555: A Very Eventful Day
05 Oct 2023John insists on using his computer.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco has thoughts on the FineWoven case
- Follow-up:
- John takes us on an adventure
- FB13211706 — Window dragging is laggy and jumpy when more than one user is logged in
- Demo video
- Maybe it’s the video card?
- What if it’s the mouse?
- Oh no, the problem is inside the hmouse
- Maybe Bluetooth will save us?
- It’s not an Intel thing
- Seemingly it’s any USB RF mouse?
- …like, really?
- It’s not just the one mouse, actually
- oh no
- ATP #115: Empathy for the Machine
- ATP #96: The Windows of Siracusa County
- Are we the baddies?
- iPhone 15 Pro is overheating
- John takes us on an adventure
- Low-cost MacBook rumor
#askatp:- How thin will phones really get? (via Joe Lion)
- Do we ever MagSafe charge our MacBooks? (via Chriskast)
- Are we team light or team dark? (via Jack Mordoj)
- Post-show: Casey bravely performs an experiment 🫣
Sponsored by:
- Green Chef: The #1 meal kit for eating well. Use code atp60 for 60% off plus free shipping.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
- Trade Coffee: Let’s Coffee Better. Get a free bag of fresh coffee with any Trade subscription.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- A lukewarm take
- John’s bug odyssey
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- iPhone 15 Pro heat
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- “Low-cost MacBook” rumor
- Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp60)
- #askatp: Future phone thinness
- #askatp: Use MagSafe on Macs?
- #askatp: Light or dark themes?
- Ending theme
- Peer pressure
A lukewarm take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have something that makes me a little uncomfortable to report to you at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I’m uncomfortable. I don’t know if I want to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no water in my closet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s five gallons. No. Different closet on the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, I actually have been for the last day or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of enjoying the fine woven case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t have a problem with that. I didn’t, I would say I actively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disliked it, but it wasn’t the visceral hatred that everyone else has.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was fine, but- And it’s woven. And it’s woven,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s certainly not worth the $60 price tag to me, but I don’t think that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say that’s a lukewarm take. I don’t think that’s a hot take.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have the issue. I’m, first of all, I’m loving the USB-C lifestyle with these new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of, especially because I upgraded my phone and Tiff’s phone at the same time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our kid doesn’t have a phone yet, so that’s the whole family. Yep. You and I are living
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it’s great. So we were able to get rid of almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning cable in almost every place that we had one. Cars, all the different charging locations
⏹️ ▶️ John What about when you have to charge your mouse?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s the problem, right? So, so basically I, I only, I think I’m only going to really need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lightning cable on my, like at my desk. I’ve already like re like move some things. Like the way I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I use my laptop as a, as a desktop, I have one cable that comes down and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out front from the, from the display. And that has always been my like desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone cable for when I have to plug in my phone for Xcode or whatever. And that’s always been lightning. And that would also then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Occasionally I would unplug it from the phone and charge up the trackpad and the mouse that I have here both of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need lightning Right, right. Well now I just replaced that cable with a USB 3.0 or 3.1 Gen 2 by 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey 1s to you whatever you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the heck the modern USB cables are called So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I have this problem where now I have like my ports are full I want to charge stuff on my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes So I guess I’m gonna have to like get either like one of those little USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lightning hats for the cable, or I guess just have a separate lightning cable somewhere for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my unsightly keyboard and mouse charging, or trackpad and mouse charging at some point. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this is to say, this arrangement was great until I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to plug in this USB-C 3.0 QRSTUV cable into my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone through the fine woven case hole, and it does not fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no. That’s no good. That’s not fun. Yeah, so I’m jumping ahead,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually. But I guess I will tease instead. I’ll be a professional podcaster, and I’ll tease that I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have committed to semi-begrudgingly a case on my phone. And the USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hole is quite large, and I am quite happy with that particular portion of the case. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should point out that, speaking of earlier, Craig Hockenberry, he has found some sort of like Medusa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multi-headed cable that he swears by. I don’t think I’ll be able to find it for the show notes, but if somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points me to it, I will link it in the show notes even retroactively. But there’s some Medusa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that he swears by that apparently is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a bunch of them, but like I don’t understand how anybody can tolerate them because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it is the definition
⏹️ ▶️ John of untidy cable mess. There is no way to use it tidily because you will only plug in one of those. And the other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones are just gonna be like dangling out there at right angles, wiggling all around, getting in the way, clacking into your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just soap, it’s like, do not want, do not want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also those like, you know, multi-head or adaptable cables tend to only be USB 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I’m gonna have USB 2 speeds, I might as well use Apple’s nice little woven cable the phone came with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s probably what I’m gonna end up doing and just tolerate the lower speeds or go back to caseless or get a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a bigger USB-C hole. But anyway, I understand the fine woven case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better now with some time. I was, honestly, I was going to return it and I missed the return window. So I’m stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it now. And so I decided, let me actually try to use it. And when I compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to the Peak Design case, by the way, follow up on that, the thing we talked about last week about Peak Design possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like kind of recalling their cases or like, you know, issuing free replacements, they apparently are actually going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That there’s been a little more concrete statements from them on that since then. So that’s apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna happen and that’s awesome. Anyway, I’ve been kind of switching off between the Peak Design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, the fine woven and my and just no case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I love the way the phone feels caseless I love the way it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the peak design case a little bit more than with the final of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the pizza in case has worse buttons and is heavier and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger and so the final oven actually provides you know some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection, but it’s really thin and light compared to the full, you know, the bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pete Design case, which is more, you know, it’s more made for like, you know, a more rugged lifestyle than I actually lead. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m going to have a case at all, which I think I’m still going to go back and forth on, but if I’m going to have a case at all, the Find Move on I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, it fits my needs better than I expected it to, as long as I never mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the back. But as previously stated, I never look at the back of my phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I just won’t know or won’t care once I finally do mess up this wonderful fine texture. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, it’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a very, very ringing endorsement. You could say it’s, as we’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, the ultra fine woven case. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like kind of just like as a, as a curiosity, I decided to weigh and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measure the phone with the Peak Design case and with the fine woven.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I add the Peak Design case to the 15 Pro, it makes it almost the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size and weight of the Pro Max. Cases add a decent amount of bulk, and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often think about it, but when you’re talking about the difference between the phones being not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much size and not that many grams anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases can actually jump that difference for you. So I’ve been really enjoying using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone caseless because it feels so good in the hand and it is so much lighter. When I add the Peak Design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case to it, it actually makes it substantially noticeably bigger and heavier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t make it feel impossible or anything, but you do really notice that bulk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the Fine Woven case is kind of in the middle. You don’t not notice it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s substantially more palatable and doesn’t feel like you’re ruining the gains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve made with this phone generation as much as the Peak Design case. So that’s why I think if I’m going to have a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, which is still up for debate, But if I’m going to have a case at all, I think the fine woven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something else that’s thin and light might be the better move. What
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to do about the fact that you can’t plug in the cable?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably going to either, you know, take a Dremel to it and hope for the best, or I really shouldn’t do that because I would mess
⏹️ ▶️ John can get a cable that’ll fit, you know, you just have to shop based on the size of the connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I was trying to have all the same cables. Like I wanted, I had this grand goal of like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to have all of my charging USB-C cables be white because I have these wonderful anchor ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really like that are super flexible and nice like I’m gonna have All the charging USB C’s be white and all the data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones be black Oh, that’s clever so that way I can tell quickly you know does this cable support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast data or not and so I had I found these figure these two cables out on Amazon that had good reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or from good companies and So I’m already now it’s already ruined like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m already got a I already got a throw away or move or reassign these black cables that I got to different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles and or get get a different one for my desk then I got to keep it straight it’s a whole thing so my all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my plans are ruined.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you order this before or after I told my story about the thing not fitting. Before. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. That’s
John’s bug odyssey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Buckle up, everyone, because we are going on a journey. John, what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about six months ago on this program, I discussed a bug I was experiencing. I think I brought it up
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show because I had had a breakthrough at that point. I don’t remember how old it is. My
⏹️ ▶️ John recollection is that either I had this breakthrough around
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS 13.3, or that’s when I started noticing the bug. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bug is this. Sometimes I’ll be dragging a window around and it will go like real slow, like it’s going through molasses,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s not keeping up with my cursor. Like I’ll grab a window and I’ll move it and my cursor will move an inch and the window will be like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m coming. I’ll get there eventually. And for a while I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, this is some kind of weird thing. I’ll just restart and that’ll fix it. And then the restarts were fixing it. And then eventually I figured out
⏹️ ▶️ John this bug only happens when I have more than one user logged into the computer. And I figured that out, it just occurred
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. It was like, why does it get fixed by restart? Well, when I restart, I just log into my account and there’s only one account logged in. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I go over to my wife’s account, log into her account to go to the photo library. This was before iCloud shared photo library, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John still go over there because so much stuff isn’t shared. And yeah, eventually I would log into my wife’s account and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John bug would happen and I figured it out, okay. And I filed this with Apple and I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, I think actually I did file it before that and I thought it was something different. And then I’m like, okay, now I know what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. It’s easy for you to reproduce. You just gotta log in with more than one user. Anyway, that was six months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m, you know, obviously no response on the bug report because obviously, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, you know, this is still bothering me. When Sonoma betas were released, remember I said on
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, I loaded the latest Sonoma beta and I think my bug is gone because I tried it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonoma, you know, external disc that I boot from and it couldn’t reproduce the bug anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said at the time, either they fixed it in Sonoma or it’s just because my Sonoma
⏹️ ▶️ John external boot disc was like a clean install, right? And I said, well, I’ll find out which one of those things it is when Sonoma is
⏹️ ▶️ John released for Reelsy Reels and I put it on my main boot drive. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonoma was released. And after our last week show, I did put it on my main boot drive. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John very first thing I did was logged into a second account and tested whether the bug is still there. And it was still
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Oh no. And I said, no. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John was so confident that it was gonna be fixed because it was fixed in that beta. And I started to question everything. I’m like, was
⏹️ ▶️ John it really fixed in that beta? Or did I not notice that only one, was I really only logged in, but I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it was fixed. I don’t understand. So anyway, I’m like, it’s still there. It’s still there in Sonoma.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I’m going back into feedback and digging up my bug. And I’m like, yeah, there’s still no activity on this bug and it’s still here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had basically forgotten about it because I’m like, oh, it’ll be fixed in Sonoma. I don’t have to worry about it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not. And so I just, I was stewing on it for a while. Eventually I decided, you know what? Every time I
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about YouTube, you’re like, oh, there’s some weird thing you got. It must be your Mac Pro or whatever. You know, you make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stupid jokes about it. That’s how we sound. Yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have this problem. And I don’t hear about other people having the problem either. Which is why you
⏹️ ▶️ John were like, oh, it must be an Intel thing or must be because you have a weird Mac Pro or you have such a strange setup or whatever. So I’m like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This problem only shows up when you have at least three graphics cards in your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to that. Actually, even before that, let me rewind a little bit. Once
⏹️ ▶️ John I found out that this happened in Sonoma, I’m like, it must’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it was a clean install. Like I was still saying it didn’t, you know, it was fixed in that Sonoma beta, but that was like booting
⏹️ ▶️ John off an external disk I’ve got nothing on it, right? So it must be some third-party software, or cruft or crap that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on my boot disk that’s doing it. And so I spent, I think I spent a couple of weeks just tearing third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John software out of my Mac. Just everything. I had previously, when we discussed this, I had ripped out all Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John software, because I thought it was that, but it wasn’t. I purged Adobe from my system, didn’t help. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going through the slash library folder, not tilde slash library, but just plain old slash library, because this bug is reproducible
⏹️ ▶️ John when you log into fresh accounts. I have like these test one and test two accounts that have nothing in them on
⏹️ ▶️ John my boot disk. So it’s not tilde slash or anything, but slash library has lots of crap in it. I’m deleting
⏹️ ▶️ John the unsanity windowshade.ape files in my slash library directory,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that predates your use of the Mac probably, you don’t remember. My slash library, I mean, that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John was inert. It wasn’t doing anything, but I’m just removing everything. I got to the point where I’m diffing
⏹️ ▶️ John my slash library against the slash library that’s on the Sonoma Beta external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, what’s, you know, recursive diff? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s, what’s, what third party stuff is in here? What could it possibly be? Right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John with the course of doing that, I said, well, you know, I don’t really want to be diffing
⏹️ ▶️ John against the Sonoma, the last Sonoma beta that’s on my external disk. I should really update
⏹️ ▶️ John that external disk to the release version of Sonoma. Just, you know, cause what’s the point? If I find out that, that, you know, something is different
⏹️ ▶️ John about the beta, that doesn’t mean it’s the same as the release, right? So I updated my external
⏹️ ▶️ John drive to Sonoma. I erased the disk. I just erased it entirely and put Sonoma release on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I made two test accounts that are not even logged into any kind of Apple IDs, test one and test two
⏹️ ▶️ John on that Sonoma thing. And when I did that, I booted into it. I’m like, ah, now that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John in here, let me just confirm that like on this clean install, it doesn’t happen. And I tested it on the clean install
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was able to reproduce it. And that’s, I’m like, oh, maybe I was, was it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed in a beta or was I wrong? I don’t understand how I could be wrong. I was like, I have plenty of experience with this bug, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, was I really only logged into one account? But anyway, regardless of whether my memory is faulty or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonoma release on a erased disk with two fresh user accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John that have nothing to do with my life or anything and are not signed into any Apple IDs, reproducible.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s when I started thinking about hardware and Marco was making a joke. It’s like, oh, you got a weird Mac Pro, but there’s video cards in it, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to open this machine up and start tearing stuff out of it. Oh my word. Because I want to simplify
⏹️ ▶️ John my machine. So I was suspicious of the video cards too, because hey, it’s like a video related, you know, it’s a graphical
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, or you know. And I do have two video cards in my Mac Pro. One of them I use to drive my monitor, and the other one is essentially just
⏹️ ▶️ John there for compute, which I rarely use. I remember I talked about using it when I was like
⏹️ ▶️ John cracking a notes document with a, you know, GPU powered decryption thing, so that was cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m like, no, I gotta pull that out. So I pulled out my unused video cards. Now there’s just one video card
⏹️ ▶️ John in there Didn’t help, still reproducible. That’s when I took to Mastodon and I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, Mastodon, there’s gotta be somebody out there who follows me who has a 2019 Mac Pro with
⏹️ ▶️ John the AMD Radeon Vega II video card. So someone who matches my config.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wasn’t even asking if they have Sonoma, because I know this reproduced in Ventura as well. I said, does anyone out there have this configuration?
