561: Market Your Bug
16 Nov 2023Our initial M3 Max MacBook Pro impressions, details on M3-family SSD performance, more enthralling content about body oils, and Marco’s self-created need to go to a hardware store.
Episode Description:
- Show Administrivia:
- Follow-up:
- Face ID is also an accessbility affordance (via Todd Scheresky)
- Uses for 🛢️👃🏻 (via Jamie West)
- Microwaves
- The modern knob (via Nate)
- There’s such a thing as too much (via Kieth Bradnam)
- Scanning old photos
- Ryan’s procedure
- Todd Vaziri’s advice
- Possible laptop improvments (via Nathaniel Velez)
- Apple explains dynamic caching (via Gokhan Avkarogullari)
- Metal Profiling Tools
- Performance Best Practices for Shaders
- Memory is now unified within the GPU (via Jonathan Ragan-Kelley)
- M3 SSD speed vs. M3 Pro SSD speed
- SSD price graph (via CG)
- Mac laptops have had the same base RAM since 2017 (via David Schaub)
- Marco and Casey’s new laptops
#askatp:- What is a “neural engine”? (via Richard Levitt)
- How often should bugs on beta OSes be reported? (via Mike Hoffman)
- Is there a way to get Photos.app’s geotag metadata into the actual files? (via Santiago)
- Post-show: Marco’s hardware adventure
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Chapters
- Intro
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Member special: ATP Dev
- Face ID on Macs
- More uses for nose oil
- The modern knob 🖼️
- Just four buttons 🖼️
- Scanning photos
- Wearing away keycap paint
- Dynamic Caching details
- M3-family SSD speeds
- SSD vs. HDD prices 🖼️
- Base RAM over time 🖼️
- Sponsor: Notion
- New MBP impressions
- #askatp: What’s a Neural Engine?
- #askatp: Re-file bugs every beta?
- #askatp: Embeding photo metadata
- Ending theme
- Marco goes to a hardware store
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I should acknowledge that if something weird happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be my fault because I have a brand new computer that I’m recording on. Marco, it could be your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault because you have a brand new computer that you’re recording on. And it could actually even be John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault because his computer is so old, busted, ancient, and slow that it could be his fault after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. We don’t know. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John think you mean reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Slow and steady wins the race.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see. But why are you worried about your computer? There’s nothing weird about your computer. I mean, yes, they are new,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, do you expect there to be problems? They’re not too different from the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re replacing them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re also jumping ahead and I need to put the kibosh on this until we get there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t want to spoil the fact that we buy new computers frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially, especially one of us. Make it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who has bought the newest computer here? Oh, you. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. It’s like I’m the older twin because I’m five minutes older anyway. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, what I got on the call this evening, First thing Marco said to me was, oh, you’re on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wrong mic, which was true for the record.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that never happened with the old computer. you’re right, this is a big change.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is your second notice. Second of three. Second of three notices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also known as the second to last. Also true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m warning you with peace of love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The ATP holiday gifts, whatever store is here at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store. Now is the time and let me remind you if you are an ATP member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I assure you almost all of the cool kids are. There’s only a few cool kids left that aren’t. So if you’re an ATP member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can join at ATP.FM slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, to be clear, you can join even if you’re not cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think actually by joining you become cool and we’re not going to do any further research on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, we’re going to leave that as a theoretical.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So if you wanted to partake in this, a time limited as we call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sale, this is one of those times that you get 15% off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything you buy from the ATP store in this time limited sale. You can go into your member dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever we’re calling it to get your bespoke discount code that you use at Cotton Bureau.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yes, now is the time to buy gifts for you. Hey, you know what? You know what you should do, Marco? You should treat yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should get yourself a gift. You could have somebody else treat you. You can treat somebody else. Treats all around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tells you. So John, can you walk us through what are the wares we have on offer today?
⏹️ ▶️ John We went through them all last week. The headlining stuff that you need to know is that there’s a new shirt where we tried to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the logo out of pixels, which is at the bleeding edge of what is possible on printing. And so that’s exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Give it a try, live on the edge with us. And then we have a space black joke shirt where the logo is not quite black, just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the new MacBooks. Then we have a bunch of M3 shirts, which are like the M2 and M1s were.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have the ATP6 color shirt where the shirts come in lots of different colors, but the logo is
⏹️ ▶️ John just white on all of them. That’s the main colorful one. Then we have the plain ATP one, the hoodie, the polo,
⏹️ ▶️ John a new mug and pint glasses. And the only thing I wanna add that we didn’t mention last week is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John mugs and the pint glasses, unlike the other things, Like we have to guess how many we’re gonna sell these and we order them
⏹️ ▶️ John up front in a certain amount, which means that they may run out. So if you want a mug
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you want a pint glass, don’t wait because they may run out. And if they run out, that’s it. Like we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get any more in time for anything close to the holidays. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wait on the mugs and the pint glasses. Every time we sell mugs, people send us pictures of all their mugs that they broke, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John careful, someone dropped their mug on their iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no, they drop their iPad on their mug.
⏹️ ▶️ John either way. That’s all we already know the power of the iPad. It shatters windshields. It destroys mugs. The iPad is indestructible
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you drop it by itself. And then it shatters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all fairness,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the mug damage on that on the drop incident was actually it was like a little chip off the side. The mug was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly intact. It was a pretty big chip. I think that suggests that the mug might be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sturdy than windshields.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s true. Yeah, for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, not not wielded by Casey, though. We don’t know. We don’t know what the velocity is involved here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. But yeah, it’s just got a patina now, the mug. But yes, we are saying this in part for our own selfish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purposes, because we want you to buy and buy now. But also really and truly, that isn’t a lie. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we did, I don’t remember the quantities, and honestly, I don’t know if we tell you anyway, but we have limited quantities of the mug and the glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should have enough if you order anytime soon. But if you’re concerned, order now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t wait on those. And the other things you don’t have to worry about, but you do have to worry about the sale ending. Again, I worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John people who like, who want this, but it’s a perfect gift for someone to get you. If you’re hard to shop for and people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what to get you and you’re afraid they’re going to get you socks or something, send them this link. Do not be shy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t beat around the bush. You can’t lay hands. You have to say, look, the sale ends November 26th and I really want
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these things. I know you think it’s dumb, but I like this. Like, that’s what you have to communicate. Say, I know this stuff looks
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb and expensive, but I like this podcast and this would be a good gift for me. Tell somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ John actually wants to get you a gift, tell them that and send them the link before the sale ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breaking news we’ve actually added not new designs but some new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other things. John, can you elaborate a little bit for me?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a couple of people asked, Hey, do you have long sleeve versions of these? And I was like, Oh, I meant to do that because we did
⏹️ ▶️ John we did add sweatshirts to a lot of them like instead of just t shirts, a lot of them come in sweatshirt variants. It’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John product like the product will be called like ATP space black. And that comes in short sleeve t shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John sweatshirt, but now also long sleeve t shirt. Some of them even come in tank tops, like every varieties and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But think, Oh, I don’t want a t-shirt so I don’t want to click on that. Click through on the design that you like and see if it’s offered
⏹️ ▶️ John in sweatshirt, long sleeve t-shirt, tank top, whatever you want. And we also added youth and kid sizes. We can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do baby sizes for these because they, like the, whatever the printing process is, the logo is the same color and this logo is
⏹️ ▶️ John too big to fit on a baby. The on-demand ones I think they can do on babies because that’s a different printing
⏹️ ▶️ John process where it’s just like, I don’t know anything about how it works. But I imagine in my head that it’s more like an inkjet
⏹️ ▶️ John printer that can print anything whereas these are like, I don’t know, some kind of like pattern that they run
⏹️ ▶️ John ink through or something. Anyway, point is no infants for these, but we do have youths and kids sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John which are like smaller than adult sizes. And we do have long sleeve tees on several of them and sweatshirts on several
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. So they’re good for winter weather. So check them out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And as a final note on that, the youth sizes were a request from my beloved wife, Erin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has said, and I think I’m pretty damn sure she said it jokingly, but she said, you know, when you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of you are just swimming Scrooge McDuck style in all of your merch proceeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because everyone has gotten youth-sized tees for their children or friends’ children or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what have you, you know, I should thank Erin. So if you would like her to be able to rub something in my face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably until the end of time, go ahead and buy your friends’ kids, your kids, your random
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids, throw them in the schools like a t-shirt cannon at a stadium. I’m sure that won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awkward or get you in trouble at all. Buy some youth sizes, too. I believe this is the first time we’ve offered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything in youth sizes, so check Check it out, http.fm.
Member special: ATP Dev
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also have something else to talk about. We have a new member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know, Marco, would you like to take a stab at describing this and then John can correct you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, as we’ve discussed in the show a little bit here and there, in recent months, John has been working on the CMS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the CMS is something that I wrote in PHP originally. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John has been learning, well, reluctantly, plowing through PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we thought, what is better content than having John talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his learning process of learning not only PHP, but learning my totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco undocumented framework that is a custom framework that no one else uses, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, the whole code base to the CMS, which, let’s be honest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never my top priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John had to wade through that, and we made him talk about it and recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I think it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the title of it is the more aspirational, my more aspirational goal, which is the title,
⏹️ ▶️ John which were, this format title for our specials I’m rapidly regretting, but now it’s kind of becoming
⏹️ ▶️ John something colon and then something else, right? So we do ATP top four for the ones that are like top four format
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes sense. ATP eats for the ones where we eat gross foods, ATP movie club or whatever, where we watch movies.
⏹️ ▶️ John This one is ATP dev colon other people’s code. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope to make it more broadly applicable to like, hey, so you’re a software developer. Guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re gonna be doing? You’re gonna be looking at other people’s code a lot. And what is that like? And obviously the concrete example is I’m looking at other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John code. It’s Marco CMS stuff or whatever, but we hope it’s more broad than that. If not, you can just hear me. I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John lay off complaining about PHP too much because like, yeah, whatever, we get it. It’s gross. We’ve had many shows where we’ve talked about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the more applicable thing is like, what is it like?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not just for programming, but any other thing. What is it like when you don’t get to define everything from the ground up? And what is it like
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do? Like with Marco’s perspective, he did get to write this thing from the ground up, but that means it’s a weird thing that only he knows
⏹️ ▶️ John and that he didn’t document that he’s not interested in anymore, but it still exists and it still runs. And anyway, that’s what the episode is about.
⏹️ ▶️ John We hope you find it entertaining. As we said on this member special, the next one, the one for December,
⏹️ ▶️ John will probably not be tech related. We’ll see what that ends up being.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And remember, atp.fm slash join. You can join for as little as a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can join for a year, you can, you know, grab all the member specials, get your discount and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then cancel. And because we respect you, that’s easy to do. But because you love us, you won’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re going to join and say, holy smokes, this is the best decision I’ve ever made. Happy Christmas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hanukkah, birthday, whatever to me, I’m just going to stick with it. And that’s what we recommend. So at p.f. at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey p.fm slash join a tp.fm slash store. Treat yourself Now’s
Face ID on Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Todd Shoresky writes, Amen to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Face ID on Macs. As someone that uses his Mac completely hands-free, Face ID on the studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display and MacBooks would be a game changer. I am paralyzed from the shoulders down. Having Face ID in place when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s accessibility feature voice control came about was truly a life-changing moment. It gave me complete independence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being able to operate my phone and iPad by voice completely by myself. It would be nice to have the same independence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my MacBook and Macs connected to the studio display. You know, I’ve been trying, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been telling myself I need to try to work on being more aware of the non-vanilla case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everything. That’s oftentimes, you know, thinking about accessibility, but not exclusively. And this was just a complete oversight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my part. And I thought Todd made the point very succinctly. Yeah, we should think about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that would be real. I mean, it would be nice for all of us as with most accessibility things, but it would be doubly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice for those of us who have that kind of need. So I thought that was a great point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially the studio display, because you don’t have problems with like, it’s not thick enough, you know what I mean? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s a place where I feel like you can solve these problems. And apparently they’re not afraid to add
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of dollars for accessories like the stand. So I just throw a face
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ID in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, something tells me that they have the margin in that product to add the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one additional sensor. Cause like they already have a camera and you’re right, they have room, you know, at the wazoo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that product. So yeah, I’m pretty sure they could add like, you know, the IR blaster thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like that would be fine. Especially when you look at how inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phones are now that have it in it. It’s like, okay, now almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every iPhone model, including almost every one of the less expensive ones, has Face ID now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s probably a very short matter of time before they all have them. Once they do the next iPhone SE,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be all Face ID at that point. So, it’s no longer a cost thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You look at the studio display and there’s a few misses in that product. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it just didn’t make it in, in time or whatever. But hopefully when they update their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco monitors, which they do very frequently, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John sure it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John time. Once a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they update the monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we mean human generations, not hardware generations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even want to think about it.
More uses for nose oil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Jamie West writes, oily noses are not just useful for testing for fingerprints.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t find the original source now, but at some point in the past, BBC TV technicians used vision mixers, which had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faders that would sometimes get a bit sticky, causing the crossfades to visibly not be smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As everything was basically still done live back then, you couldn’t exactly stop to perform some quick maintenance, but often a quick rub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the side of the operator’s nose and an application of nose grease to the fader would be enough to get it unstuck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and moving smoothly again. So first of all, yuck. Second of all, that’s actually kind of interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John This sounds a lot like something that a British person would make up to tell Americans to make them.
⏹️ ▶️ John See how gullible they are. Yeah, surely. How do you get the grease down into the part where the friction surfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John meet? Like, you could put grease on the top of it, but that doesn’t help you. you anyway. Uh, I hope this isn’t true.
The modern knob
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then we have microwave follow up because how could we not? This is the accidental appliance podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nate writes, the modern knob. That was the whole tweet or toot, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s a photograph of a LG microwave. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a display in the upper right hand corner. It has what appears to be a horizontal slider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey labeled time with a minus on one side of plus on the other, and then stop start buttons. That’s the whole microwave. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw this and I thought of like car controls and I was thinking like that’s like a touch slider. You know how they do those things? Like instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of having a volume knob in a car, they’ll have like this little tiny region with some gloss black plastic where you swipe your finger
⏹️ ▶️ John to change the volume. It’s like, it’s like it was a contest. You’ve seen these things. There’s like a contest for like how,
⏹️ ▶️ John make the worst kind of progress bar, I think, with a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seen those, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like that, but in real life. Someone’s like, how can we make the worst, most annoying interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to a microwave? It’s like, you know, how about just a knob? No, too simple. How about a plus
⏹️ ▶️ John and a minus button? And I really hope you can swipe between them because that would just make it so much worse. This is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so bad. And yet I feel like for me, I’ve found one worse.
