463: No Indication of Progress
30 Dec 2021Holiday tech that we love and holiday tech that we don’t.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Marco’s desk situation
- Casey’s desk situation
- Follow-up:
- Jonathan Dietz Comes Through
- Glenwing’s page and calculator and forum post
- Chroma Subsampling
- USB4/TB4 bandwidth (via Dimitri Bouniol)
- Jonathan Dietz Comes Through
- Marco’s Christmas-movie Adventure
- Holiday tech we love
- Casey joins 2019 and gets AirPods Pro
- Marco’s new Switch
- Tina’s new iPhone car mount
#askatp:- Would we rock a full-on iMac as an external monitor if Target Display Mode still existed? (via Jeff Fowler)
- Does Apple like the drama and rumors around it? (via Erik Neu)
- Do we close all our apps before rebooting our computers? (via AdamMHead)
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Chapters
- Crooked, shaking, and dim
- Casey’s coaster
- 8K 120 Hz over Thunderbolt
- Sponsor: Memberful
- Marco’s Christmas-movie adventure
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Holiday tech we love
- Sponsor: Linode
- #askatp: Future Target Display Mode
- #askatp: Does Apple like rumors?
- #askatp: Teaching kids window management
- Ending theme
- Saying farewell to Intel
Crooked, shaking, and dim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m back on my LG five gigs. I’m in that other location right now. Every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I come back to this, I feel like it gets smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s some jokes here, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s so not only does it seem like it’s smaller, which you know that’s that’s its own problem, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second I touch the keyboard on this desk, it jiggles the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor jiggles with every key stroke and I’m I’m oh and of course because of the stand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can never quite tell if it’s level. Like if the rotation angle of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always seems like it’s a little bit tilted. And I try to tilt it back. I’m not, I haven’t gotten to the point of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting on a level yet. I probably should, but like, it’s just, it’s so mediocre. And then there’s some kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy behavior where it seems to forget its brightness setting every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so often. I’m not sure with what conditions exactly. I don’t use it enough, thank God to have nailed that down yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it’s like every time I come up to it, it’s like crooked and shaking and dim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have to like hit the brightness up button on the keyboard to make it, and then it’s blast with full brightness because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only adjusted it one square, but it actually moved up nine squares. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing with the brightness, I don’t recall having an issue with mine with brightness, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will say that the volume, because the speakers on that thing are hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad, but nevertheless, the volume, like the third, the jump from third to fourth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey block, cube, whatever you want to call it, was like the difference between a whisper and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouting. And I believe when I busted out the iMac Pro, which I actually have an update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that as well, but when I busted out the iMac Pro briefly to do the firmware update, I believe that was one of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the only thing that got fixed was the volume was actually more linear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subsequent to that firmware update. So you might wanna see if a firmware update is possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if so, if that does anything for your brightness. I believe as of, did we talk about this on the show? But as of a week or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, the LG monitor, whatever app, which is a steaming pile of garbage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually works on M1 Macs now, so that’s kind of cool. Well, for a loose definition of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works, but nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But no, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say, I still am, even despite all that I’ve been through, I still am a bit of an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG ultrafine 5K apologist. However, it absolutely is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you said with regard to the stand. it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly and utterly atrocious, like hilariously bad. And one of these days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to figure out a different mechanism, well, assuming I ever get it back, a different mechanism to mount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because it is truly terrible. What I really want is like a Visa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand rather than a Visa mount because I have this glass desk that I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like to get rid of. Is it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visa? Or is it like MasterCard or like is it? I go with Visa, I don’t like saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, I very well could have that wrong. I personally, like John, go with Visa rather than Vesa, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not standing by this as accurate. This could very well be a Bazell moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they do make stands. I mean, I’ve looked at a bunch of them for TVs and they make them for monitors too. But the problem with, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s a problem for you because you’re using an LG, but my problem with most of them is they don’t look great. I mean, I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re sturdy and you can find ones that are metal and that, you know, are well-made and it’s a straightforward thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do, but they’re not particularly attractive. They look a lot like just what they are, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like bent pieces of metal in an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco L shape with,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re just, they don’t have good surface finishes. They’re not really shaped in any interesting way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the one thing the LG stands have going for them is that from a distance, if you don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible they are, they usually look pretty minimal and they’re not in your face. And they’re usually some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable curve. They don’t look like robot spider legs like they do on the gaming monitors. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Those giant claws or, you know, fake articulated, like
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-jointed feet. They’re just plain. But of course, they don’t fulfill their function of actually holding
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor up and still. So then you look at the VESA mounts and they all just look like they
⏹️ ▶️ John belong in an office. In fact, many of them are things that I’ve seen in my office and they’re fine if you’re gonna buy 700 of them
⏹️ ▶️ John to put on all the desks of the people in your company or whatever, but they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly nice looking. And I know that sounds dumb, but it’s no more dumb than the criteria people use
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy $30,000 cars, which is if you don’t like how it looks, You’re not into it.
Casey’s coaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so may I give a brief update on my desk situation?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve added a coaster. Yeah. I do have a coaster, actually. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do have a coaster.
⏹️ ▶️ John New setup. I’ve not fixed where my drink is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be not as many rings on my glass desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s a new level. It’s three millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John taller. You’re going in the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. You’re not supposed to go higher. Higher
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey does not help because the gravity
⏹️ ▶️ John will pull the water down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we learned at Marco’s Closet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have placed everything else in the table on coasters. The water remains at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As it should be. So my desk situation is actually the same. I joke. There’s no significant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey differences here. In fact, I don’t think there’s any differences from last week, which is itself a difference because every week there was something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. But I will say that my LG 5K arrived in California,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, last week in City of Industry. Is it sending you postcards? No, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wish you were here. Yeah, we don’t. Good God, tell me about it. But surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something is happening on it because the track repair feature on LG’s website moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from appointment confirmation, which it sat in for like three or four days after the monitor arrived, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repair. So one would assume that my LG 5K is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully in the to-do list if not actively getting repaired. So, yeah.
8K 120 Hz over Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along. Let’s start with some follow-up and speaking of displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friend of the show. I think we can say that at this point friend of the show Jonathan Dietz came through with all sorts of numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and mathematics about Cabling and monitors and resolutions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and bit rates and all that I’m going to leave it as mostly an exercise for the listener to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig into this and try to make heads or tails of it But a couple of things that are worth noting is this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote that you put in here John is this from Jonathan?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is. That’s the sort of the main, I mean, we feel like we’ve gone over the same ground multiple times. So every time we go
⏹️ ▶️ John over it, the released Apple products are slightly different. So we’ve always talked in the abstract about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, here’s what the standards support. And here’s which kind of standards can be tunneled over which
⏹️ ▶️ John type of other connections and which type of mode, blah, blah, blah. But the, you know, and the reason we keep like
⏹️ ▶️ John forgetting is like, well, that’s all well and good. But then the question is, of the existing Apple products that are released,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do they support over their ports? What protocols are they using? And then so things. Anyway, this is an
⏹️ ▶️ John update, a modern update based on current hardware and the current standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so Jonathan wrote to us privately, a single Thunderbolt cable at 40 gigabits a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second can handle 8192 by 4320, which is DCI full format 8K. RGB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 10 bits per component, which is HDR10, no chroma subsampling at 120 Hertz when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using display stream compression. Any existing Thunderbolt 3 or 4 controller that supports two display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port 1.4 HBR3 streams and DSC 1.1 at eight bits per pixel, should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be capable of this including Titan Ridge, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Goshen Ridge, Maple Ridge, M1 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and M1 Max. So hypothetically, it should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be possible to do, according to Jonathan, who I trust, 120 Hertz at 8K. Although I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swear I keep reading somewhere and I forget where, that the M1 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps Mac OS doesn’t, something in the Mac tool chain does not support 8K. Do you guys know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m talking about there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’m not sure if this list is exhaustive, but notice that the plain old M1 is not on the list. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, so maybe this is a new thing in the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Like, obviously we know Thunderbolt 3 and 4 have existed on Macs for a long time, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John question is, do they also support sending to DisplayPort 1.4, high bitrate 3 streams,
⏹️ ▶️ John and DisplayStream compression version 1.1? Like, there’s a bunch of extra qualifiers. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the M1 Pro and M1 Max hardware is apparently capable of that. Is the entire hardware software stack capable
⏹️ ▶️ John of that? I don’t actually know the answer to that, but the point is that it could be
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, there could be a new version of Mac OS or maybe even the existing version for all we know, and an 8K
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor that you’d run 120 Hertz with display stream compression.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So Jonathan had put together an Excel spreadsheet, which I have then uploaded pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey untouched to Google Sheets, and I will put a link in the show notes. If it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work properly, don’t blame Jonathan on that because it’s probably something about the Excel to Sheets conversion, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go and poke about and kind of play with that if you so desire, then Jonathan pointed us to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person on the internet called Glen Wing, who seems to have been doing some really deep dives into this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Glen Wing has a page, which we’ll put this in the show notes, about different display infos and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can learn about it, including a calculator where you can say, at such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such resolution, at such and such frequency, and such and such color depth and whatnot, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is not possible given that configuration? And then separately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within the Linus Tech Tips forum, there’s like this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting and interactive, it’s a forum post, but it’s an interactive calculator where you can say, all right, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer’s outputting Thunderbolt 3 and my monitor is importing Thunderbolt 3,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you can mix and match, what’s possible? So for example, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go Thunderbolt 3, it’s Thunderbolt 3. According to this, USB-C Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternate mode, 8K is only supported at 30 Hertz. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mess, it’s such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mess, but we’ll put this link in the show notes as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John This doesn’t mention display stream compression, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed. Maybe that’s where I’m missing out here. Jonathan also had another piece of follow-up, which I thought was very interesting. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he pointed out a page on artings.com, which is I think John’s beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV review website, where they talk about chroma subsampling, which is something I vaguely understand. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is relevant because it talks about how chroma subsampling, which is basically like providing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less information about color than you would normally want in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decrease the amount of data you need to throw across the wire. So you can get more stuff in less space, kind of, sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of. And so Jonathan writes, I also came across this page the other day that does a pretty good job of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explaining chroma subsampling in relation to TVs and displays. It even mentions LG’s cryptically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey named HDMI Ultra HD deep color setting. to quickly remind you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on these LG 4Ks that I have, I was saying I couldn’t get 60 Hertz on HDMI until I turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color setting on. So Jonathan continues, when you had your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG connected via HDMI, it would have been using YCBCR, is there a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey verbalization for that, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I always hear people just say it out, say it just like you did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, 422 to hit 60 Hertz at 10 BPC, which would have made the text slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blurry, which makes me feel a lot better Because I swore that on the same monitor, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flip-flopped between HDMI and DisplayPort, the text just looked a little wonky on HDMI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I couldn’t put my finger on why. So Jonathan continues, turning off HDR for that display by unchecking high dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey range and system preferences might have enabled RGB8BPC at 60 hertz and allowed for sharper text.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you have multiple displays that are the same model, connecting them using the same type of interface is definitely the way to go, which is what I’m doing now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherever possible. It sounds like you have rearranged things and now have both displays connected via USB type C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to display ports, so I’m guessing they don’t look noticeably different anymore. That is correct. However, it is worth looking at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RTINGS page, because not only is it a really good explainer about what all of this stuff is about, but it shows you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it provides images of what it looks like when the chromosome subsampling goes a little wonky, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around text. So this is surely what I was running into, and I’m just glad that for all the many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons that I am bananas, this is not on that very long list.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was my guess when you said the anti-Allison look weird. I’m like, what do you mean the anti-Allison look weird? Didn’t I mention chromosome sampling?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You might have, I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I was surely thinking it if I didn’t say it. But yeah, it’s not that it goes wonky. That’s what chromosome settling does. Like you said, it throws
⏹️ ▶️ John away data. It just plain throws it away. It either throws away data about color or throws away data about brightness
⏹️ ▶️ John or both in a way that it hopes you won’t notice if you were like watching a TV show. But if you’re looking at a monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John where you expect sort of pixel perfect text with, you know, so that every pixel has meaning, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John around the edges of text if it’s anti-aliasing or whatever, every one of those pixels is important. And if you just say, ah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this square of four pixels We’ll just average the color between them and you’re just gonna get one
⏹️ ▶️ John color for all of them or one brightness for all of them or both. The graphics are great here to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The text does not explain it very well. At one point I read something that made
⏹️ ▶️ John me think I understood the encoding of 444422420, like what the number stood for. Graphically,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see it here. And it’s like, okay, I get it. You can see how 420 is worse than 422 and 444
⏹️ ▶️ John is just what you would expect of just everything going straight through, right? but
⏹️ ▶️ John the text that tries to explain this on this page does badly. It says, the first number,
⏹️ ▶️ John in this case four, returns, refers to the size of the sample. Okay, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John size of the sample has eight pixels in this example. So what the hell is the four about again? The size
⏹️ ▶️ John of the sample? I don’t, I mean, I’m sure that makes sense if you already know what it means, but I don’t already know,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it doesn’t make sense to me. So anyway, the graphics is good, the text is not great. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have to remember anything, just remember that 444 is show me all the pixels, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Show me all the blueprints, Casey. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco nothing. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume it’s the aviator?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I haven’t actually seen it. Oh. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you heard it on Back to Work
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a lot. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right. And then 422 and 420. Like, if you’re watching it on a television,
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in from a couch distance and watching like a movie, you can get away with a lot of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of video games, for example, use those formats to save data
⏹️ ▶️ John when sending things to displays and stuff, and you can probably get away with it. But if you’re looking at a monitor real up close to it
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to see every single pixel, 404 is the only way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, sure seems like that was probably the case. And then Dimitri Boignol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, technically USB4 slash Thunderbolt 4 can also support using all lanes in one direction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for displays, making 80 gigabits per second available for it. Won’t it be possible to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or excuse me, it won’t be possible to have a hub in the display, but 8K at 120 Hertz should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely be possible on a supported system. And that’s again, USB 4, Thunderbolt 4, so many different,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many different disc
⏹️ ▶️ John code. I don’t think anyone would do that though. Like I looked it up in the spec and it does seem like that’s true that you can say, okay, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna use all the lanes in one direction, but I don’t think any computer system would really want like
⏹️ ▶️ John no way for any communication back from the monitor, especially if it’s like an 8K monitor and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really big, That means no ports on your monitor. No, maybe not even any kind of ambient light
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor, anything like that. So unidirectional doesn’t seem, and it may be like
⏹️ ▶️ John for a Super Pro setup where, you know, you’re just using it for display purposes. You don’t care about any of the other stuff. It would
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense, but it’s interesting to know that it’s there, but I’m not aware of anybody that has used that. And this is again,
⏹️ ▶️ John without display stream compression. It’s like, didn’t you just get done saying that we could do 8K at 120 Hertz with 40 gigabits per second?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are we talking about 80 gigabits? Because it’s all about display stream compression or not. Uncompressed
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just do the straightforward math of how many bits or pixels how many pixels and you know do it out both straight display
⏹️ ▶️ John stream compression I don’t know what the expected compression ratio is which is what’s why it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky to figure it out But presumably all these calculators that we will link in the show notes have some value put
⏹️ ▶️ John in for that and you can just punch the numbers in yourself and see what you get.
