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489: Very Inappropriate Thoughts About This Computer

 

00:00:00   I'm trying to avoid getting my heart broken again.

00:00:03   So in various ways with the iOS beta situation

00:00:07   and everything, I mentioned that I had ordered myself

00:00:10   an iPhone 13 mini.

00:00:12   I had the 12 mini last year as my only phone,

00:00:15   and I loved it.

00:00:16   And the 13 Pro came out and won me back to the midsize,

00:00:20   which is really quite a large size,

00:00:22   with the big camera system and the big battery

00:00:24   and everything, 'cause the mini's battery life sucked.

00:00:26   Well then it turned out the 13 mini,

00:00:29   while it didn't have any of the fancy camera stuff,

00:00:31   it did improve the battery life a bit,

00:00:33   and I was a little envious, but I thought,

00:00:35   I don't need it, I already have my pro phone,

00:00:38   I'll stick with the pro, I'll enjoy the camera, et cetera.

00:00:41   And I have for most of the year,

00:00:43   and it's this big heavy brick in my pocket

00:00:45   every time I carry it anywhere.

00:00:46   And as the summer has been kicking into high gear

00:00:49   and I start wearing shorts as the default--

00:00:52   - Oh, here we go again.

00:00:53   - The default leg covering, I was even feeling like,

00:00:56   you know, maybe I should buy a 13 mini

00:00:59   just for the summer, you know, and then I don't know,

00:01:01   just sell it then or whatever, I don't know.

00:01:02   Even though I can have 17 different computers

00:01:05   and that feels okay, for some reason having two iPhones

00:01:07   feels ridiculous, like that feels like such an extravagance,

00:01:10   like such a waste.

00:01:12   So for I've never really--

00:01:12   - You need a pants phone and a shorts phone.

00:01:14   - Right. (laughs)

00:01:17   So for whatever reason, like that always felt like

00:01:19   that was off limits.

00:01:21   There's probably no good excuse why,

00:01:22   it's like well if I can have a laptop and a desktop,

00:01:24   like why can't I have two phones?

00:01:26   But you know, it just felt wasteful.

00:01:28   Anyway, as I mentioned, I think two episodes ago,

00:01:30   I gave away my Mini for a family member who needed a phone.

00:01:34   And so I had only one phone left total that could run iOS 16.

00:01:39   And I really, for my various testing figures,

00:01:41   I really need two.

00:01:43   And so my Mini was that before.

00:01:45   And I lost it.

00:01:46   So I ordered a new like, refurb, refurb, renewed, refurb,

00:01:51   iPhone 13 Mini to be my test phone.

00:01:53   And I thought, well, now that I have this, now that it's here,

00:01:57   I'll put 15 on it and I'll put 16 on my carry phone.

00:02:01   So that's what I've done.

00:02:03   And I realized like well,

00:02:07   maybe I should just take this out.

00:02:08   Just take this for a night.

00:02:10   I'll pop my SIM card into it and just see.

00:02:12   - Here we go. - Maybe I can talk about it

00:02:14   on the show, you know, just that famous excuse, right?

00:02:17   That's how every podcaster excuses buying gear

00:02:19   they don't need.

00:02:20   - Yeah, I needed it for the show.

00:02:21   - I needed to be able to talk about it.

00:02:24   So, but I legitimately need this device

00:02:26   as a test device, I just don't need to be using it

00:02:29   as my carry phone.

00:02:30   So anyway, so for a few days, I'd say maybe three,

00:02:34   four or five days, I use it as my main carry phone again.

00:02:38   And it was glorious.

00:02:41   It feels so good and frankly, so I got the blue one.

00:02:46   Frankly, I think it looks really good too.

00:02:48   Like the back, eh, the back I could care less about.

00:02:51   The blue aluminum on the sides though looks really nice

00:02:54   in all different lighting conditions.

00:02:56   it is way nicer looking than the Pro Phone.

00:02:59   And I have that baby blue version of the Pro Phone.

00:03:01   - Same.

00:03:02   - It's so much nicer looking.

00:03:03   And I don't think the Pro Phone looks bad,

00:03:05   but that's just how good the non-Pro aluminum looks,

00:03:08   like this wonderful blue color.

00:03:10   It's so nice.

00:03:12   But I kept telling myself, I can't stick with this,

00:03:15   I can't, because this is about to die.

00:03:18   This whole product line's about to die,

00:03:20   and I even thought, do I really need the 14

00:03:23   when it comes out?

00:03:24   But the answer is I probably need to have one

00:03:28   because it's gonna have that low brightness widget mode

00:03:30   on the home screen that I'm going to have to test with.

00:03:32   So like I'm going to get on the train again

00:03:35   and in the fall for the mid-sized phone.

00:03:36   So I'm like I just, I don't wanna get my heart broken again.

00:03:39   And so yesterday I switched back to the giant phone

00:03:42   just 'cause I didn't wanna get too used to the mini.

00:03:45   And it's so big, oh my God.

00:03:48   It's so, it's just, it's so big and heavy.

00:03:50   Like, ah.

00:03:52   And when you look at the specs,

00:03:54   like the mini versus the mid-size non-pro

00:03:58   versus the mid-size pro,

00:04:00   it's like 140 grams, 175 and 200.

00:04:04   So the mini is, it's more than half the weight

00:04:08   of the big one, but that's still,

00:04:11   it just feels both the weight difference

00:04:13   and the footprint size difference in your hand.

00:04:16   It just feels so big.

00:04:17   I still wish there was something between these two sizes.

00:04:22   Now maybe the answer is I just get like, you know,

00:04:25   the big non-pro phone, but that's, I mean,

00:04:28   that's not gonna solve my development needs

00:04:29   for this fall with the Always On Screen and everything.

00:04:31   Anyway, I just, I miss having the small light phone so much.

00:04:36   I'm so torn, I am so fortunate that I have a job

00:04:40   and the means that I can actually own both of these phones

00:04:42   and have to actually test on both of them

00:04:44   and have a good reason to buy them, et cetera.

00:04:45   Yes, I know.

00:04:46   However, God, I wish they would make

00:04:49   better small phones again.

00:04:51   And it kind of crushes me that,

00:04:54   according to every rumor that at this point,

00:04:56   usually iPhone size rumors are pretty well nailed in

00:04:59   by a year before it launches, let alone a few months.

00:05:02   But at this point, it's pretty clear,

00:05:04   the mini is going away.

00:05:06   And I miss the days, it feels so good in the pocket.

00:05:10   It doesn't look ridiculous in pockets.

00:05:13   I'm still a front pocket kind of person.

00:05:16   And it doesn't look stupid with this giant lunch tray

00:05:20   in my pocket the way that the big phone does.

00:05:22   The difference between the Mini and the Pro

00:05:26   is way bigger than the difference

00:05:28   between the Pro and the Max.

00:05:29   So they really just made the Max and the Maxer right now.

00:05:32   That's how it feels.

00:05:34   Here we are, we have the normal sized phone,

00:05:36   which is the Mini, and then we have the Max and the Maxer.

00:05:39   And oh, it's so sad to me that this is going away

00:05:43   and it'll probably never come back.

00:05:46   We're never gonna have a 3.5 inch phone again,

00:05:48   and that's probably for good reasons,

00:05:49   but it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger

00:05:53   and heavier.

00:05:55   And I hope in the future, I hope maybe Apple does

00:05:59   more advances with materials maybe,

00:06:00   maybe not using steel, maybe reducing the use of glass

00:06:03   on the back, 'cause steel and glass are very heavy.

00:06:07   So I don't know what they could do.

00:06:09   I just hope they do it.

00:06:11   - Now the periscope cameras will, I hope,

00:06:13   make it feel not quite as onerous in the pocket.

00:06:16   Those were rumored to be coming for the iPhone 14,

00:06:19   but turns out not, we talked about that on a past show.

00:06:21   Maybe for the 15 or 16, imagine if it was a phone

00:06:25   the size of the plain old 13, but a little bit thinner,

00:06:28   a little bit lighter, and totally flat back,

00:06:30   that would feel less oppressive in your pocket,

00:06:32   I feel like.

00:06:33   - Yeah, that would be nice.

00:06:35   And I still, again, I still think that if they can,

00:06:38   if they can find it in their hearts

00:06:40   to make a pro-quality phone without steel around the outside

00:06:45   like use the aluminum, it's lighter,

00:06:48   It looks better and it feels better.

00:06:50   - I think the steel looks better and feels better.

00:06:52   It's not lighter but I think it looks better and feels better.

00:06:54   I would use a case so who cares

00:06:55   but I think it definitely looks better and feels better.

00:06:58   - Yeah, disagree.

00:07:00   I will say though, besides the size,

00:07:05   I was thinking like, well if I just switch this to the summer

00:07:07   like what am I gonna miss from the Pro phone?

00:07:09   You know what I missed?

00:07:10   Shockingly, I would never have guessed this, ProMotion.

00:07:15   - Oh, interesting.

00:07:16   I thought there was something wrong with my mini,

00:07:18   that everything was so jaggy,

00:07:20   like all the animations seemed like very low frame rate.

00:07:23   I never would have noticed this before

00:07:24   using promotion for a year now,

00:07:26   but now, and I still use a 60 hertz monitor all the time,

00:07:30   but for some reason I noticed that instantly,

00:07:33   and I thought, oh, maybe it's just 'cause this is

00:07:34   like a fresh boot, maybe it's indexing crap

00:07:36   in the background and everything,

00:07:37   but no, it never went away.

00:07:39   It always felt like low frame rate animation,

00:07:43   and I would never have guessed that.

00:07:45   - By the time they do the Mini again,

00:07:47   it'll be 120 hertz, don't worry.

00:07:49   - Three years.

00:07:49   - Yeah, three, that's optimistic.

00:07:51   - No, it won't be, it'll be the next SE probably,

00:07:53   and it'll have all the lowest end components.

00:07:55   - No, I mean, I feel like the smaller phone thing

00:07:57   comes in cycles, they, you know, people ask for it,

00:08:00   they make one, they're disappointed in the sales,

00:08:02   they forget about it for a while,

00:08:03   then people ask for one, they make it,

00:08:05   they're disappointed in the sales, it'll come around,

00:08:07   I give it five years.

00:08:08   - I don't think it will, 'cause the thing is like,

00:08:10   you know, the rumors were like nobody's really buying it,

00:08:12   and so my anecdotal experience,

00:08:14   How many iPhone minis have you seen in the wild

00:08:16   that weren't in the hands of an Apple nerd?

00:08:19   I can tell you my number, it's one.

00:08:20   - I feel like the next mini,

00:08:22   when the next mini comes around in five years or so,

00:08:24   it's not gonna be that small.

00:08:25   It's gonna be smaller than the current 13,

00:08:28   but not as small as that little dinky thing.

00:08:31   - I don't know, as I've said many times in the past,

00:08:34   I would probably at least try for a year

00:08:38   having a 13, or well, a 14 in this case, mini,

00:08:41   if it had the same camera system as the big guys,

00:08:43   but I will not, like that is my do or die.

00:08:46   I will not compromise the camera system.

00:08:49   Well, that's not entirely true, I suppose,

00:08:51   'cause when the max phones had a better camera,

00:08:54   I wouldn't go that big.

00:08:56   Like I guess my first tier is no max phones

00:08:58   because I am not a genetic misfit,

00:09:01   I have normal size hands.

00:09:02   But my second tier is I will not compromise

00:09:05   the camera system.

00:09:06   And I actually do use all three cameras

00:09:09   or all three lenses frequently.

00:09:10   So for me, I don't wanna give it up.

00:09:13   If the 13 or 14 or 15 or 17 Mini had the same camera system,

00:09:17   I'd probably get one.

00:09:18   But while it doesn't, it's a no-fly zone for me.

00:09:21   - So for whatever it's worth,

00:09:22   I know we're a little earlier

00:09:23   for our exit interview for the phone,

00:09:25   but I don't like the 3X perspective

00:09:29   as the only thing you have between 1X and zoomed in.

00:09:33   Like almost every time that I want something zoomed in,

00:09:36   3X is actually a little bit too much,

00:09:37   or it's way too little,

00:09:38   in which case nothing would solve the problem.

00:09:40   But like 2X, I often used 2X when that was a thing.

00:09:45   The 3X is oftentimes too much zoomed in

00:09:49   so that I have to then zoom back out,

00:09:50   in which case it's the thing that's gonna use the 1X lens,

00:09:53   in which case I don't even need the 3X lens.

00:09:55   And there is still that noticeable quality de-grating,

00:09:58   de-grating, degradation, there we go, that's the word.

00:10:01   - There it is, I couldn't fabricate it myself.

00:10:04   No, I think I agree with you actually.

00:10:06   A year ago-- - Downgrade, sorry.

00:10:09   (laughing)

00:10:11   - A year ago, I think I would have been a 3X apologist,

00:10:14   'cause early on I did like it,

00:10:16   but the more I've used it, and I do use it,

00:10:19   but I concur with what you said,

00:10:20   either I want like a 20X or something like that,

00:10:24   or like I'm just a little bit too far,

00:10:27   like I don't know, I'm across a big table

00:10:29   or something like that from a kid or Aaron

00:10:31   or something like that, and I don't need 3X,

00:10:35   but I need more than 1X,

00:10:37   And if only there was something between one and three

00:10:39   that would potentially work in this scenario.

00:10:42   So yeah, I think I agree with you.

00:10:43   - I think I got enough pixels in there,

00:10:44   you can just digital zoom out to two.

00:10:47   I don't have a 3X cameras, I haven't experienced this,

00:10:49   but one of the main places I use 2X

00:10:52   is when I'm trying to take a picture of either a document

00:10:56   or a piece of paper or something.

00:10:57   And yeah, 1X will work, but very often with 1X,

00:11:00   like the phone casts a shadow on the thing

00:11:03   'cause the phone is too close to it.

00:11:04   or 1x is a little more kind of fish-eyed

00:11:07   so the edges get a little bit wavy,

00:11:09   the lens compensation doesn't quite

00:11:11   straighten everything out.

00:11:12   And if I just want the document to be straight,

00:11:14   switch to 2x, move the phone up higher,

00:11:17   shadow goes off the item,

00:11:19   edges are a little bit straighter, there you go.

00:11:21   But I can imagine maybe if that was 3x,

00:11:23   I would have to hold the phone uncomfortably high

00:11:24   and I wouldn't be able to see what it was doing.

00:11:26   Really, I should just use the document scanning feature

00:11:27   and Notes where it just fixes all that for you,

00:11:29   but I kind of wish that was a part of the phone app

00:11:32   'cause I don't want it to go into Notes,

00:11:33   I want it to be in my photos,

00:11:35   but I want it to be square edge piece of paper.

00:11:37   Anyway, my next phone will have a 3X camera, I assume,

00:11:40   so I'll try it out.

00:11:41   (electronic beeping)

00:11:43   - All right, let's do some follow-up.

00:11:44   And we should talk about something we talked about,

00:11:47   what, 250 episodes ago, something like that,

00:11:50   which is Bitcode.

00:11:52   And I can take a stab at what Bitcode is all about,

00:11:56   but perhaps, Jon, you would be better suited to do this.

00:11:58   So can you explain what Bitcode is

00:11:59   and we'll talk about why we're talking about it?

00:12:01   It's the thing where when you upload your application

00:12:04   to Apple, instead of sending Apple executable code,

00:12:06   you instead send them this bit code, which

00:12:08   is slightly more abstracted.

00:12:11   But it tells you what your program is going to do,

00:12:13   but it isn't made for any specific piece of hardware.

00:12:17   And then what Apple does is at the time

00:12:19   they distribute your application to someone

00:12:21   who is downloading it, they decide what architecture

00:12:24   is the person downloading it on, what kind of iPhone

00:12:26   do they have, whatever iPad, what processor does it have,

00:12:29   so on and so forth.

00:12:30   And then they will take the bitcode and convert it to--

00:12:33   I mean, they probably do this ahead of time.

00:12:34   But anyway, convert it to the machine code

00:12:36   that will run on your device.

00:12:38   So even though what you upload is

00:12:40   bitcode that will run on any device, what you download

00:12:42   is a thing that's made specifically

00:12:44   for your architecture.

00:12:46   It's a way to give people slightly smaller downloads.

00:12:48   It's a way to be able to take that thing that was uploaded

00:12:53   and target hardware that might not have even been released

00:12:55   at the time you built that bitcode, right?

00:12:58   Because you're uploading the bitcode,

00:12:59   And maybe later that year, Apple releases a new piece

00:13:02   of hardware that has a new instruction that, you know,

00:13:05   you don't have to upload a new app.

00:13:06   They can just convert the bit code that you uploaded

00:13:09   to use that new instruction if it'll make some piece

00:13:11   of your code faster while still keeping

00:13:13   the functionality the same.

00:13:14   Like that's the idea behind bit code.

00:13:16   And I believe bit code was mandatory for watch apps.

00:13:19   Marco, do you remember the details on this?

00:13:21   - It was always mandatory for watch apps

00:13:23   and it was optional for iOS apps.

00:13:25   - Yeah, so anyway, that's bit code.

00:13:27   And the story is Bitcode is deprecated now.

00:13:30   So when Bitcode came out when,

00:13:32   I gotta click on this link to see how old this episode was.

00:13:34   ATP episode 205 when we interviewed Chris Latner, 2017.

00:13:38   So it's been around for a while.

00:13:40   And I think Chris talked about it in our interview,

00:13:42   like why it exists, what the advantages are.

00:13:45   But now it's not going to be a thing anymore.

00:13:48   So starting with Xcode 14,

00:13:50   Bitcode is no longer required

00:13:51   for watchOS and TBRs applications.

