catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

476: Plausibly Viable

31 Mar 2022

Cracked pixels, acousticiology, the Overcast redesign, and a big surprise.

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Public preflight
  2. Retina vs. resolution independence
  3. Why silicon wafers are round
  4. Neighboring dies not needed
  5. Sponsor: Backblaze
  6. Mac Studio fan-noise follow-up
  7. Cellular licensing costs
  8. Sponsor: Remote (code ATP)
  9. Funding open-source
  10. Software warfare
  11. Overcast redesign 🖼️
  12. Sponsor: Memberful
  13. #askatp: File-naming convention
  14. #askatp: NAS Time Machine is slow
  15. #askatp: Apple ever make display panels?
  16. Ending theme
  17. John has an after-show

Public preflight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before we record every single week, we’ve gotten in the habit of doing what John likes to call pre-flight,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is reasonable. And we’ll quickly, quickly walk through, you know, what we’re going to talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where we think we’re going to stop follow-up and start topics and end topics and do Ask ATP and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we went the entire way through pre-flight, and I felt like we had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it pretty well sorted. I think John felt like we had it pretty well sorted. And then Marco looked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at us, Puss in Boots style, with his hat in his hands and his big eyes looking up, and he said, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what about the Overcast update?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I said, like, I don’t want to be too self-serving here, but do we want to talk about the Overcast update?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was suspiciously not mentioned yet. And why was it not mentioned, Marco? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you didn’t mention it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because

⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t put

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it there. Because you didn’t put it in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the frigging show notes. Good grief. Well, this is the last episode of ATV. I hope everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoyed the program.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, that’s the point of pre-flight. It functioned, it fulfilled its intended purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We made sure we knew

⏹️ ▶️ John how the show was going to go and Marco brought this up now instead of just springing it on us mid-show saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah. By the way, we also didn’t mention, now that we’re pre-flighting in public, Apple did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their external link thing and then they revised the dating app thing. But it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they’re in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John such a tiny… That’s too late-breaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I read it over all of it. And the only thing of note really is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made the text on the dialogue for the dating apps thing a little bit less horrendously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco biased. But otherwise, it’s mostly stuff that we already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew or stuff that’s very unsurprising. But yeah, so I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much there is to talk about there because, you know, it’s just Apple doing their usual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jerky stuff around this area. And you know, there’s not much different here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, what we could do is we could put things that we want to talk about in a shared

⏹️ ▶️ Casey document.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s a good idea. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then maybe the next time we record, we could potentially look at that shared document and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what we should talk about.

Retina vs. resolution independence

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a lot to get through. We have a mountain of follow-up, and it just keeps growing and growing and growing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I feel like we should just start by trying to conquer it. So first item on the list,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolution, independence, and retina. I feel like we have gone two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to three consecutive weeks trying to explain this and apparently failing. I had a pleasant,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if long, exchange with a listener who was not being belligerent, who was not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being mean in any way, which is somewhat rare for the internet, but they just really weren’t understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the big deal about retina was. And it’s not that they were an unintelligent person, it’s just I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I was doing a good job describing it. And learning from my mistakes in that regard, I can take a crack

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this, but I wonder, John, if it would be best if you took a crack at this, because one of the things I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey referred this listener to was some old Ars Technica Mac OS X reviews.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So would you explain to me, John, for those of us who are not aware, what makes retina

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screens and retina displays so crisp? If it’s just two times the regular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolution, but it’s showing the exact same stuff, why would it look better?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a lot of people sent feedback with asking questions that, and their questions revealed that they had a mistaken

⏹️ ▶️ John notion of how, uh, how Mac OS specifically deals with retina displays.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then some other people had some questions clarifying a point that we didn’t really bring up comparing how Mac does

⏹️ ▶️ John it with Windows. Right. So I’ll start with the the basics. Every time we talk about retina, we try to describe

⏹️ ▶️ John it as like, there’s twice as many pixels. So before, you know, if you’re measuring length in one dimension,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d say, what was previously one pixel long, now two pixels sit in the same place. Or what we

⏹️ ▶️ John would say is, on a non-retina screen, what was previously one pixel, now it’s a two by

⏹️ ▶️ John two grid of four pixels, a little square of four pixels, right? And we’re doing that to express the change in

⏹️ ▶️ John density, right? The way Apple did retina displays for the most part is if there had been a pre-existing thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John like say the 27 inch Thunderbolt display, what they did for their 27 inch Retina display, the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Studio display, is it’s like the Thunderbolt display, but every place there is a single pixel on the Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ John display, the Retina, the Apple Studio display, has four pixels in a little square, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so people ask, but why would you want that? If it’s just gonna draw things with a bunch of little blocks of two by

⏹️ ▶️ John two pixels in these four pixel squares, why not just draw a single pixel on the Thunderbolt

⏹️ ▶️ John display? What do you get? Who cares if every pixel is made of four pixels? It’s still the same thing on the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t it? And the disconnect there is, what we’re trying to explain

⏹️ ▶️ John is how the density of pixels changed, but macOS does not draw

⏹️ ▶️ John things with two by two squares of pixels. It draws things with individual

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels. So if you have like a letter O where the sides of the O are all in a big curve shape, it doesn’t make that the curve

⏹️ ▶️ John side of the letter O out of two by two blocks of pixels, right? It makes them out of single individual

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels. So it’s twice as smooth around the O. Obviously you can imagine if you’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John make a curve out of big blocks, the smaller the blocks, the more the curve will look like a continuous curve and not a stair step,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that’s the disconnect for that thing. And the second thing to understand on this

⏹️ ▶️ John topic is how did Apple eventually decide to

⏹️ ▶️ John come upon the solution where they took their previous screen and for every single pixel they made

⏹️ ▶️ John a two by two grid of pixels and then drew at the higher resolution, right? For many years,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll put links in the show notes, starting from 2005, then another link in 2007, then another link of 2011,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple had tried for many years to figure out how am I going, how is macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John going to draw on higher density displays? You know, macOS 10

⏹️ ▶️ John was the newest operating system then came out in 2001. High density displays look like they might be a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where the pixels would be really, really tiny. You wouldn’t want to just continue to draw exactly the way

⏹️ ▶️ John you had been drawing because then everything would be really tiny and no one could see it. What you’d want to do is what I described.

⏹️ ▶️ John Keep things more or less the same size, so a 12 point letter O would be the same size as 12 point letter

⏹️ ▶️ John O. It would just be smoother. So how do we go about doing that? One way that Apple tried

⏹️ ▶️ John for years and years and years is that you’d have the drawing

⏹️ ▶️ John commands that say draw letter O at 12 point text, and you’d have the screen which would have some arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ John pixel density. And the operating system would figure out based on the screen density and how big

⏹️ ▶️ John a 12 point letter O is supposed to be use the right number of pixels, which sounds like a great solution. It’s like any

⏹️ ▶️ John screen density, the more pixels you have, the smoother that letter O will be, but this letter O doesn’t change size

⏹️ ▶️ John like a 12 point letter is a 12 point letter O is a 12 point letter O and they would try to keep that consistent. The problem with that

⏹️ ▶️ John is, if you have something that you’re trying to draw, like you know, things in the operating system are defined by how big they’re supposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to be that 12 letter O or whatever. If that 12 point letter O requires a number

⏹️ ▶️ John of pixels that is odd on one pixel density but even on the other

⏹️ ▶️ John it might be offset by a little bit. Which doesn’t sound like a big deal but now imagine trying to do things like draw tab bars

⏹️ ▶️ John or toolbars or buttons or things where they have to abut and join exactly. If you can have an

⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrary pixel density you might end up in a situation where oh this dividing line has to be right in the

⏹️ ▶️ John middle but it can only be in the middle if there’s if this is five points because you’ve You’ve got two points, then the middle

⏹️ ▶️ John one point, and then two points. Well, what if it’s six points? Where’s the middle of six points? There is no middle. It’s gotta be

⏹️ ▶️ John closer to one side or the other because of the number of pixels. And so you get what they call pixel cracks and all sorts of other

⏹️ ▶️ John things where if we try to let the operating system draw it an arbitrary, what we call a scaling factor,

⏹️ ▶️ John an arbitrary scaling factor, it’s very difficult to draw things consistently

⏹️ ▶️ John because you always end up with like one pixel extra left over that you have to decide whether it’s on the

⏹️ ▶️ John left or the right and then you can’t line things up. So Apple eventually just pretty much gave up. After years and years of

⏹️ ▶️ John having that feature sort of as a debug feature in the operating system, you’ll see screenshots in the links where

⏹️ ▶️ John there was actually a resolution scaling slider that you can move around and you can move it to fractional values like 1.5, 1.25,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’d see how just the drawing of everything broke, right? Because nothing expected that and it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to get that to join up. So what Apple decided is we’re not going to do that. We are only doing

⏹️ ▶️ John integer scaling factors. So it’s either 1x, 2x, 3x,

⏹️ ▶️ John 4x, any, but it has to be an integer. So that way you always know exactly how to draw anything. You never end up

⏹️ ▶️ John with pixel cracks because you either, you know, either one regular non-retina pixel

⏹️ ▶️ John or a two by two grid, you know, double the density or triple the density or quadruple the density or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how Mac OS draws things as in draws them to the in-memory buffer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Final thing to understand is, okay, so that’s how Mac OS draws stuff. hey, I can take a 4K monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John and display a 5K, I can set it to 5K, how’s it doing that? That doesn’t divide evenly, that’s not an integer

⏹️ ▶️ John scaling factor, how does that work? Well, the way it works is, macOS draws

⏹️ ▶️ John at an integer scaling factor, like when it draws the screen, it says, here’s all the pixels in the screen, it

⏹️ ▶️ John is an integer scaling factor of, you know, it’s twice, three times, well, I think I only like the iPhones do three

⏹️ ▶️ John times, whatever, but it’s either 1X or 2X. That’s how macOS draws it. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John at the very end, after drawing a 5K image at exactly 2x, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It scales the entire final drawn image down to 4K. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John where everything gets all fuzzy. And then it shoves that on the screen. So that’s why people it’s like, why, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John non-native scaling factors. If it had fractional scaling, you could display 5K

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote 5K worth of points on a 4K display without any fuzzy

⏹️ ▶️ John scaling, but then you’d have pixel cracks everywhere, but that’s not what Mac OS does. Same thing on the 3X phones, by the way. Maybe Marco remembers the

⏹️ ▶️ John details more than I do. Yep. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco originally. Yeah. When the Plus phones launched, the 6 Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So they drew everything internally at 3X, but the screens did not have three

⏹️ ▶️ John times the number of pixels. So they would draw at 3X and then take the final 3X drawn

⏹️ ▶️ John pixel image and squish it and make everything all blurry and then put that on the screen. But the pixels are

⏹️ ▶️ John so small, people really didn’t notice, right? And that lasted until the iPhone 10. And that’s when

⏹️ ▶️ John they could do 3x. Well, not really, because the iPhone 10 didn’t use a pentile pattern, which is getting into more complexity

⏹️ ▶️ John of how pixels are drawn. But anyway, these pieces of information are key to understanding what’s different

⏹️ ▶️ John about macOS. And I think Windows tries to do what Apple did, which is arbitrary scaling factors.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m not entirely sure. So I’m not going to speak for Windows. But I can say that macOS, if you follow these links and look through the years, they

⏹️ ▶️ John tried the other way to do it. And they could not get it to work to be perfect. And so they said, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just going to do integer scaling, which I think was the right call because 2X and 3X turn out to be

⏹️ ▶️ John adequate for not seeing the pixels anymore. And it just makes everything so much easier because you never have

⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about that leftover pixel and which side of a thing to allocate it to. You never have to worry about pixel

⏹️ ▶️ John cracks. The price of that is because of the way macOS works. If you want to display quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John 5K worth of stuff, which I know it’s not, you know, however many points is

⏹️ ▶️ John horizontally and vertically Apple’s 5k monitor if you want to display that number of points worth of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John it had on a you know on a 4k monitor it macOS draws it at 5k

⏹️ ▶️ John and then it takes the final image and squishes it just like you would squish it an image editor and that’s why everything looks fuzzy

⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t get any pixel cracks but you do get a little bit of blurring in the same way that you take any image that’s pixel perfect

⏹️ ▶️ John and you scale it everything gets a little bit fuzzy I guess anti-aliasing around the edges so hopefully that will explain

⏹️ ▶️ John to people who are wondering why any of this matters to Mac users. It’s a combination

⏹️ ▶️ John of our expectations based on products Apple ships, and also how Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS and iPad OS, and every OS Apple makes, decided, you know, back in 2011 basically,

⏹️ ▶️ John how they decided how they’re going to draw on high DPI screens. They always draw at an integer

⏹️ ▶️ John scaling factor, and then if necessary, they squish that image down to fit in the number of pixels of the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the way we like it is no squishing. draws at an integer scaling factor and then just puts those pixels

⏹️ ▶️ John directly on the screen, which has exactly that number of pixels.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I get feedback, including today, I had two different pieces of feedback in the span of like five minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from each other on Twitter, like, hey, what about this monitor? What about this one? And I don’t know what I’m being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unclear about, but let me try one more time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel this way every single time. What? What am I being unclear about?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like if your screen is physically 27

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches or bigger, it must be at least 5K if not bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because how big is the XDR? It’s like 30 or something like that, 30 inches? 32, I believe. 32, I think. So between 24

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and 27

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches, you need to be 5K. Much above 27 inches, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting into the 6K XDR territory. And if you’re 22 to 24 inches, then 4K is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sufficient. people are sending me these like 32

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch ultra wide screens that have the same horizontal resolution, maybe it’s the same vertical, one or the other,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the dimensions is the same as a like ultra fine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K or a studio display 5K. And they’re like, oh, this would work, right? No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, that’s way physically bigger and zero more pixels. What is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, Zorro more boogs or whatever it was, John? I don’t remember now, but there’s not enough pixels in there. Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco There’s not enough pixels there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s just not even close to enough pixels there. And people keep thinking like, it’s like us with Trump. Like, oh, we got them this time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got them. And no, it’s not even in the ballpark. If it’s bigger than 27

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches, it better be more than 5K. If it’s bigger than 24 inches, it better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be more than 4K. Like, I don’t feel like this is unclear, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow people just aren’t getting it. I don’t know. I love all of

⏹️ ▶️ John you though. And that gets back to the scaling thing. Cause it’s like, you just set your monitor resolution to higher res. Well, then it will

⏹️ ▶️ John be non-native because then the Mac OS will draw at the higher res and squish that down to fit within the number of pixels

⏹️ ▶️ John that are on the screen and everything will look slightly fuzzy. And then yes, many people wrote in to tell us, well, yeah, I bet you can’t see those pixels, it’s in your

⏹️ ▶️ John vision bed anyway. That’s just up to the individual whether they care about native, what we call

⏹️ ▶️ John non-native display where the operating system draws at a higher resolution than the number of pixels on

⏹️ ▶️ John the display and then scales the drawn image before pushing it to the display. That looks fuzzy

⏹️ ▶️ John to us. Some people don’t notice the fuzz. Again, the old iPhones, when the big iPhones came

⏹️ ▶️ John out, they drew it 3X, but there weren’t 3X the number of pixels, so they scaled it. And I bet a lot of people didn’t notice

⏹️ ▶️ John because those pixels were really, really small. But on Mac screens,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of us can still tell.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, even if I can’t or John can’t or somebody else can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not we are being ridiculous, this is something that is important to us. For right or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, it’s important to us. So if you don’t agree, that’s fine. That’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just let people like things. All right.