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Marco’s Christmas-movie adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like this has been a running problem for the last few weeks where one of you two jerks will drop something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes that gives me the shakes. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, I see the following in our show notes. Marco’s Christmas movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adventure. What problem are you going to bring upon me that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have immediately solved with either FFMPEG or Plex?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, before Marco talks about this, I just want to tell the listeners that he assured us that this is tech-related.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, now, keep that in mind, and Marco will now begin. Because I keep thinking he’s going to tell us about his giant Christmas tree, and it’s like going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John about how his life is like Christmas vacation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the movie. I believe I have mentioned in previous years that every year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TIFF makes a photo slideshow video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Christmas photos to give to the family. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very important to certain members of the family. And so it’s a big deal. We make the Christmas video every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then we show it to the family the following Christmas. Here’s last year’s Christmas video.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like a desktop laptop. This is a photo, slideshow, video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a video of a slideshow of photos. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John still photos. Yes. So it’s one still
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco photo after another.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, mostly still photos. There are occasional video clips mixed in. usually. And, you know, this has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generated over time from what used to be called iPhoto. Later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, you know, the Photos app, one or two years using Keynote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and back to the Photos app now, because that’s where the photos start. And they have a slideshow feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can export to video. So, it seems like the obvious place to do it. And—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so now hold on. So you’re saying this year, at the end of 2021, TIFF has created
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime recently, or attempted to, a video of mostly stills, occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other videos, that is Christmas 2020, that will be displayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a like family event during Christmas 2021? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct. And we also do time lapses, but those are actually much easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We would set up a camera, this is before phones had good cameras, we would set up a like you know an older
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SLR that didn’t matter so much on a tripod and have a little timer trigger thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like using the like bulb port on it where you can like have a remote trigger for the shutter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well they have one that basically is an interval timer and like it’s this weird very specialized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Canon accessory and you know you could have it you know just automatically click the shutter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every X seconds and that I would use FFmpeg to create the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the head. That was no problem at all. But the slideshow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the much more effort and time intensive thing and that falls on Tiff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she has had many trials and tribulations with these videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years because this is the kind of thing like I feel like that I you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I don’t like to invoke when Steve Jobs is still alive, unnecessarily. But Steve Jobs really seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to care a lot about this kind of use case. You know, about the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what used to be called iLife would cover. Now not everything in iLife
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would still have a role today. For example, iDVD, which we used to use to make these into DVDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when that was like the easiest way to display a video that we had made on our computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the family at at Christmas time, we actually made DVDs and would bring it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a whole menu and everything. But it makes sense why that doesn’t exist anymore. But just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco act of creating a slideshow that is somehow, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does a lot of the heavy lifting of giving us a cool template to work within, and then you pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the photos, and it maybe suggests an order and a pattern,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also hopefully allows you to modify the thing it automatically generated. and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save it in some way that is persistent and maybe can be exported as a video. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco function has moved around so much over the years as these apps have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco died and been reborn and been rewritten and been neglected in many cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the simple function of creating a slideshow from your photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a nice way has been increasingly difficult over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do reliably or even to be able to do it, whatever way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did it last year, just do it again this year. That is so often not possible because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way you did it last year doesn’t exist anymore or it officially exists but it doesn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a common thing unfortunately in today’s technology world, especially in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of Apple’s apps and various things like this. So again, this is an area where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in post-jobs Apple, I think Apple has totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost the ability to make really good consumer-facing content creation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or content management apps in most ways. There are a couple of counter examples. Like I think the Notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is pretty good, although honestly, Notes Sync has been really buggy for me recently, but that’s separate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, the apps that used to be called iLife, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I work, frankly, either don’t exist anymore or have reached a stage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of kind of passive, mostly neglect, many of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially in the case of Photos, the old app was rewritten and thrown away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so now the new Photos app has really no part of iPhoto left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. So the experience that she has every year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is poor, to say the least. This year, she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran into frequent crashes, like just using, this is using the Mac app to be clear, not like on an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Mac Photos app on photos that were created and stored in Photo Library,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a slideshow and doing a couple of modifications and the app would just crash. And every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time that she would like, either leave a slideshow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the selection of what she’s currently working on and go back in, or every time the app would crash and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’d go back in. Any customizations she had made were lost and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just reset to its automatic state every single time. So that’s one problem, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A secondary problem is that at some, like we were looking for, like we were missing in our main folder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were missing like 2017s, or 2017, 2018, like one of those, like a few years back we were missing the video for that year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we couldn’t find where the heck we had stored it and she had them all in iPhoto,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previously on probably like three computers ago, whenever it last ran.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And iPhoto’s files are just gone. Like there’s like, those files were just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nowhere on her computer, which we had like migrated every time. Those files are just not there anymore. So like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a whole other thing. There was an issue with like, oh, I had these in my iTunes home movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder. Where is that? What app does that even show up in anymore? That good luck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding that like that’s. So there’s a lot of things that have moved in recent years that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of stuff gets dropped on the floor every time Apple migrates something or rewrites something. And this seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to impact this task in some way, like almost every single year.
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. My vague recollection of the iPhoto to Photos transition is that one of the very few things
⏹️ ▶️ John that didn’t make the transition, and they told you that during the transition, was like your projects,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they used to call them in iPhoto, some or all of your projects won’t come over. What it meant for me is that
⏹️ ▶️ John some of my book projects from iPhoto didn’t come over. Well, here’s the thing. They wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John come over, they wouldn’t, it’s not that they wouldn’t come over, they wouldn’t sync through iCloud, right? So this was back
⏹️ ▶️ John when the photo library was, was being used on my wife’s computer, in addition to being on her Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID. And so on her computer, the projects were all there. But when I when I got
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac Pro and said, Now the phone now I’m going to do all the photo library stuff on my computer. I didn’t, you know, I had to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I synced it from iCloud, I wouldn’t see the product, she still had them because she we like converted
⏹️ ▶️ John in place her actual So the projects were on her computer, but when we sync with iCloud, they were on mine. And now I think the reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John is true. Now I think when I make projects, maybe they don’t sync back to her computer. This may not still be true.
⏹️ ▶️ John It may it may have just been a transient thing, but I distinctly remember projects being the one of the few things that was left
⏹️ ▶️ John behind, which makes some kind of sense because of Apple’s not like selling you the books anymore. Having a
⏹️ ▶️ John project for it is useless. Like you can order a new book from wherever, but that may also be true of slideshows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then what you said about like home movies or you know, you’re saying home movies, people don’t know what that is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John any video file that you stick into iTunes that it doesn’t understand is a television show or movie
⏹️ ▶️ John would call quote unquote home movies, but it could be literally anything. And that’s how they were categorized.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when iTunes was iTunes, you could, you know, right click, reveal in Finder and see where those
⏹️ ▶️ John files are. They were filed away somewhere, but then when music came along, who knows where they went?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And there’s been, you know, increasing turbulence in that area in over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, then then iTunes got killed and well, sort of killed and broken apart. and then the TV app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replaced that section of it, but the TV app has no concept of these videos. And it’s just, it’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. So anyway, so that whole mess, that’s mess number one that I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do wish that Apple would regain the talent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and prioritization to make those kinds of apps really good again, because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be so great. That’s exactly the kind of app Apple used to just nail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Jobs era. And I recognize that not only is he gone, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s different people in charge, but also we’re in a different time. And I recognize that. And I recognize that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this stuff is, has fragmented onto, well, some people want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it in, you know, in iPhone apps. And some people want to do it in web apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, we’ve tried some of those and they’re horrendous. I
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone apps, like, that I bet a lot of people are thinking like, oh, it’s because you’re being
⏹️ ▶️ John an old grandpa and you’re trying to use a Mac to do this stuff. And yes, Apple did stop caring about these types of apps
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. But what about all these new apps that do similar things that are all focusing on the phone? Like that Clips app
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple made and a couple other examples of iPhone focused apps that can
⏹️ ▶️ John do all the things you’re describing and that’s where Apple’s paying its attention. What I would say to that is, yeah, Apple occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out with an app that they’re super proud of, that it actually is pretty cool on the iPhone for doing this type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But two things about that. One, we call us old and fuddy-duddy, but doing a big project with
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of media on a phone screen is not fun, right? Having a big screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and a keyboard and a mouse and lots of different windows, it’s way easier to do a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And two, the much more important one, depending, you know, setting aside how much easier it is to do this stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac because of the UI and the screen space, Apple makes these apps and then
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to lose interest in them. It’s not saying that they don’t still exist or that they aren’t still updated,
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not like, the thing people might not remember about iPhoto, if you’re not an old fuddy duddy like us, is that every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone would come on stage and say, here’s the new version of iPhone, here’s how it improved from last year. They would just keep making these apps
⏹️ ▶️ John better and better and better year after year after year. Like more capable of handling more photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John better performance, new features, every single year. Whereas now we hear like, here’s the Clips app, isn’t it fun? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John will never hear about it again. So if that’s their solution, that like we made a Clips app
⏹️ ▶️ John once and it’s really cool, like does that team even still exist? it is disbanded, those people go on to something else. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, if you want to have a, you know, there’s a customer problem, hey, I want to make a cool Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John slideshow. We’re not saying the solution has to be you have to make an app just like Steve Jobs did on the Mac, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what he did. But whatever it is that you do, you can’t make it once and then be done reassign those people, you have to just
⏹️ ▶️ John keep updating and supporting that app every single year. And I know that’s boring, or
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like a waste of time, do we really need to have a development team dedicated to photos on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, and we We keep them employed year after year, we keep paying them money. Yes, you do. Because otherwise the
⏹️ ▶️ John app just dies in the vine. So whatever Apple’s strategy or solution is, A, I would recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John their solution involve the Mac because big screens and keyboards and input devices like mice and trackpads,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not so much trackpads, are way better than trying to do it on a phone screen when you’re trying to wrangle hundreds of photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And B, wherever you put it, you have to keep developing and improving it. It’s a thing you can
⏹️ ▶️ John brag about. It’s a selling, used to be a selling point of the Apple experience. If you want to make a slideshow
⏹️ ▶️ John by our stuff, because we have an easy way for you to make it and you’ll look cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and, and I do it does feel like you know, like you said, it does feel like they release these apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the teams get disbanded instantly. And so like there’s never like whatever, either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work, or, or isn’t very good. In version 1.0, that will just never get fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then five years down the road, some manager somewhere will have a project, oh let’s make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new, today’s modern version of Clipse or iMovie or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then something new comes along and then it has its own 1.0 bugs and limitations and they never get fixed because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the team gets disbanded. And I wish that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco held themselves to a higher standard in some of these areas. And the second half of this story is going to touch on that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a slideshow feature in Photos App. It is in many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways worse than what it replaced in iPhoto. How many years ago was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now? Why is it still worse at all? And why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you buy a flagship Apple product, suppose you buy a new MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s a Mac. That is like the highest end, high end of Apple’s product lines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mac, it’s higher end than the phone, it’s higher end than the iPad, it’s certainly a higher price, so people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it. This is the flagship Apple product line. I know sales-wise it doesn’t work out that way, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s… Logically, in the product line, if you want, like, you know, the best Apple computing device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at what they have, and, oh, it’s clearly the Mac. Okay. So you buy the Mac. You open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up Photos, which is a really simple name, and you would think Photos would have this feature, and look!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it does! It has a slideshow feature. Awesome! You start using slideshows, and it just crashes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, you do something really obvious and simple, and it doesn’t work. And I feel like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does Apple not care that a common task on their flagship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product just doesn’t work? Is that okay? Is somebody in Apple saying, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine because our priority isn’t to make our Mac apps very good? Because that’s what’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or because not a lot of people use that feature. They would say, oh yeah, but we have limited resources
⏹️ ▶️ John and 0.02% of our customers ever touch the slideshow feature. There are
