00:00:08 ◼ ► I've begun some light travel in the sense of going from the beach back to regular life for a couple of weeks.
00:00:25 ◼ ► But I haven't heard back yet. The estimate still has I think another week on it at least.
00:00:29 ◼ ► Being that it's Christmas week and I'm sure shipping parts and getting people's hours is all tricky this week.
00:00:37 ◼ ► I told them no rush anyway, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually another week or two after this.
00:00:43 ◼ ► But ultimately, man, every time, so I'm using the M1 full time this whole week and doing my regular work.
00:01:08 ◼ ► Because it's hard to quantify and benchmark some of the things that are faster about it.
00:01:31 ◼ ► And then with this, certain navigation through apps, like navigating in Logic, zooming in and out of waveforms,
00:01:54 ◼ ► I think that's what's going on where it seems like the throughput of the system in certain ways has massively improved.
00:02:03 ◼ ► Because certain tasks that, I don't know that much about the low-level CPU design stuff,
00:02:15 ◼ ► Because most of the time they're waiting on something else. They're waiting on memory access, or IO, or network,
00:02:26 ◼ ► And they can't frequently use their full power or their full capabilities 100% of the time,
00:02:32 ◼ ► or even close to 100% of the time, because they're so often waiting on some other subsystem to give them the data they need
00:02:41 ◼ ► And it seems like the M1 architecture is just significantly better at keeping that CPU fed with stuff to do
00:02:50 ◼ ► and with the data it needs. I don't know whether it's the unified memory, whether it's the memory bandwidth,
00:02:55 ◼ ► who knows what it is. But whatever, well they know, I don't know, but whatever it is, it makes a significant difference.
00:03:07 ◼ ► If you look at the benchmarks you can say, "Oh, it's whatever it is, like 30% faster, single threaded, similar to machines XYZ, multi-threaded stuff."
00:03:15 ◼ ► But it feels like more than that because significant architectural things have changed, and you can feel it in a lot of apps.
00:03:24 ◼ ► And that is I think what's going to get me to most likely stick with this full time and probably trade in my iMac.
00:03:33 ◼ ► Not to prolong our usual pre-follow-up diversion any longer than it used to be, but the one test that I saw that a lot of people posting videos about,
00:03:43 ◼ ► you mentioned it as well, is zooming the timeline in Logic. So people know Logic is an audio editor,
00:03:49 ◼ ► and if you can imagine it as having a bunch of horizontal stripes that show audio waveforms stacked on top of each other.
00:03:54 ◼ ► Those are all the different tracks. So if you have multiple people on a podcast, it's all the different audio tracks.
00:03:58 ◼ ► Anyway, zooming on the timeline is showing smaller and smaller portions of time in the same width of your screen, or bigger and bigger portions of time.
00:04:15 ◼ ► So it's not graphically intensive, and you might think, "Well, that should always zoom in and out quickly. Why would it ever take a long time?"
00:04:24 ◼ ► But if you watch people doing it on their tricked-out Mac Pros with gigantic GPUs that crush the integrated GPU, even in the M1 MacBook Air, you'll see it being kind of jerky.
00:04:37 ◼ ► I mean, you see something like that, it's like, "Okay, well, it's not GPU-bound, because here's this machine with this monster GPU that's being jerky here.
00:04:45 ◼ ► So it's not like we're waiting on the GPU to do something. The GPU can do this no problem."
00:04:54 ◼ ► So then you start looking for things like Marco was talking about, where every component in this system can do this job well.
00:05:01 ◼ ► I mean, you can run an amazing 4K game that's doing these amazing graphics at 100 frames per second.
00:05:07 ◼ ► Surely zooming some rectangles with some little lines in them is not taxing any part, but it's the combination of pieces.
00:05:13 ◼ ► It's somewhere in the connection between, "Okay, how is logic drawing the timeline? How does it draw the little squiggles that represent the waveforms?
00:05:22 ◼ ► How does it redraw the timeline things, and how does that communicate? How does that turn into drawing calls? How does it affect memory access?"
00:05:30 ◼ ► Just how all the pieces fit together. Obviously, on Intel Mac Pro or on iMac Pro and other systems, there's some kind of hitch in that chain of things,
00:05:47 ◼ ► It's not like before Marco got this M1 MacBook Air, he was like, "Oh, I can't edit in Logic. The timeline zooms too slowly."
00:05:53 ◼ ► It was just a little bit jerkier. You didn't know it was jerky until you saw, "Oh, look, now it's not jerky anymore."
00:05:58 ◼ ► That type of thing makes me think of the Pro Workflow team. They talked about things like this, where some dialogue that was taking too long to come up.
00:06:07 ◼ ► Do you remember the story? The Pro Workflow team said this story about how they were doing something in some video editor.
00:06:13 ◼ ► It's like, "Every time I do this thing, I've got to bring up this dialogue, and it takes three seconds to come up, and I don't understand why I'm waiting three seconds."
00:06:18 ◼ ► It turned out to be—I forget the details of the story—but it was something you would never think of.
00:06:22 ◼ ► It was like a bug in the GPU driver that was causing a dialogue to take a long time to appear.
00:06:31 ◼ ► Because the Pro Workflow team had people saying, "Here's the thing that annoys me in my workflow. Find out what the deal with this is and fix it."
00:06:40 ◼ ► They tracked it down into something that no one ever would have thought of, and they fixed it.
00:06:44 ◼ ► It seems like with the M1 Macs, yes, they are faster and everything, but for something like this, where you know the hardware on any modern Mac should have absolutely no problem zooming a timeline full of tracks,
00:07:02 ◼ ► So you know it's not like the hardware is too weak, so it's not the M1 advantage of it being a faster CPU, and it's not the integrated graphics versus the discrete because the discrete stomps all over it.
00:07:12 ◼ ► And in the case of the Mac Pro, it's not memory bandwidth, because Mac Pro has tremendous memory bandwidth, much more than the M1 MacBook Air, as we talked about in a past follow-up.
00:07:22 ◼ ► And when Apple makes all the things, they can make sure much more easily and confidently that everything really does work together.
00:07:30 ◼ ► And in fact, I'm not even sure they would have to do this work for the M1 Mac, because you know on iOS devices that they've been killing themselves for a decade or more now
00:07:40 ◼ ► to make what started out as being relatively slow CPUs and GPUs show good animations on a dinky little phone on battery power, right?
00:07:50 ◼ ► So they've already put in all of that work to get rid of all the hitches and the video drivers and the GPU and the CPU and the way redrawing works and all that other stuff.
00:07:58 ◼ ► And you know, I'm not saying they just didn't have to do anything for the Mac, because apparently they did have to fiddle things around in terms of texture formats and special instructions on the M1 that aren't on the iOS ones
00:08:08 ◼ ► to handle stuff that Macs do that iOS devices don't. But finally really controlling the whole stack and not having to rely on third parties for anything means that any kink that's in the system
00:08:24 ◼ ► And so that's what it makes me think when I see, I wish we had a link to the tweet or whatever, but the animation showing, here's the most powerful Mac money can buy zooming logic timeline.
00:08:33 ◼ ► Here's the $999 MacBook Air zooming the logic timeline. And you know it's not power. It is just, you know, that thing where people are like, only Apple can do this because they control everything.
00:08:42 ◼ ► It's like, sure, what's the benefit? Someone actually asked us this once in an ask. What's the benefit of Apple controlling everything? And I'm going to chalk this up in that column and saying, when Apple controls everything, and when they're using a tech stack that they that came up on a, you know, that was used to build phones on much weaker hardware.
00:09:03 ◼ ► So you know, if I do a big diversion, all of a sudden we're all ready to get the follow up. Yeah.
00:09:14 ◼ ► All right, so we have some information about the AirPods Max and we start with some information from Barney who writes some clarity on your discussion tonight on the battery situation of the AirPods Max. Both batteries are housed in the right ear cup and use the yoke to conduct and pass the power into the left ear cup.
00:09:31 ◼ ► And our friends at Snazzy Labs have a video that demonstrates this. We'll put a link in the show notes.
00:09:36 ◼ ► It's pretty interesting. I mean, last year we realized that that obviously there has to be an electrical connection because as Mark pointed out, that there's only a charging port on one side.
00:09:45 ◼ ► So electricity's got to get to the other side somehow. I was surprised to see that both batteries are in a single side.
00:09:52 ◼ ► You'd think they'd split them up for weight purposes, but I guess it's offset because I think all the electronics are in the other side.
00:10:02 ◼ ► The Snazzy Labs video didn't zoom in too much on it. I would have liked to see a closer picture, but it was described as being kind of like brushes, like brushes on an electrical motor, you know, like little metal things pressing against other pieces of metal.
00:10:14 ◼ ► So that the yoke, the big stainless steel tube that you use to adjust that goes over your head, that thing, that goes into the ear cup into like this ball joint kind of thing.
00:10:24 ◼ ► And then there's these little brushes apparently that rub against that stainless steel yoke and that's used to transmit electricity to the other side.
00:10:32 ◼ ► I mean, this was just described verbally and shown at a distance on the video, but we'll put a link in the video and you can check it out yourself.
00:10:38 ◼ ► But it's interesting. Both batteries in one side. Pretty weird. And you look at the batteries and they're actually pretty small.
00:10:43 ◼ ► So I guess it's pretty amazing this thing gets 20 hours of battery life from these two postage stamp size battery packs.
00:10:48 ◼ ► Well, headphones don't need that much power. I mean, Bluetooth headphones for a while have existed.
00:10:54 ◼ ► And even with like the most ancient ones, with the most ancient battery technology, weight was never a big problem with Bluetooth headphones.
00:11:02 ◼ ► Like they've always been able to be made pretty lightweight because they don't need very big batteries.
00:11:06 ◼ ► Oh, by the way, speaking of these Apple AirPods Pro Max, I think I have decided to return them.
00:11:18 ◼ ► I'm away from my primary office for a couple of weeks and wanting to get work done, having to record and edit podcasts.
00:11:35 ◼ ► And I just don't have a place in my life where I really want amazing sounding but uncomfortable wireless headphones.
00:11:43 ◼ ► And if I'm going to plug them in and use a wire, not only can I do that with other headphones, but it's better with other headphones because the wire is not so short and not in the way.
00:11:52 ◼ ► Like with this one, if I'm at a desk using a mouse next to the laptop, the wire is just completely in the way.
00:11:59 ◼ ► Because it goes down from the right ear cup into the right side headphone jack on the MacBook Air.
00:12:10 ◼ ► So it's just constantly in the way. And the cable is too short so I can't loop it around the back of the laptop and go around the left side. It's too short for that.
00:12:18 ◼ ► And so if I'm going to use cabled headphones, I'd rather have it be a more convenient cable and a more comfortable headphone.