00:13:53   And the App Store no longer accepts

00:13:55   bitcode submissions from Xcode 14.

00:13:57   So if you got bitcode up there, it'll keep working,

00:14:00   but it's no longer required,

00:14:02   and you can't even send it from Xcode 14.

00:14:04   So bitcode is done, and they're just sort of phasing it out.

00:14:06   And they suggest that you update your projects

00:14:08   and change the build settings to disable bitcode,

00:14:11   and so on and so forth.

00:14:12   And the compatibility to build with bitcode

00:14:15   will be removed from a future Xcode release, Apple says.

00:14:17   IPAs that contain bitcode will have their bitcode stripped

00:14:19   before being submitted to the App Store,

00:14:21   or debug symbols for past bitcode submissions

00:14:22   or made available for download, right?

00:14:25   So this is interesting just because

00:14:27   bitcode I think was interesting.

00:14:28   It's an interesting idea and when I saw this,

00:14:31   that it was being deprecated,

00:14:33   obviously we don't know what goes on inside Apple,

00:14:35   even on things that have a semi-public face

00:14:37   like we see like Swift language evolution

00:14:39   and stuff like that.

00:14:40   But this smells to me entirely like a feature that,

00:14:45   a feature whose champions have left, right?

00:14:48   That someone had this idea for bitcode

00:14:50   or some group of people had this idea for bitcode

00:14:52   And they pitched and they said,

00:14:53   here's what we're gonna do,

00:14:54   here's what the advantages are.

00:14:55   It's got advantages to our users,

00:14:57   it's got advantages to us, it's a good idea.

00:14:59   In fact, it's such a good idea,

00:15:00   let's make it mandatory on the watch.

00:15:02   And either the things that it promised to fulfill,

00:15:05   like the, oh, you know, we could release new hardware

00:15:07   with, you know, that we can retarget existing bit code

00:15:11   to that new hardware and developers don't have to submit

00:15:13   a new app, right, and smaller downloads

00:15:16   and all that type of stuff,

00:15:17   that either those games were not realized,

00:15:19   like they never actually did that,

00:15:21   Or they were realized, but the benefits that they got from them

00:15:24   did not match the downsides of having

00:15:27   to deal with bit code and all the machinery

00:15:29   to churn out the right versions or whatever.

00:15:32   But in general, someone had this idea at Apple

00:15:34   and championed it and released it and promoted it.

00:15:37   And it seems like one of the ways projects like this happen

00:15:41   in big companies is the people who

00:15:42   are super enthusiastic about it and who

00:15:44   are promoting all those benefits left the company

00:15:47   or moved on to do other things.

00:15:48   Or they're on Project Titan now or whatever.

00:15:50   And the remaining people, after a few years

00:15:53   of shepherding Bitcode and babysitting it

00:15:56   and looking at it, the same questions would get asked,

00:15:58   why are we doing Bitcode again?

00:15:59   What is this giving us?

00:16:01   Especially if, say, it caused a problem once or twice,

00:16:03   or it seems like running the whole Bitcode thing

00:16:06   was a problem, like what are these theoretical benefits?

00:16:08   And the champions were no longer there to say,

00:16:09   no, we have to do Bitcode, here's why,

00:16:11   'cause it's gonna be awesome for this and that other thing.

00:16:13   And instead it was just the people

00:16:14   who were sort of shepherding it saying,

00:16:16   yeah, I mean, I guess it's okay,

00:16:17   but eventually someone has the guts to say,

00:16:20   should we just stop doing this?

00:16:22   And then it goes away.

00:16:23   Now I'm weaving this whole big story

00:16:24   of what could be happening inside Apple.

00:16:26   I have no information on this whatsoever.

00:16:28   But that's what this smells like.

00:16:29   And I think that's a natural thing to happen,

00:16:32   especially in big companies.

00:16:33   To get any idea from someone's head

00:16:38   to become an actual project that goes out to the public,

00:16:40   especially in a company like Apple,

00:16:41   is so difficult and requires so many skills

00:16:45   beyond doing the thing,

00:16:46   having to do with promoting the thing,

00:16:48   explaining why it's a good idea,

00:16:50   getting support from all the people who need to

00:16:53   give you a thumbs up for this to go through.

00:16:55   And a lot of that is predicated on promises.

00:16:58   I think this will do X, Y, and Z for us.

00:17:01   And sometimes those things just don't turn out.

00:17:04   Or sometimes they turn out,

00:17:05   but the time where they had a big benefit has passed

00:17:08   and now it's not, maybe during the 32 to 64 transition

00:17:11   or whatever was a big deal, but now it's not that big a deal.

00:17:13   But the costs remain, and so I think it is actually

00:17:16   a good thing that, assuming this is the right call,

00:17:19   again, I don't know inside Apple,

00:17:20   but assuming this is the right call,

00:17:21   it is an important thing for companies to do

00:17:24   to decide when a thing they decided to do many years ago

00:17:27   has either not worked out or its time has passed

00:17:31   and it's time to sort of put it to bed.

00:17:33   And I think this will mostly not impact developers

00:17:35   too harshly, there's gonna be a long transition period

00:17:37   and this was, you know, the benefits to developers

00:17:41   probably were minimal, like do you know of a case

00:17:43   where Bitcode made your app run slightly faster

00:17:46   than it would have without you submitting a new app.

00:17:48   If that happened, developers probably

00:17:49   wouldn't even know about it.

00:17:50   - Chris talked about it in the interview

00:17:52   'cause I re-listened to that session

00:17:54   in the interview to remind me.

00:17:55   And this was actually one of my favorite things

00:17:57   that he spoke about on that interview,

00:17:58   or at least one of the few things I remember

00:18:00   all these years later, which is,

00:18:02   and he had a specific example,

00:18:04   and I'm gonna butcher the details,

00:18:05   but the idea was there was a processor,

00:18:07   I think the comically named Swift processor,

00:18:10   I forget which one it was, it was like iPhone 5

00:18:12   or something like that, and it had,

00:18:14   as a hardware instruction, integer, either multiplication or division or something like that.

00:18:19   And so what you could do, or what Apple could do, is say, "Hey, you know, I built, let's say,

00:18:25   Masquerade for the prior processor that does not have the special opcode for integer, division,

00:18:31   or whatever it was. But because I'm submitting to them bit code, they can do the appropriate

00:18:37   conversion such that the version of my app that's downloaded does use this new hardware instruction.

00:18:43   So I get the benefits of this really fancy fancy hardware instruction without having even known it existed when I compiled my code

00:18:51   Which is pretty neat.

00:18:51   Right, but do you notice that benefit as a developer? Like do you even know that it happens?

00:18:56   As a developer, no.

00:18:57   Right, so in theory it's benefiting you because your app runs faster or something.

00:19:01   Right, exactly.

00:19:02   But like is that a benefit that you would notice and care about if they took it away?

00:19:07   Yeah, probably not. And how much faster would it make your app?

00:19:09   And then the flip side of that is, OK, that's

00:19:12   how it's supposed to go.

00:19:13   But what if there's a problem?

00:19:14   What if we're supposed to do it in such a way

00:19:16   that it is functionally identical

00:19:18   to the previous version?

00:19:19   So when the new instruction comes out,

00:19:20   we can just use the bit code to produce that thing.

00:19:22   But maybe some part of this application

00:19:25   relied on some unintended side effect

00:19:28   of the previous instruction that it was using.

00:19:30   And now all of a sudden, this person's app

00:19:31   behaves differently or has a bug or something like that,

00:19:33   and they lose time on that.

00:19:35   Or like I said, just the cost to maintain the infrastructure

00:19:37   that processes the bitcode for all the different architectures.

00:19:41   And there's definitely costs involved in this.

00:19:45   And the benefits of them--

00:19:46   I think the reason we haven't talked about bitcode very much

00:19:49   is it's not something that developers are like,

00:19:51   oh, bitcode is a lifesaver.

00:19:53   I'm so glad Apple did that.

00:19:54   It makes my life as a developer so much better,

00:19:56   and it makes my apps better for my users.

00:19:58   I mean, maybe it does a little bit, but not so much that--

00:20:02   I haven't seen anyone kick up a fuss about this deprecation.

00:20:04   No one is saying, no, don't take away bitcode.

00:20:06   It's like, huh?

00:20:07   All right, I guess it's time has passed.

00:20:09   Obviously, I would love to know what the real story is.

00:20:11   And obviously, one person who did leave Apple

00:20:13   is Chris Latner, who seemed to love Bitcode,

00:20:15   but I don't think it's the type of thing,

00:20:16   well, once Chris Latner left, it was just, you know,

00:20:19   a few short years before they decided

00:20:21   to deprecate it and turn it off.

00:20:22   It's obviously a lot more complicated than that.

00:20:25   - All right, so apparently,

00:20:26   Marco got a belated birthday present

00:20:28   because there is a new big HomePod rumor, Marco.

00:20:32   Did we read this by chance?

00:20:34   - This literally could not have been better timed.

00:20:36   (laughing)

00:20:37   I spent the first 10 minutes of last week's show

00:20:40   basically begging, please, why aren't there HomePod rumors?

00:20:44   Please, Apple, make a new big HomePod.

00:20:46   I hope they still make HomePods.

00:20:48   And sure enough, I mean, it must have been two hours

00:20:51   after we released that show.

00:20:53   Mark Gurman in his newsletter for Bloomberg

00:20:56   has, you know, one of these various, like, you know,

00:21:00   Gurman dumps of like, here's 17 new products

00:21:02   we expect in the next year.

00:21:03   And also one of them happens to be a new larger HomePod.

00:21:08   It's a German rumor.

00:21:10   You know, usually he gets most of the hardware things right.

00:21:15   The timing isn't always right.

00:21:16   The marketing isn't always right.

00:21:18   But he gets most of the existence

00:21:20   of hardware products right.

00:21:22   And so I'm inclined to believe

00:21:24   that this is likely to happen.

00:21:28   I don't know when it'll happen.

00:21:29   I don't know what exactly it'll be.

00:21:31   but what he says is the upcoming HomePod

00:21:34   will run an S8 chip, which is the same one

00:21:36   that's gonna be in the watches this fall.

00:21:39   And I looked it up, the HomePod Mini is, I think, an S4,

00:21:42   and so it's also a watch chip, but it's a few years older.

00:21:46   The previous large HomePod ran the A8 chip

00:21:50   from iPhones from a billion years ago.

00:21:53   One of my complaints with the big HomePod,

00:21:55   besides the fact that it dies and is unreliable,

00:21:57   is that it's extremely slow to do anything.

00:22:01   And that is something that, you know,

00:22:02   when you use a big HomePod and then you use a HomePod Mini,

00:22:04   the difference is night and day.

00:22:05   The HomePod Mini is way more responsive, way faster.

00:22:09   It's still not fast, mind you, in absolute terms,

00:22:13   but it is way faster than the big HomePod

00:22:16   with its crappy A8 chip.

00:22:17   So, for this to be a few generations ahead

00:22:22   of where the HomePod Mini is in the processor

00:22:25   is probably a very good thing.

00:22:27   And Germin also says that it'll be quote,

00:22:30   "Closer to the original HomePod in terms of size

00:22:32   "and audio performance rather than a new HomePod Mini."

00:22:36   And it will apparently allegedly have an updated display

00:22:38   on top, possibly with multi-touch.

00:22:41   So that's all interesting.

00:22:44   That all sounds like it solves problems

00:22:46   that the HomePod had.

00:22:47   If it's gonna have much more responsive performance,

00:22:50   that's great.

00:22:51   If it's gonna have better audio capabilities

00:22:54   in the Mini, that's great because we need that

00:22:57   in the market, and the display and touch interface

00:23:01   to it also sucked, and so to have that be possibly improved

00:23:06   or expanded upon, that's also great.

00:23:09   So this sounds awesome, I really, really hope this is true

00:23:13   and I hope it pans out this way, and if so,

00:23:16   it can't get here fast enough.

00:23:18   He said I believe it's gonna be like 2023 sometime,

00:23:20   so not soon, but I'm just, I'm happy to hear

00:23:24   that this product line is most likely not dead,

00:23:27   and that the HomePod Mini is most likely

00:23:30   not intended to be the only thing in it.

00:23:33   - I kind of fear that based on this extremely vague rumor

00:23:36   that the thing I'm picturing in my head,

00:23:37   I mean I guess you would take it Marco,

00:23:39   'cause you know, beggars can't be choosers,

00:23:40   but I'm picturing a HomePod Mini that's bigger

00:23:44   that still just has one speaker in it,

00:23:46   as opposed to the UMTINE speakers

00:23:47   that are inside the big HomePod,

00:23:49   like basically just a larger speaker,

00:23:51   a larger speaker cone, but still just one.

00:23:53   So yeah, that will be better than the Mini,

00:23:56   but I don't think, based on their past experience

00:23:59   and this rumor, it doesn't seem like it's going

00:24:01   to be something that is going to match the audio quality

00:24:03   of your current big home phones.

00:24:05   - Well, there's a lot of room between those.

00:24:06   So when you only have one driver,

00:24:09   like in a speaker usually, in very tiny speakers,

00:24:13   you have one cone, like one speaker cone.

00:24:15   And when you get larger speakers,

00:24:16   you typically have multiple speaker cones,

00:24:18   they're called drivers, and they are different sizes

00:24:20   to cover different frequency ranges.

00:24:22   The bigger the cone is, the more it covers the bass.

00:24:25   The smaller the cone is, the more it covers the treble.

00:24:27   Or you get these little tiny tweeter things

00:24:28   that aren't even cones anymore because they're so small.

00:24:30   Anyway, the more you can separate out the rolls,

00:24:34   you get different benefits there.

00:24:36   And also, the larger the driver is,

00:24:39   the harder it is to serve the full range of sound.

00:24:42   So what I hope is happening here is,

00:24:45   there's a lot of room between the one driver

00:24:49   and the, quote, passive radiators

00:24:53   that the HomePod Mini has, and the, I believe,

00:24:56   nine drivers or something like that,

00:24:59   that the big HomePod had.

00:25:00   I think it had seven mid-range and tweeters up in the ring,

00:25:04   or down in the ring, and then it had one woofer,

00:25:07   or was it, were there two woofers

00:25:08   in force-canceling configuration?

00:25:09   I don't know, I forget.

00:25:10   Anyway, there's a lot of room between those two.

00:25:14   It wouldn't really make a lot of sense, I don't think,

00:25:16   audio engineering-wise or mechanically or quality-wise,

00:25:19   to have a significantly larger speaker

00:25:22   than the HomePod Mini that only has one driver in it.

00:25:24   That doesn't make a lot of sense.

00:25:26   It's probably going to split out the woofer

00:25:28   and the mid-range/tweeter into at least two drivers.

00:25:32   And that is great.

00:25:33   That alone is, in many cases, enough.

00:25:37   And one thing that was very impressive,

00:25:39   what they did with the full-size HomePod,

00:25:41   they were able to get surprisingly good bass

00:25:43   in a surprisingly small space

00:25:45   with the type of woofer they used.

00:25:48   you don't need a ton of these things.

00:25:50   You just need a little bit more than one.

00:25:53   And the original HomePod, it had the seven

00:25:57   mid-range drivers all in a circle,

00:25:59   so it could fire in 360 degrees of sound.

00:26:03   Most people don't need that in most spaces.

00:26:06   Most people need sound to come out, at most,

00:26:10   180 degrees in front of it.

00:26:11   And that's great, if it can be a wide soundstage

00:26:14   that's still only 180 degrees instead of 360,

00:26:17   That's still awesome.

00:26:19   That's still better than most passive non-smart speakers

00:26:22   that only have a couple of drivers facing forward.

00:26:24   That's nowhere near 180 degrees of coverage.

00:26:26   So it's still better than that.

00:26:28   I think they can really get away with maybe four drivers.

00:26:31   Like I'd say one woofer and three mid-range slash tweeters.

00:26:35   Forward, left, and right on the tweeters.

00:26:37   That's probably enough.

00:26:39   So that's a huge component reduction

00:26:41   from what they have now.

00:26:42   - You're gonna have to fight the designers,

00:26:44   Nap, as they're gonna say, "Wait a second,

00:26:46   "what you're describing is a product

00:26:47   that is directional, so we can't make it symmetrical.

00:26:50   Like if it fires in a circle,

00:26:51   there's no front to the HomePod, right?

00:26:53   Whichever way you put it, like it adapts to whatever,

00:26:55   but if you actually have something that,

00:26:56   even if you have something that has a forward-facing driver

00:26:58   and a backwards-facing driver,

00:27:00   you have to know where forward and back is.

00:27:01   They have to put like an arrow on it or something,

00:27:03   like so you know how to face the 180 degrees into the room.

00:27:06   - No, but you already know that though,

00:27:07   because you know where the cord goes in the back,

00:27:10   and you know where the buttons are aligned on top.

00:27:12   - Yeah, the cord could probably do it.

00:27:13   Although I feel like, I mean,

00:27:15   not that this is what Apple will do,

00:27:16   But like good product design would make that way more obvious than you just having to know that the cord goes to the sound

00:27:21   Yeah, it looks like it's a perfect cylinder

00:27:23   But keep in mind that the sound comes out

00:27:25   Opposite of the way the cord goes and if you don't realize that and like put it sideways, you know

00:27:29   Why is this sound so bad and you don't know this your symmetrical?

00:27:32   You know cylinder is firing into the wall to the side of you instead of into the room

00:27:36   I know this is probably a pipe dream that I don't think they will do this

00:27:40   I would love for them to do this

00:27:42   it would be great if the HomePod had a line-in jack

00:27:46   on the back, and so--

00:27:47   - Yeah, right.

