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435: A Strong Number Four

 

00:00:00   - I'm enjoying a wonderful vanilla cream house seltzer

00:00:03   right now that I had to open with the pliers

00:00:06   that are still in our fridge from whenever that intro

00:00:09   that we did to our show with Tiff was like six months ago

00:00:12   or at least. - You'd be like,

00:00:14   oh buff from the rowing now, you should be able

00:00:16   to just crank that sucker open. (laughing)

00:00:20   - No actually, my arm's all messed up right now

00:00:22   for other reasons, but yeah. - Whoa what happened?

00:00:24   - Well it's, I've had some shoulder rotator cuff challenges

00:00:28   over the last six months. - Oh no!

00:00:30   - I've been working through it with a PT friend,

00:00:31   so we're getting there, but I currently have this black tape

00:00:33   on my arm, this rock tape that makes me look really cool.

00:00:37   - It does it though, that's not from trying to open

00:00:39   the seltzer, right? - No, well maybe, I mean,

00:00:42   I guess I can't fully be sure what the root cause was.

00:00:45   Maybe I opened so many seltzers over the last five years

00:00:48   that I just, I wrecked my whole left shoulder, but.

00:00:51   - Yeah it's all that major league pitching

00:00:52   you've been doing. - Yes, that's,

00:00:54   especially with my left arm since I'm right-handed.

00:00:56   Not to mention the fact that I'm not a baseball player.

00:00:58   I was, for one year in school, I was actually held back

00:01:03   in T-ball for an extra year, that was fourth grade,

00:01:08   but then fifth grade I played regular baseball,

00:01:11   and I'm pretty sure I got one hit for the entire year,

00:01:16   and did not play baseball after that.

00:01:18   - How many at bats though, 'cause if that was your only

00:01:20   at bat, that's a great average.

00:01:22   (laughing)

00:01:23   - Unfortunately, far more than one.

00:01:26   It's funny you say that.

00:01:27   I've told this story somewhere on the internet before,

00:01:29   but when I was in fifth grade, this was toward the height

00:01:34   of me being interested in and playing basketball.

00:01:37   And at my very best moments,

00:01:40   I was a passable basketball player.

00:01:43   I was never good, but when I had a good day, I was passable.

00:01:46   And our fifth grade, so this is not middle school,

00:01:51   this is still elementary school in the States,

00:01:53   our fifth grade school team, which in and of itself

00:01:56   was weird to have a school team in fifth grade,

00:01:57   but be that as may, it was a school team

00:02:01   that would travel to other schools

00:02:03   and play basketball against them and stuff,

00:02:04   which is usually something that doesn't happen in America

00:02:06   until you're older, at least for school affiliated teams.

00:02:09   Well anyway, I tried out for the fifth grade basketball team,

00:02:13   which is about the most athletic thing

00:02:14   I think I've ever done in my life.

00:02:16   And I tried out, and I made the team,

00:02:20   and then I moved like two weeks later.

00:02:22   And it wasn't until I was an adult

00:02:23   that I realized, wait a second,

00:02:25   they knew full well I was moving this entire time.

00:02:28   That was totally a pity, except that's what's in hand.

00:02:31   - You don't know they knew you were moving.

00:02:32   - I think they might have, but I'm gonna claim that.

00:02:35   - Did you move in order just to get away from that team?

00:02:38   Like do you think the team paid off your parents

00:02:41   to make you move?

00:02:42   - I'm pretty sure they did not.

00:02:43   It is possible, but I'm pretty sure no.

00:02:45   - I think it's pretty permissive.

00:02:47   Fifth grade basketball teams probably pretty much

00:02:49   let anyone on who shows any sort of desire

00:02:51   to be on the team, so I don't think they knew you were moving

00:02:53   I think they just basically take everybody.

00:02:55   - I mean certainly my fifth grade baseball team

00:02:57   was pretty permissive, if they let me on there.

00:02:59   - Jon, do you have a fun sports related story,

00:03:03   sports related failure perhaps

00:03:05   you would like to share with the group?

00:03:06   - I mean, my quote unquote career sport was tennis,

00:03:11   which is brutal in the same way that Microsoft used to be

00:03:14   where everything is force ranked.

00:03:15   So if you were going to be on the tennis team,

00:03:18   the players are pitted against each other

00:03:20   to determine the rankings.

00:03:22   So there's no question about where you are in the hierarchy

00:03:25   and if you want to play at all,

00:03:27   you have to be in the top four or whatever.

00:03:29   Not that, depending on what school you went to,

00:03:31   maybe they only had like four or five courts.

00:03:33   So only the top four or five people are gonna play period.

00:03:36   So if you're number six on your team,

00:03:37   you're just not gonna play at all.

00:03:38   And the only way for you to get higher

00:03:39   is to beat the number five person.

00:03:41   So that's the crucible I was formed in.

00:03:44   - Aren't sports great?

00:03:46   I mean, the funny thing is like sports

00:03:48   weren't even the most emotionally damaging part

00:03:49   of my school career, but they certainly didn't help.

00:03:53   - I love tennis.

00:03:54   Like, I mean, the first year I played in junior high,

00:03:56   no, I didn't get to play in the matches

00:03:58   because I was like number six or number seven,

00:04:00   but I worked my way up.

00:04:01   - So you played in junior high,

00:04:03   but you did not play in high school?

00:04:04   - No, I played in junior high and high school.

00:04:06   - Were you varsity in high school?

00:04:07   - Yeah, I was good at tennis.

00:04:09   - I am having a seriously difficult time

00:04:12   imagining any of the three of us doing varsity anything.

00:04:16   - I'm very athletic.

00:04:17   - Oh, sure.

00:04:18   - I am.

00:04:19   - I was more than us.

00:04:20   - Oh, let's put it this way.

00:04:21   I'm very coordinated.

00:04:23   Team sports I was less good at,

00:04:24   but that was mostly because I didn't have a lot

00:04:26   of confidence for reasons that you would imagine.

00:04:28   But no, I was good at tennis.

00:04:29   I mean, I wasn't number one or two,

00:04:31   but you know, I was number four.

00:04:33   Strong number four, occasionally number three in high school.

00:04:37   - In a team of four?

00:04:38   - No, it was like a team of people.

00:04:40   - Cruel.

00:04:41   Tiff and I just rewatched Freaks and Geese.

00:04:44   The first time I've seen it in probably five to 10 years,

00:04:46   it's been a while since then.

00:04:47   - I've never seen it.

00:04:48   - Oh, it's a fantastic series.

00:04:49   - I rewatched it like three months ago, coincidentally.

00:04:53   I rewatched it because The Incomparable was gonna do

00:04:56   a show about it and they said,

00:04:57   hey, you should rewatch this.

00:04:58   So I did and then I just forgot about the episode

00:05:00   and other people aren't anyway.

00:05:01   But I saw you say that you were rewatching it

00:05:03   and I assume you're not.

00:05:04   Didn't do it because of The Incomparable,

00:05:05   but it's weird that we both just rewatched the whole series.

00:05:08   - I think I did actually do it for The Incomparable, but--

00:05:10   (laughing)

00:05:11   - Oh, you did?

00:05:12   Were you on that episode?

00:05:13   - They haven't recorded it yet.

00:05:14   But, man, that show, not only does it hold up,

00:05:19   and not only is it great,

00:05:20   and it has a whole bunch of famous people in it

00:05:22   that weren't that famous at the time,

00:05:24   so you get to see them when they're super young.

00:05:25   You get a 16-year-old Seth Rogen, it's pretty cool.

00:05:29   But, man, that show is painful to watch.

00:05:32   If you were a nerd growing up, as we all were,

00:05:37   wow, there is some deep pain when watching that show.

00:05:42   - Sounds great.

00:05:43   - I mean, everybody watching that show

00:05:45   is gonna look at these three characters

00:05:45   and be like, well, that's us.

00:05:46   That's like, obviously it's me and you guys. (laughing)

00:05:49   - Which character do you think you are, Mark?

00:05:51   'Cause I can tell you which one I was, more or less.

00:05:53   - I mean, I think everybody would say you were Bill.

00:05:56   The only thing is I'm unclear

00:05:58   whether I would be Sam or Neil.

00:06:00   I definitely have some overlap with each of them,

00:06:04   so I'm not sure.

00:06:05   - The problem with Sam is he does get together

00:06:08   with an unrealistically more attractive girl

00:06:10   for a plot point in the season.

00:06:12   - Right, and that sure as hell

00:06:13   was not gonna happen to me in high school.

00:06:14   - Exactly, I mean, it works in the show

00:06:17   because of how that turns out,

00:06:18   but practically speaking, not gonna happen.

00:06:22   - Right, so that's why I think I'd be,

00:06:25   realistically, I'm probably more Neil.

00:06:27   - Yeah, my rewatch, since it's not gonna be in the episode,

00:06:30   I'll give you my tiny capsule summary.

00:06:31   The only thing that really changed from my first watch,

00:06:33   I watched it when it actually aired, 'cause I'm old,

00:06:36   the only change from my rewatch is I felt like

00:06:39   the main character, Lindsey, what's her other name?

00:06:42   - The main character's motivation was not well sketched out,

00:06:45   and it's not the fault of the actor,

00:06:47   it's mostly the fault of the script.

00:06:48   I know the arc that they wanted her to go on,

00:06:51   but a lot of the time, she just seemed to be

00:06:53   going through the paces of the script because she had to,

00:06:56   and her motivations were not clearly outlined,

00:06:58   but other than that, everything was great.

00:07:00   - I never once looked at it that way. (laughs)

00:07:03   - Well, I mean, it depends on who you're identifying with

00:07:05   in the show, but if you're identifying mostly

00:07:07   with her little brother and their friends,

00:07:09   then maybe you don't care about that,

00:07:10   but she really is the heart of the show,

00:07:12   and the problem is a lot of her,

00:07:13   like what she does, it's not unmotivated,

00:07:15   like the show says things in it,

00:07:18   like here's why she's doing this,

00:07:19   but it's never really on the screen,

00:07:21   it's just like they'll drop a hint on it here or there,

00:07:23   and then she'll just act under the influence

00:07:25   of that one hint for three episodes.

00:07:26   It's like, what are you really trying to do, Lindsey?

00:07:29   I don't, it's not, she just felt a little bit

00:07:31   like a leaf in the wind.

00:07:33   - Watch how I soar, that's a reference.

00:07:36   Just letting you know. - Yeah, but I was doing

00:07:37   the Forrest Gump thing, I guess it was just that feather.

00:07:39   (electronic beeping)

00:07:41   All right, we have a lot to do,

00:07:42   we should stop goofing off,

00:07:43   and let's start with some follow-up.

00:07:45   It is back because it's not keynote week.

00:07:48   All right, so let's talk about universal control

00:07:50   and device arrangement.

00:07:51   A lot of us were wondering,

00:07:53   when you do this universal control thing,

00:07:55   which is like Synergy was/is,

00:07:58   where you have one keyboard and mouse

00:08:00   attached to one computer,

00:08:02   but it's controlling multiple computers,

00:08:04   then how does it know, if, say you have an iPad and an iMac,

00:08:08   which side is the iPad on?

00:08:10   And I think this was actually discussed in the talk show,

00:08:13   if I'm not mistaken, but we also got feedback

00:08:15   via Andreas Baier-Boudin, who apparently saw

00:08:18   or received an email from Federighi,

00:08:21   which reads, this is Federighi's words,

00:08:23   "When you move to an edge, we default to assuming

00:08:25   you are moving to the most recently active device

00:08:27   that is nearby and not yet quote-unquote paired."

00:08:29   So if you turn your iPad and put it next,

00:08:31   turn on your iPad, excuse me, and put it next to the Mac,

00:08:34   and then move the cursor, as I did in the demo,

00:08:37   we will assume that you were attempting to access that iPad

00:08:39   versus, say, another Mac that you had not interacted with

00:08:42   as recently, and once you're quote-unquote connected,

00:08:45   we remember that arrangement.

00:08:46   There is, of course, also a displays arrangement,

00:08:47   system preferences pane, but we've designed the features

00:08:50   such that using these sorts of settings

00:08:51   should generally not be necessary.

00:08:53   This is, if it works, and I haven't tried it,

00:08:56   this is Apple at its best, when it's using

00:08:59   like some really smart inference, maybe,

00:09:02   I'm not sure what word I'm looking for,

00:09:04   but it's using evidence based on circumstance

00:09:07   to figure out what you want before,

00:09:09   or without you having to explicitly tell them,

00:09:12   and I think that's super cool, and if it works well,

00:09:14   it's going to be very impressive.

00:09:16   - It's like a magic trick where once you hear how it's done,

00:09:18   you're like, "Oh, that is clever,

00:09:21   but that's not as complicated as I thought it would be."

00:09:23   Like, they're essentially letting you, the user,

00:09:25   tell them where things are.

00:09:26   Now, it's not perfect because if you do that,

00:09:29   first of all, once you know how the trick is done,

00:09:32   it's trivially easy to confuse it,

00:09:34   but second of all, you're basically just picking

00:09:36   whether the computer is left, right,

00:09:38   or maybe even up or down from where you are,

00:09:40   but you're not really picking the exact height

00:09:42   that the screen's joining to host,

00:09:43   so you're gonna kinda get the default.

00:09:45   I don't have enough systems running this new stuff

00:09:47   to do this, but I'm interested to see,

00:09:49   so once you do that, it shows up as a display,

00:09:52   like in the displays panel,

00:09:54   and then you could arrange them after that.

00:09:56   It's not entirely clear to me

00:09:57   'cause I haven't seen this demoed,

00:09:58   but anyway, the magic trick of how they do this

00:10:00   is very clever, and it's like, it makes for a good demo,

00:10:04   and in practice, it will sort of magically just work

00:10:07   for people who don't know how it works,

00:10:09   and it'll be super impressive,

00:10:11   and I suppose there are a couple of failure modes

00:10:13   where it'll get messed up,

00:10:14   as long as there's a place where you can go to like,

00:10:16   oh, arrange it the way you want,

00:10:17   like the displays panel, like Federico says,

00:10:20   this is very clever, very interesting.

00:10:22   - Additionally, some information about initiation

00:10:25   from friend of the show, Federico Petici.

00:10:27   A universal control can only be started

00:10:29   from a Mac running Monterey.

00:10:31   You cannot start dragging the pointer

00:10:32   from an iPad towards a Mac.

00:10:35   It only originates from Mac OS,

00:10:36   and then you can move it around freely after that.

00:10:39   - This falls into the same category

00:10:40   as my snarky tweet during the WWZ keynote,

00:10:43   which is get an iPad.

00:10:44   It's a great accessory for your real computer.

00:10:46   - Oh, brutal. - 'Cause like,

00:10:47   'cause everything in the keynote was like,

00:10:51   from your Mac, here's what,

00:10:52   like the iPad can help your Mac out in various ways, right?

00:10:57   But it was so clear that the Mac was like in charge,

00:10:59   and even in universal control.

00:11:00   If you're on your Mac,

00:11:01   yeah, you can bring your cursor over to your iPad,

00:11:03   but you can't take that stinkin' iPad cursor

00:11:05   and bring it over to your Mac.

00:11:06   Anyway, maybe this'll change one day,

00:11:08   and that's mostly just snark,

00:11:09   'cause obviously iPads are incredibly powerful and amazing,

00:11:12   and I love them, but it was a change from the norm

00:11:15   to see kind of the Mac taking center stage,

00:11:18   and we talked about that in the last episode,

00:11:20   but I think it's worth reemphasizing

00:11:22   the sort of unspoken theme of the keynote,

00:11:25   which is that features now come across

00:11:28   all of Apple's platforms,

00:11:29   because all of the barriers to stopping that from happening

00:11:31   have been knocked down one at a time, right?

00:11:34   It's the same chip architecture,

00:11:35   it's the same framework, SwiftUI,

00:11:37   like we have the catalyst to bring UIKit onto the Mac,

00:11:40   and so all of Apple's resources towards like,

00:11:44   we're gonna do a new thing,

00:11:45   now they can essentially do a new thing,

00:11:47   whatever that new thing is,

00:11:48   once optimize it for their own chips,

00:11:52   write it in a framework that they know

00:11:53   runs on all their platforms,

00:11:55   within reason, obviously,

00:11:56   you're not gonna write something that runs on,

00:11:58   oh, maybe on the watch too,

00:11:59   'cause it takes SwiftUI as well,

00:12:00   but anyway, they can literally do one thing

00:12:03   and have it everywhere,

00:12:04   so almost all the features that rolled out

00:12:07   as part of WWDC are on all the platforms,

00:12:11   and that hasn't happened in a very long time.

00:12:13   Granted, there's varying degrees of jankiness,

00:12:16   depending on how mature,

00:12:18   whatever it is that you're doing,

00:12:19   is it a catalyst app, is it a SwiftUI app,

00:12:21   both of those things have limitations

00:12:22   versus a pure AppKit app on the Mac,

00:12:24   but it gets, at least this year,

00:12:28   we're not like, oh, well, this feature

00:12:30   is available here and here,

00:12:31   but either the Mac doesn't have it at all,

00:12:34   or the Mac has a worse version of it.

00:12:35   In general, if they're rolling out something new,

00:12:38   it is available and the same everywhere,

00:12:41   which is refreshing and a big payoff

00:12:42   from the many years of transition

00:12:44   that Apple's been going through.

00:12:45   - Yeah, and I'm sure there are examples

00:12:47   of that not being true,

00:12:48   like Center Stage is a great example

00:12:50   of that not being true,

00:12:50   which actually, quick aside,

00:12:52   I had a FaceTime call with somebody with a new iPad

00:12:54   that was using Center Stage,

00:12:56   and holy smokes, that's super cool,

00:12:58   even on the quote-unquote receiving end,

00:12:59   you know, on the viewing end,

00:13:01   it was super cool because as the friend of mine

00:13:04   that I was speaking with was like walking around

00:13:06   a little bit or, you know, gesturing with his arms,

00:13:09   it would zoom in or zoom out or pan or what have you

00:13:12   in order to keep what was relevant in focus,

00:13:15   it was super duper neat,

00:13:16   and whenever it is I get around to upgrading my iPad,

00:13:19   which I'm not planning on doing as I sit here now,

00:13:21   I'm really looking forward to having that,

00:13:23   'cause is that on both sides iPads, is that correct,

00:13:25   or is that only on the big boy?

00:13:26   - No, it's on both. - Okay, good.

00:13:27   Did it look like unnatural when it would do the movements

00:13:30   or was it kinda subtle and smooth?

00:13:32   - It looked unnatural insofar as it was something

00:13:35   you don't expect to happen on a FaceTime call,

00:13:37   but it did not look unnatural insofar as like it zooming

00:13:39   at twice the speed you would expect

00:13:41   or that it's, you know, like whipping to the side

00:13:43   and then stopping short.

00:13:44   It was very gradual, very appley,

00:13:47   and it was not, it wasn't distracting as a movement,

00:13:51   it was distracting as a holy crap,

00:13:53   I understand all the work that's going in

00:13:55   to make this work and this is amazing.

00:13:57   So it was very cool.

00:13:59   - Yeah, it's weird that some of the remaining differences

00:14:01   almost sort of come down to hardware,

00:14:03   like why don't the Macs have FaceTime,

00:14:05   why are the Mac cameras so much worse,

00:14:07   or even just with center stage,

00:14:08   like why is that on these iPads and on other ones,

00:14:10   like what is it that the center stage requires,

00:14:12   and we'll get to that later in the topic section

00:14:13   about what features require what things.

00:14:16   But there is still a remaining hardware gap,

00:14:18   but in general, like in terms of major applications

00:14:21   or even major features,

00:14:23   one example I think is like focus,

00:14:25   that's on the Mac too, right?

00:14:27   - Which one is, oh, the do not disturb on steroids,

00:14:30   yes, yes, yes, yes, I believe that's on the Mac.

00:14:32   - There's no way that that would have been on the Mac

00:14:34   if it came out like three years ago,

00:14:36   just no way, because it is so obviously phone-centric,

00:14:38   but now it's like, why not put it on the Mac?

00:14:41   Because we can write it essentially once

00:14:44   in one of our cross-platform frameworks,

00:14:48   and it makes sense to be on the Mac,

00:14:49   and it's actually not that much more work,

00:14:51   so let's go do it, right?

00:14:52   And even last year when the iPhone got widgets

00:14:57   but the iPad didn't, it's like, well, what's the excuse there?

00:15:00   Those are practically the same platform,

00:15:01   even though you renamed one of them iPad OS,

00:15:03   like it used to be just iOS,

00:15:05   why didn't the iPad get it there?

00:15:06   And that was kind of, it seemed like tied up

00:15:07   in the iPad multitasking stuff,

00:15:09   where that whole suite of things wasn't ready

00:15:12   and they didn't just wanna ship,

00:15:15   just widgets on the iPad or whatever.

00:15:16   So there's always like, how are things prioritized,

00:15:19   how many resources do you have,

00:15:20   and what can you hold till last year?