00:12:25 ◼ ► And so the only way these would be useful to me is if I really needed wireless, great sounding, but uncomfortable, full-size headphones.
00:12:41 ◼ ► Because the original AirPods didn't fit your ears right? You love the AirPod Pros, but these ones, it's for the same reason, a comfort factor.
00:12:50 ◼ ► By the way, people who are wondering why Marco keeps talking about the wire on the Apple wireless headphones is because he's talking about monitoring during podcasting where you need to be connected by a wire for zero latency.
00:12:58 ◼ ► Exactly, yeah. Or editing where it's really awkward and frustrating to try to edit audio when the playhead in Logic is like a half second ahead of what you're hearing in your ears.
00:13:17 ◼ ► And yes, you could get an extension cable for the wire. But really, I feel like your main complaint, well, I would characterize you have two main complaints.
00:13:24 ◼ ► One, they're not comfortable on you, which is the same complaint you had with the original AirPods.
00:13:28 ◼ ► And that I feel like is a thing potentially Apple can address with better ear cups or whatever.
00:13:33 ◼ ► And then two, I think what your real problem is you already have tons of headphones that you spent years finding ones that you like.
00:13:41 ◼ ► So it's really a difficult and competitive environment for the AirPods Max to come into.
00:13:47 ◼ ► If you don't already own three or four favorite set of over ear headphones that you like, maybe the Max will have a better place in your life.
00:13:57 ◼ ► Yeah, and I mean, if all you need is wireless stuff and if you mostly don't need or want the AirPods Pro, like if you want something bigger than the AirPods Pro and you never really need to use it wired.
00:14:10 ◼ ► Then they're great. Again, I'm kind of regretting how bad they feel on me because I love the way they sound.
00:14:27 ◼ ► I've heard from a lot of people and seen a bunch of reviews where they say these are super comfortable.
00:14:36 ◼ ► I'm proud of you. I'm happy for you. Enjoy them. I'm going to enjoy my AirPods Pro in my 770s.
00:14:44 ◼ ► Not yet. I'm going to see. We have a bit of time, so we're going to try that in the next few days.
00:14:49 ◼ ► But most of what she does with headphones is also podcast related. So I don't think the result is going to be different.
00:14:58 ◼ ► Alrighty. And then have you done extensive battery testing on the SmartCase purse, underwear, whatever, for the thing that you're about to return?
00:15:07 ◼ ► No, because it takes three hands to get them in and out of the thing. And I only have two.
00:15:11 ◼ ► Delightful. Well, nevertheless, just FYI for the headphones that you're seeing to return,
00:15:17 ◼ ► the AirPods Max SmartCase makes little to no difference with regard to battery life as per 9to5Mac and from Apple's own support documents.
00:15:27 ◼ ► Yeah, the Apple support document puts the details in here explaining exactly what the timings are in the low power mode.
00:15:33 ◼ ► And there is a difference between when it goes into super low power mode when it's in the case versus when it's out of the case.
00:15:38 ◼ ► And Apple doesn't really spell this out. But if you look at it, you'll see that what the reason is,
00:15:47 ◼ ► So if you just leave your headphones somewhere, you want them to stay in regular low power, not ultra low power for a longer time.
00:15:57 ◼ ► So you can use Find My to find where you left your headphones. Whereas I guess Apple's assuming if you put them in the case and put them away,
00:16:03 ◼ ► that's more of a deliberate move, showing that you're done using them and you're putting them away.
00:16:07 ◼ ► At least that's my thinking on the logic and the different times. But either way, even in the middle low power mode,
00:16:14 ◼ ► it takes a long time for the battery to drain. So unless you're going to leave them there for days, it's not a big deal.
00:16:20 ◼ ► So you look at the timings yourself and see what you think. But these things already have all day battery life.
00:16:24 ◼ ► And if you don't plan on leaving them unattended somewhere for days and then picking them up later, I don't think you have to worry about it.
00:16:30 ◼ ► Now, Marco, I know that you are the world's biggest superfan of the LG Ultrafine 5K. But I have bad news, as it turns out, it also has a fan.
00:16:49 ◼ ► I looked for it before the show because I said, well, I don't have one of these, so I can't look for myself.
00:16:57 ◼ ► So I was hoping Marco would be able to confirm this. But I have no reason to doubt Joseph Duffy who sent this in, saying that the Ultrafine does indeed have a fan in it somewhere.
00:17:10 ◼ ► Yeah, once I get back to mine, I intend to check this. I think that's the most hilarious thing ever, if that's actually true.
00:17:18 ◼ ► It's, you know, one more, I guess one more vote in the XDR category or one more vote that both of these monitors suck.
00:17:26 ◼ ► Noise has not been your complaint about the LG 5K. And you also mentioned that the LG 5K was revised in 2019.
00:17:35 ◼ ► And we talked about this earlier off air. You said that you have the older revision rather than the new one?
00:17:40 ◼ ► Yes, there's actually been like four revisions of it, but only two kind of official versions.
00:17:45 ◼ ► The very, very first one where the serial number ends in A, that was the one, if you remember back when the Ultrafine's first launched in 2016, they had Wi-Fi interference problems.
00:17:55 ◼ ► And they quickly recalled them and added shielding around them. And then they released the B version that already has the shield, that basically shipped with the shielding.
00:18:05 ◼ ► Mine on the back says A-B, which I think means it was originally manufactured without the shielding.
00:18:12 ◼ ► The shielding was retrofit to it and then it was sold. I think that's, based on my research, I think that's what that means.
00:18:17 ◼ ► And those were all the ones that the video signal had to be Thunderbolt. It could not be a USB-C display video signal. It had to be a Thunderbolt video signal.
00:18:27 ◼ ► And so it was never compatible with iPads or like the 12-inch MacBook or anything like that.
00:18:32 ◼ ► And so a couple years later they released a revised version that used a new generation Thunderbolt controller from Intel.
00:18:39 ◼ ► I think it went like Alpine Ridge to something else Ridge. I've lost track of the Thunderbolt controller names.
00:18:44 ◼ ► But anyway, it used a different Thunderbolt controller and it could take USB-C 5K input from iPad Pros.
00:18:51 ◼ ► And that's, I think the serial number is like N and L or K for that one, something like that. I don't have that one.
00:18:57 ◼ ► So mine is the first generation model. It is fixed for the shielding, but it does not have the newest Thunderbolt controller.
00:19:04 ◼ ► So it's possible that new ones are more reliable. Maybe they've fixed some of the glitching of the ports.
00:19:09 ◼ ► But based on what I've heard from people who are reporting in their opinions and experience with this monitor over the last couple of weeks,
00:19:17 ◼ ► it sounds like most of them are not very reliable. There are frequent problems with image retention over time,
00:19:29 ◼ ► So it sounds like it's just kind of an okay to mediocre monitor for a lot of people. It's not just me.
00:19:35 ◼ ► And if I got a new one, maybe some of it would be fixed. And actually my current plans, I think, probably involve getting at least one additional one for various practical reasons.
00:19:47 ◼ ► So we'll see how that goes. But anyway, there are multiple versions and I have the first one.
00:19:53 ◼ ► Just to read out the actual serial numbers, it's 27MD5KL is the 2019 revision and 27MD5KA is the original one.
00:20:03 ◼ ► And according to an article that we'll link in the show notes, another upgrade of the current 2019 L version is that it also has 94W power delivery with the Thunderbolt port.
00:20:15 ◼ ► Right. Mine was before the MacBooks went up in power. So it supplies, I think, 85W max.
00:20:22 ◼ ► Also, there is a firmware updater. Yes, I have run it. I have the latest firmware. Still sucks.
00:20:28 ◼ ► Probably for the fan control. Speaking of the 10 minutes right stands to say that Marco, even after a month of usage, I didn't even know that the XDR had a fan until I listened to last week's episode of ATP.
00:20:39 ◼ ► So we're sorry for telling people listening to the show that their XDR has multiple fans, not just one.
00:20:44 ◼ ► Yeah, and I have heard from a number of people, I don't know if they want to be named, but I've heard from a number of people who use XDRs who have basically said either you don't notice the localized dimming at all, like what you said, Jon, in regular use.
00:20:59 ◼ ► Or some people have said you do notice it when you have like a 100% black background on something and then something has to go over it.
00:21:06 ◼ ► But that's relatively uncommon and easily fixed by making, like if you have a desktop background, you shouldn't have it be pure black.
00:21:13 ◼ ► Well, I don't have that. I run my Mac in light mode, I have a light blue background, so that I wouldn't be likely to see.
00:21:19 ◼ ► But it's hard for me to get over the localized dimming thing. I really don't like that.
00:21:25 ◼ ► So I am very suspicious of reports of people thinking they can see the haloing with their naked eye and I'll tell you why.
00:21:30 ◼ ► Go get an OLED TV, bring up a pure black background and put some white text in the middle of it.
00:21:35 ◼ ► With your eyes, you'd be like, wow, look at all that haloing. And you know the OLED's not doing haloing because individual pixels are controlled.
00:21:42 ◼ ► But your eye sees haloing because it has bright light from these thin letters that blooms out.
00:21:47 ◼ ► It's always going to look a little bit bloomy because that's how things look to our eyes when there's something bright white in the middle of a black background.
00:21:53 ◼ ► Actually detecting the little square sort of, you know, the haloing due to the dynamic backlight is much more difficult to do with the naked eye.
00:22:01 ◼ ► I don't doubt that people can do it under the right conditions. I'm just saying I've never seen it in real usage and I know that whenever they test this on televisions,
00:22:07 ◼ ► they always have to screw with their camera settings because it's very difficult to see with the naked eye.
00:22:12 ◼ ► Real time follow up from the chat room, Shappy has put a link in to a picture of the fan in the LG 5K.
00:22:26 ◼ ► Can't quite see the serial number from the sticker. I believe they said earlier that they have the same version as me though, so it's probably the A.
00:22:32 ◼ ► I mean, usually Thunderbolt, I don't know what the needs of modern monitors are in terms of like their internal circuitry, but Thunderbolt specifically,
00:22:39 ◼ ► Thunderbolt controllers have usually run really hot. Like if you've ever had a Thunderbolt disk enclosure or anything like that, they almost all have fans because they run really warm.
00:22:47 ◼ ► Like I've been trying out the last week or so, I have the CalDigit TS3+ Thunderbolt hub.
00:22:53 ◼ ► Yeah, I have that. I have a couple of minor issues with it. Like the Ethernet port just doesn't work and that's actually a fairly common problem if you look at reviews.
00:23:01 ◼ ► Yes, I've tried all of the support. I've tried their firmware updater. I've tried all the different things where you remove your network configurations and you re-add it and look for the Thunderbolt port zero, whatever.
00:23:13 ◼ ► And if you look at reviews, a lot of people seem to get these things with dead Ethernet ports.
