, please, please, please. No, no, we can’t. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is your warning. This is your chance until the end of the day on the 12th of November. We will remind you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice more. The end of the day on the 12th of November, ATP time, that is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please check it out. Also, I don’t have the details in front of me because I completely forgot to add it to the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, Cotton Bureau, who is our vendor and and T-shirt maker and all that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve made some changes for international people. I know a lot of you have unfortunately gotten kind of burned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by value-added tax or whatever crazy taxes that they do overseas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m told that both for the UK and Europe, all the taxes and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fees should, in most circumstances, be calculated in build right up front. So you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to have a $30 or $40 T-shirt and then like $10 or $20 in fees or whatever your local currency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in fees once it hits your shores. So no promises.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still a little fuzzy on what this means because I’m a dumb American. But hopefully, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see that be a lot better this time. And if not, then please reach out to us or to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cotton Bureau, and they’ll square you away. So
⏹️ ▶️ John check it out. A few more items before we move on. Mugs and pint glasses? Yes. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I completely forgot. We know people want mugs and pint glasses. We wanted to sell them, especially mugs, because it’s the wintertime.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fortunately, our supplier for mugs and pint glasses is not able to
⏹️ ▶️ John guarantee us any kind of order fulfillment in time for the holidays. So no mugs and pint glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John We know people want to replace them. We know some people have broken them. We will put them on sale again as soon as we can get them
⏹️ ▶️ John in stock. We also looked at like alternate mugs from different makers and we didn’t find anything that we really liked.
⏹️ ▶️ John But mugs and pint glasses will be back someday. We’re sorry we don’t have them for the holidays, but you know, we do
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of other new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would even consider doing a run of just mugs and glasses if and when the time comes that we can. But yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not plan on that being available for the holidays, which is not what we intended. It’s not what Cotton Bureau intended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just in these unprecedented times, sometimes things don’t show up when you want. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one more thing to remind everybody, if you are an ATP member, check your member page
⏹️ ▶️ John because you will find your own discount code there for 15% off everything in the store. And if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanna get 15% off because you think you’re gonna buy a bunch of stuff and it’s expensive?
⏹️ ▶️ John Become a member, atp.fm.com, become a member for one month, get the 15%
⏹️ ▶️ John discount, and then just cancel your membership. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then forget. Or forget, then forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John Either one, the whole point is it’s pretty easy to save whatever the membership cost is, like $8. You can save eight bucks buying
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of t-shirts, easy. And I’m always amazed people don’t do this, because I look at the membership numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think, surely everybody who bought from the store, Nobody would buy anything from the store without
⏹️ ▶️ John first getting the easy 15% off and then canceling. But no, it never happens. Like we don’t see a big bump in members. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just the members get the discount and nobody else does. Everybody get the discount, do the math beforehand, figure out I’m gonna order
⏹️ ▶️ John this, this and this. And this is how much membership costs. And this is how much 15, like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John we should put a calculator in to say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you shouldn’t check out. We should do that actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco member. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John members don’t forget it’s on your member page at atp.fm. What is the member page? It is atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash member. That’s where you go if you’re logged in on the site, you will see your member code, copy
⏹️ ▶️ John and paste it into the store site during checkout to get your discount.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, if you weren’t a member, and this sounds just too good to be true because it kind of is, where would you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to become a member?
⏹️ ▶️ John I said it already, atp.fm slash join.
Sponsor: Memberful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Memberful, help you monetize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your passion with membership. Memberful allows you, a content creator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somebody with an audience, to monetize your passion, monetize your business with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling memberships to your audience. This is used by the biggest creators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web. And this can be memberships for all sorts of things, things like custom podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or custom access to stuff. Memberful makes all of that not only possible, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. And they understand that creators don’t want Memberful branding all over everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they don’t want Memberful to have like, to own the whole relationship. So they’ve designed this with you in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your interest in mind. You control all the branding, you retain control and ownership of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience, the memberships, it even goes directly to your own Stripe account with the payments. So really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Memberful is all about helping you, the creator, take control of your business, and sell memberships
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your audience. They have amazing support if you ever need it. They have actual humans ready to help you make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money because they really want to support you as well. Their interests are aligned with yours. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make money when you make money, so everyone wins. And with Memberful, they handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the hard stuff, integrating with any existing tools you already have, integrate with lots of popular CMSs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything already on the web. So see for yourself by starting a free trial with no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit card required at memberful.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let them handle all the tricky and kind of pain in the butt payment stuff so that you can focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your business, your brand, your audience. So once again, memberful.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Get started for free, no credit card required at Memberful. Thank you so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to Memberful for sponsoring our show. Memberful, monetize your passion with membership.
APFS fast directory-sizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s up with fast directory sizing?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the last episode or maybe an episode or two ago, we were talking about keeping track
⏹️ ▶️ John of how big the stuff inside a directory tree is. And I mentioned that APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently has a feature that does that. It’s called APFS fast directory sizing, but I didn’t know if it
⏹️ ▶️ John was in use. Like it was touted when APFS was introduced all those years ago. And it seemed like a cool idea. and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, this solves a problem we all have. Like you have this problem on your Mac, you have it on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very often you just wanna look at a folder and say, how much stuff is in this folder and all of its subfolders?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just tell me immediately. But instead you have to see the little things as calculating or when you go to the storage screen on your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, you wait a year and a day for it to figure out how much room is taken up by your movies and your apps
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And then the giant gray bar of other that we don’t understand. Anyway, so that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the open question. What’s the deal with APFS, APFS, fast directory sizing? Is that still a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it removed? Is it active? Are they using it? This is the best answer I’ve been able to get so far. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is an answer on the Apple Stack Exchange site from someone named Chris, and I have it on good authority that this answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is accurate. So here’s, this is reading from Chris’s answer. Fast directory sizing is enabled on a per directory
⏹️ ▶️ John basis, and this could be checked by the user, albeit not easily. It can only be enabled when a directory is empty
⏹️ ▶️ John and must also be turned on for every new sub-directory. So that’s quite a wrinkle. So you can’t just like
⏹️ ▶️ John take a folder on your hard drive or whatever and say, I wanna enable fast directory sizing. Has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be empty. And then every single new sub directory that’s made also has to have
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing turned on when the directory is made, because at that point it’s empty. So this is the type of thing that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to do manually unless you were very careful. It would really have to be done by the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be consistent. I will put a link to the APFS reference PDF
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple’s website so you can read more of it. Here’s a relevant quote from that PDF. You cannot enable directory
⏹️ ▶️ John fast directory sizing on directories containing files or other directories You must instead first create a new directory
⏹️ ▶️ John Enable fast directory sizing on it and then move the contents of the existing directory into the new directory So I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John a utility or something can do that if you know if it wanted to but I don’t know of any that does Uh to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this you have to enable this flag. It’s called inode maintain dir stats All caps
⏹️ ▶️ John underscore and that tells it to track everything that’s underneath it. This is again from chris
⏹️ ▶️ John Though still unclear to me if Mac OS is turning this flag on automatically or appropriately or not, but some initial experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think it isn’t being used. I agree, Chris, because it doesn’t seem like anything about directory sizing is fast on
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS or on iOS. And from an anonymous source that would know about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this quote, I know that stat maintenance is expensive and opt in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what I said before about like keeping track of the size of the stuff on your directory is expensive because you have a lot of contention to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep updating that one count, you know, time anything gets created or destroyed underneath that directory, whatever did
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing wants to update this number, and you sort of have to they all have to get into a big line and fight with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to update the number. No, I do know I can really slow things down. Yeah, it’s expensive. Apparently, there’s no magic. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why it’s not enabled by default. I still feel like I might want to pay that price, especially for like
⏹️ ▶️ John sub trees of my hard drive that I checked the size on. But apparently macOS is not doing it for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of work for something that isn’t used, but yay, stuff happens.
AnandTech on M1 Pro/Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s an Anantek, I think I have that right. Oh, God, I really got to learn that pronunciation. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a article over there about the performance of the M1 Pro and Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read through this and I don’t know if I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind, but my eyes kind of glazed over. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to have to ask you, John, to step in as the chief summarizer and chief and tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ John We get a backdoor ask ATP because Dom asked this question and I was going to put an SAT, but it’s very relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John to this article. Dom asks, do you think non-pro users will notice the extra memory bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John in the M1 Max, or do you need to run pro workloads to feel the benefit over the M1 Pro? We talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about that on past shows, the M1 Max has, you know, double, uh, lots of stuff has
⏹️ ▶️ John doubled the GPU cores, has doubled like the video encoder decoders, it also has doubled the memory bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as I said on that show, do you know what workloads you do that stress the memory bandwidth?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s a question that people will be asking, well I noticed that, is the memory bandwidth thing I would feel at all or
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I know whether I should bother you know going up to the max if I’m not sure that any of those GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. So this Anandtech article tries to answer that question so here are some choice quotes from it. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, using the CPU alone, meaning the power cores and the efficiency cores together, doesn’t seem to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to use more than 243 gigabytes per second of RAM bandwidth in the M1 Max. So recall that
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 Max has up to 400 gigabytes of memory bandwidth and it seems like just using the CPU, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU or anything else on the system on a chip, you can only use a little bit more than half of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John While 243 gigabyte per second is massive and overshadows any other design in the industry, it’s still quite far from
⏹️ ▶️ John the 409 gigabytes per second the chip is capable of. More importantly, for the M1 Max, it’s only slightly higher than the 204
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabyte per second limit of the M1 Pro. So from a CPU-only workload perspective, it just doesn’t appear to
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense to get the max if one is focused just on CPU bandwidth. I don’t know if this helps people make a decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you might know okay what do you do you see your cpu core is maxed out if that’s the case
⏹️ ▶️ John the max is not going to even though it has theoretically double the memory bandwidth it’s not going to help you if you’re just using your cpu
⏹️ ▶️ John so the article says i imagine that workloads that stress the cpu gpu and media engines all at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time would be able to take advantage of the full system memory bandwidth and allow the m1 max to stretch its legs and
⏹️ ▶️ John differentiate itself from the m1 pro and other systems so right away if you’re not planning on using like
⏹️ ▶️ John almost all the chip at the same time, the memory bandwidth advantage of the M1 Max is probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John important to you. So the article goes on to compare the M1 Max and
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro with the ostensible competition in the marketplace. It says the workloads
⏹️ ▶️ John that put the most memory pressure and stress DRAM the most all have multiple factors of performance advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the best Intel and AMD you have to offer. So there’s that qualifier of saying if you find a workload,
⏹️ ▶️ John synthetic or real that uses that uses a lot of memory bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John the m1 pro slash max i wish we had a name for the pair of them the better m1s
⏹️ ▶️ John stomp all over the competition uh this is quoting from the article the performance differences here are just insane
⏹️ ▶️ John and really showcase how far ahead apple’s memory subsystem is and its ability to allow the cpus to scale to such a degree
⏹️ ▶️ John in memory bound workloads we noted how the m1 max cpus are not fully able to
⏹️ ▶️ John take advantage of the dram bandwidth of the chip, we can’t help but ask ourselves how much better the CPUs would score
⏹️ ▶️ John if the cluster and fabric would allow them to fully utilize the memory. So this is another unknown,
⏹️ ▶️ John like why can’t the just the CPUs use the bandwidth themselves? What are the limitations of what they call the on chip
⏹️ ▶️ John fabric that sort of weaves all these pieces together? Because if you look at the chip diagram, you’ll see like this for independent memory
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces as the ears on the max. And you can see kind of what they’re plumbed into.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you look at the read the the article see the description of like it’s like the plumbing those pipes don’t all go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the CPU which is why the CPU alone can’t use all the memory bandwidth because it doesn’t really have a direct line
⏹️ ▶️ John to that so theoretically if the fabric that weaves together all these pieces had more
⏹️ ▶️ John routes between the pieces perhaps it could go better do better maybe that’s we’ll see that in the larger
⏹️ ▶️ John chips we’ll see um so let’s talk about the spec fp suite which is the the
⏹️ ▶️ John spec floating point benchmark. In the spec FSP suite, the M1 Max is in its own category
⏹️ ▶️ John of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2 times
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance of the second best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core
⏹️ ▶️ John 5950X, a chip whose package power is 142 watts, with the rest of the system quite above that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.