00:15:22   But in general, technology-wise,

00:15:23   we're finally getting to a place where

00:15:25   the reason why something might not be

00:15:27   on a less popular platform is no longer that,

00:15:29   oh, we'd have to write an entirely new app

00:15:32   using AppKit if we want that on the Mac.

00:15:35   So that's too much effort, nevermind.

00:15:37   - All right, let's talk about object capture

00:15:41   and the quality thereof.

00:15:42   Object capture's the thing where you take

00:15:43   a zillion pictures of a 3D object

00:15:45   and then do magic and mathematics,

00:15:48   and then suddenly you get a 3D model

00:15:50   coming out the other side.

00:15:52   Somebody anonymous, because they've since deleted

00:15:54   their tweet and I don't know if they're trying

00:15:56   to remain anonymous, writes, "I worked in motion production,

00:15:59   "live action and animation, and while this certainly

00:16:02   "isn't ready for final production quality,

00:16:04   "the ability to quickly mock up a quote,

00:16:06   "good enough quote concept is actually quite valuable."

00:16:09   So even if this isn't a perfect representation,

00:16:12   it's still useful to have,

00:16:13   and that's not particularly surprising to me.

00:16:15   - Yeah, since seeing Apple's demos and the sessions on it

00:16:18   and all that other stuff, lots of just users,

00:16:21   individual people have been posting their experiments

00:16:24   with using this feature, and I have to say,

00:16:27   everyone that I've seen is way more impressive

00:16:29   than Apple's demos, which is weird.

00:16:30   Usually Apple picks very good demos

00:16:32   to show off their feature, so we'll put some links

00:16:34   in the show notes.

00:16:35   Matt Waller did a scan of a plush baby Yoda toy,

00:16:40   and the object capture of it looks amazing,

00:16:44   'cause it's a challenging shape.

00:16:45   It's not, you know, it's fuzzy and it's got weird,

00:16:47   pointy things with the ears and the clothes and everything.

00:16:50   It looks amazing, and someone else posted a pineapple.

00:16:52   You know what a whole pineapple looks like,

00:16:54   with those little pointy little tendrils

00:16:55   that come out the sides, and did an object capture of that,

00:16:58   and it looks fantastic.

00:16:59   Like you wouldn't, you'd think it would just melt

00:17:01   all the little things together, and it would just look

00:17:03   like a flat football with a pineapple texture on it.

00:17:06   It doesn't.

00:17:07   So yeah, obviously these things will need to be touched up,

00:17:09   but the more examples of this that I've seen,

00:17:11   the more impressed I am at how good you can get with this.

00:17:15   Now, back to Marco's point of like,

00:17:17   oh, this would be cool to share an object with somebody,

00:17:19   it seems like you just have to take too many pictures

00:17:22   for that to be feasible.

00:17:23   Like you have to take a lot of pictures,

00:17:25   and there has to be a huge amount of overlap,

00:17:26   so you have to like, take a picture and then move

00:17:28   like a little tiny bit, and take a picture,

00:17:30   move it a little bit, and take a picture,

00:17:31   and your pictures have to have like 70% overlap

00:17:33   between them, so I don't think you're gonna want to

00:17:37   spend five minutes slowly walking in a circle

00:17:39   around some object just to send it to someone

00:17:41   in a message thing.

00:17:42   If you could take one or two pictures and send something,

00:17:45   that might be conceivable.

00:17:46   For now, I think it is basically, you know,

00:17:48   amazing results if you're willing to put in the time

00:17:51   from hardware that everybody has,

00:17:52   so it is lowering the barrier to entry,

00:17:53   but it is not to the point where you can take two photos

00:17:56   of, you know, a couch that you're looking at,

00:17:58   and then have, give someone a 3D model they can spin.

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00:19:54   - Did you know that in Mac OS Monterey,

00:20:00   the, what is it, live text, the OCR thing

00:20:03   that they're doing now, it works on captchas too,

00:20:06   because why wouldn't it, which is super neat.

00:20:08   - That's fantastic.

00:20:09   - I mean, to be fair, we'll put a link to someone's video,

00:20:12   like the captcha they're doing is not one of those

00:20:13   challenging ones, but lots of people are posting

00:20:16   impressive results of like, oh, live text,

00:20:18   like pulled text off of my laptop screen

00:20:20   that's viewed at this incredibly oblique angle.

00:20:23   In general, humans are impressed when computers

00:20:26   can do things that would be difficult for humans to do,

00:20:28   but very often they're not difficult for computers to do

00:20:30   because, you know, they're just,

00:20:32   the strengths and weaknesses are different.

00:20:33   But yeah, live text looks pretty good,

00:20:35   and it's impressive where it's able to pull text out of.

00:20:40   - Indeed.

00:20:41   I have good news, which I did not even look into myself,

00:20:45   to be honest with you, but Jason Aiten writes

00:20:47   that the app library in the dock is optional on iPad OS,

00:20:51   though according to Jason,

00:20:52   there's no good reason to turn it off.

00:20:53   I actually have left it on so far, and it hasn't bothered me,

00:20:56   but I've barely used my iPad since putting the beta on it.

00:21:00   So, you know, take that for what you will.

00:21:03   - Yep, the setting is right next to the other one

00:21:04   that I turned off, which is show suggested

00:21:06   and recent apps in the dock.

00:21:08   - I'm not surprised that you turned that off.

00:21:11   All right, John, I know that the world was shocked,

00:21:16   devastated even, when they saw the new Safari toolbar

00:21:20   and realized everyone's favorite Safari extension

00:21:24   may not belong for this world.

00:21:26   Please tell me, please, John,

00:21:28   tell me the reload button like a phoenix rises

00:21:30   from the ashes to live again.

00:21:32   - Yeah, and last episode I thought like,

00:21:34   well, there is no more toolbar.

00:21:35   It's just like, 'cause they put the tabs up there, right,

00:21:37   in Safari 15.

00:21:39   There's the tabs and there's some fixed buttons,

00:21:41   and that seemed like that was it.

00:21:42   And I'm talking about on the Mac right now,

00:21:44   not on the phone and not on the iPad.

00:21:46   I was like, well, there's, you know,

00:21:48   so much for my reload button, right?

00:21:49   And the absurd thing about it was that there,

00:21:52   it doesn't appear to be any reload button.

00:21:55   The only place you had reload was like in the address bar,

00:21:57   there was a little dot, dot, dot on the far right.

00:21:59   And if you clicked on the dot, dot, dot,

00:22:01   a menu would pop up, and then you could select

00:22:03   the word reload from that menu.

00:22:06   And I saw this in WWDC sessions.

00:22:07   So you'd be watching a session,

00:22:09   and the person in the session would have to reload

00:22:10   a webpage, and to make it clear,

00:22:12   like 'cause it's a video, you don't,

00:22:14   if they just hit Command + R, it wouldn't be clear

00:22:16   to the viewer what they're doing.

00:22:16   So you have to do something visually on the screen

00:22:19   to show that they're reloading.

00:22:20   And so in one of these, it was one of the Safari videos,

00:22:23   like this person, the presenter had to reload a webpage

00:22:25   multiple times to show changes,

00:22:27   and every time they did it, they had to click

00:22:29   on the three dots, move the mouse down, click reload,

00:22:31   click on the three dots, move the mouse down, click reload.

00:22:33   And it was so painful to watch.

00:22:34   I was like, oh, goodness.

00:22:35   We really need to have an always visible reload button.

00:22:37   So of course I installed Monterey on one of my,

00:22:41   actually I installed an external hard drive computer

00:22:42   from that, 'cause I didn't wanna screw up one of my computers

00:22:44   'cause all the computers in the houses are still used,

00:22:46   at least until my kids get out of school.

00:22:48   And so what the deal was.

00:22:50   So first of all, there is still a customizable toolbar.

00:22:53   You can custom, and now you're fighting with the tabs

00:22:56   for space, but you can in fact customize the part

00:22:59   to the left of the tabs and shove as much stuff up there

00:23:01   as you want, stealing space from your tabs.

00:23:04   When you do the customized toolbar thing,

00:23:06   and the sheet comes down, reload is not among those choices.

00:23:09   So you don't have a choice to put a reload button

00:23:11   in your toolbar.

00:23:12   And there also is, the reload button that is currently

00:23:15   in the address bar in Safari, that's also not there.

00:23:17   All you get is the three dots from which a menu spawns

00:23:20   and you can click reload.

00:23:21   The good news is that my Safari reload button extension

00:23:24   still works.

00:23:26   You can run it on Monterey.

00:23:27   It runs just fine.

00:23:28   I didn't even need to recompile it or anything.

00:23:30   It just works as is.

00:23:32   And then you can put a reload button up there.

00:23:33   The bad news is, presumably in order to save space,

00:23:37   like I understand why they did this,

00:23:39   because again, the toolbar is now fighting for space

00:23:41   with the tabs because they're all in the same line.

00:23:44   They changed the back forward buttons to be quote unquote

00:23:48   smart so that there is no forward button

00:23:53   until you've gone back.

00:23:54   So instead of it being a back forward,

00:23:55   like a less than and a greater than sign,

00:23:57   it's just a less than sign.

00:23:59   And then if you ever go back, suddenly the greater than sign

00:24:02   appears next to it because now you have a place

00:24:04   to go forward to.

00:24:05   Which means that the back forward button,

00:24:07   which used to be a pair of things,

00:24:09   now changes size depending on if you have some place

00:24:12   to go forward to, which makes everything move around.

00:24:14   Like I understand why they did it to save space,

00:24:15   but it just looks not great to me.

00:24:18   I don't like when things squirm around,

00:24:19   as established in the past show

00:24:21   with the squirmy super rectangles.

00:24:23   And I don't like it when buttons change size

00:24:26   in the toolbar.

00:24:27   And I just don't think it looks unbalanced.

00:24:28   And the other thing that's, this is a minor point,

00:24:30   but when you do, when you put a button on the toolbar,

00:24:34   in current Safari or in Safari 15,

00:24:36   they make you supply like an image for the button.

00:24:39   And there's a limited number of formats you can make it,

00:24:42   but every format that I have tried,

00:24:44   every way I've tried to make this image,

00:24:46   it basically uses it as a template image.

00:24:49   And you don't have control over how it positions

00:24:52   the thing vertically.

00:24:52   I tried putting empty space above and below

00:24:54   to like move the thing around.

00:24:56   And it just is, it's like, nope,

00:24:57   I'm going to find the edges of the blackness

00:25:00   in your monochrome picture.

00:25:01   And that's what I'm gonna consider your border to be.

00:25:03   And that's a concern to me because

00:25:05   when the lonely left hand, the lonely less than sign

00:25:08   is next to my reload button,

00:25:10   the reload button, if you know what it looks like,

00:25:13   it's like a circle, an incomplete circle,

00:25:16   but then there's an arrow on one end of it.

00:25:18   And the arrow sticks out beyond,

00:25:20   the top part of the arrow sticks out beyond

00:25:23   the diameter of the circle, right?

00:25:26   So what you'd want, visually speaking,

00:25:28   is the center of the circle to be aligned

00:25:31   with the point in the less than sign.

00:25:32   You know what I'm saying?

00:25:34   But that's not how it works

00:25:35   because as far as Safari is concerned,

00:25:37   the height of that graphic is not the height of the circle,

00:25:40   but it's the height of the circle

00:25:41   plus that little stem that sticks out.

00:25:42   So it shifts the whole thing down.

00:25:43   So when I just see that less than sign

00:25:45   and then my reload button shifted down

00:25:47   to be slightly below the less than sign,

00:25:48   that's very upsetting.

00:25:49   - Oh no.

00:25:51   - Anyway, I'm still glad to have a reload button.

00:25:53   You know, and I'm living with it, but I'm still,

00:25:56   I spent a long time rebuilding that application

00:25:59   with differently sized and shaped buttons to try.

00:26:01   The only way I can get it to work

00:26:02   is to have a non-transparent background

00:26:05   'cause then it thinks my image is the size of my image.

00:26:07   But of course, if you have a non-transparent background,

00:26:08   it looks awful, right?

00:26:10   - So I'm sorry, can we play this back?

00:26:12   The same man who has superhuman hearing

00:26:16   when it comes to extraordinarily small and quiet fans

00:26:21   and will do anything to get fans out of his house

00:26:24   is the same person who can't just hit Command + R

00:26:28   to reload a tab and must have an offset icon

00:26:33   on the toolbar.

00:26:34   - Don't make me tap the sign, Casey.

00:26:36   Yes, I know Command + R exists.

00:26:37   I tried to preempt that in my tweet about it.

00:26:39   I have to put it in the same tweet

00:26:41   'cause if you put it in a follow-up tweet,

00:26:42   no one will ever see it.

00:26:43   - That's true. - Yes, yes.

00:26:44   I know Command + R exists.

00:26:45   Sometimes I'm using the mouse.

00:26:47   Sometimes the mouse is near there.

00:26:48   Sometimes I like to click on mouse buttons.

00:26:50   Like the GUI exists in addition to,

00:26:51   yes, I know about Command + R.

00:26:53   I absolutely know about it and I do use it.

00:26:55   But sometimes I also click the button.

00:26:57   - I mean, in and of itself, that's fine.

00:26:59   I'm flabbergasted that someone who is as particular as you

00:27:04   would be able to look at this all day, every day,

00:27:08   look at this offset icon and not be driven mad, whereas--

00:27:12   - I mean, it was offset in the previous version

00:27:13   of Safari 2.

00:27:14   It's emphasized more due to the tighter spacing

00:27:18   and I think the smaller or less than sign,

00:27:20   so it looks a little bit worse.

00:27:21   The same problem existed before.

00:27:22   This is not a new thing.

00:27:24   - Well, the good news is if you wanna go back

00:27:25   to the old style tab bar, there's a way to do that.

00:27:28   - Yes, someone discovered this feature flags

00:27:32   plist somewhere in the OS.

00:27:34   And I put the XML for it in the show notes

00:27:37   to see what the keys are.

00:27:39   So the key is unified bar.

00:27:40   It's in the library preferences, feature flags,

00:27:43   domains, safari.plist.

00:27:44   I'm presuming this is like a temporary thing

00:27:46   for Apple messing with feature flags.

00:27:47   And the reason I say that is because unified bar is the key

00:27:50   and then the value is a dictionary

00:27:52   and some of the keys of the value dictionary,

00:27:55   one of them is called disclosure required.

00:27:57   And then there's a string that looks like UUID.

00:28:00   And that makes me think that the way they do feature flags

00:28:03   for people don't know, the parlance inside Apple

00:28:07   about whether you as an Apple employer

00:28:09   are allowed to know about a thing

00:28:10   is are you disclosed on that thing, right?

00:28:12   So a lot, you know, it's like an Apple.

00:28:13   If you're not working on Safari,

00:28:15   you wouldn't be disclosed on the new Safari.

00:28:18   So there'd be no reason for you to know

00:28:19   about the new Safari.

00:28:20   And in your builds of Monterey,

00:28:22   if this disclosure required field

00:28:24   didn't have the special UUID in it,

00:28:27   it wouldn't show up on your version of Monterey

00:28:29   or wouldn't be enabled on your version of Monterey.

00:28:31   And they, I presume they trust their employees

00:28:33   not to hack in and try to figure out, you know,

00:28:35   what resources are new in Safari or whatever.

00:28:37   This is my guess.

00:28:38   I don't know any of this for a fact

00:28:39   about this is what it's for,

00:28:40   but the fact that there's a disclosure required field

00:28:43   with a string that looks like UUID

00:28:44   makes me think this is part of how they control

00:28:47   showing new features in Safari

00:28:50   to other people inside Apple.

00:28:52   Obviously it's not controlling anything for us,

00:28:53   but what it means is that you can disable this feature

00:28:56   and go back to the old one

00:28:58   just because they still had that code in there

00:28:59   maybe for the non-disclosed people for awhile.

00:29:01   I presume that will eventually go away.

00:29:03   Maybe it will go away before release.

00:29:04   But if you really, really don't like the new Safari

00:29:07   and you're using a beta,

00:29:08   you have a way to turn it off for now.

00:29:10   Just keep in mind that kind of like

00:29:12   every Chrome flags feature

00:29:13   that I used to rely on,

00:29:14   it will eventually disappear

00:29:15   and you'll be forced to use the new thing.

00:29:17   Yep.

00:29:18   - Yeah, but you know what?

00:29:19   Like I feel like, you know,

00:29:20   like on principle of that,

00:29:22   like there are certain things that Apple adds

00:29:24   where they make some change that I don't like,

00:29:28   but the old behavior is still available

00:29:29   through either a checkbox preference somewhere

00:29:32   or some kind of, you know,

00:29:33   P list hack like this.

00:29:35   Or you know, a default write command or something like that.

00:29:37   And I used to think like,

00:29:39   well I might as well adopt the new thing immediately

00:29:42   because one day they're gonna remove this ability

00:29:44   to use it the old way.

00:29:46   And I might as well adjust on my terms now

00:29:49   rather than later being forced to.

00:29:52   But now I think, you know what?

00:29:54   Some of those things never go away.

00:29:55   Like I still haven't switched over

00:29:57   to their quote natural scroll direction.

00:29:59   I still scroll the old direction and it's fine.

00:30:01   - Are you serious?

00:30:03   You monster.

00:30:04   - Me neither.

00:30:04   I'm never switching it.

00:30:06   Like here's the thing.

00:30:07   - What?

00:30:08   - Sometimes they'll do something new

00:30:10   that people don't like.

00:30:12   And I think the natural scrolling is an example

00:30:14   where Apple said, look,

00:30:15   enough people like it the other way

00:30:18   that we can't really get rid of this.

00:30:20   Natural scrolling has been around what, five years?

00:30:22   - Seven. - Way more than that.

00:30:23   Way more. - It's like 10.

00:30:25   - And so it's not a big deal.

00:30:27   It's easy to switch and why not just leave the preference?

00:30:28   So that's the right call for them.

00:30:29   Toppy tabs, speaking of Safari.

00:30:31   They tried a different tab arrangement

00:30:33   and I think it was just the press or whatever

00:30:36   making a big stink about it.

00:30:37   And Apple, you know, just kind of wimped out

00:30:40   and said, ugh, we're getting a lot of bad reviews this

00:30:44   and maybe we won't do it.

00:30:45   I think Apple's gonna stick with the Safari design

00:30:48   because they're a little bit,

00:30:50   you know, they're more gutsy now than they were.

00:30:52   They have more courage now, I'd say.

00:30:54   - Well, they don't, I mean, they have,

00:30:56   I hate to bring this up,

00:30:57   they have a different design leadership going on now

00:31:00   and I think they,

00:31:02   I don't think the current design leadership

00:31:05   has shown a lot of willingness to respond to feedback.

00:31:08   - Yeah, I watch more of the sessions

00:31:10   explaining the new Safari.

00:31:11   Like, you know, as I said in the last episode,

00:31:14   part of the new design is that Apple has signed itself up

00:31:17   to a bunch of readability challenges

00:31:20   because they explicitly are allowing the content

00:31:22   of the webpage to essentially color the user interface.

00:31:25   So it's now up to Apple to make sure

00:31:28   that no matter what color the interface is,

00:31:30   that the elements that are part of the interface are visible.

00:31:32   Like, you have to still be able to see the buttons,

00:31:34   you have to be able to read the address bar.

00:31:36   They gave an example in one of the sessions

00:31:37   because actually like Safari 15 will do a smart,

00:31:41   this is again all on the Mac,

00:31:42   it'll do a smart thing where it'll like pull a color

00:31:44   from the webpage up,

00:31:45   but you can also from your webpage explicitly specify

00:31:47   what color you want that to be.

00:31:48   So on my website, I immediately specified

00:31:50   that it should be UI colored.

00:31:52   You just specify white and it stays UI colored.

00:31:54   Anyway, you can specify the color.

00:31:56   And in the presentation that the Apple person said is like,

00:32:00   you can specify pretty much any color,

00:32:02   but Safari will stop you from specifying certain colors.

00:32:05   And they gave an example.

00:32:07   If you specify the color of the toolbar in Safari

00:32:10   should be the same color as the close widget,

00:32:12   effectively making the close widget disappear.

00:32:14   Yeah, they won't let you pick that color, right?

00:32:17   So this is the kind of special case code they have to be.

00:32:19   Like you can't make it red of the stoplight,

00:32:21   you can't make it yellow, you can't make it green, right?

00:32:24   If you make it too dark, they have to switch the text

00:32:26   to be light on dark instead of dark on light.

00:32:28   Like all the same challenges as the menu bar,

00:32:30   which they also decided to make translucent

00:32:32   and pull stuff through.

00:32:33   And the menu bar changes from light text on dark

00:32:36   to dark text on light, depending on what's

00:32:38   in the background of your thing, right?

00:32:40   So now they've signed up for that challenge

00:32:42   on a per web page basis, because you can change that color,

00:32:45   not just per site, but per page.