⏹️ ▶️ John Please look at this YouTube video. I recorded a new YouTube video to explain the bug. I narrated
⏹️ ▶️ John it with some terrible microphone, so it’s awful, I’m sorry, but I will put a link in the show notes. Like, this is how you reproduce the bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, why did you not use your good microphone? Yeah, seriously. The desk at that point had so much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John on it that I wasn’t, because it was a mess. You know what, it’s easy-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John to open this thing, but it’s a very big and very heavy computer, and it’s got cables attached to it, and you have to disconnect all of those,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was just no room for me to bring the podcast microphone out. It was a mess. I had boxes down here, because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John putting away the video card back in its original box and everything. Like, that’s why, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course you are. You’re going to have the thing out of the computer for four minutes and you put it back in the original box?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t put it back in. It’s up in the attic now. Oh, okay. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey take it back. I mean, I think it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling. And you know, I don’t… Practically speaking, I wasn’t using that extra GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John compute power. If I ever need it again, I can put it back in. Anyway, so I asked on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone out there, do you have the same config? And then people are like, oh, I’ve got one. I’ll try it or whatever, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the instructions in my video are adequate for anyone to reproduce it, right? And that began
⏹️ ▶️ John a very eventful day of me going back and forth on Macedon Trying to figure this out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here is where things turn So a bunch of people said I have a Mac Pro and I’ll try it and I was waiting for them You know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna try today tomorrow Whatever at one point friend of the show Steve Trout and Smith said I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce on my m1 at all I would be curious to hear if it can repro on any Intel machine
⏹️ ▶️ John or with any AMD GPU You know what? I’ve heard this from so many people like I can’t reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John this It must just be your weird setup or whatever. Then he continues, what kind of mouse slash track
⏹️ ▶️ John pad are you using? And what screen resolution? And my mind stuck on that first sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ John What kind of mouse slash track pad are you using? Hmm. I’m like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John I hadn’t considered that at all at this point. Why would I? But as soon as he said it, something,
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind latched onto him and said, huh, oh my God. So I disconnected my mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John from my computer. I went over to my wife’s computer. I took her mouse, which is a old Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with a little like USB-A dongle thing. I brought it over to my computer, connected
⏹️ ▶️ John her mouse to my computer, could not reproduce the bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s your old stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse that’s the problem. So I’m like, yeah, so I posted on this, I’m like, I cannot believe this, but it’s my stupid Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse that I’ve replaced once under warranty. It’s the stupid mouse! Because I did have the hardware problem with the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse, I got it replaced under warranty, and I had actually bought a backup of it, because I remember I like this mouse because
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the shape of it, I like how it feels, like everything about it, but apparently, you know, I’m like, it’s a stupid mouse. It wasn’t the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system at all, that’s why nobody can reproduce it, because they don’t have my stupid mouse, it’s gotta be the stupid mouse. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I felt, I was annoyed, but I felt an incredible amount of relief, and the eureka moment, seeing the bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce it anymore, my wife’s, and she’s got a, it’s just an old, crappy Logitech mouse, nothing special about it. I can’t reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John it with her mouse, that must have been it, it must have been my mouse. But, you know, being a
⏹️ ▶️ John career programmer, I didn’t let it go at that and say, I’m satisfied that I’ve solved this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me just close that feedback and say, nevermind Apple. It was my stupid mouse. You don’t have to worry about it. I’m closing
⏹️ ▶️ John this feedback. I think I already made the mistake once when I closed this, but I thought it had been fixed, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know, anyway, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me just, if it really is the mouse, this should be pretty easy to confirm. And so then I hinted over the course of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did a long series of experiments and it was a depressing series of experiments
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m not going to go through it all. You can follow the threads on mass. I don’t know if you really want
⏹️ ▶️ John to, but it is a roller coaster. Lots of people are still finding the original and I’m like, oh, it’s my mouse. They’re like, ha, I’m glad you figured it out. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep reading. Here’s the deal with this book. Has nothing to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac Pro. Has nothing to do with Intel. Also kind of, sort of has
⏹️ ▶️ John something to do with my mouse but not in the way that you think. Over the course of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ John many people were able to reproduce it and based on their responses, I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce it. Here are all the places and ways that I was able to reproduce it. I reproduced
⏹️ ▶️ John it on my Mac Pro, of course, in a clean install of Sonoma and in my regular install.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, on the clean install, the reason I do that clean install is that installation has zero
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party software on it. Nothing, no apps, no nothing. It does not have a shred
⏹️ ▶️ John of software from anybody other than Apple on it, by design. So everybody who was saying it must
⏹️ ▶️ John be a kernel extension or a Logitech driver or whatever, some people did say, when you plug in the mouse, it must download
⏹️ ▶️ John a driver from Logitech. I’m like, I’m not sure about that. But anyway, I was able to reproduce it on
⏹️ ▶️ John my Intel MacBook Air running Ventura. I was able to reproduce it on my wife’s Mac Studio, which is an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Max running Sonoma. I was able to reproduce it on all of those computers with the
⏹️ ▶️ John following mice, Logitech M705, Logitech MX Master 3, Logitech MX300,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Precision Mouse connected through USB and Bluetooth and Apple Mighty Mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was, I was trying to find an Apple mouse, surprisingly difficult in my attic. I know where one
⏹️ ▶️ John is, but I’m not getting it because my Mac Pro came with the Apple mouse, but it’s never been opened and I’m not taking that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody in your house believes in the magic trackpad?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing. I went, I said, let me go get my wife’s old 5K iMac and I opened the box, she bought that
⏹️ ▶️ John with a trackpad. So it doesn’t, it didn’t come with an Apple mouse, it came with an Apple trackpad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not, wasn’t in the box, you must have it somewhere or whatever. Anyway, this is over the course of the day, because
⏹️ ▶️ John at first I thought it’s just my mouse, my mouse is broken and then I’m like, oh, but it only happens on my mouse connected through USB so it must be it
⏹️ ▶️ John must be a USB thing and not Bluetooth but then I was able to reproduce in Bluetooth now here are the parameters here here that the
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting part of this so and that’s the reason why this is still a legit Apple bug
⏹️ ▶️ John but the reproduction parameters are interesting the quote-unquote easiest
⏹️ ▶️ John way to reproduce this is of course the way I saw it first on my Mac Pro with my Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse connected through USB which is how I use it that reproduces super easy
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s the steps are basically make sure at least two users logged in.
⏹️ ▶️ John What one of the users, nothing, nothing open on them, just they don’t have any apps open
⏹️ ▶️ John any windows open, just nothing, they’re just logged in no third party software. On the second user, open 25
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, any windows in any app, doesn’t matter what it is. And then just grab any
⏹️ ▶️ John window and try to move it and you will reduce the bug. And this is I tried to make it clear in the video, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not about the system being overloaded, hot, runaway processes. The system
⏹️ ▶️ John is idle. Nothing is happening. Activity monitor, before you begin dragging a window around, shows nothing, 0%
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, nothing. Steve Trout and Smith actually made an app that just opens NS Windows with nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John in them, as if a tech-set window isn’t lightweight. It doesn’t matter what the app is, just a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of windows, right? So 25 windows, 25 windows, complete idle system, no third-party software, no
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, no nothing. Nothing is running. 25 windows, USB connected Microsoft Precision
⏹️ ▶️ John Mouse. On the far end of this spectrum is Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse connected with their little RF dongle on an M1 Max Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need about 200 windows to reproduce it there. And all those different
⏹️ ▶️ John combinations that I said between all those different mice and all those different computers, pretty much at every data point, 25, 50,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s just a question of how many windows it takes. What are the parameters there? A lot of people have
⏹️ ▶️ John theorized that it is the polling rate of the mouse and the higher the polling rate,
⏹️ ▶️ John the easier it is to reproduce. Certainly it seems like the speed of the hardware might be a factor because
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 Max Max Studio is obviously the fastest computer in the house. And that’s the hardest to reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ John on because the Intel MacBook Air is slow and my Mac Pro is slow these days too. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John As far as CPU stuff goes, not GPU. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John and other people are writing in and saying, I’ve got the Magic Mouse, I’ve got an Apple trackpad. Someone wrote in recently and said
⏹️ ▶️ John they were able to reproduce it using the built-in trackpad on their MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is an Apple bug. And the reason most people don’t see it, yes, ha ha, because they don’t open a lot of windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the combination that is the easiest to reproduce is with a mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John connected with a USB cable to an Intel Mac Pro. That’s three people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people have Mac Pros? And if they do, how many people use a mouse instead of a trackpad? Maybe a lot, but how many use a wired
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse? Like it’s even hard to find wired mice. And when my mouse is, when
⏹️ ▶️ John this Microsoft mouse is connected through Bluetooth, I’m like, oh, it doesn’t reproduce over Bluetooth. No, it’s just harder. You just need to open more
⏹️ ▶️ John windows. And I think a Bluetooth, uh, you know, the Microsoft precision mouse with Bluetooth on my Mac Pro was like 50
⏹️ ▶️ John windows or 75 for reproduction. You’ll look at the YouTube video. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not one of those things where it’s like, oh, it’s hard to catch and it does it sometimes or whatever. is 100% reproducible
⏹️ ▶️ John trivially instantaneously always all the time it never doesn’t do it and it is super duper duper
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious it’s not subtle it’s not hard to see it’s not hard to reproduce you don’t need to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy it’s a three-step reproduction so it was a long depressing day where I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I had figured because I would have you know as much as it would annoy me if a mouse died I would love to be rid of this bug and say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just my stupid mouse throw them out the window buy a new mouse look behind me never you never look back. But
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it is a legit operating system bug of some kind. The
⏹️ ▶️ John bad part is that to reproduce on a modern computer with sort of the default Apple setup, which is like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-wired mouse or trackpad and a modern computer, you do need a lot of windows. 100
⏹️ ▶️ John to 200, depending. And Apple could look at that and say, okay, fine, so
⏹️ ▶️ John our window manager freaks out with 200 windows, but we don’t care. And I’ll say, but what about my computer that freaks out
⏹️ ▶️ John with 25 windows and I spend most of my life with more than 25 windows which is why I saw it immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John like right now I have way more than 25 windows open. I’m never at just 25 windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about my computer? Oh, just don’t use the USB mouse. But I want to use USB
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse. It’s I like it better than Bluetooth. It just it’s more reliable. I don’t have to worry about charging.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple folks, if you’re listening, I know some people look to this bug and they’re like, I couldn’t figure it out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we as a community have have collectively chased this bug down so far now. Like how much more
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want? It’s served up on a silver platter. Reproduction steps are literally three steps that
⏹️ ▶️ John now we’ve tested all these sorts of parameters. Like you can do this Apple, you can reproduce. I was gonna ask you two
⏹️ ▶️ John before you came to the show today, if you wanted to log into a second account so you could reproduce this without opening tons of windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John But guess what? You can reproduce it while only being logged into one account. That’s how far we chase this down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re only logged into one account, you guessed it, you got to open more windows. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like with two users logged in, you know, 25 windows will do it on Mac with one user logged
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I think it would probably take three or 400. So obviously having the second user logged in makes it way, way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not linear. It’s not like you divide it by two or whatever, but yeah, some people, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried it on like my, you know, dinky Intel MacBook Air. You can reproduce it with one user logged in. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a problem with the window manager, right? Or something, something having to do with dragging windows around
⏹️ ▶️ John combined with like the thing that checks for where the cursor is, has some kind of terrible performance
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And this is new. This started around Mac OS 13.3-ish, I can’t nail it down exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John This didn’t happen in 12, 11, 10, or all the other versions. So something changed, something is broken. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to fix this. I would love for something to happen related to this bug. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John put the number in the show notes if any Apple folks are still listening. It is FB13211706. I
⏹️ ▶️ John filed a new bug. Every time I find something new, file a new bug with a better title.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, this one was filed before I did all the stuff you just described there. So the title is window dragging is lagging
⏹️ ▶️ John and jumping on more than one user logged in. I don’t know what I would call the new bug, it would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John window dragging is lagging and jumping you and there are a lot of windows. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I what what a what a terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible ongoing journey. I mean, now that now that the world knows about this
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sort of. You two will probably never see it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like now that you know it exists, you may find yourself creeping up to it, like log
⏹️ ▶️ John into a second account and you just may end up with enough windows open where you just hit that threshold and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be like, hmm, is my, because you might look at it and lots of people are saying, yeah, I have that too and my computer is overloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not it, that’s a different thing. Your computer being overloaded is an entirely different thing. And so I think if you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John ever got to the point where you had 75, 150 windows open and you logged into a second account
⏹️ ▶️ John and then all of a sudden window dragging was weird, you’d be like, huh, my computer must be overloaded, maybe I should reboot and you’d forget about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now you know better. Now you know that even if your computer was 100% idle and the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing open was text edit with that number of windows open, your window dragging is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be super lagging. So the other fun thing by the way is the jumpiness. That is in fact
⏹️ ▶️ John the window snapping thing. You know, when you drag a window in Mac OS And it tries like line itself up with its neighboring window. They
⏹️ ▶️ John added that in like Sierra something or maybe high Sierra You can disable that by holding down the option key
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you hold on the option key and drag windows around the jumping is disappears what you’re left with is the massive lag
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically the massive lag the jumping is comes from the fact that there’s massive lag and The jumpy, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this snapping is Lagging is ahead of where the window actually is and it flips out and starts going
⏹️ ▶️ John all the place Anyway, if you hold on option, you will just get the molasses like lag and knock at the jumpiness
⏹️ ▶️ John So that totally shows that this is a well, where is the problem is the problem in the window manager? Or is
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem in the? You know human interface device driver thing probably
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in the driver thing because the Windows Server is probably doing the right thing it’s just probably getting bogus input from the mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Further news as we continue to track this down But the last revelation was
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s when more than one users logged in and the new revelation is Actually, that just lets you see it more
⏹️ ▶️ John easily. And actually, every single Mac and every single pointing device in the entire world is susceptible
⏹️ ▶️ John to this. It’s just a question of what it takes to make it reproduce.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, really, John, this is the reaping or whatever of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life choices. You’re using an Intel Mac that you spent too much money on. You’re using a wired mouse like it’s 1996. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell, you’re using a mouse like it’s 2003, much less a wired mouse like it’s 1996. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John never not gonna use a mouse, never.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I said that. I was that guy until 5 or 10 years ago. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am all in on the trackpad. Trackpad’s everywhere, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Nope. Nope. Nope. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John the trackpad. Mm-hmm. Sure does. That’s what I’m saying. Like, really, you could say this is my punishment for opening too many windows, but 25! 25 is not too many.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go ahead, hit the little, uh, mission control and count your windows. I bet you all have more than 25 windows open right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, as in not hidden? I think I have 8.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, that’s the thing. They do need to be visible. I suppose you can just do hide others and say… I can do hideout and say, look, I have one window open.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the Zoom window. But no, I have five. I have eight.