⏹️ ▶️ John In particular aspects where these chips are strong, memory bandwidth in particular, but also like floating point
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and benchmarks that use that memory bandwidth, these chips are absolutely amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the article goes on to describe, but how could that be? Why? What is it that’s? Is there something
⏹️ ▶️ John magic in these chips? It’s more about what Apple has decided to focus on when making its designs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, quoting from the article, Apple’s stark advantage in specific workloads here do make us ask the question
⏹️ ▶️ John how this translates into application use We’d never seen such a design before, so it’s not exactly clear where
⏹️ ▶️ John things would land. I think Apple is relatively clear that their focus with these designs is catering to content creation crowd, the
⏹️ ▶️ John power users who use large productivity applications via video editing, audio mastering, or code
⏹️ ▶️ John compiling. These are all areas where the microarchitectural characteristics of the M1 Pro slash Max
⏹️ ▶️ John would shine and are likely vastly outperform any other systems out there. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has made these chips with specific strengths, And it’s hard to know where those strengths,
⏹️ ▶️ John what those would do for you, but it’s pretty clear that they’re focused on the types of things that Apple thinks its
⏹️ ▶️ John customers will do with its chips. Did I put the thing about gaming in here? Maybe I didn’t. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so this is a good time to mention that they benchmark a bunch of games too. You will be shocked
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn that is not where. These chips do well. That, yeah, you can play games on
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac. And yeah, you saw that diagram where it’s like, wow, it’s as fast as the, you know, the Nvidia 3080 laptop chip. like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all true. But if you, first of all, there’s not a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John names, games that are even native to ARM. So they’re running all these games in Rosetta. And second of all, they’re not even very good ports.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re Mac ports of older games that don’t run very well on the Mac. So it’s very clear that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was not concentrating on making sure that PC games from five years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John are able to take advantage of all this computing power. Because they’re not, it’s there. And a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of M1 native, well-done port or implementation of a game could absolutely take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of all this stuff, but it’s not what Apple concentrated on, mostly because there just aren’t a lot of good games for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, which is a shame, but it’s true. So here’s an example scenario from the folks who make
⏹️ ▶️ John Affinity Photo. Affinity makes a bunch of apps. In fact, I make all the designs for the shirts. I
⏹️ ▶️ John make an Affinity, what are they called? Affinity Designer? Affinity,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Affinity Designer. It’s like an illustrator type thing. So there’s a bunch of Affinity apps. I think they’re really great.
⏹️ ▶️ John They make Mac and iOS native versions of those and everything. Here are some support reports
⏹️ ▶️ John from Andy Summerfield, who is the Affinity Photo lead. That’s just what his bio says.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lead what? Lead developer? Maybe. Anyway, first he had a Twitter thread before
⏹️ ▶️ John the new laptops came out, describing how Affinity Photo was originally created
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with GPU stuff. And he said, in Affinity Photo, an ideal GPU would do three
⏹️ ▶️ John different things well. High compute performance, fast on-chip bandwidth, and fast transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John on and off the GPU. Back in 2009, when we made this plan, no GPU did all three things
⏹️ ▶️ John well, but we thought that eventually the industry would get there, so we took a risk and designed the entire architecture based on that assumption.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then he says, things didn’t go entirely to plan. Basically, they designed this in 2009,
⏹️ ▶️ John and for years and years, there was no chip that did all of these things well. Maybe there’d be one or two of them, but in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast transfer on and off the GPU, that’s usually a bottleneck, right? Because you could have fast on-chip, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John VRAM between your GPU, but then you have to ship everything from main memory to the GPU, and then it grinds in
⏹️ ▶️ John and sends it back. And they designed the entire architecture expecting to be able to do that back and forth very
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly. So fast forward to today, where Andy is testing the M1 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John with Affinity Photo. This is from a tweet. The M1 Max is the fastest GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John we have ever measured in Affinity Photo Benchmark. It outperforms the AMD W6900X, a $6,000 300-watt
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop part because
⏹️ ▶️ John it has immense compute performance, immense on-chip bandwidth, and immediate data transfer on and off the GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John He says, the GPU isn’t the only big win here. The Vector Multi-CPU score in the M1 Max is the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John we have ever measured for Affinity Designer users, as is the combined single GPU score for Affinity Publisher. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in the right circumstances, in an application that is designed to take advantage of the things that this
⏹️ ▶️ John system on a chip does well, in an actual application that people use, like Affinity Photo, not an
⏹️ ▶️ John artificial benchmark, but an actual shipping application, Affinity Photo, it’s faster than the
⏹️ ▶️ John W6900X. Again, a $6,000 GPU. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple definitely had certain applications in its sights, and if your applications play to the strengths
⏹️ ▶️ John of these chips, they can do amazing things with very little power. But finally, as Paul Stamaciu says,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only benchmark that really matters is extracting Xcode from its zip file. Oh, preach!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you’re a developer, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what this is, and you know that when I said zip, I pronounced it with an X instead of a Z. But if you’re not a developer, you might
⏹️ ▶️ John not know that one of the ways you can get Xcode is by downloading a file from Apple called Xcode, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, version number.XIP. .xip is some compression format. I don’t know if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple proprietary or if it’s just a standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s just a renamed zip that also has code signing, I think. Or signing, you know, content
⏹️ ▶️ John signing. Yeah, well whatever it is. It’s a compressed file, right? And when developers get a new version of Xcode, often
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in a hurry to decompress it and install it because they have to do a build to submit to the store. So you download this.xip
⏹️ ▶️ John file, this zip file, and then you decompress it, and it’s one of the most common times a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John or iOS software developer feels their machine is slow because it takes forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One big tip, by the way, turn off Dropbox if you use their public client, for the reason we talked about two episodes ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the FS events thing, or if you use Maestro, you won’t have that problem either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so why does it take so long? Well, part of it is probably just CPU grinding and decompressing, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a multi-gigabyte thing that’s decompressing, but the other part of it is that it decompresses into thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John and thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny files, right? And doing anything with the file system, making lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of files takes a lot of time. That’s why you don’t want Dropbox watching every file system event as
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes by, because it’s just gonna put drag on your system, right? And you may be
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering, like, well, how does the M1 Max help with that? How do the new M1 Max, including the one with the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco help with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So obviously CPU helps with the decompression part, maybe. Memory bandwidth, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also, as we mentioned last time, the SSDs are faster in these things. So here is the benchmark we care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John If previously you have the fastest, best Mac laptop you could buy, 2019, the eight
⏹️ ▶️ John core, was the eight core the best you could get? Yeah, it was eight core i9, 16 inch MacBook Pro. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re unzipping Xcode 13.1. It would take nine minutes and 34 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have one of the fancy new M1 Macs, 16 inches, less than half that time, four minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John and 43 seconds. So there you have it, or is that less than half? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the benchmark, the only benchmark that matters, you will unzip Xcode twice as fast. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s amazing. I’m excited. Although, now that I think about it, how does it do it twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast? The disks aren’t twice as fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new SSDs did get a lot faster in read performance. I don’t know if they’re that much faster in write, but I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably one of those things where you’re just shuffling a ton of data around, and so it probably stresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bandwidth of the entire system. Like, memory bandwidth, cache lines, I O speed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, is gonna be a big one, but there’s gonna be like just stuff moving back and forth all over the place within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system. So I would imagine like making everything kind of faster and higher bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and increasing the caches everywhere and increasing the IO speed, all of those things probably play into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe there’s some kind of like, since it’s like a signed version, maybe verifying the signature, there’s some dedicated, I think, for that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster. These are fast machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are very fast indeed.
6K/120 Hz over a cable?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about Jonathan Dietz and the Pro Display XDR and 120 Hertz refresh rates. Yeah, our
⏹️ ▶️ John resident graphic expert who writes us in about all sorts of graphic stuff wrote a very long email
⏹️ ▶️ John doing some math that I asked for last show about whether or not it would be possible to drive a
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Display XDR at 120 Hertz given the current interfaces that connect monitors
⏹️ ▶️ John to Macs. So first thing I did with Jonathan’s permission is I put up
⏹️ ▶️ John the text of his email On a URL, you can find a link in the show notes, if you want to look through all the
⏹️ ▶️ John math, because he did all the math like longhand and showed his work, right? And so if you want to know the gory details
⏹️ ▶️ John and where all this is coming from and learn a little bit about, you know, well, I don’t even know what these things are called,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 444, 442, the whole like color component thing, chroma, subsampling and all that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know about it from the TV space, but I don’t actually know how you describe those things. You guys know what I’m talking about with the 444 and the 422
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know anything about it until I read this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know only the parts that I had to know to transcode pirated videos. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s more commonly seen in the television world, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John basically has to do with how much information you can throw away and still have the picture look decent in terms of the
⏹️ ▶️ John various channels. And in the world of video, we’re talking about chroma and luminance, which is different than RGB,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you separate the color from the brightness, you can save a lot of space. So anyway, the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Display XDR, with the resolution that it has, the shipping product, the 6K screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John at 120 hertz at 444, which means not dropping any of the information on the floor, would require 78.61 gigabits per second to drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no interface does that, right? The maximum display
⏹️ ▶️ John port tunneling bandwidth with current display port interfaces that connect up to Mac video cards is 38.88 gigabits
⏹️ ▶️ John per second. So you can see we have about half, a little bit more than half
⏹️ ▶️ John than what we would need. But the whole point of display stream compression and chroma
⏹️ ▶️ John subsampling is to try to compress things down and they can actually compress things down to about
⏹️ ▶️ John half of what they the size that they would normally be so it seems like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to give up quality which i probably don’t think you are for
⏹️ ▶️ John at least for chroma subsampling on a screen you could in theory squeeze it down
⏹️ ▶️ John a single wire with two wires you could definitely drive it but two wires
⏹️ ▶️ John i don’t think there’s no way support for two wires to go into the back of the Pro Display XDR so they’d have to make a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a different interface or whatever. So I would encourage you, if you care about this, to look at the look at the document to see
⏹️ ▶️ John the math, but the bottom line is that it seems unlikely that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would even want to drive the existing Pro Display XDR or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John it 120 hertz over a single cable given current interfaces because you would have to lose a lot of quality, which
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter so much when you’re watching a TV. I wish I think there’s a link somewhere in his email that that shows like
⏹️ ▶️ John what is chroma subsampling. It’s basically throwing away data, which is fine if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at a picture of a beach, but not so fine if you’re looking at your menu bar because some of what it might’ve thrown away
⏹️ ▶️ John is the pixel data that defines the shape of the letters. Like if you’re looking at small text on a screen, you really want to be able to see
⏹️ ▶️ John all the individual pixels. And if you throw away even just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly imperceptible data at very small feature sizes, you will notice that because you’re sitting way close to
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer screen. So I feel bad that Jonathan wrote all this information
⏹️ ▶️ John and I really just wanted the bottom line question is like, is it technically possible in any feasible way? And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe, but probably not something that you would want. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John really don’t think Apple’s gonna ship a monitor with two wires coming out of the back of it. I mean, they kind of did that, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John on the inside of the original 5K iMac, but you never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw that. Yeah, well also keep in mind, like even if you had the two cable solution, that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take the entire bandwidth of, I believe, two Thunderbolt buses. And most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern, most Apple computers have between two and I think at most four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt buses on like the Mac Pro maybe. But you know, like the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros that were just released have three. That’s why there’s three Thunderbolt ports. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, assuming those all have that full bandwidth, but you’d also be consuming it. So that would basically reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your capability of having any kind of peripherals using bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to basically one port. Or in the case of the MacBook Air or the 13-inch MacBook Pro, none.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not a great solution in the era of today’s Thunderbolt and DisplayPort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards. But down in the future when these things presumably have increased bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their upcoming revisions, then we’ll talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Jonathan had one more thing he wanted to get off his chest and I figure it’s worth noting because I’ve heard this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John He says, and incidentally, because I’ve been seeing this all over the internets, the HDMI ports on the MacBook Pros being HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John 2.0b does not point to any lack of IO bandwidth intrinsic to the new SoCs. We talked about this last week. I said that the
⏹️ ▶️ John three Thunderbolt ports were a limitation of the SoC, and I was disappointed that the
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI port wasn’t a fancier standard, but they’re not connected to each other. They’re just two
⏹️ ▶️ John separate decisions slash limitations. Jonathan says, the HDMI port is almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John might be using a DisplayPort 1.4a to HDMI 2.0b protocol converter because Apple chips
⏹️ ▶️ John only support DisplayPort output. While there are various chips that support DisplayPort to HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John 2.1 conversion, Apple’s decision was most likely based on the availability, reliability, pricing, or some other combination thereof.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So yeah, it is disappointing that doesn’t support better HDMI standards, but these machines were designed a
⏹️ ▶️ John while ago and maybe they just didn’t have the parts available to do the conversion. But what they would
⏹️ ▶️ John be converting for is Display port coming off the chips and they’re converting that with some other set
⏹️ ▶️ John of chips to an HDMI standard And they went with 2.0 B, which is not great
⏹️ ▶️ John This is I mean, maybe we should have a topic on this for future shows now that we’ve got these great laptops What
⏹️ ▶️ John thing what are sort of like obvious spec bump things they can do to improve them in the future?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure we touch on some of that when Marco talks about his experiences in a bit.
