00:00:00 ◼ ► I am happy. Good. There's a couple of significant reasons why right now I shouldn't be this happy.
00:00:06 ◼ ► I shouldn't be incredibly happy because I have a flat tire I have to deal with. Oh. On your bicycle or your car? On my car.
00:00:12 ◼ ► That's been parked in a parking lot for a while? Yeah, somebody hit it a little bit and tore the tire,
00:00:17 ◼ ► tore a hole in the sidewall on the tire specifically. So the tire is very flat. Oh, slow down.
00:00:31 ◼ ► few days ago. Oh no. After taking the boat over. After taking the boat over in like the one
00:00:38 ◼ ► time slot in the entire day that I could do this because there's only two boats on the weekends,
00:01:02 ◼ ► Didn't you take driver's ed? You're supposed to walk around the perimeter of the car inspecting it for damage before you get in.
00:01:08 ◼ ► Does anybody ever actually do that? Well, now you know why. Now you know why they teach you to do that.
00:01:13 ◼ ► I do only when I'm going on a long, long, long trip. Casey does to make sure none of his wheels fell off.
00:01:18 ◼ ► Well, that's true. See, you never know. It could happen. Could happen. Here, I just sent, I'm pasting three pictures into our private channel,
00:01:25 ◼ ► you can see. So you can see there's a hole in the sidewall of the tire and there's a bit of paint scraping around.
00:01:52 ◼ ► on this particular grocery shopping trip. This is the first time I'd ever brought a friend to a grocery shopping trip.
00:01:56 ◼ ► So fortunately, I brought a friend and he had a car so we just took his car instead. But this was,
00:02:02 ◼ ► this is what I have to deal with. So I actually have to go off, probably back off the island again, probably on Friday,
00:02:18 ◼ ► What could possibly hit the sidewall? What pointy thing on another vehicle is at that level?
00:02:28 ◼ ► My initial theory was maybe it was a higher up bumper from a truck because at this time of the year,
00:02:34 ◼ ► most of the people going in and out of this parking lot are contractors. And so it's a bunch of trucks and SUVs.
00:02:39 ◼ ► But that front corner paint scrape on the very low, that's very, that's well below a truck's bumper.
00:02:47 ◼ ► So it had to have been another like, you know, low car. But anyway, honestly, I don't really want to dwell on this
00:02:59 ◼ ► Well, before we leave the car thing, does your car have the thing that it's like records a
00:03:05 ◼ ► security video of everything that goes on around it all the time? It has that feature. It's called Sentry Mode.
00:03:13 ◼ ► No, no, I have the USB thumb drive. And it's actually the only time I ever bought a thumb drive was for the dash cam feature
00:03:20 ◼ ► and the music playing feature on my car. The only reason why it wasn't running is it's off by default.
00:03:26 ◼ ► And you can put it on, but I've heard that it noticeably increases the idle power drain.
00:03:32 ◼ ► If your car is parked somewhere long term. And that's, yeah, that's the opposite of what I need right now.
00:03:35 ◼ ► Because my car sits here for weeks at a time. So that's the last thing I need is to increase power drain.
00:03:39 ◼ ► So I had it off. And honestly, I have spent over the last five years cumulatively probably a year and a half
00:03:46 ◼ ► parked in this parking lot. And this is the first time anything's ever happened. So it's like my average is still pretty good.
00:03:55 ◼ ► So how does this work with a lease? You would either repair it and disclose it upon returning the car or just not repair it and take a big ding when you return the car?
00:04:11 ◼ ► But usually it's either like a money allowance of like, they expect a certain amount of monetary damage to it.
00:04:18 ◼ ► Or they have certain metrics like a scratch can be, you know, smaller than a quarter and you can have up to five of them or whatever.
00:04:28 ◼ ► And they allow you to have a an inspection like a few months before you turn it in so that you can get warned about this and have a chance to deal with it yourself first.
00:04:45 ◼ ► Like it was a Tif's car where like a tree branch fell on it and it wasn't bad enough to get it fixed.
00:04:53 ◼ ► But like there was a noticeable dent in a panel and I think they charged a few hundred dollars but that you know that was fine.
00:05:03 ◼ ► And so and I mean obviously my my previous Tesla turn and had had a lot of issues with it with that whole thing where they forgot to cancel the lease when I turned it in.
00:05:15 ◼ ► So that I don't know how what their normal process is because I know I didn't go through the normal process.
00:05:24 ◼ ► But I think I'm going to when I bring this to the service department to have them give me a new tire at least one new tire.
00:05:33 ◼ ► I'm going to have them also take a look at this and just say like hey is this is this within bounds or not because it's some pretty substantial paint scraping going on there.
00:06:01 ◼ ► I have been fighting server stuff and most of it has gone well except when I got to the stupid database issue.
00:06:08 ◼ ► And I have to now like devise a whole new MySQL backup solution in the meantime until prokona releases extra backup 8.0.23 to match MySQL 8.0.23 which is what all the servers came with that I instantiated.
00:06:24 ◼ ► So even that and even my flat tire are not enough to prevent me from being happy right now because a few days ago I got a wonderful email from phobia apples trade in partner saying your trade has been accepted.
00:06:40 ◼ ► Here is your gift card and that gift card was the trade in value for tifs laptop the last butterfly keyboard in our house.
00:06:52 ◼ ► The butterfly keyboard is gone from our house it will never come back into our house and I couldn't be happier and I'm very glad I was not totally sure they would give us the full value of this keyboard or this computer rather because the space bar was dead and it was covered in vinyl stickers that we couldn't quite peel all of them off.
00:07:12 ◼ ► And so I thought surely there is a high risk of getting that dreaded email of like we're reducing your value do you accept or not.
00:07:24 ◼ ► We now have a nice credit to spend on future Apple products for the rest of this year and it's just I'm so happy to be done with the butterfly keyword era in our household and for those of you out there who are not yet done with the butterfly keyboard era in your household.
00:07:49 ◼ ► You too someday will be done with the butterfly keyboard and it is glorious on the other side of it.
00:08:04 ◼ ► The butterfly keyboard is gone so when I go to sit in my car for a few hours on Friday morning after sitting on a boat for an hour so that I can wait for some service van to come give me the tire of shame so I can actually drive my car.
00:08:17 ◼ ► I will be typing on my MacBook Air my favorite computer I've ever had so far with its wonderful non butterfly keyboard.
00:08:25 ◼ ► You know I don't know if I said this on the air I don't think I did but there's been a handful of times recently that have been asked you know what laptop should I buy and as we definitely discussed in the past it's been delightful because I just say a MacBook Air.
00:08:42 ◼ ► Like just max out as much as you can get MacBook Air what are you doing with it don't care get a MacBook Air and a lot of times people will be hemming and hawing between a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro.
00:08:52 ◼ ► And my favorite way to make this whole situation go away is the following you know I have a friend who had a $7000 iMac who traded or who got rid of it in favor for a $1000 MacBook Air and maybe that's not 100% true but that gets the point across.
00:09:09 ◼ ► Neither of those prices are right but it's close enough you get the idea but then the problem just goes away and it is quite nice to not really have to think about it when you not have to be like.
00:09:22 ◼ ► You know all of that except in the most you know one off scenarios just completely goes away and it is delightful yeah because we didn't have that for so long we didn't have like an unqualified recommendation of like.
00:09:36 ◼ ► The default computer to recommend was this and you didn't have to add a bunch of asterisks to it right we didn't have that for like probably 3 or 4 years and so now we have that again and it's wonderful and really the last one of those that we had.
00:09:48 ◼ ► Was the previous MacBook Air not the 2018 model but the 2012 through the 2010 through you know 2015 model but the retina transition ruined that for the last half of that time right so like.
00:10:03 ◼ ► It really has been awhile since we've had that one computer that we could say you want to you want a new Mac you probably want X like it's very it's been it's been a long time.
00:10:13 ◼ ► You're right it's not since the amphibious MacBook Air that we've been able to and I this was also a good time to bring up that Apple has discontinued officially my other favorite computer ever the iMac pro.
00:10:28 ◼ ► Yeah I shouldn't say like I shouldn't say it's for the best but it's sad when the thing that you're actively using to talk to you gentlemen on right this very moment has been put out to pastor I.
00:10:41 ◼ ► I love this iMac pro I am very lucky because I have yet to experience an M1 Mac and I think once I do that's going to make me have very uncomfortable feelings about my iMac pro.
00:10:52 ◼ ► I love this machine I love the way it looks I love the way it runs it's been by and large almost you know foolproof for me.
00:11:00 ◼ ► I'm sad to see it go I really am I totally make sense to me why it's going I don't think it's something we need to discuss very much I mean basically.
00:11:09 ◼ ► Modern non pro iMacs are just as good if not better in some ways and if you really want to say.
00:11:17 ◼ ► Well okay we can talk about that in a second then but if you really want to set money aflame then you can be absolutely ridiculous and buy a Mac pro that you don't need hi John anyway so I am sad to see it go but I totally understand it.
00:11:36 ◼ ► No I mean it should be ideally it would have been updated sometime you know and and the reason why it's going now does make some sense in that like they are I think really close to releasing you know based on the latest rumors it sounds like the.
00:11:49 ◼ ► The first Apple silicon based iMacs are coming out like any day now so it does seem like it's about to be replaced by something that should be better but no the party disagree with.
00:11:59 ◼ ► Is that the that the regular iMac is generally better than the iMac pro now I disagree with that it is it does outperform it in many benchmarks and stuff but.
00:12:09 ◼ ► What made the iMac pro so great was that amazing cooling system and the fact that it had like things like ECC ram and all and the xeons like all that the high end pro hardware in a iMac case that you know in this in this you know relatively compact.
00:12:24 ◼ ► Totally silent thing until until it got clogged with permit dust and things started filling on the motherboard but before that like.
00:12:32 ◼ ► I think you know John Gruber said in his post about the dis continuation like he said that this might be his favorite Intel iMac ever.
00:12:40 ◼ ► I think that's actually a fair characterization I it's hard for me to point to any Intel Mac like the entire Intel Mac era.
00:12:52 ◼ ► Are any other Intel Macs better than the iMac pro overall yeah the the the cheese grater.
00:12:57 ◼ ► I don't know I don't think so no no I can't agree that whole that whole lineup it's the MacBook era of the desktops it was such a great design for so long had such incredible flexibility could hold host to all so many things you know so many different times of upgrades it was exactly the promise of a tower.
00:13:14 ◼ ► Type computer and they were actually fairly cheap in the sort of their heyday you could get one for a reasonable amount of money and then just that you know soup it up with aftermarket parts and aftermarket ram and run it for years it was it was great.
00:13:27 ◼ ► So the reason why I think the iMac pro is better so first of all you know when you're judging computers you know when trying trying to figure out what's the best one ever you know you gotta obviously judge it in the context of its day.
00:13:38 ◼ ► And so when you're in the Intel iMac or the Intel Mac era you know that's that's from 2006 until now basically or until November last year when you know whenever you want to declare that the Intel Mac era is over you know 2006 until roughly now.
00:13:50 ◼ ► And most of that time the first retina Mac was 2012 so most of that time it was retina and the the the cheese grater Mac pro and indeed all Mac pros until the current one never had a good story for retina.
00:14:08 ◼ ► And so and that makes it hard and I also you know for for most you know context of how how you want to power thing how you want to balance things like power and and heat and size and everything the cheese craters are huge and loud by comparison to the iMac.
00:14:27 ◼ ► That's true but but by comparison to the iMac pro every Mac pro ever made except for the trash can is pretty loud.
00:14:36 ◼ ► Right but still so you know you have because the Mac pro is so much larger and bulkier and louder and and for it's a different type of machine like that's what it's for it's the big it's the big truck right so I have to judge it in the context of if you wanted a big truck.
00:14:51 ◼ ► The the big truck to have was this one and this was the time to have it because it was back when you could do all your Intel gaming and you had parrot it was like it was like a gaming PC and a Mac for not that much money.
00:15:01 ◼ ► I you're not going to convince me I love the iMac pro it's great it was certainly the best Intel iMac that there's ever been but the best I'll give you is a tie with the cheese grater because that entire line and design just did exactly what it was supposed to do now I'll grant you it's for fewer customers.
00:15:17 ◼ ► It's more narrow interest right it is not the mass market thing although I would argue the iMac pro isn't really particularly mass market either but if you squint if you gave someone for free and iMac pro they would love it if you gave someone for free a Mac pro they probably wouldn't unless they're the type of person who would like a Mac pro.
00:15:32 ◼ ► Yeah right but like the iMac pro is such an amazing generalist you know obviously it wasn't priced as a generalist but as a machine there is almost nobody who had needs that that a desktop could solve it all that couldn't be solved by the iMac pro that like that was so good and continues to be so good for you know those out there who are still using them.
00:15:54 ◼ ► You're glossing over your problems with it or something goes wrong you got to bring the whole thing in and when it fills with spider eggs the thing gets noisy and that never happened my ancient much abused dented dust filled 2008 Mac pro that just trolled along for 10 years without complaint.
00:16:10 ◼ ► Yeah and that I'll give you that I mean that's that's the the problem that I've had with every iMac is that it's great for like 3 years and then and something starts getting worse at that point usually seemingly related to thermals or the screen wearing out.
00:16:24 ◼ ► So yeah I will give you that but still what an amazing machine and especially one that seemed like it seemed like it was not part of apples long term plan to create it and certainly once they did create it it seemed like it was kind of a bridge product to this next era and to the next iMac pro but man what a great machine that was you know it kind of like in the same way that like it didn't seem like Nintendo thought the switch was going to be a big deal or the or Nintendo didn't have a lot of time to make the switch hardware really fancy.
