ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► John, I have a question for you. When you were perhaps younger, uh,

00:00:05 ◼   ► or just generally in the days before,

00:00:08 ◼   ► did you have any strong corporate allegiances?

00:00:12 ◼   ► So what got me thinking about this was obviously, you know,

00:00:15 ◼   ► I have a strong affinity for Apple, even though sometimes it may not sound like it,

00:00:18 ◼   ► but I was thinking, you know,

00:00:20 ◼   ► there was a time when I felt probably as strongly in favor of BMW as I do about

00:00:25 ◼   ► Apple, which now sounds bananas,

00:00:28 ◼   ► but there was a time when I was extremely enthusiastic about BMW, you know,

00:00:33 ◼   ► Marco and I flew halfway across the planet in order to visit more BMW.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Um, and I was also thinking about like when I was a kid,

00:00:42 ◼   ► I had very little actual possessions, but a strong affinity for Sony stuff.

00:00:47 ◼   ► And you know, we've all talked about,

00:00:48 ◼   ► especially us old men about how Sony used to be great, blah, blah, blah.

00:00:51 ◼   ► And actually, quite suddenly we're going to be talking about Sony again later,

00:00:53 ◼   ► but I was curious for both of you, but particularly John,

00:00:57 ◼   ► were there any other corporations that you felt like you did or perhaps still do

00:01:02 ◼   ► have a really strong like affinity for?

00:01:04 ◼   ► Sure. And it's, I mean, like,

00:01:07 ◼   ► just like with you and BMW and all the things we're talking about,

00:01:09 ◼   ► it comes down to the products, like unlike sports teams,

00:01:12 ◼   ► which like you're born into, right. Or whatever, like, um,

00:01:16 ◼   ► or just geography, um, we're for,

00:01:20 ◼   ► for like tech products or even any kind of products it's based, uh,

00:01:24 ◼   ► companies it's based on the products they put out.

00:01:25 ◼   ► So I also had an affinity for Sony stuff that was based on both the Walkman,

00:01:30 ◼   ► which was a new piece of technology when I was a kid. And that really, you know,

00:01:34 ◼   ► knocked my socks off. And a little bit later, uh,

00:01:37 ◼   ► the trinitron display because I always like good display technology and the

00:01:41 ◼   ► trinitron only curved in one direction instead of two. And that's, you know,

00:01:44 ◼   ► 50% to being entirely flat. And then of course, Apple used trinitron monitors.

00:01:49 ◼   ► So there was a connection there. Nintendo. Why? Oh, the NES,

00:01:52 ◼   ► the NES was another thing that came out in my day, right?

00:01:55 ◼   ► Because of the NES I became devoted to Nintendo and the games they put out,

00:02:00 ◼   ► you know,

00:02:00 ◼   ► a legend of Zelda and Mario that made me devoted to Nintendo.

00:02:03 ◼   ► So every time Nintendo did a thing, I was into it. Um,

00:02:06 ◼   ► those are probably the big ones. Maybe you could say like Ferrari and Porsche,

00:02:11 ◼   ► but like, I only saw pictures of those things. So, you know,

00:02:14 ◼   ► who really knows what they're actually like. Um, but yeah,

00:02:17 ◼   ► I think it's the same amount of, uh, I wouldn't call it corporate allegiance.

00:02:20 ◼   ► I would call it, um,

00:02:23 ◼   ► identifying and being interested in the output of companies that were doing

00:02:27 ◼   ► things that I found cool.

00:02:29 ◼   ► What about OXO? Like as in a lot of your kitchen stuff, OXO?

00:02:33 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean like that's, I, I had on,

00:02:36 ◼   ► it's not quite the same thing as those other companies because a lot of OXO

00:02:40 ◼   ► stuff is hit or miss,

00:02:42 ◼   ► but they're in my group of brands that I trust. Like all clad is another one.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Like you kind of know what you're getting with them.

00:02:49 ◼   ► I bought enough of their products that I have some confidence in what they're

00:02:51 ◼   ► going to give. But the,

00:02:53 ◼   ► those things don't go into the top tiers because it's,

00:02:56 ◼   ► I feel like their taste is not entirely aligned with mine or not,

00:03:01 ◼   ► not aligned with mine as much as say a Nintendo or an Apple is.

00:03:04 ◼   ► So I really have to just sort of pick and choose from those companies. So yeah,

00:03:08 ◼   ► I like them,

00:03:09 ◼   ► but sometimes the things they make don't agree with my taste.

00:03:13 ◼   ► That's fair. Marco, other than your incorrect opinions about Sega, uh,

00:03:18 ◼   ► anything for you? I was just thinking about saying when your, but yeah,

00:03:23 ◼   ► I don't know. I mean, you know, like when I was, when I was young, like, you know,

00:03:26 ◼   ► we didn't have a lot of money and I didn't have like the,

00:03:30 ◼   ► the breadth of knowledge or product availability to me or internet searching.

00:03:35 ◼   ► So like I only knew what we had and all we had,

00:03:40 ◼   ► like, you know, we'd get like one of everything. So like, you know,

00:03:42 ◼   ► we'd have one TV, one VCR, you know, I,

00:03:45 ◼   ► we had one game system, the Sega Genesis for most of my childhood. So like,

00:03:49 ◼   ► it wasn't, it wouldn't,

00:03:52 ◼   ► it wouldn't be so much like an allegiance as like,

00:03:54 ◼   ► this is just the only one that we have.

00:03:56 ◼   ► So it's the only one that I have any experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:03:59 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't know. I mean like we had Toyota cars because we bought them and

00:04:05 ◼   ► drove them forever. Oh yeah. I should've listed Honda,

00:04:08 ◼   ► which was later in life thing at the first Honda that my family had was,

00:04:11 ◼   ► I think it was like a teenager by then, but obviously very quickly,

00:04:15 ◼   ► I developed an affinity for that brand and this is the only car I've ever bought.

00:04:19 ◼   ► It's just a series of Honda. So put that in the loyalty column for sure.

00:04:24 ◼   ► It's funny to me that early on,

00:04:27 ◼   ► before I put something to the order of 10 or $15,000 worth of repairs into my

00:04:30 ◼   ► three series, I would have said early on that, you know,

00:04:34 ◼   ► money not withstanding because it's a big issue with the BMW.

00:04:37 ◼   ► I would probably drive BMWs forever more because when my 335 worked, holy crap,

00:04:42 ◼   ► that was a great car. It really, really, really was.

00:04:45 ◼   ► But the problem is never worked.

00:04:46 ◼   ► And coincidentally I ran out to do some takeout for dinner.

00:04:50 ◼   ► And when I was out, I noticed coming,

00:04:55 ◼   ► coming out onto the road I was driving on, you know, so perpendicular to me,

00:04:58 ◼   ► was one of the new either three or four series with the

00:05:03 ◼   ► humongous,

00:05:05 ◼   ► ridiculous kidneys that we had talked about many shows ago,

00:05:08 ◼   ► ago now.

00:05:10 ◼   ► And that might be the first time I've seen them in person and they are uglier in

00:05:13 ◼   ► person than I think they are on paper.

00:05:15 ◼   ► And that is saying something because they are truly awful on paper.

00:05:18 ◼   ► That's amazing.

00:05:20 ◼   ► It's so bad. So yeah, it just, you know, fast forward a couple of years and,

00:05:23 ◼   ► and genuinely, I mean,

00:05:24 ◼   ► I could not say enough good things about the trip that me,

00:05:27 ◼   ► Aaron Marco and Tiff went on and about, you know,

00:05:30 ◼   ► going to BMW Welt and going to do European delivery and taking this,

00:05:35 ◼   ► you know,

00:05:37 ◼   ► it'd be even just being a passenger and Marco's ridiculous BMW and taking it

00:05:41 ◼   ► around the Nurburgring on like April 4th or something when there was

00:05:43 ◼   ► snow on the sides of the road. Like everything about that trip,

00:05:46 ◼   ► really on paper was kind of dumb and wrong and bad, but I loved it.

00:05:50 ◼   ► I loved every moment of it. And,

00:05:52 ◼   ► and to go from that to me saying today,

00:05:56 ◼   ► it is unlikely that I would ever really even strongly consider a BMW again is

00:06:01 ◼   ► surprising. And I feel similarly, although not exactly the same with Sony,

00:06:05 ◼   ► you know, like I loved Sony so much as a kid and now I'm just like, eh,

00:06:10 ◼   ► it's a thing. Maybe I'd get a camera sometime. Maybe. And again,

00:06:12 ◼   ► we'll be talking about this later, but, um, I don't know, it's just wild to me.

00:06:16 ◼   ► How, how such a strong allegiance can just evaporate into thin air like that.

00:06:21 ◼   ► Just wait until Declan wants a PlayStation.

00:06:22 ◼   ► I think a lot of it was like, you know, in, in that era of like, you know,

00:06:27 ◼   ► eighties, nineties like that, the time that we grew up, uh, well the Casey and I

00:06:31 ◼   ► grew up,

00:06:32 ◼   ► things were a lot less based on software and,

00:06:38 ◼   ► and ecosystems and services and everything. And they're,

00:06:41 ◼   ► they were a lot more just like which of these like consumer electronic companies

00:06:45 ◼   ► can make really nice hardware.

00:06:46 ◼   ► And the hardware was could be really delightful and really well made.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And it was because there was not much software dependence at the time and for

00:06:54 ◼   ► almost any category of device,

00:06:57 ◼   ► I think more companies were able to become interns in those fields.

00:07:01 ◼   ► So like you had more companies being able to make really good TVs and really

00:07:05 ◼   ► good VCRs and really good game systems and everything. And,

00:07:08 ◼   ► and now I feel like not only do we use fewer things like human back then,

00:07:12 ◼   ► you might've had, you know,

00:07:14 ◼   ► you might've had like a an early computer from whoever made that. Um, you,

00:07:17 ◼   ► you definitely would've had like, you know, TV, VCR, um,

00:07:21 ◼   ► later on DVD player. Um, you would've had a game systems,

00:07:25 ◼   ► at least one usually growing up. And you also would've had things like,

00:07:29 ◼   ► you know, a disc man as, as we said, or, or a walkman.

00:07:32 ◼   ► Maybe later in the later, like in the late nineties, you would've might've,

00:07:35 ◼   ► might've had like a PDA or something like you would've had more things.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Whereas now a lot of those hardware products are not necessary anymore.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Like now it's the, to make,

00:07:47 ◼   ► to get hardware that we actually need or want to use.

00:07:50 ◼   ► It basically has to be like either a phone or a computer and like that's about

00:07:55 ◼   ► it.

00:07:55 ◼   ► And not a lot of people are able to make competitive phones or computers these

00:07:59 ◼   ► days because they're so complex and so reliant on software and ecosystems.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Yeah. And so like you don't, so it's harder for somebody like a Sony,

00:08:07 ◼   ► for example, Sony has always been miserably bad at software, uh,

00:08:12 ◼   ► but really pretty good at the hardware side. Um,

00:08:14 ◼   ► and now Sony like the direction the world has moved with the exception of things

00:08:19 ◼   ► like the camera division, but like the rest of Sony, you know, it's,

00:08:24 ◼   ► the world has moved in places that Sony mostly can't do very well.

00:08:28 ◼   ► Like now, like, you know,

00:08:30 ◼   ► Sony does not have a PC or mobile operating system.

00:08:33 ◼   ► They don't make most of the hardware that would be in a PC or mobile,

00:08:38 ◼   ► although with the exception of they do make a ton of the camera sensors, uh,

00:08:42 ◼   ► which is pretty good. That's a pretty good business to be in.

00:08:45 ◼   ► The camera modules on smartphones, that's a pretty good business. Um,

00:08:48 ◼   ► but like I feel like there's less room for somebody like,

00:08:53 ◼   ► like nineties Sony, like just make a really nice VCR.

00:08:56 ◼   ► Like there's less room for that in what we use today because what we use today

00:09:01 ◼   ► requires massive investments and massive established ecosystems in areas Sony has

00:09:06 ◼   ► not ever been really able to do. So I do kind of miss that. Like,

00:09:11 ◼   ► like a couple of years back, um,

00:09:13 ◼   ► I got this little tiny Sony audio recorder and it was about the size of an iPod

00:09:18 ◼   ► shuffle and it was this full blown audio recorder.

00:09:22 ◼   ► It was so delightful and I use it like three or four times maybe and I just

00:09:29 ◼   ► haven't used it and I looked for it the other day and I couldn't find it.

00:09:31 ◼   ► But like it was so delightful to have this thing and hold it in my hands.

00:09:35 ◼   ► It's like this is a modern Sony device that had, you know,

00:09:39 ◼   ► it looked and it looked just like an alternative device. You know,

00:09:41 ◼   ► this black plastic casing, really well made big buttons,

00:09:45 ◼   ► the nice big record button, nice big display. We had had like a,

00:09:48 ◼   ► like a black and white OLED for the displays. What looked really nice.

00:09:52 ◼   ► Like it was a beautiful little device,

00:09:54 ◼   ► but I just don't have a ton of use for this kind of thing anymore.

00:09:57 ◼   ► Cause so often like, you know,

00:10:00 ◼   ► either our phones can do that and we don't need to do it anymore. Or, you know,

00:10:03 ◼   ► things about things that are about physical media,

00:10:05 ◼   ► we almost never need anymore. Um, so I don't know, it,

00:10:08 ◼   ► it seems like there's a whole,

00:10:10 ◼   ► there's been whole massive categories of things that we could become big fans of

00:10:15 ◼   ► or really, you know,

00:10:17 ◼   ► respect certain companies for and that whole category doesn't really exist

00:10:20 ◼   ► anymore.

00:10:20 ◼   ► Or it only exists in very specialized areas and like only pros in a certain area

00:10:25 ◼   ► needed.

00:10:27 ◼   ► Speaking about data stuff, Tivo,

00:10:28 ◼   ► another brand that I had tremendous loyalty for until the bad times.

00:10:33 ◼   ► All right, we should start with some followup and we have some neutral followup.

00:10:42 ◼   ► I am sorry if this is not your cup of tea. This is why chapters exist.

00:10:45 ◼   ► Thank you, Germany. Uh, to begin,

00:10:47 ◼   ► somebody on Twitter found that there were official renders of the model S and

00:10:52 ◼   ► model X, uh,

00:10:54 ◼   ► interiors with a traditional round barbarically ancient and yet so delightful

00:10:59 ◼   ► steering wheel. And I was extremely pleased to see this and I hope it's the thing.

00:11:03 ◼   ► I don't know if it's renders. It might be a photo presumably the countries that,

00:11:07 ◼   ► where it's illegal to, to have the, the steering yoke,

00:11:11 ◼   ► the non wheel wheel.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Apparently that's against certain laws in certain places.

00:11:16 ◼   ► So they're probably going to have to make a round wheel anyway.

00:11:18 ◼   ► And this was an official picture on their site. So there it is. It's a wheel. Um,

00:11:23 ◼   ► and if I would say because Tesla makes that part,

00:11:25 ◼   ► it would be easier for people to buy the aftermarket.

00:11:27 ◼   ► But then I remember the Tesla doesn't exactly make it easy to buy parts period.

00:11:31 ◼   ► Yeah. My, my best guess is that if they don't enable that wheel option for

00:11:36 ◼   ► everybody, you know, upfront, I think they will probably enable it at some point,

00:11:40 ◼   ► like maybe within the next year.

00:11:42 ◼   ► I think enough people will want it and they'll lose enough sales to not having

00:11:46 ◼   ► it, that they'll probably relent and start offering that as an option.

00:11:49 ◼   ► But I could be wrong. I mean they never offered function to door handles.

00:11:52 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Then fix those for all those years. Even this gen, um,

00:11:56 ◼   ► speaking of controls, uh,

00:11:58 ◼   ► at least one person on Twitter said that the touch controls on the wheel are

00:12:02 ◼   ► supposedly forced touch, like you actually have to press them hard. So, um,

00:12:07 ◼   ► I speculated about that last show.

00:12:09 ◼   ► I'm not sure where this information is coming from.

00:12:10 ◼   ► That would make a little bit more sense than them being capacitive,

00:12:15 ◼   ► but it doesn't make any sense to me why they are apparently on a

00:12:20 ◼   ► completely smooth featureless service without any kind of outline or indent or

00:12:25 ◼   ► bulge to indicate where the things are.

00:12:27 ◼   ► Yeah. Like if I, if I want to like dust off my steering wheel,

00:12:30 ◼   ► am I going to accidentally honk the horn?

00:12:31 ◼   ► Not, not unless you press.

00:12:33 ◼   ► But the reason I think it's weird that it's just a smooth surface is you'll just

00:12:36 ◼   ► have to memorize which parts of the smooth surface to press.

00:12:39 ◼   ► It's like the Apple TV remote all over again. Right. Um,

00:12:42 ◼   ► and if you don't know exactly where it is and you just put your finger onto this

00:12:45 ◼   ► completely smooth surface and you press real hard and your blinker doesn't turn

00:12:48 ◼   ► on, then you just move your thumb like a millimeter and press and move your thumb

00:12:51 ◼   ► and millimeter and press. Then you look down to see the little glowing symbol.

00:12:54 ◼   ► Oh, that's where it is. Like this is just,

00:12:55 ◼   ► there is no scenario in which a smooth surface with places on it that you can

00:13:01 ◼   ► press is better than a stock for turn signals. And I don't understand,

00:13:05 ◼   ► understand why they're doing this, but at least supposedly they're not capacitive,

00:13:09 ◼   ► which would be the real worst case.

00:13:10 ◼   ► As a model S driver for like the last six years or whatever it's been,

00:13:14 ◼   ► I've never once thought this car has too many physical controls.

00:13:19 ◼   ► Like I've always thought it had like either exactly the right amount or slightly

00:13:23 ◼   ► too few, but very close to the right amount.

00:13:24 ◼   ► Like I'm very happy with the physical controls with what is physical and what is

00:13:28 ◼   ► on the touch screen. I'm very happy with that overall.

00:13:30 ◼   ► And so for them to go mess with it, I'm again, this might be really cool,

00:13:34 ◼   ► but I I'm wary, especially because of this next point. Right.

00:13:39 ◼   ► So Elon tweeted no more stocks.