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of bean counter reasons you can come up with that, but they’re terrible reasons, but I bet that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say. I feel like you can use the term bean counter to describe a lot of the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tremendous leadership failures of the Tim Cook era. And I think that definitely applies to things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically ignoring the entire Mac hardware and software ecosystem for a few years, back during the bad old days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And fortunately, we’ve pulled out of a lot of that, but I feel like the software team still seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run with like a, the mindset of like a 22 year old smart guy, right? Like, you know, we, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were those guys once. We understand that, you know what I was when I was 22, when a 22 year old smart guy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that I knew everything about everything. I would look at something that I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand and say, well, that’s stupid. Why is it done that way? And I was really good at starting projects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really bad at finishing them. And I really think that’s how Apple seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be run a lot of times. Like it’s, you know, we, We talk about the kind of institutional attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple seems to have in certain areas, and I feel like they are so good at starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new little projects. Oh look, Clips app, hey, go have fun with this. And then it just falls on the floor, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, we’re gonna rewrite this entire, our entire iPhoto app, we’re gonna rewrite it for the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then replace the Mac version, all this old code. Yeah, you know who rewrites old working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code? 22 year old smart guys. And then you replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old working code with this, no, we’re gonna rewrite it, this whole new thing, new language, new platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else, new methodologies, we’re gonna use the Gang of Four book or whatever. And then the thing comes out and it’s full of bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t have all the features of the old one that people actually used.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve really got it in for patterns. I guarantee you that is not the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more of a culture thing. But so the thing is, they’re so good at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing the things that young people love to do. We’re gonna rewrite it, we’re gonna start clean. You know, I mean, design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team’s a whole other thing. You know, starting clean, right? But so much gets thrown away when you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, the healthy and functional and high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to do is to, you know, obviously when you start out with something fresh, like the photos rewrite,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s gonna be some losses along the way. And certain features won’t need to make it into the new version. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay that iDVD went away. We don’t need to burn DVDs anymore. but you have to then iterate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it and restore the things that don’t work anymore or are missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people still do actually need and use. Instead, Apple just walks away.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I think this is not a problem of like smart engineers wanting to rewrite stuff because that’s not how things
⏹️ ▶️ John work inside big companies for the most part. Like someone else is setting the priorities. What do we staff? How many
⏹️ ▶️ John people do we put on this project? How many people are on the photos team versus how many were on before? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the photos, like rewriting apps with new tech stacks and new UI frameworks, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that every once in a while. I remember when they changed iMovie to like iMovie 8 or whatever, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John had fewer features, but it was an all new UI and an all new foundation for how video was done. That needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be done because the old one was old and creaky and the new one didn’t have as much feature, so they kept the old one around for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so that’s where engineering gets to lead there. And if you give enough resources to people who want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, it comes out okay. Like I think that that new foundation for iMovie eventually became the foundation for Final Cut Pro 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John which also had its own problems in terms of not having as many features, but they kept people on both of those
⏹️ ▶️ John teams long enough to make it over that hump. But when you see something like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos app come out and remove a lot of features from my photo and never get better, that’s not because, you know, the engineers
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to rewrite it or because they did come up with like, what was it called, UX kit or whatever. It was like a first attempt to put
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS APIs on the Mac without straight porting them. So instead of it being UI kit, it was UX kit,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m assuming the API looked like UIKit, but it was all on the Mac. And it was, you know, this is before Catalyst,
⏹️ ▶️ John before Swift, like this is all, you know, older stuff. And in retrospect, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had waited longer, you could have used Catalyst to do this. Or if you had waited longer, you could have used Swift. But they didn’t, they did it way back when.
⏹️ ▶️ John That wasn’t so much the problem, it’s just unfortunate timing. The problem is, the people who make staffing decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people are on this project? How much money will you put in this? When we’re budgeting for next year, how much of our budget is
⏹️ ▶️ John put towards the Photos app? That’s where prioritization mistakes are being made. And
⏹️ ▶️ John engineers aren’t making those decisions. No matter how much someone wants to rewrite something or whatever, if they say, well, guess what? The budget
⏹️ ▶️ John for this team is cut in half for next year and you’re being reassigned to do something else. No matter how super smart you are and how awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John you would have made photos if you’re reassigned, or if they cut the team size down, that’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this is a management and prioritization failure first and foremost. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can quibble with like, oh, this person rewrote this application and they did a bad job.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the most part, if you, you know, I think, I think El’s problem is not like picking the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong people to do an important rewrite. Their problem is keeping their eye on the ball and
⏹️ ▶️ John not following through on the rewrite. If you’re gonna do the rewrite, do it, but then keep supporting it. Or just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like with the Mac, it’s not like they stopped making the Mac, but they heavily deprioritized, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say, the Mac. They made a bunch of design mistakes and then they deprioritized it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure lots of people wanted to fix it inside Apple, But it’s like, no, we’re not doing that now. We’re doing something else.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, I don’t, I never, we’ll never fault somebody for trying to make the bold move and rewrite the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even things like a discovery D versus, what was the other thing? DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John responder. Right. Like I applaud those efforts. You just have to have enough follow through on it. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John the follow through is, you know, we made a mistake, let’s revert and we’ll regroup and consider this later. CoreOS
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to do a good job of this in that when they address subsystems, they either do it and then
⏹️ ▶️ John follow through and fix it until it works or realize their mistake and back it out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John either way, what they don’t do is drop discovery D and then disband the team. Like we’d still be
⏹️ ▶️ John suffering from that now if that’s what they did, right? So I blame this entirely on management
⏹️ ▶️ John and almost not at all on engineering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that rings true to me as well that this is absolutely prioritization more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it is some hotshot 20 year old trying to shoot from the hip and pew, pew, pewing all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really suspect this is management, this isn’t engineering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I hope you’re right, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now when you’re on the outside, you don’t care what the reasons are. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, and I have to say- The reasons aren’t our problem. Yeah. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like, the reasons, whatever the reasons are, I’m sure there’s like, you know, a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people in our audience who are gonna hear this who work in the company and who are gonna be upset because like, oh, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t understand. It’s like, I don’t need to understand the details of why it is this way. All I need to understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it is this way, and it’s Apple’s problem to fix it. And I don’t care how far up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to go, the buck lands somewhere. And it’s on some manager’s desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ultimately, it goes all the way to the top. Ultimately, this is up to Federighi and Cook. That’s where this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes. It’s software problems that someone has to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsibility for this. And it should be on somebody to fix this problem. And whether it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem of resource allocation or incentives or some bad manager somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along the line, frankly, I don’t care. It’s the company’s problem and they need to deal with it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had crashes in photo slideshows as well. Also, like they have a plugin system for
⏹️ ▶️ John photos where you do like the third party things that replace the books and stuff. Sometimes those are a little creaky, but that’s probably like third
⏹️ ▶️ John party. It could just as well be a third party problem. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, you know, I tend not to expect year to year big
⏹️ ▶️ John things from the photos app. And that’s why like, you know, once I learned that the slideshow crashes
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, I just don’t touch that part of the app anymore. And look for alternatives. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John know you haven’t finished with your story, but the thing I would have suggested if you had described to me your frustration with this
⏹️ ▶️ John in the process, I would have said, I, you know, you tried Keynote already and maybe you went back to that, but iMovie
⏹️ ▶️ John I found to be much more stable and an easier way to put a series of still images with transitions between them with
⏹️ ▶️ John an occasional movie chucked in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John interesting. Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other thing, like there were so many other limitations, like the speech volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the movie clips was considerably lower. And this was shot on iPhones, but it was considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower than the music volume. And there was no way to tweak that. There was no way to tweak how long the movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were shown. So it would show like a split second of a movie and then go back to a photo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a split second of a 15 second long movie. There were so many lacking customizations and stability problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is barely even a feature. So anyway, to end this on a happy note, before I go into part two of the story, which is more interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If anybody out there has recommendations for other apps to use, because frankly, again, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern Apple has shown an ability to maintain this kind of consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app very well. So if there’s any alternative out there, please not a stupid web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. But something that on a Mac or iPad or iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that could make this easier, just please let you know right and let us know. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so part two. We eventually found we actually dug up the missing 2017
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video on an old backup folder. So we got that covered. And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually Tiff suffered through and found like, you know, the exact pattern of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to cause a crash once or twice and got this year’s videos made. So then we thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t it be nice? You know, this means the most to her father. We thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrap up like a USB something that he could plug into his iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he could unwrap it and plug it right in and view the movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, okay, so first we were like, all right, maybe we should get some kind of like cheap digital picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame that can play videos and just, because we wanted to be able to unwrap it and see the movie right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be, this is a meaningful experience in this family and so we’re like, let’s make it cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? All right, so, he thought, all right. First I looked at digital picture frames and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they’re like 150 bucks and everyone says they’re kind of terrible and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few of them are battery powered so you’d have to plug it in first and I knew the screen would suck and I knew also like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would have a use for a digital picture frame afterwards. Then I thought, well, for less money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can just get like an Amazon Android tablet. So I wonder if we could just get like a cheap Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablet to serve this purpose, it has a battery, and it could play videos, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m like, then after that, after that moment is done, nobody in the family wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Amazon tablet. So, we would have no use for this afterwards. I’m like, that feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too wasteful. So, we’ll stick with the iPad plan. So, I knew that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple sells that, and this is a 10.5 inch iPad Pro he has, so it has lightning port,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not USB-C. So I thought, all right, well, I know Apple sells the camera connection kit thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or what used to be called the camera connection kit, which is a lightning to USB adapter. So you can plug in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a USB storage device and it’ll offer to import it into photos. So I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, that’s the way to go. So we had a USB stick, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, great. I even, I got a new USB stick this year, a SanDisk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sliding thing where it has a USB-C port and a USB-A port on the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB thumb drive, and you just like slide the cover over to pick which one it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco those are nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I got one of those for my PlayStation 5. Yeah, for the record, the SanDisk one that has the slidey thing, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this USB stick, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But anyway, so we thought, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s wrap up this thing, and we’ll try to get it on her father’s iPad. Like, in that moment, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrap up a USB stick plugged into a camera connection kit, done, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I put the videos on that. These are videos that were created with the Photos app on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a standard M4V file, whatever it exported as its video export.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco H.264, some of them are 1080p, some of them are 4K, like the newer ones are 4K. You know, maybe 300 megs each.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re not talking big or obscure videos. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encoded in ProRes or anything huge. They’re not 8K, they’re not even HEVC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re H.264, 4K and 1080p videos, okay? So, unwrap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, everyone’s happy, okay. Trying to get the videos onto her father’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. So first, we plugged in the thing that we got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with the modern SanDisk USB thumb drive, because we had an old thumb drive that we also had, like we had it made a while ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like a wood look, with like a nice engraving saying like our family Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, so. But those are all USB 1.0 drives. Sorry, USB 2.0 drives. So they’re pretty slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I thought, all right, let me get a modern USB 3.1 and then the USB-C port on it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he eventually upgrades his iPad, he’ll have a USB-C model, he can plug it in, it’ll be even better, great. Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first we use the new SanDisk USB thumb drive, that’s USB 3, with the USB 3.0
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning adapter. Plug it in and it says it needs power. Okay, well fortunately the modern Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning adapter does have a second lightning hole for power input. So we plug in, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get the cable, I’ll get a charger. Then, you know, this is already disrupting the flow of this experience that we were trying to have here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but fine, get a charger, plug it in. And we plug it in, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing happens. Nothing at all. Nothing on the system seems to recognize that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a drive plugged in, not even the Files app. So I thought, okay, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me try the other thumb drive. I plug in the old, ancient USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thumb drive, it’s recognized every single time. Now both of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are recognized on my Mac every time. Both of them are formatted as MBR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partitioning with FAT32 file system, exactly as thumb drives come from most factories. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a difference in any of that. For some reason, the iPad can see the USB 2.0 ancient one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not the modern USB 3.0 one. Okay, well, whatever. So eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re like, okay, well, we at least get it to see the thing, but only in the Files app, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Photos. So we go to the Files app and we navigate to the drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all right, well, it’s listing the files. Now, how do we get these into his Photos library?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, time out. These were just video files on the root of the USB key?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see you’ve listened to this before, I’ll get there. So, originally, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so, you would think that there would be, you know, photos would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it, it doesn’t. Right, okay, so, but Files app does. So here we are first. So the Files app can list the contents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the drive. And it offers the share menu. So I think, okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I selected like the five or six videos you didn’t have yet, and I hit share, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an option that says save videos. Now I assume that this is very much like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the save photo option all over iOS, where like you share a photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from anything and you hit that and add it to your photo library. Save videos. That seems like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense, right? So I tapped save videos. And what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing. No feedback. For a while, no error message. No sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of any progress happening. You tap it and the share sheet disappears and just nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, I think it was like 45 seconds. Like it was a long time. So what you definitely don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something is going to happen. And then it would eventually put up an error box like can’t open, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, fail to save item. Okay, so okay, and we start checking. Okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re on the latest software of everything. There’s 200 gigs of free space on the iPad. So it’s not like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free space issue. So and we’re trying to add like one gig of movies to
⏹️ ▶️ John a 200 gig. I feel like it’s fine. At what point in this process did you reconsider the idea of just having
⏹️ ▶️ John it be on the network somewhere and then just loading it in a webpage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but this isn’t our house. They don’t have anything. They don’t have a NAS or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So I’m like, all right, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could have just put it on marco.org slash Christmas slash rmovies.m4v
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just sent him a URL and a message and tapped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Not with this internet connection. Anyway, so that would have taken longer. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually I’m like, all right, what can I do here? So then I tried, let me try. I plugged it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone, because modern iPhones have the Files app. So I plugged it into my iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I opened up my Files app, and I selected the videos, and I thought, let me AirDrop them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So this, and this is like, I was already laughing, like, this is how ridiculous it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, the iPad’s supposed to be easy to use. And here we are trying to get videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the right format from a USB drive using all Apple’s hardware into
⏹️ ▶️ John But another network thing could have been a shared album that you could have just shared with him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but then it wouldn’t be the original quality. Like these are, this is like, you know, archival stuff for the family. Like we want him to have the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files in his library.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right, it wouldn’t be the original quality, but if you wanted the, I open up a present and I can immediately look at a video
