ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Before we record every single week, we've gotten in the habit of doing what John likes to call pre-flight, which is reasonable.

00:00:06 ◼   ► And we'll quickly, quickly walk through, you know, what we're gonna talk about and where we think we're gonna stop follow-up and start

00:00:12 ◼   ► topics and end topics and do SKTP and so on and so forth.

00:00:15 ◼   ► And we went the entire way through pre-flight, and I felt like we had it pretty well sorted.

00:00:21 ◼   ► I think John felt like we had it pretty well sorted. Then Marco

00:00:25 ◼   ► looked at us Puss in Boots style with his hat in his hands and his big eyes looking up and he said well

00:00:30 ◼   ► What about the overcast update? No, I said like I don't want to be too self-serving here

00:00:34 ◼   ► But do we want to talk about the overcast update? It was suspiciously not mentioned

00:00:40 ◼   ► Why was it not mentioned Marco because you didn't mention it because you didn't

00:00:44 ◼   ► Well, this is the last episode of ATP

00:00:53 ◼   ► Anyway, that's the point of free flight it functioned it fulfilled its intended purpose

00:00:58 ◼   ► We made sure we knew how the show was going to go and Marco brought this up now instead of just springing on us mid-show

00:01:04 ◼   ► It's saying oh, yeah, by the way, we also didn't mention now that we're pre-flighting in public

00:01:08 ◼   ► Apple did their their external link thing and then they revised the dating app thing, but it's I mean there is too late

00:01:16 ◼   ► yeah, well and I read it over all of it and the only thing of note really is that they

00:01:23 ◼   ► They made the text on the dialogue for the dating apps thing

00:01:26 ◼   ► a little bit less horrendously biased.

00:01:29 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:01:30 ◼   ► But otherwise, it's mostly stuff that we already knew

00:01:34 ◼   ► or stuff that's very unsurprising.

00:01:36 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't know how much there is to talk about there

00:01:39 ◼   ► because it's just Apple doing their usual jerky stuff

00:01:44 ◼   ► around this area and there's not much different here.

00:01:47 ◼   ► - You know, what we could do is we could put things

00:01:50 ◼   ► we want to talk about in a shared document. That's a good idea. Maybe the next time we record,

00:01:55 ◼   ► we could potentially look at that shared document and see what we should talk about.

00:02:00 ◼   ► All right, all right, we have a lot to get through. We have a mountain of follow-up and it just keeps

00:02:06 ◼   ► growing and growing and growing. And so I feel like we should just start by trying to conquer it.

00:02:11 ◼   ► So first item on the list, resolution, independence, and retina. I feel like we have gone two to three

00:02:19 ◼   ► consecutive weeks trying to explain this and apparently failing. So I had a pleasant, if

00:02:24 ◼   ► long, exchange with a listener who was not being belligerent, who was not being mean

00:02:30 ◼   ► in any way, which is somewhat rare for the internet, but they just really weren't understanding

00:02:35 ◼   ► what the big deal about retina was. And it's not that they were an unintelligent person,

00:02:39 ◼   ► it's just, I don't think I was doing a good job describing it and learning from my mistakes

00:02:44 ◼   ► in that regard. I can take a crack at this, but I wonder, John, if it would be best if

00:02:48 ◼   ► if you took a crack at this,

00:02:49 ◼   ► because one of the things I referred this listener to

00:02:52 ◼   ► was some old Ars Technica Mac OS X reviews.

00:02:56 ◼   ► So would you explain to me, Jon,

00:02:58 ◼   ► for those of us who are not aware,

00:02:59 ◼   ► what makes retina screens and retina displays so crisp?

00:03:04 ◼   ► If it's just two times the regular resolution,

00:03:07 ◼   ► but it's showing the exact same stuff,

00:03:08 ◼   ► why would it look better?

00:03:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, a lot of people sent feedback

00:03:12 ◼   ► with asking questions, and their questions revealed

00:03:14 ◼   ► they had a mistaken notion of how Mac OS specifically

00:03:19 ◼   ► deals with retina displays.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And then some other people had some questions

00:03:23 ◼   ► clarifying a point that we didn't really bring up,

00:03:25 ◼   ► comparing how Mac does it with Windows.

00:03:27 ◼   ► So we'll start with the basics.

00:03:29 ◼   ► Every time we talk about retina, we

00:03:31 ◼   ► try to describe it as like there's twice as many pixels.

00:03:34 ◼   ► So before, if you're measuring length in one dimension,

00:03:37 ◼   ► you'd say what was previously one pixel long, now two pixels

00:03:40 ◼   ► sit in that same place.

00:03:41 ◼   ► Or what we would say is on a non-retina screen,

00:03:44 ◼   ► what was previously one pixel,

00:03:46 ◼   ► now it's a two by two grid of four pixels,

00:03:48 ◼   ► a little square of four pixels, right?

00:03:50 ◼   ► And we're doing that to express the change in density, right?

00:03:53 ◼   ► The way Apple did retina displays for the most part

00:03:56 ◼   ► is if there had been a preexisting thing,

00:03:57 ◼   ► like say the 27-inch Thunderbolt display,

00:04:00 ◼   ► what they did for their 27-inch retina display,

00:04:02 ◼   ► the Apple Studio display,

00:04:03 ◼   ► is it's like the Thunderbolt display,

00:04:05 ◼   ► but every place there is a single pixel

00:04:07 ◼   ► on the Thunderbolt display,

00:04:08 ◼   ► the retina, the Apple Studio display has four pixels

00:04:11 ◼   ► in a little square, right?

00:04:13 ◼   ► And so people ask, but why would you want that?

00:04:15 ◼   ► If it's just gonna draw things

00:04:16 ◼   ► with a bunch of little blocks of two by two pixels

00:04:18 ◼   ► in these four pixel squares,

00:04:20 ◼   ► why not just draw a single pixel on the Thunderbolt display?

00:04:23 ◼   ► What do you get?

00:04:24 ◼   ► Who cares if every pixel is made of four pixels?

00:04:26 ◼   ► It's still the same thing on the screen, isn't it?

00:04:29 ◼   ► And the disconnect there is,

00:04:32 ◼   ► what we're trying to explain is

00:04:34 ◼   ► how the density of pixels changed,

00:04:36 ◼   ► but macOS does not draw things

00:04:39 ◼   ► with two by two squares of pixels.

00:04:42 ◼   ► It draws things with individual pixels.

00:04:44 ◼   ► So if you have like a letter O where the sides of the O

00:04:46 ◼   ► are all in a big curve shape,

00:04:48 ◼   ► it doesn't make that the curve side of letter O

00:04:50 ◼   ► out of two by two blocks of pixels, right?

00:04:53 ◼   ► It makes them out of single individual pixels

00:04:55 ◼   ► so it's twice as smooth around the O.

00:04:58 ◼   ► Obviously you can imagine if you're trying to make a curve

00:05:00 ◼   ► out of big blocks, the smaller the blocks,

00:05:02 ◼   ► the more the curve looks like a continuous curve

00:05:04 ◼   ► and not a stair step, right?

00:05:06 ◼   ► So that's the disconnect for that thing.

00:05:08 ◼   ► And the second thing to understand on this topic is,

00:05:11 ◼   ► how did Apple eventually decide to come upon this solution

00:05:16 ◼   ► where they took their previous screen

00:05:19 ◼   ► and for every single pixel they made

00:05:21 ◼   ► a two by two grid of pixels

00:05:23 ◼   ► and then drew at the higher resolution?

00:05:25 ◼   ► For many years, I'll put links in the show notes,

00:05:28 ◼   ► starting from 2005, then another link in 2007,

00:05:31 ◼   ► then another link in 2011,

00:05:33 ◼   ► Apple had tried for many years to figure out

00:05:35 ◼   ► how am I going, how is Mac OS going to draw

00:05:39 ◼   ► on higher density displays?

00:05:42 ◼   ► You know, Mac OS 10 was a newer shopping system

00:05:45 ◼   ► that came out in 2001.

00:05:46 ◼   ► High density displays look like they might be a thing

00:05:49 ◼   ► where the pixels would be really, really tiny.

00:05:51 ◼   ► You wouldn't want to just continue to draw exactly the way,

00:05:53 ◼   ► you know, you had been drawing

00:05:55 ◼   ► because then everything would be really tiny,

00:05:57 ◼   ► no one could see it.

00:05:57 ◼   ► What you'd want to do is what I described.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Keep things more or less the same size,

00:06:01 ◼   ► so a 12 point letter O would be the same size

00:06:04 ◼   ► as 12 point letter O.

00:06:05 ◼   ► it would just be smoother.

00:06:07 ◼   ► So how do we go about doing that?

00:06:09 ◼   ► One way that Apple tried for years and years and years

00:06:11 ◼   ► is that you'd have the drawing commands that

00:06:16 ◼   ► are say, draw letter O at 12 point text,

00:06:18 ◼   ► and you'd have the screen, which would have

00:06:20 ◼   ► some arbitrary pixel density.

00:06:22 ◼   ► And the operating system would figure out,

00:06:24 ◼   ► based on the screen density and how big a 12 point letter O

00:06:27 ◼   ► is supposed to be, use the right number of pixels, which

00:06:29 ◼   ► sounds like a great solution.

00:06:30 ◼   ► It's like any screen density, the more pixels you have,

00:06:33 ◼   ► the smoother that letter O will be,

00:06:35 ◼   ► this letter O doesn't change size.

00:06:36 ◼   ► Like a 12 point letter O is a 12 point letter O

00:06:38 ◼   ► is a 12 point letter O,

00:06:39 ◼   ► and they would try to keep that consistent.

00:06:40 ◼   ► The problem with that is,

00:06:42 ◼   ► if you have something that you're trying to draw,

00:06:43 ◼   ► like things in the operating system are defined

00:06:45 ◼   ► by how big they're supposed to be,

00:06:46 ◼   ► that 12 point letter O or whatever,

00:06:48 ◼   ► if that 12 point letter O requires a number of pixels

00:06:52 ◼   ► that is odd on one pixel density, but even on the other,

00:06:56 ◼   ► it might be offset by a little bit,

00:06:58 ◼   ► which doesn't sound like a big deal,

00:06:59 ◼   ► but now imagine trying to do things like draw tab bars

00:07:02 ◼   ► or toolbars or buttons or things

00:07:03 ◼   ► where they have to abut and join exactly,

00:07:06 ◼   ► if you can have an arbitrary pixel density,

00:07:08 ◼   ► you might end up in a situation where,

00:07:10 ◼   ► oh, this dividing line has to be right in the middle,

00:07:12 ◼   ► but it can only be in the middle if this is five points,

00:07:16 ◼   ► because if you have two points,

00:07:16 ◼   ► then the middle one point, and then two points.

00:07:18 ◼   ► Well, what if it's six points?

00:07:19 ◼   ► Where's the middle of six points?

00:07:21 ◼   ► There is no middle.

00:07:22 ◼   ► It's gotta be closer to one side or the other

00:07:23 ◼   ► because of the number of pixels.

00:07:25 ◼   ► And so you get what they call pixel cracks

00:07:26 ◼   ► and all sorts of other things where

00:07:28 ◼   ► if you try to let the operating system draw it

00:07:30 ◼   ► an arbitrary, what we call a scaling factor,

00:07:32 ◼   ► an arbitrary scaling factor, it's very difficult

00:07:35 ◼   ► to draw things consistently, because you always end up

00:07:38 ◼   ► with like one pixel extra left over that you have to decide

00:07:42 ◼   ► whether it's on the left or the right,

00:07:43 ◼   ► and then you can't align things up.

00:07:44 ◼   ► So Apple eventually just pretty much gave up.

00:07:46 ◼   ► After years and years of having that feature

00:07:48 ◼   ► sort of as a debug feature in the operating system,

00:07:51 ◼   ► you'll see screenshots in the links where there was actually

00:07:53 ◼   ► a resolution scaling slider that you can move around

00:07:56 ◼   ► and you can move it to fractional values like 1.5, 1.25.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And then you'd see how just the drawing of everything broke.

00:08:02 ◼   ► because nothing expected that and it's very difficult to get that to join up.

00:08:06 ◼   ► so what apple decided is we're not going to do that. we're only doing

00:08:10 ◼   ► integer scaling factors. so it's either 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, any but it has to be an integer.

00:08:17 ◼   ► so that way you always know exactly how to draw anything you never end up with pixel cracks.

00:08:21 ◼   ► because you either, you know, either one regular non-retina pixel or a 2x2 grid,

00:08:26 ◼   ► you know, double the density or triple the density or quadruple the density or whatever.

00:08:31 ◼   ► That's how Mac OS draws things,

00:08:33 ◼   ► as in draws them to the in-memory buffer.

00:08:36 ◼   ► Final thing to understand is,

00:08:38 ◼   ► okay, so that's how Mac OS draws stuff.

00:08:40 ◼   ► But hey, I can take a 4K monitor and display a 5K,

00:08:43 ◼   ► I can set it to 5K, how is it doing that?

00:08:45 ◼   ► That doesn't divide evenly,

00:08:46 ◼   ► that's not an integer scaling factor, how does that work?

00:08:49 ◼   ► Well, the way it works is Mac OS draws

00:08:52 ◼   ► at an integer scaling factor,

00:08:54 ◼   ► like when it draws the screen,

00:08:55 ◼   ► it says here's all the pixels in the screen,

00:08:57 ◼   ► it is an integer scaling factor of,

00:08:59 ◼   ► you know, it's twice, three times,

00:09:01 ◼   ► I think only like the iPhones do three times, whatever,

00:09:03 ◼   ► but it's either 1X or 2X.

00:09:05 ◼   ► That's how macOS draws it.

00:09:07 ◼   ► And then at the very end,

00:09:09 ◼   ► after drawing a 5K image at exactly 2X, right,

00:09:13 ◼   ► it scales the entire final drawn image down to 4K.

00:09:18 ◼   ► And that's where everything gets all fuzzy.

00:09:20 ◼   ► And then it shoves that on the screen.

00:09:22 ◼   ► So that's why people's like,

00:09:23 ◼   ► why, you know, non-native scaling factors?

00:09:26 ◼   ► If it had fractional scaling,

00:09:28 ◼   ► you could display 5K, quote unquote, 5K worth of points

00:09:33 ◼   ► on a 4K display without any fuzzy scaling,

00:09:35 ◼   ► but then you'd have pixel cracks everywhere.

00:09:37 ◼   ► But that's not what Mac OS does.

00:09:38 ◼   ► Same thing on the 3X phones, by the way.

00:09:39 ◼   ► Maybe Marco remembers the details more than I do, but.

00:09:42 ◼   ► - Well, originally.

00:09:43 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:09:44 ◼   ► - When the Plus phones launched, the 6 Plus.

00:09:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, so they drew everything internally at 3X,

00:09:50 ◼   ► but the screens did not have three times

00:09:52 ◼   ► the number of pixels.

00:09:53 ◼   ► So they would draw at 3X,

00:09:54 ◼   ► and then take the final 3x drawn pixel image

00:09:58 ◼   ► and squish it and make everything all blurry

00:10:00 ◼   ► and then put that on the screen.

00:10:01 ◼   ► But the pixels are so small,

00:10:02 ◼   ► people really didn't notice, right?

00:10:04 ◼   ► - And that lasted until the iPhone X.

00:10:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's when they could do 3x at,

00:10:08 ◼   ► well, not really, 'cause the iPhone X

00:10:10 ◼   ► didn't use a pen tile pattern,

00:10:11 ◼   ► which is getting into more complexity

00:10:13 ◼   ► of how pixels are drawn.

00:10:14 ◼   ► But anyway, these pieces of information

00:10:17 ◼   ► are key to understanding what's different about macOS.