Just four buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Keith Bradenham writes, I love our microwave for its rejection of any complexity. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four buttons, microwave, defrost, start and stop slash cancel. I’m not kidding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folks. We will put a link in the show notes to a photograph of this microwave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s a display,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey microwave, defrost, stop, start and cancel. Or excuse me, stop, cancel
⏹️ ▶️ John What has the microwave done? You think the microwave does like 30 seconds?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. But anyway, Keith continues, you repeatedly press the microwave or defrost buttons to set the cooking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. It has an LED display, but I love how it doesn’t even bother to include a clock. And sure enough, in
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a feature, not a bug. Like, not having a clock is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, I wish fewer appliances would have clocks on them, because that’s fewer things that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reset every time they get out of sync or daily saving time happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair. Or they
⏹️ ▶️ John would just set themselves based on the weird AM radio thing, or like, I mean, everything has internet access now. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John microwave interfaces are the opposite of what Twitter apps were. They’re a UI playground for
⏹️ ▶️ John people to do terrible things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, though, the feedback suggests that knob based microwaves are actually extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common everywhere except the US.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But did you see the European ones that they sent pictures of? They look a lot like the like kitchen timer,
⏹️ ▶️ John like mechanical ticket.
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And that’s not really what you want. Like, I know that’s also a knob, but it’s it’s like the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you to get it back to zero, you can like push it and it goes. And it’s just, it’s not great. Yeah.
Scanning photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, now we move into the scanning photos corner. Ryan writes, I’m the crazy one who decided to scan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my family photos, crop them and apply dates. I wrote a post on how I went about it and we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took a couple of years, but it’s been incredible being able to go back and find photos by dates, get face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detection photos, etc. Then friend of the show, Todd Vizzeri writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of our pandemic projects was to do something about the thousands of prints and film negatives that we had in shoeboxes in our basement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, get them digitized. We ultimately used a service called Scan Cafe, and were extremely happy with the results.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The print scans were far better than anything we could have accomplished at home, and the negative scans were spectacular. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing to keep in mind before anyone embarks on a project like this is to plan and organize before you ship off your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prints and negatives, and be prepared for tons of work after you get the scans. Create logical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey batches of prints and negatives in chronological order as best you can, because the service will honor your naming conventions. Once you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your scans, you could simply import them all into Apple photos and be done. But taking that extra step of assigning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them dates at a minimum and at maximum with geotags and captions will take hours and hours and hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of work. Be prepared. In all, we organized scan categories and dated over 3,500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos that span over three decades. And I’m so glad we took the time to do so because now we have an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey organized digital photo library that are backed up in triplicate and we never have to worry about losing our physical prints or negatives
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I forgot to mention this with my scanning thing, although it doesn’t depending on how much work you put into it, it doesn’t take that
⏹️ ▶️ John much time, certainly not as much time as scanning with my stupid slow scanner. But the problem that you will encounter
⏹️ ▶️ John is, when was this taken? If you’re lucky, you have that obnoxious burned in like little
⏹️ ▶️ John seven segment display date on the picture. And if you’re extra lucky, that date is right. Because speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of setting your clocks on things, not everyone was good about setting the clocks on their like instant cameras or whatever, or not instant
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras, but their film cameras. So very often that date can be wrong. But the older the pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John get, Like before the advent of that kind of date stamping, like in my childhood, those things didn’t really exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what year was this? How old do I look here? Am I seven? Am I eight? Am I four?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you’re lucky, you can see, okay, this is when we lived in that house, in this town. And then you get into stuff from
⏹️ ▶️ John like my parents’ childhood. They don’t know when it is. I’ve been telling my parents, when was this taken?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, I don’t know, sometime in this decade range. Oh, it’s brutal. Like, and the sooner
⏹️ ▶️ John you do it, like the more relatives you have who are alive, who could perhaps date them. Like I have super old
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures that I got from like, my uncle scanned a lot of stuff from his father, right? So they’re super old
⏹️ ▶️ John black and white pictures. And I’m lucky if I can get a decade. I do surveys with relatives like,
⏹️ ▶️ John which decade do we think this is, 40s or 50s? Forget about geo tagging with
⏹️ ▶️ John location. And they’re like, oh, by the way, who’s in this picture? There’s uncle Bob. I have no idea who
⏹️ ▶️ John these two people are. Does anybody know? It gets harder the longer you wait. And even for your own pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ John even for your own pictures, I can tell we were in college, but what year were we in college, right? It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do. And so what you kind of have to do, and I really, really wish photos had this feature, although it’s not on my very long list of things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I want them to add immediately, but the concept and bullying logic of
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t cares where I want to be able to put in a date and I guess I look, all I got is the year since 1962. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos. Yeah, you got to make up a month and a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And so you have to come up with a convention where I just do January at like 12 a.m. But what if something legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ John happened on January 1st? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow, we take a lot of pictures when we’re hungover after New Year’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like. And it’s summertime. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then you’ll find one,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’ll find one that you have a date for, but now it’s all messed up because you know that one came between these ones, but you shove
⏹️ ▶️ John them all up into January. And even though you don’t know the months for those, you know this one was somewhere in the middle of them. It’s very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, even if you just know it’s the 60s, you can’t put, like, if you put 1960, later you’re gonna remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that, oh, that wasn’t really 1960. I just put 1960 because I didn’t know which year in the 60s it was. So photo
⏹️ ▶️ John apps aren’t good at that. So do the best you can. That’s why photo albums where someone wrote in like, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John grandmotherly cursive right next to them with dates and stuff, that is a godsend. But yeah, do
⏹️ ▶️ John the best you can and realize that that is going to be, even if you get them scanned, that’s gonna be the majority
⏹️ ▶️ John of your work, especially if you’re not organized, like Todd says, when you send them off, because they’ll send
⏹️ ▶️ John them back to you and sometimes there is no discernible order and sometimes the order is just whatever you sent them
⏹️ ▶️ John in And who knows if that order is right. So yeah, it’s a big job. and the longer
⏹️ ▶️ John you wait, the harder it gets.
Wearing away keycap paint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nathaniel Velez writes, On the topic of things Apple still needs to improve on its laptops, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top of my list is the durability of the plastic used for the keyboards. They become shiny with just a few days of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use because of your fingertips being able to sand and polish the plastic. I always thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was unavoidable since this happens with most cheap keyboards, but since getting a slightly fancier mechanical keyboard that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have this issue, I learned that if Apple used different materials, we would not have to live with laptop keyboards that look disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m always curious why people don’t complain about this more. I’m happy to see at least one review from CNET mentioned that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioned the shiny, disgusting keyboard problem. Man, I am mealy-mouthed today. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have a link in the show notes. I definitely noticed that my finger grease gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the keyboard, and I don’t ever feel like I’ve worn a keyboard down to the point that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, you know, the paint on it is being lost. Maybe it’s because, although I do not change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboards and computers, like Marco changes his keyboards and computers, which is like most change their underwear.
⏹️ ▶️ John never changes the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the same one, just keeps rotating. Well, yeah, I have many, many copies of the same one, which appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to now be finally fully for real discontinued.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all gone from Amazon and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Me with my cheese graters and you with your keyboards were just running through the back catalog now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some point in the next 15 years, I might run out of them and have to switch keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, same with my cheese graters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, yeah, so I find that, yeah, the finger grease thing is a thing. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every month or so, and there’s no real schedule to it. It’s just when I noticed my keyboard is getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross. I’ll take one of the Mr. Clean magic erasers. I think there is a non, that’s the, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it, proprietary eponym, the Xerox name for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it? Yes, what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking for is melamine foam. That’s the actual thing. It’s like a very, very, very fine abrasive.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta be careful, because some of those are also infused with some gunk. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not gunk, but like a-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them have like detergent.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and you really don’t wanna put that in your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if you’re buying a magic eraser, make sure it’s like the plain, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John unflavored. Unscented, no bleach. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, yeah, one time I accidentally bought a little box of like the ones that use them and they like foam up with soapy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, oh, this is totally wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know if I would even want that grit to go there. I know we don’t have butterfly keyboards anymore, that stuff does kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like flake a little bit when you’re using it. But anyway, Casey, why are you taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a magic eraser? What are you trying to remove?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the paint, yeah. No, to get the keyboard or the finger grease off the keyboard. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been doing this for years and years across many, many, many different laptops. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abrasive to do that? You don’t need abrasive. It’s just I, I, it works well. I don’t know. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s what I found that works the best. I’m sure that’s not the only way to do it. Maybe even just a damp cloth would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. But that’s what I’ve always used. And it’s worked well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would I would I would suggest you maybe not do that and instead use
⏹️ ▶️ John the very slightest of dampness on a thing because you just want to like carry away. Finger grease will come off pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John easily. You just got to get a cleanish thing there to, anyway, don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the keyboard, this annoys me, we talked about this before. It annoys me that iPads, I guess it’s annoying too, but especially
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs are so not waterproof like the phones are. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for reasons that make sense, like there are reasons, but maybe we’ll get this, if we actually get to this topic, boy, it would be great if
⏹️ ▶️ John they did that better because it makes cleaning your keyboard on your MacBook, and your MacBook especially,
⏹️ ▶️ John so fraught. If you’re like, oh, I have a vaguely damp cloth and I’m just gonna use this to do the keys
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wad it up a little bit and you press it and a little droplet of water comes out and it slips between the key
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing. You’re like, no. You do not want water to go inside that thing at all. Now you know you can
⏹️ ▶️ John clean it when it’s upside down and it’s annoying. You gotta buy those apps that disable the keyboard so the thing doesn’t turn back on and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too fraught. But on the topic, Nathaniel’s question about like, why don’t people complain about the keyboards being gross?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ve talked about this before. Some people have fingers that
⏹️ ▶️ John excrete something that destroys keyboards. And it is not a personal failing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not show that they’re haunted by demons. It is just a thing. Wow. There is no value judgment here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a thing that happens. We all know people, if you’ve worked in offices or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll have a standard issue keyboard for the whole company or everyone will have MacBook Pros and one person will wear the letters off
⏹️ ▶️ John their keys within two weeks. Another person will only use a keyboard for seven years and be typing madly on it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time and it will be fine. Setting aside finger grease, which is an aesthetic thing of like how greasy it doesn’t look it’s a separate issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying the people who have like, I don’t actually know what it is. Is it acidic? Is it, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have calluses on their hands? I don’t know what it is, but something about their hands just, it really
⏹️ ▶️ John wears down the key caps. In terms of using different materials, I think matte
⏹️ ▶️ John versus glossy makes a difference. Kind of like it does for the fingerprint showing up on like the glossy
⏹️ ▶️ John mirrored Apple logo on the back of the new laptops versus the anodized matte bumpy
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever. So that is a factor. So part of that is the Johnny Ive hangover of like, boy, the keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John look nice when no one has ever touched them and they’re glossy black, but then of course you touch it. Same thing with piano black interiors
⏹️ ▶️ John on cars, which they’re still making. This year, they’re still making them. Please stop people. It scratches
⏹️ ▶️ John so easily. It looks horrendous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you remember how bad that was in the M5, Marco? It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awful. Yeah, the piano black. Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ John They still, do you believe they still do that? Like every car review for the past five years, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would go, has some section, they said, oh, and they use piano black on the interior and they roll their eyes and
⏹️ ▶️ John with a knowing look to the audience, this is, of course, we all know this is a bad idea, but the car makers don’t think it’s a bad idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably because it looks good in the showroom and they don’t care what it looks like after they sell it to you, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, it does look really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John until you touch it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any dust goes near it. Yeah, it’s very similar to the jet black iPhone 7 finish. Like, yeah, it scratches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly, but even with some scratches on it, it still looks really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John it also like the dust shows up on it a lot. Like, especially in a car
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever carry pets or anything, or if you ever use a tissue and blow your nose and the tissue dust like goes out of the, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good idea. So yeah, I think Apple could make a keyboard appearance that
⏹️ ▶️ John is more resilient to fingers touching it, kind of in the same way that they have with the anodized coating on the new
⏹️ ▶️ John black ones. Like just, you know, we’re not saying it’s perfect, but try to improve on that. Obviously in some
⏹️ ▶️ John areas, it’s gonna be difficult, like trackpad, which you touch a lot, and you know, iPhones and iPads, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John touchscreens. We’re constantly touching the screens. If you really ever look at an iPhone or an iPad screen, especially when it’s off,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re covered with grease. But that’s why Apple has the oleophobic coating and they work on that, right? It’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John area that Apple should continue to advance on. I feel like on the keyboards, I don’t know if they’re better or worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should get someone to write in and say, I am a person whose fingers wear the keys, the things with the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco keycaps. And by the way, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not painted on there. That’s part of the thing. We need Mike Hurley on the show to tell us all about the keyboard technology
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, dying in, putting in different colors of plastic and molding them together. There’s all these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they’re backlit, so they’re probably not painted, I would assume. I’m the one who said painted a
⏹️ ▶️ John minute ago. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like, they’re not painted. There are various techniques where you’re not actually touching the
⏹️ ▶️ John letter part, so you shouldn’t really ever wear it off. But for laptop keys, it may be more difficult because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re so thin. Anyway, I agree. This is an area that Apple should improve. But I think in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t look that gross to me when I see people’s laptops in real life. I think the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of some people destroying keyboards with their fingers is, it’s not unsolvable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s gonna be more difficult, especially since I personally don’t understand what is the difference, but there is a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can categorize people into, my fingers destroy keyboards, and my fingers just wear them in the normal amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hesitate to say normal, because it sounds, you know, but like, there is a difference. Sounds finger-ist.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it is. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the difference is. It could be as simple as calluses. It could be different
⏹️ ▶️ John pH level to the secretions from their fingertips. And like, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is what it is. Apple should design products to withstand the use that they expect. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they could do better on the keyboards. But I think Apple’s keyboards, now that they’ve gotten rid of the butterfly thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John are not below average for the industry. And I personally don’t think they look too disgusting, even when they’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, moving along.