⏹️ ▶️ John of sharing it through photo sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I know that now, thanks. But anyway, so I try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugging into my phone and airdropping it to his iPad. The transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progresses, it goes, and you know, this is, as I mentioned, it’s about a gig, so it takes like a minute or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two. Eventually, AirDrop completes the transfer, and the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throws up an error that just says, failed to save item. Save to iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, I guess that doesn’t work. So then I started looking up, and here we are, the Googling part of the story,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? and I learned what Casey just alluded to, that apparently the Photos app will not offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to import things unless it seems to have the file structure of a camera card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So you have- Like DCIM and all that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the DSIM slash, and then an eight character name, you know,.MOV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all capitals. All right, so I’m like, okay, so I rename all the files that I’ve put it on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I made copies, and it’s whole thing. So eventually that completes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I plug it back into the iPad again, And the Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app finally shows the card, you know, the USB drive as a card.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you tap it and it says, no photos to import.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Another suggestion that I found with my Googling was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to plug the iPad into a Mac to be able to use the old file transfer thing, like from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes where you open up in NowFinder, what used to be iTunes, and you go over to the files section try to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like drag it in or the photo section. So I tried that, but oh, when iCloud photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library isn’t used, you can’t do that. So, what I, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, okay, this, I don’t even know at this point, like, what are normal people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would normal people do in this case? Like, you just give up, right? So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so then I’m like, all right, let me just get this, let me see what I can do here. So, I knew AirDrop came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the closest to working. So I just airdropped the files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one by one from my Mac, where they originated, to the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First one worked great! And most of them worked great, except for two of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that said, on the iPad after transfer, failed to save item. Saved to iCloud Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead. Now, so I had, now I figured out, okay, there are two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files that for some reason just don’t work. and that’s causing the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I look at these two files. Both of them were 4k, h.264,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco m4v files, exported from the Photos app for Mac, just like all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other files. There was nothing, seemingly nothing different about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the rest worked, although only when transferred one by one with AirDrop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just, those two problem files, I just transcoded them to 1080p with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the compressor app and then of course they worked. So that’s finally the story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how how we got videos from a thumb drive onto an iPad that were all made by Apple. Like I just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad is supposed to be the easy computer. This worked instantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Macs. Everything about it worked great on Macs. What the hell is going on with the iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John As you’ve learned, like the iPad is not a computer that has good ways to get hardware input like connecting
⏹️ ▶️ John drives or connecting hardware devices like the camera connection kit is very tailored to what the name
⏹️ ▶️ John says that’s why I wanted everything in that format or whatever but the I think the the way that
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad people or the iPad experience wants you to do it is all over the network and there are lots of solutions to that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s photo sharing there’s iCloud Drive there’s Dropbox the files app understands all of them so if for example
⏹️ ▶️ John you could you know your grandfather was on Dropbox and you were on Dropbox and you shared the folder you could just go into the Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John happened from there you could save and or you could view it directly in the Dropbox app or you could have put an iCloud drive and shared
⏹️ ▶️ John it or you could put like I said you could put it on a web page because you have a website where you could just chuck it up there and then they would just tap a link and
⏹️ ▶️ John watch it and all of these are ways to get the original files and original quality over to
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad that are probably more in keeping with the iPad experience. The iPad experience is not
⏹️ ▶️ John connecting a camera connection kit then connecting that to a charger then connecting it to a USB thumb drive to put a file that you
⏹️ ▶️ John exported on your Mac into it right that should have still I’m not saying it shouldn’t, this is a mess. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad-y way to do it is everything’s just over the network and everybody has
⏹️ ▶️ John huge amounts of bandwidth and easy ways to share large files. Or, and I would imagine the more consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it, loss of quality, who cares? Like that’s what everyone says when they talk about shared iCloud libraries. Why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you just use shared albums? It’s the same thing. I’m like, no, but it reduces the quality. No one cares about that. Like they just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care. So yeah, this should definitely be easier and all these stupid limitations on
⏹️ ▶️ John how things work or just I feel like their historical baggage from the iPad, basically being a sealed box
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, we don’t need to ever get data from anywhere except for the network. That lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John port is just for charging, don’t worry about it. But I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, but you’d be right if these features weren’t not only offered, but advertised.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Apple sells equipment to do this. They, in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous, whatever, I forget which version of iOS has this, but in like in one of the recent versions of iOS or now iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS, they even bragged about, hey look, Files app now supports external storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices. And so, they officially support everything I just said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They officially support plugging in something to the Files app to be able to browse the files on it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do something with them. And you would expect that the Files app, since it offers a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button that says save videos in the share menu when you select a video file, would be able to save videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t. It just can’t. There’s so much about this experience where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, that thing that we say you can do, that you even spent money to buy hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do, oh, that doesn’t work. Okay, well, what do you mean it doesn’t work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You literally said this worked, and the software says it works. These options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are offered, and then it just doesn’t work. And that’s okay?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the other part of the iPad experience is the goalie effect of, we don’t want to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John anything onto this iPad that either is in a place where it isn’t expected or is in a format that isn’t expected. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the expectations on a personal computer or a Mac is, if you’re in the Finder or any kind of file manager and you have external
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, you can copy a file from point A to point B and the computer and operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system do not care what’s in that file. They’re like, oh, file, I guess I’ll just copy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not the Finder’s problem what is in that file. Right, whereas I always get the impression when dealing with anything having to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John files on the iPad or the iPhone, it’s like, whoa, wait a second, you want to copy a file?
⏹️ ▶️ John Who owns that file? Where will it be stored? Who’s containing reality? And who can read that? Who should own that file?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this a format I can understand? Can I play this back? And it’s like, I don’t care files that just copy the file,
⏹️ ▶️ John put it like, trust me to later find a thing. And that’s not the iPad experience. That’s a personal computer experience where
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a file manager and the file system and the files and then it’s a separate problem deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, what app can read this? Can you play it back or anything like that? And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, your whole experience makes me think that somewhere there’s a misguided
⏹️ ▶️ John set of rules that are saying, we don’t want to allow anything onto this iPad that can’t be played back
⏹️ ▶️ John because that would be a bad experience. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John much worse experience to get just an obscure error that says I couldn’t copy your file. I’m not going to tell I can’t tell you why, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just like, it’s like, it’s all the worst of Apple. Like it’s, it’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of, you know, an edge case feature on what they have always treated as an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge case operating system, iPadOS, which has never gotten a ton of attention and still isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s, it’s on, it’s doing something that I think is a fairly common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that people think they’ll be able to do, which is take something on a USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thumb drive that came from some other computing device and get it onto their iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s a fairly common
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know about that. I don’t think anyone really uses thumb drives anymore except us olds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And beyond that, certainly nobody would think to themselves, you know what I need for my iPad? I need a camera connection kit so I can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a thumb drive. Like I sympathize with what you went through. I truly do because it stinks and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t have been that hard. And if it did fail, it should have told you why it failed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the thing that I think has driven all three of us nuts about Apple for the entire run of this damn show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But be that as it may, I think this was a bit of an esoteric use case. An
⏹️ ▶️ Casey esoteric use case that I still think should have worked. But
⏹️ ▶️ John well, no, because the use case is sharing video with family. That’s not esoteric at all. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the way that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John went about doing it with his, you know, PC mindset that should have worked. But like the other mechanisms
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple gives you to do it like I imagine a lot of people if they try this at all, like one
⏹️ ▶️ John of their go-to’s depending on their age might be, why don’t we email it to them? Which to us sounds like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going down the wrong path, stop. But that’s the way a lot of people share files with each other, because it’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve learned how to do in the past, is I know how to email stuff to people. And when that inevitably doesn’t work for
⏹️ ▶️ John things like large videos, and they don’t understand why, then they’re kind of stuck. But that’s their instinct. Our instinct is to copy
⏹️ ▶️ John files. Apple would probably tell you, oh, just within the Photos app, you can add it to a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John album and then add your your grandpa to the shared album, then they just launch photos on their iPad and they’ll see it there. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell you, having done that, that theory works most of the time. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a large slideshow and you’ve just invited
⏹️ ▶️ John them to the shared album, there are ways, depending on how they have things set up, accepting an invitation
⏹️ ▶️ John to share a shared album and photos, there are ways to screw that up. Like if you, for example, use the
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail app and not the Apple Mail app, and you try to click the link, for years that didn’t work, and you had to be like, use the Apple Mail app to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John the invitation. Then once you accept it, where does that show up? Oh, it’s in the photos app. Where? In the shared albums. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in shared albums. I don’t see it. Well, wait, how long should I wait?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It will appear. Cause you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like with iCloud syncing. Like it’s pretty good and it syncs most of the time, but it’s not like there’s a progress indicator.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s a refresh button. It’s not like a thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do to say, hey, someone, I just accepted an invitation to a photo library. When is
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff gonna show up? This is one of the reasons why, and I haven’t looked at this in years, but for a long time with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV, Apple TV had, you know, you can sign into your Apple ID with Apple TV and you can use it to connect
⏹️ ▶️ John to your photo library. And so if you make a slideshow, for example, on your Mac, and the Apple TV is connected to the same
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID and you point it to your photo library, in theory, Apple TV can say, oh, I can show
⏹️ ▶️ John you all your photos and your albums and your slideshows on the TV. Wouldn’t that be great? In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just shows me a bunch of empty thumbnails forever because apparently my photo library too big for it to handle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I tried that for several years. Every time a new Apple TV came out, I’m saying, hey, can you do something useful with my photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library besides showing me a bunch of blank gray thumbnails? And the answer was no. So I just gave up.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like, even the ways that like the sort of the paved paths for doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John fall down when you let’s say have a big photo library or, oh, I wanna show a slideshow in 4K. 4K,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would anyone want that? Just take the defaults, use the lower quality setting. Don’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with big files because then our complete lack of progress indicators and your slow network connection will make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ John you just see an empty nothing for an undefined period of time after which maybe it will show
⏹️ ▶️ John up or maybe it won’t. And if it doesn’t show up, what’s your recourse? I don’t know. Do it again, unsubscribe from the library
⏹️ ▶️ John and resubscribe to it. Yeah, this is back in the same realm of
⏹️ ▶️ John making things magically work so there’s nothing you need to do is great when they magically work, but when they don’t magically work, it’s magically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the thing, I feel like these are all hallmarks of, you know, the problem we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were talking about earlier with 22-year-old hotshots, of like, this is just immature software. Like, software that does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle edge cases very well, or that fails silently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that can’t really accommodate the things that it says it can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they just don’t test them very often, or they don’t think people do it very often. Those are all hallmarks of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immature software, or software that is being managed in an insufficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. But the result is immature software, which is just like, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can only do the common path. Because that’s all they had time to implement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or test or both, or care
⏹️ ▶️ John about. And it trains you badly though. Like I think of an example, my son was having
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem, he called me into his room, which is never a good sign of like, I have a problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. He was having a problem in Xcode, an app you may be familiar with. He was just trying to like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, build and run his app. He was just trying to do development. And what he was faced with was like a dialogue that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John please wait while Alex’s Apple Watch is being prepared for development. Have either of you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey seen this message? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John God. Reboot all three
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yep, yep, yep. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I had trained him well enough, I’ve gone through stuff. By the time he called me into the room, he said, I already rebooted everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good, you did the first step debugging because that would have been my first suggestion. But here’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is one of the situations where, you know, you can do Googling for it and see all sorts of stuff, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, one of my instincts was, all right, so something is stuck or bad, because for
⏹️ ▶️ John people who don’t know, if you just wanna build and run your app, and for the record, he doesn’t have a watch app, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I could tell that it was like, you know what, if you use Xcode, like it wants to set up your device
⏹️ ▶️ John for development, it does stuff to your devices, whether it be your phone, your watch, even your Mac to say, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John setting this up so it can be used as a target to deploy in progress builds of stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though he doesn’t have a watch app and we’ve never had a watch app. Wait, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I pause you right there? If you want him to continue loving software development, never build it, never make a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah. Can’t confirm, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s what he was saying. He was like, but I don’t even have a watch app. I’m like, yeah, but I bet you probably, Xcode probably updated
⏹️ ▶️ John and it needs to, like because your watch is paired to your phone and because your phone is a dev target, it needs to prepare your watch so
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could deploy a watch app to it. And that for whatever reason is blocking your ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John run your app on your phone, right? But the thing is that message would come up and it would say
⏹️ ▶️ John preparing Alex’s watch for development. And we were Googling for answers and looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at it. And it’s like, because it was there for so long and because there was no progress indicator other than
⏹️ ▶️ John like a spinning indeterminate progress indicator distinguishing this is hanging and it’s never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John complete from you just have to wait is very difficult. And my first instinct was this
⏹️ ▶️ John is clearly hanging because it’s kind of like iCloud stuff was like, well, you just wait. And after a certain period of time, you’re like, well, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John updating. I don’t see the stuff. I added this album on this computer and I don’t see it on this computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just not updating. So we should do, you wanna do something. You wanna say, okay, let’s delete it and reshare
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? Or let’s, you know, and if you do that, you’ll just chase your tail forever, right? Because it could be that it wants you
⏹️ ▶️ John to wait 37 minutes and you waited 32 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco before you gave up and deleted it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’re just going in a cycle forever. So luckily my old age instincts prevailed
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, let’s let this sit for a little while and see if it eventually does
⏹️ ▶️ John something. and his instinct to say, let’s just keep trying to build and run, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll keep getting stuck, but then you can try to do it again. We did do another set of reboots. The bottom line is we just
⏹️ ▶️ John had to wait. And the instinct, like if you use this software for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John you start distrusting it. Because you say, in the past, I have waited.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve all had this experience. I’m trying to update to a new version of macOS. I’m trying to do an iOS update.
