PodSearch

ATP

330: A Rotation You Can't Complete

 

00:00:00   I gotta say, I'm a little bit scared of Skype right now.

00:00:03   - Right now?

00:00:05   - More than usual, because for the last, I don't know,

00:00:08   three, four weeks, Skype has popped up the box

00:00:11   about every few hours when it's open, saying,

00:00:14   Skype would like to install a helper tool

00:00:16   and to your password to allow this.

00:00:19   And normally, my rule with Skype is,

00:00:21   it's gonna do whatever it wants anyway,

00:00:23   so just let it do it right.

00:00:24   - Just embrace it.

00:00:26   - Yeah, 'cause I depend on Skype, I need it to work,

00:00:28   so normally I just let it do what it needs to do.

00:00:31   So the first couple of times I actually entered my password,

00:00:34   you know, it's the system dialog,

00:00:35   I actually enter my password and let it install

00:00:36   whatever helper tool it thinks it needs.

00:00:38   The problem is that that box just kept coming up.

00:00:41   And so eventually I got tired of entering my password

00:00:43   and just started hitting cancel on it.

00:00:45   And it's coming up at the same frequency

00:00:47   as when I was entering the password,

00:00:49   and nothing seems to be different or broken.

00:00:52   Nothing seems to be happening,

00:00:54   and everything seems to be working fine,

00:00:56   but I feel like something's going to explode

00:00:58   at any moment.

00:00:59   - Yeah, this is ominous.

00:01:02   - Or Skype has given me a virus and, you know,

00:01:04   there's no good outcome.

00:01:06   - Well now you've given it to me!

00:01:07   - Does that work that way?

00:01:08   - Yeah, by virtue of the Skype call,

00:01:10   now I have your virus, thanks a lot.

00:01:11   (laughing)

00:01:12   - It's like when Microsoft Office prompts me

00:01:14   to turn on auto-updates, and the choices

00:01:17   in the notification are turn on and not now.

00:01:20   And I get these on other people's accounts,

00:01:23   the shared 5K AMAC, and no matter what you hit,

00:01:26   it doesn't matter, you'll be seeing that notification

00:01:28   again in a day or two.

00:01:29   - Wonderful.

00:01:30   - Yeah, 'cause like your only option is like,

00:01:31   I want to do it later.

00:01:33   - No, but you can say turn on.

00:01:34   I do want auto-updates on.

00:01:36   I hit turn on.

00:01:37   It doesn't matter what you hit.

00:01:37   It's still going to come back later,

00:01:39   and it's going to say, you know, it doesn't matter.

00:01:41   It seems to do nothing.

00:01:43   On a shared computer, I always think it's because

00:01:45   like some weird ownership things,

00:01:46   'cause the person who installed the app

00:01:48   is not the person who's getting prompted,

00:01:49   and what does it mean for every individual user

00:01:51   to have auto-updates on, and can those users

00:01:53   even auto-update an app that was installed

00:01:55   by another user, but you're on your own Mac,

00:01:57   and I'm assuming you installed Skype yourself,

00:01:59   so I don't know if that's the problem.

00:02:00   - You know, I didn't think about multi-user.

00:02:02   Tiff has a profile on this Mac with Skype

00:02:05   for when we're at the beach, and she's doing her podcasts.

00:02:07   - But did she install Skype, or maybe did she update it

00:02:09   last time she ran it?

00:02:10   Just see her on the Skype app to Marco, and see if that works.

00:02:14   (laughing)

00:02:16   I cannot believe we're actually doing this on the air.

00:02:18   - Skype.app.

00:02:20   It's root wheel.

00:02:22   - That seems wrong.

00:02:23   - Cool.

00:02:24   - Very, very wrong.

00:02:25   - It should be Marco staff.

00:02:28   - First of all, I've never seen a staff group on Mac OS.

00:02:31   - What?

00:02:32   - Well, you can do Marco admin, it doesn't matter, whatever.

00:02:34   - Let me list my home directory.

00:02:35   Oh, there it is, yeah, there's staff.

00:02:36   All right, so I guess staff is the default group.

00:02:38   - Oh, yeah, that is true.

00:02:39   What is wheel?

00:02:40   I thought you were crazy.

00:02:41   What the hell is wheel?

00:02:43   - It's the group for root.

00:02:44   Don't worry about it.

00:02:45   - I'm actually kind of curious.

00:02:46   I've seen that on servers and stuff.

00:02:48   I have no idea where, where does that come from?

00:02:50   - Why, is it called wheel?

00:02:51   That's a bit of Unix history I don't actually know,

00:02:53   but it is called wheel.

00:02:55   Wheel, noun, from slang, big wheel, for a powerful person,

00:02:59   a person who has an active wheel bit.

00:03:00   The traditional name of security group zero in BSD

00:03:02   to which the major system internal users

00:03:04   like root belong is wheel.

00:03:05   - That is a terrible origin story.

00:03:07   I was hoping it was something more interesting.

00:03:09   - Origins, the term wheel was first applied

00:03:11   to computer user privilege levels after the introduction

00:03:13   of the 10x operating system.

00:03:15   - It's pronounced 10-10.

00:03:17   - I can't even tell if you're messing with me right now.

00:03:19   In the early 60s, in the 60s and early 70s,

00:03:21   the term was derived from the slang phrase big wheel,

00:03:23   referring to a person with great power or influence, see?

00:03:25   Stack exchange was right.

00:03:27   - Yeah, it's those same websites say that slash US-star

00:03:30   stands for like Unix system resources or some stuff

00:03:32   and it does not, it's short for user.

00:03:35   - Yeah, this wheel thing, this is a terrible story.

00:03:37   I was hoping maybe it was like W heal

00:03:39   and there was something more interesting about it

00:03:41   or something, who knows, right?

00:03:43   That's too bad.

00:03:44   - W heal.

00:03:45   - I don't know.

00:03:46   - Yeah.

00:03:47   - Oh, I just got the box again, what should I do?

00:03:49   I'm gonna hit cancel.

00:03:50   I'm doing it, I'm doing it.

00:03:51   Cancel.

00:03:52   (laughing)

00:03:55   This is my life.

00:03:56   It's very exciting.

00:03:58   (electronic beeping)

00:03:59   - So why don't we switch into FaceTime audio for this thing?

00:04:02   - Never.

00:04:03   - As soon as we switch to iCloud Drive

00:04:04   and their new shared folder support instead of Dropbox.

00:04:07   - Yeah, I haven't knowingly seen this new,

00:04:10   further ruined Dropbox yet, but I'm already dreading it.

00:04:13   - Dropbox is really making people mad.

00:04:15   I mean, Dropbox has always been like

00:04:18   an incredibly hellish client app

00:04:19   that happened to achieve good functionality

00:04:21   and we tolerated it, but the client Dropbox app

00:04:24   has always been a total piece of garbage

00:04:25   from a technical level, and it's always been

00:04:28   amazingly wasteful of system resources.

00:04:30   And it seems like not only did they just raise their prices,

00:04:32   which everyone's mad about, but also now

00:04:34   they have this additional problem of the app

00:04:36   is now bundling all of Chromium

00:04:39   and taking like half a gig extra.

00:04:42   (laughing)

00:04:43   - Hey, have I told you about WorkChat?

00:04:44   WorkChat is excellent.

00:04:45   - You don't have a job anymore, what are you talking about?

00:04:47   You don't need this stuff.

00:04:48   - No, I'm talking about Evernote,

00:04:49   'cause Evernote has gone down this road as well,

00:04:51   and it's just not good, not good.

00:04:54   - Remember, I don't know, maybe a year ago

00:04:55   I tried to drop Dropbox and looked into

00:04:58   what that would take, and one of the things was,

00:05:00   one of the reasons I, I guess picked it back up,

00:05:03   is that there was no shared folder support

00:05:06   on iCloud Drive, and so many people like you guys

00:05:09   who I deal with are, the way we deal with each other

00:05:12   and pass files around is through Dropbox shared folders.

00:05:15   So it seemed almost impossible to totally get off Dropbox

00:05:19   until they had, until iCloud Drive had shared folders.

00:05:22   Now it will, I guess, I mean, I'm not running the beta yet,

00:05:25   but like once everyone's on the new versions,

00:05:27   like this fall, we will have shared folders.

00:05:30   They might even work, and so if they actually work

00:05:33   acceptably, I think a lot of us could drop Dropbox finally,

00:05:37   but I don't know, there's so much network lock-in,

00:05:41   I have a feeling it's gonna be really hard

00:05:43   for some people to totally get rid of it.

00:05:45   - Yeah.

00:05:46   - There's some vaguely Dropbox-related stuff

00:05:49   in the topic list today.

00:05:50   - Yeah.

00:05:51   - I'm excited.

00:05:53   - I'm a little scared.

00:05:54   (laughs)

00:05:55   - That's a tiny item, lots of small items today.

00:05:58   - Yeah, speaking of small items, I'm finally

00:06:01   actually diving in more in Swift.

00:06:03   - Yeah, and?

00:06:05   - How's that a small item?

00:06:07   - Yeah, right.

00:06:08   - It's a big, big item.

00:06:09   - I keep running into things that remind me

00:06:11   just how much of a dick Swift is.

00:06:14   It's such a dick.

00:06:15   But I think what I've come around to is that,

00:06:18   you know, some people are dicks,

00:06:20   and I don't wanna associate with them.

00:06:22   I'm also friends with a lot of people who are dicks.

00:06:24   And the ones that are my friends,

00:06:27   I have chosen to be like, you know what,

00:06:29   I recognize you're a dick, but I like you for other reasons,

00:06:31   and you're my friend, and so I will tolerate

00:06:33   your dickishness because you're my friend.

00:06:36   - You know I'm on the call with you, right?

00:06:37   - That's the kind of relationship,

00:06:39   that's the kind of relationship that I think

00:06:41   I need to have with Swift now.

00:06:42   Like, Swift is a dick, but I have to be its friend

00:06:46   for lots of other reasons.

00:06:47   And there are parts of it I like.

00:06:49   You know, even your dickie friends can be nice sometimes.

00:06:51   And so there are parts of it I like,

00:06:52   and so I have to get over that and just embrace it

00:06:57   for its full dickitude and just be 100% okay with,

00:07:01   you know what, Swift is my friend now,

00:07:04   and yes, it's a dick a lot of the time,

00:07:06   but it's still my friend, and so I have to stand up for it,

00:07:08   I have to support it, and I have to use it.

00:07:10   - So you're spending all this time complaining about Swift,

00:07:12   and while you were doing that, I wrote a Mac app in Swift,

00:07:15   so I don't know what's taking you so long.

00:07:16   (laughing)

00:07:18   - Swift didn't bother me at all.

00:07:20   - What is your Mac app?

00:07:21   Are you talking about the extension?

00:07:22   - My, but you have to, Safari extensions

00:07:24   have to be in apps now, so I have to make an app

00:07:26   to wrap around the one line of code

00:07:28   that constitutes my reload extension.

00:07:30   Page.reload, open, close parens.

00:07:33   That is the code of my application.

00:07:34   I just read it on the air, it's open source now.

00:07:36   The whole rest of it is, how do you make

00:07:39   a notarized Mac application starting from zero,

00:07:42   and that is a surprising amount of work,

00:07:46   if you've never done it before, which I haven't.

00:07:47   - So you enlisted Marco to fix all your problems?

00:07:49   - No, I just read webpages, like it's not difficult,

00:07:53   but Xcode sure doesn't help you.

00:07:54   I was saying in Slack that I think it needs more wizards,

00:07:57   it needs more like, you're gonna make an app,

00:08:00   here are the 9,000 things you're gonna need.

00:08:02   Don't make me go like Keychain Access

00:08:04   and make a certificate signing request.

00:08:06   You can do all that, you're the computer, just do it all.

00:08:09   Like you know what I need, like just do all the things.

00:08:12   And you know, I'm going to the website,

00:08:13   I'm going to Keychain Access, I'm going to Xcode,

00:08:16   and in every step of the way, there's like one wrong turn,

00:08:19   like it could lead you into a dead end

00:08:22   that's not gonna get you anywhere.

00:08:23   One of the web instructions was like,

00:08:24   this thing is gonna pop up, this dialog box

00:08:26   is gonna pop up, hit cancel.

00:08:28   Like the dialog is offering to do something

00:08:30   that sounds useful, and normally you just say okay,

00:08:33   but no, you have to hit cancel if you hit okay.

00:08:35   Anyway, yeah, so you build this Mac app that does nothing,

00:08:40   and inside it you bury this other little extension

00:08:42   that does one simple thing.

00:08:45   Yeah, the most difficult part was getting us code working

00:08:47   and getting signing working, and the second most difficult

00:08:49   part was making PDF graphic because my 2x bitmap graphic

00:08:53   from the old reload button is no longer acceptable.

00:08:55   (laughing)

00:08:57   - The struggle.

00:08:58   You know, I can't, I just, it's hard for me

00:09:01   to wrap my head around anyone, but particularly you, John,

00:09:05   being this set in your ways that you can't just hit Command R.

00:09:08   Like, is it that hard?

00:09:09   - I can't Command R all the time.

00:09:11   - Then why do you need a (bleep) button?

00:09:13   - Every once in a while I hit the reload button

00:09:15   with my mouse because I sometimes use the mouse.

00:09:17   Have you ever used the mouse when you use a computer?

00:09:19   - Nope, never, not once.

00:09:21   - Sometimes my hand is on the mouse and my pointer

00:09:23   is near that section of the screen or I'm doing something

00:09:26   else and I hit the reload button.

00:09:28   Sometimes I hit Command R.

00:09:29   - I don't think I ever even click anywhere

00:09:31   near the address bar.

00:09:32   - Yeah, you're a Command L person for life.

00:09:34   - Yeah, oh yeah.

00:09:35   - Wait, but hold on a second.

00:09:36   Why do you not hit the button in the, what you call 'em,

00:09:40   the URL field?

00:09:41   - Because it's in the wrong place and my cursor

00:09:42   is never over there.

00:09:44   - Oh my God, so you have two buttons just to hit reload?

00:09:47   - Well, I can't get rid of the other reload button.

00:09:49   - Oh my God, John.

00:09:50   - It's also because, so I've always had back forward reload.

00:09:53   Chrome has back forward reload.

00:09:55   Every version of Safari, until they shoved it

00:09:57   into the address bar, has had back forward reload.

00:09:59   I'm just used to the buttons being over there.

00:10:02   - I just, if this were me, if this were me,

00:10:05   and God help me, I hope this gets released.

00:10:07   Can I just put it on record?

00:10:08   I'm actually in a very good mood, but I would also like

00:10:10   to put on record that if this were me saying these things,

00:10:13   the whole of the ATP listenership would say,

00:10:15   what is wrong with you, Casey?

00:10:17   Get over it and embrace 2016.

00:10:20   - This reload button is not a new thing

00:10:22   and every time I mention people like, oh thank God,

00:10:25   I hate that reload button in the address bar.

00:10:26   People thank me profusely for this one line application

00:10:30   that reloads web pages badly.

00:10:31   That's it.

00:10:32   In this case, I'm not the only one.

00:10:36   If you don't want it, then you don't have to use it.

00:10:38   - Well, because you can do no wrong.

00:10:39   - It's just that, I mean, there is a method to the madness.

00:10:43   Like, back-forward reload is the standard way

00:10:45   if you use multiple browsers, if you're used to the buttons

00:10:47   being over there and you wish the button was back there,

00:10:49   you can do that.

00:10:50   It's the whole point of the toolbar and extensions

00:10:52   and why you can customize it.

00:10:53   So you can make the toolbar the way you want it.

00:10:55   I don't know what your toolbar looks like, whatever.

00:10:57   - It's certainly within your rights.

00:10:58   I'm not trying to like say that you're not allowed

00:11:00   to do this, but--

00:11:01   - And it's not ridiculous.

00:11:02   It's not a ridiculous notion.

00:11:03   I mean, there is a reload button.

00:11:04   - I'll say it, you aren't allowed to do this.

00:11:05   This is a terrible idea.

00:11:07   - I mean, it is a terrible idea, but you do you, man.

00:11:09   I just can't fathom that you would, you of all people

00:11:12   would look at two reload buttons in the same window.

00:11:15   How do you, how is that okay?

00:11:16   - The other one isn't a button.

00:11:17   The other one is a tiny glyph way in the inside

00:11:20   of the header's bar that you don't even notice.

00:11:22   - Jon, I love you so much,

00:11:23   but you are out of your damn mind.

00:11:25   I'm just like, how often are you reloading pages

00:11:28   and your hands aren't near the keyboard?

00:11:30   - Yeah, I've never do web development

00:11:32   a surprising amount of time, apparently.

00:11:34   Like, it's not like I don't use Command R.

00:11:35   I'm sure I use Command R more than the reload button,

00:11:38   but when I do use the reload button,

00:11:39   I want it to be where I want it to be.

00:11:41   - And having it where you want it to be,

00:11:44   resulting in this hilariously complex setup,

00:11:48   and also, then you have two reload buttons on screen.

00:11:51   Isn't that worse?

00:11:53   Doesn't that bother you on a fundamental level?

00:11:54   - Right!

00:11:55   - So the other one isn't a button.

00:11:56   It's a tiny little glyph.

00:11:58   - It is not a tiny little glyph!

00:11:59   - It's a tiny little glyph.

00:12:00   It's like smaller than the little lock symbol.

00:12:03   I don't even see it.

00:12:05   It is invisible.

00:12:06   - Let me start Xscope,

00:12:07   and let's see how small this tiny little glyph is.

00:12:09   - Yeah, it's certainly not a button.

00:12:11   It's not like it has its own outline.

00:12:12   It is just tucked into the corner of the address bar.

00:12:15   Anyway, I hadn't, like, it broke in Safari 12 or whatever,

00:12:18   'cause, like, you had to load it manually.

00:12:19   Remember, we talked about it in the show.

00:12:20   And I was like, well, whatever, I'm not gonna bother with it.

00:12:22   But then, when it became clear that I actually

00:12:25   can resurrect it if I go through this pain,

00:12:27   I was waiting and waiting, and then finally,

00:12:28   like, Safari 13 isn't gonna support the old ones at all.

00:12:31   Right, so I figured I would bite the bullet and resurrect it.

00:12:35   And many people have thanked me for resurrecting it,

00:12:38   because they too want to move over a reload button,

00:12:41   for whatever reason.

00:12:42   I remember I did it, I did it originally kind of as a joke

00:12:45   when Safari extensions came out.

