00:00:07 ◼ ► So it's been like eight years that we've been doing this and we're still doing all this bullsh*t trying to get it to work.
00:00:12 ◼ ► Usually it's only one of you that radically changes your setup and has things, but now Marco wanted to get in on the action today too.
00:00:19 ◼ ► You know, it's not always me. I rarely mess with my setup. Marco's one that changes computers like underwear.
00:00:59 ◼ ► Of the 32 minutes and seven seconds we've been recording, do you think we have six minutes of content at this point?
00:01:05 ◼ ► This is all for the bootleg. They need to get their money's worth. Oh my God. All right.
00:01:37 ◼ ► But I was happy until today because I had this list of things I had to do for set up my Backblaze and Dropbox and Time Machine.
00:01:58 ◼ ► That would be Adobe setup and transferring the cellular plan from my old Apple Watch to my new Apple Watch.
00:02:42 ◼ ► And then I went to record the ads for this podcast, which I do right before we record the podcast.
00:02:51 ◼ ► And I know there are other programs that are what we used to call a wave editor, like back in the very, very old days.
00:02:59 ◼ ► Whatever now we call Adobe Audition, it's a wave editor but with a bunch more features.
00:03:15 ◼ ► I could be wrong about that but I just love a good wave editor and I've never found a better one than Audition.
00:04:00 ◼ ► And it's not my only one. I have many sound tools but this sounds as much of my business and pleasure.
00:04:09 ◼ ► But oh man, installing Adobe, that is a fast way to bring my computer high down crashing back to earth.
00:04:22 ◼ ► First you got to install Creative Cloud and there's no, there should be no way around installing Creative Cloud.
00:04:36 ◼ ► That I pay for anyway just so I wouldn't have to have Creative Cloud installed on my computer.
00:04:47 ◼ ► But anyway, other than Adobe's crap being spewed all over my computer in the worst possible way,
00:05:00 ◼ ► I'm so happy to be at the stage I'm at now, which is everything is mostly done and working.
00:05:14 ◼ ► And I'm doing that because I wanted to trial using my fancy new MacBook Pro, which has finally arrived.
00:05:27 ◼ ► It's actually a truly stupid procedure that I'm doing right now because I have this beautiful 27-inch screen
00:05:38 ◼ ► And I'm just that 27-inch screen with all that beautiful real estate is just sitting there dark.
00:05:49 ◼ ► But in the process of getting all this squared away, of course I had to do all my installs.
00:05:53 ◼ ► And I'd like to get a reminder out in front of all of the people, including you Marco, although it's too late.
00:05:59 ◼ ► Homebrew Bundle. If you believe in homebrew, which I do, then bundle is sort of kind of like a gem file, I guess, for homebrew packages.
00:06:21 ◼ ► And you can put that in your bundle file and then you say to homebrew bundle, once homebrew is installed, "Go install all the things."
00:06:33 ◼ ► Specifically, the mechanism by which you can install stuff from the App Store is kind of broken at the moment.
00:06:44 ◼ ► The one thing I will say, though, is I was sold a bill of goods with this MacBook Pro. I'm kind of spoiling a little bit later, just a smidge.
00:07:13 ◼ ► And of course, like a noob, the way I did my bundle file, which you can find off the link on my blog,
00:07:19 ◼ ► is I did all of the Mac App Store stuff first, and then all the straight up brew stuff later.
00:07:32 ◼ ► But then that caused everything to effectively come to a screeching halt, because I couldn't install anything else.
00:07:40 ◼ ► If I'm running through this file, it's held up on Xcode before it gets to any of the other stuff I want it to install.
00:07:57 ◼ ► And I know this isn't really your style, because I know you don't like automating anything with these sorts of things.
00:08:06 ◼ ► It isn't that I'm against automating this kind of stuff. It's just that the setup that I have,
00:08:11 ◼ ► or the technical needs of whatever I'm installing, or the packages themselves, tend to change more often than I set up new machines.
00:08:19 ◼ ► And so the result is when I am ready to use it again, either the script has broken, or the packages it refers to have changed or broken,
00:08:32 ◼ ► And so if I was setting up, like, suppose I was ridiculous enough to buy a new Mac every year.
00:08:57 ◼ ► So that's where you and I differ. So it makes even more sense that you would not be keen on this idea.
00:09:07 ◼ ► I just like cleaning out all the cruft. And I know that's more of like a holdover from Windows time.
00:09:19 ◼ ► I always use Migration Assistant. I was just watching one of our Slack people were just talking about Brew and all that other stuff.
00:09:28 ◼ ► Like Margot was saying, I update so infrequently that when I update, it's basically an opportunity for me to either update or change which things I have.
00:09:40 ◼ ► So that's the time for me to upgrade my installation of Postgres and upgrade my installation of MySQL if it even still exists or if it's MariaDB now or whatever.
00:09:53 ◼ ► I don't mess with those for years, but when a new computer comes, that's the time for me to revisit all of it.
00:10:06 ◼ ► And Migration Assistant brings a lot of it over. And because of the wonders of binary compatibility and/or Rosetta, my existing installs tend to just work, but those are just copied as files because everything is in user-local.
00:10:16 ◼ ► And Migration Assistant tends to copy over user-local, or if it doesn't, I can manually do it because it's just one directory tree. And that's all my stuff.
00:10:23 ◼ ► But I do take that opportunity to say, "Okay, well, my stuff came over and it seems like it works, but do I want to start upgrading or uninstalling or putting something different in or whatever?"
00:10:36 ◼ ► All right, let's talk about the most important thing in the world. It is not new MacBook Pros, as exciting as they are.
00:10:43 ◼ ► It is instead the ATP Store, which is back, baby, just like we said last time. The Store is back.
00:10:50 ◼ ► This is the middle of three episodes where we plan to talk about this. So you are running out of time. You are running out of time.
00:10:56 ◼ ► So the ATP Store is back, in case you missed last week. We've got all new stuff. We've got ATP The Flamethrower. No, not really.
00:11:04 ◼ ► We've got ATP M1 Pro shirts and Max shirts. We have them in various flavors of black fabric with a rainbow front and printed on the back.
00:11:16 ◼ ► Then we also have the monochrome version, where the colors of the shirt are of various different colors, but the ink is always white.
00:11:26 ◼ ► And then we also have the ATP Winter Hat. Note, this is not a chicken hat. Perhaps we should call it a turkey hat. I don't know.
00:11:46 ◼ ► Oh, there it is. We've got the ATP Hoodie and then we've got the classic ATP logo shirt. All of these things are available at ATP.fm/store.
00:11:55 ◼ ► If you are listening to this right now, if you're driving, maybe signal and then pull over. If you're walking, maybe just ease your way to the side.
00:12:05 ◼ ► If you're biking, do what you need to do, whatever bicyclists do, to get into a less dangerous situation.
00:12:15 ◼ ► John spent a lot of time, y'all, on the backs of these shirts. Don't let John down. Don't let us down.
00:12:21 ◼ ► Buy a shirt. Buy a shirt for you. Buy a shirt for your friend. Everyone will be happy. ATP.fm/store.
00:12:28 ◼ ► Also, don't forget, if you are an ATP member, you get 15% off on timed sales like this one.
00:12:44 ◼ ► But instead, you could hold on and listen to the amazing bootleg that we put out every week,
00:12:51 ◼ ► This is a good one. If you're going to listen to a bootleg, this week is a good time to start.
00:13:40 ◼ ► I would also like to know this because I really think this MacBook Pro that I'm talking to you on right now
00:13:48 ◼ ► So, I would like a dock and a friggin' monitor Apple, but we'll leave that for another time.
00:14:18 ◼ ► But my primary setup with the XDR here at the beach is using actually none of those hubs.
00:14:28 ◼ ► I have the CalDigit here, but I use it more for like, you know, if I have to like set up for a project doing something.
00:14:34 ◼ ► Like, I'm currently playing with some gaming hardware type stuff that I might do like capture of all three of us in the family playing a game.
00:14:49 ◼ ► which is actually one of the reasons why I upgraded the laptop, even though I didn't necessarily need to for other reasons.
00:14:56 ◼ ► Anyway, so the CalDigit just kind of floating around my house is like a utility as needed thing right now.
00:15:12 ◼ ► Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 2 to Ethernet, which is how we are talking to each other right now.
00:15:31 ◼ ► And they are not Thunderbolt, they are USB because there isn't enough bandwidth left over after the display segment to also offer Thunderbolt ports in the back.
00:15:37 ◼ ► But it turns out that the only really high bandwidth thing I have is the Pro Display XDR.
00:15:46 ◼ ► It's mostly keyboard receiver, sound devices, input and output, a couple of external hard drives or external SSDs, USB devices.
00:16:08 ◼ ► Also under my desk I have a USB-A hub, so that provides a lot of the less modern connections to a lot of that stuff too.
00:16:17 ◼ ► In the back of the Pro Display XDR I connect my audio interface, that USB hub, something else I think one of the charging cables.
00:16:30 ◼ ► So for now I'm not using any of these hubs and I don't think I will need to add one to my desk in the near future.
00:16:43 ◼ ► There's no reason why that should be a problem, but superstition just tells me that seems like a terrible decision.
00:16:58 ◼ ► When the USB-C generation of laptops first came out in 2015 and 2016, the USB hubs and dongles and stuff on the marketplace were very unreliable.
00:17:08 ◼ ► Including the ones that were on the back of the LG fine. Those ports are notoriously unreliable.
00:17:17 ◼ ► And so for the early generation of USB-C stuff, it wasn't wise to plug in something like an audio recording device into anything besides a port that was on the computer.
00:17:28 ◼ ► And that's one of the reasons why I always wanted more ports on the computer because the things I needed to be 100% reliable had to go into those ports.
00:17:40 ◼ ► Well, the XDR's ports have been 100% reliable for me. I haven't had any problems with them at all.
00:17:45 ◼ ► So it's great in the sense that I guess after spending $15 million on this display and another $5 million on its stand, that I get four extra USB-C ports.
00:17:55 ◼ ► Do you remember the actual names of the two, the OWC and the CalDigit hub? Is the CalDigit the TS3+? Does that sound right?
00:18:04 ◼ ► Yes. They've been making it for a while. It's great. It's like this solid block of aluminum.
00:18:08 ◼ ► Anecdotally, or opinion-wise, between the CalDigit and the OWC, the Thunderbolt 3 dock I think it's called, I prefer the CalDigit.
00:18:17 ◼ ► They have similar capabilities. The CalDigit is a little bit smaller and stockier in its shape.
00:18:26 ◼ ► And even though they both seem to be built with high quality, the CalDigit is basically a giant block of metal.
00:18:32 ◼ ► The outside has fins so it cools off without needing a big fan anywhere. It's a really nicely built thing.
00:18:39 ◼ ► I'm a big fan of CalDigit from this purchase alone. I've never had any of the previous stuff, but this device has made me a fan.
00:18:46 ◼ ► It just feels so damn solid. They actually have something called the Element Hub that I desperately want, but it's out of stock everywhere right now.