00:13:41 ◼   ► The car will guess drive direction based on what obstacles it sees context in

00:13:45 ◼   ► the navigation map you can override on the touch screen.

00:13:48 ◼   ► So let me back up a half step. So in order to control,

00:13:51 ◼   ► if you're going in forward or reverse, that's a stock on the model S right,

00:13:56 ◼   ► Marco, the way it is right side. Yep. And you know,

00:13:59 ◼   ► that's the way it is on some like column shifted, you know, traditional cars,

00:14:03 ◼   ► but apparently the model S and the model X will just figure it out by

00:14:08 ◼   ► magic. And that's how it's going to work. Or if you don't trust it,

00:14:11 ◼   ► you can use the touch screen. All right. So here's the thing.

00:14:14 ◼   ► I have a group chat with a couple of friends of mine that we talk nominally about

00:14:18 ◼   ► cars pretty much all day, every day. And it's not John and Marco surprisingly.

00:14:22 ◼   ► But anyways, one of the things we were talking about just earlier today is,

00:14:25 ◼   ► you know,

00:14:26 ◼   ► whether or not it's appropriate for cars to be putting so much stuff behind a

00:14:31 ◼   ► touch screen. And because we're all old, we of course say, no, not,

00:14:36 ◼   ► not everything should be back there. And you know,

00:14:38 ◼   ► I can make arguments about what could and could not be in a touch screen.

00:14:41 ◼   ► So for example, Aaron, Aaron's Volvo to adjust the temperature,

00:14:44 ◼   ► that's on the touch screen. Now they do it in the most convenient,

00:14:47 ◼   ► most reasonable way possible,

00:14:49 ◼   ► but I would still prefer to have a little dial that you could,

00:14:51 ◼   ► that you could spin or what have you to put gear selection on the touch screen.

00:14:56 ◼   ► That is well, either I'm extremely old, which I guess is true,

00:15:02 ◼   ► or that is the most preposterous, ridiculous,

00:15:05 ◼   ► like you want to talk about courage. That's fricking courage.

00:15:10 ◼   ► Like come on. No, just no.

00:15:12 ◼   ► Well, it's not,

00:15:13 ◼   ► it's not that it's putting it on the touch screen because if that's what we were

00:15:16 ◼   ► talking about, that would be one thing and we can have that conversation.

00:15:19 ◼   ► But as you just read, the key part of this is, and it's a lot like the, uh,

00:15:23 ◼   ► the driver assistance things that the car does for you to try to help you drive

00:15:27 ◼   ► or the, you know, the autopilot or whatever is that it chooses for you.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Like, so if it was on a touch screen, it would be like, well, you must,

00:15:35 ◼   ► you must go into drive before you can drive. But in this car,

00:15:38 ◼   ► according to Elon's description, no, you don't have to go to the touch screen.

00:15:41 ◼   ► And plus drive,

00:15:41 ◼   ► you just need to get into the car and the car will pick based on, you know,

00:15:45 ◼   ► context clues, whether you want to go forward or backwards.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Now, if the car has made the wrong choice, of course,

00:15:52 ◼   ► you can use the touch screen to change the gear.

00:15:54 ◼   ► But the thing is you don't have to use the touch screen if the car guessed right.

00:15:58 ◼   ► And this is exactly like the autopilot, uh, you know,

00:16:01 ◼   ► anti-pattern where if the car guesses right enough,

00:16:05 ◼   ► if autopilot is good enough to keep you in the lane,

00:16:08 ◼   ► 99.9% of the time,

00:16:10 ◼   ► it will form a habit where you just get in your car and press the accelerator

00:16:14 ◼   ► pedal because, Hey, the car just picks for you.

00:16:17 ◼   ► I don't have to steer when I'm in the lane because the thing stays in the lane

00:16:20 ◼   ► for me, except for that one time. It doesn't. And then I die. Well,

00:16:23 ◼   ► you're supposed to be ready to take over any second.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Have you departed from lane? Well,

00:16:27 ◼   ► you're always supposed to check the touch screen to see if it's in the right

00:16:29 ◼   ► gear. It says right here in the manual. Oh yeah,

00:16:31 ◼   ► we'll pick the right gear for you. But if we pick the wrong one,

00:16:33 ◼   ► just use the touch screen, but it's training you not to do that. So, I mean,

00:16:38 ◼   ► this is less, much less dangerous.

00:16:39 ◼   ► Cause what's going to happen is people are going to get in fender benders,

00:16:41 ◼   ► right?

00:16:41 ◼   ► Where they're just going to assume the car has correctly picked forward or

00:16:44 ◼   ► reverse or whichever gear they think it's supposed to be.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And they're going to have to accelerator and bump into a wall,

00:16:48 ◼   ► bump into a cone, bump onto a tree,

00:16:50 ◼   ► whatever it is they're going to bump into. If the car guesses incorrectly,

00:16:54 ◼   ► the car will have long since trained you to never bother overriding it because

00:16:58 ◼   ► the guess is right almost every single time.

00:17:00 ◼   ► So this is another example of a non human centered feature.

00:17:03 ◼   ► It's not, you know, the touch screen having the gear selector on the touch screen.

00:17:07 ◼   ► That's one thing.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And I think that's an interesting evolution of gear selection because in,

00:17:12 ◼   ► in the olden days, Casey mentioned column shifting.

00:17:15 ◼   ► There was a physical connection between either the column or a big lever to

00:17:20 ◼   ► trigger something in your transmit,

00:17:21 ◼   ► your automatic transmission to go into the right gear,

00:17:23 ◼   ► setting aside manuals for a second. Right.

00:17:25 ◼   ► And over the years as transmissions have gotten more and more complicated,

00:17:28 ◼   ► they've kept in a skeuomorphic way, again, a truly skeuomorphic way,

00:17:32 ◼   ► a big giant lever in a car that you can move from PR and DL,

00:17:37 ◼   ► you know,

00:17:37 ◼   ► like just a huge lever as if you're still moving mechanically something inside

00:17:42 ◼   ► the transmission. When in reality, over the past, you know,

00:17:44 ◼   ► the recent several years,

00:17:45 ◼   ► what you're actually doing is moving a giant electronic switch.

00:17:48 ◼   ► That's telling the transmission to change gears.

00:17:50 ◼   ► More recently in like the past couple car generations,

00:17:54 ◼   ► lots of car manufacturers have switched from having a gigantic handle that takes

00:17:57 ◼   ► up the entire center console to having buttons. In fact, most Hondas do this now.

00:18:01 ◼   ► And I started this, you know, maybe five, seven years ago,

00:18:05 ◼   ► but a lot of cars have buttons for park reverse neutral,

00:18:09 ◼   ► including clever buttons,

00:18:10 ◼   ► like where reverse you pull up on the button like a window lifter and you know,

00:18:13 ◼   ► drive you press down to try to, you know, sort of make it have, make it,

00:18:18 ◼   ► make it have more physical sense about whether you're going forward or backwards

00:18:20 ◼   ► because there's no need for a lever because all you're doing is activating a

00:18:24 ◼   ► button. So they had physical buttons,

00:18:25 ◼   ► touchscreen buttons are just an evolution of that.

00:18:28 ◼   ► And that's where you get into the debate. We've had all the time,

00:18:30 ◼   ► physical buttons versus touchscreen buttons,

00:18:31 ◼   ► but it's still, it's just a button.

00:18:32 ◼   ► It's a recognition of the fact that you're not actually shifting a transmission

00:18:36 ◼   ► into gear by moving a lever that presses a thing that moves a physical male gear

00:18:41 ◼   ► to mesh with a different gear. You know, you're not doing that.

00:18:43 ◼   ► You're doing an electronic switch, right?

00:18:46 ◼   ► So I think touchscreen for gear selection of all the things that you have to do,

00:18:51 ◼   ► it's probably not the worst sin.

00:18:54 ◼   ► I would challenge people to make what people call a K term,

00:18:57 ◼   ► but I always call a three point turn while trying to use a touchscreen to change

00:19:00 ◼   ► gears. But then again, I'm a stick shift driver.

00:19:02 ◼   ► I don't have to look at anything when I make a K turn because everything is at

00:19:06 ◼   ► hand that I never have to look anywhere.

00:19:07 ◼   ► But I know lots of people have to grab their thing and look at their dashboard

00:19:11 ◼   ► indicator to see that they're going from D into R and they haven't actually

00:19:14 ◼   ► accidentally switched into N or low gear or whatever. Like people do that.

00:19:19 ◼   ► And a touchscreen, I feel like is a slight downgrade there,

00:19:21 ◼   ► but that's an entirely separate matter that we can debate.

00:19:25 ◼   ► I think what's not debatable is if this works, how Elon says it does,

00:19:29 ◼   ► and if it is remotely good at guessing,

00:19:32 ◼   ► it will train people not to bother looking at the touchscreen and just assume the

00:19:36 ◼   ► car is guessed correctly and then they're just going to hit their bumpers into

00:19:38 ◼   ► things.

00:19:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's, that's the most likely outcome here. Cause like

00:19:42 ◼   ► when my car tries to guess what I want to do,

00:19:47 ◼   ► it is sometimes right.

00:19:49 ◼   ► I'd say it's even often right when my car tries to drive itself,

00:19:53 ◼   ► it is often doing the correct things,

00:19:57 ◼   ► but not always. It isn't a hundred percent of the time.

00:20:00 ◼   ► Also the more things that get put on the touch screen,

00:20:03 ◼   ► the more things I don't have access to the two or three times a year,

00:20:07 ◼   ► I have to reboot the car while I'm driving it.

00:20:09 ◼   ► Oh God.

00:20:11 ◼   ► Because Tesla can't make a reliable car computer. They can't,

00:20:15 ◼   ► they haven't, they, so as far as they can tell, they can't.

00:20:18 ◼   ► And while their computers don't need to be rebooted as often as they used to,

00:20:22 ◼   ► they still do occasionally need to be rebooted occasionally while you're driving

00:20:26 ◼   ► them. And today in the, you know, outgoing model S,

00:20:30 ◼   ► you hold down the, you know, the, the two steering wheel,

00:20:33 ◼   ► little scroll wheel things for a little while and the computer reboots. Today,

00:20:37 ◼   ► when you reboot the computer,

00:20:38 ◼   ► you can do so while driving and the only things that you lose access to that

00:20:43 ◼   ► really matter a lot are climate control and turn signals.

00:20:46 ◼   ► Everything else continues to work just fine with those computers often rebooting

00:20:51 ◼   ► and they take a good, probably 90 seconds. It like,

00:20:54 ◼   ► it takes a while for them to reboot. It's not, it's not like an instant thing.

00:20:57 ◼   ► The fact that the turn signals are connected to the computer is terrible because

00:21:01 ◼   ► those are an important driver thing and there is no reason they need to be

00:21:05 ◼   ► connected to the computer.

00:21:06 ◼   ► Yeah. And to be clear,

00:21:07 ◼   ► I'm actually not entirely sure that they don't function,

00:21:10 ◼   ► but you don't have any indication that they're functioning.

00:21:12 ◼   ► They might still be on the outside. I'm not sure. And in fact,

00:21:16 ◼   ► there was actually just today, I think, or yesterday,

00:21:18 ◼   ► there was a recall announced that basically like the, the niche,

00:21:23 ◼   ► whatever it is, a group, the organization from the government, NHTSA,

00:21:27 ◼   ► National Highway Traffic and Safety Organization.

00:21:30 ◼   ► So I learned from working at a car talk from my first job. There we go. Yes.

00:21:34 ◼   ► So anyways, so the,

00:21:35 ◼   ► the asthma group forced Tesla to recall something some massive number of cars

00:21:39 ◼   ► because the like there's some flaw in some number of cars they shipped where the

00:21:43 ◼   ► computer will frequently die and need to be like upgraded or replaced or whatever.

00:21:48 ◼   ► And it's such a,

00:21:49 ◼   ► it's such a safety hazard where the computer dies because I think of control of

00:21:52 ◼   ► turn signals and stuff like that and climate control,

00:21:54 ◼   ► which you can imagine like if you're relying on like the defroster,

00:21:58 ◼   ► for instance, that's, that's kind of a big deal. Um, so right now,

00:22:02 ◼   ► already even, even with like the latest model S with the latest software,

00:22:07 ◼   ► as of like two months ago, that,

00:22:10 ◼   ► that car still needs to reboot its computer while driving at least once,

00:22:14 ◼   ► twice a year.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And so to have things move into the touch screen,

00:22:19 ◼   ► like the reverse or drive selector,

00:22:22 ◼   ► that to me is scary because they're designing the car as if, well,

00:22:28 ◼   ► first of all,

00:22:29 ◼   ► there's an in the cars if it already drives itself a hundred percent of the time

00:22:31 ◼   ► and that's not true and probably won't be true for at least another few years if

00:22:35 ◼   ► probably not more, you know? Um, so it's already not driving itself full time.

00:22:39 ◼   ► So you need to drive it yourself manually quite often. Most of the time I'd,

00:22:44 ◼   ► I'd argue.

00:22:45 ◼   ► And then also to put something as critical as the drive mode on the touchscreen,

00:22:50 ◼   ► which makes it so you can't then operate that during these critical times and

00:22:55 ◼   ► you have to reboot the car computer. That is scary to me. And I,

00:23:00 ◼   ► and I just think like the one time it guesses wrong is going to make it not

00:23:05 ◼   ► worth it. Like that, that one time if, I mean,

00:23:08 ◼   ► you're lucky if you just bump some, some bumper or you, you know,

00:23:11 ◼   ► back into your garage door or something, you're lucky if that's all that gets

00:23:14 ◼   ► done. You know, you could, you could hit somebody, you could hit a pet,

00:23:16 ◼   ► you could hit, you could hit a kid like that.

00:23:18 ◼   ► It could be way worse than just bumping someone's fender.

00:23:21 ◼   ► And like to have the car go to have any part of that be unreliable is so

00:23:26 ◼   ► dangerous and so bad that it doesn't seem worth it to have the car try to guess

00:23:32 ◼   ► based on conditions that are not going to be a hundred percent of the time.

00:23:37 ◼   ► Correct.

00:23:38 ◼   ► I mean,

00:23:38 ◼   ► I feel like the argument is exactly the argument that keep making for self

00:23:41 ◼   ► driving the art, which has not held for their self driving and probably won't

00:23:45 ◼   ► hold for this, which is people guess wrong sometimes too.

00:23:47 ◼   ► And as long as the computer can guess right,

00:23:48 ◼   ► more often than the computer does more often than people do,

00:23:52 ◼   ► then it's a win for the computer, right? So we don't have to be perfect.

00:23:55 ◼   ► We just have to be better than people. And you know, as we know,

00:23:57 ◼   ► people do occasionally go in the wrong gear and bump into somebody and run over

00:24:00 ◼   ► a pet or a kid, right? That happens, right? So they're just trying to beat humans.

00:24:04 ◼   ► But I don't particularly like that because I am not an amorphous smear of

00:24:10 ◼   ► statistical human being. I'm one specific human being.

00:24:13 ◼   ► So if I am the person who is constantly going into reverse and running over my

00:24:18 ◼   ► dog, I love this feature because it's going to improve my average.

00:24:21 ◼   ► But if I'm someone who has never selected the wrong gear,

00:24:24 ◼   ► this is going to decrease my average.

00:24:26 ◼   ► So individuals buy cars, not just humans. And I know writ large,

00:24:30 ◼   ► like there's the effect on society.

00:24:32 ◼   ► As long as we're better than the average,

00:24:34 ◼   ► if we put the Tesla into everyone's hands somehow,

00:24:36 ◼   ► because they all get 70 grand then we will be increasing safety.

00:24:41 ◼   ► But I don't think based on their, you know,

00:24:44 ◼   ► they said the same thing about self-driving.

00:24:45 ◼   ► We don't have to be perfect. We just have to be better than humans.

00:24:47 ◼   ► And we think we are, but, and even if they are like, it's the,

00:24:50 ◼   ► it's the agency problem of like, well, you would have saved this bad driver,

00:24:55 ◼   ► but you killed this good driver.

00:24:57 ◼   ► Or even just the things we've talked about is like when,

00:24:59 ◼   ► when you make a mistake, you feel like, well, it's on me. Like I'm,

00:25:03 ◼   ► I drove badly and I got into an accident, my fault, right?

00:25:06 ◼   ► But when the car makes a mistake,

00:25:08 ◼   ► people feel powerless because they're like, well, I didn't even have a choice.

00:25:11 ◼   ► The car decided to do this and it made the wrong choice and got into an accident.

00:25:14 ◼   ► Now I'm angry about it. So I don't want to get into the self-driving stuff again,

00:25:18 ◼   ► but I feel like this is the same category of stuff. Like we could ask,

00:25:21 ◼   ► as we do with a lot of Apple products,

00:25:23 ◼   ► what problem were they trying to solve with this?

00:25:25 ◼   ► And I think the answer would be, well, people pick the wrong gear sometimes too.

00:25:28 ◼   ► So we're just trying to be better than that.

00:25:32 ◼   ► I think one of the things that model three owners hate the most is when one of us

00:25:37 ◼   ► says you can't adjust the cruise control with the steering wheel.

00:25:42 ◼   ► I'm sorry. This was my fault.

00:25:44 ◼   ► I knew this too because we've been yelled at many times before about this and I

00:25:49 ◼   ► knew this and I didn't think to correct you at the time and we got corrections.

00:25:52 ◼   ► So yes, all three of us are aware that you can use.

00:25:56 ◼   ► I wasn't aware cause I've never driven a model three and if I had,

00:25:59 ◼   ► I would have corrected Marco in real time. I let everyone down.

00:26:02 ◼   ► I'm sorry. What I think has happened.

00:26:03 ◼   ► So what I think happened was the very first version of the model three release,

00:26:07 ◼   ► like with its first software version, I think didn't support this.

00:26:09 ◼   ► And then I think they,

00:26:10 ◼   ► they fairly quickly added it in a software update cause everyone wanted it.

00:26:14 ◼   ► And I just forgot about that. So sorry.

00:26:16 ◼   ► You actually can adjust the cruise control speed from the steering wheel,

00:26:19 ◼   ► a little jog dial thing on the model three.

00:26:22 ◼   ► All right, moving on.