00:10:19 ◼   ► And I think Windows tries to do what Apple did,

00:10:22 ◼   ► which is arbitrary scaling factors,

00:10:24 ◼   ► but I'm not entirely sure,

00:10:25 ◼   ► so I'm not gonna speak for Windows,

00:10:26 ◼   ► but I can say that macOS,

00:10:27 ◼   ► if you follow these links and look through the years,

00:10:29 ◼   ► they tried the other way to do it

00:10:30 ◼   ► and they could not get it to work to be perfect,

00:10:33 ◼   ► and so they said, "We're just gonna do integer scaling,"

00:10:35 ◼   ► which I think was the right call,

00:10:36 ◼   ► because 2x and 3x turn out to be adequate

00:10:41 ◼   ► for not seeing the pixels anymore,

00:10:43 ◼   ► and it just makes everything so much easier,

00:10:44 ◼   ► because you never have to worry about that leftover pixel

00:10:47 ◼   ► and which side of a thing to allocate it to.

00:10:49 ◼   ► You never have to worry about pixel cracks.

00:10:51 ◼   ► The price of that is, because of the way macOS works,

00:10:53 ◼   ► If you want to display quote unquote 5K worth of stuff,

00:10:56 ◼   ► which I know it's not, you know,

00:10:59 ◼   ► however many points is horizontally and vertically

00:11:02 ◼   ► on Apple's 5K monitor,

00:11:03 ◼   ► if you want to display that number of points worth of stuff,

00:11:06 ◼   ► it had on a, you know, on a 4K monitor,

00:11:09 ◼   ► macOS draws it at 5K.

00:11:11 ◼   ► And then it takes the final image and squishes it

00:11:14 ◼   ► just like you would squish it in image editor

00:11:15 ◼   ► and that's why everything looks fuzzy.

00:11:17 ◼   ► So you don't get any pixel cracks,

00:11:18 ◼   ► but you do get a little bit of blurring.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And the same way that you take any image

00:11:21 ◼   ► that's pixel perfect and you scale it,

00:11:23 ◼   ► everything gets a little bit fuzzy,

00:11:24 ◼   ► I guess, anti-alias around the edges.

00:11:26 ◼   ► So hopefully that will explain to people

00:11:28 ◼   ► who are wondering why any of this matters to Mac users.

00:11:32 ◼   ► It's a combination of our expectations

00:11:34 ◼   ► based on products Apple shipped,

00:11:35 ◼   ► and also how Mac OS and iOS and iPad OS,

00:11:39 ◼   ► and every OS Apple makes, decided,

00:11:42 ◼   ► you know, back in 2011, basically,

00:11:44 ◼   ► how they decided how they're going to draw

00:11:47 ◼   ► in high DPI screens.

00:11:48 ◼   ► They always draw at an integer scaling factor,

00:11:50 ◼   ► and then if necessary, they squish that image down

00:11:53 ◼   ► to fit in the number of pixels of the screen.

00:11:54 ◼   ► But the way we like it is no squishing.

00:11:57 ◼   ► It draws at an integer scaling factor

00:11:59 ◼   ► and then just puts those pixels directly on the screen,

00:12:00 ◼   ► which has exactly that number of pixels.

00:12:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I get feedback, including today,

00:12:05 ◼   ► I had two different pieces of feedback

00:12:06 ◼   ► in the span of like five minutes from each other on Twitter.

00:12:08 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, what about this monitor?

00:12:09 ◼   ► "What about this one?"

00:12:11 ◼   ► And I don't know what I'm being unclear about,

00:12:14 ◼   ► but let me try one more time.

00:12:17 ◼   ► - I feel this way every single time.

00:12:19 ◼   ► What am I being unclear about here?

00:12:22 ◼   ► Like if your screen is physically 27 inches or bigger,

00:12:27 ◼   ► it must be at least 5K if not bigger.

00:12:32 ◼   ► 'Cause how big is the XDR?

00:12:33 ◼   ► It's like 30 or something like that, 30 inches?

00:12:35 ◼   ► - 32, I believe. - 32, I think.

00:12:37 ◼   ► - So between 24 and 27 inches, you need to be 5K.

00:12:41 ◼   ► Much above 27 inches,

00:12:43 ◼   ► you're getting into the 6K XDR territory.

00:12:45 ◼   ► And if you're 22 to 24 inches, then 4K is sufficient.

00:12:50 ◼   ► people are sending me these 32-inch ultra-wide screens

00:12:54 ◼   ► that have the same horizontal resolution,

00:12:56 ◼   ► maybe it's the same vertical,

00:12:57 ◼   ► one of the dimensions is the same

00:12:59 ◼   ► as a like Ultrafine 5K or a Studio Display 5K,

00:13:04 ◼   ► and they're like, "Oh, this would work, right?"

00:13:07 ◼   ► No, no, that's way physically bigger and zero more pixels.

00:13:12 ◼   ► What is it, Zorro more boogs or whatever it was, John?

00:13:15 ◼   ► I don't remember now, but there's not enough pixels in there.

00:13:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it's totally it.

00:13:18 ◼   ► There's not enough pixels there.

00:13:20 ◼   ► There's just not even close to enough pixels there.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And people keep thinking like, it's like us with Trump.

00:13:24 ◼   ► Like, oh, we got them this time, I got them.

00:13:26 ◼   ► And no, it's not even in the ballpark.

00:13:29 ◼   ► If it's bigger than 27 inches, it better be more than 5K.

00:13:34 ◼   ► If it's bigger than 24 inches, it better be more than 4K.

00:13:38 ◼   ► Like, I don't feel like this is unclear,

00:13:41 ◼   ► but somehow people just aren't getting it.

00:13:43 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:13:44 ◼   ► I love all of you though.

00:13:45 ◼   ► - And that gets back to the scaling thing,

00:13:47 ◼   ► 'cause it's like, oh, why don't you just set

00:13:48 ◼   ► monitor resolution to higher res. Well then it will be non-native because then

00:13:51 ◼   ► the Mac OS will draw at the higher res and squish that down to fit within the

00:13:55 ◼   ► number of pixels are on the screen and everything will look slightly fuzzy. And

00:13:57 ◼   ► then yes many people wrote in to tell us well yeah I bet you can't see those

00:14:00 ◼   ► pixels isn't your vision bad anyway we you know that's just up to the

00:14:03 ◼   ► individual whether they care about native what we call you know non-native

00:14:06 ◼   ► display where the operating system draws at a higher resolution than the number

00:14:10 ◼   ► of pixels on the display and then scales the drawn image before pushing it to the

00:14:14 ◼   ► display. That looks fuzzy to us. Some people don't notice the fuzz. Again, the old iPhones,

00:14:20 ◼   ► when the big iPhones came out, they drew it 3x, but there weren't 3x the number of pixels,

00:14:24 ◼   ► so they scaled it. And I bet a lot of people didn't notice because those pixels were really,

00:14:28 ◼   ► really small. But, you know, on Mac screens, I think a lot of us can still tell.

00:14:33 ◼   ► And, I mean, even if I can't or John can't or somebody else can't, like, whether or not

00:14:40 ◼   ► we are being ridiculous, this is something that is important to us.

00:14:43 ◼   ► For right or wrong, it's important to us. So if you don't agree,

00:14:47 ◼   ► that's fine. That's fine. Just let people like things.

00:14:51 ◼   ► All right, Joe Lyon wrote in to tell us about why silicon wafers are round,

00:14:56 ◼   ► and Joe writes, "The ingot of sil--" ingot? ingot? I don't know, I probably pronounced

00:15:00 ◼   ► that wrong. It can go-- it's the French pronunciation. You got it right the first

00:15:03 ◼   ► time, ingot. "The ingot of silicon is created as a

00:15:06 ◼   ► cylinder as the solid silicon crystal is grown and

00:15:09 ◼   ► pulled out of molten silicon, which leads to round wafers.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Furthermore, many of the processing steps in the fab

00:15:15 ◼   ► to produce the chips on the wafer

00:15:17 ◼   ► are based on circular polishing motions

00:15:19 ◼   ► and spinning the wafer around its center,

00:15:21 ◼   ► which also requires angular symmetry

00:15:23 ◼   ► and just wouldn't work well or as efficiently

00:15:26 ◼   ► with a non-circular wafer.

00:15:28 ◼   ► And then there's a video, I think it was like,

00:15:30 ◼   ► how do they do that or how it's made or something like that,

00:15:32 ◼   ► which we'll put in the show notes.

00:15:34 ◼   ► I watched it, the whole thing is like eight, nine minutes.

00:15:37 ◼   ► and the good part starts at about,

00:15:39 ◼   ► just shy of two minutes,

00:15:41 ◼   ► and we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes.

00:15:42 ◼   ► I will note that the source video

00:15:44 ◼   ► does seem to have a couple places where it freezes.

00:15:46 ◼   ► I was concerned that my Mac was on the fritz,

00:15:48 ◼   ► but no, no, no, it appears that it's the video itself.

00:15:51 ◼   ► But anyways, it does a really good job

00:15:52 ◼   ► of explaining all of this stuff,

00:15:54 ◼   ► and I definitely think it's worth a watch

00:15:56 ◼   ► for all nine minutes if you have nine minutes to spare.

00:15:58 ◼   ► So check that out.

00:16:00 ◼   ► - I love the idea of somebody

00:16:01 ◼   ► who would answer that question with,

00:16:02 ◼   ► "No, I do not have nine minutes to spare."

00:16:04 ◼   ► Meanwhile, they're listening to our show.

00:16:06 ◼   ► fair. Hey man, let people spend time out they want, but I agree with you. Moving right along,

00:16:12 ◼   ► can you tell us John about winning the M1 Ultra lottery please?

00:16:15 ◼   ► This is Jonathan Ragon Kelly chiming in about the possibility that was of the theory espoused

00:16:21 ◼   ► in that MaxTex video about having to fab two M1 Maxes next to each other in order to make

00:16:28 ◼   ► an Ultra. So like you've got the wafer, which as we just established is round, then you

00:16:32 ◼   ► You got a bunch of these rectangular chips on it and they're in a big grid and there's

00:16:36 ◼   ► a little bit of waste around the edges.

00:16:37 ◼   ► That's why we asked about the round thing, but apparently there's good reasons for that

00:16:40 ◼   ► as I surmised.

00:16:41 ◼   ► And then the theory was, okay, well, if you want to get an ultra, not only do you have

00:16:45 ◼   ► to find two M1 maxes that like, you know, have all the parts working if you want to

00:16:49 ◼   ► get like an ultra with all the parts working, but they have to be next to each other on

00:16:52 ◼   ► the dies.

00:16:53 ◼   ► Here's what Jonathan has to say about that.

00:16:54 ◼   ► "It is almost certainly not the case that neighboring pairs of M1 max dies are cut out

00:16:58 ◼   ► of the way for it to make an M1 ultra.

00:17:00 ◼   ► What they described at launch matches much better onto a more standard technology which

00:17:03 ◼   ► is the class of thing Intel markets as EMIB and TSMC markets as LSI.

00:17:12 ◼   ► That's a standard, widely used available technology and cheaper and easier to build with better

00:17:17 ◼   ► yield precisely because you don't need directly adjacent dies to be functional to pair them

00:17:21 ◼   ► up.

00:17:22 ◼   ► You don't need to have fabricated dies next to each other on the same wafer to use this

00:17:24 ◼   ► technology at all.

00:17:25 ◼   ► The way to think about all these technologies is they're basically circuit boards, just

00:17:28 ◼   ► like the human scale printed circuit boards you're used to, just built at different levels

00:17:31 ◼   ► of miniaturization with different technologies.

00:17:34 ◼   ► And then Jonathan lists a bunch of the different technologies.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And so if people know what a circuit board is, it's a big flat board that is mostly non-conductive,

00:17:42 ◼   ► but that has conductive, what we call traces on them.

00:17:46 ◼   ► You often see it in, you know, if it was an emoji, which it probably is or will be.

00:17:49 ◼   ► It's like a green board, but with like gold lines on it.

00:17:52 ◼   ► Those gold lines are the conducting paths.

00:17:55 ◼   ► So they're kind of like wires but laid down as these sort of, you know, gold, you know,

00:17:58 ◼   ► they're not made of gold usually, but gold things on there that conduct and circuit boards

00:18:02 ◼   ► can have multiple layers.

00:18:03 ◼   ► So you see the little gold lines that are on top, but sometimes they have multiple layers

00:18:07 ◼   ► where there are other gold lines sandwiched in between connecting point A to point B to

00:18:11 ◼   ► point C all at different levels, right?

00:18:12 ◼   ► So that's what it means by circuit board.

00:18:14 ◼   ► And these things, these interposer type things, they are just like circuit boards, but way,

00:18:19 ◼   ► way, way, way smaller.

00:18:20 ◼   ► So here are the different technologies you can do this.

00:18:22 ◼   ► One is multi-chip modules like AMD uses for its CPUs to do the integration of multiple

00:18:26 ◼   ► dies with the "circuit board" organic substrate in package using traditional package die connections

00:18:31 ◼   ► along the edges of the dies.

00:18:32 ◼   ► This is also what Apple uses for its integrated memory, it's just standard package level interconnect

00:18:37 ◼   ► that cell phones and some laptop chips use.

00:18:39 ◼   ► No special 3D stacking going on.

00:18:41 ◼   ► So if you see all the RAM chips that are around like the M1 Ultra, they're just connected

00:18:45 ◼   ► with this like a multi-chip module.

00:18:47 ◼   ► There is traditional silicon interposers to do the circuit board as a 3D stacked big slab

00:18:52 ◼   ► of silicon all the way under the entire array of chips with through silicon vias, TSVs,

00:18:57 ◼   ► to connect the chips to the interposer.

00:18:58 ◼   ► So this is like a thing that's just underneath the whole chip and has these little tunnels

00:19:01 ◼   ► that go through it to reach up to the chip.

00:19:04 ◼   ► And then finally the newer EMIB-like things are like the full interposer where the circuit

00:19:09 ◼   ► board is again silicon and connected with high density TSVs, but where you only put

00:19:13 ◼   ► a very small interposer under the adjacent edges of the pair of dies for point-to-point

00:19:16 ◼   ► connections.

00:19:17 ◼   ► This is very clearly what the M1 Ultra uses based on everything Gianni Surugi said and

00:19:21 ◼   ► is the most sensible balance of cost and performance.

00:19:23 ◼   ► So rather than being an interposer that goes underneath the whole chip, as you saw in the

00:19:25 ◼   ► video, it's just a little strip between the two that connects them.

00:19:28 ◼   ► So if you think of that interposer as like a really, really tiny microscale circuit board

00:19:33 ◼   ► with all sorts of little traces and things happening in it, that's how they're connected.

00:19:37 ◼   ► And to do that, you do not need them to be next to each other on the silicon wafer.

00:19:41 ◼   ► So I found this pretty compelling evidence that they don't need to be next to each other.

00:19:44 ◼   ► Now I'm angry again about the price of the almond alger, I suppose.

00:19:48 ◼   ► - Well, but if anything, this means obviously

00:19:51 ◼   ► that yields would be massively higher doing it this way

00:19:54 ◼   ► than doing it the way that we initially guessed,

00:19:56 ◼   ► which is good in the sense that this method

00:19:59 ◼   ► of making giant chips effectively is scalable

00:20:03 ◼   ► and is healthy long-term probably.

00:20:05 ◼   ► So I think it's great in the sense that

00:20:07 ◼   ► this isn't just some kind of weird one-off they're gonna do

00:20:09 ◼   ► and then figure out something else for later.

00:20:11 ◼   ► This is something that they're gonna be able to do

00:20:13 ◼   ► for a long time probably, and this is scalable.

00:20:16 ◼   ► when they want to go to say four of these

00:20:19 ◼   ► instead of two of these,

00:20:21 ◼   ► maybe four potential future Mac Pro,

00:20:23 ◼   ► that becomes much more possible

00:20:26 ◼   ► and relatively much more affordable.