00:18:57 ◼ ► Because what's interesting is that now that the MacBook Pros are providing HDMI and SD, I no longer really want those things in a hub.
00:19:08 ◼ ► Every little feature that a hub provides, every little hardware thing that it has built in, is kind of a liability if I don't need or want it.
00:19:17 ◼ ► Because for instance, all these hubs have their own audio devices built in. They have a headphone jack, maybe a microphone, like a headset kind of microphone jack input.
00:19:26 ◼ ► But it has all these additional things. And to me, all of those things are liabilities for some kind of peripheral that will be permanently connected to my computer that I can't separate from the rest of the hub.
00:19:40 ◼ ► That might at some point get flaky or have some kind of weird driver issue with the OS or something like that.
00:19:46 ◼ ► I want my hubs to be mostly dumb. I want the variety of ports and stuff to be in the computer. The computer should have things like the SD slot and the HDMI port and hardware Ethernet if it's a desktop and stuff like that.
00:20:01 ◼ ► That should all be in the computer and the hub should only be necessary ideally to provide just more ports. More USB ports ideally and Thunderbolt ports.
00:20:10 ◼ ► So what I'm looking forward to is I'm hoping to get the CalDigit Element hub at some point soon once it comes back in stock.
00:20:17 ◼ ► Because all it is is Thunderbolt in and I think it's three Thunderbolt out and a whole bunch of USB A out.
00:20:25 ◼ ► And that's it. There's no networking, there's no sound, there's no HDMI. It's just a USB and Thunderbolt port multiplier.
00:20:34 ◼ ► And that's awesome. That's exactly what I want. So hopefully I can get one of those sometime soon.
00:20:40 ◼ ► And I hope that now as these new, a little bit more generous port filled laptops start going into the market and over time start taking over the market as they filter in and people start replacing the old USB C only ones after a few years from now.
00:20:59 ◼ ► I'm hoping that the world of these big multi-port hubs kind of gets reduced and we are just seeing much more multiple USB port multipliers or multiple Thunderbolt port multipliers. Hopefully we'll get there.
00:21:14 ◼ ► I wish the Element hub worked without a power supply though because it is so slim and small and just has those ports on it but it does require DC power so you've got a power brick and you've got a cord.
00:21:24 ◼ ► Yeah, I know. That is unfortunate. But as far as I know, and the other side of part two is that on the market, I think how digit makes one, I think OWC and maybe a couple others, maybe Belkin.
00:21:35 ◼ ► There are other ones on the market that are bus powered Thunderbolt hubs but they only tend to have two USB ports and then like two HDMI or two DisplayPort ports.
00:21:48 ◼ ► And a couple different brands make this so I'm guessing it's some kind of like just standard Intel chip they have in there to do this.
00:21:54 ◼ ► But that to me, that's fine but I don't really need two additional HDMI ports. I really just need more USB ports.
00:22:02 ◼ ► But I also recognize the power demands of modern USB devices. They expect a certain amount of power from the bus and while Thunderbolt can deliver a lot of power over that port, I'm sure there's, I don't know if the limit is off the top of my head for Thunderbolt devices.
00:22:17 ◼ ► Maybe it's like 30 watts or something like that but I bet they would hit that limit pretty fast once they're adding ports.
00:22:23 ◼ ► Yeah, it's from their fact. They say Thunderbolt ports each require 15 watts of power and USB ports each provide up to 7.5 watts of power so if you add it all up, you need a power supply. You can't get that from the bus. It makes sense but you know.
00:22:36 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace.com/ATP. Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Make your next move with Squarespace.
00:22:50 ◼ ► I've made lots of moves with Squarespace. I have built my own sites on Squarespace. I have set up other people with Squarespace. My village's website is on Squarespace. Our preschool website was on Squarespace.
00:23:00 ◼ ► And the reason I use it is because I've made websites in pretty much every way there is to make websites and Squarespace is the right tool for the job most of the time.
00:23:09 ◼ ► If you have needs that they cover and believe me you probably do because they can cover simple things from a couple of pages of content all the way up to really complicated otherwise stuff to host like storefronts or podcasts.
00:23:22 ◼ ► They can host all of that on Squarespace and their tools are really easy to use whether you're a nerd or not. There's no coding required. Everything is visual drag and drop live previewing.
00:23:34 ◼ ► So you start with one of their templates and they're professionally designed and they look modern and they look great on every screen size and everything.
00:23:41 ◼ ► And then you can customize it as much as you want for your own colors and logos and branding and you know we can rearrange blocks of content, add your own blocks of content, whatever you need.
00:23:50 ◼ ► So it's fully customizable to fit how you want it to look. But you have Squarespace's awesome designers to back you up with the bones of the thing.
00:23:58 ◼ ► And so it's just fantastic. And then they have great support if you need it. Honestly you probably won't. It's super easy to use. But their support is there when you need it.
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00:24:51 ◼ ► A quick update on my AirPods 3 I talked about last week. Now I've had a week to spend with them. I've used them as my main and only AirPods, which means I use them a lot.
00:24:59 ◼ ► Used them while listening to podcasts, watching TV shows and movies on my iPad. Did all the things.
00:25:04 ◼ ► Update on the comfort. I think they're fine. My ears don't hurt. They're not fatigued. I was worried about that. They do still feel different. They feel larger in the ear.
00:25:14 ◼ ► They press up against parts they didn't. After a week, I feel confident in saying if these were going to bother my ears in some way, they would have already and they don't.
00:25:22 ◼ ► That's just me. You have to try them yourself to see how it works for you. I'm personally glad that they don't bother me.
00:25:28 ◼ ► The case size, I did say they come in a charging case that's bigger, which kind of annoys me. It's worth noting that it is smaller than the AirPods Pro case.
00:25:38 ◼ ► It looks just like the AirPods Pro case. It opens on the long side and everything like that, but it is smaller than that.
00:25:44 ◼ ► It is slightly larger than the regular AirPods case, but still significantly smaller than the big AirPods Pro case.
00:25:49 ◼ ► Don't be too afraid of the case. It's kind of like going from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone X. Is that the time when we got it bigger? 7 to 10, right?
00:25:59 ◼ ► It's a little bit bigger, but you get used to it. And then finally, spatial audio. These are my first headphones, besides messing with my wife's AirPods Pro, that I've used that support spatial audio.
00:26:11 ◼ ► And I don't like it. Every time I try to do stuff on my iPad, I'm like, "Why the hell is the audio all messed up?" "Oh, okay, spatial audio."
00:26:19 ◼ ► "Do you want head track spatial audio? Do you want non-head tracks?" It's like, "No, I don't want any spatial audio."
00:26:24 ◼ ► I'm mostly watching TV shows and movies, but whatever they're doing, some of them say, "Don't be at most available." No, it sounds worse to me.
00:26:35 ◼ ► Maybe with music. I tried it with music a little bit too, including downloading ones that are, you know, whatever the keyword is for the music that says "redownload" to get the fancy spatial multitrack thing.
00:26:47 ◼ ► For whatever reason, it's not what I want. I definitely don't want it on a TV show. It just makes it sound like... I don't want the thing where, "Hey, the sound sounds like it's coming from the iPad."
00:26:57 ◼ ► I don't want that. I want the opposite of that. That's the point of wearing headphones, is that the sound doesn't sound like it's coming from the iPad. It sounds like it's right in my ears, and that's much better.
00:27:06 ◼ ► But then also, you know, the music, the multitrack music, I just want it to be mixed for headphones. I don't want it to sound like everything I'm listening to isn't like...
00:27:18 ◼ ► It's like the stereo equipment from my youth when they first started having a concert hall mode where everything sounds like it's in a cathedral.
00:27:25 ◼ ► It's not that bad. Anyway, it's not to my personal taste, but for people who don't know, if they just buy these and start using their iPad and everything sounds weird, remember that you can...
00:27:33 ◼ ► What is it? Upper right corner swipe down to get the control center and then hold down on the volume bar. This is not particularly discoverable. I don't even know what the "real" way to do it is.
00:27:43 ◼ ► Anyway, upper right corner swipe down on iOS or iPadOS. Hold your finger down on the volume slider and it will pop up a full screen thing that will have a giant volume slider, and then at the bottom of the giant volume slider you'll see probably three buttons for like...
00:27:56 ◼ ► Spatial audio off, spatial audio head tracked, and spatial audio fixed. And then you can switch among them. And it does seem to remember your settings per app, which means that every time I use a different app...
00:28:06 ◼ ► Now I'm using Netflix, now I'm using Hulu, now I'm using Apple TV Plus, in every app I have to convince it no spatial audio. It does seem to remember so far, which is good, but yeah, not a fan.
00:28:17 ◼ ► Oh yeah, and I guess speaking of not a fan, the tapping versus squeezing, I'm getting a lot better at doing the little pinch. Still miss tapping. I really wish they would bring that back in a future version of these, but I'm really not holding my breath.
00:28:29 ◼ ► The squeezing is just... it's worse for my use cases. It occurred to me when I was thinking about the squeezing and all this stuff during the week, I used to frequently knock on the AirPods with my knuckles, or the back of my hand when my fingers were all gross from cooking or washing something or whatever.
00:28:47 ◼ ► Forget about that. Try pinching. If you have gross fingers that have cooking stuff on them, you can't pinch with your knuckles. At least I can't anyway. I guess I could also go with the "hey dingus stop" and "hey dingus play" type of thing.
00:29:04 ◼ ► Anyway, still the audio quality is better enough that I'm definitely going to stick with it, but I will miss tapping.
00:29:11 ◼ ► I still haven't tried spatial audio, nor the pinching versus tapping thing. I only have non-spatial audio tappable AirPods. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about either of those things when eventually I upgrade.
00:29:25 ◼ ► One of you wanted to know what our Monterey situation is, who's updated, who hasn't, etc. Marco and I just got new computers, so I think it's safe to say that we've upgraded.
00:29:38 ◼ ► Well, I mean, just before we get to me, obviously your new computers all came with Monterey and you can't use anything else, but what about your older/existing computers? Did you bother upgrading those? Marco's got so many computers, I can't keep track, so he's got to have some that are right.
00:29:52 ◼ ► Did you upgrade everyone else's computer in the house to Monterey? Is your old Mac Mini upgraded to Monterey? What's the upgrade story?
00:29:58 ◼ ► The Mac Mini is not, just because I had no reason to upgrade it to Monterey. It's funny, when the M1 Macs first launched last fall and developers had the opportunity to either leave our apps as is and let them be available, sorry, iOS developers had the ability to let our apps become available in the Mac App Store for M1 Macs, or you could opt out.
00:30:23 ◼ ► And I said at the time, "Why would anybody opt out? This is like free additional users for your app." And I figured, what could possibly go wrong? Of course I'm going to leave Overcast in as, you know, for, able to run on Macs.
00:30:38 ◼ ► Well, it worked okay for the most part for most of the last year until iOS 15 beta started coming out and Mac OS Monterey beta started coming out and they started to become bugs in the, like, now shipping versions of Xcode that build for iOS 15 and Mac OS Monterey.
