0:00:00I'm kind of interested in the mini review, except I am extremely, I am extremely not interested in your mini review because I don't want to know.
0:00:07Oh, my iPhone mini?
0:00:09Mm hmm.
0:00:10I don't want to know.
0:00:11So let me tell you, I don't want to know.
0:00:14I stopped the, I stopped the, the show rundown right after we got to that thing, but Marco can feel free to talk about it if he wants during the topic section, which we'll get to shortly.
0:00:27Fast resolution switching on M1 Max.
0:00:30Gokin Avkarogullari writes, and I believe this individual is an Apple engineer, writes, I was waiting for this.
0:00:38Our display pipes are many years ahead of the industry.
0:00:41And this is just one example of that.
0:00:42From contrast to accessibility to color management, many teams at Apple, including my display driver team, put so much effort to it.
0:00:49Glad to see it makes a difference.
0:00:50Yeah, it does make a difference because I finally, well, so I finally saw a demo and somebody tweeted this.
0:00:57And we'll put a link in the show notes and they have, I guess an older, an old and busted MacBook Pro on one side.
0:01:04They have the current top of the line MacBook Pro, the 16 inch.
0:01:07Yes.
0:01:07Yep.
0:01:08And then, which is obviously old and busted.
0:01:10Yeah.
0:01:10And then the, on the left hand side, they have a brand new MacBook Pro, which is the 13 inch.
0:01:15And you know, when Marco, I think it was Marco or maybe it was John.
0:01:18I think it was always John.
0:01:19No, no, it's always John.
0:01:20That's the rules.
0:01:21Remember?
0:01:21And so when John said, when, when John Marco said, when John Raffio said that the resolution switching was instant, I conceptually understood the words that were being said.
0:01:35But seeing it visually is a whole nother thing.
0:01:39Like this tweet, it's so ridiculous how fast this is.
0:01:44I just cannot believe my eyes.
0:01:45It's one of those things that like, you know, with computers, we've, we've used computers for a long time now.
0:01:51And it's just one of those things that always has taken a few seconds.
0:01:54Like it just, it's a thing that when you change the resolution of your screen, it goes blank for a few seconds and things kind of like pop in kind of ungracefully.
0:02:03And you know, a few seconds later, everything is kind of basically where it should be.
0:02:06And when you go from something that takes a few seconds and you see the transition and it's ungraceful like that to something that literally is like instant, you just like, boom, it's just like click, click, click, boom.
0:02:17It's, it's shocking.
0:02:19Like it, and it's, again, this is not something that they had to optimize.
0:02:22This is not something that needed to be done, but it's just so damn delightful to see it.
0:02:27And it's something that you don't see very often in computing where something that previously used to take a good amount of time all of a sudden takes no time.
0:02:35And again, like this, most people don't change resolutions that often, although many people do plug in monitors and unplug monitors frequently.
0:02:43And from what I hear, I haven't been able to test this yet, but from what I hear, that is similarly fast now.
0:02:49So I am just so happy that this kind of stuff is being worked on and we can still have things in modern computing that make us go, whoa, like that really surprise us because that doesn't happen that often anymore.
0:03:03Because stuff is really good pretty much everywhere.
0:03:04So like, you know, to get one of those whoa moments is rare and it's just so incredibly delightful when you see one.
0:03:12And this is one of those times.
0:03:13I guess one of the benefits of the iOS project, you know, having started for the phone and of course they started from Mac OS 10, but they had to rip like tons of stuff out to just get it to fit into the phone and to get it to be fast enough on that very slow phone hardware.
0:03:27And that sort of gave them a chance to tear everything down to the studs, so to speak, and to build back up from there without concern for legacy because they totally controlled the hardware and iOS didn't need to run anywhere except for on, you know, this phone hardware.
0:03:42And so that's the perfect opportunity over the course of the next 10, 15 years to reconsider things like the display driver stack, which like Marco said, they weren't broken.
0:03:51There's nothing wrong with them.
0:03:52They worked fine.
0:03:53Like their main job is to be reliable and, you know, do the things we want them to do.
0:03:59They supported retina.
0:04:00You could change resolution, you know, they, you know, it did all the things that you would expect it to do.
0:04:06But if you have the opportunity to sort of rebuild that from nothing, starting from very simple display driving on the original iPhone up till today, you can end up building a display driver system, especially with the move to metal, not having to support OpenGL, not having to support other people's graphics drivers.
0:04:24They control the hardware and the software stack.
0:04:26It's an opportunity to do something better.
0:04:28And I don't think there was huge pressure from the outside saying you really need to make resolution switching faster.
0:04:33I think it is just a side effect of redoing the display driver stack to be high performance in all ways.
0:04:40And one of the benefits you get basically for free for doing a good job is, oh, guess what?
0:04:44Resolution change.
0:04:45That's lightning fast now too.
0:04:46Oh, it's extremely, extremely impressive and I'm only seeing it on video.
0:04:49It's very cool.
0:04:50And to your point, Marco, Sylvain Philto writes, you mentioned how fast it is to change resolution.
0:04:55It is exactly as fast plugging in an external display like the ultra fine 5k.
0:04:59Very cool stuff.
0:05:01Tell me, Jon, about TensorFlow and forks and M1 max and so on.
0:05:06So, you know, one of the things that Apple talked about in their presentation about the M1 max, they showed the system on a chip and we've talked about this in the past, how much of these system on chips is dedicated to machine learning stuff.
0:05:16Obviously, you know, the benefit that Apple touted to this, oh, we'll take our cruddy 720p camera and it will make those pictures look a little bit better.
0:05:23Although that may be the image signal processor and not the neural engine.
0:05:26But anyway, that's splitting here.
0:05:27The point is there's hardware on the M1, just like there is on all of the iPhone and iPad system on a chips that is dedicated to doing specific tasks very well.
0:05:37And on the Mac, it's like, OK, that's great.
0:05:41The OS uses it for certain things, but otherwise it's just sitting there not being used until someone updates their software for it.
0:05:46So this is an announcement that Apple, I think it's Apple's fork of TensorFlow, which is a machine learning thing of some stripe.
0:05:53The new version optimized for the M1 base max has seven times faster performance.
0:05:59And how does it get seven times faster performance?
0:06:02It's not in this case because, you know, the M1 is faster in CPU than than any other Mac, but it's not seven times faster.
0:06:08It's getting sometimes faster because it's using the machine learning hardware that's on the chip.
0:06:12The previous version didn't because there was none right on the Intel chips.
0:06:15There was nothing right.
0:06:16And now it's using that machine learning stuff that's on there.
0:06:19Huge speed boost.
0:06:20So this is the type of sort of nonlinear increases you get for actually taking advantage of the hardware that they put on the system on chips for, you know, for phones, for iPads.
0:06:30And now the Mac has them, too.
0:06:32And, you know, the sooner Mac developers pick up that, the better it's going to make their applications look.
0:06:37I think I don't remember if what's the what's the app that has like that super resolution plug in?
0:06:42Is it Pixelmator?
0:06:44Yeah. Yeah. I think that one is also now taking advantage of the neural engine and stuff like it is.
0:06:50Yes.
0:06:50Yeah. So those are and there was someone that a benchmark of those things are showing like, you know, if you do it on the CPU, like it's still it's still faster because the CPU is faster.
0:06:59But if you don't do it on the CPU, instead of doing it on dedicated hardware, it's a lot faster.
0:07:03So those things are great and probably more power efficient as well.
0:07:06So that's exciting and not just like, oh, we recompiled it for our Macs.
0:07:11We didn't just recompile it.
0:07:12We wrote to use whatever new set of APIs targets the new hardware that makes it way faster.
0:07:16That is extremely impressive.
0:07:19Then tell me about 8K rendering, if you please.
0:07:22I think I did my own, you know, McGurk effect, Green Needle, iPhone, Fortnite, whatever thing in the last episode.
0:07:31During the section where we were talking about various people's impressive benchmarks of the M1 based Macs.
0:07:37One of the examples was a 8K video render test.
0:07:43And the thing was that, you know, the M1 based Mac rendered it and it was competing with the Intel version.
0:07:50The Intel version couldn't do it without draining its battery.
0:07:53Right. And what was written in the notes and what I could swear I tried to say twice on the podcast was the percentage that the M1 based Mac depleted its battery.
0:08:04And I listened back to the show and I realized twice I said what sounded like the M1 Mac used 70 percent of its battery.
0:08:11And the Intel Mac drained its battery before completing the task.
0:08:14But what I was trying to say was the M1 Mac depleted 17 percent of its battery.
0:08:22Two more than 15.
0:08:24The number after 16.
0:08:26So the M1 based Mac not only did it faster, but it depleted only 17 percent of its battery, having 83 percent remaining.
0:08:35And the non M1 based Mac, the Intel based Mac could not complete the task on a single charge.
0:08:41So I just wanted to clarify, my mouth said what sounded like 70, but it is not.
0:08:47It was 17.
0:08:48That is absolutely bananas.
0:08:50We're going to talk more about these new Macs and I don't want to.
0:08:55I might quit the show because I like, I really like my MacBook Pro that I have from June of this year.
0:09:02It doesn't feel like it's a 40 year old computer, but the way everyone is talking about this M1 Macs, I feel like this is barely better than the 8088 I had in my bed.
0:09:11Room when I was like 10 years old, when it was already, you know, a way too old computer.
0:09:14My word.
0:09:15All right.
0:09:16Tell me about running iOS apps with just the IPA files, please.
0:09:20Yeah.
0:09:20And we talked about this when Apple made the announcement that like, if you have an iPad or if you have an iPhone app, you have a choice of whether you want that iPhone app to be available for people to download on their Macs through the quote unquote Mac App Store.
0:09:36Right.
0:09:37And you can say, yes, opt in and no to opt out and every developer basically has to make this choice.
0:09:41But what if you want to run an iPhone app, but the developer of that iPhone app has decided not to make it available to Mac users.
0:09:49For example, Marco could have decided, oh, overcast.
0:09:51I'm going to make a Mac version, so I don't want you downloading using the iOS version.
0:09:54But he didn't.
0:09:55So you can get overcast on your Mac.
0:09:57Right.
0:09:57But another developer may not make that choice.
0:10:00Well, many people through experimentation have determined if you can just use I don't know what they're using iTunes or whatever, whatever way you can get to download the dot IPA file onto your Mac.
0:10:12I got IPA files.
0:10:13What does it stand for?
0:10:13I phone package something, something.
0:10:16It's a renamed zip file.
0:10:18It's one of many file formats that is just renamed.
0:10:20Yeah.
0:10:21Anyway, it's basically how we package up iOS applications for distribution.
0:10:24Probably iPhone app.
0:10:26Yeah, maybe.
0:10:27But anyway, if you can get one of those.
0:10:30As in the legit downloaded one from like the app store, the real app store.
0:10:34And you can like, you know, get it through iTunes.
0:10:36But when iTunes would download stuff, you can do it in a local backup.
0:10:38But I would get a legit downloaded dot IPA for your iPhone applications.
0:10:43Lots of different ways to get that on your Mac and double click it on an ARM based Mac.
0:10:47It'll run because it's not.
0:10:50It's valid.
0:10:50It's signed.
0:10:51It's, you know, you have downloaded through your Apple ID.
0:10:54It will do the fair play check and everything.
0:10:56You know, it's not like you're hacking anything.
0:10:59If you can get that IPA, which you can, you can just run it on your Mac.
0:11:03Apparently now it may be broken.
0:11:04There may be a reason the developer chose not to distribute it on the Mac.
0:11:07And I'm not sure how sustainable this is and when Apple will close this door.
0:11:10But if there's some app that you want to use that you can't right now, try it.
0:11:14The person who wrote this into Mac rumors named Amy said she's used this method to
0:11:18install Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Spotify, all of which at the time of writing
0:11:22were not available on the Mac app store.
0:11:24But you can get the IPAs and you can run them on your Mac.
0:11:26That's very cool.
0:11:27By the way, real time, real time follow up.
0:11:29IOS app store package.
0:11:31So I and IOS A and app store P.
0:11:33I don't know if you can think of that A stand for app store.
0:11:36App store is two words.
0:11:37Wikipedia says it, so it must be true.
0:11:39It's like the ISO.
0:11:39Yeah.
0:11:40What does ISO stand for?
0:11:41It's something French, but it's like the international standards of organization.
0:11:45It's like, I don't know.
0:11:45Oh, no, no.
0:11:46I thought you meant, I thought you meant the like CD-ROM archive.
0:11:49Technically it's the same thing.
0:11:51It's the same thing.
0:11:52It's the same company.
0:11:53Yeah.
0:11:53They made the same stand.
0:11:54Yeah.
0:11:54I mean, it's a little bit of a walk to get there, but yes.
0:11:56Wow.
0:11:57Well, today I learned.
0:11:59All right.
0:11:59Tell me about crossover.