00:12:46   It's like, what is the simplest extension

00:12:48   you could possibly make?

00:12:49   And I'm like, well, a reload button.

00:12:50   I think it was their example or something.

00:12:53   And it was actually more complicated before.

00:12:54   The app extensions, you just, you get an SF Safari page,

00:12:58   whatever, view, and you just call reload on it.

00:13:00   The old way, you had to inject a script,

00:13:02   and the script had to remember the scroll position,

00:13:05   reload the page, and reset the scroll position.

00:13:07   So it was a little bit silly.

00:13:08   - This is 22 points wide by 26 points tall.

00:13:12   - It's not a button though, is it?

00:13:13   - Can you click it?

00:13:14   Then it's a button.

00:13:15   - You can click all sorts of things.

00:13:16   - Oh my God.

00:13:17   - You can click a checkbox, checkbox isn't a button.

00:13:19   - And a matter of speaking, it is.

00:13:21   - You can click a text field, text field isn't a button.

00:13:23   - I think, aren't some of these actually buttons,

00:13:25   like at the AppKit level?

00:13:27   - Well, where's the Accessibility Inspector?

00:13:29   Hold on, where's Accessibility Inspector?

00:13:31   How do I start that bad boy up?

00:13:32   Let me see what this says.

00:13:33   - Oh, I need to add a tool tip because,

00:13:35   oh, I already have a tool tip, nevermind.

00:13:36   - Reload this page, button.

00:13:38   Label, reload this page, title, reload this page,

00:13:40   value nil, type, button.

00:13:43   - For accessibility purposes, sure, it's a button.

00:13:45   How is he gonna describe it?

00:13:46   - Oh God, Jon, really?

00:13:48   Are you trying to get me out of technicality on this?

00:13:50   - Did you remember that this is a button thing

00:13:52   for the Neven Murgon made

00:13:53   that I concluded one of my OS X reviews?

00:13:56   How buttony are your buttons?

00:13:57   - Oh my God.

00:13:58   - What color is your parachute?

00:14:00   - Can we move on to follow up?

00:14:01   I'd never thought I'd be this excited to get to follow up.

00:14:03   I'm gonna need to get a drink or start some follow up,

00:14:05   one or the other.

00:14:07   I love you, Jon.

00:14:08   Oh my God.

00:14:08   - By the way, I just verified that in the app kit,

00:14:12   check boxes are indeed NS button instances.

00:14:14   (laughs)

00:14:16   - Score one for me.

00:14:17   - Yeah, well, that's just a base class.

00:14:19   That's not a--

00:14:19   - Oh God, you were going, technicality's all the way down.

00:14:23   - Go look in the Apple Human Interface guidelines.

00:14:26   It will say buttons, check boxes,

00:14:28   pop up whatever they call them.

00:14:30   You know what I mean.

00:14:31   - That's the technical term, of course.

00:14:33   - Oh God, Jon.

00:14:34   I love you so much.

00:14:36   Oh my God.

00:14:37   All right, let's do some follow up.

00:14:39   And it starts with some ASCII art apps.

00:14:41   And I thought we talked about at least one of these

00:14:44   in the past, did we not?

00:14:46   Maybe not, I don't know.

00:14:46   - No, I think I got bumped for the live show.

00:14:48   - Oh, is that what it was?

00:14:49   Okay, so in any case, there are two ASCII art apps

00:14:53   that were called to our attention.

00:14:55   The context here is doing ASCII art in comments,

00:14:59   which I find to be delightful.

00:15:00   Not everyone does, but I do.

00:15:02   And there's two options that we have been turned on to

00:15:05   from various people, one of which is Monodraw,

00:15:08   which is a Mac app, it's specifically for the Mac,

00:15:11   and it looks extremely full featured.

00:15:13   I think it's shareware, it's a free trial

00:15:17   by license sort of situation.

00:15:19   I haven't tried it, to be honest,

00:15:20   but it looks really and truly incredible.

00:15:22   - I have, it's amazing.

00:15:24   - There you go.

00:15:25   - I think it's only $10.

00:15:25   I immediately bought it once I saw it,

00:15:27   because actually it feels very similar to PaintCode

00:15:30   in a lot of the basic design structure of it,

00:15:33   which I guess is kind of just Mac standard.

00:15:35   It is delightful.

00:15:37   To be able to just draw out ASCII art

00:15:40   as if it's a drawing tool,

00:15:41   and it behaves a lot like a drawing tool.

00:15:43   There's a fill tool, there's different shapes,

00:15:45   and different line strokes and everything

00:15:48   all generating this ASCII stuff.

00:15:50   It's kind of amazing.

00:15:51   I don't really have so much use for this kind of app

00:15:55   that I really needed to buy it,

00:15:57   but I bought it because it's just delightful.

00:15:59   It just makes me smile.

00:16:01   As a nerd and as a Mac user and as a programmer,

00:16:04   all three of those things, this app makes me smile.

00:16:06   And so it was definitely worth the $10.

00:16:09   And even if I never launch it again,

00:16:11   which is unlikely, honestly,

00:16:12   I think I will probably try to find reasons to use it,

00:16:14   but even if I never launch it again,

00:16:16   I'm just so happy this app exists.

00:16:18   I'm so happy to give them 10 bucks.

00:16:20   It's delightful.

00:16:21   - Yeah, this is like the good old days of Mac apps

00:16:23   where there would be a high quality native Mac app

00:16:26   that someone sweated over every detail of

00:16:29   for insert ridiculous purpose here.

00:16:31   Whatever it was, whatever you wanted it to be,

00:16:33   whether it was like software for dealing

00:16:35   with a dentist's office or thing to track your workouts

00:16:38   or just a thing to explore old maps.

00:16:41   Some person somewhere loved that thing so much

00:16:44   and was a Mac developer and made this amazing app.

00:16:46   Not like just a junky thing that someone threw together

00:16:49   that sort of works, but like a polished application

00:16:52   that they sold on their websites for a reasonable fee.

00:16:54   This is totally a throwback to those days.

00:16:57   - It is very cool looking having not even tried it.

00:17:00   And then additionally, there's a web-based tool

00:17:02   called ASCII Flow, and we will have both these links

00:17:05   in the show notes.

00:17:06   I was just trying it and Marco will fix it in post,

00:17:08   but I dropped my Apple pencil on my desk

00:17:10   'cause I was trying to use this.

00:17:12   I was trying to use this with the pencil

00:17:14   and it is slightly clunky, but it is workable on the iPad.

00:17:17   But anyway, this is obviously a free app.

00:17:18   It looks a lot less fancy than Monodraw is,

00:17:21   but if you favor something free and less fancy and less good

00:17:25   this is also an option, so this is called ASCII Flow Infinity.

00:17:29   Also very cool, and it's cool to see that done on the web.

00:17:32   So two very, very neat apps

00:17:34   if you wanted to be an ASCII artist.

00:17:38   - Yeah, this is the flip side of that.

00:17:39   The beauty of the web is you might need something,

00:17:41   but you don't have time to or don't want to install software

00:17:44   and something like, well, this is simple enough.

00:17:46   Can I just do this somewhere on the web right now?

00:17:47   You just go to asciiflow.com.

00:17:50   Instantly you're in the app and you can start using it.

00:17:53   I'm sure it's less powerful than the native app,

00:17:54   but it's nice to have, you know, it's the best of both worlds.

00:17:57   The web is available everywhere,

00:17:59   accessible to everybody, and often free.

00:18:01   And then if it's something you really care about

00:18:03   having a polished native app is great.

00:18:05   - Excellent.

00:18:06   We have more information about the thing

00:18:08   that Marco and I are still skeptical

00:18:10   is called the blending stump,

00:18:13   but a video from Landon Epps indicates

00:18:15   that it's also a lasso tool because why not?

00:18:19   - I don't know if it's also a lasso tool.

00:18:21   It might only be a lasso tool.

00:18:22   Like, I don't know what it's called.

00:18:23   I've never heard anyone from Apple name it.

00:18:25   I asked somebody, remember when you were there with me,

00:18:27   I asked someone in the Mac Pro demo room,

00:18:29   what is that tool called?

00:18:30   They had no idea, but it just looks like a lasso tool.

00:18:33   I don't know if it does blending at all.

00:18:35   I'm very confused by this tool.

00:18:37   It is a fairly faithful rendition of a blending stump,

00:18:41   but in this video that we will link in the show notes

00:18:43   in someone's tweet, you can see that all it does

00:18:45   is sort of a magic selection type thing,

00:18:47   and you get little crawling ant borders

00:18:49   around the thing that you've selected.

00:18:51   (laughing)

00:18:53   That's what it's called.

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00:21:03   - You know, can we use this moment now a week on?

00:21:10   What are you guys most excited about?

00:21:12   I know we're gonna talk about some of these things later.

00:21:15   There'll be some file system talk later, don't you worry.

00:21:17   But what are you guys most excited about?

00:21:19   Because I've started digging into Combine,

00:21:22   which as I think I said last week at the live show,

00:21:24   I keep trying to call Combine.

00:21:26   But anyway, I've dug into that some,

00:21:29   and I'm still very excited about it.

00:21:31   Although I'm in the,

00:21:32   this is not meeting all my hopes and dreams stage

00:21:34   of learning it, which is fine.

00:21:36   That's part of the process.

00:21:37   But SwiftUI I have also dabbled with a little bit.

00:21:41   And again, it's not meeting all my hopes and dreams,

00:21:43   but it is very shiny and very cool.

00:21:47   So I think my two favorite,

00:21:48   oh, and actually I need a third favorite,

00:21:51   the new Collection View layout stuff.

00:21:53   What is it called?

00:21:54   Collection View Compositional Layout or something like that?

00:21:57   I forget exactly what it's called,

00:21:58   but that looks incredible.

00:22:02   So I think those are my top three.

00:22:04   I probably could come up with a four

00:22:05   if we wanted to stay on brand.

00:22:06   But I mean, I guess staying on brand

00:22:08   is not coming up with all four of them.

00:22:10   Anyway, Marco, what are your favorite,

00:22:13   you know, one, two, three or four things a week on

00:22:15   that you heard about?

00:22:17   - Honestly, I haven't had a lot of time

00:22:19   to actually dive into the technical side of this,

00:22:22   so I could change my mind once I find

00:22:24   some of these things might be not what I thought they were

00:22:27   or they might not be ready yet

00:22:28   or they might be more limited than I think.

00:22:30   But at the moment, I am super into the idea

00:22:32   of using SwiftUI, especially on the watch.

00:22:35   You know, like the SwiftUI project,

00:22:38   formally rumored as the name Amber,

00:22:40   started on the watch.

00:22:41   And it shows.

00:22:43   The watch is what needed it most badly

00:22:46   and it shines clearly so much on the watch.

00:22:49   And it's just so much better than WatchKit.

00:22:52   And so even if, like you know, right now,

00:22:55   SwiftUI, it's very early days for it.

00:22:57   It's very limited probably in what it can do.

00:23:00   You're still gonna have to be calling out a lot

00:23:01   to like UIKit views or controllers to do certain things.

00:23:06   But on the watch, it's such a small problem space

00:23:08   that it's like an even better fit

00:23:10   for something that is so new and probably

00:23:12   is gonna start out so basic.

00:23:14   So I'm very much looking forward to using that

00:23:17   and replacing my watch app, which I, you know,

00:23:19   every May, I tell myself, I hope I don't have to rewrite

00:23:24   my watch app this summer.

00:23:25   (laughing)

00:23:26   Because I hate working on my watch app and whatever.

00:23:29   And then June comes around and I get some awesome new thing

00:23:32   in the SDK and I'm like, I should really rewrite

00:23:34   the watch app because it can be so much better now.

00:23:37   And this is the biggest year for that

00:23:40   that there has ever been.

00:23:42   It can now be way better than even it was.

00:23:44   Like, you know, last year I was able to add

00:23:46   offline playback that actually worked reliably.

00:23:49   But the files didn't transfer reliably.

00:23:51   So like the audio part was there last year,

00:23:53   but I couldn't do streaming and I might still

00:23:56   not be able to do it, I don't know yet,

00:23:58   depending on what the API is.

00:23:59   But there is just so much more now that I can do in the UI

00:24:04   and so much more easily and just so much nicer.

00:24:08   Like, I've never been happy with the interface

00:24:10   of my watch app.

00:24:10   It's been crap and it's just different degrees of crap.

00:24:13   And it's always been very limiting with what I could do

00:24:15   because it was all like this very small set of watch kit

00:24:17   tools that you were actually allowed to use

00:24:19   and they weren't very good and they had weird behaviors

00:24:21   and weird bugs and weird things you had to do

00:24:24   to make them work at all.

00:24:26   And so having a big reset switch on that is huge for me.

00:24:30   And it's also, it's also just gonna be like a nice

00:24:32   like small attack surface on which I can learn

00:24:36   Swift and Swift UI a lot better before I like bring it

00:24:39   to like my big app.

00:24:41   - Fair enough.

00:24:42   John, I know it may or may not be as directly applicable

00:24:45   to you, but what are you still excited for?

00:24:47   Or maybe newly excited for?

00:24:50   - I'm still excited for the Mac Pro, that's my number one.

00:24:52   - Of course.

00:24:53   - My number two is Swift UI, which I also haven't really

00:24:58   dug into, but not so much for what Swift UI is,

00:25:00   but what it will become.

00:25:02   I'm finally getting a chance to see how it was implemented

00:25:06   under the covers, which I'm subscribed to,

00:25:10   I was subscribed to Swift evolution when it was

00:25:11   a mailing list and I do stop by the forums these days

00:25:14   and try to keep track of the various Swift evolution

00:25:17   proposals.

00:25:19   If I had to been on top of them more,

00:25:21   I could have better predicted what Swift UI would be.

00:25:23   And I'm sure people who were on top of Swift evolution more

00:25:26   probably did predict what Swift UI would be.

00:25:29   But suffice it to say that it uses a bunch of features

00:25:32   that landed in Swift in the past year, year and a half.

00:25:37   That are essential for making it work.

00:25:39   And it's those features that I'm most interested in

00:25:40   to see how other people can make APIs like this

00:25:43   and to see how Swift UI is going to evolve.

00:25:45   And then third place, I don't even know.

00:25:48   Like it's all, my head is entirely filled with Mac Pro

00:25:50   and Swift UI at this point.

00:25:52   - Fair enough.

00:25:54   So let's carry on where we left off last week,

00:25:57   carry on my wayward son.

00:25:58   Let's talk about everyone's favorite topic, APFS.

00:26:02   - You're gonna complain that Marco and I didn't know

00:26:04   that was a reference, 'cause we totally did.

00:26:05   We don't tell you the obvious ones, just so you know.

00:26:08   - Okay.

00:26:09   Usually that doesn't happen until well after the show.

00:26:10   Like a few days later--

00:26:11   - Like when I nip it in the buds,

00:26:12   I don't have to do 100 people saying,

00:26:14   "He's a carry on my wayward son, you didn't say anything.

00:26:16   "That means you didn't know it."

00:26:17   No, that's not what it means.

00:26:19   - I love that I've trained you over the years to have--

00:26:22   - No, I feel like the audience needs to know

00:26:23   where the bar is.

00:26:25   The bar is higher than that.

00:26:28   - Oh my God.

00:26:29   All right, so I have a lot of ranting and raving

00:26:31   and complaining to do about installing Catalina.

00:26:34   But before I put a sour note on everything,

00:26:37   why don't you tell us, John, about what's going on

00:26:38   with APFS and Catalina?

00:26:40   - Yeah, I bet Catalina's quite an adventure too,

00:26:42   kind of like iOS 13.

00:26:43   Maybe wait for later builds if you're, you know,

00:26:46   if you wanna actually use it for something useful.

00:26:48   But this is about the, one of my favorite sessions

00:26:50   every year at WWDC, the file system session.

00:26:52   Sometimes there's multiple ones this year.

00:26:54   There was just one.

00:26:55   I love me a good file system session.

00:26:57   I went into this one only with the expectation

00:27:00   that I'm gonna hear about the read-only system partition,

00:27:02   which was something we discussed before WWDC,

00:27:04   and in fact, it is a thing in Catalina.

00:27:06   And I did, and I'll talk about that first,

00:27:08   but there was another announcement

00:27:09   that I was very excited about in that session,

00:27:12   which I can understand why it was kind of buried,

00:27:14   but I'm still excited about it anyway.

00:27:16   So as for Catalina and the read-only system partition,

00:27:20   if you're envisioning that as like,

00:27:22   there'll be a separate volume for your operating system

00:27:26   that is mounted read-only, and then a second volume

00:27:30   that has all your stuff on it,

00:27:31   that's not what you'll see in Catalina.

00:27:33   They added some file system features to APFS

00:27:35   to make this possible.

00:27:36   First, they added a thing they call volume groups,

00:27:38   which is not, as far as I can tell, not really groups.

00:27:42   It's like volume pairs, or there are weird limitations to it,

00:27:45   but anyway, it's sufficient to take two volumes,

00:27:49   your Catalina operating system volume

00:27:51   and your everything else volume,

00:27:54   and merge them with each other,

00:27:56   so they appear to be one volume,

00:27:57   even though they are two volumes.

00:27:59   The Catalina volume is read-only,

00:28:01   because that's your read-only system partition,

00:28:03   and the volume with your stuff is read-write,

00:28:06   and the way they merge them is a little bit weird.

00:28:09   So they, you know Apple, and it's links, right?

00:28:12   So Unix had symlinks and hardlinks.

00:28:15   Apple didn't invent, but popularized or pioneered,

00:28:20   or certainly made the largest number of hardlinks

00:28:22   to directories, which is not a thing in traditional Unix.

00:28:25   Most of the time, hardlinks are just for files,

00:28:27   but they made hardlinks for directories

00:28:29   to make Time Machine possible.

00:28:31   Now they have a thing that they call firm links,

00:28:34   and firm links are kind of like symlinks,

00:28:37   in that you can imagine how you can weave

00:28:39   two volumes together with symlinks,

00:28:41   or even with hardlinks and directories,

00:28:42   but the, oh, you can't do hardlinks

00:28:44   and directories across volumes.

00:28:45   Anyway, you cross volumes with symlinks,

00:28:48   but symlinks have the property that if you like,

00:28:50   change directory into a symlink,

00:28:52   and you go into that directory,

00:28:53   you went into a directory called A, right?

00:28:57   When you're in the directory,

00:28:58   you're not actually in a directory called A,

00:28:59   you can name the symlink anything.