00:16:54 ◼ ► So they used basically you know like the nvidia whatever platform they use that's like they didn't really customize it that much that kind of feels like what the iMac pro was it seemed like it was kind of a rush job but they did such an amazing job on it and what what resulted from it was so good that it's kind of like it should be on some level possibly kind of frustrating to apple that.
00:17:14 ◼ ► It did seem like it was kind of a bridge product and it was so much better than what came before or in some ways after.
00:17:22 ◼ ► Well it wasn't supposed to be a bridge product or this was this was supposed to be the pro Mac story before they had a change of heart and decided to continue making towers so i think that's why it's so good this was supposed to be the flagship.
00:17:33 ◼ ► And that before it shipped but after it had been designed and mostly developed they said oh no we got actually got to make a Mac pro and they did a big announcement you know like so i that when this comes out.
00:17:44 ◼ ► It looks like a bridge machine in hindsight and when you look at the whole line as it exists today but i think when it was conceived it was like this is why we don't need a Mac pro anymore we're just going to have such an amazing iMac and they did have such an amazing iMac but they miscalculated.
00:17:57 ◼ ► What their pro customers want and need and accidentally made an amazing all in one computer yeah one thing i want to add to this though and reason why i wasn't topics is.
00:18:07 ◼ ► Like it's interesting that it's being discontinued rather than doing what they're doing with the entire Max because they all know all these Intel Max are going away like there's there's a hard-based iMac coming out of the arm based Max are going to come out and replace the Intel ones right so.
00:18:18 ◼ ► Every Intel Mac is essentially quote-unquote discontinued like there's we see the end of the line for all the Intel Max right with the possible exception of the Mac pro we don't know when that's good what's happened there probably eventually right.
00:18:30 ◼ ► But why why the premature announcement is it because they don't want to deal with getting a Xeon stock they don't want to deal with the parts of this low volume thing like especially as Marco noted it's so so close we think to the arm.
00:18:42 ◼ ► I Mac introduction why pre announced this where they was it so popular they're running out of stock and they didn't want to bother building anymore it's kind of weird that of all the computers to sort of pre announced and say I get them all they last because they're running out we're not making anymore that they chose to do the iMac pro.
00:18:57 ◼ ► My best guess is that they were some component of it that they can't get anymore because you know it hasn't updated in three years three and a half years whatever it's been they can't get such old Xeons anymore.
00:19:07 ◼ ► Well I mean Intel sells the arms forever it probably wasn't down but maybe it was like the GPU or some other component like it could be it could be a lot of it could be almost any component in it because at this point like Apple is not going to invest in.
00:19:18 ◼ ► The engineering and testing when you know all the overhead required for any kind of component swap so if any part of that computer that if they can't get anymore at this point it's yeah they're just going to kill it so that's probably what happened is like some component they can't get anymore.
00:19:31 ◼ ► The other thing I was thinking about for this is we don't know yet of course is they haven't announced the arm I Macs but.
00:19:40 ◼ ► It's an open question of whether we were talking about this before the arm transition started will they make an iMac pro in the arm era.
00:19:48 ◼ ► There's no reason they can't because you know it's a it feels a different role in their line it is.
00:19:53 ◼ ► And all one computer with all those tradeoffs but you could make an all one computer that has pro like internal CCC ram and high end CPU and so on and so forth but now that we've seen what their arm hardware looks like.
00:20:06 ◼ ► I first of all I don't know the answer to this question whether the current arm acts of CCC ram I'm pretty sure they don't but I've also also remember reading stuff about how.
00:20:16 ◼ ► All of the modern RAM standards if you squint at them have a little bit of error correcting baked into them but anyway set aside the CCC ram for a second.
00:20:26 ◼ ► Does Apple want to introduce a CPU variant that is the desktop CPU variant for the iMac but a pro version of that because without that and without some other feature how do you differentiate an iMac pro.
00:20:41 ◼ ► From playing iMac in the armor and the Intel era was easy you put the ions in and you give it CCC ram you give a much better cooling it was very well differentiated plus it was slightly darker Gray.
00:20:52 ◼ ► Right but in the arm era I thus far having seen what Apple has put out it doesn't seem like they want to make a huge variety of different system on a chip center or a huge variety of different.
00:21:04 ◼ ► Hardware so although Apple could of course make a CPU with like more cores or system you know likely they could pro it up a little bit in the inside of that iMac pro.
00:21:14 ◼ ► I'm guessing that they're not going to bother doing that but instead say this is the sort of.
00:21:21 ◼ ► You know hardware set Apple silicon hardware set that defines an iMac and will make a lot of iMacs with them and you can get good better best and some part of it will vary probably just storage or whatever.
00:21:32 ◼ ► Maybe they'll come in colors and that's it and we don't have a pro product for you because how would we make it pro especially if it has an integrated GPU that's even higher.
00:21:43 ◼ ► You know build say OK we're going to make a whole new system on a chip just for the iMac pro that like nobody's going to buy so.
00:21:51 ◼ ► It's sad the iMac pro is going away but I think the results of that will be no arm iMac pro but every arm based iMac kind of like every arm based laptop so far and Mac Mini will be so good that no one will care.
00:22:04 ◼ ► Because they're going to be faster than the iMac pro the plane iMacs already fast and iPro they're going to be quieter they're going to you know just everything about them is going to be better the only possible exception is the iMac pro could you could get that with a pretty beefy.
00:22:17 ◼ ► GPU and it may be tough for Apple to beat that with an integrated GPU on an iMac unless they really go all in on it because remember I'm the prediction that they're going to make a single system on a chip for the entire iMac line not a custom one for an iMac pro with a much bigger GPU.
00:22:34 ◼ ► I will see what happens but I'm sad I'm sad that it's going away but you know hey it's we don't know what's coming and it could be way way better sure sure seems to be like I'm only sad in the sense that it is it was a really really good product.
00:22:47 ◼ ► And I'm sad in any like nostalgia fondness way not that I want to buy one right now because you know we're ever so close so close to the replacement this seems like it would be a terrible time to buy one but.
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00:25:07 ◼ ► All right let's return to neutral just very briefly. I offended some people with my why buy Audi question from last week but thankfully I was not besmirching Tesla so I only offended a handful of people.
00:25:23 ◼ ► The only really good answer I heard and I did hear some decent answers but the one really good answer I heard from a couple of people were you buy Audi for all-wheel drive because if you look at say particularly Volkswagen and to some degree Porsche most Volkswagens are not all-wheel drive.
00:25:43 ◼ ► In fact you know outside of the SUVs and maybe a wagon or two I think that mine is the only one I might have that wrong it doesn't matter but pretty much every Audi is all-wheel drive and so that is one thing.
00:25:54 ◼ ► Also a bunch of Europeans reminded me of Skoda and what's the other one that I'm not thinking of there's one other that's a Volkswagen Auto Group brand that's even crummier than Volkswagen I can't think of what it was off the top of my head.
00:26:05 ◼ ► But suffice to say there are things that exist in Europe that don't exist here and that is also true and that changes kind of the the relative positioning of Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche and so on.
00:26:20 ◼ ► Kiss Guy. Kiss Guy is real. This was we were I don't remember how it came up but we were talking about and I think John had brought it up about how the Foo Fighters had asked a gentleman on stage who was dressed as one of the people from Kiss.
00:26:33 ◼ ► And he played the Foo Fighters song Monkey Wrench with them and I finally a few days after we recorded got the chance to watch that video and it is absolutely delightful.
00:26:45 ◼ ► You should definitely watch it and we'll put a link to this in the show notes as well as a kind of behind the scenes if you will or an interview anyway with with the gentleman who was Kiss Guy.
00:26:59 ◼ ► Yeah we didn't have the link to the video in last week's show so I wanted to include in this one and the Kiss Guy is real part is like we tweeted about this and we're going back and forth on Twitter and a lot of people like that's obviously fake.
00:27:11 ◼ ► You know people are so cynical but here's a link to this article which is an interview with the person and he says no it wasn't a setup.
00:27:24 ◼ ► So believe who you want but I choose to believe this was a actual real spontaneous thing that happened because someone came to the show Dress is Kiss with the giant side that said let me play monkey wrench and he did.
00:27:36 ◼ ► You know and I didn't realize too this is like a thing that they do like the Foo Fighters do this frequently and so like that's it's different when it's like a thing and so you can go to a show and actually expect that it might happen to you and you can actually prepare and practice the thing that you want to you know so that's I think that actually makes it very plausible.
00:27:54 ◼ ► Right and you know I mean this guy was dressed up as Kiss and had a giant sign like if you want to get attention if you want to be the one who gets pulled on stage to do the thing this is a great way to do it so I totally believe it's like they don't have to set this up ahead of time and you know have their people go out and talk to somebody and give them a seat and say now you come here and we'll call on you.
00:28:10 ◼ ► They're like that's there's no point to doing that right so I believe I believe Kiss guy is real.
00:28:17 ◼ ► Alright let's see here what else is next we've got Ben Packard writing us with regard to Swift quote unquote header files.
00:28:25 ◼ ► It is let me get this right it's control command up and if that is out of order I apologize I'm reading from the show notes control command up and control command down to toggle a Swift files header view in Xcode which is in the menuing system as the oh so obvious navigate menu.
00:28:47 ◼ ► Okay the counter is the counterpart file like we're saying going between the dot M and the dot H and objective C so that makes some kind of sense of course when you do this you aren't traveling from one file to the other what you were doing is taking the file that you're editing which is a Swift file.
00:29:01 ◼ ► And changing into a read only view that only shows you essentially like what you were seeing a header file just the signatures of the I think as is the public functions on maybe it's just some of the functions anyway the odd thing about this is it's not command control up and down arrow to toggle.
00:29:18 ◼ ► Any like command control up arrow is like jump to my one it's one of the is either next to previous jump to previous counterpart and the opposite direction is jump to next counterpart you can just continually hit one of those commands.
00:29:29 ◼ ► Command control up up up up up up and as you hit up it goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth but they are both toggles for each other is very strange very strange adaptation of those.
00:29:38 ◼ ► Keyboard shortcut so you don't have to like a look at what mode you're in and hit in the opposite direction just any of the any either one of those keystrokes will toggle it to the opposite of what it's currently in and there's a delay when you toggle it to so like it's is it like compiling it to extract the metadata to find out the signatures.
00:29:54 ◼ ► I'm assuming it caches it after the first time or whatever but there it is somewhat hidden feature of Xcode.
00:30:06 ◼ ► And maybe I made it up in a few state but I could swear and I was trying to repeat it a moment ago and I can't prove myself where it was but I could swear at some point when I was doing the Commonwealth of Virginia's vaccination pre request whatever thing which happens to be at vaccinate.virginia.gov at one point during that process you know how I logged in Marco password list login with an email link that's exactly right.
00:30:33 ◼ ► I don't really have much to say about it other than that but I thought I thought at least Marco would be amused and I thought I would hear at least a grunt of disappointment from John but I only got half of that so you can't win them all.
00:30:47 ◼ ► Alright so moving right along and we have a very interesting entry in the show notes entitled families colon.
00:31:00 ◼ ► I'm a little worried this about to become a sex ed podcast or like a marriage counseling.
00:31:19 ◼ ► It's possible that you were hearing us on exactly the 10 year anniversary of a podcast episode I did called no I life as an island in which I complained that Apple didn't understand how families work as in families have multiple people who may take photos.
00:31:36 ◼ ► But the photos some of those photos a subset of those photos belong to the family and not the individual person.
00:31:57 ◼ ► The idea that the I life suite at that time had the idea that you were an individual person who lives by yourself and had your own silo of things and if you were in a family every single person had their own things and it was frustrating then.
00:32:10 ◼ ► And here we are 10 years later I thought it would be a chance to revisit this topic now.
00:32:16 ◼ ► In June of 2014 a mere 3 years after that episode Apple rolled out their family thing family sharing or whatever where you can build a little family in iCloud and say the organizer I'm the family organizer and here are the adults in the family and here are the children in the family and so I can form a little family.
00:32:36 ◼ ► And I remember being optimistic a mere 3 years after complaining about something on a podcast Apple has taken action to lay the groundwork to solve this problem with him for all because now it understands my family and knows the people people want to know it's only a matter of just updating all the relevant programs.
00:32:51 ◼ ► To also understand family families and allow them to have a relationship with each other with respect to their.
00:32:57 ◼ ► You know iCloud data they did a little bit of that like with purchases where one person can purchase thing and the other people can see that person's purchases and fast forward to 2021 they did sharing of an app purchases well.
00:33:10 ◼ ► But in general that's been all the progress that they've made they set up families and they did purchase sharing and a bunch of other integrations but they didn't really do where do it where it counts which is the actual data even something as simple as contacts which we've been talking about a little bit recently.
00:33:26 ◼ ► It's a tiny amount of data and again in the pre digital days very often a household would have an address book that had the names and phone numbers of everybody that the family knew granted children could have their own address books with the names and phone numbers of their friends.
00:33:41 ◼ ► But there was still a family address book and so when grandma moved you didn't have to update it in every single person's things because grandma's address was only and phone numbers only in the family address book right so the concept of having.
00:33:52 ◼ ► A family that shares some subset of data amongst themselves while also having their own private data.
00:33:58 ◼ ► A great place to try that out would have been on contacts but of course the big one is photos photos continue to be a thorn in everyone's side.
00:34:04 ◼ ► We talk about asking TP we get questions repeated questions and sometimes we answer them like once a year just to get them out there we are constantly being asked hey.
00:34:12 ◼ ► How do you guys deal with photos in your family because I'm I have photos in my photo library my wife has photos in her photo library and how do they you know how do you deal with sharing them do you have one photo library do you have a third Apple ID doesn't belong to you the person that you both sign into do you have an Apple store ID even though the family sharing and purchases.