0:12:00So this is something that I was not aware of, but apparently this is like a, well,
0:12:05I'm going to sell it short, but kind of like a white labeled version of wine.
0:12:09What is going on here?
0:12:10So for those who are not familiar, wine is a thing that I used to use when I told
0:12:16myself that running Linux full time was a worthwhile endeavor.
0:12:18It wasn't.
0:12:19We all had a Linux phase.
0:12:20Yep.
0:12:21Title.
0:12:22So wine, last I remember paying attention to it was basically.
0:12:28A shim on top of your local systems, like os APIs that acted like windows APIs.
0:12:37So if you wanted to run an app that was built for windows, it would start talking
0:12:41to wine, w I N E, which I think is a background name for something.
0:12:45Wine is not an emulator, I believe.
0:12:47Yeah, I think you're right.
0:12:48Um, sorry.
0:12:49So we talked to wine and wine would kind of like translate these API calls into
0:12:54something that your system like Mac, Mac, iOS, or Linux or to have you would
0:12:57understand.
0:12:58And I guess crossover is a four pay, uh, like fancier version of wine.
0:13:04That's presumably a lot less fiddly.
0:13:06Is that fair to say?
0:13:07I'm not sure which one of you put this in the show notes.
0:13:08So I'm reaching out to the two of you.
0:13:10Yeah.
0:13:10Yeah.
0:13:10That's basically what crossover is.
0:13:12And one of the main uses of it has been to run windows based games on your Mac
0:13:16without having to boot into windows.
0:13:18Obviously on an Intel based Mac, you can use VMware or parallels.
0:13:21To run a full windows OS.
0:13:23And then within that run games, you can also reboot with bootcamp to boot your
0:13:26Intel based Mac into windows and run your games there for best performance.
0:13:29But crossover is like wine.
0:13:30It's like, what if I don't want to run a VM?
0:13:32I don't want to run a full windows operating system.
0:13:33I don't want to reboot my Mac, but I do want to run a windows game.
0:13:36Well, like wine, you can launch the windows game in the crossover environment
0:13:40and it will basically take all your win 32 calls or whatever and say, okay, well,
0:13:43uh, you know, this isn't windows, but I understand what you're trying to do
0:13:47windows application.
0:13:48So I will make the roughly equivalent set of Mac OS or Unix calls to do the thing
0:13:54that you want and get the job done.
0:13:56Um, so that's what crossover is.
0:13:57We're like, well, that doesn't have any relevance on M1 based Macs cause M1
0:14:00based Macs, you know, they're, they're not Intel, right?
0:14:03And this is all about running windows things and windows only runs on Intel,
0:14:06except for the weird arm version of the Microsoft one license to anybody yet.
0:14:09But anyway, uh, what if I want to run windows games on my M1 Mac?
0:14:12You might think you're just SOL because you can't run power parallels.
0:14:15You can't run, you can't run windows and parallel as a VMware and you can't
0:14:18reboot your arm based Mac into windows yet.
0:14:20So what are you going to do?
0:14:21Oh, and by the way, as we know, like big Sur doesn't,
0:14:26uh, is 64 bit only.
0:14:27And there has never been a 32 bit processor in a Mac in ages, right?
0:14:32So how are you going to run? And most windows games are still 32 bit.
0:14:35How are you going to run a 32 bit windows game? Well,
0:14:37apparently through the magic of crossover,
0:14:39you're able to take a 32 bit windows game written for Intel processors and run it
0:14:44on a 64 bit arm, uh, Mac through the magic of translation. So here's,
0:14:49here's Jeremy White from a crossover. I think he's one of his, yeah,
0:14:53he works at the company that makes his code weavers. There's so much emulation
0:14:56going on under the covers. Imagine a 32 bit windows,
0:14:59Intel binary running on a 32 to 62 bridge and wine slash crossover on top of
0:15:03Mac iOS on arm CPU that is emulating X 86 and it works. This is just so cool.
0:15:08And Brendan Shanks, one of the developers says Mac OS 10.15,
0:15:13remove 32 bit executable support,
0:15:15but added support for 64 bit apps to create 32 bit code segments.
0:15:19Crossover uses that on Intel and Rosetta emulates it,
0:15:22which is how you can do it on the Apple Silicon.
0:15:24So I didn't know that that you're able to like in a 64 bit app,
0:15:28create a 32 bit code segment and then apparently execute that. And so that,
0:15:32that ability on Intel CPU's plus Mac OS 10.15 and later is being correctly
0:15:38emulated by Rosetta on arm. And you would think, okay, well this is, you know,
0:15:42it's like one of those things where you run VMware inside VMware inside VMware.
0:15:45It's cool and it's funny, but that's silly. It's not actually practical as it,
0:15:49they show playing actual games like you get acceptable gaming performance on
0:15:53certain varieties of games. It's not incredibly,
0:15:56it's not as slow as you would think it would be.
0:15:57It is actually viable for playing some type of games, which is amazing.
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0:18:09This is not something that I've dabbled with yet,
0:18:11but I know a lot of people are very happy about this forthcoming change.
0:18:14iOS 14.3 Beta 2 no longer opens the shortcuts app when launching an app from a
0:18:19custom icon. So to back up a half step here, using shortcuts,
0:18:24you can put a quote unquote app on your home screen with a custom icon that the
0:18:29shortcut, all it does is launch the app.
0:18:33And so people are using this to be able to make their own icons for existing
0:18:38apps, both system and otherwise. And this is, you know,
0:18:41part of the customization craze that, you know,
0:18:43our dear friend David Smith has been riding with widgetsmith,
0:18:46which you should check out if you haven't already.
0:18:48So the way it used to work was, or way officially it still works,
0:18:52is that when you launch one of these shortcuts from your home screen,
0:18:55it will launch the shortcuts app for a flash and then punch you into this actual
0:19:00thing you're trying to do. And apparently in Beta 2,
0:19:03that's no longer the case. It will just immediately open the app.
0:19:05And I believe it does one of the little banners at the top of the screen as well,
0:19:08but it's, there's no like flash into the shortcuts app first,
0:19:12which is excellent.
0:19:13This makes me think about sort of the corporate mechanics inside Apple,
0:19:18right? Because we know that, you know, where do shortcuts come from?
0:19:21It was the workflow team that Apple sort of aqua hired and then they made
0:19:24shortcuts for iOS. Okay. And you know,
0:19:27especially given how, you know,
0:19:30it wasn't very long ago when these were independent developers.
0:19:33Now they're inside Apple. They see everyone doing this customization craze,
0:19:37where they want to make custom icons for the applications.
0:19:39And they do it by making a trivial shortcut and all it does is launch the apps
0:19:42and it goes through the shortcut app and people use it anyway,
0:19:45just because it's a cool thing to do, but it would be better if it didn't.
0:19:48You know, that workflow development, the development team sees that and says,
0:19:51Oh, well we can do that. Like we work inside Apple now. And we, you know,
0:19:55we're the, we're the shortcuts team. It's pretty easy for us to say, Hey,
0:19:58if you make a shortcut that just launches an app, don't bounce through shortcuts,
0:20:02just launched the app directly. And so the implements didn't do it.
0:20:04And this is a beta, so it hasn't shipped yet, but you know,
0:20:06I can see that sort of feedback loop being simple and closed, right?
0:20:11But on the other hand,
0:20:12there are larger strategic implications of allowing
0:20:17customers this level of customization, which based on our discussion of,
0:20:22you know, the whole widgets thing back when we were talking about iOS 14,
0:20:25we're all in favor of,
0:20:26and we think it's a great idea to let people customize in this way. But Oh,
0:20:30I have felt like that Apple accidentally backed into this by accidentally
0:20:35providing a critical mass of customizability combined with, you know, apps like,
0:20:39uh, underscores,
0:20:40widgets Smith that a lot suddenly allowed people to express themselves in a
0:20:44holistic way and theme there's, you know, home screens.
0:20:46It doesn't look like anything that Apple planned and pitched and
0:20:51promoted. They just kind of got it accidentally.
0:20:53So this type of small changes,
0:20:55the shortcuts team does an obvious thing based on customer feedback. Hey,
0:20:58this is the thing people want and we can do it pretty easily.
0:21:00So here you go is kind of a tacit endorsement of this
0:21:05steaming craze without,
0:21:07I feel like buy in from the larger org because the real full buy in way to do it
0:21:12would be, Oh, now on the setting screen,
0:21:14there's a place where you can customize every app icon or now on the setting
0:21:17screen,
0:21:17there's a themes section where you can download a theme packs from the theme
0:21:21store. Like we know how I full throated sort of endorsement of this thing would
0:21:25look from Apple, right? I mean,
0:21:28how they did the iMessage store and I'll use that like a theme store or a watch
0:21:31face store. Like we like, that's sort of the whole Apple buys in.
0:21:36This is the shortcut team is filled with developers who want to do the right
0:21:39thing. And so they have,
0:21:41so I'm still watching this space to see how much Apple is willing to
0:21:46embrace theming and customization on iOS.
0:21:49Because I can tell you on the Mac, aside from free, your accent colors,
0:21:54Apple has not fully endorsed theming and as mostly accidentally
0:21:59shut down every application on Mac OS 10,
0:22:03anyway,
0:22:03that has allowed some kind of theming from candy bar to shape shifter to all
0:22:07that other good stuff. It's not that they had it out for them.
0:22:10It's just that they never considered that an important use case.
0:22:12And they slowly semi accidentally semi on purpose broke it all until,
0:22:16until where we are today, where no one really tries to do anything.
0:22:19But iOS is going the other direction. So I'm still watching this space.
0:22:24Yeah. Didn't wasn't there, I don't know,
0:22:26like an iOS release or two ago a way that I think shortcuts could set like your
0:22:31lock screen or your, your, your wallpaper on your home screen.
0:22:34And then that like got pulled and then it came back and then it got pulled.
0:22:37And from the outside,
0:22:38it almost smelled like there was a cat and mouse going on between the, you know,
0:22:43former the shortcuts team. What was it called? Workflow.
0:22:48God, I just had a total blank, sorry.
0:22:50The former workflow now shortcuts team and the rest of the iOS team at Apple
0:22:55where, you know, a shortcut slash workflow was like, Oh yeah,
0:22:57we can totally make it so you can change your home screen and your lock screen.
0:23:00And then the rest of the iOS group was like, huh? What? No, no,
0:23:05no, no, no. And it just went back and forth a few times.
0:23:08I think it actually just came back recently, but yeah,
0:23:10it is interesting to see a group of developers that,
0:23:14that very much believed in the, you know,
0:23:16go fast and break things mantra and how they're dealing with the large, you know,
0:23:21aircraft carrier that is Apple.
0:23:23I don't think they're going fast and breaking things.
0:23:25They're just being as responsive as they would be as an independent company,
0:23:28which is more responsive than Apple is. And by the way,
0:23:31we're talking about teams being responsive. I will once again,
0:23:33make my pitch to anybody. Apple who is listening.
0:23:35There is a level of customization that iOS has allowed basically from day one,
0:23:39which is the ability to rearrange icons in your home screen.
0:23:41That interface continues to be a thorn in the world side. Please, please,
0:23:46somebody, because third party developers can't do this.
0:23:48If you let third party developers do it, it would be solved already,
0:23:50but you haven't, you're keeping it for yourself.
0:23:52So if you're going to keep it for yourself,
0:23:53please give us a way to rearrange home screens and icons in a way that does
0:23:58not drive us all up a wall and make us tear our hair out because the current
0:24:01system is really, really bad.
0:24:03And my home screens are a mess and I want to fix them and I can't please,
0:24:07please Apple do something about this. Yeah.
0:24:10I would like Apple to treat the home screen
0:24:15arrangement as more valuable data than they appear to treat it right now.
0:24:20Because right now I like, so you know, when I was going through, you know,
0:24:25COVID last two weeks,
0:24:26I decided I should add to my home screen a widget that can display the blood
0:24:31oxygen level from my Apple watch, whatever the last measurement was.
0:24:35I want that on a widget on my home screen so I can see it all the time.
0:24:37Well, that's a good idea. Yeah, thanks. I thought so too.
0:24:39And I did eventually find something that could do that. Um,
0:24:42let me plug it real fast. It's called health view.
0:24:45And it just displays like, you know, anything from health kit in a widget.
0:24:47And when I first, like, I don't know anybody, myself included,
0:24:51who has placed a widget on their home screen successfully without totally
0:24:57screwing up a million other icons in the process. Yeah.
0:25:01It's like setting off a bomb on your own screen. Yeah. And there is,
0:25:04not only is there no undo,
0:25:06but even if you just take whatever widget you had just bombed your home screen
0:25:10with and just move it to a different page,
0:25:12the icons don't go back to the way they were.
0:25:15They go back to some other like shuffled random order. It's really weird.
0:25:19It's literally like a bomb. It's like if you,
0:25:20if you set off a bomb and then you, then you remove the bomb,
0:25:23the bricks don't go back to where they are. They stay scattered to the four winds.
