00:00:00 ◼ ► Hello, listeners. We had an audio issue this week that resulted in lower audio quality than usual. We are very sorry about this.
00:00:08 ◼ ► Maybe you won't even notice, and the person who made the mistake can get away with it without too much embarrassment. It was an honest mistake, and he feels bad enough already, so I won't even name him.
00:00:21 ◼ ► Anyway, hopefully this will work. And God, if you need to use a Skype backup for some crazy f*cked up reason, then blame me. But you shouldn't. You really shouldn't.
00:00:30 ◼ ► We need to talk about, for the next to last time, we need to talk about one very important thing, which is the RealAFM fundraiser for St. Jude.
00:00:47 ◼ ► By the time, within a few hours of the episode being released, not only did they cross the $75,000 mark, which was their goal, they crossed the $100,000 mark, I believe the same day that ATP was released.
00:01:01 ◼ ► And so, thank you from the bottom of all three of our hearts, and from all of Relay, even though ATP is not officially on Relay, obviously we are a, I guess you could say, a sister show to Relay.
00:01:11 ◼ ► It means a lot to all three of us, and especially to Relay, that our listeners and everyone else have opened their wallets and sent money to St. Jude.
00:01:20 ◼ ► I can't think of a better place to send some of your hard-earned money than St. Jude. If you aren't familiar with them, if you missed it last week, St. Jude is a children's research hospital that is in Memphis, Tennessee, which just so happens to be the hometown of Stephen Hackett, who is one of the founders of Relay FM.
00:01:36 ◼ ► St. Jude does incredible work with both research and treatment of childhood cancer, and what St. Jude has decided is, you know, hey, if you have this god-awful situation wherein one of your children has cancer, let's do what we can to take away the one thing that we can really and truly control, which is the cost of treatment.
00:01:54 ◼ ► And because treatment is so expensive in this country, because our country is so backwards in a lot of ways, it can be millions upon millions of dollars that is spent on one human being.
00:02:03 ◼ ► You know, because St. Jude doesn't charge their families, this money needs to come from somewhere, and guess what, kids? It comes from you and me.
00:02:09 ◼ ► And as we've talked about in the last episode, you know, all three of us are spending some absurd amount of money on Apple products this year.
00:02:19 ◼ ► As it turns out, we'll talk in the after show about how I'm signing up for spending even more money at Apple than I had originally intended this year.
00:02:24 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I actually have not yet made my donation, but before the end of the month, I will be making my donation to, or our donation, I should say, to St. Jude on behalf of the List family.
00:02:33 ◼ ► I encourage you, if you just spent $1,000 on a telephone or several hundred dollars on a watch, I bet you can scrape together at least a hundred bucks to send St. Jude to help out families who are fighting and battling childhood cancer.
00:02:47 ◼ ► I cannot think of a better organization to give your money to. I cannot thank you enough, and I ask you, if you haven't yet contributed, to please think about doing so.
00:02:55 ◼ ► Go to stjude.org/atp. S-T-J-U-D-E.org/atp. If you can send any money their way, even five bucks, we'd appreciate it.
00:03:06 ◼ ► But if you want to be guilt-free from having spent a thousand plus dollars on an iPhone 11 Pro Max or whatever you chose to get, maybe spend like a hundred bucks, maybe even five hundred bucks on St. Jude.
00:03:23 ◼ ► All right, let's move on and let's talk about the follow-up that I really wanted to put in last week. I know you've been waiting with bated breath.
00:03:31 ◼ ► Before you continue, I did happen to take a look at that little follow-up snippet that you linked in the notes. Do you want to say anything about that, Casey?
00:03:40 ◼ ► I don't know. I listened to it two or three days ago. Why? You yelled at me at the time, didn't you?
00:03:44 ◼ ► What it is, is you, Casey, saying that you have some follow-up and both me and Marco saying, "Hey, wait a second. We don't do follow-up in Apple event shows."
00:03:55 ◼ ► That's the clip you're putting in. It says, "Proof that we had to show." All right, just anyway, you can put the link in. People can judge themselves. I'm just saying it's not really helping your case.
00:04:05 ◼ ► I'm vindicated. I'm telling you, I'm vindicated. All right, moving on. The follow-up from last week that I never got to. I know you've been super excited to hear about it.
00:04:12 ◼ ► When we were talking about Sirius XM and how I was trying to, let's say I was trying to time shift some of the recording.
00:04:21 ◼ ► Yeah, it does feel like a lifetime ago. I had said, "I finally paid for Sirius XM, but I used this thing that Bank of America offers wherein you can make up a fake credit card number."
00:04:32 ◼ ► It's a real credit card number, but I one time used credit card number in order to give to this company. I had said, "Oh, they'll probably put me in collections if I just let the credit card expire," which was the theory I was going to have if I had problems canceling.
00:04:45 ◼ ► Well, as it turns out, this feature is called ShopSafe. Within days of that recording, Bank of America sent the following.
00:04:53 ◼ ► "On September 20th, we are discontinuing our online ShopSafe service. At this date, you will no longer be able to use the service to create new ShopSafe virtual credit card numbers or make purchases online with Safe ShopSafe virtual credit card numbers."
00:05:04 ◼ ► So my grandiose plan to prevent me from having to have an uncomfortable conversation with Sirius XM if I want to cancel.
00:05:12 ◼ ► Which wouldn't have worked in the first place, but just go with it. Was to use ShopSafe, which now isn't going to work anymore.
00:05:17 ◼ ► By the way, ShopSafe was Flash only, and at the same time this email came out, I noticed that Chrome was saying, "Hey, we're no longer supporting Flash coming soon."
00:05:26 ◼ ► So I think what happened was they just decided, "We can't be bothered rewriting this, so we're just retiring."
00:05:33 ◼ ► So now you know, everyone. I know you were waiting with bated breath for all that time, and now you know.
00:05:42 ◼ ► See? I'm telling you, it was so important. It got sidetracked a week. A week, Jon! A week!
00:05:58 ◼ ► All right, moving on. Jon, why don't you tell us about other Jon's theory about Apple presenter names, please?
00:06:04 ◼ ► In our very long conversation about the Apple event last week, we were talking about how some presenters were announced or brought to the stage by saying their first and last name, and some just had first name.
00:06:17 ◼ ► His idea is that if you've been on the stage presenting at an Apple event before, you get just the first name.
00:06:25 ◼ ► But if you've never been on the stage before, you get first and last, which I think for all the names in the presentation that it works out for, it's kind of charming and sort of familiar.
00:06:38 ◼ ► And it's like, honestly, I'm not sure I remember. This person may have been at an Apple event before, but there's a lot of Apple events and a lot of people, and I can't even remember the names of people I meet in real life, let alone people on stage in a presentation.
00:06:50 ◼ ► But anyway, I think that fits with the facts and it makes some amount of sense, and I think it's kind of adorable, but also I think it's not maybe a great idea.
00:06:58 ◼ ► So Apple, please consider first and last names, at least until they've been on stage, let's say three times, because then we're like, "Oh, yeah, I know that person."
00:07:05 ◼ ► I would even go even further. I would say first and last names and titles for anybody who isn't on the executive leadership page on the site.
00:07:20 ◼ ► Yep, I dig it. We were also told that Midnight Green, the color that I will be getting in a couple of days, when I'll be...
00:07:27 ◼ ► That actually might be my third consecutive day visiting the Apple store, which you'll hear about later.
00:07:31 ◼ ► Midnight Green, not a China thing. I don't remember which one of us said we thought it might.
00:07:36 ◼ ► I had heard it as a theory put forward, that, "Oh, this is a thing in China," but it was just some random tweet, so I didn't know if there was any providence.
00:07:45 ◼ ► My favorite feedback on this were the multiple people who pointed out, "Yeah, we said this must be from demand from somewhere else. Meanwhile, everyone we know is getting green."
00:07:57 ◼ ► Yeah, a lot of that is just because it's the one different color alongside Space Gray and white, silver, or whatever.
00:08:04 ◼ ► I think what really shows is the appetite, as you said last show, Marc, that you wish that the pro model had the vibrant colors and had more choice, but it doesn't.
00:08:13 ◼ ► So you're lucky if you get one interesting color per year, and that's what everyone's going for.
00:08:18 ◼ ► Poor Jason Snell pointed out that his red-green color blindness makes it so it looks exactly the same as the Space Gray run to him.
00:08:24 ◼ ► I mean, in all fairness, many of the people who have them so far say it does look very similar to Space Gray, especially in low lighting.
00:08:30 ◼ ► Jason Snell had a really good article over on Six Colors about the U1 UltraWideBand, which is a really great read, including a brief interview or some commentary from the CEO of a company that makes some of these chips.
00:08:45 ◼ ► And it sounds like, and maybe I'm reading this wrong, so correct me gentlemen, but it sounds like what it's kind of doing is almost like GPS, but at a very, very, very micro level, so you can get a really good position of where you are in relation to another thing based on just one of these chips and a couple of antennas or something like that. Is that kind of a reasonable summary?
00:09:07 ◼ ► Yeah, I think so. It's doing a time of signal propagation to locate things in the same way that the time of signals from satellites overhead lets you locate yourself on the Earth. It's just a smaller version of it.
00:09:17 ◼ ► I would love to see the teardown and see exactly what the hardware looks like for this and how it's incorporated.
00:09:21 ◼ ► But yeah, this definitely sounds cool. We talked about it last week in terms of the one feature that Apple announced that uses this chip, which being that you can point your phone at somebody else's phone with a U1, and they will be the default top item and airdrop.
00:09:35 ◼ ► So, you know, of all the people listed or whatever. But of course, all the rumors about those little tiles that you can stick on, which is a name, we call them tiles, which is so terrible.
00:09:45 ◼ ► Tile is a company that makes a product like this. Apple probably will not call that thing tiles. But anyway, it's a little tiny thing that you can stick on your belongings, and then if you lose your belongings with other things stuck to it, you could use your phone to find it.
00:09:57 ◼ ► With much, much greater precision than like, find my iPhone today, which will tell you that your phone is somewhere in your house and you can make it beep and listen for it like it's a smoke alarm with a bad battery until you find it.
00:10:08 ◼ ► But this presumably would give you a much more precise location, even a location that you could use with your fancy AR goggles to just look around and see where it is and yada yada.
00:10:16 ◼ ► So anyway, link in the show notes to Jason's article to give you an idea of what could be in store for us all with these U1 chips and all the new phones.
00:10:23 ◼ ► Real time follow up from Ryan Jones. It's more like radar in terms of operation than it is GPS. I said GPS earlier. What I just meant was location, relative locations of things, but he is right that it works.
00:10:33 ◼ ► As you had said, John, you know about the time it takes for signals to travel and so it is more radar-esque. And that is a reasonable correction.
00:10:41 ◼ ► Speaking of things that were corrected, a lot of people pointed out to us more than I expected that, hey, you know, you guys have been begging about iPhones to get thicker over time and they have been.
00:10:53 ◼ ► And as it turns out, I talked about that last episode, but Mark would justifiably cut it out because we went for about 14 hours last episode.
00:10:59 ◼ ► But yeah, the iPhones, if you look at each individual lines, you know, like the 10 to the 10s to the 11 Pro, they are getting ever so slightly thicker ever since something like the 5s.
00:11:11 ◼ ► And Joe Beninato put together both a chart and a graph that he had posted on Twitter, which we will link to in the show notes.
00:11:20 ◼ ► But short, short version, they are getting thicker and the assumption is that a lot of the battery life gains in the Pro models is because of a combination of the phones just plain getting thicker and, you know, perhaps using some of the space that the 3D Touch sensor was taking up in prior phones.
00:11:38 ◼ ► Yeah, as we record this, unfortunately, I only checked about an hour ago. The iFixit teardown isn't up yet, so we're still going by people's speculation, but someone tweeted out a bunch of statistical speculation about the nature of the phones.
00:11:51 ◼ ► This was, I think, even before the embargo broke or whatever. So I'm not sure where they're getting these numbers, but they have guesses for the increase in battery size for all the various phones.
00:12:00 ◼ ► In theory, the iPhone 11, which are the XR, the XR versus the 11 has 6% larger battery and the 10s versus the 11 Pro has a 20% larger battery and the 10s Max versus the 11 Pro Max.
00:12:19 ◼ ► So I'm mostly trusting the battery numbers because you can pull this from the devices or whatever.
00:12:25 ◼ ► The really tricky bit in these specs that have been posted, again, unconfirmed, were people trying to measure RAM.