00:32:47   And it's kind of fun, you know,

00:32:50   kind of fun design online where you can make your,

00:32:51   and you can also do it in light mode and dark mode, right?

00:32:53   You can do lots of fun things.

00:32:54   But as Marco said last episode,

00:32:57   sometimes the content people care about

00:32:58   is in fact their tabs and not the web page,

00:33:01   or at least on equal footing that they care about the tabs

00:33:03   and the web page and tying the two together

00:33:06   in sort of a unified design thing

00:33:07   may not be what people want.

00:33:09   Like sometimes you do want a clear separation

00:33:12   between here is the Chrome of my application,

00:33:13   which doesn't change colors or shape or wiggle around

00:33:16   or do any weird stuff and is always readable.

00:33:17   And then here is the content of the web page.

00:33:19   And Apple, their current design direction is

00:33:23   minimize that bar, make it as small as possible,

00:33:25   put everything on one line, so they all have to fight

00:33:27   for each other for the same amount of horizontal space.

00:33:30   They even had a thing where they're saying like,

00:33:31   oh, make sure your page titles are short

00:33:33   and put the important stuff up front,

00:33:34   which is a general good practice for web design period.

00:33:37   But the reason it's even more pressing in Safari 15 is,

00:33:40   guess what, your tabs have even less space

00:33:42   for giving window size

00:33:43   because they're fighting with the toolbar.

00:33:46   So I used it a little bit.

00:33:49   It's not terrible.

00:33:50   I will eventually get used to it probably,

00:33:52   but it's a design choice that I wouldn't have made.

00:33:55   And I sincerely hope that websites don't adopt the thing

00:33:59   where you can colorize that top toolbar thing

00:34:02   'cause that's not really what I want.

00:34:03   And by the way, now that really matters,

00:34:04   because if you don't want that, speaking of options,

00:34:07   there is an option in Safari's preferences to say,

00:34:09   hey, don't let websites do that.

00:34:11   Just like, I forgot what it's called.

00:34:12   I should have put a screenshot in it,

00:34:13   but there's a checkbox that says,

00:34:15   even if a website says the top bar should be black,

00:34:17   just ignore that, and then we'll just keep the top bar

00:34:19   the same color all the time.

00:34:20   - I feel like we keep relearning this lesson in our industry.

00:34:23   Like we keep unlearning and then having to relearn.

00:34:27   You know, we shouldn't allow arbitrary colors and things

00:34:31   from user content or web content to be under and behind

00:34:36   and through the UI because it causes problems

00:34:39   in lots of edge cases, and not even edge cases,

00:34:41   lots of just common cases.

00:34:42   And you know, we had Windows Vista forever ago

00:34:45   with its translucent everything.

00:34:47   We've had the history of translucent backgrounds

00:34:51   and sidebars and toolbars and everything,

00:34:53   and Mac OS and Windows and everything else.

00:34:57   And we keep relearning this lesson over and over again.

00:35:00   Oh, it actually is better to have the Chrome

00:35:03   of the interface be mostly or entirely opaque

00:35:08   'cause it actually improves legibility

00:35:10   of critical interface elements.

00:35:11   And like, when are we gonna finally stop fighting this fight?

00:35:14   We keep unlearning it, like every two years,

00:35:17   somewhere new, we have to fight this fight again.

00:35:20   - Well, to Apple's credit, they have gotten,

00:35:22   over the many years, way, way better at this

00:35:25   than they used to be.

00:35:26   If you just go look through the history

00:35:26   of a Mac OS X reviews from 10.0 on,

00:35:29   it was one of my first complaints.

00:35:30   And if you watch as the years went on,

00:35:31   Apple got, you're right that Apple keeps going back

00:35:33   to that well, 'cause they want it.

00:35:35   They want it so bad.

00:35:36   And every time they do it, they do a better job.

00:35:38   Even the menu bar, whatever OS release,

00:35:41   there was a Catalina or whatever,

00:35:42   and they first rolled out the current menu bar thing.

00:35:44   The first few iterations of that in the beta,

00:35:47   I mean, I filed bugs on it myself,

00:35:49   and people had screenshots of it,

00:35:50   like look at this menu bar, it's totally unreadable.

00:35:52   And they made adjustments.

00:35:54   Essentially, Apple has become an expert

00:35:57   at figuring out how to solve this specific design problem,

00:36:00   mostly because they keep signing themselves up for it.

00:36:01   The sidebars, the menu bar, the Safari toolbar.

00:36:05   They're way better at it.

00:36:06   It's rare that you get a case that is completely unreadable

00:36:10   like it used to be.

00:36:11   It's just, it is a challenge,

00:36:12   and it's kind of a war of choice, right?

00:36:15   And so it's clear that someone somewhere,

00:36:17   or groups of someones over the past decade or more

00:36:19   inside Apple really want this.

00:36:21   They want your desktop image to color your windows

00:36:25   and have the personality come through.

00:36:28   I understand why aesthetically it's a desirable thing,

00:36:30   but it is a difficult problem.

00:36:33   But Apple's pretty, really good at it now.

00:36:37   And also, they give you lots of check boxes to turn it off.

00:36:40   So window tinting, that's a check box in general preferences

00:36:43   that I assume is just gonna stay there.

00:36:44   Sidebar tinting was also a check box thing.

00:36:46   Like not just a P-list thing,

00:36:48   but like they actually have GUI to turn this off.

00:36:49   And in Safari, same deal, a check box turned off.

00:36:52   The default is all that crap to be on,

00:36:54   and a lot of times people aren't gonna find

00:36:56   those check boxes.

00:36:57   So if you see someone complaining about their computer

00:36:58   being hard to read, and you just go through

00:37:00   with those preferences and check, check, check, check,

00:37:01   then people will be like, oh,

00:37:03   why I wasn't like this to begin with,

00:37:04   which is, to Marco's point, why maybe the brass ring

00:37:08   that you're going after maybe isn't worth pursuing

00:37:10   because what are you even doing?

00:37:11   It's probably worse for most people.

00:37:13   But I will give Apple credit for doggedly pursuing

00:37:18   this stupid goal and being probably the best

00:37:20   in the industry at doing it, even though the result

00:37:23   is still probably worse than just having everything

00:37:25   be a normal color and be readable.

00:37:27   - I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on YouTube monsters

00:37:29   not using natural scrolling.

00:37:31   You know, I am the middle child of this podcast.

00:37:33   I am the middle child of this podcast by birth date,

00:37:36   but I am easily 30 years younger than both of you.

00:37:40   - Natural scrolling is not an old young thing.

00:37:42   I'm surprised that Marco doesn't use it

00:37:43   because he uses a trackpad now.

00:37:44   Natural scrolling doesn't make sense

00:37:46   if you still use a mouse wheel, which I do.

00:37:48   If you use a trackpad, I can understand why people

00:37:51   like natural scrolling.

00:37:52   And it is two separate settings, by the way.

00:37:54   You can have natural scrolling on your trackpad

00:37:56   and quote unquote unnatural scrolling on your mouse.

00:37:59   - No, that's correct.

00:38:00   - It's two separate settings.

00:38:02   But yeah, the reason I think they leave that checkbox there

00:38:04   is there are enough people that will just never

00:38:07   get used to it.

00:38:08   Enough people probably inside Apple who are just like,

00:38:09   just leave the checkbox.

00:38:11   It's not skin off your back.

00:38:12   It's really easy to do.

00:38:13   It's just like some negative number flips somewhere

00:38:15   and some code just, yeah.

00:38:17   - Absolute monsters.

00:38:19   - Well, and going back to like the reason I brought that up

00:38:20   is like I feel like, you know, the original thinking was

00:38:24   as soon as they change something that you don't like,

00:38:27   just adopt it quickly.

00:38:29   Just go for it.

00:38:30   That way, you know, you're not surprised later.

00:38:32   Well, I've recently decided, you know what?

00:38:33   I'll be surprised later.

00:38:34   That's fine.

00:38:35   Like if they give me an option to turn Safari,

00:38:39   like if this option that was discovered in this plist thing,

00:38:42   like if this sticks around or if there ever is an exposed

00:38:45   GUI option to turn Safari back to the way

00:38:48   all web browsers have looked forever, you know what?

00:38:51   I'll use it because I want my tabs to have the full width

00:38:55   of the window to expand into their tab list

00:38:58   because so often, I have enough tabs in one window

00:39:02   that they start collapsing the little text down

00:39:04   and become icon only and that's worse.

00:39:07   And so I try to then keep the number down

00:39:08   because I like being able to see part of the title

00:39:11   of the text because that's useful UI.

00:39:14   And if the tabs end up having like 2/3 or 1/2

00:39:18   of the space they had before total,

00:39:20   that's gonna significantly impede

00:39:22   the usability of this browser.

00:39:23   And so if there's some setting to just change it back,

00:39:26   then fine, I want that setting.

00:39:28   And if they take it away in five years, fine.

00:39:31   I'll reevaluate then.

00:39:32   But until then, I might as well enjoy it the good way.

00:39:35   - I mean, but in this specific case,

00:39:37   the quote unquote setting isn't even like a plist

00:39:39   in the Safari plist.

00:39:41   It is like disclosure required in the feature flags plist.

00:39:45   And I really wonder how long that's gonna stay around

00:39:48   or be functional.

00:39:49   - Yeah, I mean, honestly, that probably won't even make it

00:39:51   through the beta, but if it does, and I hope it does,

00:39:54   I will probably end up using it that way.

00:39:56   Now the real question is, can you somehow hack

00:39:58   the iOS Safari to not suck as much as it does right now

00:40:01   in the beta?

00:40:02   - You know, I don't know about that.

00:40:03   - Yeah, I haven't, I've mostly just been messing

00:40:05   with the Mac ones, but I am curious to see

00:40:07   what the iOS ones are like.

00:40:09   In principle, I feel better about the iOS changes,

00:40:12   but I will have to try them.

00:40:13   - Yeah, and I should clarify, iPad's not too bad.

00:40:15   I don't love the iPad version, but it's not as bad.

00:40:18   The iPhone version is not--

00:40:20   - Strong disagree, strong disagree with you there.

00:40:23   iPad is mediocre at best, and iOS, I actually think,

00:40:27   is very good.

00:40:28   I like having the address bar down at the bottom

00:40:31   so you can use it as like a second home indicator,

00:40:34   affordance, whatever you call that thing.

00:40:36   - Oh, speaking of the address bar on the bottom,

00:40:39   that's another one of the focuses of one of the sessions.

00:40:41   Right, so you've got the address bar on the bottom,

00:40:43   but if you think about it, if you scroll,

00:40:44   like the address bar collapses to that smaller version,

00:40:48   and then moves up to be floating right to the bigger version

00:40:52   and when it moves up like that, it can possibly block

00:40:55   what is at the bottom of the webpage,

00:40:57   depending on how you scroll.

00:40:58   And so they have special, you know,

00:41:02   like there are settings in CSS that you can do

00:41:05   to make it aware of when that button appears

00:41:08   so your webpage will scoot up out of the way of the UI,

00:41:10   and it's like, oh, come on, Apple.

00:41:12   It works, you can do it, but it's like, it's adding work

00:41:15   for web developers that basically no one's gonna do

00:41:17   except for people like me who have nothing better to do.

00:41:19   Right, because who's gonna make a change that only,

00:41:21   maybe Safari, mobile Safari is so popular

00:41:23   that they'll make the change anyway, right?

00:41:25   But it's like, the UI of your web browser

00:41:30   makes me have to change my website to accommodate for it,

00:41:33   that is backwards, it should not be that,

00:41:35   which should be the other way.

00:41:36   Like, however my website is, your browser should accommodate

00:41:39   because my website is the show and your browser

00:41:41   is supposed to be the Chrome.

00:41:43   Oh my God.

00:41:44   - Well, and also, like, they never actually,

00:41:46   like, that's wonderful wishful thinking

00:41:48   that the entire web's gonna somehow make this work.

00:41:51   The reality is, like, we've seen for how long,

00:41:53   over a decade as iPhone users, that, you know,

00:41:56   we, like, whenever you, like, whenever you see, like,

00:41:59   a web view or a webpage that opens up

00:42:01   and they've put something in the bottom 44 points

00:42:04   of the viewport, and you just can't tap it,

00:42:07   because if you try to tap it, the toolbar comes up, right?

00:42:09   Like, and this has been a problem forever.

00:42:12   You can't rely on the entire internet

00:42:15   to update all of their designs for all of time

00:42:18   to work around some of these UI hacks

00:42:21   that Apple puts in every iPhone.

00:42:23   You know, a lot of web developers will do it right,

00:42:25   but even if, you know, 95% of the web pages you visit

00:42:30   do it right, that 5% is gonna really bother you.

00:42:34   And so, to add even more, like, little custom Safari

00:42:38   behaviors that interfere with web content

00:42:41   in order to have the web content, like,

00:42:44   flow around the background of the toolbar

00:42:46   doesn't seem, not only worth it,

00:42:48   but also just doesn't seem pragmatic.

00:42:50   I think that's going to break even more pages

00:42:53   than the previous thing did.

00:42:55   And again, and I keep asking, for what?

00:42:57   Like, I don't mind the concept of having the toolbar

00:43:00   at the bottom, like, I think that's an interesting thing

00:43:01   to explore, there are some challenges there,

00:43:03   but given, you know, how phones are really big

00:43:05   and everything, that's an interesting thing to explore,

00:43:07   I think, for the UI.

00:43:08   But the way they implemented this bottom toolbar

00:43:11   with those two different modes and the giant drop shadow

00:43:15   around the large mode of the address bar

00:43:18   and burying everything, it just, I feel like

00:43:22   this is like version 0.2 of this design

00:43:25   that shouldn't have made it out of the lab

00:43:27   and need some more iteration, a lot more iteration.

00:43:30   - And they did this with the hardware too, if you remember.

00:43:32   This was also in the same session where they reminded people

00:43:34   of a thing that's been there for years now,

00:43:35   which is when they added the notch to the iPhone.

00:43:37   A hardware feature.

00:43:38   Now, if you're looking at a webpage and you rotate it

00:43:40   and you turn it into landscape view,

00:43:42   you can't really have the webpage

00:43:44   getting stuck under the notch.

00:43:45   So what they do is say, okay, well now when you rotate it

00:43:48   into landscape, the actual edge of the Safari

00:43:50   quote unquote window is clear of the notch, right?

00:43:54   But then sometimes it looks weird because now it looks like

00:43:55   you're not using the full width of the screen, right?

00:43:58   So there is a feature, again, in Safari with CSS,

00:44:01   where, this is a basic CSS feature, right,

00:44:03   to say what is the safe area, insets or whatever,

00:44:05   there's a viewport directive that you can use

00:44:07   to make it so that your background extends into the notch

00:44:10   while keeping your content clear of the notch, right?

00:44:13   And most of these features, if you look at them

00:44:15   in the abstract, like, well, this is not really

00:44:18   a feature for Apple's notch, it's more like a feature

00:44:20   of saying essentially where is a safe area

00:44:22   for me to draw my content versus where is an area

00:44:24   where my background could go?

00:44:25   And that is a generic feature and web standards

00:44:27   are supported and I applaud all of that.

00:44:29   But if you look at the sum of things that Apple has done

00:44:32   to make lives more difficult with people running websites,

00:44:35   sometimes purely in service of its own particular devices

00:44:38   or its own particular design, like you said, Marco,

00:44:39   like, there are lots of ways to do a bottom navigation bar

00:44:43   that don't have this problem at all, right, lots of them.

00:44:45   But part of the problem is like when you're a designer,

00:44:48   like, if you look at the solutions they came up with,

00:44:51   when you have a design like this and it's like,

00:44:53   okay, this design has problems,

00:44:55   when you solve those problems, quote, unquote,

00:44:57   solve those problems by like, oh, here's how we can do this

00:44:59   with an existing CSS standard and some directives

00:45:01   and just do this on the webpage and blah, blah, blah,

00:45:02   and then we can make a WWDC about it

00:45:04   and explain to people how to do it,

00:45:05   you feel good that you've solved those problems

00:45:07   'cause you have done a clever thing.

00:45:09   You had some problems and you solved them,

00:45:11   but you also made the problems.

00:45:13   The problems are there because of the design

00:45:15   that you picked and so while it feels good

00:45:17   to solve those problems and it's cool when you can come up

00:45:20   with a generic mechanism to solve them

00:45:22   that it doesn't just solve your problem

00:45:23   but solves this entire class of problems,

00:45:25   you still think, well, if you just did

00:45:26   a normal bottom toolbar, that might have been better.

00:45:28   Now, there's this trade-offs for a regular bottom toolbar too

00:45:30   'cause it wouldn't be as high and as big, like, I understand.

00:45:34   It's a little muddy and we'll all live with this thing

00:45:35   for a while and see how it is and maybe we'll never be able

00:45:38   to go back to the old one where you had to reach way up

00:45:39   to the top of the phone to do anything, but it's weird.

00:45:42   But anyway, my website is update.

00:45:44   Everything I just mentioned,

00:45:45   my website is update to accommodate.

00:45:46   So if you ever look at my website

00:45:48   when I put a post on it once per year,

00:45:49   everything will look great on your phone.

00:45:52   - You update the website, like, in its design

00:45:54   and technical stuff more than you post on it.

00:45:55   - Way more often.

00:45:56   - Yep.

00:45:57   - No, 'cause it's probably like a once a year thing.

00:45:59   I still haven't done dark mode.

00:46:00   That's the one thing I don't support

00:46:01   and mostly because I couldn't, it was just too much effort

00:46:03   to try to come up with a good dark mode color scheme.

00:46:06   And I kind of don't like the idea

00:46:08   of websites turning dark in dark mode.

00:46:10   I kind of like my website to look the same all the time.

00:46:12   I'm sorry for blinding everybody in dark mode.

00:46:15   - Oh my God, I have never been in opposition with you two

00:46:20   more than I have tonight.

00:46:21   You are, but you both have had a string

00:46:25   of impressively wrong opinions this entire episode.

00:46:27   I don't know what to do with myself.

00:46:28   - Do you run in dark mode?

00:46:29   - I don't, I run dark mode when it's dark outside.

00:46:32   I don't run it all the time, but.

00:46:34   - No, that's the worst.

00:46:34   I don't like my things to change like that.

00:46:36   I know people, I understand people are into it, but like.

00:46:39   - I run it on the phone, but not on a Mac.

00:46:41   - You run it all the time on the phone?

00:46:42   - No, on the phone I do auto switching,

00:46:45   but on everything else I'm light all the time.

00:46:48   - Maybe when you get older

00:46:49   and start losing your night vision,

00:46:51   you'll like dark mode less.

00:46:52   But I feel bad.

00:46:53   I should come up with a good dark mode,

00:46:54   but actually coming up with a good dark mode color scheme

00:46:57   is much harder than you think it is.

00:46:59   Apple, again, Apple does an amazing job of this.

00:47:01   A lot of their dark mode color schemes are fantastic.

00:47:04   And it's like a, you really have to like

00:47:06   understand color theory.

00:47:07   'Cause if you like take the eyedropper

00:47:09   and sample the colors, you're like,

00:47:10   that's the color they're using, it looks awful.

00:47:12   But then you look at it in the UI like, oh, it looks right.

00:47:14   You know, it's the same way that if you, you know,

00:47:16   old optical illusions, if you like have a piece of paper

00:47:19   that covers up the whole picture,

00:47:20   except the one little square where the color is,

00:47:22   the color looks nothing like you thought,

00:47:23   because that's how color, our perception of color works.

00:47:25   So anyway, coming up with a good dark mode color scheme

00:47:28   is difficult.

00:47:29   If I could come up with a good one from my website,

00:47:30   I would probably put it in a dark mode

00:47:32   just to satisfy people, but I personally don't use it.

00:47:35   We are sponsored this week by Secret Sauce,

00:47:39   a podcast from Wondery.

00:47:41   In the Secret Sauce series, hosts John Fry and Sam Donner

00:47:45   explore the stories and successes

00:47:47   behind some of the most inspiring businesses,

00:47:49   creative innovators, and intrepid entrepreneurs.

00:47:52   And at the top of that list is Johnny Ive.

00:47:55   Everyone knows Steve Jobs as the creative force behind Apple.

00:47:59   But without Johnny Ive, none of us would be holding up

00:48:01   an iPhone or an iPad.

00:48:03   Together, they made magic happen in Cupertino.

00:48:06   Believe it or not, in the early 90s,

00:48:08   the tech giant that we know as Apple

00:48:10   was in a complete nosedive.

00:48:12   But an unlikely duo, Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive,

00:48:16   combined their powers to transform the company and the world.

00:48:20   The all new season of Secret Sauce

00:48:22   breaks down how this Apple computer odd couple

00:48:24   reached the pinnacle of Silicon Valley success.

00:48:27   Listen to Secret Sauce on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music,

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00:48:33   or you can listen one week early and ad free

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00:48:39   So once again, it's the Secret Sauce podcast,

00:48:41   wherever you get your podcasts,

00:48:43   or you can listen one week early and ad free

00:48:45   from the Wondery Plus service in the Wondery app.