Dynamic Caching details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some feedback from Gokhan Avkarugullari who writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re curious about what the new a 17 Pro and m3 GPU and dynamic caching is all about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the brand new and exceptional GPU dev tooling and shader best practices Apple has released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of new tech talks today as this was written and one in particular 1 1 1 3 7 5 will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes is all about the New GPUs, which what did they call them in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video is like Apple GPU 6 or something like that I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John exactly what they call it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it has a generation number or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was very surprising for me as someone who doesn’t ever pay attention to GPUs to be completely honest with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. But they did talk about and explain in a much better way, which I’m not gonna try to recount,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what this dynamic caching is all about, why it matters and why it’s helpful. And even as someone who knows almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing about GPUs, I was able to grok it and it was fascinating. And the whole video is like half an hour, so it’s worth watching.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Family 9 GPUs is what they’re called. So this is Family 9. And yeah, so what we said last
⏹️ ▶️ John week was accurate that the dynamic caching is about cache of local memory on
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU. Obviously the video goes into more detail. The takeaway I got
⏹️ ▶️ John from the video is that doing this, this dynamic caching thing is not
⏹️ ▶️ John just about making more efficient use of resources or rather that’s not the only point. It’s like, okay, I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you save power or like, you know, it’s, you can have a smaller GPU again,
⏹️ ▶️ John which saves you power, but you can do the same job with it. But there’s actually, I mean, this makes sense, but there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John performance story to it as well. They talk about it in the video. One of the things they’re always trying to optimize in GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John is what Apple and I think the rest of the industry calls a thread occupancy, which is how many things are in
⏹️ ▶️ John flight inside the GPU at the same time, how many things that it’s doing. And if you make
⏹️ ▶️ John inefficient use of these local caches, if one of them comes in and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to reserve, you know, 10 by a hundred block of
⏹️ ▶️ John data here, and I’m only gonna use the 10 thing once, and the rest of the time I’m just using ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I need to reserve the whole block just for that one 10 in there. Then there’s not enough room for another job to come in because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, sorry, that shared resource that you wanted a chunk of, there’s not enough left for you, so you gotta wait until I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John done. Having more, better thread occupancy means you can have more of those threads
⏹️ ▶️ John in the GPU at the same time, which means, in gamer speak, better frame rates
⏹️ ▶️ John because something that needs to run in the GPU isn’t waiting going, I gotta wait for these other jobs. one of these other jobs needs to finish
⏹️ ▶️ John before I can get on the GPU and do my thing. So it is actually a performance story there. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good to see and is relevant to pretty much anything that a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John does. It’s also relevant to laptops for like, you know, getting your job done faster. So you can power down the GPU and not be using
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. And you can do more work with less power because you know, the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is not running as long, but it should also help give you better frame rates. So thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jonathan Reagan Kelly writes, and this I think was born from that video we just mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey An interesting detail, Apple not only avoids statically allocating space for threads, they also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unify the memory for different types of state within the shader core and dynamically allocate space among them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are also pooled with the tile cache and other cache and buffer memory. Many GPUs do have unified memory for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quote unquote thread group, scratch pad memory and L1 cache, but only allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the allocation between these two roles to be configured statically per kernel. While it may seem surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to unify quote unquote registers and quote unquote caches, it’s important to know that the GPU register storage is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so large, up to 32 megs on a recent NVIDIA GPU, that it is generally built from SRAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not literal register file circuits, so really is the same kind of thing as all the other caches and scratchpads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or buffers. As someone who’s worked on and around GPU architectures for a long time, this is indeed a promising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea. The devil’s in the details. What is the cost of the complexity this adds to the hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How good are the dynamic allocation algorithms in practice? how bad are the penalties when some state isn’t cached? But this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool to see, and is actually a big change from how most other modern GPUs work, which could provide real efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John This is actually a good pairing with Apple’s unified memory architecture, and it’s of the same category
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I always use this analogy, which may resonate with some of our listeners, but hopefully you can understand it, of
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the bad old days of Linux, when you would install Linux, it would ask you to sort of partition your drive, to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much do you want to dedicate to the slash partition? How much to the user partition? And you’d have
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of say, okay, well, the operating system is this big and I’ll need to leave a little bit of extra room
⏹️ ▶️ John in case I want to install stuff in slash. But most of the stuff is going to be in user, including the user home directories and anything that’s in user
⏹️ ▶️ John local. So how big do I want that to be? And how big do I want to do for a swap partition based
⏹️ ▶️ John on how much memory I have? And you have to make all these decisions kind of upfront of like deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John how big these buckets will be. And the consequences of picking one wrong are annoying. So like, I got to repartition
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe I have to erase the entire disk. And of course, with a GPU or a CPU, If you’re gonna have multiple buckets of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have to pick ahead of time how big those buckets are gonna be, you don’t wanna make the buckets too small because
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be a performance bottleneck and everyone says, oh, they made the whatever bucket too small on the CPU, it really hurts
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. But if you make them too big, you’re wasting power and transistors and die space
⏹️ ▶️ John on resources that aren’t going to use and that stuff could have been used elsewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John on the chip where it would have been useful. So it’s hard to pick those things. And same thing with like, you know, VRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and regular RAM and having to have like a big pool of VRAM and a big pool of regular RAM and transfer between them and how big are the pools.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unified memory solves that in Apple’s architecture because it’s just one big pool of hopefully very fast memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on the GPU, same deal. Why have three different buckets of memory needs
⏹️ ▶️ John by the GPU? Because in any given, you know, job that the GPU is running, it may need
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot from bucket one, a little bit from bucket two and nothing from bucket three. And if you get a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of jobs that are like that, bucket one is gonna fill up and bucket two and three are going to waste. Whereas if you have a unified pool, you say, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make you pick ahead of time. You know, when you design your chip, how big these buckets are. There’s just one big bucket.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason it works is because, as Jonathan points out, the registers aren’t like CPU registers,
⏹️ ▶️ John how you would learn about them in a CPU class, or well, x86, you got ax, bx, cx, like these little registers that
⏹️ ▶️ John are the size of an inter whatever, that are super fast and they’re right there in the CPU. They’re not like that in
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs. It’s all made of SRAM, which is what like the L1, L2 caches are.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s big, there’s like 32 megabytes of it. So Apple making one big pool of that
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely fits with a unified memory architecture and totally makes sense. And it seems like their implementation is pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, this is their first run at it, but after three weeks of looking at dynamic caching, give it a thumbs up.
M3-family SSD speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, M3 speed, excuse me, M3 SSD speed versus M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro SSD speed. John, can you take us through this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last week we were saying, hey, in previous generations, Apple would sometimes ship
⏹️ ▶️ John the base model with half the number of SSD, you know, packages on the logic board
⏹️ ▶️ John that would cause the SSD to be half the speed. And it’s like, oh, if you got to 256 gigabit, it’s half the speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if you’ve got the 512, which is a shame. And then with this generation, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. We looked at the m3 ones and even if you get the base model m3 granted the base model m3
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro has 512 but either way if you get the base model It doesn’t have half
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of chips and so we did speed tests on it and lo and behold It’s twice as fast as the bad old base model
⏹️ ▶️ John m2 was is the two physics was right? But then we compared it to a one terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and it’s like but the one terabyte is twice as fast again So what’s going on here? And the thing we didn’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ John last week is the one terabyte one was an m3 Pro It wasn’t just a plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old m3 with one terabyte. It was an m3 Pro with one terabyte So kind of like with the RAM situation of like
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the deal with these RAM sizes? How do they make any sense? They make sense in terms of how many chips there
⏹️ ▶️ John are So the m3 the m3 SoC supports a maximum of two NAND packages
⏹️ ▶️ John two little flash memory rectangular things on the logic board The m3 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John supports a maximum before NAND packages and if you look at an m3 Pro teardown, you might not see it but there’s like two on
⏹️ ▶️ John top of the logic board and then two underneath on the underside So you won’t see another two like things
⏹️ ▶️ John on if you’re just looking at one side of up the other two on the other side And then the m3 max supports a maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John of eight NAND packages It doesn’t mean they’re all filled in like if you get the m3 max one
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get a smaller SSD I don’t know what the size threshold is But if you get a smaller one all eight
⏹️ ▶️ John spots on the logic board won’t be filled Maybe only four of them will be but the upshot of all this
⏹️ ▶️ John is that every NAND package you add adds more maximum bandwidth in these artificial benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you’re writing to it, you can be writing to all of them at once, right? And so that’s why you get twice the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have two chips, because now you’re writing to them both of them once. You know, they’re both the same speed as the one was,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now you could double. And if you double it again to four NAND packages, then you can double it again. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is borne out by Marco’s Monster M3 Macbook Pro with an eight terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD, which has all eight of the NAND packages filled in. And by the way, each NAND package,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, each NAND package has an Apple custom controller die plus four to I think 16
⏹️ ▶️ John NAND dies all inside that little package. That’s what’s in those little rectangles in the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and when Marco did a brief speed test with that Blackmagic speed test app that everybody uses, he was getting 8,200
⏹️ ▶️ John megabytes per second in write speed and 5,600 megabytes per second in read speed. So
⏹️ ▶️ John finally, if you pay whatever ungodly sum Apple charges for this eight terabyte SSD, you too
⏹️ ▶️ John can have a faster SSD than the $75 one terabyte stick that’s in my PS5. Which
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way is 5,500 megabytes per second read and write. Kind of depressing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, this is why we get this doubling. Why was the M3 Pro twice as fast as the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3? Because it has four NAND packages and the M3 only supports two and the M3 Max supports
⏹️ ▶️ John eight. Who knows how many the Ultra will support? Probably only eight, but we’ll see if and when that comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, the single package, quote unquote, bad SSD configuration was debated a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was ultimately decided it was the right trade-off. The performance analysis team, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the performance marketing team, this one is part of engineering, determined that there was a point of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharply diminishing returns in SSD performance in real-world workloads versus benchmarks. They were surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first too, and the SSD and NAND teams were skeptical. So there was a lot of discussion about this, but outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the file copy to or from a fast or Thunderbolt external SSD, they just didn’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey significant impact and real-world workflows. So all of us were getting our junk in a wad
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, this is an explanation of the bad ones on the MAM-2, right? So why did Apple do
⏹️ ▶️ John that with the MAM-2 ones? There was internal debate about it, and this is what they came up with. Like, OK, well, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s half speed when you run a benchmark, but who’s running benchmarks? Like, where does it impact real thing? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John the little part at the end here is, outside of file copy to from a fast external
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD, I think when people are waiting on disk I O, it’s probably because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a big copy. So that’s a pretty big exception to say, oh, it doesn’t in fact affect real world scenarios except for when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re really waiting for a gigantic copy. Now, obviously copies to itself on the internal drive
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t count because APFS has those constant time, you know, instant clone, copy and write magic things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re trying to pull something from a very fast SSD that’s connected with Thunderbolt or copy
⏹️ ▶️ John something to one, that’s when you’re gonna hit this bottleneck. So the bottleneck was there, But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re doing pretty much anything other than that, what this anonymous source from inside Apple is saying is,
⏹️ ▶️ John in our testing, if you’re doing like a real world task that is not a big file copy to an external drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, diminishing returns. And I still think it wasn’t a good choice. And
⏹️ ▶️ John whether Apple revisited that decision, which is why we don’t have the problem on the M3, or whether we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the problem with that M3 merely because they bumped the base config to 512. Either way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem doesn’t exist anymore. So it’s kind of a moot point, but this just goes to show when Apple does something like this, they
⏹️ ▶️ John do debate it internally. They may not come to the decision that we on the outside agree with, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they always do have their reasons.
SSD vs. HDD prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about SSD prices CG writes I thought of this graph when Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was talking about how cheap SSDs have gotten if this trend continues I’m hoping to go all SSD on my NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a few years So this is from the reddit community data hoarder and they show a graph of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD prices as compared to regular spinning platter hard disks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and back in the ye olde in times of 2013 a spinning platter hard drive was about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thirty six dollars a terabyte and a SSD was $625 a terabyte. However, here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2023, we’re down to, according to this chart, about $35 a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabyte for an SSD and $13 a terabyte for platters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you chart these lines out, somewhere around 2030-ish, SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could feasibly be even cheaper than spinning platters. I’ll believe it when I see it, but if you follow the trend line, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the graph would indicate. And that’s fascinating. and certainly does not match what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is charging people like Marco for their SSD size increases.
⏹️ ▶️ John The SSD line is pretty steep. Like, well, put a link in the notes, you can look at what the graph is. The reason they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John meet is because the SSD line is going down faster than the hard drive line. I’m amazed at how linear both of them are. They’re very,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I guess this is, is this a logarithmic graph? I think it is, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, having them across in 2030, tune in in 2030 to see if that has actually happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John but boy, won’t that be a glorious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moment. I mean, even just the ratio between them, Like, you know, back 10 years ago, the SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was almost 20 times more expensive per byte than the hard drive. Now it’s like three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. Like it’s still, that’s still a large multiple if you’re looking at a huge amount of storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s also a huge number of advantages for SSDs. And so that actually might,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that it’s, you know, quote, only three times the price per gig or whatever, that makes it a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more compelling in a lot more situations. So this is great news. As long as you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying anybody except Apple’s SSDs, everyone else’s SSDs in the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are getting remarkably affordable. Indeed.
Base RAM over time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Schaub writes, it’s hard to believe that consumer Mac laptops have had the same base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM since 2017. And the base RAM has only increased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one time since 2011. So in the last 12 years, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten one bump. And there is a logarithmic chart that we will put in the show notes that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey displays this. Sad times, y’all. Not good times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you look at this graph, like the kind of the point of this graph is like, the graph
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of divided it down the middle, the left half and the right half of the graph. And the left half of the graph seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like we had pretty regular bumps. The slope looks pretty good. It’s going up, up, up. And then in the right half of
⏹️ ▶️ John the graph, it’s like a knee in the curve and it just levels off and it becomes like asymptotically
⏹️ ▶️ John approaching eight gigs or 8.1 gigs or whatever. And David Chopp
⏹️ ▶️ John continues with the future one where he color codes the graph. He says, I don’t think it’s quite this simple. But the graph
⏹️ ▶️ John has the left side colored in with green. It says Steve Jobs, because it goes from 1999 to 2011 when Jobs died.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the right side is Tim Cook. And in the Tim Cook era, there has been one
⏹️ ▶️ John bump in base RAM on consumer laptops. And the Steve Jobs era, of the same length of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John there were one, two, three, four. Now, it doesn’t mean that, does that mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook, unlike Steve Jobs, keeps products around longer? We know he does that. But there are
⏹️ ▶️ John other things that may be factors here. Maybe it is the case that this is just a natural curve
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM prices in general. And they just, you know, the graph of RAM prices also
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a curve like this. I think that’s really true. Someone sent us a thing of RAM prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John but one thing about the RAM price chart is it is not as smooth as the SSD and hard drive chart that we had previously.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is actually a lot of volatility in RAM prices. And as the person who sent us the chart pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t sort of buy the RAM prices at instant time. They have to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of lock in a order of however huge quantity at whatever the price is at that time,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is sometimes advantageous to Apple. Hey, we just ordered, you know, 10 billion sticks of this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM back when they were sticks at this price. And that’s great because now it’s gone up since then, but sometimes they
⏹️ ▶️ John lock in the price at a higher price and that’s bad for them. But either way, what this graph shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t really allow you to assign blame or say someone was doing something wrong or whatever, but it does show you that
⏹️ ▶️ John the feeling you have that RAM has not been going up as quickly in the past decade
⏹️ ▶️ John or so, that is a real feeling when it comes to Apple consumer laptop-based RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John So hopefully we’ll get that next bump soon. And by the way, the one bump that we had since 2011 was
⏹️ ▶️ John from four to eight. So I would love for the next bump to be from eight to 16, but we’ll see how that goes.