00:30:58 ◼ ► Now I have to actually test Overcast on Big Sur when building with Monterey's version of Xcode. Is it actually working now or is it going to crash in weird ways? It's no longer like a, like a, you get this for free kind of thing.
00:31:12 ◼ ► So I actually, I'm not saying I'm going to remove it from this, I'm not, but when it does crash on Big Sur, I hear from every single person who uses it and they start leaving one star reviews and bringing my average down.
00:31:23 ◼ ► Even though they are not that numerous, there are enough of them that if the app crashes, I will hear from them. And I won't hear from them in my support email, I'll hear from them in one star reviews.
00:31:33 ◼ ► So, I do have a need now to become a Mac app tester. Like I need to be able to test my app on old versions of Mac OS. I do intend at some point soon to look into, like, how do I virtualize old versions of Mac OS so I can do it that way.
00:31:49 ◼ ► But until I figure that out, I'm just going to leave this Mac Mini running with screen share enabled, which I, maybe I'll get to that story.
00:31:56 ◼ ► But I'll leave it running with screen share enabled in my closet for a while so I can just log into that and test it whenever I need to.
00:32:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't believe I upgraded my Mac Mini that's basically a Plex server, little else. But I have upgraded basically everything else that I touch.
00:32:11 ◼ ► I don't even know what version of Mac OS Aaron's adorable is on, but it's probably like two versions old now. But I upgraded everything, it's been fine.
00:32:19 ◼ ► I like having focus modes echoed across all my devices. I know that's very divisive and not everyone will agree with me and that's fine.
00:32:27 ◼ ► But I like it. I don't use it super aggressively, but as an example, I have a podcasting focus mode that comes on at 8 o'clock on Wednesdays and stops at like midnight on Wednesdays.
00:32:37 ◼ ► And so that is an example of something that's echoed across all my devices, which I like.
00:32:42 ◼ ► And I feel like there's some other stuff, although off the top of my head I can't remember what, but I feel like there's some other stuff that I've liked about Monterey.
00:32:49 ◼ ► But buying, oh, AirPlay Receiving is pretty cool. So I can use my iMac Pro or perhaps MacBook Pro as one component of a multi-room audio setup, which I like.
00:33:02 ◼ ► The only thing I didn't like though was apparently it listens on port 5000, which I typically use locally when I write blog posts for my blog.
00:33:11 ◼ ► And I use port 5000 for the web server when I test locally. And I was starting it on the MacBook Pro in order to test or look at a blog post.
00:33:21 ◼ ► And it kept saying, well, the port is in use. And I was like, what are you talking about? Do I have something running somewhere that I don't even realize?
00:33:27 ◼ ► And it took me a little bit of duct-tack going before I realized, oh, apparently it listens on port 5000 of one other one. I don't remember which one.
00:33:36 ◼ ► I think we both end up with using port 5000 as our local web server thing, because I use the same one.
00:34:10 ◼ ► But no, all in all, it's been going well. How is it on your completely slow and boring Mac Pro?
00:34:16 ◼ ► Well, I mean, the reason I put this topic in here is a lot of people ask, like, how's Monterey going?
00:34:20 ◼ ► We kind of said the same thing quickly with iOS... What the hell number are we on now? 15?
00:34:28 ◼ ► I have to say the same thing in Monterey. In fact, the most difficult thing about Monterey was me making sure all my backups were up to date,
00:34:33 ◼ ► because they just take so long, especially the ones to the Synology, because just, I guess...
00:34:39 ◼ ► I don't know. Like, backing up over the network is always just so much slower than backing up to a local disk and when you're in a hurry.
00:34:45 ◼ ► So anyway, I updated all the backups. The new version of SuperDuper is out that supports bootable backups from Big Sur and Monterey.
00:34:56 ◼ ► What I like to do is all the... The only thing I do before the upgrade is I do all the backups and nothing else.
00:35:04 ◼ ► So I do all the backups. I got all my backups all squared away. Back to the backblaze, SuperDuper clone, local time machine, remote time machine.
00:35:11 ◼ ► Then you can upgrade. And I upgraded and it went fine. Unventful. Just did the upgrade. It did its thing.
00:35:22 ◼ ► And my traditional upgrade time is right after we record ATP, so that gives me the maximum amount of time to screw up my setup before the next recording.
00:35:29 ◼ ► So basically, last week, Thursday morning or whatever, I just started this process because I had already done all the backups.
00:35:36 ◼ ► And based on that experience, that it was fine on my computer, I upgraded my iPhone's computer too.
00:35:40 ◼ ► So if people are wondering, "Hey, how's Monterey going?" Now, with the caveat that there is some reports that updating Bridge OS is kind of hosing people's older Macs.
00:35:48 ◼ ► So if you have an older Mac, maybe look up that problem. I couldn't find a good link for it in show notes.
00:35:52 ◼ ► All the ones I saw were just like, "Hey, some older Macs are getting bricked because Bridge OS gets updated or whatever."
00:35:58 ◼ ► And I've had that happen to my Mac Pro in the past and it's no fun. So you do not want to get into this situation.
00:36:02 ◼ ► So it might be worth waiting if you have an older Mac. I wish I could tell you the list of Macs.
00:36:06 ◼ ► I looked at like four different articles and they all just said older Macs. I'm like, "You need to tell me what that means. Which specific Mac should not upgrade?"
00:36:12 ◼ ► Anyway, but if you have a modern Mac, a very up-to-date one, and you're wondering, "Is Monterey okay?"
00:36:18 ◼ ► Monterey 12.0.1 or whatever the version is that doesn't ship on hardware but that you get when you upgrade, it's been fine for me.
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00:38:43 ◼ ► But most especially around battery life. And they wrote, and I watched the video review and I believe I read the post as well, and the video review was very good too.
00:38:50 ◼ ► But they wrote, "16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro ran for 16 hours on its battery during continuous use, making it the longest-lasting laptop we've ever tested. Period. Ever, ever."
00:39:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, The Verge stuff is not particularly scientific in terms of battery testing, but they basically just use the computers to do what they normally do.
00:39:10 ◼ ► So I would imagine this is light use, right? But in any scenario, getting 16 hours of battery.
00:39:16 ◼ ► As they said in the review, they felt like they wanted to stop working and go to sleep, but the computers still had battery.
00:39:23 ◼ ► So yeah, that 100 kilowatt, the biggest battery you can put in a laptop and still have it be allowed on a plane,
00:39:31 ◼ ► apparently you put that in combined with an M1 Pro. Not the Max, but the plain old M1 Pro can result in very, very long battery life, which is great.
00:39:39 ◼ ► Now tell me about charging a MacBook Pro via USB-C. I, for one, am extremely happy that that's still a thing, and it sounds like it had to be a thing. Am I right?
00:39:48 ◼ ► Yeah, Ethan C. wrote in to say that his theory is backed up by some links we'll put in the show notes.
00:39:53 ◼ ► "Apple is required to allow charging through at least one USB-C port in order to certify the laptop as Thunderbolt 4 compatible."
00:39:59 ◼ ► Here's some text from this Thunderbolt PDF that says, "Required PC charging on at least one computer port for thin and light notebook that requires less than 100 watts to charge."
00:40:08 ◼ ► And a similar citation from PC Magazine. So it seems like to be properly certified as Thunderbolt 4 you have to do this.
00:40:16 ◼ ► Now that said, Apple has had no problem in the past just doing whatever the hell it wants with supposedly standard interfaces.
00:40:23 ◼ ► An example would be, well I don't actually, I can't say this is non-standard, but it's definitely weird. Someone will write it and tell me whether it's non-standard Apple thing or just like weird.
00:40:31 ◼ ► The USB connector that connected to USB keyboards for Macs back when the power button was still on the keyboard, do you guys remember that?
00:40:41 ◼ ► So they had a, it was a USB-A connector but it had like a notch in it. Like it was weird, you couldn't plug in a regular USB-A.
00:40:50 ◼ ► Yeah, well it was like a little, I think it was like a triangular notch or whatever. Because, you know, otherwise, you know, plain old USB, you couldn't put a power button on the keyboard. It just wouldn't work.
00:40:59 ◼ ► So Apple sort of made its own thing. I think that's a totally Apple proprietary thing or it's some weird variant of USB.
00:41:07 ◼ ► But anyway, either way, Apple has no problem doing whatever the hell it feels like with any kind of buses and just saying, hey, this is the way it is in Apple computers.
00:41:13 ◼ ► Or just look at Apple display connector ADC, which was totally made up port with a ton of a bunch of other protocols over it or whatever.
00:41:20 ◼ ► So it's not like Apple was forced to do this, but it just seems like this was the path of least resistance for Apple and we're all glad they did it.
00:41:32 ◼ ► This is a question for both of you to answer. Because I can't test these things and I see these things on the internet and I can't figure out whether they're true or not.
00:41:40 ◼ ► So this is in reference to the sort of the checkbox that's in the get info window that we referred to on the show like right after the MacBook Pros were announced.
00:41:52 ◼ ► It is in Monterey. If you go in the finder, select an application, go to get info or command I, there's a checkbox.
00:42:07 ◼ ► There you go. Basically what it says is, hey, this application might not know how to deal with a notch.
00:42:12 ◼ ► So just make this application think it is in a 16 by 10 screen. The notch doesn't exist.
00:42:17 ◼ ► And the way I thought it did that was it would just tell the application, hey, the screen bounds end at essentially where the bottom of the menu bar would normally be.
00:42:26 ◼ ► So, hey, you're on a 16 by 10 screen and just everything above that would just be black because the application wouldn't just would just ignore that part.
00:42:34 ◼ ► But if you look at this video that's attached here in this tweet that shows it's that purports to show this feature in action.
00:42:49 ◼ ► Right. That it like instead of chopping off the top, it takes the picture that would be displayed on the screen and scales it, including on the sides,
00:42:58 ◼ ► like that it basically goes to a non-native resolution by slightly scaling down the whole image so that it gets below the notch.
00:43:08 ◼ ► That's not what I thought this feature did. And I don't want it to do this. I would much rather have chop off the top pixel so it stays at native res.
00:43:20 ◼ ► We don't want you touching anything. No, you don't need to run a full screen. Just look at look at the terrible video with background music.
00:43:25 ◼ ► Probably just bled through my headphones. I'm not listening to the background music. So but they're running this full screen.
00:43:32 ◼ ► Well, screw it. I'll just try it. All right. So I took day one as an example of something that I know supports full screen mode.
00:43:36 ◼ ► And I've ticked scale to fit below built in camera. I'm now closing the info window. I'm starting day one.
00:43:41 ◼ ► And it's just in a window exactly as you would expect. However, when I go full screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:44:00 ◼ ► Well, anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if this mode is not something that got a lot of time put into it by Apple's engineers before the release of these things.
00:44:06 ◼ ► Because, you know, I mean, first of all, a lot of this stuff kind of seems like it was a little bit, you know, last minute.
00:44:11 ◼ ► But also, as soon as an app is built with the modern tools, like with the current version of Xcode, that option disappears for it.