00:26:23 ◼   ► We were lamenting and laughing about the Siri announcements of messages and did

00:26:31 ◼   ► you know you could reply and Enrico Sissatio writes,

00:26:34 ◼   ► you can adjust announced messages with Siri to announce messages from favorites

00:26:38 ◼   ► only so that messages from your bank for example, won't be announced.

00:26:41 ◼   ► And this is somewhere in settings and messages I believe where you can switch

00:26:46 ◼   ► this and it gives you the options of announced messages from favorites,

00:26:49 ◼   ► recent contacts or everyone, which I may have known at one point,

00:26:52 ◼   ► but certainly forgot. So that was a good tip. Hey,

00:26:56 ◼   ► how do you tell the Apple tube to stop talking to you, John?

00:27:01 ◼   ► Yeah,

00:27:01 ◼   ► my story from last week about how I couldn't get Siri to disengage with me and

00:27:05 ◼   ► uh, kept interacting and I couldn't get it to stop was mostly an example of,

00:27:10 ◼   ► uh, the things I know how to do not working.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Like I was trying all the things that I knew.

00:27:15 ◼   ► A lots of people wrote in to tell me the things that they use that do work.

00:27:19 ◼   ► These are all the things that I were trying. I was trying that we're failing.

00:27:22 ◼   ► Some suggestions where you can say, go away. Goodbye. Shut up.

00:27:27 ◼   ► I think stop also works.

00:27:28 ◼   ► There's all sorts of things that you can say after hailing your dingus to make

00:27:32 ◼   ► it stop doing what it's doing.

00:27:34 ◼   ► What was novel about the situation was that none of those things were working.

00:27:36 ◼   ► And in fact they would,

00:27:38 ◼   ► they would be interpreted as either my failure to answer whatever query I was

00:27:41 ◼   ► being engaged on or like an affirmative answer to for a next step.

00:27:46 ◼   ► And it was just like, I just wanted to unplug the thing. So, but for people,

00:27:49 ◼   ► I have reason I put this in there for people who don't know most voice assistant

00:27:53 ◼   ► cylinder thingies have a bunch of things that you can say to it to make it

00:27:58 ◼   ► stop whatever interaction you're in the middle of. So if you don't know that,

00:28:02 ◼   ► pick one and go with it. I would suggest not picking an angry one.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Don't pick shut up. Don't pick F off.

00:28:08 ◼   ► There's lots of things you can say to them that will work, but that's not nice.

00:28:12 ◼   ► And I know it's an inanimate object and it doesn't matter, but in general,

00:28:15 ◼   ► being angry and inanimate objects doesn't make you feel better.

00:28:17 ◼   ► So I would suggest saying goodbye or I mean, stop is pretty good too.

00:28:22 ◼   ► But anyway, sometimes,

00:28:24 ◼   ► these things just are like a dog with a bone and they just want you to answer a

00:28:27 ◼   ► question and they won't go away.

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00:30:39 ◼   ► All right.

00:30:43 ◼   ► So the two of you presumably got an email today from Apple about your, uh,

00:30:48 ◼   ► fancy, not quite Mac mini Mac minis.

00:30:50 ◼   ► Apple thinks it takes us.

00:30:52 ◼   ► Several weeks to find the box that this thing came in. They're like, Hey,

00:30:56 ◼   ► we're just emailing you just so you know,

00:30:58 ◼   ► you should probably go look for like the box that this thing came in because in

00:31:02 ◼   ► a few weeks we're going to email you to tell you how to return it. It's like,

00:31:05 ◼   ► how long do you think it takes me to find the box? I don't know. Anyway. Yeah.

00:31:09 ◼   ► They sent an email.

00:31:10 ◼   ► So I was wondering the other day actually when the Apple was going to ask for

00:31:14 ◼   ► the DTKs back for people who don't know the acronym,

00:31:16 ◼   ► that's the developer transition kit.

00:31:18 ◼   ► It was the little Mac mini with like an iPad pro inside it.

00:31:22 ◼   ► That you could use to develop and test our Mac software before the R max had

00:31:27 ◼   ► been released. Uh,

00:31:28 ◼   ► and you rented it from Apple for what was like 500 bucks or something. Yep.

00:31:33 ◼   ► And with the knowledge that you were always going to have to return it.

00:31:36 ◼   ► The last time I did this, uh, what did they give people that you got?

00:31:39 ◼   ► Like a Pentium four and a, uh, in an old cheese grater case.

00:31:43 ◼   ► And then when you returned it, you got a sweetheart deal on, I think I'm right.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Or was it like the white, the white Intel IMAX? Um, so we were wondering, Hey,

00:31:52 ◼   ► when they ask for these DTKs back, what are we going to get in return?

00:31:56 ◼   ► And the answer is in Apple's not exactly clear language is you'll

00:32:01 ◼   ► receive a one time use code for $200 to use towards the purchase of a Mac with

00:32:06 ◼   ► M one now. All right. So $200 that's clear.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Can you only buy an M one Mac with it or is it just an Apple store gift

00:32:16 ◼   ► certificate? Right. Good ques- that's gonna, that matters a lot. And,

00:32:20 ◼   ► and also did you see there was an expiration date? Yeah. May 31st you've got May 30.

00:32:25 ◼   ► So sometime between like in a few weeks, Apple is going to email us and say, Hey,

00:32:29 ◼   ► here's how you return it. Cause we don't know how to return it yet.

00:32:31 ◼   ► We just know we're supposed to find the box, right?

00:32:33 ◼   ► But in a few weeks they're going to email us and say,

00:32:36 ◼   ► here's how you return it. And then upon confirmed return of the DTK,

00:32:40 ◼   ► you will get the 200 bucks.

00:32:42 ◼   ► Then the clock starts and you've got to use that or lose it before May 31st.

00:32:46 ◼   ► Yeah. So you basically have,

00:32:47 ◼   ► you're going to end up having like a month to use it.

00:32:50 ◼   ► I mean, it's plenty of time, like whatever,

00:32:52 ◼   ► like we don't expect to hold onto it forever. Um,

00:32:54 ◼   ► I don't know if you have to buy an M one with it, but just to, to calibrate,

00:32:59 ◼   ► what is $200 worth?

00:33:00 ◼   ► That's how much Apple charges for an additional eight gigs of Ram.

00:33:03 ◼   ► So you're running, Oh, should I get the eight to the 16? Well, don't worry.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Apple gave you 200 bucks off.

00:33:10 ◼   ► And that 200 bucks is exactly how much it costs you to upgrade from eight to 16.

00:33:15 ◼   ► So it's not like you're getting a Mac for free or whatever. Anyway, it's fine.

00:33:17 ◼   ► It's better than nothing.

00:33:18 ◼   ► It's better than just renting it for $500 and getting nothing in return.

00:33:21 ◼   ► But now I have now I've suddenly, I feel like Marco or Casey was like, Oh no,

00:33:25 ◼   ► why do I have these? I normally don't have any questions about what max I want to

00:33:28 ◼   ► buy, but now suddenly I have this money burning a hole in my pocket,

00:33:31 ◼   ► which if I don't use it, presumably I just lose it and that's bad.

00:33:34 ◼   ► But if I do use it, that's not particularly economical because great.

00:33:38 ◼   ► So I have $200 off, but then I pay all the rest of the price of the computer.

00:33:42 ◼   ► So I don't know what I'm going to do.

00:33:43 ◼   ► I was pricing out Mac minis mostly just because my DTK is sitting like there's a

00:33:48 ◼   ► place in my little computer area for the Mac mini that is the DTK.

00:33:51 ◼   ► And I would love to just swap that out with an actual and one Mac mini and then I

00:33:56 ◼   ► can actually use it. I can host my plex stuff on it.

00:33:58 ◼   ► I could do all sorts of stuff with it. You know,

00:34:00 ◼   ► I have a place for a mouse and a keyboard over there.

00:34:01 ◼   ► It's like nestled into my life, but who knows? So I have to,

00:34:05 ◼   ► I have to start thinking about this and sometime before May 31st,

00:34:08 ◼   ► I will either buy something with this $200 buy something with,

00:34:12 ◼   ► I would buy something and use this $200 to help get more Ram on it.

00:34:16 ◼   ► Or I would just let that $200 evaporate and feel sad.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Hope you get a non Bluetooth mouse to use with your Mac mini because the

00:34:25 ◼   ► Bluetooth range on this Mac mini sucks.

00:34:27 ◼   ► I've been using, I've actually been using my wife's old,

00:34:32 ◼   ► it's a Logitech mouse and it's got the little, you know,

00:34:34 ◼   ► USB plug in dongle thing. Oh, good, good, good. Yeah. I mean, so this,

00:34:37 ◼   ► this DTK thing, uh, you know, when,

00:34:41 ◼   ► when we all got these, you know, that last summer, you know, I,

00:34:45 ◼   ► it was only $500 and I thought, well, that's a lot less than like, you know,

00:34:49 ◼   ► the old DTKs back in the Intel days. There's like 1500 I believe,

00:34:52 ◼   ► something like that. Right. Um, so it's like, I was like, Oh well that's,

00:34:54 ◼   ► that's, that's not a bad deal. And I knew it was, it was a temporary, you know,

00:34:58 ◼   ► basically leasing this thing for a few months. Uh, and that's fine.

00:35:02 ◼   ► At the time I thought modern Apple, you know,

00:35:06 ◼   ► they don't need to work that hard for, to get developer favor.

00:35:10 ◼   ► People are going to get, people are going to want these things. And I,

00:35:12 ◼   ► I was assuming they were going to give us nothing for them.

00:35:14 ◼   ► I was assuming there'd be some kind of, you know,

00:35:16 ◼   ► recall for them at the end of the year or whatever it was. And they would,

00:35:20 ◼   ► they would say, all right, thanks. Program's over. And that'd be it.

00:35:23 ◼   ► And they'd give us nothing.

00:35:24 ◼   ► And that's not to say that that's what they should have done,

00:35:27 ◼   ► but that's what I expected based on like, you know, modern Apple,

00:35:30 ◼   ► like they're not big on giving people free hardware or you know,

00:35:34 ◼   ► discounted hardware. They're real. They really don't do that anymore. Uh,

00:35:37 ◼   ► so I figured that was it. We'd get nothing.

00:35:40 ◼   ► So the fact that we are getting more than nothing is welcome. Uh,

00:35:44 ◼   ► but the, the number of asterisks on this is,

00:35:48 ◼   ► is so high and it's like, okay, well,

00:35:50 ◼   ► answer number one, it's only $200, which as you said,

00:35:54 ◼   ► doesn't get you very far with Mac hardware. Asterisk number two,

00:35:58 ◼   ► it seems like you have to use it specifically on an M one Mac.

00:36:01 ◼   ► So that's only three computers right now. And asterisk number three, you'll have,

00:36:06 ◼   ► you'll basically have to use it between like April and May, April and June.

00:36:10 ◼   ► And so you'll have like this,

00:36:12 ◼   ► you're gonna have this narrow window to use it and the M one max launched in

00:36:17 ◼   ► November. Yeah. They could have told us they were going to do this, right?

00:36:20 ◼   ► Most people who need this for their development have already bought an M one Mac

00:36:26 ◼   ► at least one. And so to do this,

00:36:30 ◼   ► it's kind of a crappy way to do it. And all those aspects like I think, you know,

00:36:34 ◼   ► if Apple, if they needed to get their stuff together and they were super busy and

00:36:37 ◼   ► they, you know, they were behind schedule or whatever. Okay, fine.

00:36:41 ◼   ► Then like make the discount code a little more flexible, you know,

00:36:45 ◼   ► maybe give us a year to use it and let it apply to anything in the store or

00:36:48 ◼   ► something like that, you know, or at least any Mac for the, for the next year,

00:36:52 ◼   ► you know, something like just make it a little bit more,

00:36:55 ◼   ► a little bit further from what it seems like now,

00:36:59 ◼   ► which is like one of those scammy mail and rebates that have so many conditions

00:37:03 ◼   ► that they want people to disqualify themselves for it.

00:37:06 ◼   ► They don't have to pay the rebate, you know, like it's, it's,

00:37:08 ◼   ► it feels kind of like that where it's like we have such an arrow window and it

00:37:13 ◼   ► allegedly only applies to M one max,

00:37:15 ◼   ► which have existed now for like three months and we,

00:37:18 ◼   ► most of us already have one if we needed it that badly to have a DTK.

00:37:21 ◼   ► So like it's just, yeah, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of weak sauce,

00:37:25 ◼   ► but at the end of the day it is more than I was expecting to get from this.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Yeah. And paying $500 to be able to develop on an R Mac.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Like I did actually,

00:37:34 ◼   ► especially after I banished big survey it is from my main computer.

00:37:38 ◼   ► I was doing all my arm and big arm and big sir development on the DTK.

00:37:43 ◼   ► So, and I got that computer for 500 bucks. So as far as I'm concerned,

00:37:47 ◼   ► even though I got $0 back,

00:37:48 ◼   ► it was definitely worth it for me in terms of development and also having a

00:37:52 ◼   ► machine that I could use big Sarah on without poisoning my computer,

00:37:56 ◼   ► any of the other computers that I cared about.

00:37:57 ◼   ► Well, John, if you really are going to let the $200 just go poof, you know,

00:38:03 ◼   ► and turn into smoke,

00:38:04 ◼   ► then I call dibs and I'll use it for a Mac mini that I probably shouldn't buy.

00:38:08 ◼   ► I'm sure Apple's real flexible about me.

00:38:10 ◼   ► Tras and transitioning that $200 over to you. That'll be fine.

00:38:13 ◼   ► Don't worry about it.

00:38:14 ◼   ► If you can use more than one code in an order, that could be interesting.

00:38:18 ◼   ► Oh, that would be interesting. I'm sure you cannot,

00:38:21 ◼   ► but that would be interesting. All right. That's okay. Yeah. I'm sorry guys.

00:38:25 ◼   ► But yeah, this is what you get for living on the bleeding edge. No. And again,

00:38:29 ◼   ► this is more than I expected. So I'm, you know, on one hand I'm like, okay,

00:38:33 ◼   ► that's nice. But on the other hand, now I do feel the same pressure as John.

00:38:35 ◼   ► I'm like, well, now that, now that I'm going to get a $200 credit of sorts,

00:38:40 ◼   ► it would be kind of, you know, wasteful to just let it go.

00:38:43 ◼   ► But at the same time I don't need anymore. I'm on max.

00:38:46 ◼   ► I'm very happy with the two that I already that's a two is already probably one

00:38:51 ◼   ► more than I actually needed and they're wonderful. I love them so much,

00:38:55 ◼   ► but I don't need a third for anything.

00:38:57 ◼   ► All right.

00:38:59 ◼   ► So one of the things we always talk about come June ish is typically we'll do a

00:39:04 ◼   ► public service announcement that wherein we remind everyone,

00:39:08 ◼   ► do not go on an iOS beta. It's just not worth it for 99% of the world.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Just no, don't do it.

00:39:15 ◼   ► And I generally speaking do not jump on the iOS betas until late in the cycle

00:39:20 ◼   ► until, you know, August ish.

00:39:22 ◼   ► And I haven't jumped on any of the kind of point release betas,

00:39:27 ◼   ► but oh boy, I'm thinking about it.

00:39:29 ◼   ► Cause I was 14.5 at support for unlocking your phone with Apple watch while

00:39:33 ◼   ► you're wearing a face mask. And that sounds delightful.

00:39:37 ◼   ► Now the good news is since I never go anywhere,

00:39:38 ◼   ► I don't wear a mask that often because I'm never leaving my house.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Now when I leave my house, of course I have a mask on and yes,

00:39:44 ◼   ► this would be deeply convenient, but ultimately when you don't go anywhere,

00:39:48 ◼   ► when all your grocery shopping is done by, you know,

00:39:50 ◼   ► plopping it in your trunk and doing curbside and whatnot,

00:39:54 ◼   ► this isn't something that I need often.

00:39:57 ◼   ► But golly, it sounds great for when I do need it. And so I can't help but ask,

00:40:02 ◼   ► especially Marco who has found a new love for his Apple watch.

00:40:06 ◼   ► Have you tried this yet?

00:40:07 ◼   ► Yes I have. I mean, unfortunately I'm currently under a lot of snow and so I

00:40:13 ◼   ► haven't had the reason to go out much in the world. And when I do go out,

00:40:17 ◼   ► currently I'm usually pretty heavily bundled up.

00:40:19 ◼   ► So taking my phone in and out of my pocket is not something I'm doing a lot of

00:40:22 ◼   ► right now, but I did unlock it a few times just to try and see how it worked.

00:40:26 ◼   ► And there was one time later in the day we're actually kind of legitimately

00:40:28 ◼   ► needed it like instead of just artificially doing it in my house.

00:40:31 ◼   ► And it does work as advertised most of the time. It didn't,

00:40:36 ◼   ► I think I did four or five unlocks total and it,

00:40:39 ◼   ► it failed at one of them where it just didn't do it, didn't offer it.

00:40:43 ◼   ► But it does seem to work most of the way.

00:40:46 ◼   ► It's a little slow like cause the workflow is like you pick up the phone and you

00:40:51 ◼   ► point it at your face.

00:40:52 ◼   ► I think first it tries an actual face ID unlock then that then it figures,

00:40:57 ◼   ► Oh, I think that's a mask. Then I think it asks your watch, Hey,

00:41:01 ◼   ► unlock the phone. And then it communicates. So it's like, it's,

00:41:03 ◼   ► it's a slower process than regular face ID would be,

00:41:06 ◼   ► but it's faster than typing in a passcode. Although honestly,

00:41:10 ◼   ► it's not a ton faster if you've gotten really good at typing your passcode in

00:41:14 ◼   ► this last year. But it's, it's a very nice feature and I'm very glad they added

00:41:18 ◼   ► it. And you know, like, like Gruber posted a couple of things. It basically,

00:41:22 ◼   ► you know, suggesting like that it's, it's non trivial.

00:41:26 ◼   ► It was like it was on trivial to get this done because you have to be damn

00:41:29 ◼   ► careful if you're adding a way for something else to unlock your phone.

00:41:34 ◼   ► Cause that's a really massive like potential for security problems.