0:25:27Yeah. Like they just collapsed back inward in random orders. Like I,
0:25:30it's very strange. Like I had,
0:25:32I had to look back at a screenshot that I had taken of my home screen a few days
0:25:36earlier for other reasons. Like I had to look for that to know,
0:25:39how did I have these icons arranged again?
0:25:41That's the main reason I take screenshots of my home screen.
0:25:44By the way, sometimes people say, Oh, show us your old home screen.
0:25:47The only reason I have those is because they always take one if I'm smart before
0:25:51I start trying to rearrange because I know it's going to be chaos. Yeah.
0:25:54And it just, it seems like, it seems like maybe,
0:25:57maybe whoever works on springboard at Apple just by the nature of working on
0:26:02springboard, maybe they have such constant like, you know,
0:26:06disturbances in their icon arrangements as part of that job that they just don't
0:26:10realize how incredibly disruptive it is when it happens to most people.
0:26:15Cause like, I know I'll keep the same icon arrangement for a lot of stuff,
0:26:18like on my main home screen, I'll keep it for years.
0:26:20And when that gets disrupted, it like you,
0:26:24you can't find things where they are cause you,
0:26:26you're so used to the spatial memory of where things were. And so like,
0:26:29it's such a incredibly disruptive thing to have that be,
0:26:33be messed up in a big way. And I don't know how you can possibly install a
0:26:38widget on any home screen and not do that.
0:26:41It's I do hope that Apple realizes how,
0:26:46how bad this is sometime and actually improves that.
0:26:49To be clear, the app library stuff and being able to hide home screens,
0:26:52those are all good features. We're not saying get rid of those.
0:26:55You have to have those too.
0:26:57And also for the home screens that you want to actually have,
0:27:00you have to be able to arrange things in a sane way.
0:27:02I've been trying new techniques cause I've had to,
0:27:04I've been trying to work on my later home screens cause they're like,
0:27:07I said, my home screens are a mess and no technique I can find can get me
0:27:11sanity. Like I've been,
0:27:13I think the behavior has changed slightly recently because of what I've been
0:27:16doing.
0:27:17My main technique that I've used is the grab and hold and inflict with the other
0:27:19finger to scroll. So it's like a two handed technique rather than pushing to the
0:27:23screen edge, which is, you know, it's madness.
0:27:26You'll never be successful that way. Right?
0:27:27So you just grab one or more icons and then you swipe with the other finger
0:27:30quickly.
0:27:31The problem is no matter how fast you swipe momentarily,
0:27:35iOS thinks you're on one of the other home screens and when you're on there
0:27:39momentarily,
0:27:40it tends to eject other icons like subatomic particles in a particle collider.
0:27:45It ejects them outwards. Right. And you're like,
0:27:48but I'm just passing through. I'm on my way to page five. Right. I don't,
0:27:52I didn't want to disturb anything on page three, but I have.
0:27:55And the new thing that I think in the last two iOS versions or whatever is I'll
0:28:00get to page five, I'll find the place for it that I've, you know,
0:28:03it's like preparing the way with my fridge again.
0:28:04I will have prepared a spot for it. I'll get to page five,
0:28:07I'll land the icons if I'm lucky.
0:28:08Sometimes I'm unlucky and they just go somewhere and have no idea where. Um,
0:28:12but then I'll go back and I'll swipe backwards and I'll see that icons were
0:28:16ejected and somehow spawned a new page just for the ejected icons between what
0:28:21was page three and page four.
0:28:23And now there'll be a page with one or two icons on it. I'm like,
0:28:26where did you come from? And I'll look to either side.
0:28:29And sometimes either side is filled with icons. Like how is that possible?
0:28:32Where did these come from? And how did you make a new page for yourself?
0:28:35I was just passing through and I thought I successfully landed those two icons
0:28:39on page five, but now I have an extra page with two icons on it. It's the worst.
0:28:43It's getting worse. Like it's before it used to be, Oh, well like, you know,
0:28:47I keep going from one edge to the other and it squirms out of the way and yada,
0:28:49yada, but at least it was somewhat sensible.
0:28:51Like there was just a big linear list that like a big snake and you just push
0:28:53things, but now they spawn their own pages.
0:28:56This like we need an interface to do this. That is not that a,
0:29:01is undoable slash like sort of rearrange and then commit, right?
0:29:05And then B provides a richer interface than our
0:29:11fingers on the phone screen. If we could do it on a Mac,
0:29:14if we could do it on an iPad,
0:29:15or if we could do it on a phone and miniaturize size in a sort of trial mode
0:29:19where you're just in this app that lets you rearrange home screens.
0:29:21And only when you get it all the way you want,
0:29:23do you say commit or you just bail and say, well,
0:29:25nevermind or you leave it in progress or whatever. But like, like I said,
0:29:28if this, if there was an API for doing this,
0:29:30which I'm not really asking for this is a tall order for an API.
0:29:33All I'm saying if there was a third party API for home screen management,
0:29:36this problem will be solved a hundred ways because it's, you know,
0:29:39third parties would make money doing it because there's a need and people want
0:29:42to do it. And we're just mythos proof that there's an appetite for this type of
0:29:45thing, but there's no third party API. Fine. It makes sense.
0:29:47It should be a first party thing. Apple just do a better job at it.
0:29:50That's all we're asking for.
0:29:52You know, it's funny because just a couple of days ago I was talking to my dad
0:29:56and he said, you know, can you still arrange your home screen and iTunes?
0:30:00And I was like, well, it's not iTunes anymore. It's music. And no,
0:30:03I don't think so. And you can't do it in the finder either. I don't believe.
0:30:06In fact, I don't think that's been a thing for years.
0:30:08You can do it in the Apple configurator too.
0:30:10Supposedly I've tried took a run at it a few times and I this,
0:30:14I think there's a way to do it,
0:30:16but I think you kind of have to pretend that you're managing a bunch of people's
0:30:19corporate iOS devices or something like it's, it was scary enough that I bailed
0:30:23out every time I took a run at it. But before people send us his feedback,
0:30:27apparently there is a way to use Apple configurator to, to somehow do this.
0:30:30And Apple configurator too is an app that you run on your Mac.
0:30:32So maybe there's a better, easier way to do it.
0:30:35But iTunes was the best solution we've had so far.
0:30:38And even that wasn't great because you would think that, Oh,
0:30:41you've got a Mac screen and this huge, you know, huge iTunes window. Surely,
0:30:45you can make this easy with a mouse cursor or whatever.
0:30:48It was still weird and hard. It wasn't a good interface. If again,
0:30:51if this was a third party API, there would the third part,
0:30:54many people would make third party apps and the good ones would float to the top.
0:30:57Instead, we just got the one implementation iTunes,
0:30:59which was better than nothing.
0:31:00Like that's why your dad was asking for it because it was better than just
0:31:03trying to do with your finger, but it still wasn't good.
0:31:05Then finally, one very quick piece of followup.
0:31:07I was lamenting last week about GitHub's relationship with the U S immigration
0:31:12and customs enforcement.
0:31:14And it was pointed out to me that that isn't a direct relationship.
0:31:18So what happened was a GitHub, or I'm sorry,
0:31:21a third party reseller sold an on premises GitHub enterprise server,
0:31:26like instance contract, whatever on behalf of GitHub.
0:31:30But GitHub like didn't seek this business themselves.
0:31:32There is a third party in between the two.
0:31:34It doesn't make me feel that much better about it personally,
0:31:37but you may have a different interpretation of it. And I will put it.
0:31:39It's like money laundering for morals.
0:31:41So I'll put a link in the show notes to their response about this,
0:31:46which was from a late last, actually almost exactly a year ago.
0:31:50So you can check it out if you're interested.
0:31:52Also, I wanted to give a quick shout out to this wonderful. So, okay.
0:31:56Earlier this evening, uh,
0:31:58I had discovered throughout all of my new device setups that for the first time
0:32:03ever, I had a sync problem with my contacts database.
0:32:06For the first time ever,
0:32:08I all of a sudden had duplicates of every single contact in my address book.
0:32:13And I had heard Merlin talk about this before and back to work.
0:32:17So I knew there were like apps out there that would help you find and clean up
0:32:20duplicates. So I asked you in a Slack group, um, you know,
0:32:24what these apps were called and what a good one was. And somebody who,
0:32:27who knows a bit about Mac OS named, uh, John Surakusa
0:32:32said,
0:32:33did you try the menu command in the contact app to de duplicate?
0:32:38I didn't even know this was here. John, when was this added?
0:32:41It's been there for a long time. I asked that timidly,
0:32:44cause a lot of people have contact problems and sometimes that D dupe command
0:32:49doesn't do the job. And the reason they're asking is, Hey,
0:32:52I tried the builtin D dupe command and it couldn't, it couldn't do what I wanted.
0:32:55So now give me the third party like power app or whatever.
0:32:57And I was hoping that maybe you didn't even know that was in there, but yeah,
0:33:00it's been in there for awhile. I've used it a lot.
0:33:03It's pretty good. Um, if you have a straight up duplication,
0:33:07it will handle it. If instead you've done,
0:33:10like I've done several times where you import a bunch of V cards that are from
0:33:13an old backup or something and it really takes a little bit of doing,
0:33:16it's a good first step. Um, I think it's been in there for many, many years,
0:33:21but I couldn't pin it down to a particular release.
0:33:22So this is under the card menu. So in the contacts app card menu,
0:33:26look for duplicates. And it also had a feature,
0:33:29which is a great little thing that I frequently need where if it has a,
0:33:35if it has two names, you can have it optionally like merge the info.
0:33:39Whenever it sees the same name in two different records.
0:33:41And this happens all the time because of a relatively terrible design decision
0:33:46in the messages app where you, and I think,
0:33:50I think you see this a few other places like phone and stuff where you,
0:33:54you get something from a new number and it gives you the option,
0:33:57create a new contact or add to existing contact.
0:34:01And the problem is, does anybody else face this problem?
0:34:04I face this constantly. I never know. Do I have a contact for this person yet?
0:34:09And so what I want is a name search box that I can type in their name and see
0:34:14whether I have a contact for them yet.
0:34:18And then if I do add this number to it and if I don't create a new one and the
0:34:23interface doesn't let you do that, it just create new or add to existing.
0:34:27And if you change your mind,
0:34:29you got to like cancel out of that screen and then like rebuild the entire
0:34:32sequence of taps or commands that got you there.
0:34:34So I frequently would have like, you know,
0:34:38two contacts with the same name that are the same person,
0:34:41but one of them has an email address and one of them has a phone number.
0:34:43And this command also fixes that. And I had some good luck with that as well.
0:34:48So I ran this earlier tonight. I fixed my entire problem and yeah, thanks.
0:34:51Contacts app in apparently Mavericks when this started.
0:34:55That was a very good feature.
0:34:56So the cynical message that I didn't write in the Slack to follow up is,
0:35:00uh, and now enjoy doing that at least once a week for the rest of your life.
0:35:03Because here's the thing, where did the duplicates come from?
0:35:07Like you didn't make two of all your contacts.
0:35:09Somehow they just appeared and not knowing why they appeared,
0:35:12the fact that you can fix them, you're like, Oh great, I've solved that problem.
0:35:15But then tomorrow you wake up and you have to all your contacts again.
0:35:18And then you do find duplicates and fix it.
0:35:20And then next week you see a do all your God. And so it's like,
0:35:23I hope that doesn't happen to you. But like, but that is one of the sort of,
0:35:26you know, when sync goes wrong and you don't know why,
0:35:29it's great to be able to fix it in an automated way,
0:35:32but it's still sort of shakes the foundation of your confidence in the,
0:35:36in the system. Like how did this happen? And will it happen again?
0:35:40Yeah, that's what I was so surprised to see it because really like the basics
0:35:44of iCloud syncing, the, you know, contacts, calendars,
0:35:48like that kind of stuff has always worked very well for me.
0:35:51And I've heard of other people having issues. I've always,
0:35:54I'm like a contact syncing unicorn, never had any problems.
0:35:57And the amount of devices that I set up and,
0:36:01and delete and you know,
0:36:02and go through is higher than average.
0:36:05And I've carried the same database through a much longer time span than probably
0:36:10the average customer.
0:36:10And so to have gone this long without having any sync hiccups at all,
0:36:15I consider that a win. And when this happened, I was like, yeah,
0:36:19of course this is going to happen. Like if this happens once in,
0:36:21what is it in 15 years? Fine. That's, that's like mice or cockroaches.
0:36:26Yeah. You don't just see one of them. Here's the speaking of your database.
0:36:29You see one. It's okay. If you see more than one, you're screwed.
0:36:32If you see one, there's a hundred, you don't see that's the whole thing. Um,
0:36:36speaking of database,
0:36:37have you made a backup of your contacts database recently slash ever? Yes.
0:36:41Right before I did the deduping,
0:36:43I did the export to the big contact archive thing.