00:27:48   - If they're going to do anything like that,

00:27:50   or even if, God forbid, they would make the cable

00:27:53   removable and replaceable.

00:27:54   Maybe you could replace it with a shorter one.

00:27:55   That would be amazing.

00:27:57   Suppose they were going to add a port to it.

00:28:00   I know that's a lot to ask.

00:28:02   Then there would probably be a little flattened area

00:28:05   on the back where the cables come in.

00:28:07   So that would be another thing to fix that symmetry problem.

00:28:10   But also, I don't even think necessarily that they need to do a ton of cost cutting here

00:28:16   because they now have the HomePod Mini, which is the value product.

00:28:22   You know, when they launched the first HomePod, they were entering a market where everyone

00:28:26   buys things for $50 to $100 from Amazon or Google or whatever.

00:28:30   They came in with something that was $350 as their only entry to the market.

00:28:35   Of course we all made fun of the price because it was ridiculously over-specced for that

00:28:38   market and that's not what people wanted out of a smart speaker most of the time.

00:28:42   But now they have the value segment covered.

00:28:45   So even if they come out with this next HomePod and it's $350 again, in that price range,

00:28:53   for what it offers, it actually is, as I mentioned before, pretty competitive.

00:28:58   It's just a much smaller market.

00:29:00   So I hope they actually try to bridge the gap a little bit.

00:29:01   I hope they go a little bit down market, get them something they could sell for $200 to

00:29:07   That I think they would do a decent amount of volume

00:29:11   and nobody would say, oh my god, that's way too expensive

00:29:15   if it's significantly improved from the HomePod mini

00:29:18   in terms of size and sound detail.

00:29:21   - I don't know, I'm curious to see what comes of this

00:29:23   because I feel like I'm starting to sniff about

00:29:27   in the HomePod space.

00:29:29   The Alexa's that we have are getting obscenely chatty

00:29:32   and constantly wanting to sell us stuff and tell us stuff,

00:29:35   which granted, this is not terribly surprising,

00:29:38   but when we first got them,

00:29:40   or yeah, got a couple of them a few years back,

00:29:43   they were extremely quiet

00:29:45   unless they were being spoken to,

00:29:46   and now they're constantly needing attention.

00:29:48   They're ridiculous.

00:29:50   They're like toddlers now, but.

00:29:51   - No, as far as I'm concerned,

00:29:53   Amazon had the lead in this area and threw it away.

00:29:57   - Yeah, agreed.

00:29:58   - Amazon could not have fumbled this worse than they have.

00:30:01   I don't know a lot of people who have Amazon Echoes

00:30:04   or their family of products who are super happy

00:30:07   with them right now.

00:30:08   - Yeah, yeah, I completely agree.

00:30:09   - And whereas a few years ago, they were the leaders,

00:30:11   they were the king of the world in this space

00:30:13   and they just got more and more annoying and needy

00:30:17   and pushy and people reacted very poorly to that.

00:30:20   We are sponsored this week by Lockit,

00:30:24   a thoughtfully designed, simple and elegant iOS app

00:30:27   and they're looking to hire their next iOS engineers.

00:30:30   This is a pretty good opportunity I think.

00:30:31   So with Locket, you see updates from your favorite people

00:30:36   on your phone right there on your home screen

00:30:39   through widgets.

00:30:40   So the way it works is you follow whatever small group

00:30:43   you want.

00:30:44   This is not like a public platform.

00:30:45   This is a private platform for either maybe just you

00:30:48   and your partner or maybe you and your close family,

00:30:51   close friends, however you wanna do it.

00:30:53   It's a small private group.

00:30:54   And when you open your phone,

00:30:56   you know, you look at your phone all day,

00:30:57   when you see that widget,

00:30:58   you will see the most recent pictures

00:31:01   that this small group has sent.

00:31:02   They can send them very easily throughout the day.

00:31:03   And then you can tap right there and take a picture

00:31:06   and show it to them on all their widgets.

00:31:07   So it's a way for you to really keep in touch

00:31:10   with a very small group of people privately

00:31:12   without all the baggage that comes with a big social network

00:31:16   but still being social with your friends and family

00:31:18   or with your partner.

00:31:19   So it's a really cool concept.

00:31:21   And a lot of people have gotten into this.

00:31:23   So since just this year,

00:31:25   over 500 million lockets have been sent.

00:31:27   They've had more than 20 million downloads.

00:31:29   The app's been in the top 10 in the social networking chart

00:31:32   in the App Store since launch,

00:31:33   but even though they're operating now at quite a scale,

00:31:36   their team is still only three people.

00:31:38   So this means their next iOS hire

00:31:40   will get to play a central role

00:31:42   in building and defining the app.

00:31:44   This app that ships to millions,

00:31:45   you can be right there, you can be making a big impact

00:31:48   by being part of this very small staff.

00:31:51   This is a very nice, thoughtfully designed iOS app.

00:31:53   They really care about getting the details right.

00:31:56   And by working with Lockit,

00:31:58   you're really going to be building a new social network

00:32:00   on a new frontier, the home screen,

00:32:02   through the use of widgets.

00:32:03   And this can really make your phone

00:32:05   feel fun and personal again.

00:32:07   And you can feel proud to make your friends

00:32:09   the center of your phone.

00:32:10   So if you're an iOS engineer, get in touch.

00:32:12   You can reach out to them at locket.camera/jobs.

00:32:16   That's locket.camera/jobs.

00:32:19   Or reach out to their founder, Matt Moss, on Twitter directly.

00:32:22   Thank you so much to Locket for sponsoring our show.

00:32:24   ♪♪

00:32:28   -John, tell me about passkey syncing.

00:32:31   What's the story here?

00:32:32   -So, a tweet from Ricky.

00:32:34   A tweet from Ricky. And it says...

00:32:36   -There's both. -...in iOS 16

00:32:38   and Mac OS Ventura, there isn't any UI

00:32:40   to disable syncing of credentials made via WebAuthn.

00:32:43   Those are the passkey things. Passkeys are a replacement

00:32:45   for passwords, sync across devices,

00:32:47   and are backed up with iCloud keychain.

00:32:48   So this is just a statement of fact.

00:32:50   We talked before about how you can airdrop passkeys

00:32:53   keys to somebody or whatever, but just when you're using pass keys yourself, they will sync via iCloud

00:32:58   keychain to all your devices. That is not an option because some people are asking, "Hey, what if I want

00:33:02   to have a pass key and it's like only on my phone or something? Can I do that?" The answer is no, they

00:33:06   sync everywhere. And it's, you know, it's obviously everyone makes different trade-offs between security

00:33:12   and convenience. In this first iteration, the choice Apple is making is that they balance

00:33:20   between security and convenience that is well suited for most people. Because for most people,

00:33:26   if you allowed them or if it didn't sync everywhere by default or if you allowed them to turn it off,

00:33:30   they can end up in a situation where they have a passkey that gets into some account at some point

00:33:35   in the future where people start using these things and it's only on their phone and the phone's

00:33:39   not backed up because that is a thing that you can do. "Oh, I ran out of iCloud space. I didn't want

00:33:42   to pay for it. Who pays for iCloud space?" And they dropped their phone to the ocean and that was the

00:33:47   only place the passkey was to log into their account.

00:33:50   And they try to log into their account and they can't and they're angry about it, right?

00:33:54   Syncing everywhere is the thing that makes passkeys a viable replacement for passwords

00:33:59   because then if you lose any one of your devices or even all your devices because iCloud Keychain

00:34:04   is an iCloud, if you lose your devices or they break or your house burned down or whatever,

00:34:08   you don't lose your ability to log into all your accounts.

00:34:11   Kind of like in theory you wouldn't lose it with passwords because if you knew your passwords,

00:34:15   which probably you don't, but let's say you knew your passwords, which probably means

00:34:18   they're bad passwords.

00:34:19   "Oh, my house burned down, but I have memorized these 97 high-quality passwords."

00:34:23   Probably not true, but in theory it could be done.

00:34:26   But with the pass keys, you never know what they are.

00:34:27   They're just on your devices, so it has to sync, because that is what will protect most

00:34:31   people from themselves.

00:34:33   But for people who want to have a different trade-off between security and convenience,

00:34:38   iOS 16 and macOS Ventura do not give that option, at least in the UI.

00:34:42   This is a very specific tweet that says there isn't any UI to disable the syncing of credentials.

00:34:46   Is there a command line way to do it?

00:34:48   Is there some secret key?

00:34:49   Who knows?

00:34:51   But I think this is the right call because if you made this optional or made people have

00:34:55   to turn it on, people could really get themselves into trouble.

00:34:59   Again, this all requires pass keys to become a thing because if you don't log in anywhere

00:35:03   with pass keys, who cares what it does?

00:35:04   But I think this is the right call.

00:35:06   But for people who are very security conscious and want to have a thing where, like you do

00:35:11   with hardware YubiKeys or whatever where you know this is the one and only place where

00:35:14   this thing is, that's not something Paskey's going to do at least in this first iteration.

00:35:18   Indeed. We have incredibly important follow-up to cover. This is with regard to Cafe Max and the

00:35:28   meals there. And we got some feedback, and I will read it now, Pacific Rim, Pangea, etc., are the

00:35:34   different kitchens and not the name nor type of dishes that they're offering. We were theorizing

00:35:40   that oh this the Pacific Rim entry for the WWDC meals that means it's a you know meal

00:35:46   from the Pacific Rim no no no apparently that's the kitchen and Pangaea is a kitchen

00:35:50   etc so anyway going back to the feedback employees use an app to order everything for all the

00:35:55   restaurants they do a daily special and have a couple of staples available every day this

00:35:59   person writes I worked at Infinite Loop but the kitchens are all the same at Apple Park

00:36:03   in all the other cafe max in Cupertino I worked there for a few months and ate everything

00:36:06   Everything's pretty good with the exception of the grill.

00:36:09   Think Cruise Food Kitchen,

00:36:10   basic American stuff with no frills.

00:36:13   - Little bit of real-time feedback on the Paskey thing.

00:36:15   Some people in the chat room were asking about this.

00:36:17   One question was, "Hey, wait a second.

00:36:18   I thought Paskeys weren't supposed to leave your device."

00:36:21   There's a thing that Apple has done

00:36:22   in a lot of their literature about Paskeys

00:36:24   and their presentations that's easy to miss,

00:36:27   but if you're thinking about it, you're like,

00:36:29   "What are you talking about Paskeys

00:36:30   syncing with iCloud Keychain?

00:36:31   'Cause, you know, it's supposed to stay on my device

00:36:33   and never leave my device, right?

00:36:35   But how does it sync if it doesn't leave my device?

00:36:37   Doesn't make sense.

00:36:39   What they always say in their presentations

00:36:41   and documentation is, your passkey does not

00:36:44   leave your device when you log into something.

00:36:48   Like, oh, I'm signing into my thing.

00:36:49   Unlike your password, which you send over the internet

00:36:51   to the website that you're logging into,

00:36:53   your passkey does not leave your device when you log in.

00:36:57   It's your data.

00:36:58   You keep it in your secure enclave.

00:37:00   It is yours to sync with as you want using

00:37:02   the end-to-end encrypted iCloud keychain

00:37:05   that even Apple can't get access to or whatever.

00:37:07   So yes, it does leave your device

00:37:08   when it syncs to your other devices,

00:37:10   and it leaves your device

00:37:11   when you airdrop it to somebody else.

00:37:13   But when you log in on a daily basis,

00:37:14   log into the service, log into that service,

00:37:16   it does not leave your device then,

00:37:18   which means A, it doesn't leave your device

00:37:20   most of the time when you're using it,

00:37:21   and B, the things you're logging into never see it.

00:37:24   You don't send it to them, they don't have to store it,

00:37:25   they don't have to store a hash of it,

00:37:27   they don't have any piece of it.

00:37:28   They have your public key, which is totally public

00:37:29   and anybody can have and it's fine.

00:37:32   They don't get your private key when you log in.

00:37:33   So there's that distinction.

00:37:35   And then somebody asks, what if you only have one Apple device?

00:37:37   Why would you still want syncing?

00:37:39   That's because if you drop your one Apple device in a lake,

00:37:40   you better hope someone's got a copy of that pass key.

00:37:42   And who has a copy of it?

00:37:43   It's in your iCloud key chain, which

00:37:44   is on Apple's server somewhere.

00:37:46   But they can't decrypt it because it's

00:37:47   end-to-end encrypted.

00:37:48   All right, let's briefly talk about Buy Now Pay Later.

00:37:51   This is becoming more relevant in my world

00:37:53   because Apple has announced that they're

00:37:55   going to do a Buy Now Pay Later thing via Apple Pay.

00:37:58   And we got a bunch of feedback about this.

00:38:00   And honestly, this could go on for hours.

00:38:02   And so I just thought I'd cover a couple of quick things.

00:38:05   I didn't really know how this worked

00:38:07   and who made money and how.

00:38:09   And the summary that I will offer up to you, the listener,

00:38:13   is that apparently the way this works

00:38:15   is when you go to buy something, you pay in four--

00:38:19   generally speaking, you pay in four installments.

00:38:21   You pay the first one immediately,

00:38:22   and then three more installments in two, four,

00:38:24   and six weeks later.

00:38:26   What happens is the merchant pays a little bit more money

00:38:30   to a little bit higher percentage than they would for a straight up credit card transaction.

00:38:36   And the people that are doing buy now pay later, like a firm or one of the many other

00:38:40   companies after pay, they basically make their money by taking a little bit more fee than

00:38:46   a credit card.

00:38:47   Now, why would the merchant be interested in this?

00:38:49   They do this because they're told and people believe that the conversion is way higher.

00:38:54   So it is much more likely that the thing that was in your shopping cart actually gets purchased

00:38:58   you can do it in four installments instead of just one big lump sum.

00:39:02   There was a pretty good episode of Planet Money about this that's only like 20-25 minutes.

00:39:07   We'll put a link in the show notes.

00:39:09   But what's interesting about this is we don't know a whole lot about how Apple specifically

00:39:12   is going to conquer this.

00:39:14   From what we've gathered, or from what people have dug up, it sounds like Apple is going

00:39:19   to be the one providing the financing.

00:39:21   So if you're buying a $100 item and you're doing that in four $25 installments, then

00:39:28   Apple's floating you 75 bucks, right? Because you're paying 25 immediately and then 25 in

00:39:32   two weeks, 25 in four weeks, 25 in six weeks. Where will Apple get all that money from?

00:39:36   Geez, I don't know. Since they're so cash strapped, it's going to be real hard.

00:39:41   I like that they have like, people saying, oh, Apple's not using a bank for this. They're

00:39:43   going to be their own bank. I assume Apple probably has more money than most banks.

00:39:47   Yeah, exactly. Well put. So anyway, so Apple will float it. But what is interesting is apparently

00:39:54   they're, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details here, but apparently they're using Goldman Sachs

00:39:58   to vend, for lack of a better word,

00:40:00   and that's probably technically incorrect,

00:40:02   a MasterCard such that it's a, I guess like a,

00:40:06   again, I'm way out of my comfort zone here,

00:40:08   but I guess it's like a phantom MasterCard

00:40:10   that the transaction is run up, rung up against,

00:40:13   and that they're using Goldman Sachs for,

00:40:15   but the floating of this hypothetical $75 is Apple's money,

00:40:20   and they will hopefully make their money back

00:40:23   by taking slightly higher fees.

00:40:25   And so- - That's unlikely,

00:40:26   - To use a software pattern, it's like the adapter pattern.

00:40:28   Like the entire payment system doesn't know

00:40:30   about these things, so it has to masquerade

00:40:32   as if you paid with a slightly higher fee credit card,

00:40:35   because from the merchant's perspective,

00:40:37   they get all the money at once.

00:40:37   It doesn't look like buy now, pay later to them.

00:40:39   It just looks like, oh, this is like a really high fee

00:40:42   for this credit card or whatever.

00:40:44   And like Casey said, the reason they're willing

00:40:45   to pay the higher fee is, I'm assuming

00:40:47   it's not just think, I'm sure it is actually true,

00:40:50   that people buy more stuff when you get all the money,

00:40:54   but they're only paying part of that money.

00:40:55   So they're more likely to purchase things.

00:40:57   So they're willing, the vendors, the merchants,

00:40:59   oh, there's too many stupid terms.

00:41:01   The stores where you buy stuff,

00:41:02   the store is willing to pay a higher fee

00:41:04   to get that customer to buy the thing.

00:41:08   And to them, it just looks like a high fee credit card.

00:41:11   - There are a bunch of catches and caveats with this.

00:41:13   We're not gonna go into all of them,

00:41:14   but the short, short version is

00:41:16   there's not a lot of protections around this

00:41:17   because governments haven't really caught up

00:41:20   to this being a thing yet.

00:41:21   Additionally, there's not a lot of protections

00:41:24   to make sure that there's no predatory lending,

00:41:26   although this tends to be not as predatory a practice

00:41:29   to begin with, which is good.

00:41:30   - Yeah, 'cause it's like, it's much shorter term

00:41:32   than credit cards.

00:41:33   - Right, and it has an endpoint,

00:41:35   like it has a defined end rather than,

00:41:37   oh, I'll just keep paying my $25 minimums

00:41:39   until the end of time.

00:41:41   - Right, and a lot of the things

00:41:43   don't actually even charge any interest.

00:41:44   It's just like, look, you have to pay this off,

00:41:46   and this is the amount you have to pay,

00:41:48   and here's the schedule you have to pay it,

00:41:49   and if you fail to pay on that schedule,

00:41:51   you just can't use that buy now pay later service anymore.