00:29:00   The symlink was called A,

00:29:01   but now you're in some totally other directory,

00:29:03   'cause the symlink has transported you

00:29:04   to wherever the other directory is.

00:29:06   It's a different directory and a different volume,

00:29:07   and the directory is not called A.

00:29:09   If you back up a directory from there, CD dot dot,

00:29:12   you will not find yourself where you were before.

00:29:16   You'll find yourself one directory up

00:29:17   from the target of the symlink,

00:29:20   and that can confuse lots of programs,

00:29:23   and can confuse shell scripts and other programs

00:29:25   people write that don't understand

00:29:27   that sometimes you're in a symlink and pass,

00:29:28   and yeah, anyway, canonicalizing passes is a thing.

00:29:30   So, firm links make it that if you go down

00:29:33   one of these links and you go back up,

00:29:35   you end up right back where you started.

00:29:37   Like, they're bi-directional and reversible.

00:29:39   All this is to say that when you're on Catalina,

00:29:42   it just looks like a disk to you,

00:29:44   but it's actually two volumes

00:29:45   merged together with firm links.

00:29:47   And as far as I can tell from the session,

00:29:49   the top volume, like the main one,

00:29:52   is your read-only system partition,

00:29:54   and then the slash users directory and a few other things

00:29:58   are firm links to your read-write data partition.

00:30:01   So, you will only see a single disk.

00:30:03   It is a merging of two volumes,

00:30:05   and it uses this weird feature called firm links.

00:30:07   I'm sure there's gonna be weird edge cases and lots of fun,

00:30:10   but it's nice from a user interface perspective

00:30:12   because people might not, you know,

00:30:15   who don't listen to this program

00:30:15   or don't care about read-only system partitions

00:30:17   will have no idea this took place.

00:30:19   And by the way, it's not optional.

00:30:20   You install Catalina, it will do this to your system.

00:30:23   And it makes it very easy, as Marco found out,

00:30:26   APFS makes it very easy to make new volumes

00:30:28   because it's all shared space.

00:30:29   You don't have to like squish all your data

00:30:30   into a little section to free up a big continuous block

00:30:35   of, you know, storage area on your disk

00:30:37   to put a second volume.

00:30:38   You can make second, third, fourth, fifth volume.

00:30:40   It doesn't matter.

00:30:41   Just throw it all in the same container.

00:30:42   APFS handles it.

00:30:43   So, this is gonna happen during your upgrade

00:30:45   and you might not know it,

00:30:46   but actually you've got two things merged together,

00:30:48   which is kind of neat.

00:30:49   So, Casey, before we move on to the one new,

00:30:52   interesting feature in the Fussell Sim session,

00:30:54   how was your experience going through the Catalina installer

00:30:58   that does all this stuff to your disk?

00:31:00   - So, my thought was having,

00:31:03   so let me back up a half step.

00:31:04   I never installed a Mac, a beta version of macOS ever

00:31:08   to the best of my recollection.

00:31:09   I've just never had any desire to.

00:31:10   I'm not a macOS developer, never wanted it, et cetera.

00:31:12   But Apple dangled the carrot of SwiftUI.

00:31:16   Now, SwiftUI does work on Mojave,

00:31:18   except that if you want the fancy schmancy live preview

00:31:22   where everything is being updated as you're typing it,

00:31:24   you must be on Catalina.

00:31:27   Okay, fine.

00:31:28   So, I'll install Catalina.

00:31:29   And what I did was I bought myself an external SSD,

00:31:33   a half terabyte external SSD.

00:31:35   The particular one I got is a SanDisk

00:31:36   and I like it quite a lot.

00:31:37   It has USB-C in,

00:31:41   but it comes with a USB-C to USB-C cord.

00:31:45   And then it also has a USB-C to USB-A adapter,

00:31:49   if that makes sense.

00:31:50   So basically I can use it with my old iMac,

00:31:52   I can use it with my MacBook, it's fine.

00:31:54   So I started on my MacBook, which was probably a mistake,

00:31:59   and I thought, okay, I will use my little Apple,

00:32:03   my $80 Apple dongle so I can plug in power

00:32:05   and a USB-B device, or I'm sorry,

00:32:08   an A device into my USB-C, my single USB-C port.

00:32:12   And many hours later and many reboots later,

00:32:14   it just did not work.

00:32:15   I just could not get it to work on the external.

00:32:17   So then I go to the iMac and I do basically the same thing,

00:32:20   work no problem, runs reasonably fast, everything's good.

00:32:23   So I thought, all right, fine.

00:32:24   Well, APFS is supposed to be good

00:32:26   and I have enough space on this MacBook.

00:32:28   So I actually, I'm gonna say repartitioned,

00:32:31   but that's ultimately not what I did.

00:32:32   But I basically made space for Catalina to run

00:32:35   adjacent to Mojave on my internal SSD on my MacBook.

00:32:40   And that actually worked no problem.

00:32:41   But I thought I was doing the right thing,

00:32:44   where I've got my external,

00:32:45   I'm not gonna mess at all with the internal drive

00:32:47   on the MacBook, and I just could not get it to work.

00:32:49   It very well could have been user error.

00:32:51   I don't know how it was, but it could have been.

00:32:53   But I'm still, I remain somewhat frustrated

00:32:56   that my poor little two-year-old MacBook

00:32:59   that admittedly is slower than dirt

00:33:01   just could not do it over the USB drive.

00:33:03   And I don't think that's a Catalina problem.

00:33:05   I think of anything that's a MacBook problem,

00:33:07   but I was sad, you guys.

00:33:08   That being said, one, I finally got these things installed.

00:33:12   The installation was fairly easy.

00:33:14   I don't remember anything particularly remarkable about it.

00:33:16   And holy cow, SwiftUI on Catalina is good stuff.

00:33:21   It's not perfect, but it is good stuff.

00:33:24   So if you are adventurous,

00:33:26   and especially if you have an external drive

00:33:27   and not a MacBook, I cannot recommend it enough.

00:33:30   It is excellent.

00:33:31   And Marco, for you doing watch kit stuff,

00:33:33   or I'm sorry, not watch kit,

00:33:34   for you doing SwiftUI on the watch,

00:33:36   I honestly don't know if you've installed Catalina

00:33:38   or not yet, but I cannot recommend it enough,

00:33:41   because it is way better on Catalina doing SwiftUI

00:33:45   than it is on Mojave.

00:33:46   I did the thing where I installed it on the second partition

00:33:49   and that worked fine for me.

00:33:50   So for listeners, the way to do this basically is

00:33:53   make the second partition,

00:33:54   you can make an APFS space sharing one,

00:33:55   so you're not actually losing any space on your main disk.

00:33:59   And there's two ways to do it.

00:34:02   Way number one is install a copy of Mojave

00:34:06   on the second partition, log into that,

00:34:09   and then download the beta profile on that

00:34:11   and have it update itself,

00:34:12   making sure that the updater

00:34:13   is actually gonna run on that volume,

00:34:15   which is clumsy, but a little bit safe and isolated.

00:34:18   The other way to do it,

00:34:19   and I've done one of each of these now,

00:34:21   is to install the beta profile

00:34:24   on your main installation of Mojave,

00:34:26   download the installer,

00:34:27   and then when it says what volume to install on,

00:34:30   pick your new one, and then let it install,

00:34:32   and then remove the beta profile from your main Mojave one.

00:34:35   - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I did.

00:34:36   - In both cases, if you use FileVault

00:34:38   on your main Mojave installation,

00:34:40   when the second installation of Catalina,

00:34:43   when that boots up, it won't see the Mojave disk,

00:34:46   and it'll prompt you to enter the password for it,

00:34:48   but you don't have to enter.

00:34:49   If you just hit Cancel, then the Catalina instance

00:34:52   will be able to see none of the files

00:34:54   on your Mojave instance,

00:34:56   which is actually kind of convenient

00:34:57   for keeping things isolated

00:34:58   and making sure the beta doesn't mess up your main disk.

00:35:01   So I did the Mojave, then Catalina reinstallation thing

00:35:05   on my laptop, and I did the beta,

00:35:08   and then removed the beta direct installation on my desktop,

00:35:12   and both worked totally fine.

00:35:13   So I have seen it, and unfortunately,

00:35:16   I've never really run Mac betas

00:35:18   'cause I've never wanted to, because that's crazy.

00:35:20   This is my production machine.

00:35:22   I have to have everything working right,

00:35:23   but this summer, that's gonna be different,

00:35:25   because I have to do a lot of development on Catalina,

00:35:28   because you also can't do any

00:35:30   catalyst development on Mojave.

00:35:32   - Oh, true, true, true.

00:35:35   - So for most of the Xcode work

00:35:37   I'm going to be doing this summer,

00:35:39   I'm probably gonna want to or need to

00:35:42   be doing it on Catalina.

00:35:44   So I have a feeling I'm gonna be spending

00:35:45   a lot of time booted into that,

00:35:47   and at some point, if the betas become stable enough,

00:35:49   I think I'm just gonna migrate my main installation to it

00:35:52   just to make things simpler.

00:35:53   - Jon, have you touched it at all?

00:35:55   - I haven't installed it yet.

00:35:56   I've been busily doing other computer maintenance stuff.

00:35:59   I don't plan on installing the betas,

00:36:00   although when I was writing my quote-unquote Mac app in Swift

00:36:05   and it had the language version pop up,

00:36:07   it maxed out at 4.2, and that was kind of disappointing.

00:36:10   I couldn't use any of the neat features

00:36:11   that were demonstrated in,

00:36:13   or that are demonstrated by SwiftUI.

00:36:15   Not that I had reason to, but I just wanted to like,

00:36:17   I don't know, write something.

00:36:18   But yeah, so that's a fact of life with Mac development.

00:36:23   You do need the latest OS and the latest version to do that,

00:36:26   and where you get the latest version of Xcode

00:36:28   to do development for it.

00:36:29   Although you can probably install the beta of Xcode

00:36:32   back on Mojave, I'm assuming.

00:36:33   - Yeah, that's what I did at first to play with SwiftUI,

00:36:36   and then that's when I realized, wait a second,

00:36:38   the canvas, I think Xcode thinks it's showing the canvas,

00:36:41   but it's not showing the canvas,

00:36:42   and the canvas being the live preview thing.

00:36:45   And so you're exactly right.

00:36:46   You can do all of this on, well, by all of this,

00:36:49   I mean you can use SwiftUI and Swift 5, et cetera, or 5.1.

00:36:53   On Mojave, it's just that you don't get any

00:36:55   of the new hotness with the,

00:36:56   don't call it a simulator simulator in the canvas.

00:36:59   - And you can't run, like Marco said, the catalyst apps,

00:37:01   'cause I guess those libraries all aren't there.

00:37:04   - So no, I don't think I'll install the beta.

00:37:06   Although Mojave has been fighting me

00:37:07   and doing weird things lately, so I'm maybe, I don't know.

00:37:11   I haven't installed betas in a long time.

00:37:13   Like for years and years,

00:37:14   I had to have the betas installed all the time,

00:37:16   and it's just nice to be able to be running

00:37:17   the release version, but the release version of Mojave

00:37:19   has not been friendly to this 5K iMac,

00:37:21   so maybe I'll upgrade sooner rather than later, but we'll see.

00:37:24   - All right, tell me about volume replication.

00:37:26   - Yeah, so this is the new feature.

00:37:28   So they started off in the file system session

00:37:30   after they did all the Catalina read-only system prediction,

00:37:32   saying, oh, volume replication.

00:37:34   Like, oh, this is great, because, I mean,

00:37:35   it's a feature that existed for the HFS+,

00:37:37   but they hadn't updated it for APFS,

00:37:39   so the Apple system restore, ASR command line

00:37:43   now replicates APFS volumes, which is nice.

00:37:46   And also, you can point it to a particular snapshot,

00:37:49   so you can say copy from volume A snapshot two.

00:37:51   You can copy that over to another volume,

00:37:53   so you don't have to copy from the volume,

00:37:56   the head of the volume, so to speak.

00:37:59   And that'll be useful for backup programs.

00:38:02   Time Machine already does this.

00:38:03   Time Machine already takes a snapshot in APFS

00:38:06   and backs up from that, so it has a single point in time,

00:38:09   consistent view of the file system,

00:38:12   as opposed to the HFS+ days,

00:38:13   where it would paint in the Golden Gate Bridge style.

00:38:15   It would start the Time Machine backup,

00:38:17   and it would slowly work its way through your files,

00:38:19   and an hour later, it would complete.

00:38:21   And what you would have a copy of

00:38:22   is the files spread over that hour.

00:38:25   I think it went back, it would go back again

00:38:26   and try to catch up, but it's a,

00:38:28   again, you're just, you're chasing your own tail

00:38:30   at a certain point.

00:38:31   If changes are constantly being made

00:38:32   to the source volume, you're never gonna be,

00:38:34   quote, unquote, caught up,

00:38:35   whereas a snapshot takes a point in time snapshot

00:38:37   and says, here's the state of the whole volume,

00:38:39   and it's cheap to do, so it's been doing that for years.

00:38:41   So now, Apple System Restore Utility

00:38:44   can copy from a snapshot onto a target volume.

00:38:47   But now here's the exciting new feature,

00:38:49   and also why they didn't talk about it this year.

00:38:52   So if you copy snapshot number,

00:38:55   from volume A, snapshot number one, over to volume B,

00:38:59   and then a day later, you take a new snapshot of volume A,

00:39:04   and you say, I wanna copy this new snapshot over to volume B.

00:39:08   Well, you already copied snapshot one yesterday,

00:39:11   and it would be wasteful for it to copy

00:39:15   all of snapshot two over,

00:39:16   'cause probably mostly between snapshot one and two,

00:39:19   not that much has changed.

00:39:20   Well, APFS and ASR in Catalina

00:39:25   can tell what has changed

00:39:27   between snapshot one and snapshot two,

00:39:29   and it will only send the changed data over

00:39:33   in an efficient manner.

00:39:34   Rather than, again, the old time machine one was like,

00:39:37   it would try to keep track of what directories have changed,

00:39:39   but it would end up having to scan a bunch of files

00:39:41   and figure out, okay, well, this directory has changed

00:39:43   since then according to the FS events log.

00:39:44   What files in this directory have changed?

00:39:46   Do I need to copy them, all this other stuff?

00:39:48   This is probably not as fancy and efficient

00:39:52   as ZFS block deltas between snapshots,

00:39:54   but maybe a little bit more flexible.

00:39:57   This obviously would be ideal for time machine,

00:40:00   but as far as I'm aware,

00:40:02   time machine in Catalina does not use this technology,

00:40:04   'cause I think if it did,

00:40:06   they would have said so in the session.

00:40:07   They would have said,

00:40:08   and this is what the new version of time machine Catalina

00:40:10   uses to be so much more fast and efficient.

00:40:12   They didn't say that.

00:40:14   I haven't installed Catalina, so I don't know,

00:40:16   but if this is not implemented in Catalina time machine,

00:40:19   then I think next year, finally,

00:40:20   will be what we've all been waiting for,

00:40:22   what I've been waiting for,

00:40:23   which is APFS, this great new file system,

00:40:27   a lot of its features are an ideal fit for time machine,

00:40:31   and yet up until the, well, I don't know,

00:40:34   I don't know about Catalina,

00:40:35   but you couldn't even use APFS as a time machine volume

00:40:40   in Mojave and earlier.

00:40:42   You could have the source volume be APFS,

00:40:44   but you couldn't have the target volume

00:40:45   of a time machine backup.

00:40:47   So now finally, in either Catalina

00:40:49   or on the operating system that comes after next year,

00:40:51   time machine should get a lot faster,

00:40:54   a lot more efficient, and a lot less disk grinding.

00:40:59   I guess that's not the right term anymore

00:41:01   'cause we all have SSDs, but a lot friendlier to your SSD,

00:41:04   both in terms of reads and hopefully writes,

00:41:08   and won't have to create thousands or millions

00:41:11   of hard links to directories,

00:41:13   all of which are stored in a hidden directory

00:41:15   at the top level of HFS+ drives.

00:41:17   It's horrifying, don't look.

00:41:19   So I'm excited that the advantages of APFS,

00:41:22   we just described a bunch of advantages,

00:41:23   how easy it is to "repartition,"

00:41:26   which is not a thing anymore.

00:41:27   Just make a new volume right on top

00:41:29   of all your other volumes, how easy that is,

00:41:31   how it's so easy that Apple is going to do it

00:41:34   without an option to do otherwise.

00:41:37   When you install Catalina,

00:41:38   it is going to "repartition" everyone's disks,

00:41:41   and soon it will make time machine more efficient.

00:41:43   So this has been a banner year

00:41:46   for file system advances, improving all of our quality of life

00:41:51   and maybe next year will be the big banner year

00:41:55   when time machine probably gets the update.

00:41:57   - Man, everything's coming up Syracuse.

00:41:59   - Yeah, it's a good year, it's good to be in the D.C.

00:42:02   - All right, tell me about user space drivers.

00:42:04   Why do I care about this?

00:42:05   - More file system stuff, oh my goodness.

00:42:07   - Hooray!

00:42:07   - They talked about this in the keynote, right?

00:42:10   - Craig mentioned it at the talk show live

00:42:13   about how moving the mass storage drivers

00:42:18   and file system drivers out of the kernel

00:42:21   and into user space was why the iPad got USB drive support.

00:42:26   - Yeah, maybe they talked about it instead of the union too.

00:42:28   So anyway, this is not just file system stuff,

00:42:31   it's user space drivers in general.

00:42:32   So basically kernel extensions as we know them,

00:42:35   pieces of code that Apple and third parties could write

00:42:38   that would literally run inside the kernel

00:42:40   in the address space of the kernel,

00:42:42   those are essentially deprecated.

00:42:44   It's always been dangerous to let third parties do that

00:42:47   because if you are inside the kernel,

00:42:49   you have the highest privilege you can have

00:42:51   in the operating system

00:42:52   and you can do all sorts of bad things.

00:42:53   Kernel extensions are supposed to not do bad things

00:42:56   like cause kernel panics and other things

00:42:58   that could take down the entire operating system

00:43:00   or snoop data or stuff like that.

00:43:02   And over the past several years,

00:43:03   Apple has been becoming more and more strict

00:43:05   about what it takes to be able to write a kernel extension

00:43:10   that can be loaded by Mac users with a default security setting.

00:43:13   So first of all, Apple has to sign them

00:43:14   and then it's like they can only be loaded

00:43:16   if people have the settings a certain way.