00:20:29 ◼   ► I know, again, the term relatively here,

00:20:32 ◼   ► than if you would have had to have like four perfect dies

00:20:35 ◼   ► all next to each other.

00:20:37 ◼   ► That would have been ridiculous,

00:20:38 ◼   ► where two is even pretty out there.

00:20:41 ◼   ► So this is promising in the sense that

00:20:43 ◼   ► it's much more reasonable of a technique to use

00:20:46 ◼   ► and it suggests that there will be much higher yields

00:20:48 ◼   ► and the ability to do larger scale combinations

00:20:50 ◼   ► in the future.

00:20:51 ◼   ► - Something we might touch on in a future episode

00:20:53 ◼   ► is the other problem of having a bunch of,

00:20:57 ◼   ► in this case, a bunch of M1 Maxes,

00:20:59 ◼   ► a bunch of Jade Sea Dyes or whatever,

00:21:00 ◼   ► connected to each other, doing stuff.

00:21:03 ◼   ► It's kind of what we've talked about a little bit

00:21:05 ◼   ► in the past, it's like,

00:21:07 ◼   ► each one of those ships can act on its own,

00:21:09 ◼   ► but now you want them to all act together

00:21:12 ◼   ► as one, looking like one big CPU to the operating system,

00:21:16 ◼   ► And that can be tricky because each one of those ships

00:21:18 ◼   ► does have its own stuff, right?

00:21:21 ◼   ► It's got its own, all its own stuff that is closer to it.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Sometimes also in the case of the M1 Max,

00:21:26 ◼   ► it's got its own connections to its own RAM

00:21:28 ◼   ► and all that stuff.

00:21:29 ◼   ► If you got four of them together,

00:21:31 ◼   ► now four things all have their own stuff

00:21:33 ◼   ► and you want them to cooperate as one,

00:21:34 ◼   ► it becomes, it starts to become important

00:21:37 ◼   ► how you allocate, it starts to become even more important,

00:21:40 ◼   ► let's say, how you allocate work to those things.

00:21:43 ◼   ► 'Cause you don't wanna give a piece of work to one die

00:21:45 ◼   ► and then give it to another die, a millisecond labor,

00:21:47 ◼   ► and then give it to another die,

00:21:48 ◼   ► 'cause every time you go to a different die,

00:21:49 ◼   ► it left behind all its stuff.

00:21:51 ◼   ► It might have left stuff in the cache

00:21:52 ◼   ► that was in the one die, and now you put it on another die,

00:21:55 ◼   ► and it goes to look in the cache, and it's not there.

00:21:57 ◼   ► So it's a good idea to keep things in the die

00:22:01 ◼   ► where they started, because their stuff will be there

00:22:04 ◼   ► as they build up their cache or whatever,

00:22:05 ◼   ► and you don't wanna flush all that stuff out

00:22:07 ◼   ► when you change processes.

00:22:08 ◼   ► Anyway, this is a very complicated process.

00:22:10 ◼   ► They're already doing it within a single chip, obviously,

00:22:12 ◼   ► and then within the M1 Ultra, it's an even bigger problem,

00:22:15 ◼   ► and if you had four of them,

00:22:16 ◼   ► it would be an even bigger problem.

00:22:17 ◼   ► So we'll see if Apple ever mentions that

00:22:19 ◼   ► in a future keynote to emphasize

00:22:21 ◼   ► how they've been able to harness

00:22:22 ◼   ► these four different chips woven together or whatever.

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00:24:24 ◼   ► - Phil Stullery writes that the fans in the Mac studio

00:24:31 ◼   ► are not just cooling the chip,

00:24:32 ◼   ► they're also cooling the power supply

00:24:34 ◼   ► which needs cooling no matter the load.

00:24:36 ◼   ► So this is the context for this is that we were wondering why the fans are really spun up always and as per Phil

00:24:43 ◼   ► They're cooling the power supply. Yeah, that's a good theory

00:24:46 ◼   ► The m1 Mac Mini also has an internal power supply and it does not make this much noise or run as fans aside

00:24:53 ◼   ► So it's it's it is a factor because we were always comparing it

00:24:56 ◼   ► Like why would this being making be making as more noise than the laptop?

00:24:59 ◼   ► Well, of course the laptop doesn't have an internal power supply to get that external power brick

00:25:02 ◼   ► It's also true of the iMac. Why is the iMac so silent? Well, the power supply is not inside there either

00:25:07 ◼   ► It's in the external brick, but the M1 Mac Mini has got a fairly beefy

00:25:11 ◼   ► you know oversized power supply from the Intel version still inside there and it's basically silent obviously

00:25:17 ◼   ► Everything is beefier in the Mac Studio than it is in the Mac Mini

00:25:21 ◼   ► But it seems like the math still doesn't quite add up

00:25:25 ◼   ► Yeah

00:25:25 ◼   ► I mean also, you know the iMac Pro had a massive power supply in it supplying

00:25:31 ◼   ► hundreds of watts to all the guts of that machine,

00:25:34 ◼   ► and that was silent.

00:25:36 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't, it is worth noting, certainly,

00:25:40 ◼   ► that that is a factor, but I still don't think,

00:25:43 ◼   ► first of all, I still don't think this is the only factor

00:25:45 ◼   ► leading to why this machine is so mysteriously loud,

00:25:48 ◼   ► and I still think something here is possibly wrong.

00:25:53 ◼   ► Like that's how weird it is that this machine is,

00:25:57 ◼   ► that people are saying this is audible at all,

00:25:59 ◼   ► because compared to its peers,

00:26:02 ◼   ► that it still seems weird that they've set the fan minimum

00:26:05 ◼   ► to be so audible when it seems like

00:26:06 ◼   ► it probably shouldn't be necessary.

00:26:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, the studio display

00:26:09 ◼   ► also has an internal power supply,

00:26:10 ◼   ► also has two fans, and is also,

00:26:12 ◼   ► according to everyone who's had one, silent.

00:26:14 ◼   ► - Yep, and then there was a Twitter thread from Only Me

00:26:18 ◼   ► about returning a max studio due to fan noise,

00:26:21 ◼   ► and so we'll link the thread in the show notes.

00:26:23 ◼   ► This person says, "Cooling does seem to be

00:26:25 ◼   ► "over-specified in the max studio,

00:26:27 ◼   ► at least with my admittedly light usage.

00:26:30 ◼   ► With normal usage, my MacStudio CPUs

00:26:31 ◼   ► are about 35 degrees Celsius.

00:26:33 ◼   ► My 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro

00:26:36 ◼   ► is around 45 degrees Celsius with the fan off,

00:26:40 ◼   ► according to iStop menus.

00:26:42 ◼   ► As an experiment, I taped a piece of paper

00:26:43 ◼   ► around the back of the MacStudio.

00:26:44 ◼   ► This seems unwise, but whatever.

00:26:46 ◼   ► Covered in the back vents. - Yeah, don't do this.

00:26:49 ◼   ► - But with a little gap between the case and the paper,

00:26:51 ◼   ► a bit like a chimney.

00:26:52 ◼   ► This reduced the fan noise by about four to five decibels,

00:26:56 ◼   ► which made it audible, but completely acceptable to me.

00:26:59 ◼   ► The CPU temps increased by less than 10 degrees Celsius,

00:27:02 ◼   ► which is still less than my MacBook Pro with the fan off.

00:27:05 ◼   ► And then this person clarifies,

00:27:07 ◼   ► "Actually, I don't think the paper

00:27:08 ◼   ► increased the temperature at all.

00:27:10 ◼   ► I only did it about 90 minutes ago,

00:27:11 ◼   ► and they include a graph."

00:27:13 ◼   ► So, yeah, I mean, I don't know what to make of this.

00:27:16 ◼   ► It seems like maybe this will get fixed in software.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Maybe? I don't know.

00:27:20 ◼   ► -Yeah, I don't recommend blocking the vents

00:27:22 ◼   ► on your computer, but as a fun experiment

00:27:24 ◼   ► that somebody else does, not me,

00:27:27 ◼   ► it is interesting that even blocking the fence

00:27:29 ◼   ► doesn't seem to increase the temperature much.

00:27:31 ◼   ► It's just so over-provisioned with cooling, it seems like.

00:27:34 ◼   ► There's like nothing you can do to make this thing hot,

00:27:36 ◼   ► and yet the fans, they keep spinning.

00:27:39 ◼   ► - It is a little suspicious that at this point,

00:27:41 ◼   ► now we are a couple of weeks out from release,

00:27:44 ◼   ► and I don't think anybody's gotten a weird statement

00:27:47 ◼   ► from Apple PR saying, oh, we'll tweak the fans

00:27:49 ◼   ► in the software update.

00:27:50 ◼   ► I haven't seen anything like that come by the news people,

00:27:53 ◼   ► So maybe this is just how it is.

00:27:56 ◼   ► But it just seems so odd to me

00:27:59 ◼   ► that they would ship something like this

00:28:00 ◼   ► with fan noise that is audible.

00:28:03 ◼   ► 'Cause obviously, and we're gonna get into this in a second,

00:28:05 ◼   ► like what does audible mean?

00:28:07 ◼   ► It's very variable.

00:28:09 ◼   ► It depends so much on people and on conditions,

00:28:12 ◼   ► but it just seems like a weird misstep.

00:28:16 ◼   ► And they've been so good about fan noise

00:28:21 ◼   ► with all their other recent models for years,

00:28:24 ◼   ► excepting the Intel laptops before,

00:28:26 ◼   ► but for all the desktops have been really quiet

00:28:29 ◼   ► for a long time, and all of the M1-based computers,

00:28:33 ◼   ► including the laptops, have been really,

00:28:35 ◼   ► it like ridiculously, amazingly quiet.

00:28:38 ◼   ► And so to have this chip come out,

00:28:40 ◼   ► and even the configuration with the M1 Max,

00:28:43 ◼   ► the same chip as in the high-end laptops,

00:28:46 ◼   ► even that configuration has audible fan noise

00:28:48 ◼   ► to a lot of people.

00:28:49 ◼   ► And so it just, it seems like something is,

00:28:52 ◼   ► something went wrong here.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And I have a hard time believing

00:28:56 ◼   ► that this is just how they designed it,

00:28:57 ◼   ► 'cause they've been so good otherwise.

00:29:00 ◼   ► - And then Acoustician Andrew Wade,

00:29:03 ◼   ► this is someone who is very smart with audio things.

00:29:07 ◼   ► Andrew Wade says, "Acoustician checking in

00:29:09 ◼   ► "on the span noise thing with some rules of thumb,

00:29:11 ◼   ► "since you sound a little unsure of the decibels thing.

00:29:14 ◼   ► "For noise level differences," according to Andrew,

00:29:17 ◼   ► "one to two decibels, the human ear

00:29:18 ◼   ► can't hear the difference. Three decibels, just about noticeable. Five decibels, clearly noticeable.

00:29:25 ◼   ► Ten decibels sounds about twice as loud. So a 25, 26, and 27 decibel fan will sound the same,

00:29:31 ◼   ► assuming of course one isn't making a weird hum or something. As for quote-unquote "audibility",

00:29:36 ◼   ► that depends on how loud the room is already that you're in, how close you are to the thing,

00:29:41 ◼   ► how old you are. You're hearing, especially at high frequencies, normally fades with age from about 20.

00:29:46 ◼   ► So I would probably, I as in Casey, would probably be able to hear fans that Jon can't, coincidentally.

00:29:51 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't know what you're complaining about, Jon.

00:29:54 ◼   ► But anyway, back to Andrew.

00:29:56 ◼   ► So is a 25--

00:29:57 ◼   ► Newsflash, I'll tell you why.

00:29:59 ◼   ► Because the frequency distribution of fan noise is not mostly in those very upper ranges that you lose.

00:30:05 ◼   ► Like, you know, like the teens, teen K hertz kind of range.

00:30:09 ◼   ► It's not those ranges that you're hearing.

00:30:11 ◼   ► It's broadband noise across many frequencies,

00:30:14 ◼   ► including most of the mid-range frequencies

00:30:17 ◼   ► that people tend to hear pretty well for a very long time.

00:30:19 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:30:20 ◼   ► So back to Andrew.

00:30:21 ◼   ► So as a 25 to 26 decibel fan quiet,

00:30:23 ◼   ► in almost all normal circumstances,

00:30:25 ◼   ► it's going to be inaudible.

00:30:27 ◼   ► Most offices are anything from 30 to 50 decibels.

00:30:29 ◼   ► Sitting one to one to one and a half meters from the studio,

00:30:33 ◼   ► you're never gonna be able to hear a 25 decibel fan.

00:30:35 ◼   ► Quiet recording studios are at about 20 to 25 decibels.

00:30:38 ◼   ► So in that highly unusual scenario,

00:30:40 ◼   ► You may hear it if you're close to it, maybe.

00:30:42 ◼   ► - Challenge accepted.

00:30:43 ◼   ► - So someone who is professionally trained in this field.

00:30:48 ◼   ► - Well, so I would say I am not an acoustician.

00:30:51 ◼   ► I am a computer nerd.

00:30:52 ◼   ► I know a little bit about audio,

00:30:53 ◼   ► but not as much as Andrew most likely does,

00:30:55 ◼   ► I hope, for somebody with that title.

00:30:57 ◼   ► So Andrew probably dramatically out qualifies me on this.

00:31:00 ◼   ► So that thing aside, we're clearly hearing

00:31:03 ◼   ► from lots of people, hey, subjectively,

00:31:05 ◼   ► I'm hearing these fans and they're loud,

00:31:08 ◼   ► or they're at least noticeable.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Most people are not saying like,

00:31:11 ◼   ► I can't believe how loud it is.

00:31:13 ◼   ► Most people are simply saying,

00:31:15 ◼   ► it's odd that I'm hearing the fan,

00:31:17 ◼   ► because on all these modern computers,

00:31:18 ◼   ► I haven't heard the fan.

00:31:19 ◼   ► It's weird, I'm hearing it on this one.

00:31:21 ◼   ► - But some people also characterize it as silent.

00:31:24 ◼   ► - Right, and anyway, I'm sitting here,

00:31:25 ◼   ► like I measured, I happen to have an SPL meter for reasons,

00:31:28 ◼   ► so I measured my office earlier tonight,

00:31:30 ◼   ► and my office hovers around 40 decibels at night,

00:31:33 ◼   ► which is, you know, right there in the middle of the range

00:31:35 ◼   ► Andrew said most offices are.

00:31:37 ◼   ► But if my office is 40 decibels,

00:31:39 ◼   ► I can hear quiet fans when they're on.

00:31:43 ◼   ► So are the measurements wrong?

00:31:46 ◼   ► Am I wrong?

00:31:47 ◼   ► Am I somehow magically hearing?

00:31:49 ◼   ► Probably not, my hearing not that good.

00:31:51 ◼   ► - When you have something that is a certain volume,

00:31:53 ◼   ► it's not like adding another thing

00:31:54 ◼   ► that is lesser volume doesn't count somehow

00:31:56 ◼   ► or cancels it out.

00:31:57 ◼   ► - Right, that's true.

00:31:58 ◼   ► - It just adds to the noise.

00:31:59 ◼   ► What we were just saying is if you don't find

00:32:01 ◼   ► the noise in your office deafening

00:32:03 ◼   ► with nothing turned on,

00:32:05 ◼   ► adding something, a noise source at that volume level

00:32:09 ◼   ► is not going to find it super duper offensive.

00:32:12 ◼   ► And I was, I think we were linked to

00:32:15 ◼   ► Panzarino's thing or something.

00:32:16 ◼   ► I just read something again today from somebody

00:32:18 ◼   ► who just offhandedly said,

00:32:19 ◼   ► "Oh, and the great thing is it's absolutely silent."

00:32:22 ◼   ► I know it's frustrating to hear us talk about this,

00:32:23 ◼   ► when none of us have one.