⏹️ ▶️ John I launched Photos and it’s beach balling, right? Sometimes you can say, well, I should just wait. But then you forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John it and come back five hours later or come back the next day and it’s still beach balling. And this trains you to believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that if I have no indication of progress and something is taking way longer than I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t assume it’s ever going to complete. Just give up and try something different or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem is that’s right like 50% of the time. The other 50%, if you had just walked away for an hour and come back, it would have
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually completed. And half of me was not surprised and half of me was surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John when after waiting for, you know, 15, 20 minutes, eventually it finished doing whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell it was doing, right? I think at that point we’d like, we’d rebooted everything multiple times.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was almost to the point where I was gonna un-pair and repair the watch, right? I was trying to, I was in the device manager saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I delete the watch from the thing or whatever? But if you have software that behaves this way, no indication of progress,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it completes if you just wait a long time, but other times it doesn’t. It trains users to
⏹️ ▶️ John be distrustful and to do things that are counterproductive, like give up after too short a period of time just keep
⏹️ ▶️ John repeating the same action, which is just angering the software, right? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John just, for all we know, a lot of the stuff, like when you said when you had the share thing to save videos and the share sheet
⏹️ ▶️ John went away and then nothing’s on the screen, how long are you supposed to wait before deciding that that didn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? 45 seconds with no feedback is too long. 30 seconds, five seconds, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John when people are writing software, it’s like, I assume this operation will happen real quickly because it happens real quick
⏹️ ▶️ John in my dev device. So I don’t need any kind of progress indicator here. I mean, while you do it, the share sheet goes away and you’re left staring at the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering what the hell just happened. Maybe it would be successful if I wait here for two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like how long do I have to wait with no progress? Who knows? And if you’re not a computer person, it makes you look
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, they look at you kind of with pity and go, so are
⏹️ ▶️ John we waiting for something? And you’re like, just give it time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It might do something. It might not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t promise it’s gonna do something. And so you’re sitting there, they all just want to see the pictures and they’re all just looking at each other,
⏹️ ▶️ John in their eyes and you’re like, something might appear here. If it doesn’t appear, what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John We can try it again, I guess. It’s not a good situation, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This reminds me, I saw my parents today and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had just seen them over the holiday. And over the holiday, I’m the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of de facto family photographer. And I’d taken a bunch of pictures of the events of the holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and had shared it with the people that were there. Thankfully, all of us are on iOS devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my dad wanted a copy of all the files, which was fine. And I was too lazy to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collect the files and like zip them up and send them to him by any number of different ways of doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said, well, just download them from, you know, the photos, you know, it was particularly photos on your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he said, well, they’re not there. It’s a shared album. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see it on your phone? Yeah, I can see it on my phone. Can you see it in photos? No. On your Mac? No, I can’t see it. They’re not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Here’s what I’ll do. I will record a screencast, a 45-second screencast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me showing you. Here’s where you go. Here’s what you do. Because exporting photos wants to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, it wants to eat all the things. It doesn’t particularly want to give them back up. So I’ll show you exactly how to export
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Then you can do with them as you please, whatever. I swear to you, they’re not there. And of course, I love my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad to death. He’s a very smart guy, very good with computers and and technology, but he very rarely gives me actionable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback. It’s just, they’re not there. Okay. I’m not sure what you want me to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. So he was here, his computer was here because he has a MacBook Pro, an older MacBook Pro and Intel MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the way, seeing a touch bar again for the first time in a long time was kind of weird. But nevertheless, he shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me photos, he says they’re not there. And I look and darned if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the damn album wasn’t there. What was the problem, gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t wait long enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, good guess. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the whole thing. If you do something like, hey, I shared a thing with you, or I added, we’re in a shared album that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been in for literally seven years, and I added two photos to it, and everyone in the family sees the two new photos except for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the problem? The problem is very often, I don’t know, reboot your device, wait a day,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and very often it will happen like, oh, they showed up eventually. But why did they show up eventually?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why did it take a day? Why did you have to reboot? I don’t know. There’s no refresh button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so as it turns out, the problem was, and I don’t know what made me think of this, but I went digging in the photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferences of which there are very few because Apple, but sure enough, in the iCloud tab,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are two checkboxes, iCloud photos and shared albums. I’ll give you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one guess what was unchecked. It was shared albums. So as soon as I checked that, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came flying in right away and it worked perfectly. And I mean, I don’t necessarily, like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t necessarily do anything wrong here, It was just very frustrating because I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really know why that’s not the default. I don’t think he had deliberately changed that, but even still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it seems like some sort of information to assist him or me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like if you’re looking for shared albums, you know, or shared albums is currently disabled in the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos or something to give you a hint that, oh, this is something you have chosen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either implicitly or explicitly, and you might want to look in preferences to take action on it, you know, and obviously messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is very difficult, especially in a sidebar, but something to show him slash me, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is where you need to look. And to their credit, to Apple’s credit, everything worked lickety split once I checked that check box, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not understand for the life of me what his deal was. Like what do you mean it’s not showing up? You’re clearly in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shared album if you’re seeing it on your phone. What’s your problem, old man? And it turns out his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem was one checkbox.
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Holiday tech we love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tell you what, so Aaron got me, this is a complete subject change, Aaron got me AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco because it was too cheap to buy them for myself. Oh nice, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think? And they are really good. I really, really like them a lot. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noise cancellation is phenomenal. Now admittedly, I’ve not had a modern,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like what is the beloved Sony’s, the WRX TUV 6794321s? 6, 7, 9, 4, 3, 2, 1s. Yeah, the Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WRX STI. Well done. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, I have not tried those. So for all I know, they might be just as good, if not better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the noise canceling that I am familiar with from several years ago now was not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And holy cow, it’s different depending on what fan I’m standing next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. Sometimes noise canceling is sufficient. But sometimes it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that fan is gone. fan just disappeared from my life. I very briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried spatial audio, very, very briefly. It was fine. Like it didn’t do much for me. I did this in the context
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of audio, not like watching a movie or anything. I have not taken the time or nor do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really even know what I should watch to try spatial audio in the context of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie. I don’t know, John, what’s the best way of doing it? Like, is there some Apple TV show? The
⏹️ ▶️ John best way is to turn it off and not use it because-
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, I don’t find it like useful at all. But there’s lots of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can watch pretty much any movie and just turn it on and it will try to spatialize it. But I’m sure you can find like demo
⏹️ ▶️ John things on Apple. The thing is, I don’t think the effect that it’s, we’ve described it before. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the sound is coming out of the iPad. Is that what you want? Do you want the sound to feel,
⏹️ ▶️ John sound like it’s coming out of the iPad? Because it can do that for you. And it’s really impressive and it’s very convincing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what I want. That’s why I’m wearing headphones. Where the sound was coming out of the iPad. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you one thing. One time when you really don’t want that is suppose you have your AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro paired to your MacBook and you have your MacBook propped up on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rowing machine and you are rowing back and forth, forward and back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco body physically frequently as it decides after a software update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spatialize all the audio from YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. First of all, the illusion breaks real fast. Cause yeah, it’s really impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re like sitting still on an airplane seat, it’s a lot less impressive when you are moving. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, let me tell you, that’s the very first thing you do. If you, listeners, if you have this problem, go to a control center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and turn off the spatialized audio setting for that device on the Mac, because you, trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, you do not want this.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other problem with that setting, especially if you have your AirPods set to connect automatically, is because the audio sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s coming out of the iPad, you’re constantly thinking, did my AirPods not connect?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, because a lot of the reasons you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods is you don’t want to disturb the person next to you. If like you’re in bed and someone’s sleeping next to you, you’re on an airplane, you don’t want them
⏹️ ▶️ John to hear it to be annoyed by the movie that you’re watching, but it sounds so much like the sound is coming out of the iPad. You’re worried that the
⏹️ ▶️ John sound is coming out of the iPad, but it’s not, it’s coming through your headphones, but sometimes it actually is coming out of your iPad and you’ll be fooled into thinking it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out of your headphones. But it’s confusing. As people are talking about in the chat, this is going to be great for AR,
⏹️ ▶️ John but AR is not what I want when I’m watching a movie on my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Actually, so to bring it back around a little bit, I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly spend this time talking about really positive experience we’ve had with technology over this Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, because I have had a lot of those as well. And Casey, you mentioned how much you’re loving the AirPods Pro. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta say, as a long-time AirPods Pro user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am still incredibly happy with them. And if my AirPods Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some reason, got lost or broke or something, I would just go instantly buy another pair. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, listeners are aware how much I love headphones, and I’m constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using them and wearing them, and I used to be constantly trying out different portable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash wireless headphones. My desk headphones have been set for a while. I love the HiFiMan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HD6 for open, I love the DT770 for closed. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t, you know, I’m so happy with those, and so little has come around that’s really been better for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferences and needs and priorities in those areas, that my desk headphone game has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved for some time. But my portable headphone game was really up in the air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time because portable headphones typically sucked in some ways, and usually more than one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so typically you had to choose between quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and size, first of all. Small headphones, like all of Apple’s white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earbuds, Small headphones usually sounded like garbage for things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like music, but maybe they’d be acceptable for podcasts and phone calls. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could like kind of, you tolerate their crappiness in music because well, they’re small, they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be good. And historically, you’d also have to shoot between things like noise isolation or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco active noise cancellation and size slash price slash portability. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the big Bose or Sony noise canceling over your headphones for airplanes maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but those were a little large to be wearing, you know, walking around, you know, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were also honestly quite expensive. And so I went through so many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like both wired and then later Bluetooth portable headphones, you know, headphones that were not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as big as the giant ones I use at my desk, like my studio headphones. And I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never found a pair that was really great. I found some that were pretty decent in most ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wired sets tended to be better in most ways, except for, of course, there being a wire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when we all went Bluetooth, everything went to hell. There were so many crappy headphones on the market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of which were very expensive. And really, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth that I ever tried was pretty compromised in some way, until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPods Pro. And the AirPods Pro are so damn good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, now that they’re, what, about two years old? Three years old now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so now that, you know, they’re no longer at all, like, you know, cutting edge in terms of newness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, even the new AirPods have a couple of little feature improvements that the AirPods Pro don’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are still the best all-around headphones that exist in the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Like, if I had to just have one pair of headphones in my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life, it would probably be the AirPod Pros. Because they are just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so not only, so you mentioned Casey, the noise canceling. I can tell you, because I’ve done back to back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparisons. The noise cancellation on AirPods Pro is not as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the big over ear Sonys or Boses, but it’s not that far off. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close enough that after one plane flight where I had both with me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I compared, I never carried the big ones on a plane again, and I think I sold them. I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen them in a while, although I haven’t flown in a while either. But it’s close enough in quality and in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise cancellation abilities that I decided to just take the massive backpack space savings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my airplane backpack and just never carried the big headphones again. And that’s when I believe we joked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it on the show, the only downside of the AirPods Pros in that context is that their battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not super strong to get through like a six hour flight. So I just bought a second pair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco answer I’ve ever heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because two pairs of AirPod Pros are better than most other ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could spend four to $500 in the portable headphone space. Honestly, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just better. It’s simple as that. I would rather have two of those than one of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. I’d rather have one AirPods Pro than the Bose or the Sony. You know, if I have to take out an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earbud at hour five to have it recharging the case for a while and swap it out for the other one, I’ll do that, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re that good. And when you compare their music quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anything else in the portable headphone space, you have to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a pretty large headphone before you match their quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you have to really get to like full-size over-ears before you can find anything that’s better than them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even among full-size over-ears, not all of them sound better than the AirPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros. The AirPod Pro is for, you know, given their convenience and their size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all their features with the integrations and everything, even though I strongly suggest turning off auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device switching, please. Everything works better when you do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s basically no trade-off. Like, they’re just great in all of those ways. The only possible downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if you’re one of the people who they are not comfortable for. And I understand that, being, I’m the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of person who other AirPods were never comfortable on, and I hated how awesome they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everyone else, not for me. But, you know, so I know how you feel, but man, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPod Pros are comfortable for you, I so strongly recommend them because they are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good in pretty much every way. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never found a pair of headphones that was so good at so much. I had