00:43:18   So you couldn't just be like,

00:43:19   I'm gonna make a kernel extension,

00:43:20   I'm gonna put it up on my website, anyone can download it.

00:43:22   They could, but if you didn't go through Apple

00:43:24   with the whole signing thing,

00:43:25   it wouldn't be able to load

00:43:27   unless someone changed the gatekeeper settings

00:43:29   to be like load everything and turned off system integrity.

00:43:31   Anyway, this long road has been leading to the point

00:43:34   where they say, you know what,

00:43:35   just don't write those anymore

00:43:36   because there's no real way to make them safe.

00:43:39   If you do something wrong in your kernel extension,

00:43:41   you can and will take out the entire system.

00:43:44   And it's just, you know, it's something we want to,

00:43:47   we prefer if that wasn't a possibility at all.

00:43:50   So user space drivers lets you write a driver

00:43:54   for whatever it is, a piece of hardware,

00:43:55   something you would normally make a kernel extension for,

00:43:57   but do it in user space.

00:43:59   And historically that hasn't been done

00:44:00   because it's less efficient to switch from user space

00:44:03   to kernel space and back and forth in a rapid manner.

00:44:05   I'm not sure how they're mitigating that.

00:44:07   I don't think I've seen any session

00:44:08   that has explained how they're able to do this

00:44:11   and make it more efficient.

00:44:12   But the bottom line is that they are doing it.

00:44:14   And the interesting thing in the user space driver session

00:44:17   that I saw was this may be the last time

00:44:21   that anybody at WWDC gets to do the equivalent

00:44:24   of the classic BOM app demo.

00:44:27   Back when the Mac operating system

00:44:31   did not have protected memory,

00:44:32   and we were all waiting for whatever

00:44:34   the next generation operating system would be from Apple.

00:44:37   And they almost bought B and were thinking

00:44:40   of getting the Windows NT kernel

00:44:41   and had seven internal projects.

00:44:43   Several of them were announced,

00:44:45   but then canceled publicly.

00:44:47   And it was just an embarrassing time.

00:44:48   When Apple finally had a next generation OS strategy,

00:44:51   I think it was maybe Rhapsody even before Mac OS X,

00:44:54   but either way, I think they did a Mac OS X as well.

00:44:56   They would do a demo at their developer conference,

00:44:59   but they would say, "Here is an application

00:45:00   "that's gonna dereference a null pointer."

00:45:02   Like an application meant to crash.

00:45:03   And it would have a window,

00:45:04   and in the window would be the classic Mac

00:45:07   cannonball black BOM icon,

00:45:09   like a huge version of the BOM icon.

00:45:10   I think sometimes the little fuse was sparking or whatever.

00:45:14   And the app would run for a second,

00:45:16   and you'd click on it or something,

00:45:17   and it would crash, right?

00:45:19   And they would launch that app,

00:45:20   and they'd say, "And here we go, crash."

00:45:22   And the app would crash, and the window would disappear.

00:45:24   And then the presenter would say,

00:45:25   "And look, the operating system is still running."

00:45:28   And the audience would cheer.

00:45:29   They would cheer so loud,

00:45:31   you would think they were announcing

00:45:32   PS4 controller support.

00:45:33   (laughing)

00:45:34   It was the most crowd-pleasing demo ever.

00:45:36   And anyone who was using Unix or even Windows NT

00:45:40   would be like, "Boy, these poor suckers.

00:45:42   "They're cheering for memory protection."

00:45:44   You don't get to do the demo anymore.

00:45:45   We just assume that if an app crashes,

00:45:47   of course it doesn't take out your operating system.

00:45:48   What century is this?

00:45:50   Well, the user space driver session,

00:45:52   they said, "Here, I'm gonna make a driver."

00:45:54   And in this driver, they said,

00:45:56   "I'm gonna add an infinite loop,"

00:45:57   which would be very bad if you're

00:45:59   an infinite loop inside the kernel.

00:46:00   Very, very bad indeed.

00:46:01   And also, right after the infinite loop,

00:46:04   which would be like, "How are you ever gonna reach out?"

00:46:06   Anyway, right after the infinite loop,

00:46:07   I will add a null pointer dereference.

00:46:10   So they used the driver and they plugged in

00:46:12   some piece of hardware that activated the driver,

00:46:14   and the driver went along and went into its infinite loop,

00:46:17   and basically they showed,

00:46:18   "Look, the operating system is still working,

00:46:20   "even though that driver is just spinning

00:46:21   "in an infinite loop."

00:46:23   And then he attached to it with the LDB

00:46:25   and modified the loop condition

00:46:26   to get it out of the infinite loop,

00:46:28   and it immediately hit the next line,

00:46:29   which was null pointer dereference,

00:46:31   and it crashed the driver.

00:46:32   And the driver crashed, and the operating system was fine,

00:46:35   and the driver auto-relaunched itself.

00:46:37   And that was an exciting demo.

00:46:39   And I think this is the last time

00:46:41   we're gonna have to have that exciting.

00:46:42   Didn't have as much applause as the Mom app,

00:46:44   but it was still pretty neat.

00:46:45   And as Margot said before, why do we care about this?

00:46:50   A couple reasons.

00:46:50   One, if you've ever had some piece of hardware

00:46:54   or some application that installed a kernel extension

00:46:57   and you started getting kernel panics,

00:46:59   now just your application will crash,

00:47:01   but at least the rest of your operating system will be fine.

00:47:04   And two, I don't know if this is the reason

00:47:07   they didn't have mass storage support in the Files app,

00:47:10   but it was stated as one of the things

00:47:12   that helped bring about mass storage access in iOS

00:47:17   was that now they don't have to worry about

00:47:20   a bug in the driver or something,

00:47:21   'cause Apple's gonna write these drivers,

00:47:22   not like they're letting people

00:47:23   distribute kernel extensions for iOS.

00:47:25   If there's some sort of bug in the driver

00:47:26   that you're able to exploit

00:47:28   by plugging in some malicious USB key or something

00:47:31   that could suddenly corrupt the kernel

00:47:32   or jailbreak or whatever,

00:47:34   they don't have to worry about that

00:47:35   because file system drivers in iOS and in macOS

00:47:38   now exist in user space.

00:47:40   So there's no way they can, in theory,

00:47:42   there's no way they can get at kernel memory

00:47:44   and start doing nasty stuff.

00:47:46   And the way this is related to Dropbox and OneDrive

00:47:49   and other stuff like that, that, where was this?

00:47:51   In a Vitiges interview with Craig Federighi,

00:47:54   he mentioned that these user space

00:47:57   sort of file system driver mechanism,

00:48:00   they also have APIs that can be used by companies

00:48:03   like Dropbox and OneDrive where they,

00:48:06   Dropbox has a thing, I'm not sure

00:48:07   what the OneDrive equivalent is,

00:48:08   where they give you what looks like a view

00:48:10   of the file system, but the files actually aren't there.

00:48:12   Like it doesn't put all the files on your disk

00:48:14   as the traditional Dropbox did.

00:48:16   The files are over on the server.

00:48:18   And when you access those files behind the scenes,

00:48:20   it goes and fetches the bytes from the server

00:48:22   as you need them.

00:48:23   That's all done with weird file system driver magic.

00:48:27   These user space file system drivers can be used,

00:48:30   and they're, I'm sure Apple wants these companies

00:48:32   to use by companies like Dropbox to add this functionality

00:48:35   in a way that doesn't screw with your kernel

00:48:37   and that has less chance of messing up your system.

00:48:40   There's always been the FUSE system, what is it?

00:48:42   File system and user space, whatever.

00:48:44   I've used SSHFS and similar user space file system drivers,

00:48:49   and they're great because they may be buggy

00:48:51   and might not work, but it's not going to affect

00:48:52   the stability of your system.

00:48:53   So I am excited for all the drivers

00:48:58   that aren't super performance critical

00:49:00   to go into user space.

00:49:02   I'm excited for Dropbox to be a better behaved application

00:49:04   that has less of a chance of closing my system.

00:49:07   And I also hope somewhere, somehow, I can learn

00:49:11   how they've implemented the user space file system drivers

00:49:13   in a way that is efficient.

00:49:14   So if anyone knows where I can get that information,

00:49:17   please send me the link or the WWDC session details.

00:49:21   - Excellent.

00:49:22   Well, that sounds good to me.

00:49:23   I mean, I don't know if I'm quite as jazzed about it

00:49:25   as you are, but it sounds good to me.

00:49:28   - You'll be happy when your stuff doesn't crash.

00:49:30   I mean, that's the thing with crashes.

00:49:31   Like, when you get, I get kernel panics on my laptop,

00:49:35   as we discussed, every once in a while.

00:49:38   I've always attributed them to my weird Thunderbolt dock

00:49:40   thing, but honestly, I don't know.

00:49:42   The more stuff, the more third-party software

00:49:44   we can get out of the kernel, the better.

00:49:46   - We are sponsored this week by Away,

00:49:49   who makes awesome, thoughtfully designed suitcases.

00:49:53   Away considered all types of travelers,

00:49:55   did tons of research and development,

00:49:57   and they made their famous carry-on suitcase.

00:50:00   Now the carry-on is available in two sizes

00:50:03   and an optional, ejectable TSA compliant battery.

00:50:07   This is what made them famous, really,

00:50:08   is that you can charge your phone or anything else

00:50:10   USB powered from your carry-on suitcase

00:50:14   while you're waiting around in the airport

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00:50:21   and then you can bring the battery with you on the plane.

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00:51:29   Thank you so much to Away for sponsoring our show

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00:51:34   - Alright, so that's it for me for this episode.

00:51:40   It's been great being with you guys.

00:51:41   Alright, I'm gonna go to sleep.

00:51:42   Tell me about the Mac Pro.

00:51:44   (laughing)

00:51:46   - One thing I loved that we didn't know last time,

00:51:49   I know you have this later down

00:51:50   but I'm gonna talk about it now.

00:51:52   I love that the Mac Pro kind of asterisk

00:51:56   has hard drive bays inside of it.

00:51:59   - Wait, it does?

00:52:00   Oh, you mean the SSD things?

00:52:02   - No, no, no.

00:52:03   I mean 3.5 inch hard drive bays.

00:52:06   - It does?

00:52:07   - Sort of, asterisk.

00:52:10   So here's how this works.

00:52:11   So on the inside of it, we mentioned,

00:52:14   we had seen in the little hands-on thing

00:52:16   and we mentioned in the live show

00:52:18   that there are two SATA ports on the inside

00:52:22   right next to that USB-A port on the inside

00:52:24   to put the DRM dongles for Pro apps.

00:52:27   So there's, inside near the top of the case,

00:52:30   there is a USB-A port.

00:52:33   Next to it is two SATA ports and a power header for them.

00:52:37   And above them is, or in front of them,

00:52:40   is basically a big empty space.

00:52:42   And so it turns out, this is kind of like

00:52:45   when Apple outsources things it doesn't feel like

00:52:48   making to Belkin or Logitech or LG.

00:52:53   Apple has basically outsourced

00:52:54   the Mac Pro's drive bays to Pegasus.

00:52:57   So Pegasus sells two modules for the Mac Pro.

00:53:01   One of them, I think we saw already,

00:53:03   one of them is the R4i, and this is a full-size MPX module.

00:53:07   So this is one of those full-length,

00:53:09   three-slot-wide PCI Express things

00:53:12   that seems to mount in in some kind of firm way.

00:53:14   That one takes four hard drives

00:53:17   and has a built-in RAID controller.

00:53:19   So that's, and that's, I don't think they've announced

00:53:20   pricing of either of these things yet,

00:53:22   but that's probably gonna be fairly expensive.

00:53:25   And I also kind of think it's hilarious

00:53:26   to mount four hard drives in a PCI Express slot.

00:53:30   Even though, yes, I know that they have

00:53:32   all these like screw mount points

00:53:34   and it's probably gonna be really secure in there,

00:53:36   that still seems comically heavy to put in a PCI slot.

00:53:40   So I don't know, I'm not sure how comfortable

00:53:43   I'd feel with that, even though I'm sure they thought of it

00:53:44   and I'm sure it's safe and everything.

00:53:45   But it just seems wrong.

00:53:47   - Yeah, the vibrations alone, right?

00:53:49   Like the spinning disk, are they gonna slowly

00:53:51   work the contacts out of there?

00:53:53   - I know.

00:53:54   Like it shouldn't be, like the MPX modules,

00:53:57   it just feels like the wrong place to put

00:53:58   four three and a half inch hard drives.

00:54:01   But, so that's the Pegasus R4i,

00:54:04   the big four-slot RAID one that goes in the main slots.

00:54:06   Then the Pegasus J2i appears to have no circuitry at all.

00:54:11   It appears to be just like a mount for two disks

00:54:15   that plug directly into those two SATA ports

00:54:19   and the power header next to them

00:54:20   in the top open space of the Mac Pro.

00:54:22   So really, the Mac Pro has two three and a half inch

00:54:27   hard drive bays in that top space.

00:54:29   They're just optional and sold by Pegasus.

00:54:31   That I think is kind of fun.

00:54:33   Like I'm not sure I would use them,

00:54:35   but I'm really happy to have the option.

00:54:37   Because like one thing that we've lost

00:54:40   in the move away from cheese grater Mac Pros

00:54:44   for the last X years, we've lost the ability

00:54:47   to have a whole bunch of internal storage.

00:54:49   Because this is corresponding with the SSD revolution,

00:54:52   which is wonderful for speed and everything.

00:54:54   And I still love an all SSD computer,

00:54:56   but as a result we have to have external drives

00:55:00   or NAS boxes or other complex external expensive things

00:55:05   in order to get large bulk storage for archive storage

00:55:09   or for videos or for media servers or for time machine.

00:55:14   And I always loved when I had the tower Mac Pros,

00:55:17   I always loved just having four hard drives in there

00:55:19   and just having all of my storage internal.

00:55:22   So it was a cleaner setup, it was way cheaper

00:55:24   to get big storage, and although nothing about this new

00:55:27   Mac Pro is cheaper really, but it's all relative I guess.

00:55:31   I'm actually really happy to see this,

00:55:34   because back when we were discussing

00:55:36   what we thought would be the next Mac Pro,

00:55:38   none of us would have guessed that there would be

00:55:40   any three and a half inch drive bays.

00:55:43   And while there technically aren't in a stock configuration,

00:55:46   the fact that they clearly designed it with that in mind

00:55:48   and basically allowed for these modules to exist,

00:55:51   and honestly Apple probably designed them

00:55:53   and handed the design to Pegasus.

00:55:55   The fact that these exist and were made for it

00:55:57   and it was designed with them in mind is awesome.

00:56:00   So now you can theoretically, I mean heck,

00:56:03   you can, I think you can fit up to three MPX modules, right?

00:56:07   - No, it's just two.

00:56:09   - Oh okay, so well, you could theoretically have

00:56:11   two Pegasus R4Is, one Pegasus J2i,

00:56:16   and a regular PCI Express video card

00:56:18   that isn't an MPX module to be your video card.

00:56:21   And you could then theoretically have

00:56:24   10 three and a half inch hard drives inside your Mac Pro.

00:56:28   - Oh my word.

00:56:29   - That's a lot of terabytes.

00:56:31   So that's really cool.

00:56:33   - This heading was actually under,

00:56:35   this whole topic was under the idea of the question

00:56:37   that came up during the live show.

00:56:38   Are third parties allowed to make MPX modules?

00:56:41   Answer, yes, and Apple seems to love Pegasus.

00:56:43   Like they're always promoting Pegasus

00:56:45   as the maker of their RAID and other storage stuff.

00:56:47   The main thing I'm interested in is

00:56:49   I do want internal drives.

00:56:50   Probably not spinning disks,

00:56:52   'cause if I wanted to buy humongous spinning disks

00:56:54   I would just shove them in a NAS somewhere.

00:56:57   But I'll probably use one of my old SSDs

00:57:00   as like a boot camp thing.

00:57:02   And if I wanna have internal time machine storage

00:57:05   and I get like a four terabyte SATA SSD,

00:57:09   like it's fine for time machine backup purposes.

00:57:12   Although that might be kind of expensive.

00:57:13   Anyway, I like the idea of having room for internal storage

00:57:16   no matter what it happens to be in whatever slots they go.

00:57:19   Because there are so many slots.

00:57:20   I'm not going to fill all the slots.

00:57:22   There's so much room inside that case.

00:57:24   I may actually be interested maybe in this J2i thing

00:57:27   just because why not?

00:57:29   Like I have big hard drives laying around

00:57:31   and it's better than trying to find an external enclosure

00:57:33   and having these wires dangling out of the thing

00:57:35   and plugging up some of your ports

00:57:37   and having to deal with the extra power.

00:57:39   It's all inside the case.

00:57:40   Does it manage to having,

00:57:42   one of the many advantages to having a Mac Pro?

00:57:44   - Yeah, and like the limitation of SATA as the bus

00:57:47   instead of like direct connect, MVME, whatever.

00:57:50   Like for something like time machine

00:57:52   or for like a big archive files drive

00:57:53   or the drive you store all your iTunes media on or whatever,

00:57:56   that doesn't matter.

00:57:57   It's fast enough for that.

00:57:59   And so it would be such a cool setup

00:58:01   even if you never put a spinning disk in it

00:58:03   for like noise or heat or whatever reasons.

00:58:05   For me it would be noise.

00:58:06   But like you can get mounts that mount

00:58:09   a two and a half inch SSD

00:58:11   into a three and a half inch hard drive sized box.

00:58:14   And so just get two of those for like 12 bucks each.

00:58:16   Stick it in the Pegasus J2i

00:58:17   and you can mount two SATA SSDs

00:58:19   which these days don't cost very much anymore.

00:58:21   So that's pretty cool.

00:58:23   - Yeah, and the heat and noise,

00:58:24   like I'm doing this right now.

00:58:25   Like on my 2008 Mac Pro

00:58:27   that's still chugging along down there.

00:58:29   I boot off a one terabyte Samsung SSD

00:58:32   and the spinning disks are all unmounted

00:58:35   or otherwise asleep.

00:58:37   And when the thing wakes up at 3 a.m.

00:58:39   to do a super duper backup,

00:58:41   it will mount the disk,

00:58:42   do the super duper backup and unmount it.

00:58:44   Like so during the day it's not on and not spinning

00:58:47   and therefore makes no noise and no heat.

00:58:49   - That's cool.

00:58:50   - But I have the advantage

00:58:52   that I have cheap spinning disk storage

00:58:54   to do a super duper backup or a time machine or whatever.