00:23:18 ◼ ► Anyway, other than that, it works fine, so I'm going to decide what to do about that later.
00:23:21 ◼ ► But in the meantime, I will say that the whole thing is a giant block of aluminum and it gets noticeably warm.
00:23:28 ◼ ► And again, this is true of all Thunderbolt gear I've ever seen. I'm assuming Thunderbolt chips just run hot.
00:23:34 ◼ ► They just seem like they're complicated things and they're non-trivial to implement and so they just run hot.
00:23:41 ◼ ► Neat. All right, Jon, your favorite pet project, Chrome is bad. What's going on with that now?
00:23:48 ◼ ► Well, this was actually, I think this update actually had been put out last week, but we just didn't get it in the show.
00:23:54 ◼ ► So there's obviously a bug report, probably multiple, but one main bug report of this at Chrome,
00:23:59 ◼ ► where they're trying to get people to perform a series of steps to do diagnostics to try to track this thing down.
00:24:05 ◼ ► And if you are a developer and you ever had to deal with bugs like this, you know how frustrating it can be to have a bug that is
00:24:12 ◼ ► widely reported that you can't reproduce and that you also can't even think of any reason why it could be happening.
00:24:19 ◼ ► So here from Norberg at Google.com is this comment that we'll link to in the show notes that I thought was a funny glimpse into a frustration
00:24:27 ◼ ► that I think most programmers have felt. It says, "At this point, we have still not been able to reproduce the issue.
00:24:33 ◼ ► We only have guesses as to what might cause a Windows Server performance issue that apparently occurs when none of our binaries are running
00:24:40 ◼ ► and is reported to be resolved by removing a software package that does not present a UI."
00:24:50 ◼ ► I mean, but it's also just frustrating. I mean, like I said last time, you can think of all sorts of plausible ways that this could happen.
00:24:57 ◼ ► For example, you think your thing's not presenting a UI, but actually it's using some kind of off-screen buffer as part of some Apple framework
00:25:03 ◼ ► that you don't even realize you're using, and the Windows Server is freaking out redrawing it.
00:25:09 ◼ ► All I can say we can take from this is that the Chrome folks are on it, they are just as frustrated as everybody else
00:25:15 ◼ ► in the totally non-reproducible nature of this, and I would also say that if you look at this issue,
00:25:20 ◼ ► I don't see a lot of action and movement in narrowing it down, so I'm not sure how much progress they're going to make on this phantom bug.
00:25:29 ◼ ► Until someone can reproduce it, or reproduce it at least once and give them some kind of diagnostics,
00:25:37 ◼ ► it's going to be difficult to track this one down, so I will be following this issue just to see in three or four years if anything ever comes of it.
00:25:50 ◼ ► I think ultimately the best way for this to ever be resolved, if it's going to be resolved, is for Apple engineering to be able to get a machine in their hands
00:25:59 ◼ ► and then just like sample it or whatever they know how to do so that they can figure out what is this coming from.
00:26:07 ◼ ► Whether it's one of their problems or whether it's one of Google's problems, I think it's going to take Apple engineers to figure out what the problem is.
00:26:13 ◼ ► I have faith in the Chrome engineers that if they had access to a reproduction, that they could figure it out pretty quickly whether it's their problem or Apple's problem.
00:26:23 ◼ ► Because they have the source code to Chrome and they have the source code to Keystone, and if they find out that everything is fine until we step into an Apple framework and then it goes nuts, they can say, "Well, that's not us."
00:26:36 ◼ ► I feel like the other point about this is if you are willing to believe that the Chrome developers are being forthrighted in this public bug report, which I have no reason to believe they're not,
00:26:45 ◼ ► is that they're not doing anything. Chrome is not doing anything. They say, "Oh, it must be that really sneaky thing we're doing where we call this private API or inject something into some exploit."
00:26:56 ◼ ► They're not saying, "Yeah, it's that super dangerous risky thing we're doing and we'll look into it."
00:27:07 ◼ ► It should just be a plain old bug where it's like, "Oh, we made a mistake in our program," as in a plain old bug, or a bug that they are triggering elsewhere in the system, or neither of those things, which is also in contention.
00:27:18 ◼ ► All right, so honorary fourth host of ATP at this point, Jonathan Dietz, has written in with some more clarification.
00:27:26 ◼ ► Multi-chip module, MCM, or multi-chip package refers to placing more than one silicon die on the same organic substrate.
00:27:45 ◼ ► A chiplet is an informal term for the relatively small dies resulting from the disaggregation of a system on a chip.
00:27:54 ◼ ► These smaller dies can then be combined into various configurations using a high-speed interconnect fabric and either conventional substrates or silicon interposers.
00:28:11 ◼ ► Breaking up a system on a chip increases the total die area, power consumption, latency, and complexity.
00:28:25 ◼ ► Excuse me, Apple currently has preferred access to the most advanced manufacturing process available,
00:28:30 ◼ ► and the capital and engineering resources to help TSMC climb the yield curves if it comes to that.
00:28:36 ◼ ► They're not going to give up on any of these benefits of integration until they are forced to.
00:28:41 ◼ ► This was in response to a previous feedback we were getting about multi-chip modules and how awesome they are and how you can...
00:28:56 ◼ ► I mean, being broke was hyperbole. There was a paragraph here at the Casey's Kip that gave more detail about...
00:29:01 ◼ ► The bottom line is, AMD was not in a position to make chips that are all on a single die,
00:29:12 ◼ ► It's better in terms of, as you said, power consumption, latency, complexity, everything about it is better,
00:29:21 ◼ ► So if you're thinking that Apple's solution to making a chip for the Mac Pro based on our architecture is to do chiplets,
00:29:32 ◼ ► And if you're thinking it's going to be multi-chip modules, that's the thing that Apple and Intel and AMD have been doing for a long time,
00:29:41 ◼ ► I think it's putting it mildly to say, Apple has access to the preferred access to the most advanced manufacturing process.
00:29:50 ◼ ► They apparently have the best chip designs, they have tons of money, and they have partners that want that money from them,
00:29:58 ◼ ► The only thing holding them back is something we talked about in previous shows with the...
00:30:03 ◼ ► Apple can't really do that, because anything they need chips for, they probably need millions of them.
00:30:10 ◼ ► And so Apple kind of has to wait until the process is ready to make millions of something,
00:30:15 ◼ ► whereas a small upstart competitor could, in theory... A small upstart like, say, Microsoft, which sells relatively few Microsoft service pieces of hardware,
00:30:24 ◼ ► that scrappy little upstart Microsoft, maybe they could get access to a better process technology a little bit sooner than Apple.
00:30:31 ◼ ► But even that is doubtful, depending on how ironclad Apple's contracts are about preferred access to the good stuff.
00:30:38 ◼ ► And then Jonathan Dietz continues to school us, this time with regard to Thunderbolt hubs and controllers.
00:30:43 ◼ ► "OWC is taking pre-orders for a four-port, one upstream, three downstream, thunderbolt/USB4 hub for $150. That should be shipping any day now.
00:30:52 ◼ ► This is possible because Intel is finally making a Thunderbolt controller with more than two ports.
00:31:08 ◼ ► and also there's an interview with OWC about Thunderbolt 4, which I presume Jon has provided for us,
00:31:19 ◼ ► Yeah, Thunderbolt 4 was confusing. We talked about it before, how it's really just Thunderbolt 3 plus a bunch of things that you have to satisfy.
00:31:38 ◼ ► So if your computer has one Thunderbolt port and you want more than one Thunderbolt port,
00:31:43 ◼ ► you can buy this hub, and like an old-fashioned USB hub, you plug in one thing into your computer,
00:31:51 ◼ ► And, again, the only reason I'm able to do this is because Intel finally made a Thunderbolt controller that does that.
00:32:06 ◼ ► there's also one called, what is it called, the Thunderbolt Dock that has SD card reader and Ethernet and all the other stuff in it, right?
00:32:15 ◼ ► So these are OVC products, but they're just basically wrapping around an Intel reference design,
00:32:33 ◼ ► but it is certainly more capable in that you can actually multiply some of your ports now,
00:32:37 ◼ ► and that may, for some people, solve some of their connectivity problems a little bit better than existing solutions.
00:32:46 ◼ ► The big one. Yeah, I got the big dock thing, because it's very similar to the CalDigit in its general capabilities,
00:32:57 ◼ ► But it's so hard to know with this stuff, because I've had so many reliability issues with various USB-C hubs and dongles and everything.
00:33:10 ◼ ► And even before that, many people, including me, have had a hard time in the past finding reliable USB hubs, even, just regular USB hubs.
00:33:20 ◼ ► and often it's hard to know what the good ones are without just trying them for a few months,
00:33:24 ◼ ► and then you know, "Oh, did this one that got great reviews, did it actually work for me reliably, or was it garbage after a few months?"
00:33:33 ◼ ► I eventually did find a good USB-A hub, but of course, once you know it's good, they don't make it anymore.
00:33:40 ◼ ► So, anyway, this is why I hate hubs so much, and why I have so often preferred the desktop livestock,
00:33:46 ◼ ► because with desktops, usually you either don't need hubs because they have enough ports,
00:33:50 ◼ ► or you can get away with fewer or smaller or simpler hubs, and there's more ports on the desktop itself,
00:34:11 ◼ ► You know, Thunderbolt products that actually have the logo and are officially licensed and approved,
00:34:17 ◼ ► those go through significantly more testing than most other stuff does, especially most stuff in the USB ecosystem.
00:34:23 ◼ ► And so, to be Thunderbolt certified means something, so I'm hoping that Thunderbolt versions of these hub products
00:34:32 ◼ ► are significantly more reliable and have a much higher chance of being good long-term than just USB-C ones.
00:34:38 ◼ ► But the downside is, of course, not only are they much more expensive, and they're usually significantly larger,
00:34:44 ◼ ► and I think almost all, if not all of them, require external power, so that's all significantly less convenient
00:34:50 ◼ ► for any kind of mobile setup or mobile needs, but they also have this massive bandwidth stuff,
00:34:58 ◼ ► and so they have relatively few ports. And when I look at what I actually plug into USB ports,
00:35:21 ◼ ► but sound stuff is all USB 2.0 at the hardware level, it doesn't need 3.0 speeds for anything.
00:35:27 ◼ ► Like, that's most of what I'm plugging in, and so it almost feels wasteful to get a Thunderbolt port multiplier/hub thing
00:35:40 ◼ ► Like, that's really what that's gonna be, or it's gonna be running this USB 2.0 sound module.
00:35:46 ◼ ► This is not, I don't need massive bandwidth with a small number of ports, the laptop gives me that.
00:35:52 ◼ ► I need almost no bandwidth with a huge number of ports. I just want those ports to be USB-C for cable convenience reasons.