00:12:33 ◼ ► And the theory here is that the iPhone 11 has 4GB, whereas its predecessor had 3GB, and the 11 Pro has 6GB, where its predecessor had 4GB.
00:12:42 ◼ ► And same thing for the Pro Max, but the 6GB thing is a big question because I've heard a lot of doubts about that.
00:12:46 ◼ ► So anyway, all this is to say, I can't wait to see the iFixit teardown to find out exactly how much RAM these things have.
00:12:52 ◼ ► And you would think with the embargo up, didn't all those reviewers just ask Apple to tell them how big the battery is and how much RAM it has?
00:12:59 ◼ ► Oh, you can ask Apple that, but they don't like to talk about those things. And so they don't.
00:13:11 ◼ ► I do like to see RAM going up over time and they're so powerful now that they can do stuff with that RAM.
00:13:18 ◼ ► Like, if they have Pro right in the name, they should have a huge amount of RAM. Kind of like the weird thing they did with the iPad Pro, where only the one that had a terabyte of flash had the extra amount of RAM.
00:13:27 ◼ ► But I think that's a cool sort of Pro-level feature, and hey, they did put Pro in the name.
00:13:33 ◼ ► And the battery size, I think just based on the size and weight, which you can see in the graphs, it's clear that something's heavier in there, and the battery makes total sense that it's larger.
00:13:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, no matter what the exact numbers end up being, like, where we are right now is we don't have the teardown yet, none of us have phones yet, but the review embargo lifted this morning for all the press units that went out.
00:13:58 ◼ ► And all the press reviews, all of them, even the ones from publications that are normally critical of battery life, like Joanna Stern at Wall Street Journal, all of them said the battery life is significantly better.
00:14:09 ◼ ► So whatever the numbers actually end up being, it almost doesn't matter. Like, now we know, like, okay, it's a big deal. They made the battery bigger, and it made the battery life way better with the other improvements as well.
00:14:20 ◼ ► So that's just great news. And frankly, I don't really care about RAM, and I don't really care about how they made battery life better. As long as they did make it better, that's fantastic.
00:14:32 ◼ ► The only thing, so with all the press reviews, I mean, I don't know if we're jumping ahead here, but like, so far all the press reviews seem to agree on the two major themes of, like, the camera actually is significantly better in certain ways, and also the battery life is significantly better.
00:14:47 ◼ ► So those are great things. The one thing that the reviews have not seemed to say much about, or if they did say it, they said, "Oh, I can't notice the difference," is the increased angles and distance for Face ID.
00:14:59 ◼ ► No one seems to really notice that, or they say it's about the same. That's the only thing about it that I'm a little bit disappointed to hear, because that's one thing I really wanted, was improved Face ID distance and stuff.
00:15:10 ◼ ► But we'll see when we actually get these phones. But so far, you know, the major themes of, like, battery and camera being significant upgrades, that's good for me, and I'm happy with that.
00:15:21 ◼ ► Did you see any reviews that actually test, like, explicitly said they tested the Face ID angle, or even mentioned it at all?
00:15:28 ◼ ► So it could be, I mean, it could be just not a thing that they, because the embargo was pretty tight in terms of, like, when they got the phones and when the embargo was lifted, so maybe there just wasn't time to do that, and, you know, the other features are obviously so much more important, but when you get your phone, try it against your XS, and we'll see.
00:15:44 ◼ ► I thought Pansarino had said something about it, but maybe I'm making that up, that it was, oh, here we go. This is from TechCrunch's review by Matthew Pansarino. Now I'm quoting, "Oh, about that improved Face ID angle. I saw maybe a slight improvement, if any, but not that much. A few degrees? Sometimes hard to say. I'll be interested to see what other reviewers found. Maybe my face sucks."
00:16:08 ◼ ► I'm not looking at you. So, yeah, so, as you said, I'm basically reiterating what you guys said, you know, nobody seems to be completely convinced from what I've seen, but Matt at least had mentioned it, and was kind of ambivalent about it.
00:16:22 ◼ ► I mean, some of the gains are just iOS 13. Like, iOS 13 made Face ID a little bit faster, and so they could be kind of lumping that in with their claimed gains.
00:16:31 ◼ ► Alright, moving on. The iPhone 11 lineup is said to include two-way charging hardware, but the software has it disabled. Now, we had talked a little bit about this idea last week, and one of the things that we, and I think particularly I, had said was, I don't really feel like this is something I need in my life.
00:16:51 ◼ ► I'm sure I would enjoy it if I had it, but I don't yearn to charge other people's phones from my phone. But then a lot of people wrote in and pointed out, "Yes, but what if this would allow you to charge an Apple Watch without bringing the bespoke Apple Watch charger when you travel?"
00:17:07 ◼ ► And that, my friends, has dramatically changed my tune. Now, with that said, the Apple Watch, as far as I knew, even the modern, even the brand new ones, don't support regular Qi charging, is that correct?
00:17:19 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know if they officially support it, but I think it might be able to get it to work, because it's not like it, you know, it's just kind of like a coil of wire or whatever that you induce a current in. I can imagine it sort of working, but I don't know what the official support situation is.
00:17:33 ◼ ► Well, and the reality is, like, Apple could make it work with their phone. They could do that if they wanted to.
00:17:38 ◼ ► That's true, too. But I don't know if that's, if this is even true or not, but people are saying that the 2-way charging hardware may be there, and here's another reason why we want to see the Syfixa teardown, but the software has it disabled, at least for now, which is a very interesting approach, and I'd be interested to see if that's the case.
00:17:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I never considered the possibility, you know, I was also very critical of this, of 2-way charging last week, saying, like, why would you want to kill your phone's battery to charge something else, and it would be slow and everything, but I hadn't even considered the possibility of, like, using your phone as a charger for something else while your phone is plugged in.
00:18:10 ◼ ► And, you know, so therefore, yeah, you could just, you know, take the phone and the watch somewhere and just take the phone charger and plug it in overnight with the watch on top of it with the phone face down, like, you could do that, yeah, I still think it's not an incredibly compelling feature, but maybe that's easy to say as somebody who doesn't travel with an Apple watch, but it's, you know, all the rest of the uses for it I think are not incredibly compelling, so I'm sure there's a good reason.
00:18:33 ◼ ► Well, no, we've really left the Johnny Ive design error when Apple incorporates a pop socket on the back of their phones, but it doubles as a watch charger.
00:18:48 ◼ ► Alright, moving on, still in follow-up, it's the follow-up that does not end, the Apple release date matrix, so there are so many different pieces of hardware and software that are coming out at so many different times that our good friend John Voorhees over at MacStories has put together an entire page full of information about what is being released and so on and so forth. This is an incredibly long list.
00:19:11 ◼ ► Yeah, it's been confusing. I mean, the confusion continues, I think it's on this list with Apple Arcade and what's the state of that and what's released when and can you get the things just on iPhones and iPads and what about the Apple TV version. It's just, yeah, Apple's got a lot of stuff and it's all kind of overlapping and all kind of interlinked with each other, so if you get confused, reference this page, which I assume is correct as of our recording, but who knows? By maybe by the time you listen to this, things will change again.
00:19:36 ◼ ► I will say, on this topic, as we're going to release this show about a day before iOS 13.0 is released, iOS 13.1 is coming out in a couple of weeks, if you're the kind of person who tends to wait until the .1 update before you upgrade to the major OS, let me advise you this year, wait for the .2.
00:19:59 ◼ ► Because, you know, this 13.0, which all the reviews noted, is a buggy mess and it's usable, like, you know, when your new phone, if you're getting the new phone, you're stuck, you know, you have to have it anyway, but if you're not getting the new phone yet and you have a choice of when you update to iOS 13.0, whatever,
00:20:19 ◼ ► I would say wait, like, one version past what you normally would update to. If you normally do it immediately, wait for 13.1. If you normally do .1, wait for .2, because it is still, like, I was using the 13 betas most of the summer, and again, like, it's usable, like, your phone's not going to melt, like, it is usable, but 13.0 feels like a typical year's, like, beta 2.
00:20:47 ◼ ► And unfortunately, 13.1, I would say, feels like a typical year's beta 3 or 4, still. Like, it still feels like a beta. There are still beta bugs. Like, 13.1, I still have issues with mail, the mail app.
00:21:05 ◼ ► I have issues, 13.1 broke the way the navigation bar handles transitions in all apps, and to the point where if you happen to have overcast on a 13.1 device right now, you can, this is a bug introduced in the latest beta, go try to add a podcast via search, then hit cancel and go back to the root menu, and the navigation items in the top navigation bar from the search will be on top of the ones that go in the other menu, and you'll have a big stack of overlapping navigation items.
00:21:35 ◼ ► I'm not doing anything crazy here. This is just a search controller and a navigation bar, and it's, like, these are, like, common things, and in the latest beta, they broke that. They broke the way navigation bars work in, like, beta 2 of iOS 13.1.
00:21:50 ◼ ► Like, this is the kind of bug we're still dealing with here. So, like, this is the kind of thing that, again, like, normally you would see this, like, in mid-June in the beta cycle. Like, not even July. You'd see this kind of stuff, like, in mid-June, and that's still where we are here with what is supposed to be the stability release 13.1 that comes after the really buggy 13.0.
00:22:13 ◼ ► So, this is still a mess. So, I would, again, strongly advise, wait at least one extra version past what you normally would before you update.
00:22:22 ◼ ► Yeah, I finally installed an iOS 13 beta. I installed 13.1 on my iPad, and the first thing I did after it was installed was tap the YouTube app icon, and it sat there for a while, and then YouTube crashed.
00:22:35 ◼ ► Yeah, there's problems, like, Instagram too. Instagram has problems with the keyboard. Like, if you're typing a comment or whatever the text on Stories is called, after a couple of tries of typing, the keyboard will just not appear anymore.
00:22:50 ◼ ► Like, it'll be a blank area, and if you tap where the keyboard should be, you can type out things. But you're doing it blindly. You can't see it.
00:23:01 ◼ ► Again, there's so many bugs like that, and again, this is like beta 2 level bugs here, not 13.1. We should not be seeing these kind of bugs for a bug fix release that's supposed to come out at the end of September.
00:23:17 ◼ ► Even the 13.0 GM is rough, and the 13.1 beta is also rough. It's not as bad as I had been led to believe, but it is not great. And I echo what you're saying, Marco. If you're the kind of person that is capable of waiting for plus one of what you normally do, I would do that.
00:23:33 ◼ ► And the big stuff seems pretty much fine. Your phone's not going to reboot in the middle of the day, probably. It's not going to burn the whole battery down for no reason, probably. But there's just so many little paper cuts still all over the place.
00:23:47 ◼ ► I don't think iOS 13 is so great that you need it so fast. You're not really getting much by updating to it that couldn't wait a few more weeks for the next version.
00:23:57 ◼ ► Do we get more icons on the springboard on your iPad? Although speaking of the iPad, I installed 13.1 beta, I tried to launch YouTube, it shows me the YouTube slash screen and crashes. What would I do after that? Of course I'd tap the YouTube icon again, and it worked. That's not reassuring.
00:24:15 ◼ ► I didn't use the app, I tapped the icon, and it crashed, and I tapped it again, and it didn't crash. Okay, 13.1, this is how we're going to do it, I guess. It's mostly been okay, to both of your points. It's fine, but it's a little bit wonky sometimes, and you don't know why. I'm looking forward to 13.2.
00:24:38 ◼ ► Yep, me too. Alright, so other news that has slipped a little bit under the radar over the last week or so is that Apple Care Plus can be purchased in one lump sum for two years of service or coverage or whatever.
00:24:53 ◼ ► But in general, you can also treat it as just another monthly subscription, because everything should be a subscription these days according to Apple, and you can just pay for it month to month.
00:25:09 ◼ ► Maybe it was. Anyway, I remember having questions about it after the event, and saying, "Well, what do they mean by that? Is it monthly, like you're just taking the lump sum and dividing it up into payments because you don't want to pay it all up front?"
00:25:22 ◼ ► But no, the answer is, you just pay a certain amount a month, and you just keep paying that forever and ever and ever, and basically, Apple has reinvented insurance.
00:25:32 ◼ ► I mean, it makes perfect sense, because that's what Apple Care Plus is on the phone, is basically fancy insurance, and before, your only option was buy it for two years or don't buy it, and have one year limited coverage, and then eventually it became two years of accidental damage coverage.
00:25:48 ◼ ► But now, it's like you can still do that, or you can pay monthly, which will end up being a little bit more money if you actually keep it for two years.