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New MBP impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you and I both have received some new treats, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like we should talk about them. So, Marco, tell me what you got, and I don’t know if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey round-robin it, if you just want to start talking, and I’ll interrupt when necessary, but tell me about what you bought.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the big one. It’s awesome. I’m so happy with it. Good talk. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the black, as mentioned last episode when I had it sitting next to me on my desk, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had not yet actually moved into it yet. It is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been doing a lot of overcast work the last couple of days, a lot of having to do clean builds to work around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs in Xcode. So I’ve been doing a lot of clean builds during regular development that wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be necessary in the Objective-C days, but they’re certainly necessary now. But my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer is now much faster at doing those clean builds. I measured it, and a clean build of overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went from about 19 seconds to about 11 seconds. So it’s almost twice as fast at doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly common and increasingly common task that makes me stop and wait. That’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big gain for me. I’m very happy for that. The build time reduction alone would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this worthwhile to me at this point in my development life because, again, just how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many times per day I’m having to do not only incremental builds but especially clean builds which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so time consuming. As I push more and more of my code base into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift and SwiftUI, it just increases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much stress is being put on the development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process. Because for those of you who don’t know, Swift and SwiftUI are extremely complex languages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the compile side. Part of the reason why is that they are doing huge amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of complexity at compilation time to save you from yourself, basically, to save you from different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classes of bugs, to enforce different features and protections within the Swift type system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Swift language itself is also extremely complicated. And of course, SwiftUI really pushes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything to the limits with the way it abuses the language to achieve what it achieves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you’re not using previews, which I actually am not using SwiftUI live previews that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my work so far. And if you do use switch by previews, it pushes it even harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas like, you know, if I compile Objective C code today, it builds in like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half a second and it’s just done. And, you know, if I make a mistake in Objective C code, like it highlights it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly, like it’s so it’s so fast, because Objective C and C that it’s based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on are just much smaller and simpler languages to compile on modern hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as I’m pushing my code base into the more modern languages, it is costing me dearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in computing resources at development time. Of course, that in the long run should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prove worthwhile in the sense that not only does it get my code into where it needs to be for the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also it should prevent and avoid a lot of bugs along the way that cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer time, which is much more precious than computing time. But anyway, all this is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, the more Swift and SwiftUI I’m using and moving towards, the greater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my computing needs are, and the slower it is to build the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app if I don’t keep doing these upgrades every few years. So that’s the biggest justification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have for the upgrade. And that, again, that alone, cutting the build time almost in half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after only two years? There’s been a lot of talk about, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 is only a little bit faster than the M2, which is actually not always the case. We’ll get to that, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John always the case? Never the case, yeah. I’ve seen that same sentiment and I do not understand it,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why I put these graphs. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a video that you should watch. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was talking before about, oh, why should they compare it to the M2? Because you want to know if like, is this the year to buy?
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that got Marco excited to buy this when he was not excited about the M2 is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, he just talked about it. The main thing he does all day that he waits for is now twice as fast. Like if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough, you know, forget about synthetic benchmarks or whatever. That’s like him doing real world stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you care to look at the synthetic benchmarks, this Max Tech video has a whole bunch of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Single core, you’ll see the M3 line, the M2 line is barely past the M1 line.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M3 line is significantly past. Multi-core, the M3 is like double
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 max. The M3 max is like double the M2 max. It’s not even close. Like M1 to M2, tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little increase. M3, twice as fast, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the Cinebench score, same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the logic test, it’s like three times as fast as the M2 Max. In the logic test,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster than the M1 Ultra. This is, if you’re wondering, is this the one to buy? Is this a good year? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 is a good, if you’re buying the highest of the high end, like Marco is, the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good year to buy. So I think Marco was very wise, and Casey, very wise to skip the M2. Not because the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John was bad, the M2 was great. It was the best that you could get. But if you already have an M1, and M2
⏹️ ▶️ John was a smaller upgrade, the M3, depending on what you’re doing could be a monstrous upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M3 Max, by the way, I’m talking about, not just the plain M3 of the Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We take this for granted now because Apple Silicon era is just so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Like it’s so bountiful with upgrades for us that seem to have basically no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides except SSD costs. But it wasn’t that long ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, back in the tail end of the Intel days, not even just the tail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end, the whole rear third of the Intel days, getting almost 50%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement gain in two years? That doesn’t happen anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that hasn’t happened in the PC chip world in a long time. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the last decade or more, we’d be lucky to get maybe 15%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a gain over that same time span in like sheer CPU performance during that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Like again, 15% between generations, maybe. And even then it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually achieved only with like some real thermal, you know, aggression.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear on the for the single core, that’s kind of what the M3 Max gets over. It’s like 17% faster
⏹️ ▶️ John in single core than the M2 Max. But again, if you look at the difference between the M1 and the M2 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not 15%. So 15, you know, 17% single core for, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, over a computer that came out in January and now we’re getting into November is still pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the big wins come from like, OK, but what about the multi-core and to a lesser extent, some of the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff? And that’s what, like, you know, you might think of like, oh, compiler. Isn’t that a single core thing? No, there’s plenty of things
⏹️ ▶️ John to be compiled. And so you can use those cores because each core is compiling a different file and many files make up an
⏹️ ▶️ John application. In case that’s not clear, if you’re not a software developer. That’s why, you know, Marco is not getting 15 percent
⏹️ ▶️ John faster compiles because it is a multi-core type of thing. And we do pay a price for it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the prices of the M3 Max can use at peak, like 50 watts-ish, and the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John Max was using maybe 35, 37 watts. There’s a little bit more power being used, a little bit more heat
⏹️ ▶️ John being generated, but nothing that I think the cooling system can’t handle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that is one area that it’s a little too soon to say, I mean, I’ve never heard the fans so far in the week that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had this. It’s a little too soon to say whether that will be a noticeable difference here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I noticed the same thing. I believe it was an Antec who had like the power consumption graphs of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various max chips over time. And they are ramping up the power use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at peak. And that is, I am, I gotta say, I was not happy to see that in those graphs because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little worried now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you can’t get blood from a stone. Like if you want it to be faster and you want to have more of a performance core is doing all that extra
⏹️ ▶️ John work, they have to use more power. But like, we’re not sure about the efficiency, but that was the point that was made by someone whose name
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget in a past episode was that the M2, despite using more heat than the M1, was still more efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would be done with the same amount of work faster. And I would imagine that’s also true of the M3 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope so, and probably, but certainly it remains to be seen, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the M1 Max was so glorious because that computer just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never spun the fan up. And I still am so proud of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Max MacBook Pro and so baffled by the M1 Max Max Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the Mac Studio was frankly embarrassed by the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. That first gen Mac Studio had that weird thermal design where the fan was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audible at all times, whereas the MacBook Pro had the same processor as the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Studio and was never audible in a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem with the Mac Studio was that even at max load, the fans were the same speed as
⏹️ ▶️ John when it was idle. And they were, the cooling system was so over, so
⏹️ ▶️ John over-provisioned, but then it never got quiet enough for my taste anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That, you know, so you’d run a benchmark and it’d be like, how fast are the fans going compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to when it was idle? Oh, same speed. Like they just, they didn’t need to go any faster, but it was still annoying. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they fixed that in the M2 MacStudio generation. So if you’re worried about a MacStudio, I’m assuming that
⏹️ ▶️ John also won’t be, that it’ll be fine in the M3 generation as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would assume so as well. But anyway, I mean, I am extremely happy with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far even the black is nice I’ve had it now and more varied lighting conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know all the all like the youtubers keep that they’re still complaining like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it’s not that dark honestly it’s pretty dark like I maybe if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a video studio with spotlights pointing at it maybe it’s not that dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty dark I’m very happy with it I you know I don’t think I I will go black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all my computers in the future, but I like this one being black as just like a different, fresh, new take on things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, I was working on it earlier today, like in laptop mode, on a couch in the sun, using the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers to play Phish, which are surprisingly decent. Like it was great. I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of work done. Once again, I am very, very glad that I got the 16-inch just because I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much screen space as possible. Also, I, you know, based partially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my need for screen space, but also on my preference for low noise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does, I’m a little concerned about fan noise on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 14-inch models. If you spec them up with the M1 Max chip, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of thermal load that, because again, keep in mind, they’ve increased the thermal caps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these chips, like of how much power they use at peak. They’ve increased that from the M1 generation through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M2 and the M3 now. So if you’re worried about fan noise, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might advise you to either not get one of the big CPUs or not get the 14 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think the 16 can save you there a little bit. But also, the 16 inch has a much bigger battery, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s also nice if you’re ever, you know, working on battery for a long time. But at the end of the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what the trade-offs were, I’d get the 16 inch for the screen size alone. It’s a big beautiful awesome screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I need to defend people who like laptops that are not aircraft carriers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I have. They’re not that different in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size. It’s a difference. It’s not like the 17 was back in the day. That thing was a monster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thing was awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s close. I mean, 16 inch, like it’s, you know, what happened to the 15?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the 17 had a lot more bezel to get, you know, around that 17. Faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it weighed almost twice as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. Those things were seriously such beasts. I bought a 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1, excuse me, M3 Max. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the computer I just told everyone not to buy. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s correct. I bought it with 64 gigs of RAM because I just didn’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed more than that. I’m sure it wouldn’t have hurt, but I decided to spend that money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey elsewhere, and specifically I decided to spend it on their eight terabyte SSD because I keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my entire photo library on my Mac, and that’s something like a terabyte and a half, and then you put in a few X-codes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a few Xcode simulators or iOS simulators, what have you, and you start filling stuff up pretty quick. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I got. And I got the Space Black because how could you not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this thing is incredible. It just came in Monday afternoon. And I’d like to talk about in a moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how what I did with it once it got here in terms of loading it up. But putting that aside for a moment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had the time to do very much coding work since it came in because I recorded analog yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning and didn’t have a whole lot of time after that. and then I was prepping for ATP today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t have a whole lot of time after that. And so I haven’t done a lot of coding work, but in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing is just like a faster, peppier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even better version of what I already had. And I didn’t have any complaints about what I already had. It was already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really freaking great. And again, I came from an M1 Mac, 64 gigs, four terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love this computer. I have heard the fans. The only time I’ve heard the fans, Would you like to guess
⏹️ ▶️ John Running migration assistant?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I heard the fans then, and you’re spoiling my moment here in a minute, but no, that’s not what I was doing. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would I, Casey Liss, be doing that would cause the fans- FFmpeg. There it is. I was doing a transcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and FFmpeg, and those fans got screaming. But, I mean, whatever, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t mind if the fans scream when I’m doing a transcode and FFmpeg. I forget exactly what I was doing, but I think I was taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something from H.264 to HEVC, you know, H265.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was doing it at something like 15 frames a second. I don’t know. What was it? It was 15 X, not 15 frames a second, 15 X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So 15 times normal speed. It was bananas how fast
⏹️ ▶️ John was that using a, I don’t know what the options are, who does know what the options are, but anyway, were you using the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that use the hardware encoders or were you not using the ones that use hardware encoders?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the question. I actually don’t know the answer. I was using Lisa Melton’s scripts if memory serves. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I think those will try to use hardware encoders if possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very not confident that I’m telling the
⏹️ ▶️ John truth. I’m just wondering, because like the fan spin up, like you think the fans wouldn’t spin up if it’s just using this tiny corner
⏹️ ▶️ John of the chip that is just the, you know, the fixed function H265 encoder or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I honestly I again, I understand the question. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should just look up at your menu bar. You have this eternal CPU usage bars and say, hey, are
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of cores lit up or is it just, you know, anyway. Yeah, in the benchmarking, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would see less of this back in when they were benchmarking the M1 Max and the M2 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when they do the M2 Max versus M3 Max test, you can see that you can get the fans spin up on both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just laptops, right? You know, they just, they will spin their angry little fans and spew
⏹️ ▶️ John out hot air from their two little vents, but most people are not doing things that
⏹️ ▶️ John will torture your SoC like that. But if you do, be aware that you are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John hear those fans when you’re using 50 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but otherwise, ignore Marco’s propaganda. I was doing a little bit of Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remotely this morning. I went to my beloved Wegmans to do my ATP research, then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a little bit of time to do some Xcode work. No fans. Don’t listen to his propaganda, people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John The 14’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I do. I haven’t yet seen a good 14 versus 16, but for the M1 generation, 14 versus 16,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 16 did have better cooling capacity,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which doesn’t really make a lot of sense
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. Like, cause when you look at the teardowns, you’re like, it looks like they have the same heat pipes, the same fans,
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, like, why should it make such a difference? Just because there’s like a little bit more lateral room in the 16 inch, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John did in the M1 generation. So I haven’t yet seen a M3 test, but yeah, I don’t actually know if
⏹️ ▶️ John the 14 inch is gonna have appreciably worse or noisier or cooler than the 16, but it is a, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m guessing it’s going to be worse, but not in a way that most people will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically run into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s probably fair as well. I’d like to spend at least a minute talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I did when the computer came in. In years past, I’ve always done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fresh install. Unlike Windows, which last I used Windows, which admittedly was like 10 plus years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, every six months you needed to start from scratch. It’s just the rule of Windows. Every six months you start from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You move everything somewhere else, you start anew. That’s just the way it works. And I have not had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that experience with the Mac. been some times where I feel like, you know, a reset in start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new has been necessary. But I can count those times on probably one hand, and I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a Mac for like 15 years now, something like that. I typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will do a fresh install. But this time I decided, you know what, I’m going to try migration assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thankfully, I had my friend Marco here to run through the gauntlet of migration assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first and instruct me on all the ways I need to to save myself if things go wrong. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I did, I think the same thing that Marco did and it pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just worked. So what I did was I used, my cable is white and it’s not braided,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the current-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sometimes it just happens to you. Yeah, sometimes it just happens. I use the, it’s an Apple cable and I think it is a Thunderbolt 4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable. I looked to put a link in the show notes just a moment ago and I couldn’t find it, but I found what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the new version, which is the Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable. This is a one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meter long cable. So it’s, you know, about a three foot long cable. That is $70 70 it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas expensive, but that being said when I was doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey migration It was it took a while for it to admit to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash itself that it was connected via Thunderbolt You know So I connected via Thunderbolt from one laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the other and it really was not happy at first with doing that and I wonder if Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might have bailed a little too soon on getting that process to work. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have taken better notes. It’s not that I was rushing. I just didn’t think to take copious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes as to what I was doing. But as you’re going through migration assistant, which if you’re not familiar, it’s an Apple thing where you start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically kind of sort of a server on the old computer and you start a client on the new computer. That’s probably not as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strictly accurate, but you get the idea. And it’ll transfer all your stuff from one to the other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when you’re doing it on the on the target computer on the new computer, it really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wants you to sign on to Wi Fi or perhaps you know, if you have an Ethernet connection, it really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants you to get on the internet via Wi Fi or Ethernet. And I did neither.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I just kept saying like, No, thank you. No, thank you. No, nope, not now. Not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it. Eventually, it finally relented. And then I saw that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection detail screen that you can pull up where it says, okay, here’s all the ways I can connect from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the source to the target Mac. And sure enough, it says Casey’s MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or MaxBook Pro is what I call the old one, Ethernet on this Mac, which by the way, the only thing connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than power to the new one was this Thunderbolt cable. So I guess it’s some sort of like Ethernet over Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what have you. Anyway, it’s sampled at 37 megabytes a second. Peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sampled at 68 megabytes a second. Not sure how, but you know, hey, that’s what it says. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt on this Mac, 882 megabytes per second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which to be fair, as I watched on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all? Mine was 2000 when I got Thunderbolt working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, really? Wow, then maybe my cable should be updated to a Thunderbolt Pro cable. But yeah, that’s all I saw. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw a max of around then, although it would definitely dip lower. It took,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say, a couple of hours, two or three hours, and I think I had something to the order of two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three terabytes in use on the old machine, but once I finally convinced it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fricking use Thunderbolt, it flew. Like it went real fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and apparently would have gone faster if I had a better cable, I didn’t even realize, but it was fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it might’ve picked up speed as it was going to like, here’s the thing about that, those rated speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it’s not just copying one giant media file, right? So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to see those