Why silicon wafers are round

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe Line wrote in to tell us about why silicon wafers are round. And Joe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, the ingot of silicon is created as a cylinder as the solid silicon crystal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is grown and pulled out of molten silicon, which leads to round wafers. Furthermore,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of the processing steps in the fab to produce the chips on the wafer based on circular polishing motions and spinning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wafer around its center, which also requires angular symmetry and just wouldn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well or as efficiently with a non-circular wafer. And then there’s a video, I think it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, how do they do that or how it’s made or something like that, which we’ll put in the show notes. I watched it. The whole

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is like eight, nine minutes and the good part starts at about just shy of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two minutes. And we’ll put a timestamp link in the show notes. I will note that the source video does seem to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of places work freezes. I was concerned that my Mac was on the fritz, but no, no, no. It appears that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video itself. But anyways, it does a really good job of explaining all of this stuff. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely think it’s worth a watch of all nine minutes if you have nine minutes to spare. So check that out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the idea of somebody who would answer that question with, no, I do not have nine minutes to spare. Meanwhile, they’re listening to our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, man, let people spend time how they want, but I agree with you. you

Neighboring dies not needed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, can you tell us, John, about winning the M1 Ultra lottery, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is Jonathan Ragan-Kelly chiming in about the possibility that was of the

⏹️ ▶️ John theory espoused in that MaxTax video about having to fab two

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Maxes next to each other in order to make an Ultra. So, like, you’ve got the wafer, which as we just established

⏹️ ▶️ John is round, and then you’ve got a bunch of these rectangular chips on it, and they’re in a big grid, and there’s a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit of waste around the edges. That’s why we asked about the round thing, but apparently there’s good reasons for that, as I surmised, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John the theory was, okay, well, if you wanna get an ultra, not only do you have to find two M1 Maxes that

⏹️ ▶️ John have all the parts working if you wanna get an ultra with all the parts working, but they have to be next to each other on the die. So here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what Jonathan has to say about that. It is almost certainly not the case that neighboring pairs of M1 Max dies are cut out

⏹️ ▶️ John of the wafer to make an M1 Ultra. What they described at launch matches much better onto a more standard technology,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is the class of thing Intel markets as EMIB, which we will link in the show notes, And TSMC markets

⏹️ ▶️ John as LSI, which is local silicon intranet. That’s a standard widely used available technology

⏹️ ▶️ John and cheaper and easier to build with better yield precisely because you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John directly adjacent dies to be functional to pair them up. You don’t need to have fabricated dies next to each other on the same way for it

⏹️ ▶️ John to use this technology at all. The way to think about all these technologies is they’re basically circuit boards, just like the human scale

⏹️ ▶️ John printed circuit boards you’re used to, just built at different levels of miniaturization with different technologies. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then Jonathan lists a bunch of the different technologies And so if people don’t know what a circuit board is, it’s a big

⏹️ ▶️ John flat board that is mostly non-conductive, but that has conductive, what we call traces

⏹️ ▶️ John on them. You’ll see, you’ll often see it in, you know, if it was an emoji, which it probably is or will be. It’s like a green

⏹️ ▶️ John board, but with like gold lines on it. Those gold lines are the conducting paths. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re kind of like wires, but laid down as these sort of, you know, gold, you know, they’re made of gold usually, but

⏹️ ▶️ John gold things on there that conduct. And circuit boards can have multiple layers. So you see the little gold lines that are on top,

⏹️ ▶️ John but sometimes they have multiple layers where there are other gold lines sandwiched in between, connecting point A to point

⏹️ ▶️ John B to point C, all at different levels, right? So that’s what it means by circuit board. And these things, these interposer type

⏹️ ▶️ John things, they are just like circuit boards, but way, way, way, way, way smaller. So here

⏹️ ▶️ John are the different technologies you can do this. One is multi-chip modules like AMD uses for its CPUs to do the integration of multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John dies with the quote unquote circuit board organic substrate in package, using traditional package and die connections along

⏹️ ▶️ John the edges of the dies. This is also what Apple uses for its integrated memory. It’s just standard package level interconnect

⏹️ ▶️ John that cell phones and some laptop chips use. No special 3D stacking going on. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s if you see all like the RAM chips that are around like the M1 Ultra, they’re just connected with this like a multi-chip module.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is traditional silicon interposers through the circuit board as a 3D stacked big slab of silicon

⏹️ ▶️ John all the way under the entire array of chips with through silicon via TSVs to connect the chips

⏹️ ▶️ John to the interposer. So this is like a thing that’s just underneath the whole chip and has these little tunnels that go through it to reach up to

⏹️ ▶️ John the chip. And then finally, the newer EMIB-like things are like the full

⏹️ ▶️ John interposer where the circuit board is again, silicon and connected with high density TSVs, but where you only

⏹️ ▶️ John put a very small interposer under the adjacent edges of the pair of dies for point-to-point connections. This is very clearly what the

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Ultra uses based on everything Johnny Sruji said, and is the most sensible balance of cost and performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John So rather than being an interposer that goes underneath the whole chip, as we saw in the video, it’s just a little strip between the two

⏹️ ▶️ John that connects them. So if you think of that interposer as like a really, really tiny micro-scale circuit board with

⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of little traces and things happening in it. That’s how they’re connected. And to do that, you do not need

⏹️ ▶️ John them to be next to each other on the silicon wafer. So I found this pretty compelling evidence that they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to be next to each other. Now I’m angry again about the price of the Almond Ultra, I suppose.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but if anything, this means obviously that yields would be massively higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it this way than doing it the way that we initially guessed, which is good in the sense that this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco method of making giant chips effectively is scalable and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is healthy long-term probably. So I think it’s great in the sense that this isn’t just some kind of weird

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one-off they’re gonna do and then figure out something else for later. This is something that they’re gonna be able to do for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably and this is scalable. You know, when they want to go to say four

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these instead of two of these, maybe four potential future Mac Pro, that becomes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more possible and relatively much more affordable. I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s again, the term relatively here, than if you would have had to have like four perfect dyes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all next to each other, like that, that would have been ridiculous where, and two is even, you know, pretty, pretty out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. So this, this is promising in the sense that it’s much more reasonable of a technique to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. And it suggests that there’ll be much higher yields and the ability to do larger scale combinations in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future.

⏹️ ▶️ John Something we might touch on in future episode is the other problem of having a bunch of,

⏹️ ▶️ John in this case, a bunch of M1 Maxes, a bunch of Jade C dies or whatever, connected to each other,

⏹️ ▶️ John doing stuff. It’s kind of what we’ve talked about a little bit in the past, it’s like, each

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those ships can act on its own, but now you want them to all act together as one,

⏹️ ▶️ John looking like one big CPU to the operating system. And that can be tricky because each

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those ships does have its own stuff, right? It’s got all its own stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that is closer to it. Sometimes also in the case of the M1 Macs, it’s got its own connections to its own RAM and all

⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff. If you’ve got four of them together, now four things all have their own stuff and you

⏹️ ▶️ John want them to cooperate as one, it starts to become important how you allocate,

⏹️ ▶️ John starts to become even more important, let’s say, how you allocate work to those things. Because you don’t want to give

⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of work to one die and then give it to another die, a millisecond labor, and then give it to another die. Because every time you give

⏹️ ▶️ John it to a different die, it left behind all its stuff. They might’ve left stuff in the cache that was in the one die.

⏹️ ▶️ John And now you put it on another die, and it goes to look in the cache, and it’s not there. So it’s a good idea to keep things

⏹️ ▶️ John in the die where they started, because their stuff will be there as they build up

⏹️ ▶️ John their cache or whatever. And you don’t want to flush all that stuff out when you change processes. Anyway, this is a very complicated process.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re already doing it within a single chip, obviously. And then within the M1 Ultra, it’s an even bigger problem. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you had four of them, it would be an even bigger problem. So we’ll see if Apple ever mentions that a future keynote

⏹️ ▶️ John to emphasize how they’ve been able to harness these four different and ships woven together or whatever.

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Mac Studio fan-noise follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Phil Stollery writes that the fans in the Mac Studio are not just cooling the chip, they’re also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cooling the power supply, which needs cooling no matter the load. So this is, the context for this is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were wondering why the fans are really spun up always, and as per

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Phil, they’re cooling the power supply.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a good theory, except the M1 Mac Mini also has an internal power supply and it

⏹️ ▶️ John does not make this much noise around its fans as high. So it is a factor because we were always comparing it like,

⏹️ ▶️ John why would this thing be making more noise than the laptop? Well, of course, the laptop doesn’t have an internal power

⏹️ ▶️ John supply, it’s got that external power brick. It’s also true of the iMac. Why is the iMac so silent? Well, the power supply is not

⏹️ ▶️ John inside there either. It’s in the external brick. But the M1 Mac mini has got a fairly

⏹️ ▶️ John beefy, you know, oversized power supply from the Intel version still inside there. And it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John silent. Obviously, everything is beefier in the Mac Studio than it is in the Mac mini.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems like the math still doesn’t quite add up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean also, you know, the iMac Pro had a massive power supply in it, supplying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundreds of watts to all the guts of that machine. And that was silent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I don’t, it is worth noting, certainly, that that is a factor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I still don’t think, first of all, I still don’t think this is the only factor leading to why this machine is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so mysteriously loud. And I still think like something here is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly wrong. Like that’s how weird it is that this machine is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people are saying this is audible at all. Because, you know, compared to its peers, that it still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems weird that they’ve set the fan minimum to be so audible when it seems like it probably shouldn’t be necessary.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the studio display also has an internal power supply, also has two fans, and is also, according to everyone, has had one

⏹️ ▶️ John sound. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there was a Twitter thread from Only Me about returning a Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey due to fan noise. And so we’ll link thread in the show notes. This person says, cooling does seem to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over specified in the Mac Studio, at least with my admittedly light usage. With normal usage,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Mac Studio CPUs are about 35 degrees Celsius. My 16 inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is around 45 degrees Celsius with the fan off, according to iStockMenus.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As an experiment, I taped a piece of paper around the back of the Mac Studio, this seems unwise, but whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco covering the back vents. Don’t do this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But with a little gap between the case and the paper, a bit like a chimney. This reduced the fan noise by about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey four to five decibels, which made it audible, but completely acceptable to me. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU temps increased by less than 10 degrees Celsius, which is still less than my MacBook Pro with the fan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. And then this person clarifies, actually, I don’t think the paper increased the temperature at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only did it about 90 minutes ago and they include a graph. So yeah, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what to make of this. It seems like maybe this will get fixed in software. Maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t recommend blocking the vents on your computer, but as a fun experiment somebody else does, not me,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is interesting that even blocking the vents doesn’t seem to increase the temperature much. It’s just so

⏹️ ▶️ John over-provisioned with cooling, it seems like. There’s like nothing you can do to make this thing hot, and yet the fans,

⏹️ ▶️ John they keep spinning.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a little suspicious that at this point, you know, now we are a couple of weeks out from release, And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think anybody’s gotten like a weird statement from Apple PR saying like, oh, you know, we’ll tweak the fans in a software update. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t seen anything like that come by the news people. So maybe this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just how it is. But it just seems so odd to me that they would ship something like this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with fan noise that is audible, you know? Because, you know, obviously, and we’re gonna get into this in a second,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what, you know, what does audible mean? It’s very variable. It depends so much on people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on conditions, but it just seems like a weird misstep.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve been so good about fan noise with all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their other recent models for years, you know, excepting the Intel laptops before, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the desktops have been really quiet for a long time. And all of the M1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco based computers, including the laptops, have been really, like ridiculously, amazingly quiet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have this chip come out, And even the configuration with the M1 Max, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same chip as in the high-end laptops, even that configuration has audible fan noise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a lot of people. And so it seems like something went wrong here. And I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hard time believing that this is just how they designed it because they’ve been so good otherwise.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Acoustician Andrew Wade, this is someone who is very smart

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with audio things. Andrew Wade says, Acoustician checking in on this fan noise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing with some rules of thumb since you sound a little unsure of the decibels thing For noise level

⏹️ ▶️ Casey differences according to Andrew one to two decibels the human ear can’t hear the difference three decibels

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just about noticeable five decibels clearly noticeable ten decibels sounds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about twice as loud So a 25 26 and 27 decibel fan will sound the same same,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming of course one isn’t making a weird hum or something. As for quote-unquote audibility, that depends

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on how loud the room is already that you’re in, how close you are to the thing, how old you are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re hearing, especially at high frequencies, normally fades with age from about 20. So I would probably,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I as in Casey, would probably be able to hear fans that John can’t, coincidentally. So yeah, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what you’re complaining about, John. But anyway, back to Andrew. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is a 25… Newsflash,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you why. Because the frequency distribution of fan noise is not mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those very upper ranges that you lose, like, you know, like the teens, teen K Hertz kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of range. That’s it’s not those ranges that you’re hearing. It’s every it’s broadband

⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise across many frequencies, including most of the mid range frequencies that people tend to hear pretty well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a very long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So back to Andrew. So as a 25 to 26 decibel fan quiet in almost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all normal circumstances, it’s going to be an audible. Most offices are anything from 30 to 50 decibels. Sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one to one and a half meters from the studio, you’re never going to be able to hear a 25 decibel fan.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quiet recording studios are at about 20 to 25 decibels. So in that highly unusual scenario, you may

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear it if you’re close to it, maybe. Challenge accepted. Says someone who is professionally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trained in this field.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so I would say I am not an acoustician. I am a computer nerd. I know a little bit about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, but not as much as Andrew most likely does, I hope for somebody with that title. Um, so Andrew probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically out qualifies me on this. So that that that thing aside, we’re clearly hearing from lots

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people. Hey, subjectively, I’m hearing these fans and they’re loud or they’re at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable. Most people are not saying like, I can’t believe how loud it is. Most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are simply saying it’s odd that I’m hearing the fan because on all these modern computers, I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard the fan. It’s weird. I’m hearing it on this one, but some people also characterize it is silent, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And anyway, I’m I’m sitting here, like I measured, I happen to have an SPL meter for reasons. So I measured my office earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tonight and my office hovers around 40 decibels at night, which is, you know, right there in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the range Andrew said most offices are. But if my office is 40 decibels, I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear quiet fans when they’re on. So are the measurements wrong?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Am I wrong? Am I somehow magically hearing? Probably not, my hearing’s not that good.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you have something that is a certain volume, it’s not like adding another thing is lesser volume doesn’t count somehow

⏹️ ▶️ John or cancel

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it out. Right, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ John It just adds to the noise. What he was just saying is if you don’t find the noise in your office deafening

⏹️ ▶️ John with nothing turned on, adding something, a noise source at that volume level

⏹️ ▶️ John is not going, you’re not going to find it super duper offensive, right? And I was, I think we were

⏹️ ▶️ John linked to Panzerino’s thing or something, I just read something again today from somebody who just offhandedly said,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the great thing, it’s absolutely silent. I know it’s frustrating to hear us talk about this but none of us have one.