00:41:54   - Well, and we'll send it to collections.

00:41:56   So it can--

00:41:58   - Yeah, no, they'll get your money somehow,

00:41:59   but the whole point is they're not willing

00:42:01   to do what credit cards do, which is like,

00:42:02   just make them an payment for the rest of your life.

00:42:05   That's not an option.

00:42:06   They're not trying to make money from you that way.

00:42:08   Yes, they need you to pay back the money,

00:42:10   and they will get it from you if they can,

00:42:12   but the stop gap is, unlike a credit card,

00:42:14   where you can just keep paying the minimum

00:42:15   and keep using that card,

00:42:17   you can't use your buy now pay later thing anymore

00:42:20   if you have not made the payments on your existing thing.

00:42:23   So it sort of kills your payment method until you pay it off.

00:42:26   - Yep, and then the other interesting thing is

00:42:28   what happens if you, like, I don't know,

00:42:31   buy something and it turns out

00:42:32   you're getting totally ripped off.

00:42:33   Well, there's no idea of like a chargeback

00:42:35   or anything like that because you're not really doing,

00:42:38   you're not really purchasing this

00:42:39   through a credit card company

00:42:40   that supports that sort of thing.

00:42:42   You're purchasing it through Apple or Afterpay

00:42:44   or what have you.

00:42:45   And so there's a lot of ways that it's not as safe

00:42:49   for a consumer, but the advantage is,

00:42:51   especially for naive consumers,

00:42:53   and I don't mean that dismissively,

00:42:54   or inexperienced perhaps is a better word for it,

00:42:57   is that you're not looking at a 20% credit card fee

00:43:02   that could follow you like you guys were saying

00:43:05   until the end of time.

00:43:06   Like this has a defined stop date

00:43:08   and that's six weeks from whenever you purchase.

00:43:10   So I find this very interesting.

00:43:13   As someone who has basically treated his credit card

00:43:15   like a debit card for his entire life,

00:43:17   I don't think this is necessarily for me,

00:43:19   But it is a very interesting approach.

00:43:21   And I am very, I'm very curious to see

00:43:25   what Apple does with this and how this works out for Apple.

00:43:28   - I feel like there is ample room

00:43:30   for what they call innovation in the finance space

00:43:32   to figure out, okay, but what if we did charge people

00:43:35   fees and interest, right?

00:43:36   You know, like, it's very,

00:43:39   the way the banking industry finds a way

00:43:40   to make money off things that don't seem like they were,

00:43:42   like that most banks essentially make money off fees now.

00:43:45   Like, they don't, you know, the old model of like,

00:43:47   go the bank takes your money and they hold it for you

00:43:49   and they use it to give people loans,

00:43:50   they charge you just those loans,

00:43:52   like no, they just charge you fees

00:43:53   and that's how they make all their money, right?

00:43:55   And so there's so many places in the system

00:43:57   where you can add a little fee,

00:43:58   in fact someone in the chat room is saying like,

00:43:59   oh if you miss a payment,

00:44:00   they charge you a $10 penalty or something like,

00:44:02   just little fees like,

00:44:03   oh it's not interest but yeah if you miss a payment,

00:44:05   it's this fee or whatever,

00:44:06   but we'll let you use your card,

00:44:07   it's kind of like, you know,

00:44:08   think of everything used to gamify the casino games

00:44:10   for children on the App Store, right?

00:44:12   Oh, you missed a payment,

00:44:14   so A, you get a $10 penalty,

00:44:15   but B, do you still wanna use this payment method?

00:44:17   'Cause normally we would stop you,

00:44:18   but if you pay $20 now,

00:44:19   we'll let you use it for another purchase.

00:44:21   - Pay $30 for a boost in a loot box.

00:44:23   - Exactly right, it's like,

00:44:25   do you wanna use it for an extra 24 hours?

00:44:26   You can have an extra week on this,

00:44:28   we'll let you use it even though you haven't paid that off,

00:44:29   but it's just a $50 fee, or it's just like,

00:44:32   and okay, so it's not interest,

00:44:34   but it's a way to make small amounts of money,

00:44:37   knowing that people will miss a payment

00:44:38   or buy something that's a little bit more

00:44:40   than they can afford and have to wait

00:44:41   for the next paycheck to pay it off.

00:44:42   Like the industry of finding a way to make people feel good about buying something, like,

00:44:49   "Oh, this is great.

00:44:50   I don't have to pay it all at once.

00:44:51   I'll pay it now.

00:44:52   It's real easy," and not realize that future them is going to miss that payment and then

00:44:56   they're going to have to pay a fee and then just like multiply that over millions of people.

00:45:01   It's in the industry's nature to exploit human weakness to make small amounts of money that

00:45:06   people don't notice.

00:45:08   And now Apple's in all these businesses.

00:45:10   Great.

00:45:11   Right.

00:45:12   kind of like they did with Apple Card,

00:45:13   Apple will try to do the slightly better version of that.

00:45:16   Because like I said before,

00:45:17   I think the upside for Apple for doing this is,

00:45:20   let's make more people use Apple Pay,

00:45:22   more transactions going through Apple payment methods.

00:45:24   Apple wants to drive more people to use its payment systems.

00:45:29   So that's the benefit it gets.

00:45:31   But kind of like services, where it's like,

00:45:34   okay, well Apple's business,

00:45:35   they make all their money from selling phones,

00:45:36   but they want to give services

00:45:37   to make their phones more valuable.

00:45:38   Eventually, if something is successful,

00:45:40   somebody wakes up and notices, you know what?

00:45:43   Services actually make a lot of money too.

00:45:44   And unlike phones now, it's growing.

00:45:46   So that should become a profit center for us

00:45:48   instead of just a way to make our phones more valuable.

00:45:50   And that can easily happen with payment methods

00:45:52   if they ever get to that point.

00:45:53   Because it may right now be a way to just drive more people

00:45:55   to buy things on their phones and so on and so forth.

00:45:58   But, and you know, we don't charge late fees

00:46:00   and we don't do this, we don't have any interest,

00:46:02   but five years from now, someone,

00:46:04   Bean Counter runs the numbers and says, you know what?

00:46:07   Services have stopped growing,

00:46:08   but this payment method stuff,

00:46:10   This is a gold mine.

00:46:11   If we add a 1% fee for missed,

00:46:14   increase our fee for missed payments by one cent per year,

00:46:16   we make an extra billion dollars.

00:46:17   And then we're looking at the Apple payments graph

00:46:20   go up and up in our old age.

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00:48:20   All right, so apparently in the infinitely long list of reasons why the 13-inch MacBook Pro with them too is a piece of

00:48:30   is because the

00:48:33   SSDs is apparently way slower, which is cool.

00:48:38   - This is kind of disappointing for this computer

00:48:39   'cause honestly I don't think it's really,

00:48:41   like of all the things that are wrong with this computer,

00:48:45   this one of them is a thing that could have happened

00:48:46   to any computer, right?

00:48:48   It could have happened to the nicest computer.

00:48:49   It didn't, it happened to this cruddy computer.

00:48:51   - It happens to every computer sometime.

00:48:52   - Yeah, right, it's true.

00:48:54   (laughing)

00:48:55   So the thing that happens is,

00:48:58   when you put storage in a computer,

00:49:00   whether it's RAM or SSDs or whatever,

00:49:02   You can buy the little chips that make up the RAM

00:49:06   or the flash storage or whatever in various sizes.

00:49:09   And sometimes the biggest size you can get

00:49:12   is not big enough to do the thing that you want.

00:49:14   So like say you wanted to have, in this case,

00:49:16   a 256 gigabyte SSD.

00:49:19   Can I get a 256 gigabyte single chip?

00:49:21   No, you gotta buy two of them.

00:49:22   You gotta buy 128 and 128.

00:49:24   So all right, fine.

00:49:25   Because there's no 256s available,

00:49:26   or they are available,

00:49:27   but they're exorbitantly expensive, right?

00:49:28   And this is not our top end computer, right?

00:49:30   So we're gonna buy two of those chips

00:49:33   and that'll make, you know, two 128s will make 256.

00:49:36   Years go by, the new model of this machine comes out,

00:49:38   it's like, oh, actually we can get

00:49:39   single chip 256 gigabyte flash storage now.

00:49:43   So in the new computer, we won't have to buy a 128 and 128,

00:49:45   we'll just buy one 256, 'cause it's not more expensive

00:49:48   and it'll use less power and it'll take up less space

00:49:49   and so on and so forth.

00:49:51   And you know, and in the case of the M2 MacBook Pro,

00:49:54   like, we're not gonna redesign the motherboard,

00:49:56   like, we're just gonna put one chip there.

00:49:57   Like, there used to be a place for two chips,

00:49:59   But now we'll just buy one of them off of the base model,

00:50:01   'cause the base model has 256 gig SSD.

00:50:03   Before we had to buy 128 and 128,

00:50:05   now we can just buy a single 256.

00:50:07   March of progress, fine, right?

00:50:09   The problem is, the way SSDs work in that Mac

00:50:11   and in many Macs, is if you put two chips there,

00:50:15   the little controller that reads the solid state storage

00:50:20   can read from and write to both of those chips

00:50:22   at the same time.

00:50:23   - Two chips at the same time.

00:50:25   - Yeah. (laughs)

00:50:26   It's, you know, again, it's not like RAID or anything,

00:50:29   it's all invisible to the operating system,

00:50:31   it's like a single volume, but practically speaking,

00:50:33   there's enough bandwidth and the controller knows

00:50:36   how to talk to both of them at the same time.

00:50:38   So when they went from two 128 chips to a single 256 chip,

00:50:42   it cut the disk speed in half.

00:50:45   Because previously, it could do both at once,

00:50:47   and it's just straight up parallel,

00:50:49   like oh, you're writing stuff, I'll write some here

00:50:50   and some there, and I'll do it both at the same time.

00:50:52   And with just one chip, the speed gets cut in half.

00:50:55   And that's not great.

00:50:56   So if you bought a base model M1 MacBook Pro,

00:50:59   the Touch Bar M1 MacBook Pro with a 256 gig SSD

00:51:02   and it came with two 128 gig flash things,

00:51:07   that thing's SSD.

00:51:08   - Flash things, that's what they're called.

00:51:10   - Twice as fast as the new M2 one.

00:51:13   Only if you get the base model.

00:51:14   Now if you get the M2, if you get an M2 with a bigger SSD,

00:51:18   then they have to do two chips again

00:51:19   'cause they can't get them big enough, right?

00:51:21   So I don't know what the size of that.

00:51:21   I think if you just get a 512,

00:51:23   to give you two 256 chips,

00:51:25   and then you get your speed back.

00:51:28   But this is one of those weird things

00:51:30   that you'd have to be a nerd to know about,

00:51:32   that some person's gonna go in

00:51:33   and they're gonna get this machine,

00:51:35   and in addition to all the other things

00:51:36   that are bad about this machine

00:51:37   that we talked about before,

00:51:38   they're gonna get the base model

00:51:39   'cause it's the cheapest and not realize

00:51:41   they're getting a slower SSD

00:51:43   than if they had bought the M1 version of this.

00:51:45   And that's a bummer, especially at the low end.

00:51:47   So now you have to have a nerdy friend

00:51:48   who tells you don't buy the 256 gig

00:51:50   if you care about SSD speed.

00:51:51   If you don't care about SSD speed,

00:51:52   people don't notice is like browsing the web

00:51:54   and using Microsoft Word or whatever,

00:51:56   but it just makes this machine more of a bummer

00:51:58   with yet more reasons to be wary of it.

00:52:01   - As much as this sucks to be a regression,

00:52:04   you know, because this was not true of the M1 version,

00:52:07   like the M1 base model did not have this problem,

00:52:10   just 'cause of different chip configurations, as John said,

00:52:12   but it just, it sucks that like this is yet another reason

00:52:15   why people are getting a subpar experience

00:52:20   with this machine by a lack of information.

00:52:24   They're gonna go into an Apple store,

00:52:26   they're gonna see, oh, here's something that says Pro

00:52:28   and is inexpensive relative to the other Pros.

00:52:30   I must get this over the Air.

00:52:32   And by the way, I fully expect the Air

00:52:35   to have this exact same problem.

00:52:37   Like, this probably just this generation

00:52:39   of these storage chips with this M2 generation

00:52:42   of architecture or whatever, like,

00:52:43   this generation of these chips is gonna have this problem.

00:52:45   So I expect all of the M2 products

00:52:48   in the 256 configuration,

00:52:51   I expect them all to have this exact same problem

00:52:54   this time around.

00:52:55   And it just sucks, there's just more asterisks

00:52:57   where you have to, as John said,

00:52:59   consult your nerd friend, and be like,

00:53:01   "What's the right one to buy?"

00:53:02   And now it's more complicated.

00:53:04   And the reality is, SSD speed,

00:53:07   it's really fast either way,

00:53:09   it's just much faster this other way,

00:53:11   and sustained transfer rates from SSDs

00:53:13   aren't that important of a performance characteristic

00:53:16   of modern computers.

00:53:17   What sucks more about this is that it's a regression

00:53:20   and a significant one in a certain metric.

00:53:22   Not necessarily that it's going to result

00:53:24   in a very noticeably slow computer in most operations.

00:53:27   It won't.

00:53:28   And I would also argue like, if you're buying,

00:53:31   A, this computer at all, and B, the base model storage,

00:53:36   performance might not be very important to you.

00:53:38   Like there's a much higher chance than usual

00:53:40   if you're buying the base SSD

00:53:43   that you're not really in it for the disk performance.

00:53:47   It's kind of a shame that it's on the model with Pro suffix,

00:53:49   though, because maybe you would think it's going to be faster.

00:53:52   I'm kind of afraid that when the M2 MacBook Air comes out,

00:53:54   it won't have this problem, because it

00:53:56   will have a redesigned motherboard,

00:53:57   or the base model will use two chips, or something like that.

00:54:00   And so the base model Air will have a faster SSD.

00:54:02   But this whole issue has made all the people

00:54:05   who have been testing this look around a little bit more,

00:54:08   as they occasionally do, and say, you know,

00:54:10   Apple's SSDs used to be super fast in their Macs,

00:54:13   but they haven't really kept up.

00:54:15   If you look at the SSDs that are coming in a lot of PC laptops in similar classes, you

00:54:20   can get much faster SSDs in a similar price range.

00:54:23   They would look at like, "Oh, let's look at a Microsoft laptop or a Dell laptop in a similar

00:54:28   price range and do tests on its SSDs."

00:54:31   Because there are faster SSDs coming out all the time and Apple hasn't really kept up in

00:54:36   this area.

00:54:37   Again, not that they're slow and on the Air, who cares?

00:54:40   If the Air has this problem, if you're buying a base model Air with 256 gigs, your main problem

00:54:44   is probably going to be that you bought a laptop with 256 gigs in it, which is going

00:54:47   to feel really tight to you, I think.

00:54:50   And your secondary problem is the performance.

00:54:51   But it's Apple's cheapest laptop.

00:54:53   It's the base model of Apple's cheapest laptop.

00:54:55   So what do you expect?

00:54:56   But the one that has the pro in the name, the whole point is, oh, you're stepping up

00:54:58   to something that's a little bit better.

00:54:59   And it would be really disappointing to step up to something that has a quarter of the

00:55:02   performance of a similarly priced SSD in a PC laptop.

00:55:06   Again, not that it's a spec race or whatever.

00:55:07   Just feel like Apple has to do some minimum amount to keep up here.

00:55:11   Apple's SSDs are really fast, and I think they're just a little bit behind in this generation.

00:55:16   Maybe it's because the PCIe 4 stuff is coming out on the PC side and Apple hasn't revved

00:55:21   to that.

00:55:22   Maybe they'll catch up with the M3s and everything.

00:55:24   But for most people, this doesn't matter because you're not running benchmarks all day.

00:55:27   You're just browsing the web.

00:55:28   It's perfectly fine.

00:55:29   And what more people care about are things like reliability and maybe Apple's, the ones

00:55:35   they're choosing to do better in that area, who knows.

00:55:37   But Apple does have to keep up here.

00:55:39   And it's kind of like the camera.

00:55:41   like once this starts catching on and people start poking into it, it just becomes a thing

00:55:45   and hopefully now if Apple is paying attention they will feel, I don't think it's going to

00:55:53   be like the camera, the camera they're going to feel the need to do better with the camera

00:55:55   because it was such a big story everywhere.

00:55:58   But with the SSDs they'll probably be like, "Eh, a few people complain but no one really

00:56:01   cares."

00:56:02   But I do hope they keep up because it is something that does impact your day to day experience

00:56:06   whether you know it or not.

00:56:07   You might not notice from one computer to the next,

00:56:09   but if you skip like three computers and you're like,

00:56:12   "Oh, they both have an SSD,"

00:56:13   but the SSDs are so much faster than they were

00:56:15   like five, 10 years ago,

00:56:17   and that needs to continue to be the case.

00:56:19   - Additionally, and unrelatedly,

00:56:22   there's apparently going to be a 15-inch MacBook thing,

00:56:26   according to Ming-Chi Kuo.

00:56:28   15-inch MacBook could feature M2 and M2 Pro options

00:56:31   without the Air brand.

00:56:34   And there's been a lot of debates

00:56:36   whether or not my beloved 12 inch would come back or not.

00:56:40   Nobody seems to agree at this time.

00:56:41   But apparently there may be a 15 inch

00:56:43   that is not a Pro, which is interesting.

00:56:46   And not an Air either, just a 15 inch MacBook Studio?

00:56:51   I don't know.

00:56:51   I don't know what this would end up being.

00:56:52   - It's possible.