0:36:45That's a thing I would recommend people do anytime they find themselves diving
0:36:50into the contacts app on their Mac.
0:36:51Cause they're really gonna get some stuff straight.
0:36:53Like say before doing your holiday cards, you're like, okay,
0:36:56I'm going in and I'm gonna,
0:36:57I'm gonna straighten out my addresses cause a bunch of people moved and yada,
0:37:00yada stop.
0:37:02Before you start getting in there and digging around,
0:37:04make a complete backup of your contacts database.
0:37:07The contacts app has a command to do this inside of it, uh,
0:37:11and make a backup of it and don't just call it contacts backup,
0:37:14put the date in the name,
0:37:15put it in a folder somewhere and have multiple contacts backups.
0:37:18So then if you do get bitten by an evil, you know,
0:37:22contacts bug that keeps duplicating your things, you can always go scorched.
0:37:25Or the beauty of contacts, unlike photos and other data that is really big,
0:37:29contacts are relatively small.
0:37:31You can make a complete backup of them and say, forget it. I give up,
0:37:35wipe all your contacts, delete everything, and then just restore again,
0:37:39from within the contacts app,
0:37:40restore from your backup and get back to hopefully a good starting point.
0:37:43Even doing that can be difficult because to really delete all of your contacts is
0:37:47that surprisingly tricky because you'd have to delete it and allow the deletion
0:37:50to sync to all your devices and make sure there's not one poison device screwing
0:37:53everything up somewhere. And then when you're confident, okay,
0:37:57the only contact in there is the me contact,
0:37:59which is another tricky thing you've got to deal with.
0:38:01How do you set up the me contact right now? I'm good.
0:38:04Then you could restore from your backup, but if you don't have a backup,
0:38:06you're kind of out of luck.
0:38:07So please everybody make a backup of your contacts before you start screwing
0:38:10with them.
0:38:11Also, if you use the, um, you know, file export contacts, archive, uh,
0:38:15version of this, it puts the date in the file name for you in the box.
0:38:20So you don't even have to type in the date. It's right there.
0:38:22Look at that there. I don't know when they started doing that,
0:38:24but that's convenient. That's exactly what you want.
0:38:26We are sponsored this week by flat file, the easy,
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0:40:05Okay. So for the last couple of weeks, if you've heard the bootleg,
0:40:12which is our, you know, no holds barred, immediately released,
0:40:16not that great sound quality, no ads,
0:40:18but you get to hear all the garbage version of the show. I'm selling it super.
0:40:22Really selling it.
0:40:23Yeah. You can,
0:40:24you can join us and listening to the bootleg or a ad free but nicely edited
0:40:29version of the show by going to ATP dot FM slash join.
0:40:33And for those of you who have already joined, thank you.
0:40:35You've heard me trying desperately to bring up a topic for like two or three
0:40:40weeks running that underscore my name is T said in the chat a couple of weeks
0:40:44ago and they said after show requests for the week after next, which again,
0:40:48it's like two or three weeks ago now, uh, two ends,
0:40:50two Wednesday's from the time this was written is the 10th anniversary of the
0:40:53first build and analyze episode.
0:40:55It'd be great to hear some reflections on 10 years of podcasting,
0:40:57how it's changed, what surprised you, et cetera.
0:41:00I am so desperate to hear this,
0:41:03not because I really have anything to contribute,
0:41:05because I really want to hear what you guys have to say about this as the elder
0:41:10statement statesmen of the three of us. You know,
0:41:12what has podcasting been like for you for 10 years?
0:41:16And since we started with build and analyze in this question,
0:41:18let's start with Marco.
0:41:19Well, first of all,
0:41:20you do have a lot to contribute to this because this show is what,
0:41:23seven years old.
0:41:24That's a good point. I always, I feel like almost eight. Exactly.
0:41:27It's like seven and a half years old. So you know, it really,
0:41:32you have been here for most of this time.
0:41:34You also were listening for this whole time. That's true too. So,
0:41:39so you do have things that you should add to this.
0:41:41So I am going to put you on the spot and have you add stuff to this later as
0:41:44well. But I honestly, I, you know,
0:41:47I don't have a lot to say about this right now. You know,
0:41:51it's in many ways what we do as the,
0:41:56the kind of podcasters we are, which that's a big asterisk,
0:41:59but the kind of podcasters we are in many ways,
0:42:02what we do hasn't really changed much during this time. You know,
0:42:05we have our handful of totally non diverse white men,
0:42:11talking with each other for a couple hours each week,
0:42:15unscripted, you know, this, you know, we have like an outline of topics,
0:42:18but we don't like script things that we're going to say. It's real.
0:42:22It's a very,
0:42:23very high quality implementation of very low production value.
0:42:28So like if that makes sense,
0:42:30like we try to sound as good as we can with sound quality and we put it in some
0:42:35niceties that we didn't used to do things like chapter markers and you know,
0:42:39we have our, our ad free members version as case we're just talking about and
0:42:42stuff like that. It's like we have like production values in that sense. We,
0:42:46you know, we do detailed show notes for each episode.
0:42:49We do a little description.
0:42:50So like the experience in a podcast app is pretty rich.
0:42:53Our website exists and is functional. And so, you know,
0:42:56it remains a product in our lineup. Yeah, no, but like there's,
0:43:00there's permalink pages for each episode. That's not a given for podcasts.
0:43:04Trust me, I know I make, I maintain an index of podcasts.
0:43:07Like that's far from a given. You know,
0:43:09our podcast is easily shareable because we don't do dynamic ad insertion and so
0:43:14our timestamps matter and are stable. And so stuff like that. So like we,
0:43:18we have a lot of production value on that side of things,
0:43:21but we are not doing like a music bed under every segment and having scripted
0:43:26segments and interviews where we go out on scene and talk to a person in Iowa
0:43:32whenever, like we don't,
0:43:33we don't do stuff like that the way like high production podcasts do.
0:43:37Cause that's just a different style of show.
0:43:39It requires a totally different skill set and a staff and everything else that
0:43:43this is not what we do.
0:43:44But what we do is a really good version of people talking to each other
0:43:50unscripted about computers and Apple news each week and funded by a few
0:43:56statically baked in host red ads spread throughout the episode.
0:44:02And that basic format, we've been doing that for pretty much 10 years. You know,
0:44:07we've refined the format over time,
0:44:09but that basic thing we've been doing for pretty much the whole time and that
0:44:14existed before us.
0:44:15And there is no sign of that stopping anytime soon in the future either.
0:44:20But that's,
0:44:24that's just what we do in our little corner of podcasting.
0:44:26What has mostly changed in the last 10 years is that while this is a very
0:44:33different world, while this version of podcasting has definitely grown,
0:44:37the rest of the podcasting world became way bigger and went in some pretty
0:44:43different directions.
0:44:43So our version of podcasting became a much smaller proportion of the podcasting
0:44:48world as a whole. And some of this is great. You know, some of this,
0:44:51I mentioned our diversity issues earlier as podcasting has gotten bigger,
0:44:56diversity has dramatically improved and thank God it needed to,
0:44:59it still needs to,
0:45:00we're still nowhere near like being a representative sample of the world's
0:45:04population, not even close.
0:45:06But it is way better than it used to be and we're making progress in that area.
0:45:10So that's good.
0:45:11There are other areas of where podcasting has gone that might not be so great
0:45:16for us. You know,
0:45:19things like as the big money platforms move in and start locking stuff down and
0:45:24making all these like exclusivity deals that take people out of podcasting and
0:45:29lock their stuff into a certain app or something like that's, that's not great.
0:45:33Like that, that actively threatens the world that we're in.
0:45:36Not as much as people think, but it does threaten it. And also, you know,
0:45:40I mentioned earlier that we are funded as we've been this entire time,
0:45:44mostly by the sponsor reads that are in each episode.
0:45:47And if the sponsor landscape dramatically changes in some way,
0:45:52that could affect us too. So even if like the big business side of podcasting,
0:45:59you know,
0:45:59most of the time we can kind of coexist and we don't get any shutters away and
0:46:03what they do is over there and we do is over here and it's fine.
0:46:05But if they cause major changes to happen in the sponsor landscape,
0:46:11that could affect us.
0:46:13So that could be things like if all sponsors start requiring way more tracking
0:46:18data than what we give them, you know, so far we have had to turn away,
0:46:24I think one or two sponsors ever because we don't do demographic tracking.
0:46:29But everyone else and they've required it and everyone else is like,
0:46:33they ask and we say, we don't do that. And they say, okay.
0:46:35And they just, they buy that anyway. Right.
0:46:38We should tell you something about the value of demographic tracking. Anyway,
0:46:41the, but like,
0:46:44if the sponsor landscape shifts around in bigger ways where sponsors start
0:46:49requiring for all the shows they sponsor the same kind of data or other things
0:46:58that they get from like the really,
0:46:59really big shows with their dynamic ad insertion platforms and like micro
0:47:03targeting and tracking and all that stuff,
0:47:05then that would affect us in a negative way.
0:47:08But for the most part as the big world of podcasting has grown,
0:47:13most of the way it is ways that it grows is just in having some really big shows.
0:47:19And if a show is really big, that doesn't really negatively affect us, you know,
0:47:25in almost any possible way. Again,
0:47:27these kind of like macroeconomic factors could affect us, but they, so far,
0:47:31they mostly haven't. So it's been overall good for us.
0:47:35But interestingly, like the thing that we do,
0:47:38like the kind of shows that we make, the kind of shows I listened to, frankly,
0:47:43are mostly the same as they were 10 years ago. There's just,
0:47:47there's more of them. There, there are more people in this world than there were.
0:47:51Back then there are more listeners in this world.
0:47:54The shows have all gotten better.
0:47:55Like we've gotten better at doing this format and we've gotten just better at our
0:47:58jobs and the equipment has gotten better. The software has gotten better. Our,
0:48:02you know, our techniques and, and you know, that, that's all gotten better.
0:48:06And hopefully we've gotten a little bit wiser in a decade.
0:48:09But for the most part, the,
0:48:15the core of what we do here is
0:48:20basically the same but better now. And, and you know,
0:48:2410 years is a long time. I think it's a lot better. But overall,
0:48:28we're still, you know,
0:48:30hanging out talking with our friends once a week for a couple hours about
0:48:33technology and Apple stuff. And I love that.
0:48:36And I'm in no rush to change or stop that.
0:48:39Because I still can't believe that like we get paid to do this.
0:48:44Like that's, that's incredible to me. It's still incredible to me.
0:48:48I said this before, so I won't go too far, too far into it,
0:48:49but like I'm not even a good speaker. I've never been a good speaker.
0:48:55I don't pronounce words right. And I stutter constantly.
0:48:59And I don't plan what I'm saying. And I say, uh, or um, and like,
0:49:02and constantly I know this cause I'm, I'm the editor of the show.
0:49:06You would think like, you know,
0:49:09I did used to think before podcasting that like I could never get a job as like,
0:49:13like one of my like kid fantasy jobs was I wanted to be a radio DJ,
0:49:17but I thought, well, I don't have the voice for it. I don't,
0:49:20I don't speak well enough.
0:49:21I don't have that kind of like low nineties radio DJ voice,
0:49:23like all that stuff. So I figured, yeah, you know what? That's,
0:49:25I guess I won't ever be able to do that.
0:49:26It turns out being a radio DJ is a terrible job in practice and being a
0:49:32podcaster is an awesome job in practice. And yeah,
0:49:35I could never be a radio DJ. I'm not, I don't have the right traits to do that,
0:49:39but I do apparently have the right traits to stumble into this.
0:49:43Because the world of podcasting is different and more forgiving and more human
0:49:48and less of that like polished, you know,
0:49:51eighties artificial perfection kind of, kind of image. And so this,
0:49:55like this I can do and it still shocks me that I can do this,
0:50:00but you know, now like it's been 10 years and after this long,
0:50:05like I'm not,
0:50:05I used to be nervous before every single show for probably the first six or
0:50:09seven years that's finally stopped. But yeah, otherwise like I,
0:50:14I'm just very happy with what we do. I'm,
0:50:18I'm incredibly happy that people still tune in and listen to this stuff because
0:50:23to me it's just BSing with my friends about tech that we would have been talking
0:50:26about anyway.
0:50:26But we just happened to record it and do it in a more slightly more structured
0:50:30way. And and that, you know,
0:50:33that's how we started back then and that's still what we're doing now.
0:50:37So I'm just really happy that we've kind of found our groove and that this is a
0:50:42thing that continues to exist and that podcasting for,
0:50:47for all of the effort that has been thrown at trying to ruin it.
0:50:51No one has succeeded at ruining it. And I think it's,
0:50:55I think it's proven to be pretty resilient to being ruined by many things about
0:51:00its nature that are likely to stay that way for, for a while longer at least.
0:51:04I hope so. Yeah. So far, I mean, you know, back when I started,
0:51:08I wasn't as much in the business. I, you know,
0:51:11I didn't make overcast until almost halfway through this period.