00:35:59 ◼ ► I don't even need them to be USB 3.0 half the time. But, you know, if this is what I have to do to get a bunch of ports,
00:36:07 ◼ ► is get one of these $250 Thunderbolt dock things and have it actually work well, then I'll take that.
00:36:18 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is, I mean, the big deal about this is that it actually does have more than one USB-C connector-shaped hole on it, right?
00:36:25 ◼ ► So it multiplies them, but as you said, it's a waste because, you know, you don't need the 40 gigabits from those ports.
00:36:32 ◼ ► But if you just think of them as, "Okay, one of them I need 40 gigabits and I'll connect something, my monitor, whatever to that."
00:36:37 ◼ ► But the other two I don't, but just think of them as low-speed USB-C-shaped holes, and they'll work fine for that purpose.
00:36:44 ◼ ► I actually have a little bus-powered Thunderbolt SSD, which actually does use some of the bandwidth, maybe not all 40 gigabits.
00:36:53 ◼ ► But it's nice to have that. I love bus-powered drives because I hate those power adapters and everything,
00:36:59 ◼ ► and USB-C is a nice connector for them, and having it be Thunderbolt instead of actual USB gives it a higher bandwidth overhead.
00:37:06 ◼ ► And just to let everyone know, if you haven't followed the link already, the dock thing that Marco got has three Thunderbolt 4 ports on it,
00:37:12 ◼ ► gigabit Ethernet, and then it has three USB-A ports on the back and one USB-A port on the front, plus an SD card, plus a headphone jack.
00:37:21 ◼ ► And yeah, it does have an external power adapter. So it's got a lot of ports on it, and if they all work reliably,
00:37:36 ◼ ► And then you've got three of the high-speed ports, one of which is a monitor, and you've got two of those free for any random other USB-C-shaped peripheral,
00:37:43 ◼ ► or for faster stuff if you happen to have a little portable drive. So it looks like a pretty good product.
00:37:48 ◼ ► I have an OWC USB-C dock at work where I haven't been in ages, and it was flaky and slightly unreliable,
00:37:57 ◼ ► but only during the connect/disconnect. Once everything was set up and working, it was very reliable,
00:38:02 ◼ ► but since I'm using it with a laptop, I was constantly connecting and disconnecting it.
00:38:05 ◼ ► So yeah, I would hope that the Thunderbolt 1 would be more reliable than my USB-C one was,
00:38:10 ◼ ► but I still have affection for it because when it was working, it did give me all the ports that I was missing, and it was nice.
00:38:15 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm hoping, because the whole promise of Thunderbolt is to help laptops have most of the benefits of desktops.
00:38:24 ◼ ► That's the whole benefit here, is like, okay, we gave up a lot when the laptops went to USB-C. Gave up a lot.
00:38:33 ◼ ► But the promise is, oh, now you don't need all of your, quote, "legacy" ports to be built into the laptop,
00:38:40 ◼ ► because you can just turn this one amazing universal port into whatever else you need with these commonplace adapters and things.
00:38:48 ◼ ► And I mean, there's a lot of problems with that logic, especially when you realize you don't always have your adapters with you,
00:38:57 ◼ ► But that entire promise, the upside of that promise, is predicated on the assumption that these adapters will exist,
00:39:05 ◼ ► and that they will work, and they'll be reliable, and there will be an ecosystem of good ones to buy.
00:39:10 ◼ ► And that's been really hard to actually have happen in practice. It almost never has happened in practice.
00:39:18 ◼ ► So if the Thunderbolt ecosystem is now finally getting to the maturity and to a broad offering of products to actually make that dream come true,
00:39:30 ◼ ► then great. If this can make our laptops work better and we have to use them more like desktops, which a lot of people do, that's fantastic.
00:39:37 ◼ ► I just hope we're there, because we keep being promised this, and it keeps not quite happening for a lot of people.
00:39:44 ◼ ► One day, one day. Imagine they had different cables with different ends for when they served different purposes. Wouldn't that be amazing?
00:40:02 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com/atp for an extra three months with a one-year package.
00:40:10 ◼ ► There's lots of reasons why you might want to use a VPN. You might want to encrypt your traffic because you don't really trust your ISP.
00:40:18 ◼ ► Maybe they're spying on what you're doing. Maybe you're using someone else's Wi-Fi network and you don't trust them or their operators or their ISPs.
00:40:26 ◼ ► This is the most common time I use a VPN. If I have to connect to a hotel Wi-Fi or a coffee shop Wi-Fi or something like that, like when I'm out or traveling or something, that's when I use a VPN.
00:40:38 ◼ ► Because I don't trust someone else's Wi-Fi network. They could do weird stuff. I don't want any part of that.
00:40:43 ◼ ► ExpressVPN is the one I go to for that because it is super fast. You don't even realize you're on a VPN. There's no noticeable slowdowns or delays from having your traffic routed through somewhere else.
00:40:56 ◼ ► You would think it would be noticeable and it just isn't with ExpressVPN. They're really good.
00:41:00 ◼ ► They're top-rated. CNET, WIRED, countless other places rate ExpressVPN the number one VPN.
00:41:06 ◼ ► And with good reason. Their apps are super easy to use. I didn't have to worry about configuration or IPs or anything like that.
00:41:17 ◼ ► In this time, it's kind of hard to know which of the ISPs and networks are not selling your data. Who can you really trust here?
00:41:24 ◼ ► So when you want to be extra careful and you want to use a VPN, ExpressVPN is the one to go to.
00:41:28 ◼ ► So go to expressvpn.com/atp right now and you can arm yourself with an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.
00:42:03 ◼ ► It is not perfect. It is not without flaws. There is nothing that is so perfect that it cannot be complained about.
00:42:08 ◼ ► Hi, John. But I actually really liked it. Now, Marco, as the more prolific exerciser of the two of you, have you tried this yet at all?
00:42:15 ◼ ► I have not had a chance yet. No, because of all the various logistical things that we've been doing.
00:42:20 ◼ ► But I heard it launched and I'm actually looking forward to trying it. But first I want to hear what you have to say.
00:42:34 ◼ ► I believe it is part of the most expensive, what is it, Apple One? I can't even keep it all straight anymore.
00:42:40 ◼ ► It's the Apple Two bundle. The One is the cheaper one. The Two is the more expensive one.
00:42:58 ◼ ► And if you get a new Apple Watch, you get three months for free. And guess who got a new Apple Watch just a month or so back.
00:43:03 ◼ ► So I started my free trial. I don't remember off the top of my head specifically which exercises I did.
00:43:09 ◼ ► But I've done it two different days and I've done a sum total of I think five workouts.
00:43:14 ◼ ► And the workouts, like leaving aside some of the integration which is I think the more interesting stuff to talk about.
00:43:29 ◼ ► But Erin has gotten considerably more into her personal health and fitness over the last couple of years.
00:43:36 ◼ ► And has been a very devout exerciser. And has typically been using this service called Beachbody On Demand.
00:43:46 ◼ ► You might know them because they are definitely a disgusting dirty MLM, a multi-level marketing thing like Mary Kay and things like that.
00:43:54 ◼ ► However, their exercise videos taken only the exercise videos and none of the BS around it.
00:44:00 ◼ ► They're actually, in my personal opinion, I'm not a doctor, I know nothing about health, they seem pretty good to me.
00:44:10 ◼ ► So if you can leave aside, you know, "Oh, become a coach, become a coach, become a coach, sign people up, sign people up, sign people up."
00:44:15 ◼ ► If you leave all that aside, which if you're just watching the videos you don't really see any of that, I actually like them.
00:44:20 ◼ ► And typically the programs I like to do are more like lifting weights with a little bit of high, what is it, high impact?
00:44:33 ◼ ► I recently completed a boxing themed program which is a very not Casey thing to do but I actually kind of liked it.
00:44:50 ◼ ► I never have had a personal trainer. Now I certainly have no interest in it with all the COVID stuff going around.
00:44:57 ◼ ► And in a perfect world I'd love to have a personal trainer but I'm too cheap and too scared of the inside and too scared of other people.
00:45:11 ◼ ► This is what we've been doing. Like Tiff and I, our trainer moved before COVID but we've been still using him just over FaceTime.
00:45:21 ◼ ► We had Apple watches, he can see the stats and we do workouts over FaceTime and it's totally fine and we've been doing it for like a year.
00:45:30 ◼ ► I probably should look into that at some point. But again, I'm just trying to establish context.
00:45:33 ◼ ► So I came to Apple Fitness Plus, a very amateur veteran of a specific flavor of workout video.
00:45:47 ◼ ► And once you upgrade to the latest version of iOS, in the Fitness app you can go in and there's a new tab in the center called Fitness Plus.
00:45:56 ◼ ► And once you've enabled your free demo or if you've paid for it, then you get just basically a list of exercises.
00:46:14 ◼ ► However, once you pick a workout, and in my case what I was doing is I was using my iPad Pro hooked up to their 70 or whatever dollar it is.
00:46:30 ◼ ► And I'm doing this all because this is in the bedroom where we do have an Apple TV but it's one of the like OG pre-installable apps.
00:46:37 ◼ ► Apple TVs, you know what I'm talking about? Like with the old remote, the old silver remote.
00:46:41 ◼ ► And the reason I have that in the upstairs, I'm saying all this because I don't want to get email.
00:46:44 ◼ ► The reason I have that in the upstairs is because we have a 1080 semi-modern Apple TV downstairs that is hooked up to our 4K TV.
00:46:52 ◼ ► And as I've complained about several times recently, I've been waiting for over a year to get the Apple TV that's surely going to be refreshed tomorrow.
00:47:00 ◼ ► And surely will have been refreshed tomorrow for every tomorrow for the last 365 tomorrows.
00:47:05 ◼ ► And I've been waiting to get a new 4K one for downstairs and the 1080 will get bumped upstairs.
00:47:16 ◼ ► But nevertheless, that was my setup. So I have an iPad connected to a TV and I've got my watch.
00:47:22 ◼ ► And I went in and I selected a workout and I knew that this was the way it was supposed to work.
00:47:36 ◼ ► And it shows that on the TV, it shows it on my watch and I hit play on my watch and sure enough the TV starts playing.
00:47:44 ◼ ► You know, I control it with my watch, the TV changes. If I pause on the TV, the watch pauses its workout.
00:47:48 ◼ ► It already knows what workout I'm doing. I don't have to go in there and say, "Well, I'm doing a strength workout."
00:47:52 ◼ ► It immediately knows not only that I'm doing a strength workout but I'm specifically doing strength with Greg for 20 minutes.
00:48:02 ◼ ► So then I start the workout. And up in the upper left, I can see, you know, like the progress in terms of time through the workout.