⏹️ ▶️ John All windows, not just the ones that are visible. Do show all. Yeah, I have eight. Show all? You have eight windows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one Safari window with two tabs. I have one Chrome window with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visual Studio Code, which I use for show notes. Textual, which is the IRC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. Zoom, Audio Hijack, Slack, and Messages. That’s it. That’s everything. How
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of that? That’s only eight? Oh, actually, males, I’m sorry, males hidden. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sorry. I don’t know why you guys buy fancy computers. You might as well just get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing? What are your 20? Okay, okay, tough guy. Let’s do it. Let me hear your 25 windows. You don’t want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I want to hear your 25 windows. Let’s hear it. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s way more than 25. Oh my gosh. Google Chrome. Let’s see. Well, with 3000
⏹️ ▶️ John tabs, right? So that’s your first problem. We’re not counting tabs. We’re counting windows. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey see. Well with 3,000 tabs,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your first problem. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not counting tabs, we’re just counting windows. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stop! You have 13 Chrome windows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What the hell is wrong with you? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Okay, I know we did this before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is 13 different windows with tabs within each one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are these different projects you’re working on? Like what’s how why why the split here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, why do I use Safari and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no no no no how do you end up with?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13 windows hey 13 windows for the same browser each of which has tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in it Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s my main Chrome window which has a fixed set of tabs and that that never changes right so let’s ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John that one There is the window with a bunch of tabs that was when I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to debug Call recorder problems color cutter by the way does not work in Sonoma a call recorder Skype
⏹️ ▶️ John I sent a text word email, but I’ll close that one now. There is me looking up
⏹️ ▶️ John information about the release date of Ventura and a bunch of tabs when I was talking to some folks about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John just to try and pin down when this happened. There is the page with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of tabs related to BBedit language servers, because I was debugging some issues with the PHP language server, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco BBedit- I didn’t write it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I’m just saying, why am I doing it? Why do I have a PHP language server installed for BBedit right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, there are a bunch of pages related to Perl Unicode because I was doing some research
⏹️ ▶️ John for a tweet I posted about Unicode stuff. I can close that one now. There is a page with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of tabs related to Sendable because I was messing with strict concurrency in Xcode. Maybe we’ll touch on that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at some point in the future. That has a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tabs. That was part of my day today as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there are windows, like these windows are like themed. They’re like all the tabs
⏹️ ▶️ John in this window are about Sendable, you know, and how do you do, how do you do Sendable with key value observing? Cause it’s an older API.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, a bunch of things like that. Don’t. Yeah, all right. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer, don’t. Unfortunately, a lot of my apps are based heavily on key value observing. There’s literally no other way to do it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a page open with the YouTube studio and the YouTube pages related to my video, because every
⏹️ ▶️ John time I update the feedback, I put what I ever put in the feedback, I put it in the description of the YouTube video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, here’s the thing, though. I kind of do want to make you go through all of this BS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what I don’t understand is, one there was a long time ago i would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roundabouts of may first twenty fifteen that allies man once said you should have empathy for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the machine there’s no way to be here it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all that i don’t know if it’s open you
⏹️ ▶️ John know you know i don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know i don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if the because i am down my mac with ninety six years around i know you
⏹️ ▶️ John much in your computers your tiny little computers but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey i can have them i think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are going to ram it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John different well i have ninety six and uh… there’s plenty free
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway i i could I could continue enumerating them, but yeah, I will clean these up as I go through and close these things. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the language server thing from Bibi Edit, for example, I’m not actively pursuing that now, but occasionally it crashes and stuff, so I want to leave
⏹️ ▶️ John that open so that when it does crash, I can go consult, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, real-time follow-up, the MacBook Pro is currently available with up to 96 gigs of memory. Oh, see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Move those goalposts, John. Keep moving them, keep moving
⏹️ ▶️ John I said your computers. Yeah, he doesn’t have the M2, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I have the M1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but still. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was never offered with 96
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the m2s are the ones currently available in the same family and are in our puny little little Laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. Anyway, I have a similar number work windows open in Safari for the same reason
⏹️ ▶️ John BB edit BB edit how cheese too many My god windows 42
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, do those have tabs in them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you need an intervention You need an intervention now. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re working on a project, uh, you know, like in like a, you know, a directory, uh, for a web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or whatever in BBA, do you, does one window hold like all the files you switch between
⏹️ ▶️ John I rarely use that interface. I did when I was, for example, working on the, uh, the CMS stuff, the ATP CMS.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco window project directory thing when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were programming PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s not what I prefer. I prefer separate windows. As you can see, I prefer separate windows. There’s BBA windows
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, there’s a set of BBA windows that essentially always have open just always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is lunacy to me I mean I have that with text me too but there’s like four or three of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at most times like it’s not yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a lot more stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve gone on there’s one there’s one slack window there’s one messages window there are two ivory windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the amount of like balls I have in the air right now are at an all time high in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life like I’ve never been busier and doing dealing with more projects and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obligations and tasks that I’m doing right now. And I think I have, if I include
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the hidden windows, maybe I might have 15 windows open on my entire computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I’ve got more.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, there’s one feedback assistant window,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s one zoom window, one textual window, one system settings window,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many terminal windows? About 10-ish terminal windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are aware that you, one can close one of these windows
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I do. I clean stuff up. Like, in fact, while going through this thing, I closed a bunch of stuff that I was done with. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally go through and close things. Once a year?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason you need a $17,000 Mac Pro is because you are incapable of cleaning up your own mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not why. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And by the way, you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, but how do you do that? Isn’t that more than 25 windows? Isn’t everything broken? Aha, but I only have one account logged in. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John way more windows than this to bog it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. I don’t even know. I know we went over this. What was that? Episode 96, I believe. I remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a lot of windows. I use it all. I use all the screen space. And I know you know this, but you can’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John hide them. You don’t need to see them all at the same time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand why you can’t. Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John as much as I’m. I did
⏹️ ▶️ John write two separate programs for dealing with windows and pulling them forward and hiding them and making them go away. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a reason both of my applications have to do with Windows. And the third one I was talking about writing
⏹️ ▶️ John but can’t, it would also have to do with window management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love like, you know, so part of, part of, you know, the challenge of writing a podcast app as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, I would say, I would call myself kind of a, a moderately heavy podcast listener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there are people who use my app that have collections that are like 10 times the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size of mine. And so it’s hard for me to actually know what the app is going to be like for them. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to, to architect the app in such a way that it performs well for them, because I’m not seeing that every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John has no such problems with his apps because no one is using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s apps with more windows than John.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, what I do get for reports from my thing is people are using apps that I’ve literally never even heard of that
⏹️ ▶️ John do ridiculous things. Like, I don’t even know what these apps do. I’ve downloaded so many
⏹️ ▶️ John apps because someone will say, hey, I was using this 3D app you’ve never heard of. Which one did I download recently? Maybe it was Rhino
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D. I think I’ve actually heard of that one. Maybe it was something different.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s been around forever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’ll send me these apps. There was one that started with an A. there was like some kind of audio editor that was not Audacity.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll send me them and say, just download the demo and do it. And I do it, but like. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you leave it open forever after that? Like, oh, I just, I don’t know, I can’t figure out how to quit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I mean, I delete that stuff. I always look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the C, is this gonna put crap on my system? Anyway, sometimes I boot into another disk to do it because I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John install. Anyway, you still do get reports of like, hey, this app does some weird thing that interacts
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. And those are good reports. But yeah, in terms of opening Windows, I’m pretty good to go there. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the Brent Simmons stories I told years ago that I used to use NetNewswire and you’ll be shocked to learn that I had a million subscriptions in NetNewswire.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would complain to him about like, hey, I’m using the app and this thing is kind of slow. And he’s like, what do you mean it’s slow? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning fast. I’m like, well, eventually we get to, how many subscriptions do you have? So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he wrote a blog post about that once. Like, yeah, there’s a computer. If you don’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John a limit on the amount of things you can have, I will use the computer to do what computers are good at, which is remember a bunch of stuff for me
⏹️ ▶️ John so I don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, at what point do you have an are we the baddies moment? At what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point do you, rather than bending everything to your
⏹️ ▶️ John setup. 25 windows is not a lunatic setup. I will stand by that. I know I have a lot of windows, but 25 is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot. It is just not. Okay, I’ll let that go. I mean, because I mean, again, look at the video 25
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s not like, oh, it gets a little bit slower at 25 windows. It is unusable at 25 windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just Matt, Like like as in look in the video at one point. I tried to like reset to like Oh, let me just drag
⏹️ ▶️ John this window back to where it was I can’t physically can’t put the window back where it was because it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John messed up like Watch you’ve seen this video like the recording where I said, let me just put I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to put the sticky note back Where it was I literally can’t do it. That’s not like oh, you’re just annoyed because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit laggy when you have a Million windows. No, it is unusable with 25 with two users logged in But
⏹️ ▶️ John again to use logged in is not unheard of and I use that frequently So I think my report is legitimate and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple should fix this But I fear because I am using an older computer and because it’s Intel and because
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah blah Like they’ll say well It’s so much harder to reproduce on the m1’s that We’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John sweep this under the carpet and say this is not a big deal and no one will ever have 200 windows open I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agree with you that this is a legit problem and it legitimately should be fixed as much as I’m snarking and giving you a hard
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, like forget forget about like the problem this is a sign that something is wrong in the code. Like it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer, quote unquote, can’t handle it because it’s just too much. It should be able to handle it. This should be nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was like, you know, in Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar, you could have 25
⏹️ ▶️ John windows up and two users logged in and it would go fine. Like I’m not asking it to do, it just seems, oh, you have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John windows. That’s kind of like the naive person’s understanding of computers. Oh, I think my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John is overloaded because I have too many windows open. No, that is not a thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you can have one window of them with the infinite loop in JavaScript and some Facebook page. Yeah, that can
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, you know, make your things. But like the number of windows open seems like a lot to us because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is like visually oppressive. But as far as the computer is concerned, 25 empty text
⏹️ ▶️ John edit windows is not stressing it at all. Just it’s not. That’s the thing where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you have yourself to blame because you’re overloading the computer. This is not overloading the computer at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you that this should be fixed. I agree with you. it’s indicative of a deeper problem. But golly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point, I wonder if maybe it’s time to rethink your strategy here a little bit there, big guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So my strategy should be,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to make sure I use less than 25 windows so I can drag them without.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, all kidding aside. I think the strategy is, and this is going to sound snarky and I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take off the snark hat. It was fully on my head earlier, but I’m trying to take it off now. Like log out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the other user. If you’re done using
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s that’s so annoying to do because I go back and forth. It’s so annoying. How often do you go back
⏹️ ▶️ John you why this is related to another book report. Why do I have to leave my wife’s account logged in because if I don’t it will never do
⏹️ ▶️ John face analysis because she has to be logged in for the conditions to be just right for the stupid face analysis
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to run. It’s like oh, you know, don’t use the photos app, but make sure you’ve run
⏹️ ▶️ John it at least once to launch the photo demons, but the user has to be logged in. I’m pretty sure if she’s not logged in photo
⏹️ ▶️ John analysis will not run against her library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why doesn’t her library live on her Mac studio?