⏹️ ▶️ John speeds because what it’s doing is making literally millions of tiny files and directories. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know there’s not a read head moving back and forth, and I know random access is not that much slower
⏹️ ▶️ John on an SSD than sort of sequential access, but there is more stuff for it to do
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of I have to read all these different files and all the metadata about the files and all their different attributes, and then I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to write that out, and then the other thing has to receive that and get that information and write it out. And so basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the rule of thumb, which was way more true with spinning disks than it is with SSDs, but it is still true to some degree with
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs is that doing tons and tons of little files is way, way, way, way slower than doing one
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic file. And doing migration assistance is gonna let you copy tons and tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of little files. So you’re not gonna get the full rated speed, but it will go a lot faster if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a Thunderbolt connection or something similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and like I said, I didn’t sit there and watch the whole thing, cause it was literally hours, but I did take a couple of photographs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause I don’t think I could take screenshots cause you can’t really do anything while this is going on. But I have a photo that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took and I’m about two thirds of the transfer done. So there’s about a third remaining.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at this point I had transferred four and a half million files. So there was an hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and five minutes remaining at 551 megabytes a second. So yeah, it’s a lot of stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that being said, it seemed to work lickety split. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would said it was all done. I start the new machine. I had to do some stuff that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fairly annoying. Like I had to redo the whole dance with the audio hijack, audio capture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine, and like get that to re-initialize itself. I did get all the prompts that Snell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Jason has been understandably complaining about because he’s right to complain about it. You know, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this wants to look at the desktop. Oh, now it wants to look at your downloads. Oh, now it wants to do this. Oh, this other thing wants to look at the desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you do that? Hey, well, this, what about this? What about this? What about this? And it was not quite to the level that Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had, but it was not great. The only real problem I had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and perhaps this was my own lack of patience, I’m not sure, but I went to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start grabbing GIFs to send in like messages or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I happened to use Alfred as my launcher, and Alfred lets you do very quick and easy file system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey searches, that’s not unique to Alfred. And I would type in the name of a GIF that I knew I had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would get nothing. I was like, huh, that’s weird. I wonder why. And I thought, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alfred has no, Alfred’s just asking spotlight. So what’s going on with spotlights,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I tried spotlight. And I tried typing in the same file name. And it’s like, Nope, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. So I tried via the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the system preference or system setting or whatever, to try to get it to re index my home folder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I couldn’t get spotlight or, you know, MDU till
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John why are you trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to re index how long like it has to index it first once,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? I agree. So, maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John hadn’t finished the first pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. Which is why I thought maybe this was user error, but I gave it about a day before I gave up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the fact that it hadn’t indexed yet. I tried doing this in system settings, it didn’t get it to go. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found the MDUtil or whatever it is, where you tell it, all right, here’s what I want you to do, do it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure enough, within 20 minutes of me saying, go ahead and doing whatever incantation I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed to with MDUtil, to get the re-index to happen, then everything works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much straight away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve asked it. You tell
⏹️ ▶️ John straight away. We got to call him on his British as a man, his pronunciation. Yeah, at least hey, at least you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a command my utility. Unlike face recognition and photos, at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can look up what
⏹️ ▶️ John the the empty you tell incantation is to. It’s kind of weird that it didn’t do it after a day, but it does remind
⏹️ ▶️ John me of like the photo stuff where it’s like, hey, laptop, you’ve been here for a day. When are you going to get around to
⏹️ ▶️ John that first spotlight pass? And it’s like, oh, I don’t feel like the time is right yet. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can go to the command line and say, no, the time is right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So that was the biggest one of my problems with Spotlight not seeming to want to re index.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now that that’s done, pretty much everything has worked lickety split.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting that that I needed to tweak or fiddle with. But almost everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked. I’m sorry, not straight away, right away, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been it’s been really great. And I think part of the reason I was willing to to do migration assistant rather than start anew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that there was no like nagging software issue that I’ve been too lazy to properly deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the old machine. Like everything seemed fine. I had nothing I was running away from or anything like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so if you’re in a situation where you don’t have any complaints with your current system, migration assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets two thumbs up from me. Marco, do you want to talk at all about what you ran into or do we just want to move along?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so yeah, so I just had a bit of trouble getting migration assistant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the Thunderbolt connection automatically. I was able to solve it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within a half hour, 45 minutes of random troubleshooting and trying different things that people on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggested. This was the first time Migration Assistant has ever not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been just super easy and automatic for me. Usually, I’m a Migration Assistant unicorn. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figure after all these years of using it, one time I had to spend a half hour getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt to connect. Oh well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John worse, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are worse things. Overall has worked fine for me every other time. I did learn that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco target disk mode is kind of gone. That I thought that might be easier to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old Mac go in target disk mode and then just plug Thunderbolt cable in that way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t work anymore. There is, Apple Silicon Macs do have a like disk source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode you gotta like reboot into that recovery environment and launch it from there. But the migration assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process doesn’t recognize those. So like, not only does it not work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over Thunderbolt, like it doesn’t work at all. Migration Assistant, just, you cannot use it with target disk mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the source Mac is an Apple Silicon Mac anymore. That’s just unsupported now. So that was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bummer. But otherwise, I did get it working, you know, through Migration Assistant on both computers eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it was very fast, and I ran it overnight when I went to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you have like ethernet, or did you get on the Wi-Fi at all during that process?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the first couple times I did it, where I wasn’t using Thunderbolt correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I had told the computer during its little activation step, here’s my wifi network, yeah, please proceed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever I would start it that way, it would never use Thunderbolt. I would even try running ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the two computers, and that would work, but it would never switch over to Thunderbolt when that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an option. What I ended up having to do was on the source Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I went into Migration Assistant, set up a Thunderbolt bridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface in the network settings, give it a static IP address, and then set up internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing to share my Wi-Fi to my house over the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bridge. Then with the new computer, have it reset itself back to its initial state, which it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easy, fortunately. When you do that, if you have the Thunderbolt bridge with internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing connecting to the new computer, the new computer won’t ask you for your Wi-Fi information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will activate using the shared internet connection over that Thunderbolt cable to the old computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it bypasses Wi-Fi activation completely, and then the only networking that computer knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point is Thunderbolt. And then it works that way every single time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you happen to have trouble getting Thunderbolt recognized, have it reset itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s the Apple Silicon Macs have this thing during setup where you can say, eh, reset everything back to its initial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state. And so you do that, like if it fails, you do that, and then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very simple process once you learn that Thunderbolt bridge and internet sharing over Thunderbolt bridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trick. There’s probably a simpler way to get it to work. I mean, many people have reported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that theirs works just like yours. Just totally fine, perfectly, you just plug the cable in and it finds it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying everything. I tried, I found every Thunderbolt cable in my house, which, I mean, there’s not that many of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, there’s like three. But I tried them all. I tried different configurations. I tried different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. I tried, like, which computer do you plug into the cable first? When do you plug in? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried everything before that. Could not get it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long did you wait? To Casey’s point, I know this is old data, probably about Intel Max or whatever, but sometimes you’d plug in the
⏹️ ▶️ John faster thing and it wouldn’t find the faster interface immediately, but eventually it would find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So how long did you let it sit there to see if it’s going to find it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The longest I let it sit was about five or ten minutes. I like, you know, went to go brush my teeth and wash up and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I can’t and it hadn’t found it by then so I figured it wasn’t gonna find it and I wanted to go to bed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I made it work. So I’m like I’m not gonna say I’m not gonna let this go you know 75 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything I’m gonna make this go quickly or not at all. So anyway, got it to work eventually. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now amazing and I’m very very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the only thing I would say is I did not give the computers any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism to talk to each other, other than the Thunderbolt cable, I guess they may have been able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like sort out and it seems like they might they sort of did sort out a peer to peer Wi Fi. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like when I when I talked earlier about the Ethernet connection, there was no Ethernet connected to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey target computer, the new computer. Granted, my old one was in my normal setup with two displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you know, Ethernet and so on and so forth. But the new computer literally only had power and the Thunderbolt cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never plugged in Wi Fi information. I never plugged in an Ethernet adapter. It was just the Thunderbolt. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took a lot of no reallys and no thank you, no, not Wi-Fi. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I’m sure. But eventually, I don’t know if it just needed some time, to John’s point, to do the handshake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before it got satisfied and was happy with me, or what the deal was. But eventually, it did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give up on having me do the more conventional approach. And once it did that, everything was golden.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, these new computers, I love my… I can’t stress enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved but I still do I say it as though it’s dead. I love my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey m1 max MacBook Pro. It is Such a phenomenal computer. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so unreal to have the power of an iMac Pro in In your bag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and as much as I’m snarking with Marco about you know, 16 versus 14 Ultimately either one is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it doesn’t matter these machines are so frigging good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M1s were, and now you’re just cranking it up even more. So now instead of an iMac, an old and busted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Intel computer, cause who would want to use those now, instead of that in my bag, I’ve got a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio in my bag. You know what I mean? And, and the screen is so good. And I do feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s probably, I’m probably, you know, incepting myself or I’m telling myself that it’s true, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do feel like I noticed in the brighter area and Wegmans today that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the standard deaf stuff was just a touch brighter than I’m used to. That the screens are phenomenal. The keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are great. It’s got plenty of ports. Like everything about these machines is so freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. I cannot stress enough. If you have the means, I highly suggest you picking one up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, even an M2 or M1 MacBook Pro, particularly an M2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or M1 Max MacBook Pro, they are so, so good. We are in such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a golden time for the Mac and I’m so thankful for it. And so in love with it. This is such a great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time no matter what you get even if you don’t want a pro The m2 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is great Aaron has an m1 MacBook Air other than not having MagSafe with which bums me out a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s great. Like all of these machines are so Freaking good right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are still on Intel If you’re still on Intel for the love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all that’s good and holy treat yourself first to an ATP bit of merch But after you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your ATP merch treat yourself to a computer because they are so so good now
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you can find like a like a used m1 max MacBook Pro that
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a steal now because no it’s not gonna be as fast as the m3 is gonna be twice as fast Or whatever, but like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John such a good computer and you’re getting such a bargain It’s kind of like buying a very fancy car. They
⏹️ ▶️ John depreciate so fast the higher-end ones depreciate so fast So it may be hard to find
⏹️ ▶️ John it like, you know an m1 MacBook Air for one-third of the price but I bet you can find a
⏹️ ▶️ John well configured M1 Max for one third of what it was new. I know everyone wants like the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Black Friday sales to find like, oh, I wanted an M3 Max for $150 off. Look at the M1 Maxes. MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, they’re such a good deal now because, you know, the M2 is here and the M3 is here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the M1 Max to Marco’s point was such a great machine. And if you can get it for a bargain, especially one that’s spec’d
⏹️ ▶️ John up, because that’s the whole thing, like, you know, So if someone paid an extra $800 for that RAM, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to pay an extra $800 for that config when you buy it two years after it was introduced. So hunt for those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a good point. Similar to cars, you pay a lot for those options at purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at resale, they’re worth a lot less. And so similar to that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was saying, when you buy a used computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even just a close-out, last year’s model computer that’s still technically new, but just not the newest model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you pay a lot less for those RAM and SSD upgrades than they do when they’re new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could like, I personally, I would rather have a used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Max MacBook Pro than a brand new, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low spec, you know, M3 MacBook Air. Yeah, like base
⏹️ ▶️ John model, like where you get like, if you could get an M1 Max with like, you know, four terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John versus an M3 Max with 512, go to the M1 Macs all day. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the base config, when you’re, especially on a laptop where you’re constrained on RAM or storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to annoy you so much more than the speed will thrill you. Like, so get the M1 Macs with
⏹️ ▶️ John the more SSD and the more RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m just so happy, again, being in the laptop world. Like, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, you know, honestly, I feel like if I was a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan of Apple’s desktops right now I would feel a little left out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was in the desktop world for so long, I know what that’s like. But the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple’s desktop market, it feels kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad multitasking market. Where it’s like, here’s the thing that some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people care a lot about. And it seems like if you care a lot about Apple desktops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you care more about Apple desktops than Apple cares about Apple desktops.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s entirely true. Like we focus a lot about how they really screwed up with the Mac Pro and I kind of agree, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that the Studio exists is such a great change from before it existed. Like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just saying desktops, you’re not saying Mac Pro, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m saying including both desktops, because I think what I’m getting at is like, right now the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the MacBook Pro has all the best processors in the Apple lineup for most metrics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro, Like the M3 Max is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better in certain ways than the M2 Ultra. And so right now, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want the fastest Mac at certain things, at many things, it’s a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like if you’re in the desktop world, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Studio is always kind of playing second fiddle to the MacBook Pro now.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a staggered release schedule. I mean, like when the Ultra comes out, when the Ultra came out of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, It was twice as fast because it had two maxes in it. It was just straightforward. And you got, if you got the desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to enjoy that twice as fastness until the M3 Max comes out. But guess what? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be two M3 Maxes stuck together in an M3 Ultra, and then you’ll be twice as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John again. It’s a staggered release. And you’re right, right now, M3 Max is the fastest. And for most things,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for GPU stuff, where the Ultras tend to still win, but that will change when they come out. So yeah, it would be great
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were all put out together, especially since like they do sell Max Studios with the M3 Macs, why don’t we have that now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t know. They don’t have enough of them to go around. They sell more laptops or whatever. But I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t feel like the Mac desktop line is particularly neglected. I feel like the Mac Pro is in a bad spot. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that there’s the mini and the studio is an embarrassment of riches in recent decades when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to desktop Macs that don’t have a screen. You know what I mean? So I’m not super mad about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think an M3 Max or an M3 Ultra Mac Studio is gonna be a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing desktop machine, all things considered. So, yeah, right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops, laptops has always been a great place. And right now, due to the staggered release schedule and the fact that they’re not giving you
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac Studio with the M3 Macs, like I kind of understand it because they want to roll out the Macs and Ultra in the studio at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time. But I don’t think the desktop line is neglected. The Mac Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sad over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, it’s more just like, you know, there’s gonna be, you know, if they continue this release pattern,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then there’s always gonna be this like six or eight month span where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac where the MacBook Pro is in some ways better than the Mac studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that conditional you put at the beginning there, I think for the first three generations of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon, what we’ve learned is that it’s very difficult to discern any kind of pattern. Is it because just
⏹️ ▶️ John all this, you know, stuff happens or whatever. But boy, the M1 to M2 to
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 has not been a regular predictable cadence of anything. It’s been so
⏹️ ▶️ John weird, like in the M1, like Okay, it’s the first one, it’s gonna be weird, but then we’ll get a rhythm going. Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you never know what’s gonna happen. The three nanometer thing threw everything off. The fact that we got
⏹️ ▶️ John M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max at the same time where we had never gotten that before. So who the heck knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s gonna be like in M4, but I guess we’ll find out.