00:34:32 ◼ ► And it's a you know it's a disappointing question to get because kind of like the laptop situation used to be we don't have a good answer there's no good solution for this and we always say well this is a problem that Apple has to solve I used to say it optimistically like well it is for all that family sharing and probably maybe in the next few years they'll roll out new versions of their apps that will support family sharing in a sophisticated way nope hasn't happened so.
00:34:58 ◼ ► Still no progress on one of the biggest remaining sort of fundamentally annoying things about being what you an ideal Apple customer you've got a family you buy all sorts of Apple junk you sign up for all the services and you just want to have like a normal smooth.
00:35:18 ◼ ► Lifestyle and workflow with Apple stuff and so much of it works well you know multiple users support on Macs people we have to log into them all the new Macs and laptops purchase sharing even media sharing managing what apps your kids buy stuff like that.
00:35:34 ◼ ► But the family photo library and the family collection of contacts just just I mean contacts is more minor because I've just given up and I say my wife's is the canonical contact thing when I look up someone's info go to her address book but again the volume of data is small it's not a big deal.
00:35:49 ◼ ► But photos it is just such a pain and to celebrate 10 years photos on my Mac has decided that my previous technique this is what I was doing and I do not recommend this because it's terrible but my previous technique is.
00:36:00 ◼ ► I would take pictures on my phone and then I would plug connect my phone with a USB cable to a Mac that's logged in as my wife.
00:36:16 ◼ ► Periodically this is like a Casey workflow it's like I just got to remember this thing well to celebrate 10 years photos said you know what that's not going to work anymore what happens now is I plug in my phone and it thinks for a really long time because it because the photos app on the Mac latest version of everything the photos version of iOS version of Mac OS.
00:36:36 ◼ ► The photos app is like seems like you've imported a lot of these photos already so I have to sort these in the UI to say OK here's all the ones you imported before and here's photos that haven't yet been imported.
00:36:47 ◼ ► First of all I don't need to do this at all if it just gave me a reverse chronological list of photos I would just scroll a little bit and select the ones that I want to be important second of all I intentionally don't import all of them if there's like a screenshot or some random photo that I don't want in the photo library I don't know.
00:37:06 ◼ ► No I don't import those what that means is that from that point on I'm going to continue to see those photos presented to me as hey do you want to import these because you haven't imported them before right but.
00:37:18 ◼ ► Recently all this broke down and now I just get kind of like a grid of blank thumbnails if I scroll too quickly sometimes photos will crash sometimes it will just stop filling in thumbnails like and I'll just have a bunch of blank thumbnails and now I don't know which ones to select to import because it's just a great giant grid of blank thumbnails that will never fill in this by the way is after you get past the first mini boss which is.
00:37:40 ◼ ► When you plug in your phone with photos it says please unlock your phone to act to allow photos to access the pictures on your phone like it tells you to unlock your phone like there's a prompt on the screen says please unlock your phone.
00:37:51 ◼ ► And if you are if you follow instructions say okay you look at your pick up your phone which is plugged in with the USB cable you swipe up face ID it's unlocked.
00:38:00 ◼ ► Put the phone down photos will continue to have the on screen a giant window that says please unlock your phone.
00:38:06 ◼ ► No progress indicator no nothing just please unlock your phone it's like I just did unlock my phone what do you want me to do and that will stay there for 30 seconds a minute two minutes.
00:38:14 ◼ ► Until eventually goes okay I'm going to start into load your thumbnails right it's the worst you I ever but if you if you get past that and you know that it's just lying to you and you really didn't like your phone and just be patient.
00:38:25 ◼ ► Eventually it will start filling your screen with empty thumbnails that don't show anything just totally blank grey rectangles so what I've taken to doing now is they use image capture which still does work and shows me reverse chronological list of photos and has no awareness of which ones I've imported.
00:38:38 ◼ ► And I manually import photos into a folder with image capture this is more and more like Casey isn't it oh yeah and then I drag those photos from the folder onto the photos app.
00:38:50 ◼ ► Again this is all no account and then import them into the photo library and that as far as I can tell is a lossless way to get them in but it's a super pain in the butt happy 10 year anniversary.
00:38:59 ◼ ► That is utterly preposterous couple of quick observations first of all you know it's it's a kind of uncomfortable feeling that a Casey workflow is indicative of something being just unbelievably wrong which I can't really fault you for that analogy but it's not specifically about photos I don't know maybe your other workflows are fine.
00:39:19 ◼ ► And that's only that's the second time in like 48 hours I've heard some sort of reference like that because you know we're doing a little bit of work on the house and we had an electrician come out and visit it and he was explaining that he was probably going to do the work for our house on Saturday because that's when he does his special projects.
00:39:36 ◼ ► And I never got a clear read from him even after asking him directly does that mean we're just really important to you or that there is our project that jacked up and I'm not really sure.
00:39:51 ◼ ► I'm not even sure but nevertheless like special teams and football like your football players technically but you're the kickers.
00:40:04 ◼ ► Well we'll see but nevertheless I can't believe I remember this episode I cannot believe it has been literally a decade and you know this is one of those times and I think I feel like I've made a similar speech a few times in the last few months but as a consumer and user of Apple products.
00:40:41 ◼ ► Like it's it's and I know that doesn't really it's not a great metric for anyone but me but it's a pretty startling metric for me.
00:41:25 ◼ ► Well not impossibly difficult but a very difficult problem a very difficult problem and I don't envy the people who are surely working.
00:41:35 ◼ ► And it's it's it's challenging and this is why software is hard and this is why software is difficult.
00:41:41 ◼ ► And shoot I think it was on Dubai Friday maybe on the after show that Merlin was describing if I recall correctly.
00:41:48 ◼ ► Describing all the what ifs and gotchas involved with some piece of I think home automation software.
00:41:56 ◼ ► I don't remember where it was but he was he was backing into in a way that I've never heard someone who doesn't write software for a living able to describe it.
00:42:04 ◼ ► Like something that sounds easy is actually really freaking hard and this this is something that sounds hard.
00:42:10 ◼ ► So imagine how hard it would be and the funny thing is I almost wonder if we're better off this way.
00:42:32 ◼ ► My recollection of the discussion of this back in 2011 was that I recognized that it's a hard problem.
00:42:42 ◼ ► Forget about actually implementing it or whatever just saying like how should it work is actually a fairly complicated question.
00:42:47 ◼ ► Because the way I described it like you do want to have a family photo album but you also want to allow people to have photos of their own.
00:42:55 ◼ ► So how do you even present that interface right and then comes the implementation and this was back before Apple was as good as they are today with dealing with photos period.
00:43:08 ◼ ► Again I said I was optimistic when three years later they just introduced the concept of families because that's a prerequisite for dealing with this.
00:43:24 ◼ ► So I wasn't expecting them to come around the next year and fix this or even in five years and fix it.
00:43:28 ◼ ► But in 10 years if you told me in 2011 in 10 years they won't even have taken a swing at this.
00:43:50 ◼ ► It will be like it's some baseline percentage of ask ATP is people asking this exact question in one way or another.
00:43:59 ◼ ► We all and especially now that all the kids have phones and stuff we all take pictures.
00:44:04 ◼ ► But a lot of those pictures if you're on a family vacation are family photos and dealing with that.
00:44:10 ◼ ► I just want to look at the family photos and having people send you photos and airdrop them and send them.
00:44:17 ◼ ► With the quality loss and the metadata loss going into that and just the general hassle and not keeping track of who has what photos where and where was that photo.
00:44:30 ◼ ► Like version one maybe you do simple let's just do photo libraries and internet able photo libraries.
00:44:37 ◼ ► They just need to take the next step and Casey's doubt about whether they're working on this.
00:44:44 ◼ ► Like surely someone in Apple is working on this or at least thinking about it but it's going to take a while.
00:44:50 ◼ ► I really hope someone is working on it and thinking about it and they haven't just given up or convinced themselves that you know what one photo library per Apple ID is fine.
00:45:02 ◼ ► And I don't think it's like a terrible problem like the butterfly keyboard or something that needs to be addressed immediately.
00:45:07 ◼ ► And like you know something that'll get written about in a mainstream newspaper whatever like in the mainstream press will catch on to this.
00:45:14 ◼ ► It's just a minor annoyance that anybody who wants to sort of get a handle on their digital life will inevitably come to some point and say this part is annoying.
00:45:24 ◼ ► This whole thing with the photo libraries and who has what photo that part is annoying.
00:45:28 ◼ ► Maybe they'll never get there in contacts although arguably I have the same complaint of like you know if you have friends of the family it's a pain to have their contact information in various versions in various individual people's contacts rather than shared in some way.
00:45:45 ◼ ► Google tried to address it with their like you can mark these photos to be shared with other people in your family.
00:45:55 ◼ ► And you know if Google cared about this at all they could make a second cut and a third cut or whatever.
00:46:13 ◼ ► I would like to hope and think that the three of us will still be lucky enough to be doing this in 10 years.
00:46:29 ◼ ► I'm going to put it in my calendar right now because that's why this I put this in my calendar probably around 2014.
00:46:36 ◼ ► And now I'm going to put the 10-year anniversary in my calendar now for us to revisit this.
00:46:52 ◼ ► And what you can do is you can move from Apple Photos or whatever it's called Photos in the cloud.
00:47:02 ◼ ► You can move from iCloud Photo Library to Google Photos because Apple let you do it now.
00:47:18 ◼ ► Lots of companies that have tried to be good service citizens have at various times had
00:47:32 ◼ ► Google has an entire what is it called Google takeout like an entire section of their website
00:47:38 ◼ ► that's like here is all the data Google has about you and here are ways you can dump it out.
00:48:01 ◼ ► decisions about products and so you come out with stuff I remember when it first came out
00:48:10 ◼ ► You know you can here's your data you can get it out in a non-proprietary format and then
00:48:18 ◼ ► I think I got all my email into Gmail by like importing in an Mbox format or something.
00:48:22 ◼ ► I got exported from what Claris email or whatever the hell I was using then in Mbox format.
00:48:35 ◼ ► In fact speaking of calendar events I have an annual calendar event that reminds me to dump
00:48:40 ◼ ► all of my Gmail email to my local file system just so I you know if and when Google like
00:48:48 ◼ ► unceremoniously cancels my entire Google account for some reason that I can't appeal or talk
00:49:20 ◼ ► your own tweets in a very cool sort of local HTML and JavaScript version to you know as
00:49:28 ◼ ► a big zip file that is expanded to a bunch of files and I do that periodically dump all
00:49:48 ◼ ► They say it's a you know request to transfer a copy of iCloud photos to another service
00:50:21 ◼ ► misses photos but it's better than nothing and so I just run that continuously and it's
00:50:40 ◼ ► So I looked at this and said okay well here is this has got to be better supported than
00:50:44 ◼ ► what I'm doing now because it's Apple doing the transfer and it's like an offline thing
00:50:52 ◼ ► as they can I hope and you know because they're Apple they know about their photo library
00:51:05 ◼ ► just sit there right and so then if you want to do that again they say oh do you want us
00:51:30 ◼ ► transfer all my photos into Google Photos and then every year first delete all my photos
00:51:41 ◼ ► cumbersome especially since the transfer says take several days or whatever much more cumbersome
00:51:53 ◼ ► It's a good way if you go with Apple Photos and you get frustrated and just like decide
00:51:58 ◼ ► you're never going to do anything with Apple again it is an escape hatch for your photos.
00:52:14 ◼ ► You can of course export all of them you know export unmodified originals right to another
00:52:18 ◼ ► disk or something like there's other ways to get your photos out that I'm like your photos
00:52:21 ◼ ► are trapped but I presume that this transfer service will try to preserve as much of the
00:52:42 ◼ ► that doesn't have some kind of edits to it and if you gave me all my originals back it would
00:52:46 ◼ ► like it would be like okay I hope you enjoy doing 10 to 15 years worth of edits over again.
00:52:55 ◼ ► worth of edits and I also don't want to bake in my edits like Casey does because I'm not a monster.
00:53:01 ◼ ► So I do like having my photos in Apple Photos because Apple preserves my originals while
00:53:06 ◼ ► maintaining my all my metadata all my face recognition all my tags and yes all of my edits.
00:53:12 ◼ ► So I'm not going to use this service even to make a backup but I would be super excited if
00:53:18 ◼ ► Apple ever enhanced this service to sort of do incremental backups or periodic dumps or
00:53:23 ◼ ► something like that but I'm not holding my breath and honestly they should do the family stuff first.
00:53:32 ◼ ► I mean I think they're clearly right now in a time where they're under a pretty significant and
00:53:39 ◼ ► seemingly rapidly increasing amount of regulatory and antitrust pressure and possibly legal pressure
00:53:46 ◼ ► from competitors as well. So I think a lot of the moves that we're seeing Apple make recently that
00:53:51 ◼ ► seem kind of like huh I never thought they would do that or that's a little odd why did they do that.