00:41:39 ◼   ► If you do anything wrong,

00:41:40 ◼   ► if there's any holes in that process and there's a way for some external thing

00:41:45 ◼   ► to unlock your phone, that's a big deal. And so I,

00:41:49 ◼   ► I'm surprised that they did this at all. Honestly,

00:41:52 ◼   ► it kind of seems like maybe it wouldn't have been worth the risk.

00:41:56 ◼   ► Well, they had to do it because in the grand tradition,

00:41:58 ◼   ► we talked about it on last week's ATP.

00:42:00 ◼   ► And then once we talk about it on the show, it comes into being magically.

00:42:03 ◼   ► It was actually, it wasn't an ask ATP question last week. Oh yeah, right.

00:42:06 ◼   ► Someone asked, Hey, what about, what about unlocking your,

00:42:09 ◼   ► your phone with your watch? And then we were saying, well,

00:42:12 ◼   ► exactly what Gruber said. We were said, well,

00:42:14 ◼   ► you can already unlock your watch with your phone.

00:42:17 ◼   ► So there's a little bit of a chicken egg thing and they have to be very careful

00:42:19 ◼   ► about how that works because you can't have them both being able to unlock each

00:42:22 ◼   ► other in all scenarios. Is that security, right? Um,

00:42:25 ◼   ► but they worked out the issues, right? So I, you know, you can't, if you're,

00:42:29 ◼   ► if your watch is locked and you have your phone and you unlock your phone using

00:42:34 ◼   ► traditional means without the watch,

00:42:36 ◼   ► then that can be set up to unlock your watch.

00:42:38 ◼   ► And once you've unlocked your watch, that can be, and it's on your wrist,

00:42:41 ◼   ► that can be used to unlock your phone.

00:42:43 ◼   ► If you were to relock your phone and all their methods of unlocking on the phone

00:42:47 ◼   ► failed. And I,

00:42:48 ◼   ► what Marco described is exactly what I read that it will try face ID first and

00:42:53 ◼   ► then maybe see if you have a mask and then unlock with the watch.

00:42:56 ◼   ► But I do wonder about the logic of that. Like if,

00:43:01 ◼   ► if it can, I don't know, maybe just doesn't know this, but if,

00:43:03 ◼   ► if it was able to know that you are wearing a watch and that it's nearby,

00:43:07 ◼   ► I would say, try that first. Like why bother with the face ID stuff?

00:43:10 ◼   ► Because the watch unlock doesn't care what the camera sees, presumably.

00:43:14 ◼   ► It's like, well, whatever, I'm using the watch to unlock, but maybe there,

00:43:17 ◼   ► it doesn't actually know that the watch is nearby and it takes some time to

00:43:20 ◼   ► figure that out. So it makes more sense to try a face ID first. I don't know,

00:43:24 ◼   ► but either way, it's one more option for people who wear masks.

00:43:27 ◼   ► So gets a thumbs up, although this is like you said, it's a beta.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And what is it like a 14.5 beta one? What, what beta number are they on?

00:43:34 ◼   ► One.

00:43:35 ◼   ► Yeah. So not going to be in regular people's hands for a while.

00:43:39 ◼   ► And as Casey said, I would not recommend running beta one of iOS.

00:43:43 ◼   ► Honestly, it's been fine for me so far, but you know, I usually like the,

00:43:47 ◼   ► the point releases like this usually aren't as risky as like the, you know,

00:43:51 ◼   ► the big dot zero beta one for, you know, in the summertime at WBC.

00:43:55 ◼   ► So it's not too bad, but, uh, yeah, I still,

00:43:58 ◼   ► it's still certainly like a risk.

00:44:01 ◼   ► Yeah. And to go back a step, John, to what you were saying about, you know,

00:44:04 ◼   ► why not just go to the watch immediately? I would suspect that the,

00:44:08 ◼   ► the idea is trust the most trustworthy thing first.

00:44:13 ◼   ► So the camera that is trained to look at your face, that is,

00:44:17 ◼   ► it is very, very difficult to fool.

00:44:20 ◼   ► Whereas it is comparatively easier to fool the phone into

00:44:25 ◼   ► thinking the watch is unlocked in nearby. Not to say it's easy, but you know,

00:44:28 ◼   ► compared to the thing that's internal, I would imagine it is easier.

00:44:32 ◼   ► But if the watch works, it doesn't matter.

00:44:35 ◼   ► You're not adding any security by trying the more secure one first.

00:44:38 ◼   ► If the less secure one is going to work, who cares what order tries it in?

00:44:42 ◼   ► Because if someone,

00:44:42 ◼   ► if someone was going to break in and they had the watch, you know what I mean?

00:44:46 ◼   ► It's like,

00:44:47 ◼   ► I think it's probably because it doesn't actually know that the watch is nearby

00:44:51 ◼   ► and has to do a thing to make that determination. Doing that thing takes time.

00:44:55 ◼   ► So it's probably still faster to do the face. But we'll say,

00:44:57 ◼   ► this is still just a beta when, when 14.5 final comes out,

00:45:00 ◼   ► Marco can retest and, or you can as well and see if,

00:45:04 ◼   ► see if you can really tell whether it's actually reading your face first and

00:45:07 ◼   ► then trying to watch. Yep. I am excited to try this when,

00:45:11 ◼   ► when the time comes, I'm trying to resist going on the beta because again,

00:45:15 ◼   ► I never go anywhere, but it's tempting.

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00:47:06 ◼   ► show.

00:47:07 ◼   ► John, I heard you got a late birthday present earlier today.

00:47:15 ◼   ► Yeah. Someone at Apple is going through someone,

00:47:19 ◼   ► a bunch of people at Apple are going through old radars/feedbacks and closing

00:47:23 ◼   ► them out because I saw a whole bunch of tweets from other people saying, Hey,

00:47:26 ◼   ► my super old bug was closed or whatever. And that happened to me too.

00:47:30 ◼   ► This was a nine and a half year old radar that I had filed.

00:47:33 ◼   ► Part of the response, which I will read now was,

00:47:37 ◼   ► thanks for your patience and your feedback. It has been noted.

00:47:40 ◼   ► We do not plan to address this issue further because so much has changed since

00:47:44 ◼   ► this was filed. And as I, as I tweeted, indeed,

00:47:48 ◼   ► so much has changed. Like, yeah, if you wait nine and a half years,

00:47:51 ◼   ► probably the thing is irrelevant. This specific bug was, you know,

00:47:55 ◼   ► not, not a very important one.

00:47:57 ◼   ► It was I filed it shortly after I had posted my review of a MacOS 10.7 Lion to

00:48:02 ◼   ► Ars Technica. That's how long ago this was. And in my review,

00:48:10 ◼   ► I had to link to a tech note on Apple's website that described the HFS plus

00:48:15 ◼   ► volume format. And, and the day I posted this, like the day I posted it,

00:48:20 ◼   ► the day Lion came out. So the day I posted this review,

00:48:23 ◼   ► which was the launch day for Lion, Apple removed that documentation,

00:48:28 ◼   ► that tech note. So I had linked to it like in six different places.

00:48:31 ◼   ► And of course everyone's trying to follow the links and saying, Hey,

00:48:33 ◼   ► your link is broken, blah, blah, blah. The link was live the day before,

00:48:37 ◼   ► the day of publication.

00:48:39 ◼   ► Cause you know how they do like a documentation shuffle very often to coincide

00:48:42 ◼   ► with the release of a MacOS, at least they used to anyway.

00:48:44 ◼   ► They still kind of do, I guess. Um, they broke that link.

00:48:47 ◼   ► And so in between frantically trying to either remove the link or find,

00:48:52 ◼   ► I think I ended up linking it maybe to a Google cache or an archive.org page.

00:48:56 ◼   ► I forget what I did, but I also said, you know what, Apple,

00:48:58 ◼   ► this was a little bit of stress that I didn't need. And by the way,

00:49:01 ◼   ► you shouldn't have removed that tech note because it was good historical

00:49:05 ◼   ► information, right? Or whatever. HFS plus volume format.

00:49:08 ◼   ► It had lots of technical details about it. It was pretty good.

00:49:10 ◼   ► It was TN one one five Oh. So that's what this bug was about.

00:49:14 ◼   ► And of course, you know,

00:49:15 ◼   ► it was only really relevant to my life during the first week that my review had

00:49:20 ◼   ► been published or the first day or so when I had to deal with that link.

00:49:22 ◼   ► And I had long since forgotten about it. Of course,

00:49:25 ◼   ► Apple never did anything about it. So they came by here and, you know,

00:49:29 ◼   ► closed it with a slow, this is, you know, we don't plan to address this,

00:49:32 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah. Right. Whatever. I mean, I think it's good.

00:49:36 ◼   ► It's good that Apple is going through their old bug backlog and, you know,

00:49:39 ◼   ► bring things to some kind of resolution, even if it's unsatisfying resolution,

00:49:43 ◼   ► some resolution is better than none. So kudos to Apple for that,

00:49:45 ◼   ► but I will take away those kudos because in this particular

00:49:51 ◼   ► case, the very first thing that I did was say, you know what,

00:49:55 ◼   ► what is the deal with this bug now? Um, just out of curiosity,

00:49:58 ◼   ► not that I care anymore because dead links in my line review are not particularly

00:50:02 ◼   ► important in my life right now. But Hey, you know,

00:50:05 ◼   ► what did they end up doing with that anyway? Like, is that tech note still gone?

00:50:08 ◼   ► So out of curiosity, I went to the link that was reported as broken.

00:50:13 ◼   ► And wouldn't you know it, it redirects to an archive version of that note.

00:50:17 ◼   ► So at some point during the last nine and a half years,

00:50:20 ◼   ► Apple essentially fixed this problem. The old URL redirects to the new,

00:50:24 ◼   ► they have like a new archive section for like old outdated documentation.

00:50:28 ◼   ► The old URL redirects to the new place.

00:50:31 ◼   ► When did that happen during this 9.5 years? I don't know,

00:50:35 ◼   ► but some point it did when someone did that redirect,

00:50:39 ◼   ► they could have closed this bug as closed fixed.

00:50:43 ◼   ► This bug was successfully fixed. I have no idea when,

00:50:47 ◼   ► but then when the reviewer came to like get rid of this old crusty bug,

00:50:50 ◼   ► they didn't even do the simplest thing, which is, Hey,

00:50:54 ◼   ► let's just click this link that they say is broken.

00:50:56 ◼   ► Cause if they had done that, they would have said,

00:50:57 ◼   ► we do not plan to address them. I said, Oh, we fixed this.

00:51:01 ◼   ► I don't know when we fixed it, but we totally fixed it. You're welcome.

00:51:04 ◼   ► But they didn't even do that.

00:51:06 ◼   ► So I continue to be disappointed with the level of interaction that the people

00:51:10 ◼   ► who are updating bugs have with those very bugs,

00:51:13 ◼   ► whether it's not telling me whether they ran a sample project,

00:51:16 ◼   ► not telling me whether they're able to reproduce a problem or not doing

00:51:20 ◼   ► something as simple as, Hey, this thing says I have a broken link.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Is that link actually broken? Click. Nope. It's totally not broken. Closed,

00:51:26 ◼   ► fixed. Instead they just said, we're not going to do anything about this. Oh,

00:51:29 ◼   ► and by the way, you can close it yourself. They didn't even close it.

00:51:32 ◼   ► They didn't even change the status. You can just close this yourself.

00:51:34 ◼   ► So I closed it as resolved because guess what? It's resolved.

00:51:37 ◼   ► When was it resolved? I don't know. So the, you know,

00:51:42 ◼   ► it's fine in the grand scheme of things. It's not a big deal,

00:51:44 ◼   ► but it's frustrating for me.

00:51:45 ◼   ► It makes me think that a computer did it and not a human or maybe the human who

00:51:49 ◼   ► did it was overworked and harried and did not have time.

00:51:53 ◼   ► It doesn't have time to actually read each of these radars and engage with it.

00:51:57 ◼   ► But I feel like if you're, if you're closing old bugs,

00:51:59 ◼   ► don't you have to read the bug a little bit to know like what to say? It's,

00:52:03 ◼   ► I don't think it's entirely computer because the other people who are tweeting

00:52:06 ◼   ► like, here's what my old bug said. The wording is different.

00:52:09 ◼   ► Like they said slightly different things for different bugs. It's really,

00:52:13 ◼   ► it's really just,

00:52:14 ◼   ► I don't understand what's going on at the other end of this pipeline.

00:52:17 ◼   ► I don't know if it's just like a bird pecking on a keyboard or like a random

00:52:22 ◼   ► number generator or just, I don't know.

00:52:26 ◼   ► It's one of those, uh, little birdies that just pecks over and over again.

00:52:29 ◼   ► It's like snow piercer.

00:52:31 ◼   ► You just go up to the front and pull up the floorboards and I don't want to run

00:52:34 ◼   ► in the movie or in the movie. Sorry. I've been watching the TV series.

00:52:36 ◼   ► That's why it's on my brain. No spoilers, no spoilers.

00:52:39 ◼   ► For the record.

00:52:40 ◼   ► I was trying poorly to make a Simpsons reference and it didn't land,

00:52:42 ◼   ► but that was my own fault. That's okay. All right.

00:52:46 ◼   ► Moving right along.

00:52:47 ◼   ► We have some talk that we've been promising this episode about

00:52:52 ◼   ► Sony cameras of all things.

00:52:54 ◼   ► I know nothing about what it is you would like to talk about, John.

00:52:58 ◼   ► So what's going on?

00:53:01 ◼   ► A quick item. Um, Sony continues to roll out new cameras. Uh, I don't,

00:53:05 ◼   ► I haven't been following the rumors for the, for their top of the line stuff.

00:53:09 ◼   ► So I don't know if this was rumors, but it was a surprise to me. Um,

00:53:13 ◼   ► because what I had been expecting was new iterations of all the cameras Sony

00:53:17 ◼   ► already makes. I think we talked about in the show a while ago when they came out

00:53:21 ◼   ► with the new version of the a seven R and how they hadn't come out with a new

00:53:24 ◼   ► version of the a seven yet. And they came out with this surprise a seven C,

00:53:28 ◼   ► which is like a full frame camera in like a small body like mine,

00:53:31 ◼   ► my little tiny a6300.

00:53:32 ◼   ► This new camera is the a one,

00:53:36 ◼   ► which is a bold naming statement for a camera that is extremely capable.

00:53:42 ◼   ► It's their flagship camera. It is fairly amazing.

00:53:46 ◼   ► It costs a huge amount of money.

00:53:48 ◼   ► I think it's the most expensive camera Sony has ever made,

00:53:50 ◼   ► or at least the most expensive like consumer camera they ever made.

00:53:53 ◼   ► It's $6,500 just for the ball. Good grief.

00:53:59 ◼   ► Right. But you know, Hey, it's a one, it's the top of the line,

00:54:03 ◼   ► a number one. Um, so here are the specs, a 50 megapixel sensor.

00:54:07 ◼   ► It will shoot eight K video at 30 frames per second.

00:54:10 ◼   ► And that eight K is down sampled from a larger than eight K a region on the

00:54:14 ◼   ► sensor, which is cool. It will do four K one 20 frames per second. Um,

00:54:20 ◼   ► but one of the most important and most relevant specs is it will do 30 frames

00:54:25 ◼   ► per second in, uh, from the,

00:54:28 ◼   ► the photo part of the camera, not 30 frames per second video.

00:54:31 ◼   ► It will take photographs,

00:54:33 ◼   ► 50 megapixel photographs at 30 frames per second.

00:54:37 ◼   ► It will do 20 photos per second in lossless raw.

00:54:42 ◼   ► My goodness. And the mechanical shutter is a mere 10, 10 frames per second.

00:54:47 ◼   ► Right? So it's doing 20 and 30 with the electronic shutter.

00:54:49 ◼   ► Now everyone doesn't like electronic charges if you've ever used them,

00:54:52 ◼   ► because especially with large sensors,

00:54:54 ◼   ► you get all sorts of rolling shutter artifacts and all sorts of weird stuff. Um,

00:54:58 ◼   ► but all of this,

00:55:00 ◼   ► all the specs that I read you are relevant to a thing that has come up in a

00:55:05 ◼   ► bunch of the reviews and has got me thinking about it.

00:55:06 ◼   ► And we've talked about in this program as well, which is on our phone cameras,

00:55:10 ◼   ► they have tiny crappy sensors,

00:55:13 ◼   ► but they take amazing photographs because of the magic of the computers inside

00:55:19 ◼   ► them. And we haven't gotten into too many gory details, or if we have,

00:55:23 ◼   ► we haven't really connected the dots to why that's possible. One reason is,

00:55:27 ◼   ► of course, you know,

00:55:28 ◼   ► they're done by computer companies and those computer companies have very

00:55:31 ◼   ► clever people who work for them,

00:55:32 ◼   ► who know how to do all the clever algorithms to take a very noisy,

00:55:35 ◼   ► crappy set of bits from a sensor in a phone and make a good picture out of it.

00:55:41 ◼   ► That's very difficult to do. It's a very big software problem.

00:55:43 ◼   ► As Marco talked about before of like, it's really hard to do software.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Sony can make really good camera sensors, but do they have a team?

00:55:50 ◼   ► They can do what we call computational photography as well as Apple or,

00:55:55 ◼   ► you know, Google or any of these other companies that make good smartphone

00:55:58 ◼   ► cameras. It's actually a very hard problem,

00:56:00 ◼   ► but there is a second thing that a second factor in why a big camera like this,

00:56:05 ◼   ► like a, you know, quote unquote, real camera,

00:56:08 ◼   ► a full frame camera with a huge sensor wasn't,

00:56:11 ◼   ► hasn't been able to do what our phone cameras do.

00:56:15 ◼   ► One of the things our phone cameras do, well,

00:56:18 ◼   ► speaking of electronic shutter for one, we, none of us hear a shutter sound.

00:56:22 ◼   ► Well, maybe you do if you have the audio on, but honestly,

00:56:24 ◼   ► you should turn that off. There's no shutter as in a physical thing that

00:56:29 ◼   ► goes in front of the sensor and then reveals a sensor and then goes in front of

00:56:32 ◼   ► it again in our phone cameras, they all use what we call an electronic shutter.

00:56:36 ◼   ► The sensor is just constantly exposed to light.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Light comes in as just hitting the sensor constantly.