#askatp: What’s a Neural Engine?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Richard Levitt writes, what exactly is a neural engine? I imagine it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be something akin to database search optimizations, but it seems it must be more than that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a good question. The short answer is, for me personally, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need to know specifics, because I know what it is in general. We’ll put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I thought we had a link to a video about this. Maybe we just have a link to the documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John on GitHub, to Google’s TPU, Tensor Processing Unit, which is a similar type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing. Here’s what you need to know about the neural engine. And lots of things that are on the SOC that have names that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the CPU or GPU, to a lesser extent.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you have something that you know you’re gonna need to do a lot of, and it’s very regular,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have the general purpose CPU do it, because hey, the general purpose CPU can do all the math. It can do multiplication,
⏹️ ▶️ John division, addition, and subtraction, it can do bit shifts, it can do masks, it can do
⏹️ ▶️ John all of those things. And it can do a bunch of them at the same time and it can reorder instructions so it
⏹️ ▶️ John can keep those execution units running. It can do it, it’s a general purpose processor. But what if you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually what I’m gonna need to do is take this huge list of numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ John add every single one of them in a particular pattern to this other huge list of numbers and then put the result
⏹️ ▶️ John in another huge list. And I’m gonna need to do that just so many times you can’t even imagine. You could send
⏹️ ▶️ John all those numbers to the CPU. Here’s number number one from the third set. Here’s the first one from the second
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Please add them together, take the result, write it back into memory in this location. Okay, here’s the next number. And you can have five
⏹️ ▶️ John of them going at once because you have five execution units in the CPUs and you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco through. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have vector instructions. I mean, we ever since MMX.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so CPUs also have a thing, you know, that’s like SIMD, a single instruction, multiple data. It’s like, do I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John add individual numbers? What if I could add together five numbers at the same time? I’ll just pack all those five numbers into
⏹️ ▶️ John a single thing, Send it to the SIMD engine. Here’s five numbers, five other numbers in a single operation. Five. Those five numbers all
⏹️ ▶️ John get added to the other five numbers. I think those five results and put them in a new location. That’s five times faster. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John SIMD, every CPU core has some kind of thing. I figure what they call it for ARM. Isn’t like neon instructions or
⏹️ ▶️ John something? It’s not. Yeah. But that’s still the general purpose CPU. But you’re like, no, you don’t understand. I don’t have like
⏹️ ▶️ John five numbers to add together. I have like 300000 numbers to add together. And you’re going to be doing literally the
⏹️ ▶️ John same operation to all of them. Right. Let’s say it’s like matrix operations, but you can look up on a Wikipedia page where there’s various operations.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can perform to matrices. It’s a rule book. You take this from there and that from there and do that to this and put the
⏹️ ▶️ John results over there and you just do it over and over again. So the neural engine, a lot of the algorithms
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to run for these, you know, machine learning, neural processing, inference, whatever things
⏹️ ▶️ John are like that. You’re gonna have to do something over and over again to just so many numbers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John doing five of them at once or 10 of them at once, that’s not really gonna cut it. The TPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try to find a link to the video for the show notes, but the TPU stuff, So here’s some specs. Obviously the TPU is an entire gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that only does stuff kind of like the neural engine does, but it’s custom designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to just do this one thing. So instead of having a one or two little adders and they pull from memory and
⏹️ ▶️ John they add the numbers together and write the result back into memory, they sit there and say, all right, give me the first 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers. And give me the other group of 100,000 numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m gonna smush them all together and now I’ll write the result on it. And that’s all they do. They can’t do any other,
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not like general purpose processors. They’re like, they’re made to do this, right? So here’s some numbers from the TPU thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again, is much bigger than Neural Engine, but it gives you an idea of the scales here. The TPU can do 250,000 operations per
⏹️ ▶️ John clock cycle. So for a general
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose CPU, you turn the crank, one clock cycle goes by. It’s like, I added five numbers together. Good job,
⏹️ ▶️ John general purpose CPU. I added 250,000 numbers together in that same clock cycle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other thing is, How many operations per instruction? 256 million
⏹️ ▶️ John operations per instruction. You can send it one instruction that says, hey, take these 256 million, take these 175
⏹️ ▶️ John because they know, it’s like, I’m not gonna send you
⏹️ ▶️ John to these onesie twosie. I’m not gonna pack them into groups of five or 10 to do SIMD. I’m just gonna tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s 100 million numbers over here and another 100 million numbers over here. Smush them
⏹️ ▶️ John together and write the new 100 million out in the other place. Ready, go, one instruction.
⏹️ ▶️ John 250,000 operations per cycle. That’s what the neural engine does. Obviously not on that scale, because it’s a tiny little thing, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ John functional units that are designed to do the specific thing that they know you need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John for various machine learning algorithms. And those things need to do some brain dead simple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing over and over again on huge lists of number. And they do not want to be fed those numbers onesie twosie.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want to get them all at once, smush them together through this gigantic, massively parallel machine, like
⏹️ ▶️ John in a single turn of the crank, and then do that over and over again. That’s what the neural engine. Now, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are those operations? What is it doing? Is it doing multiply accumulate? Is it doing matrix transformations? I don’t actually know,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But it doesn’t matter. That’s what this thing, that’s what these functional units do. And it’s even more
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, not brain dead, but like simple and parallelizable than things like the H265 encoder,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that has a job to do like encoding and decoding video, but that is a much more complicated job
⏹️ ▶️ John than what these things do. These are just like, think of them as just huge rows of these machines
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one big crank at the end and you turn it and it doesn’t process five widgets, it process hundreds or thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of widgets all in each turn of the crank. That’s where you get the bang for the buck for the neural engine.
#askatp: Re-file bugs every beta?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Hoffman writes, with regard to Apple beta OSs, how often is it appropriate to report the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug? Do you report it after every update or do you wait until the GM release and report it again if it still exists?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, since Apple’s feedback mechanism is totally f***ing broken, then you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it hourly because that’s the only way you have a chance of them noticing it. So hourly is our answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Santiago writes.
⏹️ ▶️ John who you ask. It depends who you ask. It’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to know what the right thing to do is. I’ll give you an example of my window dragging bug, which continues to drag on. Ha ha. Ha
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll tell you what I chose to do there and how that’s working out for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John what I chose to do is what I usually choose to do is file a bug. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard very often from people inside Apple that if the conditions
⏹️ ▶️ John change in some way, it might be a good idea to file a new report. Maybe the old one got
⏹️ ▶️ John chucked in the trash can. Maybe the old one didn’t have enough information. Maybe the other one is caught in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, limbo somewhere or whatever. Like say something has changed. There’s a new beta that comes out. Or in my
⏹️ ▶️ John case, you’ve learned new information about the bug. Oh, I found a better isolation. I was mistaken about what
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought caused it. I filed the bug against the wrong component. When you do a bug report, it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick like, what is this bug about? And it’s a pop-up menu. And there is an other choice, but I always
⏹️ ▶️ John fear the other choice now I’m like at the whims of whoever like, like triages the others,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then the other choices are like, I don’t know, what is like window dragging? Needless to say, there’s no choice for
⏹️ ▶️ John window dragging. There’s a system performance choice, which is kind of good, but like when I’m filing a bug against,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m against a bug against an app, there’s probably a choice for like photos or whatever, but anyway, it’s hard to know where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re filing it. And so if you learn something new about this bug, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you say like, oh, I thought it was a bug in X, but it’s really a bug in Y, file a new one. if a
⏹️ ▶️ John new version of the OS comes out and it’s still happening in that new OS, file a new one partially
⏹️ ▶️ John because I imagine and that if there’s a bug filed against the OS that they
⏹️ ▶️ John just released, those get more priority than bugs that you filed against the previous version because it’s like, ah, that was the
⏹️ ▶️ John old version. We’re not looking at those bugs so much anymore, but oh, we just released a new version and there’s a bug against that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets looked at more. The downside of that approach is as I found out with my window dragging bug, from
⏹️ ▶️ John what I have heard, work is happening on my window dragging bug, but it’s happening attached to
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my older reports from an older version, which is a shame because all my new good information
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the new reports, like as I’ve learned more and I’ve refiled against new versions of the US, but it happened to get
⏹️ ▶️ John picked up a while ago on one of the early versions. So now I have my effort.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say the feedback scattered around, but let’s be honest, there’s no feedback, right? But there is a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John bit, apparently some metadata changed and recently I wanted them that said that a fix is coming or whatever, But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t gotten any replies on any of them. By filing multiple reports, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure which one of those, if any, is actually being worked on by Apple. And if they are working on one, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not working on the one that you’re putting your effort into. You keep adding new comments. Oh, I’ve discovered new things. Here’s a better sample project.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s a new screen recording. Here’s a new cyst diagnose. Oh, the new version came out. And I retested it, and it’s still there. And I filed
⏹️ ▶️ John a new bug. You may think you’re doing important work, but it could be that that bug is being worked on by
⏹️ ▶️ John the second one you filed a year ago. So as with all things, I don’t know how best to handle this, but I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John filing new bugs is probably a good idea because if you file one, two versions of Mac OS ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, I hope they get to that one eventually. If it still exists, refile against the new OS. If a new beta
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out and it’s still there, if you don’t refile, add a new comment that says, hey, just so you know, I tested this
⏹️ ▶️ John in the new beta and it’s still there. Is that the right or best thing to do? We do what
⏹️ ▶️ John we can out here. We throw stuff over the wall and we hope it sticks. But I think the only thing I can definitively say is the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to do is assume that the one bug you filed a while ago is sufficient, because it almost certainly isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is just, so a long time ago, a deep cut on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show maybe, I discussed a challenge that I had against one of Apple’s APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where my solution was to build an automatic kicking machine, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is, this was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible hack that like, when you’re exporting a share clip from Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes the video encoding API that I’m using to generate the shared clip video files,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some deep Apple API, sometimes it just hangs. And the only solution is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cancel it and restart it. And so I actually built this process in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clip sharing feature where it observes the progress. And if the progress stalls for too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, it just cancels it and starts over. And I describe it on the show as an automatic kicking machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is kind of how we are treating Apple’s bug reporting system. and how Apple employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell us to treat it. The fundamental problem is the Apple bug reporting system is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just hopelessly, deeply, massively broken and dysfunctional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at every possible level. And it reflects a huge amount of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the company has internally managing itself. And then also the problems it has managing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of both feedback or communication or QA or prioritization from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the outside world. Every part of this system in the company is dysfunctional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and inefficient at best. And so we are told by many Apple employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and over again, you gotta file bugs often. Yes, it helps, file them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often. Oh, and Apple employees have told us, every single beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refile your bugs that aren’t fixed yet as new bugs, new copies. Not even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t just go and comment on the old one, refile them. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this does is it takes a massively broken system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just breaks it more. The official word from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not official, the unofficial word from Apple employees is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to dump more of our time and effort into this broken system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasting our time even more so that they can avoid fixing their problems on their end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their deep fundamental problems in this area, we should collectively all waste all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our time way more to make their dysfunctional system work slightly better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. What I say is, F that. I’m going to just complain to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the press, because as you know, running to the press never helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it always does. Steven It always does. And so, yeah, maybe file a bug, but also talk about it as much as you possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Talk about it on Mass. Make blog posts about it. If you have a podcast, talk about it on the podcast. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really what helps with Apple to get over their broken bug system is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public attention on something. What helps is, like many other parts of Apple, what helps is the right people seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And if you go through the plain bug filtering system that you get in the feedback assessment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get through that, the odds of anyone ever seeing that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m convinced, are very, very low. The odds of the right people seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, like people who could actually maybe do anything about it are even lower than that and then the odds that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those people will actually have time to fix your bug seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even lower than that and so you have to treat a bug that you care about like something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that needs marketing you have to market your bug you can’t just submit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in the background in feedback assistant and hope it will get fixed it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to get in public and talk on Twitter and talk on mass on and talk on threads and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else, get it out there and and market your bug. If you want Apple to have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance of fixing it. And no, this system absolutely should not work this way. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many problems with this. But it’s the truth. If you don’t market your bug, it won’t be fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, recognize, it’s kind of hard to market your bug when you don’t have a tech podcast. Maybe you don’t have a popular
⏹️ ▶️ John blog. It’s even difficult to say, Okay, well, I have a popular blog, maybe a popular blog will pick
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. Like we recognize this is not great advice for regular people who- No, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is why it’s so broken. Yeah, exactly. But we’re just saying, I mean, we’re just saying, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John think that it works because that’s worked for you. And yes, it has worked for us. Maybe there are other things that work for people without
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of public platform, but honestly, there’s so few things that we found to work that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s worth communicating. This is one approach that has worked, even though we recognize it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a solution for pretty much anybody except for this tiny, weird minority of people who do have an
⏹️ ▶️ John audience. Although I still even, you know, I think about the Air Network Change thing, which yes, we did
⏹️ ▶️ John have something to follow up about it, but I got pushed it next week. Don’t worry, it hasn’t gone away. This is a bug that’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John hanging around, apparently since 2019. I only really heard about it when it started happening to me and that’s a similar story
⏹️ ▶️ John to other people, right? You’ll know when this bug is getting close to
⏹️ ▶️ John being fixed by whoever is responsible for fixing, when there’s like a verge story about it. or network
⏹️ ▶️ John change plaguing people who use Chrome based things. Like that’s when you like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say it’s not somebody’s pet bug, like my photos thing or my window dragging thing that I constantly talk about on my stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast. Let’s say it’s something more general, like our network change, which is happening to lots of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s gonna cause that to get fixed? No one who’s working on Chrome or has any control over this is probably listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to this podcast because that’s really not our focus, right? But if there’s a story on the verge about it, or some
⏹️ ▶️ John popular tech website, or like the big thing with like with apples and keyboards. There’s a New York Times
⏹️ ▶️ John story about our network changed or butterfly keyboards or whatever. You can be sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is paying attention now. And it goes from the top down, right? It’s not like the people in the rank file don’t wanna fix your bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix your bug. They don’t have time. No one gives them the time to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re not a programmer, you might not know this, but most people who are programmers, especially good programmers, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have responsibility for something, whatever it is, I work on the DNS subsystem on the Mac or
⏹️ ▶️ John the sound things, or I work on these APIs on iOS or whatever, the last thing you want is to
⏹️ ▶️ John know that there’s some bug in the new version of the thing that you just released and not be
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to fix it, not be given time to fix it. You wanna fix it, you don’t wanna put out code that’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I made a dumb mistake, oh, I see what it is. You wanna get that fixed out as soon as possible. But if you work in a big organization,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, getting a bug fix out, quote, as soon as possible could take weeks or months, and B, you might not even be
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to do that because you’ve got a bunch of other stuff you’re supposed to be doing, you don’t get to set your own priorities. And it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John when some vice president sees a story on The Verge that they talk to their person below them, talks to their person,
⏹️ ▶️ John love talks to the person below them that finally they say, hey, that bug you’ve been wanting to fix for six months. Now you have two days to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Go. That’s how things work in big companies. And it sounds dysfunctional, but if it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work this way, programmers are to spend their entire time gold plating the one corner of the functionality they’re responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for. We never have any new features. So you have to find a balance between those two ends of the spectrum.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, we often think Apple is way too far in the direction of ignoring bugs, but you can go too far in the other direction too. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to see Apple go too far in the other direction for a change of pace, but I’m not holding my breath. So
⏹️ ▶️ John right now the best we’re doing is, you know, complaining on podcasts and trying to drag Apple kicking and streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more towards the gold plating angle, which is a businessy phrase that maybe people haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John heard and maybe it’s out of date or whatever, but I can’t think of a better name for the other one at the other end of the spectrum. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they’re way too far on the end of the spectrum where bugs just go unfixed for years and years, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John they get a story in the verge, unless they get a New York Times story, unless some senior vice president actually notices,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and with the air network change, it’s has the great thing about it. It’s like, it’s not even clear whose bug it is. It is. Is it Apple for its
⏹️ ▶️ John is Chrome’s fault? Is it both of them? Is it neither? It’s just like a problem that users are encountering
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not severe enough to cause to appear as a story anywhere except for here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe someday it will be.