00:53:54 ◼ ► I bet a lot of it is like they are trying to dodge some kind of regulatory problem or legal problem
00:54:02 ◼ ► they see coming down the pipe and in this case you know Apple Photos or iCloud Photo Library is
00:54:09 ◼ ► part of you know Apple's possible monopoly risk in the sense that it has way better integration
00:54:15 ◼ ► with the iPhone than anything else can and so it is kind of part of their like you know
00:54:21 ◼ ► unfair advantage moat that competitors could have a problem with. And so maybe this is just like
00:54:28 ◼ ► something else they can put out there that didn't take them a lot of time or effort probably
00:54:32 ◼ ► that they can you know they don't have to really radically change the way they do anything
00:54:36 ◼ ► or really take any significant risks by doing stuff like this but it can relieve a little
00:54:41 ◼ ► bit of pressure that's building up somewhere in that you know antitrust area. I feel like
00:54:46 ◼ ► the thing about the service is it's probably expensive for Apple to do and they're only saved
00:54:57 ◼ ► shiny gooey button to do it like in photos like it's not an obvious thing. People who don't listen
00:55:02 ◼ ► to tech podcasts or read Apple news probably don't even know that it exists and will have to be told
00:55:07 ◼ ► that it exists by someone at an Apple store or a tech nerd friend or something right because to do
00:55:13 ◼ ► this what they're probably doing behind the scenes is running a big batch job in one of their data
00:55:17 ◼ ► centers that calls the Google Photos API that reads photos from where Apple keeps them in their
00:55:22 ◼ ► cloud storage and writes them through Google's public APIs that they expose to the Google Photos
00:55:28 ◼ ► service to your Google Photos account which means they have to allocate computing resources
00:55:34 ◼ ► for multiple days for each individual customer and then they have to do all the data transfer
00:55:42 ◼ ► from wherever the data is being stored so they're reading from their own storage and then writing
00:55:45 ◼ ► over the wire over the network into Google's thing and I don't know if Google's charging per API call
00:55:50 ◼ ► but probably something like that it's not like I don't think Google's giving this hallway for free
00:55:54 ◼ ► for an for just to do a single person's photo library is a non-trivial amount of money that
00:55:58 ◼ ► Apple is spending on you know somebody's data centers or you know even just electricity and
00:56:09 ◼ ► essentially for free so yeah this definitely does read like a thing that we either have to do for
00:56:15 ◼ ► regulatory reasons or that we want to be able to say that we offer but please don't do this like if
00:56:21 ◼ ► if if any if like 50% of Apple's customers did this they would lose a ton of money not to mention
00:56:27 ◼ ► you know losing all the photos and you know I'm sure Google would be happy to have a bunch of
00:56:31 ◼ ► more people's photos to analyze or whatever so yeah it's it's a weird feature it every like you
00:56:38 ◼ ► were saying Marco everything they do whether it really is motivated by the current political
00:56:43 ◼ ► climate or not it's just you view it through that lens if it's any if it's in any way you know
00:56:48 ◼ ► relevant to that if it anyway helps or hurts them you just immediately view it through that lens and
00:57:02 ◼ ► code up this whole batching system and a way of initiating it and I can't think of anything else
00:57:08 ◼ ► that you can do from Apple that you can initiate and then they will run a batch job for you and
00:57:13 ◼ ► tell you several days later that it has completed like there's nothing else like that uh app
00:57:18 ◼ ► reviews kind of like that yeah I suppose but but they're like they're the whole point is most of
00:57:23 ◼ ► the time they're not doing anything for you you're in a queue right then they pop you out of the queue
00:57:27 ◼ ► and you get your review but this is just like the whole time that you're waiting presumably that
00:57:35 ◼ ► hundreds of thousands of photos uh it's gonna take a while you know I I would like to challenge um
00:57:42 ◼ ► something you said a little while ago I don't know that Google would charge Apple for this because if
00:57:47 ◼ ► you think about it Google is almost certainly taking on a customer at this point so why
00:57:52 ◼ ► wouldn't they you know welcome Apple with open arms and all of this customer's data and of course
00:57:58 ◼ ► bring that to Google Photos because we're going to charge them soon works for us I don't know what
00:58:02 ◼ ► Google's business model is like normally you want to have API limits and like the customer here is
00:58:07 ◼ ► not the individual I guess is they're authenticating as an individual but like Apple potentially could
00:58:11 ◼ ► send a lot of API requests to Google if even if any non-trivial number of people did this and
00:58:16 ◼ ► then Google will throttle them and then Apple can't do your thing within this promised seven
00:58:20 ◼ ► days or whatever and then maybe money has to change hands but yeah in general cloud providers
00:58:25 ◼ ► like you know S3 or whatever will make it very easy to get data into S3 but much more expensive
00:58:30 ◼ ► to get it out again so it's not it's not that they don't charge you at all because sometimes like we
00:58:34 ◼ ► won't charge you for data transfer in but we'll charge you per API call a tiny amount for each
00:58:39 ◼ ► thing like and you know like I said that's for like individual customers to AWS right for Apple
00:58:45 ◼ ► and Google the relationship between their two data centers and what kind of deal they work out
00:58:50 ◼ ► who knows I don't you know I don't know if any money changed hands here there's any kind of
00:58:56 ◼ ► agreement but I think there has to be some kind of discussion because it would be pretty surprising
00:59:00 ◼ ► for Google just to wake up one day and you know say a tiny tiny fraction of a percentage start
00:59:05 ◼ ► doing this even just out of curiosity like I almost did it that's going to show up on Google's radar
00:59:09 ◼ ► of like whoa what what's going on here suddenly there's a huge spike in API calls to our Google
00:59:14 ◼ ► Photos API and these giant batches and they're all coming from this one Apple data center and then
00:59:19 ◼ ► you know I feel like they would they would have a discussion before this rather than just surprise
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01:01:25 ◼ ► So a few weeks ago, almost a month ago now, it was announced I guess that Apple was cracking
01:01:31 ◼ ► down on apps with quote "irrationally high prices" quote as app store scams are exposed.
01:01:38 ◼ ► And so Apple said that in in very apply way "customers expect the app store to be a safe
01:01:44 ◼ ► and trusted marketplace for purchasing digital goods. Apps should never betray this trust by
01:01:48 ◼ ► attempting to rip off or cheat users in any way. Unfortunately the prices you've selected for your
01:01:52 ◼ ► app" oh I'm sorry this is in the case of you charging a thousand dollars for a fart app.
01:01:56 ◼ ► "The prices you've selected for your app or in-app purchase products in your app do not reflect the
01:02:00 ◼ ► value of the features and content offered to the user. Charging irrationally high prices for content
01:02:04 ◼ ► or services with limited value is a rip-off to customers and is not appropriate for the app store."
01:02:10 ◼ ► And then they give you you know different resolution steps. "The next submission of this
01:02:14 ◼ ► app may require a longer review time and it won't be eligible for an expedited review until this
01:02:18 ◼ ► issue is resolved. Thank you but please get off my lawn. Love Apple." I mean I don't know that
01:02:26 ◼ ► there's that much to say about this other than finally. I mean this seems completely reasonable
01:02:31 ◼ ► to me and I was thinking about this a little bit earlier. If Apple wants to have this like walled
01:02:37 ◼ ► garden there's no side loading. We are the only way. This is the way to get on the phone. I mean
01:02:44 ◼ ► in and of itself I don't have an extreme problem with that, although that's kind of a discussion
01:02:49 ◼ ► for another day. But if you're going to do that, if you're going to cultivate this walled garden,
01:02:54 ◼ ► it better have some pretty flowers in it and it better not be full of weeds. And so if this is
01:02:59 ◼ ► Apple finally weeding then okay cool let's keep let's get these weeds and all the other weeds that
01:03:05 ◼ ► are there because there's a lot of them. And this analogy is getting me to death. But nevertheless
01:03:09 ◼ ► you get the idea is that there's so much there's so much garbage and just nasty stuff in the app
01:03:15 ◼ ► store that's maybe not nasty in the sense of inappropriate like content but just it's nasty
01:03:21 ◼ ► in the sense that it's like a bait and switch and and it's just gross and so why not clean this up
01:03:29 ◼ ► and and you know what finally you know I hope this is actually some kind of ongoing thing but I think
01:03:36 ◼ ► again this is important to look at the context that surrounded the timing of this. When this
01:03:41 ◼ ► came out about a month ago this was right around the time when there was a lot of like twitter
01:03:49 ◼ ► storms coming up about scam apps in the app store and a lot of people were shining a lot of light
01:03:55 ◼ ► on just how prevalent scam apps have become especially in regards to using usually weekly
01:04:03 ◼ ► subscription billing to seemingly trick people into paying absurd prices like you know ten dollars a
01:04:10 ◼ ► week for an app that has like you know one screen and does a really simple thing you know stuff like
01:04:14 ◼ ► that where you end up like if you do the math it's like wow this is like four hundred dollars a year
01:04:18 ◼ ► for this really simple app that does one very basic thing if it even does that at all. And so and
01:04:25 ◼ ► it has seemed for so long that no one's no one's job at Apple seems to be to monitor the top
01:04:34 ◼ ► grossing apps or the app or the top apps on the top charts for scammy apps and and maybe this is
01:04:41 ◼ ► someone's job but it doesn't look like like from the outside you see apps climb those charts all
01:04:47 ◼ ► the time that are like obvious scams and they stay there until someone says something usually and so
01:04:54 ◼ ► anyway so what was happening last month was there were a bunch of people on Twitter who were like
01:04:58 ◼ ► really shining lights in this and calling attention to in particular like you know specific scam apps
01:05:02 ◼ ► that have been there for a long time and then you know when they made a stink on Twitter you know a
01:05:07 ◼ ► day later or a few hours later they'd be taken down and these again these are apps that had been
01:05:11 ◼ ► there for months or weeks beforehand so it does seem like as usual Apple has not seemingly been
01:05:21 ◼ ► running the app store with the kind of resources it actually needs to be good or not prioritizing
01:05:26 ◼ ► or not caring about those things enough but then also we know how Apple works when a light is shown
01:05:34 ◼ ► on something that is unpleasant to them or makes them look bad they do fix it like running to the
01:05:40 ◼ ► press always helps right like they always respond to negative press oftentimes that is the kick in
01:05:47 ◼ ► the butt they need to do something that they should have done a while ago or that is obvious
01:05:52 ◼ ► but that they just didn't care enough before to prioritize it or to give it resources to
01:05:56 ◼ ► get done and so it does seem like in the context of when this was raised you know that was during a
01:06:05 ◼ ► storm of bad press about app store scams in particular around scammy pricing and scammy
01:06:11 ◼ ► subscription price apps and so in that context I think this could have just been them reacting to
01:06:17 ◼ ► that in a quick you know band-aid kind of way I hope that's not it I hope they're actually devoting
01:06:25 ◼ ► significant resources to making the app store seem less like a crappy scam filled flea market because
01:06:32 ◼ ► it has needed that for almost its entire life if not its entire life like the app store you know
01:06:39 ◼ ► case is right like it should the amount of curation that apple says they're doing which again go back
01:06:46 ◼ ► to antitrust pressure apple is trying to project the image to regulators and governments that they
01:06:54 ◼ ► are protecting users from scams and stuff like that and that's why they need to maintain their
01:06:59 ◼ ► incredibly rigid hold on the gatekeeper status they have over the app store and you know ripping
01:07:04 ◼ ► off 30 off of all of our money while they're at it right apple needs to defend this image because
01:07:08 ◼ ► they make a lot of money from this image from the from the gatekeeper role that they have that this
01:07:14 ◼ ► image is their defense to current and future government probes about whether they should be
01:07:19 ◼ ► allowed to keep this control so if the app store is obviously filled with scam apps and anybody who
01:07:27 ◼ ► looks at it can instantly find scam apps in the app store that weakens apple's argument to these
01:07:33 ◼ ► regulators that you know that are putting increasing pressure on them again that weakens
01:07:37 ◼ ► their argument that they need to be in control of this you know to protect us i guess right so again
01:07:42 ◼ ► looking at it in context this this is not something apple's doing out of the goodness of their heart
01:07:47 ◼ ► this is something they're doing because they got bad press about it and because their app store
01:07:58 ◼ ► make sure their argument is actually you know visibly apparent that like yes they actually
01:08:04 ◼ ► are keeping this a safe place and this walled garden is you know it has seemingly been about
01:08:09 ◼ ► as safe as like central park in the 80s like it's not it's not it's not a great walled garden
01:08:14 ◼ ► like for for like you know scamming people out of their money um because and and honestly most of
01:08:30 ◼ ► fairly straightforward we didn't have a lot of pricing scams besides just like paid up front
01:08:37 ◼ ► apps or in-app purchases that then like wouldn't work the way they wanted but that's a lot easier
01:08:40 ◼ ► for app store for app for you to catch what the the biggest root of this problem seems to be
01:08:47 ◼ ► specifically subscription billing apps and specifically apps that try to mislead people
01:08:53 ◼ ► into starting subscriptions with either free trials or just weekly prices or both because
01:09:02 ◼ ► those those both kind of like bury and and obfuscate the true cost of something to people
01:09:08 ◼ ► and this is something that apple can totally fix you know i think there are two very obvious things
01:09:15 ◼ ► they could do here that for some reason they haven't number one i said this on twitter i'll
01:09:19 ◼ ► say it again i think they should eliminate weekly billing as an option because while there are some
01:09:25 ◼ ► legitimate uses for that like people say newspapers are a common one and i'm pretty sure that's why
01:09:31 ◼ ► it's there i think it's there basically for the new york times if they even still use it
01:09:34 ◼ ► purchase i don't know i don't know off the top of my head but most things people pay for on an
01:09:39 ◼ ► ongoing basis are not paid weekly most things that you pay for on an ongoing basis are paid monthly
01:09:45 ◼ ► and most legitimate subscription apps don't charge you weekly they charge you either monthly or
01:09:51 ◼ ► annually weekly seems to only be used by a handful of important publications and every single price