Sponsor: Lutron Caséta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Caseta by Lutron. Smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighting control brought to you by Lutron, pioneers in smart home technology. A lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people think that you need smart bulbs to get smart lighting, but there is a smarter and honestly far more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable way that I’ve seen myself because I use it in my own house. It’s Caseta. Caseta’s smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dimmers and switches replace the switch in your wall, making all the lights that switch controls act
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart. And you know, there’s lots of reasons to have smart lights. You can save money. You can have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, places in your home where a switch controls more than one bulb. Ceiling lights, chandeliers, bathroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vanities, and more. You can save money by replacing the switches instead or replacing all of those bulbs with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of little smart bulbs. And smart switches are always smart. Smart bulbs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are only smart when the switch on the wall is on. So if somebody, like you know, a visitor or kids,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flips it off not understanding that oh, I have smart bulbs up there, then you can’t control the bulb anymore until somebody goes and turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that switch back on. Caseta switches on the other hand are always smart. Even if the switch is off, you can just control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it the same normal way. And you can control it with an app, voice assistant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home kit integration, it is the best. You can control all of that with Caseta. So you don’t have to worry like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having only apps or only switches, it’s just everything. You control it however you want. I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Lutron Caseta switches and various outlets and stuff in my house because It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really reliable and it’s the only system I’ve found that is rock solid reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fantastic. So see for yourself. Go get smart lighting the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way with Caseta by Lutron Smart Switches. Learn more about Caseta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Lutron.com slash ATP. That’s Lutron.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thank you so much to Caseta for reliably switching all of my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for sponsoring our show.
Memory Pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about memory pressure, because Sean Woods wrote in about this. Sean writes, I was listening to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey latest ATP and I heard John’s skeptical take on the 16 gigs of RAM in the MacBook that Marco ordered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This sent me into a total tailspin as I had ordered the exact same config earlier this week and wanted to know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had chosen poorly. That’s a reference, John. I discovered that Apple recommends checking your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac’s memory pressure as a way to gauge whether you need more RAM for your Mac. you recommend using memory pressure as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of gauging likely RAM needs? So how do you get here? If you open up Activity Monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then at the top you choose Memory, at the bottom there’ll be a running, like, graph of what your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory pressure on your machine is. And that’s how you look at it. According to an Apple support document,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yellow memory pressure means your computer might eventually need more RAM. Red memory pressure means your computer needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more RAM. And one of you was kind enough to put in here, I assume, John. The number of Macs curr… Oh, it was Margo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. The number of Macs currently for sale with upgradable RAM to the 27-inch iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I thought it was funny that they have this support document that says, your computer might eventually need more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, well, that means throw away the computer. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just saying it needs more RAM. They didn’t say it can’t get more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought this was interesting. I had never actually watched this before. And, and I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John will tell me why it doesn’t matter in a second. But I thought this was was interesting. And so I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching my memory pressure graph on my Mac Mini that I’ve been using as my desktop, the 16 gig M1 Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sure enough, it is basically always yellow, meaning my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might eventually need more RAM. So it was worth knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my quest for higher memory machines to eventually replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this desktop is not in vain, that I actually would benefit from that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we’ll get to some of my ideas later and how I might get there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is definitely a need. And I recommend if you think you might need a certain amount of RAM, run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Activity Monitor in the corner for a while and glance over at the graph every so often and see, is it yellow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or red? If it’s always green, you probably don’t need more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people are asking about memory stuff. And I think the reason, I mean, Marco just touched on probably the main
⏹️ ▶️ John reason we all recommend in general getting more RAM is because it increases the life of the machine because you can’t upgrade it later.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like in the old days where, you know, if you ever need more RAM, you can install it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we suggest this because even if you look at your memory usage, which by the way is a good idea, like actually measure, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just assume, right? That just tells you what you’re doing today and how that affects your memory pressure. You don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna keep that laptop for five years or if you’re gonna keep your computer for 10 years like me, you don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John your RAM usage will be like years from now. You just know what it’s like today. So, and because you can’t upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John it And you can’t even like, you can’t upgrade the SSDs either, but you can add external storage, but the RAM, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like nothing you can do about at all. So if you want to lengthen the useful lifetime of the machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John get more memory because you know you can never change it again. And that will allow the Mac to be viable for a
⏹️ ▶️ John longer period of time. Based on the assumption that RAM usage tends to go up over time, not
⏹️ ▶️ John stay level or go down, the history of computing has more or less shown that, you know, kind of like induced
⏹️ ▶️ John demand on roads, you add more RAM, software developers use it, you open more Chrome tabs, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Four years from now, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John probably be using more RAM than you are today, even if only by a little bit. But yeah, definitely do measure. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of this memory pressure graph being accurate, it’s so difficult to measure this in a useful way,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially even with your gut. You’re like, why don’t I just tell if my computer feels slow? There’s just so many reasons your computer can feel slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is kind of a problem for everybody who uses technology. People know when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not satisfying them. I don’t like how this is working. It’s making me wait. Something is
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with it. But beyond that, it’s too much to ask of individuals to be able to diagnose
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what is causing their computer to feel slow or be annoying or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so graphs like this are better than nothing, but just because you see it in the yellow,
⏹️ ▶️ John like my question would be like, yeah, but does your computer ever feel slow? Because if it’s yellow, but your computer never feels slow,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that tells you, you know, you’re on the edge of something that bad can happen. Or if your RAM usage is gonna double
⏹️ ▶️ John in the next five years, then maybe you wanna get more RAM. But just this is kind of like a, you know, just a rule
⏹️ ▶️ John of thumb, like for a laptop or for a computer in general, if you want it to last longer
⏹️ ▶️ John on machines where you can’t upgrade the RAM ever, ever, ever, get more RAM than you think you need and that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be an insurance policy for the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly.
Kühl pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wanted to do some quick follow up on pants that have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dedicated side leg iPhone pocket, which is not to prevent the problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Merlin thought it was preventing. It really is preventing the problem of it just like swinging on the forward part of my leg.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I talked about this in the past. I mentioned how a lot of people had recommended pants by a brand that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is pronounced cool. It’s KUHL and the U has the two dots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over it. Is that the umlaut or is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s in Umlaut, I believe, or Umlaut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry, Germany. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chapters are great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, chapters are great. I actually did order a pair of these and I tried them out and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re fine but the problem with these pants, besides that they don’t look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very attractive, literally every single option that people have sent in of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pants or shorts that have like a side leg phone pocket, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I would say, utilitarian. tactical you might call them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are specifically tactical yes or there or it’s like workout gear like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s you know like like workout shorts like that’s I don’t like to wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tactical or athletic wear as my everyday pants I I’m you know I’m a boring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jeans person I like jeans regular-looking decent jeans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stretchy ideally so I have not been tempted by the looks of pretty pretty much anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody has sent in with such pockets. However, the CoolPants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are no exception. But anyway, so looks wise, not really what I’m going for, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided let me try one pair and just see the utility of it, maybe I’ll find use for it. But the issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have with it is that, and maybe this is just the ones that I got, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side pocket for the phone is actually so low down the leg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that not only is it kind of awkward to actually reach the phone in and out of the pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also as you walk, it basically just slams into your leg over and over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look, so I think I just traded one problem for another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so this category of pants that have special phone pockets so it rests on the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your leg instead of the front of your leg, so far this seems to be an unsolved problem. And I think I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why. If you look at the construction of most pants, Usually it’s basically just like a front piece and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back piece with a seam that runs down the side of your leg. And I think it’s probably difficult from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a construction perspective to make a pocket that rests on that seam on the inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as opposed to like on the front side really. So I understand why it is this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Doesn’t really solve my problem, but instead I’m just slowly getting used to having this giant brick of a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my pocket. So anyway, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John tactical pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation is not really being solved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just slowly forgiving the problem and just living with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still don’t fully understand the problem. To be clear about your Merlin reference before, he thought your phone was hitting you in the junk,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s apparently not
⏹️ ▶️ John But then like the problem is what? I don’t like things touching the front, the more fronty part of my legs?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, I think it definitely makes walking inconvenient if the phone starts like swiveling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over towards like the front of your leg instead of the side. And I think it looks ridiculous as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John How does it make walking more difficult? It’s just your thigh, your thigh has no joints in it. It’s unjointed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I just think it is not the way you’re supposed to put stuff in your pockets. Like stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your pockets, I think it’s supposed to rest more to the side. But because these phones are so big and heavy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just kind of migrate as you walk to whatever is like the most ideal gravity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position, which tends to be more in the front. And that’s- Maybe you need tighter jeans. These are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already pretty snug. I gained some weight this summer because I started going to restaurants because it became okay again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think I do. I think my jeans are pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John of those back pockets are always there just waiting for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. I can’t imagine. All right.
John’s AirPods 3 review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we should move on and talk about new stuff, at least some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us. John, you got some AirPods 3, tell me about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, I got my AirPods. Oh boy, the personalization on them is so bad. It’s all caps. I mean, they showed you a
⏹️ ▶️ John preview on the side. I knew what it was gonna look like, but it’s just comical. I really just sort of gotten like a little emoji or something, but I get my
⏹️ ▶️ John full name on them just because like the whole point of having, you know, there’s two points. One is to differentiate around the house so you
⏹️ ▶️ John know which little case is yours, right? But the second is if I lost them somewhere someone found
⏹️ ▶️ John them that person was feeling nice I want them to be able to find me and so if I just put my initials on it they can’t find me but if I put
⏹️ ▶️ John my full name and they type it into Google there’s a shot they can find me so so far I haven’t lost them
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway I got my full name on the case it’s fine so my impressions of the new
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods 3 the size and the shape was my major concern like are these gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John fit nice in my ears the I’ve been using the original AirPods for years and years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love them. They fit my ears perfectly. Um, would these fit because these are shaped entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John differently. There’s nothing, no part, no, no panels, body panels are shared as they say in the auto industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an entirely new thing. It’s very much like the AirPods pro, but not quite like them either,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s similar shaped up. They don’t have a little soft thing that goes in your ear. They’re more like the old AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just hard plastic things that go in your ear. Right? So when I first put them in, I’m like, oh, oh, this is great,
⏹️ ▶️ John they fit perfectly. They feel even more secure in my ear than the old ones in terms of like if I shake
⏹️ ▶️ John my head around, how much should they wiggle? I didn’t do the taking, I should have done this before the show, I didn’t do like the taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the shirt on and off with the AirPods test, which the original ones basically fail because they
⏹️ ▶️ John have long stems and they aren’t in my ears that tight, but these felt very secure, very snug in my ears. So I’m like, great.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do. Like even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the AirPod Pros, which have the short stems, that’s a difficult thing to pull off without one of them flopping out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but it’s a good test of how snug they are on your ear, right? That said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wore them for, I’ve been wearing them since I got them for a few days or whatever, and I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint from a bunch of other people who presumably are like me or using the original ones and now have the AirPods 3.