00:48:49   Wondery, feel the story.

00:48:50   - Let's talk more WWDC stuff

00:48:56   and let's see what wrong opinions

00:48:59   you two have about this stuff.

00:49:01   There are ARM only Monterrey features,

00:49:02   only on Apple Silicon, which is kind of a bummer.

00:49:06   So the following features are listed in some fine print

00:49:10   as being, as requiring a Mac with the M1 chip.

00:49:13   Portrait mode, blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos,

00:49:16   live text for copying, oh man, I didn't realize that.

00:49:19   - Keep reading, how you feeling about it?

00:49:20   - Yeah, live text for copying, pasting, looking up,

00:49:22   or translating text within photos,

00:49:24   an interactive 3D globe of the earth in the Maps app,

00:49:27   more detailed maps in cities like San Francisco,

00:49:29   Los Angeles, New York, and London,

00:49:31   which by the way, those maps are crazy cool.

00:49:34   I was impressed by that when I saw it in the keynote

00:49:36   and I have the beta on a Test 11 Pro

00:49:40   and on my day-to-day iPad

00:49:42   and those maps are incredibly cool.

00:49:45   Text-to-speech in more languages,

00:49:46   including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish.

00:49:49   On-device keyboard dictation

00:49:50   that performs all processing completely offline.

00:49:52   And finally, unlimited keyboard detection,

00:49:55   which is previously limited to 60 seconds per instance.

00:49:59   That's a bummer, particularly the maps thing

00:50:02   and the live text thing, I think are super, super bummers.

00:50:05   That's too bad.

00:50:06   - So this is quite a mixture of features,

00:50:08   many of which were kind of headlining features, right?

00:50:11   And people might be surprised to learn

00:50:13   if they're not on Intel.

00:50:14   Now obviously, like this is on Apple's webpage

00:50:16   and they have a little footnote

00:50:17   that says they're not available on Intel.

00:50:19   Maybe that will change before release,

00:50:21   but it's not like this is just how it is in the beta

00:50:23   and we can guess they did put it on a webpage.

00:50:25   Like it's apple.com/macos/monteray-preview.

00:50:28   So it's not a public webpage where they're saying,

00:50:30   hey, if you got an Intel Mac, don't expect this.

00:50:32   Some of the features have a plausible,

00:50:35   if still frustrating explanation, right?

00:50:37   The portrait mode blurring, FaceTime video, whatever, right?

00:50:41   That features that were developed for iOS devices

00:50:45   and for the neural engine on the ARM chip

00:50:47   and all that stuff.

00:50:49   Yes, they could rewrite it so it worked on Intel.

00:50:51   But at this point in Apple's transition to ARM,

00:50:54   how much effort do you think Apple wants to spend

00:50:57   rewriting something for Intel,

00:51:00   to be GPU powered or to use Intel's SIMD instructions

00:51:04   or whatever, right?

00:51:05   There's lots of ways you could do this.

00:51:06   It's not like Intel Macs are quote unquote incapable of it.

00:51:08   The neural engine is pretty amazing though, but still,

00:51:11   you could do it on Intel Macs.

00:51:13   But Apple doesn't want to have to invest time

00:51:15   in writing that.

00:51:16   And like a lot of the frameworks they use to do it

00:51:19   are probably Apple neural engine frameworks

00:51:21   'cause this feature was building on work that was done

00:51:24   when this was only ever going to ship on something

00:51:27   with the neural engine and all that.

00:51:28   So that, I mean, it's disappointing.

00:51:31   It's not actually a technical barrier,

00:51:32   but you can understand why Apple wouldn't want

00:51:34   to invest the time to make an Intel version

00:51:36   just as they're flushing the rest of the Intel Macs

00:51:38   down the toilet, right?

00:51:39   So sad, but understandable.

00:51:41   Some other ones though, you're like,

00:51:43   does this require anything having to do

00:51:46   with the ARM, you know, with ARM Apple system on a chips?

00:51:51   Or is it just that they had finished working code

00:51:53   that works in ARM and they didn't even bother

00:51:55   even like recompiling and dealing with the issues?

00:51:57   And one example of that is the app Globes View.

00:52:00   Apparently there's a way to re-enable that feature

00:52:03   with a debug flag and it works just fine in Intel Macs.

00:52:07   So maybe it has bugs on Intel.

00:52:09   Maybe they didn't want to test it on Intel,

00:52:10   but it all kind of gets into the sort of

00:52:11   the corporate horse trading of like,

00:52:14   what does Apple deciding to spend its time on?

00:52:16   And it seems like any time spent on things

00:52:19   just for Intel Macs is kind of below the line,

00:52:21   as we say in the business for Apple these days.

00:52:25   With the possible exception being

00:52:26   the newly revised Mac Pro Tower that supports Nvidia

00:52:30   of 6,900 video cards that has been rumored for a while.

00:52:35   So if they come up with the new,

00:52:36   if they come up with a new,

00:52:37   you know, with the new Xeons and everything,

00:52:39   if they come up with new Intel Macs with the new Xeons

00:52:41   and new video cards, but still you can't do

00:52:43   like the globe map thing on Intel Macs,

00:52:45   that's quite a mixture of corporate priorities.

00:52:48   But I suppose the priorities for the super duper pro group

00:52:52   and their customers are very different

00:52:54   than the priorities of everyone else.

00:52:54   But it is going to make people feel disappointed.

00:52:56   Like if live text doesn't work and it's like,

00:52:59   oh, I saw that, you know,

00:53:00   I thought I see people doing that on their Macs.

00:53:02   Why can't I do it on my Mac?

00:53:04   Oh, you've got an Intel Mac.

00:53:05   What's Intel?

00:53:06   Like people don't know why they can't do it.

00:53:09   It's just, it just seems like a shame.

00:53:12   Granted, everyone should have our Macs,

00:53:14   but Apple's not going to give everyone one of those for free.

00:53:16   So I really hope that Apple kind of changes its mind

00:53:20   on at least a few of these and puts in the work

00:53:22   to make an Intel version of these features.

00:53:24   'Cause I don't think it would be that much work.

00:53:26   And even though Apple's not going to be selling

00:53:28   Intel Macs pretty soon,

00:53:29   people are going to have them for a long time.

00:53:32   - It is kind of funny to think like, you know,

00:53:34   back when we were all in middle school, you know,

00:53:36   when we'd be talking, oh yeah,

00:53:37   do you play the latest, you know, Doom or whatever.

00:53:40   And you know, the one kid would be like,

00:53:42   oh, I have a Mac.

00:53:43   And it was like, oh, that's, you poor kid, right?

00:53:46   Like that's-- - You sweet summer child.

00:53:48   - Yeah, like your games suck.

00:53:49   And like now, like, you know,

00:53:51   eventually Apple moved to Intel,

00:53:53   the same processors PCs were using,

00:53:54   you can install Windows on it and everything,

00:53:56   like the maximum compatibility with everything.

00:53:58   Now they left that world,

00:54:00   and now we feel bad for the Intel Macs.

00:54:03   Oh, you can't do this new feature, that's too bad.

00:54:05   We really have come full circle.

00:54:08   - Yeah, it's 'cause the Apple's new big thing

00:54:12   is the phone new big thing, right?

00:54:13   But that's where all the action happens.

00:54:15   And so it's like all the cool features happen on the phone

00:54:17   and if the Mac can benefit from that, great.

00:54:21   But if it can't,

00:54:21   because it uses the wrong kind of processor, oh well.

00:54:24   I mean, that's the whole reason

00:54:25   they did the transition to begin with.

00:54:26   But I remember speaking of Mac and Doom,

00:54:28   I remember playing Doom on my Mac.

00:54:30   What was it?

00:54:31   It was like, it was a Doom port to the Mac,

00:54:32   which is not a good port.

00:54:34   And it was many years after Doom was, you know,

00:54:36   obviously out on the PC.

00:54:37   And there was some kind of thing you use for Mac OS

00:54:40   that gave you like, oh, YouTube will tell me this.

00:54:43   - What was the weird PC networking

00:54:44   that Doom used for deathmatch IPX?

00:54:47   - IPX. - IPX.

00:54:48   - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:54:49   Anyway, it was a Mac OS IPX extension.

00:54:52   So you could play Doom deathmatch against people on PCs

00:54:55   through like the world's jankiest network stack

00:54:57   that somehow is like a house of cards, like making it.

00:55:00   It was like, I don't even know if it was,

00:55:01   I guess it had to be TCP/IP.

00:55:03   Because TCP/IP used to be like an extension,

00:55:07   you know, it wasn't built into the operating system

00:55:08   back in the day.

00:55:09   So like Trumpet/Winsock days, you know,

00:55:10   when it was like a thing that you would get

00:55:11   for your computer and add on so you could get on the internet.

00:55:15   Anyway, the framework was terrible.

00:55:17   And I'd already played Doom for like years

00:55:19   on my friend's Pentiums and it was kind of pointless.

00:55:22   - The funny thing is like, through this entire like circle

00:55:24   of having the wrong processor,

00:55:26   then having the right processor,

00:55:28   now having the wrong processor again,

00:55:30   games on the Mac have always sucked

00:55:31   and still have still suck and will always suck.

00:55:34   - I mean, that shows that the hardware

00:55:36   is not usually the main barrier,

00:55:37   but there was a time in there when we were on Intel

00:55:40   and you could get Nvidia GPUs when,

00:55:42   yeah, it was still a grim situation,

00:55:44   but at least you could just boot into Windows

00:55:46   and have the same stuff.

00:55:47   You got the same processor,

00:55:48   you got the same Nvidia graphic card,

00:55:49   you got the same Windows,

00:55:50   and it would run at the speed that you would expect

00:55:52   a PC that you built for one eighth of the price

00:55:54   would run that same game.

00:55:56   - So since I've made fun of you two for being old,

00:55:59   let me make fun of myself for being old.

00:56:01   I remember vividly having friends bring their like

00:56:06   mini tower to tower computers

00:56:08   and their 8,000 pound CRTs to my house to have a sleepover

00:56:12   and a quote unquote LAN party,

00:56:14   but this was during the days of DOS.

00:56:16   And so it wasn't a LAN party,

00:56:17   it was instead like two computers would connect to each other

00:56:21   with what you would think as a serial cable,

00:56:23   but oh no, no, no.

00:56:24   Do you remember what it's called Marco?

00:56:25   - A null modem cable?

00:56:26   - Mm-hmm, with a null modem cable.

00:56:29   And so you could play against each other

00:56:30   'cause there was no like any sort of networking

00:56:33   at that point that was,

00:56:35   I mean, I'm sure it existed, but it wasn't on DOS

00:56:38   or anything like that.

00:56:40   And then fast forward a little while

00:56:42   and a lot of these games on DOS like Doom, for example,

00:56:45   supported the aforementioned IPX networking,

00:56:48   which I don't know where or how that ever existed for real,

00:56:52   but apparently it was a thing somewhere.

00:56:54   But, and I've talked about this several times on the show

00:56:57   over the last few years,

00:56:58   but I remember getting a piece of software called Kali,

00:57:01   K-A-L-I, and I'll put a link in the show.

00:57:03   - Oh, that was huge.

00:57:05   - Yeah, and so what it would do is it would emulate

00:57:08   an IPX network, like a local IPX network,

00:57:10   but it rode on top of the internet, on top of TCP/IP.

00:57:14   So it was like a combination of this like network facade

00:57:18   as well as a like game match system.

00:57:22   And I'm sure there's a better term for that

00:57:24   with kids these days, but I don't know,

00:57:25   that's what I called it at the time.

00:57:26   And so you could find like,

00:57:28   and I remember playing Descent with this all the time,

00:57:31   but you would figure out on the internet

00:57:34   a group of people to play Descent

00:57:37   and you would find these rooms in Kali

00:57:39   and then you would connect

00:57:40   and then it would fake out the IPX network

00:57:42   so you could all play each other.

00:57:43   And this was applicable to many, many, many different

00:57:46   DOS games and in Windows as well at the time.

00:57:49   And it was amazing.

00:57:51   And it was shareware.

00:57:52   And I remember I like asked dad

00:57:53   if I could have his credit card to spend like 20 bucks

00:57:56   one time to have a license in perpetuity,

00:57:59   which I don't have that information anymore,

00:58:00   but I guess if I wanted to download Kali again,

00:58:03   I think it's still valid.

00:58:04   But anyways, it was just amazing.

00:58:07   And it's so wild how far we've come

00:58:10   from bringing these exceedingly heavy computers

00:58:14   and extremely heavy monitors upstairs to my house

00:58:18   where we had these no modem cables

00:58:19   where we would sit and eat too many Doritos

00:58:21   and play games against each other.

00:58:24   See also when we would play point to point via modems.

00:58:27   So you would have your modem call the other person's modem

00:58:31   and you could play point to point in a local area

00:58:34   against each other.

00:58:36   It was so barbaric, but at the time

00:58:38   it was the coolest thing in the entire world.

00:58:41   And it was a miracle that we could get it to work.

00:58:43   And golly, now it's like, thinking about that,

00:58:47   it's so ancient and preposterous technology, man.

00:58:50   - Yeah, even though I had Macs during all this time

00:58:52   and never owned a PC, everything you've listed I've done.

00:58:55   (laughing)

00:58:56   No modem cables, Kali.

00:58:58   Just because I didn't have a PC

00:58:59   doesn't mean I wasn't around people who had them.

00:59:01   So I was there as technical help

00:59:03   to do what Marco has described.

00:59:04   To spend the first hour and a half

00:59:05   just trying to get everyone to get the map

00:59:07   and get everything set up and get the connections to work.

00:59:09   Or get us to call on the phone and say,

00:59:11   "We're gonna call you now, okay, hang up, all right, hang on."

00:59:13   Then have to do the modem thing, oh, it was a nightmare.

00:59:16   - Oh God, I miss those days.

00:59:18   I don't really want to go back to these days,

00:59:21   but I do miss those days quite a bit.

00:59:23   And Marco, you did a fair number of honest to goodness

00:59:26   LAN parties in your day, didn't you?

00:59:28   - Yeah, actually, because we had,

00:59:30   like in our little group of friends,

00:59:31   we had three of us had some concept of a home network.

00:59:36   Like ethernet wiring running somewhere

00:59:40   with multiple computers.

00:59:41   But mostly it was us bringing our giant tower computers

00:59:45   and giant heavy CRT monitors to each other's houses

00:59:48   and plugging in somehow to some kind of ethernet situation.

00:59:52   I mean, these days it's so much easier,

00:59:55   because these days most kids have laptops

00:59:58   instead of desktops.

00:59:59   So even if your gaming performance on a laptop

01:00:01   would be inferior to desktop performance,

01:00:03   it would still be far more useful

01:00:06   for bringing it to your friend's house

01:00:08   and playing together.

01:00:10   Not to mention the fact that WiFi exists,

01:00:11   which back then it was just barely starting to come out

01:00:15   and none of us had it.

01:00:16   So, oh man, we had so much fun.

01:00:20   To go from not being able to play computer games

01:00:24   with each other in the same room

01:00:26   to the first time we experienced that

01:00:28   was such an upgrade in fun and in coolness.

01:00:32   I still remember those early games.

01:00:34   I mean, the very first one we played was Doom.

01:00:38   We didn't have a null modem cable though.

01:00:41   And one of my friends, his parents had two computers,

01:00:44   'cause they both were like computer using professionals,

01:00:47   and they had two phone lines,

01:00:49   'cause again, they were professionals.

01:00:51   - Oh, so you would dial it yourselves?

01:00:52   - Well, by lacking a null modem cable,

01:00:55   we used one computer to call the other one,

01:00:57   tying up both phone lines.

01:01:00   Naturally, that did not last.

01:01:01   The parents were not super pleased with us

01:01:03   tying up both of their phone lines

01:01:06   for indefinite amounts of time to play Doom.

01:01:08   But man, we do have it a lot better today,

01:01:12   but those times were very fun as well.

01:01:15   - Yeah, it's funny you bring that up,

01:01:16   'cause we had two phone lines for most of my childhood,

01:01:18   which made us pretty spoiled.

01:01:21   And the reason we had it was because my dad,

01:01:23   when he came home, was often living on the computer.

01:01:26   We were talking about this just a couple of weeks ago,

01:01:28   continuing to use profs,

01:01:29   which was this terminal-based email solution.

01:01:31   And he would be on the phone,

01:01:34   dialed into IBM for hours in the evenings.

01:01:36   And if we didn't have two phone lines, it would be a mess.

01:01:39   But dad would go to bed pretty early,

01:01:42   'cause he always woke up early.

01:01:44   And so there were a couple of hours at night

01:01:45   that I would be awake,

01:01:46   that the second phone line would be empty.

01:01:47   And so it was not unusual to have a late night gaming session

01:01:50   with one of my local friends,

01:01:51   where I would dial that person,

01:01:53   or they would dial me, or what have you.

01:01:55   And it's also funny too,

01:01:56   because I don't know how it is today,

01:01:59   but when Marco and I were in college,

01:02:00   and I think, John, you had a similar experience

01:02:02   with different games,

01:02:03   but when Marco and I were in college,

01:02:05   Counter-Strike was really big,

01:02:06   and Quake 2 or 3 or something, I forget which one it was,

01:02:09   but one of the Quakes was really big.

01:02:12   And as Neil, underscore, underscore, underscore,

01:02:13   in the chat, points out,

01:02:14   college dorms were just land parties across several rooms.

01:02:19   I played an unreasonable amount of Counter-Strike,

01:02:21   both against people in my own dorm,

01:02:23   and across the internet when I was at college.

01:02:25   And again, I miss those days, they were so fun.

01:02:28   John, you had some sort of collegiate

01:02:31   networked gaming experience, didn't you?

01:02:33   - Yeah, I mean, with the Mac people,

01:02:35   you could do AppleTalk networks with the Phonet thing.

01:02:37   So it was like a little adapter

01:02:38   that let you use phone cord to tie it.

01:02:40   Because there were a lot of Mac, not a lot,

01:02:42   but there were Mac games, there were only Mac games,

01:02:45   that use AppleTalk networking,

01:02:47   and only AppleTalk networking to do their network gaming.

01:02:49   So if you wanted to play those games,

01:02:51   you needed an AppleTalk network,

01:02:52   and nobody had an AppleTalk network.

01:02:54   There were some schools, you'd hear stories of a school,

01:02:56   like, yeah, this school is so bought into Apple stuff,

01:02:58   they have an AppleTalk network in their dorms.

01:03:00   You're like, an AppleTalk network, really?

01:03:01   Anyway, we'd have to make our own in our school.

01:03:03   We weren't that lucky slash unfortunate,

01:03:05   depending on how you view having an AppleTalk network

01:03:07   in your dorm.

01:03:08   AppleTalk was cool in lots of reasons,

01:03:10   but not so cool once the internet came out,

01:03:12   I can tell you that.

01:03:13   But yeah, that Bolo was the old one.

01:03:15   But when I was in school, we were playing,

01:03:17   I think it was Ambrosia Software.

01:03:21   I never knew how to pronounce it,

01:03:22   because no one ever said these words,

01:03:23   and there was no audio on the internet,

01:03:24   but it was A-V-A-R-A.

01:03:26   It was either Avara, or, anyway,

01:03:28   it was like a, you were like a 2D chicken walker mech,

01:03:32   3D rendered, and you would shoot projectiles out

01:03:34   of the other 2D chicken walker mechs,

01:03:36   in a 3D rendered world.

01:03:37   So it was flat shaded, no textures, but polygons.

01:03:41   And so it was a 3D first person online shooter,

01:03:43   and your movement direction was independent

01:03:46   of your view direction.

01:03:47   So it was novel in that way,

01:03:49   and you were sort of controlling a little vehicle thing.

01:03:52   Anyway, we do that over Apple Talk,

01:03:55   or over various versions of Apple Talk,

01:03:57   tunneled across various things throughout the computer labs,

01:03:59   because to be able to run that,

01:04:01   you needed a bunch of Macs that were powerful enough

01:04:03   to do 3D stuff, mostly in the days before 3D cards.

01:04:06   You needed actually a pretty fast CPU,

01:04:08   and a fancy color screen,

01:04:09   which a lot of Macs didn't have,

01:04:10   'cause they were black and white, a lot of the older ones,

01:04:13   and also an Apple Talk network.

01:04:15   - Bolo is a video game initially created

01:04:17   for the BBC Micro computer by Stuart Cheshire in 1987.

01:04:20   - You know that guy.

01:04:21   - Yeah, I know that guy, and then later ported to Cheshire,

01:04:24   by Cheshire to the Apple Macintosh.

01:04:25   No frickin' way.

01:04:27   So Stuart works at Apple now,

01:04:29   and is Mr. Discovery, well, not Discovery,

01:04:32   what's the, the MDMS responder?

01:04:34   - Zeroconf, rendezvous.