01:09:58 ◼ ► scammer on the app store and so i have to imagine that protocol ratio on weekly billing is really
01:10:07 ◼ ► poor it's really not good and if they got rid of weekly billing that would prevent so many scam
01:10:15 ◼ ► apps from scamming so many people out of so much money because it would make the pricing terms much
01:10:20 ◼ ► more clear to people and then secondly as many people on twitter have have pointed out the design
01:10:26 ◼ ► of the in-app purchase confirmation screen is not great everything's just like small and illegible
01:10:34 ◼ ► and it doesn't call attention to the price very well and it spends a lot of like screen real
01:10:39 ◼ ► estate on you know emptiness or on you know bs text and and it also shoves into the app
01:10:46 ◼ ► the responsibility of a lot of disclosure of things like what are you buying most of that is
01:10:51 ◼ ► most of that is left up to the app and is enforced by app review and of course that means it's
01:10:57 ◼ ► selectively and inconsistently enforced much of that should be moved into the design of the
01:11:01 ◼ ► purchase screen that could significantly cut down on the problems that in-app purchase scams create
01:11:10 ◼ ► and and what they can do how many people get fooled etc and why apple hasn't modernized the
01:11:17 ◼ ► in-app purchase screen for subscriptions i don't know i i can only leave it up to a combination of
01:11:23 ◼ ► you know the the allen die software design era of not caring about legibility and clarity for
01:11:29 ◼ ► people and instead caring about minimalism and combined with the seeming like moving mountains
01:11:36 ◼ ► effort that it takes to change anything about the store and the purchase like store kit and like the
01:11:41 ◼ ► that whole area of the os in the services ecosystem seems like it moves glacially for whatever reason
01:11:47 ◼ ► so you know combine those things and i'm not expecting big changes here anytime soon but
01:11:51 ◼ ► again i just i wish they would put more resources into really making the app store better for
01:11:59 ◼ ► customers in ways that like this that really matter instead of just you know giving lip service
01:12:04 ◼ ► and and i don't know why things have been as bad as they are in this area for as long as they have
01:12:17 ◼ ► fend off antitrust problems the regulatory angle on this is interesting because i think apple is
01:12:24 ◼ ► relying on and i think they're smart to rely on because i think they're they're correct
01:12:28 ◼ ► relying on the fact that the technical nuances that i think most people who would listen to
01:12:33 ◼ ► the show or are up on tech news understand are never going to get a fair hearing in a sort of
01:12:40 ◼ ► public forum or any kind of like congressional you know congressional hearings like that which is
01:12:45 ◼ ► when when apple makes a claim that you know that you were just saying we're like we make the app
01:12:49 ◼ ► store safe that's why we need control it's about safety we're protecting customers so on and so
01:12:52 ◼ ► forth the truth is that most of the safety comes from the design of the os and sandboxing and has
01:12:58 ◼ ► nothing to do with app review or the or the control over the app store but that is a technical nuance
01:13:03 ◼ ► that i think most people involved in this at the highest levels don't understand and even if they
01:13:09 ◼ ► did understand it trying to articulate that technical nuance is going to make you look like
01:13:14 ◼ ► just a you know a wonk who's just like getting into the weeds and it's like you're missing the
01:13:19 ◼ ► big picture here it's apple control it's like but this is this technical distinction actually is
01:13:28 ◼ ► undercuts apple's argument that their control of the app store is essential for customer safety
01:13:32 ◼ ► is that most of the safety has nothing to do with the app store you know we apple is going to say
01:13:37 ◼ ► you know we have fewer viruses it's safer but well that's all true but it's not because of the app
01:13:41 ◼ ► store it's because of since day one apps have been sandboxed and have very limited access to resources
01:13:48 ◼ ► on the iphone and everything now granted obviously you know if if things didn't go through the app
01:13:54 ◼ ► store it would be easier to exploit things because people can't slide like there is that's why this
01:13:59 ◼ ► is nuanced they might get off into the weeds of saying okay well but uh apple it doesn't allow
01:14:03 ◼ ► private api's it probably you guys might be more exploitable or you can't distribute a jailbreak
01:14:07 ◼ ► through the apple store and and it's harder for people to jailbreak and if sideloading was
01:14:10 ◼ ► available it'd be easy to jailbreak and you know like all that is true but still it is a nuanced
01:14:16 ◼ ► distinction and what it's undercutting is the idea that the app store is the one and only most
01:14:22 ◼ ► important bulwark against chaos on the iphone and it is not it is part of a solution but i don't
01:14:28 ◼ ► think even think it's the biggest part the second big argument against oh we're keeping customers
01:14:34 ◼ ► safe is alluded to in an ironic way by the first sentence of this little message about this is the
01:14:40 ◼ ► message that you get if you have an app that like apple decides is priced too high the case you read
01:14:45 ◼ ► earlier customers expect the app store to be a safe and trusted marketplace for purchasing digital
01:14:49 ◼ ► goods do they why would they anything you do on the app store as a regular person like say go you
01:14:56 ◼ ► hear about a cool app and you want to go download it so you go to the app store to find it you will
01:15:01 ◼ ► be flooded with thousands of scam clone apps that are not the app you want that have hundreds of
01:15:07 ◼ ► five star reviews that are in the top of the search results and maybe are the top one because
01:15:10 ◼ ► they paid for ad keywords it is not a safe and trusted marketplace at all anybody who has been
01:15:17 ◼ ► in the app store in the last several years has known that it's just very unless you know exactly
01:15:24 ◼ ► what you want and are very careful to go exactly to that one not to pick the the scam clone apps
01:15:29 ◼ ► with identical looking icons and similar names it is a terrifying place to be not because the apps
01:15:34 ◼ ► are going to like root your phone and steal all your pictures or whatever because you know again
01:15:38 ◼ ► sandboxing prevents that but because you're going to end up getting the wrong thing and that wrong
01:15:43 ◼ ► thing may end up costing you money and making you accidentally sign up for a 499 per week
01:15:47 ◼ ► bill that it starts off as a free trial right and you're gonna you know well i can just look at the
01:15:52 ◼ ► reviews and it's a curated collection it's like no it's not curated apple that's any junk through
01:15:56 ◼ ► and the reviews are meaningless because they can be scammed and apple hasn't stopped that right
01:15:59 ◼ ► and the search results are terrible so even if it's the most popular app in the world and you
01:16:02 ◼ ► search for it by name you might get some five other results before the one you want that that
01:16:07 ◼ ► combined so the the nuanced art technical argument about sandboxing versus the app store and the you
01:16:13 ◼ ► know the the caveats about side loading combined with apple's terrible job act the actual job of
01:16:20 ◼ ► curation of keeping scam apps out of the app store totally undercuts their safety argument but let's
01:16:26 ◼ ► set that aside for now because that's a huge thing to set aside right but you're right but
01:16:32 ◼ ► other than that did you enjoy the play mr clinton right but this this particular story is about one
01:16:37 ◼ ► new thing that they're doing that apple is doing to try to reduce the scams right and and and this
01:16:44 ◼ ► new thing i'm going to come at this from the entire entirely the opposite direction although
01:16:47 ◼ ► it'll it'll come around you'll see um it reminds me of my very first thought and i brought this up
01:16:54 ◼ ► on past shows my very first thought when the app store was announced it flashed in my head when
01:16:58 ◼ ► they were talking about it on screen in the presentation here comes the app store right
01:17:02 ◼ ► and here's what you can do because you know i was virtually surrounded i wasn't there in person but
01:17:07 ◼ ► i was virtually surrounded by all my other uh apple nerd friends watching the same keynote
01:17:12 ◼ ► remotely or in person and we're all taking it in i i think it was a live stream who knows i can't
01:17:21 ◼ ► and what i thought was here are all these people that i know my friends who are you know what we
01:17:27 ◼ ► called indie software developers back then who make a living by selling software for apple
01:17:34 ◼ ► platforms and they sort of do it on their own maybe with a you know a couple of people in a
01:17:39 ◼ ► small company or maybe literally by themselves and they've been doing it for years and they are sort
01:17:44 ◼ ► of you know these indie software developers living the dream they found a way to you know make
01:17:50 ◼ ► something that people are willing to pay money for and that's how they make their living and you know
01:17:55 ◼ ► even though we all had stars in our eyes about what promised to be and really was a gold rush
01:18:00 ◼ ► for you know being able to make lots of money on the on the app store on the iphone to make apps
01:18:06 ◼ ► through the iphone i saw all those people suddenly changing from indie software developers who
01:18:23 ◼ ► you know back in the day you'd write checks for shareware like actual but you'd actually put a
01:18:27 ◼ ► check in the mail they are getting credit cards you know online and you know charging people's
01:18:32 ◼ ► credit cards and you know getting their money and then giving them a code for the software or
01:18:36 ◼ ► allowing them to download it whatever all those people were suddenly going to change from that
01:18:40 ◼ ► form of income to a new form of income and that new form of income was every month you will get
01:18:45 ◼ ► a single check signed by apple it doesn't mean they suddenly work for apple but i was like well
01:18:51 ◼ ► this really changes the relationship of all these supposed indie developers previously they were
01:18:57 ◼ ► getting money from their customers for things that they made and that you know if they go all
01:19:03 ◼ ► in ios that's going to end and they're no longer getting money from customers in fact they no
01:19:07 ◼ ► longer have customers what they're getting is money from apple and they're not apple employees
01:19:11 ◼ ► it's kind of like they're sharecroppers for apple right like when you're when all of your income
01:19:18 ◼ ► income is checks signed by apple the relationship that you thought you had as a quote-unquote
01:19:25 ◼ ► independent software developer really changes that was my first and i wasn't i'm not and wasn't then
01:19:31 ◼ ► an independent software developer but that was my thought of like oh geez this is this is really
01:19:35 ◼ ► a bigger change than we think it is not to say that people shouldn't develop for the app store
01:19:38 ◼ ► because they totally should and it really was a gold rush and it was a good time to get in there
01:19:41 ◼ ► and get some good apps out and you know it's like and now that i was it wasn't but it was just a
01:19:46 ◼ ► a thought in my head that this this fundamentally changes the relationship and this this altercation
01:19:52 ◼ ► alteration of the relationship between independent software developers and the platform they develop
01:19:56 ◼ ► on has always been there and every once in a while something like this will come along and give me
01:20:02 ◼ ► that same feeling when this came along where apple is deciding you know like apple has always had
01:20:08 ◼ ► control over the app store like they they decide what's in they decide what's out they make up the
01:20:12 ◼ ► rules they change their mind like that's always been the way it is and occasionally they make a
01:20:16 ◼ ► decision it's bad and people complain and sometimes they make a decision it's good and people cheer
01:20:20 ◼ ► right but the relationship the power dynamic has always been the same here apple is deciding like
01:20:26 ◼ ► calling attention to the fact that they really do control everything now you could argue that
01:20:32 ◼ ► decisions like oh the minimum price you can charge is 99 cents that is a pricing decision that apple
01:20:37 ◼ ► has had basically since day one you could have free or you can have 99 cents you can't have 98
01:20:41 ◼ ► you can't have 50 you can't have one cent you can have 99 right and i think apple did some stuff
01:20:47 ◼ ► with like the imrich application at least strongly discouraging it from being like a thousand dollars
01:20:51 ◼ ► or whatever like not that there's a cap because i think some apps can be very expensive because
01:20:54 ◼ ► they're very fancy apps but in general apple has set pricing parameters but most independent
01:20:59 ◼ ► software developers developing for apple platforms through apple's app stores have not felt like apple
01:21:04 ◼ ► is telling them how to run their business i mean other than telling them what apps they're allowed
01:21:08 ◼ ► to develop and the fact that their minimum price has to be 99 cents and here's what you can do
01:21:12 ◼ ► with descriptions but in general i would think if you ask developers they would say well i decide
01:21:17 ◼ ► i decide how much to charge for my application right like if i think i can get away with charging
01:21:22 ◼ ► 99 for my app i'm going to try to do it and if i'm a dummy and really no one's going to buy it then
01:21:28 ◼ ► i'll change my price right and there's lots of arguments for the downward price pressure of the
01:21:31 ◼ ► app store and free apps being hard and you know all that stuff but in general it always seemed
01:21:36 ◼ ► like okay apple sets the rules but then we all we as independent software developers or whoever
01:21:41 ◼ ► and just companies or whatever we get to play in that space and decide how to price our products
01:21:46 ◼ ► based on our notion of what we think is the right move in the current competitive environment
01:21:51 ◼ ► and a move like this is apple saying you know what sometimes we can just tell you you know
01:21:57 ◼ ► that price you pick for your product yeah no it's not not because it's below 99 cents we just think
01:22:04 ◼ ► we think your app isn't good enough for the price that you are charging like they come right out and
01:22:11 ◼ ► say it right the price you've selected for your app do not reflect the value or features of the
01:22:17 ◼ ► content offered to the user that is an incredible statement incredible flex of power of like just
01:22:24 ◼ ► so you know i don't just now you haven't thought about this lately but we can do anything in the
01:22:29 ◼ ► app store and we've decided that your app isn't worth the price you're charging it now the context
01:22:36 ◼ ► here is okay well these are scam apps everyone can tell they're scams and i just got done
01:22:39 ◼ ► complaining that the thing is full scams should we get rid of the scams yes absolutely we should get
01:22:43 ◼ ► rid of the scams but the power they're exercising and the judgment they are displaying is terrifying
01:22:50 ◼ ► should be terrifying to everybody because it's basically saying okay we've always known we've
01:22:55 ◼ ► had this power now we're telling you that we're willing to flex it right and i feel like once