0:51:16So, you know, I was only a podcaster before that.
0:51:19I wasn't a podcast app maker for the whole time. So, you know,
0:51:24that kind of changed my, my view of it in certain ways. But overall,
0:51:28I just, I still love this world. I still like back when I,
0:51:32when I announced overcast at XOXO, I think there was like 2013 or something.
0:51:37I gave this comparison in my presentation about how like, you know,
0:51:42the world of text on the web and big text was a world that I kind of was turned
0:51:47off by.
0:51:48But the world of big podcasting was just like everything I liked. It was,
0:51:52it was all like good technology, good people, great audiences.
0:51:57And I just, I loved how the world of podcasting worked.
0:52:01And that was almost seven years ago now. Actually,
0:52:05I might've been exactly seven years ago. And that's still the case.
0:52:09Like I still look around the web and I still look at like the world of text on
0:52:14the web, you know, all the big media articles and everything.
0:52:18And I don't want to be a part of that world.
0:52:22I was for a long time and it's,
0:52:24it really took some bad turns over the, over these years. And it's not,
0:52:30it's not a good place for a lot of people to be anymore.
0:52:33Some people can still make, make a good time out of it,
0:52:35but it's certainly not what it was.
0:52:39Podcasting seems to just still be getting better. And you know,
0:52:42as all this big money has moved in, it's certainly, you know,
0:52:45there have been a little bit of kind of uneasy times here and there where we're
0:52:49not like we see some massive amount of money being spent to try to ruin it.
0:52:53And it's, you know, it's hard not to feel a little bit scared when that happens.
0:52:56But so far like the,
0:52:58those attempts mostly just bounce off of us or they are a bunch of the big shows
0:53:03and the big ad networks and the big hosting platforms that host the big shows
0:53:08with the big ad networks all like buying each other and doing things that affect
0:53:13each other, but that don't affect us over here.
0:53:16So as long as that dynamic continues to be the case, I'm,
0:53:19I'm very optimistic and I love the world of podcasts and I, uh,
0:53:22I'm very happy to be in it all this time and I'd like to stay here.
0:53:26Concur. You know, I really want to hear what John has to say, but just briefly,
0:53:31you know, I was looking as we record,
0:53:34I get a pretty solid first draft of the show notes together and Marco will,
0:53:38you know, edit things here and there.
0:53:40And John will add things here and there and edit things occasionally.
0:53:43But I was looking at the,
0:53:45to get the link for the XOXO video that you just mentioned and you know,
0:53:49I found it pretty quickly and I'm looking at this and it says, you know,
0:53:53Marco Arment, the magazine slash Instapaper.
0:53:56When he asked New York writer and programmer Marco Arment to speak at XOXO,
0:53:59he was still developing Instapaper in the magazine and Tumblr was an independent
0:54:02startup. Since then,
0:54:03he sold the magazine to Glenn Fleischman Instapaper to Betaworks and Tumblr sold
0:54:06to Yahoo and a billion dollar deal.
0:54:08One of the best parts of independence is choosing what you work on.
0:54:11And Marco's clearing his plate for something brand new.
0:54:13It's funny to me that I'll read this and the magazine was like 30 years ago,
0:54:18but ATP started last year. Like that's the way I feel. You know what I mean?
0:54:24Like the magazine was so long ago to me.
0:54:27It was forever ago and yes, conceptually, intellectually,
0:54:31I understand that ATP was seven, you know, we started almost eight years ago now,
0:54:35but it doesn't feel like it's been almost eight years,
0:54:38which hopefully is a testament to the two of you and our awesome, you know,
0:54:42our awesome listeners. But nevertheless,
0:54:44it's just it's so funny how one thing can feel forever ago and another feels
0:54:48like it was just yesterday. But anyway, John,
0:54:50what are your thoughts on this as the other elder statesman?
0:54:53Like when you need to,
0:54:54I need to plan more surprise segments in the show to make Marco feel nervous
0:54:58before we record again. I'm going to get back that nervous energy. Why?
0:55:02You shouldn't be coming into the show complacent.
0:55:03You don't know what's going to happen. Anything can happen.
0:55:05You got to stop pre-flighting before we record.
0:55:07It's time for Marco to get nervous again.
0:55:09Yeah, I think, yeah,
0:55:11I think Marco covered most of the industry stuff pretty well.
0:55:14And I think I got most of the navel gazing/back padding out in the episode 400
0:55:19spectacular. So the only thing I'll add here is,
0:55:23some personal reflections on 10 years of podcasting.
0:55:26Did I start hypercritical or maybe I started on the incomparable before
0:55:31hypercritical. I don't remember. Like this is where you keep good records.
0:55:35Cause no one else cares about it. Someone says, when did you start podcasting?
0:55:38Honestly, I don't know. Like I can,
0:55:40I can look it up and I can think I can determine that.
0:55:42I think I was on the incomparable before the first episode of hypercritical,
0:55:45but I might've been on another ad hoc podcast with episode with Dan Benjamin
0:55:50before that.
0:55:51You were probably on his interview show.
0:55:53Yeah. What was that called? I forgot. Yeah. I don't know. We're all,
0:55:57we're all too old. But all I'm saying is,
0:55:59I think I started podcasting around the same time as Marco. So here, you know,
0:56:03so I've been podcasting for a similar amount of time.
0:56:06And the reason I am reflecting on this, I think about how,
0:56:12how did I get into podcasting? Cause I had been, you know,
0:56:14I've been a programmer since I left school since even before I left school.
0:56:18That's been my profession. I still do it professionally.
0:56:20And I had been, you know,
0:56:24in the sort of Mac web world from the Usenet groups to eventual websites and web
0:56:30forums. And eventually I started writing for Ars Technica and did all the Mac OS
0:56:3410 reviews. So I was, you know, I was in the tech world as well.
0:56:37So I was a programmer and did tech writing, but podcasting,
0:56:42it's another thing I can't really remember.
0:56:44The first podcast I remember listening to though,
0:56:45the first one that had made an impression on me was a Merle Aphrodis podcast
0:56:49called I Should Be Writing.
0:56:51As the tagline of the show went back when I started listening to it,
0:56:57it was a podcast for wannabe fiction writers by a wannabe fiction writer.
0:57:02At the time, Merle Aphrodis wanted to be a fiction writer and she was trying,
0:57:06and she made a podcast where it was literally just her and a microphone.
0:57:11And that was it. No music beds, no intro music, no theme song,
0:57:17just Merle Aphrodis and a microphone.
0:57:19And she would talk about the struggles of being a writer,
0:57:24different things about being a writer, how to plan your stories, you know,
0:57:27what to work on in your writing, the value of writer's workshops,
0:57:30how to try to get an agent. And, you know,
0:57:32she wasn't coming as an expert because she was a wannabe fiction writer.
0:57:36She was working through these things in real time and podcasting about them.
0:57:39Eventually the show tagline had to change because she became a published author.
0:57:43She just kept doing the podcast, so on and so forth. But anyway,
0:57:46I would listen to her in the car as an alternative to listening to NPR or
0:57:50whatever I was listening to on my radio because, you know, I had music,
0:57:54I think I had music on my iPod at this point, but I, you know,
0:57:57my cars didn't have Bluetooth and so it was kind of hard to hook up.
0:57:59So I would listen to NPR.
0:58:00And when I didn't want to listen to that say during pledge week or whatever
0:58:03pledge month, pledge decade, I was listening to, I should be writing.
0:58:07I didn't want to be a fiction writer particularly, you know,
0:58:09I enjoyed writing and I enjoyed hearing people talk about it,
0:58:12but I just love listening to her talk about, I mean,
0:58:15she's got a great voice for podcasts. It's very calming. It's very soothing.
0:58:18She's, she was, you know, very sort of, uh,
0:58:23thoughtful, uh, and, you know,
0:58:26spoke about writing with a lot of feeling, uh, but with, you know,
0:58:31a lot of good insights and, uh,
0:58:33what sounded to me like good advice for all I knew about, about fiction writing.
0:58:38Um, and so that was one aspect of it. And the second one was at this time,
0:58:42I was going into the office like we all used to and working as a programmer.
0:58:46And we, we had like, this was one of the smaller companies I was at.
0:58:49There's like maybe one or 200 people by the end and started off significantly
0:58:54smaller. And we had a lunch room and we'd all sit at the lunch table and eat,
0:58:57whatever we packed as our lunch and just hang out and talk about things.
0:59:00And inevitably we ended up talking about,
0:59:02I'd talk with my friends about tech stuff. If we talk about anything,
0:59:05it was a lot like a lunch room at school where maybe if you sat with your nerdy
0:59:10friends, you got to talk about like D and D or cars or baseball or whatever it
0:59:14was you were nerdy about. But if you were at a more sort of, you know,
0:59:18general audience table, like on a field trip or something,
0:59:20you just talk about whatever anyone wants to talk about.
0:59:22And we'd have great conversations at this table about stuff like this.
0:59:26And as you can imagine me being a big blabbermouth from hearing me on this
0:59:29podcast,
0:59:30sometimes I'd go off on a big rant about something and it doesn't take much,
0:59:33you know,
0:59:33it can be about refrigerators or computers or pizza or bagels or like,
0:59:38you know, whatever it would be.
0:59:39And sometimes I'd go off on one of those and I'd see that I had a little
0:59:44audience of people who was listening to me do this.
0:59:48And then I would quickly shut up because I would be embarrassed or whatever.
0:59:50But I did take note that occasionally I could entertain an audience with the
0:59:55thing that I do that I now do on podcasts. So these two things combined, Hey,
1:00:00I like listening to Merle Lafferty talk about a topic that I'm not even that
1:00:04interested in just because I find it entertaining and soothing and interesting.
1:00:09Right. Uh,
1:00:11and also I have things that I can talk about.
1:00:14I'm writing articles on Ars Technica and people are reading those.
1:00:17And I know a lot about a couple of specific tech topics.
1:00:21Maybe I could combine those two things.
1:00:23And it was a certain point where for doing both these things combining,
1:00:26I said,
1:00:27I think podcasting is a thing I might be able to do, right?
1:00:31Because I'd heard people podcasting and I'd had experiences in real life where
1:00:35occasionally people would be entertained by me talking about things.
1:00:39And so that sort of culminated in, you know, however it happened,
1:00:43that it probably knowing me,
1:00:44what probably happened is Dan Benjamin probably reached out to me and said, Hey,
1:00:47do you want to be in a podcast? Because like so many things in my life,
1:00:50I need to be dragged kicking and screaming into things that are good for me.
1:00:53Right. So I've always been very bad about sort of putting myself forward.
1:00:57How it happened in Ars Technica.
1:00:58I don't think I've told the story a million times or not,
1:01:01but like I was active in the Ars Technica forums and Ken Fisher,
1:01:05who founded Ars Technica, reached out to me and said, Hey,
1:01:08would you like to write something for Ars Technica?
1:01:10I didn't go banging on his door and say, I want to write articles for Ars Technica.
1:01:14Every almost everything is good to happen to me.
1:01:16All I have is that because someone else has dragged me into it,
1:01:18which is why anyway, that's, that's just the way I am. I'm sorry.
1:01:22I'm assuming that's what happened with podcasting as well.
1:01:25But at that point I was primed to jump on that because I had already been
1:01:28thinking about the idea that I think podcasting could be a thing that I could
1:01:33do. And sure enough, 10 years later,
1:01:36it seems like it is a thing that I'm glad I did.
1:01:39Even if I had to be dragged into a kicking and screaming,
1:01:41not really kicking and screaming, but I had to be,
1:01:43I had to be like a vampire. I had to be invited in. Let's just put it that way.
1:01:46And now I'm here and you can't get rid of me.
1:01:50It's funny how different and yet similar all three of our paths into this were.
1:01:55You know, for me, I didn't, I had been aware of podcasting,
1:02:01but I don't think I'd ever listened to a podcast until this friend of mine from
1:02:06when I was a child, literally a child,
1:02:09who I think I had started to talk to again around this time.
1:02:13But this guy, his name was Marco Arment,
1:02:15and he started this podcast called Build and Analyze. And I thought, well,
1:02:18you know, I know I knew Marco and I'm getting to know him at this point. Again,
1:02:22I forget where this was in our like a grand reintroduction to each other,
1:02:27but I believe I was instant messaging my friend Blista.
1:02:30How can we forget? Um, but, uh,
1:02:35one way or another, you know, this was around the time that Marco and I,
1:02:38you know,
1:02:38cause we were as close as two kids who saw each other once a year could be,
1:02:42you know, when we were like 10 and then, you know, and not in an angry way,
1:02:46we just fell out of contact for a long time.