00:58:57   This is all pre-NAS.

00:58:58   I did this budget and this only has four internal drives,

00:59:00   the one SSD and the three spinning disks.

00:59:02   My bootcamp disk in this very machine is a spinning disk

00:59:05   with I think Windows XP on it or something.

00:59:06   Anyway, I'm excited about my bootcamp future.

00:59:11   I did confirm that with the Apple folks

00:59:13   that the Mac Pro does indeed support bootcamp.

00:59:17   How well we'll see,

00:59:18   but at least that's the official party line

00:59:19   that it supports it.

00:59:20   - That's step one.

00:59:22   - Yeah.

00:59:23   So details about the Mac Pro,

00:59:25   not too much stuff, but just little stuff

00:59:26   that mostly we knew probably the day after the live show,

00:59:29   but since the live show is on keynote day,

00:59:30   there's a lot we don't know.

00:59:32   So we discussed never knows the sort of lift off case

00:59:35   where rather than a door opening on the side

00:59:37   or the back or something,

00:59:38   you lift the entire case off vertically.

00:59:41   And that's cool in the demos and it lets you do,

00:59:46   has a whole cool handle on top

00:59:48   and you reveal the naked robotic core underneath.

00:59:51   And shortly after the intro, I got to thinking,

00:59:55   if I put this under a desk,

00:59:57   I can't lift the case off to like get it the RAM or anything

01:00:01   because they will hit the desk.

01:00:03   So again, wheels would come in handy here.

01:00:05   I'd have to slide it out from the desk

01:00:07   to get the vertical space to lift the top of the thing off.

01:00:11   The second thing that I learned from the folks

01:00:13   in the come look at a live Mac Pro thing is that

01:00:16   if you lift the case off, the computer will turn off.

01:00:20   Like the computer cannot be on when the case is lifted off.

01:00:23   There's like an interlock mechanism and a locking thing

01:00:26   where if it was on and you tried to twist that handle,

01:00:28   it just cuts power to the whole thing.

01:00:30   Like you cannot take the case off with the computer still on

01:00:33   which is unlike all the power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro.

01:00:37   I frequently take the door off my Mac Pro

01:00:40   while it's still running to look around in there

01:00:42   to blow some dust while it's still going

01:00:44   or to check on some weird fan noise that I think I hear

01:00:46   to see what the deal is.

01:00:48   Not in this computer.

01:00:49   When the case is off, the computer is off.

01:00:52   And the final thing that's made me think about

01:00:54   which I didn't think to ask when I was there,

01:00:55   but now I'm kind of curious about is,

01:00:58   so the Mac Pro has ports on top of the case,

01:01:00   but when you lift the case off, the ports come with it.

01:01:05   So how do the ports connect to the rest of the computer?

01:01:08   There must be some really cool like, you know,

01:01:10   interconnecting, custom interconnect mechanism

01:01:13   that like plugs the Thunderbolt ports and the power button

01:01:17   and all the other sort of circuitry into the computer.

01:01:19   And I would love to see what that looks like.

01:01:21   You couldn't see it at the live thing

01:01:23   'cause they just had sort of the naked robotic core

01:01:25   with nothing in it and enclosed Mac Pros.

01:01:28   They didn't have, at least in any of the meetings

01:01:30   that I was in, they didn't have a place

01:01:31   where you could actually look at the inside of the case.

01:01:33   So as soon as I fix it gets this thing,

01:01:35   that'll be fun to see how all that stuff works.

01:01:37   That's pretty cool.

01:01:39   Yeah, and speaking of the case and the holes

01:01:41   that everybody loves or everybody loves to hate,

01:01:44   I guess there's two items with this.

01:01:45   One, I've seen a lot of people speculating

01:01:48   about how the holes are made.

01:01:50   Some person took some wood in their wood shop

01:01:53   and tried to make the same hole pattern

01:01:54   by using like a drill bit.

01:01:56   It came pretty close.

01:01:58   It looked very similar.

01:02:00   But I think, and I heard it described on another podcast

01:02:03   as like one set of circles and another set of circles

01:02:06   behind it that are offset,

01:02:07   that just like they're circular holes

01:02:08   but they're offset from each other.

01:02:10   And that's not actually what it is.

01:02:12   Again, I can't, we haven't seen the inside of it,

01:02:15   but from the outside I'm pretty sure

01:02:16   the way this is machined is that the holes,

01:02:20   or if you can imagine the tool that makes this,

01:02:22   I think the tool basically makes hemispherical dents.

01:02:27   Right, so they're not,

01:02:28   it's not just making cylindrical cuts,

01:02:30   it's cutting little, like the dimples on a golf ball,

01:02:33   little hemispherical dents.

01:02:35   - Yeah, that explains the shape.

01:02:36   And that's why the wood mockup wasn't quite the same

01:02:40   because it was more of a cylinder.

01:02:42   And it does seem like the tool

01:02:45   that is milling out these holes,

01:02:47   although we don't know anything about manufacturing,

01:02:48   but it seems like it has a rounded end

01:02:52   as opposed to a flat end.

01:02:53   - Yeah, who knows, it could just be some single thing

01:02:55   that's like 3D printed, or not 3D printed,

01:02:57   but you know what I mean,

01:02:58   like a single tiny pointy tool that makes hemispherical

01:03:00   shapes, but anyway, my impression is that

01:03:03   there are hemispherical divots cut on the front

01:03:05   and there is a series of offset hemispherical divots

01:03:09   cut on the back.

01:03:10   So again, I'd love to see this thing and take a look at it.

01:03:12   And the reason we're talking about these little holes is,

01:03:16   I forget where I heard this,

01:03:18   someone was saying, oh, the design for these holes

01:03:20   actually has been around Apple for a long time.

01:03:22   And Marco, when he was hanging out in the,

01:03:26   let's look at the Mac Pro room with Tim Cook and Johnny Ive,

01:03:30   the discussion they were having about it,

01:03:31   this happens all the time,

01:03:32   like if you see Tim Cook and Johnny Ive

01:03:34   in like a demo room after a press thing,

01:03:36   no matter what it is, they're always talking to each other.

01:03:38   And Johnny is always telling Tim about things.

01:03:40   And I've always thought, is that like theater?

01:03:44   Or is Johnny telling Tim things that he doesn't know?

01:03:47   Like you would think, Johnny's saying,

01:03:48   well, we decided to make the,

01:03:50   does Tim not know?

01:03:51   Has he not been in the meetings?

01:03:52   Did someone not review, say, by the way,

01:03:53   we're releasing a Mac Pro, let me tell you about it?

01:03:55   Tim always is like, he's hearing about it

01:03:57   for the very first time.

01:03:58   Oh, tell me more about the case.

01:03:59   Why did you make it like this?

01:04:01   Anyway, they were having one of those conversations,

01:04:03   legitimate or not, I don't know.

01:04:05   - I think it's a little bit of theater.

01:04:06   - Yeah. - I'm honest, it has to be.

01:04:08   - I don't know.

01:04:08   But in that conversation that Marco was standing near,

01:04:13   someone was filming it on their phone

01:04:15   and they uploaded a video and you can kind of hear,

01:04:18   kind of make out Tim and Johnny's conversation.

01:04:20   As far as I can tell, and as far as other people

01:04:22   on the internet can tell by trying to decipher

01:04:24   what they're saying in this noisy room,

01:04:26   Johnny is telling Tim that the lattice pattern

01:04:29   on the front of the new Mac Pro

01:04:32   was originally developed for the G4 Cube,

01:04:35   developed for, but not released on the G4 Cube.

01:04:38   So like they were trying to come up with,

01:04:40   this, the G4 Cube was like a chimney heat remover thing,

01:04:45   like there's no fans, but there was like cold air

01:04:47   comes in the bottom and then the hot air rises, right?

01:04:50   That was like a convection type system.

01:04:52   And I assume they were gonna use this for

01:04:54   either the top or the bottom of the convection.

01:04:56   They ended up using something a lot simpler

01:04:57   with little slots or whatever.

01:04:59   But I think that's what they said.

01:05:01   So if you're wondering how Apple came up with this strange,

01:05:05   some people think ugly, some people think upsetting,

01:05:07   design for the front of their Mac Pro,

01:05:09   the answer is apparently that they came up with it

01:05:12   for the G4 Cube, which was what, 2001?

01:05:15   So, you know, 18 years ago, and now it sees the light of day

01:05:20   on the front and back of their amazing new computer

01:05:23   and the back of their monitor.

01:05:26   - Yeah, and I'm guessing, I mean, part of the reason

01:05:28   why they might not have used it before

01:05:30   is that people were telling us about manufacturing,

01:05:33   that in order to manufacture that,

01:05:35   in order to have the tool that drills out all those holes,

01:05:38   it's basically just really expensive.

01:05:39   It's gonna be a very expensive type of pattern

01:05:43   and material to make.

01:05:44   And so they might have decided back in the G4 Cube days,

01:05:47   we don't need to do this, it's too expensive,

01:05:49   and we'll just use a simpler pattern instead.

01:05:52   But with this product, I think they have,

01:05:55   price is less of an object to them for this product now,

01:05:58   these days, and also, they, I think,

01:06:02   the design of it is more important to them

01:06:06   than it used to be.

01:06:07   Like the physical design of the metal is more important now

01:06:10   to modern day Apple than it was in 2001.

01:06:13   - Yeah, they did some attempts to justify it

01:06:15   during the keynote and in the little videos of saying

01:06:17   that it allows lots of air to go through

01:06:19   and that is incredibly structurally strong.

01:06:22   Structurally strong, I'm sure that's true,

01:06:24   but it's pointless because, as I said in the live show,

01:06:27   who cares, it's not a load-bearing part.

01:06:30   Like there's no, there doesn't need to be strong.

01:06:33   And as for air going through, I would imagine

01:06:35   that there is more open space on the front

01:06:37   of the old cheese grater, like cumulatively,

01:06:39   than there is in this one.

01:06:40   The bottom line, they just did it 'cause it looks cool.

01:06:42   Like, it was just fine, it's the fine reason to do it.

01:06:45   You know, it may be upsetting to some people,

01:06:47   I think, after seeing it in person,

01:06:49   I find it a lot less upsetting in person

01:06:51   than I did in pictures.

01:06:52   - Yeah.

01:06:53   - Still probably not my cup of tea,

01:06:54   but it does look better when you see one in person.

01:06:57   - Yeah, like when you see the pictures of it,

01:06:59   they're doing this very like perfectly evenly lit,

01:07:02   perfectly straight on flat view of it,

01:07:05   which it looks really weird that way.

01:07:07   And that's why I'm going to refuse to ever use

01:07:10   that whole pattern as part of our podcast artwork,

01:07:12   because it's really weird looking from the front.

01:07:14   But when you see it in person, you're not seeing it

01:07:17   in that exact perfection, even lighting it.

01:07:19   Like, you're seeing it as a 3D object in space,

01:07:22   and so like, and anyone can do that by downloading

01:07:25   the AR model from the website on your phone or your iPad.

01:07:28   And you can see for yourself, like when you actually see it

01:07:31   in 3D space, it doesn't look as upsetting.

01:07:33   I wouldn't say it looks good, honestly,

01:07:35   but it doesn't look upsetting.

01:07:37   But I think they also, like, I think you're right,

01:07:40   they did it now in part because they could,

01:07:43   in part because I think they have more price,

01:07:45   you know, profit margin with which to use

01:07:48   to do fancy machining.

01:07:50   But also, I think they were going back

01:07:52   to a cheese grater, basically.

01:07:54   I don't think they wanted it to look

01:07:55   that similar to the old one.

01:07:58   And so, if they would have done a simpler whole pattern,

01:08:01   maybe it would have looked too similar.

01:08:02   And maybe they wanted to make a really big statement

01:08:04   that like, that this wasn't like a retreat,

01:08:07   this wasn't like they got defeated by their fancy

01:08:10   cylinder design and they had to go back to this cheese grater.

01:08:12   They wanted this to look like a new thing,

01:08:14   a separate thing, and to have it look striking

01:08:17   and radically different from what was there in the old one.

01:08:20   So, from that point of view, if that was one of their goals,

01:08:22   I think they succeeded because this really does look

01:08:25   very different than the cheese grater,

01:08:26   even though it basically is a cheese grater.

01:08:29   - Yeah, and they could have gone with the vertical slats

01:08:30   or horizontal slats or also some other patterns,

01:08:32   but they did go with, you know, fairly circular holes.

01:08:34   But here's the thing, this, like,

01:08:36   I think this pulls off the thing that good Apple hardware

01:08:39   always pulls off.

01:08:40   When I came home and looked at my 2008 Mac Pro under my desk,

01:08:43   it looked old.

01:08:44   - I mean, to be fair, it is really old.

01:08:47   - True. - Very, very old.

01:08:48   - It looked much older than it did before I left,

01:08:51   the week before when I left for WWC,

01:08:53   mostly because you see that like, oh, this is just like,

01:08:56   you know, kind of not too thick aluminum bent in a C shape

01:09:00   with a door on the side and then some even thinner aluminum

01:09:03   bent around the front with holes drilled in it.

01:09:06   Like, it's not as impressive a piece of sculpture.

01:09:09   And you mentioned like, showing the computer from the front,

01:09:13   like, I took some pictures myself,

01:09:15   I tweeted them the other day of the Mac Pros,

01:09:18   and I think even in my own, directly from the front

01:09:20   with Apple sort of glamor lighting on it,

01:09:23   I think even that looks good.

01:09:24   Like, it looks like a more impressive thing.

01:09:27   It looks, it doesn't look like most things,

01:09:29   most things you see are, most products you see

01:09:32   look the way they do, partly because it is efficient

01:09:35   and/or inexpensive to manufacture in that way.

01:09:37   And so when you see something that is not efficient

01:09:39   to manufacture and that is expensive to manufacture,

01:09:42   it stands out to you because you're not used to seeing

01:09:44   products that are like that.

01:09:45   It's true of some of the exteriors and interiors

01:09:48   of very, very fancy cars, and it's also true

01:09:50   of the best Apple hardware.

01:09:52   And this new tower, even though it's like,

01:09:55   oh, it's just another cheese grater,

01:09:56   standing next to an old-style cheese grater,

01:09:59   it looks much more expensive.

01:10:01   It just does, like, it looks like an object

01:10:04   that should cost more based on pure manufacturing alone,

01:10:08   and I'm sure it does.

01:10:09   So in that respect, it is fulfilling that of like,

01:10:12   it does not look like a retreat, it looks like an advancement

01:10:15   it looks like a fancier product

01:10:17   than the old cheese grater Mac Pro.

01:10:19   - And I mean, it is, like, you know,

01:10:22   price and segmentation-wise, like the old Mac Pro,

01:10:25   when that was, I mean, first of all, it was basically a G5,

01:10:27   you know, with slight modifications to the exterior,

01:10:29   but the, like, the original Mac Pro in 2006,

01:10:33   you could get one, they had a, as John would say,

01:10:35   a stripper configuration for like $1,700 or $1,600.

01:10:39   It was actually below $2,000 if you, like,

01:10:42   went to only one CPU, and there were a couple other options

01:10:45   you could do.

01:10:46   So like, that computer had to be sold for $1,600,

01:10:50   so the minimum price of what, like, what the case

01:10:54   and power supply and everything had to cost

01:10:56   was much lower than when your base configuration is $6,000.

01:11:00   Even after inflation, it doesn't come close

01:11:03   to being a similar price range, like, it's not even close.

01:11:07   And so, they have the flexibility, you know,

01:11:10   by having this only be a high-end thing,

01:11:12   and actually I wanna talk about that in a minute,

01:11:14   but by having this only be a high-end thing,

01:11:16   they gave themselves the flexibility in manufacturing

01:11:18   to say, you know what, if the case ends up costing

01:11:21   $700 to manufacture, instead of a more simple one

01:11:24   that the cheese grater might have cost, like,

01:11:25   $200 to manufacture, like, they have the room

01:11:28   for that in the budget.

01:11:29   Now, that being said, I did wanna talk about, like,

01:11:31   there has been, you know, when we did our show,

01:11:34   mere hours after this thing was unveiled,

01:11:37   we were, you know, we were all, like, still

01:11:38   in, like, the high of this, and everybody was amazed by it

01:11:41   and talking about the ridiculous pricing, the monitor stand,

01:11:43   but since then, I've seen, there's actually been

01:11:46   a lot of criticism of the Mac Pro itself

01:11:49   being such an expensive thing, and starting at $6,000

01:11:52   and everything else, and I did wanna talk

01:11:54   about that briefly, and I said a little bit

01:11:57   this last week of, like, people, when the original

01:12:01   tower Mac Pro came out in 2006, back then,

01:12:05   you needed a desktop more than you do now.

01:12:08   Like, more types of pro work needed a big desktop,

01:12:11   because CPUs weren't that fast yet, there weren't

01:12:14   that many cores available in laptops,

01:12:17   and SSDs hadn't happened yet, and so the difference

01:12:20   between a desktop and a laptop was significantly greater

01:12:24   in many common tasks that many people do,

01:12:27   not just, like, the highest end of the high end use cases,

01:12:30   like, you know, video encoding, which is always the example,

01:12:32   right, so, like, video editors and people doing, like,

01:12:36   super big data sets, like 3D modeling

01:12:38   or scientific research computing, like,

01:12:40   huge things like that, those can always justify

01:12:43   the biggest and biggest and biggest hardware,

01:12:44   but there's a whole lot of more common use cases

01:12:47   where you don't necessarily need that,

01:12:50   and over time, the number of people,

01:12:52   or, like, the percentage of, like, types of work

01:12:55   that need that highest end of high end hardware

01:12:57   keeps going down, because the hardware

01:13:00   that is more mainstream, that's available, like,

01:13:01   across all sizes and prices and everything,

01:13:05   is more and more capable for more and more people's

01:13:07   actual needs than it was in 2006, and so, like, right now,

01:13:11   like, you know, people always say, like,

01:13:13   I need to get the greatest thing to do video editing.

01:13:15   When you started doing video editing, like,

01:13:17   when 4K video first came out, people were editing 4K video

01:13:20   on, you know, big towers and everything, well, now,

01:13:23   you can get that exact same power in a laptop,

01:13:26   and you don't even necessarily need the biggest laptop.

01:13:28   Like, now, like, a 13-inch MacBook Pro

01:13:31   can edit video just fine.

01:13:33   It might not be as fast as the 15, but it can do it,

01:13:37   and for most people who are creating video

01:13:40   and editing video, that's actually enough.