⏹️ ▶️ John They press up against more parts of your ear. Like they have a larger volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re just bigger. There’s a bigger thing inside your ear.
⏹️ ▶️ John ignoring the stems, and I was talking about like the pod part, right? That part is bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ John it presses against more parts of your ear than the old one. And I think the old one’s kind of like just hung in my ear. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why they were a little bit loosey, like there was more air around them. These ones have contact points on like
⏹️ ▶️ John the top, the side, like they have more contact points, which is why they’re more secure, but it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s something in my ear sort of pressing outward. And it’s not painful or annoying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe I’m hypersensitive to it now, but when I take them out, I can feel where they were touching my
⏹️ ▶️ John ears a little bit, whereas I don’t remember that sensation before. Or maybe I’m just noticing that now they’re touching a top part
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of hanging down from my ears. They also pressed up against the top part. So far, not a deal breaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s only been a few days, but it made me consider a couple times, should I order a backup
⏹️ ▶️ John pair of the regular ones just in case? But I figure I have plenty of time. If they’re still selling the old ones, they’re gonna sell them for at least probably
⏹️ ▶️ John six months or a year, so I have time to think about it. But anyway, that’s the size and the shape.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very secure fitting in my particular ear. Maybe feel a little bit big, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned that over like the long haul, I will find it annoying. The longest I’ve ever worn them is like
⏹️ ▶️ John cleaning up the kitchen time, you know, or like going for a walk time. So I haven’t even worn them for like an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour to stretch yet, right? Or actually maybe, I think I watched something on the iPad, but it was at least an hour, but
⏹️ ▶️ John jury’s still out, but so far so good. Second thing, squeezing the little stubby things instead of tapping.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not a fan. I knew I wouldn’t be. I wanted to give it a chance. Interesting. Pfft. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the problem. In the scenarios where I want to quickly, first of all, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John double tap or whatever, you know, tapping the AirPod set to stop the playback. That’s what I use it for,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s always when someone in my house comes over and wants to say something to me and I can’t hear them
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m listening to music or a podcast, I gotta go, tap, tap, what? You know, like you wanna be able to do it quickly, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The first problem is obviously habit. They come up to me, they tap me on the shoulder, they say something, I tap my ear, nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just a habit, but I’ve done it like 19 times now. I just tap my ear and it’s like, oh, nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I tap it twice until I remember, oh yeah, tapping does nothing on these anymore, which is annoying, they’re so huge. Put an accelerometer
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, anyway. But the real problem is when I do remember, how quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John can I take one of my hands, which may or may not be covered in dish soap, and
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it up to my ear and find that little stubby little thing sticking out and then get it between my little
⏹️ ▶️ John fingertips and squeeze it. It’s tricky because the little stubby thing It’s like against my ear. It doesn’t stick out and it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John extend down and it’s so tiny. And it’s not like squishy and you can kind of squeeze it anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can squeeze it more in more places than you think you can. And it does have the nice little click to know that you did it. All
⏹️ ▶️ John that is good. But squeezing it I find very difficult and fidgety.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas tapping I could do literally with an oven mitt on. I could do it outside of a winter hat. People have talked about wearing helmets
⏹️ ▶️ John and be able to just smack the side of the helmet and it would trigger the accelerometers. That’s all out the window when you got to find that
⏹️ ▶️ John little tiny thing and squeeze it. So I’m a little bit sad about that, but again, only been a few days,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to give it a try. And the main reason I’m willing to give it a try is these sound so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey AirPods. It’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that I didn’t, mostly didn’t listen to music. I just mostly listened to podcasts and stuff on them, but you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John that the sound quality is, I mean, the volume is louder, the bass is better, the reproduction is better. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just better sounding, as they should be. Like the original AirPods are what, like four or five years old now? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and these are just bigger. They’re just plain bigger. probably have bigger drivers in there, and then also I think the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably gonna end up being better. I have no idea, because I haven’t come close to draining the battery on these. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re better headphones, so that’s why I’m gonna stick it out. And the case, yeah, I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the case. The case is bigger. I prefer the old case. But I tested the mag
⏹️ ▶️ John safeness of the case, and there are definitely more magnetic sort of alignment
⏹️ ▶️ John points than there were before. And I did some testing with like old versus new on my little Apple MagSafe puck thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like the old case had maybe two ill-defined magnet
⏹️ ▶️ John points that would stick, where, you know, I don’t know if they’re magnet points, they’re probably just metal things, right? Because the
⏹️ ▶️ John ring around the MagSafe puck is magnetic. So it felt like it only had two, and that didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John give it kind of a firm placement, it was just kind of like wobbly just on those two things. The new one has like four clear
⏹️ ▶️ John points, you put it on the MagSafe puck and it has four clear points. It still isn’t kind of like spring into
⏹️ ▶️ John place, but when you get it into place, it is more secure. So Apple did actually change
⏹️ ▶️ John some aspects of the design to be better with the MagSafe, but almost too good because now if you just, like I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s suction stuff sticking my puck to my nightstand. So if you’re not careful and you go to lift the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods case off of the puck, it’ll take the puck with it. That’s how strong the magnets are if you don’t sort of get your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath it. So overall, I give a tentative thumbs up, good sound quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John So far, no deal breakers, but I kind of miss tapping and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a question of whether the ergonomics will be adequate for me
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know and I won’t be able to leave them because I I’ll get too used to the good sound quality.
Sponsor: Earnest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Earnest. If you want to pay off your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco student loans faster, Earnest can help you. Federal student loan payments are on hold, but with rates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this low, now is a good time to refinance. And Earnest was voted best student loan refinancing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall by NerdWallet. They have some of the lowest rates, flexible payments, and an in-house team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready to help. So with Earnest, you could change your interest rate, get a lower monthly payment, and you never pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fees, not even late fees. And if you have any questions, You can even talk to a real, live human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Earnest for help. By refinancing, you can reduce your loan term, save money, or combine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple loans into a simple monthly payment. And when you pay less interest, you can put that money towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your other goals. With Earnest, it only takes 2 minutes to see what your new rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be, and there’s no credit impact. Right now, Earnest is offering our listeners a $100 cash bonus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your student debt at earnest.com slash ATP not available in all states.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, you get $100 cash bonus when you visit earnest.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to refinance your student loan. Visit earnest.com slash ATP for more details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not available in all states terms and conditions apply. Ernest student loan refinancing made by earnest operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LLC and MLS number 1204917 California financing law license number 605-4788 535 Mission Street, San Francisco, California 94105.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visit earnest.com slash licenses for a full list of licenses. Thank you to earnest for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsoring our show.
MacBook Pro so far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should talk about the MacBook Pro. Marco made mention that his was dragged underwater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a mile in order to get to his house this afternoon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mine, so I have the first worldiest of first world problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My MacBook Pro has been sitting somewhere in Shenzhen for like three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days now, I think, or something like that. It was originally due next week sometime. I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was actually, uh, but it shipped a couple of days ago. As we record this on Wednesday night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and UPS was like, Hey, it’s on its way. It’ll be here Monday. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, well, maybe Wednesday as in a week from when we’re recording right now. Uh, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UPS said, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’ll be Monday. And actually still says, no, no, no, it’ll be Monday. But it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kept sitting in Shenzhen and sitting and sitting over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day, over two days, over three days, if I’m not mistaken. and just sitting, chilling out in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shenzhen. Doesn’t want to leave home, apparently. And I was getting increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embittered about this because I want my treat. I really am excited for this. I really want my treat. Is that so much to ask?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t buy computers very often. I buy them more often than John, but considerably less often than Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I was like my-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco hard. On either side of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re exactly right. It was really difficult to thread this needle, I tell you that. Yeah. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, I just want my treat. And somebody, a friend of mine, Simon, pointed me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a MacRumors post that was put up this morning. MacBook Pro shipments being delayed due to UPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanical issues. And I’ve heard conflicting reports over exactly what’s going wrong, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, it seems like UPS just doesn’t have enough planes to ship all the stuff they need to ship.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my MacBook Pro is sitting in China for a while. Maybe it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave at some point. I presume it will. Don’t know when. Y’all, I’m really trying to find some chill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this issue. Coming up short, though, I really don’t have a lot of chill right now. And I should, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, this doesn’t matter. And I’m extremely appreciative of the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get one and that it’s eventually going to show up. But patience is not my strong suit, gentlemen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m really running low on chill on this issue. So I did go to the store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday, and I went to see what builds they had in stock. They didn’t have anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was close enough to what I ordered that I was willing to just impulse buy on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spot. But nevertheless, I did quickly handle both the 16 and 14 inch machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t play with them in terms of like software very much, but in terms of physical design and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot, I did hold on to them, you know, to lift it up and spin it around and so on. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing I think I should note right away is that as compared to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel MacBook Pro, I didn’t feel like they were that dramatically heavier. My understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is as compared to an M1 MacBook or certainly MacBook Air or perhaps even a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is quite a bit heavier. And Marco, you can correct me in a moment here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But compared to my Intel machine, it was actually roughly the same. Other than that, it looks beautiful. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the new design. I love those ports hanging out there and the screen looked great, but I didn’t have it like side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to side or side by side with anything else. So I don’t have really good comparisons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It occurred to me well after I left that I must be a professional podcaster because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t even think to like open up Safari and go scrolling to see what the 120 Hertz was like. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just did not even cross my eye. I haven’t done that either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I feel a little
⏹️ ▶️ John better. What you should have done is gone to the screensaver and see something in HDR, because I think like you said, oh, the screen, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell because I know everything side by side. If you were to bring up something in HDR, as in not the UI, you would notice
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference. And one easy way to do that with the built-in thing is, well, isn’t it built in? Maybe it’s not, I’m thinking of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV. Anyway, if you use the aerial screensaver and tell it to show HDR video only and turn that
⏹️ ▶️ John on, suddenly you have your screen filled with HDR video and it will really pop. You won’t need like a side-by-side
⏹️ ▶️ John comparison. You will notice the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can’t imagine Apple shipping a screensaver for a laptop that runs on batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would show HDR content continuously. There’s no way they would
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. I mean, but in that case, it’s actually kind of hard to like find HDR content because none of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be HDR. You need like a video or a photo or something. Maybe they have some HDR photos if you launch the Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just take a photo with a modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone that can shoot HDR photos and just view it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, you do need
⏹️ ▶️ John something with a like highlight or something that’s gonna really show that off But I think that’s that’s where the screen difference,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you’ll be able to see that without a side-by-side comparison There’s just so much brighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s a good point. And by the way real-time follow-up. I was saying shenzhen. I’m in Shanghai I’m sorry, and it has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting. I don’t know if this is actually my local or their local, but it’s been sitting in Shanghai
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since 4 13 a.m. On Monday So it’s been two days that it’s been 12 almost 3 at this point that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been sitting there And yeah, it eventually will show up at my house, I’m sure, but I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sad, y’all. So Marco, let me live vicariously through you as I weep quietly, perhaps on mute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How good is it? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mazzella, PhD I really don’t know yet. Steven Penn Fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, part of that is because of the aforementioned issues with just, you know, getting it here during a big storm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my town is flooded and everything. So it’s and not like a flood that anybody has to feel sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. It’s just what happens in a beach town on the off season. It’s, you know, nothing’s, nothing’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruined or anything. Anyway, so issue number one is that I haven’t had it for very long. Issue number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two is that for the first time I think ever, migration assistant totally failed me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I had, I have nothing on it yet. Like all I did so far was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get whatever I could set up so I could run my Xcode comparison, building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast. And so I could see like how much more quickly does it build overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than my M1, Mac mini and MacBook Air. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I want to know with this computer is, do I want to use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as my desktop until Apple makes a faster desktop than this? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because my current thinking on that, which we talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar today as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my current thinking on that is that chances are based on the rumors and based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, you know, tea leaf reading, that they’re probably done releasing hardware for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. And they are almost certainly, if they’re not done releasing hardware, they’re almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly done releasing Macs for this year. And the next, the soonest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can imagine there being a Mac mini or any other kind of desktop Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these chips in it or better, is at least next spring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as we discussed, it might even be next fall. So we have between probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between six and 12 months where the fastest computers Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes are gonna be MacBook Pros. That’s the most likely outcome here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I decided, well, I wanna see how fast is this because after last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show, we were talking in the after show and Casey, John convinced me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I should have ordered higher specs and maybe I should be using this possibly as a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in clamshell mode or whatever else. And I had a good experience doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my M1 MacBook Air last fall, when I first got it, before I got the Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I know that that works really well on the M1s. And so I’m like, all right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. So I placed a just-in-case order, because it was a while out, for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more decked out 14-inch, 64 gigs of RAM, four terabyte storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 32-core, top-end CPU, Because I’m like, well, just in case I end up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting this and wanting something faster, then at least I’m ahead of the order queue a little bit. And that’s not going to ship until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the end of November, allegedly. So I have a month, roughly, before it’s even going to get here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If your shows up before mine, your second one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco shows up before mine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to come up and steal it. So put it under lock and key if it does show up. I’m telling you now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bring some tall boots. Before Marco gets to the end of his story, which may or may not have a happy ending,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to warn people that if you ever think of trying to do this, you say, oh, it says it’s gonna arrive at the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of November, so I don’t have to worry about it. You do have to worry about it, because kind of like progress bars in our past discussion,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t know the future. And even though when you order it, it says this is the date range your thing may be coming,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes, in fact, fairly often, that date is not the date your thing comes. It could come