00:48:09 ◼ ► In certain workouts, you can see, I forget what they call it, like a little bar that indicates basically are you a worse exerciser than the other people who have done the same exercise or are you better?
00:48:25 ◼ ► And especially because on the one I did that did have this bar, I wish I could remember the name of it and I forgot to write it down.
00:48:31 ◼ ► But I was like all the way on the good end, which is really surprising because I'm not a terribly fit person.
00:48:39 ◼ ► I mean, I do workout pretty much every day but I'm still not the most terribly fit person in the entire world.
00:48:47 ◼ ► I think you're significantly more fit than the average Apple test engineer is what you're seeing.
00:48:51 ◼ ► Well, maybe. Or is it that I'm unfit and I'm working so darn hard in order to keep up that it's like, "Wow, you're kicking ass over here."
00:49:05 ◼ ► So they do this workout and of course it's like this beautiful Apple commercial basically in terms of the set and the staging.
00:49:12 ◼ ► And in the workouts I've done it's typically like the main host, if you will, the trainer.
00:49:17 ◼ ► And then there's two other trainers in the background and they're not like fill people, you know?
00:49:32 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. But they're other legit trainers. It's not like there's only the one star and then those knuckleheads off the street.
00:49:38 ◼ ► Like these are other stars in the context of Apple Fitness Plus, but they're doing somebody else's workout instead of leading their own.
00:49:44 ◼ ► And so I start the workout, you know, I see the progress in the upper left and in the upper right I see my rings.
00:49:50 ◼ ► Which is such a dumb thing, but I gotta tell you it is super frickin' satisfying as you're doing this workout.
00:49:58 ◼ ► Watching your green ring go further and further around. Watching your red ring go further and further around.
00:50:03 ◼ ► It is deeply satisfying. And it's updating, I mean, perhaps not real time, but near as makes no difference.
00:50:15 ◼ ► And the trainer, I've had a couple of trainers now, and they're good. They're varying levels of cheesy, which is to be expected.
00:50:28 ◼ ► But they're good. And they're personable and mostly relatable. And I enjoyed them. And I enjoyed the workouts.
00:50:36 ◼ ► And in and of itself, if you're doing something to move your body and this thing is successfully making you move your body, then I'd say it's a success.
00:50:48 ◼ ► But where it gets really frickin' cool is during the workout they say something like, "Oh, your heart should really be racing or your heart rate should really be spiking right now."
00:50:58 ◼ ► And sure enough, the heads-up display that shows your heart rate highlights your specific heart rate instead of showing your current heart rate of 120 beats per minute or whatever.
00:51:07 ◼ ► It says, "Okay, your current heart rate is 120 beats per minute. By the way, your lowest heart rate was 70 and your highest heart rate was 160."
00:51:14 ◼ ► I'm making up the numbers, but you get the idea. And this is changing on screen perfectly with the trainer saying, "Oh, your heart should be spiking right now. Your heart rate should be spiking right now."
00:51:26 ◼ ► It's such a dumb trick. It's such a stupid thing. And really, I don't feel like it's that technically challenging a thing to implement when you own the whole widget.
00:51:35 ◼ ► But gosh, if it isn't so cool to see as you're in the middle of this workout. It's just very, very, very cool.
00:51:42 ◼ ► And then another time, the trainer was like, "Oh, you should be closing those rings right about now," or something like that. I forget what they said.
00:51:52 ◼ ► And sure enough, the rings on the upper right-hand side of the screen, they get much bigger and they start showing you or highlighting the fact that you're very close or whatever the case may be.
00:52:00 ◼ ► And if you close your move or exercise or whatever rings as you're working out, it does a whole animation in sparklies and whatnot to call to your attention that, "Hey, you've finished your exercise ring."
00:52:09 ◼ ► The integration is so cool. It's so silly but so neat that if I smash the space bar on my iPad Pro to pause it, sure enough, like I said a minute ago, the Apple Watch workout pauses.
00:52:24 ◼ ► And when I'm used to doing these Beachbody workouts, it is not a difficult thing to hit pause on both my watch and my iPad.
00:52:31 ◼ ► But it is so convenient not to have to. It's so dumb. I know it's dumb, but it's so convenient.
00:52:44 ◼ ► One of the funny things about the Fitness+ workouts is that as you're selecting them, if you're looking through the title cards, so the super, super small view, like the gallery view.
00:52:57 ◼ ► So for example, I'm looking at, "Try something new. Strength with another trainer," which is Strength with Sam, "30 minutes pure dance."
00:53:03 ◼ ► And so you see right there on the tin what kind of music it is. And then you can drill in and you see that it's Sam Sanchez, it's 31 minutes pure dance.
00:53:17 ◼ ► And then if you scroll down a little bit, it has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different songs.
00:53:22 ◼ ► And they tell you exactly which songs they are, who they're by. And they give you a nice little thing to listen to Apple Music if you're an Apple Music subscriber, which I'm not because as much as Spotify is evil, I really like them.
00:53:31 ◼ ► So nevertheless, you can play the music that they play in the workout right there in your phone or your iPad.
00:53:40 ◼ ► And additionally, they do like a little card, like a YouTube-style card on the top of the screen when the music changes.
00:53:46 ◼ ► And all of it was just so incredibly, incredibly well done. And I really, really, really liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
00:53:55 ◼ ► I have some complaints about the UI in the phone and the iPad in terms of selecting a workout, but any questions on the workout itself or any thoughts about that?
00:54:10 ◼ ► Well, nobody can dance well to that. Unfortunately, they do have some like, some like chill, I forgot the other word for it, downtempo is a genre that I can't define well, but I really like.
00:54:21 ◼ ► This is like Massive Attack or Zero Seven. And I went searching for some of that just based on music, not based on the exercise.
00:54:28 ◼ ► And unsurprisingly, the only exercises that had that kind of music were like yoga and stretching and stuff like that, which is perfectly fine, but not what I was looking for at the time, which was a bummer.
00:54:37 ◼ ► But no jam-band stuff that I saw, although one of the workouts I did see has Never Gonna Give You Up as the first song in the workout, which I thought was quite funny, or whatever the Rick Astley song is, you know what I'm thinking of.
00:54:49 ◼ ► It's one of the limitations, at least you can tell me it's a limitation, I think it is, that's been bothering me a bit about this, especially with the onscreen prompts and everything, is that you can only, it only works for one person at a time, right?
00:55:01 ◼ ► That is my understanding. Coincidentally, Aaron and I had planned to do a workout together today and we just didn't get a chance to.
00:55:07 ◼ ► So I'm not 100% sure, but I am almost positive that that is correct, that I think whoever is the assigned account, so for Aaron and me, the Apple TV is signed into me by default.
00:55:20 ◼ ► So I think, having not done this, that other Apple watches in the vicinity would pick up the correct workout, but the things that are shown on the screen are specifically for me and my watch, as far as I know.
00:55:34 ◼ ► Yeah, that seems like the biggest gap for a version two, and it's not like people have giant gyms in front of their televisions, but very often, especially in these quarantine times and everything, one of the things that can motivate you to work out is someone else who lives with you also encouraging each other to do it.
00:55:48 ◼ ► So if someone is not in the mood to make the other person do it, but you can't kind of do the workout together if the feedback is only going to one person, or if it doesn't track both of them or whatever, so it would be interesting for you guys to try that, to see what happens if you try to do it with two people in front of the television.
00:56:03 ◼ ► When you did the Beach Bod things, did you do them just by yourself, or did you do them with Aaron?
00:56:07 ◼ ► Almost exclusively by myself, and she'll be downstairs with the TV in the living room, in the good Apple TV, and then I'll be up again with my iPad upstairs.
00:56:17 ◼ ► We have done them a couple times together, specifically the early boxing workouts. We had done the first few together, and then for uninteresting reasons ended up not being able to complete them together, like finish the program together.
00:56:28 ◼ ► But Beachbody has no sort of integration of any kind. In fact, from my limited experience, and again, basically all I do with the Beachbody app is go in, pick a workout, and do it.
00:56:37 ◼ ► I don't explore the app or anything like that, but my limited experience says that there's no real integration with the Apple Watch. They don't seem to really acknowledge that the Apple Watch even exists.
00:56:48 ◼ ► It's just straight up, it's like Netflix for exercise, which is ostensibly what Fitness Plus is, but Fitness Plus has the music integration, and the Apple Watch integration, and all that, whereas Beachbody has none of those things, as far as I can tell.
00:57:04 ◼ ► Now, conversely, I've never done anything with Peloton, and I feel a little scared bringing up Peloton because I feel like they're really, really devout fans, and I don't want to upset any other groups.
00:57:18 ◼ ► Well, I feel like on the scale of totally fine to Tesla, or maybe Joe Rogan being the worst, Peloton on this scale is not very high ranked, but they're also not zero.
00:57:30 ◼ ► That's fair, that's fair. So anyway, I have not done anything with any Peloton. Everyone I know who has one, and I know a handful of people that have a Peloton device now, all love them. Like, not just a little, they love them.
00:57:45 ◼ ► And my limited understanding is that there's some amount of integration there, but again, I don't have one, I've never tried it, so I don't have any particular facts to share, but I think that there is more than zero integration with Peloton.
00:57:57 ◼ ► Yeah, I've tried my for like two seconds once. I too have a few friends who have them, and they all love them, just like that. They have remarkable customer loyalty and seemingly customer satisfaction, as far as I can tell, just anecdotally.
00:58:11 ◼ ► Yeah, and there's no question, I think Peloton is probably the most direct alternative or competitor to this, but Peloton requires you to buy the bike, which is not only a pretty large commitment in terms of you better know that you're going to like it, but also it's a ton of money up front and takes a ton of space in your house.
00:58:30 ◼ ► And so it's really like, it's much more of a thing to get into than what Apple's doing, which is, well, take the stuff you already have and maybe like move the couch back a bit so you have some space to move around and do this thing, which is significantly easier to get into, even though it might not reach the same levels of competitiveness and lifestyle change that something like Peloton might.
00:58:52 ◼ ► It's more like the entry level version of that probably, but that's actually probably where there's the most room for improvement and where Apple can make the most difference.
00:59:01 ◼ ► So I'm actually, I'm very much looking forward to trying this. I don't know how much I will use it because I see, Tiff and I do the FaceTime with the trainer twice a week, and many of the other days of the week, that's when I do my rowing workouts.
00:59:17 ◼ ► So what I can see this, where I can see this being useful is maybe like one or two days a week, instead of rowing, I do this. Or if we are, you know, once we can travel again, if we're traveling, and you know, maybe we do it on those mornings where we can't easily do the other things or whatever.
00:59:34 ◼ ► So I'm looking forward to just having this as an option that's always ready, that's always there so that if I need it or if I feel like doing it, I don't have to schedule with anybody, I don't have to rely on having any particular equipment with me as long as I have my Apple Watch and any of my other devices that can play the video stuff, then that's good.