01:13:43   Anything above that is a luxury,

01:13:45   but it's not actually that necessary.

01:13:47   For me, as a developer, my iMac Pro,

01:13:49   I have a 10-core iMac Pro.

01:13:51   It's wonderful.

01:13:53   It is, in my tests, faster than a four-core MacBook Pro,

01:13:58   but not two and a half times faster, as you'd think,

01:14:03   and looking at the Mac Pro now, like,

01:14:05   I don't need the Mac Pro.

01:14:07   I actually, honestly, I'm having extreme skepticism

01:14:10   about whether I'll even get one,

01:14:11   which I know you'll make fun of me,

01:14:13   but, like, the Mac Pro is so, like,

01:14:16   stratified above everything else, not just in price,

01:14:20   although it is, to be fair,

01:14:21   it is very much stratified in price,

01:14:23   but in who even needs this thing,

01:14:26   it's a very small market of people

01:14:28   who actually need this thing,

01:14:30   and people who want to have their own upgradeable PCs

01:14:33   as more of, like, just like a value thing

01:14:36   or a long-term upgradeability and maintenance thing

01:14:38   or a hobbyist thing, people who want that,

01:14:41   that really upsets them, that, like,

01:14:43   Apple's only solution to an upgradeable tower starts at $6,000,

01:14:48   and let's be honest, that $6,000 configuration

01:14:50   is kind of crappy, and it's probably gonna cost

01:14:53   more like eight or $9,000 for one we're actually gonna want.

01:14:56   That angers a lot of people,

01:14:58   and that's a totally valid thing to be angry about,

01:15:02   but it's never gonna change.

01:15:03   Like, people have been wanting Apple

01:15:04   to make the, quote, "X Mac" forever.

01:15:08   They're never gonna do it.

01:15:09   Like, they're never gonna make, basically,

01:15:10   like an IMAX components in a Mac Pro style case.

01:15:14   Like, that's never gonna happen.

01:15:15   That's not a market they want to address,

01:15:17   and increasingly over time,

01:15:19   that isn't a market that exists much anymore.

01:15:21   Like, there's not a lot of people

01:15:22   who are even buying those from manufacturers

01:15:25   who do offer them.

01:15:27   By far, most consumers these days buy laptops.

01:15:30   The only people who really want, like,

01:15:32   an upgradeable desktop most of the time

01:15:34   are either super, like, value-conscious buyers,

01:15:37   like people who are managing large fleets

01:15:39   of desktop towers for office buildings or whatever else.

01:15:41   In which case, they want the cheapest stuff possible

01:15:44   with, like, service contracts from Dell and everything.

01:15:46   Apple doesn't really play in that market.

01:15:48   Or they're gamers.

01:15:49   Apple doesn't really play in that market either.

01:15:51   Or they're high-end workstation users.

01:15:52   Like, or they're, like, PC hobbyist builders

01:15:54   who want to build their own thing,

01:15:55   which Apple doesn't play in that market either.

01:15:57   So, like, there's very few markets

01:15:58   that Apple is willing to play in and would succeed in

01:16:02   that still need a significantly upgradeable desktop.

01:16:06   And while it would be wonderful,

01:16:07   I would love if they would bring back

01:16:09   the, like, $1,600 configuration of a configurable tower

01:16:12   that you could upgrade later.

01:16:13   That would be great.

01:16:15   But the number of people that affects

01:16:17   is just shrinking over time.

01:16:18   Radically shrinking.

01:16:19   It isn't ideal to have this thing

01:16:21   start so incredibly expensive.

01:16:23   But the reality is most people

01:16:25   who are gonna be that price-conscious about it

01:16:28   aren't in the market for this kind of thing

01:16:30   at all these days.

01:16:30   They buy other things.

01:16:31   They buy laptops or they buy iMacs.

01:16:33   Or they buy PCs.

01:16:35   And so I think it's fine.

01:16:37   It's not great, but it's fine.

01:16:40   - Yeah, the sub-2000 Mac Pro was very close

01:16:43   to being an XMac because it was cheap.

01:16:45   It had all the expansion you want.

01:16:47   The only thing stopping it from being an XMac

01:16:48   was it was so darn big, right?

01:16:50   'Cause it's like an XMac, like,

01:16:51   why do I need all this space?

01:16:53   It's only got one CPU.

01:16:54   Like, it's just a waste.

01:16:55   It's this huge hulking tower.

01:16:56   But it was close.

01:16:58   And I think, as you mentioned,

01:17:01   the main market for the kind of computer you described

01:17:04   is gaming PCs, which is, you know,

01:17:06   it's not a huge market, but it's not tiny either.

01:17:09   Like, pre-assembled, you didn't build it yourself

01:17:11   gaming PCs.

01:17:12   They're very expensive.

01:17:13   They're thousands of dollars.

01:17:14   They have glowy lights in them.

01:17:15   And they're filled with high-end hardware,

01:17:17   but they're not workstations.

01:17:19   For Apple's re-entry into the quote-unquote

01:17:23   pro desktop market, as I said last week,

01:17:26   they have gone all the way to the extreme,

01:17:29   which I think is appropriate.

01:17:30   It would, like, you can do this two ways.

01:17:32   It would be like, again, with more car analogies.

01:17:35   If a car company stops making sports cars and says,

01:17:37   we're going to re-enter the sports car after a many year

01:17:39   absence, like, we've decided it's important to us

01:17:42   to make really fast cars, right?

01:17:43   They could come out with an extremely inexpensive,

01:17:46   affordable, every person sports car,

01:17:48   kind of like what Mazda did with the Miata.

01:17:50   They kind of made their name with that.

01:17:52   It's not a particularly fast car,

01:17:54   but it shows that they like the spirit of driving.

01:17:56   Very inexpensive, small, sporty thing.

01:17:59   But what most car companies do is they make their halo car.

01:18:01   They make a super car.

01:18:03   They make a really high-end sports car

01:18:04   that they know most people don't need.

01:18:06   But it shows, we're serious about high performance.

01:18:08   We're back in the game, and then they

01:18:10   will sell a bunch of other cars below that.

01:18:12   So for the very first re-entry pro desktop computer,

01:18:16   I'm glad that Apple didn't hold anything back

01:18:19   and went for the highest of the high end,

01:18:21   highest you can possibly go.

01:18:23   Doesn't preclude them doing other things in the future,

01:18:25   but it's clear where they were going.

01:18:27   And if you hear how Apple talks about the new Mac Pro,

01:18:31   they don't think they're competing with desktop computers

01:18:34   or gaming PCs.

01:18:37   They're competing for people who buy what Apple calls internally

01:18:40   workstations, which is a word from decades ago.

01:18:43   They usually don't hear bounced around that much these days,

01:18:45   but it is still a thing.

01:18:47   And even though it seems like a very small number of people,

01:18:50   the workstation market has actually

01:18:52   been growing in recent years.

01:18:56   While the PC market has been shrinking,

01:18:58   the workstation market has been growing.

01:18:59   I don't know if it's been growing in terms of unit sales

01:19:01   or in terms of overall revenue, but it is actually growing.

01:19:04   And Apple used to have significant market share

01:19:07   in the workstation market.

01:19:09   And that share has dwindled and almost disappeared

01:19:12   over the last decade or so.

01:19:14   So their re-entry into the space is

01:19:16   we want to reclaim the workstation space.

01:19:18   We want those people who are currently

01:19:20   buying $8,000 HP computers.

01:19:25   Those are the people we want to sell to.

01:19:27   So our $6,000 entry price Mac Pro is actually

01:19:30   coming in under a lot of the competition.

01:19:32   The competition is not a gaming PC.

01:19:33   The competition is not I built a PC myself.

01:19:36   The competition is not shuttle PC.

01:19:38   It is $8,000 HP workstations.

01:19:42   Can Apple make-- so your point, Heather Marco--

01:19:45   can they sell a computer in this case with this power

01:19:48   supply and this number of slots for less than $6,000?

01:19:51   Yes, but probably not that much less.

01:19:54   And honestly, as I think I tried to emphasize last week,

01:19:59   in this grand scheme of things, it's

01:20:00   not the Mac Pro that is cripplingly expensive.

01:20:03   It's expensive, but not out of bounds.

01:20:08   What is cripplingly expensive is that the monitor

01:20:10   is the same amount, right?

01:20:13   So lots of people are planning, oh, the Mac Pro,

01:20:15   it's so expensive.

01:20:16   If the Mac Pro was $6,000 and change for--

01:20:20   or $7,000 plus a $1,000 monitor, we

01:20:24   wouldn't be having the same conversation.

01:20:26   We'd be having the conversation that we usually have,

01:20:27   which is like, look what you can do in the configurator.

01:20:30   I can make the Mac Pro $100,000 by adding a terabyte

01:20:32   and a half of RAM.

01:20:33   Ha ha, isn't that funny?

01:20:34   But no one thinks that that means the Mac Pro is over--

01:20:37   just don't configure it that way.

01:20:39   It's ridiculous, right?

01:20:40   It has that capacity, which is great.

01:20:41   But I'll spend-- if I think of how much I spent total

01:20:45   on my Mac Pro system that I'm sitting in front of now,

01:20:47   it was probably inflation adjusted around $6,000 or $7,000

01:20:52   for the monitor and the PC.

01:20:54   That's about what my iMac Pro cost.

01:20:56   Yeah, so I don't think the Mac Pro itself is out of bounds.

01:20:59   The monitor is, and we'll talk about that more, I'm sure,

01:21:03   for different reasons.

01:21:04   But the Mac Pro itself, I think, is--

01:21:06   it's coming at the high end for sure,

01:21:07   but I feel like they can actually--

01:21:11   if they decided to go down market and not--

01:21:14   and address anything other than the workstation market,

01:21:17   they could.

01:21:18   There is, as I said last week, there is that space there.

01:21:20   If they ever will, I don't know.

01:21:21   But if you're wondering, why does Apple even

01:21:23   make a machine like this, the workstation market

01:21:25   is a good place to be selling computers.

01:21:27   Apple used to sell much more computers there

01:21:29   than it does now for obvious reasons,

01:21:32   see all the previous Mac Pro years without a change.

01:21:35   They want that market back.

01:21:37   It's a good market to be in.

01:21:38   And so they're in it.

01:21:41   Let's talk about that monitor for a minute.

01:21:44   I think you're right.

01:21:45   The monitor really hurt the optics and the pricing

01:21:49   discussion of this announcement.

01:21:51   Because while everyone has been quick to get the nice bullet

01:21:57   points from PR about how this is much better than other

01:22:00   reference monitors in this class and much cheaper

01:22:02   than these $40,000 monitors that suck, that's all true.

01:22:06   But that doesn't help a conference of 5,000 developers

01:22:09   and thousands more watching at home

01:22:11   feel like this is within their reach anymore.

01:22:14   Because developers don't need all the stuff

01:22:17   this monitor provides.

01:22:18   And having this be an option that you can buy is one thing.

01:22:25   But I think the bigger problem is that this is basically

01:22:28   the only option for a good monitor that is currently still

01:22:33   for sale that has the right retina density for a Mac.

01:22:37   That is anywhere-- there's almost no other options.

01:22:39   The LG 5K is discontinued.

01:22:42   Dell discontinued their pretty similar monitor a year ago.

01:22:47   As far as I can tell, I don't think there's any left

01:22:49   on the market.

01:22:49   I don't think you can buy a 27-inch 5K monitor from anybody

01:22:55   right now, except for the few remaining LGs that are still

01:22:59   in stock in various places before they all sell out.

01:23:01   But I don't think anyone is currently

01:23:03   producing 5K 27-inch monitors.

01:23:07   You can get a 4K 27-inch, which is the wrong density for retina

01:23:12   use as a Mac.

01:23:13   You can get 5K 33-inch, which is also the wrong density.

01:23:18   No one's making this, as far as I can tell.

01:23:21   Or at least there are very few, if anyone is.

01:23:23   And so by releasing the Mac Pro and having the only monitor

01:23:29   from Apple be a $6,000 monitor, the monitor really

01:23:34   hurts this story badly.

01:23:36   Because then we're all saying, well, they

01:23:39   made the computer we finally want.

01:23:41   It's more money than we wanted to spend.

01:23:43   And also, the only monitor choice that's any good

01:23:47   is $6,000.

01:23:49   Yeah, the monitor is many times more than we-- the Mac Pro

01:23:53   is a small percentage more than maybe we wanted to pay.

01:23:56   But the monitor is many times more than we would expect it,

01:23:59   like two or three times the price we would have expected.

01:24:02   Because if you're not in the market for a reference monitor,

01:24:06   why would you be considering the features that it offers?

01:24:10   And when Apple said back at the Mac roundtable,

01:24:13   like we're going to make a Mac Pro-- two years ago,

01:24:15   we're going to make a Mac Pro, and we're

01:24:17   going to make a monitor for it, I

01:24:19   had that whole big rant about-- back on the show,

01:24:22   when they said they were not going to make monitors anymore,

01:24:24   about how I wanted to have an Apple monitor,

01:24:27   mostly just because I knew it would be high quality

01:24:30   and calibrated well, and the case would match the system,

01:24:34   and it would look nice.

01:24:35   And that's an important part of my computing.

01:24:36   That's part of the reason why I buy Macs.

01:24:38   I like that they look nice.

01:24:40   I like that the whole thing matches.

01:24:42   But this new monitor is much more

01:24:44   in line with the Apple philosophy

01:24:46   that we don't enter a market unless we can

01:24:47   make a significant contribution.

01:24:49   How do you make a significant contribution to monitors?

01:24:51   Well, our pro workflows often have

01:24:54   to involve the use of a reference monitor.

01:24:56   They're incredibly expensive, and you can only

01:24:59   have a few of them in the studio,

01:25:00   so most of the people working on the video pipeline

01:25:02   don't get to see their stuff the way it's actually

01:25:04   going to look.

01:25:05   The way we can make a significant contribution

01:25:07   to the market to sort of make a dent

01:25:09   is we can offer a reference monitor for much less money

01:25:12   that will also be an amazing all around display.

01:25:14   And that's exactly what they did.

01:25:15   But they weren't on the same page with me,

01:25:18   it seems, of the idea of like, another thing we can do

01:25:21   is just offer you a very nice monitor in a matching case,

01:25:23   which is essentially what they did with the iMac.

01:25:25   They offer you a very nice monitor in the 5K iMac

01:25:28   and the iMac Pro in a nice case that also happens

01:25:31   to have the computer in it.

01:25:32   And unfortunately, they removed the ability

01:25:35   to use an iMac as an external monitor a long time ago,

01:25:37   or I bet people would be considering that.

01:25:39   Because honestly, it's way cheaper

01:25:40   to get an entire 5K iMac and just use it as a monitor

01:25:43   than it is to buy the Pro Display XDR.

01:25:46   But alas, that's not even an option until someone figures out

01:25:49   how to hack a ribbon cable into the T-con or something

01:25:52   and snake it out one of the vents or something.

01:25:55   Yeah, because like right now, they

01:25:57   sell the iMac's panel with a free computer behind it

01:26:01   for $1,800.

01:26:02   Like, the cheapest 27 inch 5K iMac

01:26:05   has the same panel as all the rest of them.

01:26:07   It's $1,800.

01:26:09   They could release that as a monitor

01:26:11   with almost the same enclosure, which is like a Thunderbolt 3

01:26:15   input, and change almost nothing about it,

01:26:18   take out the free computer, and they could literally

01:26:20   charge the exact same price.

01:26:22   They could literally charge $1,800, and we would buy it.

01:26:27   Because like the LG was $1,300, and it

01:26:29   was a crappy enclosure and everything.

01:26:32   They could really just make the Apple version of that LG, which

01:26:35   is basically an iMac with a computer.

01:26:36   And that, I think, would have really improved

01:26:42   the optics of this story.

01:26:43   Because right now, what they have shown

01:26:46   is here's a Mac Pro that's more expensive than you want.

01:26:49   Here's the only display that's any good on the market that

01:26:52   will go with it that's significantly more

01:26:54   expensive than what you expected.

01:26:55   And we made it for people who aren't you.

01:26:58   Like, if you are a professional video editor or colorist

01:27:01   or one of the relatively few industries that actually would

01:27:05   use those reference monitors before,

01:27:07   that's great news for you.

01:27:09   For everybody else, that's a hard pill to swallow.

01:27:12   For every other kind of pro, every other type of user

01:27:16   who wants to buy a high-end desktop or a high-end work

01:27:18   station or have a MacBook Pro and connect it

01:27:22   to an external monitor, which is very common,

01:27:25   for all those other kinds of users,

01:27:28   Apple has offered no solution really, or no solution

01:27:31   anybody wants or likes.

01:27:33   This is one of the reasons why I'm having serious doubts

01:27:35   whether I'm gonna buy a Mac Pro yet,

01:27:37   because if I'm honest with myself,

01:27:39   the iMac Pro is the better solution for me overall.

01:27:41   I could spend what would probably be, I don't know,

01:27:45   $16,000 on a Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR setup

01:27:50   that would be significantly better than my iMac Pro,

01:27:53   but that's $16,000 for mostly, like, you know,

01:27:58   a good chunk of that cost would be for the benefits

01:28:02   of this monitor that I will never use,

01:28:04   that I would rather not buy if I don't have to.

01:28:07   Like, I don't want a monitor that is $6,000

01:28:10   and has fans in it that can go to brightnesses

01:28:13   that I will never set it to, that has accurate color

01:28:17   for applications I would never do with it.

01:28:20   I don't need all that.

01:28:22   I want the empty iMac case, like, that's what I want.

01:28:24   Like, I want that to be my monitor.

01:28:26   - Although you'd like it to be 6K,

01:28:28   which maybe the next iMac will be.

01:28:29   - And sure, and yeah, 'cause you know what,

01:28:31   when I sat down at my iMac coming back from WBC,

01:28:34   you know, your computer looked old,

01:28:35   my 27 inch iMac looked small, but the reality is,

01:28:39   it didn't look $6,000 small, that's for sure.

01:28:43   So I just, I don't, I'm gonna have a really hard time

01:28:48   justifying this, and I think most developers

01:28:52   would have a really hard time justifying this

01:28:54   because of the monitor situation.

01:28:55   And so what I'm hoping will happen,

01:28:57   I'm hoping that there will be a Pro Display

01:29:02   without the XDR after it, just a Pro Display.

01:29:05   It would probably be the iMac's 5K panel,

01:29:07   it probably wouldn't be 6K yet, maybe down the road,

01:29:08   but probably not yet.