⏹️ ▶️ John The shipment dates of these things are out into May or June. I eventually will have one. I

⏹️ ▶️ John wish I didn’t have to wait until May or June, but I did not place my order soon enough, so I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I will eventually have one and I’ll tell you how it is. And I do have the Mac Pro here,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is probably the previous loudest Mac Apple makes. So I’ll be able to tell you what it’s like, but

⏹️ ▶️ John for now, none of us have one, hint, hint, Apple. So we can’t actually tell you firsthand, but we’re getting lots of different reports. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John why we’re looking at all of these, people doing measurements, people chiming in about what is audible and what is not audible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I went and I saw the studio display and the Mac studio in an Apple store, and I’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first to tell you, an Apple store is really loud. I am not denying that, not in any way, shape or form. But I did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pick up the studio, and this is, I didn’t have the presence of mind to like stick my ear next to it, but I picked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up. Someone had to come over to you, and

⏹️ ▶️ John put that down, what are you doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alarms

⏹️ ▶️ John start going off.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I know, it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John did you pick up the Mac Pro? They don’t even have a Mac Pro, nevermind.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I actually asked if they had an XDR, And they were like, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least not a display model anyhow. But anyway, I picked it up and again, I’ll be the first to tell you, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an Apple store. Apple stores are not quiet. I understand that. But in the context

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an Apple store, even with the thing like, I don’t know, a half a meter away from my head,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was completely silent. Again, I’m in an Apple store, I understand, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t hear squat. And the way some people are talking is that it’s like a freaking, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like they’re You’re saying it’s a wind tunnel coming out of this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and a bunch of people have sent us, like someone tried to do like a YouTube video that is supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ John precisely calibrated so that if you play it on your iPhone at maximum iPhone volume, it exactly simulates the decibel

⏹️ ▶️ John level and sound of the studio. I have to say that there are too many links in that chain for me to believe

⏹️ ▶️ John that is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco remotely accurate. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John although I did try it, I, again, reserve judgment until I get one of these things to my house.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, if only one of us got a review unit, or all three of us, imagine that. That would be so convenient. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right. Renfred writes, I wanted to point out that Apple actually provides noise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey measurements for their products on the technical specification pages. Here are a few examples, and you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can search for acoustic performance if you wanna see exactly where it’s listed. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Renfred has done the courtesy of doing the work for us. So I’m gonna rattle off some numbers. The Mac Pro, 11

⏹️ ▶️ Casey decibels, Mac Studio, 15, MacBook Air, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know, MacBook Air,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three, MacBook Pro, three. Wait, hold on. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air doesn’t have any moving parts. How? I mean, is it like a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco electrical

⏹️ ▶️ John noise? I mean, maybe three decibels is just the atoms vibrating. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like. This is suspect. I mean, these are Apple’s official numbers, right? But like the Mac Pro 11 decibels,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really? That’s it? That’s all it makes? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John so let him finish the thing because obviously how you measure sound can vary.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like where you put the microphones, what, anyway, go on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Mac Pro 11, Mac Studio 15, MacBook Air 3, MacBook Pro 3, iMac Pro 13,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which splits the difference between the Studio and the Mac Pro. The quote unquote best laptop ever made,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise known as the 2015 MacBook Pro, six. And so Renfred continues, these results are quite different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to the QuietMac site. We don’t know exactly how Apple’s measuring these, but they noted a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent number of details, including the fact that they are measuring from quote operator

⏹️ ▶️ Casey position, quote. They compare idle versus wireless web mode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latter being pretty pointless. I know for a fact that the 2015 MacBook can get much louder than six

⏹️ ▶️ Casey decibels under load, but given that the M1 Macs and Mac Pros tend to stay at idle, these numbers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be a pretty good comparison point if they’re being measured consistently.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you would think Apple has to have some sort of procedure, like why would they list this on their spec pages? Whatever Apple’s procedure

⏹️ ▶️ John is, they must have like a standard of like, here’s how you measure the sound of a Mac. Put it in this position where we expect

⏹️ ▶️ John people to use it, put the microphones here, use these microphones in this environment and measure the sound. I am

⏹️ ▶️ John not an acoustician, but maybe three decibels is just like the electrical noise of like the various

⏹️ ▶️ John inverters and stuff that are inside there. Like, is that really, really quiet? Maybe that’s like so low

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s below the level of human hearing. And I’m sure I still experienced

⏹️ ▶️ John this even in my old age, but especially when I was younger, you can hear the sound

⏹️ ▶️ John of electronics that have quote unquote, no moving parts.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right? There’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John fans. depending on how, if there’s a power supply or a transformer or an inverter,

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things can vibrate and make noise that ostensibly aren’t supposed to be moving parts. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it can be really bad. Like my Power Mac G5 had a chirping power supply that that power supply wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to have any moving parts in it, but it had parts that move so much they made chirping noises like a bird, right? So it can happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that makes me think maybe that’s what rearing the MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, but these numbers are so, first of all, they’re so low, that they’re suspiciously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low. and also relative to each other, they’re very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco odd.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re suspiciously low because if they do operator, like everybody on YouTube who’s measuring the sound is sticking

⏹️ ▶️ John a mic like behind the back studio. Like they’re literally putting a mic right, like they’re micing a drum

⏹️ ▶️ John kit or something. Like they’re putting a mic right where the fan outlet is. Whereas Apple says they’re doing it from operator position.

⏹️ ▶️ John So operator position is those, the output is facing away from you. The thing is on the desk, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John three feet away, huge difference. I don’t find the absolute value suspect at all. The

⏹️ ▶️ John relative values, I don’t know. I haven’t had enough of these machines to know. Like again, maybe three

⏹️ ▶️ John decibels is below, is just electrical noise. iMac Pro at 13

⏹️ ▶️ John and Mac Pro at 11. You’re right, I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kind of-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like relative to each other, it’s very strange. And to say, and if, you know, the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 11 and then the Mac Studio is 15, Like that’s, again, then the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Studio is pretty loud. So.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we see previously about a three decibel difference or four decibel difference being

⏹️ ▶️ John just about noticeable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I notice a three decibel difference. I make three decibel adjustments when I’m editing. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what that sounds like.

⏹️ ▶️ John So eventually, eventually, at the very least, I eventually will get one of these in the distant future

⏹️ ▶️ John and then when no one cares anymore, I will tell you how it sounds. All right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So real time follow up from Mr. Jason Snell. All I can say is that I noticed the sound. I wasn’t trying to hear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I noticed it. But it is very quiet and my office was entirely silent when I noticed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then some of us just don’t really care about fans and in fact have a clickety clattering stenology.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You’ve got the same room as you and that thing is

⏹️ ▶️ John so loud. It’s the loudest fan having thing in my house.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t get the vibro slap,

⏹️ ▶️ John only when Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey says

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey He, I was, now he’s slow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, he was delayed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco He was delayed. Does it sound

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a vibro slap? hopefully all the hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey drives clicking you know yep that’s back up to time machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching some plex actually that’s how you know when they’re Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right.

Cellular licensing costs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey along, that’s enough about fan noise for now. Anonymous writes in with regard to cellular and licensing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the context here is that, you know, what happens if Apple were to release a cellular equipped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook, which by the way, Marco, did you see somebody was saying, there was like a brief rumor that somebody was saying, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that that’s coming. Maybe I made that up, I could swear I saw that, but nevertheless.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that would be nice. I’m not holding my breath.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, neither am

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I. I hope so much that they do it. I think cellular might be my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last outstanding laptop feature request from Apple. I love everything else about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current laptops. I think they nailed pretty much everything else I want. I would always appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more ports, but I’m very happy with these laptops. I have pretty much no outstanding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wishlist items except cellular. That’s it. That’s the only thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey left. Yeah, I cannot say enough good things about the laptops right now. They are so freaking perfect. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, so we were talking about, would it be a fortune for Apple to add a cellular modem to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of these devices? And so Anonymous writes, I don’t see a discussion about laptops, but at least for phones,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Qualcomm caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a $400 phone. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote a thing from Reuters about this, because we were saying, we thought that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey royalties owed to Qualcomm are a percentage of the cost of the device. So if you have like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a $5,000 laptop, that’s a lot of money you owe Qualcomm. And so Anonymous is pointing out that, oh no, no, no, at least

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for phones, it was capped at $400. And there were a couple of links about this. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was also interesting, which I’d forgotten, is that Qualcomm collects royalties

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regardless of whether an OEM gets the modem chip from Qualcomm or from someone else. And this is quoted in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a court document that we can put in the show notes as well. And the quote from that document is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OEMs are required to pay a per-unit license in royalty to Qualcomm for its patent portfolios regardless of which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey company they choose to source their chips from. Man, that’s a racket. I want to get in on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just how patents work. I mean, we don’t actually- Patents are a racket. Yeah, we don’t actually know if there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John patent cross licensing agreement with either Apple and Qualcomm or with Intel’s cellular modem

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Apple bought, right? Lots of companies. That’s why patent cross licensing agreements exist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Patents are terrible and stupid and and shouldn’t exist, but they do. And because they do, it’s this mutually assured destruction thing where

⏹️ ▶️ John companies have their own portfolios of patents, and then they sort of enter these agreements where they say, we

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t annihilate you with our patents as long as you promise not to annihilate us with your patents. And they enter a

⏹️ ▶️ John cross-licensing agreement that says, we let you use your patents as long as we can, you know, we let you use our patents as

⏹️ ▶️ John long as we can use your patents. And then we agree not to sue each other. And that’s the only way anything gets done sometimes, because

⏹️ ▶️ John patents are so dumb, and so many companies have them. But yeah, I’m sure. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, everything is patent encumbered. Everything that’s in, you know, if you look at all the patents that apply to, you know, the M1 chips,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure there’s tons of patents in there that Apple doesn’t own, they have to pay somebody for. And Apple is making its own cell modems,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure there are patents in those cell modems that Apple has to pay for. I just don’t know if there is an existing

⏹️ ▶️ John cross-licensing agreement between Apple and Qualcomm or the ex-Intel cellular company

⏹️ ▶️ John Qualcomm or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, patents are great. You should do a podcast episode about that sometime, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah.

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Funding open-source

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Deep, deep cuts. This was when we were talking about open source and funding open source and how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many people, so many companies specifically are kind of riding on the coattails of open source. And I brought up Discourse,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which had put up a blog post, if I recall correctly, saying, oh, look at us. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fund open source. They gave tens of thousands of dollars to different open source projects. And at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first I was like, oh, that’s great. And then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, tens of thousands of dollars, really?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I got an email from Jeff Atwood, who is one of the co-founders of Discourse, if I’m not mistaken. And Jeff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, as far as open source goes, our primary contribution is the discourse code and almost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of its plugins. One of our core values is to be 100% open source now and forever. So far,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good. We’ve been a self-sustaining, profitable, fully remote, no headquarters open source company since 2012,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost a decade now. We host 100 plus forums for open source projects free of charge as part of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our free hosting programs, which I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. And then Jeff continues, we also contribute hundreds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hours of upstream fixes to the open source that we rely on and pay other open source projects for work and or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscriptions whenever we can. For example, until we built a native chat feature in discourse, which is currently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in early beta, we paid for a yearly enterprise subscription to Mattermost, an open source web chat solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is, that’s my kind of stuff. That’s the spirit I like to see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And Jeff Atwood, I mean, you know, so those of you who don’t know, Obviously, forever ago, he’s been known as his blog,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coding Horror, but also he was one of the founders of Stack Overflow. I’m pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure the reason why Stack Overflow had, since the beginning, it had that thing where its content

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all released under an open license of some sort. I forget the details, but all the content

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Stack Overflow that everyone’s writing is freely available for other people to redistribute under certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms. I’m pretty sure that’s because of Jeff. I think he was the one who championed that early on, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has always been pretty strong about this kind of open source stuff. So yeah, I respect him a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot. And that sounds all right to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and open source companies are like, if you are a company that’s trying to make money from open source,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, the old discussion, how can you make money? You give people the source code. Well, they pay for support, and they sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John pay for hosting and pay for all this other stuff. But anyway, if you are an open source company and you’re doing that, it behooves you to

⏹️ ▶️ John also help support other companies that do the same thing, because it doesn’t help you if

⏹️ ▶️ John you are the only company in the entire world that does open source stuff and every other one goes out of business. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John you are using some other open source component in your open source, throw some of your money their

⏹️ ▶️ John way, right? So just try to make it an actual ecosystem that is self-sustaining, because

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t just have, you can’t sort of be, I get all the free stuff from everybody, but I give nothing back,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re gonna be an open source company, You really have to sort of give and take.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, and then speaking of that, there was a really good blog post that was pointed out to us. This blog post is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Filippo Valsorda, and it discusses how to pay professional maintainers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So people who, you know, their job, either literally or effectively, is to maintain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey open source projects. And Filippo writes, or actually it’s Filippo, isn’t it? I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, they write, I believe that to successfully fund an open source project, company needs to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay the maintainers, not people external to the project, pay them real money in the order of what they could make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as senior engineers, pay for maintenance, not features, grants, governance, or support, and keep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying them, assess performance at contract renewal time. So basically in so many

⏹️ ▶️ Casey words, kind of sort of treat them like a real employee. And I think that’s good advice.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And this is, you know, what I’m saying, like, oh, people charge for support and stuff like that. This, this advice is

⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with, but it’s so hard to sell inside the company because that’s why these bullet points are so

⏹️ ▶️ John shocking. It’s like paying the maintainers versus people external,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, that’s not that shocking. I suggested that in the last show. Don’t pay random people to help. There are already people

⏹️ ▶️ John maintaining this. Just pay those people because they already know how to do it. They’re already the experts. But then pay for maintenance, not

⏹️ ▶️ John features or governance or support. No one wants to pay for maintenance. No one ever wants to pay for maintenance

⏹️ ▶️ John on anything, on cars, houses, but especially software. If you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John to convince your company to pay for something, you’re like, what do we get for the money? They’ll add the feature that we want, right? Or, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll give us commercial support. Like those are things you can buy as well, but also someone has to

⏹️ ▶️ John maintain it. There’s nothing to give you support on if no one maintains it and paying for maintenance, everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John hates that, but it’s important. And then keep paying them. It’s like, can we just pay them once? Like during open source week, we’ll give them a thousand dollars and we

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to think about it again for a year. That’s not sustainable. The year goes by and maybe that thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’ll have some bug in it that destroys your whole company that no one fixes because you never paid anyone to maintain it.

Software warfare

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then tell us about software warfare, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is another, you know, we talked about open source people doing things intentionally because they’re cranky about not

⏹️ ▶️ John getting paid enough to maintain their software. This is like literal warfare, as in

⏹️ ▶️ John some people who are, again, good old Node. Some people who are authors of a popular Node package

⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally updated it with some malware that wipes your disk if you happen to have a Russian or

⏹️ ▶️ John Belarusian IP address to sort of punish everyone who is in those countries

⏹️ ▶️ John for the war in Ukraine, if you didn’t notice and didn’t pin your dependencies and download this thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and it does a GOAP lookup, it tries to erase your hard drive. And that is an example of absolutely, positively,

⏹️ ▶️ John 100% malicious, intentional, on-purpose damage from an open source thing. And it gets back to the whole argument,

⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s an accidental bug or a malicious thing or someone who’s just having a bad day, if this piece of software

⏹️ ▶️ John is super important to your business, and if you care about your business, you have to take

⏹️ ▶️ John some ownership of that by either pinning the dependency to a version that you have vetted or

⏹️ ▶️ John making sure that you have some kind of relationship, business relationship with the people who rank the software so that you can

⏹️ ▶️ John have some recourse. Like for example, if you had a support contract and somebody did that, probably you could

⏹️ ▶️ John sue them and win. But if you have no commercial or relationship with this person whatsoever,

⏹️ ▶️ John when something like this happens, there’s not much you can do about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is something. I don’t even know what to make of this, but it’s fascinating what you can do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if people are nefarious. So, moving right along.