00:32:24 ◼   ► The shipment dates of these things are out into May or June.

00:32:27 ◼   ► I eventually will have one.

00:32:29 ◼   ► I wish I didn't have to wait until May or June,

00:32:32 ◼   ► but I did not place my order soon enough, so I am sorry.

00:32:35 ◼   ► But I will eventually have one,

00:32:37 ◼   ► and I'll tell you how it is.

00:32:38 ◼   ► and I do have the Mac Pro here,

00:32:41 ◼   ► which is probably the previous loudest Mac Apple makes.

00:32:44 ◼   ► So I'll be able to tell you what it's like,

00:32:46 ◼   ► but for now, none of us have one, hint, hint, Apple.

00:32:48 ◼   ► So we can't actually tell you firsthand,

00:32:50 ◼   ► but we're getting lots of different reports.

00:32:51 ◼   ► And that's why we're looking at all of these,

00:32:53 ◼   ► people doing measurements, people chiming in

00:32:54 ◼   ► about what is audible and what is not audible.

00:32:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I went and I saw the studio display

00:33:00 ◼   ► and the Mac studio in an Apple store,

00:33:01 ◼   ► and I'll be the first to tell you,

00:33:03 ◼   ► an Apple store is really loud.

00:33:04 ◼   ► I am not denying that, not in any way, shape or form.

00:33:06 ◼   ► But I did pick up the studio and this is I didn't have the presence of mind like stick my ear next to it

00:33:12 ◼   ► But I picked it up someone who to come over to you is put that down. What are you doing?

00:33:15 ◼   ► Alarm start going off. Yeah. Did you pick up the Mac Pro? They don't even have a Mac Pro. Nevermind

00:33:20 ◼   ► No, I actually asked if they had next ER and they were like no

00:33:23 ◼   ► Early, it's not done not a display model anyhow. But anyway, I picked it up and again

00:33:27 ◼   ► I'll be the first to tell you it was in an Apple Store Apple stores are not quiet

00:33:31 ◼   ► I understand that but in the context of an Apple Store

00:33:36 ◼   ► Even with the thing like I don't know a half a meter away from my head. It was

00:33:40 ◼   ► Completely silent again. I'm in an Apple store

00:33:43 ◼   ► I understand but I couldn't hear squat and the way people some people are talking is that it's like a freaking

00:33:49 ◼   ► You know

00:33:50 ◼   ► Saying it's a wind tunnel coming out of this thing

00:33:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and a bunch of people have sent us like someone tried to do like a YouTube video that is supposedly

00:33:57 ◼   ► Precisely calibrated so that if you play it on your iPhone at maximum iPhone volume

00:34:02 ◼   ► It exactly simulates the decibel level and sound of the studio

00:34:05 ◼   ► I have to say that there are too many links in that chain for me to believe that is remotely accurate

00:34:09 ◼   ► so although I did try it I

00:34:11 ◼   ► Again, reserve judgment judgment until I get one of these things to my house

00:34:15 ◼   ► Yeah, if only one of us got a review unit or all three of us imagine that that would be so convenient

00:34:20 ◼   ► That's all right

00:34:22 ◼   ► Renfred writes I wanted to point out that Apple actually provides noise measurements for their products on the technical specification

00:34:28 ◼   ► Pages here are a few examples and you can search for acoustic performance if you want to see exactly where it's listed

00:34:35 ◼   ► and Renfred has done the courtesy of doing the work for us.

00:34:39 ◼   ► I'm gonna rattle off some numbers.

00:34:40 ◼   ► The Mac Pro, 11 decibels, Mac Studio, 15.

00:34:44 ◼   ► MacBook Air, I don't know.

00:34:46 ◼   ► MacBook Air, three, MacBook Pro, three.

00:34:49 ◼   ► - Wait, hold on.

00:34:50 ◼   ► MacBook Air doesn't have any moving parts.

00:34:53 ◼   ► How, I mean, is it like a little electrical noise?

00:34:56 ◼   ► - I mean, maybe three decibels

00:34:58 ◼   ► is just the atom is vibrating.

00:35:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:35:02 ◼   ► - This is suspect.

00:35:03 ◼   ► - I mean, these are Apple's official,

00:35:05 ◼   ► at least Apple's official numbers, right?

00:35:07 ◼   ► - But like the Mac Pro 11 decibels, really?

00:35:10 ◼   ► That's it, that's all it makes?

00:35:11 ◼   ► - So let him finish the thing,

00:35:13 ◼   ► because obviously how you measure sound can vary,

00:35:16 ◼   ► like where you put the microphones, what, anyway, go on.

00:35:19 ◼   ► - All right, so Mac Pro 11, Mac Studio 15,

00:35:21 ◼   ► MacBook Air 3, MacBook Pro 3, iMac Pro 13,

00:35:25 ◼   ► which splits the difference

00:35:26 ◼   ► between the Studio and the Mac Pro.

00:35:28 ◼   ► The quote unquote best laptop ever made,

00:35:31 ◼   ► otherwise known as the 2015 MacBook Pro 6.

00:35:34 ◼   ► And so Renfred continues, "These results are quite different compared to the QuietMac site.

00:35:37 ◼   ► We don't know exactly how Apple's measuring these, but they noted a decent number of details,

00:35:43 ◼   ► including the fact that they are measuring from 'operator position'.

00:35:48 ◼   ► They compare idle versus wireless web mode, the latter being pretty pointless.

00:35:53 ◼   ► I know for a fact that the 2015 MacBook can get much louder than 6 decibels under load,

00:35:57 ◼   ► but given that the M1 Macs and Mac Pro tend to stay at idle, these numbers should be a

00:36:02 ◼   ► a pretty good comparison point if they're being measured consistently.

00:36:04 ◼   ► Yeah, you would think Apple has to have some sort of procedure like why would they list

00:36:08 ◼   ► this on their spec pages. Whatever Apple's procedure is, they must have like a standard

00:36:12 ◼   ► of like here's how you measure the sound of a Mac. Put it in this position where we expect

00:36:16 ◼   ► people to use it, but the microphones here, use these microphones in this environment

00:36:19 ◼   ► and measure the sound. I am not an acoustician, but maybe three decibels is just like the

00:36:23 ◼   ► electrical noise of like the various inverters and stuff that are inside there. Like is that

00:36:28 ◼   ► really really quiet? maybe that's like so low that it's below the level of human hearing?

00:36:33 ◼   ► because i'm sure i still experience this even in my old age but especially when i was younger

00:36:39 ◼   ► you can hear the sound of electronics that have quote-unquote no moving parts yeah right

00:36:45 ◼   ► there's no fans you can depending on how if there's a power supply or a transformer or

00:36:49 ◼   ► an inverter or lots of things can vibrate and make noise that ostensibly aren't supposed

00:36:54 ◼   ► to be moving parts, and it can be really bad.

00:36:57 ◼   ► My Power Mac G5 had a chirping power supply.

00:37:00 ◼   ► That power supply wasn't supposed to have

00:37:01 ◼   ► any moving parts in it, but it had parts that moved

00:37:03 ◼   ► so much they made chirping noises like a bird, right?

00:37:05 ◼   ► So it can happen, so that makes me think

00:37:07 ◼   ► maybe that's what's rearing the MacBook Air.

00:37:09 ◼   ► - Maybe, but these numbers are so,

00:37:11 ◼   ► first of all, they're so low,

00:37:13 ◼   ► that they're suspiciously low,

00:37:15 ◼   ► and also, relative to each other, they're very odd.

00:37:20 ◼   ► - I don't think they're suspiciously low,

00:37:22 ◼   ► because if they do operator,

00:37:23 ◼   ► like everybody on YouTube who's measuring the sound

00:37:25 ◼   ► is sticking a mic like behind the Mac studio.

00:37:28 ◼   ► Like they're literally putting a mic right,

00:37:30 ◼   ► like they're miking a drum kit or something like that,

00:37:32 ◼   ► putting a mic right where the fan outlet is.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Whereas Apple says they're doing it from operator position.

00:37:36 ◼   ► So operator position is those,

00:37:38 ◼   ► the output is facing away from you,

00:37:40 ◼   ► the thing is on the desk, it's like three feet away,

00:37:42 ◼   ► huge difference.

00:37:43 ◼   ► So I don't find the absolute value suspect at all.

00:37:46 ◼   ► The relative values, I don't know.

00:37:49 ◼   ► I haven't had enough of these machines to know.

00:37:51 ◼   ► Like again, maybe three decibels is below,

00:37:53 ◼   ► is just electrical noise.

00:37:55 ◼   ► iMac Pro at 13 and Mac Pro at 11, you're right, I kind of--

00:38:00 ◼   ► - That's the thing, like relative to each other,

00:38:02 ◼   ► it's very strange.

00:38:03 ◼   ► And to say, and if the Mac Pro is 11

00:38:06 ◼   ► and then the Mac Studio is 15,

00:38:09 ◼   ► like that's, again, then the Mac Studio is pretty loud.

00:38:12 ◼   ► - Well, we see previously about like a three decibel

00:38:17 ◼   ► difference or four decibel difference

00:38:18 ◼   ► being just about noticeable.

00:38:21 ◼   ► I notice a three decibel difference.

00:38:23 ◼   ► I make three decibel adjustments when I'm editing.

00:38:26 ◼   ► I know what that sounds like.

00:38:28 ◼   ► - So eventually, eventually, at the very least,

00:38:31 ◼   ► I eventually will get one of these in the distant future

00:38:34 ◼   ► and then when no one cares anymore,

00:38:35 ◼   ► I will tell you how it sounds.

00:38:36 ◼   ► - All right.

00:38:37 ◼   ► - So real time follow up from Mr. Jason Snell,

00:38:39 ◼   ► all I can say is that I noticed the sound.

00:38:41 ◼   ► I wasn't trying to hear it, I noticed it.

00:38:43 ◼   ► But it is very quiet and my office was entirely silent

00:38:46 ◼   ► when I noticed.

00:38:48 ◼   ► And then some of us just don't really care about fans

00:38:50 ◼   ► and in fact have a clickety clattering,

00:38:52 ◼   ► clattering, uh,

00:38:53 ◼   ► - You've got the same technology in the same room as you

00:38:55 ◼   ► and that thing is so loud.

00:38:56 ◼   ► It's the loudest fan having thing in my house.

00:38:59 ◼   ► - Ah, see I snuck them up on you.

00:39:00 ◼   ► - I don't get the vibrous laugh,

00:39:01 ◼   ► only when Casey says it.

00:39:02 ◼   ► He, I was, I was slow.

00:39:03 ◼   ► - No, he was delayed.

00:39:04 ◼   ► He was delayed.

00:39:05 ◼   ► - Does it sound like a vibrous laugh?

00:39:06 ◼   ► Like all the hard drives clicking, you know?

00:39:08 ◼   ► - Yup, that's exactly what it sounds like.

00:39:09 ◼   ► - Oh, I'm just backing up the time machine.

00:39:09 ◼   ► (phone ringing)

00:39:10 ◼   ► Yeah, that's, oh, I'm watching some Plex.

00:39:13 ◼   ► - Actually, that's how you know when they're failing.

00:39:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

00:39:15 ◼   ► - All right, moving right along,

00:39:16 ◼   ► that's enough about fan noise for now.

00:39:18 ◼   ► Anonymous writes in with regard to cellular and licensing.

00:39:21 ◼   ► So the context here is that, you know,

00:39:23 ◼   ► what happens if Apple were to release

00:39:25 ◼   ► a cellular equipped MacBook, which by the way,

00:39:28 ◼   ► Marco, did you see somebody was saying,

00:39:30 ◼   ► there was like a brief rumor that somebody was saying,

00:39:32 ◼   ► I think, that that's coming.

00:39:33 ◼   ► Maybe I made that up, I could swear I saw that.

00:39:35 ◼   ► But nevertheless.

00:39:36 ◼   ► - I mean, that would be nice.

00:39:37 ◼   ► I'm not holding my breath.

00:39:39 ◼   ► - Neither am I.

00:39:40 ◼   ► - I hope so much that they do it.

00:39:42 ◼   ► I think cellular might be my last outstanding laptop

00:39:47 ◼   ► feature request from Apple.

00:39:48 ◼   ► Like I love everything else about the current laptops.

00:39:50 ◼   ► I think they nailed pretty much everything else I want.

00:39:53 ◼   ► Besides, you know, I would always appreciate more ports,

00:39:56 ◼   ► but I'm very happy with these laptops.

00:39:58 ◼   ► I have pretty much no outstanding wishlist items

00:40:01 ◼   ► except cellular.

00:40:03 ◼   ► That's it, that's like the only thing left.

00:40:06 ◼   ► - I cannot say enough good things

00:40:08 ◼   ► about the laptops right now.

00:40:09 ◼   ► They are so freaking perfect.

00:40:10 ◼   ► But anyway, so we were talking about, you know, would it be a fortune for Apple to add,

00:40:14 ◼   ► you know, a cellular modem to one of these devices?

00:40:17 ◼   ► And so Anonymous writes, "I don't see a discussion about laptops, but at least for phones, Qualcomm

00:40:22 ◼   ► caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a $400 phone."

00:40:26 ◼   ► And they quote a thing from Reuters about this, because we were saying, you know, we

00:40:30 ◼   ► thought that the royalties owed to Qualcomm are a percentage of the cost of the device.

00:40:36 ◼   ► So if you have like a $5,000 laptop, that's a lot of money you owe Qualcomm.

00:40:40 ◼   ► And so Anonymous is pointing out that, oh no, at least for phones, it was capped at

00:40:44 ◼   ► $400.

00:40:45 ◼   ► And there were a couple of links about this.

00:40:47 ◼   ► And then what was also interesting, which I'd forgotten, is that Qualcomm collects royalties,

00:40:52 ◼   ► this is Anonymous again, Qualcomm collects royalties regardless of whether an OEM gets

00:40:56 ◼   ► the modem chip from Qualcomm or from someone else.

00:40:59 ◼   ► And this is quoted in a court document that we can put in the show notes as well.

00:41:04 ◼   ► And the quote from that document is, "OEMs are required to pay a per-unit license from

00:41:07 ◼   ► royalty to Qualcomm for its patent portfolios regardless of which company they choose to

00:41:11 ◼   ► source their chips from. Man, that's a racket. I want to get in on that.

00:41:16 ◼   ► That's just how patents work. Patents are a racket.

00:41:20 ◼   ► We don't actually know if there's a patent cross-licensing agreement with either Apple

00:41:24 ◼   ► and Qualcomm or with Intel's cellular modem thing that Apple bought. Lots of companies.

00:41:30 ◼   ► That's why patent cross-licensing agreements exist. Patents are terrible and stupid and

00:41:34 ◼   ► shouldn't exist, but they do, and because they do, it's this mutually assured destruction

00:41:38 ◼   ► thing where companies have their own portfolios of patents, and then they sort of enter these

00:41:43 ◼   ► agreements and say, "We won't annihilate you with our patents as long as you promise not

00:41:46 ◼   ► to annihilate us with your patents," and they enter a cross-licensing agreement that says,

00:41:50 ◼   ► "We let you use your patents as long as we can use your patents," and then we agree not

00:41:55 ◼   ► to sue each other.

00:41:57 ◼   ► And that's the only way anything gets done sometimes, because patents are so dumb, and

00:42:00 ◼   ► so many companies have them.

00:42:03 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm sure, I mean everything is patent-encumbered.

00:42:05 ◼   ► Everything that's in, you know, if you look at all the patents that apply to, you know,

00:42:09 ◼   ► the M1 chips, I'm sure there's tons of patents in there that Apple doesn't own that they

00:42:11 ◼   ► have to pay somebody for.

00:42:13 ◼   ► And Apple is making its own cell modems, and I'm sure there are patents in those cell modems

00:42:16 ◼   ► that Apple has to pay for.