1:02:47And then around this time we started to talk again. Again,
1:02:51I don't remember if we were talking already and then build and analyze started
1:02:53or if, you know,
1:02:54build and analyze was what spurred me into reaching out or whatever the case
1:02:58may be. Maybe it was Marco that reached out. I don't know. But point is, you know,
1:03:00we were, we were getting to know each other again in the sky, Marco Arment,
1:03:03he was like, no, he's a friend, you know, he's doing a podcast.
1:03:05I should check that out. And he does the same sort of work that I do for a living,
1:03:09you know, in a different environment. You know,
1:03:11I was all in on the windows stuff at the time, but you know,
1:03:14it's still writing code so I should check that out. And you know,
1:03:17as so many people have said to us, you know,
1:03:19once you start listening to build and analyze, you know,
1:03:21Marco's constantly name dropping hypercritical.
1:03:23And then once you start listening to hypercritical,
1:03:25you get constant name drops of the talk show.
1:03:27And so it does not take long before every waking minute of your day is spent
1:03:32listening to other people talk. And then, you know,
1:03:36I would listen to the show to build and analyze.
1:03:39I would listen live and I would be one of the jackals in the chat room.
1:03:41And I remember even though Marco and I are friends and were at the time,
1:03:45you know, every great once in a while he would mention my name or,
1:03:47or even more impressively because I didn't know him,
1:03:49John would mention my name and my,
1:03:51my freaking heart would beat out of my chest. Cause like, Oh my God, Oh my God,
1:03:55Oh my God. They, they know I exist. Like Mario, of course, Marco knows I exist.
1:03:58Like we're friends. But nevertheless, when you hear it in the context of the show,
1:04:01it's like, Oh my God, what's happening? And, uh, and so that was, you know,
1:04:05circa 2010, 2011, something like that. And then I guess it was the end of 2012,
1:04:10or thereabouts when I started needling Marco about doing a car show with me.
1:04:13And I've told the story several times before, probably on this very program.
1:04:16But you know, Marco had the genuinely brilliant idea of saying, well, you know,
1:04:20I stopped building analyze and you know,
1:04:23John Syracuse had just stopped hypercritical and he likes car stuff.
1:04:28I wonder if the three of us could do something together. And,
1:04:31and that's when neutral started and I still stand by neutral.
1:04:35It was a disaster, but it was a beautiful, beautiful,
1:04:37beautiful disaster and I loved it so much. And, and again, Marco,
1:04:41in a stroke of brilliance realized, well,
1:04:44when we stopped recording neutral and just started goofing off about the things
1:04:48that, you know, allegedly we weren't there to talk about,
1:04:51which always ended up being nerdy tech stuff. Well, Marco put,
1:04:54what was it on sound cloud? The first few episodes went up. Is that right?
1:04:57Yeah.
1:04:58And then it turns out that we actually know things about technology and don't
1:05:02really know squat about cars and you know, fast forward a couple of years,
1:05:06three, four years and suddenly this is my job. Like it's, it's,
1:05:09it's utterly bananas.
1:05:11The path that I have taken from being one of those people in the chat room just
1:05:16trying to get noticed. And I mean that both in a self deprecating and also a
1:05:20literal way. Um, but now, you know, I'm,
1:05:23I'm hosting what I like to think of at least for our, you know, little pond,
1:05:26a relatively popular and important program. And it's,
1:05:29it's amazing to me that this is how I can put food on the table and how I can
1:05:34feed my family and how I can spend my time.
1:05:36And the three of us are indescribably lucky that any of you are listening,
1:05:41much less any of you who have spent money on either an advertiser or,
1:05:46or membership or what have you. Um, it's wild. And it's,
1:05:50it's scary to see these changes.
1:05:52Scary for me cause I have very chicken little tendencies. Um,
1:05:56it's scary for me to see all of this big money coming into big time podcasting.
1:06:00And while I do think a rising tide raises all boats, you know,
1:06:04and having cereal takeoff in such a big way, God have been poisoned.
1:06:08I almost said so bigly, Oh God, is it over yet? Oh God, I know it's so bad. Uh,
1:06:13having, having cereal takeoff in such a big way is helpful to all of us, right?
1:06:17Because if, if,
1:06:18if you're around the proverbial water cooler and everyone is saying you have to
1:06:23listen to cereal, this podcast, it's amazing. Well, just like I said, you know,
1:06:27cereal isn't about to name check the accidental tech podcast,
1:06:31but if you find this thing that you enjoy and if you happen to enjoy Apple stuff,
1:06:36I like to think that, you know,
1:06:37ATP is one of a handful of shows that'll bubble to the top of the list of things
1:06:41you should check out.
1:06:42And so it may be that probably more listeners than we would expect came to us in
1:06:47an indirect way from cereal. And it scares me to see what's going on with Spotify.
1:06:51It scares me to see these exclusive, it scares me to see this,
1:06:54this seemingly inevitable march toward the Facebook,
1:06:58Facebook if vacation, Google of vacation, if you will, of, of big data,
1:07:03of big data advertising and tracking and so on.
1:07:06And obviously we have zero intention of ever doing that.
1:07:09And that's part of the reason why membership is a thing.
1:07:11But it scares me to think about that.
1:07:13And I hope that it remains exactly as Marco describes where they're over there,
1:07:18we're over here, never the two shall meet and everyone's happy.
1:07:21But I don't know, I just,
1:07:24I probably say this more often than I should to the point that I hope it's not
1:07:28frustrating,
1:07:28but it is important to me that listeners know that as best I can,
1:07:32I recognize and we recognize how incredibly lucky we are that you'll spend a
1:07:37couple hours of your week every week with us.
1:07:42And that is an incredible,
1:07:44incredible honor because one of the most precious things in the entire world,
1:07:48golly, especially as we're learning in 2020,
1:07:50one of the most precious things that we all have is time.
1:07:53And to spend your time with us is such a compliment.
1:07:56And I know all three of us are deeply appreciative and,
1:07:58and it's extremely cool. And I know I speak for me,
1:08:02and I'm pretty sure I speak for the other guys that, you know,
1:08:04if you'll have us, we'll be doing this in another 10 years.
1:08:06Please don't get sick of us cause we'd like to, we'd like to keep doing it.
1:08:11Actually. And one, one last thing to add,
1:08:13cause Casey you kind of touched on this,
1:08:14like with the serialization of podcasting and you know,
1:08:18all these big hits and the comedians who have all these massive audiences.
1:08:20One major thing that has changed is that I no longer have to explain what
1:08:25podcasting is to people. Like if you like, you know, 10 years ago,
1:08:29you know, people would ask me what I do and oh yeah,
1:08:31I make an app and I do some podcasts. They'd be like, what?
1:08:34And even when I started overcast, cause I started overcast before serial,
1:08:39not by much. It was like a year before something, but it was,
1:08:41it was still before like that big wave started.
1:08:44And so I've had to explain so many times to so many people like in the regular
1:08:49world who are not nerds,
1:08:50what podcasts are and I largely have stopped having to do that in the last few
1:08:55years cause they're so big now,
1:08:57such a large portion of at least Americans so far listen to podcasts.
1:09:02It's still, podcasting is still very heavily skewed towards the English speaking
1:09:07world. Um, very, very heavily like, you know, North America and you know,
1:09:11the English speaking countries, Europe and you know, Australia, Canada,
1:09:15still, you know, like it's,
1:09:16it's still very much like a an English Anglo centric, what's the word for that?
1:09:21An English centric thing. Um,
1:09:23but among the people I interact with on a, you know,
1:09:27around here in the English speaking North American world,
1:09:30podcasting is so ubiquitous.
1:09:32Podcast listening is so ubiquitous that I no longer have to explain what the heck
1:09:35it is to almost every single person I meet. And that's, that's pretty great.
1:09:40And that has only come because of those massive shows that attract those,
1:09:44you know, giant audiences that are way, way bigger than ours. So, you know,
1:09:48again, as long as,
1:09:49as long as their world doesn't end up crushing our world accidentally,
1:09:54then you know, I'm happy that they can exist and we can exist and everything's
1:09:58good.
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1:11:53So you guys have spent more time with your Mac books, air Mac book errors,
1:12:00however we pronounce it. Uh, anything new you would like to share?
1:12:03I have one new thing. I think someone asked about this.
1:12:06It was going to be an ask ATV, but it's a shorty. Someone asked, uh,
1:12:09is power nap still present on the M one max?
1:12:14Uh, power nap is the feature that's been around for a while and Mac OS 10.
1:12:18That basically says when you put your Mac to sleep,
1:12:20occasionally it will wake up but not really wake up and do a bunch of things
1:12:26mostly through Apple apps that you might want it to do.
1:12:28Like it'll do a time machine backup, it'll check your mail or whatever.
1:12:32But you know, as far as you can tell, your computer is still asleep.
1:12:35Like it won't turn on the screen.
1:12:37Some max at various times have tried not to turn on the fans or to turn them on
1:12:40very low RPM and it will, you know,
1:12:43basically do some activity when you think it's basically sleeping in sort of a
1:12:47low power state and then go back to real for real. Is he sleep right?
1:12:50One of the items on the slides that the presentation introducing the M one max
1:12:56was like, what was like always on computer, always on processor.
1:13:00Yeah, always on processor. Um, and if you have an iOS device,
1:13:04iPhone or iPad or something, you know there's no power nap mode. Like yeah,
1:13:08when you hit the quote unquote power button, the screen turns off. But yeah,
1:13:13what determines whether your mail gets checked for is whether the mail
1:13:16application has background processing turned on and settings, so on and so forth.
1:13:19The idea being that you don't put your phone to sleep.
1:13:24It's always kind of in this, in this same state.
1:13:27It knows whether the screen is on or not,
1:13:29and it knows whether an app should be allowed to run in the background and the
1:13:32iOS versions that support that or not.
1:13:34But there is no mode where it's like asleep and nothing is running to save power,
1:13:38right? It's got an always on processor, I guess is what Apple's calling it.
1:13:41Right? So the answer to this question on the M one max,
1:13:44as far as I can tell any energy or saver slash battery preference pain,
1:13:47there is nothing that mentions power nap the place where it should be.
1:13:50There is just no checkbox for it because as far as I can tell,
1:13:53it's not needed in the same way that it's not needed on iOS devices.
1:13:57Now Mac iOS is not iOS and there's no sort of setting screen where you can
1:14:01enable background processing or whatever. So I'm not entirely sure how,
1:14:05what the interaction is between the OS and the applications,
1:14:08because other than to know that,
1:14:10that it seems like the Mac never goes to sleep sleep where nothing is happening
1:14:15whatsoever. It must go into a low,
1:14:19low power mode where maybe it just uses one of the efficiency cores or
1:14:22something. And in that mode,
1:14:24if mail is running or if there's a background demon that checks mail,
1:14:28it seems like it will execute. Um, I don't know the technical details of it.
1:14:31I'm just guessing,
1:14:32but I can tell you that I could not find a power and act checkbox power nap
1:14:36checkbox. So I think this is part of the always on processor thing,
1:14:40that that is a complication that is no longer necessary.
1:14:44Now that Apple is making the guts of these things.
1:14:46Marco,
1:14:48you tweeted earlier that your iMac pro has been a breast,
1:14:52breath of fresh air to return to and you are so happy to have this actually fast
1:14:57computer and not have to be slumming it on your Mac book air.
1:14:59Did I read that right?
1:15:00It certainly is taking many breaths of fresh air through its fans that I keep
1:15:05hearing.
1:15:06Is it really that much faster than that Mac book there?
1:15:09It's, I mean, the reality is like the speed difference. Yes, it is faster.
1:15:13Like the Mac book air is indeed faster.
1:15:16Most of the time I'm not doing, I'm not like maxing it out constantly and,
1:15:20and such that I would notice the speed difference. Honestly. Um,
1:15:24I do notice the fan difference,
1:15:25but I'm also just really happy to be back on my iMac pro after two weeks away
1:15:30because it has all my stuff on it.
1:15:32It's a giant screen and it has my nice split keyboard in front of it.
1:15:35It's my main computer. You know,
1:15:37when you're away from your main computer and you get back, it's nice.
1:15:39And I was able to just plow through massive amounts of work today of just like,
1:15:44you know, catch up admin work that I've been, that I've been, you know,
1:15:47putting off or missing the ability to do. Um, so I've just been,
1:15:50I've been getting a lot done on it, so I, I'm happy with this computer.
1:15:53I do wish I could figure out the fan noise thing.
1:15:56It does seem to be this intermittent thing probably caused by some dust wedges
1:16:00and very hard to reach places that I won't be able to get out without like
1:16:03disassembling the entire computer, which I'm not going to do. Um, so you know,
1:16:07I do wish I could,
1:16:08I could solve that problem because I know that when the iMac pro is working
1:16:11normally, like when it was new,
1:16:13I didn't have any fan noise like almost ever. It was,
1:16:17it was nearly impossible to hear them. So I, you know,
1:16:20I think it's just mostly cause it's old and full of dust, but like us, I, I,
1:16:24but I am going to,
1:16:27I'm very much looking forward to what a future iMac can be.
