458: This Is Not Your First Plane Crash
22 Nov 2021Pants hacks, mystery beeps, password-manager battles, and Casey’s totally fine setup.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Energizer lithium AA batteries and 9V for smoke alarms
- Marco’s utterly bananas password-managers setup
- The ATP on-demand store is back!
- Follow-up:
- Meta/Facebook
- In the Enterprise
workplace.com- An aside about scrolljacking
- Hardware prowess
- Gaming
- Wearing VR headsets
- In the Enterprise
- Apple TV+ on the web
- HomePod problems abound (via Joe Mesterhazy)
- Plex and two-zone playback
- Bullstrap leather case review
- Marco’s pants update
- Meta/Facebook
- Laying out the Apple Silicon roadmap
#askatp:- How can one keep an older MacBook Pro running well? (via Stephan)
- How do we organize our pictures? (via Guilherme Alles)
- What’s the ∆ between a junior & senior developer? (via Roar Lochar)
- Post-show: John’s mystery beeps
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Chapters
- Everything’s ultrafine.gif
- ATP On-Demand Store
- Follow-up: Facebook metaverse
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Where to watch Apple TV+
- Grim HomePod reports
- Two-zone Plex audio
- Bullstrap leather case
- Sponsor: Rows
- Marco’s Pants: Finale 🖼️
- Sponsor: Earnest
- The Apple-silicon roadmap
- #askatp: Keep a 2015 MBP going
- #askatp: Photos safe-zones
- #askatp: Junior vs. senior developer
- Ending theme
- John’s Beeps 🖼️
Everything’s ultrafine.gif
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So update as I’m sitting here. Can you still hear me?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh no. What did you touch? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anything. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here minding my own business. Is anything wet? No. I mean, other than my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forehead now, I’m sitting here minding my own business and the LG was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know about this. And it turns itself off. You don’t need to see to see the screen to podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then turned itself right back on, which is weird though, because I’m talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you on the phone. the USB mix, it’s fine. I’m talking to you on the MixPre 3. Which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged into that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right? Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what the hell just happened. That was weird. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right, well, Godspeed all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you, so, okay, question. Do you have batteries in the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sled on the back of the MixPre
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. And in fact, I have a reminder in Due, D-U-E, to check those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey batteries every six months to make sure they haven’t exploded acid everywhere. And that six month reminder just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened a week or two ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, for God’s sakes, spend the extra four bucks to get lithiums.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Do those not, do they not explode everywhere? They don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, they’re incredibly stable for like 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that, I genuinely did not know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they weigh basically nothing. They’re fantastic. The only problem is- They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as alkalines, right? No, lithiums, no, they’re great. They just, they’re a little expensive and you know, they’re not rechargeable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when Marco says a little expensive, that’s dangerous.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, by last as long, I mean like, like if you tried to drain them, they don’t have as many watt hours, do they?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think they still do. Rechargeables don’t usually. Rechargeables don’t last as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John non-rechargeable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I know what you’re talking about. You’re not talking about lithium ion rechargeable, but like about the plain old lithium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. Yeah, I’m talking about the single-use non-rechargeable, like Energizer or lithium, whatever is, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome for things where weight matters because they are very, very lightweight, but also for things where long shelf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life matters. Here’s a life hack. If you have one of those smoke alarms with nine-volt batteries and they beep every three years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the batteries just die, use lithium nine-volt batteries. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a 10-year smoke alarm. that too but if you you know assuming if that’s for people who still use an eyeball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones or who are stuck somewhere where they can’t control the smoke alarms put one of those 10-year 9-volt batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there because they are awesome because when your smoke alarm beeps for low battery usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not because the battery was used to depletion it’s because the battery basically slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self discharged oh just with age and the lithiums last way longer than that so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely a little life hack there use those in your 9-volt smoke alarms instead of the alkaline ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not trying to be funny. This is all new thought technology for me. So you’re saying a lithium battery will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never just vomit acid every, because you know with an alkaline battery after a long time, oftentimes it’ll just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explode acid everywhere. You’re saying lithiums don’t do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you leave an alkaline battery in something long enough, it will do that. Like every time, it’s just a matter of how long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be. Lithium, the ones I’m talking about, now this is different from like lithium ion batteries that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are rechargeable that are in our computers and phones. That’s a different.
⏹️ ▶️ John also won’t puke stuff all over the inside of your stuff, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yes. But, although they have other issues, like if you charge them and they might swell and explode. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m talking about is the single use, non-rechargeable, lithium, double A’s, and nine volts. Those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve only used the ones from Energizer. I don’t know if there’s other brands that make them, probably. But I’ve only used the Energizer ones. But they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are great because they have very, very, very long shelf lives. And weigh nothing. So, if either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those things are important to you, oh, and they’re very stable and they won’t leak crap all over stuff. So if you’re putting batteries into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something expensive, where leaking battery acid into it might not be a very good thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somewhere that you expect to have to have the batteries in there for a very long time, like multiple years before opening it up or replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, go lithium, it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Huh, I’ll have to do that. Although $15 for four pack of Energizer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lithium AA’s, my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a lot, usually they’re about $2 each.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness, well, either way. I guess you guys are worth it, So I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put that in my shopping cart.
⏹️ ▶️ John That will not cause your LG monitor to stay on all the time, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it won’t, but it’ll at least give you a consistent recording when your LG monitor inevitably continues to flake out because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is ultra fine. Hey, if it, I mean, honestly, if it really is that bad, I’ll just plug in the MixPre
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the computer if I really need to. I just don’t want to, I shouldn’t have to, darn it. And you know, this would all be better if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple just made a monitor. Have we ever talked about that? We should talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No one’s ever brought that up before. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, I have some news.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I should share this, but I think I’m going to. Oh no. Tiff told me the other day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’s like, can I tell you something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is never, ever good, but carry on. She
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I kind of missed the touch bar. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever, that’s fine. She
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it for emoji? No, for autocomplete and web forms, which honestly, that’s the only thing I ever liked about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally understand that because it is really nice to have those little autocomplete blobs when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filling out a web form and you have them on the iOS and you have them in the touch bar and they never brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to Mac. Don’t you see the
⏹️ ▶️ John autocomplete options in the text field? I mean, I guess it could show the same thing in the touch bar, but aren’t they
⏹️ ▶️ John already on your screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if it’s like a username and password, yeah. But I’m talking about filling in an address or name or email,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those kind of things, where it’ll offer the autocomplete just like- Chrome does that. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It does though, Chrome says,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if there’s a first name field, like and I just click in it, it shows a pop-up menu
⏹️ ▶️ John with like my name, my address or whatever, like all my contact info and then I just pick that autocomplete and it fills in
⏹️ ▶️ John all the rest of the fields in the form.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean Safari has a feature like that but it doesn’t always kick in. By the way, oh my God, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just have started using the, as part of my new setup, like when I redid everything for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new computers, I enabled the one password Safari extension, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new one. Now, every time, so I use one password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also use iCloud Keychain. I know I probably should just pick one or the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and go all in on one of them, but I like different parts of each one. And so right now I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the most Casey thing you’ve ever said in your entire life. I only use one password.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no other password managers. I only use one password. And you’re sitting here saying, well, I kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one, and I kind of like that one. So I’m going to use both and make my life a living hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think the most case thing would be if I’m like, well, I really want to only use one password. But because I’m paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iCloud storage, I feel like I should take away the one I like more that works better and switch over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this other one that doesn’t work as well because I’m paying for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The real case answer is he’d keep a text file on his desktop. And any time he needed to autocomplete something, he’d open up the text
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and paste the passwords out of it into his form. Because then he knows where all his passwords are, and they’re not an
⏹️ ▶️ John opaque data store that he has no control over. You’ll be looking for your passwords, but Casey knows they’re all in that file on his desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s almost too simple, though. I feel like you have to involve the garage door opener somehow. Like, how would he know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what state his garage door is in if it didn’t involve an encrypted text file?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the file couldn’t be on his desktop, it would have to be on a Raspberry Pi attached to the outside of his house
⏹️ ▶️ John that he connects to through SSH.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey First of all, I’m still here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second of all, I’m gonna need so much therapy after this episode, oh my God. Anyway, so in your bananas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And you thought we didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seriously. In your bananas to system setup, you were trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just throwing it out there. Viewing any webpage that has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text field, it’s like my screen gets covered in dialogues that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the one password extension is, whoo, it’s aggressive in like how much it covers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up on the screen and how it, you know, It shows this giant floating box under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every login form that it finds. And it usually asks me to unlock it because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently unlocked because I haven’t used it in a little while or something. And then that seems to fight with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud keychain. If they’re both trying to suggest passwords,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s kind of unclear which one wins.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you put your one password into iCloud keychain so that you can unlock one password with your iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco create some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco singularity. I don’t know if it’ll auto-fill that. Like the box that’s injected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the page from the extension, yeah, that probably not. But oh my God, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me just tell you people out there, don’t do what I’m doing. Pick one or the other and go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all in on it. This is, what I have now is a total mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t recommend this mess.
ATP On-Demand Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The ATP store is different now. This is where I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normally say it’s gone and you’re not allowed to use it anymore, but that’s not true. We now are back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the on-demand store and it is slightly different than it was before. Before you could get the original M1 shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, this is a rainbow colors in the front, nothing on the back. You may not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s incredible chip diagram because you missed out on the limited time offer. Well, now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we also have M1 Pro and M1 Max equivalents. Again, nothing on the back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you cannot have the sweet chip diagrams, but you may have M1, M1 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or M1 Max, all available on demand in TriBlend or 100% cotton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever you want. And I believe I actually should have checked this before I started talking, but here we are. I’ll just vamp for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit while I figure out the answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my own question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can also get these apparently in sweatshirt form, which is news to me, but tank top form
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also onesies. So that’s kind of cool too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there are. These aren’t for the people who listen to the show. I know we said this before. These are the people who don’t listen to the show. I don’t know how we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show, but we should at least mention it if you missed out and you want to get a lesser inferior shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, this is which episode do we talk about this on? I don’t want to explain it all again,
⏹️ ▶️ John but sometimes people wear our shirts and YouTube videos and then people watch YouTube videos really want
⏹️ ▶️ John the shirts and then they’re not for sale anymore. We want to have some way where if someone sees it in a YouTube video,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can at least get the shirt. Because if we don’t do this, people illegally sell our shirts all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And we have to keep telling
⏹️ ▶️ John them. That’s not a joke. That doesn’t happen. Like, for real. Like, multiple times. Like, I think we’re up to like five or six times
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve had to do copyright takedown notices on people trying to sell our shirts. So this is entirely for that. And those
⏹️ ▶️ John people have no idea what ATP is, and they don’t listen to this podcast. So this on-demand store mostly exists
⏹️ ▶️ John just so we can put a legit link in for people who want the shirt. But you, dear listeners to the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual podcast, you can wait until our next sale. Thank you very much if you participated in our recent sale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, thank you very, very much. That sale actually went really well. And you know, come to think of it, I should have done some analytics.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah man, I’ve been doing much better about being on top of things with this show, and apparently I’ve just failed with this two-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. But nevertheless, I should have done some analytics to see whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Max beat the Pro, which I’m pretty sure it did, and how handily it did so.
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely beat it, it was like two to one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was it two to one? Thank you, John. You’re not supposed to be doing any research, but here we are. All right.
Follow-up: Facebook metaverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-ups. So apparently someone from within Facebook was trying to defend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their honor as much as somebody who works at Facebook can. Tell me, John, what’s going on with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meta and enterprise stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of points from
⏹️ ▶️ John anonymous Facebook employee talking about the meta stuff. So on the enterprise, this person says, it was mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John that Facebook has no experience in the enterprise. I would simply like to point you to workplace.com, a
⏹️ ▶️ John website that I had never gone to or heard of until this email. It’s essentially Facebook, but for work,
⏹️ ▶️ John and has been quite successful, so says the person who works for Facebook. So Facebook does have some experience
⏹️ ▶️ John dealing with and selling services to businesses, and meetings and VR directly tie into the same service. Further, Microsoft Teams
⏹️ ▶️ John integrates with Workplace, so many businesses that use Workplace also pay Microsoft. I’m not saying Microsoft slash Salesforce
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have more success with business, but Facebook isn’t entirely new to this either. If you go to workplace.com
⏹️ ▶️ John and look at it, and you see the header on the top of the website, It says, predictably,
⏹️ ▶️ John workplace from meta, because they’re not going to say from Facebook, because the workplace
⏹️ ▶️ John and Facebook do not mix. So more evidence of the branding being important to trying to sell into the
⏹️ ▶️ John enterprise. But I’m assuming this product predates the meta rebranding. I don’t actually know what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Presumably, it’s like Facebook for work, but they don’t want to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Man, this is big. This website is big corporate software energy. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John everything about it. But that’s what you have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sell to businesses.