#askatp: Embeding photo metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Santiago writes, I just noticed that when you geotag photos in the Mac Photos app, the location information is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added to the file metadata. It’s probably kept somewhere in the library. Quick aside, I think this is true for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music as well, which is frustrating, but nevertheless. Santiago continues, this means that when using some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup solutions, that data will be missing. Is there any way to take the location information from the photos library and add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to their respective photos? This is why I process all that junk before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ingestion into photos. I don’t know if there’s a way where I’ll ask my co-host here in in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is, I view photos as kind of a lens into my photo library, rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the bespoke or the, the, the, the, I can’t think of the one I’m looking for the, um, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one true version of the photo library, and that’s, that’s probably dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me and I’m probably missing out on some things, but that’s the way I treat it. Cause I just, I want the files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stand on their own and have all that metadata, just like Santiago does. So, uh, John is our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos expert, I guess. Is there a way to do this that you know of?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so first thing, there’s that feature that is described here, the fact that like, hey, there’s what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in the file, but then there’s also the separate stuff that’s in the library and the library stuff takes precedence when you’re viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John it through the lens of Apple Photos, but then it’s not written to the file and backup programs don’t see that. That is also kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John feature in certain scenarios. One of the features I’ve talked about about Apple Photo Library that I love is you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do all sorts of stuff to your photo knowing that the original is still there. Crop it, alter it, do
⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff, none of that gets baked in. So you always can say, oh, I’ve changed my mind. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do it frequently. I’ll go back to a photo that I edited seven years ago and I’ll be like, you know what? I’m better at photo editing now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me undo most of that and redo it better. And there’s no problem because the changes
⏹️ ▶️ John you made in photos are written to the photos library, not to your file, your file’s unmodified. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s great. But in this case, like, well, what about stuff that I really like, it’s not like edits or whatever. I just would
⏹️ ▶️ John rather have the date in the photo. The good thing about Apple’s photo library, and I think also about their music library is
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of the rare cases where Apple has public open supported third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces to the photo library. It doesn’t help you as a user unless you can find an
⏹️ ▶️ John app that does it, but technically speaking, is there a way to take that location information from the library
⏹️ ▶️ John and add it to the photos? There is a way. You’d have some code that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in an app that would read the library and write that data out to the photos and modify them. Someone
⏹️ ▶️ John could 100% write that program, Maybe they already exist. Maybe next week, 50 people will send us a bunch of app suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But like, this is one of those cases where it’s not like, oh, Apple doesn’t let you do that and there’s no API for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is, there is an API for doing all of that. You could do this, one could do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there are not lots of apps like this, it may reflect the fact that most people are like, ah, it’s in the photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine, I don’t care. Like not everybody cares like Casey does of having it baked into the file or like Santiago does.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m saying it’s technically possible. So I’m hoping somewhere out there is an app that you
⏹️ ▶️ John could do this. There’s also command line tools and other things that you could potentially do this for. Obviously Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John does it like upfront with his own tools before he goes to the photo library. But if the dates are in the library,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, there is a way for one to programmatically get that data out. And there also is a way for
⏹️ ▶️ John one to programmatically write that to a photo file. That is all technically possible and supported without any
⏹️ ▶️ John weird hacks or whatever. It’s just a question of whether somebody wrote that app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Notion. And thanks to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, 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 and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John check podcast so long
Marco goes to a hardware store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I heard some rumblings that you had some sort of hardware-related, and I don’t mean computing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean hardware store-related project, which means you presumably made something between five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and five hundred trips to Home Depot recently?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not Home Depot. Fortunately, this was with a local hardware store in town. So this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the new house. The HVAC people had installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some dumb thermostats even though I had I had requested smart thermostats and in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had requested nest thermostats. Now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the very first generation nest thermostats a million years ago. They they’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house that we are selling. I’m not taking my ancient nest thermostats with me. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staying with the house. They are they are quite old. Some of them have like you know lines through the screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything but they still work. Anyway Anyway, at the beach, when I smartified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these thermostats, I tried Nest first and it gave me all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of problems with connectivity. Because the walls here are very thick and radio signals aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very effective here, they get blocked really easily, Wi-Fi is very challenging here. I had constant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with the modern Nests and I ended up switching over to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ecobee HomeKit smart thermostats. The Ecobee thermostats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started out being a little more ugly and clunky than the Nests,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at least they were home kit and at least I was done with the Nest hardware. And then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept getting software updates that make them even worse somehow. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ecobee recently redesigned their interface to do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change the temperature of the thermostat on the thermostat,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which you would think would be an action that they would optimize the design to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is always something that Nest was fantastic at. And now Nest makes a whole bunch of thermostats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which are like those really, like they made like a really cheap version. And by the way, and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Upgrade Plus listeners, I know Jason Snell is literally just making the opposite move like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. So we’ll see, maybe Jason, maybe I’ll mail you a whole bunch of Echobee’s someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, Echobee has worked fine with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomeKit setup. It doesn’t work exactly as well as I would want it to. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at HomeKit Secure Video cameras, which again, I’ve had my issue with my Logitech Circle Views, maybe I’ll mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those to Jason too. Don’t get Circle Views. HomeKit Secure Video, the way it works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you set up a device that uses it, for most things, including Logitech ones, that’s all they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might have their own separate app, but they’re really first and foremost designed for HomeKit Secure Video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not the way Ecobee’s are with HomeKit thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s more like, okay, yeah, we’ll talk to HomeKit, but that’s not what we’re designed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ecobee wants you to use their own app. It’s very similar to Nest in the type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of problems it tries to solve. It tries to get you to do all these efficient things and be smart and automatically adjust your temperature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all this stuff, most of which I disable because it doesn’t really work very well for people who work at home. The Ecobee’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have had moderate mixed success with. I don’t hate them enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace them but I don’t like them enough to buy any more of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the recent update to the to the UI and the Ecobee’s makes it so that if you want to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the temperature on the thermostat it takes something like five or six taps and a decent amount of time is you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait for it to like wake up and then animate into a few different positions and then you can adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and it’s so error prone it’s I don’t know what they were thinking with this update like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad and the ecobees they don’t look as good as the nest even to even to start with even when they’re off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t look as good so it’s it’s it’s a downgrade anyway the new house that we’re renovating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a is a much simpler more traditional layout the thermostats are just there’s one upstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one downstairs they’re both in the middle of the hallway so they get great Wi-Fi coverage from anywhere so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a much easier thing so I said you know what let me go back to nest because the echo bees are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so annoying to use I’ll just do nest so get there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HVAC people we have all new brand new HVAC systems because this this house was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it were heavily renovating it because it was a very old house that was really not kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up much it’s kept up now we’re renovating everything brand new HVAC systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they install the wrong thermostat so yeah let me just do this myself like it we’re trying everything done as quickly as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can move in expense so I go there today first of all there was no one working today so there was no one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around to like you know help out or borrow tools from and look around the house and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are no tools anywhere like this is a construction site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they clean it up pretty well and there’s like you know buckets and nails and you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dumpster full of drywall fragments but there’s no tools there’s one little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area of the house where we were able to like shove a few of our things and not have them be touched. And in that one little area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found a small battery-powered drill that had one bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Phillips bit. Okay, that’s, I can do something with that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was able to take the old thermostats off. And fortunately, you know, once you get in there, the wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all these little press wires. And what I learned when I opened up the nest, the nest actually comes with, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the nicer nest, like the old kind with the turning knob, because they’re more pleasant to use and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they let you change the temperature really easily on them. A feature that Ecobee should learn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so the Nest actually comes with a little tiny screwdriver to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take off the old thermostat’s wiring and you can pop in the new one. So anyway, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic tools. A little little tiny flathead screwdriver and a medium-sized Phillips screwdriver and this drill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was able to get one of them installed just fine, but I noticed when I did the wiring, like wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wire colors on this are not at all what I’ve seen on any other thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. Now, I’ve installed a decent number of smart thermostats, I’ve never seen the color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scheme that the installers of the new system used. I’m trying to figure out, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the heck are these wires? Where is the common wire? What is this blue one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all these colors, and I’m looking up up on my phone, what the heck are these colors? Well, I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I had a multimeter, I could just test them and see where, you know, where is the 24 volts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AC? Like where, is it between this and this or this and this? And I didn’t want to like, you know, start to short them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together to like see, oh, does, if I short these two together, does the heat turn on? Like I didn’t want to start doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I knew what I was shorting together. So I’m like, all right, well, let me, let me, if I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had that, and then one of the wires, they hadn’t connected yet, like the, they hadn’t connected the AC stuff. They’d only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected heat, because it was the bare minimum to keep the work going through this cold month. So I’m like, let me connect the AC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, I might as well. And I’m going to need a multimeter to figure out which of these wires has that, and they’re not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stripped. So I’m like, alright, so let me run to the hardware store real quick, there’s a hardware store right in town, I’ll get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap multimeter and a cheap wire stripper, and I’ll get this going. And all of my other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point is a 45 minute, or a half hour drive away, like over the sand, like I’m not going to go all the way back, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get all my other stuff. Let me just go to the hardware store right in town.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, trip number one. Multimeter and wire strippers. Great. Go back to the house, figure it out. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I know what these wires do. And just, let me just test. I’ve measured the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voltages, they’re all right. Let me just test. I’m pretty sure this one’s the air conditioning wire. It’s blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems like it would make sense. It’s not standard, but it’s at least something. It’s the only other wire. Okay, let me try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pushed, I connected that wire to the other one, and a little spark formed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the two wires. I’m like, hmm, that’s probably not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it stopped working. Like, then there was no voltage in any of the wires. I’m like, oh crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did I just break my brand new HVAC
⏹️ ▶️ John unit? I don’t know if you’re gonna break somebody’s thing. Breaking your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own works out. Yeah, so I’m like, all right, now how do I solve this problem? Like, all right, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just broke something. And at first I tried, let me just go flip the breaker off. Wait a minute flip back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on see if I can reset whatever needs to be reset did that no luck. Oh, man
⏹️ ▶️ John You came to the point where now you realize you’re gonna have to explain to the people you’re paying to fix your house that you’re like You know when you weren’t there
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided I’m gonna I’m going to play contractor and pretend that I can fix the house, but I broke it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that’s and that’s what I was dreading. I’m like, oh man, can I I gotta figure out?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t want to have to call the HVAC people back to like look hey, I tried to use, I just broke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my slash your brand new system.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like if they came to you and said, yeah, we made a bunch of changes to the overcast code and now it doesn’t compile anymore. We’re not sure what we did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, we uploaded that, we uploaded that bill to the app store. Just, can you fix it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Like I’m like, I felt like such an idiot. I’m like, oh man, like I should not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done this. So were you,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, you decided at this point to avoid that you’re gonna dig further. It sounds like you did considering you made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, well, it was time for lunch. I go have lunch and as I’m eating my quick microwave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, I’m looking up YouTube videos like, you know, what if a Bosch air handler doesn’t have any…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I somehow found through web searches and Reddits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that, an HVAC installer saying, hey, these people keep blowing their control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board fuse. And somebody else was like, oh, that’s usually what happens when there’s a short somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the thermostat wiring.
⏹️ ▶️ John It happens when homeowners start connecting wires, they don’t know what to do and the spark forms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and I’m like, Oh, I short of my control wiring probably and then and I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more research into that. It’s like, Oh yeah, this tends to happen, especially if you short the common wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly to the other side, you know, the other side of the transformer, then it will blow this fuse instantly. Great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is almost definitely what I just did. Like it everything lined up. I definitely short of the common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wire to the R wire. Definitely. Okay, so I go back to the house and I like go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crawl space under the house find the new air handler my heart where it where it work how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I get to this control board and it has really big flathead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screws that hold the panel on on top of the control board and I don’t have a flathead screwdriver
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have a dime because you’re not loading in the 50s with change in your pockets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I scoured the house no call for anything that could yeah I didn’t fight I thought of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coins I couldn’t find anything that could be a A big flathead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screwdriver. I tried the little one that I had. It was way too small, wouldn’t turn it at all. Nothing I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere in the house. I’m looking at the strips of nail gun nails that look like ammo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, maybe if I use the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of one of those. Yeah. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you were even just in our parents’ generation, I know that my dad, when I was growing up, when he
⏹️ ▶️ John came home from work and he emptied out his pockets, he was always emptying change out of one of the pockets. Like he had his
⏹️ ▶️ John wallet, he had his keys, but he always had loose coins, And that just is not the way I live my
⏹️ ▶️ John life as an adult at the age he was. Like, yeah, having, dad’s
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly having change in their pocket is not a thing anymore, I feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m not like a knife guy either, so I don’t have knives in my pockets or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John your Leatherman strapped to your belt for 364 days, so on the 365th, you can unscrew these big screws. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I’m learning is you need to really refine your EDC after this experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you could just have a box of tools at the house that’s being worked on.