⏹️ ▶️ John It does, it does live on her Mac studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So is there a reason she has to be logged into your Mac pro all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ John When I, well, she’s not logged in all the time, but when I’m working on photo stuff on my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and she hasn’t launched photos like recently, or also I’m not sure how much, how long it takes for that stuff to
⏹️ ▶️ John sync. Like I’m doing work in the photo library on my computer on her account.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be hogging her computer. That’s the whole point of it. You know what I mean? I could go over to her computer and say, let me launch photos and let me launch
⏹️ ▶️ John activity monitor and let me make sure, because if she’s using her computer photo analysis, D is gonna be like, oh, I can’t run now because
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s using the computer and I’m only supposed to run the background priority. It does help
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is on her computer. And I have when she’s at work gone and tried to make it run on her computer. But that’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John why I’m constantly leaving her logged in. And you know, I don’t wanna leave her logged in because it makes my windowing experience
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but sometimes I have to leave her logged in. And anyway, I hop back and forth. Like, let me do something over here. Let me do something over
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I wish I could hop back and forth faster. I kind of wish fast user switching was even faster. Remember when I used to do the cube
⏹️ ▶️ John rotation effect? I was annoyed that that slowed me down, but
⏹️ ▶️ John The point is, these are features of the operating system. I’m using the computer. It’s supposed to be able to do these things. I’m not gonna like
⏹️ ▶️ John shrink myself down to work around a bizarre bug in the IO subsystem
⏹️ ▶️ John of the recent versions only of the Mac operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I’d be a little less patient if this hit me. Like, you know, whenever I run into a problem with something that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that I can modify some habit or way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using something to just completely settle the problem, I’ll usually just choose to do that. Like, yeah, I’ll complain about it on the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s only one user logged in now. Like, I don’t leave, as soon as this bug hit in 13.3, I stopped my old
⏹️ ▶️ John habit of just constantly leaving her logged in. For example, on my wife’s computer, like, every user is logged in all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John because why wouldn’t be? Because it’s just, you know, it’s convenient, because it’s a kind of a shared computer, and you know. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to leave multi-users logged in now, but since this bug happened, what I’ve changed is I
⏹️ ▶️ John am the only logged in user unless I actually need to be doing something on her account.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I feel like this is the same as all of us who, when we were all giving Mike garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because he was having some sort of issue with his phone and everyone just kept telling him to, you know, what was it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dump everything and like start a new, I forget the term that we were using for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restore the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’d be totally willing to do that if it would fix the problem. But as we know now, it would not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but I feel like what’s happening is we’re all saying to you, change the way you’re using the phone or excuse me, using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the computer. in the same way we were saying to him, just try to restore. Well, John, just try to change the way that you use
⏹️ ▶️ John I will not! I will not change it in one way. Less than 25 windows is a non-starter. Like, just non-starter. It’s never gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Never. Like, why would I do that? I could have more than 25 windows open on my Mac Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the Finder. I mean, come on, 25 windows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t need all of these open concurrently. You may want them, but you don’t need them to be open concurrently.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s what the computer is doing for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to have more than one application open at once. I lived a long time, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of my former years, where only one application could be open at a time. You just quit one and launch the other one and it’s fine, but come on, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why not also just like try a different mouse that has a higher limit? There are so many options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can easily sidestep this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the limit, unfortunately, on my computer going to, I tried all the mice I have access to,
⏹️ ▶️ John the limit doesn’t go up high enough. I can get it up to like 50 or 75, but like it’s not far enough up
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, oh, I won’t see this anymore. I’ll still see it because it is kind of a slope.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like it doesn’t happen and all of a sudden it happens. There’s a gradient, right? So with 25, you
⏹️ ▶️ John see it less with Bluetooth. With 50, you start to see a little bit more. With 75, it’s back in full force.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not great. And also like Bluetooth, maybe it’s because my Mac is farther away. I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John always feel like Bluetooth is not as reliable and smooth as USB, at least under this stupid mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other mice, as we established, I don’t like the shape of them, right? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard. Like I was actually installed, I was like, okay, I’m gonna go Bluetooth now, because Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John solves the problem. Before I had figured out that Bluetooth didn’t solve the problem. And I was all ready to go all Bluetooth, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll deal with the lag if this just solves it, or, you know, start shopping for a new mouse. But once I determined that this didn’t solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem, like, no, this is not an Apple to fix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fully agree with you. This is a real problem and they should fix it. However, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difference of philosophy of like, what do I do as the person suffering from this problem? Like, I can bang my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head against it forever, or I can just sidestep it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not suffering from it now because only one user is logged in. Like, the common case now is only one user is logged in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I don’t suffer from it. Oh my. Because with one user logged in, like, it’s not linear. It’s not, like I said, with one user logged in,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t take twice as many windows. It takes like five, 10 times as many. Like right now, one user logged in and I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, 100 windows open? And it’s fine. So this is how I spend most of my time using the computer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just that every time I have to go to my wife’s account, I basically have to like, now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally causing this thing to happen and I’ll be like this for the rest of the day. So remember if you’re gonna move windows
⏹️ ▶️ John around, hide windows first. That’s the real modification that you guys haven’t touched on that I have to do because remember it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John visibility of the windows, not the fact that they’re open. So command option H is your friend because that essentially solves
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem if you just constantly hide others or option click away from one app to another. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how many windows are visible on the screen because if they’re not visible on the screen, the Windows server doesn’t try to snap to them
⏹️ ▶️ John and doesn’t do all that. And actually, I don’t know why the visibility of the Windows affects the mouse tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John part, but it does. Experimentally, visibility of the Windows is the determining factor. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the modification of behavior that I probably should be doing more often, hiding other Windows, not closing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At what point are you going to just dedicate a day or two to doing a manual git
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bisect and trying to figure out exactly when this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John introduced? I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the source code to the operating system. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know that- No, no, no, not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literal one. I’m saying like, I’m both kidding and actually not kidding. You said that it was around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what 13.3 or something like that. I forget what version it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could go to version 13.2, install it, see if it happens, version 13.2.1. I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even a thing, but you know, and you could try doing what is- It’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to get those installers. I could do that, but like, honestly, that’s like, I don’t care. Like, I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to help that much. And if Apple cares, they can figure that out. Like, it’s their thing. Like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes, but here again, like, Jokes have left the room. You’ve put in an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inordinate amount of work trying to figure out and narrow down what this is. And I commend you, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as I’m giving you a hard time, I commend you for it, because I wouldn’t have that frickin’ patience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he would not, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I let it lie for like six months, figuring out, you know, either it’s not a big deal or it’ll be fixed in Sonoma,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it seems like it’s fixed in Sonoma. But now that I know that it’s not, it came roaring back. I’m like, no, this needs to be addressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I genuinely admire your tenacity. As much as I’m giving you a whole pile of poop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely admire your tenacity. But at this point, I feel like if Apple isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing anything about it now, and there’s maybe a bunch of innocent reasons and a bunch of not so innocent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John reasons. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if they’re, they might be doing stuff about it, I just don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some feedback? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John anyways. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only been six months, Casey. Yeah, right, a mere six months. It hasn’t even been a decade. But I almost wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you went and did this, quote unquote, get bisect and said it’s in 13.2.79
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, that I wonder if that would get them to be, I was going to say less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lazy, but that’s not fair. I wonder if that would just get
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I mean, they’d have to like diff the operating system, diff Sonoma against 13.1, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they don’t, because they don’t even know what the problem is. Like, I’m not going to tell them how to debug this because the operating system is
⏹️ ▶️ John huge. It’s millions of lines of code. Like, you know how many diffs there must be between 13 point something and 14?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly my point. If you said it wasn’t in 13.3, but it is in 13.4, again, I’m getting these numbers wrong. That narrows the problem space.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it could have been the type of thing they get crept up over time. That would be a very unfortunate result of me doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John experiment, which is like, well, it’s harder to trigger in 13.1, harder still in 13.0, because again, it’s not like a thing where it’s on and off. It’s just like a gradient
⏹️ ▶️ John of badness, depending on how
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey stuff you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah. Oh my word. It’s annoying. I mean, I don’t envy them trying to track down this bug. I’m just trying to help here. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like I said, the main thing I fear is like, I mean, it’s a fear, but it’s also the type of thing of like, well, if it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to reproduce on faster Macs, eventually when I get an M3 Mac or something or an M4 Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll take 700 windows to reproduce and I’ll never see it again because I never had that many.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you will, you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that high. You’ll hit that limit. If there is limit, you’ll find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is, like, I need a much bigger screen. Anyone knows? Because there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a crowding. Remember, it’s visible windows. They have to be visible. And you know, there’s a limit to how many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what, another thing, Again, jokes have left the room. Another thing that I wonder if it’d be worth you trying, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you’re going to vomit all over your desk when I bring this up, but what if you tried spaces? I wonder if,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if using spaces and putting, I don’t know, all the Chrome windows in one space, which I will be the first to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you that that would dramatically change the way you use your computer. And I’m not arguing that, but I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that would be. At least an interesting way.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, hideout, hideout is way faster than spaces and essentially accomplishes the same purpose. You know what I mean? Or even stage
⏹️ ▶️ John manager, like anything, like it’s just visibility. Like I don’t need to put them way over in another space. I just need to option click
⏹️ ▶️ John away from one app to another, you know, and hide them behind me. It’s hiding is not bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I do hide most of the time. It’s just that in certain scenarios, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John several clusters of things going on and it’s enough for it to be annoying. No, I hear that. No, I mean, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be less sympathetic if and when you start encountering this because considering this has gotten worse
⏹️ ▶️ John over time, it either didn’t exist and then did exist or it has gotten worse because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John notice this at all. and I would have, because it’s not like I’ve changed it. I didn’t notice this at all a year or two ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now I notice it a lot. So it may be coming for you guys eventually, because if it continues to get worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever log in a second user, even with your eight windows open, you might see it. And not as severely,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you might see it a little bit. You’re like, huh, is this app slow? Why is it lagging behind the cursor a little bit? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, eight windows is, you should be able to see some amount of lag
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to like microanalyze it in slow-mo video, right? because it is not, again, it’s not like not happening, then
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. It’s just a matter of degree. How much is it happening? With eight windows, it’s happening more than it is with seven which
⏹️ ▶️ John is more than it is with six, which is more than it is with five. You know, it’s happening to you too, you just don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I think like Casey and I use so many fewer windows. Also, we’re using, you know, Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs and I use an Apple mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Apple mouse is not, I don’t think it’s the Apple mouse. I think it’s the polling rate of the mouse. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I think Bluetooth is harder than USB because I think USB allows lower latency
⏹️ ▶️ John and more polling, especially for like the fancy mice, like this Microsoft one, it’s not that fancy, but like Logitech
⏹️ ▶️ John MX Master 3, I think is a semi, well, maybe it’s not that high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s more that like the, you know, the combination of conditions that I’m using, like I’m using their recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware, I’m using their mouse, I think it’s much less likely that a bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that affects me in that way would ever get through Apple, because they would hit it. I’m using the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in combinations and software in patterns that they expect. I’m like, I’m on the happy path.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using the mainstream stuff. You have some kind of fringe edge case things around. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this weird Microsoft mouse. You’re using the Mac Pro. You have multiple users.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Microsoft mouse is not, that’s what I’m getting. The Microsoft mouse is not weird. It’s just a USB connected mouse. Well, to Apple it’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like, because again, you know, pick a Logitech, plain old Logitech USB connected mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not weird, easy to reproduce. It’s not just a Microsoft mouse. Like, I think it really has to do with the,
⏹️ ▶️ John It might have to do with the polling rate. I don’t have a way of telling what the polling rate is. But yeah, but some people said they reproduced it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John built-in trackpad on their MacBook Pro. So that’s a pretty happy path too, you know what I mean? Yeah, fair. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think you two should both reproduce this. Next week, I’ll have you log into a second account before we start recording, just
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can see it for yourself. just so you will know that your computers are not immune.
Sponsor: Trade Coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Trade Coffee. The best way to make coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home, and believe me I’m a coffee nerd, I’ve tried them all, number one thing that matters is freshly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roasted beans. Fresh is best. With Trade, they get you fresh roasted coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within 48 hours and ship directly to you by their roasters. They connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to the best roasters in the country so that you can discover great coffee to brew at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home. They have over 450 coffees to choose from. Whatever you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want, espresso, dark roast, light roast, blends, rare roasts, you name it, trade has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and they will guarantee that you’ll find something new to love. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a coffee subscription service that makes it so simple to discover new coffees from over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 55 of the nation’s top indie roasters, so you can make your best cup of coffee at home every day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with freshly roasted beans. You give them a little bit of guidance on what you like and their matching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithm curates coffee that’s perfect for you. And no matter what your needs are, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have created flexible subscription plans and a diverse assortment of roasts tailored to whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want. You know, fresh coffee is the best you want delivered quickly right after it’s roasted and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they do. And it’s hassle free, free shipping, customizable plans and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy cancellation anytime. So it’s easier than ever to discover better coffee with trade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Upgrade your morning routine with better coffee. Right now, trade is offering our listeners a free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag of coffee with any subscription at drink trade.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s drink trade.com slash ATP for a free bag of coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any subscription purchase. Once again, drink trade.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check it out. I highly recommend it. I love trade. been a member for a long time, drinktrade.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks so much to Trade for sponsoring our show.