⏹️ ▶️ John This doesn’t look any better or worse than any other enterprise thing, but you know, Facebook does have a
⏹️ ▶️ John toe in that market at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry for interrupting you a second time, but here we are. If you were to both load workplace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and scroll down, do you see the like parallax sort of situation going on there? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has this company announcements image in the upper right. And as you scroll, it also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scrolls the company announcements to like give you a sample of what it all looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we digging that? Are we not digging that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate any kind of scroll-based animation. Like, to me, any kind of scroll jacking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or things like this, I know why people think they’re fancy or they’re cute or they’re cool or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But to me, interfering with scrolling is like interfering with text selection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cut, copy, and paste. Like, this is a fun- Like, scrolling is a fundamental feature of the UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I feel like the content should be below that layer. It should not operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that layer. You know, like, it shouldn’t react to it. It should just allow you to scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however you need and want to. And the content should just be scrollable content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I mostly agree with you. However, in this case, it’s not like Apple’s oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way overdone scroll jacking where it completely disrupts the way a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is supposed to scroll. In this case, we’re just getting sort of like a parallax-y sort of effect where it’s not interrupting how the
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not parallax. It’s trying to make it like, Oh, and by the way, you’re also scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John the view in this screenshot, because the screenshot is also of a window and the window has scrollable content. So
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine if when scrolling the page that the screenshot is on, you’re also kind of sort of tiny little bit scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff in that window, which is cute and honestly not as offensive as the Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. What Margo is talking about is basically like, we want it to be, because we’re funny duddies,
⏹️ ▶️ John or some people want it to be like you printed out a webpage and then put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a big long scroll behind a viewport and then just move the piece of paper that you printed up and down through the viewport,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That it is essentially a static thing and scrolling just changes where the viewport is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously that is a tried and true model and it’s very stable and people understand it and it’s simple. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple model is more like, to use the scroll wheel as an example, because that’s how you happen to use a scroll wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m weird and old. It’s as if the scroll wheel is like turning the crank on
⏹️ ▶️ John a mechanical box that has a bunch of animated toys inside it. It’s like, what does it do? It just turns the
⏹️ ▶️ John crank. Stop thinking of it as scrolling and start thinking of it as, this is a clockwork toy
⏹️ ▶️ John that has an animation that goes forward and backwards. And when you turn this crank, you make the animation go forward and backwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, yep, yep. And that, all right, that’s also a thing. I find that
⏹️ ▶️ John very frustrating when I’m looking for content because all the tools that we’re used to using, quickly scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John from one place to the other, home and page up, page down, the find tool, find in browser window,
⏹️ ▶️ John work tend to work in strange ways with this clockwork mechanism that used to be a static document
⏹️ ▶️ John but is now you know, a wind up toy. So it can be done well, it can be done poorly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the worst I feel like is when I’m reading like a news story on like a newspaper website that is just simply prose.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s doing that it’s like, who you’re trying to impress, you have text and maybe you have like two photos. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know New York Times like Oh, New York Times interactive snow thing. But it’s like, there’s a time and a place
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. If you want to show off go for it. But I’m just reading a 15 paragraph text story with two photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gaining anything by making it a clockwork toy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. So I’m like I was looking for something to put in the show notes for scroll jacking in case you know people weren’t familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I stumbled upon Envato.com, Envato.com will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as I’m scrolling down just kind of trying to quickly skim this make sure it’s not complete and utter trash. Look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they use as one of the examples of terrible, terrible usability. If you wouldn’t mind scrolling down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey below the delicacy of usability heading, what do they have there, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still scrolling. It’s so hard to find the mute button in Zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, the Mac Pro page, the old Mac Pro page. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trash can Mac Pro page.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, God. But like every Apple page is like that now. We’ve just gotten used to it. Like the Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John no worse than all the Apple web pages that are on now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it says in this site, let me state that I’ve seen amazing parallax layouts that perform great when designed properly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s Mac Pro site is, in my opinion, one of the worst offenders of bad parallax design and scroll hijacking.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re saying parallax because it’s like the animation technique where the things that are in front of you move
⏹️ ▶️ John more than the things that are far away to make it look like a 3D type world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, but that’s not necessarily what a lot of these things do. They’re not trying to induce parallax.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like these things are closer to you and those things are farther away. So when you scroll, the things closer go by faster than things,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that they do at all. They’re just like, well, we have arbitrary level of layers and by turning the crank in this machine, some of them fly
⏹️ ▶️ John by faster than others. It has nothing to do with any sort of simulating depth from the viewport
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that, which is fine. Again, it doesn’t have to simulate depth, but these little clockwork machines,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like they need to be really amusing and engaging or serve a purpose. And a lot of the times when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to the Mac Pro page at apple.com, I’m there to get information. Like my task is not let
⏹️ ▶️ John me be wowed by your little clockwork toy. My task is I want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John information. What’s the maximum amount of RAM? You know, what date was this page updated?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t know. I want to find something out. Or I want to see a picture of something. That’s the worst. If you want to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, where is the close-up picture of the ports on the back of this thing? And you realize you can’t get to them by
⏹️ ▶️ John grabbing the scroll thrub and thumb and moving because it’ll just fly by too fast because it’s like an animation that,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, this is a tangent. We need to get off this. Sorry. We’ve been scroll jacked by scroll jacking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. So we were talking about workplace for meta is where we left off. Yes. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So next point to be addressed by the anonymous Facebook employee. Would Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John be the company to solve the hardware problem? Oculus is the most successful company selling VR headsets today.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still relatively niche compared to smartphones, but based on public data, meta slash Oculus is the leading company in the space.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t automatically mean no one will do a better job and win. But if you were to think of who’s most likely to make VR hardware that’s good enough to win,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oculus should at least be considered is a strong choice. I did point out that Facebook bought Oculus, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea. I did point out that Oculus was the leader when they bought them. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we talked about, not that they fumbled Oculus, but they have not, it has not
⏹️ ▶️ John been a continued smashing success and other competitors have gained ground on them. But the more important
⏹️ ▶️ John point is, despite Oculus being the leader in the space for some time, and arguably maybe still now, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on how you look at it, neither Oculus nor any of its competitors have
⏹️ ▶️ John solved this problem, have, you know, have have cracked the problem in the way that the iPhone did for smartphones,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We’re still in the stage where people are trying things, seeing what will work. The technology is just
⏹️ ▶️ John not there yet. We don’t have anything that’s small enough, light enough, cheap enough, you know, like the dream of having a thing that looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John a pair of regular reading glasses that has a high resolution, high refresh, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John going into your eyeballs and all, you know, like, and can like blank out of your whatever, like we’re not there yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ John all of these companies are still, you know, despite that you’ve got the leader, but no one has figured it out yet. So we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know who’s gonna figure it out. And yes, Oculus is in the running and it’s good that Facebook bought them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I say I don’t have faith that Facebook can solve this problem because they haven’t before. Now that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John to say that they won’t. There’s lots of things that Apple hadn’t done before. Apple had never made his own chips before and they’re really good at that. And they did
⏹️ ▶️ John it by buying a company. Like it’s not impossible, But you would like when
⏹️ ▶️ John a company that has never achieved something before boldly proclaims that it will not only do it, but be the leader and usher
⏹️ ▶️ John in a revolution before they’ve actually done anything. It’s worthy of skepticism,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like Apple’s not out there saying, you know, five years ago, we’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the leaders in self driving cars, right? They were trying to do that. They’re buying lots of people and, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, working towards it, but they didn’t sort of pre announce that we’ve solved this problem before they even solved it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you say, well, but they bought all, you know, I don’t know. They probably did buy companies. But we’ve hired all these important people. They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t. Or to give an example, when they bought PA Semi, they didn’t say, we will soon be the leader in the
⏹️ ▶️ John silicon chip space. They never said that. They just didn’t say anything until they were. And even now, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John brag about it because they don’t have to because they’ve got the goods. And this Facebook employee says,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is nothing like Apple and social networks, as in Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John notoriously bad at social networks. And he’s saying, Facebook isn’t that bad. Facebook at least bought a company that was good at it and
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely screwed them up. So that is true. But then again, Apple has actually tried to field
⏹️ ▶️ John social networks and failed. So it’s not like Apple has never done anything. They’ve just not shown that they’re good at doing it yet. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook has also not shown that they’re good at that. They shown that they’re good at buying a company that’s good at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that company that they bought, didn’t sort of continue on its rocket like trajectory and has competitors that
⏹️ ▶️ John are gaining on them, I feel like to the point that games are creating software
⏹️ ▶️ John people actually want to use. Facebook has already been buying companies that make the most successful apps and games for the quest. Most recently
⏹️ ▶️ John acquired the company behind
⏹️ ▶️ John Supernatural, which is a popular VR workout app. Yeah, that’s as I said, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that Facebook has to do it itself. It could just wait for someone else to do it and buy them. Buying companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that make good VR games makes sense because if no one is making games or whatever for your platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if the people doing it aren’t successful, it behooves you to fund them or buy them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like there there may be a limit to
⏹️ ▶️ John how successful you can be by acquiring companies that are good at doing the thing that you weren’t able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John yourselves. Again, pointing to Apple, they’ve done that many times, it’s an important thing how they bought next it saved the entire company.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was kind of reverse takeover. Like I don’t, you know, I’m not saying that’s not a viable strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s also not an easy strategy. The history of big companies buying little companies that are more innovative
⏹️ ▶️ John and that working out well, is littered with the bodies of companies that just bought up all all these
⏹️ ▶️ John great smaller companies and just squandered it right. Apple is the exception. There is not the rule.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so far, Facebook has been continuing like most big companies, they buy small companies, you get talent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Occasionally, you can make an important strategic acquisition, mostly the most successful acquisitions are buying companies that already have the
⏹️ ▶️ John customer bases like WhatsApp and stuff, or really what you’re buying is not so much the application or the technology, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John people we want the WhatsApp user base. We want the Instagram user base. And yeah, there are apps and
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, but that’s not really the whole story there. And then the final point,
⏹️ ▶️ John why do you need to wear VR headsets for hours at a time? This person says another thing I didn’t understand is the assumption that VR
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be comfortable to wear for many hours at a time to be successful. I don’t see that I think if VR becomes something that you use a few
⏹️ ▶️ John times a day for 15 to 30 minutes each, that’s likely a success. I don’t believe VR is supposed to replace of
⏹️ ▶️ John any of any of our current devices. It should be a new medium that becomes a new option to take part in, as the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware gets better, it’ll probably become a big thing to play or hang out in for a little while at a time. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s true that VR doesn’t have to be something that’s comfortable for hours on end. You could just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, use it for your one or two meetings per day if you have a very optimistic view of how
⏹️ ▶️ John many meetings people have per day. Again, I can’t think, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if VR was used for any kind of meeting, the idea that that equals 15 to 30 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe I just have too many meetings. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John metaverse, the pitch of the metaverse is not that it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing you do once per day for 15 to 30 minutes or even three times per day, 15 to 30 minutes, but more
⏹️ ▶️ John like it would be a place that you want to spend time in the same way that people don’t play World of Warcraft
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple times a day for 15 to 30 minutes, right? The reason people have longer sessions with those
⏹️ ▶️ John type of environments is because those are places where they want to be because it’s immersive fun has all the qualities that the metaverse
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to have or even just as simple as staring at a computer or your phone using your
⏹️ ▶️ John web browser to buy stuff shopping potential use of the metaverse ties well into
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook’s advertising business people don’t shop in you know tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John increments of time people spend time going through websites looking for sales clicking around because it’s a pleasurable
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do, to windowshop online, to browse for things, to do product research. Almost
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that has been described as being part of the metaverse that people already do but not
⏹️ ▶️ John in VR, they do for extended periods of time because it’s an enjoyable
⏹️ ▶️ John or productive thing to do. And so for VR to be part of that, it
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be so onerous that you can only tolerate in small chunks. It should be
⏹️ ▶️ John either completely transparent or else, ideally, desirable that I prefer to
⏹️ ▶️ John do my research on what my next dishwasher will be on my big computer with the big screen with a thousand browser
⏹️ ▶️ John tabs because that is a tool that helps me get that job done better. I don’t go there and go, oh I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to endure my computer I hope I don’t get too motion sick during this one hour in dishwasher research session. I want to go
⏹️ ▶️ John on my computer instead of my phone because it has a bigger screen and that’s a useful tool for me to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that task. Shopping. Whatever. Repeat for any other activity, whether it’s hanging out with friends
⏹️ ▶️ John or like playing a game or even, you know, taking a meeting or something. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to feel like, oh, I gotta put on a VR headset again for this meeting and just thinking of that sweaty
⏹️ ▶️ John thing stuck into my face. Like, you know, same thing with a laptop or a phone. We don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to hold your phone in front of your face for eight hours a day and stare at it, but we do have to say you will feel
⏹️ ▶️ John comfortable having your phone with you all day long and using it whenever you need to use it because you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the phone for something, right? Same thing with your computer. Doesn’t mean you have to sit there in front of it all day long for
⏹️ ▶️ John eight hours and stare at it, but it should be the type of thing that you can sit at with on
⏹️ ▶️ John with it on your desk at work all day long and use it for its intended purpose without
⏹️ ▶️ John undo effects again. See also RSI, having a good chair, all that other stuff. So VR needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to fit into that and right now even just the ordeal of putting the thing on your face for a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John meetings would start to feel a little bit onerous, even if when you’re in those meetings, it offers a superior
⏹️ ▶️ John immersive experience that you wouldn’t get by staring at your laptop with teams. But see, past episode where
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark talked about how many people might not want their meetings to be more immersive.