00:25:55 ◼ ► But what's nice about it is that it decouples that time interval from it, so now, you can buy it if you want to, you can still do the same thing you used to do and buy the two years up front for about the same price.
00:26:04 ◼ ► Or, you can just, you know, if you only keep your phone for a year, great, you can buy just one year of it and then stop it on that phone and start it for the next phone.
00:26:12 ◼ ► If you keep your phone for three years, I'm pretty sure you can keep the Apple Care going for three years.
00:26:18 ◼ ► Yeah, just do the math before you decide to keep your phone for six years and pay maybe insurance every time, because that's probably not going to be a great deal for you.
00:26:27 ◼ ► Well, I mean, if you're the kind of person who, like, you know, drops your phone on average of like once or twice per phone that you own, like, that could be significant.
00:26:34 ◼ ► Like, for me, I still don't buy Apple Care for my phones, but someone else in the family needs it right now, and I'm happy that we have it on that device.
00:26:44 ◼ ► That's funny. I did Apple Care once in the past. I don't even remember what phone it was on.
00:26:50 ◼ ► But this year, I am pretty sure I'm going to stop using cases for the first time in a long time.
00:26:57 ◼ ► And so this year, I decided to get Apple Care on my phone. So, as discussed in the last episode, I can be caseless, caseless.
00:27:05 ◼ ► And this way, if I do drop and shatter my phone, it will be considerably cheaper than it would have been otherwise.
00:27:11 ◼ ► I need to look farther into this thing, because my other question that I realized I didn't put the answer to in the notes here is like, if you can you buy this at any time?
00:27:20 ◼ ► Like, if I decide six months into owning the thing, can I start paying monthly for it? And the second question, can I interrupt it?
00:27:26 ◼ ► If I started paying for it as soon as I got the device, but stopped for a month, can I resume for a month?
00:27:30 ◼ ► Like, what are the rules about, you know, because there's lots of things that I've always wanted to do with computers.
00:27:35 ◼ ► Like, oh, I'll use it for the first year to see if it's a lemon, and if it's not a lemon, I used to be able to do this.
00:27:41 ◼ ► If it's a lemon, I'll buy the extended warranty, but if it's not, I won't, you know, that type of thing.
00:27:45 ◼ ► Or, you know, not being able to afford to pay it for a couple months and just being more careful with your phone, but then resuming paying for it later.
00:27:53 ◼ ► I don't know what all the rules are. I'll look into it. If my interest stays until next week, I'll look into it.
00:27:58 ◼ ► They had a thing with Apple Careless Before where if you didn't buy it upfront, you could add it later, I think within a month,
00:28:05 ◼ ► but you'd have to bring it into an Apple store and they would have to look at it to make sure you hadn't already broken it.
00:28:09 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the problem with, like, you know, buying it and then not buying it when the device is new.
00:28:15 ◼ ► That's always sort of the problem of, well, you bought it, then suddenly you drop your phone. What a coincidence.
00:28:19 ◼ ► Yeah, right. And this is the kind of thing, too. And this goes into a lot of the stuff about, like, repair law and battery servicing that we didn't ever have time to talk about on this show, I don't think, that went on last month.
00:28:32 ◼ ► But anything about iPhones getting repaired or replaced, you have to keep in mind, like, we talk about it and we think about it as, like, the ideal case.
00:28:43 ◼ ► People who, you know, have their stuff and they're being honest and they break it, oops, let me get it fixed, whatever,
00:28:49 ◼ ► but any time Apple creates a way for you to transform a broken phone into a working phone, people will take advantage of it in giant scam operations
00:28:58 ◼ ► to basically, like, you know, take, like, trashed phones and swap the serial numbers and somehow bring them in.
00:29:05 ◼ ► It's like, there's these giant, like, scams that run all over the world where people basically try to get free phones out of Apple so they can sell them and make a bunch of money.
00:29:14 ◼ ► Like, so anything Apple does in this area, you have to also consider, like, how could this be used fraudulently at scale to defraud Apple?
00:29:23 ◼ ► Because it will be. Like, whatever possibility is there, it will be exploited. And so you kind of have to consider, like, you know, whenever they touch this area,
00:29:31 ◼ ► whenever they make it possible to get things repaired or replaced or whatever else, like, there's always that risk that you have to consider.
00:29:37 ◼ ► We were sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host. Go to linode.com/atp to learn more and get a $20 credit.
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00:31:03 ◼ ► compared to the amount of power I got. And they've been just, you know, not only is it super easy to do,
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00:31:14 ◼ ► and I want to drop that plan down, I can. No problem. And then I just pay for the hours that I was using it.
00:31:19 ◼ ► And if I don't change anything, I just pay the monthly rate by the time I hit that cap.
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00:31:41 ◼ ► Thank you so much to Linode for keeping all my servers running and for sponsoring our show.
00:31:45 ◼ ► Now we should move on and talk about the press embargo that we've kind of been, you know, touching off of already.
00:31:55 ◼ ► I've read Gruber's review, I've read A Piece of the Verge's review, Neely Patel's review, and I've read
00:32:01 ◼ ► Panzareno's review. All of them seem to be saying the same things. I think it was Marco that said so earlier.
00:32:06 ◼ ► The camera's great, the battery life is great, the phones are great, you probably want one.
00:32:10 ◼ ► But I assume that the two of you want to dig in a little bit deeper on some of this, so where shall we start?
00:32:17 ◼ ► Yeah, I'll start with Gruber's. He had a couple of interesting points that I hadn't seen elsewhere.
00:32:21 ◼ ► And particular things that people were speculating about during the event that actually turned out to be true.
00:32:31 ◼ ► The thing that people were saying that Apple would do well that a lot of multi-camera phones don't do as well is sort of making sure the cameras are well-matched to each other.
00:32:42 ◼ ► That when you transition from one camera to another, the colors don't look different or the perspective isn't weird or whatever.
00:32:49 ◼ ► And Gruber said that basically, like, not only are all the cameras the same, but you can smoothly transition between them, like during a zoom motion or whatever.
00:32:57 ◼ ► And you have no idea it's even changing cameras. That's the type of super cool magic that I would like.
00:33:02 ◼ ► But in particular, I really am glad that the cameras are sort of calibrated to each other, because that's what you would expect from an Apple device.
00:33:13 ◼ ► It's bad enough that the apertures are different, which has some effect, but apparently they managed to paper over that as well.
00:33:18 ◼ ► You can even do it while you're shooting video. So you're going to be shooting video on your triple camera phone.
00:33:23 ◼ ► And zoom while you're shooting video, and while it's recording the video, it will switch smoothly from one camera to another, so it just looks like you zoomed in on the video, which is pretty amazing.
00:33:37 ◼ ► If you're recording in 4K 60, you are stuck with the camera lens that you started with, because apparently that is stretching the limits of the processor.
00:33:48 ◼ ► But, you know, I'm a 4K 60 shooter. I was talking about this earlier today. I don't actually mind this limitation, because the phone has never been able to switch lenses during video.
00:33:58 ◼ ► So for me, it's just like, everyone else gets this one new feature except me. But I haven't had it ever before, and I don't really ever need it.
00:34:07 ◼ ► So I'd rather keep shooting 4K 60 and enjoy my new dynamic range that I get with this new mode than drop down to 4K 30 just to be able to zoom in.
00:34:16 ◼ ► It's probably more important for photographs, though, because the experience, like, this is part of the magic of the camera system and everything, all the software.
00:34:24 ◼ ► If you look at the back of the phone, it's got these three things on it, but your experience from the front of the phone is you just have a phone with a camera.
00:34:30 ◼ ► Like, you don't think about three cameras. I mean, I suppose you can, if you're a nerd and realize the aperture differences and select them or whatever, but if you're just using your camera,
00:34:39 ◼ ► just pretend there's one lens back there, and you can zoom in and zoom out, and it's just like, from the front face of the camera, it's just, or the front face of the camera,
00:34:48 ◼ ► the front face of the phone is just like you have a single really, really good camera, and that's the way it should be.
00:34:54 ◼ ► And one thing I love about this, too, is like, the specs of them are much closer than they used to be.
00:34:59 ◼ ► So in the previous phones that had the telephoto and the regular lens, the telephoto was never as good in pretty big ways.
00:35:08 ◼ ► Like, I think the first ones, I don't think were even stabilized, were they? I don't remember.
00:35:21 ◼ ► - That was the wide camera, back when it was only wide cameras. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
00:35:25 ◼ ► But until the 11s, the ones that have the telephoto camera, the telephoto lens had a much tighter maximum aperture.
00:35:34 ◼ ► We mentioned this last week, and so the result was that the telephoto camera did way worse in low light than the wide camera.
00:35:42 ◼ ► Like, you get much more noise, to the point where sometimes the phone would actually evaluate the conditions
00:35:49 ◼ ► and would use a digital zoom on the wide sensor in low light when you were using 2X mode,
00:35:56 ◼ ► because it was less crappy than actually using the 2X sensor because it was such a worse camera.
00:36:02 ◼ ► And so the result of that was that these last couple years I've had the 2X camera with the 10 and 10S,
00:36:07 ◼ ► there were a lot of times where I just wouldn't use it when I wanted to, because the image quality was just so much worse.
00:36:15 ◼ ► And with the 11 family, with the 11 Pro specifically, like the one that has the telephoto,
00:36:30 ◼ ► And I know these numbers don't sound like a big difference if you weren't a photographer, but trust me,
00:36:33 ◼ ► f/2.4 to f/2.0 is a huge increase in light, and f/2.0 to f/1.8 is a relatively small jump.
00:36:48 ◼ ► The wide is not stabilized, and you don't need stabilization nearly as much on a 13mm equivalent lens
00:36:55 ◼ ► as you would on a 26mm or a 52mm, but I would like it to be stabilized just to have that across all three,
00:37:05 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm really happy to see that all three lenses are almost optically the same quality,
00:37:17 ◼ ► With this phone, you're no longer having to make a ton of trade-offs between, "Well, I want to shoot telephoto,
00:37:31 ◼ ► There are very, very few of those little tricks and exceptions and trade-offs you have to make between the cameras now,
00:37:38 ◼ ► Speaking of trade-offs, another one is that night mode is not available on the ultra-wide lens due to hardware change.
00:37:54 ◼ ► So on camera sensors, there are a certain number of parts of the sensor that are used for focusing,
00:38:03 ◼ ► I'm not sure how the focus pixels are related to night mode, but anyway, it sounds like it's a hardware limitation,
00:38:18 ◼ ► but there's still room, so don't worry. They'll find a way to improve the camera next year too.
00:38:22 ◼ ► One of the really funny parts of Gruber's review, which one of you, I guess John, put in the notes,
00:38:32 ◼ ► So he said, "The ultrawide lens is so insanely wide that I need to learn a new phone grip while shooting photos.
00:38:40 ◼ ► And he actually includes a picture of him and how he holds the phone when he's shooting,
00:38:44 ◼ ► and I guess he's holding it wrong because, as it turns out, I guess you can see some of his finger in the frame that he captured.
00:38:56 ◼ ► you would never in a million years think that any part of his finger was anywhere in the frame.
00:39:00 ◼ ► Yeah, he's not blocking the lens at all. This does not bode well for me because I get my fingers in the frame now without an ultrawide lens.
00:39:07 ◼ ► I need to just get it. I was thinking about this when we were talking about the camera and I'm thinking about that little bulge on the back or whatever.
00:39:14 ◼ ► I know there's lots of meme images going around making the camera cluster look like a stovetop with little stovetop rings or whatever.
00:39:22 ◼ ► They say, "Next year there'll be four and it will look like a real stovetop," and they show a little camera score with four cameras in it.
00:39:28 ◼ ► I don't think they're going to four cameras next year. Who knows? I mean, again, the Gillette razor thing we've already covered.
00:39:33 ◼ ► But I am thinking about assuming next year's phone is like the redesign year, where we've had a couple years of this similar form factor,
00:39:45 ◼ ► and next year is, I don't know, a flat-sided iPhone SE look and shape, or who knows what it is, like a redesign redesign.
00:39:56 ◼ ► So you've got three cameras. It's kind of weird that they're in a square now. I know they tried to sort of work it out by saying,
00:40:02 ◼ ► "Well, we also have the flash and the microphone," but honestly, if you have three big circular things, putting them in a square is not particularly harmonious.
00:40:11 ◼ ► Putting four in a square would work, but I'm not sure they're going to go to four cameras.
00:40:18 ◼ ► Triangle is even more disharmonious with the Apple design aesthetic probably with the whole round rack thing.