00:42:17 ◼   ► I just don't know if there is an existing cross-licensing agreement between Apple and

00:42:22 ◼   ► Qualcomm or the ex-Intel cellular company, Qualcomm or whatever.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Yeah, patents are great.

00:42:27 ◼   ► You should do a podcast episode about that sometime, Jon.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

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00:44:12 ◼   ► - Deep, deep cuts.

00:44:17 ◼   ► This was when we were talking about open source

00:44:19 ◼   ► and funding open source and how so many people,

00:44:21 ◼   ► so many companies specifically are kind of riding

00:44:23 ◼   ► on the coattails of open source.

00:44:24 ◼   ► And I brought up Discourse,

00:44:26 ◼   ► which had put up a blog post if I recall correctly,

00:44:29 ◼   ► saying, "Oh, look at us. We fund open source." And they gave, you know, tens of thousands

00:44:34 ◼   ► of dollars to different open source projects. And at first, I was like, "Oh, that's great."

00:44:37 ◼   ► And then the more I thought about them, I thought, "Well, tens of thousands of dollars,

00:44:40 ◼   ► really? That's it?" Well, I got an email--I got an email from Jeff Atwood, who is one

00:44:44 ◼   ► of the co-founders of Discourse, if I'm not mistaken. And Jeff writes, "As far as open

00:44:48 ◼   ► source goes, our primary contribution is the Discourse code and almost all of its plug-ins.

00:44:53 ◼   ► One of our core values is to be 100% open source now and forever. So far, so good. We've

00:44:58 ◼   ► We've been a self-sustaining, profitable, fully remote, no-headquarters, open-source

00:45:01 ◼   ► company since 2012, almost a decade now.

00:45:04 ◼   ► We host 100+ forums for open-source projects free of charge as part of our free hosting

00:45:08 ◼   ► programs, which I'll put a link to in the show notes.

00:45:11 ◼   ► And then Jeff continues, "We also contribute hundreds of hours of upstream fixes to the

00:45:14 ◼   ► open-source that we rely on, and pay other open-source projects for work and/or subscriptions

00:45:19 ◼   ► whenever we can.

00:45:20 ◼   ► For example, until we built a native chat feature in Discourse, which is currently in

00:45:23 ◼   ► in early beta, we paid for a yearly enterprise subscription

00:45:26 ◼   ► to Mattermost, an open source web chat solution.

00:45:29 ◼   ► So that is, that's my kind of stuff.

00:45:31 ◼   ► That's the spirit I like to see.

00:45:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, and Jeff Atwood, I mean,

00:45:34 ◼   ► so those of you who don't know,

00:45:36 ◼   ► obviously, forever ago, he's been known

00:45:37 ◼   ► as his blog, Coding Horror,

00:45:40 ◼   ► but also he was one of the founders of Stack Overflow.

00:45:42 ◼   ► And I'm pretty sure the reason why Stack Overflow had,

00:45:46 ◼   ► since the beginning, it had that thing

00:45:48 ◼   ► where its content is all released

00:45:49 ◼   ► under an open license of some sort,

00:45:51 ◼   ► I forget the details,

00:45:53 ◼   ► but all the content on Stack Overflow

00:45:55 ◼   ► that everyone's writing is freely available

00:45:57 ◼   ► for other people to redistribute under certain terms.

00:46:00 ◼   ► And I'm pretty sure that's because of Jeff.

00:46:01 ◼   ► I think he was the one who championed that early on

00:46:04 ◼   ► because he has always been pretty strong

00:46:07 ◼   ► about this kind of open source stuff.

00:46:08 ◼   ► So yeah, I respect him a lot.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And that sounds all right to me.

00:46:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, and open source companies are like,

00:46:16 ◼   ► if you are a company that's trying to make money

00:46:18 ◼   ► from open source, again, the old discussion,

00:46:20 ◼   ► how can you make money?

00:46:20 ◼   ► You give people the source code.

00:46:21 ◼   ► they pay for support and you know they pay sometimes pay for hosting and pay for all

00:46:25 ◼   ► of this stuff but anyway if you are an open source company and you're doing that it behooves

00:46:28 ◼   ► you to also help support other companies that do the same thing because it doesn't help

00:46:34 ◼   ► you if you are the only company in the entire world that does open source stuff and every

00:46:38 ◼   ► other one goes out of business so if you are using some other open source component in

00:46:42 ◼   ► your open source throw some of your money their way right so just you know try to make

00:46:46 ◼   ► it an actual ecosystem that is self-sustaining, because you can't just have, you can't sort

00:46:51 ◼   ► of be, "I get all the free stuff from everybody, but I give nothing back," especially if you're

00:46:56 ◼   ► going to be an open source company.

00:46:57 ◼   ► You really have to sort of give and take.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Indeed, and then speaking of that, there was a really good blog post that was pointed out

00:47:03 ◼   ► to us.

00:47:04 ◼   ► This blog post is by Filippo Valsorda, and it discusses how to pay professional maintainers,

00:47:10 ◼   ► so people who, you know, their job, either literally or effectively, is to maintain open

00:47:15 ◼   ► source projects. And Filippo writes, or actually it's Filippo isn't it, I'm sorry.

00:47:20 ◼   ► Anyways, they write, "I believe that to successfully fund an open source project

00:47:25 ◼   ► a company needs to pay the maintainers, not people external to the project, pay

00:47:29 ◼   ► them real money in the order of what they could make as senior engineers, pay

00:47:33 ◼   ► for maintenance, not features, grants, governance, or support, and keep paying

00:47:37 ◼   ► them, assess performance at contract renewal time." So basically in so

00:47:41 ◼   ► many words kind of sort of treat them like a real employee and I think that's

00:47:45 ◼   ► good advice yeah and this is you know what I'm saying like oh the people

00:47:48 ◼   ► charge for support and stuff like that this this advice is I agree with but

00:47:52 ◼   ► it's so hard to sell inside the company because that's why these bullet points

00:47:56 ◼   ► are so you know shocking it's like you know paying the maintainers versus

00:48:00 ◼   ► people external it's that well that's not that shocking I suggested unless

00:48:04 ◼   ► you have like don't pay random people to help there are already people

00:48:07 ◼   ► maintaining this just pay those people because they already know how to do it

00:48:10 ◼   ► they're already the experts, but then pay for maintenance,

00:48:12 ◼   ► not features or governance or support.

00:48:14 ◼   ► No one wants to pay for maintenance.

00:48:16 ◼   ► No one ever wants to pay for maintenance on anything,

00:48:19 ◼   ► on cars, houses, but especially software.

00:48:22 ◼   ► If you're going to convince your company to pay for something,

00:48:24 ◼   ► they're like, well, what do we get for the money?

00:48:25 ◼   ► They'll add the feature that we want, right?

00:48:27 ◼   ► Or they'll give us commercial support.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Those are things you can buy as well,

00:48:30 ◼   ► but also someone has to maintain it.

00:48:33 ◼   ► There's nothing to give you support on

00:48:35 ◼   ► if no one maintains it, and paying for maintenance,

00:48:37 ◼   ► everybody hates that, but it's important.

00:48:39 ◼   ► and then keep paying them.

00:48:40 ◼   ► It's like, can we just pay them once?

00:48:41 ◼   ► Like, during Open Source week, we'll give them $1,000,

00:48:43 ◼   ► and we don't have to think about it again for a year?

00:48:45 ◼   ► That's not sustainable.

00:48:46 ◼   ► The year goes by, and maybe that thing, you know,

00:48:49 ◼   ► will have some bug in it that destroys your whole company

00:48:51 ◼   ► that no one fixes because you never

00:48:52 ◼   ► paid anyone to maintain it.

00:48:54 ◼   ► - And then tell us about software warfare, Jon.

00:48:56 ◼   ► - This is another, you know, we talked about

00:48:58 ◼   ► Open Source people doing things intentionally

00:49:00 ◼   ► 'cause they're cranky about not getting paid enough

00:49:02 ◼   ► to maintain their software.

00:49:03 ◼   ► This is like literal warfare, as in some people who are,

00:49:08 ◼   ► again, good old node.

00:49:08 ◼   ► Some people who are authors of a popular node package

00:49:12 ◼   ► intentionally updated it with some malware

00:49:15 ◼   ► that wipes your disk if you happen to have

00:49:16 ◼   ► a Russian or Belarusian IP address.

00:49:19 ◼   ► To sort of punish everyone who is in those countries

00:49:22 ◼   ► for the war in Ukraine, if you didn't notice

00:49:25 ◼   ► and didn't pin your dependencies and downloaded this thing

00:49:27 ◼   ► and it does a geo-IP lookup,

00:49:28 ◼   ► it tries to erase your hard drive.

00:49:30 ◼   ► And that is an example of absolutely, positively,

00:49:32 ◼   ► 100% malicious, intentional, on-purpose damage

00:49:35 ◼   ► from an open source thing.

00:49:37 ◼   ► And it gets back to the whole argument, you know,

00:49:39 ◼   ► whether it's an accidental bug or a malicious thing

00:49:41 ◼   ► or someone who's just having a bad day.

00:49:43 ◼   ► If this piece of software is super important

00:49:45 ◼   ► to your business, and if you care about your business,

00:49:48 ◼   ► you have to take some ownership of that

00:49:50 ◼   ► by either pinning the dependency to a version

00:49:52 ◼   ► that you have vetted or making sure

00:49:55 ◼   ► that you have some kind of relationship,

00:49:57 ◼   ► business relationship with the people who rank the software

00:49:59 ◼   ► so that you can have some recourse.

00:50:02 ◼   ► Like for example, if you had a support contract

00:50:04 ◼   ► and somebody did that, probably you could sue them and win.

00:50:06 ◼   ► But if you have no commercial or relationship

00:50:08 ◼   ► with this person whatsoever,

00:50:11 ◼   ► when something like this happens,

00:50:12 ◼   ► there's not much you can do about it.

00:50:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is something.

00:50:17 ◼   ► I don't even know what to make of this,

00:50:18 ◼   ► but it's fascinating what you can do

00:50:20 ◼   ► if people are nefarious.

00:50:23 ◼   ► So moving right along.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Marco, you've been busy.

00:50:27 ◼   ► - I have.

00:50:28 ◼   ► - So busy you couldn't add anything to the show notes.

00:50:30 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:50:32 ◼   ► - Too busy pushing out software.

00:50:34 ◼   ► - Right?

00:50:36 ◼   ► So all kidding aside, congratulations,

00:50:38 ◼   ► new Overcast release.

00:50:39 ◼   ► Can you walk us through it?

00:50:40 ◼   ► What's new, what was good, what was bad, what was ugly?

00:50:43 ◼   ► Tell us everything.

00:50:44 ◼   ► - I have just released the Overcast 2022.2 update

00:50:49 ◼   ► that includes a significant redesign,

00:50:52 ◼   ► probably the most significant redesign

00:50:53 ◼   ► that I have done in its history,

00:50:56 ◼   ► as well as a bunch of features

00:50:58 ◼   ► and little tweaks here and there.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And this was the result of roughly,

00:51:04 ◼   ► I don't know, five months of work.

00:51:05 ◼   ► However long ago Thanksgiving was,

00:51:07 ◼   ► like it was like the week before Thanksgiving

00:51:08 ◼   ► that I really started this, like in earnest.

00:51:11 ◼   ► It's been a lot of work,

00:51:12 ◼   ► and I think it turned out pretty good.

00:51:15 ◼   ► I'm really happy with it.

00:51:17 ◼   ► I think this is the first time

00:51:21 ◼   ► that I think something that I designed

00:51:25 ◼   ► is good looking in an app.

00:51:27 ◼   ► You know, I've always had programmer designs before,

00:51:31 ◼   ► and I've never thought that what I was releasing

00:51:33 ◼   ► was absolute crap at the time I was releasing it.

00:51:36 ◼   ► But in retrospect, my design skills were terrible

00:51:40 ◼   ► in my early years of making apps

00:51:42 ◼   ► and got a little bit better over time.

00:51:45 ◼   ► But I think this is the first time

00:51:47 ◼   ► I've finally reached the point where

00:51:50 ◼   ► I think looking at this current design,

00:51:53 ◼   ► most people will not look at this and say,

00:51:55 ◼   ► wow, you should really hire a real designer.

00:51:57 ◼   ► I mean, some people will, 'cause that's always the case.

00:52:00 ◼   ► Even people who have, quote, real designers

00:52:02 ◼   ► will have people telling them that.

00:52:04 ◼   ► But I'm proud of this in the sense that

00:52:07 ◼   ► I think this is something that is nicely designed

00:52:09 ◼   ► that I designed.

00:52:10 ◼   ► That's not a common thing, not a common feeling I've had

00:52:13 ◼   ► in my career so far.

00:52:15 ◼   ► So I'm very proud of that.

00:52:17 ◼   ► So secondly from that, I think I'm pushing the design

00:52:20 ◼   ► forward in a way that is a little bit more aggressive

00:52:24 ◼   ► than I've done.

00:52:24 ◼   ► Most of the time my designs have been fairly conservative

00:52:28 ◼   ► in the ways they would use system elements,

00:52:31 ◼   ► the colors and fonts they would use,

00:52:34 ◼   ► it was all fairly conservative.

00:52:36 ◼   ► Here again, I think I'm very aggressively pushing

00:52:39 ◼   ► into color with this update.

00:52:41 ◼   ► I have thicker line weights everywhere as well.

00:52:45 ◼   ► I'm using the SF Rounded font,

00:52:48 ◼   ► and I even customized the numerals

00:52:49 ◼   ► so that it has the alternative four, six, and nine glyphs,

00:52:53 ◼   ► because I thought that it made them look more fun

00:52:55 ◼   ► and improved legibility at small sizes.

00:52:59 ◼   ► So, a lot of that kind of design work of like,

00:53:02 ◼   ► pushing this into what I think looks much more modern

00:53:06 ◼   ► than it did before.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Because the previous overcast design,

00:53:09 ◼   ► and if you wanna see before and after shots,

00:53:10 ◼   ► I have this blog post that I did on my site,

00:53:13 ◼   ► and it shows certain screens side by side,

00:53:15 ◼   ► and you can see the difference like, you know,

00:53:16 ◼   ► night and day.

00:53:17 ◼   ► If you look at that, it's very clear

00:53:19 ◼   ► that the previous design was very much of its era,

00:53:23 ◼   ► which was largely unchanged since I launched it,

00:53:26 ◼   ► at least in the list screens.

00:53:27 ◼   ► The Now Playing screen has changed a bit over time,

00:53:29 ◼   ► but, oh, and by the way, this redesign doesn't include

00:53:31 ◼   ► the Now Playing screen, or some of the other screens

00:53:33 ◼   ► in the app, but I'll get to those next.

00:53:36 ◼   ► But the main area of redesign here was the home screen,

00:53:41 ◼   ► you know, the thing that lists all your podcasts

00:53:42 ◼   ► and playlists, and then a little bit on the episode screens,

00:53:46 ◼   ► like the playlists themselves or the podcast,

00:53:49 ◼   ► but there's more to come on the podcast screen.

00:53:51 ◼   ► Anyway, I did a lot here that dramatically looks different

00:53:55 ◼   ► than the way the app has looked on the home screen

00:53:58 ◼   ► since basically it launched eight years ago almost.

00:54:01 ◼   ► It launched in the summer of 2014,

00:54:02 ◼   ► so this is almost eight years ago.

00:54:04 ◼   ► That was in the era of iOS 7 design.

00:54:06 ◼   ► And so the entire app before this,

00:54:09 ◼   ► at least the list screens, looked very iOS 70.

00:54:14 ◼   ► And that's a very dated look now.