⏹️ ▶️ John just let the people who you’re paying to work on it. Anyway, there’s many solutions here. Continue, what did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually get? So, and I’m like, I’m pretty sure it is this blown fuse. I don’t wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make two more trips. Because I don’t know how big and what kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fuse. So I can’t just go buy a fuse and a screwdriver in the same trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta take the donkey across with the chicken. Yes! You don’t wanna bring the hay at the same time. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first I had to go buy a screwdriver, then go back to the house, take the cover off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the fuse, pull it out, sure enough it is very blown, and then go back to the hardware store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a third time saying I need this please, buy, I bought a five pack, so I’m like, you know, first of all it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all coming, and second of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all I’m like, I’m probably gonna need this. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, finally got it all back, popped it in, it worked perfectly, sure enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was indeed the common wire. Apparently they are sometimes blue now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now, finally, I have my Nest thermostats in the house. And now I have to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them patch the giant space out holes they made with the wrong thermostats.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, think about the smart thermostats and the pressing connectors. The thing that I was always fearing when I was messing with mine is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the cable with all those various wires is just barely long enough to reach,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because you have to kind of connect it. And I was like, if I screw this up, Like if I like bend it
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth too many times and like the stripped end breaks off or whatever, like I don’t have, I’d have to like
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the basement and somehow free some slack somehow to go up through the walls. And it’s just so precarious
⏹️ ▶️ John with these tiny little wires and these little press connectors. Like for all the, you know, that we complained about like computer
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors, the lack of connectors with just like house wiring is, you know, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re in a very old house because in new houses, like, oh, a good electrician will leave you lots of slack and the wires are very robust
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re sturdy. But if you have an old house, I mean, you don’t have the excuse, this is new construction. But in my
⏹️ ▶️ John old house, the wires are just barely long enough to reach and older
⏹️ ▶️ John than everybody in your family combined. And
⏹️ ▶️ John ready to fall apart at the moment you like look at them funny. So it’s always a little bit scary to be
⏹️ ▶️ John messing with stuff. But yeah, I’m sure the people who are working in your house are glad that you had this little do it yourself project
⏹️ ▶️ John that you accomplished without them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m just not going to tell them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re gonna notice that the thermostat that they installed is no longer there and this new thing is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, I guess I guess they will they will eventually see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did you do with the old thermostat that you paid for by the way? I rested it on the floor below it and walked away.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re gonna be like, oh the thermostat fairy came in the night. And just
⏹️ ▶️ John set this down. Yeah, you put out wooden shoes and it takes your old thermostat and puts them inside. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re gonna think. You need to communicate. I mean, I do feel like you should own up and say
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah So I’m a little bit of a do-it-yourselfer and only took me three trips to the hardware store
⏹️ ▶️ John And one blown fuse, but
⏹️ ▶️ John did it. So let me know if you need my help later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just glad that that was a fuse and I didn’t like fry the whole control port. That’s what I was really afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John what fuses are for right? But I believe in you you could have if you had a coin you could have bridge that
⏹️ ▶️ John That fuse thing with a coin and then really blown the board. Oh god It’s the old thing is like, yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need a fuse. Just take some foil off your pack of Marblos and put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what do you need a fuse for? Just bypass it. I’m sure it’s fine. Yeah. Fuses
⏹️ ▶️ John are pointless anyway, right? Speaking of microwaves, I think that’s one of the few things that did go wrong with microwaves.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do believe I blew a fuse at one point, like those microwave fuses. And I don’t know why. And I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced it. And it hasn’t blown since in years. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still can’t believe you’re using a screenless microwave for all this time. It’s got a screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it doesn’t work, but it’s there. I mean, it might as well not be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, well, no, it’s it. It has become
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does. I think one of these seven segments in one of the things lights up
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like just one like never changes, but it’s like always just anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t like occasionally blink on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, oh, it’s a multiple. Don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it’s very sensitive about its screen, but we consider it a whole microwave. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John now that we did that episode, I swear, after we did that episode, the fan is starting to make noises. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John did you hear the podcast microwave? What are you doing? Get the brevil, you gotta get the brevil. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a vibration. Maybe if I touch it, it’ll went away. So I’m giving this thing side eye now. And to be fair, already,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the door opening, closing was being wonky, which is why I had done that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco research that I referenced. But now that
⏹️ ▶️ John we did that podcast, it’s like, I heard you talking about me. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, look, I know your wife listens to this podcast. I’m just saying, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, both Christmas and your birthday are coming up real soon. She
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want a new microwave either. When I was doing microwave research, everyone I showed her, she’s like, oh, I don’t like that. What’s wrong with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microwave? I mean, you just named quite a few big things that are wrong with your microwave.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you know, we’ll see. But I do have my eye on that. I’m asking for so much kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff for my Christmas stuff, but it doesn’t currently include a microwave. Just eight cheese graters.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it is similar stuff like that. It’s way cheaper than a microwave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a microwave on John’s counter. That’s the end of the song.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve got to say, I was so damn proud of myself when I got the thing working. Like, I was so ashamed
⏹️ ▶️ John You had erased the memories of the previous failures. This is a pure victory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was totally worth like two hours. Flawless execution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually, a few months ago, I told myself I was going to replace the train thermostats came with our redone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HVAC that we did in 2014, I told myself I was going to replace them with like an Ecobee or something equivalent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I looked specifically at the Ecobee and I wussed out because even though I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think my HVAC is actually that unique, I’m just so scared that I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screw something up.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could totally do it. It’ll be fine. I mean, all these thermostats, the Ecobee and I imagine the Nest ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John they come with just such extensive instructions and like wizards to guide you through. And if you do not have a weird house,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be on one of those happy paths.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, the fact that I was able to do it with almost no tools and, you know, and basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no relevant expertise, except having done it a whole bunch in the
⏹️ ▶️ John the important thing, and I think this is maybe this is where you went wrong, Marco, is assuming the installers
⏹️ ▶️ John had installed the one that they installed correctly. That is your key to understanding what all the wires do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Well, if they use the same letters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. But that’s the thing about the guides. They sell you like this may be why Y1 on your thing or maybe R2 on
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing. Like they try to cover all the bases and I, you know, again, the historical baggage of USB
⏹️ ▶️ John is nothing compared to the letters that they assigned to thermostat wires and the decades of history behind
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that only like these installers know and that you don’t even need to know the history. It’s like, you just suffice it to say, you just have to know that
⏹️ ▶️ John R1 and R2 and Y and G and P and Q and the colors and you know, it’s just, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John once you know it, I’m sure it’s fine, but you don’t have to know all like the history behind it. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John for yours Casey, when you take the worst mistake you can do is take off your other one, okay, old thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John take it off, and then just be left with a bunch of wires in your face, you made a big mistake there. Take a picture of the back of the old one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a worst case. Oh, I’ve done that
⏹️ ▶️ John already. A worst case, you can always put the old one back exactly the way it was, and then label the wires. If you have two wires
⏹️ ▶️ John that are the same color, label them, put a little piece of tape around them, label them, you know. They give you that with the kits. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy one of these things, like the Ecova thing, comes with little tiny tags to put on the wires.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t, because they know you’re gonna lose track of the two, both of the, in my case, all the wires are the color of ash,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? In my walls, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just all ash gray, or space black, Apple would call it. So you have to label
⏹️ ▶️ John them, because they literally all look identical. They all look like they’ve been in a fire, and they all look identical. So they give you
⏹️ ▶️ John stickers with the thermostat to put on your little wires, because they know you’re going to forget. So I believe in you,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey. Unlike the fiber optic thing, I think you can do the-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The thermostat replacement. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, my system isn’t that unique, but it’s like a heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have nine connected wires here. Oh wait one of them’s a loop. What the heck is this?
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. It’s fine. Look at how easy this is. He’s got these are huge fat wires with plenty of slack
⏹️ ▶️ John and gigantic connectors This is like glory. You should see the back of the ecobee thing is like doing micro
⏹️ ▶️ John surgery compared to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no this this would be fine the bigger problem is you’d have to use one of those ugly big plate covers to cover up
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the size of it. His
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hole is small there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like a side of the screws Yeah, I think this is we’re zoomed
⏹️ ▶️ John in pretty far here I think he could get away with I think a nest might span those two Phillips screws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and left No I know also the problem is nest mounts on top and bottom so you could use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom screw you have drilled a new one In the top and you have to seal up the left and right ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah, no I you could you could do it It’s it’s it’s not any harder than like changing a light switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually easier because you’re dealing with low voltage wiring
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, look at your you all’s ears are separate colors you see the jumper between RH and RC with the red
⏹️ ▶️ John one going into RC. Like that’s the tricky stuff that would be a pain for you to figure out on your own. But here it is. You got the key. Like assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John labels are correct, which they probably are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you have a common wire. Yeah. Which is blue, just like my new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in theory, you know, even if I really hosed it up, we’re friendly with our HVAC installer. Like we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talk to them periodically. Just why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t you just have them do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? Well, I should. But I also I also want to be self-sufficient. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it yourself way cheaper. I think it’s worth trying it yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you can call him and say, hey, I tried to do it myself and I screwed it up. Save me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is what I would do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to say, like, really, like the process of installing the nests and using the nests,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot nicer than the Echobee. Like, they’re both easy, but the Nest is nicer. Now, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nest’s whole backing service is, you know, slowly being neglected by Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know that it doesn’t have HomeKit support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google abandoning a product? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the actual experience of physically using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so much nicer than Eccobee. It’s not even close. So I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoying to have to go into the dumb Nest app or have to run some kind of home bridge kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John why are you doing either one of those things? Like not that I’m, I agree with you. I think that Eccobee’s interface is terrible, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John once you get it set up, like are you constantly like micromanaging it to tweak it up and down?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Up and down, not occasionally, yes. I also turn it on and off a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot, like, you know, especially in transitional seasons like this, like earlier this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was super sunny and bright during the day and then freezing at night. So during the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually wanted to open some of the windows upstairs because it was so warm and the sun was coming in. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I turned all the heat off in the middle of the day and then later on that night, turn it back on like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That kind of stuff. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John do you need to turn it off? Why don’t you just like let the heat won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John come on unless it needs to come on like you’re you’re going for a target temperature, right? You’re not going for heat on or heat off. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what the thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I didn’t want the situation where I open the windows, it goes one degree below my set point and then the heat’s blasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the windows open. I wanted to avoid that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then it would stop as soon as it got, like it’s a thermostat, that’s what it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not like it’s gonna, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, we do workouts in the house. We do FaceTime workouts with a trainer. And so I’ll turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the heat way down a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ahead of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you need focus modes for home kids. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when I’m in a
⏹️ ▶️ John workout focus mode, turn the temperature in the house down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has to be like earlier than that. It’s a whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We tweak it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re like, you know, hey, some nights you’re a little cold and you wanna turn the bedroom like one or two degrees. Some nights you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really high, you wanna turn it down a few degrees. Like that’s just what happens, you know? So anyway, I like having,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the whole point of thermostats, you can adjust them. And every smart thermostat I’ve ever seen that wasn’t a Nest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just a horrendous interface to actually just, let me just raise the temperature one degree or so, like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, it’s so hard on everything else. and I don’t know, like Ecobee has blown it so hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are so, they have some of the pieces in place to be really amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re just, they just blow it on minor design choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that some of that is, I mean, some of the, like the lack of HomeKit integration, the fact that you wanna use your own app,
⏹️ ▶️ John I consider that a feature, because I enjoy my thermostat not being connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to that ecosystem, which I have found not to be particularly reliable, So I like that my Ecobee has no idea about
⏹️ ▶️ John that other stuff. I don’t, I disable the thing that lets it use Siri or whatever, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of attracts me to the Ecobee is that it is less smart. And I don’t want it to be particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John smart. I want it to be straightforward and I set it and forget it. And yeah, that’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John and obviously my needs are less demanding. How many thermostats do I have in the house? Just the
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Actually not true. There’s a thermostat in this room that controls only this room. And then there’s one for the whole rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the house. The thermostat for this room, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of those ones with the coil of metal wire, you know, like the old, the old round ones that you would see like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in school when you guys were in school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the mercury blob inside?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, not the mercury blob, but like the little, it’s not, I don’t, I can’t say that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John have the mercury in the little caps, I haven’t looked inside it, but I think it’s just got the bimetallic, strict, curly
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but it’s super old. It’s not smart, in case you didn’t know. but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John real easy to change the temperature just turn the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dial. Yeah, see that was what Nest did. Like for all of Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mishandling of this company, like their thermostat is very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use. It’s nicer to look at, way nicer to look at than the Ecobee’s. The Ecobee’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly, but the Nest is just way nicer. And it’s so much nicer to actually physically use. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not even close. And it is kind of sad when you look around thermostat industry how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few nice options there are. Like there’s just not anything nice except Nest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little bit of Ecobee. And everything else is like crappy industrial garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I said, I’ve been flirting with the idea of Ecobees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco After my sales pitch here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean honestly, I want nothing to do with Nest. Like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’ve understood is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything around the physical, and I mean this is a different. I think you mean Google Home. Well, that too. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a transition that I have like one Google home camera and two Nest cameras and two different apps. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not great over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, yeah, but my understanding is exactly what Marco said. Like the physical interaction with Nest is great. Everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just utter shit. And I just, I don’t know. No, thank you. And so what is the other choices?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ecobee, there’s your other choice. Like that’s all you got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing. Like how are there not more of these after all these years?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you are, I said it and forget it. There are more. Like the traditional companies all have quote, unquote, smarter thermostats
⏹️ ▶️ John now, but I feel like they are less good than the Ecobee. Like Ecobee is a nice medium
⏹️ ▶️ John between like ones that have just like a plain LCD screen with that isn’t bitmap based.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just, you know, again, a bunch of like little things. Those ones, there’s ones with E-ink
⏹️ ▶️ John screens. Then there’s the full fledged Nest ones. Ecobee is kind of in that middle spot, which I think is kind of a good place
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. But if you don’t like that, you can buy for basically the same amount of money or more than an Ecobee. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones from traditional thermostat companies, like Honeywell and stuff. That’s what I’ve got.
⏹️ ▶️ John They look janky, but they have all the same features as it could be, but their app is a hundred times worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’ll probably also last longer. Like, it’s one of the things I did was, I was just as to Casey, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John take out your old one, the one that was over here, save it. Oh yeah, oh, I absolutely would. Yeah, yeah. And put it somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and keep everything, all the parts with it and labeled or whatever, because like if you’re a, well, if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John winter and then you lost heat in the middle of that winter, because your stupid smart thing died or got bricked by a software
⏹️ ▶️ John update, It’s so handy to be able to just look at this picture, bring out the old one, bop, bop, bop. Now you’re back up and
⏹️ ▶️ John running. And those old ones just do not die. Like my one that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I replaced, it was powered by like
⏹️ ▶️ John a single AA battery that lasted like seven years. Like it just has, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John an up and a down button, a plus and a minus button, and like a VCR type scheduler. They are
⏹️ ▶️ John just bulletproof. And you know, so definitely save your old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, but I, this is not a joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a week ago, I had to kill the breaker to the thermostat downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Erin does occasionally fiddle with them. I almost never touch them, but Erin will occasionally fiddle with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she was complaining, justifiably, she was complaining that it took her forever to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the temperature on this thing. And it’s a touchscreen and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a touchscreen? Well, that’s pretty modern already. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m thinking- No, it’s 2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I’m saying. That’s what these all suck at, changing the temperature. What else are you doing with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it gets better because what I ended up doing was throwing the breaker to the thermostat, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course killed the furnace, which killed the thermostat. You gave it a five count,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turned it back on. And you know what suddenly was way more performant and was much faster because I guess whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging memory leak had been cleaned, my thermostat. So yeah, it’s great, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it has a frigging memory leak that after a few
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks. Yeah, no, you don’t have one of the old reliable ones. I was thinking you had something powered powered by a AA
⏹️ ▶️ John battery with rubbery buttons and no smarts, but now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve got… Yeah, those things last forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. This is not what I have. And I mean, the one that I have, you can control via a Truly Terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, which is nice, but it’s a Truly Terrible app. There are like three of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently in the world, and so I haven’t yet found a Homebridge plugin for it. I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a search running periodically to see if eventually one pops up, and it hasn’t in the literally six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years that I’ve had this search running or something like that. I want to get rid of it and I’ve kind of want an ecobee,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m scared of it and so I haven’t put in and they’re expensive and so that’s why I haven’t done it yet. Right. Oh, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 100% got mercury in it, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the mine from the wall because I can’t reach it with my headphones on, but that’s more or less what it looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure there’s mercury inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the old round honey well with, you know, the heat on top and the cooling on the bottom or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or that’s No, that’s not cooling. It’s just saying what the current
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco temperature That’s right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat and cool is a switch on the side usually. Well, you don’t have cooling anyway. I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John cooling, don’t worry about it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John My thermostats essentially connect one wire to the other. That is the sole function. Because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only one thing you can do, is either heat on or heat off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. Yeah, this is exactly what we had in my house growing up, just with cooling also.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but you can change temperature really easy, you just turn that dial, that’s it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. That’s what the Nest was ripping off. Because that’s literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the Nest was designed after all the digital ones had come out that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had these complicated button things. And, you know, Tony Fadell was like, hey, what if we just made this a knob? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer, like the old ones. Boop, you just turn it. And everyone’s like, oh my God, that’s amazing. And look, you made a round screen somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, late 2023 is the year of the knob for Marco. Beep,