00:40:23 ◼ ► But the reason I think in the context of blocking with your finger is, especially with wide lenses like this,
00:40:30 ◼ ► the arrangement they choose and the position they choose in the back of the phone has user interface implications
00:40:36 ◼ ► in terms of how likely people are to actually cover the lens with their fingers or get their fingers in the shot.
00:40:41 ◼ ► And you see a lot of this with other phones that choose different locations for their cameras.
00:40:45 ◼ ► Some of them can be in the middle of the top. Back in the day, some of them were actually dead center in the middle of the phone.
00:40:51 ◼ ► I don't think anybody does that anymore, but I frequently find myself fumbling with my phone to make sure that,
00:40:58 ◼ ► A, I know where the camera is on the back of the phone because it's very easy, especially with my monochrome case and everything,
00:41:05 ◼ ► to not quite know which side is up or whatever. Often I feel for the volume buttons, either because I'm going to use them as a shutter
00:41:12 ◼ ► or because they let me know where the orientation is, and then I accidentally get some part of my finger in front of the shot
00:41:17 ◼ ► and don't notice until after I take it. So it's actually a difficult problem because as much as it was likely to call these things cameras,
00:41:23 ◼ ► if you were making an actual camera that was not a smartphone, you would never make it shaped like this.
00:41:28 ◼ ► It's not a good shape for a camera. It doesn't have a grip. It's really easy to get your hands in front of things.
00:41:32 ◼ ► It's not easy to hold or use with one hand. That's why, by the way, I use the volume buttons because if you're trying to hold your phone in a precarious position
00:41:40 ◼ ► and then also trying to hit the on-screen shutter button with your finger, that's how you drop your phone.
00:41:45 ◼ ► I'm always trying to use the volume button for that purpose to be a shutter release and then end up taking a screenshot.
00:41:50 ◼ ► Bottom line, it's not the world's greatest camera. But those physical attributes, like to think that there's nothing left to do with the phone design,
00:41:57 ◼ ► figuring out where to put your now three cameras and how to arrange them and how far off the edge they are and if they should be in a line
00:42:04 ◼ ► and if the line should be horizontal or vertical or they should be in a triangle pattern or maybe two of them should be on one side or one on the other.
00:42:10 ◼ ► I'm coming up with all sorts of very ugly scenarios that might have some advantages. But that's what I'm thinking about.
00:42:15 ◼ ► It's going to be interesting to see how many more fingers and fingertips we see in shots on the iPhone 11, especially with the ultra-wide lens.
00:42:23 ◼ ► Nihle Patel seems pleased with the battery life especially. I didn't get a chance to read the entire review, but he had some very complimentary things to say about the battery life.
00:42:33 ◼ ► Including, "The iPhone 11 Pro Max I've been using every day for a week has consistently run for 12 to 14 hours on a single charge with over 10 hours of screen on time reported in the battery settings per 24 hour period.
00:42:47 ◼ ► That's compared to 8 to 10 hours of battery life at most for my iPhone XS Max. So that's an increase of 4 to 6 hours."
00:42:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean it's very difficult to do battery testing. As many reviews pointed out, Apple is not helping here because they're giving sort of times for their very narrowly defined tests like video time, talk time or whatever their measurements are.
00:43:09 ◼ ► And nobody really has a good comprehensive battery test. It's not an easy thing to do, especially from year to year.
00:43:15 ◼ ► So what they do is they just use the phone and say, "Alright, well I'm using this phone just like I normally use my phone and here's the battery life I get and I can compare it to my old phone."
00:43:25 ◼ ► Now, Grubber was nice enough to point out the battery percentage of his old phone to say, "Yeah, I'm comparing it to my old phone, but my old phone according to the battery health thing says 92% so it's not like it's totally a dead battery."
00:43:35 ◼ ► But the real comparison would be, "What was the battery life for your XS when it was brand spanking new and you were reviewing that as compared to your 11 Pro?"
00:43:45 ◼ ► Again, I do not doubt that the 11 Pro is much better. I do believe it has a bigger battery and I think all the reviewers can absolutely agree that it is much better than its predecessor, so thumbs up.
00:43:57 ◼ ► But the difficulty of battery testing, not only is it difficult to test a battery, it's difficult to talk to people about battery life because you don't know their life, you don't know what they do with their phone.
00:44:09 ◼ ► Maybe they play, let's say, Pokemon Go all day. It will destroy your battery, it laughs at your battery, and yeah, you can add an extra "four hours," that's like an extra five minutes of Pokemon Go.
00:44:18 ◼ ► So if someone says, "Oh, I hit my phone, the battery dies in the middle of the day," there's nothing you can really say to them because however they use their phone, the battery is dying.
00:44:28 ◼ ► Unless they have some sort of Facebook thing in the background destroying their battery, assuming everything is working as intended, all you can really do is just buy a bigger and bigger battery case and maybe not play so much Pokemon.
00:44:48 ◼ ► No, I just followed the quote from her tweet. She tweeted this, "It feels so good to write an iPhone review without complaining about battery life."
00:44:56 ◼ ► Which is great, I mean, here's the thing, it's such a big advance that people are drawn to say, "I have no more complaints."
00:45:06 ◼ ► Which is not strictly true, like everyone would actually like more battery life, but if you make a big enough leap, they're like, "Oh, this is so much better that I feel like it is now adequate."
00:45:14 ◼ ► And so it's a time of peace in the battery kingdom on iPhones. Everyone says, "Battery life is good."
00:45:21 ◼ ► And it will take a year or two for people to go, "You know what? I could use another three or four hours of battery life and then Apple has to up its game."
00:45:27 ◼ ► But we seem like we're in a good spot. Speaking of this, and speaking of battery life and the cameras and all this other stuff, I was surprised when I saw a couple people think that we had a negative take on the Apple event.
00:45:39 ◼ ► And I just want to reiterate, like putting the event aside, which we all have complaints about their game now or whatever, I think this almost every year after the September event, and I think it again even more strongly this year, Apple doesn't screw up the iPhone that much.
00:45:53 ◼ ► These iPhones are really, really, really good products. I can't even think of a year when I'll be like, "Oh, this year for the iPhone is not good."
00:46:01 ◼ ► The worst thing people can think to complain about is like, "Is it better enough over last year's phones?" Are you kidding? Forget phones. Forget phones don't exist.
00:46:10 ◼ ► Their new iPhones are really good. There's like nothing to complain about. It's just a question of, "Yeah, but how much better is it?"
00:46:18 ◼ ► You know how hard it is to make a product, a new product every year, where there is nothing wrong with it and you spend your entire time arguing over the percentage increase in some stat that you care about?
00:46:28 ◼ ► These iPhones are good. The iPhone is almost always good. And these are, I think, particularly good. And it kind of makes sense to be like the third iteration in the same form factor. They're really perfecting it.
00:46:38 ◼ ► But they're really good phones, people. The iPhones are really good phones. And we are spoiled by every year Apple introduces an iPhone that's a really good phone.
00:46:46 ◼ ► I don't know how else to express that. Apple is really good at making phones and the iPhone is a good phone.
00:46:52 ◼ ► And I guess people can say, "Well, it's not the best phone in the world," or, "There are better other phones from other manufacturers." Sure, fine, whatever. Think what you want.
00:46:59 ◼ ► But the iPhone is really good. And every year they introduce one and every year they basically, worst, don't screw it up. But at best, produce an amazing product.
00:47:09 ◼ ► If you buy one of these new phones, I think you'll be very satisfied with your product and then Tim will put you on a slide.
00:47:16 ◼ ► Well, and ultimately I would broaden that to say the vast majority of Apple's products, every version of them is good.
00:47:23 ◼ ► We complain a lot about the ones that aren't because those are anomalies. Because there hasn't been a bad Apple Watch either.
00:47:49 ◼ ► Well, it was slower in the things it tried to do. But it wasn't a bad product. I mean, I wore the Series 0 for a year and a half. It was fine.
00:47:57 ◼ ► Every Apple Watch has been a totally fine, at least fine product. Many of them have really been excellent products for what they are.
00:48:14 ◼ ► The Intendigate thing was a minor issue, not a major one. The iPhone 5 had a bunch of weird failures.
00:48:27 ◼ ► That was, to Casey's point earlier, which I would have made much more strongly, where Casey did have a very extensive section that was added out of last week where he talked about the size of the phone going up.
00:48:41 ◼ ► That was as skinny as they got and it was also as bendy as they got and they corrected course.
00:48:45 ◼ ► The phones have mostly been good and I feel like this year, these phones are probably going to go down in history as this was one of the good years.
00:48:56 ◼ ► People who get these phones are probably going to be super happy because people love the XS and you're going to get something that is better, faster, has a better camera and the battery lasts ridiculously longer?
00:49:10 ◼ ► Imagine if they upgraded the iMac Pro and it was as better one year later as this iPhone is over the iPhone that came before it.
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00:50:44 ◼ ► So if you're doing over $10,000 a month in revenue, find out how you can receive Clearbank capital by getting your 20-minute term sheet at clearbank.com/atp.
00:51:04 ◼ ► In the last 24 hours, Apple Arcade has kind of soft-launched, and I have not played with it at all yet because I've had bigger things to worry about.
00:51:23 ◼ ► I forgot someone mentioned that like a check in the App Store, you might be able to see Apple Arcade. It might be available to you, but you have to be on iOS 13 or whatever.
00:51:32 ◼ ► I think I had already installed the beta, or maybe I installed it for this. I don't remember.
00:51:36 ◼ ► Anyway, I went to the App Store thing and said Apple Arcade is available, and I signed up, and it's like a free trial or whatever, so I didn't have to pay anything.
00:51:43 ◼ ► And I had Apple Arcade, and then I went into the little UI, which was a little buggy, and sometimes the videos would stop playing and the app would crash. But anyway.
00:51:53 ◼ ► Yeah, 13.1, remember, I'm using. The 13.1 beta. I went through, I think, most or all of the games and downloaded like 10 of them just to try them out, picking the ones that I thought would appeal to me.
00:52:06 ◼ ► And I knew about some of these games from the trailers, and I've seen stuff about them. Some of them are cross-platform that I've heard of before or whatever.
00:52:12 ◼ ► And then I'm done with that. I go back to the springboard and decide I'm going to try out one of the games, and the one I picked was Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is prominently featured in a lot of Apple's advertisement.
00:52:27 ◼ ► I'm like, "Oh, I've seen that one before, and it looks interesting. I'm going to try it."
00:52:34 ◼ ► Yeah. I was trying to think when I was tweeting about this, what is the proper name for this genre. It's like arcade rhythm game. Some people used to call them rhythm shooters, like Rez. There's lots of games that are in this family.
00:52:50 ◼ ► Now, I don't typically like this type of rhythm arcade shooter runner type thing, but this looks like a cool implementation. I figured I would give it a try.
00:52:59 ◼ ► And I've got like 20 other games that I'm going to try. It turns out I didn't touch any of the other games. All I did was play that game all last night.
00:53:06 ◼ ► I played through the entire game twice and then had my son play through it once on the television, which was a fun exercise because it's not available on Apple TV.
00:53:14 ◼ ► Yeah. This is my experience with Apple Arcade. Marco was asking, "Is there going to be one good game?"
00:53:26 ◼ ► If you don't like this genre of game, as I'm not particularly into this genre of game, I think the reason I like this implementation is it's like...
00:53:33 ◼ ► I'm not going to say it's a simple version, but it's not punishingly difficult. It's very inventive. It's beautiful and stylish.
00:53:42 ◼ ► I love the music, and it's easy. I mean, it's not super easy, but it's easy enough that I didn't get frustrated with it.
00:53:52 ◼ ► It's usually my frustration with these types of things. And so for me, it was like the perfect Apple Arcade game. I just love everything about it.
00:54:00 ◼ ► I have quibbles with the surrounding story and framing device, but I don't even care because it's brief or whatever.
00:54:06 ◼ ► And the fact that I played through the entire game twice goes to show. So I would have paid $10 for this game alone.
00:54:11 ◼ ► I paid nothing because it's part of the free trial for Apple Arcade, and it was totally worth it to me.
00:54:17 ◼ ► And I haven't even looked at all the other games which also look like they're really good. So this could be anomalous because Apple spent tons of money getting developers to make these really cool games.
00:54:27 ◼ ► And they're trying to get people on Apple Arcade, and maybe the quality will go downhill.
00:54:30 ◼ ► But having played a single game, I'm ready to declare that there is at least a single game that is worth $5, and that is Sayonara Wild Hearts.