⏹️ ▶️ John my son audition all of the existing AirPod products because he had basically AirPod Ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, still, and he just uses them 24 hours a day in the house. It’s just constantly, like he’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John attaching them. And of course now the battery is crappy or whatever and there’s newer ones. So, hey, let’s get him some new ones, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I not so subtly had him try, you know, a newer version of the AirPods, of
⏹️ ▶️ John the old AirPods, the AirPods 2 or whatever. I had him try the new AirPods 3
⏹️ ▶️ John I had him try the AirPods Pro and showed him the noise canceling feature and the transparency feature
⏹️ ▶️ John and did the tip fit test to make sure he was, you know, did all the things or whatever. And of all those three ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had him pick, you know, Which one of these do you like better? And he picked the threes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know, it was just that the idea of having something in his ear canal was wigging him out because he’s never used to that or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John He said he doesn’t care about the noise canceling. Maybe young people don’t care about noise. Noise just bothers old people.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he did like the threes better than the ones, probably because it doesn’t take much to tell that the sound
⏹️ ▶️ John is better on the threes, or the twos. It’s better on the threes than the twos. The two and the ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the audio was about the same, but the threes have significantly better audio. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what he got for Christmas. He got the AirPods 3. And my daughter did not like the three because they were
⏹️ ▶️ John too big in her ears and she got a new pair of the twos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. Yeah, these AirPods Pro are really good. And I immediately felt like they sound way better than my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess they’re replacing a second generation AirPods. So the first look, but the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John version. Yeah, it’s AirPods 2. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Night and day. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so much better. But they are very
⏹️ ▶️ John different shapes, so it is worth like actually trying them to see whether the new shape, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if the original shape fits you, you’re great. That means nothing about the second shape, the AirPods 3 shape,
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s no panels in common. Yeah, but I’ve been using the
⏹️ ▶️ John 3s now as well. And I should have been logging how many times I tapped them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just the other day, I was thinking, oh, I haven’t tapped these in forever. Maybe I’ve finally gotten over the pinch, and then like the next day, I double
⏹️ ▶️ John tapped them real quick when someone’s trying to talk to me. I’ll get over it eventually, but I’m getting better at pinching.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, to that end, yeah, the pinching doesn’t bother me. I think I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it more. I feel like it’s a slower operation, but ultimately I think I like it more than the tapping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I never was that bothered by the tapping, to be honest with you, but so far so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good on pinching. Yeah, these things are really great. And I’m gonna be so sad when the brand new ones come out in like three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months, but for those three months before that happens, I’m super happy. And if you’ll permit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a very quick technology that makes me happy. So I think I’ve mentioned many times in the past that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the greater Richmond area goes absolutely bananas when it comes to Christmas lights. And it’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go on a quote unquote tacky light tour around here. And some people go really all out and they’ll rent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a party bus or a limousine and typically drink grownup drinks while they’re riding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not driving, and looking at lights. And it’s a very fun thing to do. Granted, I haven’t done that in like 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Erin and I still like to take the kids and go around and look at lights. In the last couple of years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve done it with her youngest brother and his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now wife. But we’re still not entirely keen on everyone climbing into the same car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we used cheap, crummy, digital walkie-talkies to talk between cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Worked great. It worked great. It’s such a simple, like, I love those cheap, simple solutions to problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s much greater than, it’s a much greater feeling when you can throw $20 at a problem and, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how much these were, but it was not expensive to get these things. And yeah, we threw $20 at this problem like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four years ago for something unrelated, and we’re getting so much use out of these little digital walkie-talkies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all sorts of random and uninteresting things. But I love when basic, simple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technology actually works and works reliably, and it makes me so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll also say, so one of my Christmas gifts this year, Tiff got me my own Nintendo Switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our Nintendo Switch journey started out as I got one through a friend of the show Colin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Donnell who had like an extra pre-order and let me buy it off of him at cost back when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was really quite a generous thing to do because nobody was giving them a cost. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the first Nintendo Switch of the family. It was very rapidly stolen by the rest of my family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then later on Tiff got her own and then quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine really became Adams. And so I just really basically haven’t had a Switch for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Ab and I have really gotten into playing co-op games of Stardew Valley. I love Stardew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Valley. It’s such an amazing game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hadn’t played it in a while, probably a couple years really. And we really were enjoying co-op. Well Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got me my own Switch now, so now we have a family co-op game where all three of us are playing and it’s delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so much fun. We love doing it. I’m so happy I finally have a Switch. And she got me, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how, but she got me the Switch OLED, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one. I was going to say, how is
⏹️ ▶️ John the distribution of OLED throughout the Switch family doing here? I’m not sure that you should really
⏹️ ▶️ John be the one with the OLED based on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hours played.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I won’t have Burnin’. So yes, I have the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLED model. TIFFs and Adams were both bought before that model existed. And Adams,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is now the oldest one, the original purchase, Adams now has a very loud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan and I’ve been faced with the dilemma of like, do I try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace it? Like I looked up the iFixit guide and it’s involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a Joy-Con drift on Tips for Adams?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, surprisingly not. I mean. Wow, it’s amazing you dodged that bullet. Yeah, I mean we do have a few extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Joy-Cons so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if that happened. But anyway, so this is our first OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model and it is, I gotta say, really nice. Like I didn’t, I haven’t been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco following really very closely like what the differences were and all I knew was everybody was upset that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there weren’t many differences. But let me tell you, the differences that are there matter. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so nice. So first of all, yeah, the screen is just way nicer. OLED looks way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than any LCD, let alone the fairly mediocre and outdated LCDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were in the regular Switch console. So number one, it’s way better with contrast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, brightness, everything. It looks incredible. It looks like an OLED TV. OLED looks awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the screen size has also grown slightly. It’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger screen, and they did that mainly by shrinking the bezels. And again, that matters. It might not matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to kids who have amazing eyes and don’t care about screen quality so much. It matters a lot to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the regular Switch screen, I could play games on it, but I was always a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squinty. Like, especially like when so many games assume they’re running on a TV, and so they have really small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text in a lot of areas, and it’s a little hard to see on the original Switch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Switch OLED is like, I think a half inch or one inch bigger screen. It’s not a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference, but it is a helpful difference and a noticeable one. So way nicer screen overall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, they have updated the feel of some of the buttons around the case. The kickstand now is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way across the back instead of just this little like thumb thing. So yeah, overall, a couple of little nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements and the screen being a really big improvement. I’m very happy with it. And I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re buying a new Switch today, assuming you can find one in stock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you care about such things, the OLED model is really nice. And I think it was only 50 bucks more than the other one was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it seems like a no-brainer to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they do the, I forgot if this was a software update or a feature of the Switch OLED, but for the longest time, Switch did
⏹️ ▶️ John not support plain old Bluetooth headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s a software update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did, so I guess that’s for all of them. I haven’t actually tried it on any of them, but that was a software update across all of them recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, hold on. One complaint before we leave Nintendo Switch land.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We, you know, being modern people, purchase most of our games as downloads. Most of these games were purchased
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under my Nintendo account back forever ago. Now that I have my own Switch that I’ve activated as my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own, there seems to be no way for Adam to play the games I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on his Switch. It says you’re supposed to be able to do this, like, if it has internet connectivity. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems to fail a lot and just refuse to play. certain games you can’t play at all that way and I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different combinations of like which one you set as your active console and everything and that’s it just kind of sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that first of all you have to go through all these hoops and second of all that when you have a digital purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t even though we are a like family share group in Nintendo’s eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I as the person who originally bought these games not only can my family not play them even if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing it but I also can’t seem to like transfer my ownership to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my son for this game. So I seem to have no recourse whatsoever except to rebuy all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these $60 games that my son wants to play if he’s still going to be able to play them. And that sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John sucks. I remember I went through this with Destiny and the PlayStation. It gets even worse. So Sony’s terrible with that also, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets even worse when you have DLC like Destiny, you know, the base game is nothing and everything is about
⏹️ ▶️ John the expansions. And it’s like, okay, well, you can both play the game, but do they have that expansion? Do you have to buy the expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John separately, but you can share the base game? Can you share neither? Who can and be playing at the same time, it is very, very, very bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I gotta say, Apple is way better at family sharing than Nintendo is, by
⏹️ ▶️ John And even Apple just recently folded in in-app purchases into the system. Originally,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could share apps within the family, but in-app purchases were hit or miss, and now I think it’s up to the developers to decide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, yeah, and for a while, subscriptions couldn’t be shared, but they have recently modified that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. And yeah, it’s like, we complain a lot about Apple, but sometimes when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see some other part of the tech environment, you realize like, oh God, we don’t have it so bad. And that’s why we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all here, right? And that’s why we all care, you know, because the rest of the tech landscape is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any good technology stories from your holiday?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so. Not a lot of tech issues. I mean, the AirPods just worked out of the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I guess the only one tech thing is I got my wife a new car thingy,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a car mount for the phone. She had been using one that she’d had for years, which is one of the recommended kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John bear trap ones where you stick the phone in there and it triggers the trap and the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John any size phone. And she’s used it across many different phones with and without battery cases. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, but it always annoyed me when I had to drive her car, because when I use like the turn signal with my right hand, it would occasionally hit the,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the thing that’s sticking out of the, like they have these little things that stick out the side that you press in to make the, to set the
⏹️ ▶️ John bear trap. and it would hit my hand. I didn’t like it, it was annoying. So I figured I can solve that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John now by giving her a MagSafe mount. I heard Marco raving about his, and she has a MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and all of her cases are MagSafe, right? And she has a stupid Apple MagSafe battery thing, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John removable easily, right? So you don’t have to worry about that either. And I’m happy with it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John far she hasn’t complained about it. I think she likes it, but like the whole point is I was able to put that mount there.
⏹️ ▶️ John The mount is way smaller because it’s just a circular, you know, magnetic puck thing. and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always plugged in through a cable that I carefully routed to the USB thing. So now she was taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the cable like from the USB that’s in like the center console and she would just stretch that thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John always bothered me because she’s, remember she’s stretching this past a six shift, right? So you’ve got this lightning cable stretching
⏹️ ▶️ John from the center console that she would occasionally plug into her mounted phone if it needed battery because
⏹️ ▶️ John Pokemon Go had drained it for the millionth time, right? But then she didn’t always have a plug in and sometimes it was just dangling
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes it was just like hanging out by the shifter and all that has gone now. and now it’s just a cable that goes from the
⏹️ ▶️ John console, where the radio would be, from there up to the puck and it never
⏹️ ▶️ John moves. And I actually gaff taped it to the side of the dashboard so it’s all, there’s no hanging cables anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just get in the car and you shove on your phone and it’s mounted and it’s easily adjustable and it’s also charging.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m very happy with that gift, I hope she is too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And did she like her bowling ball as well, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, it’s in her car and I don’t even have a MagSafe case, so it’s not like, previously when
⏹️ ▶️ John I went in her car, I could use that mount. I can’t even use that mount anymore because I don’t have a MagSafe case. So like, it’s fine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not my car. I hope she likes it.