iPhone 15 Pro heat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news as we record tonight on Wednesday night, Apple just today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has released 17.0.3. This update provides important bug fixes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security updates, and addresses an issue that may cause iPhone, I still don’t like that they don’t use the, may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause iPhone to run warmer than expected. What is going on here? Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of our iPhone 15s are melting. And I think Marco, you broke this news, what a week or two ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you said during your transfer, your iPhone attempted to melt into the desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was thermally throttling itself and telling me that. This whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, the heat gate, or as Gruber and Moltz said on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the talk show, like it’s gate season. Well, all the scandals about the iPhone, and I got my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine woven case with the hole that’s too small and the material that’s crafted easily, and here I got my iPhone 15 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with its overheating chip in the heavy use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the first day. If the iPhone 15 Pro really does run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little hotter, Apple will never say that. Like if this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real problem, it absolutely will never be said. You mean if it’s a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem? Yeah, if it’s like a real shortcoming that’s just inherent to the design and choices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for the iPhone 15 Pro, Apple will never in a million years say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I don’t understand. I don’t think that’s fair at all because it’s not like they’ve ever told us that we were holding a phone wrong. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are they gonna tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us now, that we’re touching it wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Tandegate, they did confirm that this thing you said could happen if you did a thing. Yeah, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that thing, the thing you said does happen. So they did confirm that. And here’s the other thing about the iPhone 15. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen the teardowns from iFixit yet, but I don’t think there’s anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is constructed and cooled that is different than
⏹️ ▶️ John the 14 Pro in a way that would be this profound. There was, we talked about last time, like, well, the titanium has less
⏹️ ▶️ John mass, that means there’s less mass to soak up the temperature, although I don’t actually know the heat, I don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s how that works, but. It might be a factor, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think that’s a major factor. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s thermal mass, but it’s also the, there’s also a fact that I don’t know if titanium is better or worse at conducting heat than aluminum, right? And what, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, alloy of titanium or, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of factors involved. Even like how much of the heat from the chip, Just kind of in like the middle back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the phone how much of that heat even makes it to the outer frame Probably not a lot. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway like what I’m saying is that this this phone is not radically different construction-wise so
⏹️ ▶️ John what would have to be true for it to be a hardware issue is that Something in it presumably the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John would itself have to be radically different. Oh this SOC gets way hotter Or is capable
⏹️ ▶️ John of getting way hotter or whatever and I so far. I haven’t seen any evidence of of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the SoC, because it is three nanometers. Even if it is no better than five nanometer, it should get a little hotter
⏹️ ▶️ John because it has more transistors, but is the density up that much?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it seems like the overheating is so obvious and severe
⏹️ ▶️ John that if it was a hardware related thing, it would have to be incredibly significant, like totally
⏹️ ▶️ John different cooling system, totally different design for the phone, or this SoC
⏹️ ▶️ John is just way, way hotter than the other one. And none of those things seem to be true. So I’m willing to take Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John explanation to face value, which is this is a software problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably, or at least like, you know, software is a lot of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, software could be the thermal regulation of the chip. Like when does the chip throttle?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Under what conditions? How far is it willing to push itself before it starts throttling? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, you know, phone chips, If you run them hard, they do throttle. That’s not a new thing. That’s not a thing inherent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the iPhone 15. These ships have no active cooling. There’s a certain limit to how far they can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or how long they can run at full blast. And they will throttle themselves if need be. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, that’s not new. That’s not a scandal. That’s not news. It could just be that like they ship the iPhone 15 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with bad trade-offs or, you know, like a bad thermal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regulation, you know, set of parameters and they’ve tweaked that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so here’s, if you keep reading the Apple statement, they did
⏹️ ▶️ John spread a lot of the software blame around. This is coding directly from Apple. Blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, warmer, right? So Apple says, we have also found a bug in iOS 17 that is impacting
⏹️ ▶️ John some users and will be addressed in a software update. So that’s them saying, we’ve got a bug. Are some part
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS 17, it could be the part that you just talked about, Margot, that the part that controls how the thing thermal
⏹️ ▶️ John throttles or whatever. But that’s them, the Apple saying something wrong in iOS 17, we’ll fix that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they say, another issue involves some recent updates to third-party apps that are causing them to overload the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were working with the app developers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they’re blaming some third-party apps and they’re blaming
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system. So there’s enough software, and I think the third-party app one is also kind of an operating system thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system on iPhones, at least, is supposed to keep them kind of in check and not let them burn up the whole CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But there’s enough vague software blame to go around to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the design of this phone. It’s just that when you do a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John using, if you use a lot of CPU, it gets hot. And things are using
⏹️ ▶️ John more CPU than they, quote unquote, should be on a phone. And so that’s why it’s hot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think all of those things are true. I think these apps are using too much CPU. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way iOS throttles app CPUs, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t throttle you to like, all right, currently using 100% of a core, we’re going to let you use 80% of a core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. No, that isn’t how it works. The way it works, at least last time I checked, maybe they’ve changed. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the way it has usually worked is like foreground apps can do whatever they want to the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as they want. The CPU might eventually thermally throttle itself down to a lower clock speed or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But foreground apps do not have any CPU restrictions. The I. O. S. Restrictions are mainly just about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background apps, not burning too much power. And on that they do have a lot of software controls. Once you’ve reached
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain threshold, the system just kills your app. So if it’ll be something like you’ve used over 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU for over 90 seconds, then they just kill you. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not keeping apps from heating up the CPU at all. It’s keeping background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps from burning up too much CPU in the background, but foreground apps can heat up the CPU as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they want, as long as you’re still using them. And so my guess is yes, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps were ridiculous. They always are like Instagram. If you are an Instagram user, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of the heaviest battery draining apps on your phone. If you ever look at the battery screen, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram is like one of the number one things up there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did we talk about this? Did I admit publicly that I thought I thought I did talk about this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still maintain that there is no need to force quit anything. But I have now turned into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will force quit Instagram and Facebook and only those two.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, you still maintain there’s no need to force quit anything. Do you I want to amend that statement. Well, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In general usage, of course, there are times that you will need to force quit things. I’m saying you don’t need to do this. I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were meant to say was
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no need to ritualistically force quit every single application every time you’re done using the phone for a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry. Yes, that is what I meant. And the only way that I break that rule, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do agree that that is the case, I have gotten to the point, I think because I’ve been so scared by what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see in that battery screen that Marco just brought up, I will now force quit Instagram and Facebook if I ever look at them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it just creeps me out how much battery they use. I bet you 100% of it is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I’m foregrounded, but, or when they’re foregrounded, but still, it just creeps me out how much they destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John It used to be the case that if you got force quit, you couldn’t run in the background anymore until you were launched, but they changed that many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, there’s a few exceptions to that. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I guess like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a silent notification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so notification update, background refresh, that used to be killed in the back. If you did that now, it’s not. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is like, people would force quit everything, you know, out of habit, And then they would complain, why isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app getting notifications or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is my stuff not updating?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so they’ve had to add little exceptions here and there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what that means is that your decision to force quit what you perceive
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a misbehaving application, that app still has the ability to misbehave, because you’re not preventing
⏹️ ▶️ John it from doing background refresh, for example. And if it’s doing background refresh aggressively or getting silent
⏹️ ▶️ John notification updates from Facebook or whatever, which I’m sure it totally is, It’s still back
⏹️ ▶️ John there being badly behaved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and if the app is in the foreground, it can do almost whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Although when it’s doing that, the operating system won’t kill it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU will throttle due to heat. Yes. So when you’re playing a game, your frame rates will drop,
⏹️ ▶️ John not because the operating system is saying you can’t have this many frames, but because literally the clock speed of the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is being turned down, and so everything is gonna get slower, and it’s thermal throttling, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so that’s why I’m guessing the most likely explanation for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone hot story, most likely explanation is those parameters for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it would throttle and under what conditions were not set right or were not ideal for
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not my guess. My guess is this, and as my guess is based on my wife’s story of her 15 Pro, her 15
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, she said, I wish I could read her quote, but I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it handy here. I think what you’re saying, it was getting, it was like, felt like it was too hot to touch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like she, like it was uncomfortable to have in her hand and she’s got the fine woven case on it. So it’s not like she’s holding the bare
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. She has a sweater on it. Yeah, well, you know, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what it says. I can’t talk on the phone without it almost burning my hand from the heat. What was she doing with her
⏹️ ▶️ John phone? Talking on the phone, like voice call, like cell network voice call, not FaceTime, not
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTime audio, but like telephone call. So the screen’s not even on. She’s just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John on the telephone with her iPhone, which is madness, I know, but some people do it. And it was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hot that she said it was almost-
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people also use wired mice. It was almost burning her hand. What that makes me think is that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a temperature curve thing or whatever. Here’s what I think it is. These operating systems, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John based on Darwin, which is underlying all the Apple stuff, it’s Unix, it’s got a whole bunch of different processes running.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some subsystem of the operating system that has split off into a daemon process or whatever, like which is
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the parts of the operating system, had some kind of bug in it where
⏹️ ▶️ John it would get caught in an infinite loop. And it’s some essential part of the system that it doesn’t get killed. And if it does get killed, it immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John relaunches and it just would crash and relaunch and get caught in an infinite loop and maybe be
⏹️ ▶️ John killed by a watchdog process and relaunch and get caught in an infinite loop because some inner part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the operating system flipping out and getting caught in an infinite loop, that’s not gonna get killed by
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system because it’s part of the operating system. and talking on the phone, what could possibly be burning
⏹️ ▶️ John up your thing in your hand when you’re talking on the phone? It’s gotta be some subsystem
⏹️ ▶️ John that like comes into being when you’re talking on the phone or like when like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this reads to me like something crashing and looping because I can’t think of anything else that would explain and that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be Apple saying, oh, some thing is crashing all the time, so let’s fix it or whatever. The third party apps thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a hard time wondering what that could be because you know, like Casey said, Instagram has always been like this. Like this is not new,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Apple has been iOS versus Facebook apps or iOS versus badly behaved apps. That war has been
⏹️ ▶️ John going on for ages. It’s not like, oh, we’d never thought we’d have to handle this. I don’t think anything changed
⏹️ ▶️ John recently that would, you know, anyway, this is, we should skip to the end here, which is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does have a supposed fix for this that came out hours before we started recording, which is iOS 17.0.3.
⏹️ ▶️ John There, the text from Apple on this is, this update provides important bug fixes,
⏹️ ▶️ John security updates, and addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it work? I don’t have it installed yet. Did you install it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the developer beta that has allegedly the same fix in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t have an iPhone 15 Pro, but my wife is definitely updating her phone. And so I’ll let you know
⏹️ ▶️ John how it goes for her. But yeah, talking on the phone, making it so hot that it was burning her hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not good. I mean, and if this continues, if 17.0.3 doesn’t fix it, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s when I start thinking of like, Manufacturing defect? Like, you know, thermal,
⏹️ ▶️ John is there even any thermal paste? I don’t even want to know. Like, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a great start, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I feel like this is the beginnings of the studio display camera problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When Apple was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s software, we’re fine. It’s software. And to be clear, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no reason to believe that it isn’t software. I’m not trying to imply that Apple’s full of it, but as we quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey learned with the studio display, They were full of it at that point. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like the camera in the studio display is legitimately not great, but I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this legit is, is for real a software issue. Although I will say that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, some friends of ours asked in a group chat with Aaron and me asked, Hey, how do you like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your new phones? Ours arrived in a couple of weeks. And I said, you know, by and large, it’s fine. The case story is real bad this year, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phones are good. And Aaron said, well, you know, the phone is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the battery life is no better than my 14, and I plugged it in to top it off just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, and it’s basically on fire. Now, I’m pretty sure she was plugged into a MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charger, and so presumably it was fast charging, but nonetheless, it certainly seemed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even charging her phone was making it quite toasty. So I’m curious, because she hasn’t applied the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update yet. I’m curious if that gets any better once she’s updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we need some YouTuber with access to like one of those heat measuring thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we need quantitative measurements because as I said last week, when the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that has something hot inside it is hot to the touch, that means the heat is going from the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John to the outside and radiating out. So like if you hold it and don’t feel any heat, but it’s still producing
⏹️ ▶️ John the same amount, that heat is trapped inside. So things that quote unquote feel hotter may actually be
⏹️ ▶️ John running cooler because the thing that you want to be cool is in the middle of the phone and you want the heat to go
⏹️ ▶️ John out and then it hits your hand. And that’s not great. You don’t want it. of the reasons that people have reported that they think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t put better, quote unquote, better cooling systems in their laptops is because it can’t get too hot on your lap,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can’t immediately dump all the heat out the back of the laptop because it will burn your legs, so they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to let it dissipate out slowly so it never gets too hot. So I don’t know the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to the question of, is it producing more heat inside the phone, or
⏹️ ▶️ John is it merely better at shedding the heat that it does produce and it’s shedding it like, too quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially. Like, that its cooling system is quote unquote too good, because as soon as the SoC heats up, it’s so thermally
⏹️ ▶️ John conducted that it blasts that heat from the SoC out of the phone and it hits you and it is uncomfortable. And to be clear, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you don’t want that, that’s not good, but I don’t actually know if the quantity of heat is larger
⏹️ ▶️ John or if it’s just that the transfer is faster. And I think you’d need fancy scientific equipment to figure that out.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you’re just starting out with your business or you’re managing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place and all on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms. Squarespace is the best place to build a website, especially for businesses. They now have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new Fluid Engine, this next-gen website design system from Squarespace, so it’s never been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier for anyone to unlock unbreakable creativity. You don’t have to be a programmer, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to deal with code or updates or patches or anything like that. Everything is visual. They have these amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best-in-class templates that you start from, and then you customize every design detail. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all drag-and-drop, it’s all visual, so you make it look like yours. It doesn’t look like a Squarespace site, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it looks like your site, your branding, your colors, your images, everything else. You can really stretch your imagination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Fluid Engine, and that’s built-in and ready to go on any new Squarespace site. Of course, they have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the storefront functionality you might want physical goods, digital goods, service products, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time slots, like if you’re a consultant or a trainer or something, all of that plus so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexible payment options, wonderful checkout options to make sure you get good conversion rates and your customers can pay however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want. The amazing templates amazing asset libraries to choose from analytics backing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. There is so much a Squarespace and you can see for yourself by starting a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Squarespace.com. Build it, see how you like it. It is a free trial, a real free trial. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually build the site and you can see how it’ll work for you. When you’re ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace.com slash ATP. When you’re ready to buy, you’ll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It It is a great system. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
“Low-cost MacBook” rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Recently, I think this was a couple of weeks back, there was an interesting rumor about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple making a quote unquote low cost MacBook. And I feel like we’ve heard about this on and off throughout the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just becoming an Apple fan when the Ultrabook, I’m pretty sure that’s what we called them, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing. That was a physically small, extraordinarily underpowered computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John netbooks. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, you’re right. Sorry. Ultrabook was
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air clones by PC vendors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m sorry. You are a hundred percent correct. My apologies. Thank you for correcting me. So netbooks were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing. There were these little, they were very clever and interesting, but also pieces of crap. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we heard a bunch of rumors that Apple was going to make a netbook. And I think the closest we got to that was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. And here we are, we’re circling this thing once again. And so reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Jason at Six Colors, Apple’s reportedly developing a low cost MacBook series to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compete with Chromebook models in the education sector that could be released as early as the second half of 2024. Sources
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that Apple will likely launch a new product line for its low-cost MacBooks to differentiate it from existing MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air and Pro lines. The outer appearance will still use metal casing, but made of different materials. The unit price of the mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey components will be lower, allowing for more affordable price aimed at the education market, similar to the positioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, just to clarify, Jason was not reporting this. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sorry. This was reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Digitimes, but it was behind a paywall and Jason quoted it, So I quoted Jason quoting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, thank you. I’m a mess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco tonight, Bill. Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually kind of disagreed with it very well, so you should read his article that he wrote. But see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I want to talk about this, because this actually, it kind of piqued my interest, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of Apple trying to get like a radically cheaper laptop than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they have now, I think is very interesting. And there is definitely a market to that. And I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this doubly interesting, because my kid just started a school where they issue every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco student Chromebooks. And so I now have some firsthand experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Chromebooks that students are getting in very large numbers across at least the US.