00:54:39 ◼ ► I recommend everybody try it, even if you don't like this kind of game. Maybe especially if you don't like this kind of game because this is such an appealing and inventive sampler of this type of gameplay without being punishingly difficult and with an amazing soundtrack.
00:54:54 ◼ ► Which I also already bought. I bought the soundtrack for $10 because I buy music from the iTunes Music Store. I preordered it for $10. But I paid nothing for the game. Check it out.
00:55:04 ◼ ► I would also say I also joined the Apple Arcade seemingly intentional launch but on the wrong day because the actual launch date was the iOS 13 launch date.
00:55:14 ◼ ► Anyway, so I also joined it immediately just to see. I will say one problem I have with it is that they are launching with apparently about 100 games, and I was unable to find more than 20.
00:55:26 ◼ ► It's like all games at the bottom but then the app keeps crashing because the little video previews keep killing it. But there is a place where you can go to all games.
00:55:37 ◼ ► The app store design is so low density that you only really see like 5 or 6 games unless you really start digging in. And I think that's going to be a problem for them.
00:55:47 ◼ ► I think there really is a problem here that Apple Arcade, no matter how big the catalog of games is, it's not going to seem big. It's going to seem like why am I paying $5 a month for these like 6 games that I can see right here.
00:56:01 ◼ ► So that might be something they have to work on. But otherwise, of the games I was able to find, I downloaded 5 or 6 of them. I did try Sayonara but I only used the touch controls and I couldn't figure out how to do that well.
00:56:15 ◼ ► Oh yeah, I was going to say. So if you're playing Sayonara WildHuts, remember that iOS 13 has support for Playstation and Xbox controllers and that is how I recommend playing this.
00:56:25 ◼ ► I actually have warmed the touch controls a little bit. There is an adjustable sensitivity and once I figure out how it wants me to play it, it is possible to play with touch, but don't.
00:56:34 ◼ ► Hopefully you have an Xbox or Playstation controller. You just pair it and use the controller. That is the way to play this particular type of game.
00:56:42 ◼ ► Yeah, I should try that. I also tried, the only one I tried so far has been Mini Motorways, which I believe is made by the same people as Mini Metro.
00:56:53 ◼ ► Yeah, and Mini Motorways, it's pretty cool. I've been playing it here and there. I had a little bit of problems getting past certain levels of busyness in my cities.
00:57:02 ◼ ► It's a minor quibble. It's a fun game and I've been playing it here and there the last couple nights and it's fun. So yeah, I think I have a few more here I want to try, but I think overall these look like pretty good games.
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00:57:45 ◼ ► Yes, I know we have TLS encryption over all of our connections, but the thing is it isn't all of them and sometimes there's vulnerabilities and everything and I don't want to worry about any of that. I like to use a VPN when I connect to anybody's public WiFi network. Usually this is when I'm traveling.
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00:59:00 ◼ ► Let's finally bring back some Ask ATP. And let's start with Steve who writes, "I've used iMac since 2003 and every single machine in OS randomly ejects my attached drives.
00:59:14 ◼ ► I'm a professional wedding photographer and I have two Drobos, USB and Thunderbolt, an OWC Thunder Bay, which is Thunderbolt, and a printer hooked up to the ports of my 2015 5K iMac."
00:59:22 ◼ ► Hmm, 2015 5K iMac you say? Anyway, all this has changed over the years and the results are always the same with various drives being ejected after sleep.
00:59:31 ◼ ► It's always random and changing them around makes no difference. No disasters have happened so it's more annoyance than anything, although I can't imagine this is helping these drives.
00:59:39 ◼ ► The Drobos have spinning drives as they are my entire image catalog and the OWC is solid state. These are all arrays but "regular" single drives are also ejected when attached.
00:59:53 ◼ ► I think this is a casey situation here where someone is tolerating a behavior from their computer over a long period of time that should not be happening.
01:00:00 ◼ ► I know it's not particularly helpful. It's like, "Oh, it sounds like you have something wrong." Yeah, well, no doubt. But I think it is important to understand this.
01:00:08 ◼ ► It is possible to use a Mac with external drives over the course of many years and not have this happen.
01:00:14 ◼ ► I have never had this happen and if this started happening I would be very upset and very afraid immediately because, especially in the days of HVAC+, because this is not healthy behavior.
01:00:25 ◼ ► I have multiple external drives attached to my computer right now. None of them spontaneously eject. I've used every interface you can imagine.
01:00:34 ◼ ► USB, FireWire, various speeds, SCSI for crying out loud. They should not spontaneously unmount.
01:00:44 ◼ ► Is there some kind of physical problem with the wire in your house? Are they under-vaulted? Are you overloading the circuit? Is your power strip or UPS gone wonky?
01:00:58 ◼ ► I don't even know, but this is not a situation that you should tolerate. It is not good for your data. It's not good for your hardware. It's not good for anything.
01:01:07 ◼ ► Unfortunately, Steve, I don't have the solution for you, but I just want to tell you, you need to do some...probably you need to move.
01:01:22 ◼ ► That's the part...so when I first was reading the question and Steve was saying about how the drives get ejected randomly, that can happen as the machine is awake.
01:01:32 ◼ ► That, I found, I have seen that before, and that is the result usually of a bad USB hub.
01:01:39 ◼ ► But Steve was talking about both USB and Thunderbolt devices and specifically said that they get ejected after sleep.
01:01:48 ◼ ► So it could just be like, you know what, sleeping with computers is always a little bit tricky and a little bit buggy and sometimes weird things happen.
01:01:58 ◼ ► The technical process of sleeping and waking externally connected peripherals along with the computer is complicated.
01:02:06 ◼ ► And that complication, you know, something might just be getting initialized in just the wrong order.
01:02:12 ◼ ► Or there might be like one thing that's plugged in, like one USB device that's plugged in that like the computer goes to initialize it and the timing of it messes up the other things such that they take too long and they time out and they eject.
01:02:24 ◼ ► Or something, like there could be something random like that. So it could be, not only could it be like one of the drive enclosures causing the problem, but it could be like any other USB or Thunderbolt device plugged into Steve's computer at the time.
01:02:38 ◼ ► Like this stuff is very complicated when you get to this kind of level of like devices powering on from sleep and having a whole bunch of stuff connected at once and everything.
01:02:47 ◼ ► So who knows. The other thing I would say is, oh I hope Steve has backups of everything on those Drobos.
01:03:00 ◼ ► Because Drobos are not known for their reliability. And I sure hope you have a backup Steve.
01:03:07 ◼ ► So last time we did Ask ATP three years ago we had a question from Marco Silva about communities. And we weren't sure what Marco meant by that, but...
01:03:20 ◼ ► Yeah, I was totally sure, but I was absolutely wrong. I had never heard of... I'll continue reading.
01:03:27 ◼ ► I'm sorry that I wasn't clear enough on my tweet about communities, but I wasn't referencing Nextdoor. I didn't even know what it was.
01:03:33 ◼ ► My original question was about WhatsApp groups or Telegram public or private, Discord, Slack, Facebook, Messenger, and even IRC.
01:03:48 ◼ ► I have a small group of people in my university class on Telegram and I participate rarely in some open source communities and there is a bit of fragmentation nowadays.
01:04:00 ◼ ► Yeah, so this type of community is basically... I want a bunch of people to have some kind of community online.
01:04:07 ◼ ► I mean there may be some physical locality or they may be at the same university, but it's not like Nextdoor where you all have to live near each other.
01:04:13 ◼ ► It's just like, I don't know, like for Discord or whatever, people who play a particular video game together or just a bunch of friends who live all across the country.
01:04:20 ◼ ► Where do you meet and discuss? Although we don't use it that much in this country and then not personally, things like WhatsApp are much more popular elsewhere in the world.
01:04:29 ◼ ► Facebook is popular with all the normal people who don't realize how evil Facebook is and IRC of course is popular with the nerds.
01:04:36 ◼ ► Slack is there. I was going to say I was surprised not to see Slack mentioned, but yeah, those are...
01:04:43 ◼ ► Boy, those are... There are a lot of choices. I don't have any experience with WhatsApp other than reading about it, so I have no idea what that's like.
01:04:50 ◼ ► But I can say, having used Slack for... Since nearly its inception, it is a community messaging app that fits the way I work.
01:05:03 ◼ ► Like I use Slack at my job, I have a million Slacks for all the other groups of friends that I hang out with online, and I think it is much nicer than IRC in pretty much every way, especially for people who don't want to nerd out.
01:05:17 ◼ ► And the app is getting better all the time, and I really like Slack, so that's my recommendation if you have to pick one of those things.
01:05:31 ◼ ► I've found that over the last year or two, I have gone from participating in zero iMessage group chats to a handful.
01:05:38 ◼ ► And I actually quite like that. There's one in particular that I have running that's myself and a couple of friends of mine who are big car nerds.
01:05:45 ◼ ► And I'm not talking about the two of you on the show, a different couple of friends of mine.
01:05:48 ◼ ► And we often talk about cars, occasionally talk about other nerdy stuff, but we typically are chatting at least once pretty much every single day in that chat.
01:05:58 ◼ ► And I've actually come to quite like that. It's a lot less fun when it's not everyone on iMessage.
01:06:04 ◼ ► It's a lot smoother on iMessage, but if you have a situation where you're willing to exchange contact information with everyone, and everyone is on an iPhone,
01:06:13 ◼ ► I do recommend, once you can get through those caveats, that having a group iMessage thread is quite nice.
01:06:20 ◼ ► I do like Slack for groups. I do like Slack for group stuff if possible, but I don't think most people are going to be that interested in that.
01:06:27 ◼ ► I still view it as a relatively nerdy thing, and I've never used WhatsApp or I've used it so infrequently, it's effectively never WhatsApp or Telegram or anything like that.
01:06:45 ◼ ► I am basically like you Casey, I use private iMessage groups for some groups of friends, I use Slack for others.
01:06:52 ◼ ► Slack is the one that's typically larger groups of friends, but you know, Slack is, I know zero of my like real life in person friends, like my neighbors and stuff,
01:07:03 ◼ ► I know zero of them who use Slack. And trying to get people to use Slack who aren't familiar with it is not so easy.
01:07:09 ◼ ► So for like real life groups of people that are not just like my nerd friends, that's usually the iMessage groups, because we all have iPhones, thank goodness.
01:07:25 ◼ ► But for larger groups like professional groups, and we have like the Relay one, I have an Overcast one, stuff like that, we have some Friend ones,
01:07:32 ◼ ► Slacks are great for the larger groups. As for the, so the aforementioned Beach thing, the question there was, I think two years ago,
01:07:42 ◼ ► I had mentioned that there was this Facebook group that was like all the people in the Beach town, and especially including a lot of the year round residents,
01:07:51 ◼ ► and it was like the last reason I was ever on Facebook. Like the last reason I was on Facebook was because I was in this, it was a private group, I was in it,
01:07:58 ◼ ► and it was where I could keep up on the goings on of the Beach town when I wasn't there all year.
01:08:12 ◼ ► And it turns out these are very different crowds. The Facebook group was the angry old people in town,
01:08:21 ◼ ► and so while what I wanted from it was like reminding me of the Beach when I couldn't be there, what it mostly was was a handful of angry people complaining all the time about everything.
01:08:31 ◼ ► And the people I found on Instagram were largely significantly younger, and a much lower ratio of complaints, in fact pretty much zero,
01:08:44 ◼ ► because Instagram is not really an easy place to post a bunch of complaints about your village. It's a much nicer place, and it's much more encouraging of you to post nice photos of things that you see that you like.
01:08:57 ◼ ► And it's just more, in general with Instagram, it's just much more positive. And so once I found the Instagram community, not only did I not miss the Facebook people at all,
01:09:09 ◼ ► but it solved the need for me, and I decided I didn't need to run this community. I didn't need to try to make one myself.
01:09:15 ◼ ► Like this Instagram is doing a perfectly fine job for me, better than I could do, and I don't have to do it, and it's already there, and it has already succeeded. So the need kind of went away.
01:09:27 ◼ ► - Are the old people complaining about the Instagram people? Like is that what they're complaining about?
01:09:32 ◼ ► - No, no, no, no, it's just the typical, it's actually maybe what you might see on Nextdoor. It's like complaining about like, there's a pothole on this sidewalk, and the village isn't fixing it,
01:09:41 ◼ ► but yet the village spent money on police officers for doing this thing. How could you spend our tax money this way? It's that kind of garbage.
01:09:48 ◼ ► - That weird neighbor guy was carrying a suspiciously large bag. I think he's stealing things from people's homes.