01:23:02 ◼ ► they've opened this door to like set this precedent that like previously we had this power and didn't
01:23:06 ◼ ► use it now we have this power and we're using it we know that the app store rules and guidelines are
01:23:12 ◼ ► applied very poorly and inconsistently i can imagine some if they're not careful at some point
01:23:18 ◼ ► in the future someone doing an update to their app and changing the price for 5.99 to 10.99
01:23:24 ◼ ► for their in-app purchase and apple saying we've decided that the value of your app does not you
01:23:30 ◼ ► know the price of your app does not reflect the value of the features of your content that you
01:23:33 ◼ ► offer having to explain how do you appeal that and say well i think it is worth ten dollars a month
01:23:38 ◼ ► well apple thinks it isn't well you know and apple is in charge of everything it is really really
01:23:45 ◼ ► scary and and sometimes things like scary things like this are important because they remind people
01:23:50 ◼ ► that this has always been the power dynamic you might not have been aware of it before and might
01:23:55 ◼ ► not have thought about it and because you felt that like it might not impact you and even this
01:23:59 ◼ ► you can say well i'm not a scam app so this isn't going to affect me but see also everyone else who
01:24:04 ◼ ► has ever thought that about some enforcement in the app store and then suddenly found themselves
01:24:07 ◼ ► on the receiving end of it right you know i don't think this particular decision i think you know to
01:24:14 ◼ ► be clear this they should do this in fact they should do this even more aggressively they should
01:24:17 ◼ ► do all the things that marco said they should get rid of scam apps for sure right but as apple
01:24:22 ◼ ► becomes better at doing the thing they supposedly say they're doing which is curating the app score
01:24:27 ◼ ► to protect customers they're getting farther and farther from one of the things that has been
01:24:32 ◼ ► protecting the app store which is that it's more or less a free-for-all within the constraints apple
01:24:36 ◼ ► offered so even though they're the only place where you can get apps you can get pretty much
01:24:40 ◼ ► anything any old piece of junk like you know no one's being kept out of the app store for being
01:24:45 ◼ ► a bad app developer everyone can get in there it's great it's like a quote-unquote level playing field
01:24:49 ◼ ► whatever right and that allows a large diversity of apps within the rules if apple actually started
01:24:56 ◼ ► curating and saying we prefer to only really have good apps within the rules as in no scams
01:25:03 ◼ ► and then eventually that's like okay well no apps that are really crappy or whatever the number and
01:25:07 ◼ ► type of apps available to you gets narrower and narrower which is good into and that's what we
01:25:12 ◼ ► want as customers i don't want the scam apps i don't want the crappy apps but on a platform
01:25:16 ◼ ► perspective the relief valve of allowing all that junk into the app store allowed the app store to
01:25:21 ◼ ► look more like a free market than it has ever actually been so if apple ever does get good at
01:25:28 ◼ ► curating the app store it's going to be so much more obvious to regulators that it is not a free
01:25:33 ◼ ► market or a level playing field or you know like it is entirely like the only way to get apps onto
01:25:38 ◼ ► this thing is this very increasingly narrow corridor and it's great for customers as long
01:25:43 ◼ ► as those customers agree with apple entirely about everything that should be there right
01:25:46 ◼ ► so i think apple is not painting itself into a corner but every time it does something like this
01:25:53 ◼ ► as a you know a reaction to regulatory pressure it further highlights the thing that they're
01:25:58 ◼ ► going to end up getting regulated about which is that they do have all the power and every exercise
01:26:02 ◼ ► of that power power that narrows the app store makes it more and more clear that they do have
01:26:08 ◼ ► that power power and that it is a very narrowly defined thing that does not allow all the possible
01:26:14 ◼ ► innovation that could be out there in the world from being available you know and i'm not using
01:26:19 ◼ ► this to argue that apple should immediately allow side loading and allow our app stores and epic to
01:26:23 ◼ ► have its own app store and all that stuff all i'm saying is that they are in a little bit of a pickle
01:26:26 ◼ ► because if they do a good job of this you know if maybe this is the maybe this is the middle road
01:26:31 ◼ ► they're going for if we make moves in the direction of being more open but do a half-assed job of it
01:26:36 ◼ ► the app store will still look like an open marketplace but we can cite these examples as
01:26:40 ◼ ► things we're doing to protect customers i don't know how this is going to turn out but i found
01:26:44 ◼ ► this this whole thing as another reminder to me of exactly how little the power dynamic has ever
01:26:50 ◼ ► changed in the app store and it's mostly i think we did we name an episode after this a while back
01:26:55 ◼ ► mostly just all of us relying on the benevolence of the powerful and trying to feel good about it
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01:28:10 ◼ ► nick writes apple silicon is rightly getting a ton of praise but how much of it of that work is due
01:28:20 ◼ ► to what arm is doing and how much of it is because of apple is it arm with apple sprinkles or apple
01:28:25 ◼ ► with arm sprinkles if the latter why wouldn't apple just make its own chip architecture from
01:28:29 ◼ ► scratch and fully control everything you know this is a um that's a really good question i don't know
01:28:35 ◼ ► the answer but if i were to wager a guess i'm very curious to hear what you guys have to say
01:28:39 ◼ ► i think that it's really kind of both isn't it like i suppose apple could come up with its own
01:28:46 ◼ ► chip architecture and put itself behind by several years because it would have to throw away the work
01:28:52 ◼ ► it's already got but i mean plenty of other arm chips exist in the world that aren't near as fast
01:28:58 ◼ ► as this so i if i had to pick i would probably say apple but i'm biased uh but i really think you
01:29:06 ◼ ► can't have one without the other i don't know marco am i am i bananas or does that make sense
01:29:10 ◼ ► i'm not a chip designer and i really don't know to what degree like how much the arm architecture
01:29:19 ◼ ► and instruction set is being used here and how like how much apple is is going their own way
01:29:25 ◼ ► once you get below the instruction set level there's all sorts of decisions you can make when
01:29:30 ◼ ► you're designing a chip that if you know what software is going to be running on it and if you
01:29:36 ◼ ► can control things like the compiler that you know is making most or all of that software you can
01:29:43 ◼ ► make your software and hardware work very very well together you can really optimize them for
01:29:48 ◼ ► each other and that's what apple is doing here and i don't know to what degree they do it like on what
01:29:53 ◼ ► level of the chip design but it seemed like they're doing a lot of it and it seems like they are able
01:29:58 ◼ ► to you know take a lot of the advantages of the arm instruction set and basics of the architecture
01:30:04 ◼ ► and then optimize the crap out of the stuff that goes below that and and the compiler that compiles
01:30:09 ◼ ► software for it so i'm thinking you know just based on my you know relative amateur level of
01:30:16 ◼ ► of knowledge of this kind of stuff i bet a lot of the goodness of how great apple silicon is
01:30:23 ◼ ► is on apple because you can look around the rest of the industry and lots of people use arm chips
01:30:29 ◼ ► and arm chips are good overall like they there's a reason why lots of people use arm chips they
01:30:34 ◼ ► they can be tweaked lots of different you know workloads they are very good at certain things
01:30:39 ◼ ► they're very efficient in lots of ways which almost the entire industry needs needs efficient
01:30:43 ◼ ► chips so there's a reason why arm chips are used everywhere the arm you know architecture and
01:30:53 ◼ ► advantages and there's already tons of existing tooling and software around it so you know it
01:30:58 ◼ ► makes sense why lots of people use and and create and customize arm chips another reason people use
01:31:04 ◼ ► it is that it can be customized easily and and it can be optimized for certain applications easily
01:31:11 ◼ ► and i think that's large what we're seeing with apple is like every other smartphone that we know
01:31:16 ◼ ► of runs arm chips but they don't outperform the iphone not even close like apple has maintained
01:31:22 ◼ ► this huge lead and that's in part because you know advances in ios and you know power efficiency and
01:31:29 ◼ ► stuff like that over android or whatever else but it's largely because apple has done a a better job
01:31:35 ◼ ► optimizing the hardware for their software ecosystem and vice versa than the other players
01:31:42 ◼ ► in smartphones have done so far so i i think again it's it's probably some of a some of b like i think
01:31:48 ◼ ► apple silicon is largely good because of arm because arm is a really good foundation to build
01:31:53 ◼ ► upon but that probably most of the reason why it's so good is that apple has just customized the crap
01:32:00 ◼ ► out of it to be optimized very very well for their workflow and their software needs and their
01:32:06 ◼ ► hardware needs i think i lost track in this analogy like are the sprinkles like what are we
01:32:13 ◼ ► are the sprinkles the thing that don't matter or the sprinkles of things that do matter like like
01:32:17 ◼ ► which is the sprinkles good or just the frill anyway uh yeah i agree with what you both said
01:32:23 ◼ ► like it's it's 100 not 100 but like the answer is whether it's which one of these is more important
01:32:28 ◼ ► the fact that it's armor the fact that it's apple the fact that it's apple is absolutely the more
01:32:32 ◼ ► important factor um and it's like people said like just look at the other arm chips for doing the
01:32:39 ◼ ► exact same job being in a smartphone apple's chips crush them and have for years not by a little bit
01:32:44 ◼ ► not by 10 by huge embarrassing amounts um and yes apple can and does custom tailor every aspect of
01:32:52 ◼ ► the entire stack to to fit together and work well but that type of optimization alone does not
01:32:58 ◼ ► account for the massive lead that they have apple has some of the best chip designers in the world
01:33:03 ◼ ► they were blessed to be able to start with an architecture that was well suited to their
01:33:06 ◼ ► application it's kind of an accident of history of like well we need a chip for the phone it should
01:33:10 ◼ ► be a low power chip arm seems to be the leader in this area they didn't start with a weird
01:33:13 ◼ ► architecture that wasn't suited for a phone so it was a blessing there but apple only started to pull
01:33:18 ◼ ► away once they started to make their own arm chips when they were using other people's arm chips they
01:33:22 ◼ ► had performance like other people's arm chips and it seemed like it was fine but then they just
01:33:26 ◼ ► stretched that lead out when they started doing their own thing whether it's being first to 64
01:33:30 ◼ ► bit or just having the amazing chips they have now apple's chip designers are amazing it's a really
01:33:35 ◼ ► easy ab comparison look at the other people also making arm chips and the thing is if you think of
01:33:41 ◼ ► like intel or other things apple's platform especially now that it's in max is pretty broad
01:33:46 ◼ ► they make tablets they make phones they make max all with their same architecture back when it was
01:33:52 ◼ ► the wind tell duopoly it was a similar situation where the big platform that mattered before
01:33:57 ◼ ► smartphones and everything was personal computers and windows was the the massively dominant
01:34:03 ◼ ► software platform and intel or x86 based chips were the hardware platform at any point during
01:34:10 ◼ ► that very long stretch of time when wind tell was the thing there could have been and i'm sure there
01:34:15 ◼ ► was the same type of work granted across companies but like intel could design chips knowing hey most
01:34:22 ◼ ► people who buy this chip are going to run windows on it and windows people run these applications
01:34:28 ◼ ► like microsoft office or photoshop or whatever like there were known workloads that intel
01:34:33 ◼ ► absolutely could and probably did design its ship to be high performing or like games like gpu gpu
01:34:39 ◼ ► vendors do this today gpu vendors make sure that they're silicon and they're drivers they have
01:34:44 ◼ ► custom tweaks in the drivers for specific games to perform better it detects when you're running
01:34:49 ◼ ► a specific game to change how it behaves to get better scores on those benchmarks for those
01:34:54 ◼ ► features right this is not an unknown you know type of thing tweaking your hardware to the software
01:35:00 ◼ ► it's just that a it's easier for apple to do it because they're all one company and b apple seems
01:35:04 ◼ ► to be better at it like they're just like just like the silicon design why aren't everyone else's
01:35:10 ◼ ► arm chips as good as apples all those other smartphone vendors and other people making arm
01:35:14 ◼ ► system-mounted chips could also tailor those system-mounted chips to work well with android
01:35:18 ◼ ► which they know is going to be the operating system that runs on the things and they know what
01:35:22 ◼ ► people are going to be running on them so like it's not like apple has and can do something here
01:35:26 ◼ ► that no one else can do that only apple can do this everybody can and has done this apple is just
01:35:32 ◼ ► doing it better uh and you know again because they're a single company but because they have
01:35:37 ◼ ► a lot of smart people and you know sometimes you just get the right it's the right set of
01:35:41 ◼ ► people around in the right place at the right time and you know that's the result so if the
01:35:46 ◼ ► sprinkles is the good thing the sprinkles is apple all right glad we got that sorted uh matt chatman
01:35:55 ◼ ► jones writes what do you think apple would need to do to actually make gaming on max on par with
01:35:59 ◼ ► gaming on pcs hypothetically let's say a new apple silicon g1 is announced with similar power to an
01:36:04 ◼ ► nvidia 3080 or that apple starts offering an amdr x 6800 xt and mac pros what more would they need
01:36:12 ◼ ► to do to actually get developers on board in a real way to make the mac a platform the mac a
01:36:17 ◼ ► platform that triple a titles come come to on the day of release i don't know do they need directx
01:36:24 ◼ ► john what do they need to do i mean marco was it marco who mentioned the switch earlier um the
01:36:29 ◼ ► switch is ample evidence that uh even if your hardware is not good like not not competitive
01:36:43 ◼ ► apple's problem with respect to games some of it yes has been hardware but their big problem is
01:36:50 ◼ ► apis uh and the software development ecosystem games are not made for apple's apis they're made
01:36:57 ◼ ► for apis on other platforms they're made for directx they're made for the consoles or whatever
01:37:01 ◼ ► and if your platform knows how to you know cultivate uh you know gaming content and get
01:37:09 ◼ ► developers to make games for it you can field really ridiculous hardware like the ps3 with the