01:29:10   So I'm hoping that maybe this winter,

01:29:14   when they maybe release that 16 inch,

01:29:17   maybe they release it along with the Pro Display

01:29:20   that's a 5K external display for like,

01:29:23   you know, somewhere between 1,500 and two grand.

01:29:25   I hope that happens.

01:29:27   It seems unlikely, honestly.

01:29:28   If I'm honest with myself, that seems like maybe

01:29:30   a down the road thing, if ever.

01:29:32   But right now, Apple's depending on this market to exist,

01:29:37   that no longer exists.

01:29:39   No one is making these displays anymore.

01:29:41   Even their partner LG stopped making theirs.

01:29:44   And even it was pretty mediocre.

01:29:46   So it's another one of these situations

01:29:48   where like the whole reason Apple had to make

01:29:50   a monitor at all is because no one was making good ones.

01:29:54   I think this is one of those times where they have to,

01:29:56   there's this giant hole in the market

01:29:58   where tons of their customers depend on external monitors

01:30:03   all the time for their MacBook Pros or for their Mac Pros

01:30:07   or for their Mac Minis for that matter, or their iPads.

01:30:10   Like the iPad has external monitor support.

01:30:13   What monitor is you supposed to plug into it?

01:30:15   Honest question.

01:30:16   Like what are you supposed to answer that?

01:30:17   There's so few monitors that even work with it.

01:30:20   So like I think Apple needs to make this.

01:30:21   It's as simple as that.

01:30:22   The only question that I think is when.

01:30:24   - Yeah, I think in general people are probably

01:30:26   less precious about their monitors than we are.

01:30:28   I mean like I work in an office filled with monitors,

01:30:30   none of which except for mine are Apple monitors, right?

01:30:34   People just don't care that much.

01:30:36   Like it's what I thought of like when we were in

01:30:39   the big Mac Pro room dazzled by all the amazing things.

01:30:42   I wasn't thinking about this but once I had left

01:30:43   I realized that one of the demos was this amazing

01:30:47   $100,000 audio board filled with cool buttons

01:30:51   and knobs and sliders and this person demonstrating

01:30:53   like the score to a movie on a Mac Pro

01:30:57   that was doing this amazing thing

01:30:58   that used to take multiple computers

01:31:00   to be able to process all the sound for

01:31:01   but now this one can hold six of these HDX cards

01:31:04   and it was this amazing demo and only after leaving

01:31:07   did I realize why does an audio editor

01:31:10   need a reference monitor, right?

01:31:12   So you can see those logic tracks in exactly the color

01:31:15   they're intended to be shown in.

01:31:16   It doesn't matter.

01:31:17   It absolutely doesn't matter.

01:31:19   Maybe they want a big monitor to see lots of tracks

01:31:21   but I'm not even sure retina matters

01:31:22   depending on how good your eyes are

01:31:24   and how dim the room is and how far

01:31:25   you're sitting away from it.

01:31:26   Maybe one of those 4K monitors that's too big

01:31:29   or the 5K 30K three inch would be better

01:31:31   for audio editors for the purpose they have.

01:31:33   Like I just don't think people are that precious

01:31:36   about monitors.

01:31:36   I am obviously and there is a market for it

01:31:39   and I think Apple absolutely should make one

01:31:41   for the same reason they make all sorts of stuff.

01:31:43   Why does Apple make a keyboard and a mouse?

01:31:45   Plenty of people make keyboard and mouse.

01:31:46   Why does Apple make one?

01:31:47   They could just say you buy your own keyboard and mouse

01:31:50   and add it to it.

01:31:51   There's plenty of options.

01:31:51   They would partner with somebody.

01:31:52   LG makes a great keyboard and mouse.

01:31:55   Like this is the equivalent, right?

01:31:56   What Apple chooses to make and doesn't choose to make

01:31:58   is baffling to me at this point

01:31:59   because they absolutely need to make

01:32:02   a non-reference monitor monitor for their computers.

01:32:05   I don't understand why they're not doing it.

01:32:07   It could just be a timing thing.

01:32:09   Again, right now the narrative of come in

01:32:12   at the very high end and let it stew

01:32:14   'cause it's not like you can even buy this computer

01:32:16   that we're talking about.

01:32:17   It's gonna come out in the fall sometime.

01:32:18   So before you can even buy this computer,

01:32:22   they may release a monitor,

01:32:25   a normal monitor, quote unquote normal monitor.

01:32:27   But maybe not, we'll see.

01:32:30   One more tidbit before we leave the Mac Pro XDR

01:32:34   for this week.

01:32:35   Why does this stand cost $1,000?

01:32:39   My goodness.

01:32:41   There are lots of angles to this,

01:32:42   but one, I think Marco, did you tell me about this,

01:32:44   the rotation thing?

01:32:45   - Yeah, so the way it rotates is like,

01:32:49   I mean, first of all, this doesn't say $1,000 to me.

01:32:53   - No, but it's an interesting tidbit

01:32:55   that you might not know about if you weren't there.

01:32:57   - So it does the rotation, but also,

01:33:00   if you ever had a really big monitor that rotates,

01:33:03   like some of the big Dells and stuff,

01:33:05   they will often have a problem where if you rotate them

01:33:08   in the wrong way or at the wrong angle,

01:33:10   they will crash their corner into the desk.

01:33:12   (laughing)

01:33:14   And so with a monitor this big, that is a concern.

01:33:17   So Apple has engineered the stand such that

01:33:20   it will not rotate unless the monitor

01:33:22   is in its furthest up position,

01:33:24   and during rotation, it locks itself there,

01:33:28   but you can't begin a rotation that you can't complete.

01:33:31   So that's the cost of $1,000.

01:33:32   (laughing)

01:33:34   - Fun mechanical stuff that's inside that little arm.

01:33:37   This is entirely a mechanical thing that makes this happen.

01:33:41   So it's pretty neat.

01:33:42   I'm sure it's really cool in practice.

01:33:44   But the other people pondering the $1,000 monitor stand,

01:33:48   if you're in the market, through just describing the market

01:33:52   that buys workstations, the market that does

01:33:55   professional video editing or just,

01:33:57   or that buys $40,000 reference monitors,

01:34:02   that market is weird.

01:34:03   I'm not entirely sure why it's weird.

01:34:05   I'm not entirely sure how the supply and demand works

01:34:08   and how the economics work, but the fact is,

01:34:11   this monitor looks different than you would expect.

01:34:13   And I got lots of examples from people

01:34:15   who are in that market to say,

01:34:17   here's what stuff costs in that market.

01:34:19   One of the best ones I saw was,

01:34:22   so lots of these companies that sell you things

01:34:23   sell you these modular systems.

01:34:25   And it's kind of like Porsche with the options on their car.

01:34:29   You can just buy the thing,

01:34:30   but then you're gonna spend so much money on options.

01:34:32   So I think this was the red camera company

01:34:34   where you buy the brain of your camera,

01:34:36   which is as much as a car,

01:34:37   and it's just this box that does nothing.

01:34:39   Then you have to buy the thing

01:34:40   that actually lets light into it.

01:34:42   And then you have to buy the lenses for it.

01:34:43   And then you have to buy the thing that records stuff.

01:34:45   And it's like, build your own camera,

01:34:47   and each part costs 10 grand.

01:34:50   They also sell a handle for their camera,

01:34:54   which is a metal thing that goes in your hand.

01:34:56   It's like maybe six inches long.

01:34:58   And it bends down in an L shape and connects to the camera

01:35:00   so you can hold it.

01:35:02   And that handle, I think, was like $500.

01:35:04   And that handle has way fewer parts,

01:35:10   no mechanisms whatsoever,

01:35:12   less raw materials than this stand.

01:35:14   But if you're in the kind,

01:35:15   and I mentioned Pelican cases in the show last,

01:35:17   if you're in this market, buying an inert metal handle

01:35:22   for your bajillion dollar camera for $500

01:35:25   is like, that's just how much the handle costs.

01:35:27   I'm sure it's a good handle.

01:35:28   I'm sure this is a good stand.

01:35:30   Why does the stand cost $1,000?

01:35:32   Why does the handle $500?

01:35:34   Like apparently, it's what the market will bear

01:35:37   in this particular market.

01:35:40   If you are not in this market, the prices seem ridiculous.

01:35:44   But if you are in the market, they don't seem ridiculous.

01:35:47   Like tons of stuff in this market,

01:35:50   you look at it and you're like, guess how much this costs?

01:35:52   And you would never guess

01:35:54   because it's quote, unquote, pro gear or whatever.

01:35:57   Not that this justifies or explains it,

01:35:59   but it does sort of make the pricing of that stuff

01:36:04   make sense.

01:36:05   All that said, I think Apple knows that their audience

01:36:07   is not familiar with that market for the most part.

01:36:11   And I checked this after coming back from the show

01:36:15   because it seemed quick when I was in the room.

01:36:17   If you watch the W2C keynote presentation video,

01:36:21   the $999 price for the stand

01:36:24   is on screen in the video for 56 frames.

01:36:28   (laughing)

01:36:29   Which is about 1.9 seconds.

01:36:33   They press the button and it animates onto the slide,

01:36:36   and then they press the button less than two seconds later

01:36:38   to get it off of the slide.

01:36:39   (laughing)

01:36:41   So they were not dwelling on that.

01:36:43   So regardless of what market it fits into

01:36:46   and how it just makes perfect sense in a market

01:36:48   with $500 handles for your $20,000 camera thing,

01:36:51   Apple knows that it is a shocking price for most developers

01:36:56   and that's what the room was filled with.

01:36:57   So I think Apple understands that there is a gap here.

01:36:59   I really just hope they fill it.

01:37:01   - What was on, what took longer for them to go through

01:37:05   the $999 slide price or when Tim Cook said

01:37:08   the Apple Watch Edition was gonna start at $15,000?

01:37:11   Was it on a slide?

01:37:12   - I think it was just verbal.

01:37:14   - Yeah, so it's tough to say with timings and that

01:37:16   'cause obviously you say it and it's out of your mouth

01:37:17   and then you move on.

01:37:18   I guess maybe the time between he says it

01:37:19   and when he says the next thing, I don't know.

01:37:22   But yeah, I mean, it's still less expensive

01:37:24   than a fully operational red camera,

01:37:27   but you know, it's not made of, it's made of gold, right?

01:37:30   Or was at one time.

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01:39:33   (upbeat music)

01:39:36   - I'm back everybody.

01:39:37   - Hi.

01:39:38   - You're still here.

01:39:39   (laughs)

01:39:40   - Turns out.

01:39:41   - Are you excited about your new Mac Pro, Casey?

01:39:42   You getting excited to buy one now?

01:39:44   - Yeah, totally.

01:39:45   Now, you know, it's funny, for a fleeting moment

01:39:46   before we knew anything about it, I was like,

01:39:47   you know what, I might be able to use a Mac Pro.

01:39:49   It sounds nice, maybe I'll keep it for a long time.

01:39:51   It may not be so bad.

01:39:52   - You should buy one.

01:39:54   - 'Cause you don't care about monitors.

01:39:56   - I wouldn't say I don't care about monitors.

01:39:58   I'm just not nearly as picky.

01:39:59   - Yeah, but you don't care like we do.

01:40:00   - So I think, you know, I have this 2015,

01:40:03   I think it's a late 2015 5K iMac that I bought,

01:40:07   yes it is late 2015, that I bought in early, early,

01:40:09   early 2016, and so far, I mean, now that it's not crashing

01:40:13   periodically for funsies, it's mostly good,

01:40:16   and I don't often long for more speed.

01:40:19   You know, it's not often that I'm like,

01:40:20   oh my God, this thing's so slow.

01:40:22   And so I've been thinking about, you know,

01:40:24   I think I'm coming up on time to replace both my computers,

01:40:27   truth be told, which is going to be very expensive,

01:40:29   but I don't know what I would do.

01:40:33   Like if I was gonna pull the trigger today,

01:40:35   I guess I would get an iMac Pro,

01:40:37   or maybe just even a brand new, well-loaded iMac.

01:40:40   - You have to get an iMac Pro, you have to.

01:40:43   And not because of the performance, just for the quiet.

01:40:45   That's it.

01:40:46   Until they fix the cooling system on the regular iMac,

01:40:49   iMac Pro is all you're allowed to get, sorry Casey.

01:40:51   - Oh, okay.

01:40:52   - I think the iMac Pro remains overall the best computer

01:40:58   for developers to get.

01:40:59   Like it's simple as that.

01:41:00   Like the Mac Pro would be better in some ways,

01:41:04   but it would also be worse in some ways.

01:41:05   Like, you know, and all in one actually is kinda nice.

01:41:08   Like if you get a Mac Pro,

01:41:09   no matter what monitor you pair with it,

01:41:10   like we'll ignore the monitor conversation for a moment,

01:41:13   you get a Mac Pro, it's a much larger thing

01:41:16   to have in your office, in addition to it starting out

01:41:18   very expensive, like so you're gonna pay more,

01:41:20   it's not gonna come with a monitor,

01:41:21   you have to figure that out on your own.

01:41:23   It's significantly larger than an iMac Pro.

01:41:26   It actually has fewer ports than an iMac Pro by default,

01:41:29   and if you like add a bunch of GPUs, you can get more ports,

01:41:31   but you know, starting out, it's gonna have fewer.

01:41:35   It's gonna have probably more expensive expansion,

01:41:38   'cause you're starting out with the iMac Pro,

01:41:39   you're starting out from a base level

01:41:41   that's much higher configured

01:41:42   than the base level of the Mac Pro.

01:41:45   The iMac Pro is also gonna include a camera, a microphone,

01:41:49   better speakers that are built in,

01:41:51   like the Mac Pro has a built-in speaker,

01:41:52   but it's a crappy one.

01:41:54   So the iMac Pro gives you quite a lot,

01:41:56   and you have all the ports for that available

01:41:59   right on your desk, which is a plus and a minus.

01:42:02   If you have external things like drive enclosures,

01:42:04   they're harder to hide in a nice way with an iMac,

01:42:07   but you are still, when you have the iMac,

01:42:11   everything's right up top.

01:42:12   One problem I have with my stupid Microsoft keyboards

01:42:17   is the dongle for the keyboard can't be too far

01:42:20   from the keyboard, otherwise the reception

01:42:21   isn't good enough and it doesn't reliably work.

01:42:24   The iMac, the port's right there,

01:42:25   it's right on top of the desk.

01:42:27   If the desktop is down below the desk somewhere,

01:42:29   you might have less convenient cable routing options,

01:42:31   less convenient port access, stuff like that.

01:42:34   There's no SD card slot in the desktop,

01:42:35   you gotta work that in somewhere else.

01:42:37   Actually, an iMac is better in a lot of ways

01:42:40   than a Mac Pro, even if you ignore the monitor question,

01:42:42   which you shouldn't.

01:42:43   And performance-wise, there is rarely a time

01:42:47   when I am saturating the power of my 10-core iMac Pro

01:42:51   for more than a few seconds.

01:42:53   Developer workflows and workloads are,

01:42:56   we need a lot of horsepower, but we need it in short bursts.

01:42:59   And so as you add cores, you very quickly

01:43:02   hit diminishing returns of like, on my laptop,

01:43:05   I can max out all the cores for like 30 seconds straight,

01:43:07   easy, if I'm doing something significant

01:43:10   like a big compile or something.

01:43:11   And that's annoying, you gotta wait around for that.

01:43:13   But on my iMac Pro, the time that the cores are maxed out

01:43:17   might be like four seconds at most,

01:43:20   and most times like one second.

01:43:21   So if I double my cores, if I got like a 20-core Mac Pro,

01:43:26   that's gonna go from like two seconds to one second.

01:43:29   That's a significantly less severe improvement to my life

01:43:34   than going from a laptop to an iMac Pro, say.

01:43:37   And so for most developers, your workflow's gonna fall

01:43:40   somewhere in that range where like the iMac Pro

01:43:41   is gonna be the upper end of what you actually

01:43:45   can really make use of on a regular basis,

01:43:47   and it's more than what most people need, actually.

01:43:50   And it's really, really nice.

01:43:51   Long term, it isn't gonna last as long as a Mac Pro.

01:43:55   Even if it doesn't last John's 10 years,

01:43:57   and even if the ARM transition doesn't happen

01:43:59   as soon as we think it will,

01:44:00   and you won't wanna get rid of it,

01:44:01   a Mac Pro can still be serviced more easily.

01:44:03   It can still, like you're not tying it to the screen

01:44:06   you're using, so like if the screen dies in four years,

01:44:09   like out of warranty, it's not gonna kill the value

01:44:11   of a Mac Pro, stuff like that.

01:44:12   There are still reasons that the Mac Pro wins,

01:44:15   but there's a lot fewer of them these days

01:44:17   than there used to be, 'cause the iMac Pro is so good.

01:44:21   - Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

01:44:22   I'm probably not gonna pull the trigger

01:44:23   on any new computer any time soon.

01:44:26   - You're gonna wanna set that laptop on fire

01:44:27   when you start using SwiftUI.

01:44:30   - Probably.

01:44:31   - SwiftUI is incredibly demanding

01:44:32   to generate those live previews.

01:44:34   Like my 13-inch felt incredibly inadequate.

01:44:36   I can't even imagine how it is on your ancient 12-inch.

01:44:40   It's gonna melt.

01:44:41   You're gonna melt your computer.

01:44:42   - Yeah, I think truth be told,

01:44:44   I am in more pressing need of a laptop than a desktop.

01:44:47   It's just that the desktop is older.

01:44:50   And with regard to the laptop sitting here today,

01:44:53   I don't know if I would get an Air

01:44:54   or more likely a 13-inch Pro,

01:44:56   which is very light and very portable, but--

01:44:59   - I'll sell you mine when the 16-inch comes out.

01:45:02   - Yeah, there you go.

01:45:04   The 13-inch Pro is very light and very portable,

01:45:06   but it is, and if you've not held a MacBook, the Adorable,

01:45:10   you will doubt me, but the Adorable is considerably lighter

01:45:14   and more portable than the 13-inch Pro.

01:45:17   - Oh, you're right.

01:45:18   It's 50% lighter or whatever, 30%, yeah.

01:45:21   Yeah, it's two pounds versus three,

01:45:23   and it's significantly smaller.

01:45:25   No question, the 12-inch is significantly more portable,

01:45:29   but it's a question of whether it can do

01:45:32   the work it needs to do or not

01:45:33   without you wanting to set it on fire,

01:45:35   or it literally melting.