1:16:33Like I don't think they need to do that much from what the Mac book air is now to
1:16:38make larger computers that are, that are performance competitive.
1:16:41There are some areas that I would like to mention quickly. Like, you know,
1:16:43I think because we're seeing a lot,
1:16:46a lot of speculation and worrying or,
1:16:50or excitement about, you know, how do you take the M one and make bigger,
1:16:55faster, more powerful, more expandable computers with it.
1:16:58And we're also having a bunch of these new interviews that are being done by
1:17:04Apple execs that are constantly like one of the biggest things everyone's talking
1:17:09about, especially the Apple people is the unified memory architecture and quite
1:17:13how much that matters. And so there is this massive question of like,
1:17:18okay,
1:17:19we know that they can make really incredible computers at the low end with this
1:17:24chip.
1:17:24We know that as long as they cap the Ram at 16 gigs for now and as long as they
1:17:29don't need massive GPU power or more than four of these high performance cores,
1:17:36we know they can make something amazing. But how do you scale that up to the
1:17:41other models in the lineup?
1:17:42The number one question I have is how do you scale the Ram?
1:17:48That's, that's number one because the GPU is,
1:17:52is almost as important as the Ram in terms of how do you make larger machines?
1:17:56But the Ram I think is, is probably the harder question to answer.
1:18:02You know, Apple engineered this giant Mac Pro case,
1:18:06this whole new Mac Pro. And the, again,
1:18:10when I talk to the Apple people in that, in that demo room after,
1:18:14after the Mac Pro unveiling, I talked to a few different people there. And,
1:18:18and you can also look at some of the comments that have been made publicly by
1:18:21people like Craig Federighi, you know, like in,
1:18:24in that machines PR release cycle that really make it seem like they did not
1:18:29design that entire machine to be a one off. And so if you, if you think, okay,
1:18:35well somehow the M1 Mac world is going to have to scale up through the rest of
1:18:40the lineup or at least similar ish products in the rest of the lineup. You know,
1:18:46I don't know if there's necessarily going to be an iMac Pro,
1:18:48but I know there's going to be an iMac and I know there's going to be some kind
1:18:51of Mac Pro and it's probably going to be very similar to the current one in,
1:18:55you know, general dimensions and capabilities and stuff.
1:18:58So how do you do that?
1:19:01We've also seen in the teardowns of these new Macs,
1:19:05the way they put the RAM quote on package is really,
1:19:10you know, it's next to the processor. It's not part of the processor.
1:19:14And we actually heard from a number of people who know more about chip design
1:19:18and manufacturing than I do who said that it almost,
1:19:21it would almost make no sense at all to ever move the RAM on die,
1:19:27like where it's part of the same Silicon wafer and it gets punched out from the
1:19:31same way for as the CPU.
1:19:33Because apparently the way you make DRAM is so radically different than the way
1:19:38you make logic chips at that Silicon level,
1:19:40that it would be a ridiculous process and it would be inefficient in tons of
1:19:46ways.
1:19:46And it would be like really stupid to try to make DRAM and logic chips as part
1:19:51of the exact same chip. So it's going to be a separate thing. And there's,
1:19:55and there's, so there, there is already a separation between the CPU,
1:20:00you know, or like the chip and the RAM.
1:20:02There is some kind of interconnect between them and I don't know,
1:20:06I don't know enough about modern memory bandwidth and interfaces to,
1:20:08to know for sure.
1:20:09Like how possible is it to just make that interconnect bigger and support four
1:20:14RAM chips instead of two or eight or 16?
1:20:19How much would that cost in terms of memory bandwidth or speed or,
1:20:25you know, what,
1:20:26would we be reasonably able to make some kind of like RAM in a socket that we
1:20:31have like on the Mac pro or still even on the high end IMAX,
1:20:35like can we have socketed RAM still in this new world or are the interfaces
1:20:40between the pins in the socket and the CPU, are those too slow?
1:20:44Would that cost too much performance?
1:20:46So there's this huge open question of how the heck we scale these things.
1:20:50You could also just take the current chip and just make it a lot bigger.
1:20:55But then you'd run into some pretty significant cost issues with the
1:20:58manufacturing and yields of that chip.
1:21:01So I think the way they're probably going to have to scale it, you know,
1:21:06we speculated a couple of weeks ago,
1:21:08I said I think they're going to definitely move the RAM out to its own area of
1:21:13the board and possibly also move the GPUs out.
1:21:17And John said definitely not GPUs, I think, right?
1:21:21I don't recall this conversation, but I can,
1:21:24I can tell you what I think now for the Mac pro level machines you're thinking.
1:21:29I'm thinking it's probably for everything above what we have now.
1:21:33I think it's going to be for all of the laptops that might have a discrete GPU
1:21:37in the past.
1:21:38Oh yeah, no, no. I think, yeah, so this is coming back to me. Yeah, no,
1:21:41I think there,
1:21:42there is no way the GPU is moving out of the system on the chip for even their
1:21:45biggest, meanest laptop. I feel like the 16 inch MacBook pro,
1:21:49their top of the line laptop will have a quote unquote integrated GPU.
1:21:52It will just be bigger. And I say that not be,
1:21:55not because I think it's a limitation.
1:21:57I say that because I think they can meet their performance requirements.
1:22:00They can make a really, really good,
1:22:02powerful GPU with it being integrated by just making it bigger and putting fans
1:22:07on it.
1:22:07I look at the size of this chip,
1:22:09such a massive amount of the area on the chip is GPU area.
1:22:14And another massive amount of it is the high performance CPU cores.
1:22:19And so if we think like how does this chip scale up to the next level of
1:22:23performance for the higher end machines? Do they add two more CPU,
1:22:26two more of the high end CPU core maybe or four more even? Um, do they,
1:22:30do they double the GPU core count so it has double the GPU performance?
1:22:34Like that is roughly what we'd be talking about in terms of, you know,
1:22:38the performance gaps between the model lines that we have had to date. Uh,
1:22:42we don't know that that's a big assumption.
1:22:44Maybe the next generation 16 inch Mac book pro isn't going to be twice as fast
1:22:49as the air. It doesn't have to be technically like, you know,
1:22:54Apple can design these things however they want basically.
1:22:57But certainly the customer base has certain expectations and there,
1:23:00there have things have been done a certain way for, for a long time.
1:23:03And so we kind of expect that you would probably in the large laptop and in the
1:23:08iMac and definitely the Mac pro,
1:23:13we expect we're probably going to have much higher core counts for the CPU.
1:23:18Uh, you know, eight core, 12 core, you know, for the high performance course,
1:23:21I mean,
1:23:22and you look at the GPU and you look at the performance of how it compares to
1:23:27discreet GPUs today and how it might come, you know,
1:23:31how you might be able to scale that up to achieve something like a 16 inch Mac
1:23:36book pro or a high end iMac or a Mac pro customer would demand.
1:23:41And I don't see how you keep this as one chip.
1:23:43I don't see it scaling because you would need to make the chip so massive.
1:23:48They wouldn't be able to manufacture any of them.
1:23:50Like it would be ridiculous with, with yields and size and everything.
1:23:54So I think there's gotta be a separation of probably both the Ram expanding so
1:23:59it can accommodate way more Ram chips, not necessarily being socketed.
1:24:09I think the, the idea of having, having the Ram be just in regular,
1:24:14like Ram slots that you can pop out and you know,
1:24:17put in a stick from crucial if you want to. I think those days are over.
1:24:20Even with the Mac pro,
1:24:21I don't see that coming back because what we're seeing is that when they make
1:24:25the Ram integrated, truly integrated the way it is now, uh,
1:24:29it can be way faster.
1:24:30Like they have just massive amounts of bandwidth to the Ram and that's a big
1:24:34part of why the M1 is so fast.
1:24:37So I don't see them giving up the Ram speed necessarily,
1:24:42but I,
1:24:43I also don't see them sticking with the way it is now where it's just kind of
1:24:48glued onto the package. Like as one, you know, very,
1:24:51very small real estate thing. Uh,
1:24:54I don't see that scaling to a Mac pro that supports hundreds of gigs of Ram.
1:24:59I don't, I don't see how they can do that. They need more,
1:25:01they just need more chips. Simple as that. Like they need more chips. Um,
1:25:05they need more SSD chips too. Like to get larger storage capacities there.
1:25:09Like they just, they need to scale these up.
1:25:11And so the question is how did they scale these up? Um,
1:25:14and you look at the real estate on the chip on the main chip and I don't see how
1:25:19you meaningfully scale up CPU cores or GPU performance without splitting up that
1:25:25chip also.
1:25:28So I still think that the way this scales up is that the way it's going to
1:25:33is the package gets split into everything that's in it now except the GPU,
1:25:38which gets split off into its own thing and there's,
1:25:44they can do whatever they want with how they talk to each other.
1:25:47They can have some kind of massive hot wide bandwidth internet or interconnect
1:25:51between the CPU, the GPU and the Ram. But I don't see, I mean,
1:25:56they know way more about Chipperton than I do,
1:25:58but I don't see how you double the core count and double the GPU size.
1:26:04And not have some massive chip that it was very, very hard to manufacture.
1:26:07And I also don't see how you really scale up to achieve their high end
1:26:13performance needs for their higher end products without doing that.
1:26:17Like without having twice the CPU cores and without having at least twice the GPU
1:26:22area. This remains to be seen like how they're going to do this. But I also,
1:26:25you look at how the M1 is turning out so far.
1:26:28You look at what they're talking about, what they're really pushing.
1:26:32And the unified memory architecture does not sound like it's going to be
1:26:35optional in the future. It sounds like they're all going to have that.
1:26:38So somehow they're going to keep a unified memory architecture,
1:26:41but they're going to have to be able to support way more Ram than they have now,
1:26:46more CPU cores and more GPU cores.
1:26:48So I don't know how they do that without splitting this up.
1:26:51People are getting hung up,
1:26:53hung up a little bit on the unified memory architecture thing.
1:26:55Like part of that is, you know, I think we said this before,
1:26:58like this is it's a marketing term in some respects and that they're
1:27:03trying to give a name to a thing that they're doing that lots of computers used
1:27:07to do. Well, the computers used to do it to save money,
1:27:09but Apple is not doing it to necessarily save money,
1:27:12which is not having a dedicated pool of video memory. Now,
1:27:16it was the cheap computers would do that because it's cheaper not to have a bunch
1:27:20of video memory because there's a bunch of extra expensive chips you need to
1:27:23have. So we can just use system memory. Max have done this.
1:27:26You go back to like classic Mac OS or 68 K max. Yeah.
1:27:30A lot of them had a quote unquote unified memory architecture.
1:27:32That's all it means is that there's not separate VRAM, right? The, you know,
1:27:36the iPhones and iPads and the arm based max are doing it for performance reasons.
1:27:41Most of all, you know, part of it is cost and power savings on the mind,
1:27:44you know, iOS devices, right?
1:27:46But on the Mac for these similar devices that are also power constrained, um,
1:27:50they're doing it just to, you know, to save the power,
1:27:53but also because they can get really good performance. Like the,
1:27:55the memory bandwidth of this on package Ram is like three times what it was on
1:28:00the Intel machines that they replace. Right. So that's a benefit.
1:28:04And also it's a benefit that you don't have to power the extra VRAM chips and
1:28:07yada yada. Um, but like you said, Margot, if you, you know,
1:28:11same thing with the unpackaged Ram and everything.
1:28:13If you scale that up to the Mac pro the Mac pro,
1:28:15you can put it 1.5 terabytes of Ram. Um, you, I mean,
1:28:20you could make a gigantic package and have 1.5 terabytes of unpackaged Ram,
1:28:25but that starts to look a little bit silly.
1:28:28You'd have this little tiny system on a chip in the corner and then you'd have
1:28:31Ram chip, Ram chip, Ram chip,
1:28:33there's a rows and rows of them lined up probably lined up around it in a
1:28:37circle. Um, you know, you could do it like if you, um,
1:28:41if you look at some of the modern game consoles,
1:28:44I always look at them a lot of people are asking like,
1:28:45and you made the same point, like how big of a GPU can you put on dive?
1:28:49Is the GPU is on dive, the CPU, GPU, neural engine.
1:28:52That's all on the system on a chip dive and then next to it in the same package
1:28:56are the Ram chips. How big can you double the size of the GPU on a die?
1:28:59Absolutely. You can look at the Xbox series X or PlayStation five.
1:29:03They have an AMD CPU and an a,
1:29:06a pretty darn big AMD GPU all on the same die.
1:29:10It's a bigger die. It takes more power than the M1 that's for sure,
1:29:14but you absolutely can do it.
1:29:16And those GPUs would more than satisfy the needs of a 16 inch MacBook pro.
1:29:21Again, the 16 inch macro has never been like a gaming laptop.
1:29:24We're not asking it to have the world's highest end GPU, but the,
1:29:27the best discrete GPU Apple has ever shipped on a laptop.