⏹️ ▶️ John days or even weeks earlier than you expected. And they think that’s a good thing. And if you are
⏹️ ▶️ John relying on the fact that, oh, I have a week, I have a month to decide whether I have to cancel this order, you
⏹️ ▶️ John may just wake up one day with your computer that you thought you still had another two weeks to cancel sitting on your doorstep. So be careful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I only have two weeks to return this one. And so, and I know that I have most likely four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so weeks before I get the higher spec one if I don’t cancel that order yet. So I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of have to make a decision, like what do I do here? I do love a lot about this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I definitely do not want the 16 inch for myself. I love the 14 inch size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is great. And I think if, again, if I were using the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a laptop, as my main computer, I would get a 16-inch, no question, because I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the extra screen space. But because I’m using it either to most likely drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a display in clamshell mode, in which case its size doesn’t matter at all, or when I’m gonna take it somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, then I’m gonna want it to be mid-sized, not maximum sized, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 14-inch, I think, remains the size for me. But anyway, so going back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get this to work, it did eventually work in the sense that I gave up on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to migrate my M1 MacBook Pro, or my M1 MacBook Air, excuse me, to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if you have seen the target disk mode equivalent for M1s. It’s actually different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to like boot into the recovery mode, and then there’s basically like a little like share disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that you run that you type in all the passwords and it makes the disk available. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get this to work with a Thunderbolt cable and a USB 3 cable in every port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco configuration I could figure out, and I could not get the new MacBook Pro to recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Air in its whatever it’s called, target disk mode, at all. It just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t show up as the available disk in the setup wizard thing. So then I tried, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll boot up the MacBook Air in regular mode, and I’ll launch Migration Assistant and try to get that to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And migration assistant said it couldn’t authenticate the current user and failed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, that’s weird. Okay, I rebooted. Same thing. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess this isn’t happening today. So anyway, so I just set it up as new and I ran
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some tests. And I don’t have I have almost nothing on it yet. But I just basically airdropped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of files to airdrop my version of Xcode, my checkout directories for overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got you know, got the signing credentials over there, which This is a wonderful pain in the butt as it always is, but oh well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not the M1’s fault. And finally was able to build some stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, we’ve seen benchmarks for Xcode all over the map
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on basically how much faster these are than the M1’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I should clarify also, the MacBook Pro I have here to test today is an M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, not an M1 Max. It is the 10 core, so it’s the M1 Pro with all of its parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working, but it is still the M1 Pro and it only has 16 gigs of RAM, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, which yes, I do regret. Thanks, thanks John. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the building overcast in its current version from a clean build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my M1 Mac mini, my desktop, takes 30 seconds. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing on the M1 Pro takes 19 seconds. So it’s 36% faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, a lot of people don’t do clean builds very often, so I figured, let me try something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more realistic. Let me try an incremental build. I did two incremental builds, one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that changes a file that’s included by a lot of files in the project, my appearance manager file. Lots of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses this, so when I change anything in that file, it has to rebuild a lot of other files. That, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1, took 20 seconds. On the M1 Pro, it took 13 seconds, so 31% faster. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I did, after that, the most common thing, a very small incremental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. This was changing one view controller, but this was a Swift file this time. So one Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view controller file. So the most simple incremental build that you could probably do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1, six seconds, M1 Pro, four seconds. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is faster. It is a decent amount faster, and these are gains that I want. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco addition to that, you know, 30 to 50% faster build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for my actual work that I actually do with my actual project, in addition to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also has the higher RAM ceiling available. So what I am definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to try is getting this higher spec machine in and running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in clamshell mode as my desktop again. I had, as I mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a great experience doing that with the MacBook Air and the M1 MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I know the M1 machines can do clamshell mode reliably, I know they’re good at it, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a totally fine experience. And then my plan is to kind of go a bit of a different direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with my, you know, what this machine, what the role of this machine is. Since it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically be a desktop, great, but, and I mentioned last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, like, you know, I enjoy having my MacBook Air laptop as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our like around the house machine doing workouts with our, you know, FaceTime workouts with our trainer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, running like any kind of Zoom call we have to have with the school or with the teacher or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love having that machine for that. And I love, and we do those things often enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t want to disrupt my desktop every time we have to do those things. If we do those things like multiple times a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it’s a pain to have to take my whole desktop out and do that. So I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a lower powered laptop available to me in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house. So I think what I should do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually return this one or mail it to Casey, wait for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high spec one to come in or finagle one from the Apple store, I’ll get to that in a second. Wait for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to come in and then when that comes in, use that as my desktop and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep my M1 MacBook Air as the workout and around the house laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when I go on a trip where I might wanna get some work done, take my desktop laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me. You know? Because I wouldn’t be moving it that often. It would be maybe once a month I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be doing that as opposed to four or five times a week. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be a really good solution until I can get a pro desktop, in which case maybe I won’t even want it anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the laptops will be close enough and so good and maybe I’ll love this lifestyle where I can just pick up my desktop laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bring it with me on trips, but otherwise it basically behaves like a desktop. So I think I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try that approach. I think it is the more reasonable one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than having like two of these MacBook Pros. The downside is I might be without this MacBook Pro for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two to three weeks while I wait for the new one, but I think ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s the better move. Now, that being said, Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I don’t use, if I don’t keep this one, I just got and I use the MacBook air, I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really going to miss the speakers in the new one because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are good. I mean, again, good for laptop speakers. This is, we’re grading on a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curve here, a really like, you know, tinny metal sharp curve here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, the speakers in the new one are significantly better. The screen is brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I do so clearly see the difference in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a scaled pixel mode versus a non-scaled pixel mode. It is like you can look at the two screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side by side and it’s clearly visible that the MacBook Air screen next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the MacBook Pro screen, the Air screen looks a little bit blurry. Like you can just see it. You can see it on the edges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the text. Like just look at any sharp line, any text or anything and you can see, compare it between the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two, the one that is not running the scaling mode is sharper. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy that they finally fixed that. So anyway, I actually didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly notice the 120 hertz thing. Maybe maybe I’ve lost my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my eyesight for that in the last two weeks. But
⏹️ ▶️ John some apps have to be updated for like it’s been some reports of like, will you actually see 120 hertz and
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac app and it depends like so I mean, I’m assuming Safari or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John would do it. So if that’s what you were looking at, then you probably should have noticed it, but don’t expect to see it everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think, especially in Mac apps, well, same thing in iOS apps. You have a choice whether you
⏹️ ▶️ John want your animation to even take advantage of 120 hertz or not. So I don’t know what every
⏹️ ▶️ John individual app has chosen to do that’s either part of the iOS or otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this was Safari that I was testing in, but again, I’ve had this for such a short time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will do more testing and report back next week. But yeah, in the meantime, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is really great. It’s fast, and I’m looking forward to having more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM when I get the big one in. That being said, so to get the big one in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have two options. I can either wait up to another month for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order to come in, or I can go to an Apple store, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tomorrow, and get almost the exact spec I’m waiting for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because as Casey mentioned, The stores are actually stocking two high-end configurations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want the M1 Mac’s top-end CPU, 32-core, and 64GB of RAM, you can get the 14-inch with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 2TB SSD or the 16-inch with a 4TB SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those two configurations are widely being stocked in stores for same-day pickup. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t have to wait. you can go right into a store and buy it almost any day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The downside is that what I wanted was a 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top CPU, 64 gigs of RAM, and a four terabyte SSD, not a two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, it’s me! Right, the KC computer, right? So if I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this, so my options are either wait a month to get exactly what I want, or immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get either what I want but too big of a laptop to get the 16-inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or what I want but too small of an SSD. Now, I think I’d be most happiest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the too small of an SSD solution.
The Mystery Terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I went today through my M1 Mac Mini, which itself is two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes also. Like I’ve been living on two terabytes for a year. It’s been fine. It’s been a little tight sometimes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part I do okay. And then I occasionally run low on space and I have to go like, you know, be responsible and clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff up. Today I decided, let me see how much I can clean stuff up exactly. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much could I live with here? Because one thing I wanted to find out is, I keep my photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to save space on that two terabyte internal drive, I keep my Apple iCloud photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library on an external SSD that’s just always connected. But if I’m gonna have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop laptop, I don’t want any external SSDs to be in use. I want to be able to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take it and not have to take any drives or disconnect them or eject them or anything. So I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move the external SSD storage to basically this Mac mini being like a home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server in a closet or something. And it could have the external stay with it and it could offer network shares, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t want my photo library to be served that way. That would be a little odd. So I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my photo library to be able to move locally onto the laptop. So I figured, well, how big is my photo library exactly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And could I actually fit all this on my laptop? How hard could it be, right? Two terabytes is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of space. So I go, I look at the external drive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my actual iCloud photo library, and it says it’s 76 gigs. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, that’s less than I thought. And I currently had like 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs free on the main drive. So I’m like, I could just move it back. Like, I don’t actually need to have it external.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would leave me with only about 100 gigs free. That’s a little tight. Let me see what else I can free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. So I launched one of these trusty disk space viewing apps to scan my drive and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where is all my space going exactly. And I’ve used many of these apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. The one I typically use is called Space Gremlin, more specifically Space Gremlin Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like the way it presents the space better than the rest. I find it easier to find stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prune what you want to prune from it. But I also tried the same thing with, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this called, Grand Perspective, which is I think even older and I think it’s open source. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried that and when I scan my 2TB drive with Space Gremlin Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see my user’s directory which is 700 gigs. gigs, miscellaneous app stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 200 gigs free, and then I see restricted files, 900 gigs. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought, huh, that’s weird. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, and I’m running it in full root read access mode it should be able to see everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the file system.