Overcast redesign

Chapter Overcast redesign image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’ve been busy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So busy you couldn’t add anything to the show notes, I see. Too busy

⏹️ ▶️ John pushing out software.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. So all kidding aside, congratulations, new Overcast release.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you walk us through it? What’s new? What was good? What was bad? What was ugly? Tell us everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have just released the Overcast 2022.2 update that includes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a significant redesign, probably the most significant redesign that I have done in its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco history, as well as a bunch of features and little tweaks here and there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this was the result of roughly, I don’t know, five months of work?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco However long ago Thanksgiving was, like it was the week before Thanksgiving that I really started this, like in earnest.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been a lot of work and I think it turned out pretty good. I’m really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy with it. I think this is the first time that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think something that I designed is good looking in an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. You know, I’ve always had programmer designs before,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I never thought that what I was releasing was absolute crap at the time I was releasing it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in retrospect, my design skills were terrible in my early years of making apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and got a little bit better over time. But I think this is the first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I’ve finally reached the point where I think looking at this current design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people will not look at this and say, wow, you should really hire a real designer. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, some people will because that’s always the case. Even people who have quote real designers will have people telling them that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m proud of this in the sense that I think this is something that is nicely designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I designed. That’s not a common thing, not a common feeling I’ve had in my career so far.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m very proud of that. So secondly from that, I think I’m pushing the design forward

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that is a little bit more aggressive than I’ve done. You know, most of the time my designs have been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly conservative in like the ways they would use system elements, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors and fonts they would use. It was all fairly conservative. Here again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m very aggressively pushing into color with this update. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thicker line weights everywhere as well. I’m using the SF rounded font

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I even customized the numerals so that it has the alternative 4, 6, and 9 glyphs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I thought that it made them look more fun and improve legibility at small sizes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve done a lot of that kind of design work of pushing this into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I think looks It’s much more modern than it did before because the previous overcast design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you want to see before and after shots, I have this blog post I did on my site and it shows certain screens side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by side and you can see the difference like night and day. If you look at that, it’s very clear that the previous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design was very much of its era, which was largely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unchanged since I launched it, at least in the list screens. The now playing screen has changed a bit over time, but oh, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, this redesign doesn’t include the now playing screen or some of the other screens in the app, but I’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to those next. But the main area of redesign here was the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home screen, you know, the thing that lists all your podcasts and playlists, and then a little bit on the episode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens, like the playlists themselves or the podcast, but there’s more to come on the podcast screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I did a lot here that dramatically looks different than the way the app has looked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the home screen since basically it launched eight years ago almost. It launched

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summer of 2014, so this is almost eight years ago, that was in the era of iOS 7 design.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the entire app before this, at least the list screens, looked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very iOS 70. And that’s a very dated look now. Now the rest of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screens in the app, you know, the playlist and podcast screens and the now playing screen, I had done incremental

⏹️ ▶️ Marco revisions to those over the years, but the home screen that lists all your podcasts and playlists, that screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked so old before. So that’s really what I was aiming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly at, was that home screen. And lots of stuff throughout the app that happened to be affected, like when I changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the font, that changes everything in the app. I changed the orange for the first time ever. It’s now a different orange. It’s now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually iOS system orange. The default sequence of colors and most of the colors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are available in the color pickers, those are iOS standard system colors that they introduced, I think, two or three

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, where iOS basically launched its own, like here’s a nice design palette with colors at all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco harmonized together or whatever. Throughout the entire app, I’m using SF symbols instead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my own icons for almost everything. I’m highly customizing some of them. In many cases, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco am using multiple SF symbols together or I’m taking SF symbols base

⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon and like badging it in a custom way or things like that. But for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most part, I’m using SF symbols almost everywhere. All of this, I think, makes the app look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and feel much more like a modern app than it did before, where before,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways, and especially on that home screen, it just looked so iOS 70.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the era of iOS 7, when I designed that home screen, that was fine, but we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved on quite a bit since then. You know, other than design, this also introduced a bunch of features, things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mark as played button, a bunch of special playlists, but for the most part, it was mostly about the design.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and I’ll get to the reception in a minute, But before I get there, did I cover what you want me to cover? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you think of this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you explain? I know you’ve gone back and forth on this a lot with Twitter. I know Marcus played was the number one requested

⏹️ ▶️ John feature since 1.0. And I understand, you know, like people, tons of people want it and everything. But I have to say, I’m in the camp

⏹️ ▶️ John of not understanding the purpose or function of this. Can you so can you tell me what the masses

⏹️ ▶️ John that were demanding a Marcus played feature like how they use it and how it functions? Because from my perspective with the I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John used to the overcast defaults, as they’ve always has been, when a podcast completes, I have it set to auto delete itself,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So marking is played, but not deleting, I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John how that interacts with, like what were people who wanted markers played? What did they want from Overcast and what do they now

⏹️ ▶️ John have now that you’ve added it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed. So since the beginning, I’m like you, I let things play until they’re done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or until close enough, then I fast forward to the end. I even, I have a little behavioral trick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had in there, I think maybe since 1.0, certainly for a very long time, where if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast forward 30 30 30 30 30, and if you hit the end, it ignores

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any further fast forward commands until you stop fast forwarding for a second or two. That way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanna quickly reach the end, you can just slam on fast forward from whatever you’re in, if you’re in your car, if you’re on your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone clicker, whatever it is, you can just slam fast forward, just spam click it basically. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it reaches into the podcast, it won’t seek into the next one. Because that’s a common thing that I would wanna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do sometimes and often I’d be like in a car or something. And I hear the ending theme song begin to something, ah, skip, skip, skip,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco skip, skip, and then once it stopped skipping, I knew I’d reached the end. Anyway, ever since 1.0,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my vision of deletion was I would hit the end in some form, and it would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete, and that would be it. And I never thought, I mean, it did track whether something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had reached the end. So it was tracking played status since the beginning, but it never had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a button that you could make it say it was played. You could delete it, but deleting doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean mark as played. It would get rid of it, but it would not show that word played

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the description unless you actually played it till the end. And the only way to get it there quickly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you saw an episode on the list and you wanted it to be marked as played, you would have to open it up,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seek to the end, let it hit the end. You also, by the way, you also can’t seek to the end by dragging. That’s another intentional

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little behavioral thing. If you drag the slider all the way to the right, it will seek to 10 seconds before the end.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, you could drag all the way to the right and then hit seek forward, that will hit it right to the end. Anyway, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is also, you know, these are ways people were doing this, who wanted to do this. Now-

⏹️ ▶️ John But when you say it would be shown as played, if it is deleted, or

⏹️ ▶️ John is this for like, if it was streaming, like where would you see the word played, displayed on an episode

⏹️ ▶️ John that you no longer have? Like you notice that you’re tracking it, so you can know that like they have played it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if, like when I go to the end of a show naturally, it gets deleted, presumably internally

⏹️ ▶️ John your database you market is played. How does that manifest? How do I ever see that again?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Progress slash played and deleted are two separate values in the database. And the only the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that manifests itself is, if you’re looking at like the list of episodes of all episodes of a podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you go into the podcast screen, you hit the all tab, and you see all episodes of that podcast, historically, you will see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which ones you have actually played and which and the rest that are dimmed out or just deleted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the reason why people wanted this is that a lot of times people will selectively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco play only certain episodes of a podcast or they will want to go back and replay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast or they will want to you know if they come to overcast from another app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they want to have they want it they want to indicate where they are like where they’ve listened up to by marking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain episodes as play that they’ve already heard so those are the major use cases for this and in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those cases they want that all list to properly represent which ones they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have played and which ones they have merely deleted or not ever listened to. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s the demand side of it and and I don’t really work that way when I’m listening to stuff and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I never really saw that need but literally since the beginning not only has this been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a constant request but people would write in not saying hey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could you please add this feature but saying where is this feature as if they it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so fundamental to them that of course this feature would exist they assume it must exist and they aren’t finding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or it’s a bug in my app that somehow it’s not displaying that’s how fundamental people have thought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this feature is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I just blue screen this is the antithesis of how I personally go through and listen to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasts like I’m not saying it’s wrong I’m not saying that I’m right and they’re wrong it’s just it this never would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have crossed my mind in a trillion years like to go surfing through the all episodes list and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey making decisions based on what you have or have not played. I conceptually understand the words that are coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of your mouth, but this is so foreign to me that this is how people choose to listen to podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this is why a lot of the things I’ve added or changed in this version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were about trying to accommodate more usage patterns than just the way I do things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve always designed the app primarily for me. And if I can accommodate other people relatively easily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, but it’s always been designed to fit my mental model of how I listen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to things. But there’s always been lots of other people who use it who don’t use things the way I do. I use playlists.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I almost never play a podcast by going to the podcast screen and then playing it from there. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost always playing it from a playlist screen. But yet, there’s a lot of people who never use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlists or very rarely use them and only ever play from the podcast screen. There’s always been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these divides of how people use it. it’s such a fundamental workflow for people, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they play and manage their podcasts, that there’s lots of different ways that lots of different people wanna use this. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, you know, the features I added, I added the ability to have special playlist types that would show you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes that are in progress, episodes that are downloaded, or all episodes that you have starred.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In practice, I personally need none of those things. And I don’t intend to actually use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost, I might have the starred list, you know, here and there, if I want to like look up something again, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, I don’t need any of those things. But they were very highly demanded features as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because a lot of people in the way their workflow works, they want to know which ones are in progress,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they want to know only which ones are downloaded, like if they’re on a plane or something, or if they have like some kind of weird data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco restriction situation going on. So there’s all these needs I’ve been I’ve been hearing about over and over and over again

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my user base for a very long time. That’s why I added these things. Marcus played

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just so incredibly popularly requested, so frequently requested,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash, you know, demanded it so frequently, I decided not only to add it, but to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco add it prominently. That’s why it has its own button on the toolbar next to the delete button.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that demanded that that’s how many people wanted this over such a long time, that it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to be a top level feature right there very visible right next to delete.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I hear you. But it’s just like I said, that I’m blue screening. I just seem so bananas to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but whatever makes people happy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you can see, if you look in our chat right now, our live chat, everyone’s saying how they listen to podcasts and it’s all different. Everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has different ways that they want these features to work or different subsets of these features that they want to use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Half the people are like, why do you need that? The other half are like, how do you not need that? Like, it’s just, this is just how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this market goes. And so, the more versatile my app can be without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruining itself and getting too complicated, then I think the better it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco business-wise to do it. Now, the reception to the design, I think, shows quite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit of, maybe not discrepancy, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different preferences, let’s say. So tell me more about that. When I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designing this, I remember I was sitting in a hotel room.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff and I had taken a vacation right before Thanksgiving for a few days, just in upstate New York,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And she had this idea and forgive me, I’ve now told this story on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco three different podcast interviews that are all coming out around the same time, so I’m sorry if you’ve heard it before slash will hear it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But basically, she was looking through an app, I forget which app, it might have been Pinterest, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And she had these like pill shaped oval things that were showing topics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, and she’s like, look, this is what modern apps look like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what people expect a new modern app look like. And I saw those pills

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, huh, I think because for a while I’ve been thinking I want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the redesign I was thinking I wanted to make playlists look better somehow. And I played with all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to do it. I played with just giving them their own album artwork on the side like their little their own little like round rect on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco left side matching up with like the specs of the album artwork or the podcast below them. And I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different things over time with like how I represent them in CarPlay. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did like a 2x2 grid of the artwork of the episodes that were in there. And I was trying to render

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on the home screen, but it was looking really busy and ugly. I was trying to figure out what do I want playlists

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look like, and I couldn’t nail it in my head. I couldn’t figure out like everything I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was trying, everything I would think of, like the little 2x2 artwork grid. I tried rendering the artwork in my little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack as the icon for the playlist, and everything I tried just looked busy or ugly or both.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t nail it yet. And then when she showed me those pill shapes, I’m like, wait a minute.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I make them pill shaped, that changes how they look from the podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco below them in a very prominent way. And that would enable me to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more customization. And I was thinking maybe I could add icons. Maybe I could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco add custom colors. You know, people, I’ve seen for years, people have been hacking this in bad ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve been, you know, because before you couldn’t have custom colors or icons custom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordering of playlists that those are all new. And so to get custom ordering, a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people have shown me screenshots over time where they would name the playlist like one workout to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco running, you know, that kind of thing. And so they would they would prefix them with numbers. And to achieve icons,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people would just add emoji to the front of them. And I don’t know, Casey, if you’ve heard about emoji,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So it’s people have been doing these these these hacks to get around these limitations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I thought I can do a much much better job of this and make it much nicer if I first have manual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reordering because that’s clearly a need that people have requested a lot over time and then second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can have a playlist have their own custom visual identity that people can just set whatever they want so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom icon custom color so that’s kind of where that came from and I play with it and I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is you know people who have been you know paying attention to I hate to say it this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way but to my fashion preferences recently you know I’ve said over time I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so tired of black computers and black t-shirts. I did that for a very long time. I did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only that for a very long time and now I’m like exploding with color. Like just give me all the colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I recently changed my Apple Watch strap from white to yellow. Like I’m all colorful now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I wanted to bring some of that energy into the app. It was a very aggressive design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I intentionally even like even during during the beta testing I played around a little bit with with these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things but I decided I’m gonna force color upon people by default. Now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they want to remove some of that color, they can. It’s customizable. I have had feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco requests from people saying, can you please make gray a color? And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, I’m not going to do that for lots of reasons. Number one, it’s hideous. Number two, I use gray to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco indicate an empty state for the playlist. So that they wouldn’t work very well. And I don’t intend to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But by default, if you want to go in there and set every color to one color you can,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but by default, I actually created a default color sequence that if you have multiple playlists, they all follow the same color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sequence by default as you add them or as you know, as it runs first, because I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want people to try some color because it’s nice. And you know, we’ve had a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark times in the world in recent years. And maybe this will help a little bit people feel a little bit nicer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and that’s I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t know if you’ve noticed colors are in fashion right now. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not just like a color but just being colorful is kind of in fashion right now. I hate that I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you fashion advice but here this is the world we’re in now. So anyway the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reaction to this I was nervous about because it’s it’s a very big bold change.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing that’s interesting is that some of the reaction has been why did you make everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big? Now if you look at my screenshot comparisons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is exactly the same height. Playlists, podcasts, and episodes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all exactly the same height as they were before. I think it’s 88 points, something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly the same height. Actually, playlists are, you know, when you’re in a playlist view,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you actually have a few pixels of additional width for the title than you had before because the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way the artwork margins work out, you actually have more width for the title. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people view it as big and bold because before it was so sparse, you know, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlist. Playlist before on the home screen were just black text in the middle of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant float, floating in the middle of a giant cell. Like there was, it looked like, when I look back on it now, it looks like a rendering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco error. I’m like, they were so basic before. If you make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things more colorful and put borders around them, people will think they’re bigger, even though they’re not. So that’s fun. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was very confident launching this, that I had made something good, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very proud of the design and I was ready to assert to the world if necessary, no trust me, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good. And if you don’t like it, well I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna bow to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any demands to change it back. This is the way forward.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put it out there first to the beta group and the beta group was pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco positive about it. There were like one or two people out of, I don’t know, a couple of thousand maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who were like, I really don’t like this, I wanna go back to the original. But for the most part, it was a relatively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small percentage. Everyone else was pretty positive about it. And then, I gave out press