01:04:35   - Yep, yep, yep.

01:04:37   That was his baby, and he's still at Apple,

01:04:39   as of just a couple of months ago anyway.

01:04:41   So that is super wild.

01:04:42   I didn't realize that was Stuart.

01:04:44   That's super cool.

01:04:44   - You could find people to match against

01:04:46   by going to the chooser where you chose your printer.

01:04:49   - No way, that's absolutely bananas.

01:04:52   That's super cool.

01:04:53   Well, see, now I feel old too,

01:04:54   and now we're all even again.

01:04:56   All right, now that I'm in a better mood

01:04:57   and don't hate you two anymore,

01:04:58   tell me what's exciting about Disk Utility, John.

01:05:01   - Everything, Disk Utility, it's been updated.

01:05:04   - Is this an area where you really want excitement?

01:05:06   Like, it's like-- - That's true.

01:05:07   - If you really want exciting things in Disk Utility,

01:05:09   I mean, last time they touched it, it was not good.

01:05:12   - Yeah, well, that's the problem.

01:05:14   They changed Disk Utility, I forget when,

01:05:16   a couple of years ago now,

01:05:17   and they changed it by essentially,

01:05:19   seemed like it was almost like it was an all new app,

01:05:20   because the UI looked all new,

01:05:22   but all people really cared about was,

01:05:23   hey, where is this feature

01:05:24   that I used to be able to do in Disk Utility?

01:05:25   It's not there anymore.

01:05:27   So the interface was new and looked clean

01:05:29   and was quote-unquote simplified,

01:05:31   but a bunch of features were missing,

01:05:32   and slowly but surely, most of them have come back.

01:05:36   Some of them haven't.

01:05:37   Some of them have left just because of the massive change

01:05:39   in the way Macs boot, especially the M1 Macs.

01:05:42   Like, even on Intel Macs,

01:05:43   they've been changing the way they boot,

01:05:44   adding the T1 and the T2 chip and all that other stuff.

01:05:46   But then with the ARM-based Macs,

01:05:49   the boot process of Macs is totally different

01:05:51   and much more like it is on,

01:05:52   as you can imagine, on the phones and the iPads,

01:05:54   and that impacts what you can and can't do with Disk Utility.

01:05:57   And of course, APFS came out,

01:05:58   which changes everything about the file system

01:06:00   and how it works, and for a while,

01:06:01   Disk Utility didn't have the features to,

01:06:05   didn't under, it couldn't do all the things

01:06:07   that APFS could do,

01:06:08   so you'd have to do them from the command line,

01:06:10   and it's been a long time coming.

01:06:12   But anyway, Disk Utility is getting more and more features,

01:06:14   and this year, finally, in Monterey,

01:06:16   if you open up Disk Utility and select in the sidebar

01:06:20   one of your APFS volumes, you will see at the bottom

01:06:22   a new little section of the UI that shows you,

01:06:25   ta-da, all your snapshots.

01:06:27   And not only does it show you your snapshots,

01:06:29   but you can add and remove snapshots from a GUI.

01:06:32   Hey, imagine that, you don't have this TMutil anymore.

01:06:34   And it also has a bunch of columns,

01:06:36   you can customize the columns and show more of them,

01:06:38   but some of the columns that are included

01:06:39   are something called Tied Mark and Private Size and Size.

01:06:44   And if you mouse over these things

01:06:45   and get help about them,

01:06:46   little tool tip will explain what they mean.

01:06:48   This is trying mightily to explain

01:06:51   how much extra space is taken up by this snapshot.

01:06:56   If I deleted this snapshot, how much space would I get back?

01:06:59   And it has to do with, well, what is the delta

01:07:01   from this snapshot to the previous one?

01:07:03   And what is the Tied Mark of the largest allocation byte,

01:07:08   you know, used by this snapshot?

01:07:10   The definitions are complicated

01:07:12   and it's not particularly clarifying to the average person,

01:07:14   but if you really wanna know some more details,

01:07:16   now there is an actual GUI

01:07:18   to show you information about snapshots.

01:07:20   I hope people don't send other people here to say,

01:07:23   "Hey, if you can't install my software,

01:07:24   "open this utility, go down to the snapshot,

01:07:26   "select everything and hit the minus button."

01:07:28   But at least that's better than telling them,

01:07:29   go to TMutil, delete local snapshots,

01:07:32   and then type a date in the special format.

01:07:35   It's less fraught than going to the command line.

01:07:37   So I'm glad to see Disk Utility expanding

01:07:40   to finally start to actually expose

01:07:42   a lot of the functionality that has been in APFS.

01:07:44   Now, if only the Finder could do a better job

01:07:46   of telling us how much space is really free on our disks,

01:07:48   we'd be making some progress.

01:07:50   - Baby steps.

01:07:51   - I imagine that.

01:07:53   So when there seemed to be a convergence of macOS and iOS,

01:07:58   a lot of Mac fans, including me, got really nervous

01:08:02   because it seemed like bad things could come here,

01:08:04   you know, here be the dragons.

01:08:06   But there are some things that seem really cool

01:08:09   that have been integrated or brought from iOS to macOS,

01:08:13   and here's one of them.

01:08:14   Apparently macOS Monterey allows you to erase a Mac

01:08:16   without needing to reinstall the operating system.

01:08:18   That is super cool.

01:08:20   Seemingly in system preferences,

01:08:22   there's an option to erase all user data

01:08:24   and user installed apps from the system

01:08:25   while maintaining the operating system currently installed.

01:08:28   Because the storage is always encrypted on Mac systems

01:08:30   with Apple Silicon, on the T2 chip or the T2 chip,

01:08:33   the system is instantly and securely erased

01:08:35   by destroying the encryption keys.

01:08:37   Very cool.

01:08:38   - So this was many years in coming,

01:08:40   because like if you remember the path the Mac has traveled,

01:08:43   first it was just like a Mac and you had a boot disk

01:08:45   and everything was on,

01:08:46   and if you erase the disk, everything was gone.

01:08:47   And then they put the operating system

01:08:49   on a separate partition,

01:08:49   and then they said the operating system

01:08:50   is on a separate partition, it's read only.

01:08:52   And then they said the operating system

01:08:53   is on a separate partition, it's read only,

01:08:54   and actually you're booted from a snapshot

01:08:56   that's cryptographically signed.

01:08:57   And at that point, you basically have parity with iOS,

01:09:00   which, and this is what Apple says on their webpage,

01:09:02   the phrase they use,

01:09:03   a phrase that should be familiar to iOS users,

01:09:06   people who are familiar with iPhones or iPads,

01:09:08   erase all content and settings.

01:09:10   That's been an option on our phones forever.

01:09:12   Oh, if I want to get rid of my stuff on the phone,

01:09:15   say I want to give this phone a hand-me-down to my kid,

01:09:17   I want my stuff to be off it,

01:09:18   you just do erase all content and settings.

01:09:20   And what that would be doing on your iOS device

01:09:22   is essentially throwing away the encryption key

01:09:25   for the user data section of the storage.

01:09:30   You didn't have to reinstall the operating system,

01:09:31   because on iOS the operating system

01:09:32   was sealed off somewhere else,

01:09:33   and now the Macs are like that too,

01:09:35   and now you get the advantage.

01:09:36   Now you can essentially wipe your Mac

01:09:39   just as fast as you can wipe your phone.

01:09:41   - Extremely cool stuff.

01:09:42   All right, Jon, tell me about iCloud Private Relay

01:09:45   and how this all works.

01:09:46   - This, I think when we talked about it

01:09:48   in the keynote episode, it was like,

01:09:50   oh, this seems kind of like a VPN,

01:09:51   but it's subtly different than that.

01:09:52   There's been a lot of articles about this,

01:09:54   but I think it was worth touching on briefly.

01:09:55   We'll put a link to Jason Snell's article

01:09:57   where he explains it well.

01:09:58   So to recap what a VPN is,

01:10:01   a VPN is like when you connect,

01:10:04   and you can have a VPN for subsets

01:10:05   of the network or the whole network,

01:10:06   but essentially we're going to tunnel your traffic

01:10:08   over this secure connection

01:10:09   through some servers that we control.

01:10:12   Lots of people's workplaces use them,

01:10:14   so you can tunnel into your work's internal network.

01:10:17   Normally all of your internal work stuff

01:10:20   would be completely invisible

01:10:21   because they use internal IP addresses

01:10:23   that are not publicly routable,

01:10:24   but hey, if you get on the VPN,

01:10:26   it will make a little secure tunnel

01:10:27   with your authentication credentials

01:10:29   so that from your home network

01:10:31   when you're working from home for a year because of COVID,

01:10:34   you can actually get on your work's internal network.

01:10:36   That's what a VPN does.

01:10:37   And like I said, a VPN, you can say,

01:10:38   okay, every piece of traffic that goes to and from my Mac

01:10:41   over the network goes through the VPN,

01:10:43   or you can have, say, only for this subset of addresses

01:10:46   go through the VPN.

01:10:47   You have some flexibility, but that's what a VPN is.

01:10:49   People use VPNs for non-work purposes

01:10:52   to essentially disguise where they're coming from,

01:10:56   disguise who they are, where they're coming from,

01:10:58   because from the perspective,

01:10:59   once you go through the VPN,

01:11:01   the VPN is the thing connecting to the rest of the internet,

01:11:03   and the rest of the internet thinks

01:11:05   I'm getting a connection from whatever this VPN is,

01:11:07   but they don't know who you are as part of the encryption.

01:11:09   So you can make it seem like you live somewhere

01:11:10   where you don't.

01:11:11   If you go through a VPN that's in a different country,

01:11:13   as far as the servers that you're connecting to

01:11:15   are concerned, it looks like you're coming from that country

01:11:16   and not where you really are, so on and so forth.

01:11:19   iCloud Private Relay is not a VPN,

01:11:21   but it's aimed at trying to preserve your privacy

01:11:26   while you browse the web.

01:11:27   So here's the description of how it works.

01:11:28   Instead of using a VPN, which is essentially one single proxy

01:11:31   that you go through,

01:11:33   iCloud Private Relay uses two separate parts here,

01:11:36   one called an ingress proxy

01:11:38   and the one called the egress proxy.

01:11:40   So the ingress proxy is managed by Apple,

01:11:43   and that's the thing that hides your IP address.

01:11:47   You connect to the ingress proxy,

01:11:49   and the ingress proxy sees your IP address

01:11:51   'cause you're connecting to it.

01:11:51   There's no way, unfortunately,

01:11:53   if again, if you're not on a VPN,

01:11:54   there's no way to avoid that.

01:11:55   The ingress proxy sees your IP address.

01:11:57   But the ingress proxy doesn't see

01:11:59   what you're trying to connect to

01:12:01   because that has been encrypted on your Mac

01:12:02   and sent over the wire.

01:12:03   So the ingress proxy says,

01:12:04   "Okay, well, I know this person's IP address,

01:12:07   "and then I have this encrypted packet

01:12:08   "that says where they're getting to,

01:12:09   "but I don't know what's in that."

01:12:11   And then it passes this information on to the egress proxy,

01:12:14   but when it connects to the egress proxy,

01:12:16   the egress proxy says, "Who's connecting to me?"

01:12:18   And it sees the IP address of the ingress proxy

01:12:21   'cause that is who's connecting to it.

01:12:23   So as far as the egress proxy is concerned,

01:12:25   "Oh, I'm getting a connection from Apple's ingress server."

01:12:30   Oh, and by the way, here's the content.

01:12:32   It's this encrypted packet

01:12:33   of telling me where I'm supposed to go.

01:12:34   Now, apparently, somehow,

01:12:36   in a way that hasn't been explained anywhere that I've seen,

01:12:39   the egress proxy has the keys to decrypt

01:12:42   the place where you're trying to get to.

01:12:46   And so it decrypts the place where you're trying to get to,

01:12:47   say, apple.com, and then it connects to apple.com

01:12:50   and gets the information and the data flows back that way.

01:12:53   So it's trying to split up the information

01:12:55   so that one place knows your IP but not where you're going,

01:12:58   and the next place knows where you're going

01:12:59   but not your IP.

01:13:00   And Apple pitches this as privacy-preserving

01:13:04   because Apple runs the ingress proxies,

01:13:06   but it doesn't have to run the egress proxies.

01:13:08   Like, it farms them out to third parties, right?

01:13:10   And you can imagine how there can be

01:13:11   a public-private key exchange over this whole route

01:13:13   where you could get it so the egress proxies

01:13:15   know how to decrypt the thing, but here's the problem.

01:13:18   Apple keeps pitching this as like,

01:13:19   "Well, with the VPN,

01:13:20   "you need to really trust that VPN provider

01:13:22   "because they see all your traffic.

01:13:23   "Everything goes through there, right?

01:13:24   "They have all the keys to the kingdom."

01:13:26   And in this thing, you don't need to trust anybody

01:13:28   because Apple knows one thing and doesn't know the other,

01:13:30   and the third party knows the other thing and doesn't know.

01:13:32   The problem is you have to trust Apple.

01:13:33   Like, in the end, with all the stuff, you have to trust Apple

01:13:35   because Apple's the one telling us that,

01:13:37   "Oh, yeah, on your Mac,

01:13:39   "we'll encrypt where you're trying to get to,

01:13:42   "and then we'll send it along."

01:13:44   And Apple's the one deciding to do that encryption.

01:13:47   They could choose not to do the encryption.

01:13:49   They could do the encryption

01:13:50   and then send the keys somewhere else or use a well-known,

01:13:52   like, in the end, you have to trust Apple

01:13:54   because they're writing the software

01:13:55   that implements the system.

01:13:56   So Apple could know all this information.

01:13:59   Apple is telling us, and I 100% believe them,

01:14:02   that they're not doing that,

01:14:03   that they are literally encrypting it and passing it on,

01:14:05   and they can't, you know,

01:14:06   because Apple doesn't wanna know this information.

01:14:08   They want it to be secure.

01:14:09   But in the end, you have to trust Apple,

01:14:11   or rather, let's say Apple is hacked

01:14:13   and someone puts a backdoor in their operating system.

01:14:16   It would be trivially easy to get access

01:14:18   to all this traffic because, again,

01:14:20   Apple's operating systems and frameworks

01:14:22   are the ones implementing it

01:14:23   and deciding to encrypt this stuff, right?

01:14:25   So the thing I'm curious about is actually the key exchange

01:14:27   of how does the egress proxy,

01:14:29   how does the egress proxy have the ability

01:14:31   to decrypt the encrypted address that gets sent along to it

01:14:34   while the ingress proxy doesn't have that ability?

01:14:36   I'm not sure how that key exchange works,

01:14:38   and I don't think it's been explained,

01:14:39   but either way, that's what it does.

01:14:41   And the second thing that's different about this in a VPN is,

01:14:43   well, what's included in this?

01:14:44   Is it all network traffic?

01:14:45   Is it a subset of the network?

01:14:46   It's even more specific than that.

01:14:48   The only things that Apple says are included

01:14:50   are browsing from the Safari web browser specifically.

01:14:54   So it seems like some of this is implemented

01:14:55   in whatever framework Safari is using.

01:14:57   Like when you go to connect to a webpage,

01:14:59   Safari itself or some frameworks that it's using says,

01:15:01   rather than making an HTTP connection to the target website,

01:15:05   I'm going to encrypt where you're trying to get.

01:15:07   I'm gonna connect to an ingress server

01:15:08   and pass along whatever packet

01:15:10   and whatever format to the ingress server,

01:15:11   and Safari or some framework is doing that.

01:15:14   The other thing that's included is DNS queries,

01:15:16   which makes sense because if you don't see

01:15:17   where people are browsing,

01:15:18   you see what they do DNS lookups for,

01:15:20   you still know where they're browsing.

01:15:22   Oh, they did a DNS lookup for www.apple.com,

01:15:25   but then I don't know what webpage they went to.

01:15:27   They probably went to apple.com.

01:15:29   Like it's not, you know, it's metadata, right?

01:15:31   So they're tunneling the DNS queries

01:15:34   through the private relay as well.

01:15:36   There are lots of other ways to secure DNS too, by the way,

01:15:38   but this is what they're doing.

01:15:39   They're tunneling it over this thing.

01:15:41   And they will also go through the private relay

01:15:45   for what they call a subset of app traffic

01:15:47   by which they have explained that they mean plain HTTP,

01:15:50   so non-HTTPS traffic, right?

01:15:53   So apparently if any app tries to make

01:15:55   a plain unencrypted HTTP connection,

01:15:57   it will go through private relay, right?

01:15:59   And here are the things that it doesn't apply to.

01:16:01   Doesn't apply to LAN connection,

01:16:02   so anything on your local network in any form,

01:16:05   private relay doesn't do.

01:16:06   Doesn't apply to private domains.

01:16:08   I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that,

01:16:09   but maybe just like domains that are not in the public DNS,

01:16:12   but are just privately routable.

01:16:13   - Yeah, I believe that's internal, yeah.

01:16:16   Doesn't apply to network extensions VPNs.

01:16:18   Apple still supports VPNs.

01:16:20   You can run a VPN and also use private relay.

01:16:23   Like the VPN is a separate thing.

01:16:25   Like I assume that if you ran both of them,

01:16:27   either private relay wouldn't go through the VPN

01:16:29   or it would go through the VPN on its way

01:16:31   to hitting the ingress server, you know what I mean?

01:16:33   Like it'd be interesting, 'cause if you're doing a VPN

01:16:36   that makes it look like you're coming

01:16:37   from a different country,

01:16:38   would it use the ingress server in that country?

01:16:40   'Cause that's another thing about private relay.

01:16:41   It's intentionally not making you look like you come

01:16:43   from a different place.

01:16:44   So it will use an ingress server that's nearish to you.

01:16:48   So it won't be like, they won't be able to pinpoint you,

01:16:50   but they'll be able to tell like the example they gave us,

01:16:52   like they'll be able to tell you somewhere in the Bay Area,

01:16:55   but they won't be able to pinpoint you

01:16:56   to the same way they could if they had your IP address,

01:16:58   'cause the Bay Area is a big place.

01:17:00   And I imagine the farther away from big cities you get,

01:17:03   the less, the bigger the potential area where you could be

01:17:06   is because I'm not sure they have 7,000 ingress servers

01:17:09   in Wyoming, right?

01:17:10   And the network extensions are things that are used

01:17:14   to like see network traffic as it goes by and filtered.

01:17:17   All that stuff still works with private relay.

01:17:19   That stuff, it doesn't obsolete them,

01:17:20   it doesn't replace them, they still function.

01:17:23   And then finally, if you have some configured proxy,

01:17:25   it says, okay, well, they already have some other thing

01:17:27   they need to go through, so private relay can't work

01:17:29   'cause you have to go through the proxy, right?

01:17:31   The interesting bit towards the end of the W3C session

01:17:35   about this was like, for all you people out there,

01:17:38   'cause anytime you say anything about networking,

01:17:39   everybody who has to like support Macs and the enterprise

01:17:41   and businesses is like, oh no, what is this gonna do

01:17:45   to all my, like, no one's gonna be able to get

01:17:47   to the internet and everything's gonna break or whatever.

01:17:49   So the question is, hey, what if you run,

01:17:52   the example to give, if you are an enterprise

01:17:55   or education customer and you don't want private relay

01:17:59   to be in your network, and I can imagine there are a lot

01:18:02   of people who work in education and enterprise

01:18:04   who don't want private relay, 'cause it's just another

01:18:06   headache, right, here's what you can do.

01:18:08   Here's their suggestion.

01:18:09   So the first thing is, step one, block the DNS resolution

01:18:13   of Apple's ingress servers, because, you know,

01:18:16   it's like, Apple systems will try to say,

01:18:18   I need to talk to an ingress server,

01:18:20   let me look one up by name.

01:18:21   Presumably, Apple's gonna give you a list of the DNS names

01:18:24   of all their ingress servers, but basically,

01:18:25   block the DNS of that, because if you control the network,

01:18:27   you also control DNS and make sure it makes it unresolvable.

01:18:31   Once you've blocked that DNS, Apple's devices

01:18:36   and operating system will still try to connect

01:18:38   to private relay, but they'll fail,

01:18:40   and when they'll fail, you'll get a message,

01:18:42   they'll be able to screenshot up here in the notes,

01:18:44   that says, they can only give, campus wifi isn't compatible

01:18:47   with iCloud private relay.

01:18:48   You will not be able to access the internet

01:18:50   unless you turn off Apple private relay for this network.

01:18:53   Turning off private relay means this network

01:18:55   can monitor your internet activity, blah, blah, blah, blah,

01:18:57   and so you will be prompted to turn off private relay

01:19:00   when you are on this specific network, for example,

01:19:02   on your work's wifi, and if you say continue

01:19:05   without private relay, then every time you connect

01:19:07   to your work's wifi, it won't even try to use private relay,

01:19:11   but then when you're elsewhere, it will use it.