⏹️ ▶️ John you give it full disk access?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did, full disk access and root.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is why you should use Grand Perspective, because what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heck is restrictive files? That’s why I tried Grand Perspective, I thought, hey, maybe SpaceGremlin hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been updated recently for all this new crazy security stuff they’re doing. Let me try Grand Perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Grand Perspective has a giant gray block that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is about that size, and it says, miscellaneous used space.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. This is like the gray other bar that I was just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco joking about in the iOS storage manager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided, why don’t I look at the actual built-in storage manager of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Before you go to that I would say the reason one of the reasons I use grand perspective is if you see any block You don’t understand you can
⏹️ ▶️ John right-click on it and just have it show you where that thing is in the finder copy path
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have the little info drawer I’m launching gram perspective now because I use this this all the time I hope this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna hose my recording. Yes, please scan my 4 terabyte drive while I record a podcast. Yeah But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you can change the, like there’s like a sidebar that comes out and you can change it to focus
⏹️ ▶️ John and then mouse over the part that you care about and see what the focus thing says.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Folder in view slash solicited area, miscellaneous used space. What? 1.04 terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, did you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John TMUtil to see if you’ve got local snapshots?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I looked up, how do you remove time machine snapshots or APFS snapshots?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it said basically turn off time machine or like to have it uncheck the automatic backup thing and just wait a few minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll delete stuff. And sure enough, it did. It freed up, I think about 50 or 100 gigs doing that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, okay, that’s something. So I’m now, somehow, I’m to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SpaceGremlin thinks I have about 200 gigs free, Finder thinks I have 600 gigs free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when I went to the system information storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tab and had that tell me where things were, It says I have 850 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of photos. So I thought, okay, this is interesting. Because I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my photos are most likely larger than 70 gigs as they are on my external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have tons of space missing on my main drive that is somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nothing seems to know where it is except the system storage panel, which says my photo library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 850 gigs, which, I mean, that sounds high, but that actually sounds way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plausible than 70 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John you just go to your.photo library file and do get info, command I in the finder, what does it say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s 70 gigs. No, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and I dove into it. I show package contents, dive in, look for all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files and all the random subdirectories that are named under it, and nothing in there is very old and it’s all iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you sure you’re looking in the right photo library?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I even double checked the preference screen in the photos app, like where is it pointing? show in finder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I think is happening is somehow it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storing the bulk of my photo library somewhere on the main drive that is considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restricted space that none of these apps can see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but do you have optimized storage on? No. This doesn’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sense. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supposed to be downloading all of my photos. So somehow I have photos in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some kind of state where the I have no idea where my photos are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. It thinks it has them. I can scroll all the way back to 2004 and I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see my old photos, they’re all there. It doesn’t seem like it has to download them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t find any kind of show and finder equivalent in photos.app. I don’t know if there is one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t find it for all these old photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow this This is in a strange state. So my plan is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think before I get this laptop, I have to figure out where the heck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my photos are, how to consolidate them into an actual storage system, then into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file system where I can see them and see how big my photo library is, because I have no clue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I guess, redo this whole thing and go from there. But this has been quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a journey today, trying to figure out where the heck are my photos and where’s all my disk space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know, I haven’t rebooted yet. Maybe I should just reboot and this will all fix itself. Who knows? But this is very,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I wish I could help you with Grand Perspective, but it’s still scanning my hard drive. I have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files. I’m surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I’m feeling pretty smug about my photo setup over here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You came over to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, but the one canonical photo library is still being maintained,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it doesn’t have anything to do with Apple. I know where my photos are. I’m just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John The easy way to, like, I haven’t had these problems. Grand Perspective shows you my photo library, like, oh, here’s, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have, you don’t have multiple users on your Mac, do you? I sure do. Well, but do you have, who owns the photo library? You,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re looking at your photo library, right? Yeah. Because one thing I was going to say about Grand Perspective is if you run it on an account
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t own the photo library, it won’t show up there. Like, you have to run it as each user to see, like, their
⏹️ ▶️ John files, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s, it’s just, as far as I can tell, it’s just me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but you’re looking at your photo library, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the weird, cause I have the situation where my photo library, I do have a photo library. There’s not much in it, but it’s mine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the quote unquote family one is in my wife’s account. So I’d switch to my wife’s account, run grand perspective there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I see the photo library. And even on her computer where the photo library is external, it’s on an external disc. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how big it is because the disc is whatever, you know, one terabyte. And there’s like 400 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John free. So it’s 600, right? That’s how big it is. You know, and then as it grows, it slowly fills the
⏹️ ▶️ John desk, right? I haven’t actually done get info on the photo library. I guess I just
⏹️ ▶️ John always know either based on the grand perspective block or based on how much it’s filled, the one terabyte drive, but there’s no getting
⏹️ ▶️ John around the fact that if you have a terabyte drive, you know, you know how much space is taking up as it slowly starts inching
⏹️ ▶️ John up to be filling the entire drive. I used to have it on a 500 gig drive and it filled that. That’s why I had to get a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John one. So if my scan ever completes, I’ll see what I can get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t, I don’t think this is the case of tips user account, having a giant photo library. Cause like her home directory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only a hundred gigs. So I can’t imagine that she also would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a mysterious terabyte of photos sitting somewhere. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the answer is obvious. The answer is that these are my photos somewhere in this space, somewhere on my file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that I can’t access from anything. But they show up in the Photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s weird. Like, because I mean, obviously on my main computer, the Photos library is on the main drive. So there’s no weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ John about like which drive would be contributing the storage. But on my wife’s computer, the photo library is
⏹️ ▶️ John on an external SSD, and it wouldn’t fit on, it doesn’t fit on her internal
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco SSD at this point, because
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s got one terabyte internal and one terabyte external. All right, finally, grand perspective. Finally finished, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John see what it has to say. Bring open the little, where is the little side panel thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s on the info icon on the upper right. It’s weird, these are not standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John icons, or retina.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, it used to be a drawer back in the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking. And now I’m gonna go to focus. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my iMovie library, which is surprisingly huge because it’s all those Destiny movies. And there’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John library. And it’s like the second biggest block next to the iMovie one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 183 gigs and it’s photos library, dot photos library. And yeah, it’s big. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s what I would expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t see anything gray. Like I don’t see anything on an allocated space or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of VMs from VMware. Those are big.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some streaming video files. Yeah, no, I look at this all the time because I’m always, I’m forever
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to clear out disk space because otherwise I would just fill it up. And I’ve never run into any surprises
⏹️ ▶️ John and never seen any block that it didn’t explain what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this is, this is yet another reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I haven’t spent a lot of time with a new MacBook Pro yet because as I started figuring out stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my desktop, I’m like, wait, what’s going on? Where are these photos? Now I’m running all these disk utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John apps trying to figure out what the heck is going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. You should look at TMUtil though, because there are easier ways to deal with snapshots than TMUtil,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just look at the man page. All right, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, if you could, for my edification, take a screenshot of you in focus mode mousing over your mystery
⏹️ ▶️ John block in grand perspective. I wanna see the info window and the screenshot. Just take
⏹️ ▶️ John a full screen screenshot and put it in the Slack or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. We can move on after this. I just, I wanted to, I thought that you would enjoy the frustrating aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I have to say, on my local hard drive, again, this is excluding my, the quote unquote real photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ John just in my account, one of the largest growing blocks is this tiny little village of little tiny squares, and
⏹️ ▶️ John every single one of those little squares is a recorded podcast. And it just keeps getting bigger, because I never delete them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you gotta do it. One of the things I did today was delete all of my old audio hijack recordings that are for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already completed podcasts. And when I record a podcast, I keep all the source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files of like all the tracks and everything. I keep all those, but I show those off to the archive drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I’m done with them. Like I compress them, I just have a basic shell script that compresses all the waves to flack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and compresses the logic project slightly in like a zip thing and then just shoves it off into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco archive drive. So I don’t have a computer full of podcasts. Like it’s what you expect, you know, from a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has a lot of fish. So it’s like, you know, my biggest folders are like library developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then, you know, music, iTunes, iTunes Media Music Fish, which is 163 gigs of fish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hey, it’s all I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to, well, most of the time. So anyway, hopefully I will have some answers for this at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point soon. I hope to figure out where my mysterious terabyte of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage has gone and also where my photos are stored. Hopefully it’s the same answer.
MacBook Pro, cont’d.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some questions about your laptop while you take these screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you’ve only had it for a short period of time, but how did you feel about the sort of the physical reality of the thing in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of handling it, carrying it, picking it up, putting it down, like the hinge, all the different pieces? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel? It feels dense and great. So I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, compared to the MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air that I have sitting right next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is clearly heavier and more substantial. That is not necessarily in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad way, it’s a beefier computer. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as bigger, or not as much bigger, or as much heavier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you would expect it to be compared to the MacBook Air. The MacBook Air definitely looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the slimmed down, older version of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in the same size class. And so if you are comfortable carrying an Air or a 13 inch Pro, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll be comfortable carrying the 14 inch Pro as well. It’s fine in that regard. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks at a quick glance just like the 13 inch Pro always has, or not always, but more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently has. So that being said, I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all tempted for the 16 because as I feel this and as I handle this, I think this is great. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be bigger. So it is great for what I want. The reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far that have come out and the very few like tear downs that have come out so far, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t really get much else with the 16 with the exception of obviously the more screen space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bigger battery, which are both things that I don’t think I would need for the context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which I’d be using it. And also then this high power mode where it basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs the fans at an audible level constantly so you you can do like all your 8K ProRes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color grading and stuff, none of which I will ever do while I have this computer. So it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the 16-inch offers is a lot of value for people whose needs are very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from mine. And for my needs, I think the 14 is great. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to, I think, stick with the 14-inch size. The only thing that, oh, I guess the 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might also be better on the speakers front. Through a wonderful fluke of shipping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will actually have Tiff’s new 16 tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the opposite of what happened to Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch went from, like you know, the estimated shipping time of next week to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delivered. Just today, it got delivered. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I’m talking about where if you try to do a speculative order and feel comfortable, like I don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about canceling that for another week. No, it might come tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So it never even entered like preparing to ship or shipped status.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just went straight from, you know, ship’s November 4th to 9th or whatever to delivery.
⏹️ ▶️ John So how does the lid feel? Like in the pictures, the screen lid looks thicker. Does it feel
⏹️ ▶️ John any thicker or is it just kind of like blunt edges but otherwise pretty thin?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels thicker than the MacBook Air. And I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if it actually is or if it’s just the, you know, the curvature on the edge is not really there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. But it is actually way easier to open one-handed. The MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air, it’s so, like the bottom of the MacBook Air is so light, you gotta kinda like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold your hand in a certain way to be able to lift it up one-handed without having the bottom come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a little bit. And the new 14-inch does not have that problem at all. I think one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reasons why people think they look so much thicker and boxier is that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the body, like the bottom half of the body, I think, got thicker, but the screen lid I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think got thinner. And so I think what has happened is that the total thickness has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stayed roughly the same, but they’ve just moved some of it from the top to the bottom effectively. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom is a little bit thicker, I think. But I don’t have a 13 inch here to compare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a 13 inch Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you think about the engraving on the bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I don’t care. It looks great. I mean, here, let me pick it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you ever touch it? Does your finger ever run across it, or is it just not in a touchable area?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have yet to actually use this computer on my lap. So I don’t know. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask me that in a week or so. I’ll have more information then.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking like when you’re carrying it, like you pick it up off the table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put it under your arm. I don’t think, no, I can’t even reach it. Like unless I’m, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d have to be holding it in a really weird way to actually touch the middle logo. Cause like I’m holding it on the edge.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think my final physical question thing, have you heard the fans yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not at all, no. I wish they had changed the feeling of the vents on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fingers on the side, they do feel a little sharp, just like the 2016 and forward models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have always felt this way. Like when you pick it up, you feel those side vents and they kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dig into your fingers in a slightly unpleasant way. So I do wish they had changed that now that I’m handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and stuff, but otherwise that’s a pretty minor issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I noted that when I saw a bunch of YouTube videos about them, like, oh, those side slot, because the people handling them on YouTube videos,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, those slots are still there, of course they have to be, the air has to come in from somewhere. just like in Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John product shots, they don’t really ever show you a shot that emphasizes or highlights them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you see one in real life and someone rotates it around, you see these huge slots inside. It’s a shame to hear that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a little bit sharp because it feels like there’s no reason, especially since they’re so sort of subtle and not
⏹️ ▶️ John in your face. It’s not like a design element to make the sharp edges. You just rounded them over more because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you know, why not? It’s a little bit more comfortable that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, again, it’s not it isn’t a big deal and it’s it’s not any worse than the outgoing
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Um, and so in, in terms of using the thing, uh, what do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John of the notch in your brief time with it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still only have the stock wallpaper that came configured on it cause I couldn’t migrate my stuff over. As we said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, and stock wallpaper, that middle area is a very dark Navy blue. It’s almost black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so with the wallpaper, I really don’t see the notch, but as I was using the computer, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would occasionally, you know, have light colored content in the vicinity of it or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really just didn’t notice it at all. I honestly haven’t noticed it once while using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like I just had to double check. It is definitely there, but I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John So on the topic of the notch, the Verge had a story. It was highlighting a couple of tweets that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was originally going to put in the show notes, but now we’ll just put the story in there is Quinn Nelson pointing out some strange
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior with the notch. The first is that I am surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John more people have tried this. Like, so if you are, I don’t know if it’s a car is holding the mouse button down because people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that anymore. But very old school Mac users will remember at a time when if you wanted to use a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John from the menu bar at the top of the screen on the Mac, the way you would do it is you bring your cursor up to like the word file.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would click the mouse button and hold it down and then you would move down to the item you wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ John like save or something. and then you would release and save would activate. And that was the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a menu with the mouse on the Mac for many, many, many years. Of course, Windows came along and used
⏹️ ▶️ John a different approach. In Windows, you would go up to the word file, put your pointer on it, and you would click, mouse button down,
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse button up, you would just click, and then the file menu would display itself, and the file menu would stay on the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you would move the cursor down to save, and you would click again, and it would do save.