00:56:40 ◼   ► And then the phone just decides, okay,

00:56:42 ◼   ► I'm going to read the lights hitting the sensor now.

00:56:44 ◼   ► That's the one I'm going to take my picture.

00:56:45 ◼   ► That's called an electronic shutter, but on big cameras,

00:56:48 ◼   ► it's difficult to do that because big cameras have big sensors as in like,

00:56:53 ◼   ► I don't know how big is a full frame sensor, like the size of 35 millimeters.

00:56:58 ◼   ► I was going to say a 50 cent piece, but people don't know what that is.

00:57:01 ◼   ► No one knows what 35 millimeters is either. Um,

00:57:03 ◼   ► it's about the size of an iPod screen, a little smaller, I think.

00:57:06 ◼   ► Maybe like an iPod nano screen.

00:57:08 ◼   ► It's smaller than a business card,

00:57:10 ◼   ► but it's larger than postage stamp depending on the size of your sensor. Right.

00:57:13 ◼   ► Bigger than a bread box drone. It's like if you see,

00:57:15 ◼   ► if you see like those larger than usual postage stamps, it's like that size.

00:57:18 ◼   ► Right. But if you think about the sensor in your phone camera,

00:57:21 ◼   ► it's smaller than your pinky nail. Like it's really, really tiny in your phone.

00:57:25 ◼   ► The sensors are very, very small, but the sensors in, in quote unquote,

00:57:29 ◼   ► real cameras, especially expensive ones are very large.

00:57:32 ◼   ► And the problem has been readout. How long does it take to ask sensor, Hey,

00:57:36 ◼   ► sensor, what is hitting you right now?

00:57:39 ◼   ► You can get all of the information from a tiny little phone size, you know,

00:57:44 ◼   ► pinky nail size sensor pretty quickly, right?

00:57:46 ◼   ► It doesn't have as many, many megapixels. It's not as big.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And the camera sensors,

00:57:52 ◼   ► it isn't exactly as simple as you think it is in terms of just having red,

00:57:54 ◼   ► green and blue sensors.

00:57:55 ◼   ► There's all sorts of details and how they're read out and de-mosaic and all that

00:57:58 ◼   ► stuff. Right. So it's easier to do that in a small sensor.

00:58:03 ◼   ► And the second thing for, for, and by the way, if you don't,

00:58:06 ◼   ► if you have slow readout speeding, use electronic shutter,

00:58:08 ◼   ► it could be that you read the top pixels at one moment.

00:58:13 ◼   ► And then by the time you get down to reading the bottom pixels,

00:58:15 ◼   ► you've moved the camera and now you have a slanty picture, right?

00:58:18 ◼   ► And you can see this with electronic shutter on older cameras. If you, you know,

00:58:22 ◼   ► whip the camera around in a circle and take a picture of the electronic shutter,

00:58:25 ◼   ► everything's all wavy in it because it didn't,

00:58:27 ◼   ► it read the sensor from top to bottom or left to right or whatever.

00:58:30 ◼   ► And it read one pixel at a different time than it read the other pixels.

00:58:33 ◼   ► It takes a long time to read out 50 megapixels, whatever, from a sensor.

00:58:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:58:39 ◼   ► As evidenced in this Sony camera that it can shoot 30 frames per second

00:58:44 ◼   ► from this giant sensor or 20 frames per second in lossless,

00:58:49 ◼   ► this sensor is actually allowed to read, able to read out all of its picture,

00:58:54 ◼   ► all of its pixels very, very quickly in one 30th of a second.

00:58:58 ◼   ► That's amazing and important. So let's use an electronic shutter because,

00:59:03 ◼   ► you know, you could have a shutter speed at one 30th of a second.

00:59:05 ◼   ► It's a reasonable shutter speed in many scenarios.

00:59:07 ◼   ► You can get every single pixel in that one exposure,

00:59:10 ◼   ► just like you would if it was a piece of film or another sensor where you lifted

00:59:14 ◼   ► the mechanical shutter, expose everything, and then close the mechanical shutter.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:59:17 ◼   ► The second thing that makes this sensors readout speed interesting is

00:59:23 ◼   ► that one of the ways our phones take better pictures is not just by getting

00:59:28 ◼   ► the pixels from the sensor and then doing smart things with them.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Our phones, when you're, especially when you're in the camera app or whatever,

00:59:34 ◼   ► are constantly taking pictures.

00:59:37 ◼   ► They're just not saving them. It's a rolling buffer of pictures.

00:59:39 ◼   ► I don't know how many are in there. Maybe Marco knows, but like I don't,

00:59:42 ◼   ► it's, let's just say it's like 10, 20 or 30 pictures.

00:59:47 ◼   ► I can tell you it's exactly enough to kick overcast out of Ram every time.

00:59:50 ◼   ► Right. When,

00:59:52 ◼   ► when you're in the camera app and you're just looking around,

00:59:55 ◼   ► it is constantly taking picture after picture after picture after picture in

00:59:59 ◼   ► this one big rolling buffer. And when that buffer fills up, the, the, the,

01:00:02 ◼   ► the oldest picture gets kicked out and the new one comes in.

01:00:05 ◼   ► It's constantly doing that. And when you hit the shutter button,

01:00:08 ◼   ► what it's doing then is not taking the picture. It is saying, okay,

01:00:12 ◼   ► of all the frames that are currently in the rolling buffer, take the one,

01:00:17 ◼   ► two, three, four, 10,

01:00:19 ◼   ► I don't even know how many frames around the time that button was pressed and

01:00:24 ◼   ► combine them all to make one really good photo.

01:00:27 ◼   ► So it's not just taking one readout of the sensor very often.

01:00:31 ◼   ► I don't know if all the time, but I imagine very often it's taking multiple,

01:00:34 ◼   ► readouts of the sensor over time and combining them with computer smarts to

01:00:39 ◼   ► reduce noise, increase more detail, so on and so forth.

01:00:42 ◼   ► Now, if you're whipping your camera around in a circle and you do that,

01:00:45 ◼   ► it's much more difficult to line those things up because maybe you only have a

01:00:48 ◼   ► partial picture on the frame,

01:00:50 ◼   ► or maybe the frame is shifted so much that you can't realign them.

01:00:52 ◼   ► Or maybe subject has moved in between, right? It's a hard problem,

01:00:56 ◼   ► but that's what phone cameras do to make amazing pictures is they take more than

01:01:00 ◼   ► one photo and combine them into a single one. HDR is another example, right?

01:01:05 ◼   ► In the quote unquote expensive real camera world,

01:01:08 ◼   ► they just weren't able to do that because it took so long to get to read one

01:01:13 ◼   ► frame off the camera that you can't constantly be taking hundreds of frames and

01:01:17 ◼   ► a rolling buffer and combining them because you just couldn't get them any

01:01:20 ◼   ► photos that close to each other in time.

01:01:22 ◼   ► But now with the Sony A1 and presumably future cameras with incredible readout

01:01:27 ◼   ► speed, where they're able to read the entire sensor 30 times per second,

01:01:31 ◼   ► it becomes possible for a camera like this to do what phone cameras do.

01:01:36 ◼   ► I say possible because Sony A1 doesn't do any of the stuff that I'm describing,

01:01:41 ◼   ► but previously, but for two reasons, one previously it just couldn't,

01:01:45 ◼   ► cause you couldn't read the sensor that fast. And two,

01:01:47 ◼   ► Sony doesn't have as far as I'm aware, software to do that.

01:01:50 ◼   ► So I'm excited for this camera. It's a technical marvel.

01:01:54 ◼   ► Like I'm not going to buy one it's too expensive, blah, blah, blah.

01:01:57 ◼   ► But it does mean that the next frontier of, uh,

01:02:02 ◼   ► you know,

01:02:03 ◼   ► high end photography and video cameras is not so much us keep adding more

01:02:07 ◼   ► megapixels because there,

01:02:08 ◼   ► I think there have been cameras with more megapixels and they're just,

01:02:10 ◼   ► they're not chasing that anymore. It seems like, but instead it's readout speed.

01:02:15 ◼   ► It's how fast can I read this sensor?

01:02:17 ◼   ► And there's a whole bunch of buffers down the line in the cache hierarchy.

01:02:21 ◼   ► How big is the rolling buffer of photos? How fast can I read out?

01:02:24 ◼   ► How fast can I dump them to storage? Uh, again,

01:02:27 ◼   ► the one has lots of impressive specs here where you can just hold down the

01:02:29 ◼   ► shutter and fill your giant, uh, what is it?

01:02:33 ◼   ► CF express two or whatever 160 gigabyte card with a huge number of photos.

01:02:38 ◼   ► How long, how long before you have to stop holding down the shutter?

01:02:42 ◼   ► What does the photography rate decrease to? It's pretty amazing.

01:02:45 ◼   ► You can take hundreds of photos. Um,

01:02:47 ◼   ► and also the IO is so fast that if you take your finger off the shutter for a

01:02:51 ◼   ► second, it will make sure it dumps them all to the card. Um,

01:02:54 ◼   ► which is a big change from cameras from only a few years ago where once you

01:02:57 ◼   ► filled the buffer,

01:02:58 ◼   ► you'd have to wait like five or 10 seconds for it to flush the buffer to the

01:03:02 ◼   ► card and then you can take photographs again. So, uh,

01:03:06 ◼   ► this is an exciting camera, even though there's no way in hell I'm going to buy

01:03:10 ◼   ► it, although I would definitely take one for free if someone wants to give me

01:03:13 ◼   ► one. Um,

01:03:14 ◼   ► but I'm mostly excited that it will become plausible for camera companies like

01:03:22 ◼   ► Sony and Canon or whatever to do what our phone cameras do in the coming years.

01:03:27 ◼   ► I say plausible because the hardware will be able to do it.

01:03:30 ◼   ► It's just a question of whether they will be able to make the software to do it.

01:03:33 ◼   ► And it also makes me think one more time of, you know, uh,

01:03:36 ◼   ► Grover reminded me of when he,

01:03:37 ◼   ► when he posted a recollection of Phil Schiller on stage at one of the WWC is

01:03:42 ◼   ► saying, uh, our Grover asked, is Apple the best, uh,

01:03:47 ◼   ► phone camera company in the world? And Phil said, no,

01:03:50 ◼   ► we're the best camera company in the world. That was years ago, by the way.

01:03:53 ◼   ► And Apple hasn't shipped a dedicated camera.

01:03:55 ◼   ► But if Apple ever did want to ship a day dedicated camera,

01:03:58 ◼   ► they could buy the sensor from Sony,

01:04:00 ◼   ► they could do their own computational photography and you know,

01:04:03 ◼   ► maybe let someone else do the lenses and boy,

01:04:05 ◼   ► that would be an amazing product, but it would probably cost more than my Mac.

01:04:08 ◼   ► I mean,

01:04:10 ◼   ► if we start saying that it's okay to spend $6,000 in the camera body,

01:04:15 ◼   ► the next thing you know, we're all going to be spending $6,000 on Mona. Oh,

01:04:19 ◼   ► Oh, monitor is way bigger than that camera.

01:04:22 ◼   ► So just in terms of square inches, you're really getting your money.

01:04:25 ◼   ► The camera does have a display on up,

01:04:27 ◼   ► but this place terrible compared to this monitor. It's very tiny.

01:04:30 ◼   ► Does it have a thousand dollars stand?

01:04:32 ◼   ► I don't think it's, I bet there is a stand you can get for these cameras that

01:04:35 ◼   ► cost a thousand dollars. That's what camera equipment is like. Oh yeah.

01:04:38 ◼   ► It's called a tripod. Like a really good tripod is probably more than that.

01:04:41 ◼   ► I mean like this, this is,

01:04:43 ◼   ► I haven't been paying attention to the camera world for lots of reasons,

01:04:48 ◼   ► including the fact that I think I've actually finally admitted to myself that I'm,

01:04:51 ◼   ► I don't care anymore about cameras. But, um, I,

01:04:55 ◼   ► I really am very impressed to see this, you know,

01:04:59 ◼   ► being pushed forward. I mean this category of camera, like, you know, you're like,

01:05:02 ◼   ► Oh my God, $6,000. That's nothing new. Like,

01:05:05 ◼   ► like back when I was more of a camera head,

01:05:07 ◼   ► this would basically be the competitor to like the Canon one D series, uh,

01:05:11 ◼   ► which is aimed at like sports photographers, new photo journalists,

01:05:14 ◼   ► like people who need like really,

01:05:16 ◼   ► really high end hardware for very like fast capture.

01:05:20 ◼   ► That's why that's where the sports comes in. Usually, um, stuff like that.

01:05:23 ◼   ► So like there is definitely a market for this,

01:05:24 ◼   ► that they are directly attacking with this.

01:05:26 ◼   ► It's not like totally unreasonable for that market.

01:05:29 ◼   ► I'm glad to see that they're still in the game.

01:05:31 ◼   ► I'm glad to see that this is still moving forward,

01:05:33 ◼   ► even though I'm not in it anymore. Uh, it still excites me,

01:05:36 ◼   ► like on a technical level that this kind of stuff is still happening.

01:05:40 ◼   ► Yeah. The exciting thing about this camera is previously,

01:05:42 ◼   ► Sony had split its top end line into two models, the one for sports,

01:05:47 ◼   ► which is the one that had the crazy high frame rate and the fast readouts.

01:05:51 ◼   ► That was like the nine series. Yeah.

01:05:53 ◼   ► And then the one that was super high resolution, which was the a seven R series,

01:05:57 ◼   ► which had lots of megapixels,

01:05:58 ◼   ► but didn't concentrate so much on being able to shoot at high frame rates and

01:06:02 ◼   ► being able to dump to the card faster, whatever. And this a one does both.

01:06:05 ◼   ► It has more big pixels than the,

01:06:07 ◼   ► in the a seven R series and it has faster shooting than the a nine series and it

01:06:11 ◼   ► costs as much as both of them combined. So there you go. Like that,

01:06:14 ◼   ► that's why it's impressive. Like you don't have to choose anymore.

01:06:16 ◼   ► If you're wondering like which Sony should I get?

01:06:18 ◼   ► Just get the most expensive one because it does all the things,

01:06:20 ◼   ► which is good. Like it's good to have that option if it can exist. Yeah. Um,

01:06:25 ◼   ► and also like the scent,

01:06:26 ◼   ► there's a bunch of more interesting things about this sensor.

01:06:27 ◼   ► This is a brand new sensor. It's got the Ram stuck on the back of it.

01:06:30 ◼   ► It's stack CMOS. It's like, it's, it's the next advance in the sensor thing,

01:06:34 ◼   ► but it does the effect of making all the rest of Sony's cameras kind of like the

01:06:38 ◼   ► M one say, okay, well, one of the other cameras is going to get a good sensor

01:06:41 ◼   ► like this. Not like, not this exact sensor obviously,

01:06:43 ◼   ► but like a scaled down version of the sensor. It's just sort of the, it's,

01:06:46 ◼   ► or like the new LG OLED panel that they're only putting in their highest end TV

01:06:50 ◼   ► kind of makes you wish, but when are they going to put that panel on the

01:06:53 ◼   ► affordable TV? So this is truly a flagship, you know,

01:06:57 ◼   ► top end bleeding edge product and we'll have to wait until next year for it to

01:07:00 ◼   ► start to trickle down. I've,

01:07:02 ◼   ► I put this in here mostly because I've been deeply into, again,

01:07:07 ◼   ► I tend not to fret too much about computer purchases, but camera purchases.

01:07:11 ◼   ► I'm just like, just like the two of you.

01:07:13 ◼   ► I've been fretting about what camera to buy for so long,

01:07:16 ◼   ► going back and forth and back and forth,

01:07:18 ◼   ► just learning about cameras and lenses and trade-offs and prices. And

01:07:22 ◼   ► this, I mean,

01:07:24 ◼   ► this particular camera doesn't throw a monkey wrench in anything cause there's no

01:07:27 ◼   ► way I'm buying this, but now I know the technology that's available.

01:07:29 ◼   ► And I'm like, Oh, when the, the new a seven, the a seven four comes out,

01:07:33 ◼   ► not the a seven R four, their names are so bad, but the a seven,

01:07:37 ◼   ► without any stuff after it, when the fourth, when that one comes out,

01:07:41 ◼   ► will it use one of these new sensors?

01:07:43 ◼   ► Because the rumors are it doesn't use the same sensor as the old one.

01:07:46 ◼   ► Like the a seven C came out, but it uses the same.

01:07:48 ◼   ► It's basically like an a seven three inside of compact. Oh,

01:07:52 ◼   ► I know this is just nonsensical jargon to everybody.

01:07:54 ◼   ► The point is kind of like TVs cameras.

01:07:57 ◼   ► I'm in now in this paralysis mode where I don't want any of the current products

01:08:01 ◼   ► and I can envision a product with current technology that if I could take one

01:08:04 ◼   ► from column and one from column B and one from column C,

01:08:06 ◼   ► and shove it into a camera, that's the one I want, but they haven't made it yet.

01:08:10 ◼   ► So I just sit here buying nothing and looking at reviews.

01:08:12 ◼   ► Yeah. This, this is again, like, you know, I think I've,

01:08:17 ◼   ► I've largely admitted to myself finally that like, I'm just,

01:08:20 ◼   ► I'm no longer into photography. Um, and, and,

01:08:22 ◼   ► and that my iPhone satisfies my needs perfectly well enough. Um, but

01:08:27 ◼   ► like one of the things that I think would be very welcome is what you're saying.

01:08:32 ◼   ► I'm like, if the, if the big cameras start to develop the ability to do some of

01:08:37 ◼   ► the good tricks that phone cameras are doing related to software based image

01:08:42 ◼   ► enhancements and everything like to do some more of that, I mean,

01:08:45 ◼   ► to some degree cameras have always done that. Like, you know,

01:08:48 ◼   ► if you compare like an unprocessed raw to the JPEGs, the camera makes,

01:08:52 ◼   ► obviously they're doing some processing, they're doing some noise reduction,

01:08:54 ◼   ► they're doing color mapping and stuff like that. Um,

01:08:56 ◼   ► so there's always been some degree of processing that, that the cameras do.