00:44:18 ◼ ► So this is not something that Apple intends to have as like a long term thing that people are going to do for certain apps all the time.
00:44:24 ◼ ► This is literally just like, let's get us through this transition period as smoothly and possibly hackily as we can.
00:44:31 ◼ ► But this is a temporary thing. This is not going to be a thing that you use more than a few months.
00:44:37 ◼ ► I don't know if this is, there's an info.plist key that's NS something or other or whatever.
00:44:42 ◼ ► And I don't know if that is the exact same thing. I don't think it's just building on the new tools.
00:44:46 ◼ ► The new tools may give you that key in your info.plist by default, but you could in theory just delete it off of there and still build with the newest SDK.
00:44:57 ◼ ► But anyway, this is disappointing because what it means is that you get all these advantages that we were talking about.
00:45:03 ◼ ► Having more screen space and having native resolution and always having the ability to ignore the notch if you want to on a per app basis.
00:45:11 ◼ ► But now it seems like if you do that on a per app basis with your older apps, you're giving up the native resolution.
00:45:18 ◼ ► Which people maybe don't notice because again, there's a lot of pixels there and it's like 254 dpi or whatever.
00:45:23 ◼ ► And it does make sense when Marco was saying maybe they didn't want to put too much time into this.
00:45:32 ◼ ► As far as the app is concerned, it is displaying exactly as it would if it was notch savvy.
00:45:37 ◼ ► It's just that we literally shrink. On output we shrink the image so that it avoids the notch.
00:45:45 ◼ ► Because that way they wouldn't have to build on a whole thing where if the app asks the hardware, "How big is your screen in pixels?"
00:45:56 ◼ ► It doesn't think it's on a 16x10 screen where the other apps think they're on a 16x10 point something screen.
00:46:07 ◼ ► If we figure out more about that we'll update, but otherwise it's one minor disappointment.
00:46:13 ◼ ► And speaking of the notch, apparently its code name was "Daisy" as per Felipe Esposito.
00:46:38 ◼ ► Alright, 120Hz scrolling in Mac OS on the new MacBook Pros. I can tell you from experience, very hit or miss.
00:46:51 ◼ ► Although on iOS there's still some things you might have to do to make your animations run at 120Hz.
00:46:56 ◼ ► But we were talking about Marco didn't even notice the 120Hz when he had his new computer last week.
00:47:03 ◼ ► Well, apparently Safari is one of the apps that doesn't support 120Hz because Apple has to do some update or something to it.
00:47:13 ◼ ► The funny thing is that apparently someone on Twitter said that you can get 120Hz if you run Chrome in a Windows VM.
00:47:20 ◼ ► Virtualizing Windows and then you're running Windows Chrome and scroll that and you get 120Hz.
00:48:01 ◼ ► I did learn when I got my new desktop laptop, I decided to sync my entire photo library to it.
00:48:15 ◼ ► When I'm looking at the mystery space on my Mac Mini, it is pretty much exactly that size.
00:48:26 ◼ ► So, it's very clear to me that when I told the Mac Mini, "Store my photo library on this external USB SSD,"
00:48:42 ◼ ► Like, the function of, "I'm telling you to store this photo library on this other volume," can't be trusted.
00:48:50 ◼ ► Because what it clearly did instead was store all those photos on my actual main volume.
00:48:57 ◼ ► That is weird though, because like I said, my photo library is on an external disk on my computer,
00:49:07 ◼ ► and this thing has a 1TB drive that is filled with other stuff that takes up that space.
00:49:16 ◼ ► So, somehow there is, like, I didn't tell it to do it, I just put the photo library over there,
00:49:21 ◼ ► and then I, you know, started up photos holding down the option key and picked that external one.
00:49:33 ◼ ► and it seems to get new photos, but there seems to be some kind of mechanism that is probably in some kind of bug state.
00:49:41 ◼ ► It's probably in some kind of bug state, but now it's just writing everything to mystery locked storage somewhere on the main drive.
00:49:51 ◼ ► Would that purge the space and then re-initialize it, essentially, on the external drive only?
00:50:00 ◼ ► I mean, this is one of the reasons why I decided to do a clean install on the desktop laptop,
00:50:06 ◼ ► Because that's also the same one that every time I reboot, it has the recovered items or whatever on the desktop,
00:50:20 ◼ ► So it adds those relocated items or whatever it's called, and then I still haven't been able to empty my trash for a year.
00:50:37 ◼ ► Yeah, and I just--so the solution to that, many people wrote it and was like, you know,
00:50:42 ◼ ► "Okay, first disable system integrity protection and recovery, and then do the--and then remove it with the special way,
00:50:49 ◼ ► So I just have been hitting skip every time I--like the three files that won't get deleted.
00:50:54 ◼ ► Anyway, so there were multiple reasons why I decided to leave that installation behind.
00:50:58 ◼ ► I have to say, by the way, I have some experience slinging photo libraries around having the same photo library
00:51:05 ◼ ► Photo library, especially, you know, only if you use iCloud Photos, it's pretty easy to just, like,
00:51:27 ◼ ► Like, that's the--it is--with Marco's weird bug case aside, it is supposed to be just a self-contained .photo library directory
00:51:35 ◼ ► that contains all your stuff, and it's just one huge directory tree, and you can move it around just like--
00:51:47 ◼ ► I mean, I'm not sure you need to do a clean OS install, but if it's in this weird state,
00:52:03 ◼ ► and then you could then launch photos, and it would be like, "Hey, where's my photo library?"
00:52:10 ◼ ► and turn on iCloud Photos, and then just wait, you know, five hours for it to download.
00:52:32 ◼ ► Like, until this point, that has been my photo library since I started using Apple Photos,
00:52:53 ◼ ► it's been very reliable for me over time, that still is a bit of a leap of faith that, like,
00:53:40 ◼ ► You just didn't know that it was essentially abandoning years and years' worth of files
00:54:10 ◼ ► that was being my source. I still have it. I didn't, like, blow it away or sell it yet.
00:54:32 ◼ ► But I couldn't download it, and when I double-clicked it to play, nothing would happen.
00:54:49 ◼ ► And eventually I did get that to work. I don't know what the heck happened the first time.
00:55:08 ◼ ► If someone on the Photos team knows a legit scenario in which Marco could get into the situation
00:55:35 ◼ ► You know, it is very, I guess, it's a good piece of mind to know that photo library is a pretty good backup.
00:55:58 ◼ ► Kevin Chen wrote in to say that iOS isn't always good about deleting purgeable files when the phone is low in pre-space,
00:56:04 ◼ ► but when ProRes is enabled, the camera app gains a "free resources" button to trigger this deletion manually.
00:56:11 ◼ ► Apple says, "Freeing resources will clear temporary system or app data that might be stored in your phone.
00:56:15 ◼ ► It doesn't permanently delete unrecoverable data, but might require some apps to refresh data when they're used again."
00:56:28 ◼ ► And apparently it will free up about 15 minutes worth at a time, which in ProRes is 90 gigs,
00:56:40 ◼ ► I wonder if there's like this sort of skunkworks team at Apple behind both the sync messages button in Messages
00:56:49 ◼ ► Like, imagine a button to make the computer do a thing instead of just like sort of crossing your finger
00:56:55 ◼ ► and saying, "Boy, I hope this phone notices that it's almost out of space and frees some space for me soon."
00:57:01 ◼ ► And the fact that it does it in chunks is terrible, but like sync messages, free resources, don't be afraid to put those buttons in.
00:57:07 ◼ ► But apparently only two teams in all of Apple have been somehow able to sneak through a useful button in their UI
00:57:14 ◼ ► that lets people do a thing that a lot of people want to do, which is do the thing now, free the space now,
00:57:20 ◼ ► purge the purgeable space now, because I need the space now and you're not getting the hint.
00:57:27 ◼ ► You skipped over one item, and Ezekiel Allen said in Mac OS Monterey, I think we might have mentioned this before,
00:57:34 ◼ ► but it's worth bringing up again, there is now a UI and disk utility for time machine snapshots.
00:57:41 ◼ ► But just to remind people, if you don't want to use tmutil and you don't understand where your space is going or whatever
00:57:46 ◼ ► and you want to see how many time machine snapshots do I have and how much space are they taking,
00:57:49 ◼ ► a reminder that disk utility, the GUI app that comes with your Mac, has a way to do that.
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00:59:54 ◼ ► Thank you so much to Linode, my favorite place to run servers, for sponsoring our show.
01:00:05 ◼ ► You know, I think we might have mentioned this offhandedly last week, but you and I were jockeying over who was going to talk about Quesada, who did not sponsor this week.
01:00:13 ◼ ► But I wanted to talk and do the sponsor read because I freaking love it and as far as I knew you love it.
01:00:20 ◼ ► Yeah, so we decided to talk about this week as an actual topic because they are sponsoring our show.
01:00:27 ◼ ► And so I thought it would be weird to talk about it as a topic on an episode they are sponsoring because we try to be independent with that kind of stuff.
01:00:37 ◼ ► And obviously with that giant disclaimer they are sponsored, but I've been using them now for a little over a year in various roles in my house.
01:00:46 ◼ ► And so if you recall, the last time we mentioned this kind of stuff, so Lutron Quesada just for the record is a smart home system of switches and outlets by Lutron.
01:00:57 ◼ ► And I think they have blinds and stuff, there's a couple other things, but it's mostly light switches and a couple of switched outlet things.
01:01:05 ◼ ► Yeah, and it's worth noting that they work on some sort of proprietary radio frequency or something like that.
01:01:09 ◼ ► It is not thread and I have no idea if it is or ever will be thread compatible, but it's spiritually similar in that it's got its own hub box that will spew RF or whatever it needs to do in order to talk to the switches.
01:01:24 ◼ ► And then the hub is hooked up to Ethernet so you can talk to HomeKit and whatever else you might have in your house.
01:01:30 ◼ ► But the reason this is important is because you're not relying on every one of these switches to get on your Wi-Fi.
01:01:34 ◼ ► And in my experience, and I think I can speak for Marco in saying this, in Marco's experience this is way more reliable.
01:01:41 ◼ ► And in almost all these cases there are physical switches that you can use if you want to completely ignore HomeKit in its entirety, which is really, really nice too.
01:01:50 ◼ ► Yeah, and this is exactly why I wanted to talk about it because the last time we talked about this kind of thing, we talked a few months back about, like I was frustrated with just the general unreliability of Wi-Fi smart outlets and Wi-Fi smart light bulbs.
01:02:06 ◼ ► Because it just seemed like Wi-Fi stuff works like 90% of the time and then just doesn't.
01:02:12 ◼ ► And it's very hard to find good reliable stuff. And I mentioned in particular there was a role I had in my house that we have an ice maker that is loud enough that we don't want it running during quiet evening TV or movie watching time.
01:02:28 ◼ ► But in the middle of the day it's fine. And so I wanted to put it on some kind of timer outlet where I could adjust when it runs and still be able to run it manually if we've ran out of ice or something.