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#askatp: Future Target Display Mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Jeff Fowler writes, the current iMac 27-inch starts at $1799. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new replacement for this machine starts at $1999, but includes the option to use it as a monitor for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook Pro with 120Hz, P3 color, HDR, etc., and can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected with a single cable as we all want, would you buy it just to use it as a monitor? Is a base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 27-inch iMac just going to sit dormant behind a display on your desk, or is this really stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In knowing what I know today, yes, I would buy it. And yes, it would be dormant or maybe I would turn that into my server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if there was such a way to like have it not use the screen, which I doubt, but you know, in this fantasy world, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would do that without even blinking an eye. I absolutely would. You too wouldn’t, however, because you have your stupid XDRs
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think anyone would buy this because there is no current $2,000 monitor that has the specs of
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing that they’re describing in this question. Right. But the real answer that’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, target display mode hasn’t been on iMacs in what, like seven years? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John how long ago did they get rid of that? It was a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, it never made the jump to Retina. So the last Mac that had it was the 27-inch non-Retina iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and all of the other solutions for using a Mac as a monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John like over the network or with air display or whatever, all those have lag or quality loss
⏹️ ▶️ John or both. And so I think if that was the only way you could use it, I think all of our answers would be no,
⏹️ ▶️ John we wouldn’t use a new 27 inch iMac if it couldn’t be connected like a monitor, like with
⏹️ ▶️ John an actual wire, instead of like some weird thing where we encode your video as H.264 and send it over the network.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, it would have to be DisplayPort, you know, like actual monitor connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John not some kind of network blurry compressed whatever thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John we already have enough compression with display screen compression. We don’t need, you know, showing a weird movie on the thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for $2,000, no, I don’t think any of us, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, would accept the idea that it’s a way for you to AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John to a $2,000 monitor. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I wouldn’t either. But ultimately though, I do think this is an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to revisit pricing estimates for what we think the alleged monitors that might be coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future might cost. If you look at the 24-inch M1 iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you assume that the rumored LG low-end one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made by LG, Apple monitor, which would be a 24-inch monitor. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume it’s basically the 24-inch iMac’s monitor in an external case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, you know, just ports in the back and no computer, well, that computer starts at $1,300.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet that monitor would be, and no one’s going to like this, $1,000 for the 24-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size without the, you know, micro-LED, XDR stuff. the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular 24-inch Apple monitor I bet is $1,000. And I bet now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the 27-inch that everybody actually wants, well that iMac, right now the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac, without the XDR stuff, again, $1,800 starting price. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guessing the nice one probably goes to, you know, the nice new one with the M1s, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what’s probably gonna be called iMac Pro, even, you know, even like the, you know, quote, base models, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna be the same guts as the MacBook Pros, it’s probably gonna be called iMac Pro and be 27 inches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet that starts at $2,000. And so I bet that the 27 inch monitor would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very unlikely to cost less than 1,800 by itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what I’m, just prepare yourself people. If you think that when you say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want Apple to make cheaper monitors than the XDR, well, that’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make things cheaper than $6,000. Cause you know, I bet they’ll include stand. So I’m gonna compare like to like and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say 6,000 instead of 5,000, cause I’m including the stand price. So I bet the lineup we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be left with is 24 inches at $1,000, 27 inches for almost $2,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Pro Display XDR at $6,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John One complication is some recent rumor back and forth about whether or not the 27
⏹️ ▶️ John inch thing will be mini LED and will have HDR. Cause there was some rumor going around that said, oh, actually
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be like the 24 inch that it’s not going to have HDR, not going to have high refresh, not even going to be mini LED.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I think would potentially adjust down the price of the 27
⏹️ ▶️ John inch monitor assuming it exists. Maybe not though, but that rumor was like the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who had the mini LED rumor strongly refuted it and say, no, no, no, no, the big one isn’t going to be mini LED. So I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John this is true or not, but like the idea that there is some that there is contention about whether the big one will
⏹️ ▶️ John be or not, because it seemed People seem to have consensus that the 24-inch won’t be because it’s just the iMac monitor And we know the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac monitor doesn’t have that and it’s supposed to be low-end so that all makes sense the 27-inch I still really hope
⏹️ ▶️ John is mini LED, but if it’s not it could be lower, but like $2,000 for a 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if it’s mini LED HDR high refresh That’s not a bad deal at all
⏹️ ▶️ John again See all the past shows where I looked at like if you wanted to buy that today in like the quote-unquote PC monitor market
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s expensive $2,000 for a monitor of Apple quality of that size with those specs,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a pretty good price. And it’s not just, it’s less than half of the $6,000, but it’s like, you know, a third
⏹️ ▶️ John of the price. So, you know, that’s a good price spread, right? $1,000, I know that seems like a lot for 20-inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’d be really nice to have a nice stand and blah, blah, blah. And then 2000 and then 6,000, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable monitor range, like ship it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good. Yeah, like that’s why like, I think people who are hoping for like, you know, an $800 monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re gonna be disappointed. Like, I think it’s gonna be, you know, typical Apple, as I said before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they will probably eventually deliver on this. But when it comes out, it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be substantially more money than you wish it was. And some of you out there will buy it anyway, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why they can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was gonna say that I would think that $1,000 and $2,000 would be the target prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey irrespective of the cost of the computer associated with it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco even if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 27-inch iMac starts at $1,800, which I’m not saying it will, but let’s just suppose the 27-inch iMac starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at $1,800, but the 27-inch monitor’s $2,000, I really don’t think they’d care. I really don’t. Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, I think $2,000 may be low
⏹️ ▶️ John if it has all those specs, because you cannot find a PC monitor with those specs for anything
⏹️ ▶️ John close to $2,000 right now. And you know, those are, you know, time marches
⏹️ ▶️ John on, we get new displays, right? But I think it would be quite a leap for
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple monitor with P3 color, high refresh,
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR, mini LED with thousands of zones to be $2,000 at 5K 27 inch. We’ll see though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, maybe we have the pricing on this wrong. I mean, let me see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 16 inch MacBook Pro starts at 2,500. So maybe this is not, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, just one iMac Pro starting at 1,800. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the rumors that you just said, John, about the 27-inch not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the high refresh and possibly mini LED stuff, maybe we’re actually talking about different computers
⏹️ ▶️ John The iMac and an iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe there’s gonna be a 27-inch low-end model and a 27-inch high-end model that might be $3,000 starting price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would be an even better
⏹️ ▶️ John way to diversify this range even more because a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care about a high refresh or HDR or P3 color, but the current
⏹️ ▶️ John 5K iMac screen is a really nice retina screen for regular people who don’t care about those things, so why not sell
⏹️ ▶️ John it? And then that lets them, you know, instead of having 1,000, 2,006, they can have 1,000, 2,000, 3,500, six.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, honestly, I would be surprised, like, if they do have two 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac classes, you know, if they still do have, like, you know, a non-mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LED, non-high refresh one, and the high-end mini LED and high refresh one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would turn both of those into standalone monitors. I think they would pick one, probably the higher-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Yeah, maybe. And so then we might have something like 1,000, 3,000, and 6,000. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s more even spread, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in, King Dream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But can you imagine how much developers are gonna freak out? Like, you know, people like us, how much all the fans are gonna freak out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they finally make the 27-inch monitor we’ve been waiting for for years, and it’s 3,000. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s still way less
⏹️ ▶️ John think people would be buy it and be happy to buy it. It’s like pent up demand. People are just so, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like how most people aren’t complaining about the prices of the new MacBooks because they’re so good when we waited so long for a good computer is that
⏹️ ▶️ John no one cares about the price. Like they could have been a thousand dollars more each and people still would have bought them if they could afford it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously, I spent 5,000 frigging dollars on this MacBook Pro and I have zero regrets. Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And I know you don’t want to hear this, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i spent six thousand for an hour and i have zero regrets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well sorry you We broke up again. Are you back on Wi-Fi?
#askatp: Does Apple like rumors?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric New writes, Apple is famously secretive. To what extent do you think Apple welcomes the drama and publicity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that comes with cat and mouse of the rumor and leak game? This was, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like this was a fairly interesting question, and I don’t really know what I think about it. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, by and large, enjoys the game, but they hate when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the press gets something right. Like the iPhone 4 leaking, and when they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaked a whole bunch of press images on when they themselves leaked a whole bunch of press images right before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a keynote, like a year or two back, a couple of years ago. Uh, I think when stuff is legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoiled, I think Apple hates that, hates that more than anything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone just sitting and flapping their gums about it. Hello. I think, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they quite like that and like that everyone is always paying attention to them. And anytime they, they move even the tiniest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit, all of us go, what was that? Hmm. What? But I think they quite like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, you know, what their execs have said in interviews recently, like, I know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was Schiller who said this on the talk show a few years back about how, like, you know, it was very much a, like, you know, support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the troops kind of argument of, like, well, you know, we really don’t like, you know, our teams work so hard on this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, we hate that their day comes to shine and it’s ruined, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that argument I understand to a degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see Apple as not having much of a sense of humor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco culturally, as a company. And I do think that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, oh, the team’s let down attitude, I think really pervades the company pretty deeply.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think when we heard that, I think that was correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it really deeply bothers them. that when something gets spoiled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t, I can’t say I’m, I can’t say that’s unreasonable. You know, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes total sense why they would be really upset about that from that point of view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That to me though, you know, that is definitely filed under, in my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s Apple’s problem, not our problem. You know, if there’s some leaked schematics of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Pro, it shows the ports, and we talk about it on this show, hey look, if this is real, this is pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t feel like we are spoiling anything for anybody in the company for their work not being valuable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because then when it comes out, we celebrate it again, and we love it, and we are so happy about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the whole reason people are really into finding out new information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Apple products is because we all love them, and we’re excited, and this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affects our lives in massive ways as customer, not only as podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who talk about this, But as customers of Apple’s, we care so much because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love them and we love their products and their products are super important to us. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to have an audience that cares so deeply about your stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would seek out and then discuss for hours, rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about stuff that you might be making, that rumors that might be true, and how excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we would be if they do come true. there’s also a lot of value in that to the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think, I don’t think the answer is as clear cut as Apple likes or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t like the rumor and leak game. I think it’s complicated. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like the part of it that spoils their surprises, but they also, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so strongly benefit from the culture of people who are so obsessed with their stuff that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love it so much and we care about this. you can’t ignore that benefit and granted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a benefit they didn’t necessarily ask for but that is a benefit that they greatly enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reap profits from so I think it’s complicated you know I think if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask them like would you prefer if this thing in the future be leaked they would almost certainly say no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost every time but to some degree it’s unavoidable because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scale they’re at is so big and there’s so many you know manufacturers and stuff involved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, again, that’s a problem of their success. And to, you know, the other side of it is that they, they have enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much success based on people’s obsession and care about their products. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I think it’s a mixed bag.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in an ideal world, Apple wants everyone to be talking about what they’re doing and want to
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re doing and having that conversation and they want them to never figure anything out and never get any actual
⏹️ ▶️ John leaks, right? Because the whole, the whole, I mean, Shiller’s perspective, and I was like, Oh, the team just so disappointed because they didn’t want to have their
⏹️ ▶️ John coming out story. What the, you know, the team that most cares about that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s marketing, right? They want to control the message of their product, like their message is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here’s how we want our product to be presented to the world. Here’s what we’re going to say it’s good for and they
⏹️ ▶️ John lose control of that message. If rumors of that actual product get out ahead of time is then people start talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John it however they want. Oh, like if Apple doesn’t get tell you like, here’s the thing and we did it this way because of x, if they don’t get to
⏹️ ▶️ John control the message and say, here’s how you should think about this product. We’ll just make up whatever we want. Oh, it’s too expensive. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not expensive enough. It has doesn’t have the features we want. It’s bad because it doesn’t have as many megapixels as this like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple needs to control the method and what part of Apple needs to control that message not the product team that makes it marketing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Phil Schiller is the head of marketing for years. So of course, he’s gonna say, Oh, it’s so disappointing to the team. You know what team is disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the marketing team, because now you’re like how the hell we had this whole message ready to tell here’s this product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s what we want to say about it. And now instead we are on our back on our heels saying we have to counter
⏹️ ▶️ John the narrative that’s been out there for two months because of the stupid rumors. So yeah, Apple wants people talking about them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they do not want them to know Fair
#askatp: Teaching kids window management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, Adam M. Head writes, when teaching your kids best practices for their Mac OS and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows device, do you recommend they close all open apps before restarting the device? Mac OS reopens the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you tell it to. Windows doesn’t handle this as well. I am not in a position to need to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this quite yet, although for my own use, I almost never close basically anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I shut down. I picked on Marco first last time. John, what’s your approach here with you and your kids?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Adam has a very optimistic notion of being able to tell your kids anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like as if they’re going to A, seek out, or B, listen to any advice you
⏹️ ▶️ John give them about how you think they should use technology products. Very optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John To answer this question for my kids, I do not have never taught my kids anything having to