⏹️ ▶️ Marco invitations to look at it and everything, and I knew press was all gonna hit it once when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it released last Friday. The press was all set for a certain time, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, here we go, we’re gonna see what the press says. I have no idea, I’m confident,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is very good, But we’ll see. And the press comes out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And actually, it was pretty universally positive. So I’m like, all right, here we go. I’m riding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high now. Here we go. And then it starts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting out to all the users over that overall Friday. And I’m nervous as heck because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m watching my servers, thinking like, on first run of the new version,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the playlists assign themselves colors and then they have to sync those changes to the servers. So on first run,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s playlists are going to have to sync new changes to the servers. So I’m watching the servers like a hawk, like, oh my god,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this going to explode? What’s going on? I even approved it at like 2 in the morning, or like midnight,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go live at midnight, just so that most of those syncs would happen, most of those first syncs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would happen overnight when the server’s traffic is low, you know? But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m watching the press, I’m watching the servers, I’m really nervous, seeing all the reactions on Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are amazingly positive. Everyone who’s getting the update, they’re all tweeting on Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, this is great. Wow, look at that. You know, everyone’s calling it words. I don’t even understand like whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco young people say that when things are good that you know, I saw some of those words fly by and I’m like, wow, this is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I’m even getting young people to think it’s good. Like not, I mean, probably not all of them because it’s still a podcast I made by a 40

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old guy, you know, a programmer. But anyway, you know, so I’m getting all these things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all these praise. and so for the most part it’s been very very good however the people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who don’t like redesigns tend to be a little bit slower on the uptake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of updates for apps so day you know days one two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and three were fantastic now that it’s like day six or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco um a lot i’m getting a lot of bad emails But, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I look at the proportions, it is universally very,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well received. Like and I look at my, you know, I’m of course I’m getting one, two star

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews as well from people who are angry. But if you look at the, the average still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of new reviews coming in, it’s still very good. So anyway, please, I would encourage you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I don’t ask this very often. If you want to rate Overcast, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a good time to do it because right now I’m at maximum anger from those people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like things to be changed. But this is not to say anything is dire. My average is still very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. It would be nice to have a little bit of goodness coming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into my inbox for the next couple of days as the slower and more grumpy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco group gets in. Let me see. I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco deleted one a few minutes ago. This was amazing. I can’t find it. Anyway, it was like a one word thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The subject was like, it’s poop. And there was an empty body.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice. Yeah, so that’s the caliber of things I’m getting. I’m getting nicer ones too, but they’re just like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can we please have a switch to switch back to the old design? It’s like, no.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you reset the ratings for this version?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t think I’ve ever done that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I guess I’ve never rated Overcast. I just went in and rated it. Thank you. I said

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was poop. it was poop.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is my turn to apologize for being a bad beta tester because like you know

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason we forgot about the new Overcast version is because Casey and I have been using it forever because we’ve been on the beta

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re just kind of used to it by now. It was the new version for us like months ago or whatever right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way but please everybody out there please don’t as a joke review Overcast and say it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco poop like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh gosh no that sounds like like a good funny that might funny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your head that might sound like a good joke. Trust me it won’t be received that way by the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like other people who are looking at the overcast page trying to decide whether they want to download this app or not and don’t know us and don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and don’t know me like trust me that let’s let’s all laugh at that joke in our heads right now and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then not do it. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, go ahead john. So looking at the I was thinking I’ve been using this the beta version for so long

⏹️ ▶️ John and for the most part I just you know, continue to use it the way I used it or whatever. But then I realized Like when

⏹️ ▶️ John you do a release and you do like the blog post that explains all the features, I kind of wish you’d do that at the beginning of the beta

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of at the end, because I read the blog post and I learn things about the application I’ve been using for months. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I didn’t know it had the, because I mean, again, as that gets back to like, if you don’t use those features or it’s not the way you work

⏹️ ▶️ John with things, I’m not gonna go hunting for them, right? So I just look at it and say, can I continue to use Overcast the way I’ve always used it?

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, oh, it looks different and it does a few more things. And you know, I noticed the markers, play button or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, that’s not for me. but then there’s other things that it can do. And so I’m a bad beta tester in

⏹️ ▶️ John that the only time I actually really start exploring the app is after you release it and do the blog post that explains

⏹️ ▶️ John all the features that I should have been seeing. And yes, I do look at the test flight notes, but they’re not always that informative. Certainly not as informative

⏹️ ▶️ John as the blog post. And so the second thing is now, for example, customizing

⏹️ ▶️ John playlists. I just accepted the colors and the names that you picked. I’m like, they look nice, it’s fine. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, oh, you can customize these, you can change the colors, you can change the icons. Huh, and so

⏹️ ▶️ John after it’s released officially, and I learned that from your blog post, I go in, I’m like, oh, I should change

⏹️ ▶️ John some of the, let me see if I can change some of the icons. And, you know, of course, you talked about the SF symbols thing and everything, so I

⏹️ ▶️ John saw this huge list in there. And now I’d like to do, in the grand tradition of

⏹️ ▶️ John any of us releasing software on the show, I need to do my real-time bug report. So please,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey please take out your iPhone now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Take out your iPhone now and go to a playlist and edit it, go to playlist settings,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then tap on icon, please. Tell me when you’re all there. Okay. All right, so this is what I

⏹️ ▶️ John did. I’m like, oh, look at all these icons, and I love that you have the search, and I knew that you did it based on the accessibility data or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John so you can do a text search or whatever. So just type M-U-S for music, all right? And you

⏹️ ▶️ John type M-U-S, so look, and it’s narrowed down to a bunch of icons. Ooh, a mustache. Yeah, mustache, or they

⏹️ ▶️ John look like they’re music symbols or whatever. So pick one of those. I’m like, oh, I’m gonna go with the three music notes, and I

⏹️ ▶️ John tap on the three music notes. And then I stare at my phone and I’m like, hmm. Oh yeah, I need a done button, I know.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, so what do I do now?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is, you hit cancel. No, no, no, you hit the back button. Or the back button,

⏹️ ▶️ John neither one of those things feels like an affirmative action. I literally couldn’t figure this out. I would,

⏹️ ▶️ John I did, I hit the X and I did, and I searched again and then I long pressed, then I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ John hit cancel, and then I hit, eventually I figured it out, but it is so not obvious how

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when I, when I felt it. I’m gonna add a done button

⏹️ ▶️ John to the upper right. Yeah, like I need something that’s like, and now, because just hitting the three little arrows, that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John complete the screen. It’s not like I found the icon I want and I hit it and the screen dismisses it. It stays there staring at me and I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So that’s exciting. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, that is very valid. And in fact, I tifted that when I was watching her use it for the first time and I just forgot to write it down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, no, that’s true. That’s good, thank you. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sorry for not giving you that bug in the months that I was testing this beta, but there you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey go.

⏹️ ▶️ John I made up for it live on the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you also didn’t give me the same bug then because in the version of Masquerade that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record, I hope to release tomorrow morning, it’s through app review, I just wanna check a couple of things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I rejiggered the way the default emoji settings page works and there’s a new settings page

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for face detection size where you can tell it even, you know, make this a little bit bigger than just the face.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have very large faces in my family.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, my family is full of big hearty faces. Anyway, there’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a slider, and the options in the upper left and right, in the upper left is just to go back to settings,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and in the upper right, there’s a reset button that is only valid if you’ve futzed about with, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t leave it exactly where you found it. And so in order to save your setting, you just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go back, which is basically what Marco’s got here. And I went back and forth about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it seems, I actually think I like this more now, because as soon as you make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a change, it is saved, And then there’s a reset button in my case, if you want to go back to the way it was. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m with you, Marco. I don’t think you need a done button.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, no, I do need one.

⏹️ ▶️ John You definitely need one. I mean, it really has to do with the context of like, having things take effect in real time versus

⏹️ ▶️ John having select and then hit a done. It’s really, really sensitive to like the expected context. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John are you throwing up a sheet where you have to make the sheet go away? And if the only way is to make it go away

⏹️ ▶️ John or like cancel or back, those don’t feel affirmative versus are you flipping a switch and you’re confident that when

⏹️ ▶️ John I flip the switch, the setting has taken effect because I’ve not placed into a second, like there’s all sorts of cultural baggage

⏹️ ▶️ John of like when there is an expectation that you have to sort of say, I have

⏹️ ▶️ John now done the thing, yes, versus no, nevermind everything I did. And

⏹️ ▶️ John we used to have this debate in the old days of Mac OS X of like, if you bring up a pref screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John like you bring up preferences and it’s got a bunch of checkboxes for like you want this setting on or off or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John should the preferences take effect as soon as you hit that checkbox or only after you decide whether to hit okay

⏹️ ▶️ John or cancel on the preferences window. And that culturally changed between classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John OS X way to do it by the way is to essentially do it in real time. And then closing the press window is just like I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John done setting things. But as soon as you hit that checkbox on a well-behaved Mac OS X, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, whatever we call it these days, application, that’s it. That you’ve done the thing, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, the reticulate splines check, right? You know, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And then closing the preferences window is, okay, well now I’m just not gonna do any more changes to preferences,

⏹️ ▶️ John but closing or not closing the preferences window should have no effect on, you know, like it’s not like if you

⏹️ ▶️ John make a bunch of changes and then change your mind, there’s no way to like get out of the preferences window and not commit those changes because they

⏹️ ▶️ John were committed the second that you did it. Whereas on iOS, I don’t know all the cultural things, but I do know when I was

⏹️ ▶️ John on that screen, I didn’t know what to do. And it seems like Tiff had the same problem. So that cultural context

⏹️ ▶️ John of bringing up a card or whatever you call that, requires some affirmation, or it requires

⏹️ ▶️ John when I tap an icon, it self-dismisses and say, great, you’ve picked it. Yeah. UI

⏹️ ▶️ John is weird and hard.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a bug, but it’s like a, it’s a confusing part of the UI. And why was it confusing? For reasons that are

⏹️ ▶️ John actually very difficult to explain. Like, it’s not obvious. It’s not obvious that this is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John anyone can tell that that’s wrong. It’s only the type of thing that you would realize by, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John someone who didn’t create the app and write the code to do it, attempting to use that screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, any other complaints while I’m here? It’s not your fault, but really,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing in FS Symbols for shower, bath, water, soap, like nothing? I have

⏹️ ▶️ John a shower playlist. Who doesn’t have a shower playlist? For shower,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use a thunderstorm icon.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s, I’m just saying, it’s not your fault. This is not in FS Symbols, but come on, like literally nothing?

⏹️ ▶️ John What about lightning bolt? For

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shower? Well, it’s a thunderstorm.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I searched for rain, but that’s not, I don’t shower in a rain cloud. It’s funny, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John rain cloud, it’s a shower. I think this is, this makes me, I know you talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John this before, like oh I could use emoji, but what about SF Symbols? I’m sure there’s an emoji

⏹️ ▶️ John I could use that would be a closer match, and I feel like SF Symbols has

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a different, Yeah, there’s a shower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco emoji. Has a shower gap. No, and I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the availability of SF Symbols, it is clearly a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI toolkit, It is not made for the purposes I’m offering it for here. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not made for arbitrary user input of classifying their podcast listening. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many weird omissions from it. And there’s many things in it that have no business being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco selectable here. There’s like every number, every letter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco encircled or squared for, maybe that’s not necessarily needed here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or certain oddities like every individual button on a game pad, like you could have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those as your icons, because that’s just needs of the system have. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried it with Emoji. I never shipped it as a beta, but I tried it in testing with Emoji. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this context, it looked a little bit dated. I had used Emoji

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my UI a lot. I used the Emoji cloud and star

⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons, like on description labels in the episode cells to indicate whether an episode was streaming or not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a couple of emoji like here and there in the interface, and when I first started doing that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco geez, I don’t know, five years ago, it was a long time ago, when I first started doing that, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cute and novel, and the use of emoji in UI was fairly unusual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that time. And in fact, John, I believe you even complained to me about it when I started doing it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I think that is a little bit dated for these purposes. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like Casey, in your app, a little bit different because the entire app is about emoji. So that obviously makes more sense there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In in overcast new design, you know, with all the SF symbol icons everywhere, and with these, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, thick line weights and big, bold, flat colors and pastels, emoji didn’t look right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried it and it just didn’t look good. And so I decided to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just stick with that symbols for these, because it was just it was much,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better looking in context.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I almost wonder, and maybe this exists, but something that I know we used a lot back in my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey web development days, which was a decade plus ago, was Font Awesome, which was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I recall correctly, basically a font, but it was a bunch of glyphs. Think wingdings, but less

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird. And we would use that as like UI elements all over the place. And I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we need is like a Font Awesome, but with glyphs, like a shower glyph, for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey example. poking about on the Font Awesome website, there’s plenty of excellent shower glyphs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to my eyes are in the spirit of SF symbols. Now, I’m sure a person with much better design sense than me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is basically almost everyone would tell you that these are not really in the spirit of SF symbols. But you don’t I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like something along those lines that gives you more breadth, because like you said, Marco SF symbols

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really designed to be used as UI elements or to supplement your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey user interface. Not exactly what you’re doing. Like I don’t fault for doing it, I think it makes sense, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not really what SF Symbols is about.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s exactly what it’s about because there’s lots of things that are representative. Like SF Symbols, I don’t think is about

⏹️ ▶️ John the semantics. It is really about the incarnation, which is like line drawings,

⏹️ ▶️ John clearly readable line drawings that are abstract representations of things. So it’s not super amount of detail.