01:02:38 ◼ ► But that doesn't really happen. But anyway, I decided that the regular 70s rotating knob timer switch, I wanted something a little bit smarter than that that I could control.
01:02:47 ◼ ► Also, the ice maker is built into the cabinet, or built into the counter, and the outlet is behind it.
01:02:58 ◼ ► So I wanted something that I wouldn't have to ever pull the ice maker out to access physically.
01:03:03 ◼ ► So something that had to be able to be put back there and A, still work and B, never need to be touched.
01:03:10 ◼ ► And for a while I tried a couple of different Wi-Fi smart outlets back there and they were unreliable.
01:03:18 ◼ ► They would work for a few weeks and then stop working. And then, oh, I've got to pull the whole thing out. That sucks.
01:03:23 ◼ ► And so I eventually switched. There is a hole in the Lutron Quesada lineup. They don't make a plain smart outlet the way you think of smart outlets.
01:03:34 ◼ ► They make one that is like a lamp box that has a built-in dimmer and a two-prong outlet only.
01:03:41 ◼ ► Because you don't really want to be running a dimmer circuit on anything but an old lamp because that could mess up other electronics, I think.
01:03:50 ◼ ► So the idea is you're not supposed to plug in an appliance into this thing. So they have that.
01:03:55 ◼ ► They also make an outdoor switched outlet that is huge because it has a whole outdoor housing, this big, thick, heavy cable.
01:04:04 ◼ ► Well, I put one of those behind my ice maker. Because it's the only switched outlet they make as part of their system that is not that lamp dimmer thing.
01:04:13 ◼ ► So I installed that. Whenever we talked about that topic, which was probably three, four months ago now, something like that, right?
01:04:25 ◼ ► And that's something I don't think I can say a hundred percent reliable about any other smart home thing I have ever used.
01:04:33 ◼ ► Like, never. That literally has never happened. The Quesada stuff is a hundred percent reliable. And it isn't just that.
01:04:39 ◼ ► So I also have, I remember back then we mentioned too, when we did our renovations here that they installed for code compliance for the outdoor staircase lighting.
01:04:49 ◼ ► They installed some staircase lights and a Quesada system to make them run on timers to only run when it's dark outside.
01:04:55 ◼ ► And so I had actually been running Quesada stuff for like a year and I hadn't even really thought about it ever.
01:05:02 ◼ ► Because it just works. It worked every single day. It just quietly works. And you never have to think about it. You set it up and then it just works.
01:05:12 ◼ ► The strategy they use, I think what Casey mentioned earlier, is very important. They don't make smart light bulbs. They make switches and a couple of outlets.
01:05:21 ◼ ► And so you can use whatever bulbs you want. And this is great because I actually, I am a huge light bulb nerd.
01:05:27 ◼ ► Like, I love getting new, cool, nice lights. Like, getting more light for the same wattage and getting higher color rendering index.
01:05:34 ◼ ► I'm actually, I wanted to mention also, I'm extremely happy with these lights I have from a company called Waveform Lighting.
01:05:41 ◼ ► I don't know how good or well known this is, but somebody tipped me off to this a few months back and I finally got them.
01:05:46 ◼ ► They are the nicest LED bulbs I have ever used. Like, the light they produce, it's like super high CRI and super low flicker.
01:05:54 ◼ ► My god are they nice. Like, they are so good. The only thing is they aren't dimmable. But otherwise, they are super nice.
01:06:01 ◼ ► Anyway, Waveform Lighting also, strong recommendation. And yeah, I have the 4000K ones in my office there. Oh god, I love them so much.
01:06:08 ◼ ► Anyway, what's great about the Caseta stuff is that it works at the switch level so you can have a wall switch that is smart controlled.
01:06:16 ◼ ► And that is by far the nicest way to do it. Because then, you can control it from the app. You can control it from a home kit.
01:06:23 ◼ ► You can get their little wireless switches, the little Pico switches, and you can put those wherever you want.
01:06:28 ◼ ► So, I also have a pair of those on my desk for the two lights that I have in my office.
01:06:39 ◼ ► And those are all Caseta. The wall lights are actually, they plug into an outlet and so I have another one of those outdoor outlet switches from Caseta to control that.
01:06:49 ◼ ► And then I can put over on my wall a switch that looks and works like any other light switch for that outlet plug.
01:06:58 ◼ ► I also have on the wall in the regular light switch switch box a smart Caseta light switch that controls the ceiling lights.
01:07:06 ◼ ► And so what this means is nobody else who ever enters this room or lives in my house has to know that these are smart lights.
01:07:14 ◼ ► Because there's a button on the wall. You turn it on and they turn on. You turn it off and they turn off.
01:07:20 ◼ ► And it's the only way, like you can't like trip over the cord for the lamp or accidentally switch off the lamp and your smart bulb doesn't work anymore.
01:07:26 ◼ ► Like that doesn't happen. Like it's just a switch on the wall that controls the lights on the ceiling.
01:07:37 ◼ ► When you combine that with the reliability they have, the only limitation I have for Caseta is that if you're using the outdoor plug as your switched outlet, it's kind of big and kind of expensive.
01:07:51 ◼ ► I think it's like $70 because it's not made for that obviously but I'm using it that way anyway.
01:07:55 ◼ ► I'm looking forward to actually when I have my Christmas lights this year outside, I bought a couple more of those to use for that.
01:08:06 ◼ ► Number two, I'm just getting a little more conscious over time of what kind of hardware manufacturer I'm letting into my house and onto my network.
01:08:16 ◼ ► You know, I don't really want a bunch of like no name cheap stuff from Amazon from God knows what company running God knows what insecure software on my network.
01:08:29 ◼ ► And I know I can do tricks like isolating it on its own private network and stuff like that but that's a lot of administration and work and stuff and most people don't even do that.
01:08:38 ◼ ► And so I don't want to have to deal with that. I want to get my stuff in my house that is on my network from a smaller number of companies with a higher level of trust.
01:08:52 ◼ ► Not only do those not work very well but I feel better not having a lot of that stuff in my network.
01:08:59 ◼ ► But anyway, so I mentioned back then also this past summer we were talking about security cameras and I was putting up a couple of cameras under my house because of some problems we were having.
01:09:09 ◼ ► In the area where we park our bikes, it's kind of under the house in an area that has some physical light fixtures like on the wall to light up that area.
01:09:18 ◼ ► There was a switch on the wall to turn those lights on. And I thought wouldn't it be nice to have a motion sensor that every time we rode up with our bikes if it was dark out it would turn those lights on automatically and light up the area for us.
01:09:32 ◼ ► Seems reasonable. People have been using motion sensors for that kind of stuff for decades. I thought I'll do it the smart way.
01:09:38 ◼ ► So number one I thought I will convert the switch in the wall here to a Caseta switch. Great. Then I can run HomeKit automations to detect motion in this area and trigger that switch to turn on.
01:09:51 ◼ ► And the Logitech Circle View camera that I have there has motion control built in. So I thought this would be great.
01:09:58 ◼ ► The camera will detect the motion. I'm already running the camera. So here's what happens when you do that.
01:10:09 ◼ ► Now if I'm honest, the speed at which it turns the light on after detecting motion is kind of variable.
01:10:16 ◼ ► Just like again, think of any home stuff you've ever used. It's always like this, right? Any like smart home stuff.
01:10:23 ◼ ► It's like it works in two seconds most of the time. But sometimes five seconds and sometimes infinite seconds. It never works.
01:10:39 ◼ ► Problem number two is that you'd say alright when you detect motion turn the light on for whatever minutes, x minutes, and then turn the light off if there's no more motion.
01:10:49 ◼ ► Well guess what would happen? The light would get turned off and the camera would say something has changed. There's motion.
01:10:56 ◼ ► Because the difference in picture between the light being on and off was considered by the Logitech Circle View Camera to be motion.
01:11:10 ◼ ► So that was not going to work. So I thought okay, I have to separate the rules of motion detection and this camera.
01:11:20 ◼ ► Because obviously that's not going to work. So most motion detectors I don't think work in the visible spectrum.
01:11:27 ◼ ► The camera is doing it optically in the visible spectrum of light. So it's considering this change in illumination to be a big motion event.
01:11:37 ◼ ► There are HomeKit motion sensors. Not many of them. The best reviewed one is by the company Eve.
01:11:43 ◼ ► I got the Eve motion sensor and I've heard Merlin talk about how good their stuff can be.
01:11:47 ◼ ► I even got the Eve extend because it's in an area below the house. It's kind of in a poor Wi-Fi area.
01:11:54 ◼ ► I have since put an access point down there to fix the Wi-Fi but it's still very far from any kind of Bluetooth reception for any HomeKit hub that might be at my house.
01:12:05 ◼ ► Of course it is. No it's not. It wasn't. But this is an area where it's very covered. It's pretty far from the LMS.
01:12:15 ◼ ► No no no John and Marco. As much as I want to make fun of Marco about this one. Apparently it is IPX3 water resistance.
01:12:24 ◼ ► Alright well then so that must be. I mean unless they think your house is going to have water in it. There's got to be some kind of outdoor thing right?
01:12:30 ◼ ► No I mean like in this particular location I can use pretty much anything as long as I can tolerate temperature extremes.
01:12:36 ◼ ► Because you know it does get pretty cold in the winter. But otherwise like this no rain gets to where this is. Ever.
01:12:57 ◼ ► Just like every other HomeKit thing. It works sometimes and it was kind of slow to respond just like the Logitech thing.
01:13:06 ◼ ► Eventually I decided this is not for me so I took that back in and I got the Caseta motion sensor.
01:13:17 ◼ ► But you can set up automation in the Caseta app that when that sensor detects motion it will turn on the lights that are in whatever room you say it's in.
01:13:33 ◼ ► It works every single time and it detects zero false things. It doesn't care at all when the light turns off. It doesn't treat that as motion.
01:13:42 ◼ ► And best of all it's so freaking fast. You can ride a bike up into this area as you're still riding the bike and it turns on in time.
01:13:52 ◼ ► It's so much faster than everything else because it's kind of like when your hand touches a hot stove and your brain doesn't have to process that to say "Oh pull away the hand."
01:14:02 ◼ ► It just doesn't. It's like that kind of difference where the HomeKit stuff always felt like "Hey I detected motion. Send somebody a memo about it."
01:14:11 ◼ ► And then somebody goes "Oh is that Bob? Is he saying there's motion? Oh hey Joe turn those lights on."
01:14:18 ◼ ► Whereas this is just like boom motion. It's as if the motion sensor is built into the lights.
01:14:25 ◼ ► That's how fast this is. And when you compare it to the HomeKit stuff. Oh my god. So anyway I am just so incredibly happy with Lutron Quesada.
01:14:34 ◼ ► And I wanted to tell all of you this in an episode they were not sponsoring because I want you to really know it's authentic.
01:14:42 ◼ ► That it's just so good. It's so reliable. And the smart outlet situation is a little bit limited and pricey.
01:14:49 ◼ ► But otherwise I don't see any major downsides except for the fact that they only make a certain set of types of things.