00:59:53 ◼ ► I do share Jon's reservation about not having like multiple people in the room support, because Tiff and I often work out together, and to have this be so individual, I hope that's only a version one limitation and not something that they intend to keep that way long term.
01:00:12 ◼ ► Maybe they didn't want to pay the in-app purchase tax, and so it has to be an individual to individual experience being transmitted, you know, remember? No? Nothing? No one remembers that from like two months ago? Anyway, I tried, it was a good joke.
01:00:25 ◼ ► Anyway, no it wasn't. So I noticed, I'm curious to get your take on this Casey with the experience of it, one of the things that people have reported so far that I don't know, I hadn't really thought about how they would do this, but I was kind of assuming that the feedback loop would exist in some way and be a little bit more dynamic with like what they say on the video versus how you're actually performing, and it sounds like that's not the case.
01:00:53 ◼ ► It sounds like it's just a static video, and the video is the same no matter what you're doing, and it's just overlaying your stuff on top of it. Is that right?
01:01:01 ◼ ► That is my impression. I don't know that for sure. And since I have the floor, let me give you a little bit of real time follow up on a couple of things you just mentioned. First of all, I believe that you do not have to buy a Peloton bike anymore.
01:01:12 ◼ ► I think it's like obviously state or it's if my understanding is that it's really designed around having the actual device, but I thought that you could actually bring your own device to Peloton. So you set up like an iPad in front of your own bike or something like that.
01:01:27 ◼ ► And it does work for my understanding, but the integration obviously is not there the way they're used to, and it's not really meant for that, but you can do it, I think. Second of all, you spoke about rowing and one of the categories in Fitness Plus is rowing.
01:01:52 ◼ ► You could absolutely, whatever your rowing day is next, set this up on your phone or your iPad or what have you, and pop in your beloved AirPods Pro and you could row with one of these trainers.
01:02:02 ◼ ► And I would really encourage you to try that. In the same way that I think I was predisposed to like Fitness Plus because it's slotting into a very defined space in my life.
01:02:12 ◼ ► I'm already doing workout videos basically by myself as it is, you know what I mean? And so I don't have the multi-person concerns, not to say that I don't echo, but you know it's not a need that I think I have to fill because Erin typically has her own workouts, which are typically much harder than mine to do by yourself.
01:02:29 ◼ ► And then I have my workouts that I do by myself. And so for me it's not a big deal, but I basically wanted something that will show me decent exercise videos and that I can do for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes on an average day.
01:02:44 ◼ ► And it's worked really well and actually something I didn't bring up and one of the things I really like about it is typically when I've done these Beachbody exercises, I'll go through a program.
01:02:53 ◼ ► And so typically every exercise will be 30 minutes or 40 minutes or what have you and it's the same trainer every day and it's a slightly different thing every day, but you're doing the same basic idea.
01:03:02 ◼ ► With the boxing program you're boxing every day. Now maybe you were doing these moves this day and those moves that day, but it's always boxing and that's fine. It's not a complaint.
01:03:09 ◼ ► But one of the things I really liked was the second day that I did Fitness Plus workouts, which was a couple days ago, I basically just went in there and said, "Well, you know what? I'm going to start with a little strength training."
01:03:18 ◼ ► And I did I think a 10 minute strength workout and then I did a 10 minute HIIT workout and then I did a 10 minute core workout.
01:03:23 ◼ ► And I kind of made this like, you know, I almost felt like I was Link, you know, cooking at the little pot in the Zelda game.
01:03:30 ◼ ► You know, I was making my own recipe of my own workout and I actually really liked that.
01:03:35 ◼ ► I liked that I could, if I wanted to, do like a 30 or 40 minute work, you know, strictly HIIT workout or strictly strength workout.
01:03:41 ◼ ► But it was really kind of nice to be able to just mix and match. And there's nothing in Beachbody that like prevents you from doing that, but that's not really, in my experience, it's not really what it's meant for.
01:03:51 ◼ ► It's meant for you're going to do this program, you're going to do it top to bottom, start to finish, and you're going to do it in the order that they expect you to.
01:03:57 ◼ ► And I've mixed and matched it before, but it's not as nice. And a lot of these programs are 40 minutes and I only have but about an hour window of time that I've allotted for exercise.
01:04:07 ◼ ► So I'm not exactly going to mix and match two 40 minute workouts in an hour, you know what I mean?
01:04:12 ◼ ► And so, yeah, for that reason I've really, really enjoyed it. I feel like you actually had a specific question for me 20 minutes ago, but I've already forgotten what it was.
01:04:21 ◼ ► It was about like whether the staticness of the videos is something that's a problem or like does it feel like you're just kind of doing this in the void?
01:04:30 ◼ ► Because like one of the big advantages of Peloton, and I don't know how the other systems do it, but one of the big advantages of Peloton is that it has this live class mechanic and these leaderboards and everything.
01:04:41 ◼ ► So there's all this like live and dynamic functionality so that you get feedback about what you're doing and it can be called out by an instructor or it can be integrated into some other functionality.
01:04:53 ◼ ► If you're a competitive person, which I'm actually not at all, but if you're a competitive person there's angles to that that can appeal to you and everything.
01:05:00 ◼ ► With version one this seems a lot like you're just alone in the void, right? Is there anything to like draw you in besides your own satisfaction?
01:05:09 ◼ ► Not really. So there's that red line that I spoke about earlier, but literally all it is is an icon on a line, you know what I mean? So it's not what you're talking about. It's not like, "Oh, good job, Blista, for doing that really good work."
01:05:31 ◼ ► No, it's not. But anyway, there's no like calling out or anything like that. To the best that I can tell, the videos are completely static. There's no real editing or real-time modifications.
01:05:44 ◼ ► So if you're heaving on the floor and clearly not doing the workout, they're not going to yell at you or anything like that.
01:05:50 ◼ ► The tough thing about a trainer, especially in a workout video, is that for me it's a very, very, very fine line between being like the life coach and being like synthetically upbeat.
01:06:07 ◼ ► Be like, "Yeah, you can do this, man. You can do this. You've got it. Just give me three more." And like it's real easy with me to just go way off the deep end on that for me to just find it super gross.
01:06:19 ◼ ► Yeah, and then you can have like the super clinical like, "Three more reps. Two more reps. One more rep."
01:06:26 ◼ ► Right, exactly. And so there's this very fine line where you have some amount of enthusiasm and some amount of like personality, but not so much that you're like, "Oh my God, like relax with this."
01:06:39 ◼ ► And I actually felt like the trainers have walked that line pretty darn well. They're not exceedingly like super crazy bubbly for the most part, but they're not robots either.
01:06:51 ◼ ► And they've dripped in like just enough of their personal histories as you're doing these workouts that you kind of start to see them as people and not just trainers.
01:07:00 ◼ ► Like as an example, Greg mentioned like offhandedly that he used to live in New York and now he lives in LA and he made some mention about like some crappy apartment he had in New York or whatever the case may be.
01:07:08 ◼ ► And like obviously I don't remember specifically what was said and it doesn't really matter, but that's nice to have this human connection with these trainers so that you feel like they're people.
01:07:18 ◼ ► And no, they're not saying, you know, "Let's just pick it up," or, you know, "Oh, great job on this one."
01:07:29 ◼ ► And actually, interestingly, I forgot to mention, if you go looking through the Fitness+ app or the Fitness app in the Fitness+ tab, as you find a trainer, they'll talk about like their brief history and whatnot and prominently is a link to their Instagram account.
01:07:45 ◼ ► And also I should note, I'd heard rumblings, I forget where, that they were instructed to learn at least the basics of sign language so they could like greet or say goodbye with sign or say thank you with American Sign Language, which I've seen a little bit of, which I thought was really cool.
01:08:05 ◼ ► And one of the strength training exercises I did was with Amir, who had lost one of his legs due to an accident.
01:08:12 ◼ ► So like here it is, I'm huffing and puffing doing these leg workouts with two perfectly functional legs.
01:08:22 ◼ ► Like, I don't know, maybe that's lame or not very woke of me, but I think it's cool that they have people that are differently bodied that are able to not only participate, but instruct on these workouts.
01:08:46 ◼ ► I don't know for sure if I'm going to stick with it, but it's a pretty good chance that leaving aside like iCloud storage and Apple Music and all the other things that come with the bundles,
01:08:55 ◼ ► I would probably, I'm almost sure that I'm going to pay for at least Fitness Plus because I've been really, really impressed with it in the short time I've spent with it.
01:09:08 ◼ ► I probably will, to be honest, but I haven't sat down and looked at it and looked at what I do and don't want from the bundle, from the Apple E bundle and see if it's worth it.
01:09:20 ◼ ► Yeah, you're probably already in the black in terms of how much you would spend based on that stuff, especially if you start factoring in iCloud backups of kids' iOS devices, which will become more important as they get older and get actual data.
01:09:35 ◼ ► Now this whole Fitness Plus thing, we talked about it before when it was first announced and released, but just hearing you talk about it again, it reminds me of what a weird technological middle ground this is.
01:09:47 ◼ ► So we have things like Peloton, which is kind of a different thing, we can put that aside.
01:09:51 ◼ ► But for all the tech and controlling this whole tech stack, if this really is, as Casey described it, it's like a fancied up version of the VHS aerobics videos my mother would do.
01:10:05 ◼ ► You'd rent the VHS tape or buy it more likely, you'd stick it in and you'd have the instructor encouraging you to go on, and it's the same tape every time.
01:10:11 ◼ ► Now obviously this changes, right, and they have different instructors and different classes, so it's better than just that one tape, but you could in theory keep buying new tapes, right?
01:10:17 ◼ ► And Peloton is slightly different than they have the live classes, but a lot of the live classes aren't every moment of the day, so there are the pre-recorded ones as well.
01:10:26 ◼ ► But now I'm thinking of something that is at the other extreme, we have the VHS tape on one side, and at the other extreme is not Peloton, certainly not Apple Fitness Plus, it's something like Wii Fit, right?
01:10:39 ◼ ► Where it is entirely interactive because it's a video game, and if you do start lagging and slow down, like the whole point is constant feedback.
01:10:47 ◼ ► You're doing this poorly or you're doing really well, or keep up with this or whatever, and granted there's rubber banding and all the other gamification things they use to try to match your skill level, but it is 100% interactive with what you're doing.
01:11:02 ◼ ► And if you don't do the exercise or don't do it well or satisfactory, there's no question about it.
01:11:07 ◼ ► Whereas if you put in a VHS tape and you just get tired and sit in front of the tape eating Oreos, the tape doesn't know, right? It just keeps playing, right?