⏹️ ▶️ John Welcome, both my children have had Chromebooks for many, many years now. And they’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ John broken Chromebooks. So I have lots of experience, get ready for Chromebooks. I mean, this is one of the things that I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have kids in school, you might not have noticed the Chromebook revolution, but it happened. They
⏹️ ▶️ John swept through the education sector, And yeah, if your kid gets issued a computer in their school, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a Chromebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it goes well beyond just being issued a computer. So, and this was news to me, like I knew Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were making massive, you know, inroads, not just inroads, but you know, just massively, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken over schools and, you know, over a long time now. But I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize, so my kid started at a school, you know, he’s in middle school now, and they don’t even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only do they not bring backpacks between classes, they aren’t even allowed to. They just carry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Chromebook and a small binder. There’s not even textbooks and backpacks anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely not in my schools. That may just be a local thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or maybe the textbooks are in the classroom. Regardless, they don’t carry books around anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, they don’t carry textbooks. The textbooks are mostly electronic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is true. Right, and so everything is in Google Classroom and whatever else, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those different platform tools are
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Adams School actually use Google Classroom?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so, yeah. They use it, at least for some stuff, they use it. I don’t know if they use it for everything, but they do
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a couple big vendors in this space and, you know, that have lots of market share. I just wondered what
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Classroom’s market share is. None of my kids’ schools use Google Classroom, but there’s a couple other software
⏹️ ▶️ John packages that are common.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, what I find interesting about the idea of Apple trying to get into this market is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this market is just so utterly dominated by Chromebooks, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are so entrenched now. So you have the massive amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cheap hardware, first of all. And, you know, to give some idea, I looked up the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chromebook that my kid was issued by the school. And right now just, you can buy it on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $230. The school’s, school’s buying hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them at once. So I’m sure they’re, they have a good bulk rate on that, but the retail price for one One of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a regular person off Amazon is $230 for an entire laptop. Now it is a crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop. The screen is dim and low resolution. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole thing is creaky plastic and you know it. This is not a good laptop but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fully functioning asterisk laptop for $230.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you compare that to you know the M1 MacBook Air, the cheapest laptop Apple sells,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the retail price for education is $900. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, again, schools don’t often pay that full price. They have discounts. Also, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been discounting that exact MacBook Air through like retailers down to like the 750 range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like from Amazon or Best Buy or whatever. Like sometimes they’ll do that. They’ll dump a whole bunch out. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say they could actually sell the M1 MacBook Air for like around 750, 700 if they really wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s again, that’s not the current model. the old model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you think Apple would get anywhere near $230 when they’re currently at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven or $800 minimum? And I think that’s the interesting question to ask. How could they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get there? So this rumor says it’ll still use metal casing, but made of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different materials. Well, there’s lots of things that could
⏹️ ▶️ John mean. It’s made of aluminum foil. I mean, I mean, what is the less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John material you can make a laptop out of that’s still metal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it could have a simpler construction process. Like I said, maybe it’s not unibody. Or maybe there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other assembly method that’s cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with Jason that this Digitimes report isn’t great, but it does say made of different materials.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it also says, quote, the unit price of the mechanical components will be lower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I guess that’s like the hinge and stuff. I don’t even know what that even means.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the cryptotactic engine or whatever. Here’s the thing about this rumor though, with the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John can Apple make a less expensive thing that can compete with the Chromebooks? As I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see as you accompany Adam on his Chromebook journey, Google’s real
⏹️ ▶️ John dominance is not the crappy laptops that your kids use, although it helps that those exist and are cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the web-based, cloud-based software that is behind them. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John the lock-in thing. Apple has nothing that can compete with that. Apple’s web-based, you know, equivalent of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Just even it’s just as simple as like Google Docs and the fact that kids have a Google Drive, setting aside actual Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Classroom or things like Schoology or all the different, you know, not so great enterprise-y
⏹️ ▶️ John education software things, all that stuff is web slash cloud-based. So the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing that your kid has is to access web slash cloud-based stuff, which is why a Chromebook, which runs
⏹️ ▶️ John a web OS and all the apps are web apps, makes perfect sense. Apple has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the cloud side of that that can compete. Their offerings are not compelling, Not, they’re just plain not as good,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a, you know, usually it’s like, well, Apple costs more, but they’re better. Apple’s education stuff is not
⏹️ ▶️ John better. They don’t even have anything they can compete with, just plain old Google Docs, just text, collaborative text
⏹️ ▶️ John and a webpage that kids can do stuff together, setting aside all the other features that are way more complicated than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s like collaborative iWork stuff is miles behind plain old Google Docs. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John almost like the laptop part of it doesn’t even matter. And why would you
⏹️ ▶️ John pay three times the price or two times the price, or heck, $10 more than the Chromebook
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a nicer way to view the same exact web apps that you can see in a Chromebook. And as slow and janky
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Chromebooks are, they’re good enough to load up your kid’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Drive and look at their Google Docs and submit things to Schoology and do all the things that the kids need to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s no other stuff beyond that. Like, they don’t need to run high frame rate games. The kids shouldn’t be playing
⏹️ ▶️ John any games anyway. They don’t run fancy software. Everything happens on the web. And yes, it is nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The kids totally do play games on their Chromebooks. They all figure out how.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like, that’s not the, as far as the education marketing is concerned, they’re like, our kids aren’t getting high enough
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rates in their games. Like, you could say, well, don’t you want them to have the cool chemistry
⏹️ ▶️ John experiment where they’re going through 3D? That stuff demos well, but practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, schools don’t wanna pay even $10 more for that. So I feel like Apple’s, even if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out with something for $230, they’re still going to be totally pushed out of the education market
⏹️ ▶️ John by Google because what schools want is, give me a way for teachers to run classes and grade
⏹️ ▶️ John assignments and accept submissions and all the cloud stuff that Google and other
⏹️ ▶️ John companies do that Apple either doesn’t do at all or has worse solutions for. And that is what’s keeping Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John out of education, not $700 MacBook Pros or MacBook Airs or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think there’s so many factors here. I think this rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, first of all, it’s unlikely to be true. But if it is true, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most interesting part is the hardware. Like to us as Apple nerds, like how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get it meaningfully different from the current Macs? And that whole other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of the management, you know, the management of the fleet of them by school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IT departments, how you source them, how you service them, how you repair them, what happens when a kid breaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, how you manage the software, how you manage, What are they accessing? What web services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and software packages are they accessing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because what schools would want is, oh, it’s a MacBook Air, but literally the only thing you can
⏹️ ▶️ John ever see on the screen is Google Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromebook. It’s like a single, yeah. Because that’s what schools want. They don’t want kids to be able to get to the Finder and install
⏹️ ▶️ John good games and play them. You know what I mean? They want it to be a Chromebook. And even with Chromebooks,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you noted, they find a way to get Solitaire on there, or find web-based games, and do all sorts of other. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Mac operating system and MacBook Airs, like they provide,
⏹️ ▶️ John like to lock them down to the degree that they would need to be locked down for school students is just so difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can be done, like you can do manage stuff, everything can be controlled centrally and you could stop them from running everything else or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but that’s so much more complicated than a Chromebook, which like comes pre-lockdown in so
⏹️ ▶️ John many ways out of the box before you even begin actually locking it down, which of course you can do with Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. Like the Mac is just too powerful, like not in terms of like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, CPU, although it obviously is a bazillion times faster than a Chromebook. But in terms of like we always talk with the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, you can do so many things on the Mac. It is a general purpose computer that runs arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ John software. You have to shut off so many things before it becomes, quote unquote, safe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think it’s interesting to think like if they were to try to make a lower cost, like a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower cost level, you know, suppose, you know, the current ones, you know, $800, $900. Suppose they wanted to hit 400 or 500.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s still twice as much as Chromebooks, but suppose they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually wanted to hit four or 500 bucks, because I can’t imagine them going lower than that. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be very aggressive for them. But it’s worth thinking about, like, what would that be? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would it be so that they wouldn’t lose too many MacBook Air sales to it? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John You remember the eMac? Like, this is Apple’s kind of out where it’s like, oh, you can’t buy this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s education only. They would do that for various reasons. One, usually in the past was back
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were actually big in schools, is they would design computers specifically for the needs of schools, and they didn’t suit the needs
⏹️ ▶️ John of consumers, because they would be designed for shared environments, they’re designed for durability, and
⏹️ ▶️ John certain features would be omitted. So it was like, this is tailor-made for you education. And consumers wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be like looking at it longingly, even if it was cheaper, they’d be like, oh, but I don’t want that one. That one doesn’t have what
⏹️ ▶️ John I want. But in terms of what they could do to save money on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they could do what they used to do with the eMac. If they made one that’s cheaper, consumers would want it. They would
⏹️ ▶️ John say, but what about that one? They’d be, oh no, no, you can’t have that one. It’s for education, but it looks great. I like it, it’s $400.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I just have that one? Oh no, you know what, that’s just for schools. And like, what is it about it that is schooly?
⏹️ ▶️ John And when we look at the laptops today, like they have so little on them anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like back in the day, we were talking about all in one computers, the number of features and the size and the looks
⏹️ ▶️ John and the shape and how many ports, like it was such, there was so much variability, but in a MacBook Air type thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you think will be different about the form factor for school, other than potentially being uglier and more durable, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are so few ports, there’s just some USB-C shaped holes that screen a trackpad and a keyboard. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what the education one would be, maybe the case would be a little bit different, but here’s the thing, I think when I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John this story, I’m like, you know what? Apple can pretty easily make a
⏹️ ▶️ John much cheaper but still very good laptop that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John would want because it would be much cheaper. And the reason they can
⏹️ ▶️ John do that is mostly because of the Apple Silicon transition. And the way they do it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if, wait, wait two years from now, I think two years from now, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could sell a plain old M1 powered laptop with a not so great screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and a not so great trackpad for $400 and still make 30% margins. And then an
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 three years from now, still really good. Like compared to what’s in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromebook, still perfectly fine for web browsing, still like just,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the Tim Cook principle. How long can we keep selling M1 based laptops? I think for a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John long time, especially if your bar is Chromebook. And so when
⏹️ ▶️ John does an M1 based laptop with a not so great screen and trackpad become $400 only
⏹️ ▶️ John a few years from now, I think, with 40% margins, only a few years from now. So there is an obvious way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. I still don’t think Apple will do it, but they could do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously the iPad is the big elephant in this room. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model iPad is about 300 bucks. That’s in Chromebook territory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s also just the iPad, no case, no keyboard. You know, you’d have to, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen Apple attempt to, and maybe succeed, I’m not sure, I don’t know to what degree, but you know, we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple address the educational market with the iPad, with these kind of, you know, cases they’ve kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of co-designed with Logitech to be like the educational case, and it’s this big rubbery thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and it has a built-in keyboard, and can be used in a standardized test, and stuff like that. Like, we’ve seen them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of attack this market from the iPad end. And I think it’s interesting that, you know, That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much closer in price to Chromebooks. You’d still be looking at about double once you throw in a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, but that’s at least closer. And so I wonder if the way to attack this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, if they wanted to, suppose they wanted to hit 400 bucks, maybe they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start from the iPad and work their way up, rather than starting from the Mac and working their way down. Now, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right that the M1-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It is a closer
⏹️ ▶️ John fit though, like the Chromebook, by the way, is, and the iPad, they’re closer to each other
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of exposed capabilities. Like it is harder to screw up an iPad, you know what I mean? And it’s easier to lock an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s easier to centrally manage a whole bunch of iPads and everything. Like there are certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear advantages there that Apple has been selling to education. Like it’s not that the iPad doesn’t sell to education, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve been doing that for a long time. So we see that strategy, we see how it works, we see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good for and what it’s not so good for, we see how it loses to Chromebooks in certain ways and how it beats Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain ways. But I think if you built a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similarly to how you would build a low-end iPad with a permanent keyboard and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hinge and everything, make it a laptop shell with mostly iPad guts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you could hit those price ranges. Running iPadOS? See, I don’t know. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running iPadOS, maybe not. Maybe iPadOS is probably what they would do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part to avoid the cannibalization angle, and in part because it is probably better managed for this
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a more appropriate functional surface for education because all this different
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that the Mac can do is not relevant to education unless you’re talking about like a computer science class in high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think ultimately the best way for Apple to even attempt to attack this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably an iPad that is its own permanent laptop. like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to attach a case and keyboard to an iPad like no.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about the emate the emate strategy. Remember the emate you don’t remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco email before my time about
⏹️ ▶️ John the emate retroactively. It was a Newton with a permanently attached keyboard essentially for made for it made
⏹️ ▶️ John for education. Thus the e yeah, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I that it with today’s iPad hardware and running iPad OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like the main, you know, the most the OS for it. I think if Apple wants to actually attack Chromebooks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I you They’re never going to replace Chromebooks because everything we mentioned a few minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago of like there’s this whole ecosystem around them that Apple would not be able to compete with in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software and services.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they basically be selling it like, you can use our amazing apps and also through the web browser access,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that runs your entire school, which is Google slash Schoology slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Yeah, exactly. So like, they’re not gonna like really compete well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Chromebooks, but they could at least do the Apple thing and find a high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end and capture that. Like that’s usually what Apple does with most of their products. You know, most of their products do not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dominate their categories. Usually their products are like the high end version that takes a lot of the profit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, you know, the high end profitable shares, but it doesn’t really compete with all the commodity stuff at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John And to that end, like, since my kids have, you know, had Chromebooks for all these years, it did take
⏹️ ▶️ John them a while, but both of them, I guess probably around sophomore year of high school,
⏹️ ▶️ John did the thing, which is like, can I not use the Chromebook, but instead
⏹️ ▶️ John use one of the fancy laptops that my parents have because they have lots of money?
⏹️ ▶️ John They asked, is there a laptop I can use instead of the Chromebook? For years, they didn’t care. Like Chromebook,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, school, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But eventually, and let me tell you that neither one of these kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John my kids, cares about computers at all in terms of the hardware or whatever. But eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could tell. Chromebooks are, the screen doesn’t look great. They’re slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they just wanted to play better games. I don’t know, but either way, they asked. And so practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter who’s a junior now takes an M1 MacBook Air with her to school and does not use her Chromebook. Except
⏹️ ▶️ John on certain testing days when you have to quote unquote have to use the Chromebook because the test is like, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, you’re only allowed to bring a certain calculator to like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what the Chromebooks are. That’s kind of the obligatory. So she still has a Chromebook, I think. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John my school is also trying to save money and saying, if your kid doesn’t need a Chromebook, like we won’t issue
⏹️ ▶️ John them one and we’ll just give them one for standardized testing or whatever, but anyway, the Apple thing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your parents have money, you can be one of the rich kids and not have to slum it with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromebook because you’ll bring your own, you know, ridiculously over-spec expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy Apple laptop, which you use to run Chrome and access the same web pages
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone else is accessing. But you know, the solitaire game you can play background during class is way nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So watch for that for Adam. How long does it take him to say, dad, our house is filled with laptops. Do I have to use
⏹️ ▶️ John this Chromebook or can I bring points to one of the 17 laptops in the house that went to school with me?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you can have a fun conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think the more important question is at what point does Adam become the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bull reason that Marco has to get a new laptop? He has to get a new laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, oh, Adam needs one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because doesn’t do the thing where like rotating iPads down to Adam soon Adam’s gonna have phones like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no he wrote He wrote it’s iPads down to me. He’s the iPad power user in the house Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Adam both almost always have iPads that are better than mine Oftentimes I don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad because if something goes wrong with Adams I swap mine for his as I have his you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent for repair or whatever so like Oftentimes I don’t even have one
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m got the big fancy gaming laptop right or is that is that supposedly tips that I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we each have a of a fancy gaming laptop. I wouldn’t describe it as big, and they aren’t that fancy, but yeah, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the 15-inch Razer low-end GPU versions. I
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be interesting, since he already has, quote-unquote, his laptop, it’ll be interesting to see if he asks you, can I bring
⏹️ ▶️ John my gaming laptop to school?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s way too heavy and big for him. He
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t. He’s being protected by the fact that it’s monstrous. And the battery lasts 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the Chromebook, I think it’s like an 11 or 12-inch screen. You know, it’s fine. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John let me know when he first breaks it. the rite of passage.
Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp60)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Green Chef is a CCOF certified meal kit company. They make eating well easy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plans to fit every lifestyle. Whether you’re keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, or just looking to eat some healthy meals, Green Chef offers a range of recipes to suit your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferences. We have in the past worked with HelloFresh. Green Chef is now owned by HelloFresh. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a wider variety of meals to choose from, there’s something for everyone. You can enjoy both brands at a discount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with our code. So, looking to stock up on functional snacks and clean beverages? You have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that covered with HelloFresh. You can kickstart your clean eating routine this October
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with 80 plus weekly options featuring nutritionist approved and foodie approved recipes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have eight meal preferences you can pick from, including new quick and easy, calorie smart, delicious discoveries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plant-based options, and more. And Green Chef makes it easy to eat clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recipes that help manage your weight and support your wellness goals without skimping on flavor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s sustainable. Green Chef is the only meal kit that’s both carbon and plastic offset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 100% of their delivery emissions are offset, as well as 100% of the plastic in every box. And nearly all packaging material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is curbside recyclable in most of the US. So you can get dinner on the table during busy weeknights,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get ahead of the busy season, stay with their step-by-step recipes, and it’s super convenient. You can even make dinner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ready in 25 minutes or less. It is just such a great service at Green Chef.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to greenchef.com slash atp60 and use code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp60 to get 60% off plus free shipping. Once again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco greenchef.com slash atp60, code atp60 for 60% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus free shipping. Thank you so much to to Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Future phone thinness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Joe Lion asks, in a recent discussion about USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of you mentioned that in the next 10 years, the USB-C port will be the limiter in phone thickness. Maybe this wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jest, but it sounded serious. Is there any reason to actually think that? Apple has shown no desire, or at least no ability,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to shrink thickness in the past 10 years, and seem to be content at between 7 and 8 millimeters for the body
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the phone. There’s an image that we will put in the show notes that apparently somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had put together. Nevertheless, the popular assumption has always seemed to be, quote, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our phones will be as thin as credit cards, quote. But is that based on anything other than sci-fi depictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the future? Has anyone actually demonstrated R&D for future tech, where battery chips, hardware, Taptic Engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other ports and switches, etc., the screen, and not to mention the camera, fit in a package of four millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or less, much less the two to three millimeters. I feel like in discussions of future phones we often veer too far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into what we think must be possible in the future just because of advances we’ve made in the past without considering what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, what really are bound to be physical and practical limitations at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t, I don’t think we’re going to go massively thinner than what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have now for the foreseeable future for a number of reasons. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest of which is camera optics. You know, we, we see as the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plateau keeps getting larger and they keep protruding further. now we’re having to turn the optics sideways just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fit some of them in or whatever like we see that that is such a driving force behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone advances and what people not only what people get excited about and why they buy phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what they want out of their phones people want their phones to be amazing cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they want them to have pretty good battery life and that’s just going to result in a lot of stuff being crammed in we already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that people want basically the biggest phone they can hold in their hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fit in their pockets like you know for like width and height wise and then they want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain amount of thickness behind it to house a really big camera and whatever the most battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we can throw in there and so there really is not a lot of market pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make phones thinner at the expense of battery life and camera optics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The idea that things must get thinner and lighter forever is in part not not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in part predicated on the assumption that we hate these things. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you make things smaller and people are like, oh, thank God, I can carry less of this bulky work computer that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate. People love their phones, and they love their phones being great cameras, and they love their phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having decent battery life. There really is not a massive amount of demand to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to shrink them thinner and thinner and thinner. There was that demand back like in the days of the Razer phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, in the early 2000s. There was that demand because cell Cell phones back then didn’t do that much. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were much simpler devices. They didn’t have any meaningful camera optics to speak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of. Back then it was like, all right, this phone is not doing much for me. I want this to be as small and light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible because it isn’t that important of a part of my life and it’s not doing that much that would justify bigger things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not true anymore. Today phones are cameras, number one, and they also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a whole bunch of other, all this other stuff. And so I don’t think anybody is really demanding, I want my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone to start disappearing out of my life and getting smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, no, that’s not what anybody wants. People want their phones to be bigger and do more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think the market is going to go in that direction for the foreseeable future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we’re being pressured to shrink phones super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin at the expense of all those other factors that people actually care a lot about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s what this question was asking, though. I think it was saying, like, you know, why do we think that they’ll eventually be
⏹️ ▶️ John thin? Is it just because we see that in sci-fi movies? Or, you know, there’s two parts to this. One is like, how could
⏹️ ▶️ John we possibly get there? Like, are there any advances over the horizon that, and by the way, I’ll contest the idea that we
⏹️ ▶️ John said definitively that within 10 years, the USB-C port would be a limiter. I think we probably said something like, especially if I said it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it may become the limiter at some point, maybe in the next 10 years. Lots of qualifiers. But anyway, why do we think that’s even
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing? Like, why, you know, again, other than seeing it in sci-fi movies, because every sci-fi
⏹️ ▶️ John movie and TV show some shows that these days show somebody using something that is essentially an iPhone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s usually transparent, which is dumb, but you know, sci-fi thing, but it’s always thinner and lighter. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like a piece of plexiglass that they use CG on top of or whatever. And that part of it, I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John legit. And that’s the reason I think that the USB-C port could become the limiter in thickness, again, assuming ports
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t disappear before that, because that’s, you know, obvious thing that, A, ports could disappear, and B, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Something else could replace the phone, the visual aspect of the phone, like glasses or whatever. But anyway, setting that
⏹️ ▶️ John aside, assuming those things don’t thwart this idea, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that thinness of a phone, if possible, without compromises, which we’ll get to in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that’s still worth pursuing is markers should know better than anybody. They feel big in your pants, man. You put it
⏹️ ▶️ John in your pocket, they’re heavy, they’re big, they’re inflexible. You want that big screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John when the Max is in your shorts pocket, it feels a little bit big. And if I could tell you, okay, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have the iPhone Max, but it’ll be half the weight and also bendable and a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit thinner. And when you put it in your pants pocket, it would feel more like you had like a very thin paperback book in
⏹️ ▶️ John there instead of a solid, you know, fragile brick thing, you’d say, yeah, sign
⏹️ ▶️ John me up. I think there is room to go within the traditional phone form factor for it to be both
⏹️ ▶️ John lighter and thinner and also more flexible, not a piece of paper, cause then you can’t hold it. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John are the practical considerations. Like it can’t be too thin because then it becomes uncomfortable to hold. But we could
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely go thinner than we have now, and we can definitely go lighter. Now, with
⏹️ ▶️ John current technology, do we wanna go thinner and lighter? Eh, we wanna go a little bit lighter. Titanium, Marco likes that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we probably don’t wanna go thinner because that sacrifices battery. So the next part of the question is, okay, if I agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that, yeah, the phone could be a little bit thinner and lighter, and people would like it. Like, they’re not begging for it, they’re not dying
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, but people would like it. Especially people who have long memories. Like, the Motorola RAZR was
⏹️ ▶️ John less obtrusive in your pocket than any modern phone because it was just smaller. Yeah, it was way thicker. The Motorola Razr was thicker
⏹️ ▶️ John than an iPhone, but length and width wise, it didn’t have a screen. It was so tiny. So in terms of how much
⏹️ ▶️ John are you aware of this item in your pockets or in your clothing or whatever, the Razr
⏹️ ▶️ John was less obtrusive than this. So given that we have to have these big screens, how do you make something this big less obtrusive?
⏹️ ▶️ John A little bit thinner, a little bit lighter, right? Are there any technologies out there that could get us there?
⏹️ ▶️ John The camera things is a big problem. We don’t have any good technologies on the horizon for cameras, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the possibility of not having to deal with the optical stuff for the cameras Periscope
⏹️ ▶️ John helps a little bit or not as much as you would think but technologies like the a
⏹️ ▶️ John More advanced version of those light field cameras that have like a million different lenses on them Whatever if you could imagine we’ve talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John in past shows ages ago the entire back of the phone being a giant flat light sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John of some kind using a technology like imagine the entire back of the phone is like a giant CMOS sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John not literally but you know I mean that type of thing where it’s just a different way to capture light than
⏹️ ▶️ John any of our current technology like a different approach it’s not like oh can we make current cameras smaller tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of glass or plastic that focus light beams onto a little sensor what if we took
⏹️ ▶️ John an entirely different approach to cameras that’s how that’s the only way you’re gonna get a breakthrough that allows us to
⏹️ ▶️ John get that thin and you’d also need a breakthrough in battery technology because and that I I think is closer
⏹️ ▶️ John like we can say okay solid-state batteries, which are always five years over the horizon They have better energy density
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them have better energy density than currently if they my own things you’re not gonna get much thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John without destroying battery life unless Everything in the phone takes up less power Which is probably not gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ John because you need to emit the photons for the screen and there’s some minimum amount of light that that takes or you have a different
⏹️ ▶️ John battery technology, so Maybe you know ten years That’s the saying everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John overestimates what you can do in a year and underestimates what can happen in 10 years, right? I had 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera problem isn’t gonna be solved But in 10 years there could be a battery breakthrough that lets our phones
⏹️ ▶️ John get one or two millimeters thinner And then USB C is kind of tight if if tapered
⏹️ ▶️ John phones become a thing for fashion reasons I began I don’t recommend this but
⏹️ ▶️ John like if Apple decided that they wanted to have a tapered phone and They’d say no we can’t have a USB
⏹️ ▶️ John C port on it. They would just go with no ports, honestly But, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can quibble about the time horizon, but the reason I think the pursuit of thinner phones
⏹️ ▶️ John is out there in the future, if not our future, because we’ll be dead, is because, yeah, they could stand
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a little bit thinner and a little bit lighter. And if they’re not superseded by glasses, like we don’t have to look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this rectangle anymore because the images are just in front of our eyes, you know, if that doesn’t happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually these things that we carry with us will be thinner and lighter.
#askatp: Use MagSafe on Macs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Chris Cast writes, do you guys ever use the MagSafe charger on your M1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or M2 MacBook Pros, or do you just use USB-C charging? I think I’ve used MagSafe twice in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last 18 months that I’ve had the computer, and both of these times were in the first week I had it. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use MagSafe around the house. Generally speaking, my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is plugged into the CalDigit TS4 dock, which is part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I was a little surprised that Marco doesn’t have a dock, but but we went through why that is already.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The CalDigit provides something like 96 watts of charging. Occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m working on the back porch, I now, thanks to a one Marco Arment, I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better portable porch monitor, well, mildly portable porch monitor than I’ve ever had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And coincidentally, I don’t think we talked about it on the show, but I sent Marco a picture of, or it might’ve been Marco and John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a picture of me using the UltraFine 5K on the back porch with the MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing plugged in, and Marco asked me why the hell I was doing that, and I was very confused until I remembered, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Ultrafine also provides power. So around the house, I almost never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it, but pretty much any time I’m working from somewhere else, like the power supply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable that I use, that I keep in my laptop bag is the MagSafe cable. So earlier today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was at a local library, and we are very lucky here that we have just truly phenomenal libraries, and I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MagSafe cable, literally 12 hours ago. So that’s what I’m doing. John, you don’t believe in laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At my desk, my desktop laptop is powered by the monitor as mentioned, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need one there. I do have a MagSafe charger, like near,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in my office for my laptop laptops to charge. When I travel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t bother with MagSafe. When I travel, I just use USB-C just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t usually need every single one of my ports all the time when traveling. But whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m somewhere, like if I’m setting up like some kind of AV setup where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something with a laptop that’s gonna use a bunch of its ports, then I will use MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it gets me a port, it gets me an extra port, you know? But otherwise, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I use it sometimes, but I don’t use it most of the time and not when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveling. But I’m glad it’s there for the times I do need it for the extra port.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a laptop person, but if I were I would be all in on MagSafe. I have one laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John that, it’s not my laptop, but it is the laptop that I use. It’s basically I use it for, I boot
⏹️ ▶️ John it into Monterey to do Monterey testing. It’s I’m keeping it on Ventura to do Ventura testing. It’s kind of like a dev thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. It’s just sitting in the same room with me. It’s sitting on a desk. It never moves. It doesn’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe because it’s a 2018 MacBook Air, but it has always had a thing that I bought for it, which is one of those little
⏹️ ▶️ John like fake MagSafe USB, you You know, you shove it into the USB-C port and it’s got a little magnet on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how much I wanted MagSafe. I was putting it on my laptops before MagSafe even came back to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the reason a lot of people end up not using it is because they don’t care enough about it to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably probably pretty expensive MagSafe chargers and all around the house, what do you have? You have
⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C chargers for your USB-C devices and none of those have MagSafe. The only thing that has MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple laptops. So unless you love it so much that every place you’re gonna bring that laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna go out and buy another MagSafe thing, which is hard to integrate into whatever charting stuff because it’s got its
⏹️ ▶️ John own brick and all that crap. People aren’t gonna do that. I think that’s why MagSafe gets less use because it only comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John one in the box and you put that one somewhere, but if you’re, laptops are portable, and if you’re anywhere else with that laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John you either have to lug the MagSafe thing for you or you care so much that you buy them and sprinkle them throughout
⏹️ ▶️ John the house. If I was a laptop person, I would buy MagSafe things for every single position in the
⏹️ ▶️ John house because I like the idea. I like that, I like MagSafe. I like sticking it on with a magnet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like yanking it off. I like not worrying about if the cords are gonna get caught. I give it a big thumbs up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t like laptops so it’s not relevant.