00:54:16 ◼   ► Now the rest of the screens in the app,

00:54:18 ◼   ► the playlist and podcast screens

00:54:20 ◼   ► and the now playing screen,

00:54:21 ◼   ► I had done incremental revisions to those over the years,

00:54:24 ◼   ► But the home screen that lists all your podcasts

00:54:26 ◼   ► and playlists, that screen looked so old before.

00:54:30 ◼   ► So that's really what I was aiming mostly at,

00:54:33 ◼   ► was that home screen.

00:54:34 ◼   ► And lots of stuff throughout the app

00:54:36 ◼   ► that happened to be affected, like when I changed the font,

00:54:38 ◼   ► that changes everything in the app.

00:54:39 ◼   ► I changed the orange for the first time ever.

00:54:41 ◼   ► It's now a different orange.

00:54:42 ◼   ► It's now actually iOS system orange.

00:54:46 ◼   ► The default sequence of colors and most of the colors

00:54:49 ◼   ► that are available in the color pickers,

00:54:50 ◼   ► those are iOS standard system colors

00:54:52 ◼   ► that they introduced, I think two or three years ago,

00:54:55 ◼   ► where iOS basically launched its own,

00:54:56 ◼   ► like here's a nice design palette

00:54:58 ◼   ► with colors that all harmonize together or whatever.

00:55:01 ◼   ► Throughout the entire app, I'm using SF symbols

00:55:04 ◼   ► instead of my own icons for almost everything.

00:55:07 ◼   ► I'm highly customizing some of them.

00:55:08 ◼   ► In many cases, I am using multiple SF symbols together,

00:55:12 ◼   ► or I'm taking an SF symbol's base icon

00:55:15 ◼   ► and like badging it in a custom way or things like that,

00:55:18 ◼   ► but for the most part, I'm using SF symbols

00:55:20 ◼   ► almost everywhere.

00:55:22 ◼   ► All of this, I think, makes the app look and feel

00:55:26 ◼   ► much more like a modern app than it did before,

00:55:29 ◼   ► where before, in many ways,

00:55:31 ◼   ► and especially on that home screen,

00:55:33 ◼   ► it just looked so iOS 70.

00:55:35 ◼   ► In the era of iOS 7, when I designed that home screen,

00:55:39 ◼   ► that was fine, but we've moved on quite a bit since then.

00:55:43 ◼   ► Other than design, this also introduced a bunch of features,

00:55:45 ◼   ► things like a Mark As Played button,

00:55:47 ◼   ► a bunch of special playlists,

00:55:49 ◼   ► But for the most part, it was mostly about the design.

00:55:53 ◼   ► And I'll get to the reception in a minute.

00:55:54 ◼   ► But before I get there, did I cover

00:55:56 ◼   ► what you wanted me to cover?

00:55:57 ◼   ► Like, what do you think of this?

00:55:59 ◼   ► Can you explain-- I know you've gone back and forth on this a

00:56:01 ◼   ► lot with Twitter.

00:56:02 ◼   ► I know Marcus played was the number one requested feature

00:56:04 ◼   ► since 1.0.

00:56:05 ◼   ► And I understand, like, tons of people want it and everything.

00:56:08 ◼   ► But I have to say, I'm in the camp of not understanding

00:56:11 ◼   ► the purpose or function of this.

00:56:13 ◼   ► So can you tell me what the masses that were demanding

00:56:15 ◼   ► a Marcus played feature, like, how they use it

00:56:17 ◼   ► and how it functions?

00:56:18 ◼   ► 'cause from my perspective with the,

00:56:19 ◼   ► I'm used to the overcast defaults as they've always been.

00:56:22 ◼   ► When a podcast completes,

00:56:23 ◼   ► I have it set to auto delete itself, right?

00:56:25 ◼   ► So marking is played, but not deleting,

00:56:29 ◼   ► I don't understand how that interacts with,

00:56:31 ◼   ► like what were people who wanted markets played?

00:56:33 ◼   ► What did they want from overcast

00:56:34 ◼   ► and what do they now have now that you've added it?

00:56:36 ◼   ► - Agreed.

00:56:37 ◼   ► - So since the beginning, I'm like you,

00:56:39 ◼   ► I let things play until they're done or until close enough,

00:56:42 ◼   ► then I fast forward to the end.

00:56:44 ◼   ► I even, I have a little behavioral trick

00:56:46 ◼   ► I've had in there.

00:56:47 ◼   ► I think maybe since 1.0, certainly for a very long time,

00:56:50 ◼   ► where if you fast forward 30, 30, 30, 30, 30,

00:56:54 ◼   ► and if you hit the end,

00:56:56 ◼   ► it ignores any further fast forward commands

00:56:59 ◼   ► until you stop fast forwarding for a second or two.

00:57:01 ◼   ► That way, if you wanna quickly reach the end,

00:57:04 ◼   ► you can just slam on fast forward from whatever you're in.

00:57:06 ◼   ► If you're in your car,

00:57:07 ◼   ► if you're on your headphone clicker, whatever it is,

00:57:08 ◼   ► you can just slam fast forward,

00:57:10 ◼   ► just spam click it basically,

00:57:12 ◼   ► and then when it reaches the end of the podcast,

00:57:13 ◼   ► it won't seek into the next one,

00:57:16 ◼   ► because that's a common thing that I would wanna do sometimes

00:57:18 ◼   ► and often I'd be like in a car or something.

00:57:20 ◼   ► I hear the ending theme song begin to something,

00:57:21 ◼   ► ah, skip, skip, skip, skip, and then once it stopped skipping

00:57:24 ◼   ► I knew I'd reach the end.

00:57:25 ◼   ► Anyway, ever since 1.0, my vision of deletion was

00:57:30 ◼   ► I would hit the end in some form and it would delete

00:57:33 ◼   ► and that would be it.

00:57:34 ◼   ► And I never thought, I mean it did track

00:57:37 ◼   ► whether something had reached the end,

00:57:39 ◼   ► so it was tracking played status since the beginning,

00:57:42 ◼   ► but it never had a button that you could make it

00:57:44 ◼   ► say it was played.

00:57:46 ◼   ► You could delete it, but deleting doesn't mean

00:57:49 ◼   ► mark as played.

00:57:50 ◼   ► It would get rid of it, but it would not show

00:57:52 ◼   ► that word played in the description

00:57:55 ◼   ► unless you actually played it 'til the end.

00:57:57 ◼   ► And the only way to get it there quickly,

00:57:59 ◼   ► like if you saw an episode of this

00:58:01 ◼   ► and you wanted it to be marked as played,

00:58:03 ◼   ► you would have to open it up, seek to the end,

00:58:06 ◼   ► let it hit the end.

00:58:07 ◼   ► You also, by the way, you also can't seek to the end

00:58:09 ◼   ► by dragging, that's another intentional

00:58:10 ◼   ► little behavioral thing.

00:58:11 ◼   ► If you drag the slider all the way to the right,

00:58:13 ◼   ► it will seek to 10 seconds before the end.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Now, you could drag all the way to the right

00:58:17 ◼   ► and then hit seek forward,

00:58:18 ◼   ► that will hit it right to the end.

00:58:19 ◼   ► Anyway, so this is also,

00:58:22 ◼   ► you know, these are ways people were doing this

00:58:24 ◼   ► who wanted to do this.

00:58:25 ◼   ► Now-- - But when you say

00:58:26 ◼   ► it would be shown as played--

00:58:28 ◼   ► - Yes. - If it is deleted,

00:58:30 ◼   ► or is this for like, if it was streaming?

00:58:31 ◼   ► Like, where would you see the word played displayed

00:58:35 ◼   ► on an episode that you no longer have?

00:58:37 ◼   ► Like, you notice that you're tracking it,

00:58:38 ◼   ► so you can know that like, they have played it.

00:58:40 ◼   ► but when I go to the end of a show naturally,

00:58:44 ◼   ► it gets deleted, presumably internally in your database

00:58:46 ◼   ► you mark it as played, how does that manifest?

00:58:48 ◼   ► How do I ever see that again?

00:58:49 ◼   ► - Progress/played and deleted are two separate values

00:58:52 ◼   ► in the database, and the way it manifests itself is

00:58:56 ◼   ► if you're looking at the list of episodes

00:58:58 ◼   ► of all episodes of a podcast,

00:59:00 ◼   ► like if you go into the podcast screen,

00:59:01 ◼   ► you hit the all tab, and you see all episodes

00:59:03 ◼   ► of that podcast, historically you will see

00:59:05 ◼   ► which ones you have actually played,

00:59:07 ◼   ► and the rest that are dimmed out are just deleted.

00:59:10 ◼   ► So the reason why people wanted this

00:59:13 ◼   ► is that a lot of times people will selectively

00:59:16 ◼   ► play only certain episodes of a podcast.

00:59:20 ◼   ► Or they will want to go back and replay a podcast,

00:59:23 ◼   ► or they will want to,

00:59:24 ◼   ► if they come to Overcast from another app,

00:59:27 ◼   ► maybe they wanna indicate where they are,

00:59:30 ◼   ► like where they've listened up to,

00:59:32 ◼   ► by marking certain episodes as play

00:59:34 ◼   ► that they've already heard.

00:59:35 ◼   ► So those are the major use cases for this.

00:59:37 ◼   ► And in those cases, they want that all list

00:59:40 ◼   ► to properly represent which ones they have played

00:59:43 ◼   ► and which ones they have merely deleted

00:59:45 ◼   ► or not ever listened to.

00:59:48 ◼   ► So that's the demand side of it.

00:59:50 ◼   ► And I don't really work that way when I'm listening to stuff.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And that's why I never really saw that need.

00:59:55 ◼   ► But literally since the beginning,

00:59:56 ◼   ► not only has this been a constant request,

01:00:00 ◼   ► but people would write in not saying,

01:00:03 ◼   ► hey, could you please add this feature,

01:00:05 ◼   ► but saying, where is this feature?

01:00:07 ◼   ► as if they, it's so fundamental to them that of course this feature would exist,

01:00:11 ◼   ► they assume it must exist and they aren't finding it. Or it's a bug in my app that somehow it's not

01:00:16 ◼   ► displaying. That's how fundamental people have thought this feature is.

01:00:19 ◼   ► - I feel like I just blue-screen. This is the antithesis of how I personally go through and

01:00:25 ◼   ► listen to podcasts. Like, I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm not saying that I'm right and they're

01:00:28 ◼   ► wrong, it's just, this never would have crossed my mind in a trillion years. Like, to go surfing

01:00:33 ◼   ► through the all episodes list and making decisions based on what you have or have not played.

01:00:38 ◼   ► I conceptually understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, but this is so foreign

01:00:43 ◼   ► to me that this is how people choose to listen to podcasts.

01:00:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is why a lot of the things I've added or changed in this version were

01:00:51 ◼   ► about trying to accommodate more usage patterns than just the way I do things. I've always

01:00:57 ◼   ► designed the app primarily for me, and if I can accommodate other people relatively

01:01:02 ◼   ► easily great, but it's always been designed to fit my mental model of how I listen to

01:01:07 ◼   ► things. But there's always been lots of other people who use it who don't use things the

01:01:11 ◼   ► way I do. Like, I use playlists. I almost never play a podcast by going to the podcast

01:01:16 ◼   ► screen and then playing it from there. I'm almost always playing it from a playlist screen.

01:01:21 ◼   ► But yet, there's a lot of people who never use playlists or very rarely use them and

01:01:25 ◼   ► only ever play from the podcast screen. So there's always been these divides of how people

01:01:29 ◼   ► use it, it's such a fundamental workflow for people, like how they play and manage their

01:01:34 ◼   ► podcasts that there's lots of different ways that lots of different people want to use

01:01:37 ◼   ► this.

01:01:38 ◼   ► So like the features I added, I added the ability to have special playlist types that

01:01:43 ◼   ► would show you episodes that are in progress, episodes that are downloaded, or all episodes

01:01:48 ◼   ► that you have starred.

01:01:50 ◼   ► In practice, I personally need none of those things, and I don't intend to actually use

01:01:55 ◼   ► I might have the starred list here and there

01:01:59 ◼   ► if I wanna look up something again,

01:02:00 ◼   ► but for the most part, I don't need any of those things.

01:02:03 ◼   ► But they were very highly demanded features as well.

01:02:06 ◼   ► Because a lot of people, the way their workflow works,

01:02:09 ◼   ► they wanna know which ones are in progress.

01:02:12 ◼   ► Or they wanna know only which ones are downloaded,

01:02:14 ◼   ► like if they're on a plane or something.

01:02:15 ◼   ► Or if they have some kind of weird

01:02:16 ◼   ► data restriction situation going on.

01:02:18 ◼   ► So there's all these needs that I've been hearing about

01:02:20 ◼   ► over and over and over again from my user base

01:02:23 ◼   ► for a very long time.

01:02:24 ◼   ► That's why I added these things.

01:02:26 ◼   ► And Marcus played was just so incredibly popularly requested,

01:02:31 ◼   ► so frequently requested slash demanded it so frequently,

01:02:36 ◼   ► I decided not only to add it, but to add it prominently.

01:02:39 ◼   ► That's why it has its own button on the toolbar

01:02:41 ◼   ► next to the delete button.

01:02:43 ◼   ► It's that demanded.

01:02:44 ◼   ► That's how many people wanted this over such a long time

01:02:47 ◼   ► that it had to be a top level feature right there,

01:02:50 ◼   ► very visible right next to delete.

01:02:52 ◼   ► I mean, I hear you, but it's just like I said,

01:02:54 ◼   ► I'm blue screening.

01:02:55 ◼   ► It just seems so bananas to me,

01:02:57 ◼   ► but whatever makes people happy.

01:02:59 ◼   ► - I mean, you can see, if you look in our chat right now,

01:03:00 ◼   ► our live chat, everyone's saying how they listen to podcasts

01:03:02 ◼   ► and it's all different.

01:03:03 ◼   ► Everyone has different ways that they want these features

01:03:05 ◼   ► to work or different subsets of these features

01:03:07 ◼   ► that they want to use.

01:03:09 ◼   ► Half the people are like, why do you need that?

01:03:11 ◼   ► The other half are like, how do you not need that?

01:03:12 ◼   ► Like, it's just, this is just how this market goes.

01:03:15 ◼   ► And so, the more versatile my app can be

01:03:19 ◼   ► without ruining itself and getting too complicated,

01:03:23 ◼   ► then I think the better it is business-wise to do it.

01:03:26 ◼   ► Now, the reception to the design, I think,

01:03:29 ◼   ► shows quite a bit of,

01:03:31 ◼   ► maybe not discrepancy, but different preferences, let's say.

01:03:38 ◼   ► - So tell me more about that.

01:03:39 ◼   ► - When I was designing this,

01:03:42 ◼   ► I remember I was sitting in a hotel room.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Tiff and I had taken a vacation right before Thanksgiving

01:03:49 ◼   ► for a few days, just in upstate New York.

01:03:51 ◼   ► And she had this idea, and forgive me,

01:03:54 ◼   ► I've now told this story on three different

01:03:57 ◼   ► podcast interviews that are all coming out

01:03:58 ◼   ► around the same time, so I'm sorry if you've heard it before

01:04:00 ◼   ► slash we'll hear it again.

01:04:02 ◼   ► But basically, she was looking through an app,

01:04:05 ◼   ► I forget which app, it might have been Pinterest, I think.

01:04:07 ◼   ► And she had these pill-shaped oval things

01:04:11 ◼   ► that were showing topics or whatever,

01:04:13 ◼   ► and she's like, look, this is what modern apps look like.

01:04:18 ◼   ► this is what people expect a new modern app to look like.

01:04:22 ◼   ► And I saw those pills and I'm like, huh, I think,

01:04:26 ◼   ► 'cause for a while I'd been thinking I want to,

01:04:28 ◼   ► in the redesign I was thinking like I wanted

01:04:29 ◼   ► to make playlists look better somehow.

01:04:32 ◼   ► And I played with all sorts of ways to do it.