01:14:56 ◼ ► Like they don't make thermostats and stuff like that. Obviously you got to go to other things for that.
01:15:01 ◼ ► But yeah for the things they do make. Man they're good. And they are literally the only smart home system that I have found that is reliable.
01:15:14 ◼ ► You know I don't want to belabor the point so I'll just very briefly say that in my experience I completely agree with you.
01:15:21 ◼ ► I think we talked about several times months ago we put a screen in porch in the back of the house earlier this year.
01:15:28 ◼ ► And we used Quesada switches for the fans there. And then I got a B and my bonnet to change all of the switches in the house.
01:15:50 ◼ ► And so I switched all of the switches in the house. And only maybe five of them I replaced with Quesada switches.
01:16:01 ◼ ► But because it is relatively expensive. Like you can get really crummy versions of a lot of their stuff for considerably less money.
01:16:36 ◼ ► And I am a very poor homeowner in that I am very bad at all home maintenance things of any sort.
01:16:54 ◼ ► But I don't think regular like on offer maybe was the dimmer didn't check my work on this.
01:17:32 ◼ ► And he was talking about his smart home in general so it's not strictly limited to Quesada.
01:17:43 ◼ ► I was overjoyed when we were able to get them to sponsor the show because it's one of those sponsors.
01:18:02 ◼ ► Oftentimes when we replace some kind of old technology with something that we think is new and better.
01:18:09 ◼ ► Oftentimes we add coolness and capabilities and convenience at the cost of reliability.
01:18:32 ◼ ► And so to have something that literally does work 100% of the time is like game changing.
01:18:56 ◼ ► It went via I believe Korea and then Alaska and then Louisville as UPS shipments are wont to do.
01:19:25 ◼ ► And let me set, this is probably going to be relevant in a few minutes, but let me set a little bit of expectations.
01:19:30 ◼ ► I have this iMac Pro, I have a 2020 MacBook Pro, and I really, really love both machines.
01:19:42 ◼ ► which I'm not saying is fact or fiction, I'm just saying this is what I was kind of setting myself up to believe,
01:19:47 ◼ ► was that on M1 machines, particularly these new ones, basically everything is instant and you never have to wait for anything ever again.
01:20:00 ◼ ► And I expected this thing to be a little bit on the chunky side, but overall not too different than what I've got.
01:20:05 ◼ ► So with that in mind, physical design, I think the weight, not having measured it and not having looked it up,
01:20:11 ◼ ► I think John had looked it up last week, but the weight as compared to my 2020 Intel MacBook Pro seems to be approximately equivalent.
01:20:32 ◼ ► And I hadn't thought about it until I read that in the show notes, but it is a lot more slidey than it was before.
01:20:50 ◼ ► I wonder if that was a reason I put this in is because I wondered if it was true, so thanks for conferring.
01:20:55 ◼ ► But I also wonder if that's an intentional feature because this is a trade-off with feet on a laptop.
01:20:59 ◼ ► You do want them to be grippy, but I have definitely seen people expect to be able to shove their laptop over
01:21:06 ◼ ► or even just rotate it so someone else can see it, and the feet are so tacky that it just doesn't want to do that.
01:21:11 ◼ ► So I think there is probably a balance between making it easy to move your thing around on the surface versus making it secure.
01:21:17 ◼ ► Where do you think this falls? It obviously feels less tacky, but does it feel insecure, like you're going to accidentally knock it off,
01:21:26 ◼ ► I would say it's less tacky. Also, again, it's not fair because I use a glass top desk,
01:21:44 ◼ ► That's true. I do have a water bottle, but it is capped about three inches from the computer as we speak.
01:21:50 ◼ ► Nevertheless, I would prefer it to be slightly more tacky, but it's not so slippy that I find it to be bothersome.
01:21:58 ◼ ► It's not like the computer is moving when I'm just using it, but if I put really any amount of pressure on it
01:22:05 ◼ ► So I'm not saying it's bad. I actually don't have my old laptop near me. It's downstairs.
01:22:11 ◼ ► But I would say I would probably prefer it a little bit tackier, but not necessarily as tacky as the old one was.
01:22:19 ◼ ► Other than that, the shell of it, as we've talked about, some areas are curvier when maybe they weren't before,
01:22:38 ◼ ► And it is super trippy for me to see the HDR stuff happening, because I'm used to seeing that on a phone
01:22:46 ◼ ► when suddenly the rest of the screen seems to get dim and just the video you're looking at gets super bright.
01:22:52 ◼ ► I don't have a problem with it, especially since I'm used to it on the phone, but it is very trippy to see on my Mac.
01:22:59 ◼ ► 120Hz, I wouldn't say I notice it that often, but one place I notice it every time, and it makes me smile every time,
01:23:08 ◼ ► and this is the equivalent of me saying that the animations like zooming in and out of an app on my phone,
01:23:21 ◼ ► So I may, as we've talked many times, a devout Spaces user. This is like virtual desktops.
01:23:25 ◼ ► And as I slide laterally back and forth between spaces, it is buttery smooth, and it makes me very happy.
01:23:36 ◼ ► and honestly, my eye is not stupendous for this, but there are definitely times where I'm like,
01:23:45 ◼ ► I have much more to say, but Marco, do you want to jump in on this particular point, or are you good for something?
01:23:52 ◼ ► Interesting. I mean, so just to set the stage here, I've been looking at these screens a lot over the last week,
01:24:01 ◼ ► but what happened is I decided to go ahead with the plan to replace my desktop with a high-powered laptop,
01:24:12 ◼ ► So I spent most of the last week setting up two of these right next to each other on my desk.
01:24:27 ◼ ► Migration Assistant failed, which has happened to a lot of people with the MacBook Air,
01:24:31 ◼ ► and there's occasionally some way to dive into something or other and try to fix it with system integrity protection
01:25:29 ◼ ► I don't know what it is. Maybe it's that I'm just not seeing a lot of apps that use it,
01:25:37 ◼ ► Like I've been looking at a lot of Safari recently, like going to websites of apps that I have to download,
01:26:00 ◼ ► nor is there anything to replace it with that would support 120 hertz at anywhere near this size and resolution.
01:26:09 ◼ ► that I don't seem to notice it much on the Mac, and that I can be happy using it without that on my desktop.
01:26:16 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I think so far I mostly agree with you that it's not terribly noticeable,
01:26:31 ◼ ► You were setting up both the computers, so you're going to use the 16 as a desktop replacement
01:27:11 ◼ ► Yeah, I did, because I was going to the mainland for some grocery shopping and stuff last Thursday,
01:27:23 ◼ ► I went and reserved one at the nearby Apple store, and then I bounced it, got in the shower,
01:27:28 ◼ ► got in a boat, got in a car, did the whole cars, trucks, boats, trains, whatever it was,
01:27:39 ◼ ► It feels really extravagant to have bought two at the same time, but I am very happy I did,
01:27:46 ◼ ► because, as I mentioned earlier, I really did consider only having the desktop laptop as a new one,
01:27:55 ◼ ► and keeping my M1 Air as my Air on the House one, and truthfully, that would be fine for almost all conditions,
01:28:01 ◼ ► except I do intend to do some pretty heavy video capture stuff on it, where there's going to be three different cameras,
01:28:12 ◼ ► and so I figure having a beefier system that has more GPU power and more I/O, like Thunderbolt throughput,
01:28:19 ◼ ► I thought would be beneficial to that, plus, not to mention, more disk space and more RAM,
01:28:39 ◼ ► It's so good to be back to this. I think that's what my iMac Pro had for the years I used that.
01:29:01 ◼ ► Sometimes I'm running more than one at a time, or switching between very RAM hungry apps.
01:29:05 ◼ ► Now, when I switch between Xcode and Logic, it doesn't bring everything to a crawl for a few seconds.
01:29:16 ◼ ► I want to talk about that YouTube video, by the way, because a lot of people have asked about that.
01:29:26 ◼ ► There is nothing particularly magical about the ARM-based Macs that makes them magically not need more RAM.
01:29:36 ◼ ► if anything, it's potentially possible for the code size of Intel binaries to be smaller,
01:29:49 ◼ ► So, in theory, the code portion of your applications and memory could take up more room on ARM.
01:29:53 ◼ ► Now, granted, you don't have to deal with 32 and 64, but that's also not true in Intel anymore.
01:29:57 ◼ ► Anyway, the whole point is with the RAM thing, if you test an application that doesn't particularly stress the memory system,
01:30:16 ◼ ► and you start swapping, which means not just pushing things into virtual memory or how much swap is used,
01:30:21 ◼ ► but swapping means the program is constantly putting things into the swap file on "disk" and taking them out,
01:30:27 ◼ ► and then putting them in and taking them out. That's swapping. That's an activity. It's a verb.
01:30:35 ◼ ► So, if you see some YouTube video that says, oh, we tried a 16-gig machine and a 32 one,
01:31:12 ◼ ► Therefore, the only way to ever open this file on a laptop is to have a laptop with "64 gigs of VRAM"
01:31:29 ◼ ► and you can see that activity if you look at the VM stat or whatever the equivalent tools are on Mac OS.
01:31:45 ◼ ► What you want to tell is like, hey, if I do this, if I do the activity that I want to do on a machine with more RAM,
01:32:00 ◼ ► The only thing is there's actually a few people in my family and friends who need a computer,
01:32:27 ◼ ► And maybe that's because the M1 MacBook Air is that fun, like weird, like orangey-pinkish color,
01:33:12 ◼ ► It looks like you borrowed someone else's cable when you see it against the space gray.
01:33:17 ◼ ► Both the color of the metal and the color of the cord are both noticeably too light for the space gray laptop,
01:33:29 ◼ ► I think silver looks better because not only does MagSafe look better, far and away better, I think, with silver,
01:33:53 ◼ ► I think the higher contrast of the silver model looks nicer overall compared to the space gray,
01:34:00 ◼ ► which I think looks a little bit old, a little bit dated, and is lower contrast with the hardware,
01:34:35 ◼ ► like when you peel it in order to remove it, so you're like putting your finger under it and peeling it upwards.
01:40:48 ◼ ► And I will probably, I suspect, pick up one or two more of these USB-C to MagSafe ends,
01:45:43 ◼ ► It was just part of the screen, but the Touch ID is supposed to just look like more touch bars,
01:45:58 ◼ ► but these are really, really good, and you get way more bass out of these than you would expect.
01:47:15 ◼ ► like, regular 2.5-inch SATA enclosure, that seems to have problems with these new Macs.
01:47:22 ◼ ► Now, I was trying to isolate -- it might not be a problem with the new Macs specifically.
01:47:43 ◼ ► So it seems to be maybe a problem with, you know, M1 series chips and Big Sur combined,
01:48:01 ◼ ► Yeah, so anyway, there's something going on with these machines/Monterrey and USB 3 storage devices.
01:48:18 ◼ ► like conveniently, Apple's charging cable from all of their most recent laptops, except these.
01:48:26 ◼ ► that comes with pretty much every Apple laptop made between 2016 and right before these came out,
01:49:11 ◼ ► It seems to not apply to USB 2.0 devices or to anything that is like Thunderbolt or otherwise not USB.