00:56:54   I don't think Studio would be the name

00:56:55   because Studio is effectively like Pro Plus

00:56:59   in their - That's fair point.

00:57:01   - In their nomenclature so far.

00:57:02   Or maybe, I don't know, it's like mid-range Pro.

00:57:05   But this, so take with a grain of salt

00:57:07   anything from the rumor mill that's about pricing,

00:57:11   naming, or marketing.

00:57:13   The Apple marketing team basically does not leak.

00:57:16   Like the only times we've really gotten credible leaks

00:57:20   from like for things like product names

00:57:22   usually is when we have like accidental inclusion

00:57:25   in Apple's own software releases of references

00:57:28   to a certain name or something like that.

00:57:29   Like Apple leaks it.

00:57:31   - Had a MacStudio leak, remember on MacStudio leak

00:57:33   like a few days before, I don't remember where they came from.

00:57:35   - Oh, that's true. - Oh, that's true.

00:57:36   - Yeah, it was one of those Twitter people.

00:57:39   Anyway, it's very unlikely that this product

00:57:42   that is scheduled to come out not exactly soon,

00:57:45   that the name of it would leak.

00:57:47   So I wouldn't get too bogged down in the name.

00:57:48   What does seem likely incredible here is that

00:57:53   some kind of 15-inch non-pro MacBook is coming out.

00:57:58   I think there's a big potential market for this.

00:58:02   If you look at what Apple's doing with the iPhone,

00:58:05   there is a similar rumor with the iPhone this fall.

00:58:09   - That's not a rumor, that's basically guaranteed.

00:58:11   - Yeah, at this point, yeah.

00:58:11   - 'Cause the phone stuff does leak.

00:58:13   - Yeah, the phone stuff leaks like crazy.

00:58:14   And so this fall, if this is correct,

00:58:17   the non-pro phone is going to come in two sizes.

00:58:22   Previously, it has not been possible to get a large,

00:58:25   to get the largest size class of phone in a non-pro line.

00:58:31   But this fall they are changing that

00:58:32   because turns out there's a big market for big phones,

00:58:36   even if that market doesn't necessarily include everybody

00:58:39   who's willing to spend like 1200 bucks on a phone.

00:58:41   So that makes sense for them to cover that market.

00:58:44   Well, the same thing applies to laptops.

00:58:47   Size of the screen does not need to correlate

00:58:50   with all of the pro components inside.

00:58:54   Many people want larger screen laptops.

00:58:57   And Apple has covered the 13 inch range extremely well

00:59:00   for years, and I'm pretty sure that is the number one range

00:59:03   in terms of what volume sells across the whole industry.

00:59:06   I think 13 inch is probably the most common one,

00:59:09   but I would imagine second place is 15 inch.

00:59:14   For years Apple covered that very, very well.

00:59:16   I think what's interesting though is that when you look

00:59:17   at the recent products, and this applies across many

00:59:21   Apple product lines, possibly all Apple product lines,

00:59:24   the word pro used to just mean the bigger ones.

00:59:30   But in recent years, Pro has actually been pushed

00:59:33   further up market.

00:59:34   In some ways, that's just Apple wanting to

00:59:36   keep their extremely healthy profit margins

00:59:38   and hey, that's how they got where they are, good for them.

00:59:41   But in other ways, it allows them to use actually fancier

00:59:45   and more expensive components and materials

00:59:47   and stuff like that.

00:59:48   And so, what I think we're seeing is the bifurcation

00:59:52   of more and more Apple product lines

00:59:53   into much more distinguished Pro versus non-Pro

00:59:57   than we used to have.

00:59:58   You know, if you look at the MacBook Pro,

00:59:59   Mapbook Pro now has these much larger,

01:00:03   higher core count chips.

01:00:04   We have things like the ProMotion displays, HDR,

01:00:08   like being built on display, stuff like that.

01:00:10   Those are much higher end components and needs

01:00:14   most people don't care about.

01:00:15   Look at the phones.

01:00:16   You have the three camera system,

01:00:17   all like the Pro, raw stuff.

01:00:20   You have the fancy materials that I hate,

01:00:22   the ProMotion display again there too,

01:00:23   like this is a more expensive thing.

01:00:25   So I think what they're doing is breaking

01:00:28   this long-held notion, in a much larger way,

01:00:30   breaking this long-held notion that pro just meant

01:00:33   the biggest ones, and offering non-pro big options

01:00:38   in their product lines, because there's demand for that,

01:00:41   and letting pro actually mean the higher end of components,

01:00:46   most of which happen to be on the bigger scale,

01:00:49   but not just the biggest ones.

01:00:51   - Yeah, I think this is long overdue,

01:00:53   especially since, I mean, whether they call it an aeronaut,

01:00:55   a 15 inch MacBook Air-ish type computer

01:00:58   with MacBook Air internals is such a great machine

01:01:02   for people who want a bigger screen

01:01:03   because remember, it's still got the Air internals.

01:01:05   It doesn't have Pro internals, no super hot anything.

01:01:07   It's just like the same little power sipping thing

01:01:10   that's in 13 inch, but so much more room for battery.

01:01:13   And yes, you have a bigger screen to power too,

01:01:15   but that screen's not gonna be a 1600 HDR,

01:01:17   like whatever, it's a bigger screen,

01:01:20   but I feel like the battery increase

01:01:21   will more than make up for the screen increase.

01:01:23   So what you get for the people who want it

01:01:25   is a thing with a bigger screen,

01:01:26   which people really want, either for the real estate

01:01:28   or so they can do a scale resolution

01:01:30   to make everything bigger on their screen, right?

01:01:32   And you get better battery life.

01:01:34   And it's only a little bit bigger

01:01:35   and only a little bit heavier,

01:01:37   and that's a trade-off that tons of people are willing

01:01:39   to make, like, you know, we're so used to it,

01:01:41   but like, it must be so weird if you're shopping

01:01:43   for a laptop in the traditional Apple world

01:01:45   of the past decade or so and saying,

01:01:47   you know, I want a laptop, oh, this screen's a little big,

01:01:49   can you show me something with a bigger screen?

01:01:50   And you're like, it costs how much?

01:01:52   You were just looking at the $999 MacBook Air

01:01:56   with the 13-inch screen.

01:01:57   You just saw something with a little bit bigger screen.

01:01:59   It's like, yeah, that'll be, you know,

01:02:00   add $2,500 to the price of your thing.

01:02:03   It doesn't make any sense to the consumer.

01:02:05   Like, but the screen is only a little bit bigger.

01:02:06   And they're like, yeah, it's got this and that

01:02:07   and the other thing in it.

01:02:08   And they're like, but I don't know what any of that is.

01:02:10   And I don't care about it.

01:02:10   I just need a laptop that I can browse the web on

01:02:12   and write things in Microsoft Word.

01:02:14   I just want a little bit bigger screen.

01:02:15   And you're telling me my only option is this monstrosity

01:02:18   that I don't understand?

01:02:20   This thing needs to be here.

01:02:21   Now Apple could be scared of doing it,

01:02:23   like oh no, it's gonna cannibalize our 16-inch sales,

01:02:25   but honestly, no one is cross-shopping.

01:02:27   Like I was looking at the bottom-of-the-line MacBook Air,

01:02:30   but to get that bigger screen,

01:02:31   I decided to pay a few thousand more dollars.

01:02:33   Like I don't think that's something

01:02:34   that happens very often, right?

01:02:36   So this machine has to exist,

01:02:37   and that's what they're doing with the phones too.

01:02:40   It's just so much more pleasing and symmetrical

01:02:43   and makes so much more sense for market segmentation,

01:02:46   and it allows you to make this machine,

01:02:47   which will have slightly different trade-offs

01:02:49   than the base Air or than any of the larger Pros.

01:02:52   And most of those trade-offs are going to be in favor

01:02:55   of things that people want.

01:02:56   More battery life, bigger things on the screen

01:02:58   or room for more stuff for not much bigger size.

01:03:01   And that's why I really hope that this thing,

01:03:03   like I'm rooting for basically a 15-inch MacBook Air.

01:03:05   Again, whether they call it that or not,

01:03:07   I'm rooting for it to stick to the lowest power components

01:03:11   that Apple ships 'cause the M1 is plenty good,

01:03:13   the M2 is gonna be plenty good.

01:03:14   That's all people need.

01:03:15   Don't try to put a Pro in there.

01:03:17   I mean, I guess you could offer it if you wanted to,

01:03:19   but I feel like the best version of this machine

01:03:22   is MacBook Air guts, 15-inch screen, bigger battery.

01:03:25   That is the machine that really hits the sweet spot

01:03:28   of people who don't care about Pro stuff,

01:03:30   and they'll love that thing,

01:03:31   'cause the Airs get such great battery life as it is.

01:03:34   Can you imagine an Air with even more battery life

01:03:37   and a bigger screen?

01:03:37   That's a crowd pleaser.

01:03:38   - Yeah, definitely, and I think this would sell a lot.

01:03:42   - Yeah, I strongly agree.

01:03:43   Although I do think that there is potentially an appetite

01:03:46   for an in-betweener between,

01:03:49   or I guess this would be bigger than the big Pro.

01:03:51   No, no, no, we've got 14 and 16 inch Pros now, gosh.

01:03:54   - Yeah, let's the Pros be like,

01:03:55   well, it's not 15, it's 16.

01:03:57   That little bit of differentiation,

01:04:00   oh, and by the way, it's also ProMotion 1600,

01:04:03   like the gap between Apple's Pro laptop screens

01:04:05   and its non-Pro laptop screens has never been bigger.

01:04:07   Like those Pro laptop screens are amazing.

01:04:10   And the MacBook Air screen is fine,

01:04:11   but it's not even in the same league

01:04:14   in terms of the features that it's missing

01:04:15   things it can't do. I don't know, I still, even though I don't think it has a place in my life

01:04:19   anymore, I still feel like I want a 12-inch MacBook with Apple silicon internals. Because again, I

01:04:28   loved that machine, but it was a, it was kind of a piece of trash when it was brand new. It was slow.

01:04:35   It was, shush, it was, it was delightful and it was also terrible. The, what people loved about it, the

01:04:41   physical side of it is so achievable with Apple silicon today

01:04:46   Exactly. That's exactly what I was driving at is that it would presumably in the same way that my my 14-inch MacBook Pro

01:04:53   feels like I mean, it's not literally but it feels like my

01:04:57   My iMac Pro yet portable. Well the phantom 12-inch, you know, like m1 or m2

01:05:05   MacBook could be a

01:05:09   Intel 12-inch MacBook, but not crappy.

01:05:11   You know, like, I'm a little concerned about the keyboard

01:05:14   in terms of, you know, could they make a scissor switch

01:05:16   keyboard that's super thin, but, or maybe they just make it

01:05:20   a little thicker than the old one was,

01:05:21   but it's spiritually a successor.

01:05:23   I don't know. I just, I love that machine so much.

01:05:25   And I really think it could be a really, really great seller

01:05:31   for someone who wants like a very small,

01:05:34   very portable thing that isn't an iPad.

01:05:36   And granted, you know, iPadOS is allegedly

01:05:39   getting much better and is allegedly going to have more pro apps coming soon, but I don't know when I bought the

01:05:46   The MacBook I wanted an iPad that wasn't an iPad basically and in a lot of ways

01:05:52   That's what I got except it was slow and couldn't do anything

01:05:55   So I guess now he was like an iPad. Hey, oh

01:05:58   But I don't know I I miss that machine and and I kind of wish it would come back even though I don't know that

01:06:04   I would buy one. It's the same team that makes the mint the iPhone mini, right?

01:06:08   - They're the smallest device in the line

01:06:12   that has people who really want it,

01:06:13   but doesn't really sell that well,

01:06:15   and for people who want it small,

01:06:16   don't have any alternatives.

01:06:17   I mean, obviously, I think they should just make it

01:06:20   straight up, like I think it would be a perfectly fine,

01:06:22   straightforward computer, and yeah,

01:06:23   it would sell fewer than the other models,

01:06:24   but I think that's fine.

01:06:25   I think Apple can absorb that, right?

01:06:27   But if they don't wanna do that,

01:06:28   if I had to motivate Apple to say,

01:06:30   "Oh, you should really offer this product,"

01:06:31   and I say, "Yeah, we're not into the just

01:06:32   "plain old 12-inch laptop, even if we can make it

01:06:34   "really thin, we did that and we weren't into it,"

01:06:36   I would say, this is a perfect opportunity

01:06:38   to get over your reticence to make a touchscreen Mac.

01:06:40   'Cause make it a convertible thing,

01:06:42   it already runs iPad apps, for crying out loud.

01:06:44   Make it something that you can fold over backwards

01:06:45   and turn into basically a 12 inch iPad

01:06:48   when you need it to be an iPad,

01:06:49   and a touchscreen Mac when you need it to be a Mac.

01:06:51   And it's running Mac OS the whole time,

01:06:52   and you can just run iPad apps on it.

01:06:54   I know Apple doesn't wanna make this machine,

01:06:55   but the 12 inch form factor is a perfect opportunity

01:06:58   to do that, because you wouldn't want to turn

01:07:00   a 16 inch MacBook Pro into an iPad

01:07:02   that's a pretty heavy iPad.

01:07:03   But the 12 inch one, that's already in,

01:07:06   we already make iPads that size.

01:07:07   You can make it a similar thickness,

01:07:09   tons of other people in the industry are doing this.

01:07:11   I know they don't wanna make a Mac OS touchscreen

01:07:13   or whatever, but I feel like Apple can't,

01:07:17   can't stay away from this forever.

01:07:19   And the 12 inch size is the perfect place

01:07:21   for them to dip their toe in.

01:07:22   I don't, I'm not predicting this.

01:07:23   There are no rumors of this.

01:07:25   I just, that's the way I would pitch it as,

01:07:26   aren't you more interested in this product now

01:07:28   if you weren't interested in a plain old 12 inch laptop?

01:07:30   But according to the rumors,

01:07:31   it seemed like they might just make a,

01:07:33   potentially a 12 inch laptop, which would be fine as well.

01:07:35   But I just feel like it's a less exciting machine

01:07:37   in a convertible.

01:07:38   - Frankly, I think people would love that thing,

01:07:41   convertible or not.

01:07:42   I think, you said it's a less exciting machine,

01:07:44   and that's true in the sense of what we talk about

01:07:46   on podcasts, but in actual day-to-day use,

01:07:50   that machine, just a modern 11 or 12 inch MacBook Air

01:07:55   with the Apple architecture and the good current keyboard

01:07:58   that we have, that would be an incredibly fun,

01:08:02   awesome computer that I think a ton of people would love.

01:08:05   And yeah, granted, you know, the reason why,

01:08:07   my speculation on the reason why the 12 inch

01:08:11   didn't really sell that well

01:08:13   once the 13 inch Air came out is simply that

01:08:15   if you're looking for something for your only computer,

01:08:20   you generally don't wanna get the tiniest screen you can get.

01:08:23   Usually you want something mid-sized.

01:08:25   That's why 13 inch and 15 inch laptops sell so well.

01:08:27   'Cause if you're only gonna have one computer

01:08:29   and one screen, a 13 inch or 15 inch laptop

01:08:32   is probably what you want most of the time.

01:08:34   So, I get that.

01:08:36   But this, to have this computer as an option in the lineup,

01:08:40   what you capture with that is people who maybe

01:08:43   have a desktop as their main computer

01:08:45   and want something as small and light as possible

01:08:48   for when they travel.

01:08:49   Maybe people who fly a lot,

01:08:50   because using anything bigger on an airline tray table

01:08:52   is, you know, cumbersome at best, if it's even possible.

01:08:57   You know, once that person leans their chair back

01:08:59   like a jerk, you can't do anything on any computer

01:09:01   except something this size.

01:09:02   Like, this is your only option.

01:09:04   But all the people who absolutely loved

01:09:09   the old 11-inch MacBook Air,

01:09:11   and then who tolerated the 12-inch when it came out,

01:09:14   that is a market, that is a market worth serving.

01:09:17   I would speculate that market is probably even bigger

01:09:20   than the market for many of the Macs

01:09:22   they do happily sell in the lineup.

01:09:24   I'm guessing, for instance, that market is probably bigger

01:09:26   than the market for, say, the Mac Studio.

01:09:30   Maybe even the Mac Pro, probably.

01:09:32   - The Mac Mini, any Mac that doesn't have a screen on it,

01:09:34   All laptops sell more than that, I'm sure.

01:09:36   - Yeah, probably, yeah.

01:09:37   I think there is very much a market for this,

01:09:39   and yeah, it's not gonna replace the volume

01:09:42   that the 13-inch Air does.

01:09:43   It doesn't need to.

01:09:44   It's a different computer for a different purpose

01:09:45   for different people.

01:09:46   But I really hope that someday they do find a way

01:09:50   to offer that because I think that would be

01:09:52   very well received by more people than you might expect,

01:09:57   unless they totally fumbled again

01:09:59   and make something crappy again.

01:10:00   But I don't think they would.

01:10:01   I think they've shown their current direction is good,

01:10:04   their current team making product decisions is good.

01:10:06   They really haven't had a lot of fumbles recently,

01:10:09   except maybe like the studio display camera

01:10:12   and the MacStudio fan.

01:10:14   Other than that, like, oh, and this new M2 MacBook Pro.

01:10:17   (laughing)

01:10:20   That's its own flat, thin box of worms,

01:10:23   but I would trust them to do a really good job

01:10:25   with making a new, modern 12 or 11 inch MacBook Air

01:10:30   with their current sensibilities

01:10:32   and current hardware abilities.

01:10:33   I think they would do a really nice job,

01:10:35   and I hope they do.