01:04:34 ◼   ► I played with just giving them their own album artwork

01:04:36 ◼   ► on the side, like their own little like round rect

01:04:38 ◼   ► on the left side, matching up with like the specs

01:04:41 ◼   ► of the album artwork or the podcast below them.

01:04:43 ◼   ► And I've tried different things over time with,

01:04:46 ◼   ► like how I represent them in CarPlay.

01:04:48 ◼   ► if you've ever seen them in car play,

01:04:48 ◼   ► I did like a two by two grid of the artwork

01:04:51 ◼   ► of the episodes that were in there,

01:04:52 ◼   ► and I was trying to render that on the home screen,

01:04:55 ◼   ► but it was looking really busy and ugly.

01:04:57 ◼   ► I was trying to figure out what do I want playlists

01:04:59 ◼   ► to look like, and I couldn't nail it in my head.

01:05:02 ◼   ► I couldn't figure out like, everything I was trying,

01:05:05 ◼   ► everything I would think of,

01:05:06 ◼   ► like the little two by two artwork grid,

01:05:08 ◼   ► I tried rendering the artwork in a little stack

01:05:10 ◼   ► as the icon for the playlist,

01:05:11 ◼   ► and everything I tried just looked busy or ugly or both.

01:05:14 ◼   ► I couldn't make it work, I couldn't nail it yet.

01:05:17 ◼   ► And then when she showed me those pill shapes,

01:05:18 ◼   ► I'm like, wait a minute.

01:05:20 ◼   ► If I make them pill shaped,

01:05:22 ◼   ► that changes how they look from the podcast below them

01:05:27 ◼   ► in a very prominent way.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And that would enable me to have more customization.

01:05:32 ◼   ► And I was thinking maybe I could add icons.

01:05:35 ◼   ► Maybe I could add custom colors.

01:05:37 ◼   ► You know, people, I've seen for years,

01:05:39 ◼   ► people have been hacking this in bad ways.

01:05:41 ◼   ► They've been, you know, 'cause before, you know,

01:05:43 ◼   ► before you couldn't have custom colors or icons

01:05:46 ◼   ► or custom ordering of playlists.

01:05:48 ◼   ► Those are all new.

01:05:49 ◼   ► And so to get custom ordering,

01:05:51 ◼   ► a lot of people have shown me screenshots over time

01:05:53 ◼   ► where they would name the playlists like one, workout,

01:05:56 ◼   ► two, running, that kind of thing.

01:05:58 ◼   ► And so they would prefix them with numbers.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And to achieve icons, many people would just add emoji

01:06:04 ◼   ► to the front of them.

01:06:05 ◼   ► And I don't know, Casey, if you've heard about emoji.

01:06:07 ◼   ► - I should look into that. - Yeah, yeah.

01:06:09 ◼   ► So people have been doing these hacks

01:06:11 ◼   ► to get around these limitations,

01:06:13 ◼   ► but I thought I can do a much better job of this

01:06:15 ◼   ► and make it much nicer if I first have manual reordering,

01:06:19 ◼   ► 'cause that's clearly a need that people have requested

01:06:22 ◼   ► a lot over time, and then second,

01:06:24 ◼   ► if I can have playlists have their own custom

01:06:26 ◼   ► visual identity that people can just set whatever they want.

01:06:28 ◼   ► So custom icon, custom color, so.

01:06:31 ◼   ► That's kinda where that came from.

01:06:33 ◼   ► And I played with it and I thought,

01:06:34 ◼   ► and this is, you know, people who have been,

01:06:37 ◼   ► you know, paying attention to, I hate to say it this way,

01:06:40 ◼   ► but to my fashion preferences recently,

01:06:42 ◼   ► I've said over time, I'm so tired of black computers

01:06:46 ◼   ► and black t-shirts.

01:06:47 ◼   ► I did that for a very long time,

01:06:49 ◼   ► I did only that for a very long time,

01:06:51 ◼   ► and now I'm like exploding with color,

01:06:53 ◼   ► like just give me all the colors.

01:06:55 ◼   ► Like I recently changed my Apple Watch strap

01:06:57 ◼   ► from white to yellow, like I'm all colorful now.

01:07:00 ◼   ► And so I wanted to bring some of that energy into the app.

01:07:04 ◼   ► It was a very aggressive design, and I intentionally,

01:07:07 ◼   ► even during the beta testing, I played around a little bit

01:07:10 ◼   ► with these things, but I decided I'm gonna force color

01:07:14 ◼   ► upon people by default.

01:07:15 ◼   ► Now, if they wanna remove some of that color, they can.

01:07:18 ◼   ► It's customizable.

01:07:20 ◼   ► I have had feature requests for people saying,

01:07:22 ◼   ► "Can you please make gray a color?"

01:07:24 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:07:25 ◼   ► And frankly, I'm not going to do that for lots of reasons.

01:07:28 ◼   ► Number one, it's hideous.

01:07:29 ◼   ► Number two, I use gray to indicate an empty state

01:07:32 ◼   ► for the playlist, so it wouldn't work very well,

01:07:35 ◼   ► and I don't intend to do it.

01:07:36 ◼   ► But by default, if you wanna go in there

01:07:39 ◼   ► and set every color to one color you can.

01:07:42 ◼   ► But by default, I actually created a default color

01:07:44 ◼   ► sequence that if you have multiple playlists,

01:07:46 ◼   ► they all follow the same color sequence by default

01:07:48 ◼   ► as you add them or as it runs first.

01:07:50 ◼   ► Because I want people to try some color, because it's nice.

01:07:56 ◼   ► And we've had a lot of dark times in the world

01:07:59 ◼   ► in recent years.

01:08:00 ◼   ► And maybe this will help a little bit.

01:08:02 ◼   ► People feel a little bit nicer.

01:08:03 ◼   ► And I think that's one of the reasons why--

01:08:05 ◼   ► I don't know if you've noticed-- colors are in fashion right now.

01:08:08 ◼   ► and not just like a color, but just being colorful

01:08:11 ◼   ► is kind of in fashion right now.

01:08:13 ◼   ► I hate that I'm telling you fashion advice,

01:08:14 ◼   ► but here, this is the world we're in now.

01:08:16 ◼   ► So anyway, the reaction to this, I was nervous about

01:08:21 ◼   ► because it's a very big, bold change.

01:08:25 ◼   ► One thing that's interesting is that

01:08:28 ◼   ► some of the reaction has been,

01:08:30 ◼   ► why did you make everything so big?

01:08:32 ◼   ► Now if you look at my screenshot comparisons,

01:08:37 ◼   ► Everything is exactly the same height.

01:08:40 ◼   ► Playlists, podcasts, and episodes

01:08:43 ◼   ► are all exactly the same height as they were before.

01:08:45 ◼   ► I think it's 88 points, something like that.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Exactly the same height.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Actually, playlists are, when you're in a playlist view,

01:08:53 ◼   ► you actually have a few pixels of additional width

01:08:56 ◼   ► for the title than you had before,

01:08:57 ◼   ► because the way the artwork margins work out,

01:08:59 ◼   ► you actually have more width for the title. (laughs)

01:09:02 ◼   ► But anyway, people view it as big and bold,

01:09:06 ◼   ► because before it was so sparse, especially Playlist.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Playlist before on the home screen were just black text

01:09:14 ◼   ► in the middle of a giant floating,

01:09:15 ◼   ► floating in the middle of a giant cell.

01:09:17 ◼   ► Like there was, it looked like,

01:09:18 ◼   ► when I look back on it now,

01:09:19 ◼   ► it looks like a rendering error.

01:09:20 ◼   ► I'm like, they were so basic before.

01:09:23 ◼   ► If you make things more colorful and put borders around them,

01:09:27 ◼   ► people will think they're bigger even though they're not.

01:09:29 ◼   ► So that's fun.

01:09:30 ◼   ► Anyway, so I was very confident launching this

01:09:34 ◼   ► that I had made something good,

01:09:36 ◼   ► that I was very proud of the design

01:09:38 ◼   ► and I was ready to assert to the world if necessary,

01:09:41 ◼   ► no, trust me, this is good.

01:09:42 ◼   ► And if you don't like it, well, I'm sorry,

01:09:44 ◼   ► but I'm not gonna bow to any demands to change it back.

01:09:49 ◼   ► This is the way forward.

01:09:52 ◼   ► I put it out there first to the beta group

01:09:56 ◼   ► and the beta group was pretty positive about it.

01:10:00 ◼   ► There were one or two people out of,

01:10:03 ◼   ► I had a couple of thousand maybe,

01:10:05 ◼   ► who were like, I really don't like this,

01:10:06 ◼   ► I wanna go back to the original.

01:10:08 ◼   ► But for the most part, it was a relatively small percentage.

01:10:10 ◼   ► Everyone else was pretty positive about it.

01:10:13 ◼   ► And then I gave out press invitations

01:10:16 ◼   ► to look at it and everything,

01:10:18 ◼   ► and I knew press was all gonna hit it once

01:10:20 ◼   ► when it released last Friday.

01:10:24 ◼   ► The press was all set for a certain time,

01:10:26 ◼   ► and I thought, here we go,

01:10:28 ◼   ► we're gonna see what the press says.

01:10:29 ◼   ► I have no idea, I'm confident, I think this is very good,

01:10:33 ◼   ► But we'll see.

01:10:34 ◼   ► And the press comes out,

01:10:36 ◼   ► and actually, it was pretty universally positive.

01:10:39 ◼   ► So I'm like, all right, here we go.

01:10:41 ◼   ► I'm riding high now.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Here we go.

01:10:44 ◼   ► And then it starts getting out to all the users

01:10:48 ◼   ► over that overall Friday.

01:10:51 ◼   ► And I'm nervous as heck because I'm watching my servers,

01:10:53 ◼   ► thinking on first run of the new version,

01:10:57 ◼   ► the playlists assign themselves colors,

01:10:59 ◼   ► and then they have to sync those changes to the servers.

01:11:02 ◼   ► So on first run, everyone's playlists are going to have to sync new changes to the servers.

01:11:06 ◼   ► So I'm watching the servers like a hawk like, Oh my God, is this going to explode?

01:11:09 ◼   ► What's going on?

01:11:10 ◼   ► Like, I even I approved it at like two in the morning, or like midnight to go live at

01:11:14 ◼   ► midnight, just so that most of those sinks would happen, most of those first things would

01:11:18 ◼   ► happen overnight, when the server's traffic is low, you know, but anyway, so I'm watching

01:11:25 ◼   ► the press, I'm watching the servers, I'm really nervous, I start seeing all the reactions

01:11:28 ◼   ► on Twitter and they are amazingly positive. Everyone who's getting the update, they're

01:11:33 ◼   ► all tweeting on Twitter, "Oh my God, this is great. Wow, look at that." Everyone's

01:11:38 ◼   ► calling it words I don't even understand, like whatever young people say that when things

01:11:41 ◼   ► are good that I saw some of those words fly by and I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing."

01:11:45 ◼   ► I'm like, "I'm even getting young people to think it's good." I mean, probably not

01:11:48 ◼   ► all of them because it's still a podcast I've made by a 40-year-old guy, a programmer.

01:11:53 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm getting all these things, all these praise. And so for the most part,

01:11:58 ◼   ► it's been very, very good.

01:11:59 ◼   ► However, the people who don't like redesigns

01:12:03 ◼   ► tend to be a little bit slower on the uptake

01:12:05 ◼   ► of updates for apps.

01:12:07 ◼   ► So, days one, two, and three were fantastic.

01:12:12 ◼   ► Now that it's like day six or whatever,

01:12:15 ◼   ► a lot, I'm getting a lot of bad emails.

01:12:19 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:12:20 ◼   ► But, you know, when I look at the proportions,

01:12:23 ◼   ► it is universally very, very well received.

01:12:27 ◼   ► And I look at my, of course I'm getting one, two star reviews as well from people who are

01:12:33 ◼   ► angry but if you look at the average still of new reviews coming in, it's still very

01:12:38 ◼   ► good.

01:12:39 ◼   ► So anyway, please, I would encourage you all, I don't ask this very often, if you want to

01:12:45 ◼   ► rate Overcast, this is a good time to do it because right now I'm at maximum anger from

01:12:50 ◼   ► those people who don't like things to be changed.

01:12:53 ◼   ► But this is not to say anything is dire.

01:12:56 ◼   ► My average is still very good.

01:12:58 ◼   ► I just, it would be nice to have a little bit of goodness

01:13:02 ◼   ► coming into my inbox for the next couple of days

01:13:04 ◼   ► as the slower and more grumpy group gets in.

01:13:09 ◼   ► Let me see, I just deleted one a few minutes ago.

01:13:13 ◼   ► This was amazing.

01:13:15 ◼   ► Oh, I can't find it.

01:13:15 ◼   ► Anyway, it was like a one word thing.

01:13:17 ◼   ► It was, the subject was like, it's poop.

01:13:19 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:13:21 ◼   ► And there was an empty body.

01:13:22 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:13:24 ◼   ► - Nice.

01:13:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, so that's the caliber of things I'm getting.

01:13:27 ◼   ► I'm getting nicer ones too, but they're just like,

01:13:29 ◼   ► can we please have a switch to switch back

01:13:31 ◼   ► to the old design?

01:13:32 ◼   ► I was like, no.

01:13:33 ◼   ► - Did you reset the ratings for this version?

01:13:35 ◼   ► - No, I don't think I've ever done that.

01:13:38 ◼   ► - 'Cause I guess I've never rated overcast,

01:13:39 ◼   ► I just went and rated it.

01:13:41 ◼   ► - Thank you.

01:13:41 ◼   ► - I said it was poop.

01:13:43 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:13:46 ◼   ► This is my turn to apologize for being a bad beta tester,

01:13:48 ◼   ► because part of the reason we forgot

01:13:52 ◼   ► about the new Overcast version,

01:13:53 ◼   ► as well as Casey and I have been using it forever,

01:13:54 ◼   ► because we've been on the beta,

01:13:56 ◼   ► and we're just kind of used to it by now.

01:13:58 ◼   ► It was the new version for us like months ago, right?

01:14:01 ◼   ► - By the way, please everybody out there,

01:14:03 ◼   ► please don't, as a joke, review Overcast and say it's poop.

01:14:07 ◼   ► Like, I know that sounds like a good--

01:14:09 ◼   ► - Not funny, not funny.

01:14:11 ◼   ► - In your head, that might sound like a good joke.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Trust me, it won't be received that way

01:14:15 ◼   ► by the other people who are looking at the Overcast page

01:14:18 ◼   ► trying to decide whether they want to download this app

01:14:20 ◼   ► or not and don't know us and don't know you

01:14:21 ◼   ► and don't know me.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Trust me.

01:14:24 ◼   ► Let's all laugh at that joke in our heads right now

01:14:26 ◼   ► and then not do it.

01:14:27 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:14:28 ◼   ► Sorry, go ahead, Jon.

01:14:30 ◼   ► So looking at the--

01:14:31 ◼   ► I was thinking I've been using the beta version for so long.

01:14:33 ◼   ► And for the most part, I just continued

01:14:35 ◼   ► to use it the way I used it or whatever.

01:14:37 ◼   ► But then I realized when you do a release

01:14:39 ◼   ► and you do the blog post that explains all the features,

01:14:42 ◼   ► I kind of wish you'd do that at the beginning of the beta

01:14:44 ◼   ► instead of at the end.

01:14:45 ◼   ► Because I read the blog post and I

01:14:46 ◼   ► learn things about the application

01:14:48 ◼   ► I've been using for months.

01:14:49 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, I didn't know what had to be--

01:14:50 ◼   ► I mean, again, as that gets back to like,

01:14:51 ◼   ► if you don't use those features

01:14:53 ◼   ► or it's not the way you work with things,

01:14:54 ◼   ► I'm not gonna go hunting for them, right?