⏹️ ▶️ John The lines are pretty thick. They’re good icons that are exactly for this type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is useful in your UI because it’s not going to draw attention to itself like a subtly shaded cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John emoji would, right, that may clash with your UI and like, you know, like the emoji

⏹️ ▶️ John are very, they’re very bold and they have their own style and that style is not the same style that

⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the UI and Overcast has. So the, the, SF Symbols, I think this is a perfect, you know, use of

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s just SF Symbols fault for not having anything there for shower. So maybe you could augment it by

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco drawing

⏹️ ▶️ John one vector shower head icon, throw it in there. Like you should actually have a custom set of icons

⏹️ ▶️ John that that you can add to SF Symbols. And then eventually, as SF Symbols gets stuff added to it all the time, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually it will probably get a showerhead.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and another common one people are complaining about the lack of is that there’s not a lot of sports representation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s like a sports court. There’s like a basketball court looking or a tennis court looking thing. But that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main sports thing. There’s not like, you know, different balls

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for each

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Not a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco soccer ball, tennis ball. Right, right. But you know, there’s also, you know, one of the great things about this, first of all, one of the great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about this is that I don’t need to buy or commission or create this artwork, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is just there in the system waiting to be used. Secondly, there’s all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of benefits you get by using it. So for instance, they have all these different modes, they have these different rendering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco modes, you can render them as, what I’m doing here is hierarchical mode, where you can have like different levels of transparency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain icons, like the if you look at the guitar icon that I use for music or my fish playlist, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, you know, these different layers of guitars. Also, one of the big advantages is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for accessibility settings, like if you enable the setting called bold text in the accessibility

⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel in the system, every icon in the app, including those, gets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thicker.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not every SF symbol has a bold version, like the guitar one doesn’t, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them do. And so you have like variable weight, you have all these different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rendering modes they can be in. So there’s a lot of advantages to using them. And also you have Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping them updated, hopefully over time. They’re always adding more, like almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every point release of the OS adds more as of symbols, not a lot more usually. The major releases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to add larger numbers, but it’s great that Apple has a team of designers that effectively now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for me for free. And that’s fantastic. And somebody like me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting better at my app design skills. I’m not nearly as good as them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at icon design, and I also am not nearly as good as them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just spending the time on that and drawing thousands of symbols. Like there’s something like 3,800 SF symbols right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never in a million years address even a 10th of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is just a fantastic resource for me, and I think it looks really good in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app. I think it makes it look very, very modern. and the amount of reward

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has to me of how great it looks and how much it enables versus how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little effort and time and money and app file size, John,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes for me, it’s really, it’s pretty great. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks real good. And I’ve been enjoying it, obviously, so kudos for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I will be sending you a 25-minute list of bugs and issues, a 25-minute video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fine, hey, do what you gotta do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you watched mine yet? You know, I was gonna say, I finally got, I had enough time to watch a portion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, and I gotta tell you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you have nine minutes to spare?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had nine minutes to spare. No, I think I removed approximately 15

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds of text from the app during the five minutes of your video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was able to watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire app is now five kilobytes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, exactly right. No, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually got a little bit bigger on the pending release, because I added a picture of me that I used on the aforementioned,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how big do you want the face detection to be? And then, did we talk about this? That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the icon on the landing screen was not properly retina, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two size icons, it appears that Apple bakes into your bundle.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of them is like a not very big iPad icon, and then I think there was one other one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was even smaller. And so I was just using the biggest one I could, and a couple of eagle-eyed users were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, hey man, why is this not retina? Is this broken? Well, no, it’s not really broken. I just didn’t want to add another icon just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that one screen. And then I got browbeat enough about it that I allowed myself

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add one more icon in there. And so the app is probably like five or six megs now instead

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of three or four or something along those lines. I’m so sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re still okay. We did talk about this. His name was Stampy. You loved him.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Reference for Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John Dugan maybe? I got it, I got it, I got it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got nothing. said it.

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#askatp: File-naming convention

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unforgettable Luncheon, very good name, writes, do you have any preferred file naming scheme that you follow? Recently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my university degree, we were told to name our files with the prefix year, month, day,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore title, underscore subtitle. For example, this is with no hyphens or anything. So example, 20210329

⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore proj3 underscore site plan. But this seems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey clunky and space inefficient to me. I feel like we’ve talked about this before. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to horrify a lot of people as with so many of my opinions, but for general

⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage, I don’t favor year, month, day. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for file names or things where I’m going to be sorting by file name and I know I want this stuff to be sortable,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then yeah, year, month, day with hyphens. And then use spaces like an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey adult and kind of do whatever you want after that. Marco, what is your opinion on this?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we’ll round it out with john telling us what we should believe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends a lot on context.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what john is probably going to mention is that the file system does keep track of things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like creation date modification date However, and I’m sure john’s gonna mention this as well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is when you’re in this kind of context of okay, you’re in a university program.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re creating documents You’re probably gonna be sending them around to people Well, as they get moved around,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they get emailed or Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever, Google Driven, whatever it is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they go around, the opportunities for them to lose this metadata on someone else’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer or in some other context increase dramatically. So if you’re relying only on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco creation date in the file system to indicate when something was made and that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not represented actually in the file, like in a document, like actually as text created on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, or as metadata somewhere, if you’re relying on that, it’s going to get lost as these things travel around.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, when I make files on my own personal computer, I have faith that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that those things are not going to be a problem for most in most of my most of my files here. Like I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned to trust the file system and its metadata for the most part, as I’m using my own computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tends to be maintained. And so I can look and see modification or creation dates and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to be accurate. Then that isn’t true of everything though and of all context. And that’s why I think it depends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in this kind of situation where you’re working with other people a lot, you’re sending files between other people a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see why they would do something like this. There are good reasons for that in that context even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I personally don’t bother doing that. With one exception and that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for files that I’m not naming that are being named automatically by something else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that is the case. And I think my most common version of that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I have a sheet fed scanner and it automatically creates PDF files of whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I scan in this folder in Dropbox. And those files are just named

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like this, like year, month, date, and then number within that day that I scan them. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time I’m scanning paperwork so I can get rid of it. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually need to reference most of that paperwork again. I needed to have names

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that it exists in the file system and I can find it somewhat. But I don’t need those names to be very meaningful. I don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like manually type in like, you know, date dash electric bill, you know, I don’t I don’t go go to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I just let it be the date. And if I ever need to find something, I just think about roughly when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was and go to that time range and just start, you know, hitting up arrow with the preview with quick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco view open and just like browse through my PDF scan around the time. Oh, here it is. You know, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had any trouble finding stuff that way because, you know, adding to that is much more common than reading from it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. But other than that, I don’t do this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s the right answer? So

⏹️ ▶️ John school work and other institutions will make you comply with all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ John things. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they say you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to name your GPS report this way, you name your GPS report that way. It’s just part of life, so don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John worry about it. But for doing stuff, your own personal things, here are a few things

⏹️ ▶️ John I would encourage. I would encourage you to only put things

⏹️ ▶️ John in the file name that describe the content of the file. Surprisingly,

⏹️ ▶️ John often, that includes the date, even though, yes, of course, I’m gonna say the file system has dates or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John If the document, if describing the content of the document

⏹️ ▶️ John document means it includes a date, put it in the file name. So for example, tax return 2001.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you’re not saying the file was created in 2001. You’re not duplicating file system

⏹️ ▶️ John metadata here. You’re saying it’s really important that I know which year this tax return is

⏹️ ▶️ John for. Put that in the file name. And yeah, then you can do it year, month, day, you can put year at the beginning,

⏹️ ▶️ John year at the end, do whatever you want, but putting dates in the file name is not ridiculous. It’s only ridiculous if the date you

⏹️ ▶️ John put in the file name It’s the same as the creation or modification date, just because you’re mirroring

⏹️ ▶️ John that data. And again, people may make you do that or whatever, but that’s a little bit silly. And for

⏹️ ▶️ John portability reasons, like if you want that to be preserved, it’s super important that people know the year, month, and day this

⏹️ ▶️ John file was created, even though it has no intrinsic connection to the content, that is a little bit sketchy,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you gotta do what you gotta do. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John even in the age of the internet and all the, it’s use spaces between words.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the internet can handle it, right? I promise you the HTTP protocol will

⏹️ ▶️ John not die.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know lots of people don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do encoding stuff right. I know sometimes things are not URL encoded and they’re not double encoded and

⏹️ ▶️ John people get confused about plus versus percent 20 but like functionally speaking, it can work. So

⏹️ ▶️ John for your own purposes, use spaces to separate words, please. Don’t use hyphens or underscores.

⏹️ ▶️ John Computers don’t need those things. You may feel like you need them and you’ll be like, how

⏹️ ▶️ John am I ever going to tab complete something with a space in it? All of these things are possible, I promise you.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no reason for you to be reading things that look like a bunch of little snakes tying together your words.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John prefer to use title case when I title my file names. You can do all lowercase if you wanna feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re cool or whatever, but I feel like words, capitalization is important for a reason, URL

⏹️ ▶️ John is all capitals, ACME or whatever, like IRS is all capitals,

⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe Acme isn’t or whatever, but use proper capitalization in your words.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t, you know, for dates and other things that are in the file system metadata that do

⏹️ ▶️ John not describe the content of the files, to help you, to discourage you from doing that,

⏹️ ▶️ John think about how weird it would be, think of how absurd you would feel if

⏹️ ▶️ John your quote unquote naming scheme for your files was, oh, whenever I name my files, I always put the file size in the file

⏹️ ▶️ John name. Right? Nobody does that. And the only reason nobody does that is because

⏹️ ▶️ John we all have a hundred percent confidence that the file size is something that will transfer with the file.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas we have very little confidence that the modification or creation date will transfer with the file. Right? So I kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of understand the differences there, but in general, describe the content of the file. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John try to mirror our file system metadata.

#askatp: NAS Time Machine is slow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, oh no, not finally, excuse me, in the middle we have Carson Brown writing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been experimenting with time machine setups and noticed that backing up to an SMB share is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very slow compared to an external drive attached via USB, especially since it’s all wired.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Has that ever made you reconsider backing up to a network attached storage?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope, not for me. I don’t wanna be bothered having to physically connect.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I reconsider it all the time because it is so slow.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It really is

⏹️ ▶️ John the slowest thing ever. Uh, and especially as drives get bigger, it just seems like it gets slower. So I’m actually

⏹️ ▶️ John highly interested in this topic and I’ve been keeping up with, uh, uh, what was it? Howard Oakley at eclectic

⏹️ ▶️ John light company. He’s also constantly fighting with this and trying to figure out why time machine is taking

⏹️ ▶️ John so long and the different techniques it uses to back things up. And like, all I really care about is bottom line. Why is it so damn slow?

⏹️ ▶️ John So, um, we’ll put two links in the show notes for what is the state of the art of trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to make Time Machine not be as slow as balls when backing up to a NAS.

⏹️ ▶️ John And apparently the only thing that actually has any effect whatsoever

⏹️ ▶️ John is if you globally disable like IO throttling for background processes

⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS. macOS does not apparently have a way for you on a per process basis,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially in already running process like backup D or whatever to make it not be throttled. And

⏹️ ▶️ John by default, Mac OS gives

⏹️ ▶️ John less priority to background jobs. So when it runs the thing, it’s running time machine or spotlight indexing,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is intentionally saying, don’t swamp the machine. You have a low priority,

⏹️ ▶️ John do things slowly, pace yourself. Don’t go nuts, but you don’t want the thing, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the performance of your Mac falling off a cliff because like spotlight index is happening, which is the thing that used to happen back in the

⏹️ ▶️ John day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And in fact, this is actually one of the major reasons why the M1 architecture computers get such great battery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco life and aren’t so hot and loud at the time, because most of those background processes also get forced to run on the efficiency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cores instead of the high performance cores. And you can like, you know, like most like right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can look at mine and I see I have the backblaze busy serve thing running on the efficiency core right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a background process, just backing up cloud stuff. And so it doesn’t need like constant,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, high CPU, high performance access. And like, whereas in the past, with Intel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines that had symmetric cores, you would have Dropbox or Time Machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or MDS or whatever maxing out a high performance Intel core and it would not throttle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And so it would make your machine heat up and kill your battery life. So having the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asymmetric core thing here really helps a lot in terms of the amount of processing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power background tasks are given.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even back in the Intel days, they still had processor priority in terms of how much CPU you got, but they couldn’t go on a cooler

⏹️ ▶️ John core for the most part that would just go on the same core as anything else. The IO throttling in particular though is saying

⏹️ ▶️ John how much disk IO is it allowed to do? And as you can imagine, Time Machine Backup, all it’s ever doing

⏹️ ▶️ John is basically waiting around for IO to complete. So it’s not like it’s burning your CPU, but if left to its own devices, it

⏹️ ▶️ John would be like read files as fast as possible. I’ve got thousands and thousands of files to back up and just

⏹️ ▶️ John one after the other in parallel and multiple process, like whatever it’s gonna do, it just, I can’t get enough of those files and

⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta send a bunch of network requests, so there’s some more IO. And so the IO throttling is the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that is slowing it down because the IO throttling says, seems like you just did like a hundred file operations

⏹️ ▶️ John at a fraction of a second, maybe chill a little bit, right? You know, there is a limit to how fast it can go. So if you want Time

⏹️ ▶️ John Machine backups to a NAS to go faster, you can globally disable the IO

⏹️ ▶️ John throttling on the entire system. And it doesn’t just affect Time Machine, it affects every single process

⏹️ ▶️ John the machine is now exempt from this global thing. You don’t wanna do that in general. But if you know

⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, I just got a new Mac or I just got a new Synology, I need to do like my initial backup and it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John four terabytes, and it’s gonna take like a day, maybe globally disable that thing because it can speed up the process.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can read the links to find out about it. It annoys me that it’s so slow. It makes some sense, like this is something

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s counterintuitive to anyone who hasn’t ever done server-side development, but doing anything to lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John small files takes way, way, way, way longer than doing something to an equivalent number of, equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ John size of large files, right? So one one gigabyte file versus a million files that are whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John a gigabyte divided by a million is. Night and day difference. And as you do things

⏹️ ▶️ John over the network where everything that you do has to be like, send this thing over the network, find out what

⏹️ ▶️ John happened at the other end when it completed and go back and forth, that’s just, it just adds so much overhead. You

⏹️ ▶️ John basically, you burn up all your time on overhead and very little time on actually doing anything and that slows stuff way down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do we ever figure out like, one of the things when APFS launched,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the potential promise existed for a much better and more efficient time machine. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never happened,

⏹️ ▶️ John did it? No, it did. One of the strategies that Time Machine uses, Time Machine has multiple strategies to answer the question,

⏹️ ▶️ John what changed since the last time I ran? One of the strategies is APFS snapshot diffs.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a very efficient way to find out what has changed. The problem is, okay, now that you know what’s changed, do

⏹️ ▶️ John you also have an efficient way to send those changes to a NAS

⏹️ ▶️ John over SMB? is no, there’s nothing like SMB doesn’t know about APFS. SMB, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John like, like ZFS had a protocol where you could send snapshot diffs as a byte stream.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like as long as it was ZFS on the other end, you could do that, but if you’re just doing, you know, doing

⏹️ ▶️ John SMB, it has no idea what the file system is on your Synology. It’s probably like BTRFS or EXT4 or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that snapshot functionality helps with local, can help with local backups. I don’t even think they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing the byte stream thing. I’m not sure if that exists, but snapshot diffing is one of the things. But if you see,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you look in the logs and say, hey, time machine, what strategy did you pick? Often it will pick the old one, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is FS events, you know, ID, last process event ID, one, two, three,

⏹️ ▶️ John and now I’m gonna start picking up from there. It picks whatever it thinks will be the most efficient strategy, but

⏹️ ▶️ John snapshot diffing is one of the strategies to figure out what changed. I’m not sure if there is

⏹️ ▶️ John any plausible way for it to then say, okay, now that I have the snapshot

⏹️ ▶️ John diff, can I get a block stream? Because to do that even with ZFS, you kind of need the other file system to sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of be on the same page to efficiently receive the changes. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I still have hope that it can get better over time. And it has gotten a little bit faster over time, but the

⏹️ ▶️ John I-O throttling is the biggest culprit right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it could also presumably like store it on the other end in a different format that is more like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocks, you know, big block chunks instead of individual files. I mean, is it? But I mean, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a sparse bundle a lot of times now, But so is that not as efficient? Like how?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the sparse bundle is just inefficient inefficiency on top of inefficiency, because, you know, so let’s say you’re using ext4

⏹️ ▶️ John on your Synology, right? And you’re doing it over SMB, but for it to work, there has to be a disk image

⏹️ ▶️ John and the disk image is APFS. And that’s one more abstraction of these little stripe files

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in the sparse

⏹️ ▶️ John bundle folder. It’s like abstraction on top of it. It does not make things faster to do this, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there is potential for it to be better, but I wouldn’t want the backup to be stored in some

⏹️ ▶️ John weird, super efficient format, right? I like the fact that if I go onto my

⏹️ ▶️ John Synology, I can see the files. So, you know, if you mount that disk image, you

⏹️ ▶️ John see the files sitting there. It’s different than using hard links with HFS, right? Now it uses the, like the, what

⏹️ ▶️ John do you call it? The clone files and stuff like that. It is much better than it was, and it is getting better

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time, but there are definitely ways that it could improve. And every time I see how long it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna take to do a backup to my Synology, It makes me wish it was just a little bit faster. It makes me wish

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of that there was a big button that I could say, time machine, I’m gonna be away from my computer for an hour, use all available

⏹️ ▶️ John resources, no throttling, go as fast as you can, saturate my bandwidth, you know, max out the

⏹️ ▶️ John IOPS on my Synology, just get the backup done. And instead it’s so polite, just doles out the bits

⏹️ ▶️ John one at a time and takes forever to finish.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve actually been considering, it’s funny, I bought my Synology here with the intention,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that long ago, I talked about it right here on the show, of it being only a Time Machine device,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is really slow for that. I was thinking about, so I’ve actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco repurposed a little bit of it, and I’m now using it for archive file storage as well, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a backup thing that’s backing it up to Backblaze B2. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like buying a bigger house, so you just fill the rooms.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, and now I’m thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I should actually move Time Machine off of that, because now I freed up the little SSD I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was using as my archive drive at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John my desk. That’s so much faster. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like, you know, I can just like, you know, Velcro this SSD under my desk and just have that be a local time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine. I think I might do that because it is so much faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean, I hardly ever need to restore anything from Time Machine, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the process of restoring it from a NAS is like hilariously slow. Like if you think backing up is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow, try reading the backups, it’s amazing. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I have been kind of thinking of flipping that over.