01:10:36   - I got another way to make this more exciting.

01:10:38   Again, not that the regular 12 inch is boring or anything,

01:10:40   but if someone was balking out of decision making

01:10:43   and saying, "Ah, that doesn't seem like it."

01:10:45   Another way to make it exciting,

01:10:46   if you don't want to do it in convertible,

01:10:47   this machine is also the perfect opportunity

01:10:50   to finally explore materials other than aluminum.

01:10:53   Aluminum's been great, served us well.

01:10:55   It has lots of strengths, it also has some weaknesses.

01:10:57   Many, many years there have been rumors

01:10:59   about Apple experimenting with different materials

01:11:01   to make their laptops out of,

01:11:02   and obviously those different materials

01:11:03   have their own sets of trade-offs,

01:11:05   but I think a 12 inch would be a great place

01:11:08   to experiment with a material that shores up

01:11:11   aluminum's two weaknesses.

01:11:12   One, weight, but obviously aluminum is really lightweight,

01:11:15   but there are things that are lighter.

01:11:17   And two, aluminum bends and dents,

01:11:19   and things like plastics and carbon fiber

01:11:21   are more resistant to permanently bending or denting

01:11:25   than aluminum is.

01:11:26   So, if one of those materials,

01:11:29   if there are various many, many years of experimenting

01:11:31   with different materials to make laptops out of it,

01:11:32   If there's a top contender, it would be great to do it on a 12 inch because not only would

01:11:37   it be so much smaller than everything else, it would be so incredibly light and so incredibly

01:11:41   durable.

01:11:43   Even if it's just a plain old straight up laptop with no convertibles and no touchscreen

01:11:46   or anything like that, but it's a laptop that's lighter than you could ever imagine.

01:11:50   Look how durable it is.

01:11:51   You can put it in your backpack without a case and drop your backpack on the ground

01:11:54   like my kids do all the time and it will just bend and flex and bounce back instead of denting

01:11:59   or chipping or shattering.

01:12:01   I'm always on the lookout for the next leap

01:12:03   in laptop technology, 'cause glass and aluminum is great.

01:12:06   It's the best laptops I've ever been,

01:12:08   but there is a next step somewhere out there,

01:12:09   and I hope Apple finds it.

01:12:11   - Also, this would be a great opportunity

01:12:14   to launch cellular Macs.

01:12:16   - Oh, don't, can you imagine--

01:12:18   - They can do that at any time, they don't need to.

01:12:20   - I know, I know.

01:12:20   - That's not something that's like,

01:12:22   at any time now, it's in iPads, same stupid chip, all right.

01:12:26   - Can you imagine how much I would lose my mind

01:12:29   if they came out with what is effectively

01:12:31   a not-crappy 12-inch MacBook that actually had cellular,

01:12:35   I would, I would, I'm already having

01:12:38   very inappropriate thoughts about this computer.

01:12:40   - You have to wait for Apple's cell chips

01:12:42   to come out to do that, right?

01:12:43   - Yeah, that's probably true.

01:12:44   - That's the current rumor, it's like,

01:12:45   oh, the reason they're not doing it

01:12:46   is 'cause they're waiting to do it

01:12:47   with their own cell chips, which they are making,

01:12:49   but they're making them for the phones, but like--

01:12:51   - Yeah, but it's like, why can't you,

01:12:52   the iPads have had them since day one,

01:12:54   that's 12 years ago, they've had them for 12 years!

01:12:56   - They don't wanna play Qualcomm, they don't wanna play,

01:12:59   They all, whatever the excuses are,

01:13:00   there's not a big enough market, nobody cares about it.

01:13:02   I don't know what they're thinking, but yeah,

01:13:04   we want cellular in our laptops.

01:13:06   Apple get on that eventually.

01:13:07   - Can you imagine, like that would be like Casey,

01:13:09   it would be like when the Mac Pro came out

01:13:11   and it was John Christmas,

01:13:12   like this would be like Casey Christmas, like.

01:13:13   - Yes.

01:13:14   - A black carbon fiber, 12 inch with cellular.

01:13:16   - Oh, stop, oh, stop.

01:13:18   Oh God, oh, if it was black too,

01:13:20   oh, this is like, oh, my dreams come true.

01:13:22   How many episodes of ATP did we have to go on

01:13:25   about the stupid Mac Pro, like 50?

01:13:26   - But the Mac Pro is a real computer.

01:13:27   We're just, you know, these are things that are probably going to happen.

01:13:29   Excuse me! You went on about the Mac Pro for 30 episodes before it was even real.

01:13:33   Don't even start. You owe me at least 30.

01:13:35   It was real. They pre-announced it in like April of 2014 or whatever the hell it was.

01:13:39   Whatever.

01:13:40   And even now, they even pre-announced the new one.

01:13:43   They're like, "Uh, the Mac Pro, we'll talk about that later."

01:13:45   And so now, yeah, we're just seeing this.

01:13:47   You owe me easily 30 episodes.

01:13:48   Apple has not pre-announced the black 12-inch laptop.

01:13:50   No, but you probably owe me 10 just on the theory.

01:13:53   on the theory, or not even theory,

01:13:55   on the hope that such a thing would ever exist.

01:13:58   - Why don't you just draw some fan art,

01:14:00   maybe that'll make Apple make it.

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01:16:00   - All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:16:05   And Elijah Yup writes, "I was fortunate to attend WWDC 22

01:16:10   "as a Swift student challenger

01:16:12   "and I just listened to your WWDC show.

01:16:15   "John quipped that for non-press folks,

01:16:17   what happened was not WWDC, but Apple Park tourism.

01:16:20   I'm curious what he felt had changed.

01:16:22   I had heard WWDC meant meeting the developer community

01:16:25   and having direct conversations with Apple engineers,

01:16:27   and I'm glad to say that both were abundant this year.

01:16:29   So what the heck, Jon?

01:16:31   -So what actually happens at WWDC in the old style

01:16:34   is you go to sessions and you sit in a room,

01:16:38   and someone gets up on stage and does a live performance

01:16:41   of kind of like those things you're seeing on video,

01:16:44   and during that, you're sitting in an audience

01:16:46   next to other developers, some of which you may know, some of which you may not, so that

01:16:49   there's an interaction you can have there with your neighbors, talking about things

01:16:52   that you're seeing.

01:16:54   When the thing is over, it is possible in many cases to go up and talk to the person

01:16:57   who just gave that presentation to ask them a question or two, and then you go out into

01:17:02   the hall where other people who went to see other sessions are milling about and talk

01:17:05   to them about what they saw as you're on your way to your other session.

01:17:09   All that experience isn't there when you're sitting around watching a video with somebody.

01:17:13   You can't talk to the people in the video about it.

01:17:16   Everyone's watching the same thing,

01:17:17   there's not multiple tracks, right?

01:17:18   You're not interacting, you're not forced,

01:17:20   but you're not constantly bumping into other developers

01:17:23   and talking to them about stuff and forming social groups

01:17:25   and going to lunch with them and talking about the sessions.

01:17:28   What sessions did you do?

01:17:29   What sessions did you go to?

01:17:30   Again, I'm not saying that's the reason

01:17:31   the current thing is bad, it's just different, right?

01:17:34   And so when I say what you got is,

01:17:36   you go there in person, you kind of apple park tourism,

01:17:38   you're just physically not doing the same things

01:17:40   that you do at normal WWDC.

01:17:42   You're not going from session to session,

01:17:44   watching things, talking to people, you know,

01:17:46   it's just different, right?

01:17:47   Now you do get to interact with Apple people,

01:17:49   there was no Slack in the old ones,

01:17:50   you couldn't ask questions, how many people could,

01:17:52   you know, who are you actually sitting next to,

01:17:54   how many people actually went to the front of the room,

01:17:55   like there's obviously limited bandwidth,

01:17:57   the reason the new approach is better overall,

01:18:00   but it is different.

01:18:01   So when I say what happened wasn't WWC,

01:18:04   I mean what happened wasn't what used to happen

01:18:06   at the old in-person WWC, it was very different,

01:18:08   that like, you know, one day or whatever it is,

01:18:11   one or two days of touring the fitness center

01:18:13   and seeing a big video on the screen with everybody,

01:18:15   it's much more like going to the keynote,

01:18:17   but less like going to a normal day of WWDC

01:18:19   where you're picking which sessions you're gonna go to

01:18:21   and sitting next to people and talking with your friends

01:18:23   who went to different sessions.

01:18:24   - And don't even forget all the community events,

01:18:26   like when we recorded live and the talk show live,

01:18:28   which I guess happened to a degree this year.

01:18:31   - If you're one of the lucky 180 people

01:18:33   that fit in that room.

01:18:34   - Well, still, I mean, it's still a thing.

01:18:36   And then there was like Layers that was across the street

01:18:38   and Alt Conf that was often nearby.

01:18:40   - I mean, and the new thing, the theater,

01:18:41   Gruber had to talk to 180 people as opposed to like 2000 or whatever the

01:18:46   whole theater held. You know what I mean?

01:18:47   But that's my point, right? Is that, you know, talk show is different, but,

01:18:50   you know, you didn't see us per- I almost said performing, which I guess is true,

01:18:53   but recording live and you didn't see, you know, any of the relay shows recording live.

01:18:58   You know, you typically would see Connected having a live episode. And so there's so much

01:19:02   community stuff that happened around WWDC. So even if you weren't going to WWDC proper,

01:19:08   it was still a fairly enjoyable time to just go and hang out with everyone,

01:19:12   especially in San Jose because there were like two decent places to hang out.

01:19:16   Now there's one.

01:19:17   It wasn't hard. Yeah. Now there's just one. But anyways, no, that,

01:19:21   that is very helpful. Thank you, John. Wade Trageskas writes,

01:19:25   I just listened to episode 50 of the Real AFM crossover podcast,

01:19:28   the iMac Pro with Marco Arment and Jason Snell,

01:19:30   and was startled to hear Marco describe the then situation as quote,

01:19:33   an embarrassment of riches quote,

01:19:35   in light of the release of the iMac Pro and the promise of a real new second coming Mac Pro.

01:19:40   It also reminded me that it's been over five years since Apple's little "public come to Jesus" moment

01:19:44   with the trash can and the Mac Pros. I'm curious how Marco feels about all that in hindsight. Are

01:19:49   we now living in a gilded age for Macintosh professionals, or was it more of a case of a

01:19:53   reality distortion than reality? I suppose the timing is perfectly imperfect. Next week is WWDC

01:20:00   week, as Wade wrote this, and it marks the climax of Apple's about two years promise for the ARM

01:20:04   transition will we see a new Mac Pro will it be everything we hope for will

01:20:07   we achieve the coveted three out of three HP hosts own it award please make

01:20:11   your prediction so I guess that's all unnecessary so you can cut that Marco

01:20:14   hey buddy I left that in there purpose was the this is an older question or

01:20:17   whatever but this is what people were thinking before WWDC obviously no Mac

01:20:21   Pro at WWDC so the question still stands yeah so I predict at WWDC that we will

01:20:26   get the reveal of the Mac Pro they will definitely tell us what it is they'll

01:20:30   It'll detail it and it'll be available

01:20:31   to order later this year.

01:20:33   Whoops. - Totally.

01:20:34   Yeah, I think you already did say that

01:20:35   on the episode. - I did.

01:20:36   - And I said I was doubtful,

01:20:37   so I'll gather my being right points for that now.

01:20:40   - Yeah, you've earned it.

01:20:41   All right, so in this case, so looking at the question here,

01:20:44   are we now living in a gilded age for Mac Pros,

01:20:48   and Pro here was lowercase,

01:20:50   or was it more of a case of reality stores

01:20:51   than the reality back then?

01:20:53   So this is, at the time of the iMac Pros launch,

01:20:57   when that was out and it was great

01:20:59   and I got one and so did Casey later and it was amazing.

01:21:02   John should have gotten one but never did.

01:21:04   - Concur.

01:21:05   - And lots of our friends got them and they were great.

01:21:07   At that time, I stand by that statement.

01:21:10   Now, I think we have even more of an embarrassment

01:21:15   of riches in the Mac Pro area and lowercase p there,

01:21:19   but it's different and we're in a transitional period.

01:21:22   So it's hard to say for sure just because we haven't seen

01:21:25   the Apple Silicon Mac Pro yet.

01:21:27   So we don't know how high these specs go,

01:21:30   we don't know how well this thing scales,

01:21:32   we don't know what we get with the highest end model,

01:21:35   like are we gonna get--

01:21:36   - Do they trash can it?

01:21:37   We don't know if they trash canned it.

01:21:39   - What?

01:21:40   - Like are we getting another Mac Pro

01:21:41   where they totally miscalculated

01:21:43   what they should be building, right?

01:21:44   - Right, right, exactly.

01:21:45   So there's a lot of unknowns there

01:21:48   and this is a transitional period,

01:21:49   so it's hard to say for sure at the very highest end,

01:21:53   but I think we still do have the situation

01:21:56   where we have an embarrassment of riches

01:21:58   in the high-end Mac line, because now you have

01:22:03   so many different options that all give us

01:22:06   really great performance, and what most pro Mac users want

01:22:11   is now available in laptops and in desktops,

01:22:15   and there's very few trade-offs between those two.

01:22:19   My needs could really, honestly,

01:22:21   if I got one of the new M2 MacBook Airs

01:22:25   with 24 gigs of RAM, maxing that out to 24,

01:22:28   I could get away with that most of the time.

01:22:30   Now granted, I want more RAM, I think I have,

01:22:32   what do I have, 64 in this thing?

01:22:33   - I think that's right.

01:22:34   - Yeah, 64.

01:22:35   So, you know, but when I had 16,

01:22:38   when I was using the M1 MacBook Air,

01:22:39   and then later M1 Mac Mini as my main desktop,

01:22:43   I had 16 for like a year, and I felt it,

01:22:47   but the rest of it was good enough,

01:22:49   it was compelling to keep using it that way.

01:22:51   So going from 16 to 24 would certainly be welcome,

01:22:53   having more would be great, but honestly,

01:22:56   with that one exception of more RAM being nicer to have,

01:23:00   I could do all of my work on a MacBook Air,

01:23:03   plugged into a giant monitor, which is what I did,

01:23:06   and it was great.

01:23:07   And almost every person I know

01:23:10   who used to buy the big tower Macs,

01:23:14   usually Mac Pros or before that, like G5s,

01:23:17   almost everyone I know, almost every job that needed those,

01:23:21   or almost every hobbyist who wanted those,

01:23:24   almost all of them no longer need

01:23:26   what is currently called the Mac Pro.

01:23:28   Almost all those needs for most of those people

01:23:31   are satisfied now by laptops, and in some cases,

01:23:35   even the lowest end laptops that they now sell.

01:23:39   That's amazing.

01:23:40   And it's only the very, very narrow niche

01:23:44   of specialized needs and John

01:23:46   who are still buying the Mac Pro.

01:23:48   (laughing)

01:23:49   - I'm over here, I just added another giant MPX card.

01:23:53   I put the Radeon Pro Vega II inside my Mac Pro.

01:23:56   So now I literally have every,

01:23:58   I have the giant W5700X whatever

01:24:03   that takes up like four slots or whatever.

01:24:06   And then out of the second, the Pro Vega II in there,

01:24:08   I was gonna put the 580X in as well,

01:24:11   but I realized it doesn't fit.

01:24:12   Like you can't put a third video card in there

01:24:15   because there are slot, there are PCI slots for it,

01:24:17   but the brackets don't let you put it in there.

01:24:19   I guess it can't deliver the power to it.

01:24:20   So yeah, here I am stuffing my gigantic tower computer

01:24:24   with way more GPU than I can ever possibly use.

01:24:27   But that is not a market that Apple is targeting

01:24:30   with any of its current computers,

01:24:32   except the 2019 Mac Pro that I'm using.

01:24:35   When they come out with the new Mac Pro,

01:24:36   we'll see what they've decided to target after that.

01:24:37   But that's the beauty of everything you're saying.

01:24:39   That the lineup is so great for pretty much everybody.

01:24:43   And also, Apple has said that they're also gonna make

01:24:46   a ridiculous computer that almost nobody should buy.

01:24:48   Like they're not even saying,

01:24:49   oh we're not gonna make that.

01:24:50   They're saying, you get all these great computers

01:24:52   that fill all these needs, you get everything you ever want,

01:24:55   and even if you're one of these ridiculous people

01:24:57   who wants this big monster computer,

01:24:59   we're gonna make one of those too,

01:25:00   and who knows what that's gonna look like,

01:25:02   and that'll be fun, right?

01:25:03   So I think they're doing so much better than they were.

01:25:07   Obviously from the outside it's hard for us to see this,

01:25:09   but when they made that promise,

01:25:11   we're gonna do this thing,

01:25:11   we're gonna turn everything around, they have.

01:25:13   It's taken a long time, it's taken them longer

01:25:15   than we wanted, and we lost faith a lot

01:25:16   because on the outside we can't see the progress,

01:25:18   but look at the machines they released.

01:25:20   They eventually figured out what they should be doing

01:25:23   with their Mac products, from top to bottom,

01:25:25   not just the Pro ones where they figured out

01:25:26   they need more ports and everything,

01:25:27   but I think MagSafe on the MacBook, M2 MacBook Air,

01:25:30   they're doing it right.

01:25:33   So again, a few exceptions,

01:25:35   like the weird 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro,

01:25:39   the fans on the Mac Studio,

01:25:41   and the camera on the Studio Display,

01:25:43   but hey, the fact that the Studio Display exists,

01:25:46   That's a big victory with one tiny step back with the camera

01:25:49   and Apple's camera has always been crap

01:25:51   and it's a lesson they haven't quite learned yet,

01:25:52   but yeah, this is the best the Mac lineup has been in ages.