⏹️ ▶️ John The philosophy behind that in the original days of the Mac is like if you get into a situation where, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac was introduced into where no one even knew what the heck a mouse was, like it came with a tutorial about how to use a mouse. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a very important part of using the product. Like this is called a mouse. And when you move it, you see the cursor. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John had to explain that. There was onscreen tutorials for it. It was in the manuals, the first thing you needed to learn, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so to throw a computer in front of people and have it behave the Windows way, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you would click the file menu and the menu would display, now you’ve got the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John displayed, but your cursor is free. So you might go off and try to do something else, but you’re like, how do I, like the file
⏹️ ▶️ John menu is stuck down. It’s like a mode, but you’d go off and do something else, but the file menu would be there and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d click somewhere else. And that click would essentially, if you’re lucky, deactivate the file menu, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not go through to the thing that you clicked on because that click was just the clicking outside the file menu thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, the reason the Mac worked that way was because it was one operation, click, hold down, go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing you want and release. And there were no modes and no sort of getting stuck in a position, which made perfect sense
⏹️ ▶️ John for the original day of the Mac. But obviously when Windows did it the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John way, everyone got used to it. Eventually Apple adopted it because the world didn’t need to learn how to use a mouse and wasn’t afraid of
⏹️ ▶️ John getting the menu stuck down and not knowing what to do. And so that’s the way they did it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a long winded way to say, with the notch, if you have a series of menus that span the notch,
⏹️ ▶️ John like some of your menus are on the right side of the notch, but the most of them are on the left. If you activate the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac by holding down the mouse button or even just clicking, and the menu bar is active and you
⏹️ ▶️ John just move your mouse to the right, like you go, you know, file, edit, whatever, and you keep moving to the right,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently the mouse cursor will teleport around the notch when you get to the last menu that
⏹️ ▶️ John is to the left of the notch, and you go to the right. Rather than the cursor hiding under the notch, which is what it would
⏹️ ▶️ John do if you were just mousing, because you are in, like, I am currently highlighting menu items,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, either holding the mouse button down or clicking and being in that mode, the mouse cursor will
⏹️ ▶️ John teleport to the other side of the notch and immediately you move one pixel and it hops to the other side and now you’re on the next menu. So it preserves
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the muscle memory of you know, mousing through the menus if that’s what you wanted to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that you’ll see that in the video, which I think is a good behavior. Another thing you’ll see in the video is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar icons, the menu extras, the little icons that appear on the right side of your menu bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John those things have no idea that the notch exists, which is bad. Now, it
⏹️ ▶️ John takes some amount of effort or being Casey, to get enough menu bar icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John stop. To get enough menu bar icons to reach the notch. Because remember the notch is dead center in the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to build up quite a conga line of icons to reach the notch. But if you do, those menu bar icons
⏹️ ▶️ John will apparently just display underneath the notch. And you can use them. You can put your mouse cursor underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John the notch and find, like blindly find, like whatever menu extra icon
⏹️ ▶️ John is under there and click it and it will display a menu out from under the notch. That’s not good behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems like a bug. They should work on that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, what you should do is those menu extras, but you’re basically controlled by the system, more or less, of how they’re laid
⏹️ ▶️ John out, should have an awareness of not just like the menus do, and it should do the sort of same teleporting thing. And then the final thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that Quinn, quote unquote, discovered is that if you have lots of menus, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an app with tons of regular menus, they will just overwrite and
⏹️ ▶️ John push away the menu bar icons. That is not a new behavior. They’ll do that today in any computer with or without a notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John In a contest between those icons and the menus, the menus always win. And they don’t win in a graceful way. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like your icons get truncated or you scroll or there’s a sub menu. They just disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a couple of things to, software packages to deal with that, obviously there’s Bartender
⏹️ ▶️ John and what was the other one called, Vanilla maybe. Is that the one that does the same thing as Bartender but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cheaper? Yeah, mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, those are two apps that you can use that will let you sort of compress your own menu bar icons down to a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John size while still being able to get out of all of them. Um, and as for the notch, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are two applications to make it less prominent. One is called denotifier from the same person who made boring old menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and the other was called top notch. They’re both ways of essentially because the menu bar is transparent,
⏹️ ▶️ John putting a darkly colored thing behind the menu bar so that the menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John blends better with the notch, obviously you can just change the dark mode and do that and you’re, you could, or you could
⏹️ ▶️ John use a dark desktop background, but both of these tools lets you darken the menu bar or blend it with a notch
⏹️ ▶️ John without doing either one of those two things. So I’ll have links to all these in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest like before, like when you, if listeners, if you get one of these machines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest like instead of rushing to install one of these notch hiding utilities, the second you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the machine, try using it for a few days first because I think you’ll probably find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, Oh, actually you don’t actually care. You don’t actually notice it in practice. So just try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it’s designed first, because again, I think these apps are jumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve a problem that people think they have, but I think once you get these machines, you’ll quickly realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t actually have this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a lot more questions about the notch, like in terms of how does it behave if you’re on a menu bar hiding.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that space is still preserved and the menu bar just slides down into it. The various,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how it behaves with different apps that know about the notch versus ones that don’t in that compatibility check box
⏹️ ▶️ John and get info. And there’s lots of nuances to the behavior. Like this is just one example of
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu icons not being notch savvy yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I bet there are lots of other weird edge cases like that where you could lose things under the notch, which is a shame, but if the
⏹️ ▶️ John notch is young, I’m sure we’ll figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ha ha ha. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Membriful, Earnest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Lutron Caseta. and thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ 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, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, check podcast so long.
Helping with homework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had to help Adam with his homework this past week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is remarkable? His homework from gym class.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is slightly remarkable, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apparently they have recently learned or have started to learn flag football. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those of us who are non-Americans, it’s basically American football but without tackling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can play it responsibly with children. And the idea is you basically, Each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid basically has one or two little straps of fabric hanging off their waistbands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to do the function of, quote, of tackling them in regular American football, you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull one of these flags off of them. And it’s like, okay, that’s it. You’re down, or you’re out, or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, the assignment that the gym teacher assigned was sometime in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next two weeks, you have to watch a football game and fill out this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worksheet of questions about the football game that you’ve watched.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are there so many beer and Viagra ads?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I am not a sports person really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know the rules of the games enough to watch them and know what’s going on but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care about the games and I don’t care about any of the teams or the players and that’s why I’m not into sports. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I respect them as games but I just don’t care and therefore don’t watch them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have cable TV and so at first I’m like all right I first thought I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh no, how what if I just like go on YouTube and find video of an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old game? So I I’m like does it have to be a current football game or can it be any
⏹️ ▶️ John And I found is a I made this probably wouldn’t qualify for the homework But have you ever watched even Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John must know this, you know NFL films am I getting the name right Casey? Yes, I believe so old grainy
⏹️ ▶️ John film footage with this one guy’s voice narrating over where he says, and this was the greatest game you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John ever seen any through the, it’s just, it’s, they’re great. They’re amazing. They’re basically the football equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of, oh God, what’s his name? Chat room, Warren Miller. There we go. You didn’t even need it. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John the football equivalent of Warren Miller ski films. They’re not an actual game. It is someone
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a voiceover of a summary of a dramatic thing that happened. But even if you hate football, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are so amazing. NFL films, I think is what they’re called. Check it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Well, I didn’t know about that, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have called either one of us. You could have called Uncle Casey, who has season tickets to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a university football team’s games. And you could have called me up, but you didn’t. So what did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, at first we were at a restaurant one night, and I asked the bartender, I’m like, hey, when is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco football on? Because they have TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there that, normally when I’m in a restaurant, I do my best to ignore what’s on the TVs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they do occasionally show football games. And they even have a whole separate menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of junk food that you can order during football games. So I thought, all right, when are the games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on? And they said, Sunday is at one. Great, okay. So between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that day and Sunday, I forgot what time she had said, and so Sunday comes around, I’m like, what time do we go again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought, oh, I’ve always heard that Siri is really good at sports stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think you like sports. So great, all right. So I asked Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what time is the football game on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, Marco. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was presented with this list of like 30 games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, oh, I didn’t even consider the possibility, but of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s more than one game at a time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey because there’s a whole league of teams. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two teams? Yeah, it’s like, wait a minute, of course, like there’s this whole league, this whole country full of teams. they probably play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than one game a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You realize we are talking about this during the World Series. The World
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Series, which is not football, that’s happening right now. Yeah, but my point is, this is how clueless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of us, but particularly Marco is, we are recording during the World Series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’re, oh my gosh, Marco, you know, I’m trying very hard not to lose my mind and I’m trying very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to channel XKCD and the, Oh, you’ve never seen this, you know, then today’s your lucky day. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, it didn’t even cross your mind to go to ESPN.com and look at football schedules. Why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do that? I don’t even, because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answers your damn question. Well, Siri answered that one. She just told me like 30 different games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, most of them were on at one o’clock and I remembered, Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s right. She said one o’clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. So at me and Adam and Tiff, we, we made this family trip to go sit at the bar and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco empty restaurant in a beach town in the off season at one o’clock on a on a Sunday, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were like the only people in there. And they turn on the game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the game. I didn’t even ask which game it was, because part of the homework assignment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worksheet that I had to fill out, included in that was what teams are playing. So I thought, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is actually kind of fun, because he and I can try to figure this out together. Because I don’t know either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, for somebody who is an expert at watching football,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure all the different stats and things and abbreviations they’re showing on screen make total sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but to someone who is not an expert, first of all it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very confusing because what football power users want is to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on in all of the 30 games that are happening at once. And so they keep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, the very bottom row of stats on the screen was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of rotating carousel that was showing all of the games in the universe that were going on, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the scores of all the games in the universe. So first I had to figure out, wait, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the stats for this game that I think I’m watching right now? And then they keep showing highlights, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clips, and replays from all of the other games. So I’m like, okay, well I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care about all those. I’m trying to figure out one game, whatever one is the game that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people in the restaurant turned on as quote, the game. What game is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, eventually I see, I figure out on the screen that this series of letters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears to be the teams in this game. And I noticed that it was, whatever the abbreviation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured out it was the Giants versus the Patriots, which makes sense, we’re in New York, so of course they’re showing a Giants game, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, all right, so we wrote down, New York Giants, New England Patriots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it says, who is the home team and who’s the away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team? So then I’m like, oh crap. Oh, Marco. We watched for a few minutes, and eventually we saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wide shot of the field.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And you could see. When did you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? This past weekend, Sunday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Am I crazy? I thought it was Carolina Giants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, Jets, Patriots, was it Jets?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, I hope not for your sake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Who’s green and white? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yes, it’s Jets. Oh, my God, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the Giants fans are crying. you can’t tell the difference between the Giants and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jet. I am crying. I am a Giants fan. I’m listening to I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all right there green and white jets. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John Determining the home team is like well, what state is the stadium and that’s not going to help you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? Yes, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all right, so so for eventually they zoom out to a like a wide shot and I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the 50 yard line what I’m pretty sure was the Patriots logo, but then I’m like wait a minute. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco superimpose so much stuff on the video stream. Good, good
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that your tech angle is helping you out here. Not everything you see on that screen is real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I’m like, I know they’re superimposing the line of screen readers and then whatever the, whatever the, you know, 10 yard after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that line is called. I know they’re superimposing that. I’m sure they’re probably superimposing some of the ads on the side or whatever. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, like maybe that logo is superimposed, I don’t know. The ball is