01:19:12   So basically, private relay is essentially on by default

01:19:14   for everybody who has this feature,

01:19:16   and the only way to stop it is if you own the network,

01:19:20   make it not work, and if it doesn't work,

01:19:22   the operating system will say, oh, I see it's not working.

01:19:25   Do you want me to just not try on this network anymore?

01:19:28   It's pretty bold of Apple to do this.

01:19:30   It shows their commitment to privacy.

01:19:32   It's pretty weird in that the privacy still depends

01:19:34   on you entirely trusting Apple,

01:19:35   but I can't, rolling out features like this,

01:19:40   I find terrifying, like, I'm terrified by proxy.

01:19:43   Like, I'm terrified for them, because, boy,

01:19:45   you can just break everybody's stuff so easily

01:19:48   if you mess this up in even the smallest way,

01:19:50   and I'm sure network admins are not relishing the idea

01:19:53   of having to deal with this.

01:19:55   - Yeah, this kind of came across my radar pretty quickly

01:20:00   because it occurred to me that my beloved Pi-hole,

01:20:03   which is a DNS server that I run--

01:20:06   - It's never gonna stop being funny.

01:20:08   - It's a hilarious name.

01:20:09   The Pi-hole that I run in the house,

01:20:12   which is a DNS server for the house,

01:20:14   that will block advertisements and trackers

01:20:18   and things of that nature, well, that's going to be

01:20:21   in conflict with the private relay,

01:20:25   and so for a minute there, I thought, oh,

01:20:26   I'm gonna have to go in on all the devices

01:20:28   and go ahead and disable private relay for myself

01:20:32   on anything I wanna use in the house,

01:20:36   and it looks like that's not the case.

01:20:37   I can just, on the Pi-hole, I can tell it

01:20:39   to not resolve these servers, and that should fix me up,

01:20:43   so I'm pretty excited to see that.

01:20:44   - Why don't you just, why will it not be compatible with it?

01:20:47   - Because the whole idea is that it,

01:20:50   the way the Pi-hole works is it's a DNS server, right?

01:20:53   So maybe I misunderstood private relay,

01:20:57   but the idea is when--

01:20:59   - Oh, you think it's gonna bypass your DNS server?

01:21:01   - Exactly, and I'm pretty sure that's the case.

01:21:04   I'm pretty confident that's the case.

01:21:06   - If you make your Pi-hole have a publicly routable

01:21:08   IP address, you can make it work.

01:21:10   (laughing)

01:21:11   - Sure, yes, that's what I know.

01:21:13   - I think you're right, but I would also argue

01:21:17   with all the stuff that Safari is doing

01:21:19   with its own built-in tracker blocking,

01:21:22   then the difference between what you're getting

01:21:24   from Pi-hole versus that is really then just

01:21:28   full-on ad blocking, so maybe it's worth it, maybe not,

01:21:31   but maybe you could shift that onto the software side

01:21:34   and just do ad blocking extensions in your browsers and stuff.

01:21:36   - Yeah, you can run, yeah, you can run,

01:21:38   those network extensions that I mentioned, ad blockers.

01:21:41   I understand why Pi-hole is more attractive,

01:21:43   'cause you run that in one place

01:21:44   and it works for all your devices,

01:21:46   but all Apple devices support network extensions

01:21:49   that block ads.

01:21:50   - Totally, but Pi-hole also blocks other things,

01:21:53   like the Amazon Tube phoning home,

01:21:56   my television phoning home, and yes,

01:21:58   we could have discussions about whether or not

01:22:00   I should have an Amazon Tube, or whether or not

01:22:01   I should have my TV connected to the internet,

01:22:03   which actually at this point maybe I shouldn't,

01:22:05   since the Apple TV has been updated

01:22:07   and has all the 4K goodness now, but--

01:22:08   - How are you blocking that from the Pi-hole,

01:22:10   just by blocking the DNS lookup?

01:22:11   'Cause if you know where they're trying to connect it to,

01:22:13   why don't you just block that in your router, essentially?

01:22:16   Let's say don't allow connections from--

01:22:17   - That's effectively what I'm doing, though,

01:22:19   because I'm doing it in the Pi-hole.

01:22:21   - But you're doing it from DNS, you're like,

01:22:22   you're not blocking the connection.

01:22:24   If they knew the IP address, they could connect,

01:22:25   which is a flaw in your system, because for all you know,

01:22:27   these TV manufacturers are gonna be hard-coding

01:22:29   a list of IP addresses in their stupid TVs,

01:22:31   so they don't have to do DNS lookups, but--

01:22:33   - I mean, everything you said is accurate,

01:22:34   but I like the fact that even for the non-technical users

01:22:39   in my home, they are getting the benefits of all this

01:22:41   without having to do any work.

01:22:43   - The benefits/breakage.

01:22:45   - Yes, but I have tuned it such that

01:22:48   it very rarely breaks for Erin, and she has a shortcut,

01:22:52   like an Apple shortcut, in order to turn the Pi-hole off

01:22:55   should she need to, and--

01:22:57   - So she knows how to shut your Pi-hole?

01:22:59   - She knows exactly how to shut my Pi-hole, John.

01:23:02   That's exactly right.

01:23:04   She has so many ways of shutting my Pi-hole,

01:23:06   I cannot even begin to tell you.

01:23:07   How many years have we been married?

01:23:08   We're coming up on our anniversary.

01:23:10   It is 14 years this year, so she knows very well

01:23:13   how to shut my Pi-hole, don't you worry.

01:23:15   - No, but this, going back to this feature,

01:23:17   (laughs)

01:23:19   I really am very interested to follow

01:23:23   the direction this is going, because so much of tracking

01:23:25   and privacy protection falls down at the IP address level.

01:23:30   So much of it is like, well, we can block trackers,

01:23:33   and we can block certain access things and cookies

01:23:37   and all this other stuff, but creepy companies

01:23:40   can still form pretty reliable identification for us

01:23:44   based on IP address, and we see this in the podcast space,

01:23:48   all the podcast trackers and everything.

01:23:50   That's just kind of this unavoidable hole in our privacy,

01:23:53   that the IP address is always, here's where it falls down,

01:23:57   and that's why a lot of people are using VPNs

01:23:59   for this purpose and everything,

01:24:01   but this is the one big wall that keeps us being tracked

01:24:07   a lot more than I think most people would want

01:24:10   or find reasonable, and to have Apple taking

01:24:14   such a big step towards removing that

01:24:18   as a trackable data point for a large portion of users,

01:24:23   that's a significant step, and that affects tons of stuff.

01:24:27   Going back for a second to the podcast business,

01:24:30   this is going to massively break podcast analytics

01:24:34   and podcast ad tracking, and as podcasters,

01:24:39   we should definitely be a little bit apprehensive

01:24:41   about going into this, however, first of all,

01:24:44   we don't have a choice, so here it is,

01:24:45   but I think this is breaking it in a good way.

01:24:48   I think this is going to be very destructive

01:24:51   to a large part of the advertising and tracking

01:24:54   and stats collecting business, but where we are afterwards,

01:24:59   once the dust has settled and once people have figured out

01:25:04   how to do things like count unique podcast downloads

01:25:07   in a reasonably approximation way

01:25:10   without using IP addresses to identify uniqueness,

01:25:13   and the rest of the ecosystem as well,

01:25:15   all the different ad trackers and everything,

01:25:16   some of them will die or have things made harder for them,

01:25:20   oh, boohoo, here's this tiniest violin,

01:25:22   but once the dust settles on all of this,

01:25:26   a year or two or three down the road,

01:25:29   and even assuming that maybe Apple goes even further

01:25:32   with this in the future and expands it

01:25:33   to more transfer types, like more network transfer types

01:25:37   and more apps and everything else,

01:25:39   I think we're gonna be in a really good place

01:25:41   because the IP address as a tracking mechanism

01:25:45   will become so much less useful,

01:25:48   and we really need that for privacy.

01:25:50   The whole industry, society, we really need that

01:25:54   'cause we still have people out there arguing

01:25:57   that IP addresses are not personally identifiable

01:25:59   information and therefore shouldn't fall

01:26:02   under the protections of various privacy laws

01:26:04   and everything, and it's total BS, it's total garbage.

01:26:07   Every data broker can reverse look up

01:26:09   an IP address to a person.

01:26:10   The data's out there, it's so easy, it's trivial,

01:26:14   it's cheap for people to get it if they want to,

01:26:16   and so IP addresses absolutely are personal information,

01:26:19   and are extremely trackable and extremely exploitable

01:26:23   for creepy reasons by creepy people and companies.

01:26:26   So to remove a big chunk of that is a very good move

01:26:30   for the internet and for society as a whole,

01:26:32   and so as much as it will cause a lot of disruption

01:26:36   in the short term, long term, this is gonna be great.

01:26:40   - It's good for privacy, but when you talk about

01:26:42   the internet as a whole, coming from the perspective

01:26:45   of networking, like if you're a network engineer,

01:26:47   which I am not, but just in general,

01:26:49   trying to funnel everybody's traffic through,

01:26:52   like if you didn't know about the privacy thing,

01:26:54   you'd be like, what are they doing?

01:26:56   'Cause these ingress and egress servers,

01:26:58   you're gonna have to have a lot of these,

01:26:59   and they're gonna have a lot of traffic funneled

01:27:01   through them, and it is not the most efficient way

01:27:03   to get data from point A to point B.

01:27:05   It is, you know, it's a Rube Goldberg machine.

01:27:08   - Technically you're right, but the way this appears

01:27:11   to be implemented is with CDNs,

01:27:13   which is actually really clever if you think about it.

01:27:15   So one of the things Apple talks about in explaining this

01:27:18   and in the sessions and everything is that

01:27:20   this largely doesn't break region detection.

01:27:23   And the reason why is because they're using

01:27:27   basically CDN endpoints all over the world

01:27:30   so that you're still gonna come from your approximate region.

01:27:33   You know, you might be like a city-size granularity,

01:27:38   or like, you know, central Ohio maybe,

01:27:40   like instead of your exact neighborhood

01:27:43   with your cable company or whatever,

01:27:45   but you're still gonna be like nearby.

01:27:47   And if you think about it, like using CDNs

01:27:50   as like the nodes in the system is actually really clever

01:27:53   because just by the nature of, you know,

01:27:56   what you need to deploy modern CDNs,

01:27:58   like you have endpoints everywhere.

01:28:01   You have tons of them all over the place.

01:28:03   And so if all you're doing is going to the nearest CDN node,

01:28:06   not only are you not going very far,

01:28:09   and not only are there tons of those around the world

01:28:11   to help share the load, but also because it's a node

01:28:15   of a popular CDN, it might even already have

01:28:18   the content you're looking for in its local cache.

01:28:21   So it's only a short trip to go from you

01:28:25   to the, you know, egress node.

01:28:27   And then the egress node might not actually have

01:28:29   to go very far to get your data in the first place.

01:28:31   It might even be local.

01:28:32   So I think ultimately this is probably gonna prove

01:28:35   to be pretty effective and pretty transparent

01:28:38   most of the time.

01:28:40   - I think what you described is basically

01:28:41   why it won't be a complete disaster from day one.

01:28:44   Hopefully, but it's, I mean, it's not as secure

01:28:47   as that weird fish nerve that goes through your body,

01:28:50   but it's also not ideal because sometimes you are connecting

01:28:54   to something that be much more straightforward to you.

01:28:57   I mean, maybe it depends on where you live.

01:28:58   Like I connect to servers, some of which, you know,

01:29:01   are local in the area and going to the CDN first,

01:29:04   even if it's a CDN that's also in Boston,

01:29:07   and then going out of that CDN to a server then,

01:29:09   it would be more straightforward for me to go right

01:29:12   to the thing, you know what I mean?

01:29:13   Like it's not as circuitous as, oh, I have to go to,

01:29:16   I have to go to London and then back

01:29:17   to get to some server in Boston.

01:29:19   But sometimes if the thing you're trying to get to,

01:29:22   like the reason CDNs work is because stuff

01:29:24   that's on the CDNs is farther away from you than the CDN.

01:29:28   But that is not necessarily the case when you're doing this

01:29:30   because everything goes through the private relay,

01:29:33   you know, when you're browsing in Safari, right?

01:29:36   As opposed to just the things that are closer to you

01:29:39   because they are in a CDN, right?

01:29:41   So, you know, CDNs in general, if you look at them,

01:29:44   you're like, okay, this makes some sense

01:29:46   because if the CDN didn't exist,

01:29:49   maybe they'd take a different route,

01:29:50   but they'd have to go farther.

01:29:51   They'd have to go more hops.

01:29:52   They'd have to go geographically farther to get this

01:29:54   because the actual server's in California

01:29:56   and now they got it from CDN

01:29:57   that's like 10 miles away from them.

01:29:58   That's good thumbs up, even though it looks

01:29:59   a little bit weird.

01:30:00   But this one, it's not quite as clear a win.

01:30:03   And because CDNs, like I said, have been built up so much,

01:30:05   it will probably be okay.

01:30:07   This capacity is probably there.

01:30:08   Like Apple never says this,

01:30:10   but like the reason the egress servers are third party

01:30:13   is because if they weren't,

01:30:14   Apple would have to have thousands and thousands

01:30:17   and thousands of servers all over the world.

01:30:19   And guess what?

01:30:20   That's what CDNs already do.

01:30:21   So that's why it's a third party provider.

01:30:23   I don't know how, but they don't say,

01:30:24   it could be like, they probably have contracts

01:30:26   with every CDN that would give them a time of day

01:30:28   all over the entire world.

01:30:29   'Cause you really have no choice

01:30:31   to even just make this feasible at all.

01:30:33   And it's also why they're not routing everything through it.

01:30:36   But just doing Safari DNS queries and plain HTTP,

01:30:39   given the number of devices they have in the world,

01:30:41   is a lot of traffic.

01:30:42   So I imagine there is a big red button

01:30:45   somewhere inside Apple, metaphorically speaking,

01:30:47   to say let's turn off iCloud private relay

01:30:50   because everything is broken, the internet doesn't work,

01:30:53   we'll fix it in the next release.

01:30:55   - Well, and to clarify,

01:30:56   it's not just HTTP traffic in Safari,

01:30:58   it's all Safari traffic.

01:31:00   - Yeah, I said and, and not and, in.

01:31:02   So it's Safari, it's everything in Safari,

01:31:04   every DNS query, and also any plain HTTP running app.

01:31:08   - Exactly, yeah.

01:31:09   So the only, so like, you know,

01:31:11   like Overcast will be able to use this

01:31:14   for the downloads of podcast episodes

01:31:18   that are not served over HTTPS,

01:31:20   which is admittedly most of them.

01:31:22   - So you can screw up our own stats for us,

01:31:24   that's nice, thanks.

01:31:25   - Yes, ours are served through HTTPS, thank you very much.

01:31:28   - All right.

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01:33:30   (upbeat music)

01:33:33   - All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:33:34   It's been a while since we've done it.

01:33:36   Abel DeMose writes, "How's Marco finding the transition

01:33:38   "to Apple Silicon as a developer?

01:33:39   "Has anything in Marco's tech stack broken

01:33:41   "as a result of Apple Silicon?

01:33:43   "I'm hesitating to make the jump,

01:33:44   "because I hear that Homebrew is janky

01:33:46   "on the Apple Silicon Macs."

01:33:48   - Homebrew has proven to be no less reliable for me

01:33:52   on my Apple Silicon Macs

01:33:53   than it has been on all my other Macs.

01:33:55   - You know, you have such Homebrew problems,

01:33:57   I really don't. (laughing)

01:33:58   I mean, I'm not trying to say you're wrong,

01:33:59   I'm not trying to say you're holding it wrong,

01:34:01   it's just it's funny to me,

01:34:02   because I really do not have Homebrew problems,

01:34:04   and you are constantly complaining about it.

01:34:07   - Once I set it up, it works,

01:34:09   as long as nothing has to get touched.

01:34:11   Now, eventually, over time,

01:34:13   you need to install something else,

01:34:16   or change something, or update something.

01:34:18   And at that point, the entire thing breaks,

01:34:19   and the only solution usually at that point

01:34:22   tends to be remove everything in Homebrew and reinstall it.

01:34:26   Like, I have a shell script that I maintain

01:34:28   for mostly reconfiguring my Homebrew stuff.

01:34:31   Even that, I usually can't just run it,

01:34:35   you know, six months later or a year later,

01:34:37   'cause it doesn't work if I just run it.

01:34:39   But I can at least use it to like,

01:34:41   copy and paste one command at a time,

01:34:42   and see how it fails, and modify,

01:34:44   (laughing)

01:34:45   edit the file, so that hopefully next time,

01:34:47   I can just run it, and of course I never can.

01:34:49   But yeah, otherwise, other than my Homebrew drama,

01:34:53   which is going to expand now,

01:34:55   because I don't know if you saw the news on Twitter today

01:34:57   that macOS Monterey no longer includes PHP at all.

01:35:01   Like, they've been warning you on the command line

01:35:04   for a few releases now, like hey, you should stop using this,

01:35:07   it's going to be removed in a future release.

01:35:09   Well, it's removed.

01:35:11   - Actually, what they say about PHP specifically,

01:35:14   if you run PHP dash dash version,

01:35:17   they just say PHP is not recommended.

01:35:19   That's it. (laughing)

01:35:21   Just like, broadly speaking, in general,

01:35:23   it is not recommended.

01:35:24   The other ones, they do say, oh, you should get it

01:35:26   in a version or whatever, but yeah.

01:35:28   So PHP's gone, which other ones are gone?

01:35:30   'Cause I think Perl and Python are still there,

01:35:32   or Python 3.

01:35:33   - I don't think anything else is removed as of this version.

01:35:35   PHP is totally gone, Perl and Python, I believe,

01:35:38   are still showing those errors, or those warnings, rather,

01:35:41   but I believe they're still there.

01:35:42   And I know there's something about Python being,

01:35:44   it's like 2.7, and it's apparently ancient now,

01:35:47   but anyway, I don't know anything about that.

01:35:49   So going back to the question,

01:35:50   Apple and Silicon as a developer has been largely fine.

01:35:55   I really have had no downsides to it,

01:35:58   besides the fact that certain very long compiles,

01:36:03   I'm cranking away at those cores, and I want more cores.

01:36:07   Other than that, it's been totally great.

01:36:10   I don't think I have any other problems, really.

01:36:13   - Well, that's exciting.

01:36:15   I really wanna get myself a new laptop,

01:36:17   as we've discussed many times.

01:36:19   I do not wanna give up any of my four ports.

01:36:21   And I don't want a big one.

01:36:24   I want a 13 or 14 inch, or what have you.

01:36:27   And I really wanna get a new laptop.

01:36:28   But then if I get a new laptop,

01:36:29   then my iMac Pro will be slow and ancient,

01:36:32   and I don't want that either.

01:36:33   - Yeah, that happens.

01:36:34   Then there's the monitor situation,

01:36:35   'cause there's no big iMac yet.

01:36:37   - Then there's the monitor situation,

01:36:38   'cause there's no big iMac yet.

01:36:40   Yeah, it's just a mess, it's just a mess.

01:36:41   - As soon as they release that 40-core Mac Pro, I'm in.

01:36:45   - I know you are.

01:36:46   - The best thing is gonna be

01:36:47   when the new 40-core Mac Pro comes out,

01:36:48   but it doesn't support the Pro Display XDR.

01:36:51   - Oh, God.

01:36:52   (laughing)

01:36:53   - The resale value just drops through the floor on them

01:36:56   after we all find out.

01:36:57   - All right, moving right along.

01:36:59   So Ralph Krakowski writes,

01:37:01   "What year do you think that Apple will release

01:37:03   "a version of Mac OS that no longer supports Intel?"

01:37:06   That's a good question.

01:37:07   I would say, if it's 2021 now,

01:37:11   I would say 2026 would be my guess, in about five years.

01:37:16   And I think that's aggressive, actually.

01:37:18   I think it might be even later than that,

01:37:19   but I think 2026 was the earliest.

01:37:20   - 2026, hmm.

01:37:21   - I actually did a little bit of preparation

01:37:25   for this question, 'cause it's been in the notes

01:37:26   for so long. - Oh, uh-oh, uh-oh.

01:37:27   - So here's some background on the most recent transition.

01:37:32   The Intel transition was announced at WWDC 2005.

01:37:35   The first Intel Mac shipped in January 2006.

01:37:39   The first Intel-only Mac OS X shipped in August 2009.

01:37:43   So it was three years and seven months

01:37:45   after the first Intel Mac.

01:37:47   So we go to ARM.

01:37:48   Transition was announced at WWDC 2020.

01:37:51   First ARM Mac shipped in November of 2020.

01:37:53   So if we fast forward three years and seven months,

01:37:56   that pins it at pretty much exactly WWDC 2024.

01:37:59   Apple announces the first version of Mac OS

01:38:01   that does not support Intel.

01:38:03   That's if they exactly follow the Intel transition.

01:38:06   The question is, are they gonna transition faster

01:38:08   than they went to Intel or slower?