⏹️ ▶️ John The final point here, the dream for AR is something different. I don’t think the two should be confused. That I kind of disagree
⏹️ ▶️ John with because I mean, obviously, they are different. AR is where you’re seeing the real world and it is being
⏹️ ▶️ John augmented with virtual stuff. But in the end, it’s it’s more or less the same
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. It’s just a question of what canvas you’re painting on. AR is harder, but they are also as potentially richer
⏹️ ▶️ John because all the things that you can do in VR, you can also do an AR and
⏹️ ▶️ John by augmenting the real physical world with this virtual stuff, many new possibilities open up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Technologically speaking, and in terms of like, what does it what does this offer that we’re looking at my phone doesn’t offer,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same like the advantages of AR and VR, what they offer over mediums
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t have an R at the end, what they offer over your phone, your laptop, your computer is
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it’s like a 3d world that reacts to where you’re looking around, right? And yes, the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John is technically different, but the sort of goal mental, the something
⏹️ ▶️ John extra special that I are in VR have, it’s the same something extra special. It’s just a question of where they’re painting
⏹️ ▶️ John that whether it’s just on a blank field of pixels that they control entirely or onto the real world.
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Where to watch Apple TV+
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we also got a little bit of feedback with regard to Apple TV and Apple TV Plus. Don
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Leibs writes, the Apple TV app is not the only way to watch Apple TV Plus, which we all knew and I think everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single one of us forgot. Don writes, I watch it in my web browser at tv.apple.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which again, I think we all knew that. We all completely forgot. There is that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Igor Makarov writes, I tried Apple TV Plus on a Windows PC and well, the web app is really awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple doing a poor web app? You don’t say. Igor continues, I watched one episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there were weird black screen blankings at random times. Well, that’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John uncomfortable. I mean, you watch it and it’s ultra fine. It’s not the fault of the web app at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s the case. And three times the player just halted and wouldn’t restart. I had to reload the page to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get going again. The app forgot my progress, of course. My network connection is good. And while the video was playing, the quality was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are four identically labeled options, spring with subtitles, not counting the closed post-captioning. The first one simply didn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the app also didn’t remember my selection. Sweet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sounds like the web experience of Apple TV Plus is not great, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, perhaps not. Uh, good.
Grim HomePod reports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Joe Mesterhazy writes with regard to Marcos HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the HomePod popping is a design problem that will eventually kill your HomePod. Cool. This guy diagnosed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but there’s no cure. And there’s a YouTube link, which we’ll put in the show notes. It is a timestamp link to about 40 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a 1 to 3 volt DC offset always being fed to the speaker, which slowly cooks it. Lost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one HomePod, and my other is doing it now too. Awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The good thing is, so I am a little bit validated with the HomePod feedback so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, both that it seems like my HomePod problems happen to a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also there are a lot of people out there who like their HomePods as much as I like mine, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very disappointed also that there seems to be no replacement coming anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, if ever, for the full-sized HomePod. And so while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sad that it does sound like I’m probably going to lose these HomePods pretty soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not the only person who who likes my HomePod, you know, because it was such a relative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flop in the market. You know, you wouldn’t expect many of us fans to really be out there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are dozens of us. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all listening to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John this YouTube video, I don’t know how much stake I put in. I don’t know enough to judge whether this
⏹️ ▶️ John is this analysis in this video is correct or entirely wrong. It’s just an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of someone who’s got some HomePods that are doing weird stuff and is trying to fix them and getting weird
⏹️ ▶️ John results. So take it with a grain of salt, but it does seem like home pods have a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of potential ailments that are causing them to not be reliable. That’s the bottom line. The bottom line is people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John home pods and have had them for a while say it’s just not working like it used to. Where the fault lies, we’re not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, but either way, it’s not good because as Marco pointed out, they’re not making more of them.
Two-zone Plex audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve been on a journey, y’all. We talked, I think, last week in an aside about Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and two-speaker feedback or playback or, you know, two-zone playback. So what I want to do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to have a video playing using Plex in my living room and then have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the audio being piped not only to the living room but to the screened-in porch or perhaps some other place in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve been saying that this, with Plex specifically, once I selected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screened-in porch as an additional speaker, the audio would only come out in the screened-in porch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would not come out in the living room anymore. So, Ebernett on Twitter points out, the issue is a lack of AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support and Plex, and it’s not a problem with tvOS. So, I think to myself, oh, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I finally have to listen to the entire internet who has told me I really need to use Enfuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Enfuse fans are rabid. They are, to Tesla, no, nothing nothing’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as bad as Tesla. But they’re rabid, I tell you. And so everyone has been telling me for years, try Infuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try Infuse, try Infuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I do. And this is basically an alternative to Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I’m a little ignorant on this because I’ve only used it for a few minutes, but my limited understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Infuse is that it is similar to Plex in that it’s like an omnivorous consumer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike Plex, it doesn’t require server-side software. So you can just point it at a network
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share, for example, and it’ll slurp up all the media that’s there, and is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to Plex, is fairly omnivorous in what it’ll eat. You know, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play an MKV, it’ll play AVIs, it’ll play all sorts of different things. And supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it runs really well on Apple TV for reasons. And so it’s supposed to be very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing I use Infuse for, the thing that distinguishes it for me, distinguishes it from Plex,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right what you said about what it does and how it operates, but the main reason I installed
⏹️ ▶️ John it and the main reason I turned to it is that Plex being a server
⏹️ ▶️ John will, depending on your settings and sometimes in ways that are unexpected, try
⏹️ ▶️ John to feed you video that it thinks is appropriate for your device, which may involve transcoding, right? Happening
⏹️ ▶️ John on the server. And that can be a problem if you have a weak server or if it’s transcoding
⏹️ ▶️ John something in a weird way or if it’s transcoding when you didn’t want it to be. Whereas in Fuse, there is no server. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John point it to your SMB share, setting aside it’s all metadata lookup and all this stuff, if you point it to your SMB share,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that the video and audio decompression of that file
⏹️ ▶️ John off of your server is happening on your device. And so if you think you have a fast device like an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro, but your Plex server is choking on something, try Infuse because then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to give your iPad Pro a chance to do the decoding. And then you’ll know, like, is this file
⏹️ ▶️ John screwed up or is it just because my Plex server is too slow?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So, and the onboarding for Infuse was not super obvious to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. maybe I’m just a dummy, I don’t know. But it did eventually slurp up my Plex library by connecting to Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess it just basically looked at everything and said, okay, this is what’s available and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to consume it. But frustratingly, it doesn’t use any of Plex, the Plex server’s metadata that you kind of alluded to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a moment ago. It will go and figure out the metadata for each of these files on its own.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my very limited understanding is for a long time, that was really crummy because then every one of your infused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clients, like your iPad, your phone, your Apple TV, they all need to repeat the same work over and over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds like Apple, doesn’t it? So anyway, but I tried it and sure enough, it worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no problem. So I could broadcast in both living room and the screened in porch video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the video was only in the living room, of course, but the audio was going to both destinations. And so I go back to a friend of the show, Ryan Jones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and basically say, what the hell? And he’s insisting that it works for him in Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Ryan is not a dope. So I’m really wondering what the hell is going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it turns out both of us were right. So Ryan’s setup, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his is a little different because I’m on the Plex beta and he is not, but his setup was that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was working just fine with Plex as configured out of the box. And I go looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the settings for my copy of Plex, which is on test flight, and there’s an option,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t know if this is released or not, so we’re just gonna pretend that it is. There’s an option for Plex to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its old video player. It’s literally called use old video player. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encourage you to do that if you need higher compatibility. They’re not specific about what compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re talking about, but compatibility. So I think to myself, hmm, I wonder what this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does. And so I turned on use old video player, that’s turning off the new video player.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ll give you one guess what works no problem now. So I suspect, I don’t know this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I suspect that the old video players, like the out of the box AV player or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along those lines, and their new video player something custom and because the out of the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again this is all supposition but the the av player out of the box solution that obviously will support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the things that apple supports because it’s apple’s video player but plex’s new video player only supports the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that plex supports and from the rumblings i’ve heard they really don’t give a crap about airplay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2. so my near-term solution until i can’t do it anymore is to use old video player and then if And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that eventually becomes not an option anymore, then I’ll probably switch to Infuse on the occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would like to listen to something in two locations. But man, I’ve been on a journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a pain. It’s understandable, but it’s definitely a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pain. My favorite thing about this journey is that what you’re trying to do is play audio in two rooms that are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to each other physically in the house. And this would be so easily accomplished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with wires. Well, yes. the oldest potential technology in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is something that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or turning the volume up in one room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. I mean, literally the door to the screened-in porch is on the edge of the living room. Now, Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen my living room. It is a very like squat but wide room, but nonetheless, your point is completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. And yes, if I made the living room loud enough, it would be, and as long as this door was open and screened-in porch, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely hear everything in the screened-in porch. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you could fairly easily run a second pair speaker wires basically from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your entertainment center in the living room out to the porch and then you could have just passive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers there and have a receiver in the living room controlling both. I mean, you know, we talked about this before, you know, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have problems like remotely controlling volume independently with that kind of setup, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are ways that can, that can be done, but it just, it’s so funny to think like playing music in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two rooms is a very simple solve problem like 15, 20 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago and now it’s It’s very complicated and it doesn’t work half the time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re trying to do it in all these new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways. Yeah, and it’s funny you say that because literally the speaker wire that is connected to the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the screened-in porch, it enters the house right behind my entertainment center. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason I do it this way is exactly the things you said. Like, you know, there are occasions I’ll want to have two different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things playing. There are occasions I would like, well, basically always, I would like independent volume control. And again, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways I could get around this. But when this all works, I swear to you, it’s delightful. But getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it all to work has been far more, to your point, of an adventure than I wanted it to be.
Bullstrap leather case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of adventures that are way too long, tell me about your newest case for your iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so I mentioned last time when I was doing my big case review that there were a couple that hadn’t come in yet, and one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the Bullstrap leather case that did since come in. It very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much is like the kind of leather cases Apple used to make before they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made closed bottoms like the way they do now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really is like a very good alternative to the Apple leather case if what you want is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bottom is open and I will say in my time using it so far I have really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed that feeling of like feeling the nice sharp phone edge on the bottom swipe when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like swiping up instead of having to hit a case there. So I kind of I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to admit that John was a little bit right about that but I think John was right about open bottom being better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you like it when your bottom’s open?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well I like it when my case’s bottom is open. Gotcha.
⏹️ ▶️ John He likes it when he He likes to feel a bare bottom. That’s what we’re going for here. Well done. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a much better joke, John. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why we have him on the show. All right, so a few other things about it are pretty nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a few things are not so nice. So the camera plateau area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most cases for the iPhone 13 series, when they transition from the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the phone to the camera plateau, usually it’s like a hard plastic ridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s some other kind of like abrupt rising. And what they do with the Bullsharp case is they have like a nice gentle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slope upwards, like it kind of curves up. It makes for a very nice premium feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the pocket. Like so you’re not, because you’re not feeling around that camera, you’re not feeling that hard plastic edge or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big sharp bump. You’re feeling just this nice smooth transition. So it’s very nice, very nice feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall. Some things that are not so great about it, the buttons are plastic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not metal. Apple other cases always have metal buttons, at least recent ones do. this has plastic so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s less nice feeling on the buttons. It’s fine though, it’s just not as nice as Apple’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the mute switch cutout hole forms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fairly deep thing that you have to like poke your fingernail in to switch the mute switch. So flipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mute switch in the Bullshtrap case is kind of something that you don’t want to do very often. The other thing is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color I got, I got the ocean color, and I think their photographs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the website of the Ocean Color are generous. It is in practice much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco darker than it looks like on their site and has a bit more of a greenish tint along with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue than their photos suggest. I don’t like their giant bull logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the back. Maybe it’s because I don’t like cattle that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Giant is an exaggeration. It’s smaller than a dime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, a dime could cover it just barely. The other thing is that the leather they have used has a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong smell and you know leather you know part of the appeal of leather which I get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but part of the appeal of leather is you know it has that that nice smell of whatever the hell chemicals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it what it is but this smells a little bit like bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not it’s not a hundred percent great smell it’s kind of a bad smell that’s fairly strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say the magsafe works well and everything but ultimately you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I funny I actually after the last episode where I said it hadn’t come in yet. I had ordered it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had convenient. I emailed them saying, Hey, can I cancel this order? And they didn’t respond. And then it shipped the next day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. And then they responded saying, sorry, it already shipped. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stuck with it now. But if you want a nice leather case, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice leather case. I think I actually don’t like leather anymore for my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. Now that I have tried the other like, you know, better plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. I’m really very much enjoying like the, you know, the soft squishy TPU of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear case and the whatever the heck the Cauda Bay case is made out of. I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoying those. So I think ultimately I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want leather anymore most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you want a plasticky leather because the Bullstrap one looks like a leathery leather, like it’s very grainy, leathery or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But this, the OXR case I have for my 12 Pro it’s a very plasticky leather. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if I were to give it to you and not tell you it’s leather, you would say this is the worst fake leather I’ve ever seen. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s real leather,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it looks and feels very much like plastic. But I still like it because it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John the experience I’ve had with all the Apple leather cases and this OXR one is you get it and you’re like, oh no, I’ve made a mistake, it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John slippery. But then it breaks in a little bit. And that’s true of this leather case as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that it gets tackier over time as the weather, as the leather sort of wears a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John but mostly it seems completely uniform, almost like it’s a plastic surface. So if I was to design
⏹️ ▶️ John a plastic, say I want a plastic case that’s, you know, not as grippy as the silicone one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a little bit grippy, like I would design something that’s like this one, like this, this OXR leather
⏹️ ▶️ John case and the Apple leather cases do not read like leather. They read like simulated,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they read like vegan leather or something. But I like how they, I like how they work
⏹️ ▶️ John hand. Like they, I do feel like I have a good positive grip on it but it slides in and out of pockets real easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but ultimately I actually have switched back to the Cotta Bay one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna do some car driving over the next week or so, and so I wanted the nice mag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe. But I think I’m totally fine with my new plastic lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, with the leather one, I was afraid of setting it down on a wet counter or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s kind of nice with plastic to just know, like yeah, this thing can get a little bit wet, and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about your bare bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I recognize that the bare bottom is nicer, but because I have I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a covered bottom for for you know months now. I
⏹️ ▶️ John will get to your pants in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but that’s different different covered different cover for a different bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is my this. Yeah, this kind of convinced me that like yeah, a bare bottom is better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t necessarily need it because when I don’t have it, I don’t really notice that much.