01:08:59 ◼   ► But it's, it, you know, phones have so far surpassed what,

01:09:04 ◼   ► what cameras are doing that phones can now make incredible images in tons of

01:09:09 ◼   ► conditions and situations and,

01:09:12 ◼   ► and of subject matter that big cameras can't even approach. Not even close.

01:09:16 ◼   ► On that topic, by the way,

01:09:18 ◼   ► though one of the things I'm always looking at is the advancement of Sony's sort

01:09:21 ◼   ► of class leading, uh, autofocus. And, uh,

01:09:27 ◼   ► the one of the one feature that they've had for years that they keep improving is

01:09:30 ◼   ► their, uh,

01:09:31 ◼   ► object tracking and eye detection because when you're taking a picture of a

01:09:34 ◼   ► person, usually you want the eye to be in focused.

01:09:36 ◼   ► There's no reason that our iPhones can't be doing that.

01:09:39 ◼   ► Like it's not a computational challenge that the iPhone can't tackle.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Like the iPhone processor crushes anything in these cameras.

01:09:46 ◼   ► Why doesn't, why don't our iPhones do face and eye tracking?

01:09:50 ◼   ► They do face detection. They'll put a boxer on a person's face, right?

01:09:52 ◼   ► But they don't, I mean, maybe they do it and they just don't show the little box,

01:09:56 ◼   ► but I would love for them to find people's eyes.

01:09:58 ◼   ► So I wouldn't focus on like my big nose,

01:10:00 ◼   ► but it would actually get the focus back a little,

01:10:01 ◼   ► maybe it doesn't matter because the aperture is so small and these things that

01:10:04 ◼   ► the difference between focusing on the tip of my nose and focusing on my eyes is

01:10:07 ◼   ► never going to be noticeable at the apertures of these things.

01:10:10 ◼   ► But it just seems like a thing that they could do. And on that front, by the way,

01:10:14 ◼   ► Sony, Sony did eye detection,

01:10:16 ◼   ► then they did animal eye detection because eye detection would never work on

01:10:20 ◼   ► your dog because their eyes look different than ours. And this year they added a

01:10:23 ◼   ► third item. Like they have a menu for it's like fish. They did eye detection,

01:10:28 ◼   ► animal eye detection and bird eye detection,

01:10:32 ◼   ► which makes sense because people take pictures of birds,

01:10:35 ◼   ► but birds are animals. People come on, rename them. I'm just like,

01:10:38 ◼   ► what the animal I detection. It's like a, it's like throwing shade on the birds.

01:10:42 ◼   ► We've got people, animals and birds, stupid dinosaurs.

01:10:47 ◼   ► What if you want to take a picture that includes your cat attacking a bird?

01:10:53 ◼   ► In mid air, what will it focus on?

01:10:56 ◼   ► According to the reviews,

01:10:58 ◼   ► the bird eye detection works so badly that it will not get the bird. I mean,

01:11:03 ◼   ► the bird detection, they got to work on that cause it's the first year it's out,

01:11:06 ◼   ► but it's totally for people who take pictures of birds,

01:11:08 ◼   ► like literal actual birds with those really long lenses, you know?

01:11:10 ◼   ► Oh yeah. Well, cause again, like if you're, if you're aiming,

01:11:13 ◼   ► if you're no pun intended,

01:11:14 ◼   ► if you're aiming your camera market at people who still buy big cameras and

01:11:19 ◼   ► whose needs are not solved by phone cameras,

01:11:23 ◼   ► bird watchers are actually a surprisingly large category because they need such

01:11:27 ◼   ► incredible telephoto distance. Like the phone will never have that.

01:11:31 ◼   ► So like it does make sense for them to have that.

01:11:33 ◼   ► Yeah. And these things are, you know,

01:11:35 ◼   ► these are examples of computational photography cause this is all machine

01:11:38 ◼   ► learning. Like the cannons actually have much better bird detect, I think,

01:11:41 ◼   ► where there will,

01:11:42 ◼   ► they will find a bird and when the bird turns its head towards the camera,

01:11:45 ◼   ► then they will find the eye of the bird.

01:11:47 ◼   ► And that's all based on machine learning stuff of recognizing what the heck does

01:11:50 ◼   ► a bird look like. Same thing for, you know,

01:11:52 ◼   ► cause it's the whole body of the bird that they're finding. You know,

01:11:54 ◼   ► there's basic object detection of the thing that's moving,

01:11:57 ◼   ► but the bird detect is like, I don't,

01:11:58 ◼   ► not only do I recognize that's an object, but that's a bird.

01:12:01 ◼   ► So they're coming along. Well, like I said, the sensor readout,

01:12:04 ◼   ► it sounds like such a minor thing, but until this happened,

01:12:07 ◼   ► there was no way for a top end camera to be able to do what the iPhone does by

01:12:12 ◼   ► combining three or four or five photos into one cause it couldn't get three or

01:12:15 ◼   ► four or five different readouts from that sensor in a short enough period of

01:12:18 ◼   ► time with a moving subject to do anything useful.

01:12:21 ◼   ► And now suddenly that becomes plausible.

01:12:22 ◼   ► It seems weird to me that Canon or Sony or somebody hasn't like thrown all the

01:12:28 ◼   ► money at people at Google or Apple that are on the camera team and just said,

01:12:34 ◼   ► Hey, you know, the computational photography stuff, we want that. Please come work

01:12:39 ◼   ► for us and make that. And I know it's not quite that simple,

01:12:42 ◼   ► but it seems like it would be a real winner.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Yeah. Apple and Google are slightly more profitable companies than Sony.

01:12:47 ◼   ► So hiring people away is going to be tricky.

01:12:50 ◼   ► Well, I think there's also, you know,

01:12:51 ◼   ► I think there's there'll be two major challenges off the top of my head for

01:12:53 ◼   ► that. I mean, number one is like,

01:12:55 ◼   ► I don't know how much their market is actually asking for that. You know, as,

01:12:58 ◼   ► as phones have gotten so good and have destroyed the entire like low to mid and

01:13:03 ◼   ► slowly eating the high end of the market,

01:13:05 ◼   ► the people who are still buying Sony's high end cameras and everyone else's high

01:13:10 ◼   ► end cameras are mostly people who don't want a lot of that processing.

01:13:14 ◼   ► I bet like there it's,

01:13:15 ◼   ► it's mostly people who are who are using it more professionally,

01:13:18 ◼   ► who want more raw type stuff. I mean, video took over the entire, you know,

01:13:23 ◼   ► SLR style and Merrill's market as well. I mean,

01:13:25 ◼   ► many of these cameras are used only as video cameras for their entire lives.

01:13:30 ◼   ► They just, cause they happen to be really good video cameras. And, uh, and you know,

01:13:33 ◼   ► I think that that video taking over with this market kind of saved a lot of this

01:13:38 ◼   ► market. I think, I think, I think a lot of these companies would have been done

01:13:41 ◼   ► a while ago if not for video.

01:13:43 ◼   ► I mean, they can steal features from, from Apple there too. Like, you know,

01:13:46 ◼   ► the thing that Apple does where I forget what frame rate,

01:13:49 ◼   ► but you take it in one frame rate and it takes two of every frame and then

01:13:52 ◼   ► combines them or whatever like that. You know, I think it's like if you shoot,

01:13:56 ◼   ► you shoot it and you get 30 frame per second video,

01:13:58 ◼   ► but the video is actually taking 60 frames and then either it's picking the best

01:14:02 ◼   ► one or combining them. These cameras should totally do that.

01:14:04 ◼   ► Like that's a great idea. And they're able to do four K at one 20.

01:14:07 ◼   ► So they have frames to spare. But as far as I'm aware, none of them do it.

01:14:11 ◼   ► Well, but I think this gets to the second problem. You know, problem,

01:14:15 ◼   ► problem one is their market doesn't really seem to demand a lot of this stuff.

01:14:17 ◼   ► Problem two, I think if you look at like the,

01:14:21 ◼   ► the ridiculous advances in Silicon and hardware required for the iPhone every

01:14:26 ◼   ► year to do this kind of processing with a tiny little sensor,

01:14:31 ◼   ► it might not be technologically feasible at a reasonable price in a camera body

01:14:36 ◼   ► without like a giant fan in it to do this level of processing for,

01:14:40 ◼   ► for like a sensor that big from a big camera in real time.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Like it just might not be reasonably technically within Sony's ability to make

01:14:48 ◼   ► an image signal processor that could do that.

01:14:50 ◼   ► I think they're doing pretty good.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Like Sony had overheating problems with a lot of their cameras. In fact,

01:14:55 ◼   ► my line of cameras has that problem for this exact reason that the thing that

01:14:58 ◼   ► was overheating was the CPU, right? Um,

01:15:01 ◼   ► but they more or less seem to have solved that with the current generation of

01:15:04 ◼   ► cameras, presumably by having TSMC make them chips in a smaller process size.

01:15:09 ◼   ► But I, I think that they've mostly,

01:15:12 ◼   ► the technology is there to do the Silicon fabbing and to do the image processing.

01:15:17 ◼   ► Cause remember Sony also has image processing expertise. Like for example,

01:15:21 ◼   ► in their televisions, like that's one of the main selling points of their television.

01:15:24 ◼   ► They can LG panel and they slap onto it a Sony image processor. Uh, so I,

01:15:29 ◼   ► I think they're pretty good at doing that image processing and more recently

01:15:32 ◼   ► through no thanks to Sony, but thanks to TSMC or other companies,

01:15:35 ◼   ► they're able to get that within a reasonable power envelope. And like you said,

01:15:39 ◼   ► and more importantly,

01:15:40 ◼   ► a reasonable heat envelope in their cameras that I think they're within shooting

01:15:44 ◼   ► distance of doing this. I mean, we'll see when they get these camera,

01:15:46 ◼   ► this 50 megapixel thing out,

01:15:47 ◼   ► but like they remove the recording limits and all their things that can go for

01:15:51 ◼   ► hour at a time without overheating or anything. And now this one is,

01:15:54 ◼   ► is shooting 50 megapixels at 30 frames per second in photos.

01:15:59 ◼   ► So I feel like the, the grunt is there.

01:16:02 ◼   ► Hardware wise, they just need to get the software part of it together. Um,

01:16:07 ◼   ► I mean, this is, you know, this is the top of the top end.

01:16:09 ◼   ► We'll circle back in three years and see how it's trickled down,

01:16:12 ◼   ► but they really couldn't use some of that expertise from the, the,

01:16:16 ◼   ► the phone market. And I know what you're saying. Like, well,

01:16:19 ◼   ► pros don't want that. They don't want you messing with their pictures,

01:16:22 ◼   ► but I think for a lot of applications,

01:16:24 ◼   ► especially for the YouTuber market and that type of thing,

01:16:26 ◼   ► they do want you to do stuff like Apple does with the video is the reason so

01:16:30 ◼   ► many YouTubers rave about the video quality from Apple's phones because Apple

01:16:35 ◼   ► does all this clever processing with your video to make it look reasonable right

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01:17:40 ◼   ► All right, let's do some ask ATP. Donald Rabideau writes,

01:17:47 ◼   ► do you use any utilities like clean my Mac X or 10 or whatever or onyx to

01:17:52 ◼   ► perform system maintenance? If not, is there any particular reason? I don't.

01:17:56 ◼   ► Uh, I haven't ever really felt the need to. And plus, uh,

01:18:01 ◼   ► for awhile there I was, you know,

01:18:02 ◼   ► reinstalling Mac OS like it was going out of style. And so, uh,

01:18:07 ◼   ► like I've said many, many, many times on the show, to some degree,

01:18:10 ◼   ► I consider my computers mostly ephemerals.

01:18:12 ◼   ► So I never have a build that it seems like I never have a build that sticks

01:18:17 ◼   ► around long enough to develop the sort of cruft that one of these I suspect

01:18:20 ◼   ► would get rid of. But I don't know, that's just me. Marco, how about you?

01:18:24 ◼   ► So I'm going to say two things that are potentially conflicting. Oh,

01:18:27 ◼   ► this will be good. Um, I never run anything like this.

01:18:32 ◼   ► I don't think such utilities are usually necessary. Uh,

01:18:35 ◼   ► I think there's a lot of, there's always been a lot of like superstition and,

01:18:39 ◼   ► you know, in, in computer solutions, you know,

01:18:42 ◼   ► even back when we were in the windows days, like, you know, people thought like,

01:18:46 ◼   ► if you, if you defrag every night, it'll,

01:18:48 ◼   ► it'll save your hard drive and it'll make things run faster cause everything will

01:18:51 ◼   ► be in optimized loading locations and everything. And you hear about all these,

01:18:55 ◼   ► you know, procedures you should run to maintain your computer. Um,

01:18:58 ◼   ► and a lot of them I think are just superstition and don't actually,

01:19:01 ◼   ► don't actually end up being necessary, uh, or don't,

01:19:04 ◼   ► don't provide meaningful improvements.

01:19:06 ◼   ► And so I never use any of these kinds of utilities. Um,

01:19:09 ◼   ► and I don't think most people need to the second half of what I'm about to say

01:19:14 ◼   ► now.

01:19:15 ◼   ► I'm currently on an installation of Mac OS that I need to badly do a reinstall

01:19:21 ◼   ► because it doesn't work very well.

01:19:22 ◼   ► This is the one that I imported from my iMac pro onto my new Mac mini.

01:19:29 ◼   ► And it's, there's a lot of stuff about it's messed up. Like I can't,

01:19:32 ◼   ► one of the biggest things that drive me nuts that I think might motivate me to

01:19:36 ◼   ► actually finally do this is that I can't search in mail anymore. Oh,

01:19:39 ◼   ► and I've tried, I've gone like looked and looked at all the different like crappy

01:19:43 ◼   ► website articles of how to use of like how to rebuild your mail search.

01:19:46 ◼   ► And I've done everything that all of them have suggested and it doesn't work.

01:19:51 ◼   ► So every search is return zero results.

01:19:54 ◼   ► And it turns out I searched my mail a lot.

01:19:57 ◼   ► That's actually a fairly common thing that I need to, I need to find an email.

01:20:00 ◼   ► So yeah, I have to do a reinstall.

01:20:03 ◼   ► Other interesting side note that it has nothing to do with this question,

01:20:06 ◼   ► but I looked it up, um, a little while ago during our show,

01:20:10 ◼   ► some real time followup.

01:20:11 ◼   ► My Mac mini return window is still active for the next two hours.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Which why would you want to, I don't know, but it's,

01:20:22 ◼   ► it's interesting to know that I guess like I could theoretically return this Mac

01:20:27 ◼   ► mini and then in April spend the Apple credit.

01:20:29 ◼   ► I knew it. If I still, I see your point. I see your point. I missed your point.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Yes. I'm not, I'm not entirely sure I, that would be worth doing,

01:20:37 ◼   ► but it is worth knowing that I can do that. Also,

01:20:41 ◼   ► you know, um, I,

01:20:44 ◼   ► I really kind of miss my Mac book air like as my primary computer.

01:20:48 ◼   ► So we'll see. Maybe I don't know. And,

01:20:51 ◼   ► and it turns out like all of my problems that I was having with the Thunderbolt

01:20:56 ◼   ► docs seemed to mostly be that my ethernet wire in the wall was bad.

01:21:00 ◼   ► And so actually the rest of the Thunderbolt doc ecosystem seemed to work just

01:21:05 ◼   ► fine. Oh, Marco. All right, John, do you do any of this sort of thing?

01:21:10 ◼   ► Well, I'm going to, I know the question is asking us where we, where they reuse it,

01:21:14 ◼   ► but I'm going to echo Marco's advice that in general,

01:21:18 ◼   ► if you have a Mac,

01:21:19 ◼   ► you do not need to do any of these things for multiple reasons.

01:21:23 ◼   ► The first reason is that lots of these sort of

01:21:27 ◼   ► preventative maintenance procedures or as Marco called them superstitions,

01:21:33 ◼   ► that is a fertile ground for scam apps, right? Cause they're always,

01:21:38 ◼   ► they always want to advertise your computer may be in danger.

01:21:41 ◼   ► You may have a virus you need to do this per run this program every day to make

01:21:45 ◼   ► sure your Mac is healthy. A lot of those apps are scam apps.

01:21:49 ◼   ► They're apps that are installing malware mining for Bitcoin,

01:21:52 ◼   ► doing all sorts of terrible things,

01:21:53 ◼   ► putting toolbars in your browsers back in the old days,

01:21:55 ◼   ► like all sorts of unsavory things. So that's one reason to why.

01:21:58 ◼   ► Then the second is you don't actually need to do any of the things that these

01:22:03 ◼   ► things do. Like even the good ones that are actually legitimate applications,

01:22:07 ◼   ► your Mac will run just fine on its own. Or if it doesn't,

01:22:11 ◼   ► it's a bug in the OS that will be fixed in an upcoming version of the OS.

01:22:14 ◼   ► And it's not like, uh, it's something you need to do to fix it.

01:22:17 ◼   ► So I do not recommend people seek out these programs.

01:22:20 ◼   ► I do not recommend people respond to ads that advertise these programs that are

01:22:23 ◼   ► around people get these programs. That said,

01:22:26 ◼   ► I have several of these programs and I'll tell you why. Um,

01:22:30 ◼   ► sometimes if you are a, you know,

01:22:34 ◼   ► technically oriented Mac enthusiast, you may find yourself in a situation where

01:22:38 ◼   ► your Mac is doing a weird thing and you want to figure out how to make it stop.

01:22:41 ◼   ► And the solution is to do one of the many things that these pro the legitimate

01:22:46 ◼   ► programs of these type do reset your launch services database,

01:22:50 ◼   ► delete some caches, uh, rebuild your mail index,

01:22:55 ◼   ► right? Uh,

01:22:56 ◼   ► you delete your spotlight index and rebuild it like all sorts of

01:23:00 ◼   ► reset your PRAM. Who knows? There's a million things that you can do.

01:23:04 ◼   ► You don't need one of these tools to do those things at all.

01:23:08 ◼   ► And you can do them all from like the command line or whatever. Right.