01:25:56   And so I think, you know, two thumbs up from me.

01:25:58   And again, we'll see if they trash can the Mac Pro.

01:26:01   - Well, and at this point though,

01:26:02   like, you know, the Mac Studio covers even more

01:26:05   of the needs that were not already being met

01:26:07   by the MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air.

01:26:10   Like, they already, they cover so much

01:26:12   of so many people's needs already

01:26:14   with all of the other products

01:26:16   that pretty much the only needs that are still left

01:26:20   at the top end for an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

01:26:22   So if you're throwing out Windows gaming,

01:26:23   'cause that's gonna be Apple Silicon,

01:26:25   so there's no more Windows gaming, John.

01:26:26   So if you're throwing that out,

01:26:28   the needs that are left up there are basically cards,

01:26:31   very high RAM needs, and very high GPU needs.

01:26:35   And those aren't zero markets.

01:26:37   Those are markets with people in them,

01:26:40   but it's just getting more and more narrow

01:26:42   and more and more specialized

01:26:43   at people who actually need this product.

01:26:45   And so many more of us are now being served very well

01:26:49   by all the other products.

01:26:50   - I think it's also top-end video stuff, right?

01:26:53   Because we don't know what's going to be in the Mac Pro,

01:26:55   but presumably it will do everything that takes a long time

01:26:57   in Final Cut Pro faster than even a top-end Mac Studio.

01:27:00   Right, so-- - Right, yeah.

01:27:01   That's like the high-end GPU performance, basically.

01:27:02   - If Apple wants to sell this, if part of your job

01:27:05   is every day waiting for crap to come out of Final Cut Pro,

01:27:07   we get you a computer that does that 50% faster,

01:27:09   you're willing to pay through the nose for it.

01:27:10   That historically has been a big market

01:27:12   for Apple's ridiculous machines.

01:27:14   And so even if they do trashcan it and it looks like a slightly bigger Mac Studio and

01:27:18   has no slots, if it does Final Cut Pro stuff faster than a Mac Studio with an Ultra, that's

01:27:24   a valuable machine to a lot of people and I think they will sell them for whatever ridiculous

01:27:28   price they charge.

01:27:29   Yeah, you know, I think something that Marco said earlier is important in that at the time

01:27:36   in which we were saying, or Marco was saying, you know, that this is the golden age, I think

01:27:40   that was true compared to the absolute slog that we were all going through the

01:27:45   years prior with the crappy keyboards and the jumped USB-C before I

01:27:51   think anyone was really ready for it. And at that point the iMac Pro really was

01:27:57   just amazing and it was a cold glass of ice water when we were all in what seemed

01:28:03   like hell. But looking at it with today's point of view where things have

01:28:09   gotten so much better since then, then yeah, it does look like a reality distortion field

01:28:14   in retrospect. But when we were there, you know, we could say on an infinite timeline,

01:28:20   it would all be so much better than it is today, but look at how great it is now. And

01:28:24   that infinite timeline turned out to be what, how long, how many years ago was the iMac

01:28:27   Pro like four or five years? You know, it only took a handful of years for Apple to

01:28:30   really get their story straight. So I think, I think it was both the Gilded Age at the

01:28:36   time and reality distortion in retrospect.

01:28:40   Dave Eaton writes, "John has sung the praises of ZFS many times in the past.

01:28:44   How close is APFS to providing all the features he likes in ZFS and what is APFS missing?"

01:28:50   I was missing so many things.

01:28:52   I will have a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page listing the ZFS features, but

01:28:56   so many of them I had forgotten about.

01:28:58   Like ZFS does so much cool stuff at a price, at a fairly high price, but I still kind of

01:29:03   miss a bunch of them.

01:29:04   One that I was hammering on when APFS came out that I still think is important is data

01:29:08   integrity.

01:29:09   ZFS can do checksums not just on metadata but also on every piece of data.

01:29:14   So you can know if you have any kind of bit rot or any kind of errors anyplace else in

01:29:18   your system that are causing bits to be flipped when data is moved around, which is great.

01:29:22   And that is super important if you care about your data.

01:29:26   There is a cost to doing that, obviously, but as computers get faster and faster that

01:29:30   cost becomes lower and lower percentage wise given the total amount of compute available

01:29:34   and I really wish that APFS did that.

01:29:36   And it could be added to APFS at some point in the future.

01:29:39   I forget, I delved into this when APFS was released.

01:29:42   I'm not sure if there's an option to do it or it could be done very easily but they didn't

01:29:46   do it.

01:29:47   But anyway, it's an important feature of ZFS.

01:29:49   ZFS has features on top of that in terms of data integrity where it can keep multiple

01:29:54   copies of data around and then if it finds an error, it's got multiple copies of the

01:29:59   the data that it found an error in,

01:30:00   it could fix that error and it's sort of self-healing

01:30:02   type of thing because you just tell it,

01:30:03   where is that feature listed on here?

01:30:06   You could kind of say like how many copies

01:30:08   do you want it to keep and where do you want it to keep them

01:30:09   and do you want me to automatically self-heal?

01:30:11   It's really great about sort of being the caretaker

01:30:15   of your bits rather than just saying,

01:30:17   well I wrote the bits and I'm assuming

01:30:18   they're gonna be the same when I read them back later.

01:30:20   There's a bunch of transactional stuff

01:30:22   with like rollbacks and everything.

01:30:24   There's the smart snapshot diffs.

01:30:27   So if you do a snapshot and you just want to transfer the diffs of that snapshot efficiently

01:30:31   to another thing, that would be great for Time Machine.

01:30:32   Again, APFS has a similar feature, but the ZFS one is a little bit fancier.

01:30:37   What else is on this list that's interesting?

01:30:40   There's a bunch more things that are tunable about it in terms of how it lays out data

01:30:45   and how it uses caching that are mostly of interest to enterprise scenarios.

01:30:50   Obviously this is a big thing where it does essentially software raid of just combining

01:30:53   multiple disks into giant volumes.

01:30:55   APFS does something like that on a smaller scale.

01:30:57   APFS is more, obviously, more appropriate

01:31:00   for Apple's use case.

01:31:01   Because remember, APFS debuted not on the Mac,

01:31:03   but on phones, right?

01:31:05   And debuted without people even knowing

01:31:07   where it converted all our phones to APFS

01:31:08   and then rolled it back without us knowing,

01:31:10   and they told us about it later.

01:31:11   One of the greatest technical feats ever.

01:31:12   The team that did that should get some sign of a reward

01:31:15   in Apple, like, what a dangerous thing to do.

01:31:17   How many billions of iPhone users do we have?

01:31:19   - So true.

01:31:20   - And when they do a point update, we're gonna do what?

01:31:23   you're gonna convert their volume to a different format

01:31:25   and then roll it back, okay.

01:31:27   You're gonna tell anybody about this?

01:31:28   No, the update will just take a little bit longer.

01:31:31   So amazing.

01:31:32   And yeah, and they did it on the phone first

01:31:34   instead of doing it on the Mac first,

01:31:35   which seems like it would be easier

01:31:36   if you do it on the Mac first.

01:31:37   If you screw it up, who cares?

01:31:38   You host a bunch of Mac users,

01:31:39   not the billions of iPhone users.

01:31:41   So, ABFS has the features that Apple needs it to have

01:31:44   and not many more.

01:31:46   And it took a long time for them to build this thing

01:31:48   in-house to do that, but ZFS has so many features

01:31:51   is so capable and it's probably not particularly well tuned around the phone given its ram

01:31:57   requirements and its CPU requirements but it does have way more features.

01:32:02   One of the analogies I heard way back when was in terms of file systems that ZFS is a

01:32:08   little bit like a minivan.

01:32:09   It can carry a lot of people, it can do a lot of things, it has a lot of features, the

01:32:12   seats fold into floors, it's got 20 cup holders, it's got seven screens, it's got tons of stuff

01:32:17   in it and what Apple needs is a Ferrari if it's two people and it goes real fast.

01:32:21   All right, thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:32:23   Linode, Lockit, and Trade Coffee.

01:32:26   Thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:32:28   You can join at atp.fm/join,

01:32:32   and we will talk to you next week.

01:32:33   (upbeat music)

01:32:36   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:32:39   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:32:41   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:32:44   ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:32:47   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:32:49   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:32:52   'Cause it was accidental

01:32:53   It was accidental

01:32:57   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

01:33:03   And if you're into Twitter

01:33:05   You can follow them

01:33:07   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:33:11   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:33:16   ♪ Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:33:21   ♪ U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A ♪

01:33:23   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:33:25   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:33:27   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:33:29   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:33:30   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:33:31   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:33:33   ♪ So long ♪

01:33:36   - There is an item in the document that said,

01:33:39   Casey Impulse Bought a Computer.

01:33:42   I have to know what this is.

01:33:45   - I have known you since we were 10 or something like that.

01:33:50   So it's been literally 30 years or thereabouts.

01:33:54   This is, I think the closest to pulling a Marco

01:33:58   I've been in a while.

01:33:59   It only took 30 years.

01:34:01   - Wait, in all fairness,

01:34:02   I have very rarely impulse bought a computer.

01:34:06   - I don't think Marco could identify as impulses anymore.

01:34:10   (laughing)

01:34:12   You know what an impulse is Marco?

01:34:13   I don't impulse buy a computer.

01:34:15   I just decided to buy one and buy it.

01:34:16   That's not an impulse weight.

01:34:18   (both laughing)

01:34:20   What is an impulse?

01:34:21   What do you mean?

01:34:22   - I don't even know.

01:34:23   I don't even know where to go from here.

01:34:25   Anyways, yeah, so this was, let me see, it was Thursday.

01:34:30   So it was last Thursday.

01:34:32   I noticed that, I forget what Genesis of this issue was,

01:34:38   but what I ended up noticing, however, one way or another,

01:34:43   was that my Mac Mini wasn't responding

01:34:47   to incoming network requests.

01:34:49   Now to back up a half step,

01:34:50   so I have a Mac Mini, it's a 20, I don't know,

01:34:53   sometime in 2012, so at this point,

01:34:55   it is literally 10 years old.

01:34:57   It was gifted to me by our friends at Mac Mini Colo,

01:35:01   or what is it, Mac Stadium now, I believe.

01:35:03   No, is that right?

01:35:04   Yes, that's right.

01:35:05   I think they were-- - I believe they merged.

01:35:06   - Oh, okay, maybe that's what it is.

01:35:07   But anyways, they're great people.

01:35:09   I think they've sponsored in the past.

01:35:10   I don't believe they're sponsoring the future,

01:35:12   But genuinely, they're great people there.

01:35:13   And they gave me--

01:35:15   they sent me this for free.

01:35:17   It's a 10-year-old one that had a 256 gig SSD that they

01:35:20   had put in it.

01:35:21   And they had retired it.

01:35:23   And somehow or another, it ended up in my hands.

01:35:26   And I was using this pretty much exclusively as a Plex and

01:35:31   Channels server.

01:35:32   Channels is the thing that sponsored probably a year or

01:35:35   two back that lets you use an HD home run and an

01:35:39   over-the-air antenna to record things, or TV everywhere to

01:35:41   record things, look into it at getchannels.com if you're interested.

01:35:45   They have not sponsored this, but it's great stuff and one of the

01:35:47   founders is a friend of mine. So anyway, so I use it for Plex and channels and a

01:35:51   handful of other small things. I did use it actually for Xcode bots when that was

01:35:55   still a thing, but that just got deprecated as well. But one way or

01:35:59   another, I do use it and in my world, and you can snicker and laugh all you want,

01:36:03   but in my world, Plex and to a lesser degree channels are an important part of

01:36:08   world. I think all of us have understood this at this point. Like, Plex is important to me. Maybe

01:36:13   it shouldn't be, but it is. And it's important to the rest of the family too, because that's how,

01:36:17   you know, on the rare occasions I said, "Erin is watching TV without me. She'll watch TV typically

01:36:21   via Plex." The kids would get a little bit of TV time in the afternoons, and they'll do that on

01:36:27   Plex. So it's important to all of us, not just me. And I found that the Mac Mini was not responding

01:36:32   to incoming network requests. I could still do anything I wanted on the internet if I can get

01:36:37   on to the mini if I actually hook up a display and hook up a keyboard and so on and so forth.

01:36:42   But I couldn't get any incoming network requests. And I'm troubleshooting, I'm rebooting, I'm doing

01:36:48   this, that, and the other thing. I couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it

01:36:51   out. And I realized that on Wi-Fi everything was working. Network incoming, network requests were

01:36:56   working fine, but if I use the Ethernet IP it wasn't working. Very long story, well already

01:37:04   very long story, slightly shortened.

01:37:06   It was one of two things that seemed to have fixed it.

01:37:09   It was either an NVRAM reset,

01:37:11   or it was a new version of Tailscale,

01:37:14   which might be a future sponsor, I don't remember,

01:37:16   but something might have gotten misconfigured on my end,

01:37:19   user error, I mean,

01:37:20   and something might have gotten hosed up there.

01:37:23   But one way or another, I did eventually get it fixed.

01:37:27   It's like a hard drive that has started ticking.

01:37:32   I have now lost confidence in the machine.

01:37:34   And even beyond that, I'm starting to occasionally acquire 4K content from time to time.

01:37:42   And a 10-year-old Mac Mini does not do well with even direct playing 4K content.

01:37:50   Like even that didn't always go well, much less trying to transcode it on the fly.

01:37:54   So on Thursday evening, within about a half an hour of the cutoff in order to receive a Mini

01:38:01   with $8 fast shipping Friday evening, I ordered a refurb Mac Mini, an M1 Mac Mini. And I did this

01:38:10   for a handful of reasons. First of all, because at the time in which I ordered it, the Intel one was

01:38:15   not yet repaired, and so I wanted as little downtime as possible. And I was able to find

01:38:20   a refurb that had the exact configuration I wanted, which was extremely surprising and pretty awesome.

01:38:25   And I wanted to get it the next day, and you know, fast shipping said I could do that.

01:38:31   But also it occurred to me, you know, I didn't, I thought buying a Mac mini was going to be in my future, but eventually, like maybe when the M2 Mac minis come out.

01:38:40   But it occurred to me there's not that much different, leaving aside, you know, what will inevitably be like a radical hardware change, like a radical industrial design change.

01:38:52   Does that ever happen to the Mac mini?

01:38:54   Well, no, but they're saying maybe this is the time. You know, it's the year of Linux on the desktop and a new industrial design for Mac mini.

01:39:00   for Mac Mini.

01:39:01   - And by radical you mean it gets slightly thinner again.

01:39:04   - Right, exactly.

01:39:05   - Now available in starlight.

01:39:06   (laughing)

01:39:08   - Yeah, absolutely.

01:39:09   I'd rock a blue Mac Mini or something like that.

01:39:11   Anyways, so it occurred to me that looking at the M2

01:39:13   that is now freshly out,

01:39:15   it's not really that different than the M1.

01:39:19   Like there are differences for sure,

01:39:21   but it's not night and day different.

01:39:23   And yes, I am aware that there's like a little bit more

01:39:25   that with regard to transcoding

01:39:26   that actually would have been helpful

01:39:28   in this particular use case.

01:39:29   But I figured, you know what, let me just order it.

01:39:32   And worst case, I'll just not open it and return it.

01:39:34   Who am I kidding?

01:39:35   Of course I opened it.

01:39:36   - Yeah, you can still return it.

01:39:38   - I know, but I'm not gonna.

01:39:40   - Yeah, that's fine.

01:39:41   That's a different conversation.

01:39:42   - I ordered it on a Thursday night.

01:39:44   It was supposed to come Friday.

01:39:46   I paid the $8 shipping, so it would come Friday.

01:39:48   It came Monday, which I really wanna complain

01:39:51   and moan about, but in these unprecedented times,

01:39:53   I'm trying to bite my tongue.

01:39:55   And so I set it up, I guess it was Monday night,

01:39:59   and it took me a few tries to get Plex migrated over properly, but channels went immediately.

01:40:05   It took absolutely no effort to get channels working, but Plex was considerably more fiddly

01:40:09   because Plex. And so I eventually did get it working, and now it is up and running,

01:40:15   and I have a new M1 Mac Mini home server, and I'm extremely pleased with this so far.

01:40:20   It's gone real well.

01:40:20   You did a very exciting upgrade to the most boring computer you have in your house.

01:40:26   - That's pretty accurate.

01:40:28   That's not entirely true.

01:40:28   I do have a Raspberry Pi 4 that it couldn't really

01:40:31   be upgraded in any reasonable way.

01:40:33   But that is arguably the most boring.

01:40:35   Or maybe the two Raspberry Pi W's that are serving

01:40:39   as my garage door notification system.

01:40:41   Those might be more boring.

01:40:42   But I take your point.

01:40:43   I'm arguing to be a turd, but I take your point

01:40:45   and you are correct.

01:40:46   - The Mac Mini is also the perfect computer

01:40:48   in your house to buy refurb, right?

01:40:49   'Cause it sits there, it just does a very simple task.

01:40:53   The number of things it's ever asked to do is very small

01:40:55   and as long as it can do them, it's fine.

01:40:57   And they cost so much money when you find them new

01:41:01   relative to the excitement.

01:41:04   It's kind of like your Synology,

01:41:06   like most people's Synologies,

01:41:08   and you don't expect to even see or hear it.

01:41:09   It just exists ambiently as infrastructure in your house,

01:41:12   and it just needs to be there.