#askatp: Apple ever make display panels?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, C writes, Apple’s been making their own chips for a while. It seems that Apple’s been bringing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more and more components in-house over the years. Do you think that Apple will ever create, design, and or manufacture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own display panel? At least for larger displays like the iMac and the studio display. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an infinite timeline. Timescale? Timeline? Whatever. Timescale. Yeah, of course. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see that happening anytime soon, personally. Because it seems like they outsource damn near all that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to LG, don’t they? At least on the computer side of things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Samsung. I mean, I don’t see this ever happening, honestly, even on an infinite timescale, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple outsources things that are commodities. They don’t make their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own flash storage. They don’t make their own memory chips.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These things are areas in which a specialized manufacturer who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specializes in that kind of component is able to just iterate like crazy and make really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good ones of these things that are not, I mean, I hate to minimize the work, but like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as complicated and not as differentiatable,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a word, compared to something like designing their own processors. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t even manufacturing their processors, but they are designing them, you know, and they’re designing, they’re certainly making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their own software, making all their own tools. Like there’s all sorts of these areas where Apple is able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things in a much more custom way and have a much bigger impact on things. Whereas,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, are they really gonna make a better display panel than Samsung or LG? Maybe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they could also just order them from Samsung and LG and be fine. And those components

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple would consider too boring and too commoditized.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s not enough reason for them to make it because they can already buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best ones of those in the world from other people. Whereas they can’t buy the best

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software from other people. They can’t buy the best processor design from other people. They can make that themselves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be way ahead of everyone else by doing that. Whereas this kind of thing, these kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic commodity component type things, I don’t think Apple would gain anything by making it themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they don’t have any reason to take on that burden when the rest of the market is supplying that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well when they order it from them.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the differentiation you mentioned. Like the Tim Cook thing is like, we don’t want to enter market we think it can make a significant difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John And recall from episodes a long time ago, months, years,

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple has been reportedly investigating micro LED displays

⏹️ ▶️ John like itself. And again, we’re talking about display panel, like setting aside, obviously, Apple had a big hand in designing

⏹️ ▶️ John the XDR and everything, but like the display panel itself, not all the electronics and the backlight and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John but just the display panel. Micro LED is something that

⏹️ ▶️ John lots Lots of manufacturers have created at various sizes, but not at

⏹️ ▶️ John the sizes that would work in any Apple devices. And if Apple somehow, if those rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John are true, and Apple was funding attempts to develop micro LED, which I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna get into the details, but it’s a different screen technology. It’s different than OLED, it’s different than LCD, and it is in theory better

⏹️ ▶️ John than both of them. If you could, if they had some kind of breakthrough there where they succeeded

⏹️ ▶️ John in making a micro LED screen, let’s say that’s like for the Apple Watch or something, where no one else has been able

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that in a cost-effective manner, Apple manages to do it, that would be a big

⏹️ ▶️ John competitive advantage for their product. They would be able to make a big difference, not necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ John in the market because they wouldn’t be selling to other people, but suddenly they would differentiate their product. Like their watch battery

⏹️ ▶️ John life would be much higher or their screen would be much higher quality or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so I don’t see Apple making an LCD display or an OLED display because those are technologies with established

⏹️ ▶️ John players. It’s, you know, what is it? Red ocean versus blue ocean, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John red ocean. They’re all out there killing each other to try to make the best LCDs, the best OLEDs, all that other stuff, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But so far, no one has succeeded in micro LED of the type that Apple would be interested in. So that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t too surprising to me that they might be investigating that. It would be useful in AR headset. It’d be, you know, if Apple could

⏹️ ▶️ John somehow make cost-effective micro LED, it’s useful in every single one of their products and

⏹️ ▶️ John is superior than almost everything. You know, it has a potential to be superior to all other technologies,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But I don’t know if that rumor is true. I don’t know if that’s the thing they’re actually doing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’re just partnering with somebody who is like helping invest, you know, to a lot of people in chat room are pointing about this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does spend a lot of money trying to get other companies to build the thing it wants,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s spent a long time doing that with Intel, in fact. So even when it buys things from other people,

⏹️ ▶️ John it likes to use its money and its potential ordering capacity to influence

⏹️ ▶️ John the things that they make to get the thing that it wants. So maybe those rumors we’re hearing is just Apple investing

⏹️ ▶️ John in some company that was already on its way to making micro LED because Apple knows that it’s if they can get first

⏹️ ▶️ John dibs on that product, like that’ll be a competitive advantage for them or whatever. So I would say never

⏹️ ▶️ John say never, because I think Apple is interested in breakthroughs like that solid state batteries

⏹️ ▶️ John is another example, or who knows what they’re doing with the car stuff. It’s just that, historically speaking, that is not how

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has added its value. It’s not to say that they’re couldn’t do that. Like arguably, they did a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of original work with like, not perfecting the mouse, but sort of like, who had a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of experience building computer mice before Apple, not a lot of companies and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John shipped them on every single one of their Macintosh computers. So learn pretty quickly how to make one of those is decent, right.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even there, they, you know, sort of they weren’t the first to make an optical mouse or anything like that, they eventually just let the rest of the

⏹️ ▶️ John market pick up for them. So I think it would be kind of neat, but it seems like a

⏹️ ▶️ John seems like a page.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Remote and Backblaze. And thanks to our members for supporters

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly, you can join at hp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ John any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm, And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So long. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. that

⏹️ ▶️ John kadar

John has an after-show

⏹️ ▶️ John I have an after show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh All right.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so rare that I have an after show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I’m excited.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll give you to make it a game of it I’ll give you each one guess what my after show is about

⏹️ ▶️ John TVs the freezer those you’re so fast so fast on the guesses that didn’t even take a second

⏹️ ▶️ John to think about you got a TV Or freezer those are you two guesses, huh? Oh, well, which one of

⏹️ ▶️ John us was right? Oh, well, you’re both wrong. My after show is that I quit my job. What

⏹️ ▶️ John what? What? Wait, what? Really? And I’d like to say

⏹️ ▶️ John that in the guessing game, Merlin got it on the first guess.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? This entire show I’ve spent with just blue

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in front of my eyes. Wait, you quit your job?

⏹️ ▶️ John I did. You didn’t lead with this? No, it’s an after show topic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How did you make us sit through? How have we sat through an hour 57 minutes and 38 seconds of chatter, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is now the time that you decide to come out with

⏹️ ▶️ John this? It’s the after show, is where we talk about personal. So I have a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey podcast where

⏹️ ▶️ John I talk about my feelings in my life, it’s called Reconcilable Differences. If you listen to episode 179,

⏹️ ▶️ John you will learn all about this and you’ll hear me talk about it at length. At length, I’m not going to talk about it here because

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just in the after show or whatever. And that isn’t out yet, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That we’re recording? Oh no, it’s out right now. Oh my God, when did it come out?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John John, I hate you so much right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you, yeah. Oh, it came out today? If you go to hypercritical.co, you will see the top post

⏹️ ▶️ John on my website is a text version of an explanation of this whole thing. Where did that go live?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, oh my god. That went live about three seconds ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I’m going to kill you. OK, before I kill

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, and I’m not going to read this right now, first of all, congratulations since you said you quit. You didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get laid off or fired or anything like that. So congratulations. Can you give us the short, short, short version

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what the plan is from here? Are you getting a new job or are you pulling a case?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want the short version. Give me the full

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey version. I know I’d

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John love

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the full version, but I know I’m not going to get

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The long version is on. I mean, what I found rectifs I started out giving like a fact type thing

⏹️ ▶️ John because I just felt like we were in that mindset and it’s probably useful approach here. So I’ll give a mini fact version

⏹️ ▶️ John here. Mini fact. Did I get fired or get laid off? No, I quit.

⏹️ ▶️ John What are do you have a new job lined up? No, I don’t. Do you have a terminal disease? No, not that I know

⏹️ ▶️ John of. What is the plan here? The plan here is to do podcasting

⏹️ ▶️ John and other stuff as the way I make my living, just like Marco and Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ John to varying degrees, do as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome. I am so unbelievably proud and excited. I cannot even tell you. I know I probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t sound it, but I’m like smiling ear to ear. I’m so excited for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never would have guessed this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I thought you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were like a company man forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Same. Well, another fact item that I think people need to hear. Have you suddenly come

⏹️ ▶️ John into some huge amount of money that makes this possible? Like your podcast suddenly making more money? Did you win the lottery? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John you did a whole bunch of new people sign up for membership and now suddenly it’s possible. Whereas before it wasn’t. No, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not that did not happen. So like is like, why now? Why not before? Well, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John read my blog post about it, which I think was the smallest time investment to get this. Or you can listen to the longer rectus

⏹️ ▶️ John episode. And I’m sure we can talk about it more in future episodes of the show if you would like. But I just wanted to throw it in the after

⏹️ ▶️ John show because it’s important news. And the other thing I’ll say on this show, which I also said in my blog

⏹️ ▶️ John post, is this is a good opportunity to thank everybody who is listening to this podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John thank anyone who has ever listened to the podcast, thank everyone who has ever read anything that I’ve written or gone

⏹️ ▶️ John to a live show or bought a t-shirt or done any of those things, because all of those people

⏹️ ▶️ John are the people who made it possible for me to attempt to do this. Obviously,

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey made a similar decision back in 2018, Marco made a similar decision back in 2010.

⏹️ ▶️ John like, like I said, my post, like, it seems like everybody I know has

⏹️ ▶️ John done this before me. So I have all this experience watching other people do it. And now I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ John give it a try myself. So we’ll see how it goes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so excited and so proud of you. I echo what Marco said a moment ago. Never in a million

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trillion years did I think you would make this sleep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know that the math is a little bit different for you than it is for anyone else on the planet. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still am extremely excited and proud of you. This is very, very big John Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey energy that you did this quietly and didn’t confer with with your two friends here, but that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It might have been worth it just for this bombshell moment right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Totally worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am overjoyed. I’m so excited and so proud of you.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if you read the post in the podcast, you’ll see that this is I’ve been thinking about this for years. It is not like it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of a coincidence that in recent ATP episodes, We had a bunch of questions. So like, how does John fit everything in? And what’s the deal

⏹️ ▶️ John with John didn’t do any research. Like, but that is not that, that was just a happy coincidence. I was smiling when hearing that

⏹️ ▶️ John because this is a plan I’ve had for multiple years. In fact, I had a date certain set to do this multiple years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then something else happened with the world that caused me to maybe reconsider

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John so when COVID came, it was, everything got put on hold and, you know, so

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, this is not a decision I made at spur of the moment. This is a multi-year long process

⏹️ ▶️ John that was going to go off and then didn’t, and then I reconsidered again. And anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can read all about it. But yeah, this is just in time for my kids to go to college. So it’s a great

⏹️ ▶️ John time to put my

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco income

⏹️ ▶️ John in an

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco uncertain position.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, this is great. I really am genuinely, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised, genuinely, extremely happy, and just, oh man, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so happy for you. This is great, congratulations.

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope it is great. I mean, coming from the two of you who already have been there for a while, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John sound like it’s great for you, so I hope it will be great for me too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, think of all the jokes we can now make. Because before you were like, well, when you worked at a job, now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco none

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of us work at jobs. This is great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does this mean we’re going to start recording for European friendly times from time to time? Because now the day

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is our oyster, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John We can discuss. There are multiple other factors in flight here. Many things,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve felt bad because I haven’t, I’ve been trying to keep it a surprise so it could be a surprise on this show. So I haven’t been able to talk to

⏹️ ▶️ John people about things, but now that will change and we’ll see. We’ll talk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh, John Syracuse, I’m so excited for you. I’m so incredibly excited for you. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey am gobsmacked. I cannot freaking believe. Holy crap,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is rock smart. I don’t even know what to ask you right now. I’m so stunned.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, that’s why he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did the frequently asked questions. He addressed all of the most frequent

⏹️ ▶️ John things we would think of. there’s many more like I mean, I didn’t one one phrase that I did not mention in my post

⏹️ ▶️ John about this is midlife crisis because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I Really honestly

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t feel like this fits the definition of midlife crisis other than the like getting older

⏹️ ▶️ John and recognizing your mortality type thing But it’s again not something I you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I Went into

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know

⏹️ ▶️ John spur of the moment spontaneously. It’s just generally not how I do things

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible. Yep. I’m so surprised I I, again, I would never have guessed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this would happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John You both didn’t guess, but Merlin got it on the first guess.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He’s smarter than us. With no context. He’s way smarter than us.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I sprung it on him 100% as a side note. No hints, no context, no nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. All right. So when is your, if you’re willing to share, when is your last day, your jobby job?

⏹️ ▶️ John It was last Friday. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re already done? Yeah. Oh my God, I hate you so much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, directives and records way ahead of schedule. So it’s a, they had to coordinate all this stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, so you said this past Friday. So as we record it’s Wednesday, what’d you do all week?