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Marco’s Pants: Finale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so we really don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to have a bare bottom, Marco. So tell us about your pants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going back again to phones and cases and pants. So the original problem I stated was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my new iPhone 13 Pro, which is significantly larger and heavier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the mini I was carrying on last year, it just kept sliding forward in my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and was, you know, looked stupid and was uncomfortable on walks. And I got this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful email from Samuel Cohen, who said, I share your frustration with phone slippage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in standard jeans pockets. To combat this, I sew the walls of the pocket flap in half to create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two separate pocket chambers, one size perfectly for my phone in the spot where I want it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay. See attached mock-up. And Samuel has this amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diagram. It is extremely good. Which is part of this amazing email, included step-by-step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steps such as remove pants. But the basic idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually had a couple of people suggest this, but Samuel illustrated it best. The basic idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn the pants inside out or whatever, and you pull the actual pocket out, which is this double-sided piece of fabric in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you actually sew a seam down the middle of it vertically so that you’re basically dividing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into two vertical chambers. So by making the one closer to the side of your leg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just big enough to fit the phone, then it can’t slide over into the front of your leg,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a fairly labor-intensive solution to this problem where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should have just probably gotten a smaller phone to begin with, but this is actually a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hilariously clever solution. I have not tried it yet, though, because I found a different
⏹️ ▶️ John Before you move on to the different solution, the problem I see with this solution is now you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a line of stitching going down the center of your pants that people can see from the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, no. No, you don’t see it on the outside. Why wouldn’t you? You’re only stitching the inside of the pocket. You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stitching. I mean, you might see like the imprint of having something thicker there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see. You’re just stitching the liner part. All right. Well, then anyway, the second problem with this thing is now you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put your wallet in your front pocket. Well, who does that? You put it in the other one. I’m just saying you’re compromising
⏹️ ▶️ John your pocket. Like car trunks that have a divider let you remove the divider because sometimes you need to store
⏹️ ▶️ John larger things. I feel like this is decreasing the cargo capacity of your pants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can always, you can get just a second pair of pants for your extra cargo capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe like a Velcro in there. So like when you wanted to, you can zip it apart, but then put, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. When do you ever share the phone pocket with anything else?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t carry my phone the way you do. So I’m just saying, I feel like sewing. The phone gets its own pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause like that other part of the pocket is now wasted. What can you put there? Two pens?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing now. I mean, I think this is a bit bananas, but with that said, in the defense of this bananas idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you can put something else in the other part of the pocket because you’re not worried about it clanging against the phone and scratching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this actually adds card capacity because it has a divider, you know, as opposed to this one thing that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t have an item that would span it, is all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m saying. It also says not
⏹️ ▶️ John to scale in this drawing, so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know what to think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that phone, really? The only reason I haven’t attempted this yet, well, number one, we don’t have a sewing machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and I don’t want to do it by hand, and number two-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thing. You knew
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody who could so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know she also doesn’t have her sewing machine here and also doesn’t want to do it by hand, but
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s too embarrassed to sell your pockets on your pants. It’s a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into little phone caddies, but no my only concern with this approach would be that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inserting and removing the phone from the pocket might be a little more of like a sensitive operation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, because you have more now you have an opportunity to hit that divider and like miss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically and so I have to like be a little more
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you have to go with like two fingers, like a pincer like a like a carnal one of those arcade machines with a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco claw you probably don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be that tight of a fit on it but anyway and then next year when you know bigger phones come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out then you have to get on the pants
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah you can’t can’t put your hands in your pocket anymore speaking of things that won’t fit in your pocket you can’t do like a cool pose
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I didn’t think about that
⏹️ ▶️ John you you got to do the the uncool pose because everyone knows that smoking is terrible and you’d have to say you’d have one
⏹️ ▶️ John hand in your pocket the other one flicking a cigarette
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah yeah thank you yeah anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey reference acknowledged.
⏹️ ▶️ John 90s reference for you too, you lucky ducks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. Actually, that documentary just came out a day or two ago. Is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one about her or the album or what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, about the Jacket Little Pill, about the album. It’s about Full House. What? No, right, get it, I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve stated before on Top 4 that I think Jacket Little Pill is possibly the most influential album of the 90s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I could buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just trying to keep your music at the top four, I don’t know if they can survive exposure to a broader audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would also buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then again, you talk a lot about fish on here, so you’re probably fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. Speaking of bad music opinions, anyway, you know, plus, you know, if you have, if you really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do have cargo related problems with your pants, I think there is a style of pant that one could get that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would help with your cargo. I think such a thing exists. I wish I remembered the name of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, yeah, utility pants, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of the 90s, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John tactical before tactical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single one of these like pants links people have sent me for some other kind of pants that have like extra pockets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always a picture of the dude in the photos putting a gun magazine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these extra pockets. I’m like, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what else? You can sew your pocket so the gun magazine fits exactly and doesn’t move towards the middle if you’re like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I don’t need any place to put gun magazines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, it’s not called a magazine. It’s important if you’re gonna talk about firearms that you be technically correct because that’s what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the long, slightly curved thing that holds the bolts for the machine gun?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I’m just making a joke. I actually have no idea what it’s called, nor do I care, please do not send corrections. I become our
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, we really don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. All right anyway, so we do not care. I actually have solved the pants problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly and that is again. Damn it. I think John was right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just started wearing tighter pants.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God, tighter pants with a bare bottom. That’s a different style, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John since this that’s he’s moved to chaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just having John. I was just about to make the same joke beat me to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, so way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a man bun and a beard and you do handstands because that’s what’s on the front of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website? I do have a beard, the rest no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would love to see Marco with a
⏹️ ▶️ John man. He just needs that bun and he needs to be able to do a handstand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, it’s be a long wait for a train that ain’t coming for that man but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harsh anyway. So the pants that I have that I’ve worn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a few years now. At least I’ve been a big fan of the banana Republic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveler line and the quote rapid movement denim,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s what you need when you sit in front of a computer for eight hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day. I know right now. I can assure you rapid movement denim does not necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need you to move rapidly in order to enjoy it, because what that actually means is stretch pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool and stretch pants are awesome and I strongly recommend if those of you who are out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing jeans right now. If you have not yet tried stretch jeans, I strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommend you try them. Because imagine jeans but comfortable all the time. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stretch jeans. They’re like jeggings but for men. Yes, that’s why they had to call it rapid movement
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they have to call it tactical rapid movement tough guy pants.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rapid assault, whatever it is. But yeah, so I’ve been wearing those forever. I have a few pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old pair so they’re pretty broken in. And those, I have this problem severely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I know this because I put one of those on today for the first time in a while and the problem was way worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I realized was so different is that for the last, you know, month or so, I’ve been heavily wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my new brand of pants, Spoke London.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So those are trousers then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they, I mean, they’re from London. Yeah, so I guess they would call them, I guess they do call them trousers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, it’s the top nav item right next to the Spoke logo. It says trousers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but this is they make pants that are not super cheap, but not too ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive. You know, a decent pair of jeans is like 140 bucks. So it’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? Well, compared, oh my God, people spend $140 on jeans. They
⏹️ ▶️ John spend a lot more than that on jeans, but Jesus, but, uh, but the, the ones that really cost a lot already have holes ripped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, these, these are, these are, you know, intact pants, but I, I got a pair of their corduroy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, uh, last fall. And so I knew about them from that. And I decided to to try their jeans this fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re kind of amazing. So this is why, what got me to this company, yes, of course, it was an Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad, they work very well on me, but what got me to this company was that, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners and certainly hosts know, I am not a tall person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, if you try to buy pants that do not advertise their length, like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these fancy companies. Wait, they don’t have a length? No, no, a lot of these, yeah, a lot of fancy companies, If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you try to buy some pants from whatever people are recommending, which I saw a lot of during the recommendation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the great recommendation surge of October, you know, a lot of them, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t sell pants as like their main thing, or if it’s not a big thing, if it’s some brand that just happens to have made a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few models of pants, they’ll sell all the pants at the same fixed length, which is usually 34
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inches inseam. My inseam is not 34 inches, not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close. My ideal pant size is 32 by 29.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even that leaves some, you know, some hangover on my shoes. I just think it looks nice. I, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, probably more like 28, but certainly 29 is my ideal length.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you are a wee man, but you are not that much of a wee man. I mean, my goodness, you must be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thirties. Are you really thinking?
⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously? Maybe his upper body is normal size. It’s just the legs where he loses all his height.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32 waist 29 and seen that’s that’s one pants look good on me. And what’s nice about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spoke is that they actually stock all of that. And so anyway, one of the things they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like you pick obviously the waist and the length and they have those in one inch increments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is awesome. Thank God, because yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I drive. I hated that when you shop for jeans or other men’s pants, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John two inch increments because my ideal length I feel like is like 33, but I always end up getting the 34th.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like and sometimes I’m a 31 or sometimes I’m a 33 and like on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the waist. And so like it’s really nice to have one inch increments on both. The other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they allow you to pick the like thigh thickness. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been wearing thigh thickness B this winter because I crammed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year of restaurant eating into one summer. So I’m a little bit thicker than I
⏹️ ▶️ John past. This thickness thing is a little bit normative because the options
⏹️ ▶️ John are A, narrow thighs, B, regular thighs, alright, so
⏹️ ▶️ John now we’re just shaming everybody who’s not B, I guess. And then C, instead of saying adjective thighs like
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow thighs and regular thighs, C says for the wide thigh guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, let me tell you that I think that’s accurate because I thought B
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a good default and it turns out I am definitely in A.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I bought a pair in B. I later tried a second pair of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar model in A. Not only does it fit better and look better and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not kind of swimming in a bunch of extra space down there, also it fixed my phone problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it turns out the answer to fixing the phone problem is either sew a line down all of your pockets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or buy tighter pants.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Get clothes that fit. Spend an absolutely obscene amount of money on trousers slash pants.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, get clothes that fit is the solution. You don’t have to spend an obscene amount. If you do spend an obscene
⏹️ ▶️ John amount, maybe. I mean, like, you spent a lot and still got pants that didn’t fit because you
⏹️ ▶️ John picked the wrong option. So I guess it’s just get clothes that fit wherever you get them from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s why I like this company because it makes it easy for me to get stuff that fits me, which is not easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do in this area.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I do like on Spoke’s website, I’m looking at their trousers and it says, compare our styles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pretty much- Style for Casey, do not give in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re really good, I’m telling you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re right, I probably shouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 10 ounce jeans, oh my God, they’re like sweatpants. They’re so comfortable. Just hold on, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going somewhere else with this. All right, so- And they have orange accent stitching. Oh, it’s so cool. Oh my gosh. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says, you know, compare our styles and they have fives and cords and heroes and house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The cords are really good, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. And all of these are like the bottom half of an adult male, like walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or standing or whatever. And then the very first one is called Sharps. And they really went all in on the Sharps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it has a guy with one leg straight down and one leg straight out at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 90 degree angle who has apparently used his Sharps pants to cut a watermelon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in half. This is the best marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John image. The crease is so sharp. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey using them to play fruit ninja. When
⏹️ ▶️ John I went to the site, the main navigation at the top makes me have flashbacks to my honeymoon
⏹️ ▶️ John where the dress code at the resort we were staying in used a bunch of words I didn’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell is smart? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know how to dress
⏹️ ▶️ John smart? What does smart mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I barely know how to dress at all. I’m pretty sure that means like khakis and polos, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea. You’re the most fashionable of
⏹️ ▶️ John the three of us. I know what the word formal means. I know what the word casual means. I do not know what smart means. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure everybody in the UK knows what it means, but when you say dress smart, I just think of Maxwell Smart, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was he the one with the shoe phone? Is that right? Yes, I think. Oh, goodness. Why do we ever talk about fashion?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John why do you do this? You’re welcome. Because he wants to buy smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trousers. Oh, golly. For his smartphone. Smart trousers for his smartphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, actually, I haven’t bought their khakis or anything like that, but I do have their jeans and their corduroys and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of those are awesome.