01:23:11 ◼   ► But if you're technical enough to want to try to fix something yourself,

01:23:16 ◼   ► but not technical enough to trust yourself, messing with the command line,

01:23:20 ◼   ► if you can find one of these programs that is legitimate and frequently updated,

01:23:25 ◼   ► that's the key frequently updated. So like the way you can tell is like, Oh,

01:23:32 ◼   ► big sir has been released. Is there a new version of insert tool X

01:23:36 ◼   ► for big sir out like the day of or a few days after that shows that someone is

01:23:41 ◼   ► updating that thing, hopefully in a legitimate way, right?

01:23:44 ◼   ► If on the other hand,

01:23:46 ◼   ► you have a version of one of these programs that you've got three years ago and

01:23:49 ◼   ► you try running it today, hopefully it will refuse to run and say, Whoa,

01:23:52 ◼   ► I can't run on this. I don't even know what OS you're running on.

01:23:54 ◼   ► If it doesn't refuse to run, that's another warning sign, right?

01:23:57 ◼   ► So in the best case, occasionally,

01:24:00 ◼   ► I will want to use one of these tools to do a thing with less work than me

01:24:05 ◼   ► trying to go through my old notes, documents,

01:24:07 ◼   ► and look up some command line incantation. Because remember,

01:24:09 ◼   ► the command line incantations change from OS to OS as well.

01:24:12 ◼   ► And so if you do a web search for like how to reset your launch services

01:24:15 ◼   ► database,

01:24:16 ◼   ► you might find a command line that worked three years ago that doesn't work now

01:24:18 ◼   ► or does damage.

01:24:19 ◼   ► Now a well maintained version of one of these utilities will have the up to date

01:24:24 ◼   ► way to try to do the things that it does. That said,

01:24:29 ◼   ► even the best of these programs can absolutely be accidentally used to screw up

01:24:34 ◼   ► your system either because of bugs in the program or because the user error as

01:24:38 ◼   ► in you'd probably didn't want to do that and now you're in a bad situation,

01:24:41 ◼   ► right? So once again, I will say,

01:24:43 ◼   ► you should not have one of these programs. You generate in general,

01:24:47 ◼   ► you don't need it, but occasionally I resort to it

01:24:50 ◼   ► even if it's just a,

01:24:53 ◼   ► I like the best of these tools will tell you what it's going to do for the

01:24:55 ◼   ► command line just to say, Hey, I'm not going to ask you to do it,

01:24:58 ◼   ► but if you were to do it, show me the command line you would run.

01:25:00 ◼   ► And then I can use that as an input into my larger problem solving saying, well,

01:25:05 ◼   ► this tool says it's going to run this command line and these Google search

01:25:08 ◼   ► results say you should try this command line and this Apple forum post as I try

01:25:12 ◼   ► this command line and then I can try to figure out what it, you know,

01:25:14 ◼   ► what the truth is. Read some man pages, try some experiments myself,

01:25:18 ◼   ► like, but we're way off in the weeds here. This,

01:25:21 ◼   ► if you find yourself having to do this type of debugging,

01:25:23 ◼   ► you should probably just, you know, I would say take it to the Apple store,

01:25:27 ◼   ► but I don't, I don't know what you do now in COVID times, but yeah,

01:25:31 ◼   ► don't get one of these programs,

01:25:32 ◼   ► but a really good one of these programs is actually useful tool to have.

01:25:35 ◼   ► I will say one tool I do use, which is not really one of these programs,

01:25:40 ◼   ► but it's kind of in the outfield, maybe in the ballpark, maybe,

01:25:45 ◼   ► I use the,

01:25:46 ◼   ► like the disc space searching programs that will scan your disc and tell you

01:25:51 ◼   ► like where your, where your space is going.

01:25:53 ◼   ► I wouldn't put those in this category at all.

01:25:56 ◼   ► Everyone should have a disc space scanning program because those are read only

01:26:00 ◼   ► non-destructive and they're really useful.

01:26:02 ◼   ► Yeah, well they can, you can destruct with them.

01:26:05 ◼   ► Like you can delete from them usually like, Oh really?

01:26:07 ◼   ► Which ones do you have that you can delete from?

01:26:09 ◼   ► Daisy disc.

01:26:10 ◼   ► Daisy disc and space Gremlin are the two favorites in this household.

01:26:13 ◼   ► Tiff prefers Daisy disc for the prettiness. I prefer space Gremlin because I mean,

01:26:17 ◼   ► it looks like it was designed by a space Gremlin, but it was, it,

01:26:20 ◼   ► I prefer it just the way it works. Um, yeah, so Daisy disc,

01:26:24 ◼   ► I think is the more common choice.

01:26:25 ◼   ► My recommended one is grand perspective.

01:26:28 ◼   ► It used to be called disc inventory 10 or actually just inventory 10 was the

01:26:31 ◼   ► original one that had this UI.

01:26:33 ◼   ► I think grand perspective is the more modern incarnation.

01:26:35 ◼   ► I don't know if they're related anyway, but they look very similar and all it

01:26:39 ◼   ► will do is give you a big view of a bunch of, you know,

01:26:42 ◼   ► a rectangular view of your hard disk and based on area,

01:26:45 ◼   ► what's filling the space. And that's it. That's all it does.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And you can mouse over the little rectangle, the big rectangle and say,

01:26:51 ◼   ► what the heck is this giant rectangle? And you find that it's like, you know,

01:26:55 ◼   ► well, here's, here's the danger. These programs don't delete anything,

01:26:57 ◼   ► but they'll tell you what all the files are. And you're like,

01:26:59 ◼   ► what is this big rectangle? VM image. Do I need that? I'm going to go delete it.

01:27:03 ◼   ► Right. No, usually they're smarter than that. Like usually they, they don't,

01:27:07 ◼   ► they don't usually show like system stuff by default, um,

01:27:11 ◼   ► or let you delete it by default. But I mean, grand perspective,

01:27:14 ◼   ► grand perspective doesn't show you things that aren't owned by you because it

01:27:18 ◼   ► doesn't have permission to, especially in this modern OS,

01:27:20 ◼   ► even if you get full disk access, like I don't think it runs this route,

01:27:24 ◼   ► but it does show you everything.

01:27:25 ◼   ► And the danger of one of these programs is not that the program's going to do

01:27:28 ◼   ► anything because as far as I'm aware,

01:27:29 ◼   ► our grand perspective can actually modify your desk at all.

01:27:31 ◼   ► But it's the user who says, I don't know what this thing is.

01:27:34 ◼   ► I'm going to delete it. It's like the story of, you know,

01:27:36 ◼   ► when Mac OS X first came out and everyone found a library folder and they're

01:27:39 ◼   ► like, whatever this library thing is, I don't need it.

01:27:41 ◼   ► And they would just delete it. And in the old days of Mac OS X,

01:27:43 ◼   ► there was no system integrity protection or anything like that.

01:27:46 ◼   ► And you own the library folder that was in your home directory.

01:27:48 ◼   ► So people would just delete it. Like, I guess this, this,

01:27:50 ◼   ► the new version of Mac OS comes with books or something,

01:27:53 ◼   ► but I don't want any of that. Let me just delete library.

01:27:54 ◼   ► And I would just destroy their entire account because now you can't even log in

01:27:59 ◼   ► anymore because there was essential files in the library folder or, you know,

01:28:02 ◼   ► system slash library or slash system, or, you know, it's,

01:28:05 ◼   ► it's a classic thing on the Mac of people finding the system folder and saying,

01:28:10 ◼   ► I don't need all this stuff and just putting it all in the trash. So

01:28:12 ◼   ► even though these programs themselves are not harmful,

01:28:16 ◼   ► they give you enough rope to hang yourself because now you know where all the big

01:28:20 ◼   ► files are and you don't think the computer should need that big file,

01:28:24 ◼   ► but it may turn out the computer really does need that big file system integrity

01:28:28 ◼   ► protection. It helps a lot here because it will prevent you from deleting parts

01:28:32 ◼   ► of the iOS,

01:28:33 ◼   ► but there are still things that are not technically part of the iOS that you

01:28:36 ◼   ► could delete with like, you know,

01:28:38 ◼   ► authenticating it as an administrator or something that you probably shouldn't

01:28:41 ◼   ► delete. So be careful.

01:28:42 ◼   ► But I think a program like that is really useful for you to find like the three,

01:28:48 ◼   ► you know, uh,

01:28:50 ◼   ► movies you downloaded in iTunes five years ago that are each taking up five

01:28:53 ◼   ► gigs of space in your hard drive. And you totally forgot about it.

01:28:56 ◼   ► By the way, one more real time follow up.

01:28:59 ◼   ► So another thing that's wrong with my installation that I'm using,

01:29:02 ◼   ► in addition to, you know, the,

01:29:04 ◼   ► the aforementioned issues is that somehow when I migrated this installation to

01:29:09 ◼   ► the new Mac mini,

01:29:10 ◼   ► I got a previously relocated items folder, uh,

01:29:15 ◼   ► which contained nothing of use.

01:29:17 ◼   ► So I put it in the trash and I tried to empty the trash and I now have this

01:29:20 ◼   ► item that I cannot empty from the trash. It says, uh, that,

01:29:23 ◼   ► cause previously relocated items includes the folders,

01:29:27 ◼   ► the sub folders security user, like usr, the units kind of user.

01:29:31 ◼   ► And then in that a SIM link to X 11 and I can't delete it cause it says

01:29:36 ◼   ► X 11 is required by the system and I can't put it anywhere else.

01:29:39 ◼   ► So I have this item that's just stuck. I just can't do my trash forever.

01:29:43 ◼   ► Just, I have a non empty trash forever.

01:29:46 ◼   ► So there's, Oh, I also have the window server,

01:29:48 ◼   ► high CPU usage bug on this one,

01:29:50 ◼   ► even though Chrome is totally gone from this computer. Like, so yeah, there's,

01:29:53 ◼   ► there's a lot that's not right with this installation,

01:29:56 ◼   ► but I'm still not going to run some other weird utility.

01:29:58 ◼   ► I'm just going to reinstall it.

01:29:59 ◼   ► Sometimes finder refuses to empty your trash,

01:30:02 ◼   ► but if you just go to the command line and go into your dot trash folder, you can,

01:30:05 ◼   ► you can just do R minus RF and it'll kill it.

01:30:07 ◼   ► So do R minus RF will definitely almost certainly kill it. Be careful.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Like I'm telling you to run terrible commands like carefully Marco specifically

01:30:15 ◼   ► and nobody else carefully go into your dot trash.

01:30:18 ◼   ► It's folder in your home directory.

01:30:19 ◼   ► Where is it? Is it, is it under volumes trashes? No,

01:30:22 ◼   ► it's just in your home directory. Oh, look at that. Dot trash, CD, that trash.

01:30:25 ◼   ► And then do you see all the files there? If you do, uh,

01:30:28 ◼   ► just try R minus RF on those files and pseudo if it doesn't, it doesn't. Hey,

01:30:32 ◼   ► maybe not while we're recording, not while we're recording.

01:30:35 ◼   ► What do I need X 11 for?

01:30:37 ◼   ► I am not allowed to LS dot trash my home directory,

01:30:43 ◼   ► even with pseudo operation not permitted.

01:30:45 ◼   ► Uh, do you have an admin account? Yes, this is my account.

01:30:49 ◼   ► I'm telling you, this installation is not right.

01:30:53 ◼   ► I've got to get rid of it. That's not right.

01:30:55 ◼   ► You should be able to list your own trash. I almost,

01:30:58 ◼   ► I almost decided to record tonight from the mat, from the MacBook air.

01:31:01 ◼   ► I almost like plugged it back into my whole docking at my desk just cause that

01:31:05 ◼   ► installation is so good and I miss it so much as I'm using this one,

01:31:08 ◼   ► but I haven't had time to blow this one away cause I've been,

01:31:10 ◼   ► I've been pretty busy. Oh, I gotta get rid of this.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Does your dot trash directory have any extended attributes set on it?

01:31:16 ◼   ► Is it have weird owners or permissions? I don't know. I don't,

01:31:18 ◼   ► I don't want to do this. I just want to blow this away.

01:31:20 ◼   ► This is not the only issue. Step one, reboot and then step two,

01:31:24 ◼   ► see what the heck's going on. But honestly, step three,

01:31:27 ◼   ► the Mac mini really does suck at Bluetooth reception. I had to like,

01:31:30 ◼   ► I have to keep moving it closer to my, like my main stuff set up. Like I,

01:31:35 ◼   ► I first had it like beside my desk on top of a file cabinet, like which,

01:31:39 ◼   ► cause it could be tucked away neatly there and there the mouse barely worked and,

01:31:44 ◼   ► and watch unlock wouldn't work at all. I would say it's too far away.

01:31:46 ◼   ► So I now have it like scooted over, like tilted up behind a speaker,

01:31:50 ◼   ► but it's like it's still has really flaky reception.

01:31:53 ◼   ► It's like this is so much worse than the MacBook air. Oh God. Oh my God.

01:31:57 ◼   ► To go back a half step. I really liked easy disc and I recommend that one. Yeah.

01:32:01 ◼   ► And I really like space Gremlin. If, if it is a disc in your style,

01:32:04 ◼   ► try space Gremlin. It's, it's my favorite. All right. Dan Blundell writes,

01:32:07 ◼   ► I just got a Mac mini with eight gigs of Ram performance is great,

01:32:09 ◼   ► but it typically uses between 500 megs and two gigs of swap memory.

01:32:13 ◼   ► I don't notice a hit in terms of performance,

01:32:15 ◼   ► but I read in a couple of places that swap memory might impact the lifespan of

01:32:19 ◼   ► the SSD. Other places say it's not really a concern with modern SSDs.

01:32:22 ◼   ► If I'm satisfied with performance is protecting the SSD from swap memory,

01:32:26 ◼   ► a good enough reason to pay the premium for more Ram. I mean, honestly,

01:32:29 ◼   ► I don't know why, if you can afford it, you wouldn't just get more Ram,

01:32:32 ◼   ► but it sounds like the ship has already sailed.

01:32:34 ◼   ► So I honestly don't know what the situation is with lots and lots of rights on

01:32:39 ◼   ► SSDs these days as our resident file system expert, John,

01:32:42 ◼   ► what's the situation here?

01:32:44 ◼   ► So, uh,

01:32:45 ◼   ► first thing to keep in mind is the amount of swap memory as shown by the various

01:32:50 ◼   ► places in the O S is not really what you're interested in.

01:32:53 ◼   ► What you're interested in is how many page ins and page outs to the swap file

01:32:58 ◼   ► are happening like activity traffic, right?

01:33:01 ◼   ► So swap files tend to be allocated in these very large chunks just because you

01:33:05 ◼   ► have a big swap file and one of these large chunks,

01:33:08 ◼   ► if nothing is being read or written to it very frequently, it's no big deal,

01:33:12 ◼   ► right? You only care about the traffic. And, uh, as Dan noted,

01:33:17 ◼   ► uh, lots of activity on SSD slowly, very slowly,

01:33:22 ◼   ► where is it out? Um,

01:33:23 ◼   ► so you should be concerned if there is a tremendous amount of activity going to

01:33:28 ◼   ► and from your SSD anywhere, not just a swap file.

01:33:30 ◼   ► So what you want to know is am I swapping not,

01:33:33 ◼   ► do I have a two gig swap file hanging around somewhere, right? Now,

01:33:38 ◼   ► if you've determined that you are frequently swapping a lot,

01:33:41 ◼   ► it would surprise me if you didn't notice this because although SSDs are much

01:33:45 ◼   ► faster than spinning disks, they're much slower than Ram.

01:33:48 ◼   ► So if you were paging in and out to that swap file a lot,

01:33:51 ◼   ► I feel like you would notice that, uh, performance wise.

01:33:54 ◼   ► Now SSDs deal with the wear out factor by essentially being over provisioned by

01:33:59 ◼   ► some amount. So as they wear out cells inside them,

01:34:02 ◼   ► there's actually more than whatever, you know, say you get a five,

01:34:05 ◼   ► 12 gigabyte SSD,

01:34:06 ◼   ► there's more than five 12 gigabytes worth of storage inside there.

01:34:10 ◼   ► They keep some in reserve. And when you wear out a portion of it,

01:34:13 ◼   ► they will use some of the other, right?

01:34:14 ◼   ► The more expensive and enterprise of the SSD,

01:34:17 ◼   ► the more they are over-provisioned and the longer they will last.

01:34:21 ◼   ► But I would suspect that in a consumer laptop being used by a consumer to do

01:34:26 ◼   ► normal things,

01:34:27 ◼   ► something else is going to die before you wear out that SSD most likely,

01:34:31 ◼   ► unless you are doing some really weird stuff with lots of paging or lots of

01:34:35 ◼   ► constant IO or constantly recording video, or I don't,

01:34:39 ◼   ► I don't know what could cause that amount of IO, but in general,

01:34:41 ◼   ► I think modern SSDs are probably going to put up with the amount of reason

01:34:47 ◼   ► rights that a normal person does.

01:34:48 ◼   ► So I would not worry about having too little Ram causing lots of

01:34:53 ◼   ► swapping, which in turn causes your SSD to wear out.

01:34:57 ◼   ► Jan Philip writes,

01:34:58 ◼   ► if I copy three files in three different simultaneous copy processes in the

01:35:01 ◼   ► finder,

01:35:02 ◼   ► will the bits of the three files be written mixed on the hard drive as opposed to

01:35:05 ◼   ► if I had run the copy process sequentially,

01:35:07 ◼   ► is there more order in the bits on my hard drive?

01:35:09 ◼   ► If I let one copy process finish before I start the next,

01:35:11 ◼   ► I would like to know the answer to this question. Just out of curiosity,

01:35:14 ◼   ► let me tell you about defragmenting your,

01:35:16 ◼   ► well, and how with SSDs, it's,

01:35:18 ◼   ► it becomes a much more complicated thing with like what you want it to be or,

01:35:22 ◼   ► and what it needs to be. Yeah. So John here, again, this is your,

01:35:27 ◼   ► kind of part of the world. What's the situation back in the day?

01:35:32 ◼   ► Computers would address hard drives like spinning hard drives,

01:35:36 ◼   ► fairly directly. If you think of what a spinning hard drive was like,

01:35:40 ◼   ► it's a bunch of disks that spin and they're stacked on top of each other and on

01:35:44 ◼   ► in between them are a bunch of read and write heads, right? It's like,

01:35:48 ◼   ► think of like a, you know,

01:35:49 ◼   ► seven record players or five record players stacked on top of each other with

01:35:52 ◼   ► little heads reading them all.