01:38:10   And it's a complicated question

01:38:12   because they seem to be going pretty fast,

01:38:15   but there's still that nagging rumor

01:38:16   of the revised Intel Mac Pro, and it's like,

01:38:19   maybe everything will be converted,

01:38:21   but if that Mac Pro is still hanging around,

01:38:23   they can't ship a Mac OS that doesn't support it for awhile.

01:38:27   So I don't, I don't know.

01:38:28   I would say 2024 is when you should, like,

01:38:32   that's the, I don't know the betting terms.

01:38:35   Like, I feel like that is probably,

01:38:37   I don't even wanna say it's the earliest it could happen

01:38:39   'cause they could do it three years flat.

01:38:41   Like, I think there's a pretty broad range

01:38:43   because I think Apple will be,

01:38:45   will have all of its line converted,

01:38:47   except maybe the Mac Pro pretty darn quickly,

01:38:51   and they seem to be moving very aggressively.

01:38:53   Again, witness the features that are not supported

01:38:55   in Monterey on Intel, and again,

01:38:57   seemingly not just a thing about the betas,

01:39:01   but they put on their public webpage

01:39:02   information for customers that says,

01:39:04   yeah, this isn't gonna be on your Intel Macs.

01:39:07   So maybe 2023 is conceivable for when this could happen.

01:39:12   - Marco.

01:39:13   - I was gonna go with you, Casey,

01:39:15   with, you know, about a five-year timescale,

01:39:17   but man, John makes some good points.

01:39:20   (laughing)

01:39:21   - I had to look up the dates because in your mind,

01:39:23   you think, oh, yeah, it was probably like five years after,

01:39:25   no, three years and seven months after the first Intel Mac.

01:39:27   That's when they, here's the thing,

01:39:29   that's when they shipped the first Intel version,

01:39:32   Intel only version of Mac OS X.

01:39:33   That doesn't mean that's when everyone upgraded

01:39:35   to that version, especially back then,

01:39:36   people didn't upgrade as quickly, right?

01:39:38   So there's the question, there was the question,

01:39:39   it's like, when do you think they will release that version?

01:39:42   But on that day, suddenly your Intel Macs

01:39:44   don't puff, go up in a puff of smoke.

01:39:46   How many people are still running like High Sierra

01:39:48   on their Macs right now?

01:39:49   Like, I know Apple pushes the updates

01:39:51   much harder than they used to,

01:39:53   but practically speaking, a lot of people

01:39:54   just keep running the old operating system,

01:39:56   and they just like live with that badge

01:39:57   on their system preferences and dismiss those annoying nags,

01:40:00   and just, you've seen people do it on their phones too.

01:40:02   Somehow people are able to weather the storm

01:40:05   of Apple's like constant messages

01:40:08   for trying to force you to update,

01:40:09   and they just won't do it,

01:40:10   and it just becomes part of their life

01:40:12   is just dismissing those dialog boxes.

01:40:14   So yeah, the day Apple releases the first Mac OS

01:40:19   that doesn't support Intel,

01:40:20   isn't the day your Intel Mac melts down to nothing.

01:40:24   - Your Intel Mac.

01:40:24   - In case there's multiple Intel Macs, yeah.

01:40:27   - Yeah. - Yeah.

01:40:28   - No, and I think, it's hard to estimate this

01:40:32   because on one hand, Apple does usually support old Macs

01:40:37   for quite some time with software updates.

01:40:39   Like the lifetime of Macs and software update support

01:40:42   is pretty long.

01:40:44   Often to the point where you,

01:40:45   but you probably shouldn't update to the new one,

01:40:47   but you can if you want to. (laughs)

01:40:50   But the other side of this is that

01:40:53   when Apple has moved on to a new something,

01:40:57   like a new technology, a new paradigm, whatever,

01:41:01   they are very fast to drop the old one,

01:41:03   to drop support for it, to pretend like it never existed,

01:41:06   like to move, quote, move forward,

01:41:09   and that's a wonderful euphemism for like,

01:41:11   instantly drop support for everything old.

01:41:13   And so, combining those two conflicting factors,

01:41:18   you know, when nothing major has changed,

01:41:22   as the Intel line has gone along,

01:41:24   supporting new Intel Macs and old Intel Macs

01:41:28   in the same software release isn't that different.

01:41:32   But because the Apple Silicon transition is so significant

01:41:36   and there's so many interesting and major differences

01:41:39   in how the hardware works and the hardware's capabilities,

01:41:43   I think they're gonna be more aggressive with this.

01:41:45   I think it's gonna be a shorter time span than we think.

01:41:49   - Well, but the problem is the question is asking

01:41:51   about macOS specifically, and like,

01:41:53   they're not gonna release a version of macOS

01:41:56   that can't run on their still being sold Intel Mac Pro,

01:42:00   probably, so if the Mac Pro is the wildcard,

01:42:02   if they do revise that machine,

01:42:04   it takes them longer than we think

01:42:05   to come out with the ARM one,

01:42:07   they're just gonna have, like,

01:42:08   I don't see them shipping a new,

01:42:11   announcing a new version of macOS WWC,

01:42:13   and this will run on all our Macs

01:42:15   except for our very latest Mac Pro.

01:42:17   - Well, no, they would just pretend

01:42:19   like they don't sell it anymore,

01:42:20   like they would just, they would show a big slide on screen

01:42:22   that showed all the other Macs, and that's just missing.

01:42:25   - But it's fine to drop older models,

01:42:27   like they always do that, oh, this won't run on your,

01:42:29   you know, 2014 iMac or whatever,

01:42:30   but to drop literally, because this is in a scenario

01:42:33   where they don't have the ARM Mac Pro yet,

01:42:35   so it would be literally the newest Mac Pro available,

01:42:38   unsupported, so I just, that's the only thing

01:42:41   that makes me think they might actually make it

01:42:43   to WWC 2024 before doing this,

01:42:45   but if they continue with their current pace,

01:42:48   they could do it sooner than WWC 2024.

01:42:51   WWC 2024 is just like, it's pretty much down to the month,

01:42:54   exactly the gap that they had with the Intel one,

01:42:56   so maybe that's the middle of the range,

01:42:59   but I agree with Marco that they could definitely go earlier,

01:43:01   and the thing is, they move fast when they can,

01:43:05   obviously in certain things, like,

01:43:06   they moved as fast as they could with Swift,

01:43:09   but practically speaking, it took a while

01:43:10   for Swift to develop, and also, they can't, quote-unquote,

01:43:14   drop support for Objective-C,

01:43:15   'cause half their operating system is written in,

01:43:16   half their apps are written in, you know what I mean?

01:43:18   They can't do that, but they very quickly move on,

01:43:21   like, you know, to the point where when Swift was announced,

01:43:24   all the WWC slides had to have examples in Swift

01:43:26   as well as Objective-C, right?

01:43:29   They're very clear, like, this is the new thing,

01:43:31   and unless something very terrible happens,

01:43:33   Swift is gonna be it, and it just takes a while to come,

01:43:36   and so with hardware, it's even easier,

01:43:38   it's like, look, ARM is the new thing, we all know it,

01:43:40   it's awesome, everybody loves it, it's going great,

01:43:43   and so the sooner we can forget about that Intel stuff,

01:43:45   the better, and the thing is, when you don't,

01:43:49   when you, quote-unquote, no longer support it,

01:43:51   those Intel Macs keep working,

01:43:52   they can live out their natural life,

01:43:54   and eventually just be older and slower than they are now,

01:43:57   the operating systems they have are fine,

01:43:59   it would be nice if Apple maybe extended

01:44:02   its security update interval a little bit longer

01:44:06   for the Intel Macs, you know what I mean?

01:44:08   Like, just to say, we know you're not gonna get

01:44:10   any more OS updates, but you're,

01:44:12   practically speaking, your Mac works fine,

01:44:13   you can continue to use it,

01:44:14   and maybe we'll give you software updates

01:44:15   for one extra year, but we'll see.

01:44:19   - And then finally, Brian Pyree writes,

01:44:22   "In all the speculation about Apple's high-end Mac processors

01:44:25   "and the number of cores of different types,

01:44:27   "I haven't heard much talk about

01:44:28   "what the performance difference is

01:44:29   "between low power versus a high power,

01:44:31   "or high performance cores.

01:44:33   "In broad strokes, how do the Ice Storm cores

01:44:34   "use only one-tenth the power of the Firestorm cores?"

01:44:37   - That's a pretty simple answer,

01:44:38   they got less stuff in them.

01:44:40   (laughing)

01:44:41   We'll have some link in the show notes

01:44:43   to comparison of the Ice Storm and the Firestorm cores,

01:44:45   but these are all super-scalar designs,

01:44:47   which means they have multiple units that do a thing,

01:44:49   so a unit is like a thing that can add numbers together.

01:44:52   CPUs, modern CPUs, don't have just one thing

01:44:55   they can add numbers, they don't have just two things

01:44:57   that can add numbers, they have like six or seven things

01:45:00   that can add numbers, and those are just

01:45:01   for the integer numbers, and then how many

01:45:03   floating point units do they have,

01:45:04   and how many load store units do they have, right?

01:45:07   The low power cores have fewer execution units,

01:45:11   fewer things they can add, fewer load store units,

01:45:14   fewer floating point units, if you think of those things

01:45:16   as like the little machines that do the math

01:45:18   that a computer does, it just has less of them,

01:45:21   and so it takes less power to run them.

01:45:23   It's like if you think, I mean it's weird to think about this

01:45:24   but if you think about a car that had like

01:45:26   17 different V8 engines, right,

01:45:29   those are like the adders, right,

01:45:30   and then like five V12 engines,

01:45:33   those are like the SIMD engines or whatever, right,

01:45:35   how much gas does that thing take,

01:45:36   and then you take another thing that has two V8s and one V12,

01:45:40   it just takes less gas 'cause you're running less stuff.

01:45:42   It's the same thing with electricity execution units,

01:45:44   so the most important way is that they just have

01:45:47   less stuff in them, in fact sometimes,

01:45:48   depending on the things they have,

01:45:49   there may be some execution units that the low power ones

01:45:52   just don't even have at all.

01:45:53   I don't think that's the case with Ice Storm versus Fire Storm

01:45:55   I think they can all execute the same instructions,

01:45:58   but they have fewer units.

01:45:59   They may also be clock lower,

01:46:01   when you have fewer units you need less machinery,

01:46:05   shorter pipelines, lower execution windows,

01:46:09   like there's lots of things that you can do,

01:46:10   like the associated machinery needs to keep track

01:46:12   of fewer instructions that are in flight at any one time,

01:46:15   and that also shrinks the amount of essentially

01:46:17   circuitry you need,

01:46:18   which shrinks the amount of electricity you need,

01:46:20   so that's what it is, and people say like,

01:46:22   oh I don't want my stuff running on the quote unquote slow,

01:46:24   the Ice Storm units,

01:46:26   they're only slow compared to the Fire Storm ones,

01:46:28   they're plenty fast,

01:46:29   like I don't know if this is how low power mode works,

01:46:32   but imagine you could have a low power mode for your Mac,

01:46:35   they would turn off the high performance things,

01:46:38   and just run your Mac entirely on the quote unquote

01:46:40   high efficiency units,

01:46:42   I wonder how many people would tell,

01:46:44   if you're not like executing,

01:46:46   like encoding video, or doing a big compile or something,

01:46:51   you probably wouldn't even notice,

01:46:53   like that's why I was talking about the auto,

01:46:55   sort of auto low power mode,

01:46:57   the high efficiency cores are plenty fast,

01:47:00   like if you benchmark just the high efficiency cores

01:47:02   against whatever old Intel Mac you're using right now,

01:47:04   it may embarrass them, right,

01:47:05   so don't worry too much about using the slow cores,

01:47:09   in practice like that is an effective use of resources,

01:47:11   because when you're just clicking around on web pages,

01:47:14   nothing's happening until you click,

01:47:16   and then for brief fractions of a second,

01:47:18   maybe the high power ones could come into being,

01:47:20   and do us some thing, and then go back to sleep,

01:47:22   so yay for ice storm units,

01:47:25   they're probably what most of us are gonna be using

01:47:26   most of the time while the computer sits around

01:47:28   for the dumb human to do something.

01:47:30   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:47:34   Squarespace, Linode, and Wondery,

01:47:37   and thank you to our members who support us directly,

01:47:40   you can join at atp.fm/join,

01:47:43   we will talk to you next week.

01:47:44   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:47:50   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:47:52   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:47:55   ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:47:58   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:48:00   ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:48:03   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:48:05   ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:48:08   ♪ And you can find the show notes at atp.fm ♪

01:48:13   ♪ And if you're into Twitter ♪

01:48:16   ♪ You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L ♪

01:48:22   ♪ I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss ♪

01:48:24   ♪ M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M ♪

01:48:27   ♪ N-T-Marco-Armin ♪

01:48:29   ♪ S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:48:32   ♪ U-S-A-S-C-R-A-C-U-S-A ♪

01:48:34   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:48:36   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:48:38   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:48:40   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:48:41   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:48:42   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:48:44   ♪ So long ♪

01:48:47   - The Bugatti Chiron has two V8s in it, basically.

01:48:51   - That's true.

01:48:53   - It's got a V16, but all they did was just take

01:48:55   two Volkswagen V8s and just shove them,

01:48:59   weld them together into one giant engine.

01:49:01   - Cereally, right?

01:49:02   - It's, what is it?

01:49:03   It's the W16, because it's the two Vs.

01:49:05   Make it W.

01:49:06   - Oh, yes, that's right, that's right.

01:49:07   It's not serial.

01:49:08   It's not parallel either.

01:49:10   They're interleaved.

01:49:11   - Also takes a lot of gas.

01:49:12   What was the stat on that?

01:49:13   It wasn't that.

01:49:13   It was the, what was the one before the Chiron?

01:49:15   The Veyron. - Veyron.

01:49:17   - That it could run at full throttle for 12 minutes

01:49:18   before running out of gas.

01:49:20   (both laughing)

01:49:23   - Yeah, you know, since we're in a post show neutral now,

01:49:26   goodbye, everybody.

01:49:28   It's nice having you.

01:49:29   Marco and John and I were talking in our,

01:49:32   as the industry calls it, our super secret private channel.

01:49:36   And did you know, gentlemen, which I know you two did,

01:49:39   that the brand new Tesla Model S,

01:49:43   the whatever version it is that has plaid mode,

01:49:46   zero to 60 in under two seconds.

01:49:49   - Contested, contested highly.

01:49:51   Because I don't think anyone has measured that.

01:49:54   And there's like, if you find, search for it on YouTube,

01:49:56   you'll find some YouTube channels explaining how,

01:49:59   engineering wise, it is extremely unlikely

01:50:01   that that is true unless you, you know about roll out, Casey?

01:50:05   - Is that where you like get a little bit of a roll

01:50:07   and then stand on the gas?

01:50:09   - No, it's like, so there's a,

01:50:11   if you search for roll out on YouTube,

01:50:12   you find some explanations for it.

01:50:13   So it has to do with limitations and like roll out.

01:50:16   Yeah.

01:50:17   (Kasey laughing)

01:50:18   - Nicely done.

01:50:19   - Limitations in instrument technology on the drag strip

01:50:23   from back in the day, like you had a drag race

01:50:26   and you wanted to say, you know, race these cars

01:50:28   and give them times at the end of the drag racing,

01:50:30   drag racing spinning around for decades and decades.

01:50:32   And we didn't have good technology for saying,

01:50:34   when has the car like started to go?

01:50:37   So they use essentially light sensors, right?

01:50:39   And it would be like, so when the light is, you know,

01:50:42   hitting the sensor, you're not breaking the beam.

01:50:44   So you're, you know, you're at the starting line, right?

01:50:47   And they want to say when, or actually,

01:50:49   I think they have you break the beam

01:50:50   and then when the beam is continuous again,

01:50:51   you have passed it, right?

01:50:52   So you would break the beam or,

01:50:54   I don't know the details, I'm screwing it up.

01:50:55   But the problem is that for some period of time,

01:50:58   your wheel will be rolling past the beam, right?

01:51:01   And during that whole time your wheel is,

01:51:03   during the whole time your wheel is rolling,

01:51:04   that beam is blocked.

01:51:06   And only when the wheel has rolled enough

01:51:08   to get past the beam, does it connect again, right?

01:51:11   And so that amount of time when you're going from zero

01:51:14   to my wheel has rolled around enough to be past the beam,

01:51:18   that doesn't count against your like,

01:51:21   whatever your time is, your quarter mile time,

01:51:23   your zero to 60 time.

01:51:24   And the tradition of allowing that rollout has continued

01:51:27   so that in every car magazine,

01:51:28   when you see a zero to 60 time,

01:51:30   that's not the time it took from the car stationary

01:51:32   to the car going 60, it's the time it took

01:51:35   after the car had done its rollout.

01:51:38   And then from, because the car is already moving,

01:51:41   that the clock starts when the wheel is already moving.

01:51:44   So you get essentially zero to one, two, three, four,

01:51:47   five miles an hour for free.

01:51:49   And that's just tradition from like,

01:51:51   every car magazine does that,

01:51:52   'cause otherwise you couldn't compare the zero to 60 times

01:51:54   across decades, right?

01:51:55   And so they just keep doing it.

01:51:57   And so any zero to 60 time you see,

01:51:59   you might have to ask the question,

01:52:00   is that zero to 60 or are you going for rollout?

01:52:03   And even with rollout, some people are saying that sub two

01:52:07   with street legal tires, no matter how much power you have,

01:52:10   it's kind of a friction, it's a friction situation.

01:52:13   You'd really need just the right road surface

01:52:15   because you could have infinity power.

01:52:17   It's just a question of how quickly can you transfer

01:52:20   the power to the road.

01:52:21   And so I haven't seen actually any measured

01:52:24   Plaid Plus's sub twos.

01:52:26   And most of the supercars that you see,

01:52:27   like the videos for the Rimac Navara,

01:52:31   I think I'm getting that name right, have you seen those?

01:52:33   There's a bunch of them on YouTube.

01:52:34   It's like a 2000 horsepower electric supercar.

01:52:39   It's ridiculous, it does not lack horsepower.

01:52:41   I think it has like 2200 pound feet of torque or something.

01:52:44   It's got four motors, one for each wheel,

01:52:46   and it weighs like an eighth of the Model S, right?

01:52:48   The problem is how do you turn that power

01:52:51   into making car go forward?

01:52:53   And it's surprisingly difficult with street legal tires

01:52:55   and regular roads.

01:52:56   But even that it was running like eight and a half second

01:52:59   quarter miles, which is phenomenal for a street legal car,

01:53:02   if you know anything about drag racing.

01:53:05   And it was zero to 60s were in the very low twos.

01:53:09   Breaking through the twos really does not come down

01:53:12   to how much power do you have,

01:53:13   or even just how light your car is.

01:53:15   Like how much traction can you get on the ground

01:53:18   in that short period of time?

01:53:19   And then whether or not you're accounting for roll out

01:53:21   or how you're accounting for roll out.

01:53:22   So it's mostly academic, but the bottom line is

01:53:24   the Model S Plaid is an extremely fast car

01:53:26   that will, as Marco has said multiple times,

01:53:29   make you feel like someone is punching you in the face

01:53:31   when you accelerate in it.

01:53:33   In an unpleasant way that you probably won't want to repeat

01:53:35   unless you're trained to be an astronaut.

01:53:37   - Yeah, that's not true.

01:53:38   It's funny though, I'll let you guys decide whether or not

01:53:42   you want to explain the context here,

01:53:44   but I was building a Model S just for fun, just for fun.

01:53:49   And there are not very many options these days,

01:53:53   which in most cars I find extremely frustrating.

01:53:55   In this context, I actually don't really mind.

01:53:57   But one option that I really wanted to see

01:54:00   that I didn't see was the option for a steering wheel

01:54:05   because that thing has the stupid yoke here

01:54:08   in the United States and it's the only choice you have.

01:54:11   And I can assure you that may be the best automobile

01:54:16   that has ever been produced, but the chances of me buying one

01:54:20   money, no object, the chances of me buying one

01:54:22   with that stupid yoke on it are zero,

01:54:26   not approximately zero, literally zero.

01:54:29   What are they thinking?

01:54:31   - I mean, NHTSA will probably make them change it

01:54:33   after a bunch of people die from trying to use it.

01:54:35   - Seriously.

01:54:36   - No, that's-- - Preposterous.

01:54:38   Absolutely preposterous.

01:54:40   - That's the one option that everybody wants them

01:54:42   to make an option and they won't do it.

01:54:45   What do you think happens first?

01:54:47   You can buy a new Model S with a steering wheel again,

01:54:50   or Apple improves the design of Safari and iOS 12

01:54:54   so that the bottom bar is a little bit more--

01:54:57   - That's not, I appreciate the humor you're going for,

01:55:00   but I think the better question is,

01:55:02   will we get a full-size steering wheel as an option

01:55:05   or perhaps a retrofit on the Model S,

01:55:07   or will Apple make meaningful changes

01:55:09   to improve the experience for independent developers

01:55:12   on their platforms?