⏹️ ▶️ John do with this. The closest I’ve come is reprimanding them for reflexively force coding
⏹️ ▶️ John apps on their phone, but that’s mostly a losing battle because whatever. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but no, like I, they will learn to use the device the way they feel like using
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Again, if they’re doing something that has no technical foundation or that is doing the opposite of what they think it is, like force
⏹️ ▶️ John quitting all the apps on their phone reflexively, I will explain what’s actually happening and then they can make a decision from
⏹️ ▶️ John there. But I don’t recommend anything about window hygiene.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the closest I’ll get is every time I sit down to try to fix something on my son’s computer, I have to take everything out of full screen, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a me issue, because he puts everything in full screen and he three finger swipes between them. That’s not how I want to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. So when I’m, even if I’m just there for debugging for two seconds, like that, or whatever, like that Xcode problem, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I just pull everything out of full screen so I can see more than one
⏹️ ▶️ John a time. And so I just feel more comfortable doing that. I hate having to swipe around. He
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like me swiping around because I’m swiping to some webpage where he’s looking at something that he’s wanting his dad to see or whatever. Like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bad, three finger swiping is bad. Not my,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t tell him you shouldn’t run things in full. He’s got a MacBook Air, like full screen. I can understand why you’re doing things full screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to maximize, you know, he’s got the old 13 inch MacBook Air and I know why he does things in full
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And if he likes three finger swiping between them, you know, go for it. But I do, the closest
⏹️ ▶️ John I get is I show him, hey, you know, when your dad’s is down to your computer, see how I can do lots of stuff because I can see more
⏹️ ▶️ John than one window on the screen at a time, even on a 13 inch screen that has its disadvantages, consider
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That’s as close as I get. Most of the time I’m just hands off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I don’t see Adam using a Mac much yet because the only place he uses a Mac really is in school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and you know, I don’t usually see that. But on Windows, like on his gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC, he doesn’t seem to really multitask. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, I mean, but I mean, why would a kid with a gaming PC really need to multitask that much? You’ll open one game and then you close it and open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another game. So it’s not really a problem that we’re facing and he’s a little young to have like much productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff open at all. But my battle again with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, my battle is like, just can you please like quit, tear down before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you close the lid to the laptop, that way it’s not sitting there blaring the fan for the next 12 hours until I walk by and notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s on, blaring the fan, because it’s not actually sleeping and it’s running a game engine in the background. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, just please quit the game before you close the lid. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the level. If you get an M1 gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC, less fan noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A little fewer games. That’s another solution. Yeah, right. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can solve the problem of your games reading your computer by just having a computer that can’t run any of the games you like. Thanks to our sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, Linode, Memberful, and Trade Coffee. And thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join at atp.fm.com. We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Saying farewell to Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so we went long, so I will give an extremely short update for the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iMac Pro is almost in Florida. It did not sell on Twitter, it did not sell
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re disappointing me with the Florida, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re so excited
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when I hear you say the word
⏹️ ▶️ John dog and coffee and you’re saying Florida. Come on, what happened? Well, instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of Florida? Instead of Florida, yeah. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Say the fruit the Tropicana makes juice from. Orange
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened? Did you never have that or did you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lose it? No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never did. No, it’s not orange juice. I pronounce things properly, not like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Islander. But that’s the way you
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be on my page with them and you say things like dog and coffee and stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you say it like closer to New Yorker, like your New York inflected Connecticut accent.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I didn’t know those two didn’t make it
⏹️ ▶️ John Connecticut, I guess not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who even knows? But also remember I’m a mutt of an accent Yeah, you know, my very, very early life was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New York state. And then I bounced around the Midwest for a while and then Connecticut during my high school years, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Southwest, really rural Virginia for college and then in central Virginia, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is also a melting pot in of itself ever since. So I’m a mess. Although I think, I feel like I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this with you guys. Maybe it was on, on analog. I don’t know, but anyway, I feel like, uh, syllables are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John over the years, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s instead of, instead of mile, it’s mile.
⏹️ ▶️ John a mile. Yeah, the South, the South may be affecting you, but we’ll always have dog and coffee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. So anyway, so yes, so my my iMac Pro is on its way to Florida,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where Mac me an offer has given me what did they give it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Supposedly it was like 2500 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was not as much as I wanted, but is probably a fair offer for what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John They should give
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone an extra $10 due to the name of their company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s how I see this. You know, you got rid of this computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got rid of the Intel generation. It’s now out of your hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is done. Bank it and put it towards whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John conclusion ends up being. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider this part of the LG fund, for the love of God. Consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the LG Fund a sunk cost from a previous age, and now consider yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having an effective $2,500 discount towards whatever you choose to do next.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And while I would push you for the XDR thing and just be done with it now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you’re not going to really do that, even though you still should do that, but I know you won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So instead, maybe bank that towards the upcoming $3,000 27-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitor that they release instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing though. It’s the same thing that one of you, I suppose it was John, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said about the MacBooks being so expensive. In any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal scenario, if you told me that I would willingly, happily spend $5,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friggin’ dollars on a laptop, I’d laugh in your face. There’s zero chance of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking of, again, speaking of happy tech stories, this laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so good. Like, all Christmas break, I, now, you know, we went to visit family. I’ve been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did some coding work on it. Oh my God. It’s so good. Sorry, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. Couldn’t know. I couldn’t agree more. If that’s exactly it. And so yes, like even though $5,000 for really any computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a preposterous sum of money, hi John. Uh, it’s still, it’s still, I would pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it again, like not literally again, but I would do it all over again in a heartbeat to get this computer, cause I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this computer so darn much, it is so unbelievably great. And I feel like, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phantom Apple monitor that may or may not come next year, even if it’s $3,000, like when you’re standing in monitor hell, the $3,000 glass of water
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is well worth the money. Like I will absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay that, I won’t even blink an eye. Because you know what, it’s half off that $6,000 monstrosity that you idiots paid for. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I will do that in an absolute heartbeat, I won’t even blink an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you what, sit in front of this glorious 27 inch ultra fine right now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss my 6K so much. I do not mind that my 6K costs 6K. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I cannot wait to go back to it. And I see its value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every second that I’m using this slightly diagonal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mediocre monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with edge backlight bleeding and it’s shaking every time I hit the keyboard. I’m like, oh my God, I can’t wait to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get back. I totally hear you. And honestly, there is a lot of value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an Apple nerd like yourself to just be done with Intel. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume Erin’s computer is still a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? She still has the cute, the adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the 12-inch, right, I forgot, okay. Which I asked her, actually, I almost, for Christmas, I almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impulse bought her a MacBook Air, and I thought about it, and I was like, you know what? She uses her computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically exclusively to do online grocery shopping orders, and almost nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Like, she’ll use it to do-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In that case, I have a slightly different suggestion for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our spouses put up with a lot from us. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey be honest. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no idea. Right, so, I mean, the three of us, I have to imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very tolerant of our various quirks. And foibles. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Take a portion of this $2,500 you’ve just earned from your old Intel trade-in, And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new MacBook Air comes out this spring, buy one for Aaron and sell the MacBook One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would sell it, honestly. I did love that MacBook One so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, do a trade-in for Apple, that’s what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fair. No, for a fleeting moment, I thought I would pull a John and hold onto it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately, it would just take up space and there would be no point. But I did love that computer so much. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a piece of garbage the moment I bought it, and I loved it, I loved it so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, and I honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling, If any, speaking of rumors, if any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the rumors about the upcoming M2 potentially based MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the rumors are at all accurate, it’s gonna be awesome. In many ways, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, the M1 MacBook Air is awesome already. Like if you happen to go that route, that’s also a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco route to go. It would obviously be a bit of a size and weight upgrade from what she has now, which would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly be viewed as a downgrade. But, first of all, I suspect the new Air is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close that gap a little bit. But also, the new Air is going to have, like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even nicer new keyboard. It’s going to have, allegedly, like, a physical design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and color scheme similar to the new 24-inch iMacs. Like, that’s going to be an awesome computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People are going to love that thing, and they’re going to sell a ton of them. If that’s at all accurate. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider this as an option. Because, I’ll tell you one thing. as an Intel free house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, I just traded in Tiff’s laptop, the 16 inch MacBook Pro, the Intel one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple and got almost $1,500 for it. It was like $1,480 or something like that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was blown away that it was still worth that much, but it does feel really good to be Intel free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Like as a nerd, the way we are, we are Apple nerds and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, all three of us keep, with the exception of John a few years ago, all three of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us pretty high-end Apple hardware. Pretty recent Apple hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to be all-in on Apple Silicon, if you don’t need to run any Windows stuff, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so nice. It’s so, so nice. And I’m happy that the only Intel machines in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house are now gaming PCs. It’s like, all right, let Intel be Intel. Let it do what it does best, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gaming hardware with PC stuff. And have Intel and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft have their own hot little room off to the side of the house where it’s just full of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like fan noise. And then over here we have glorious M1 Apple land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s just so nice over here. This is like the, you know, the professional side of the house and it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so, so much nicer. So yeah, maybe consider that option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, speaking of tangentially, I heard the fan on my MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a couple of weeks ago. I actually heard it. I will give you one guess what I was doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco FFMPEG. Indeed! I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t even doing like… I have done so much FFMPEG work on this thing, it hasn’t even batted an eye. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for what I don’t know what I don’t remember specifically what it was, but something about this particular transcode was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really ticking it off. And I was like, what? What? Huh? Oh, that’s the fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the fan. Oh, it does have a fan. There is a fan there. Do you not use the hardware encoding?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I believe I do, generally speaking, because I don’t really futz with those particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switches is very often. And more often than not, I’m just using Don Melton scripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m almost sure do use hardware encoding. So yeah, again, I don’t remember there being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything remarkable about this particular transcode. But for whatever reason, it kicked the fans on. And it was very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very surprising. And this was before my AirPod Pro, so I couldn’t just drown it out, or I couldn’t silence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But no, all kidding aside, for me to have been startled by hearing a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this laptop, it’s just another sign of how great these machines are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you should get one. They’re really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just thinking about how I rebooted into Windows the other day and played a bunch of Windows games in Steam. I’m not going to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. I think I’m going to miss this. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to miss
⏹️ ▶️ John running Windows Update, but I will miss having the choice of anything in Steam that
⏹️ ▶️ John I want. There was a bunch of little games and free demos of things I wanted to try, and I’d seen them and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I can do that. And I just rebooted into Windows and did that, and yeah, I’m still going to kind of miss that
⏹️ ▶️ John when, you know, two years from now when the Mac Pro updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So what do you think you’re gonna buy a gaming PC then when that time comes?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. It’s under my problem. My problem with the gaming PC. I mean, there’s the, there’s the philosophical problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want Windows in my house. Uh, but uh, I mean, or I don’t want a PC in my house more precisely, but I just don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a place for a gaming PC. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end of an era. Honestly, like I know you would never do this and I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s two things. I hate a lap
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a laptop and those basic yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was gonna say like having having a gaming PC be a laptop for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whom the gaming PC is not their primary computing device. It’s really nice because it’s self contained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t have to like take over your entire desk or an entire desk like it’s to have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if you’re like a really serious gamer. I understand why you want to build a desktop and everything, but like if you’re more of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little closer to with the casual side, like I am, and even people in my family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gaming PC laptops are fine for us. They have ample capabilities for us, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexibility offered by it being a laptop is so nice. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would suggest you just check them out because they are not as underpowered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you might think.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they are as hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think. Honestly, even that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I mean, most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m playing Minecraft, so it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that demanding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game. Cool, but I’m playing it at high resolutions and having far render
⏹️ ▶️ John distances and stuff. I was playing these games on Steam. I could play them in native 6K because I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty okay graphics card and sometimes games aren’t that demanding. When they’re not demanding, native 6K, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s pretty nice. And there’s no way I would get a 6K monitor for a gaming PC. Gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John PC people are still buying 1440p displays because they’re like, oh, I get better frame rates that way is like for
⏹️ ▶️ John actual serious, like top end, triple A, you know, brand new games. It’s actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and the total inability to buy a 3090 because of crypto and COVID,
⏹️ ▶️ John means that 1440 monitors are still a big thing. Forget about HDR, forget about color reproduction. They can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John get up to 4K with most of these games. But here I am playing some old ass game and it plays perfectly