01:49:23 ◼ ► but I agree that it seems to me like it would be a software thing, but who really knows?
01:49:28 ◼ ► Speed. So again, I was sold by me to me a bill of goods that this thing would load everything instantly always.
01:49:39 ◼ ► With certain things, it definitely feels like it's churning on something or trying to do something.
01:49:50 ◼ ► which maybe that was my first problem, but one way or another, it took literally like an hour or something like that.
01:50:05 ◼ ► Like you see the Xcode icon bounce a couple of times, but one thing that blew my freaking mind was every time I opened the simulator.
01:50:22 ◼ ► Going from that to the simulator displaying my app is preposterously fast, hilariously preposterously ridiculously fast.
01:50:36 ◼ ► Now granted, I don't cold start simulator that often, but even just getting the simulator to come up with the latest version of my app,
01:50:48 ◼ ► I've rebooted a bunch of times, including about 15 times when I installed Audio Hijack.
01:51:00 ◼ ► which I am just now experiencing for the first time, when you go ahead and switch displays, it is instant.
01:51:07 ◼ ► And after 30 years of waiting for flash, flash, flash, black, not black, black again, not black, black again, oh there it is.
01:51:15 ◼ ► It is amazing. It is so cool that this happens so quickly and it makes me extremely happy.
01:51:21 ◼ ► Yeah, I know that somebody must have put a ton of work into like the display driving whatever, whatever does that.
01:51:32 ◼ ► As you said, like plugging in and disconnecting monitors or opening and closing the screen lid,
01:51:37 ◼ ► to have things just instantly pop into the new place and the new configuration is so cool.
01:51:44 ◼ ► And again, it is one of those things like we have been trained for decades into thinking I guess that can't happen.
01:51:56 ◼ ► And when you are given better things, all of a sudden in an area you didn't even think you could get them, it is really delightful.
01:52:07 ◼ ► A couple of funny things that I think were more to do with having a brand new computer than anything else.
01:52:16 ◼ ► So if you recall, for group iMessages, you can set like a name that is shared across all the participants
01:52:26 ◼ ► And the names seem to have persisted with the icons because in a few cases I set custom icons and they have disappeared which is kind of annoying.
01:52:32 ◼ ► Also I am constantly getting barraged with like, "Oh, Casey List has a new photo for you."
01:52:45 ◼ ► Just yesterday, it is like a routine matter of course, I just look at the messages window and it says,
01:52:50 ◼ ► "Do you want to update the photo of this contact?" I am like, "For the 8,000th time, no."
01:52:54 ◼ ► I think it is because you can set a preference that says, "Do you want to offer your photo to other people that you message with?"
01:53:03 ◼ ► If you set that, I think you are kind of at the mercy, like on the receiving end, you are at the mercy of other people who may be setting up a new account on a computer or something.
01:53:27 ◼ ► Another thing that I thought was quite funny was that I think I was talking with Mike Hurley.
01:53:33 ◼ ► And he replied to an image that he had sent a few days ago before this computer was in my hands.
01:54:20 ◼ ► But a slightly inconsistent, terrible, laggy, slow syncing mechanism that constantly re-scrolls you to a new bit and then it's in the scroll back is better than nothing at all.
01:54:29 ◼ ► Because with nothing at all, it's like, well, some messages are on some device and some messages are on other devices.
01:54:37 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, doesn't messages in the cloud give Apple your encryption key or something like that?
01:54:45 ◼ ► It's like I didn't want to turn on messages in the cloud because I don't want Apple seeing my messages.
01:55:01 ◼ ► Like, it's kind of like you do have the button that you can do sync now, which is great.
01:55:06 ◼ ► But if you don't do that and you're like scrolling through a scroll back to look at something, expect that at any point the program will decide,
01:55:13 ◼ ► I've done something related to sync and now I've decided your scroll back position is going to be offset by a few thousand pixels. Enjoy.
01:55:24 ◼ ► So for grins and giggles, I decided to think about what would I do if I wanted to keep this as my primary machine, which is I think what I want to do.
01:55:38 ◼ ► So I tried using my OG, like literally from the Kickstarter, Luna Display, which thankfully I had gotten when my adorable was my was my run around computer.
01:55:57 ◼ ► However, even over Ethernet, powering the 5K over the Luna Display is not exactly delightful because there's so many compression artifacts.
01:56:07 ◼ ► And it's like I tried using Xcode and every time I scroll the Xcode window, like all the text gets garbly and gross looking and then you wait a beat and then it all comes back in nice and crisp because it stopped moving.
01:56:34 ◼ ► And it wouldn't surprise me if my hardware is old and there's probably new hardware now.
01:56:47 ◼ ► So I don't think we're going to have time today, but I would like very much to whine about the piss poor state of Apple monitors because I have ordered an LG 5K from Apple that might deliver this year because I don't know what else to do.
01:57:12 ◼ ► It's not a good time to buy an XDR. I endorse the 5K plan, assuming you can resell it at some point in the future because honestly, we don't know what the schedule is for Apple ever releasing anything better.
01:57:26 ◼ ► I mean, if I was spending your money, I would have had an XDR yesterday, but I'm spending my money, which is why I don't have an XDR.
01:57:36 ◼ ► And then finally, the only iOS on Mac OS Catalyst app that I've installed is indeed Overcast because I was doing my normal thing where I put my iPhone in like a 12 South dock or whatever it is I have on my desk, and I was starting to play, I think it was Upgrade actually, the aforementioned episode of Upgrade, and I started playing.
01:58:05 ◼ ► That's exactly right. And actually, well, that's not even fair. It was a very nice experience and it all worked really well until I tried to hit a media key on the keyboard and it was like, "What? Nope. That doesn't work. Play Pause? I don't know what that is."
01:58:18 ◼ ► And that was a bit of a bummer. So I got to talk to the developer and see if I can convince him or her to add media key support because that would be super awesome.
01:58:26 ◼ ► You mean convince them to do literally anything to the app to make it aware that it's running on a Mac?
01:58:32 ◼ ► I don't think I have access to those keys in that environment. Maybe because it isn't a Catalyst app. It's like an iOS Mac app.
01:58:41 ◼ ► And Catalyst might have hooks into that kind of stuff. And one of the reasons I haven't made a Catalyst app is that once you do that, then you have to have a whole separate entry in the Mac App Store for your app and maintain that.
01:58:55 ◼ ► And submit it separately, have all these separate builds, and that's a lot of overhead for what has proven to be not no users, but not a lot of users.
01:59:09 ◼ ► Not a lot of people are using Overcast on their Macs. And of course that will grow as more people use them.
01:59:16 ◼ ► Obviously, as more people have these machines that can run it, then more people will run it.
01:59:22 ◼ ► But it's not a huge number. That being said, according to my analytics that I run, it is climbing quickly over the last couple of weeks. Or over the last week, rather.
01:59:33 ◼ ► So anyway, so far so good. I'm really looking forward to, well, I might have mentioned this last week, but I was going to say I'm really looking forward to taking this somewhere, like a patio somewhere or somewhere where I can work outside and not have to worry about my battery all the time.
01:59:47 ◼ ► But it's freaking freezing here now. So now that I have my wonderful new laptop, my portable desktop that I can take places, I can't really take it anywhere because everywhere is freezing and I'm still allergic to the indoors.
01:59:58 ◼ ► Although, random follow-up, Declan has his first shot appointment in a little over a week and I'm super excited about that.
02:00:04 ◼ ► So at that point it'll be three down, one to go. And for you guys, you'll be all in, which will be great.
02:00:11 ◼ ► In any case, this is an incredibly nice machine. I spent a preposterous amount of money on it and I probably over ordered on it. Like I probably didn't need 64GB of RAM.
02:00:23 ◼ ► I think I stand by my 4TB, but I probably didn't need the Macs. I probably could have been just fine with the Pro and 32GB of RAM.
02:00:31 ◼ ► But so far so freaking good. And outside of my big monitor problems, I really, really, really love this computer and I'm so happy it's here.
02:00:40 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Stripe. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at ATP.FM/JOIN.
02:00:51 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
02:01:04 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
02:01:15 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
02:01:30 ◼ ► That's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to, accidental.
02:01:55 ◼ ► So related to this computer, and potentially being my one and only computer, excepting my Mac mini server which we're not talking about.
02:02:03 ◼ ► I have now a, well not right now, but soon I will have an iMac Pro that I should probably get rid of, and an Intel MacBook Pro that I should probably get rid of.
02:02:13 ◼ ► I think I am going to unload both of them. There's a slim chance I might hand the MacBook Pro to Erin cause she's still on the adorable, but she uses it so infrequently that I really don't think she'd need the MacBook Pro.
02:02:24 ◼ ► I think if anything it being bigger and heavier would probably not even make her happy. So I'm going to talk to her about it and see what she thinks, but she'll probably just stick with the adorable.
02:02:34 ◼ ► So I'll have this Intel MacBook Pro to get rid of and probably the iMac Pro to get rid of.
02:02:40 ◼ ► I've not really done this, but a couple of times Marco, so I had some questions for you. Let me just rattle off the questions cause they're all pretty quick and then you can kind of answer them in whatever order you see fit.
02:02:52 ◼ ► First of all, do you, and again save your answers for a second here, do you typically include accessories?
02:03:00 ◼ ► So for the MacBook Pro, all things being equal, I'd probably just hoard the power supply and USB-C cable, but on the flip side of that if I was buying a new MacBook Pro I'd probably want those things.
02:03:10 ◼ ► So what do you do with that? Does the fact that both of these have active AppleCare+ things, does that matter? Do I take that into account in the pricing or do I just say that that's an advantage to make the product seem more lucrative?
02:03:25 ◼ ► And then more than anything else, how do you price these? Cause I did a little bit of spelunking on eBay and I came up with some numbers that I'm not sure if they're realistic or not.
02:03:35 ◼ ► And my recollection is that what you would do, and I'm going to shut up in a second and let you actually answer it, what you would do is you would look at eBay and basically discount a few hundred bucks or something like that.
02:03:44 ◼ ► And so I've had a couple of people reach out and kind of kick the tires on each of these machines so I don't think I necessarily need to go to eBay.
02:03:56 ◼ ► But if these couple of interested parties end up falling through, like my plan was to just post to Twitter and be like, "Hey, first one to pee on it, so to speak, is the winner."
02:04:06 ◼ ► So, yeah, I'm not going to post that. But what is your advice and your approach to unloading not very old and still very nice computers?
02:04:19 ◼ ► So, it depends on a lot of factors. And it's very much like trading in old cars. If you do the trade-in route, like to the dealer, if you do the Apple trade-in, you will get the worst price but the least hassle and the least risk.
02:04:37 ◼ ► So that is a really good option if there's something kind of flaky or wrong with it in the sense that you don't necessarily want to sell it to somebody who you know and who knows you in some way.
02:04:51 ◼ ► Whether that's somebody on Twitter or an eBay person or whatever. You don't want to be personally responsible for it if it's a little bit flaky or broken.