01:11:14 ◼ ► And Fitness Plus, it sounds like what they've done is, well it's like the VHS tape but we have an overlay of your info and we can highlight it at certain points.
01:11:22 ◼ ► Which is kind of a shame because a very basic choose your own adventure style interactive thing, where depending on how well you're doing, the second half is either more intense or less intense, right?
01:11:35 ◼ ► Or even something as simple as it looks like you're really slowing down and struggling based on the accelerometers in your watch, so we will cut to the part where we slow it down and give you some encouragement and tell you what to do if you're having trouble.
01:11:54 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying go full Wii Fit because that's obviously not people on video, it's computerized thing. Things like with the balance board where you're trying to do some exercise and they're showing you where your center of gravity is and everything like that.
01:12:07 ◼ ► You can't have that level of interaction with actual humans who at some point have to be in front of a camera because you can't have them do every possible thing that they might need to do.
01:12:14 ◼ ► But you can have some sort of dialogue tree or whatever where depending on what you're doing as detected roughly by the accelerometer that you're wearing and your risk and your heart rate monitor and everything like that, have a few branching paths.
01:12:30 ◼ ► Maybe they do that because Casey's only done a few of these and if they do it seamlessly, he might not even notice if you just stay within the happy path. It could be they do do those divergences, but I feel like that kind of interactivity is exactly what Apple should be doing along with what they're already doing, which is, hey, let's integrate all the devices we already have and the multi-user thing because like Peloton, I mean, whether you have the bike or you get your own bike, it's only one person on a bike.
01:12:53 ◼ ► So you got to have two bikes no matter what. And once you have two bikes, you got it's instanced, right? That's their sharding mechanism. You got two bikes, you got two screens, you got two Peloton, you're fine.
01:13:01 ◼ ► The whole point of this one is you got one big TV and especially if it doesn't do any forking, you have two people in front of it.
01:13:08 ◼ ► Like I know it gets more complicated when you have multiple people in front of TV and how you can adjust to multiple people or whatever. But that I feel like is the challenge.
01:13:14 ◼ ► That's the middle ground between full interactive Wii Fit, where it's a literal video game that's reacting to you in real time, which is difficult to do.
01:13:23 ◼ ► And by the way, Nintendo does have their Fit Ring thing, which is a similar type of exercise.
01:13:28 ◼ ► Not that kind of exercise, a similar type of endeavor of interactive fitness. But you got that way over there and you've got the total non-interactive VHS tape over there.
01:13:36 ◼ ► And in the middle of this do-it-home technologically powered workout is something like Apple Fitness Plus. And I feel like they need to move more towards the interactive side of things.
01:13:45 ◼ ► To not necessarily the gamification side of things, because I feel like Peloton may appeal to a different type of personality than Apple Fitness Plus does.
01:13:53 ◼ ► But certainly everyone can benefit from something like a workout being tailored to them better.
01:14:00 ◼ ► It's the why you might pay an actual human to help you do workouts, because they are literally a human and watching you and saying, "Okay, I can tell that you're struggling."
01:14:08 ◼ ► No computer program or pre-taped forking path thing is going to do as well as an actual human, but you want to do better than the VHS tape.
01:14:17 ◼ ► Something that Marco said earlier I think is extremely astute, which is that some of these, especially the HIIT exercises, those typically don't require any sort of equipment at all.
01:14:29 ◼ ► And if you're the kind of person like me that when you travel, or whatever that was called when we went to other places, is it called travel? Is that what it was called? It's been so long.
01:14:38 ◼ ► When you travel, you could hook up to a hotel TV and do a HIIT session or whatever and do that with nothing but the stuff you already had in your go bag, which is really convenient and really cool.
01:14:52 ◼ ► And again, you could do this with Beachbody just as much as you could do it with Apple Fitness Plus, but I don't know, I really enjoy the flexibility of it.
01:14:59 ◼ ► I keep obliquely mentioning some complaints. I don't love the information architecture within the app.
01:15:06 ◼ ► At the top, it shows all the different kinds of exercises you can do, and then it shows you more of what you do.
01:15:11 ◼ ► And try something new, and new this week, which is fine. And they do have a beginner section, which is great for people that have never done this sort of thing before.
01:15:19 ◼ ► But I don't know, I don't love that when I'm trying to figure out something to do, I'm just blindly clicking around.
01:15:26 ◼ ► I feel like it would be cool if I could, for example, filter by how long I want to spend, which I can do once I decide what exercise I want to do.
01:15:34 ◼ ► But everything starts with what exercise do you want to do? And then you can figure out, okay, who do you want to do it with? How much time do you want to spend? Etc.
01:15:41 ◼ ► And I wish there was a little more flexibility in that regard. But, all told, the app is not bad by any means.
01:15:47 ◼ ► I don't like that when it's on the iPad hooked up to a TV, it's using mirroring, it's not presenting on the TV.
01:15:55 ◼ ► So if I hook up Plex to the TV, it's taking up the entire TV, whereas I'm getting the vertical letterboxing when I use Fitness Plus, because it's just mirroring the iPad display to the TV.
01:16:07 ◼ ► It's not playing properly. And something that I've heard a lot of people complain about that I haven't tried myself is that AirPlay either doesn't work or is similarly, what is it, Pillbox, Pillarbox, whatever it's called.
01:16:19 ◼ ► And then I feel there was something else that somebody had said that they had tried where they got audio only but no video, presumably because of DRM.
01:16:27 ◼ ► I tried taking some screenshots and, of course, all I got was the HUDs, the heads-up displays, because the video was DRMed and so it was blacked out, which is really frustrating.
01:16:35 ◼ ► But in the grand scheme of things, again, I was definitely predisposed to like this because I'm taking something that isn't 100% by Apple but is largely doing the same thing, and I'm replacing it with something that is 100% made by Apple.
01:16:49 ◼ ► They own the whole widget top to bottom. And of course I enjoy it. Of course the production value is ridiculous. Of course the music is not only well chosen but extremely good quality.
01:16:58 ◼ ► It's not just some silly canned music that they bought from the Shutterstock of music or whatever online. It's all extremely well done, extremely pretty, extremely well shot, etc.
01:17:14 ◼ ► I wonder if they can use Apple's market power and connections to get a couple of occasional guest trainers that are celebrities of some kind. Can I have Joe Pesci talk me through a workout? Or Eddie Vedder?
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01:18:39 ◼ ► So I was looking through the show notes doing my pre-flight pre-flight a couple hours ago, and I noticed something interesting in the show notes.
01:18:55 ◼ ► And that was really interesting to me because I am thinking of upgrading to Big Sur and would like someone to talk me out of it if necessary.
01:19:02 ◼ ► To quickly set the stage, for me, my laptop, my MacBook Pro, is on Big Sur and has been since shortly after it launched.
01:19:10 ◼ ► But my iMac Pro is not. It is still on Catalina or whatever the hell came before Big Sur.
01:19:25 ◼ ► Before we get to that, Marco, are you thinking of upgrading to Big Sur? I mean, you're already using it now in your M1, right?
01:19:37 ◼ ► And I even told the AppleCare people, like, if you have to do a reinstall, please keep it on Catalina if you can.
01:19:47 ◼ ► So, you know, for most of the last month or whatever it's been that I've had the MacBook Air, I've been going back and forth.
01:19:55 ◼ ► Like, when I still had the iMac also, I was going back and forth between the iMac and the MacBook Air.
01:20:12 ◼ ► There was nothing about Big Sur that I missed when I would go back. Absolutely nothing.
01:20:22 ◼ ► Like, some things are a little bit better, some things are a little bit or maybe a lot worse.
01:20:27 ◼ ► Like, it has a lot of weird rough edges in its new design, which I've complained about many times.
01:20:41 ◼ ► And so, but I think it's telling that when I would go back from it, go back to Catalina for a while,
01:20:57 ◼ ► And then whenever, now that I'm on a laptop that doesn't have the Touch Bar, I don't miss the Touch Bar at all.
01:21:03 ◼ ► Not even for a second. There's nothing about the Touch Bar that I miss, now that I don't have it anymore.
01:21:12 ◼ ► However, that being said, also using Big Sur, like, it's functioning, like I'm able to use it, I'm not constantly hating it.
01:21:33 ◼ ► The entire, like, I've had so many problems with Catalina over this past year that I've never had the previous versions of macOS.
01:21:40 ◼ ► Just in terms of general system stability, performance, and I don't think it was Google Chrome at fault.
01:21:49 ◼ ► And it seems like it's a very, it's an OS full of weird subsystem bugs and performance problems.
01:22:18 ◼ ► and the engineers all move on a year later to the new version and there's no more bug-facing happening to the old one,
01:22:25 ◼ ► the strongest reason to stay on the old one would be if it had reached a more stable point than the new one.
01:22:36 ◼ ► I don't think Catalina, Catalina's latest version, I don't think is any more stable than Big Sur.
01:22:42 ◼ ► I have no fewer problems with Catalina and it's like, you know, whatever it is, .4, .5, whatever it's reached.
01:22:58 ◼ ► I don't think there's much reason to stay on Catalina because Catalina wasn't very good
01:23:03 ◼ ► and never reached that good or mostly good point that you expect an OS to reach once it's being replaced by a newer OS.
01:23:24 ◼ ► The main areas that has affected me are simply its design changes, which again I think are a mixed bag,
01:23:32 ◼ ► many of which are significantly worse, some of which are fine, and some minor functionality changes,
01:23:44 ◼ ► The standard command F to find stuff in most apps now works differently and is clunkier.
01:23:50 ◼ ► The command option F, like the main search box in something like mail or notes, now works differently and is clunkier.
01:24:00 ◼ ► So there's stuff like that with the built-in apps or the built-in UI widgets that are still a little bit rough.
01:24:08 ◼ ► But the OS as a whole, Big Sur seems not worse than Catalina in stability and system services and performance and stuff like that in my experience.
01:24:25 ◼ ► I'm not super motivated to update my iMac to Big Sur, but I also don't really know what I'm waiting for because Catalina is not good either.
01:24:39 ◼ ► What am I waiting for? Why have I not upgraded already? Am I afraid that I don't want to upgrade because I have software that's not compatible?
01:24:45 ◼ ► Well, no, I don't. Am I afraid that there's some amazing new feature that I need that I desperately want to have?
01:24:59 ◼ ► Big Sur is where the development is happening. New versions of Big Sur are coming out, and each new version brings with it hope that whatever it is that's annoying you will be fixed or better.
01:25:08 ◼ ► And the second thing is new features that I wanted, which I'll get to in a second, but getting back to the original question of what's stopping me, upgrading is a pain in the butt.
01:25:18 ◼ ► It takes a long time. If it goes wrong, you have to restore from a backup. That takes a long time. It's just a whole thing.
01:25:23 ◼ ► And given my podcasting schedule, there's never a good time to destroy my computer accidentally.