⏹️ ▶️ John Same stuff I always do just without the work part. Well, what did you do during the day? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, let’s see. You sound like my wife. She’s like, what are you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doing? After my first, on Monday was my first day without a job. Like, what did you do

⏹️ ▶️ John all day? It’s like, surprisingly not that different. Like on that Monday, I think what I did was I wrote

⏹️ ▶️ John this blog post, right? So that’s one thing I did. finalized the t-shirt designs, uploaded

⏹️ ▶️ John them to the Google Drive. Let’s see. I did some cooking and puttering

⏹️ ▶️ John around the house, drove kids to places, took out the garbage, made dinner like

⏹️ ▶️ John just a normal day with like the normal amount of pocket, you know, worked on the show notes for

⏹️ ▶️ John ATP, worked on the show notes for rectives. You know, I did. Did all the coordinated people of getting the

⏹️ ▶️ John rectives episodes up because I posted them while we were recording. So you one of you couldn’t listen to the episode beforehand

⏹️ ▶️ John and no listeners could listen to it and spoil it. That’s kind of what I did with my day. And so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like the same thing I do in normal days, except for normally, insert all that activity as context

⏹️ ▶️ John switch constantly with a normal eight hour work day. Ugh.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I heard every word you said, but I’m not sure I was listening, because I’m so happy. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ John gosh. I ate breakfast without my laptop on the table next to me. Imagine that. I don’t even have a laptop. I returned

⏹️ ▶️ John that accursed thing. That was the best part of this. No more butterfly keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John Return that thing. It’s like, take it back. God, I hated that laptop so much by

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the end. It was getting

⏹️ ▶️ John so slow, and not because of the laptop. It was just like the corporate malware they were putting on it and everything. I was so

⏹️ ▶️ John happy to not have that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No more corporate malware.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John added more. They added, I think, we talked about this in one of the Slacks we were in. They added an app called Santa

⏹️ ▶️ John that would intercept application launch, and it would tell you whether the app was naughty or nice. Right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s creepy as hell.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Whoever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed that and whoever bought it at your company, they need to like really evaluate that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it was flagging everything. It was like, oh, you want to run expand drive so you can do SSHFS

⏹️ ▶️ John to your dev machines? Expand drive? We don’t know what that is. Santa says it’s naughty. Would you like to request access to

⏹️ ▶️ John use it? I’m like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so bad. Oh my God. How does anybody

⏹️ ▶️ John work anywhere? That’s like a, that was new as of like a few months ago. And it was like, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ John helping me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, sometimes I wonder, like, I often wonder whenever I have to deal with a real company and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll be like, you know, on a call or something that somebody had insisted on having and, and, you know, it’ll, there’ll be like 17

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on the call and two of them talk and I’m like, what are all these other people here for? What do these people do? You know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear from, you know, you, you like read reports about how big a company is like on the web. You say, oh wow, you know, Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever has 5,000 employees, you know, whatever it is and you’re like, what do they need that many people for it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the answer is they create their own overhead. It was somebody’s job to choose that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was somebody’s job to purchase it, to set it up, to maintain it. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume somebody has to behave like, I guess, the elf and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco receive those inbound requests for running your expand drive and other boring things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people need that this is somehow thinking are naughty. So there’s all this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overhead. I, John, I am so incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy that all of that is now in your past. Because I will warn

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, and I know you probably already know this, but I will warn you that this will ruin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, and that in a matter of weeks, you will be unemployable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not because nobody would ever hire you, but because you will not tolerate anyone else’s crap ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I had like 25 years of tolerating it. I feel like that is a skill, the ability to tolerate

⏹️ ▶️ John that and to sort of thrive in that environment is a skill I will probably never lose. But

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, and I feel the same way about myself. But I’m sure if I put my money where my mouth is, I bet Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be right.

⏹️ ▶️ John You were in it for a little less time than I was, Casey. So you may come out of it. Marco was

⏹️ ▶️ John barely in it before he escaped.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He really is unemployable. That’s true. And I’ve been out of it the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco longest. But I mean, I was barely employable when I was employable.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had to find it for my blog post. I had to find your, like, you know, when did Marco leave

⏹️ ▶️ John Tumblr, right? I had to find

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the post about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was like a two paragraph post. It was not very long. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, maybe you had a longer one later where you reflected on it, but you’re like, you know, day of thing, like, oh, I’m no

⏹️ ▶️ John longer a Tumblr. It’s like five sentences long. You see it on LinkedIn.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because that was, you know, that was careful because at the time, you know, we didn’t want to like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco alarm anybody. You know, I was, you know, the earliest employee of Tumblr

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was leaving. And so, and at the time, I didn’t have an obvious,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, there were some people who took over my duties, but it wasn’t like a high-profile replacement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And so, we didn’t want to alarm people. And, so that’s why,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, David and I very carefully wrote that together, you know, to really just make sure, like, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we gonna be okay here? Are we not gonna alarm people? Try not to make a big deal out of this. So that’s why that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so short, and why I really never addressed it again.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, I found it. Oh, it’s so hard to find things on your site too. You don’t have any kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John archive page that lists all the posts somewhere?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well not all the posts, but you scroll to the bottom and it lists them all by like month and year.

⏹️ ▶️ John Does it? I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think by month at least.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh, there it is, archives. I guess I was on an individual post, let’s see. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, it’s not a good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I search my site the way everyone else searches their site, using Google, site colon, you know, that’s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was on an

⏹️ ▶️ John individual post, Like if you’re on the Overcast redesign one, at the bottom of that page, there’s nothing. There’s Twitter, RSS

⏹️ ▶️ John feed, you know, stuff like that, but the archive is only on the homepage. And then your main top nav is apps, podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, about, but only on the homepage, homepage is the archive thing anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Will you now post three posts a year on your blog? I’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John done three this year.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gonna say we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there. I did

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the two

⏹️ ▶️ John streaming app things, who knows? Will I post to my blog more? I don’t know. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John limit my options, who knows what I’ll do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So sitting here now, what do you suspect your day will be? Like, are you planning to take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Destiny.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All destiny. Well, I ask this, I mean, jokingly, yes, all destiny. But like, in all seriousness,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I thought I was going to be doing when I stopped my jobby job is very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different than what I’m actually doing now that I stopped my jobby job, or well, several years ago now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think sitting here now will be your day-to-day after you allow yourself some time for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey project like house projects and and taking a damn break after 25 years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, what do you expect to be doing to fill your day?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one of the things that sort of led to this decision, again, you can see it summarized in the post and

⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about inrectives is like I’ve had to turn down

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of things, both my own ideas of like, hey, wouldn’t it be neat if I and then I would reject myself and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, you can’t do that because you got other things to do. Well, what about if I try this? So you don’t have time for that, right? And also

⏹️ ▶️ John opportunities that are sometimes presented to me. Hey, would you like to do X? Actually, I would like to do X, but I can’t because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John already doing all the things that I could possibly do, right? So now suddenly I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John to reject literally every

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco idea or opportunity

⏹️ ▶️ John that comes my way. I can actually say yes to some of them. And so that’s something I will pursue.

⏹️ ▶️ John Will any of those things go anywhere? I don’t know, but it annoyed me before that I literally

⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t really say yes to anything. after I had sort of calibrated what I was doing to sort of fit within

⏹️ ▶️ John my life, which was part of what we talked about in the past in the show, it was like, how does John fit everything in? I’ve selected

⏹️ ▶️ John all the things, I had selected all the things that I did to fit within my life, but just barely. There

⏹️ ▶️ John was not any room for anything else. And so whenever there was anything bad that happened

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, things would overflow. Or the example I gave in the post is when I decided to make those two Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John apps, that’s the thing I had always wanted to do. And I said, you know what, I’m just gonna do it. And that was kind of a mistake

⏹️ ▶️ John because that was over my limit of the things that I could handle. My regular job, all the family stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John all my podcasts, oh, and by the way, now you’re gonna make two Mac apps in two months and do releases of those

⏹️ ▶️ John and support them. That was painful to do because it showed just how close

⏹️ ▶️ John to my limit I’m constantly running at. And even it’s like, I’m just gonna do the thing I always wanted to do. And

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the phone was sucked out of it by like, well, now you’re gonna get even less sleep, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Now you’re gonna be even more tired.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now you have even more things to think about and worry about. And that just showed like, I either decide

⏹️ ▶️ John that these are the only things I’m ever gonna do or I have to remove something. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John to reiterate that John didn’t do any research thing from the song, the deal with ADP

⏹️ ▶️ John was I had just come off hypercritical and I was burned out on podcasting, again having gone over my current

⏹️ ▶️ John capacity with my current family, your constraints and everything. And I was just like, I can’t do this anymore. And you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, why don’t you come do a car show? It’ll be casual, we’ll just do a thing, it won’t be a big deal, you know, Like it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be so much easier than that tech thing that you were doing. And that of course eventually turned into ATP

⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally. And the whole pitch was, but we don’t want you to burn out again,

⏹️ ▶️ John John. So don’t do any research like you did for hypercritical and everything. You know, we don’t want you to quit the show

⏹️ ▶️ John cause you can’t handle it anymore. And obviously whatever it is that nine, 10 years or however

⏹️ ▶️ John long we’re into this later, obviously I didn’t quit the show. What happened instead was I quit my job. Mission accomplished.

⏹️ ▶️ John So when push came to shove and it was like, you want to do new things, what needs to get pushed out? It’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I’m sorry, guys, I got to leave ATP. I just left my job.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you chose correctly. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, obviously, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John going to pick the thing that I enjoy more if it is financially, what is it, plausibly viable and

⏹️ ▶️ John ATP is. So again, thank you to everybody who, you know, supports the show, listens to the show. Thanks to

⏹️ ▶️ John all the members, all that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, now it’s not going to be me saying it all the time. Now it’s gonna be John. But no, all snark

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and jokes aside, it is worth noting once again, especially as we’re approaching our 500th episode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is because of the shirts that you all buy, the sponsors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you patronize, the memberships that you’ve purchased.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s because of the time you give us that Marco and me, and now John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of us now, baby, are lucky enough to do what we do. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was actually thinking recently that we should take a moment and thank everyone again. And now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s painfully obvious that I need to do exactly that. And even if you aren’t a member, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. Even if you’re not buying t-shirts, that’s fine. Even just spending time listening to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us means a lot. And telling a friend about us means a lot. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I, and now I can speak for definitely all three of us, that we are so incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thankful for every single one of you, no matter how much actual money you send our way,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s zero, it’s still awesome. And you know what? Even if the only money you send our way is actually sent to St.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jude in September, that’s fine too. We’re so thankful and appreciative of every single one of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am absolutely gobsmacked that in the course of this show,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was already, as previously stated, long unemployable, but in the course of the show, two-thirds of the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are now independent. And I can’t think of a selfishly anyway. I can’t think of a happier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outcome from this show. And I’m so incredibly thankful for all of you listening and for the two of you for making this possible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all three of us.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was thinking about when I said like, it seems like all my friends are doing this. When I was writing the thing, I’m like, oh, I can’t list everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just list my podcast. Every single person I podcast with is essentially self-employed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Merlin, you, Jason, right? So it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, I was the odd one out of still being the sucker going into

⏹️ ▶️ John the regular job all the time, right? It just felt like time for me to

⏹️ ▶️ John join the club.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so excited, John. Congratulations. This is such incredibly good news.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what I hope happens, and I think it will probably before too long, on an infinite time scale for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure, at some point we’re gonna hear about some kind of new corporate speak,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and John’s not gonna know it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that would be amazing. Oh, that would be so good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John see, it could happen. I have to admit that I hear Aaron Merlin use his corporate speak from when he had a job or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. It does change a surprising amount, and if you’re not actually forced to be exposed to it, I eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John probably won’t know about it. We’ll see. But then who on the show will bring that language in though? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John none of us can bring it, so it’ll have to come from the outside somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe we don’t need it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John First of all, we don’t need it. We don’t need any parking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots or kimonos here. We can just leave that in the parking lot and just move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right on to our action items.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even you you’re quoting stuff that Merlin says which is now like out of fashion and out of date

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I how would I know it if I didn’t hear about it from you or Merlin?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where

⏹️ ▶️ John would I learn this from this but there’s like I said There’s so much of it that I don’t bring to the show because you don’t want to hear

⏹️ ▶️ John it It’s just so it’s so weird how you just you don’t notice it until you speak with other people realize no one else uses these Phrases,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you start hearing it constantly at work It just comes it comes through the work environment like a wave like it

⏹️ ▶️ John just ripples through and it’s really invisible unless you start thinking about it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ll hear it from Tina. I’m quite sure so No, I’m sure you’ll hear it and many. Thanks for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me I’m sure you John more than anyone many thanks to Tina for for taking this leap with you because that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a big ask Especially with the financial burden. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John why we talked about it for multiple years.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I don’t believe you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the with the financial burden of of, uh, of, you know, college looming. That is, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a big ask. This is how much college

⏹️ ▶️ John will cost for Maggie. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can just, I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to make some all day

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey long because now Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ John at least one person that show will get them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, well, John, I could talk to you about this for years, but we should probably pick a title and move

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Save questions. If you have questions about it, we can talk about it in future shows or whatever, but, but, but I would encourage you to read the post and

⏹️ ▶️ John listen to rectives and maybe they’ll answer all your questions. Then you’ll be done with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We won’t be done with it. We won’t be done with it. All kidding aside. Is there anything that you like to plug other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the obvious atp.fm join and things of that nature and your two other shows robot or not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reconcilable differences is there anything else you would like to plug while we’re thinking of it

⏹️ ▶️ John no i mean if i if and when i have new things i’ll probably talk about them here but you know that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John baby steps we’ll get there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco i’m really curious to see like you know because you are you’ve been a programmer your you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know entire life since you were a baby you’ve been a programmer And now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna have that angle of yourself just be removed for a while. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you’re gonna keep coding because you will have to. Well, I got two

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac apps to support.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, but you probably don’t have a lot of ongoing needs for those. So I hope and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet that one thing you’re gonna do is more apps.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe, I mean, there’s lots of things that are now on the table. It depends,

⏹️ ▶️ John it depends on how things go. I’m still weighing options and thinking about things. Like right

⏹️ ▶️ John now I’m still kind of in the mode of like, it’s nice to have options. It’s nice to not have everything constantly

⏹️ ▶️ John be closed off. And I really need to evaluate those options. And I haven’t spent

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of time in that mode where I can consider all sorts of different things, right? And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside work stuff, there’s like, you know, spending more time with my kids before they disappear to

⏹️ ▶️ John go off to college, right? Or other sort of family things that I haven’t had time to do before, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, my priorities are definitely shifting around to not be like, well, now let me fill every second

⏹️ ▶️ John of my life with work to make up for the work I just removed from it. That’s probably not what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John going to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I have very strong opinions about this that we should talk about sometime. You know, it’s funny to me as you say that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me that my driving impetus for going independent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was wanting to be around for Declan and Mikayla while they’re young and before they go off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to school as in elementary school. And now, and so I felt like my clock

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was ticking because, you know, that they were gonna be gone all day in elementary school and well, kindergarten,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wasn’t the case for Declan because he was here on an iPad because pandemic, but you get the idea. Well, with you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the same thing, but on the flip side. Alex is not that far away from college and the clock

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is ticking for you too, just on the other end of it, which is totally wild and funny.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they don’t just go away for the day and come back. They go away and don’t come back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, golly. Oh, John, I’m so happy. I’m so excited. mad at you for not having told us, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so excited. I’m so incredibly happy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy that you just dropped this like a bomb the way you do. Like, that’s, this is, this was the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John way you could have possibly told us this.

⏹️ ▶️ John It took a lot of coordination to keep the secret for the two weeks since we recorded Rectifs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever else. Oh, goodness. I am so excited. Well, congratulations, John. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fantastic news. And let me say just one more time, atp.fm.com.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s still you constantly plugging that, Casey. I was just thanking the people who had already been members, just everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s already a member, just stay a member and I will continue to be able to pay my mortgage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, if you would like a plugin to put the membership numbers on your menu bar, I know a guy.

⏹️ ▶️ John No thanks. I don’t need to see how much CPU is being used at every

⏹️ ▶️ John second and I certainly don’t need to have that on my menu

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar either. Well, I can give you new things to stress about if you need them, don’t you worry. Beep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey beep, beep.

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