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The Apple-silicon roadmap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we wanted to, actually more John than anyone, but all three of us wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use a YouTube video that we saw as an excuse to kind of lay out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we think of as the Apple Silicon roadmap. And so I presume it was John put this Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tech video in our show notes, which of course will be in the show notes so you guys can see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s kind of a, I don’t know, it’s a really long video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was like a 17 minute video, which is rich coming from the three of us. I understand that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a really long video where most of it, I didn’t think was that new and interesting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but they did do a really good job of taking what we know about today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world and trying to extrapolate actual performance numbers, which again are all extrapolated. So who knows if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re true or not, but try to figure out actual performance numbers of what a mythical like iMac or Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be like. And that I did think was pretty interesting. And suffice to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mythical forthcoming Mac Pro, if it’s what we think it is with the J2 die or whatever, is gonna be really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fricking fast. So John, tell us about this, if you don’t mind, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of the Mac’s tech channel, I like this channel because despite the sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John samey cadence that the people who MC the channel have,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is no worse or better than anything else, but it is what it is, I think they do a good job of, just like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, distilling available information, summarizing it, and trying to extrapolate.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the most important thing about the Max Tech channel is they just keep trying. They’ll make a new video when new
⏹️ ▶️ John information comes out. And I can relate to that, because that’s what we do on the show. We talk about a topic, we say what we have to say about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then when new information comes to light, we talk about it again and again. And we build towards an understanding.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what the Max Tech things do as well, I feel like. So I enjoy watching them, to see them
⏹️ ▶️ John build towards an understanding. Anyway, that was just a jumping off point for this, because when watching it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I felt like the people making this video, a should listen to ATP and B if they don’t already
⏹️ ▶️ John and B. Something they were dancing around something that has been
⏹️ ▶️ John in my mind when we’ve talked about this topic many times, but I realize we’ve never really explicitly laid out
⏹️ ▶️ John in a boring way. I think it’s worth doing so now just in case everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else listening doesn’t also have this in the back of their mind. So this is not a an incredible insight. This is a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John was so obvious that I left it unsaid for many episodes. And we all kind of left it unsaid. But
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not necessarily what’s going to happen. It’s just the obvious thing. So and the obvious thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of Apple Silicon Roadmap is using past events and what we know of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John current roadmap to say, if the future rolls out like
⏹️ ▶️ John the past has, this is how it will go. And so the past we’re drawing from is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel PC chip business. For many, many years, Intel has been the big supplier for
⏹️ ▶️ John chips for personal computers, including eventually Apple computers. Intel had a particular way of doing things,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of which is like, oh, it’s the way Intel decided to do things, but a lot of it has to just do with the nature of
⏹️ ▶️ John the business of making silicon chips. And the nature of that business has not changed in fundamental ways
⏹️ ▶️ John in recent years, so it is reasonable to say that Intel wasn’t just doing what it did for the hell of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. There are reasons to do it the way they’ve done it, which means Apple will probably do it the same way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so far that has been true, what Apple has released. And the plan is this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you design your processor, right? The parts of your processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the adders and multipliers and the registers and all your branch predictors
⏹️ ▶️ John and your caches and everything that goes into the CPU. You design your GPU cores and how you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John fit the GPU cores together. You design your memory interface. You design all these different little pieces. In Apple’s case,
⏹️ ▶️ John they basically do that design for the phone because it’s their biggest product, it’s the most important product, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s worth investing a lot of money in there. So let’s say they make the, I don’t remember the numbers on these things, but what are the M1 cores, they’re like A14 cores
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget. Yeah, whatever, they make the A14 and they design all those pieces, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Put a lot of money into that, making a new chip, like a new CPU, new GPU cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff, that is a big investment, right? even if it’s like an evolution of the previous one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s essentially a new design. And hopefully it’s better than the other one in some ways, you know, and maybe you build it
⏹️ ▶️ John on a new process node, but either way, that’s where you put in your big money. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you take that investment and you make the Mac version of that chip, which would be the M1, which
⏹️ ▶️ John basically is the A14-ish cores. You have to add some stuff that the Mac needs, use maybe the same GPU core,
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly modified for different texture formats or whatever, but basically you’re building on the work that you did for the A14.
⏹️ ▶️ John you make a slightly bigger chip that’s the M1. It’s got more cores than a phone, more memory,
⏹️ ▶️ John more interfaces, it’s got a Thunderbolt controller, it’s got all that stuff that maybe the phone doesn’t have or maybe just the iPad has or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. You make the M1, right? That’s a little bit bigger. The next thing you do is you take that chip
⏹️ ▶️ John and you put more stuff in it, more cores, access more memory, more controllers, you get the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the M1 Max, right? It’s the same cores, it’s the same A14 cores that they made
⏹️ ▶️ John for the phone back then. And then you make the M1 and then you make the slightly bigger ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that one, as we talked about, the Jade die, whatever, I forget what the, is that what it
⏹️ ▶️ John was called? Yeah, yeah. It was, yeah, yeah. Jade die is, we said the building blocks for Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pro computers. That is potentially, that is potentially the biggest die they’re going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John with this stuff on it, right? And then the next step up is you’re gonna release a thing that’s two of those dies
⏹️ ▶️ John or four of those dies, right? With an interconnect fabric between them, right? And that timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John of from the time that you release the A14, obviously you started building the A14 before
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone with the A14, I mean it came out, right? But you release the A14, then a little bit later, months later, you release
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1, then a little bit later, you release the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, then a little bit later, you release the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Pro Max Duo, which has two of those things. And a little bit later after that, you launch the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Max Quadro and the Mac Pro or whatever. That’s like a two year span
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. Or I don’t know, It’s months and years between the time when
⏹️ ▶️ John you originally made, like we’re gonna make a new CPU core and a new GPU core. They first
⏹️ ▶️ John appear on a phone and then like a year to two years later, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the four of those giant chips that have a bunch more of those cores and a bunch more of the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cores and a bunch of Thunderbolt controllers and a bunch of new memory controllers and four of those things all shoved onto one jet. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how long it takes from the time the A14 comes out to the time that thing appears in a Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the question people had is like, well, does that mean it’s gonna be like two to four
⏹️ ▶️ John years between each one of these computers? It’s a pipeline, right? So while that’s going on, while
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re waiting, we’re sitting here waiting for like, you know, the iMac that’s gonna have two, you know, J,
⏹️ ▶️ John C dies inside them, right? We’re still waiting for that to appear. While that’s happening, we already
⏹️ ▶️ John have A15 things in our phones, right? So the A15,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did the work for the A15, it’s slightly different CPU cores, slightly different GPU cores, whatever, that’s released,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The next thing that’s going to appear in in this pipeline is the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air with the A14 core. So it’s the M1 size chip, probably going to be called M2, but it’s got the A15
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in it, right? And then after that, that, you know, MacBook Air with the
⏹️ ▶️ John A15 stuff and it comes out, what’s the next one? The MacBook Pro is with the A15 stuff in it. So you get the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and the M2 Pro, right? And what comes after The big iMac that has two of those things in
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but also supports the M2 Pro and the M2 Max. And what comes after that? The M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and M2 Max Quadro and the big Mac Pro. This is the, assuming no surprises,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not guaranteed, but I just wanna say, like, just laying out, this is the expected, boring, no surprises,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to predict pipeline of stuff. And it’s not just for the hell of it. Like, it’s like, why don’t they just release
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro one first? Why don’t, when the A14 comes in the phone, At the same time, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they release the Mac Pro with 40 of those cores in it? When
⏹️ ▶️ John the A16 system on a chip comes out in next year’s phone, why don’t they just release all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs at the same time? They can’t, because it’s a new thing, that when you’re manufacturing a new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, it takes a while to figure out how to manufacture that thing successfully, economically, without
⏹️ ▶️ John errors on the new process size or whatever, right? That’s why you have this rollout
⏹️ ▶️ John of, first, we make the small chip, then we make the medium, then we make it a little bit bigger, that make the giant one. That’s not for
⏹️ ▶️ John building suspense. That’s not because they don’t sell a lot of the big ones, although that is somewhat of a factor
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It’s mostly because you can’t jump right in and make a
⏹️ ▶️ John four die giant package thing on day one for a chip that you’ve never manufactured before,
⏹️ ▶️ John for cores that you’ve never manufactured before on a new process that you’ve never made anything on before.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why it part of the reason why Intel did the same thing. They would make a new chip and then two years later,
⏹️ ▶️ John the zions will be updated with those cores. And that’s why the zions are always behind in terms of like whatever lake
⏹️ ▶️ John chip came out, or like we’re on this lake here on our Mac books, but the, the CPU cores in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro are two years old. And it doesn’t mean that you have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John x number of years to read an update. It’s just a pipeline like pipelines and chips, right? Once you get into this cadence, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can assume that assuming Apple stays on like a yearly cycle or whatever, around this
⏹️ ▶️ John time every year, there’ll be new MacBook Airs with the new cores in them. Just like around this time every year
⏹️ ▶️ John we get new phones with the new cores in them. It’s just they shift down the line. So by the time you’re getting the Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not going to have the same cores that are in the phone. It’s not going to have the same cores that are in the MacBook Air. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how much Apple can compress these timelines, but this is the expected cadence of
⏹️ ▶️ John rolling out chips from, you know, starting from something maybe as small as the watch all the way up to the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of the Mac Pro. I don’t know if there’s any way Apple can change that, But
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a possibility that Apple decides not to do that cadence, but instead
⏹️ ▶️ John holds, let’s say holds back the Mac Pro until they can put an M2 in it or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John put it put an 815 core in it or something like that. Just because the Mac Pro is such a low volume
⏹️ ▶️ John product that there’s no big hurry to get it out. I don’t think they’re going to do that this time, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they are kind of in a hurry to get out there to finish their transition or whatever. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things can happen. But if you’re expecting, you know, when the iPhone 14 comes out with
⏹️ ▶️ John the new A16 system on a chip inside it, to also have on the same day a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro with 40 of those cars, don’t expect that, especially if it’s a new process. No, that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to happen. This is sort of the natural cadence of learning how to manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing you designed in bigger and bigger sizes in a way that doesn’t lose you money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also there’s, first of all I agree with all of that, I do think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve already seen some of how Apple does this with iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPads. iPads typically get the big version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same processor that’s in the iPhones, but that usually happens maybe six months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a year afterwards, and critically, not every iPhone chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes an iPad chip. they do occasionally skip one. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re likely to see similar things play out here. Where so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, it seems like if they wanted to, and we’ll see how this plays out over the next year or two, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they want to, they could theoretically update the M1-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products now. You know, the MacBook Air, the low-end Macs. They could update those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year, either with the launch of the iPhone or a few months later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could totally do that if they wanted to, barring unforeseen problems. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t necessarily know that they’re going to do that every year. We don’t actually know that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that becomes an M chip, you know, like the M2 or M1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t necessarily know that there’s always going to be a Pro and Max version of that and we don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that there’s always going to be whatever the Mac Pro 2X and 4X versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are called. That all is like a maybe. That’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it’s going to work most of the time, and maybe in most generations. But we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also won’t be able to depend on that because they’ve already shown between iPhone and iPad that occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t fit the cycle for whatever reason. Maybe it’s certain cores not being worth it, or maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things like, you know, certain products that they don’t think are worth updating every, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not expect the Mac Pro version of these chips to be an every year thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing we’re gonna get an every two years on average for the Mac Pro version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe the Pro version, maybe the Pro and Max version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe that’s on a two year cycle too. I don’t know. Until we see this happen, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really gonna know. And it could change over time. So I wouldn’t expect this to always be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable thing where, okay, first we make this one, then the bigger one comes out in this month, then the bigger one after that comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this other month. Years could be different and cycles could be different or things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could go wrong with one of them or it’s not worth it or it doesn’t work the same way. So it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be roughly at this cycle, but there’s a lot of details that we don’t know yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two things on that. One, like the reason I think it’s gonna be like that this time is because Apple’s on a timeline. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have ARM versions of a big iMac or a multi-core thing. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have an ARM version of a Mac Pro. They are on a two-year timeline. the timelines basically line up to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, if you do the rollout that I described, you get your A14, you get your M1,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get your M1 Pro and Max, you get your Dual and you get your Quad. That’s two years, that’s a two year timeline right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will just make their thing. They can’t wait until later, the first year you have to do them all, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John After that, it’s definitely true that Apple could choose, especially on the high end,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1, whatever they call it, the one with the A14 cores, but you get 40 of them, yeah, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John wait two years between that one, just because you don’t sell a lot of it. But the second thing is part of Apple’s frustration with
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel is sometimes Intel just didn’t have the chips that Apple needed to sell the computers that it wanted to make. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating for Apple. You know, if they don’t have a high powered one, the Xeons haven’t been updated in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have a really low power one with a good GPU. Like they were, Apple has always kind of been, was at the whim of
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel on what chips Intel decided to make. And Apple strongly tried to influence that. Apple is the
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason that Intel made these much bigger integrated GPUs because Apple wanted that for its lower power computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But a lot of the reason we were unsatisfied with the performance or
⏹️ ▶️ John the incremental year-over-year performance of Mac laptops before we all got mad about the keyboards was because
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel just didn’t have chips to offer that were compelling in the computers that Apple wanted to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John So one of the advantages of Apple making its own silicon is that it is now on the table
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple to do the boring every year update that I described. And if they don’t do it, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not because they can’t or because it didn’t work out or there was some kind of manufacturing problem
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, because so far Apple’s been pretty good at that stuff. It’s probably just because things
⏹️ ▶️ John sell in such low volume. It costs so much money to develop a gigantic 40 core CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we do that every two years because we can’t recoup the cost because so few people buy Mac Pros. That will be the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because, oh, we couldn’t do that roadmap this year. If they sold as many Mac Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John as they sold iPhones, they would do this every year. The proof is, look what they do with the iPhone. Every year somehow they have a
⏹️ ▶️ John new system on the chip that’s better than the previous one. I don’t know how long I can keep up, but they’ve been doing it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what? Not 14 times because they started with the A4, right? So 10 times, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they haven’t missed one yet. And even when this year was like, oh, they came out with it, but it’s not even that much better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous one. It turns out it was pretty good. So I think if they do skip,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a product decision and not a tech decision, but that’s exactly what Apple wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ John The ability to decide on its terms, what chips it wants on the timelines that it wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main reason I put this in here is when the Mac Pro comes out in December of 2022 and it
⏹️ ▶️ John has quote unquote only M1 cores in it, this will be why, and it will be fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’ll still be ridiculously fast and I will want
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be 40 of them. Yes, exactly.