02:05:01 ◼ ► So if there's anything kind of wrong with it, trade it in and take the hit. Also, if you just want to be quickly done with it or if it's going to be a big pain.
02:05:12 ◼ ► And this might be something like, you know, if shipping it's going to be really problematic. Like, you know, if it's something that's big and heavy and hard to ship well/affordably like a Mac Pro Tower, for instance.
02:05:25 ◼ ► Those are larger, more expensive to ship. I remember the last time when I sold a Mac Pro Tower years ago, I remember it cost like $150 to ship it.
02:05:38 ◼ ► It was a big chunk out of its value just for shipping. And I'd say the original box. Like if you don't have the shipping box for some of these things, it's even more because then you have to buy shipping boxes and padding and stuff like that.
02:05:51 ◼ ► So anyway, so trading in is good in the sense that you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Like if you do a trade in to Apple, they will send you packaging material.
02:05:59 ◼ ► Like they mail you an empty box with padding, you stick the computer in it and you send it back.
02:06:03 ◼ ► Oh, quick aside about that. A listener, and I don't have their name handy, but a listener wrote in to say they were looking to trade in their John style, what is it, 2019? Whatever.
02:06:17 ◼ ► Apparently Apple was not at all prepared for this because they sent them a box that was clearly meant for the trash can Mac Pro, which I just thought was hilarious.
02:06:29 ◼ ► Remember how big the monitor stand box is, Mark? I mean, I talk about it when I got mine. I'm sure you noticed when you had yours. The monitor stand box is huge.
02:06:35 ◼ ► Yeah, actually I just moved it yesterday because I was rearranging the basement a little bit. There it is. It's massive and heavy even without the stand in it.
02:06:42 ◼ ► So for selling on eBay and stuff, eBay is a great chance to be pretty much guaranteed a buyer. It might not be the best buyer, it might not be the most profitable buyer.
02:06:56 ◼ ► You're going to have people saying, "Hey, can you maybe ship it to this remote island I live on that's going to be a pain in the butt for you and you've got to fill out a million customs forms because it's like four countries away?"
02:07:07 ◼ ► No. You don't want to do any of that. If you go on eBay, keep it simple. Say continental US only and do shipping at cost because they'll calculate it all for you.
02:07:17 ◼ ► The good thing about eBay is that you will get a buyer, pretty much anything unless you grossly overpriced the starting bid, but for the most part you will get a buyer.
02:07:26 ◼ ► And the eBay app is surprisingly good. What I would suggest, not too long ago if you were to sell something on eBay you'd probably do it similar to the way I used to do it which is like, "Take out the good camera, get out the light box to get really good photos of the object and dust it off, get all perfect, get no speck of dust on anywhere, take the pictures, import into Lightroom, boost them up, get the contrast nice, oh there's a speck of dust, clone stamp that out so you don't see the dust in the pictures."
02:07:55 ◼ ► Really a lot of effort going into it. And then you go on and you make a really nice description and everything. I would suggest throw all of that expectation away and just use the app on your iPad.
02:08:09 ◼ ► And maybe even on your phone if you want to, but iPad is fine too. You get a little more space with things like pictures and text and stuff on the iPad so it's nicer.
02:08:17 ◼ ► But just use the built in camera and don't use any fancy lighting or fancy photo setup or anything. Set the item on a table, dust it off in a quick way and use the eBay app and the built in camera in the eBay app to take like 5 or 6 photos all around it.
02:08:36 ◼ ► And then you can look up and you can say "alright it's this model computer, here's a description" and type in approximate description, plain text, put in no effort into your listing except a handful of iPhone/iPad photos and a quick text description.
02:08:52 ◼ ► That's all you need. And what this does is it makes it really easy for you the seller. Which means you're more likely to do it and it's less hassle and time for you. Then when the thing actually gets sold, like now that people can buy it directly on eBay and check out on eBay, you don't have to deal with PayPal or anything like that anymore.
02:09:17 ◼ ► eBay just pays you. And it's really nice because it's really easy. Now they will charge you for this. You always pay fees on eBay. You pay both the listing fee and the final value fee just like it always was.
02:09:30 ◼ ► The payment fee is probably on top of it now too. You end up losing something like 20% to fees. 15-20% I think is kind of the all in for eBay. So that's significant. And so this is why it's not a place to get the most money but it is a place where you can be pretty much guaranteed a buyer and you will generally have few to no problems with them.
02:09:57 ◼ ► The previous problems in the past of very fraudulent buyers a lot of times for laptops and stuff don't seem to be as common especially if you're restricted to US only and only accept their built in payment system and stuff like that.
02:10:09 ◼ ► So they make it very easy. And then if you tell them the dimensions and weight of your package before you even list the item, they will give you a shipping label.
02:10:20 ◼ ► Oh interesting. Because they're fully integrated now with the post office and everything. So you don't even have to do that. All you have to do is print it out and tape it on the box and mail it and you're done.
02:10:30 ◼ ► So they've really reduced a lot of the old friction and a lot of the old steps you used to have to take to sell on eBay. It's now really quite easy to sell stuff there.
02:10:39 ◼ ► The other option would be as you mentioned like Twitter or if people email in saying hey can I buy your laptop, that kind of thing. The downside of that kind of sale is that you're limited in buyers.
02:10:52 ◼ ► So if you're selling something that your audience might not want or at a price they might not want to pay, it might not go anywhere. Whereas if you put it on eBay, it will sell.
02:11:01 ◼ ► No question. You put it on eBay, make a seven day auction, a week later it will be out of your house. No question. It will definitely sell.
02:11:09 ◼ ► So I've been leaning more towards eBay for a lot of that kind of stuff recently. Anything I'm not trading in I'll usually go to eBay. Just because they have just made it so much easier.
02:11:20 ◼ ► That being said, an even easier option if you don't necessarily need the money from it is to give it to a family member or friend who needs a new computer. That's also a really good option.
02:11:32 ◼ ► And so whenever I have someone in my life that could really benefit from it, I try to take that option. That's not the common case unfortunately because most people in my life don't care about computers as much as I do.
02:11:42 ◼ ► So usually I end up selling. Or in the case of selling a desktop, most people in my life who need a computer don't want a desktop, they want a laptop.
02:11:53 ◼ ► And so when we sold our IMAX a couple years back, one of them went to a family member and the other one went on eBay and it was fine.
02:12:05 ◼ ► So for eBay it's super easy. You can go search for completed items and then filter that by sold items and it will show you what this exact item has actually sold for in the last whatever days.
02:12:18 ◼ ► eBay sold items is probably the best way to figure out what is this exact thing with this exact configuration actually worth.
02:12:28 ◼ ► See what it sells for in eBay. It's like well they found buyers so obviously that's about what it's worth. So pick whatever range you see there and make the starting bid something way low so that way.
02:12:44 ◼ ► Because if yours is going for 100 bucks less, 200 bucks less, 10%, 15% less than the value that people see by doing these kinds of searches, it will sell fast.
02:12:59 ◼ ► And you will have less trouble getting it sold. People will be more likely to hit the buy it now button and then it's out of your house even sooner and with even less hassle.
02:13:10 ◼ ► Again this is one of those things like if you're willing to give up like a few percent off the price and get a little bit lower price you can have a faster, easier, more guaranteed sale.
02:13:20 ◼ ► So that's again usually what I do is I will, I hope people pick the buy it now. Most of my stuff that I sold recently never even went to auction.
02:13:28 ◼ ► People just pick the buy it now thing because I priced it you know 5 or 10% below what it seemed like it was worth.
02:13:34 ◼ ► And it went and that was it. If you're on Twitter doing that kind of sale, you basically do the same thing but you can kind of go lower because you can account for the eBay fees not being charged to you in that medium.
02:13:47 ◼ ► So what I usually do if I'm selling on Twitter, I'll look at the eBay sold out on price and I'll go maybe 20% lower than that.
02:13:54 ◼ ► Because I know I'm not going to pay the 15% eBay fees. That works out pretty well if you can find a buyer there.
02:14:00 ◼ ► But again for more specialized stuff or for computers that you have literally spent the last few months telling all of your audience you shouldn't buy, maybe eBay is the better choice.
02:14:12 ◼ ► How do you deal with payment from like stuff that you sell on Twitter? Isn't that annoying to deal with?
02:14:16 ◼ ► Usually you can take advantage of the fact that people trust you. I know this sounds terrible but you can use one of the options where it kind of works like cash to you.
02:14:27 ◼ ► So the buyer kind of has no recourse after they send it to you. That only works if people trust you obviously because that's a good amount of trust to put in somebody.
02:14:35 ◼ ► It's not that they trust you. The main thing, and I know this is not actionable advice for most people who aren't us, but the main feature that we all have is not like oh we're so trustworthy.
02:14:45 ◼ ► It's that we have a public presence that people know about so that if Marco screws someone out of a computer, it's a story.
02:14:53 ◼ ► You might seem like oh doesn't Marco have all the power? He's got the audience, this poor unknown person who is buying his computer doesn't have any power.
02:15:02 ◼ ► But that's not true. They have the power of now I have a story. Now Marco, this person you know from podcasts and developers, screwed me out of a computer.
02:15:12 ◼ ► And so the main reason we have the ability to say oh you can trust me, I think the mutual understanding is you can trust me because I know that I have a lot to lose by screwing you out of this thing.
02:15:29 ◼ ► That makes sense. Alright I appreciate it. So I've got to look at some eBay completed sales and see what these things should be pressed for.
02:15:38 ◼ ► Although I do have to say I have some experience trying to exchange money with people maybe not for selling computers and stuff but like if you're not limited to US only it can be surprisingly difficult to just like let's find a way that we can both agree on and use to transfer money between someone in the UK and someone in the US.
02:15:53 ◼ ► Oh just use Apple Pay. Oh apparently we don't have Apple Pay cash in the UK. I'm like why not? I don't know because Apple. Well what about PayPal? Why don't you use PayPal? Do you use Venmo? Is that a thing there?
02:16:02 ◼ ► There's a million services but if you have two parties on equal footing and no one is particularly motivated people don't want to sign up for a new payment thing.
02:16:14 ◼ ► Well I only use Apple Pay cash and Venmo and the other person says well I only use PayPal and some other thing you've never heard of.
02:16:21 ◼ ► And so now it's like a staring contest of like well so are you going to sign up for PayPal or am I going to sign up for Venmo? It's not super easy and if anyone says cryptocurrency I swear just don't even.
02:16:36 ◼ ► No and this is again not only for payment reasons but for shipping and customs/duty reasons you don't want to ship outside the US. It's not worth the hassle.
02:16:46 ◼ ► I'm sorry people outside the US you can buy from people in your countries to make things easier for you. As an individual seller occasionally of my computer equipment it is such a pain to ship to other countries because then you have to deal with customs.
02:17:00 ◼ ► And that is a massive wild card both for time to receive the item and for unexpected charges either to you or to the buyer.
02:17:10 ◼ ► And it's just a complexity level that's not worth it when you are not a professional seller of goods.