01:35:54 ◼   ► And the each of the disks had a, well,

01:35:58 ◼   ► they had what you can imagine, like a track. They're not like,

01:36:03 ◼   ► they're not like a a record where it's a spiral that starts in the middle and

01:36:07 ◼   ► goes out to the edge. But instead they had concentric circles,

01:36:09 ◼   ► like a tree ring, right? And one of those rings is a track.

01:36:13 ◼   ► And a sort of pie wedge shape of the disc is a sector.

01:36:18 ◼   ► And you could also address what's called a cylinder,

01:36:21 ◼   ► which is a track through the entire stack, right?

01:36:24 ◼   ► So you can imagine the outermost track,

01:36:25 ◼   ► the outermost cylinder is that track on all the disks that are down there.

01:36:30 ◼   ► And in the very, very early days,

01:36:31 ◼   ► computers would address hard drives by track and cylinder

01:36:37 ◼   ► and sector, like more or less directly,

01:36:39 ◼   ► like the operating system had the ability to say,

01:36:42 ◼   ► I want to write in the fifth sector of the outermost cylinder of these disc or

01:36:46 ◼   ► whatever. Right. And in those cases, like, uh,

01:36:50 ◼   ► Marco was talking about in case you just mentioned the, uh, the defragmenting thing,

01:36:54 ◼   ► where there was computer programs that would visualize, they would take all these,

01:36:57 ◼   ► these cylinders and sort of stretch them out and connect them together.

01:37:00 ◼   ► So it becomes a one big, long line.

01:37:02 ◼   ► And then they would wrap that line into a rectangle shape.

01:37:04 ◼   ► And they would say, this is your hard drive, all these, this rectangle,

01:37:07 ◼   ► and every one of these pixels represents like a particular, you know,

01:37:11 ◼   ► sector on a particular track or whatever, like not even that,

01:37:13 ◼   ► but they would break it up into some even sized chunks and they would rearrange

01:37:17 ◼   ► your files so that all the bits that belong to whatever the operating system are

01:37:22 ◼   ► all next to each other and all the bits that belong to this are next to each

01:37:24 ◼   ► other. When they say next to each other,

01:37:25 ◼   ► they meant like address wise because they can address these hard drives more or

01:37:30 ◼   ► less directly. And for example,

01:37:32 ◼   ► bits that were all on the same track one after the other,

01:37:36 ◼   ► you could read those in a big line because the disc would spin and like a little

01:37:40 ◼   ► record player, the little head would go over that, that track.

01:37:42 ◼   ► And it would read as the track, you know, went underneath,

01:37:45 ◼   ► they would read all those bits and it's great if they're all on that same track

01:37:49 ◼   ► because then you don't have to move the heads. If,

01:37:51 ◼   ► instead you had the first part of that files on the outermost track,

01:37:54 ◼   ► then the second part is on the innermost track,

01:37:56 ◼   ► then the third part is on a middle track.

01:37:57 ◼   ► Just to get those three little bits, you'd have to go, okay, read from here.

01:38:01 ◼   ► Now move the head, wait for it to steady, now read from here,

01:38:04 ◼   ► and then move the head again and wait for it to steady.

01:38:06 ◼   ► It was way faster if they were all on the same track cause you just move the head

01:38:08 ◼   ► and then spin the thing around 360 degrees and get all the bits off of that

01:38:11 ◼   ► track, right?

01:38:13 ◼   ► That in theory was what defragmenting was doing for you because the discs were

01:38:18 ◼   ► more or less directly addressable and the addresses were more or less sequential

01:38:22 ◼   ► within each cylinder or whatever.

01:38:23 ◼   ► And they would try to make the files contiguous so that the first bit of the

01:38:29 ◼   ► files right next to the second bit and third bit and fourth bit or fifth bit or

01:38:32 ◼   ► whatever. And that's why they'd have these very pleasing displays of taking your

01:38:36 ◼   ► disc where all these files are scrambled everywhere.

01:38:38 ◼   ► I'm going to make it all contiguous and I'm going to color code it so the

01:38:41 ◼   ► operating system is one color and your, I don't know,

01:38:44 ◼   ► audio files are another color. I don't remember what defragging things did,

01:38:47 ◼   ► but I did the same things with Norton utilities back in the day on my Mac.

01:38:50 ◼   ► Well, and there was, there was a reason why defrag,

01:38:53 ◼   ► why they would put all the files next to each other.

01:38:55 ◼   ► It wasn't just to make it look pretty, although that was, I think,

01:38:57 ◼   ► a big reason why people liked watching it. But it was,

01:39:00 ◼   ► it was because if you put all the files near each other,

01:39:03 ◼   ► there are all the parts of a file near each other,

01:39:05 ◼   ► the heads would have to spend less time going back and forth seeking across to

01:39:09 ◼   ► different cylinders on the disc. And cause back then and both still hard drives,

01:39:14 ◼   ► like, you know, spinning disc hard drives.

01:39:16 ◼   ► If you need to move the head back and forth,

01:39:19 ◼   ► it takes way longer than if you could read like sequentially off of one track or

01:39:23 ◼   ► off of nearby tracks. The more you have to move the head back and forth,

01:39:26 ◼   ► the slower it is by a lot.

01:39:27 ◼   ► Because you'd have to move the head fairly quickly to get there,

01:39:30 ◼   ► but then you have to wait for the head to settle because you wouldn't stop on a

01:39:33 ◼   ► dime. It would like vibrate a little bit and you had to wait for it to settle

01:39:36 ◼   ► down and then you could read again and then you'd start moving again.

01:39:39 ◼   ► It was terrible, right?

01:39:40 ◼   ► That whole paradigm started to fall apart way before SSDs came out,

01:39:46 ◼   ► because once you break the connection between the operating system and the

01:39:51 ◼   ► physical device in terms of addressing, all bets are off. So in the early days,

01:39:56 ◼   ► like I said, you could actually address physically the attributes of the hard

01:39:59 ◼   ► drive, but eventually you would say, Hey, hard drive,

01:40:03 ◼   ► write this into, you know, address, you know,

01:40:07 ◼   ► cylinder one sector five and the hard drive would go, Oh yeah, sure, totally.

01:40:11 ◼   ► I'll do that. And it would put those bits wherever the hell it wanted.

01:40:14 ◼   ► Like the connection between virtual addressing and physical addressing was broken

01:40:19 ◼   ► by modern hard drives because they would add things like cash and they would

01:40:23 ◼   ► allow the hard drive mechanism to make its own intelligent decisions about where

01:40:26 ◼   ► to allocate stuff. And it was no longer address one is next to address two is next

01:40:30 ◼   ► to address three is next to address four or whatever physical attributes where

01:40:33 ◼   ► you could sort of control it and say,

01:40:35 ◼   ► I'm going to put this on the outer track of the hard drive.

01:40:36 ◼   ► Cause that spins faster, right? And it will be faster to read.

01:40:39 ◼   ► And it would be like, Oh, you can tell the hard drive that,

01:40:42 ◼   ► but you can't actually make the hard drive do anything because the hardware is

01:40:45 ◼   ► now this complicated system,

01:40:46 ◼   ► which is a little miniature computer with its own algorithms of a head movement

01:40:50 ◼   ► and its own Ram cash and everything. And once that relationship was broken,

01:40:54 ◼   ► trying to do any kind of defragmenting thing to get the bits next to each other

01:40:59 ◼   ► wasn't guaranteed to do what you wanted. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't.

01:41:04 ◼   ► It was difficult to tell SSDs of course,

01:41:07 ◼   ► don't have a head that's moving anywhere. And an SSD is,

01:41:10 ◼   ► there's usually not any particular extra costs for reading something from one

01:41:15 ◼   ► location or another.

01:41:16 ◼   ► And that's not entirely true because they do read things in regions and it,

01:41:19 ◼   ► you know, the regions aren't the size of one bite.

01:41:21 ◼   ► So if you're going to read a bite from here and a bite from there,

01:41:23 ◼   ► there is additional overhead.

01:41:24 ◼   ► But now more than ever is a sucker's game to try

01:41:29 ◼   ► to arrange things physically in the storage through the operating

01:41:34 ◼   ► system.

01:41:35 ◼   ► Cause the operating system is so far from the physical reality of the storage

01:41:38 ◼   ► that it has no hope of controlling where things are. It,

01:41:43 ◼   ► so that's, that game is entirely over. So getting back to the question,

01:41:48 ◼   ► which is, Hey, if I'm doing simultaneous copies,

01:41:51 ◼   ► are the things spread out or are they together?

01:41:53 ◼   ► There are so many different layers between your time sequencing of operations.

01:41:59 ◼   ► Like I'm doing all the files at once, or I'm doing them in sequence.

01:42:01 ◼   ► There is various IO buffers in the operating system.

01:42:06 ◼   ► There is caching all the way through the entire storage hierarchy.

01:42:10 ◼   ► And then there is the actual physical addressing of the individual chips and the

01:42:13 ◼   ► SSD.

01:42:14 ◼   ► It's trying to control where things land by time

01:42:20 ◼   ► sequencing is not going to work the way you think it's going to work.

01:42:23 ◼   ► And even if it did work that way,

01:42:26 ◼   ► the benefits on something like an SSD are minimal.

01:42:29 ◼   ► That said, it takes some amount of computing to do IO.

01:42:33 ◼   ► And if you do lots and lots of IO in parallel, you could not in a finder copy,

01:42:40 ◼   ► but you could in a very large, you know,

01:42:42 ◼   ► much bigger scenario swamp the CPU by doing say

01:42:48 ◼   ► 100,000 threads, each of which is trying to write a file at exactly the same

01:42:52 ◼   ► time.

01:42:52 ◼   ► And that could slow you down as opposed to doing those 100,000 files either in

01:42:56 ◼   ► sequence or more likely in batches that equal the number of CPU cores you have.

01:43:00 ◼   ► Right? So it's not like time sequencing of IO can't affect your performance,

01:43:05 ◼   ► but when you're talking about three files in the finder,

01:43:09 ◼   ► a don't worry about it. And B,

01:43:12 ◼   ► there really is no control even at the operating system level of exactly where

01:43:16 ◼   ► those bits land in your storage.

01:43:18 ◼   ► That's the magic of a sort of a layered hierarchy,

01:43:21 ◼   ► like the separation of concerns,

01:43:23 ◼   ► having the operating system know the physical attributes of your storage and

01:43:27 ◼   ► control them directly is a worse system than what we have now. So just, uh,

01:43:31 ◼   ► let go and let storage handle it.

01:43:33 ◼   ► Trust the system. All right. And then finally, uh,

01:43:40 ◼   ► Aiden Traeger writes,

01:43:42 ◼   ► do you think Apple ever offer iCloud backup for the Mac?

01:43:45 ◼   ► It seems like another way for them to increase services revenue through iCloud

01:43:47 ◼   ► storage upgrades. I understand the logic here, but no,

01:43:51 ◼   ► given how stingy they are with, although it's gotten better recently,

01:43:55 ◼   ► how stingy they are with iCloud storage space as it is,

01:43:58 ◼   ► I personally do not see this happening.

01:44:00 ◼   ► This is why many time prior sponsor backblaze exists,

01:44:04 ◼   ► but that's just my two cents. Marco, what do you think?

01:44:06 ◼   ► iCloud backup seems like an obvious thing to offer on the Mac.

01:44:10 ◼   ► That being said, it's more complicated to offer on the Mac. You know,

01:44:15 ◼   ► as people like backblaze know, uh,

01:44:17 ◼   ► because Mac data locations, Mac data volumes,

01:44:21 ◼   ► they're just different from iOS devices. The way,

01:44:24 ◼   ► like what would you back up?

01:44:26 ◼   ► Like iCloud backup on the phone is not just a hundred percent file system clone

01:44:31 ◼   ► of your phone.

01:44:32 ◼   ► It backs up like things that are marked as documents and data for certain apps

01:44:36 ◼   ► and things like that.

01:44:37 ◼   ► And like as different reasons for how it backs up photos and whether it backs up

01:44:41 ◼   ► things like music or how it backs them up on the Mac. All of that is different.

01:44:46 ◼   ► Like the way where apps save data, how they save data,

01:44:49 ◼   ► how they mark their data. It's all different. Um,

01:44:52 ◼   ► whether they store it like in caches or in the library folder or whether they

01:44:55 ◼   ► store it in documents and on your file system and your home directory.

01:44:58 ◼   ► Like there's,

01:44:59 ◼   ► there's so many different variations of where and how they store everything that

01:45:03 ◼   ► in order to reasonably be sure that you have like all the important stuff on a

01:45:08 ◼   ► Mac, you kind of have to back up everything or at least almost everything,

01:45:11 ◼   ► which is way more data volume than what iCloud backup usually includes on your

01:45:16 ◼   ► iOS devices. So that's problem number one.

01:45:20 ◼   ► Problem number two is iCloud backup is actually a pretty bad backup.

01:45:25 ◼   ► I know this because like, so you know, I'm sure, I'm sure every,

01:45:31 ◼   ► every parent out there or even if you're not a parent,

01:45:34 ◼   ► you've probably had a situation where you or someone in your family has

01:45:40 ◼   ► accidentally caused some kind of data loss to happen on an iOS device,

01:45:44 ◼   ► but like in one app.

01:45:46 ◼   ► So we had an issue of like this recently where my kid was,

01:45:51 ◼   ► was editing some levels in a game that has like a level editor built in and he

01:45:54 ◼   ► accidentally deleted the wrong one on like the level list screen and he,

01:45:57 ◼   ► he actually deleted one that he didn't want to delete as he was leading other

01:46:01 ◼   ► ones and it crushed him and he,

01:46:04 ◼   ► he'd worked so hard on making this level and it was just gone and there was no

01:46:07 ◼   ► undo and I'm like, I'm like,

01:46:10 ◼   ► we might, if we, if we can, we can try to get this back.

01:46:15 ◼   ► I'm like if it was on here yesterday,

01:46:18 ◼   ► which was before your last iCloud backup, we can try to,

01:46:22 ◼   ► to restore this from yesterday's iCloud backup and see if it's in there.

01:46:27 ◼   ► But what that will require to basically have time machine for one app from like

01:46:32 ◼   ► five minutes ago or one day ago,

01:46:36 ◼   ► what that would require would be to capture a full computer based backup of the

01:46:41 ◼   ► iPad because a lot of stuff is not backed up to iCloud backup like Minecraft

01:46:46 ◼   ► data. So a lot,

01:46:48 ◼   ► so you still have to do it the full computer backup to even have a backup at

01:46:51 ◼   ► all. And the entire rest of the time that he's like using his iPad out in the

01:46:55 ◼   ► world or whatever upstairs,

01:46:56 ◼   ► there's no backup of any of that stuff that's not an iCloud backup unless like,

01:47:01 ◼   ► you know, the two or three times a year.

01:47:03 ◼   ► Remember to like do it to iTunes or to find her now and then to actually do like

01:47:07 ◼   ► a restore a like, Oh crap, I messed something up in this app.

01:47:10 ◼   ► You have to blow away an entire iOS device to restore all of iCloud's backup

01:47:16 ◼   ► from the previous backup onto it. So you have to like first wipe it,

01:47:22 ◼   ► then install an entire backup over it. So it's this massive,

01:47:26 ◼   ► like destructive and incredibly time consuming process to even see if you can

01:47:31 ◼   ► maybe get this information out. And at the end of the day,

01:47:34 ◼   ► like we didn't even end up attempting it. We decided, I'm like, I told him,

01:47:37 ◼   ► like, here's what, here's what it will take. Here's how long it will take.

01:47:40 ◼   ► Do you want to do it? And he decided not to cause it was gonna,

01:47:42 ◼   ► it was gonna be a while of having his iPad not be usable. But, uh,

01:47:47 ◼   ► it just showed like if this was something on a Mac,

01:47:50 ◼   ► I could just go to back please and like restore that one file,

01:47:56 ◼   ► which it would have backed up because it can do that. Cause on the Mac,

01:48:00 ◼   ► you can have third party backup solutions that can read the entire disc or read

01:48:04 ◼   ► special things however you want them to.

01:48:06 ◼   ► And they can do things that Apple doesn't do like offer point in time backup

01:48:11 ◼   ► recovery of like only certain files or save version histories of things.

01:48:16 ◼   ► And I just, I don't see Apple doing any of that stuff. I, that,

01:48:19 ◼   ► that stuff kind of looks messy to Apple.

01:48:22 ◼   ► That's not the style that they operate their services in.

01:48:24 ◼   ► Their services tend to be like, what is like the,

01:48:28 ◼   ► the 75% solution that we can offer that will solve basic needs in a basic way,

01:48:33 ◼   ► pretty reliably. Like that's what they do.

01:48:37 ◼   ► And so if they did offer iCloud backup for the Mac,

01:48:40 ◼   ► I think what we would want it to be in theory would be like cloud based time

01:48:45 ◼   ► machine. Basically that I think is what we would want it to be. Yep.

01:48:48 ◼   ► But I don't think it would actually be that. I think it's too,

01:48:50 ◼   ► I think that's too much data and too much functionality for the way Apple would

01:48:55 ◼   ► actually design and ship such a service if they ever would.

01:48:59 ◼   ► So I think really not only would they probably not do that because of the

01:49:04 ◼   ► aforementioned complexity of offering that on the Mac,

01:49:06 ◼   ► but also iCloud backup sucks if you have other options.

01:49:11 ◼   ► Like if I could have backblaze on my phone instead,

01:49:13 ◼   ► I would because it would be so much better.

01:49:16 ◼   ► And for all of our devices, like for, you know,

01:49:19 ◼   ► for all of his Minecraft levels and everything, that would be so much better.

01:49:22 ◼   ► Part of the reason that I play my games on a PC now is that I run backblaze on

01:49:26 ◼   ► the PC so we can back up my game data.

01:49:28 ◼   ► So I can't do that on an iPad or something.

01:49:32 ◼   ► So I think logically it makes sense, Hey,

01:49:36 ◼   ► they should offer iCloud backup for the Mac.

01:49:38 ◼   ► But once you start thinking about what that would entail and what that would