01:37:15 ◼ ► cell and still people will develop for it because you're sony and your product is the playstation
01:37:20 ◼ ► and you know how to deal with developers so apple's problems here have nothing to do with
01:37:25 ◼ ► like oh apple can't make good enough hardware or their gpu's aren't powerful enough or what if they
01:37:31 ◼ ► made an amazing chip or an amazing gpu like they can do all those things and you know it would help
01:37:37 ◼ ► them maybe run some games that are all available now a little bit better but they would never be a
01:37:41 ◼ ► player in the game market unless they essentially did what everyone who has ever entered and
01:37:44 ◼ ► succeeded in this market has done which is play the game woo the developers form the relationships
01:37:50 ◼ ► build the platform get the players like you have to do all those things that have nothing to do
01:37:55 ◼ ► with making a great chip apple already makes great chips like the the the chips on all their ipads
01:38:00 ◼ ► are more powerful than stuff on the switch but no one is like you know clamoring to play the the
01:38:04 ◼ ► latest ipad game uh any more than they're playing they want to play the latest zelda what does zelda
01:38:09 ◼ ► have that these games don't like apple has tons of powerful hardware they don't have the games and
01:38:13 ◼ ► they don't have the games because they don't have the developers and they know how the developers
01:38:16 ◼ ► because they don't know how to build those relationships because it's not like it's not
01:38:19 ◼ ► like software developers uh and it's not like the app development platform games is much more like
01:38:24 ◼ ► uh you know they're experiencing with streaming services the creative industry it's like making
01:38:28 ◼ ► movies and tv shows you don't know when you're going to have hit it's not a straightforward
01:38:32 ◼ ► formula to get one see the recent stories about uh amazon um and google trying their various gaming
01:38:40 ◼ ► initiatives both of them are trying to sort of have in-house gaming studios but they have no idea
01:38:44 ◼ ► how to make a good game it's like it's like saying i want to make a hit movie can i do that i know
01:38:50 ◼ ► and it's like well maybe but it's actually really hard and i can't tell you exactly what to do
01:38:54 ◼ ► otherwise everyone would make hit movies right it's it's a different skill set and even if you
01:39:00 ◼ ► hire all the right people if the culture of your company is wrong where you don't you don't create
01:39:05 ◼ ► an environment where a hit game can come into being because your company is structured to make
01:39:09 ◼ ► let's say really great operating systems or great apps or something like that games are different
01:39:14 ◼ ► enough that it is a big effort to succeed in this market totally independent of hardware i always
01:39:22 ◼ ► pointed microsoft because microsoft you know microsoft is a long history of gaming on the pc
01:39:27 ◼ ► they decided they wanted to enter the console market they were already the biggest pc gaming
01:39:32 ◼ ► platform because they were pcs at that point and even they had difficulty merely doing a slightly
01:39:42 ◼ ► the the platform for pc gaming and even they took years and lost tons of money and had to really
01:39:48 ◼ ► stick to it to figure out how to make a viable console gaming platform and even then they didn't
01:39:54 ◼ ► come to dominate they're just now one of three remaining big players in the market and the you
01:40:00 ◼ ► know the lead shuffles around as time goes on right so it's really hard and the hard parts have
01:40:05 ◼ ► nothing to do with hardware so what does apple have to do they basically have to do what sony
01:40:10 ◼ ► and microsoft and nintendo have done to become the gang power as they are now and the answer to that
01:40:15 ◼ ► question is not feel the really great chip rom srinath writes do you use any battery backups with
01:40:21 ◼ ► your desktops do you plug your nas into it too do you know if i can use the usb almost running out
01:40:26 ◼ ► of power dingus on the ups to turn my mac off this apple support page says that my imac consumes 295
01:40:32 ◼ ► watts at peak power do you know how that translates to how big a ups i should get in va what does in va
01:40:38 ◼ ► mean oh in mold amps yeah there you go sorry i'm so used to seeing virginia for that i was very
01:40:42 ◼ ► confused um for me i have a very old uh ups uh and i have the usb dingus attached to my sonology
01:40:52 ◼ ► because honestly i'm more worried about that knowing when power is about to run out than i
01:40:55 ◼ ► am my imac but plugged into the ups is the sonology my imac and uh i think my my ero and
01:41:03 ◼ ► very little else if anything uh and it's it's last it lasts long enough even though it's several
01:41:08 ◼ ► years old now it lasts long enough to keep the lights on so to speak for the typical power blip
01:41:15 ◼ ► that we would get around here um i would guess i would measure how long this lasts in 10 or 20
01:41:22 ◼ ► minutes but that's enough for me and that's how i do it marco what do you do um what i do is is
01:41:29 ◼ ► possibly different from what i recommend um but so what i what i do is i have a ups everywhere i
01:41:35 ◼ ► have a desktop and i have a ups um at my networking gear station in the closet um so that way it you
01:41:42 ◼ ► know it keeps the the router and the switches and everything all running um and of course the you
01:41:48 ◼ ► know the the verizon ont thing is also put into that so that way like you know basically power
01:41:53 ◼ ► goes out we still have internet as long as the internet service is up um and that's that is that
01:41:58 ◼ ► kind of setup is great for if you have the space and if you're willing to spend you know 150 bucks
01:42:05 ◼ ► here and there on ups and if what you have to plug in is that's obviously laptops i don't think you
01:42:10 ◼ ► need one because the laptop itself kind of kind of includes one built in uh so it's you know that's
01:42:16 ◼ ► not really necessary but certainly the quality of life improvement if you frequently have power blips
01:42:22 ◼ ► of having your internet connectivity never drop is wonderful that being said what ups is right for
01:42:30 ◼ ► you depends entirely on your situation and it can vary a lot if you are somewhere that almost never
01:42:38 ◼ ► has any kind of power blackout and if your desktop suddenly turning off in the middle of a big wind
01:42:44 ◼ ► storm is something you can tolerate then you probably don't need a ups at all if you do have
01:42:50 ◼ ► a ups it i think it makes desktop life a little bit easier if you get a really nice and massive
01:42:55 ◼ ► one it also makes a very good footrest because they don't move when you when you like push back
01:42:58 ◼ ► and lean on them because they're so heavy because the big ones are basically car batteries with a
01:43:03 ◼ ► very small amount of metal around them so that that could be a fun thing but for the most part
01:43:09 ◼ ► i just i i spent a long time with cyber power ups and before that apcs i generally prefer the cyber
01:43:17 ◼ ► powers now i find they give you much better bang for your buck than a PC does APC seems for a while
01:43:24 ◼ ► like it has been coasting on its reputation in my opinion so cyber power is where it's at they there
01:43:30 ◼ ► are multiple different kinds of ups i like the kind that have the the like pure sine wave output
01:43:36 ◼ ► not necessarily because i need a perfectly smooth wave but because that typically means it has really
01:43:42 ◼ ► good voltage regulation and stuff and that that kind of gets you into the like the high tier of
01:43:48 ◼ ► ups and please power nerds forgive me because i don't know the actual details of how this stuff
01:43:52 ◼ ► works again but basically at the at the very low end of ups they're not always running the power
01:44:02 ◼ ► through their like power regulator circuitry they're running the power straight through most
01:44:05 ◼ ► of the time and if they need to they like switch over and my understanding is the kind of higher
01:44:12 ◼ ► end version of ups are always running the power through their circuitry and so there is no like
01:44:18 ◼ ► switch over change to happen and that i think is better if your power is like a little flaky but
01:44:26 ◼ ► is not like just going like pure on or pure off so that's usually i usually end up going for whatever
01:44:33 ◼ ► is like the entry level version of that type of ups so like not like the super big fancy
01:44:40 ◼ ► server versions or anything like that but like you know the kind of like the mid-range of ups
01:44:45 ◼ ► versions and cyber power makes those in the like 150 range pretty easily so that's usually where
01:44:50 ◼ ► i go i usually go around the like 1000 to 1500 va range in part because i don't entirely understand
01:44:57 ◼ ► what that unit means and and in part because usually i'm less concerned with runtime and more
01:45:05 ◼ ► concerned with just how much wattage can it can it handle at a time because i'm usually plugging into
01:45:09 ◼ ► it a giant desktop with a giant screen and everything else so you know having something
01:45:13 ◼ ► that can handle you know a thousand watts or 600 watts or something like is probably a minimum
01:45:18 ◼ ► and that usually as you increase the wattage usually you get higher va ratings too because
01:45:23 ◼ ► i assume that's kind of somehow related but i'm sure i'm going to read some medium article next
01:45:28 ◼ ► week about how it's actually not related at all and it's actually a big scam or whatever but anyway
01:45:31 ◼ ► what ups are good for is dealing with short power interruptions like that it's there you know if you
01:45:37 ◼ ► if your power is going out for hours and hours at a time this is probably better solved in a different
01:45:42 ◼ ► way like some kind of backup generator or solar power or you know something like that but for
01:45:48 ◼ ► brief interruptions like if you just have unreliable power or you have occasional brownouts
01:45:53 ◼ ► here and there or you know if you if if you know like you're somewhere that has a lot of like
01:45:59 ◼ ► overhead power lines and you frequently have like a half hour off or something like that then
01:46:05 ◼ ► obviously get a ups the only other thing i'll add to this before i let john take over is
01:46:09 ◼ ► if you have frequent power problems where the ups is frequently having to kick on and things like
01:46:16 ◼ ► that there's a pretty good chance it will shorten the life of the battery in the ups because it's
01:46:20 ◼ ► just being used a lot and there's not a great way around that except just expect that to happen so
01:46:26 ◼ ► don't spend a whole bunch of money on a really great ups if you frequently have like little blips
01:46:33 ◼ ► little power here and there because it probably won't last more than a few years yeah the only
01:46:37 ◼ ► thing else i had are for trying to size your ups um the peak power draw or like the the the rating
01:46:46 ◼ ► for your power supply in your computer is not a good way to size things so if you if you try to
01:46:53 ◼ ► use those like sizing tools they have on the website or whatever they'll want they want you
01:46:57 ◼ ► to enter the information like that like you know my mac has a 1500 watt power supply what what is
01:47:03 ◼ ► it in the mac pro is like 1300 watts it's something ridiculous right it's the most you can draw
01:47:07 ◼ ► from a 15 amp circuit without requiring a special outlet or plug but i think it's under that i think
01:47:11 ◼ ► they're under the 1500 limit right it's not a space heater literally right well because and
01:47:15 ◼ ► and you also can't you can't have like you can't draw 15 amps sustained if it's a sustain load i
01:47:22 ◼ ► believe you have to cap it at 80 of the ambridge of the circuit um so it's i think they're 1300
01:47:27 ◼ ► 1400 watts something like that yeah but anyway the point is like that's that's what's in my mac
01:47:32 ◼ ► pro right but my mac pro my actual mac pro is never drawing that much power like because you can just
01:47:38 ◼ ► add up the power draw of the things that are inside it and they do not get to that now if you
01:47:42 ◼ ► filled my thing with like you know dual gpu uh video cards and filled every single slot and filled
01:47:49 ◼ ► it with like eight spinning hard disks and like you know yeah that's why the power supply is in
01:47:53 ◼ ► there but my mac doesn't have that in it right so don't size your load based on the maximum possible
01:48:00 ◼ ► power that your computer could draw size it based on what your actual computer does draw right and
01:48:09 ◼ ► how do you get that measurement there's lots of cheap tools you can use to like plug in and try
01:48:17 ◼ ► that if you use one of the sizing tools you're gonna be like this is telling me i need 900
01:48:20 ◼ ► worth of ups yeah that's what ups websites will tell you that you of course they're gonna tell
01:48:24 ◼ ► you you need 900 you don't right i have what i'm saying is i always under size my ups is
01:48:30 ◼ ► i've undersized them on every mac that i've ever had i get very little battery time when the power
01:48:36 ◼ ► does go out but it's fine because all i want is enough time to you know shut down or to have the
01:48:40 ◼ ► computer shut down on that uh on that aspect of these things the little ups connection or usb
01:48:47 ◼ ► connections from ups is to max the mac has a surprisingly used to have a surprisingly a good
01:48:52 ◼ ► amount of built-in support for ups and there was a time again back in the good old days of my cheese
01:48:58 ◼ ► grater when i could have my ups plugged into my mac with zero drivers installed from the ups maker
01:49:04 ◼ ► and the mac understood it and the ups could tell it hey you're on battery power you should probably
01:49:08 ◼ ► shut down now and the mac would shut down like that's what you want to happen right since then
01:49:12 ◼ ► i've become super paranoid in two aspects one i don't like weird usb things connected to my max
01:49:18 ◼ ► because usb on max has been flaky in the last i don't know decade or so and so like i hate
01:49:24 ◼ ► debugging problems that have to do with usb um and two i hate having you know cruddy un-un updated
01:49:31 ◼ ► software from a ups manufacturer running on my mac uh if it even does run on you know with the new
01:49:36 ◼ ► with the current driver model and everything like that so all that i say is my current ups that is
01:49:40 ◼ ► hooked up to my mac pro is not connected through usb at all um and i'm just relying on the fact
01:49:47 ◼ ► that my mac is always asleep and that when it's asleep it can probably last a surprisingly long
01:49:51 ◼ ► time on this big cyber power giant brick thing that i have here um so don't worry about that
01:49:57 ◼ ► the synology on the other hand is also on a ups my nast yes my nast is on a ups it's got spinning
01:50:01 ◼ ► disks in it that are like spinning all the time it's on a ups and it is connected by usb
01:50:05 ◼ ► and that's you know and that will shut itself down if power goes out right as for batteries
01:50:12 ◼ ► yeah you'll need to replace them in fact i just replaced uh like four days ago the battery in the
01:50:17 ◼ ► ups uh that is connected to my ness uh which i think the first time i had actually shut down my
01:50:22 ◼ ► ness and like i don't know how many years like it's just been on continuously the ups has had
01:50:26 ◼ ► this incredibly obnoxious impossible to disable screeching siren telling me my battery is dead and
01:50:31 ◼ ► so yeah i went down and the batteries cost like you know especially for a ness like they don't