01:45:36   And I think you're gonna have a hard time

01:45:38   with modern Swift development.

01:45:41   As Swift continues to get even more aggressive

01:45:43   with all the stuff it's doing in the background as you code,

01:45:46   you're gonna have a hard time continuing

01:45:49   to get a lot of use out of that computer.

01:45:51   - Yep, agreed.

01:45:51   So, I don't know, again--

01:45:53   - And you might literally kill it.

01:45:54   It has no fan. - I know.

01:45:55   - And you're maxing out its CPU for a long time,

01:45:57   'cause it's real slow, so it takes a while

01:45:59   to do all these things in its CPU,

01:46:00   so you're maxing out a fanless CPU

01:46:03   that is just barely fanless for a very long time

01:46:06   to have it do constant work in the background.

01:46:09   That's not gonna be good for it.

01:46:11   You're going to kill it.

01:46:13   - Right, which is why I think the plan is

01:46:15   let's wait until the 16 comes out.

01:46:18   Not to say that I want a 16.

01:46:19   I want something considerably smaller and lighter,

01:46:21   but if there is a commensurate refresh for anything else,

01:46:26   which I'm not saying there will be,

01:46:27   but if there is, then I might just pull the trigger then.

01:46:30   If there's not, then I'll probably just keep limping along

01:46:32   until there is a refresh of either the MacBook Adorable

01:46:37   or the 13s with this phantom new keyboard or what have you.

01:46:42   We shall see.

01:46:42   But anyway, I digressed on the Ask ATP,

01:46:44   so let's begin with Colton Belphills who writes,

01:46:47   I want to rent a macro lens for a camping trip,

01:46:49   which at the rate we answer Ask ATP

01:46:51   probably already happened, but hey, that's all right.

01:46:53   What focal length is the best,

01:46:54   and what else should I take into consideration

01:46:56   choosing a lens?

01:46:57   I have a Nikon and would like to spend around $40.

01:47:00   - I've been in this world not recently,

01:47:02   so my information might be out of date,

01:47:04   but there are some general things

01:47:05   to keep in mind with macro lenses.

01:47:06   First of all, for choosing a focal length,

01:47:09   I recommend, there's this wonderful site

01:47:11   I used to visit all the time when looking at lenses to buy,

01:47:14   it was called The Digital Picture,

01:47:16   and it's a guy who reviews lenses really well,

01:47:19   mostly in the Canon system,

01:47:20   so I don't think he's gonna have a lot of

01:47:21   Nikon-specific info, but there's this article,

01:47:24   we'll put the link in the show notes here,

01:47:25   where you can see direct comparisons for macro lenses

01:47:29   of how the different focal lengths look for a macro lens

01:47:34   and the various trade-offs there.

01:47:36   The biggest things to keep in mind with macro lenses are

01:47:40   you need way more light and way more steadying

01:47:44   assistance than you think you will

01:47:46   for any other kind of photography,

01:47:48   because as you get closer, as the magnification

01:47:51   gets bigger on a macro lens,

01:47:53   you just need a ton of light to get enough light

01:47:58   to the sensor, and also, you need to step down the aperture

01:48:03   way down to F8 or F16, really far down,

01:48:07   because the field of view is so incredibly shallow

01:48:11   when you're at such short distances.

01:48:13   That's why most macro pictures you see from people,

01:48:16   like from hobbyists like me who rent a macro lens,

01:48:18   most pictures you see have a sliver of something in focus,

01:48:22   and not really the whole subject is actually in focus.

01:48:25   So things like image stabilization are incredibly helpful.

01:48:29   Any kind of, if you're choosing a camera for this purpose,

01:48:32   the biggest, most sensitive sensor you can find,

01:48:35   'cause you're gonna have to crank the ISO way up,

01:48:37   because you just need to capture so much light

01:48:40   with such a narrow aperture to get anything to be sharp

01:48:43   with a macro lens, and that's also why frequent accessories

01:48:46   for macro lenses are things like ring lights.

01:48:48   Any kind of accessory lighting to help you get a lot

01:48:51   of light very close to the lens will help you a lot here.

01:48:55   As for specific rentals, I don't know the Nikon system enough

01:48:57   to actually say for sure, but macro lenses are really fun,

01:49:01   you know, if you can get past that thing,

01:49:02   so I would definitely say, if you can get anything

01:49:04   image stabilized, get it image stabilized,

01:49:07   and make that more important than the focal length.

01:49:10   Also, like the maximum aperture, you know,

01:49:12   whether it's like f/2.8 or f/2.0 or whatever,

01:49:15   doesn't matter so much, because you're not gonna be using

01:49:17   it wide open for actual macro work.

01:49:19   There is one other thing to consider though,

01:49:21   and that is that most macro lenses tend to be

01:49:24   between 60 and 180 millimeters in focal length.

01:49:27   If you intend to use the same lens for anything else,

01:49:31   either during the rental or for a standalone purchase,

01:49:33   I love prime lenses that are around 135 millimeters,

01:49:38   and so like 100 millimeter macro lens is kinda close to that.

01:49:42   A 135 prime shoots amazing portrait photos.

01:49:46   It is, like the 135 Canon prime is by far

01:49:49   our favorite lens for like for people shots,

01:49:52   and so you can actually use a macro lens,

01:49:54   like dual purpose, as a portraiture lens if you want to.

01:49:58   So if you think you might wanna do that,

01:50:01   something in the 100 millimeter range is better

01:50:04   than something like in the 60 millimeter range

01:50:06   for that purpose.

01:50:07   100 millimeter-ish primes are just so great for portraits,

01:50:10   and so a macro can totally serve that function,

01:50:13   usually not quite as narrow aperture as like a 135 prime.

01:50:18   I think macros tend to start at 2.8 usually,

01:50:21   whereas a 135 prime you can get F2.0 usually,

01:50:24   which those are awesome, but for a macro rental,

01:50:28   yeah, just keep that in mind.

01:50:28   You want image stabilization,

01:50:30   I would go for around 100 millimeters,

01:50:32   but it matters less than you think,

01:50:34   and get a lot of light.

01:50:37   - James Andrews writes,

01:50:38   "I have a bunch of old Commodore computers,

01:50:40   "and by bunch I mean all, in my loft/attic,

01:50:44   "which are all at risk of battery and capacitor

01:50:45   "leaked at age.

01:50:46   "I've removed batteries on most,

01:50:47   "but what are you doing, John, with your old machines?

01:50:50   "Is this a concern?"

01:50:52   - It's absolutely a concern.

01:50:54   What I have done with my old machines is almost nothing.

01:50:56   I removed the alkaline batteries from the Macs that had them.

01:51:00   If you bought an original Mac and many, many Macs after that,

01:51:05   they actually had removable,

01:51:09   I guess it's not many Macs, but some Macs after that,

01:51:11   they had a removable AA battery to run the clock for you,

01:51:15   which was nice in that you can actually remove it,

01:51:18   because if you don't remove it,

01:51:19   if you have a lot of electronics laying around,

01:51:22   maybe you already know this,

01:51:23   if you leave an alkaline battery in a device,

01:51:26   it eventually will, I'm not sure what's happening.

01:51:29   Is it outgassing?

01:51:30   Is it leaking liquid that then dries and leaves it?

01:51:32   Anyway, you'll open it up,

01:51:34   and you'll find a bunch of white fuzzy deposits

01:51:37   all over everything, and it's gross,

01:51:38   and it's a pain to clean,

01:51:39   and it's really impossible to get back

01:51:41   to like new condition when you do that.

01:51:43   So do not leave batteries in your devices.

01:51:46   But that said, and as James points out,

01:51:48   batteries are the least of your concerns, right?

01:51:51   Capacitors.

01:51:52   Capacitors are going to go bad and bloat and explode

01:51:56   and just destroy your stuff.

01:51:57   I'm sure probably more than half of the computer hardware

01:52:00   in my attic has blown burst bloated capacitors.

01:52:05   What did I do about that?

01:52:06   Absolutely nothing.

01:52:07   Honestly, I don't know if there's anything you can do

01:52:09   other than checking them all periodically

01:52:11   and de-soldering the ones that look like they're going bad

01:52:13   and replacing them with the equivalent things,

01:52:15   but that's not my cup of tea.

01:52:17   On the other hand, the last time I took out my SC-30,

01:52:20   which was only a handful of years ago, it's still booted.

01:52:24   So you might get lucky.

01:52:26   It's like the capacitor lottery.

01:52:27   Will you have ones that just considered an attic

01:52:30   going from freezing temperatures to blasting heat

01:52:33   year after year and still work?

01:52:35   Maybe, or maybe all your stuff will be totally destroyed.

01:52:37   I don't have any good advice how to prevent it,

01:52:39   but do definitely take out any batteries

01:52:41   that can be removed.

01:52:42   - Alrighty, and then finally, Christian writes,

01:52:46   in the light of another, and this is a few weeks old now,

01:52:49   in the light of another fatality involving Tesla's autopilot

01:52:51   does Marco use autopilot mode in his Tesla or not?

01:52:54   Christian disclaims that they are not trying

01:52:57   to be inflammatory, just curious about what your experiences

01:52:59   are with autopilot.

01:53:01   - So I do still use autopilot, but I treat it the way,

01:53:06   I think the only responsible way you can treat it,

01:53:09   and that is as basically cruise control.

01:53:12   It is a nice, fancy cruise control.

01:53:15   It is a cruise control that helps keep you

01:53:16   in the lane as well.

01:53:18   That's all it is.

01:53:20   It is not a substitute for paying any attention.

01:53:23   It is occasionally, I will occasionally take both hands

01:53:25   off the wheel for a second if I have to open

01:53:27   a bottle of water.

01:53:28   It's nice to have the option to quickly take both hands off

01:53:30   and then put it back on.

01:53:32   That's cool, but for the most part, it's cruise control.

01:53:35   So I'm still looking at the road, my hands are still

01:53:38   on the wheel, I'm still paying attention.

01:53:40   It's just a convenience in the same way cruise control is.

01:53:44   And that's all I think it will be for a long time.

01:53:49   It is still kind of dumb.

01:53:51   They're constantly talking about, Elon Musk's always

01:53:55   bragging about how close they are for full self-driving.

01:53:56   They even sell a full self-driving option

01:53:59   for a future software update for I think $5,000

01:54:03   at the time of purchase.

01:54:05   And I think anybody who buys that is a fool, honestly.

01:54:08   Because I don't think they're anywhere near it.

01:54:10   Regular autopilot, which is just fancy cruise control,

01:54:13   is still kind of dumb sometimes.

01:54:15   It still makes the wrong choice sometimes.

01:54:17   Like it'll follow the wrong lane markings

01:54:19   or it'll just totally give up in rain.

01:54:23   It's like, you know, it rains in the real world a lot.

01:54:27   I don't know, the system is a very nice

01:54:30   cruise control system.

01:54:32   As long as that's all you use it for,

01:54:34   then that's all you depend on it for,

01:54:37   then I think you're being normal and safe.

01:54:40   But when people start doing stupid things

01:54:42   like watching movies while their cars on autopilot

01:54:44   are leaving the front seat, this is,

01:54:48   I know it sounds crazy, people have done this.

01:54:51   - My word.

01:54:52   - That's just, that's literally, that's suicide.

01:54:55   To try to do that, not only can you kill yourself,

01:54:58   you can kill someone else on the road.

01:54:59   And so that, like people who do that kind of stuff,

01:55:02   that is horrendous and reprehensible

01:55:05   and incredibly dangerous.

01:55:07   But if you just treat it as the fancy cruise control

01:55:10   that it really is, that's just as safe/dangerous

01:55:15   as regular cruise control, in my opinion.

01:55:17   - So, but drivers definitely have some responsibility,

01:55:20   but I think car makers, and it's not just Tesla,

01:55:22   many car makers have very similar abilities

01:55:24   like basically that it will do automated cruise control

01:55:26   following distance and also lane keeping.

01:55:28   That's essentially what Tesla has, right?

01:55:30   - That's 100% what it is.

01:55:32   - Right, and it's not self-driving

01:55:34   and there can be arguments at how it's advertised,

01:55:36   but the bottom line is that once they added

01:55:38   essentially lane keeping, basically steering for you,

01:55:42   behaving the way Marco described is the correct move,

01:55:46   but I think it's also not responsible for car makers

01:55:52   who sell products like that because human nature

01:55:55   being what it is, people will realize

01:55:58   that the car steers for you.

01:55:59   Like it's a selling point of the car.

01:56:00   The salesman will probably tell you.

01:56:02   If not, the owner's manual will tell you.

01:56:04   If not, you'll notice when you engage it.

01:56:07   Once people are aware that they don't have to steer

01:56:10   all the time, it is now a battle between

01:56:14   their little monkey brain and all the devices

01:56:18   the car manufacturer has added to try to make sure

01:56:20   they're paying attention.

01:56:20   It beeps if you take your hands off the steering wheel.

01:56:22   It notices if your eye line has gone a certain way,

01:56:24   if your head nods, it gives you an electric shock.

01:56:27   There's all sorts of things to try to keep you

01:56:28   paying attention.

01:56:29   And those things have existed before,

01:56:32   autopilot type things as well.

01:56:34   But human nature is that like, I don't have to be,

01:56:39   the car is basically steering for me.

01:56:40   And if you're in an environment where you've been

01:56:43   on the highway for a long time and the car's been

01:56:45   steering for you the whole time, it's human nature

01:56:48   for your attention to drift.

01:56:50   Like asking any human being to be 100% vigilant

01:56:55   while being asked to do nothing,

01:56:59   that is incompatible with humans.

01:57:01   There is no amount of discipline, like monk-like discipline

01:57:05   that you can train yourself to say,

01:57:06   I am going to be vigilant so that at a moment's notice,

01:57:11   I can take over driving for six hours.

01:57:13   During that six hours, I will never be asked to do this,

01:57:16   but I will be ever vigilant, right?

01:57:18   And that's what these cars are setting people up for,

01:57:20   to be putting you in a situation where you're set up to fail.

01:57:24   There is nothing you can do, there's no amount of discipline

01:57:26   that you can do that will help you there.

01:57:29   The only thing you can do is convince yourself

01:57:32   that the car doesn't really steer for me,

01:57:33   that it's basically just fancy cruise control

01:57:36   and I'm still driving the car for the most part.

01:57:38   If you do that, and if you can convince yourself of that

01:57:40   and actually behave in that way, then you can use it safely.

01:57:42   But I feel like we are in a very uncomfortable point here

01:57:45   where cars demand constant vigilance,

01:57:50   but do not require it at all times.

01:57:55   You need to be ready to leap into that mode instantly,

01:57:58   but most of the time you don't need to,

01:57:59   and that's a formula for badness.

01:58:02   So I really hope we leave this phase

01:58:04   in one direction or another as soon as possible.

01:58:07   I really don't want a car that has this feature.

01:58:10   You could have said the same thing about cruise control,

01:58:11   but I feel like the steering is the final struggle.

01:58:14   Basically, if you don't have a car that steers for you

01:58:16   and you stop paying attention to the road,

01:58:18   even for a few seconds and the road curves,

01:58:20   you learn you have to pay attention.

01:58:24   You just have to.

01:58:24   You can glance away for a second,

01:58:26   and if you're on a straight highway,

01:58:27   you can maybe glance away for more than a second,

01:58:29   but you basically have to steer.

01:58:31   Once that's taken away, what are you even doing?

01:58:34   What you're doing is you're like,

01:58:36   any second, any second, any second,

01:58:38   I might need to drive.

01:58:40   And you can't be in that tense mode.

01:58:43   You'll relax.

01:58:44   You'll be like, ah, la-di-da.

01:58:45   Oh, I don't know.

01:58:46   That's why people are leaving the seat,

01:58:47   'cause they're like, I've been in this car

01:58:49   for an hour and a half, and I've done nothing.

01:58:51   I don't even need to be in this seat.

01:58:52   And so they'll go on the back and take a nap,

01:58:53   and then they'll die.

01:58:55   And obviously that's their fault for being dumb,

01:58:57   but it's also the carmaker's fault for making a car

01:59:00   that will lead people through the foibles of human nature

01:59:04   into that type of scenario.

01:59:06   Please see the long ago episode

01:59:08   where I predicted that self-driving cars

01:59:10   would be much more difficult to make than people thought.

01:59:13   All right, thanks for our sponsors this week,

01:59:14   Eero, Away, and Linode.

01:59:17   And we will talk to you next week.

01:59:19   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:59:24   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:59:26   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:59:29   ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:59:32   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:59:34   ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:59:37   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:59:40   ♪ It was accidental ♪

01:59:43   ♪ You can find the show notes at ATP.FM ♪

01:59:48   ♪ And if you're into Twitter ♪

01:59:50   ♪ You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S ♪

01:59:55   ♪ So that's Casey, Liz, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M ♪

02:00:01   ♪ Auntie, Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪

02:00:06   ♪ U-S-A, Syracuse, it's accidental ♪

02:00:10   ♪ It's accidental ♪

02:00:12   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

02:00:14   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:00:15   ♪ Accidental ♪

02:00:17   ♪ Tech, podcast, so long ♪

02:00:20   - All right, anything else going on?

02:00:22   How was your birthday yesterday?

02:00:24   Happy birthday.

02:00:24   - Thank you.

02:00:26   All good.

02:00:27   - Good talk.

02:00:28   - It was funny, so I actually, in my head,

02:00:31   I just turned 37.

02:00:33   - I'm 37.

02:00:34   - Yeah, but it's funny, in my--

02:00:36   - I'm not old, I'm 37.

02:00:37   In my head, I actually had been doing the math wrong

02:00:42   for most of the last year, I thought I already was 37.

02:00:46   And so actually, I feel like I kinda got this one for free.

02:00:49   (laughing)

02:00:50   - That's one way of looking at it.

02:00:52   - I forgot I was 44, and you pondering about your age

02:00:55   had reminded me to do the math, so now I'm 44 again.

02:00:58   - Now I'm 44.

02:00:59   - Did you think you were 43?

02:01:01   Oh, I'm sorry.

02:01:01   - I was 43 for all this year,

02:01:02   and now all of a sudden I know that I'm not.

02:01:04   - Oh, I'm sorry.

02:01:05   I'm sure it'll get me the other direction sometime soon,

02:01:08   but for now, I feel like I kinda lived

02:01:11   for six months for free.

02:01:13   - Well, I don't think that's how time works.

02:01:14   - I'm not sure that's how it works.

02:01:15   (laughing)

02:01:17   (beeping)