#askatp: Keep a 2015 MBP going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Stefan writes, I have a 2015 MacBook Pro, and although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a great computer in its day, I’ve recently begun to notice that it struggles with a few tasks that one would imagine a pro machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could handle deftly. Running Visual Studio Code in particular seems to be onerous enough to require persistent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use of the fan, with the eyes raised emoji, or eyebrow raised emoji. What can I do to keep the old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boy ship-shaped for a few more years? My recommendation, which is probably garbage, but what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider is if you can offload all of the data onto something else, like an external drive or something like that. Consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing a fresh install of macOS. This isn’t like Windows, or it isn’t nearly as much like Windows used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where literally every six months I would reinstall Windows, otherwise it would run like garbage. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may help, it couldn’t hurt. But I wonder if either of you guys, maybe we’ll start with Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a better solution to the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends on like how involved are you willing to get here? I think I like Casey’s perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here of like see if we can fix it via software first. Keep in mind the 2015 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, you know, compared to modern machines, not only is the processor going to be obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more outdated, but also things like GPU and SSD speed are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be way, way, way slower than what we have today. We’ve made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of advances in those two areas in particular over the time when even though the processor was making advances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more slowly, GPU and SSD really did advance a lot. And then other things, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory throughput and stuff like that have also increased over time. So that’s definitely, you know, areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re not going to be able to solve. And external SSDs are probably not going to help you too much because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that machine is limited to, I believe, Thunderbolt 1 or 2. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt 2, but you could go that direction and, you know, strap a Thunderbolt disk to the back of it, but I wouldn’t recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing. I think you are, you know, just enjoy the hardware you have for the time being.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there is someone around you or someone else who’s comfortable working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the hardware on the inside, that’s a big if, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are willing to do that and willing to take the risks associated therein, after such a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a laptop in particular, you are likely having not very good thermals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you can open it up and service it, and if you’re willing to do that and take those risks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cleaning out the fans and possibly laying down new thermal interface material on the processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and anything else that has heat sinks on it might be something that it needs by this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s worth considering, but ultimately I would say the risk of opening it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you might actually break it or make certain things worse, so unless you’re really comfortable opening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macbooks, I wouldn’t necessarily take that route. Otherwise, I’d say stick with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the software and just tolerate it for a while longer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s already old, it’s gonna get older, but if it still works today, that’s great, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep using it until it doesn’t work anymore or until you can motivate yourself to somehow get an upgrade. John?
⏹️ ▶️ John My advice is to do what Marco said, crack the sucker open and try to replace that thermal compound and totally
⏹️ ▶️ John break the computer, which will finally force you to get a new one because you desperately need a new one. I know that’s not the question. the question is how
⏹️ ▶️ John do I keep the old computer running? But the thing is, I understand this motive. As someone who kept the same computer for 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years, I understand why you wanna keep the old computer running because you’re just not ready to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John one yet. But sometimes you just need a little push. And so trying to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it yourself and inevitably screwing it up might be that push that you need.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now I really need a computer because now it sounds worse than ever. And now smoke is coming out of it. Now it won’t even turn on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then that will be a clarifying experience. No, but seriously, the ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, like this has happened a couple of times in the history of Mac. This is like a discontinuity
⏹️ ▶️ John in the performance characteristics especially of laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new Macs, even the new super cheap Macs are so much better than that computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you should rent an M1 MacBook Air. Find someone that will rent you one. That
⏹️ ▶️ John will be a better use of your time and money while you wait to buy a new computer or a quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote new computer, like a good new 16 inch MacBook Pro or whatever, rent a MacBook Air. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a thing that exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John lensrentals.com, do they rent MacBook Airs? It’s a $999 computer. Get the lowest basis based one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will crush this computer in everything, except for maybe screen quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a really good time for you to upgrade your computer. So I know you want advice
⏹️ ▶️ John on how to keep it going, but I’m gonna tell you it may be time to say goodbye to the 2015
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. Man who petulantly kept the same computer for a decade suggests- I
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t petulant, I was waiting for them to build a better one and when they did, I bought it even though it cost a bazillion dollars.
#askatp: Photos safe-zones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gilherme Ales writes, after importing my collection of about 30,000 photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into iCloud Photo Library, I find myself going through tons of useless pictures such as photos of bank receipts, shopping lists, documents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and screenshots that I don’t need anymore. How do you organize your pictures to bring some order to the chaos? Do you manually delete the irrelevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones to keep all of them in the library and use albums to sort only those that matter, something in between? Mainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I am looking for is a, quote unquote, safe zone for my pictures that I can show to people without worrying about showing something useless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or inappropriate. Hey, I have an app for that. It’s called Peek-a-View. You should check it out. But in the actual answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your question, just stop stressing about it. There’s gonna be garbage in there, that’s the way of the world. This is the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, everybody’s photo libraries are filled with useless garbage. So, you know, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect that. And they will forgive you if they accidentally, if you hand them their phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they accidentally see like a screenshot of a weather app or a bank receipt picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like, it’s fine. It’s not, that’s not a big problem. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can try to go through and organize stuff. One thing I have found, there are now smart albums
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple automatically creates for you for things like screenshots. But if for some reason you don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use those or you wanted to go with a little bit different angle on it, you can do things that create smart albums for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain resolutions of images that like a screenshot has a certain resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that photos don’t. You can also do things like filter, making smart albums filtering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by camera and other other XF data bits that might apply to one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of things more than others. But for the most part, I mean, yeah, just don’t worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ve answered similar questions this before. But I think the particular angle on this one was the having the safe
⏹️ ▶️ John zone and the garbage like receipts and other stuff like that. So for the receipts things, the Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple added the screenshot library a couple versions of iOS ago, I hope they do more of that stuff with machine learning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yes, screenshots that’s easy, but like pictures of receipts, especially now they’re doing text
⏹️ ▶️ John extraction, seems like it could be another smart album that Apple could give. So I hope Apple gets better at this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I wouldn’t spend too much time trying. And I mean, look, if you wanna go through every one of your photos and organize them, like
⏹️ ▶️ John go for it, like that system will work, but that’s a lot of effort. But for the safe zone
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, the only way to do that, and a reasonable way to do that, it’s gotta be opt-in. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to manually select the pictures that you want to be in the safe zone. And I know that might seem like, but that’s too much, I don’t wanna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want a safe zone, the only way for that to exist, don’t leave it to ML, don’t leave it to smart
⏹️ ▶️ John albums, don’t leave it to anything, it has to be you manually picking. That gets back to my, you know, if you’re gonna do one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with your photos, fave the good ones. And once you fave the good ones, your favorites view, you don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have to make this, it’s already built into the photos app. Your favorites view, you have now manually selected photos
⏹️ ▶️ John that are your favorites, and now your favorites view is the safe one. It means that you have to sacrifice faving
⏹️ ▶️ John your favorite sexy picture of your spouse, right? Because now that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey safe to show other people.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can no longer use favorites as like, this is my favorite photo. You have to use it as,
⏹️ ▶️ John by hitting this heart, I am saying this will go into the collection that is safe for everyone to view. If you don’t wanna do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John use tags, use manual organization or whatever. But the only way to get a truly safe thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is making me think you have like sexy pictures you don’t want people to see is, you have to pick the pictures and put them into the album
⏹️ ▶️ John that you deem to be safe, whether that be favorites or something else.
#askatp: Junior vs. senior developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ror Lochar writes, which is a great name, very good name. I’ve spent some time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to figure out the differences between a junior and senior developer. A certain amount of experience in years seems to be a given, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what about technical skills? What would you guys put on an essentials list for junior and senior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer skills? For example, design patterns, oop and pop, or proficiency in a specific language.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it a implementer system versus designing a system perspective? I think it would be fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this from the least qualified to answer this question to most. So, Marco, why don’t you start us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s POP? Besides like post office protocol? What does it mean in this context?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that protocol oriented? Oh, maybe. I think, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would learn about that in WWDC. Well, again, Casey is correct. I am the least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco qualified among us to answer this. But what I would propose is that anybody talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about design patterns is probably a junior developer. Junior developers are smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people enough experience to know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to rein it in and and what not to do and and like how to choose what to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not not necessarily like the the technical smarts of like how to use this cool new feature but like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you not do a senior developer I would expect to have wisdom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is different from intelligence usually comes with experience and to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make those kind of decisions of like what cool fancy thing do we not use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to get the job done better? Or how do we avoid having our junior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers exercise their 20-year-old intelligence by doing all these cool language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tricks that actually make harder to maintain and harder to recode? A senior developer should have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wisdom to be able to direct people to do things in a more boring way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually ends up working better for pragmatic purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to confess that that was an actually astonishingly good answer, which I almost entirely agree with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In my experience, a junior developer is someone who needs hand-holding, and that’s not too different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than what Marco said. A junior developer may be a quote-unquote self-starter, but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs a lot of guidance. They need guidance on what to do and how to do it. Whereas a senior developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by comparison, typically needs little to no guidance. You can have them look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a board of tickets or whatever, a to-do list effectively.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’re probably going to be able to deduce what is the most important thing for right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then once that implementation is underway, it’s exactly what Marco said. There’s a pragmatism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there that a junior developer just doesn’t have, a wisdom there, like Marco said, that a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey junior developer just won’t have. And that’s kind of how I look at it. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wanted something more concrete, you could distill it in years of experience or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey techniques that they’re familiar with or something like that. But ultimately, I think Marco, you know, absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nailed it. It’s, to me, it’s about wisdom and pragmatism in summary. But John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the most qualified of all of us to make this distinction, where is it? So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s two different ways to take this question. One of them is the way you, that’s probably, probably inspiring
⏹️ ▶️ John this question the way you see on the internet a lot, which is basically, you know, those nature films when they show, like, like the male
⏹️ ▶️ John birds doing displays with their feathers to try to compete for the attentions of the females. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ John like, who has the biggest feathers? They’re doing a funny walk. They’re collecting blue pieces of plastic. Whatever it is they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the internet amongst people who are learning programming or into programming, there is this feather display thing of
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to show that they are the biggest, toughest developer. And part of that
⏹️ ▶️ John is debating who is allowed to call themselves a senior developer, who is still junior.