01:55:13   - Or will they fix notifications on the Mac?

01:55:16   (laughing)

01:55:18   - These are not equally impactful problems in the world.

01:55:22   - No, they're not.

01:55:23   - Earlier today, I had to dismiss a stack of notifications,

01:55:27   like it was like two calendar notifications stacked up,

01:55:30   and I had to click the little X to make it form

01:55:32   the Clear All button and then click that.

01:55:35   However, and that's hard enough in regular circumstances,

01:55:38   however, through some combination

01:55:40   of what might have been a bug,

01:55:42   the top half of the Clear All and X buttons

01:55:46   was under the menu bar,

01:55:49   so I had to click on only the bottom half.

01:55:52   It's nearly impossible to hit these click targets reliably

01:55:55   when they're at their normal size.

01:55:57   Try it when they're half size.

01:55:58   - That's preposterous.

01:56:00   - Oh my God.

01:56:01   - I don't know, I can't get over,

01:56:04   'cause as much as I love to poop all over Tesla,

01:56:06   which has become basically one of my favorite pastimes,

01:56:09   I particularly like the Model S in general.

01:56:11   Like I like the three, I've been in an X,

01:56:14   and I liked that quite a bit,

01:56:16   but the Model S, leaving the incredible amount of money

01:56:19   aside, is a really, really nice car.

01:56:22   I really honestly believe that, I'm not blowing smoke.

01:56:24   It's a really nice car, and if I had more money than I have,

01:56:27   I might even own one at this point.

01:56:29   But I cannot fathom looking at that godawful yoke

01:56:34   and thinking, yes, yes, I would like that, please.

01:56:37   That sounds delightful.

01:56:38   Just, no, absolutely not.

01:56:41   And then if you don't get the Model S with the yoke,

01:56:44   I don't know, does the X have the yoke as well?

01:56:47   - I think they're going to, if they haven't already, yeah,

01:56:50   'cause those tend to get updated together.

01:56:53   I mean, yeah, like right now,

01:56:54   if I had to get a new Tesla today,

01:56:57   if I couldn't just buy a used one,

01:56:59   or buy out my current one, which is what I'm going to do,

01:57:02   but if I couldn't just get used, if I had to pick new,

01:57:06   I think I'd probably go with a Y,

01:57:08   just because it's closest--

01:57:11   - That does have the yoke, the X does have the yoke.

01:57:13   - Yeah, there it is, yeah. - God bless.

01:57:14   What are they thinking?

01:57:16   - So like, yeah, like the only,

01:57:18   like the Y at least has a steering wheel.

01:57:20   It doesn't have a dashboard,

01:57:21   but at least it has a steering wheel.

01:57:23   So like, I just, this is why,

01:57:25   this is why I get to drive my car yesterday

01:57:28   for the first time in probably almost a month,

01:57:31   and I was so happy driving it.

01:57:35   Not driving, mind you, regular,

01:57:38   like the act of driving I no longer enjoy,

01:57:40   because usually driving is running an errand,

01:57:43   and going through traffic, and it's almost comical

01:57:48   like how much all of Westchester

01:57:51   is always under construction.

01:57:54   The same roads are under construction constantly.

01:57:56   Like the roads, like the main arterial,

01:57:59   like local traffic roads that are around my neighborhood

01:58:03   are always under construction.

01:58:04   I don't know why.

01:58:05   Like there's never a break.

01:58:06   It's not like they repave it once, then it's done.

01:58:09   Like they're just always tearing up different sections of it

01:58:11   for God knows what reason.

01:58:14   - I'm trying to remember if COVID made us all forget,

01:58:16   but like the same deal around here.

01:58:17   It's almost like the, you know,

01:58:19   I guess like they couldn't do construction during COVID

01:58:21   'cause you know, everyone was home

01:58:23   and didn't want to have people gathering together,

01:58:24   but everything is under construction here.

01:58:26   Every, like, I think it is worse.

01:58:29   I think it's not just that I forgot,

01:58:30   'cause I'm, you know, well, I don't know, it's hard to say,

01:58:32   'cause I'm going back and forth to school a lot

01:58:34   'cause my kids aren't taking the bus

01:58:35   'cause they weren't taking the bus during COVID.

01:58:37   I was driving them, and just trying to find a way

01:58:39   to get to and from school

01:58:40   with the everyday new construction hazards,

01:58:44   like just totally blocking off

01:58:45   or making miserable major arteries.

01:58:47   Everything is under construction.

01:58:49   I think it is like a hangover,

01:58:50   the construction that didn't get done during COVID,

01:58:52   now it's all coming due.

01:58:54   - I mean, that's a reasonable theory.

01:58:55   It might be true for you, but for us, like even before COVID,

01:58:58   I've lived there almost 11 years,

01:59:00   and it's always been like this. (laughs)

01:59:02   - Well, at least your roads are getting repaved.

01:59:03   I think I've sent you pictures of my quote unquote road

01:59:05   that's in front of my house that is more pothole than road.

01:59:08   - Oh no, they're not repaving it.

01:59:10   That's the thing.

01:59:10   They're like tearing it up

01:59:11   to put different water pipes under it or whatever,

01:59:14   or working on it. - Or fixing gas leaks, yeah.

01:59:16   - It seems like there must be some kind of like

01:59:19   water construction mafia in Westchester

01:59:21   that they're always tearing up water mains.

01:59:23   - They just call that the mafia.

01:59:24   - Yeah, they literally just,

01:59:26   they tear up the same mains every two years.

01:59:29   Anyway, so I was driving a lot yesterday

01:59:32   and running a lot of errands and sitting in traffic

01:59:33   and being frustrated.

01:59:34   However, if I'm going to be driving a car,

01:59:38   the Model S is my favorite car ever.

01:59:40   I'm so incredibly happy with the one I already have,

01:59:43   and when I look at the new one,

01:59:45   no part of it makes me happy whatsoever.

01:59:47   Like they took away the interior color options I liked,

01:59:52   they took away the sunroof that I like,

01:59:55   they took away half the steering wheel and all the stalks.

01:59:58   Like I just, I don't want,

02:00:00   the idea of getting a new one of those ever

02:00:04   is not appealing to me at all.

02:00:06   And it's a shame because I love this car

02:00:08   and that's why I decided I'm gonna buy mine out.

02:00:09   Like my lease is up in a few months.

02:00:11   I filed today for the buyout quote.

02:00:14   I'm just gonna buy it out because I just want this car

02:00:17   to continue and I don't,

02:00:19   I would get no joy out of the new one.

02:00:23   And because when I bought it,

02:00:26   it actually was significantly more expensive

02:00:28   as they are now,

02:00:30   the price for me to buy it out is not that much less

02:00:35   than it would cost for me to buy a new one

02:00:37   with the options I would currently get.

02:00:39   But I don't even wanna do that.

02:00:41   I'd rather buy the one I have because it's a better car.

02:00:44   I like it better.

02:00:46   And I really, I will reiterate what I said last time

02:00:49   we talked about this which is I really do feel like

02:00:51   my Model S is the last one they designed

02:00:54   to be driven by a human.

02:00:56   The reality of the current situation

02:00:58   of auto driving technology is that you still have to drive it

02:01:02   like a human most of the time.

02:01:05   And I certainly still do in the conditions I drive in.

02:01:08   Like the world, the northeast,

02:01:11   we have weather and terrible roads

02:01:13   that are full of water main construction.

02:01:15   And so I am very happy now having decided

02:01:18   I'm not going to have to buy a new car this fall.

02:01:21   I'm not gonna have to make any decisions

02:01:22   or do any research or take any risks.

02:01:25   I'm just gonna keep driving the car I already have

02:01:26   because I love it and nothing they're currently making

02:01:30   tempts me at all to make a different choice right now.

02:01:33   - So start your clocks everybody.

02:01:35   This is me versus Marco.

02:01:36   Both of us are in the same situation

02:01:38   where we feel like we can't buy the new version

02:01:40   of the current car that we love

02:01:41   and also that our current car is the favorite car

02:01:43   we've ever owned which is true of my Accord.

02:01:45   Accords don't come with sticks anymore.

02:01:47   So I basically can't buy a new Accord.

02:01:49   So I basically have to keep driving mine forever.

02:01:52   The weird thing is though the car I'm looking

02:01:54   to replace the Accord with someday is like someday

02:01:56   if there's an electric car that fits within my budget

02:01:59   and that I actually like.

02:02:00   I could consider that I'm not a big Tesla fan.

02:02:02   But anyway, yeah, I'm planning on running my Accord forever.

02:02:05   And at this rate right now Marco doesn't see

02:02:08   another electric car that he wants

02:02:09   or another car period that he wants more than his Model S.

02:02:12   So we were just both sticking with our current cars.

02:02:14   - You know, if only there was a different luxury brand

02:02:17   that had been making cars for a really long time

02:02:19   that offered an electric version of one of their cars.

02:02:21   - Marco has many more choices than I do.

02:02:23   You have to admit case.

02:02:24   - Oh yes, oh absolutely.

02:02:26   - The large four-door sedan that I find appealing

02:02:29   that has a stick shift transmission.

02:02:31   There's like zero of those in the US.

02:02:35   I actually spent a while on those various auto used cars.

02:02:38   I was looking at used versions of my current car

02:02:41   just seeing what was out there

02:02:42   and how much I could get them for as like a backup car.

02:02:44   Like I should get, you know.

02:02:45   - Oh my gosh, John.

02:02:46   - As like the cheese grater.

02:02:47   So you know, it would be like a kid's car.

02:02:49   Like the kids could drive it or whatever.

02:02:50   But like, it's like my cheese grater

02:02:52   they don't make anymore.

02:02:53   I should keep buying black 2014 era stick shift Accord sports

02:02:57   and just have them in a warehouse somewhere

02:02:59   so that each time I wear one out

02:03:00   I just take a new one out.

02:03:02   - Well I feel like that's not a terrible approach.

02:03:05   I mean, that can last you a long time.

02:03:07   Like if you actually want to do that,

02:03:09   you know, whenever this car,

02:03:12   whenever you're done with this current car,

02:03:13   you can, which is probably gonna be a while.

02:03:15   It's an Accord, it's gonna last forever.

02:03:17   - And it's extremely low mileage.

02:03:19   - Right, yeah.

02:03:19   As every car has been for the last year.

02:03:22   - But I'm just saying, even before COVID,

02:03:25   like my car is a 2014 model so I bought it in 2013.

02:03:28   Guess how many miles are on my car?

02:03:30   - Let's see.

02:03:32   So normally I would say that's about seven years old

02:03:36   so you'd probably be at roughly what, 80,000, 90,000 miles?

02:03:41   - I'm gonna guess you're in the high 20s, low 30s.

02:03:46   If you're saying so, I would have said, you know, 80,000,

02:03:49   like Marco just implied,

02:03:50   but given that you've already hinted

02:03:52   that it's extremely low miles,

02:03:53   I'd say high 20s, low 30s.

02:03:54   - Unless, and this does happen to me sometimes,

02:03:56   unless I've been confused by display

02:03:58   because you know, you can switch between trip and whatever.

02:04:00   - Oh yeah, yeah.

02:04:01   - Those are whatever.

02:04:02   But I'm pretty sure I'm in low 20s.

02:04:04   - Wow.

02:04:04   - That's impressive.

02:04:05   - That's fantastic.

02:04:06   - Also, my car I bought almost exactly three years ago

02:04:11   and I just recently crossed 10,000 miles,

02:04:15   like in the last couple of months, so I hear you.

02:04:18   - How am I ahead of you?

02:04:19   I'm at 19, I'm fine.

02:04:21   - You keep going back and forth.

02:04:22   - Yeah, that's why.

02:04:24   You know, since it's just the three of us

02:04:25   and there's nobody else around,

02:04:26   can I tell you a little secret?

02:04:28   I had a really, really, really uncomfortable thought

02:04:33   like two days ago.

02:04:35   - Was it white?

02:04:36   - No.

02:04:36   - You trying to buy a Jeep?

02:04:37   - No, well actually yesterday I saw a Wrangler

02:04:40   with no doors on it.

02:04:41   No, yesterday I saw a Wrangler with no doors on it

02:04:43   and I had a very comfortable thought

02:04:44   about how I want a Wrangler again.

02:04:46   But that's not what I'm talking about.

02:04:48   I had a very uncomfortable thought

02:04:49   just two or three days ago.

02:04:51   I'm starting to think it might be okay

02:04:55   to get an electric car.

02:04:56   - Yeah, it's great.

02:04:58   - No, I don't wanna hear your propaganda.

02:05:00   I don't wanna hear your propaganda.

02:05:01   But up until just a couple of days ago,

02:05:03   I was thinking, you know, even though there's a lot

02:05:05   that appeals to me about an electric car,

02:05:07   I don't wanna give up the stick shift

02:05:09   and there's no electric car that I think,

02:05:13   just like John said a moment ago,

02:05:14   that I'm interested in and fits my price range, right?

02:05:19   And I still think that's true,

02:05:21   but it seems that the floodgates are opening

02:05:24   and they're opening slowly now,

02:05:25   but I think they're going to be opening

02:05:26   ever more quickly soon.

02:05:29   And there's going to be just a tremendous amount of options

02:05:33   on the market.

02:05:34   And I really think there's a better than 50% chance

02:05:39   that my next car will be an electric.

02:05:41   Now, I'm not planning to upgrade for two, three, four, five,

02:05:43   six years, but I think it's a pretty good chance

02:05:46   that the next one I get will not have

02:05:47   an internal combustion engine.

02:05:48   - Can I interest you in a 2014 Honda Accord Sport

02:05:52   with a stick shift for $8,000?

02:05:55   Do you see how I can get these like cheese graters?

02:05:57   For $8,000, I can get my car.

02:06:00   I mean, granted that is 230,000 miles in it,

02:06:02   but I'm saying like they're in the range.

02:06:04   They're in the range from like 7,000 to like 15,000

02:06:07   for my exact car.

02:06:08   You could think of how many of these you could get

02:06:10   for one Marco car.

02:06:11   You can just have a,

02:06:13   just again, if I could fit them in my basement,

02:06:15   I would just store them there.

02:06:16   The problem was I'm looking at all these used cars

02:06:18   and I look at them and I'm like,

02:06:19   what does that car smell like?

02:06:20   - A basement full of Honda Accords.

02:06:22   That would be amazing.

02:06:22   - What does that car smell like?

02:06:24   Does it smell like cigarette smoke?

02:06:25   Does it smell like someone spilled something in it?

02:06:26   'Cause I've always used cars,

02:06:28   especially when they're extremely high mileage,

02:06:30   230,000 hard miles in that car.

02:06:32   But anyway, these are the stick shift ones

02:06:34   and they're rare.

02:06:35   Like when you, like I go to,

02:06:36   I'm at CarGurus 'cause I just came up with Google, right?

02:06:39   Transmission and they have check boxes.

02:06:41   Automatic 123, manual eight.

02:06:43   (laughing)

02:06:45   There's not a lot of these cars in manual.

02:06:47   But the thing is they're not apparently

02:06:48   particularly desirable so you can get them

02:06:50   for less than 10 grand.

02:06:53   - That's wild.

02:06:54   - I mean, I feel like there's like,

02:06:55   so for reasons that I don't wanna get into,

02:06:57   this shows it's too long.

02:06:59   I bought a brand new, well, new to me,

02:07:01   Super Nintendo yesterday.

02:07:04   - What?

02:07:04   - And this is like a 30 year old game console.

02:07:07   And I feel like if today you can still go buy

02:07:11   a 30 year old game console in perfect working

02:07:14   and cosmetic order, like if we really,

02:07:16   if you really want to buy a 2014 Honda Accord Sport

02:07:20   with a stick in 2040, like somebody will probably

02:07:25   be able to sell it to you.

02:07:27   - It's gonna be hard to find ones that are not modified

02:07:31   and that are in good condition.

02:07:32   That's the tricky thing about this.

02:07:33   I mean, you should watch it M539, the YouTube channel.

02:07:37   It's great and the part of his, he gets old BMWs

02:07:40   and the problem is he doesn't want them

02:07:42   to have been modified.

02:07:43   So if anyone's messed with them, you know,

02:07:45   it's not as desirable.

02:07:46   But you want one as this just like,

02:07:48   'cause that's what's desirable about them.

02:07:49   You want it to be collectible and you want it

02:07:50   to be like it was when it was new.

02:07:52   And Hondas in particular are extremely attractive

02:07:56   to people who wanna modify them.

02:07:57   It's not, no, the Accord's not as bad as the Civic,

02:07:59   but finding, in 2040, yeah, you'll be able to find

02:08:03   an Accord of 2014 and with the stick shift

02:08:05   and you'll be able to find parts for it and all that,

02:08:07   but every one that you find will not,

02:08:09   will look nothing like it did when it's new.

02:08:11   It'll be modified in all sorts of ways

02:08:13   and it'll be all mangled.

02:08:14   It'll have parts replaced with non-original parts.

02:08:16   And so what you really want is to find one that is,

02:08:19   like if in 2040 you had a mint condition

02:08:22   like new 2014 Honda Accord, it would be worth a lot.

02:08:25   Like 'cause collectible is all about condition.

02:08:27   It's just like right now, if I had an Apple IIe,

02:08:29   but nobody's looking for it except you.

02:08:31   - Except, yeah, but to Jon, it's worth like 80 grand.

02:08:33   - Think of anything in the world.

02:08:35   Think of the Apple IIe, which was an extremely popular

02:08:37   computer that made tons of.

02:08:39   If you had a mint in the box, never opened before,

02:08:41   perfect condition Apple IIe, that's worth a lot of money.

02:08:44   Even though they made a ton of them.

02:08:46   It's not like it's rare.

02:08:46   They were all over the place, but it's all about condition.

02:08:49   - Jon, stop lying to yourself.

02:08:51   If you somehow, like let's suppose some listener

02:08:55   bought a 2014 Honda Accord Sport with a six speed,

02:08:59   it is six, not five, right?

02:09:01   Okay, God, I got worried.

02:09:03   So some listener has a 2014 Honda Accord Sport

02:09:07   that was put on blocks with five miles on the odometer.

02:09:09   - You can't put it on blocks.

02:09:10   You have to carefully preserve it.

02:09:11   If you just leave it outside, it'll rot.

02:09:12   - For the love of God, that's the thing though.

02:09:14   Do you really want what is almost a 10-year-old car

02:09:17   that hasn't been run in 10 years?

02:09:20   - No, you have to take care of it like a collector.

02:09:23   That's why they're valuable,

02:09:24   because it actually takes effort to,

02:09:25   you can't just put it in the garage for 10 years.

02:09:27   Again, watch the M539 channel.

02:09:29   He buys cars that have been like,

02:09:31   this has been sitting outside for 20 years, and it's grim.

02:09:34   Like, let me tell you, right?

02:09:35   It ran when we parked it,

02:09:37   and then we parked it for 20 years.

02:09:38   To actually keep a car alive that you don't drive

02:09:41   takes serious effort, because cars do not stay,

02:09:45   and we talked about the gas and how that goes bad,

02:09:48   but pretty much everything in an internal combustion engine

02:09:51   should not be sitting,

02:09:52   and even if it's sitting in a climate-controlled place,

02:09:54   you have to do lots of things to keep it going.

02:09:56   The rubber will just harden and rot out on all the tubes,

02:09:59   and you'll have to replace all those things.

02:10:02   It's not easy, and that's why it helps

02:10:04   if you have a manufacturer that continues

02:10:05   to make those parts.

02:10:07   A lot of times, you can get a part for, you know, an E46.

02:10:11   It seems to me that someone is still, maybe BMW,

02:10:13   is still making many parts for the E46,

02:10:15   because when you buy them,

02:10:16   it's not like that part was made in the '90s,

02:10:19   'cause it would be rotted out

02:10:20   just like the rubber tubes that are in your engine.

02:10:22   They make new parts that are essentially OEM parts,

02:10:25   exactly like the old ones, but are still manufacturing them.

02:10:29   So that's why collectibles are valuable based on condition,

02:10:32   because finding one in like-new condition 40 years later

02:10:35   is like a miracle.

02:10:36   - Yeah.

02:10:38   Golly, I cannot imagine you, you know what's gonna happen

02:10:42   is you're gonna clear out your garage,

02:10:44   and it's going to be pristine,

02:10:46   because you're gonna find that unicorn

02:10:48   of a 2014 Accord Sport, and you're gonna park it in there,

02:10:52   so you have your backup cheese grater

02:10:53   to your current Accord Sport.

02:10:55   - I don't really have room.

02:10:57   That's the problem.

02:10:58   Like, I don't actually have room on my property

02:11:00   for another car.

02:11:01   - That's the problem.

02:11:02   - Yeah, like, I would need to rent out another building

02:11:05   to store my cheese grater cars.

02:11:07   (door slams)