01:50:36 ◼ ► draw too much power it's like 20 or 30 bucks to get a new battery you don't have you can replace
01:50:41 ◼ ► the batteries in these things really yeah i i haven't replaced them in a very long time but
01:50:46 ◼ ► the one time i did replace when it was back in like a big apc one years ago but it cost almost
01:50:52 ◼ ► as much as a new unit well this is a this is like a dinky one like my my Synology is connected to
01:50:56 ◼ ► like one of those ones looks like a the world's biggest power strip yeah yeah like the big chunky
01:51:01 ◼ ► thing and it's what is it's like apc the rbc 32 it's like 23 from amazon i bought so many of them
01:51:07 ◼ ► right they're actually surprisingly small batteries right so you know if you have a small device like
01:51:13 ◼ ► a nast with a couple of drives in it you can get a pretty small cheap ups and every time the battery
01:51:18 ◼ ► dies and this and so this is the first time i swapped the battery out this thing has been on
01:51:21 ◼ ► a ups since 2013 so it's lasted eight years down there um so you know you can swapping batteries
01:51:29 ◼ ► is viable just you know again if you buy like a 900 ups yeah the battery is going to be expensive
01:51:33 ◼ ► too um and the final thing we'll note about this is forget about power going out once you have
01:51:38 ◼ ► things on ups that are aware they're on ups you'll find out just how much time you have these little
01:51:42 ◼ ► miniature brownouts now power supplies in in in modern electronics are actually really good about
01:51:49 ◼ ► smoothing it out same thing with the sine wave stuff like the fancy power supplies that are in
01:51:52 ◼ ► all of our max and everything you don't have to worry too much about pure sine wave because the
01:51:56 ◼ ► power supply itself will do that but uh and they'll also smooth out like dips in the power
01:52:04 ◼ ► i never noticed this before because i didn't even notice the lights flicking or anything but guess
01:52:08 ◼ ► what we have just enough of a power dip like when the vacuum gets turned on at the same time as the
01:52:13 ◼ ► toaster is going that i noticed my ups ticks on for a second hmm that's interesting and then you
01:52:19 ◼ ► feel like oh i'm glad i have the ups there because then at least the power supply on my mac doesn't
01:52:22 ◼ ► have to deal with that blip which it's designed to do and would be fine but it's just nice to have
01:52:26 ◼ ► something else there in front of it um and then of course the sinology always emails me every time
01:52:32 ◼ ► it's like i'm on battery power right now i'm back on regular power i get like two emails in quick
01:52:36 ◼ ► succession anytime anyone vacuums in the basement because my entire house is my entire house like
01:52:41 ◼ ► the whatever it is the uh the main circuit or whatever it's not it's like barely enough to
01:52:48 ◼ ► power my house uh so any kind of elevated spike is enough to sort of perturb it i think i have like
01:52:55 ◼ ► 150 uh amp service and i should have 200 right so you never know how well-sized your house is
01:53:03 ◼ ► but having ups is on the stuff that you care about is important and they also provide surge
01:53:08 ◼ ► suppression most of them as well so that's another thing that you should have going in fact most
01:53:13 ◼ ► recently the few things in my house that aren't on a ups uh we have like a power blip uh one of them
01:53:19 ◼ ► is my playstation i was like i should put that on a ups because no it doesn't really matter but if
01:53:24 ◼ ► i'm in the middle of a game when it was just a blip and it took out my playstation but everything
01:53:30 ◼ ► else didn't even notice i feel cheated out of whatever game i was in the middle of playing so
01:53:34 ◼ ► yeah this is a long answer to say yes you should get ubs's yes your nas should be on one
01:53:39 ◼ ► maybe you should hook it up to usb uh it's better if there's no drivers uh and you know and don't uh
01:53:48 ◼ ► don't be afraid to undersize them a little bit as long as you understand that all you're getting is
01:53:56 ◼ ► i remember um i was that i was standing in jason snell's house during uh dub dub week i don't know
01:54:03 ◼ ► like five years ago and i was getting constant messages from my sonology because erin poor erin
01:54:10 ◼ ► back home with i think just eckland at the time um was going through like a truly terrible wind
01:54:16 ◼ ► and rainstorm uh to the point that i think she was getting worried and legitimately worried about
01:54:23 ◼ ► like a tornado or something like that um and so i'm exchanging texts with her as i'm trying to
01:54:27 ◼ ► like be social with it with you guys amongst others at jason's house and my watch is vibrating
01:54:33 ◼ ► incessantly like oh the eps power is is down oh it's back oh it's down oh it's back meanwhile
01:54:38 ◼ ► erin's like oh man this storm is really really bad and i'm just sitting there like i wish i could do
01:54:43 ◼ ► something but uh it was a very eerie way to hammer home that erin was as and it's not her style to
01:54:50 ◼ ► exaggerate but it was that she was not exaggerating there was a really bad storm going on because we
01:54:55 ◼ ► were losing power constantly and then fast forward like a year or two later in in a tree
01:54:59 ◼ ► that that's right outside our neighborhood that was constantly you know losing branches and
01:55:05 ◼ ► knocking out our power i guess power company got tired of it and they chopped back that tree quite
01:55:09 ◼ ► a bit and and knock on wood we haven't had a power issue since so i know what you're talking about
01:55:14 ◼ ► one more uh uh thing uh marco touched on this like the different kinds of power supplies the ones that
01:55:19 ◼ ► run all of the power through the power regulation circuit all the time versus the ones that pass it
01:55:25 ◼ ► straight through until it gets cut and then they swap uh the ones that run the power through all
01:55:30 ◼ ► the time i think the whole continuous ups i forgot what the name is or whatever you probably don't
01:55:35 ◼ ► want one of those because those tend to have fans they tend to be made for data centers because in a
01:55:43 ◼ ► data center you don't want something that's going to notice when the power disappears and quickly
01:55:47 ◼ ► swap it you want just continuous power delivery that is never like truly uninterruptible power
01:55:52 ◼ ► supplied not oh there's going to be an interruption but we're really fast about switching and the
01:55:56 ◼ ► capacitors will make up for it right those truly uninterruptible ones are don't just have fans but
01:56:02 ◼ ► like loud fans fans that you probably don't want in your house now like my cyber power ups has a
01:56:08 ◼ ► fan it's the first ups i ever bought with a fan and i was afraid of it but then i did enough
01:56:12 ◼ ► research to say okay well the fan only comes on if if and when it switches to battery power
01:56:16 ◼ ► and that pretty much never happens so it has fans in it but they're not on right so i would say for
01:56:21 ◼ ► home use get the cheaper ones that aren't whatever it is continuous power supplies don't worry about
01:56:28 ◼ ► the fact that they have a fan because if you get a good one like the cyber power one the fan will
01:56:33 ◼ ► only come on when it switches to battery and it starts to get a little bit warm and then you won't
01:56:37 ◼ ► care about the fan because you'll be too busy panic shutting down your computer or it will be
01:56:41 ◼ ► too busy shutting it down for you uh through its usb connection that hopefully isn't causing your
01:56:45 ◼ ► computer to flake out yeah i'll put a link in the show notes to the one i got um just last year and
01:56:50 ◼ ► it's it's i'm pretty sure the same one it's the cyber power um and the feature that we're talking
01:56:55 ◼ ► about with the continuous power dry i think is what they call avr for automatic voltage
01:57:00 ◼ ► regulation presumably um but something like that that's that's what i get is like whatever cyber
01:57:06 ◼ ► power you know tower shaped one is around a thousand va and supports avr that's how i slice
01:57:13 ◼ ► ups and that's for for my desktop purposes that's great yeah i think i got whatever like the slightly
01:57:19 ◼ ► bigger one because i didn't i was so tired of undersizing my ups for my giant tower computers
01:57:23 ◼ ► i went a little bit bigger um so i think maybe i have to the step up model of like 200 and change
01:57:28 ◼ ► or whatever but i have no regrets it is you know i like the fact that it's a tower form factor
01:57:33 ◼ ► because it actually fits in the you know it's under my my tower computer is on a little table
01:57:37 ◼ ► and under the tower computer is my tower ups so it all fits in a nice big vertical stack is it on
01:57:41 ◼ ► a smaller table it should be but it isn't no yeah it's just it's just on the carpet which is fine
01:57:46 ◼ ► again i was worried about it being on the carpet and having a fans and overheating nope no problem
01:57:49 ◼ ► it sits there it's dead silent it does its job even when it clicks it ticks on sometimes i barely
01:57:54 ◼ ► notice because it's kind of a quiet ticking on unlike the ones that don't have sine waves that
01:57:58 ◼ ► you hear them like making a ticking noise because they're sort of they're simulating a sine wave
01:58:03 ◼ ► with a series of steps like they'll scare you in the ups advertising material like look at this
01:58:08 ◼ ► power signal from this non-pure sine wave it isn't it ugly it's fine your power supply computer will
01:58:13 ◼ ► handle that but yes it is ugly and it and it manifests in a noise when you are on battery
01:58:18 ◼ ► power on a cheaper ups but don't worry about it you want to put your nasa on one of those things
01:58:22 ◼ ► it's fine that's what my nasa's on it works fine ticks on it ticks off your battery will still last
01:58:26 ◼ ► a long time oh one of the things speaking of noise if you have frequent power outages that aren't
01:58:31 ◼ ► super like alerting for you like if you don't really need to know when the power's out you just
01:58:36 ◼ ► have to continue your work for a few minutes almost every ups by default beeps loudly when
01:58:41 ◼ ► it's running on battery to tell you hey oh my god your power's out beep beep beep it's out oh my god
01:58:46 ◼ ► and on the low end ones usually you can't disable the beep on the higher end ones you usually can
01:58:53 ◼ ► and this one of the reasons i selected this this line is that i can and did disable the beep on it
01:59:00 ◼ ► so if that's something that you want to be able to do make sure the one you that that you're looking
01:59:04 ◼ ► at can do that when my battery died and the ups connected to my sonology it's like screeching like
01:59:10 ◼ ► i just a continuous the top of its lungs screech not as loud as a smoke detector but not quite
01:59:14 ◼ ► either neither one of my children noticed this at all i come into the house i'm like the two kids
01:59:21 ◼ ► are just sitting there like they got their headphones in they're staring at their ipads
01:59:24 ◼ ► and like do you not notice the screeching noise and like what well i'm like i'm the old person
01:59:28 ◼ ► who's supposed to not be able to hear this that's terrible screeching noise like i don't hear
01:59:32 ◼ ► anything like come with me let's let's go follow the sound where is it coming from oh it seems to
01:59:37 ◼ ► be down in the basement i mean not that they could do anything about it but i would expect them to
01:59:42 ◼ ► have like texted me and say dad there's a terrible screeching noise in the house what's going on
01:59:45 ◼ ► instead they just ignored it and continued to do whatever they were doing kids these days thanks
01:59:51 ◼ ► to our sponsors this week squarespace express vpn and flat file and thanks to our members who
02:00:31 ◼ ► and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c a s e y l i s s so that's casey list m a r c o
02:01:09 ◼ ► oh no no stop don't say it don't say uh uh is that clear and present no patreon games no it's
02:01:14 ◼ ► some tom clancy one isn't it no i'm drawing a blank on it's the tom cruise uh jack nicholson
02:01:20 ◼ ► uh courtroom movie oh a few good men of course that's right yeah i said but the unfair advantage
02:01:26 ◼ ► mode is there any other kind of moat it's always an unfair moat that's what makes it a moat few good
02:01:32 ◼ ► men holds up last i saw it it's a good one i mean the courtroom stuff is good as usual i haven't seen
02:01:36 ◼ ► it you have oh my god marco yeah you should if you if you like courtroom you like my cousin vinny
02:01:44 ◼ ► right yeah yeah i've never seen that one what we've been over this like five times you haven't seen
02:01:49 ◼ ► you good men there's a bunch of other random uh surrounding stuff that's going to look dated to
02:01:55 ◼ ► you but the courtroom stuff and a few good men if you like my cousin vinny and you want a non-comedy
02:02:00 ◼ ► angle on that try a few good men why would i want a non-comedy angle because it you like the
02:02:06 ◼ ► courtroom part of it it's most of you know trust me it's it's good courtroom stuff you like it i
02:02:12 ◼ ► like joe pesci in the courtroom right but i don't know you you like that movie and a lot of it takes
02:02:17 ◼ ► place in a courtroom and a lot of the drama is about witnesses and trying to get out of them
02:02:21 ◼ ► what really happened and stuff like that and there you go every halloween i search to see if anybody
02:02:26 ◼ ► will sell me the velour tux from my cousin you just have that made for you you know you would
02:02:35 ◼ ► think it's surprisingly complicated like that is probably eventually i'm gonna have to do but like
02:02:40 ◼ ► i all i want is the my cousin vinny tux and i'm shocked that like nobody like no one on etsy or
02:02:47 ◼ ► anything like no one seems to sell it you know how hot that would be to wear though yeah well not i
02:02:51 ◼ ► mean halloween is often freezing you know it's often pretty cold but that's that's what that's
02:02:55 ◼ ► the only i've never wanted to wear a halloween costume really i've never been that into halloween
02:02:59 ◼ ► that is the only costume i actually want to wear i want that one year and i i can't find it anywhere
02:03:05 ◼ ► when i was a kid i was in like middle school or high school maybe um i guess it must have been
02:03:11 ◼ ► high school because i was big enough to wear or at least not look utterly ridiculous in clothes that
02:03:16 ◼ ► my dad had and uh i wore he had bought way back when a david burn big suit for like some party or
02:03:23 ◼ ► something like that just to goof off maybe it was halloween i don't know and maybe it was halloween
02:03:26 ◼ ► that i wore but for one reason or another i wore david burn big suit in high school nobody
02:03:30 ◼ ► understood it but i thought it was cool as hell i was not but i mean depending on when you're in the
02:03:34 ◼ ► high school like if i had worn a tried to wear that in the 80s people just think it's an 80s suit
02:03:38 ◼ ► because the shoulders are pretty big but then back then naturally it's like you can't tell if you're
02:03:43 ◼ ► intentionally doing a talking heads thing or you're just wearing a you're a kid who's wearing a suit
02:03:47 ◼ ► that's a little bit too big and it also happens to be the 80s so true so i was thinking i was
02:03:52 ◼ ► just looking up the dumb and dumber suits to see if those would hold up oh solid choice the problem
02:03:56 ◼ ► with the dumb and dumber suits is that you'd need both of them for it to be identifiable so you
02:04:01 ◼ ► would need a friend to do it with you because the suits themselves are not super remarkable like by