⏹️ ▶️ John Am I a senior? Am I a junior? let’s all argue about it because I want to feel like I’m a senior.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s total, you know, whatever the nature term is for that, like mating dance, feather plumage,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, whatever. That is mostly a sideshow, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bunch of programmers trying to figure out, uh, am
⏹️ ▶️ John I, am I improving? Like what, what am I shooting for? What is my goal? Am I still junior or
⏹️ ▶️ John can I now call myself senior? The second place this comes into play in this this place that I have more experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John is in big companies. In big companies, there are actual titles. They may not be called junior or senior developer, that
⏹️ ▶️ John every title, every company has their own weird title structure and different cohorts for jobs. But those
⏹️ ▶️ John titles have meaning within the company. They mean different pay scales. They might mean different amounts of vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John days. They might mean different amounts of stock awards if you’re in a startup or
⏹️ ▶️ John a public company. Those have real consequences. And the second conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John about this is like, I’m in a big company, how what do I have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John to get from whatever level I’m at now to the next or if I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to be hired into a big company, should I try to be hired at level x, level y or level z, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re called junior, senior, whatever they have, you know, terrible titles that Marco luckily has never had to hear in his life, and I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John subject him to them now. But there’s lots of different levels, with lots of different words. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John words are meaningful, then they’re meaningful to your life, they’re meaningful to deciding, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John should I, you know, if, if I was in company X and my title was this, when I go to company
⏹️ ▶️ John Y, what, what title should I be saying that I deserve to get?
⏹️ ▶️ John Am I a senior developer or am I not a senior developer? And that conversation is I think much more
⏹️ ▶️ John important and has life consequences versus just arguing on Reddit, whether you’re a real senior developer or
⏹️ ▶️ John real junior developer or whatever. Um, but the third one, which is kind of the question that both of you answered
⏹️ ▶️ John is setting aside companies and their titles and real world consequences and setting inside, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John people arguing on the internet about who’s the biggest, toughest programmer. I would point you both to
⏹️ ▶️ John the tweet I linked here, which is a funny image. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but delightful. So it shows scenes from, I believe, well, it’s the pilot episode of Lost,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I think like maybe episode two or three of Lost. I don’t remember the timeline, maybe it’s still episode one. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Lost is a cool show. You should check it out if you haven’t seen it before. I’m not spoiling too much in the pilot episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is an airliner crashes and a ridiculous number of people survive it, which is right away unrealistic
⏹️ ▶️ John and get ready for more of that. But anyway, an airliner crashes and there is a
⏹️ ▶️ John girl standing in the, a young lady standing in the rubble crying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things are on fire behind her. Pieces of fuselage are everywhere. And she is crying because she’s just been in a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John plane crash. Above that one, it says junior developer, right? The right
⏹️ ▶️ John side of the image shows that same girl a couple episodes later, laying on
⏹️ ▶️ John a blanket on the beach with the wreckage of the plane still smoldering behind her
⏹️ ▶️ John and she’s just sunbathing. And that one says senior developer over the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John This reminds me, I’m gonna go one more level deep before I start talking about these, of a quote that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John was from an interview with Gene Hackman, but I could not find it on the internet, so who knows who it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do kids know who Gene Hackman is? Slykes Luther? No, you don’t even know that. I can’t even make a reference. Gene Hackman, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s a famous actor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, what was the other good submarine one? Crimson Tide. He was the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey captain on Crimson Tide.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there was an interview with him that I remember reading years and years ago, where they were asking about
⏹️ ▶️ John his experience as an actor. At the time, he was already like an older elder statesman actor, right? He’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of balding, got gray curly hair, even at that time, even like 20, 30 years ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they asked him to talk about acting, or maybe he was like in the actor’s studio on PBS or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he basically said, when you’ve been acting for a really long time and you’ve been in a lot of big movies,
⏹️ ▶️ John this again, he was in the original Superman as Lex Luthor, and like, he’s been around for a long time, right? And this was
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the 80s or 90s, and he was already a big name in the 70s. When you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been in a lot of big movies in a lot of big TV shows, you become accustomed to all of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that have to do with making movies. You know, being on a set, working with big directors, seeing other stars
⏹️ ▶️ John that you maybe saw in movies when you were a kid, reading from a script, memorizing your lines, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John working with writers, the whole nine yards. And you also get used to being in front of the camera and doing different
⏹️ ▶️ John dramatic scenes, death scene, a scene where you have to cry, I love seeing all of those stuff. And he says,
⏹️ ▶️ John after doing that for many, many years, you develop a certain kind of poise in the face
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that you’re asked to do as an actor. And that poise,
⏹️ ▶️ John which really doesn’t have anything to do with the job of acting, just has to do with the fact that you’ve done this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have a certain level of poise that, say, someone who’s on their first big movie doesn’t have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people see that poise on the screen, and they interpret that as good acting.
⏹️ ▶️ John He was trying to basically make a joke that he said, I’m not a good actor. It’s just that I don’t panic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that poise, people look at that and say, wow, this is the world’s greatest actor, but really, I’m just chill.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this junior-senior developer thing, there’s a crash plane with rubble
⏹️ ▶️ John and flames in both of these pictures. The junior developer is just standing there not
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing what to do, crying. And the senior developer is sunbathing. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean the situation is any better. In the big company that you work for, your code base is still a mess, everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all broken, nobody knows how anything works, Everything’s crashing all the time. But when you’re the senior
⏹️ ▶️ John developer, it’s like the this is fine meme, to use a more
⏹️ ▶️ John recent thing. This is not your first plane crash. You’ve been through this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you develop a certain amount of poise. And people interpret that poise
⏹️ ▶️ John as seniority. Now, this is a cynical and funny way to view this, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a grain of truth to it in that the thing you were talking about gaining experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John really, like there’s kind of no amount of knowledge or skills or acronyms that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can know in your very first job as a programmer that’s gonna make you senior,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote senior, the day you land in your very first job as a programmer.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing that will make you senior is hard fought experience. And not just experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John because on the show Lost, Not everyone deals with what happens on that island
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same chill way, including by the way, the characters in the scene, it’s not a great example, but it works visually. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can be at a company as a programmer or multiple companies for years and years and
⏹️ ▶️ John never graduate from a sort of junior developer
⏹️ ▶️ John mindset. Maybe you don’t want to, maybe that’s not your ambition, right? But to,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not simply a matter of being in the seat for years, typing on the keys. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John help but gain a little bit of experience from that but to climb the ladder of actual experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside the, you know, the plumage displays on the internet and setting aside the climbing
⏹️ ▶️ John the corporate ladder and different titles. If you actually want to develop your skills to a higher and higher level, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to not only have experience, but that experience has to produce results, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to have worked on big complicated systems and successfully created them
⏹️ ▶️ John or made them better. You have to have set goals for yourself and eventually accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ John them, even if you failed the first two or three times you did. It’s not just experience, it is experience
⏹️ ▶️ John doing more and more complicated things and eventually succeeding at them or at least doing them better
⏹️ ▶️ John than you did before. Merely doing the same thing for 20 years as a programmer and never getting
⏹️ ▶️ John any better, that’s called a career. You can have that career. Everybody knows people who have careers like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. That’s not a shameful thing to have. If you think of somebody who like, you know, I don’t know, like fixes power
⏹️ ▶️ John lines and they fix power lines, like after the first one or two years on the job, they’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John all the skills they need to have and they work fixing power lines for 50 years and they never get any
⏹️ ▶️ John better at fixing them. They’re good enough at fixing power lines to fix the power lines. Like they’re doing the job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they never wanted to be the person who says, I have a new way to redesign the whole power grid. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John what they want to do. They just want to fix the power lines. and they’re good at fixing the power lines. And if you want someone to fix your power lines,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the person to do it because they’ve been doing it for years and years. But they’re never gonna graduate to the level of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna design the power grid for this new city, because that’s not the job they want. Usually in real jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear, you’re either the person who fixes the power lines or the person who designs it. There’s not a lot of crossover in those jobs, but in programming,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no city, there is nothing there, it’s just ones and zeros, it’s characters on the screen. And people doing quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote the same job, one person maybe just wanna be the person fixes the power lines when
⏹️ ▶️ John they go down after the winter storm and they want to do that for 20 years and the other person wants to essentially design
⏹️ ▶️ John the solar system. And you don’t get to design the solar system unless you
⏹️ ▶️ John work your way up to that by trying to design a chair
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a house and then a city and then a government and then a planet and you know you work
⏹️ ▶️ John your way up to it and you have to successfully do those things because otherwise they’re not going to let you design the city
⏹️ ▶️ John if you if none of the houses you designed like if they all fell down and you know crumbled to dust right
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that’s what makes an actual junior senior whatever whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John level two level three or whatever if you want to climb that ladder ladder you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do difficult things and eventually accomplish them and do more difficult things and accomplish them and do more
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult things and accomplish them and notice i haven’t say anything about technology stacks, languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, object oriented, protocol oriented, Swift, GUI, server side, client side,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of that stuff matters. Every single realm of programming, whether it’s writing COBOL or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, programming Perl, writing C++ or Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it doesn’t, you know, client side, server side, any of those realms, pick any one of them, this
⏹️ ▶️ John ladder exists within all of them that you can climb if you want to, but you don’t necessarily have to if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a quote unquote, junior developer your entire career. That’s a perfectly fine career.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of them. You know, the final thing I’ll say on this topic is one of the most important things to know is, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you actually want to do? Do you know what a quote unquote architect in your company does?
⏹️ ▶️ John And once you find out, do you still want that job? Or would you rather
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like, think of what you would like to be doing, and then figure out within whatever company you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in or working for yourself, what job title does that? And what job titles don’t do that? Or what
⏹️ ▶️ John job titles no longer do that used to do that. But then when you go up to the next job, pal, you no longer do that. It’s really important
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to figure that out. Because if you, you know, if you just say I’m going to climb the ladder as high as I can, eventually you’re the CTO.
⏹️ ▶️ John And let me tell you, there’s not a lot of programming there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. And if you are doing programming, that’s a very bad sign.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe you’re the only the only programmer in the company. You’re the CTO, the CEO, you’re the Marco of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Marco has to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is on tech support, as we’ve seen sometimes live on the air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Rose, and Earnest. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm We will talk to
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, check podcast so long.
John’s Beeps
⏹️ ▶️ John John, tell me about your beeps. I keep calling it the three beeps, but I think technically there’s four.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a multi-month thing. I’m just bringing you in on it now because I feel like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s either coming to a head or I’m starting to give up and I have to deploy the internet to
⏹️ ▶️ John save me. There’s still one step I really have to take to deploy the internet, but I figured this time
⏹️ ▶️ John for ATP audience to know. For the past several months,
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in my house, a couple of times a day,
⏹️ ▶️ John we hear three beeps, sometimes four. And it’s a little song, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a three note scale. I can’t carry a tune and I do not have perfect pitch. Don’t care, try it. So I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce it for you. Do your best. Oh, you must try it. But it’s probably, doo doo doo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, my notes are all off, but it’s three notes like that. But it’s. Three notes ascending. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the fourth one is super high pitched, like doo doo doo dee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Quick little update from the future. John recorded it and it sounds like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, back to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright so that couple months this has been going on. The sound,
⏹️ ▶️ John it only happens a couple times a day. It’s not at any particular time. It’s not on the hour. It’s not on the 15s. It’s not on the 30s. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a fixed time. You know, there is no discernible pattern to the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for the fact that you will hear it a couple of times a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only during the day, or is it at night, like in the middle of the
⏹️ ▶️ John night? At night too, but it’s not so loud that you’d hear it when you’re sleeping, right? As far as we can tell, it’s coming from the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we’ve been, at various times it’s gone off, I’ve been in every room on the first and second floor when it’s gone off. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been in the bedrooms, I’ve been in the living room, I’m in the room I’m in now, in the kitchen, dining room. If it
⏹️ ▶️ John was any of those rooms, you’d be able to tell. No matter what room in the house you’re in, It sounds like it’s coming from the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple of us have been in the basement when it’s gone off. I haven’t been, but a couple of people have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that has helped us. Well, I don’t know, has it helped us locally? There’s been various reports when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in the basement of where it might sound like it’s coming from. There’s been various reports. Right, sometimes it seems like it’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from one place. Sometimes it seems like it’s coming from another place. My parents were here recently. We have like a finished room in the basement
⏹️ ▶️ John with like a guest bedroom and they were sleeping down there. They thought it was coming from the room that they’re sleeping in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, where, where in the room? and they just, you know, it’s a type of little ditty
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s hard to isolate because it’s a computery type sound, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s a couple of problems with this. One, in the beginning it was just kind of amusing, like, hey, what is that beeping sound? But now several
⏹️ ▶️ John months in, now it’s a mission, right? So started to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the process of elimination. You have an idea of thing you think
⏹️ ▶️ John might be making three beeps, shut it off. And then wait to see if you hear the
⏹️ ▶️ John three beeps. If you hear them and the thing was off, it’s not that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So what, what things are in the basement? Like his laundry down there?