01:25:30 ◼ ► I already did that once when I had the, coincidentally, the Big Sur beta that hosed my firmware that took me a million years to figure out that was a big disaster.
01:25:39 ◼ ► That's a pain. So my thinking and the reason this topic is in here is like, well, over the holidays, I'll probably have a big hole in my podcasting schedule because no one wants to podcast around the holidays.
01:25:49 ◼ ► So that's a good time. Finally, there'll be a good time for me to dive in and upgrade. And my thinking is the same as Marco's.
01:25:56 ◼ ► Well, not quite the same. The whole idea is I don't want to leave because everyone's telling me that Big Sur has stability problems because it's new, but Catalina is rock solid.
01:26:05 ◼ ► Well, my experience with Catalina hasn't been rock solid, but it hasn't been bad either.
01:26:11 ◼ ► But on the flip side of that, I have Big Sur running on the other computer in this room, and I don't have any problems with that in terms of features or stability either.
01:26:21 ◼ ► Normally, you would think the OS that's been out for an entire year would have really settled down and gotten solved and the new one will be flaky.
01:26:27 ◼ ► And in my experience, the one that's been around for a year, stability and features and everything and bugs seem fine.
01:26:34 ◼ ► And so does the one that just came out, Big Sur. And is it because Catalina never really got that stable?
01:26:48 ◼ ► The UI stuff I know is going to annoy me because it annoys me on the other computer that has Big Sur on it.
01:26:59 ◼ ► And every once in a while, I'll see a program come out that's Big Sur only and I'll be like, "Oh, I can't run that because I'm not on the latest thing."
01:27:08 ◼ ► And as I mentioned before, the new features that I actually care about, the things that are making me want to go to Big Sur, one of them, in case you just put in the notes and I'll steal it from, the new version of Messages.
01:27:21 ◼ ► And yes, I know it's weird and has UI issues or whatever, but I want to just get that updated in the hopes that, again, that's where all the development effort is happening.
01:27:31 ◼ ► Mac Messages has not had much development effort poured into it over the past couple of years.
01:27:42 ◼ ► But the second one, this is going to sound dumb, but it's going to be predictable for me.
01:27:46 ◼ ► The main feature that's making me want to upgrade is that I think about what my big Mac Pro does most of the time and mostly what I have to babysit it doing.
01:27:56 ◼ ► I'm not using it for hours a day. I use it during podcasting and I use it during the day to do my own computer stuff or whatever.
01:28:02 ◼ ► Unless I'm in a big project, unless I'm working on one of my apps or I'm trying to make a Destiny video or whatever, but most of the time the computer is just kind of like hanging out doing its thing.
01:28:19 ◼ ► And it's not backing up a lot because I'm not producing a lot of new data each day, but I do want to have a recent backup.
01:28:27 ◼ ► So every week it does a super duper clone and every whenever it does a time machine back up to two different locations.
01:28:33 ◼ ► And it's been annoying me how long it takes to do an incremental time machine backup of my four terabyte drive with a hoejillion files in it.
01:28:41 ◼ ► And I have seen from personal experience that time machine in Big Sur, because of its taking advantage of new APFS features, is much, much, much faster.
01:28:57 ◼ ► Ars Technica in its Big Sur review from ages ago did a benchmark of how long does it take to do the initial backup and then an incremental backup in Catalina versus Big Sur.
01:29:10 ◼ ► You know, for a local backup, the initial backup took 44 minutes in Catalina and 16 minutes in Big Sur.
01:29:27 ◼ ► Fortunately, a network backup was one hour and 52 minutes versus one hour and 15 minutes.
01:29:36 ◼ ► And this is important to me because one of the things I have my computer do is while I'm asleep, it wakes up, it mounts one of my internal hard drives to the time machine back and goes back to sleep.
01:29:44 ◼ ► And I'm looking at how long that's taking and I'm like, "Geez, it takes a long time." Or sometimes there's another backup already running and it tries to stop that backup and that takes a long time and the cleaning up step is taking a long time.
01:29:56 ◼ ► And I'm like, "What I wouldn't give for my time machine backup speeds to be cut in half because they just seem unreasonable."
01:30:06 ◼ ► I understand that just, like the main problem is like it's spending most of its time figuring out what is it that I need to back up.
01:30:13 ◼ ► And you can see it, especially when I do my nightly one because there's more stuff that's built up.
01:30:17 ◼ ► The preparing to back up step, and especially since it's doing to a spinning disk, the preparing to back up step is like I need to figure out what changed since the last time I did a backup.
01:30:25 ◼ ► And then eventually it figures it out and it's like 100 megs of stuff and writes 100 megs of stuff fairly quickly.
01:30:31 ◼ ► Not as quickly as you would imagine because you think copying 100 megs of stuff would take two seconds, but a reasonable amount of time.
01:30:37 ◼ ► I think it spends like 10 to 20 times more time figuring out what needs to back up and that's exactly where the new version of Time Machine and APFS on Big Sur excels.
01:30:46 ◼ ► In that it has a more efficient way to figure out what has changed since the last time I back up.
01:30:59 ◼ ► Again, when I'm not editing video and not compiling an exode, doing backups is the most demanding thing.
01:31:05 ◼ ► I don't notice the demand, like my fans don't get any louder, my computer doesn't get any slower, but what does happen is I notice a little Time Machine icon, like it is right now, with a little arrow in my menu bar.
01:31:15 ◼ ► And what it means is, "Oh, I was going to put my computer to sleep when I got up and left it, but I should just let it finish its backup."
01:31:21 ◼ ► So I don't put it to sleep. I just leave it and I don't have it set to go to sleep by itself.
01:31:26 ◼ ► I'm like, "I'll come back later when it's done with the backup and I'll put it to sleep."
01:31:31 ◼ ► And then I go back and I have lunch and take the dog for a walk and I come back later and it's still not done.
01:31:36 ◼ ► I'm like, "Oh my God!" And then I just give up and put it to sleep, but now I haven't completed a backup.
01:31:53 ◼ ► And so I'm tempted to take this holiday break/week/whatever to be the time when I do all my last backups and do the big update and hope I don't hose myself and find out all my programs that might be broken, even though I think there aren't any of them.
01:32:14 ◼ ► And I was hoping one of you would tell me, "Don't do it because..." Is 11.1 even out yet?
01:32:45 ◼ ► It's called pinning in the user interface, but I don't know if it has a marketing name. But I've come to really, really like the thing in iOS 14 and in Big Sur where you can put a group...
01:32:54 ◼ ► Or you can move someone so that they're always at the top of the Messages list. Always.
01:32:59 ◼ ► So for example, on all of my devices except my iMac, Erin is the very top of the list on Messages.
01:33:08 ◼ ► And then I have like a handful of other people. It strikes me as very... What was it? Like top 9 or whatever on Myspace?
01:33:17 ◼ ► It was like you would put your bestest friends up there. And that was like very political from what I gathered.
01:33:31 ◼ ► So I put my family as the top. I have my wife and my two children. And then I have my parents.
01:33:51 ◼ ► See, you think you're ranking them. It's like, "Okay, well my family should be there first because that just makes sense."
01:33:56 ◼ ► And I message them. And then for the next rows, do you prioritize people in terms of your relation?
01:34:08 ◼ ► For me, I have 9 now in my phone. And it's funny you say that because for the longest time I had 6.
01:34:22 ◼ ► My two brothers and myself. I count good. My two brothers and myself. That's the top row.
01:34:31 ◼ ► But generally they're just the people that I'm constantly either wanting to send things to or just happen to talk with all the time.
01:34:41 ◼ ► But it's funny that you bring up the empty space thing because for a long time I felt like I wanted to move from two rows to three rows.
01:34:55 ◼ ► So I just didn't do it until I finally came up with what I felt like was the good next row of people.
01:35:04 ◼ ► The other thing about doing it based on frequency is if you really do message them frequently, they'll be at the top anyway.
01:35:15 ◼ ► I feel like you have to put your own family as the top top ones just because you do message them all the time.
01:35:41 ◼ ► But it's not very flexible and it really tickles the sort of whatever the part of my mind when I want things to be like arranged symmetrically.
01:35:51 ◼ ► Yeah and you know somebody in the chat is saying pinning an entry in a list is rather boring as a big macOS release feature.
01:36:04 ◼ ► And I've really liked having it and having it consistently across all my devices except my iMac Pro.
01:36:14 ◼ ► However one of my favorite bugs almost as much as the MMS bug which I'm still fighting here and there.
01:36:20 ◼ ► Is if you happen to be on a Big Sur Mac and if you hit command N in messages to create a new message.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And then if you hit enter because it drops down you know it highlights Marco's phone number.
01:36:38 ◼ ► It highlights Marco's phone number and you would hit enter in order to actually compose the message to Marco.
01:36:54 ◼ ► Yeah I've hit this every time. Like every time I have to create a new message I have to do it like two or three times.
01:37:17 ◼ ► I think had I properly done any research I probably could come up with some other examples.
01:37:26 ◼ ► I really really have come to like BitBar and its recent I'll call it a replacement although it's not really called SwiftBar.
01:37:46 ◼ ► And SwiftBar in particular is really nice because it's been completely rewritten and it seems to work a lot nicer.
01:37:57 ◼ ► Which is this like kind of sort of font that Apple provides in order to let you use like these different glyphs.
01:38:17 ◼ ► But anyways one of the features in SwiftBar specifically for Big Sur is that you can use SF symbols.
01:38:28 ◼ ► And when I use emoji which I could do in BitBar and I could do in SwiftBar in Catalina.
01:38:46 ◼ ► And a corollary of putting all my devices on Big Sur is that then I could stop all these.
01:41:02 ◼ ► Apparently that only works if you have like a mobile device management profile installed or something.
01:41:56 ◼ ► And when you go there you have to make sure you don't click the thing that says hey update to Big Sur.
01:42:12 ◼ ► So just being in this weird limbo state with Apple nagging me to update is annoying me.
01:42:17 ◼ ► And so I feel like the path of least resistance is probably to bite the bullet and go Big Sur.
01:42:36 ◼ ► Whether you are working on a personal project or managing your enterprises infrastructure.
01:43:01 ◼ ► That you can use these virtual machines with Linux to develop deploy and scale all your applications.
01:43:17 ◼ ► Specialty configurations like if you need GPU compute machines or high memory machines or anything like that.
01:44:55 ◼ ► The only thing I notice is the rest of the screen dimming as I'm watching an HDR video.
01:45:00 ◼ ► So what is it that I should be looking for to see this pop or to see what makes it so much better?
01:45:11 ◼ ► The reason I put this question here is because it's an interesting overloading of the HDR term.
01:45:56 ◼ ► But basically, the dynamic range between the brightest thing on the screen and the darkest thing