01:09:54 ◼ ► - Yeah, it was a combination of that kind of bad side of Nextdoor, and the town meetings from Parks and Rec.
01:10:01 ◼ ► - Our final Ask HTTP of the Week, Matthias Lutke writes, "IOS 13 supports game controllers. What's the right one to buy, Xbox or PS4? He doesn't own a console or controller currently."
01:10:15 ◼ ► - Yeah, my suggestion for people in general is just use whichever one you have. If you don't have either one, it's hard for me to say, because I haven't spent any appreciable time with the latest Xbox controllers.
01:10:26 ◼ ► I have spent literally hundreds of hours with the PlayStation 4 controller, and I can say, although the left thumbstick is still in the wrong place,
01:10:35 ◼ ► ergonomically, it's so much better than the PS3 controller. It doesn't bother my hands. The Xbox may be ergonomically slightly superior.
01:10:43 ◼ ► On the other hand, I think I kind of like the triggers on the PS4 better. I think it's a toss-up, and kind of like selecting what mouse you're going to buy for your computer,
01:10:51 ◼ ► there is absolutely no substitute to just going somewhere and holding it in your hand and seeing how it feels. Is it too big for you? Is it too small? Do you like the buttons? Do you like the triggers?
01:10:59 ◼ ► I think they're both really good controllers, especially the PS4, better than its predecessors. So I think you should just go to a store where you can actually hold these and try it out.
01:11:09 ◼ ► Now, that may be tricky, because if you go to a store and find these, they'll probably be in a cardboard box or something.
01:11:14 ◼ ► So your best bet might be to try to find one of the few remaining retail big box stores that has some incredibly grimy, disgusting display,
01:11:21 ◼ ► where kids, in theory, can play with an Xbox or PlayStation 4, and the controller is like bolted to this thing.
01:11:27 ◼ ► At least then you can hold both controllers in your hands, despite the fact that they're covered with the germs of thousands of children and are probably half-broken.
01:11:34 ◼ ► But that's probably your best bet. Or, a cleaner option, find a friend who has an Xbox, and find a friend who has a PS4, and just try them out.
01:11:42 ◼ ► I don't have any strong recommendations one way or the other. But yes, do definitely play Syriner or Wild Hearts with a controller, if possible.
01:11:49 ◼ ► So how did you do that? In your case, did you buy it for the Switch, or did you play it some other way?
01:11:58 ◼ ► Oh, well, in iOS 13, you can just pair your PlayStation controller with your iPad, just like a Bluetooth device.
01:12:05 ◼ ► You just put it in pairing mode and you pair it, and that's it. Then you just launch the game and you use the controller.
01:12:14 ◼ ► Yeah, and then I really wanted to play it on TV, so I'm like, "Great, I'll update my TV to the Apple TV beta."
01:12:20 ◼ ► Which I did, which is probably ill-advised given Merlin's experience with the betas, but I did it.
01:12:26 ◼ ► And then I went to the Apple Arcade icon, and all I had was a video that says, "Apple Arcade is coming soon."
01:12:31 ◼ ► Anyway, Apple Arcade is not yet available, despite the fact that I'm "in the trial" or "in the preview" or "accidentally have it"
01:12:44 ◼ ► But I can take my iPad and pair the PlayStation controller with it and then AirPlay from the iPad to my television and play the game that way.
01:13:00 ◼ ► I'm not going to say there's no lag, there is lag, but it's lower than you might think,
01:13:04 ◼ ► and Sionara Wild Hearts is tame enough that it is not going to punish you for that amount of lag.
01:13:28 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.
01:13:39 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm, and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
01:13:49 ◼ ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, A-N-T-E-M-A-R-M-E-N-T, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracusa.
01:14:18 ◼ ► I don't know if I'll put a picture in the show notes, but I've sent the two of you a picture of a very large space on my desk that has a little itty bitty laptop in it.
01:14:41 ◼ ► So I was watching Plex last night, which if you recall, all the media for Plex is on my Synology, but the Plex server is my iMac.
01:14:52 ◼ ► And it was just acting weird. I was watching it off of the Apple TV, but it was just acting weird. It could have been a network issue, could have been Synology choking for some reason, which has never happened, but you never know.
01:15:02 ◼ ► Whatever. For one reason or another, it's just acting funny. I didn't think much of it.
01:15:07 ◼ ► So the next morning, this morning, I wake up, I try to use my iMac, and it's just not right.
01:15:13 ◼ ► It's not quite locked up, but nothing's really going the way it's supposed to. It's not really responding to what I'm asking it to do.
01:15:22 ◼ ► So I think to myself, "Well, this is weird." And then I tried to shut it down, and it wouldn't really shut itself down, so I eventually forced it to shut down.
01:15:29 ◼ ► I'm sorry, John, I have no empathy for the machine. I forced it to shut itself down, and then I tried to reboot.
01:15:41 ◼ ► I tried booting into safe mode. Eventually that, I believe, worked. I tried so many things today, I should have taken notes. I'm sorry, that's why I'm hemming and hawing.
01:15:50 ◼ ► I tried to boot into safe mode, I think that might have worked, but then I tried rebooting again, same beachball dance.
01:15:56 ◼ ► I eventually went into the recovery partition and tried to do first aid on my hard drive, thinking, "Well, I know this isn't HFS+ anymore, but I don't know what else to do, so let me try that."
01:16:08 ◼ ► And it spun and spun and spun and spun and spun for a while, and then it eventually said something along the lines of, "I can't even unmount the internal SSD, so I don't know what to tell you, this thing is probably cooked."
01:16:22 ◼ ► I forget exactly what it said on there, and I don't have it in front of me, but suffice to say, it was like, "Yeah, bad things are happening."
01:16:28 ◼ ► I tried several other things, including, I took my external SSD, oh here we go, "Repairing file system, volume could not be unmounted, restoring the original state found as mounted, unable to unmount volume for repair, operation failed."
01:16:47 ◼ ► Did you try, are you still using third party RAM in there, and did you try pulling it out and putting in different RAM?
01:16:52 ◼ ► I am and I did not, and in retrospect I should have, but I didn't think of it until it was too late, and you'll understand why it's too late in a minute.
01:17:02 ◼ ► Did you run a hardware test? I don't know what the current state of that is, but there is some key combo you can run, right?
01:17:10 ◼ ► You are jumping ahead, but yes I did. I did run a hardware test, it gave me a clean bill of health.
01:17:15 ◼ ► So I eventually took the external SSD that runs off of USB, and I had Catalina on it, and I tried doing first aid from Catalina onto the, you know, Catalina running on the external, tried to first aid the internal, it didn't work.
01:17:28 ◼ ► I eventually said, "The hell with Catalina," because it was also an old version of Catalina, I thought, "Okay, let me put High Sierra on the external, and I'll see if I can get this thing to just work."
01:17:37 ◼ ► And that sort of worked, but then it would just hang all of a sudden, which brings me back to Marco's point about RAM issues, but be that as it may, leave that aside just for a moment.
01:17:46 ◼ ► It would just kind of hang for no explicable reason after some indeterminate amount of time.
01:17:57 ◼ ► Okay, so I make a Genius Bar reservation, which surprisingly I was able to get one within like a couple of hours.
01:18:03 ◼ ► And I go to the Genius Bar after, oh, and I did my hardware diagnostics as well, like John had asked.
01:18:08 ◼ ► So I go to the Genius Bar, and I worked with a very nice gentleman who tried several things, including Apple's genuinely fancy network boot, and then like hardware diagnosis and all that stuff.
01:18:24 ◼ ► Then he and I concluded, "All right, let's just try to reboot into the recovery partition again and see if we can erase the existing hard drive," which I really didn't want to do, but I don't think I would be losing anything catastrophic.
01:18:39 ◼ ► So anyway, so let me reboot into the recovery partition, and let's just see if the two of us can erase this together.
01:18:44 ◼ ► Maybe I had some bad juju at the house, and so maybe doing it at the Apple store will magically cause it to work.
01:18:52 ◼ ► And he rebooted into the recovery partition, and the little progress bar that's under the Apple logo got about halfway, and it never got any further.
01:18:59 ◼ ► So he took my iMac from me with my permission and said, "I'm going to run some diagnostics overnight. That'll tell us if there's RAM problems. That'll tell us if there's other problems."
01:19:07 ◼ ► I mean, again, he did the like quick and dirty diagnosis that only Apple can do, but he said they apparently have some like four to six hour diagnosis they can run that will give a much better view of what's broken.
01:19:20 ◼ ► This is an iMac that is officially labeled a late 2015 iMac. I purchased it in January of 2016.
01:19:27 ◼ ► It does have the one terabyte SSD. It had the four gigahertz chip in it, I think. I don't even remember. It was so darn long ago.
01:19:35 ◼ ► And it does have 32 gigs of aftermarket OWC RAM. Now, for those of you who have not listened to the show for a long time, this is my second batch of aftermarket OWC RAM, because for the longest time I had a batch in, well, I should say like six months or something like that,
01:19:49 ◼ ► I had a batch of OWC RAM in there that, as I later found out, was part of like a bad batch of RAM. And so I told OWC about this well outside of warranty and they were like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's totally our fault.
01:19:59 ◼ ► You know, we got a bad batch from such and such, Crucial or whoever it was. And they sent me a new batch of RAM, new 32 gig batch RAM for free, if you will.
01:20:09 ◼ ► I mean, I, of course, paid for the original batch. But anyway, and ever since then, for like two years plus, it had been rock solid.
01:20:16 ◼ ► But in summary, my guess, based on not a lot of facts, is that the SSD is borked. But the fact that it was being a little bit wonky, even when I was running off an external, makes me wonder if there's something deeper.
01:20:30 ◼ ► Now, the interesting turn of events here, and then I'll stop my monologue, is that to replace the terabyte SSD would run me about $1,000 at Apple.
01:20:39 ◼ ► And to replace the entire logic board at Apple is like six or seven hundred bucks. But one way or another, as it turns out, I am now hoping that it's a logic board problem, if any problem at all, because that will be almost half the price of replacing the SSD.
01:20:53 ◼ ► So tomorrow, in theory, I will get a call from Apple and they will tell me what is or is not broken with this thing.
01:20:58 ◼ ► But for tonight, I am recording on my adorable little MacBook, this poor thing that I thought I was going to replace soon.
01:21:05 ◼ ► But now, it sounds like I'm buying myself a new iMac instead, and so this little guy is just going to have to chug along a little bit longer.
01:21:11 ◼ ► Yeah, this is what, I mean, I have many thoughts on this, but like, just like as a little point here, like, the value of having a spare Mac around, like, I feel like this should inform future hardware purchases for you when you're making decisions about what kind of laptop you can get away with.
01:21:28 ◼ ► I always like to make sure that whatever laptop I have, in addition to my desktop, can take over as my main computer in a pinch.
01:21:43 ◼ ► And, you know, as fun as it is to get, like, the tiniest laptop that you can, you know, because when you're carrying it, you're like, "Wow, this is great, I love how tiny it is, and I don't need the power of anything bigger, I have a desktop."
01:21:55 ◼ ► You know, it is really nice when you don't have a desktop anymore, all of a sudden, unplanned, it is really nice to have a laptop that's a little bit more capable, so that you can have, like, you know, a pinch hitter.
01:22:13 ◼ ► If your iMac is toast, which it might even take you a week or two to figure out exactly what the problem is, like, because, like, what if they do one repair, and then it ends up, that wasn't it?
01:22:23 ◼ ► Like, suppose the diagnostics say, "Oh, it's a logic board," and then they replace it, and then it's still flaky, and then they say, "Oh, I actually, it was the SSD," or whatever, like, what if there's something like that, where there's, like, a multi-step repair necessary before you even figure it out?
01:22:48 ◼ ► I think what I would like to do is get something beefier. I don't really want a bigger laptop if I can get away with it, but I do want a more powerful laptop.
01:23:00 ◼ ► You have a 12-inch. Everything that's more powerful is bigger than it, by a good deal, actually.
01:23:05 ◼ ► Well, right, and that's the thing. Now, the new 13s, not even the Air, but the 13-inch Pro is actually not that much bigger. I mean, it is absolutely bigger, for sure, and noticeably so, and particularly heavier.
01:23:20 ◼ ► And so my thought process was, whenever the 13s come to get refreshed, you know, such that they don't have the butterfly keyboard and so on and so forth, I would probably get one of those.
01:23:38 ◼ ► I think it's so funny, like, the timing of this, such that, like, what you should really do, like, what I suggested to you earlier, like, the solution you should really take right now is, it looks like your desktop is going to be out of commission for a little while, and even if you want to order a new one, you're going to want to customize it.