⏹️ ▶️ John So one of the questions is what changed because we’ve been living in this house for 20 years
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, there hasn’t been three beats. What changed in the basement recently? Have you gotten anything new or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kind of the first stuff we tried. Uh, we got like a new, uh, carbon monoxide detector
⏹️ ▶️ John near the furnace. Right. Um, so one of the first things I tried was, okay, I’m taking that thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m bringing it. I’m taking it out of the basement and putting it into the room where I am for a day. I just carried
⏹️ ▶️ John around with me for a day. I’m like, if this thing goes off, it’s going to be two feet away from me. I’ll know it. And three beeps
⏹️ ▶️ John went off and it wasn’t the carbon monoxide detector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you know, I think the chat room has already solved it. I bet I know what it is. And I’m stealing Ted from Ohio or Ted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey O’s answer. Where is your Fios ONT? Right. So I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so let me just take some more stuff that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey learned. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s, there’s a bunch of other stuff down there. There’s, there’s both of my Synologies, there’s a UPS attached to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an Eero. I shut down all those things in turn, including turning off the UPS, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a pain because I had to,
⏹️ ▶️ John plug things directly into the wall. It’s not either one of the Synologies, it’s not the UPS, it’s not the Eero. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John unplug slash replace the switch because if I if I turn off that switch, the wired internet
⏹️ ▶️ John in the house no longer works. So I suppose I could replace that switch with another one, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, water heater? Uh, nothing’s changed with the water heater recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I figured I’d give it a try. Like, searched on the internet, like, is there any speaker inside the little
⏹️ ▶️ John pilot light? Because they have a gas water heater, and there’s a little box with thermocouple in the pilot light or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, does that box have a speaker? Period. Right? Like, trying to get the manual for that or whatever. Obviously, I can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t disable that and turn that off because we need hot water, or I wouldn’t want to, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m pretty sure it’s not that. The Fios thing was an option. If you Google for
⏹️ ▶️ John Fios box beeps, you’ll find a million people. Because, you remember this, Casey, when Fios box, or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Marco does too, remember it had the big battery backup thing? Yeah, it happened to me
⏹️ ▶️ John too. They don’t have that anymore. The modern ones don’t. If you get gigabit fiber like I have, they
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer, I think they took away my backup battery. I think I see where it used to be attached. There’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John DC input on the thing. You’re supposed to keep your plain old telephone system
⏹️ ▶️ John line active. Like if you lost power, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey still make telephone calls.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can see where my telephone wire goes to the rest of the house and there’s this Firehouse box that has a DC input
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on it. But the battery that used to be there, it used to be like a big, heavy, probably lead acid rechargeable battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when that battery started to die, the old Firehouse ONTs would beep. But they would not play a three
⏹️ ▶️ John beep song. You can go find a YouTube video. They would go beep. That’s what I was just doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John beep, like a smoke detector. You know, smoke detectors would go every 60 seconds or every 30 seconds. UPSs will
⏹️ ▶️ John make a racket and they’ll make lots of beeping, beeping. Tons of things will beep, you know, but they will not play
⏹️ ▶️ John a three, possibly four note song in an ascending scale with the super high pitch one
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end, nor will they do it once every, let’s say six and a half to eight hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not like it’s going off once every 30 seconds. It’s a, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it sound like a, is it like a happy song or is it like discordant to alert you of something you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like a song that you’re watching I mean, you know, the Washington Dryers play these little songs now. It’s not that kind of a happy
⏹️ ▶️ John song. It is a more electronic thing, but it is three distinct notes with a
⏹️ ▶️ John fourth higher pitched note.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it sounds like it’s making like a complete major chord. So it’s like a pleasant sound instead of like a boo-doo-doo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t trying to like have like a-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just, I don’t know the music theory for it, but it’s not discordant. It sounds like a major scale type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so it sounds like probably a happy alert.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how happy it is, but it’s not like intentionally scary sounding. Right, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the Fios thing is still potentially suspect. I looked up, I have so many pictures of the serial numbers of all these
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes just so I can Google for this exact thing. The first thing I always wanna know is, does this thing have a
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker inside it of any kind? As far as I can tell, the very, very tiny modern gigabit Fios
⏹️ ▶️ John thing does not have a speaker anywhere in it, nor can I find any reference on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Fios box that I have ever making any noise because there is no battery
⏹️ ▶️ John backup inside it. There’s no flashing light, there’s no alerting thing, there’s no battery, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. And if any of these things were in distress, when something is going wrong, they’re broken, or they have a failing
⏹️ ▶️ John battery or whatever, they tend to get your attention more urgently. So other things I’ve done, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John an in-ground sprinkler system for my lawn, that has a battery, replaced it. All the smoke detectors downstairs,
⏹️ ▶️ John removed them from the basement and brought them up with me, like I took them on a car trip with me, and whatever, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the way to take, because I was leaving the house, that I’m going somewhere in my car, I’m taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the smoke detectors with me. If when I’m gone, you hear the three beeps, it’s not the smoke detectors. Like this is how I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John limiting stuff. Honestly, I am running out of things in the basement of my house to
⏹️ ▶️ John even suspect. Today I was Googling for the N-Star electric meter
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think some of the, or the gas meter, because like, you know those things where they take the meter reading like remotely,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like a wirelessly as the truck drives by, I don’t know if you guys have this. Yep, yep, yep, we do, we do. I think there’s some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of wireless connection there. So I’m Googling for like, N star gas electric meter, using
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact model numbers and everything to say, is this a sound, but like, again, what changed?
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have new meters. We haven’t put new meters in or anything like that. Do they have a battery that’s dying? And if it’s dying, why is it
⏹️ ▶️ John telling me about it three times per day at random times, as opposed to constantly beeping at me? Why
⏹️ ▶️ John is it playing a song? Why is it playing three notes, possibly four? Beep, beep, beep, beep.
⏹️ ▶️ John The high-pitched one is so high-pitched you can’t even really hear it unless you’re close, right? So this is escalating
⏹️ ▶️ John because months of this is like, now it’s like, why can’t I find it? So my next step,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m really scraping the bottom of that, for a long time, during the summer, we thought it was the new dehumidifier we
⏹️ ▶️ John bought and we’re like, oh, don’t worry, when I unplug the dehumidifier, it’ll be fine. But the dehumidifier is unplugged now,
⏹️ ▶️ John still going on. It’s not the dehumidifier. Because that was a new addition to the basement and it does make noises when like it’s, filter
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be changed or whatever. But now I’m running out of stuff to remove, So my next step is, and this
⏹️ ▶️ John is an annoying step, and it’s a step that Marco would probably enjoy because it involves buying stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John the sound, right? And to do that, I need to get a small recorder
⏹️ ▶️ John that can run for essentially eight hours on battery. An iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John just constantly record stuff in the basement, right? An iPhone, an old iPhone. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good call. I don’t know if an iPhone can last that long. And also on the iPhone. Oh, heck yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ John I do want, I wonder if the microphone in an iPhone is good enough to pick up this noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done this before, of like just putting an iPhone down to record something. If it’s really far away, like if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the other room, I don’t know. So I was thinking of buying like an SD card powered like tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John recorder that you’d put on the table when you’re interviewing someone, this like sort of omnidirectional pick up everything microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you will find, I mean, unless you go pretty big on that, I think you will find that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microphones in a modern iPhone are actually better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’m not gonna use one of our iPhones because you can’t be without your iPhone for eight hours. You don’t have old ones?
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose I can look up there to see. Like the old ones the kids are using, we can hand it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your perfect jet black iPhone 7? Yeah, I do have that somewhere. I mean, that’s a little older, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you’d probably still have pretty good luck with that. I mean, you could get a little recorder, believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. I’ve gone through them, they’re very fun, but unless you get something very nice, like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a Zoom H5 with its awesome little XY capsules, I don’t think you’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better sensitivity than an iPhone built-in mic. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the other thing I was thinking of was like, obviously, if you really wanna do this right, you get three microphones and triangulate, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to get precisely synchronized clocks, and you’d get the three microphones, and you’d get the recordings, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d get the little song to play, and then you’d bring them back, and then you’d have them time code synced, and you’d be able to triangulate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need them that synced, you just line up the waveforms and see which one’s loudest.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can do that too. Um, but yeah, and the thing is guessing where I’m going to put this. I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ John going to put it in the room where it seems to be. The problem is we had reports of it. Sound, it sounded like it was coming from the water
⏹️ ▶️ John heater and then we had, it sounded like it was coming to the room I’m sleeping in. Those are on the opposite ends of the ends of the basement. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I have never been in the basement when it has gone off, but we have very conflicting reports of people who have been
⏹️ ▶️ John in the basement when it’s gone off. You know, a couple of senior citizens and someone sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John next to a running laundry machine, um, beeps are to, to isolate them that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have a laptop for work, do you not? I’m not gonna leave my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down there. No, no, no, no, no. You’re going to go down there and work on your laptop tomorrow. Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not nice in the basement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t… Do you want to know the source of the beep or not?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so the goal of recording is mostly so I can post the recording on the
⏹️ ▶️ John internet. And so people can say, oh, I’ve heard that little sound. It’s from X. And yes, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have to endure all the people saying, are you sure it’s not your dryer singing a song to you? I know my dryers and washers songs. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John have these are old appliances that we’ve had for many, many years.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, this is the mystery in my house. And I figured I would bring this up today just because like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of at my wits end like having, you know, powering down my Synology is powering
⏹️ ▶️ John down the UPS that they’re attached to powering down my basement Eero. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. And if it is the files thing, like the problem, the problem with the files thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John the all All the Google’s are also polluted by people with the beeping batteries. Like you just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t penetrate. You will just find years and years of people with their failing batteries and their Fios ONTs that are
⏹️ ▶️ John the old version. You’ll find YouTube videos of it, you’ll find web pages, you’ll find bulletin boards. And when you start
⏹️ ▶️ John putting in the model number of my thing, nothing having to do with beeping ever comes up. It was getting to the point of where
⏹️ ▶️ John you do like, what is it called, Google whacking or whatever, you find one result. Yeah. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s really brutal out there. Because if you say beep or song or anything like that, a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John legit problems pollute your results. That’s why I feel like I need to get the recording. When we do get the recording,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we’ll play it on the show and maybe someone will recognize the tune. But what a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John mystery, because it’s either a new addition to my basement, which I feel like there hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John a new addition, or it’s something that’s been in my basement for at least a decade that has suddenly decided to start
⏹️ ▶️ John singing a song every once in a while, for months, like three times a
⏹️ ▶️ John day. I mean, if a battery was dying, it would be dead by now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, John. That’s very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not that loud, but you can hear it on the second floor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the house. From the, if it is ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ John in the… In the basement, you’re on the second floor of the house, and if you are tuned to a doo doo doo, you can hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most frustrating thing, it’s like an alien signal. It’s like, when you hear it, you know, well, but I won’t be hearing that again for six hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s never more frequent.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, nope. If it was we’d be like running down there like where is it? Where is it? Nope, you it does its
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and you will not hear it again for hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time you hear it right down at the exact time. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ John I was doing I was doing the logging to try to find a pattern I gave up when there was no pattern Like it’s not even it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John even on five minute increments. It is just it’s all over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map So it’s not like every seven and a half hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it’ll only be a three hour gap.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’re like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just heard that three hours ago. Sometimes you’ll go the whole day, and obviously you’re not in the same place all the time, so it could be going
⏹️ ▶️ John off when we’re not there, but I’m in the house all day long. And I went out to hear it today. I heard it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think like at 9, 12 or something, and then at like 4, 22,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I haven’t heard it since then. But it could have gone off while I was in here recording. I might
⏹️ ▶️ John not have heard it because I’ve got headphones on and everything like that. But yeah, but sometimes you’ll hear it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember when my parents were here, sometimes they said we heard it like three times in the night,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We heard it at like 10 p.m., at like 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had various theories about what they thought it might be. And that’s a lot, that’s a pretty frequent thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But sometimes you won’t hear it for a much longer stretch. It’s super weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remember, um, remember you and I have all of us actually have visited underscore his house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of times and you slept in their basement a couple of times and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one time, I don’t know, it was two, three years ago. I forget what, what underscore was trying to ship, but he did a gray
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style staycation by basically actually Margo, you’d probably remember this. It by sequestering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey himself in his own basement and basically coming up for food and little else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think what you need to do is an underscore slash gray style staycation in your own basement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just dedicate 24 hours to living down there. Never leave unless you absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to. And if you do, you better get a proxy down there to sit and listen for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you really, really do want to fix this problem, you will. And if it is indeed in the basement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will fix this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Yeah, it needs it needs to be a recorder though because like say I’m sitting in the finish room and it goes off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not confident that I could isolate it because you’ve got like fractions of a second to hear the little
⏹️ ▶️ John song and I could probably tell directionally it’s in that half of the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John But beyond that, like you don’t realize how much you rely on the repetition
⏹️ ▶️ John of a sound to get closer to it. Like if the smoke alarm only chirped once and didn’t keep chirping
⏹️ ▶️ John every 30 seconds, you would never find it. It’s so hard to find even when it chirps every 30 seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you gotta start hunting in your house, like, all right, try this room. Stand here, my next one, then, oh, it’s this direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, go stand over here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And imagine if it chirped twice per day,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey by eight hours. You would never
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s what this is like. Anyway, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John try to get a recording. If I get one, I will post it on Twitter, and I will bring it to the show and give it to Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John and he can play it for all the ATP listeners. I’m hoping someone somewhere is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh I know what that is it really is the Fios ONT and I can call Verizon and say hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one thing I can’t turn off in my house is making a noise. Come and fix it.