⏹️ ▶️ John The glowing puck in the NHL, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, that’s not been a thing for a long time, I believe. But yes, I’m with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise me, right? Oh, I should also clarify that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no sound where we’re watching it. So I’m only seeing the video, which honestly is probably better. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it because a restaurant is the ideal viewing place for her?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, did it have subtitles on as well?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, it was just video. No subtitles. So but look because how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the hell would I have watched it? What would I have put like I’m not going to buy some streaming service to watch one game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my kid to fill out a worksheet worksheet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Download the NFL app for the Apple TV, pay for a month of it and watch a game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s not that simple with the NFL because the NFL hates people. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s never that simple. It’s never that simple with any of this crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t you just buy the NFL one and pay for it. I thought that was
⏹️ ▶️ John that was simple. It was not like local blackouts like the stupid baseball
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team. No, no. Remember? No, because this is when Lex had put up a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago about how you can get a foreign, uh, like an overseas DNS server
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that when you go to pay the NFL, it thinks, oh, you’re European, so I’ll totally take your money. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you try to pay the NFL in the States, they’re like, ha, get DirecTV because otherwise pound sand. I didn’t. I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is why you guys still can’t figure out. We’re like two minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey after. No, I know. This is why. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely know the answer. You just didn’t come to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the time it took you to argue with each other about how I could have watched it, I could have ridden my bike to this restaurant. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. We’re not arguing. I am educating John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John as to what the- I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say that well I but I had heard that NFL was the league that was there was more savvy about this stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have the stupid local TV rights and blackout things like the baseball has but you know I guess it’s still screwed up in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so I knew that there was a bunch of crap to deal with with how the heck you even go about watching sports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m like alright let me just outsource that to a place that I know broadcast them and then I can at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a good sandwich while I’m watching the game all right so anyway so So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I eventually figure out, okay, that logo does not appear to be superimposed, unless they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good job. I’m like, I’m going to assume this is where it is. So then I asked Siri, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Patriot Stadium or whatever? And because another question is like, what city and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state is the stadium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in New England. It’s right in the name. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s not a state.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so- You should have asked Adam, wait, what state is New England from? Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So eventually, Siri gives me some kind of info card that shows the stadium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a zoomed in map, but apparently the stadium’s in the middle of nowhere, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco town name is some town I’ve never heard of that’s not near really anything. Foxborough?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Ring a bell? There it is, that’s it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yep. I had to show Adam how to spell that. That was fun. Spelled like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, right, yeah, Worchester.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My Worchestershire sauce, I’m gonna say. So anyway, so eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we figured out that. And then it then came the even harder question. Who are the quarterbacks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no. All right, so I know enough about football to know that the person who the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hike person hands the ball to is probably the quarterback. But they pass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this information to the quarterback and then I’m like, wait a minute, who is that? I also know that teams might have multiple quarterbacks and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the person who’s normally the quarterback wasn’t playing this game. Or maybe they pulled them out earlier or something. I don’t know. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re like, all right, first we have to wait for each team to get the ball to figure out who the quarterback is currently playing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then we have to wait for a clear shot of the back of their shirt so we can see their number
⏹️ ▶️ John As big as you didn’t have the audio on, if you had the audio on, all they’re gonna do is talk about the quarterback and what he did or didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do on that last play.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but what are the odds that they’re gonna actually use his full name?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re gonna use his last name and you’ll be able to figure it out from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Yeah, you could Google for this once you know a last name and granted it took you half the game to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you name a famous quarterback who might have played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I knew about Tom Brady right but I’m like but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I don’t know if he was still playing he’s turns out he’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John These are all valid questions I’m just saying like you do know quarterbacks can you name how many quarter how many NFL quarterbacks
⏹️ ▶️ John living your dead can you name?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dan Marino from Ace Ventura. Pretty good. Miami
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that it? Tom Brady and
⏹️ ▶️ John Marino? That might be it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When do I need to know this? You’ve heard of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Oh, I only from like the video game series. Was John Madden ever a quarterback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just a commentator?
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s definitely a quarterback. He’s built for, built to be a quarterback, John Madden.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I don’t know. He’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old now, but you know, maybe back in the day. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say if you want to identify the quarterback, if you want to identify the quarterback in special teams as an on the field. It’s the guy who’s skinny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so we went through this exercise first, like, you know, figuring out, oh, look, here’s number, you know, ten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever appears to be the quarterback on this team. Let’s look up the roster, figure out who the heck that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we could we couldn’t get a shot of his last name on his shirt yet. And then eventually you look up. Oh, and then you get the you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last name. You confirm it and everything. Then we eventually the green team got the ball. We had to see who their quarterback was. Look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that up the green team.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zach somebody. And if you look that up, put right that down, all this stuff. Oh my god. And then, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came the most difficult question of all. Describe something interesting that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they, did this game, was it, they’re still using those flying cameras on the wires, Casey? Do they
⏹️ ▶️ John usually. That’s an interesting thing that happened during the game. It’s like when they did a replay, it was like a, it was like a drone was chasing
⏹️ ▶️ John the runner and it looked really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I didn’t, so, and you know, granted, this is all, not, not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a test of my patience and certainly of my ability to explain and figure stuff out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s also, it’s hard for a nine-year-old who’s not into sports to sit and focus for this long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this crazy thing. Because one thing that made this surprisingly difficult is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you realize when you watch sports regularly- How many ads there are. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, and I told Adam, I warned him, I said, look, pretty much every time they stop playing we’re going to see commercials. He’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was very hard to explain what’s going on or even to understand what’s going on because they’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cutting to replays and highlights and other games. Constantly. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual shot duration of each shot you get of the actual game as it’s live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so short compared to all of the replays and cuts and quick and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much going on it’s very hard for me to explain to him what was going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it happened because they kept cutting away and showing other stuff and it was hard for him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to understand like what is happening versus what’s a replay what is the game versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is some other game like it and then commercials cut it like it was manic trying to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this broadcast like in many ways I think it would have been easier to just go to a game and watch in the stadium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the exception of you wouldn’t get those wonderful line overlays which I think do make it easier to understand what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but other than that like it was it was very difficult to understand this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it and at one point at one point even as he’s Like, so, you know, they just go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forth in the field over and over again. Like, isn’t that kind of boring? Like, what’s the point? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the audio really would have helped here though, because especially with the replay, it’s just, there’s an audio, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John audio cues for the replay. The fact that the sound is cutting and replaying and the crowd noise, like a contrast.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do a good job of audio mixing to sort of make it clear what’s a flashback, what, you know, in movie parlance,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s a replay when they’re going to a different game. And the announcers say stuff. The announcers, the people who are calling
⏹️ ▶️ John the game say things that make it clear that this is a replay. Here we are seeing again, you can see where he
⏹️ ▶️ John did X, Y, and Z. Anyway, here we are, we’re back. Not that they say anyway, but you know, like audio helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, watching in a restaurant. I mean, on the one hand, maybe you could distract Adam with food when he gets bored,
⏹️ ▶️ John but on the other hand, it’s not the ideal viewing environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think watching football on TV is just not a very good, not a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideal like, you know, first sports explanation. Like I think probably the easiest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports explanation is to just go to like a AAA baseball game and sit there in the stands and get some hot dogs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch the baseball game in person in, you know, at a AAA stadium so you have nice close seats and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a lot of pressure or anything. Like that, and actually we look into doing that and it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s gonna happen this fall but it might happen next, whenever baseball starts. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it spring? Summer? I don’t know. Spring, I guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there’s spring training. You might’ve heard of that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s what we’re trying to do yeah they’re they’re their fall schedule is not so great for our ferry schedule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but but we’re gonna try to do this morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if only you knew someone if only you knew the phone number of someone if only you knew the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slack id on across six different slacks of someone that would have been overjoyed to tutor you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this very issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but i wasn’t the one who needed to learn well i mean maybe i do
⏹️ ▶️ John did he complete the assignment he completed the worksheet
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. You should complain to the gym teacher. This is a dumb assignment. I mean, it would be better if you said kids
⏹️ ▶️ John should watch a televised sport of their choice and answer some questions about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because then at least the kid gets to pick what they’re interested in, if they’re, whatever sport they’re interested in, or think they might be the most interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in, and then they can write about that. Because like, teaching kids about, you know, organized sports so that they’re televised,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is a valid role for gym, but focusing on the NFL makes me think like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Someone said, is he getting kickbacks from the NFL? He’s not, the NFL is cheap, they would never do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. They don’t have to though, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re the most popular sport in this country.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, and the chat room is asking, what was the interesting thing that happened that Adam wrote down for that question?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even remember. It was just something, some really stupid thing. When the one team ran really hard and got the ball, it was something like that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of us had just lost so much patience. I knew I was about to lose, and I’m like, let’s just write something down here and get out of here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you explain to Adam about CTE?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the brain injury stuff? Yes. Yes, we did actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think that is the most salient point about the NFL. This sport shouldn’t exist, and it exists to exploit
⏹️ ▶️ John the bodies of these people who get paid millions of dollars but often have terrible consequences and no one cares because they just get
⏹️ ▶️ John ground up in this giant machine and really the NFL should not exist as it currently stands. But since it’s the most popular sport,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will never do that. Well, I wouldn’t say never because unlike the Second Amendment, it’s not in the Constitution.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in theory, if we ever get a clue, we could stop destroying people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John brains with the NFL.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is exactly why I stopped paying attention. So my football team, my professional football team is New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Giants. And this is why I almost never watch the NFL anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course, when you ask about college football, we’re just going to sweep that under the rug real quick. But for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NFL, it’s just so exploitative. And it just made me feel so gross that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just really stopped paying attention. But the answer to the question of what interesting, which probably wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been good for his grade, but I think the most reasonable answer to the question is what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting about the game to you two. It’s how that yellow first down line works. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read a really fascinating story about the development and how it works. I was Googling trying to find it and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it. But my recollection is that they have to take hyper-accurate 3D models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the stadiums because the stadiums don’t have perfectly flat fields and so on and so forth. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyper-accurate readouts of where the cameras are pointing and where they’re panned and tilted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and zoomed, and then they’re running this through a series of computers to paint the stuff on as quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as possible as the game is happening. It’s really, really fascinating all the technology that goes into this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think even you, Marco, would appreciate that, even if you didn’t appreciate football.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because honestly, I remember when they started adding those lines, whenever that was, like 15 years ago, whatever, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really made a massive improvement in how watchable football games on TV became.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was the first time that it was actually nicer to watch it on TV than in person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. Not necessarily in all ways, but yeah. So I thought that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great technological advance that they made. It is unfortunate that it’s for such an overall terrible sport,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yes, we did have that conversation. But yeah, I mean the most interesting thing that happened in the game was the mahi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandwich I ate and it was really good. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my gosh. Do you bring these things up just to troll me? Is that what’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now? Are you doing this? You’re describing this beautiful laptop that you have and you’re telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, oh, if only I understood football, if only there was some way for me to understand football,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it would have made this assignment so much easier. Do you do this just to mess with my emotions? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand football fine enough. I just didn’t know when to watch it or whose teams were playing or what their names were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. I was explaining what was happening to Adam. It was just really hard to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love you so much, but I hate you so much right now. I hate you so much.