01:23:55 ◼ ► It's going to take, you know, a couple of weeks to arrive, maybe, you know, and I wouldn't want to go a couple of weeks on just a 12-inch.
01:24:00 ◼ ► And so my suggestion was, well, really, this would be the perfect time to upgrade the laptop to whatever, you know, because you've been floating the idea of upgrading the laptop for a while, and it's just so funny, like, I can't even imagine a worse time to buy an Apple laptop than September 2019.
01:24:16 ◼ ► Right before they're likely to replace the butterfly keyboard on at least one of the laptops.
01:24:31 ◼ ► I know you were being somewhat silly when you were recommending it, but I think if the laptops today were good, and that's a poor way of phrasing it, but hopefully you take my point.
01:24:41 ◼ ► If the laptops today were good, then yeah, I'd probably just buy a really nice laptop and then see if I even need a desktop. Like, I do want, I like having an iMac. I do want to continue to have an iMac, but maybe I would just, you know, go with just a 13 or 15-inch MacBook Pro for a while and bide my time or something like that and figure out what I wanted to do.
01:25:01 ◼ ► But my current thinking is, going on the assumption that this iMac is cooked in some way, shape, or form, which I think it is, I think what I want to do is get a new iMac.
01:25:13 ◼ ► And then it becomes a discussion of, well, do you want to get a new iMac iMac or do I want to get an iMac Pro?
01:25:19 ◼ ► Okay, so the iMac Pro is a couple years old now, but if I wanted to get an iMac with at least a terabyte of storage, which I would, preferably two at this point, if I wanted to get an iMac with at least 32 gigs of RAM, which I think I do, and if I wanted to get one that has a reasonably nice processor, like I didn't look at the numbers, but at that point I'm hovering at what?
01:25:42 ◼ ► I mean, I know you pretty much keep the Apple product catalog in your brain, Marco, so that's something like $3,000, $3,500 to get it approximately to that point, is that fair to say?
01:25:51 ◼ ► Yeah, to get an iMac to roughly match the specs of the base model iMac Pro is $3,600, I believe.
01:26:03 ◼ ► I'm not one to buy computers often, and as much as I love to poke fun, especially Marco for buying computers as often as he changes underwear, that's not me, and so I think it makes more sense to me or for me to spend a little bit extra to get something a little bit nicer, because I probably wouldn't have replaced that iMac for at least a year, if not more, were it not for it having pooped itself.
01:26:28 ◼ ► So at that point I feel like, okay, I might as well just go iMac Pro. If I go iMac Pro, well first of all I'm not going to have it for a couple of weeks, which is a bummer, especially since I was just putting the finishing touches on the vignette updates for iOS 13, but leaving that aside, it's just a bummer not to have your main computer for two weeks.
01:26:46 ◼ ► Well, the other option is, like, when we're buying computers, when it's not like something is on fire situation, like right now, when you have time, we won't compromise on what we want.
01:27:01 ◼ ► We customize all the specs, we get exactly what we want to order, oh, we want this amount of RAM, but not that amount of RAM, we don't want the GPU update, because we don't want to pay for it, but we do want this other update.
01:27:09 ◼ ► We customize everything to get exactly what we want, and we're willing to wait a week and a half or two weeks, whatever it is, for it to be custom built and shipped over here.
01:27:17 ◼ ► But a lot of times people can't do that. A lot of times something critical broke and you need a replacement today, and when that's your option, you can get replacements today.
01:27:28 ◼ ► They just might not be the configurations you want. You can go to the Apple Store and you can have an iMac Pro today.
01:27:35 ◼ ► Yeah, and I almost did. Right. Usually the only choices you have, though, are either the base configurations, and this, by the way, this is why I am so hard on Apple whenever they make a base configuration of a computer that is a really crappy computer in some way.
01:27:50 ◼ ► Like, something that's just, like, really punitive, like the spinning hard drive iMac, you know, things like that.
01:27:55 ◼ ► I really object to the base models being crappy in fundamental ways because so many people buy the base models. Like, there's a reason they do it.
01:28:05 ◼ ► Like, it's a massive percentage of buyers who just buy the base model of the computers.
01:28:10 ◼ ► So, anyway, your options at retail are mostly just the base models, and then sometimes, like, you know, they'll have, like, whatever configurations on Apple.com are like the step up that are preconfigured.
01:28:21 ◼ ► They'll have those, and usually they'll have, like, one or two tweaked high-end configurations in stock for the high-end computers, like the 15-inch MacBook Pro, the iMac Pro, etc.
01:28:32 ◼ ► Like, they'll usually stock a couple of those. You might have to, you'll have to ask, like, some people, you'll have to ask the business people, like, if they, you know, what they have there.
01:28:39 ◼ ► But they will almost always have some kind of high-end configuration customized in stock. But it won't necessarily be what you wanted.
01:28:46 ◼ ► So, you will probably end up paying more than you wanted to get something like, you know, the faster GPU that maybe you wouldn't have gotten.
01:28:53 ◼ ► But that's just what they had, you know, for you in order to get, like, the SSD you wanted or something like that.
01:28:58 ◼ ► And I've done that on a couple of occasions with various things, and it's been fine. Like, you know, it's not a huge deal, but you do end up paying a little bit more.
01:29:06 ◼ ► But the advantage is just to have something faster. It's like, you consider it like, I'm paying an extra, you know, $150 or whatever to get a faster GPU and also to have an iMac Pro for the next two weeks.
01:29:16 ◼ ► Yeah, and I've kicked that idea around, and there was actually a small window of time where I thought I was going to drive to Fairfax, which is a couple hours north of me, because I forget what Jim Metzendorf had recommended in the Relay Slack, but he had recommended--
01:29:30 ◼ ► Thank you. He had recommended Micro Center, which has the base model iMac for $500 off, but what I keep coming down to is, like, I do not have any desire to spend $5,000 on a computer, period.
01:29:42 ◼ ► I particularly do not have any desire to spend $5,000 on a computer when I'm already giving Apple something like $3,000 this month. Not even this year, this month.
01:29:51 ◼ ► Now, to be fair, 100% my own creation. I chose to buy two new iPhone 11 Pros, whatever they're called. I chose to buy two new Apple watches. This is entirely my fault, but this timing in many ways could not be worse.
01:30:05 ◼ ► And so now I'm already looking at $3,000 of Apple expenditures in the month of September, and oh yeah, why not? Let's just throw another five on top. Can't hurt, right?
01:30:14 ◼ ► But the thing of it is, if I'm gonna spend $5,000, like, I really don't want to, I really don't want to, but I'm lucky and blessed enough that I can without, you know, being financially ruined.
01:30:25 ◼ ► And so if I'm going to do it, then I might as well do it properly. So I'm gonna spend nine--no, I'm just kidding.
01:30:32 ◼ ► So what I think I'm gonna do is, I think I'm going to force myself to get at least a 2 terabyte SSD.
01:30:38 ◼ ► I think I am still gonna go iMac Pro, because this is a computer that I leave on all the time, which we can get into an argument as to whether or not that's a good idea another time.
01:30:45 ◼ ► But the fact of the matter is, I leave the computer on all the time. Yeah, iMac Pro has much better cooling, it has the ECC RAM, it has a lot of other things that make it really nice.
01:30:53 ◼ ► And if I'm already in $3,500, like, I might as well go to five grand, which again, such a sign of how lucky I am.
01:31:02 ◼ ► And I mean that genuinely, I'm not trying to be funny. Like, I am extremely lucky that I can just shrug at $1,500 extra, much less $5,000, which I'm not shrugging at.
01:31:10 ◼ ► But you know what I mean? Like, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am extremely lucky.
01:31:17 ◼ ► I know. I just--I'm also trying to justify it to myself, to be honest, but nevertheless--
01:31:22 ◼ ► Again, you're a working professional. This is required for your job. This is critical equipment for you to do your job.
01:31:28 ◼ ► Well, I don't know if this computer is required for your job, but you should be more upset about buying a 2017 computer for $5,000.
01:31:35 ◼ ► See, here's the thing. I mean, yeah, I mean, so, yeah, like some of the retailers like Micro Center, B&H, Best Buy, you can probably get a few hundred dollars off just because it is not new.
01:31:44 ◼ ► You know, not a new model. But that being said, like, I gotta say, like, even today, the late 2017, so the two-year-old iMac Pro, is still an incredibly good computer.
01:31:56 ◼ ► Like, I have similar feelings about my car as I do about my computer of, like, I'm so happy with it that if it was, like, stolen tomorrow, if I had to replace it instantly today, like, with what's available today, I would get the exact same thing.
01:32:09 ◼ ► The same thing's true about my car and my iMac Pro. I'm so happy with it. I would literally get the exact same thing to replace it if I had to.
01:32:15 ◼ ► And even in a world where, suppose it's, you know, two or three months from now and the Mac Pro is in regular availability, I think I would still replace my iMac Pro with the exact same thing if that's what was available.
01:32:28 ◼ ► Because that's how happy I am with this computer. It's, yes, it is two years old. So, yes, you shouldn't be paying full price for it if you can at all avoid it.
01:32:36 ◼ ► But my goodness, is it a fantastic computer. And it, like, you know, for you, this may vary for you, but for me, it still solves my needs better than anything else in the lineup code, including the upcoming Mac Pro.
01:32:49 ◼ ► And so it is just a fantastic computer. It is not a great value, but not a terrible value for what it is. And there is nothing in the lineup that is better for most people than this.
01:33:02 ◼ ► So my question is, which processor do I get? Because a friend of mine was telling me the 10 core is the sweet spot. And before you interrupt me, let me just, you know, kind of put everything on the table.
01:33:12 ◼ ► I don't feel like I need anything more than the 8 core, but a friend was saying the 10 core is the sweet spot. I should get that. How much RAM do I get? I don't know why I would need more than 32 gigs for the kind of thing I do.
01:33:21 ◼ ► But, you know, it's not ruinous to get 64. So, you know, should I consider it? And what size SSD? Because I think myself and I think the two of you based on our Slack conversations agree that two terabyte is probably the minimum for a computer I plan to keep for several years, God willing.
01:33:40 ◼ ► But there actually is right now a refurb iMac Pro on Apple site. I don't have it in front of me, but it was something like $5200 or something like that.
01:34:00 ◼ ► Right. But it had a 4 terabyte SSD, which in and of itself is normally a $1200 option. And not only that, but I could have it like the end of the week as opposed to if I do a CTO or whatever they call it, a BTO build to order, whatever it's called.
01:34:15 ◼ ► If I do that, then it won't be available until the very end of the month. So what leaving aside whether I go refurb or whatever, what would the two of you recommend in terms of how many cores, how much RAM and how much SSD?
01:34:29 ◼ ► I would say obsess over this less than you are, buy that refurb and be done with it for lots of reasons. Like you need this now. You need this quickly. That will come quickly.
01:34:38 ◼ ► The iMac Pro is one of the only things Apple sells where the base model is fantastic. And this is the base model plus a 4 terabyte SSD.
01:34:49 ◼ ► I would say, because the base RAM is already 32, if you had the luxury to customize things and wait a long time, maybe consider going 64 because you do heavy work and stuff like that.
01:34:59 ◼ ► But you probably don't need it. You've had 32 all this time and it's been fine. So you probably don't need 64. The base 8 core CPU is great. The 10 core is indeed the sweet spot for developer workloads.
01:35:10 ◼ ► But it's not that much better than the 8 core. It's not that big of a deal to go from 8 to 10. Again, if you were customizing, sure, go for the 10.
01:35:19 ◼ ► But you need something quickly. And because it's old, you have some of these really cool and amazing deals available on certain configurations that people happen to have in stock.
01:35:30 ◼ ► I would get that. I would just get that refurb and move on with this and be done with it.
01:35:35 ◼ ► John, any thoughts? As hopefully evidenced by the people who are listening to this podcast right now, you are not in desperate need of anything. I think you should use your MacBook until November and revisit this question.
01:35:46 ◼ ► November? Why November? Because that gives enough time for any potential iMac update and it gives enough time for the Mac Pro configurator to hopefully exist.
01:35:57 ◼ ► Actually, there is one other advantage to this plan. For using your 12-inch MacBook for all that time, anything you get after it will feel amazingly fast.
01:36:13 ◼ ► I mean, it might be worth it for that feeling alone, that first time you boot up the new computer and everything is zipping into place and it just blows you away after coming from a 12-inch.