#askatp: Light or dark themes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jack Mordaj writes, I have always used light themes because to my eyes, they were the default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in almost any app, Mac or iOS. Lately, I have found more and more apps that start with a dark theme, like Visual Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Code, for example. And I’m wondering if maybe I’m the one that lives in the past. Are you light or dark theme users? For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I think I too am living in the past, much like John with his wired mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I use the auto settings, so roundabouts of sundown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of my devices switch to dark mode. And then during the day I use light mode. But it seems like the kids these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days are all in on dark mode. I don’t particularly understand that personally, but as one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the three olds on this program, I will swap back and forth automatically based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the time of day. I think I picked on Marco first last time. So John, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think the explanation of why kids like dark theme is very easy, because it’s cool, because things are
⏹️ ▶️ John dark. It’s like dark, like Batman and like the black book.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s what the
⏹️ ▶️ John kids are saying. That’s no, that’s absolutely why, one of the reasons why people like dark, the other obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John is eye strain. You get a bunch of bright light shining your face. I mean, it’s the reason you like to go dark at night. Like, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nighttime, it’s time for everything to be less lights in my face. Right? So that makes sense. For me, I’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ John this before, the part of the revolution of the Mac, part of the thing that drew me to it so much is because in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John of the personal computer age, every personal computer I used was a black screen with, you know, green or amber
⏹️ ▶️ John text on it. So it was like the computer by default, it was black, it was a void. And then light up things would
⏹️ ▶️ John come, light up lines, light up text, you know, initially monochrome, right? That was how computers worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Mac was the first thing to flip that. The Mac, in addition to all its artsy fartsy proportional fonts
⏹️ ▶️ John and Mac paint or whatever, the whole point of the Mac is, like a sheet of paper, it’s white
⏹️ ▶️ John by default. And then the text, the lines, everything on it is dark. And that was like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that from books and life where the paper we have is white. And if you open up a
⏹️ ▶️ John book, the paper is white and the letters are black. And I can see, you know, I didn’t know what a proportional font was
⏹️ ▶️ John or a serif was, but I could say this Mac screen, it looks like a book, because books have dark
⏹️ ▶️ John text on a light background and books have text that looks like that too. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John was, that was like a light switch. It was like, computers aren’t just a big black void where green letters
⏹️ ▶️ John appear. Computers can do everything that you can do in the real world, it’s just that you can erase as many times as you want and
⏹️ ▶️ John you never wear through the paper. So from that point on, I was 100% in on
⏹️ ▶️ John on white window dark text. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ John never looked back. Even when I first experienced like the X window system,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, at school and like all the default X themes for the window managers and stuff or various
⏹️ ▶️ John inverted or dark type things, changed them all to white background with black text. And that’s where I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I’d never used dark mode for anything. Only exception is on my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m much more apt to use, like say in a dark bed before I go to bed. No, you’re not supposed to, don’t tell me about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My Twitter apps have always been dark. And even on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitterrific on the Mac or Ivory on the Mac, those are always in dark mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why. Is it because Twitterrific shipped by default?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Twitter’s a dark place.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitterrific, back when Twitter was great and we loved like in 2006, 2007, whenever Twitterrific came out, that
⏹️ ▶️ John was its default theme. And I am a creature of habit. And so whenever I’m doing anything Twitter-like
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac or on my phone, dark mode always, but everything else, light mode. What about terminals?
⏹️ ▶️ John Light, light, light, always. That’s what I’m saying. Like when I was using Xterms, right? He was like, nope, I gotta change that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gotta be black text on a white background, right? Everyone else’s Xterms were the reverse of that, but not me. My terminal on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, white windows, black text.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s funny because even in the only light mode, the only mode was light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode in macOS up until a few releases ago, and I would always make my terminals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey black background with white text on top of it. Anyway, Marco, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kind of what John does. So I have my phone auto switch, you know, with sunset or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nighttime, whatever. So, because you know, my phone, that actually, I am likely to be using my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, at night in dimly lit areas. And I like, I appreciate that difference. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with dark mode on the desktop for me or on any Mac, is that what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am doing on Macs is often content that is inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be light. So whether it’s working on basic document stuff, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spreadsheets or whatever, or just web pages. So many web pages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume light mode and don’t even have dark mode. And yes, I know some of the ones that I am responsible for are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these web pages. But anyway, so many web pages assume light mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to me, the kind of mixed window environment of a Mac, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as mixed as John’s maybe, but you know, the many windowed environment of a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it just works better with everything being light mode. And like John, I am light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere on the Mac. I have light terminal windows like John, which everyone else, all other programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides me and John, think this is like blasphemy. You have white background with black text in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminal windows, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Still the default in Apple Terminal, I believe. You get a box stock Apple Terminal, you launch it. I think Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John asks you now, do you want light or dark theme? But terminal does not. Terminal defaults to white windows with black text,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my editors, everything I do in the Mac is light background. You know, all the different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every app that has an option for dark mode, I don’t use it on the Mac. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all light, it’s blindingly bright. I run the XDR at its full brightness all of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my. Wow, that’s a lot. I don’t think I do that. Let me see what level I’m on, hang on. Oh, I’m not even at 50%, eesh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is 10 p.m., it’s dark outside, and I want full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John brightness. That’s too much,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s too much. I mean, I am in a dimly lit room, but yet I don’t crank it up that much. I think I do have
⏹️ ▶️ John the auto, do you have the auto brightness thing on your XDR? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am, in all fairness, I do keep my office very well lit. Like the room in is pretty brightly lit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. During the day, it’s very brightly lit. And then, you know, at night I keep it, you know, medium brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can’t believe you keep it, because maximum brightness for non-HDR mode, I believe is like 600 nits for the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s 500, but it isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John was on my wife’s studio display. I think that one is 600 at max. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I notice it is because her window at a certain time in the morning, the sun comes through like the
⏹️ ▶️ John slats in the shade and directly hits the light sensor in her studio display. And so if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting using your computer, all of a sudden the screen goes, vroom, and goes to maximum 600 nits. You’re like, oh my God, why
⏹️ ▶️ John is this happening? And you’re like, oh, the sun. Because you can see this tiny speck of sun lands just on the light sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like the audio adjusting, because that’s the other aspect of like, a lot of why a lot of people use dark mode. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they complain when like a white window appears, because it blows their, you know, eyeballs out, right? If you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if your pupils dilate, because it’s like everything is dim, and then one white window appears, it can ruin your day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas I feel like I’m protected from that, by being in light mode all the time, my pupils are
⏹️ ▶️ John more constricted, because, I mean, granted, I have on half brightness, but like, there’s, they never really dilate
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where one white window is gonna pop in. So a black window pops up on my screen does not hurt my eyeball.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s just, I mean, that’s just what I’m more comfortable with. I know a lot of people use light mode and dark mode depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on because it is actually a comfort and accessibility issue. For me, I think it’s mostly just preference,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I do notice the few times I’ve actually tried like legit dark mode, even on my phone or my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John I recognize people’s complaint. You try to be in dark mode and then you load one of Marco’s websites that he didn’t do dark mode for, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, oh, I can’t see anything. And that never happens in light mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that also never happens on iPhones nearly as often. On the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are mostly in different apps, not so much in the web browser, and you’re running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing at a time full screen. So I feel like it’s easier on the iPhone to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco darkness when you’re in dark
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I found the bigger, not that I have a lot of experience with this, but my short experience is the
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and more important the website is, less likely they are to support dark mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John that I post on twice a year supports dark mode. Does amazon.com? I seriously
⏹️ ▶️ John doubt it. Hello. I’m sure we’ll find out as soon as I said these words. Casey can check. Please check Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re in dark mode right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Well, but the thing is, is that I was just about to say I use an app called Noir, N-O-I-R,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does a really good best guess at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what a dark mode style sheet would look like for websites that don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own dark mode. And so my Amazon looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it supports dark mode, but based on what I’m seeing from Noir, it’s Noir doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not Amazon doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. No, it absolutely does not. I just turned on dark mode and these products are all in a white background.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Noir, we’ll put a link in the show notes. I think I got this from Groober potentially years ago, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very good. And it works on iOS, iPadOS. I don’t remember if if it’s different purchases or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey universal, but one way or another, it works on all the major Apple platforms that have web browsers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely recommend it. It’s the only way that I can use dark mode and ever open Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because otherwise it’s a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Trade Coffee and Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check podcast so long
Peer pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you two should reproduce the window dragon bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. While I’m running the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John broadcast? No. Absolutely not. Yes. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John said, you shouldn’t be afraid of it because it is not a thing that overloads your system. Like, it’s not a load-based thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John switch users? No, you don’t need to switch users. You can do it with single users. It’s just harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not opening 150 windows like you do, John. I’m not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, it’ll be super fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have too much empathy for the machine, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like peer pressure. Take these drugs. It’s not gonna hurt the machine the machine does not care about the windows
⏹️ ▶️ John I care about the windows. I think a certain point I guess at a certain point the backing stores are gonna use lots of RAM, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got plenty of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do it. It’ll it’ll hurt my soul. I I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna do this during a broadcast when I have a live recording running
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re so afraid you can stop the recording and commit the files to this cuz starting to recording Wow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m then then you’re gonna mess up my sync operation later. No, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are we? What are we looking to establish? Like, I don’t doubt that I could.
⏹️ ▶️ John just want you to feel it. I just want you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Phrasing, phrasing. Okay, so how would I go about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing this without adding any other users?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t mess up the recording, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, KC messed up the recording. What are you talking about? He’s got so many backups, he’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s never happened. The hardware recorder’s running. All right, so what do I do? Just mash on command N a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John You just open up TextEdit, and then, well, first of all, when you open up TextEdit, this is an interesting, When you
⏹️ ▶️ John open TextEdit, does it open any windows or do you get the open save dialog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box? No, I get the open save
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog. Okay, well just hit cancel. And then you’re just gonna hold down Command N, sir. And what you’re gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ John is a line of windows that say Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Untitled 3. So you’ll know exactly how many you opened. So maybe stop around 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. Oh, I already went to 70, sorry. All right. All right, so now I just drag around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just grab one of those windows and move it around. How’s it feeling for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Totally fine. And by the way, I have two 5K monitors and my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen all open right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t, none of that matters. Do you have third-party RAM installed? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a laptop. God, no, I did hardware diagnostics. When I was doing the hardware thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ John ran the hardware diagnostic on my Mac Pro, like I was, when I was thinking it’s gotta be hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything has had such a spring clean. Okay, go to 150. All right, 80, 90, 100.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast it opens them, it’s nothing. It’s nothing to your computer. 20, 130, 140, 150.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, I hate this. 152, I stopped a little too soon. It’s still fine. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think 152, you should be able to perceive something. Give it a real good, well, here’s the thing. Trackpads
⏹️ ▶️ John do a little bit of smoothing, they may be messing you up, but take a look at where the cursor is in the title bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like click somewhere and see if it-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, I’m losing, I’m migrating off of the title bar over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the response rate is so good. You know what, actually-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you were to log into a second user now, it would be fully on, but I know you can’t do that. So go to 300. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll stop at 200 first. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is like driving on the gas, when the gas tank is on E to see how far you can go. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see. Okay, 200. All right, here we go. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco put my cursor over the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey U. This would have been much better with a visual aid, but here we are. All right, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the worst podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m definitely getting some significant migration from the pointer.
⏹️ ▶️ John The jumpiness is what you’ll probably start to notice first because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t notice really any jumpiness. It’s just, I noticed that where I put my cursor, I put the mouse cursor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside the U and untitled and it doesn’t take a lot of squiggling about before move. All
⏹️ ▶️ John So stop your recording, switch to a different account and come back. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. I have my limits. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why next week I’ll have to have you guys log into a second account before we begin recording because you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John fully into it at this point with the second user logged in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computer isn’t a piece of shit and it seems to be just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you, like I said, the second user is not like it, it is not just like a multiplying factor. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, here we go, baby. Two 50. Let’s keep going. All right. Two 10, 20. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is nuts. Two 30. I don’t know when it will stop you. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than 300. These windows are opening awfully slowly. I will say that. Oh, I actually, I overshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I went to two 51.
⏹️ ▶️ John It also makes you kind of wish the animation wasn’t there. Like how much time is it spending just doing the animation slowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, it’s still, I’m not debating. It’s neat. I’m not trying to say that you’re wrong or a liar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just your computer sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My cursor is definitely migrating, including off of the title bar from time to time. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of jumpiness or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So when you’re when you’re done with the recording, log into a second user, log back
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those windows. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey will see a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will not, sir. I’m stopping at 300 in just a second. 275. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John just leave them. Just leave them there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m not. 290. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John go in activity monitor and see how much RAM text that it is using.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I way overshot because I hit the end button way too many times. All right, hold on. Activity monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If my computer doesn’t die and if this recording is actually good, I will be very surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, please don’t ruin the recording. I don’t want to have to deal with a weird resyncing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey oh, god. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see. Let’s see, memory. TextEdit is using less than a gigabyte of memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at that. And sort by CPU now. How much CPU is TextEdit using?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 16.9. There were other things. Several other things that we’re using more. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I anyway, let me start dragging some windows No, it’s fine. John. It’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Go along into a second account.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you’re done with the recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing that. I don’t even have another account in this machine
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have another account. No, that’s not that common. Hold them. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you do that cursor is definitely? Migrating way off the title bar now,
⏹️ ▶️ John how far can you get it off the title bar? Can you get it like three inches off? How high can you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man? Right. All right. I’m quitting text edit at 309 windows. This is just bananas. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you should have closed the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows. What are you doing? Oh, that one. You relaunched text edit. Are they going to all go for you? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait, how do I, what command?
⏹️ ▶️ John Command option W before you quit. Casey, you’ll thank me. Oh my gosh. But the fun thing is when you launch text
⏹️ ▶️ John edit and it has 300 windows open, you see all the shadows appear first
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John windows pop in. It’s really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I think I’ve successfully cleaned everything up. Thank you, sir. That would have been very bad. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have been great like next time you just open some random document and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what happens. That stressed you out, but it did not stress your computer. Your computer could handle it just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It stressed out your co-host.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco with his mighty computer wouldn’t even try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not while I’m recording a podcast with that said mighty computer, no! I’m saying it’s not gonna stress anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my God. So the question is, do I have enough confidence than my superior tier $17,000 computer laptop. This actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we not agree, Marco, that this is yet more proof that laptops are superior to desktops? That’s what it seems like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant at all. I’m pretty sure that’s what we just- If I had that M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Mm-hmm.