01:41:14   So the Mac Mini is not the type of machine

01:41:17   that you would get in Starlight and be excited about it

01:41:18   because you're just using it to serve your needs,

01:41:20   and your main interface with it

01:41:22   is not even in the same room as it.

01:41:24   - Right, yeah, and the Mac Mini is actually sitting

01:41:26   physically on top of the Synology right now.

01:41:28   - Although you do have some problems

01:41:31   about computer placement in your house.

01:41:34   - Yes, well, there's that.

01:41:35   - You should run some wire.

01:41:37   - You know, it's funny you bring that up,

01:41:38   because I put that--

01:41:39   - What's going on with that project?

01:41:40   - He did the project.

01:41:41   - No, I put that aside for the time being,

01:41:43   because I can't decide what I wanna do,

01:41:45   is what it really boils down to.

01:41:46   - I thought there was a problem

01:41:47   with the Historical Commission.

01:41:48   - No, not really, I think, so what I really need to do

01:41:52   is I need to price out both fiber,

01:41:54   which I'm still thinking about, and cat six or what have you.

01:41:58   - The new project is thinking about planning a project.

01:42:01   - Right, yes, yes.

01:42:01   - Right, we got past the talking stage,

01:42:03   now we're at the thinking stage.

01:42:04   - Yeah, exactly right.

01:42:06   No, all kidding aside, what I really wanna do

01:42:07   is I want to get the price list,

01:42:09   or the parts list and the pricing,

01:42:11   because if fiber really is similar money,

01:42:14   which I spent a lot of time on this show saying it was,

01:42:16   just because I put my thumb in the air

01:42:18   and that's what it felt like,

01:42:19   but once I start getting down to brass tacks,

01:42:22   I'm not so sure that I'm correct about that.

01:42:24   So what I wanna do is I wanna price out,

01:42:26   is fiber really similar money?

01:42:28   And if it is, I'll probably go that route.

01:42:30   But if it's like, 2X or something like that,

01:42:33   which it could be, then I'll probably just go to CAT6

01:42:35   and be done with it.

01:42:36   To go back just very quickly,

01:42:38   I suppose people will potentially ask.

01:42:41   The refurb I got is a M1 Mac mini with 16 gigs RAM,

01:42:45   a half terabyte hard drive.

01:42:47   But I really wanted to, because of this very project,

01:42:49   actually, see, here's your tie-in,

01:42:51   I really wanted the 10 gig ethernet.

01:42:53   I have literally, this is the only 10 gig ethernet device

01:42:56   in the entire house right now,

01:42:57   but I wanted to future proof.

01:42:59   And my thought is it might be nice

01:43:02   for communication with the Synology

01:43:03   because I could hypothetically put a 10 gig card

01:43:05   in the Synology or realistically that's on the list of things

01:43:08   I really need to upgrade because it's also a decade old.

01:43:11   Anyways, I wanted to future proof myself in that regard.

01:43:15   So it's, you know, 16 gigs RAM, a half terabyte hard drive

01:43:19   'cause I really don't put much on this hard drive

01:43:22   and the 10 gig ethernet.

01:43:23   And surprisingly that existed in a refurb.

01:43:26   And so it was with AppleCare and taxes and everything else.

01:43:29   I wanna say it was like 1100 bucks or something like that.

01:43:32   It really wasn't terrible.

01:43:33   Like it was a lot of money, don't get me wrong,

01:43:35   but all things considered, it wasn't terrible.

01:43:37   So yeah, that's the story.

01:43:39   - We really gotta get you to like coordinate

01:43:40   with my trade-in schedule.

01:43:42   - That's true, we really do.

01:43:45   Didn't I tell you I'd take that Mac Mini off your hands?

01:43:47   Actually, I thought I did.

01:43:48   - You both have the same problem,

01:43:50   is when you decide that you want something,

01:43:51   you want it now, and coordination means

01:43:53   that one or both of you would have to wait.

01:43:54   - That's very true.

01:43:55   - Casey couldn't even make it past the weekend.

01:43:58   He was like, "Oh, it's not like I'm on a Friday

01:43:59   "and it came on a Monday."

01:44:00   I'd never forget about waiting for you

01:44:02   to be ready to give up your Mac Mini.

01:44:05   - Yeah, you're not wrong.

01:44:06   Plus, the thing of it is, all kidding aside,

01:44:08   I don't know that I would have bought Marco's Mac Mini

01:44:12   at the time he was looking to sell it,

01:44:14   because I was kicking the can down the road

01:44:16   and didn't know what the M2 was gonna look like.

01:44:18   I take your point and you are right

01:44:19   that we should have orchestrated this better,

01:44:22   but I don't think at the time I would have taken it.

01:44:25   - Plus, wasn't his Mac Mini in the closet with the water?

01:44:28   - Yes. - That's true.

01:44:29   - Yes, it was.

01:44:30   - That's, what do you call it, a flood title?

01:44:34   - Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:44:36   - I will say Apple, they made their trade-in process

01:44:39   a little bit worse.

01:44:40   I just traded in the two iPads I was talking about

01:44:42   a couple weeks ago, the two old ones,

01:44:45   so I could fund the new one.

01:44:46   And the two, so the trade-in process now is by default,

01:44:51   they don't mail you a box anymore.

01:44:53   You have to like bring it to a FedEx store.

01:44:56   And you can like call up Apple and request a box now,

01:45:00   but you have to like call them on the phone to do that.

01:45:03   - Like an animal.

01:45:04   - So rather than call them on the phone,

01:45:05   I decided, well, I had this couple of days of errands

01:45:09   to do driving in America the last few days.

01:45:14   And so I'm like, all right, well, I'll just,

01:45:15   I'll wait till then and I'll bring the iPads on that trip

01:45:18   and I'll drop them off.

01:45:18   - You can use the iPads as packing material

01:45:20   for shipping something else.

01:45:21   - Right.

01:45:22   - Wow.

01:45:23   - So, and like, you know, so, you know,

01:45:25   the FedEx store is a good 15 minutes from my house,

01:45:28   so, you know, it's like a half hour trip, round trip,

01:45:30   you know, to get from, you know, there and back

01:45:31   to from where I was based.

01:45:33   And I can all the way to the stupid FedEx store

01:45:35   and, you know, the people behind the counter

01:45:37   start clicking a few buttons.

01:45:38   Oh, the computer's being slow.

01:45:40   Okay, all right, I keep clicking, call someone else over.

01:45:44   hey, is this right to you?

01:45:48   The various employees eventually conclude,

01:45:50   quote, the system is down.

01:45:52   - Oh, cool.

01:45:53   - This is not a particularly actionable statement,

01:45:56   nor is it probably accurate.

01:45:57   I mean, I think it could just be like,

01:46:00   some kind of weird error message that they didn't even read,

01:46:02   but it's, oh, it's down.

01:46:04   I was like, all right, well,

01:46:06   is this the kind of thing that takes usually

01:46:07   like a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days

01:46:09   to come back up?

01:46:10   I need to know this.

01:46:12   and oh, it should be good tomorrow.

01:46:15   Great.

01:46:16   So whatever the reason, I had to go home,

01:46:19   go back again the next day, another half hour of driving

01:46:21   just to drop off these stupid things.

01:46:23   I did all of that to avoid making a phone call to Apple,

01:46:26   which probably would have been much easier to say,

01:46:29   please send me the box that you used to send automatically.

01:46:31   Anyway, so for anybody out there,

01:46:33   this process is now worse than it used to be.

01:46:35   - I'm sorry to hear that. - That's frustrating.

01:46:36   But it's still easier than selling to people on eBay.

01:46:39   - Yeah, that's very true.

01:46:41   If you'll permit me just a very brief side topic,

01:46:45   I've received my playdate and it's adorable

01:46:47   and I really enjoy it.

01:46:49   - Oh, awesome. - It's a stupid,

01:46:50   it's a stupid frivolous purchase

01:46:52   that I probably wasted my money on,

01:46:53   but I don't care because I love it.

01:46:55   - That is exactly what it's supposed to be.

01:46:58   Like, nothing, you don't buy the playdate

01:47:01   'cause you need it for work.

01:47:02   I mean, you might, but--

01:47:03   - Oh hey, I'm talking about it now,

01:47:04   so can I write it off, is that how this works?

01:47:07   - I meant like, you know, you in general,

01:47:08   like one does not buy the playdate

01:47:10   because they need it for their work.

01:47:12   No one needs a playdate.

01:47:15   The playdate serves no major utility.

01:47:19   It's a fun thing made for fun.

01:47:21   So I'm curious, do you have anything more

01:47:24   than the first two games yet?

01:47:25   - Yeah, so I got it, I don't know,

01:47:28   like when, no, it was after we recorded,

01:47:30   so it must have been Thursday or Friday of last week.

01:47:33   It's been Casey Christmas right now, I tell you what.

01:47:36   But anyways, so I got it late last week,

01:47:39   And then I guess, is it Monday is the turnover day or something like that?

01:47:42   I think that's right.

01:47:43   But so it starts with casual burger and white water wipeout.

01:47:47   And then I also have boogie loops.

01:47:48   And what is the thing with the Back to the Future looking screen on it?

01:47:52   What is this thing called?

01:47:52   I don't even remember.

01:47:54   It is called Time Travel Adventure.

01:47:55   There we go.

01:47:56   And I also side loaded a handful of games.

01:48:00   I side loaded Retro Derby, which is kind of sort of a racing game, which is kind of enjoyable.

01:48:05   Playtris, which is basically Tetris.

01:48:07   The Drawing Board, which is kind of an Etch A Sketch,

01:48:09   and Dr. Neario, which is basically Dr. Mario.

01:48:13   I really enjoy this thing.

01:48:15   It is very small.

01:48:17   Like, I've seen them in person, that one dub-dub,

01:48:20   and I've forgotten how freaking tiny it is.

01:48:22   It is on the limit of comfortable with my crappy eyesight,

01:48:27   even with my contacts in,

01:48:28   where my eyesight is actually pretty decent.

01:48:31   But nevertheless, this thing is so fun.

01:48:33   Of course, Declan is taking quite a liking to it.

01:48:37   Of the four games, Casual Burger, Whitewater Wipeout,

01:48:40   Time Travel Adventure, and Boogie Loops,

01:48:42   Boogie Loops does absolutely nothing for me,

01:48:43   but I'm horribly not musically inclined.

01:48:46   Time Travel Adventure's fun.

01:48:48   It's the thing with the stick figure

01:48:49   that uses the crank seemingly exclusively.

01:48:52   Whitewater Wipeout is okay.

01:48:54   I really enjoyed Casual Burger, though,

01:48:56   more than I thought I would.

01:48:58   That one was a lot of fun.

01:48:59   It's kind of sort of a,

01:49:03   I don't wanna say open world, but like a--

01:49:05   - It's like a little adventure game.

01:49:07   - Yeah, it's like a little adventure game,

01:49:08   but with very low stakes in the good way,

01:49:10   and it was a lot of fun.

01:49:12   And the can full of things that are side loaded,

01:49:14   I've really enjoyed as well.

01:49:15   I really like this thing.

01:49:17   It is so cute.

01:49:18   The screen, it really should have a light on it,

01:49:21   but nevertheless, it is so crisp.

01:49:23   It is so, so crisp.

01:49:24   I love the feel of the crank.

01:49:26   Like it's such a stupid, stupid thing,

01:49:28   and yet I love it.

01:49:29   Everything about this thing is so cute.

01:49:32   Like it's so thin and small, and it's just fun.

01:49:35   And it's bright yellow, which in some ways,

01:49:38   it's a little bit ostentatious, but it's cool

01:49:40   because in the handful of times I've had it in public

01:49:43   and been messing with it, a couple times people

01:49:45   have been like, "What is that?"

01:49:48   Especially kids, actually, are like,

01:49:49   "What in the crap is that thing?"

01:49:52   So yeah, I really like it, it's super fun.

01:49:55   John, I presume yours is not even with,

01:49:58   you haven't even gotten a shipping notice yet?

01:50:00   - No, there was some email about like,

01:50:02   "Oh, group two is something whatever,

01:50:05   "but I think I'm in group two,

01:50:07   "but I haven't really been thinking about it."

01:50:09   What I'm hoping is it'll just show up at my door one day

01:50:10   and I'll be like, "Oh, pleasant surprise."

01:50:12   - Have I made a group W Banks joke about that yet?

01:50:14   - I don't think so.

01:50:15   - No, so I think ultimately,

01:50:17   so I actually, I haven't actually even touched it

01:50:20   since that group of games came out,

01:50:22   'cause I've just been busy

01:50:22   with a lot of other stuff right now.

01:50:23   So it's like over there waiting for me.

01:50:26   But I will say that I think the non-backlit screen

01:50:31   was a mistake.

01:50:33   - Yeah, I agree with that.

01:50:34   - Because it looks amazing at one angle of the light,

01:50:38   but then at pretty much any other angle,

01:50:41   it's kind of eye strainy and you kind of wish

01:50:43   there was more light.

01:50:44   And I understand why they did it,

01:50:46   'cause it is a really cool screen

01:50:47   and it's not available backlit,

01:50:48   and putting front lights in front of it

01:50:50   is difficult to do well, I understand all that,

01:50:53   but in practice, you really want a lit screen,

01:50:56   because it is very tricky to get that angle right

01:51:00   where it looks amazing.

01:51:01   - Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

01:51:03   And plus, I don't know how other people and couples are,

01:51:07   but for Erin and me, we'll typically climb into bed

01:51:11   a solid half an hour, in some cases an hour,

01:51:14   before we fall asleep, and we'll be reading on our Kindles,

01:51:17   reading a physical book, or just messing about on our phones

01:51:19   or what have you, and the last handful of nights

01:51:21   I've wanted to play the play date for a little bit,

01:51:24   and there is not a light on my nightstand,

01:51:27   and so she will keep her nightstand light on

01:51:30   as she's getting sleepy and getting ready to pass out.

01:51:33   But I have to hold the play date

01:51:35   at an extremely specific angle,

01:51:37   and at this point my contacts are out,

01:51:39   so I need to have this thing

01:51:41   literally six inches from my face,

01:51:42   otherwise it's blurry as hell.

01:51:44   And so it's just untenable, it really just does not work.

01:51:48   - You need the Game Boy front lights, that's what you need.

01:51:50   - Yeah, or the original Kindle.

01:51:51   - But the original Kindle was a reflective screen though,

01:51:54   like people are confused about this,

01:51:55   - It's not an E Ink screen, it is not reflective,

01:51:58   it is transmissive, so shining a huge amount of light

01:52:00   on this screen, I would imagine, is not going to be

01:52:03   the same as shining a huge amount of light

01:52:04   on an E Ink screen.

01:52:06   - I would say it looks a lot closer to E Ink than old LCDs.

01:52:09   - Yes, it does, it really does.

01:52:11   - Like in a sense, the pixels look like

01:52:12   they're super right on top, it is a nice matte finish.

01:52:15   Yeah, but in general though, I do think it is

01:52:19   this wonderful, cute thing, and in many ways

01:52:21   the hardware's a home run, however, I think

01:52:22   in this particular decision, I think this was

01:52:24   probably the wrong decision.

01:52:26   But that being said, I'm still delighted by the thing.

01:52:28   It's still very fun.

01:52:30   I haven't found yet like one absolutely must have killer app

01:52:35   but I will say in that first group of games so far

01:52:37   that I played out of those four,

01:52:39   certainly the casual birder stands out as like the best one.

01:52:43   But that being said, these are not games

01:52:46   you're gonna keep playing for years.

01:52:48   This is a game, these are games you're gonna play through

01:52:50   once and have fun and it's gonna take you a few hours

01:52:52   maybe for some of the more adventury ones like that,

01:52:55   and then you'll move on.

01:52:56   So we'll see how it goes over time,

01:52:57   but it is a very fun thing.

01:53:00   - Yeah, it's so cute and so innocent.

01:53:04   Like that's an odd thing to say about a physical device.

01:53:07   I don't know how else to describe it,

01:53:10   but it's so cute and innocent and I just really like it.

01:53:13   And like in order to start it up,

01:53:15   you click the little like lock button or tap,

01:53:18   press the little lock button twice,

01:53:20   and it looks like it's opening its eyes.

01:53:21   Like you press it once and one eye opens,

01:53:23   you press it again, the other eye opens.

01:53:25   Like it's just so adorable and fun.

01:53:27   And it makes me feel, or it reminds me of,

01:53:31   I guess maybe what it is is that it's nostalgic in a way,

01:53:35   even though it's a brand new device and it has a crank,

01:53:37   but it's nostalgic of the time

01:53:39   when I got my original Game Boy, right?

01:53:42   And I was talking to Declan about this just last night,

01:53:45   like the original Game Boy, my recollection of it

01:53:46   was that the screen was utter trash even for the time.

01:53:49   - Oh, it was terrible. - Gosh,

01:53:49   today's standards it was even worse. It was a tremendous brick of a device. It blew through

01:53:57   batteries ridiculously fast. Not as fast as the Game Gear, mind you, which would last

01:54:01   a measure of minutes, but ridiculously fast nonetheless. And yet I loved that device.

01:54:09   I loved my original Game Boy more than almost anything in the world because that one was

01:54:14   mine. It was all mine. It wasn't the shared family NES. That was Casey's Game Boy. And

01:54:20   so I love that thing so much. And the playdate reminds me in many ways of that in so far

01:54:26   as it's it isn't just mine because Declan is trying to steal it every chance he can

01:54:31   get. But it's just that innocent fun like everything about it is just so cute and adorable.

01:54:38   And I know that's such an odd way to describe hardware or describe a console, but I really

01:54:42   do enjoy it.

01:54:45   (beep)