01:36:21 ◼ ► Just use it for podcast recording. Does it feel slow now? You're staring at a screen talking to a microphone. You don't touch the computer. Just talk. It works fine. See? That will hold you over for a month or two.
01:36:31 ◼ ► Well, but the problem is that I have vignette floating around without an iOS 13 update.
01:36:35 ◼ ► I know. You can do dev work on that a little bit. That's where it will be slow, but during podcasting it won't be a big deal.
01:36:41 ◼ ► I have to also tell you that Overcast won't have an iOS 13 update for probably that entire time either.
01:36:46 ◼ ► Well, yes, but Overcast has dark mode already. And I'm not trying to be funny. That to me is a big deal.
01:36:52 ◼ ► I don't think I'm going to be on day one since I need to submit today in order to get there by day one.
01:36:56 ◼ ► But I do want to be there week one or two and if I wait until November, even though John, as much as I want to yell at you and tell you that it's impossible to wait that long, you do make a pretty good point.
01:37:06 ◼ ► I don't think I can wait that long, but you do make a good point. So I think, if anything, I'm going to try to get the vignette update out off of this MacBook.
01:37:14 ◼ ► Truth be told, I've probably done a third of vignette's development on the MacBook. It's not my favorite thing to do, but I can do it.
01:37:20 ◼ ► I'm not sure what I'm going to do. The moral of the story is, as much SSD as I'm willing to spend money on, 32, 64, eh, 8, 10, eh.
01:37:30 ◼ ► If I want it now, get the refurb otherwise, then I can fiddle with these sliders a little bit. Is that basically what I'm hearing?
01:37:40 ◼ ► I can't believe you gave up on your old computer so easily. Your computer throws one shoe and you're like, "Oh, take it out and shoot it."
01:37:46 ◼ ► Has nothing ever gone wrong with any... I mean, you nursed that BMW for years and it was just constantly exploding. Your Mac has one hiccup and you're like, "Kill it. Kill it with fire."
01:37:57 ◼ ► You're not wrong. Truth be told, if Apple can magically sprinkle pixie dust on it and make it work...
01:38:03 ◼ ► They can fix your computer, I assure you. It's just a question of how much it's going to cost. It will cost less than five grand, I promise.
01:38:09 ◼ ► I agree. But it's that... The best analogy I can think of is a car analogy. At what point is it dumb to continue to throw money at it?
01:38:25 ◼ ► This is a knowable thing. Just look up on eBay, "Completed item sales" for that model iMac. What are they selling for used when they're working?
01:38:39 ◼ ► Suppose it will cost you $600 to fix it and they sell used for $2,000. Well, that's probably worth it.
01:38:47 ◼ ► I don't know. I got stuff to think about. But if I were a betting man, I think what I'm probably going to do is buy some iMac Pro,
01:38:57 ◼ ► like purchase it tomorrow and receive it somewhere between the end of the week and the end of the month. And then inevitably,
01:39:03 ◼ ► that means in a month or two, there will be a brand new, much fancier iMac Pro and I'm going to jump off a bridge.
01:39:15 ◼ ► And we learned that the family of Xeons that's going into the Mac Pro is not the same family that would be likely a good fit for the iMac Pro.
01:39:28 ◼ ► And so usually with the Pro line, when it's healthy and being updated, every time there's a new Xeon of the class that goes into that computer,
01:39:39 ◼ ► they make a new one. And it's just what happens. Those Xeons tend to only come out about every two years or 18 months, something like that.
01:39:46 ◼ ► And of course, now Intel is all over the place now. It's hard to ever know. But as far as I know, there still isn't a Xeon update that would be appropriate for the iMac Pro without major internal thermal upgrades and things like that.
01:40:01 ◼ ► But I think there was supposed to be one sometime this winter. Something like that. Apple hasn't skipped one yet.
01:40:14 ◼ ► But yeah, the question really is, are you willing to wait around, are you able to wait around forever for an update that, you know, the existing iMac Pro is pretty damn fast,
01:40:24 ◼ ► you'd be waiting around forever for one that might be, what, like 15% faster? Like it's not going to be a huge difference.
01:40:31 ◼ ► Truth be told, that iMac that is currently sitting at the Apple Store, it was not often that I longed for speed on it.
01:40:39 ◼ ► It happened for sure, but it was not often. And certainly instantaneous builds would be better than two or three second builds, because Vignette is not a tremendous codebase.
01:40:48 ◼ ► But that being said, the only time I really felt processor problems was when I was doing transcoding with FFmpeg, which as much as I joke, I don't do it that often.
01:41:04 ◼ ► So I don't feel like this two or three year old, whatever, three year old iMac was really that processor.
01:41:10 ◼ ► The processor wasn't that much of a problem for me. So I can only imagine this three year old, three year newer Pro, iMac Pro would be just unspeakably fast from my perspective.
01:41:25 ◼ ► I mean, honestly, I think one thing you should strongly consider is, what if you just got a laptop that was good and used it in both places?
01:41:35 ◼ ► Because, especially if you look at the new, if you look at the 15 inch line, yes I know it's a lot bigger, shut up, you can deal with it.
01:41:47 ◼ ► Yeah, right. Because you take your stupid little 12 inch out all the time and work on it.
01:41:52 ◼ ► You like to work in libraries and stuff like that. You go out and work out in the world on a pretty regular basis.
01:41:57 ◼ ► And you travel and everything. So performance wise, you would be totally fine with any of the modern 15 inches.
01:42:06 ◼ ► Even the 6 core models, they go up to 8 now, but even the 6 core would be totally fine for most of what you're doing, the vast majority of the time.
01:42:14 ◼ ► If you're going to have a laptop anyway, as much as I'm a huge fan of desktops, as much as John is going to rake me over the coals in a second for even suggesting this.
01:42:28 ◼ ► And you could, I know this is crazy, you could buy one now to tide you over and then return it in 15 days and see what the situation is then.
01:42:37 ◼ ► I don't know, it probably won't be any different, but I don't know. It could buy you some time.
01:42:41 ◼ ► Well that's the thing, I think like I was saying earlier, if the Apple laptop line was quote unquote good.
01:42:48 ◼ ► Like if this was a good time to buy an Apple laptop, I would very strongly consider that.
01:42:53 ◼ ► I would have a couple problems with it. First and foremost, I have become very accustomed to the 5K lifestyle.
01:42:59 ◼ ► And so then I would not only be buying a brand new laptop, but I would be buying one of the LG displays.
01:43:07 ◼ ► And that's like $1500 on top of the cost of the laptop, which is still probably cheaper than the iMac Pro.
01:43:12 ◼ ► But still, now I'm convincing myself to do it. But it's such a terrible idea, I don't want to buy a laptop right now.
01:43:17 ◼ ► You run a Plex server off of that thing, you need a desktop, you need a big screen, you don't want to buy a laptop with this credit keyboard. Come on. It's not an option.
01:43:24 ◼ ► But like if you can hold out until the 16 inch comes out, that might change things, like that might change the calculus.
01:43:42 ◼ ► I don't want to spend, but I don't want to... The problem is I really don't want to spend the money, and I don't want to do it right now.
01:43:56 ◼ ► Well, let's pause this for a minute. When do you think, if the 16 inch is coming out in this calendar year, which is not a given, but if it is, when is that event?
01:44:13 ◼ ► But you might be able to order one in October. Maybe. Possibly. I don't know. That rumor, we talked about this before. I can't keep track of where that is. I think it keeps pushing off into 2020, but don't tell Casey that.
01:44:23 ◼ ► No, I think it's still for this year. And look, we know, or we don't know, but it sure seems like there sure is a lot on Apple's likely calendar that is still left for this year.
01:44:37 ◼ ► Now that we've seen the September event, there sure was a lot that wasn't in it that we expect to be coming out any minute now.
01:44:44 ◼ ► So I'm guessing we haven't heard the last of Apple this year. And it would be pretty awesome to have that.
01:44:52 ◼ ► All the rumors are pointing to the 16 inch being coming out September or October. And I think that was still the latest information.
01:44:58 ◼ ► So I would say, you know, unfortunately John is frustratingly correct on one aspect of this, which is like if you really want to have all the options available for consideration, you should wait until that next event happens.
01:45:12 ◼ ► And that could be another month, or it could be another month and a half, or it could not happen at all. Who knows? They could push all that stuff until the spring or next summer. We have no idea until it actually happens.
01:45:25 ◼ ► But you know, I think ultimately if you're going to have a desktop at all, you can just get the iMac Pro right now.
01:45:33 ◼ ► Because I don't think they're going to update it soon. Even if they did update it, it probably wouldn't be that big of an update.
01:45:45 ◼ ► And I can't imagine anything about the Mac Pro configurator is going to change your mind because you'd have a similar display issue with that.
01:45:56 ◼ ► So therefore I revert back to my earlier suggestion of just get the stupid refurb that has the 4TB SSD for almost no money. That's it. Done. And you can have it at the end of this week.
01:46:05 ◼ ► That's true. Let me throw a curveball at you though, and I promise we'll move on soon. I really do.
01:46:10 ◼ ► Should I get a Mac Mini? Well, can the Mac Mini, hold it, just hear me out, just hear me out, just hear me out. Can the Mac Mini power the LG whatever whatever Ultrafine at 5K?
01:46:20 ◼ ► Yes it can. That's how I tested the review. You don't know how to... yep, it can power it just fine. I will say the GPU sucks.
01:46:29 ◼ ► So what if I get a Mac Mini and the LG Ultrafine, because I'm looking at a Mac Mini and built real nice.
01:46:35 ◼ ► So a Mac Mini with a 3GHz processor, 32GB RAM, I haven't even looked at refurbs mind you. This is straight, you know, brand new.
01:46:41 ◼ ► 2GB SSD with the fancy 10GB Ethernet is $2600. And what is the LG Ultrafine? Like the big one?
01:47:00 ◼ ► If you already have a display, fine. But it's just a hodgepodge with a not good monitor with weird compromises. Just ugh. No, don't do that.
01:47:13 ◼ ► No, no. You want to save money, keep using what you're using right now until November and re-evaluate. That's how you save money.
01:47:21 ◼ ► You don't save money by getting a weird Frankenstein Mac Mini configuration and buying a third-party monitor. It's gross.
01:47:31 ◼ ► No, this is crap. There's no appeal necessary. Ignore John because this is your job, this is your work, you would love it anyway.
01:47:48 ◼ ► I cannot bear to see a good friend use a 12-inch MacBook as his only computer for like two months. That's cruel and unusual punishment.
01:47:59 ◼ ► Oh, come on. Alright, so let me put this appeal out to the world. If you happen to work at a fruit company and you happen to know that maybe something's happening in a month or two with regard to 16-inch laptops, you know, if you just wanted to send a little something my way, I promise I won't tell anyone.
01:48:18 ◼ ► What would that change? Suppose you get the answer back that there's definitely one coming in a month. Are you going to buy it?
01:48:24 ◼ ► I would really think about it. Yeah, I would really really that sounds so wishy-washy because it is. But I would make me wonder, like, since as you said earlier, I do take my laptop out and do work on it at least a couple of times a week.
01:48:40 ◼ ► Why wouldn't I just get a 16-inch, you know, this if it is what we expected to be a 16-inch powerhouse, maybe pair it with a monitor, maybe not. But presumably I'm getting everything I want in this fantasy world.
01:48:56 ◼ ► And it's about the same money as the iMac Pro, but I'm getting not literally, of course, two computers, but I'm sort of kind of getting two computers for the price of one in the sense that I have one amazing computer that can go anywhere with me.
01:49:12 ◼ ► Well, and you know, you laugh, but that's very true. I mean, I would keep the adorable, but your point is still fair. And the other thing is I haven't solved my Plex problems.
01:49:21 ◼ ► Well, we'll see what happens. But I also haven't solved my Plex problems. And this is a silly thing for me to be worked up about. But honest to goodness, Plex is an important part of my entire family's life.
01:49:31 ◼ ► Like, you know, the kids will watch a couple of shows each afternoon and they do that off of Plex. And so there are other mechanisms that I can do to make Plex servers, you know, like Jelly's been talking to my ear over the last couple of days because apparently he just put together some sort of Raspberry Pi something or other.
01:49:45 ◼ ► So presumably I could make this work anyway. But I don't know. I feel like money, no object. Let's just talk for a second. Money, no object.
01:49:53 ◼ ► I already have the iMac Pro and then I would still debate whether or not to get a new laptop when the time comes.
01:49:59 ◼ ► And maybe that's what I should do is not necessarily guarantee to myself I'll be getting a laptop, but do the right thing for 80% of my computer use.