01:14:56 ◼   ► So I just look at it and says,

01:14:57 ◼   ► "Can I continue to use Overcast the way I've always used it?"

01:14:59 ◼   ► And you know, "Oh, it looks different

01:15:00 ◼   ► "and it does a few more things."

01:15:02 ◼   ► And you know, I noticed the mark is played button

01:15:04 ◼   ► or whatever, like, "Oh, that's not for me."

01:15:07 ◼   ► But then there's other things that it can do.

01:15:08 ◼   ► And so I'm a bad beta tester in that

01:15:10 ◼   ► the only time I actually really start exploring that

01:15:12 ◼   ► is after you release it and do the blog post

01:15:14 ◼   ► that explains all the features

01:15:15 ◼   ► that I should have been seeing.

01:15:16 ◼   ► And yes, I do look at the test flight notes,

01:15:18 ◼   ► but they're not always that informative,

01:15:19 ◼   ► certainly not as informative as the blog post.

01:15:23 ◼   ► And so the second thing is, now, for example,

01:15:26 ◼   ► customizing playlists.

01:15:28 ◼   ► I just accepted the colors and the names that you picked,

01:15:30 ◼   ► and I'm like, they look nice, it's fine.

01:15:32 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:15:33 ◼   ► But you can customize these, you can change the colors,

01:15:35 ◼   ► you can change the icons, huh?

01:15:37 ◼   ► And so after it's released officially,

01:15:39 ◼   ► and I learned that from your blog post,

01:15:41 ◼   ► I go in, I'm like, oh, I should change some of the,

01:15:43 ◼   ► let me see if I can change some of the icons.

01:15:45 ◼   ► And of course, you talked about the SF symbols thing

01:15:47 ◼   ► and everything, so I saw this huge list in there.

01:15:49 ◼   ► And now I'd like to do, in the grand tradition

01:15:52 ◼   ► of any of us releasing software on the show,

01:15:56 ◼   ► I need to do my real-time bug report.

01:15:57 ◼   ► So please--

01:15:58 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:15:59 ◼   ► Please take out your iPhone now.

01:16:02 ◼   ► Take out your iPhone now and go to a playlist and edit it.

01:16:07 ◼   ► Go to playlist settings and then tap on icon, please.

01:16:10 ◼   ► Tell me when you're all there.

01:16:11 ◼   ► - Okay.

01:16:12 ◼   ► - All right, so this is what I did.

01:16:13 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, look at all these icons.

01:16:14 ◼   ► And I love that you have the search

01:16:15 ◼   ► and I knew that you did it based

01:16:17 ◼   ► on the accessibility data or whatever,

01:16:18 ◼   ► so you can do a text search or whatever.

01:16:20 ◼   ► So just type MUS for like search for music, all right?

01:16:23 ◼   ► And you type MUS, oh look, and it's narrowed down

01:16:25 ◼   ► to a bunch of icons.

01:16:26 ◼   ► - What mustache?

01:16:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, mustache, they look like they're music symbols

01:16:30 ◼   ► or whatever, so pick one of those.

01:16:31 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go with the three music notes,

01:16:33 ◼   ► and I tap on the three music notes.

01:16:35 ◼   ► And then I stare at my phone, and I'm like, hmm.

01:16:37 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I need a done button, I know.

01:16:39 ◼   ► - So what do I do now?

01:16:42 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:16:43 ◼   ► - And the answer is you hit cancel.

01:16:46 ◼   ► - No, no, no, you hit the back button.

01:16:47 ◼   ► - Or the back button, neither one of those things

01:16:49 ◼   ► feels like an affirmative action.

01:16:51 ◼   ► I literally couldn't figure this out.

01:16:53 ◼   ► I would, I did, I hit the X and I did,

01:16:55 ◼   ► and I searched again and then I long pressed,

01:16:58 ◼   ► then I was like hit cancel and then I hit,

01:17:00 ◼   ► eventually I figured it out, but it is so not obvious

01:17:03 ◼   ► how when I-- - I'm gonna add a done button

01:17:05 ◼   ► to the upper right. - Yeah, like I need,

01:17:06 ◼   ► I need something that's like, and now,

01:17:08 ◼   ► because just hitting the three little arrows,

01:17:11 ◼   ► that doesn't complete the screen.

01:17:12 ◼   ► It's not like I found the icon I want

01:17:13 ◼   ► and I hit it and the screen dismisses.

01:17:15 ◼   ► it stays there staring at me and I don't know what to do.

01:17:17 ◼   ► - No, no, that is very valid, and in fact,

01:17:19 ◼   ► Tiff did that when I was watching her user

01:17:21 ◼   ► for the first time, and I just forgot to write it down.

01:17:23 ◼   ► So yeah, no, that's true, that's good, thank you.

01:17:25 ◼   ► - Yes, and I'm sorry for not giving you that bug

01:17:26 ◼   ► in the months that I was testing this beta,

01:17:28 ◼   ► but there you go.

01:17:28 ◼   ► I made up for it, made it up for it live on the show.

01:17:32 ◼   ► - Well, you also didn't give me the same bug then,

01:17:34 ◼   ► because in the version of Masquerade that as we record,

01:17:38 ◼   ► I hope to release tomorrow morning, it's through App Review,

01:17:40 ◼   ► I just wanna check a couple things.

01:17:43 ◼   ► Anyway, I rejiggered the way the default emoji

01:17:45 ◼   ► settings page works, and there's a new settings page

01:17:48 ◼   ► for face detection size where you can tell it,

01:17:50 ◼   ► even, you know, make this a little bit bigger

01:17:52 ◼   ► than just the face.

01:17:53 ◼   ► - We have very large faces in my family.

01:17:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, my family is full of big, hearty faces.

01:17:58 ◼   ► Anyway, there's basically a slider,

01:18:01 ◼   ► and the options in the upper left and right,

01:18:04 ◼   ► in the upper left is just to go back to settings,

01:18:06 ◼   ► and in the upper right, there's a reset button

01:18:07 ◼   ► that is only valid if you've futzed about with,

01:18:10 ◼   ► or don't leave it exactly where you found it.

01:18:13 ◼   ► And so in order to save your setting, you just go back,

01:18:17 ◼   ► which is basically what Marco's got here.

01:18:19 ◼   ► And I went back and forth about this,

01:18:21 ◼   ► but it seems I actually think I like this more now

01:18:25 ◼   ► because as soon as you make a change, it is saved,

01:18:28 ◼   ► and then there's a reset button in my case

01:18:30 ◼   ► if you wanna go back to the way it was.

01:18:31 ◼   ► So I'm with you, Marco.

01:18:33 ◼   ► I don't think you need a done button, but--

01:18:35 ◼   ► - No, no, I do need one.

01:18:36 ◼   ► - You definitely need one.

01:18:37 ◼   ► I mean, it really has to do with the context

01:18:39 ◼   ► of like having things take effect in real time

01:18:41 ◼   ► versus having select them and hit a done,

01:18:43 ◼   ► it's really, really sensitive to like the expected context.

01:18:46 ◼   ► Like, are you throwing up a sheet

01:18:48 ◼   ► where you have to make the sheet go away?

01:18:50 ◼   ► And if the only way is to make it go away

01:18:52 ◼   ► or like cancel or back, those don't feel affirmative

01:18:54 ◼   ► versus are you flipping a switch?

01:18:56 ◼   ► And you're confident that when I flip the switch,

01:18:57 ◼   ► the setting has taken effect

01:18:58 ◼   ► because I've not placed into a second.

01:19:00 ◼   ► Like there's all sorts of cultural baggage

01:19:02 ◼   ► of like when there is an expectation

01:19:04 ◼   ► that you have to sort of say,

01:19:06 ◼   ► I have now done the thing yes versus no,

01:19:09 ◼   ► nevermind everything I did.

01:19:11 ◼   ► And we used to have this debate in the old days

01:19:14 ◼   ► of Mac OS X of like, if you bring up a pref screen,

01:19:17 ◼   ► like you bring up preferences

01:19:19 ◼   ► and it's got a bunch of check boxes for like,

01:19:20 ◼   ► you want this setting on or off or whatever,

01:19:22 ◼   ► should the preferences take effect

01:19:24 ◼   ► as soon as you hit that check box

01:19:25 ◼   ► or only after you decide whether to hit OK or cancel

01:19:28 ◼   ► on the preferences window?

01:19:29 ◼   ► And that culturally changed between classic Mac OS

01:19:31 ◼   ► and Mac OS X.

01:19:32 ◼   ► The Mac OS X way to do it by the way

01:19:34 ◼   ► is to essentially do it in real time

01:19:36 ◼   ► And then closing the preferences window

01:19:37 ◼   ► is just like I'm done setting things.

01:19:38 ◼   ► But as soon as you hit that checkbox,

01:19:41 ◼   ► well-behaved Mac OS X, whatever, Mac OS,

01:19:43 ◼   ► whatever we call it these days, application,

01:19:46 ◼   ► that's it, that you've done the thing.

01:19:48 ◼   ► You know, reticulate splines, check, right?

01:19:52 ◼   ► You know, that's it.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And then closing the preferences window is,

01:19:56 ◼   ► okay, well now I'm just not gonna do

01:19:57 ◼   ► any more changes to preferences.

01:19:58 ◼   ► But closing or not closing the preferences window

01:20:01 ◼   ► should have no effect on, you know,

01:20:03 ◼   ► like it's not like if you make a bunch of changes

01:20:05 ◼   ► and then change your mind,

01:20:06 ◼   ► There's no way to get out of the Preferences window

01:20:07 ◼   ► and not commit those changes,

01:20:09 ◼   ► 'cause they were committed the second that you did it.

01:20:10 ◼   ► Whereas on iOS, I don't know all the cultural things,

01:20:13 ◼   ► but I do know when I was on that screen,

01:20:15 ◼   ► I didn't know what to do,

01:20:16 ◼   ► and it seems like Tiff had the same problem.

01:20:17 ◼   ► So that cultural context of bringing up a card

01:20:20 ◼   ► or whatever you call that requires some affirmation,

01:20:24 ◼   ► or it requires when I tap an icon,

01:20:26 ◼   ► it self dismisses and say, "Great, you've picked it."

01:20:29 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:20:30 ◼   ► - UI is weird and hard.

01:20:32 ◼   ► Like, it's not a bug,

01:20:33 ◼   ► But it's a confusing part of the UI.

01:20:36 ◼   ► And why was it confusing?

01:20:37 ◼   ► For reasons that are actually very difficult to explain.

01:20:40 ◼   ► It's not obvious.

01:20:41 ◼   ► It's not obvious that this is-- anyone

01:20:43 ◼   ► can tell that that's wrong.

01:20:44 ◼   ► It's only the type of thing that you would realize by someone

01:20:49 ◼   ► who didn't create the app and write the code to do it,

01:20:52 ◼   ► attempting to use that screen.

01:20:54 ◼   ► All right, any other complaints while I'm here?

01:20:57 ◼   ► It's not your fault. But really, there's

01:20:59 ◼   ► nothing in FFS symbols for shower, bath, water, soap,

01:21:03 ◼   ► like nothing, I have a shower playlist.

01:21:05 ◼   ► Who doesn't have a shower playlist?

01:21:06 ◼   ► - For shower, I use a thunderstorm icon.

01:21:08 ◼   ► - But that's, I'm just saying, it's not your fault.

01:21:10 ◼   ► This is not in FFS symbols, but come on.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Like literally nothing?

01:21:13 ◼   ► - What about lightning bolt?

01:21:15 ◼   ► - For shower?

01:21:15 ◼   ► - Well, it's a thunderstorm.

01:21:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, I searched for rain,

01:21:18 ◼   ► but that's not, I don't shower in a rain cloud.

01:21:20 ◼   ► - It's funny, it's a rain cloud, it's a shower.

01:21:23 ◼   ► - I think this is a, this makes me,

01:21:26 ◼   ► I know you talked about this before,

01:21:27 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, I could use Emojum,

01:21:28 ◼   ► but what about SF Symbols?

01:21:30 ◼   ► I'm sure there's an emoji I could use

01:21:33 ◼   ► that would be a closer match,

01:21:34 ◼   ► and if SF Symbols has a different--

01:21:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's a shower emoji.

01:21:36 ◼   ► - Has a shower gap.

01:21:37 ◼   ► - No, and I think the availability of SF Symbols,

01:21:43 ◼   ► it is clearly a UI toolkit.

01:21:49 ◼   ► It is not made for the purposes I'm offering it for here.

01:21:53 ◼   ► It is not made for arbitrary user input

01:21:55 ◼   ► of classifying their podcast listening.

01:21:57 ◼   ► Like there's many weird omissions from it.

01:22:00 ◼   ► And there's many things in it that have no business

01:22:03 ◼   ► being selectable here.

01:22:06 ◼   ► Like there's like every number, every letter

01:22:10 ◼   ► in circled or squared form.

01:22:12 ◼   ► Maybe that's not necessarily needed here.

01:22:15 ◼   ► Or certain oddities like every individual button

01:22:18 ◼   ► on a game pad.

01:22:19 ◼   ► Like you could have those as your icons.

01:22:23 ◼   ► Because that's just needs of the system have.

01:22:25 ◼   ► But anyway, I tried it with emoji.

01:22:28 ◼   ► I never shipped it as a beta,

01:22:29 ◼   ► but I tried it in testing with emoji.

01:22:31 ◼   ► And in this context, it looked a little bit dated.

01:22:35 ◼   ► I had used emoji in my UI a lot.

01:22:39 ◼   ► I used the emoji cloud and star icons

01:22:43 ◼   ► on description labels in the episode cells

01:22:46 ◼   ► to indicate whether an episode was streaming or not.

01:22:48 ◼   ► I had a couple of emoji here and there in the interface.

01:22:51 ◼   ► And when I first started doing that,

01:22:54 ◼   ► geez, I don't know, five years ago,

01:22:56 ◼   ► it was a long time ago, when I first started doing that,

01:22:59 ◼   ► it was cute and novel, and the use of emoji in UI

01:23:03 ◼   ► was fairly unusual at that time.

01:23:06 ◼   ► And in fact, John, I believe you even complained to me

01:23:08 ◼   ► about it when I started doing it.

01:23:10 ◼   ► But now I think that is a little bit dated

01:23:15 ◼   ► for these purposes.

01:23:16 ◼   ► You know, like Casey, in your app,

01:23:17 ◼   ► it's a little bit different,

01:23:18 ◼   ► 'cause the entire app is about emoji,

01:23:20 ◼   ► so that obviously makes more sense there.

01:23:21 ◼   ► In overcast new design, with all the SF symbol icons

01:23:25 ◼   ► everywhere and with these thick line weights

01:23:28 ◼   ► and big, bold, flat colors and pastels,

01:23:31 ◼   ► emoji didn't look right.

01:23:32 ◼   ► I tried it and it just didn't look good.

01:23:35 ◼   ► And so I decided to just stick with SF symbols for these

01:23:39 ◼   ► because it was much better looking in context.

01:23:44 ◼   ► - You know, I almost wonder, and maybe this exists,

01:23:47 ◼   ► but something that I know we used a lot back

01:23:50 ◼   ► in my web development days, which was a decade plus ago,

01:23:53 ◼   ► was Font Awesome, which was, if I recall correctly,

01:23:57 ◼   ► basically a font, but it was a bunch of glyphs.

01:23:59 ◼   ► Think Wingdings, but less weird.

01:24:02 ◼   ► And we would use that as UI elements all over the place.

01:24:06 ◼   ► And I feel like what we need is like a Font Awesome,

01:24:09 ◼   ► but with glyphs, like a shower glyph, for example.

01:24:12 ◼   ► So I was poking about on the Font Awesome website,

01:24:14 ◼   ► and there's plenty of excellent shower glyphs

01:24:17 ◼   ► that to my eyes are in the spirit of SF symbols.