1:29:31I feel like Apple have no problem matching that performance with an on die GPU,
1:29:36right? I Mac is potentially a different story depending on how they go in that
1:29:40direction. And of course,
1:29:41Mac pro is an entirely different story because the Mac pro can have four GPUs and
1:29:44you're not, you're not going to, you know, or even more than that,
1:29:47you're not going to fit that onto the die because that's where you start pushing
1:29:51the limits of the die size. Um, the Ram question is interesting. If we can,
1:29:55I'm looking at the clock,
1:29:56I'm thinking we can segue this into the very first ask ATP question if that's
1:30:00okay with totally nicely done. Um, cause that's what this,
1:30:05this first question is about here.
1:30:06I'll let Casey read it because he's good at reading questions,
1:30:09but then I will attempt to answer it.
1:30:12All right. So Chris, uh, Chafi coffee, coffee, uh,
1:30:16Chris C writes the current M one chips have been system on a chip style chips
1:30:20with the Ram right in the chip package.
1:30:22I first thought that was that that would be fine for lower end chips and maybe
1:30:26even all laptops, but for higher end systems like the I Mac pro and the Mac pro,
1:30:29surely on chip Ram can't be the end state. This is what Marco was describing.
1:30:33Then I thought about the memory hierarchy where computers really only operate on
1:30:37registers and everything above that is just slower but larger forms of cash.
1:30:41L one L two Ram, even, you know, SSD storage. So for some future Mac pro,
1:30:46the ultimate Mac pro,
1:30:47what if Apple keeps only eight or 16 gigs of fast Ram on chip,
1:30:50maybe even calling it an L four cash and then allows off chip cash that just so
1:30:55happens to be user serviceable D Ram chips.
1:30:58I think this would give Apple a huge performance boost for the memory intensive
1:31:01tasks that people put hundreds of gigabytes of Ram into a Mac pro for while
1:31:05allowing them to keep a lower number of variants that they need to design in
1:31:08stock.
1:31:08All right, so here, this question is basically about the cash hierarchy,
1:31:13the memory hierarchy and computers. So a brief sort of, uh, you know,
1:31:17introduction to this concept, you know, memory, uh,
1:31:22it's just a place to store data,
1:31:24but there's memories of different speeds and different latencies inside your
1:31:28computer. Um, when your CPU or GPU or whatever is doing some kind of processing,
1:31:32the fastest sort of closest,
1:31:34lowest latency memory or registers and they hold small amounts of data,
1:31:37one or two numbers, five numbers, whatever,
1:31:39depending how big the registers are. And there's, you know, 10,
1:31:4420 of those depending on the execution unit. So those are registers very,
1:31:47very tight, just one, you know, 10 or 21 number slots or something like that.
1:31:50Right. Above that you have what they call level one or L one cash,
1:31:54which is on, you know, also on the CPU, you know, the,
1:31:57the CPU died just like the registers. Um,
1:32:01and that is a smaller amount,
1:32:03some amount of kilobytes or maybe a couple of megabytes or whatever,
1:32:06depending of memory. What makes that memory fast?
1:32:10Registers are barely like memory. It's like, you know, like a mail slot.
1:32:13You can put one or two little things in there.
1:32:15SIMD registers get weird cause they're a little bit wider, but they're small,
1:32:18right? L one cache is a pool of memory, but it's a pool, a tiny pool in,
1:32:22you know, in the grand scheme of things.
1:32:24Why don't computers just make all their memory L one cache if L one cache is the
1:32:29fastest memory and it's right next to the computer, why don't they just,
1:32:32why not make everything out of the stuff that the black box is made of?
1:32:35I make the whole plan out of the black box, whatever. Um, it's the same answer,
1:32:38right? So L one cache, first of all,
1:32:42you can't put 1.5 terabytes on die cause your die can't be that big, right?
1:32:47So that's reason number one.
1:32:47Number two is when you make the memory that makes up L one cache,
1:32:52it's a different kind of memory than DRAM.
1:32:55Usually it's SD Ram or something similar S Ram S Ram. There you go.
1:32:58The different,
1:32:59the main difference in terms of economics that you care about is whereas in D
1:33:04Ram,
1:33:05we try to use as few transistors as possible to store a bit of memory.
1:33:10SRAM will use like six or eight transistor to store one bit of memory.
1:33:14It's, it's complicated. You can look into it and see,
1:33:16but basically what it boils down to is it costs way more money and takes up way
1:33:21more space to store one bit in SRAM than it does in D Ram. Right?
1:33:24So it's a cost speed trade off. So that's your L one.
1:33:27L two is also on the die and even larger pool of memory that is more distant in
1:33:33terms of latency and slower than the L one, right?
1:33:36So there's your cash hierarchy registers, L one, L two,
1:33:39sometimes you'll have an L three and you could keep going.
1:33:41What level and the whole, you know, however many levels of, of a cash you want to
1:33:46have all about to memory and you can visualize the hard drive being another pool
1:33:51of caching for Ram, just even slower and more distant. Uh,
1:33:55the key point of the cash hierarchy is the sort of closer you get to being L one
1:34:01or, you know, our registers or whatever, the more expensive it is,
1:34:05the lower latency,
1:34:06meaning how long does it take for me to get anything into or out of it and the
1:34:09more expensive it is. Uh,
1:34:11and to have a useful cash hierarchy,
1:34:16you need gaps between them.
1:34:18You need your L one to be slower, cheaper,
1:34:21and more distant than registers. Otherwise, why wouldn't you just use registers?
1:34:25You need L two to be slower, cheaper, and more distant than L one, right?
1:34:29You need Ram to be slower, cheaper, and more distant than L two.
1:34:33That's the point of the hierarchy.
1:34:35If L one was 2% faster than L two,
1:34:39you're not, you know,
1:34:41doing something useful because having that cash hierarchy has overhead.
1:34:45The way cash hierarchies work is when you need some piece of memory,
1:34:50you can say, okay, well let me check. Is it in a register? Well,
1:34:52this is not how the world works, but just imagine you can check whether it's in
1:34:54a register. If it's not in a register, you can look in L one,
1:34:58but it might not be in L one. If it's not in L one, you can check L two,
1:35:00but it might not be in L two. If it's not L two, you can check in Ram.
1:35:03All of that checking takes time and adds complexity.
1:35:07And then you have cash invalidation,
1:35:08which is one of the two hard problems in computer science.
1:35:11Naming be the other one. I'm not going to do the joke. Um,
1:35:13then you have to invalidate that memory.
1:35:19If something changes something in the memory, Oh, but I have a cash copy,
1:35:22copy of that in L two and possibly a cash copy in L one.
1:35:24You need to invalidate those caches or have some sort of cash coherency
1:35:28algorithm,
1:35:28especially when you have multiple cores sharing different pools of memory to
1:35:32make sure everyone's all on the same page in some well-defined way. So there are,
1:35:35so there's a complexity to a cash hierarchy and to,
1:35:39for that complexity to be useful,
1:35:41you need the cash hierarchy to be distant from each other.
1:35:45You need them to be different.
1:35:46You need them to have different performance characteristics.
1:35:48You need the more distant ones to be bigger and cheaper to make up for the fact
1:35:52that they're slower. You don't want a cash hierarchy where each level of cash is
1:35:56like a tiny percentage different than the previous one.
1:35:59So getting back to this question, finally,
1:36:01what about a Mac that has like an M one or whatever style chip where there is on
1:36:07package Ram that counts as kind of like an L four cash and then the big pool of
1:36:121.5 terabytes of D Ram,
1:36:14like in the Mac pro in slots on the motherboard that's slower, right?
1:36:19So I just got done saying a little bit earlier that according to people who have
1:36:24measured this,
1:36:26the memory bandwidth of the on package Ram on M one chips is about three times as
1:36:31fast as it was on the Intel laptops that they're replacing in terms of bandwidth
1:36:37like whatever it was like 60 gigabytes per second or something or gigabits.
1:36:40I forget, but whatever it is, it's around three times as fast,
1:36:42three times as fast or three times as much bandwidth or whatever I think is
1:36:49pushing the limits on an acceptable difference in performance for a cash
1:36:54hierarchy, right? It's not 1%,
1:36:58but it's also not an order of magnitude and it's also not two orders of
1:37:01magnitude, right? So I question whether,
1:37:05oh, first of all, even if you just accept all those numbers and say, well,
1:37:09D Rams say the DRAM was like the speed of the Intel D Ram,
1:37:11which I don't accept as a given, but say it was,
1:37:13you've got a cash hierarchy where there's a three X difference between, you know,
1:37:18the L four and then the D Ram. I feel like that may not be worth,
1:37:22the juice may not be worth that squeeze, right?
1:37:25That you'd want a bigger gap in the cash hierarchy.
1:37:28And the second thing is getting back to Marco's question,
1:37:31I don't think there's any reason that you can't have an extremely high bandwidth,
1:37:36high performance memory bus that is,
1:37:39that talks to Ram that is not on the package just because the Intel Mac book pros
1:37:45had Ram that was three times as slow as the M ones did.
1:37:48Doesn't mean that the $6,000 high end Mac pro can't have an extremely high
1:37:54bandwidth memory bus. And I haven't looked up the numbers,
1:37:57but for all I know the current Mac pros have a higher bandwidth memory bus than
1:38:00the Intel MacBook, which wouldn't surprise me or whatever. Again,
1:38:03I point to game consoles that have had similar problems where they need to have
1:38:07a large pool of memory to feed that big honkin' GPU that's in their system on a
1:38:11chip or whatever. And a lot of them do actually arrange on the motherboard,
1:38:16a bunch of Ram chips in a circular pattern.
1:38:18So they're equal distant from the big giant SOC to feed it. That's not,
1:38:22you know, there's no dims, right?
1:38:24Because it's a game console and it's like 500 bucks or whatever,
1:38:26but you can have, or just look at any GPU,
1:38:29you can have very high bandwidth pools of memory.
1:38:32They're not literally on the same package, but are on the same board.
1:38:36Look at a high end GPU, look at their pools of multiple gigabytes of memory.
1:38:40You can buy GPU's with like 16, 32 gigs of memory.
1:38:43That memory has a huge extremely wide, sometimes they're like five,
1:38:4712 bits wide buses to and from the GPU.
1:38:51Right? So I'm thinking that
1:38:54almost all of the benefit you get of having the,
1:38:58the sort of on package memory chips you can get by having an extremely expensive,
1:39:03extremely wide, slightly more distant as in not on the same package,
1:39:06but still on the same board bus on your $6,000 plus the Mac
1:39:11pro. So when I'm picturing a Mac pro in my head, I like,
1:39:15the only reason I can imagine doing this sort of L four based approach where
1:39:19there's,
1:39:19there's the very fast Ram that's close to it in the big distant pool is if Apple
1:39:24couldn't justify the expense of doing a custom solution,
1:39:26because what Chris describes would work and be
1:39:31feasible.
1:39:32I still think the gap in performance wouldn't be big enough to justify having a
1:39:36separate pool of Ram, but you could do it.
1:39:40And the only reason you do it is like, well,
1:39:41we didn't want to make a whole new chip that doesn't have,
1:39:44it has an entirely different interface to memory. So we'll just take what we have,
1:39:48which is whatever the biggest chip we had in our 16 inch Mac book pro,
1:39:52and then tack on a bunch more memory and everything.
1:39:54But I have a feeling that's not what Apple would do. Again,
1:39:57going back to Marco's impression that he got from hearing people talk about the
1:40:00Mac pro that this beautiful giant case over here,
1:40:05like was not made in a world where Apple didn't know it was making our max like
1:40:09they knew, right?
1:40:10So there has to be a plan for that and Apple is not shy about charging a lot of
1:40:14money if they, if they want to do it.
1:40:16So I feel like they should end up with a solution that is properly fit
1:40:20for a computer of this size. It doesn't have to be quite as modular.
1:40:24It may not use standardized parts,
1:40:26but a solution that gives you huge amounts of Ram that are also
1:40:31very, very fast is definitely feasible.
1:40:34And it doesn't require any sort of gymnastics.
1:40:36The GPU question is a little bit different because Apple has in the past made
1:40:41computers that have a quote unquote integrated GPU and then in more distant, uh,
1:40:45but more powerful discrete GPUs.
1:40:48And they could do that again because the iOS certainly supports it,
1:40:51but they could also just excise the GPU entirely from the system on a chip and
1:40:54put it entirely external on the, on a machine like the Mac pro,
1:40:57because what is all that space in the Mac pro for if not to put cards that
1:41:02potentially have multiple GPU's on them and tons of Ram and all the other stuff.
1:41:06Um, I wanted to look up the die, the relative die sizes,
1:41:10and I couldn't do it in time. Maybe I'll do it for next week.
1:41:12But I was trying to look up, you know, how much bigger can the die get? The M one.
1:41:17Yeah. I tried looking this up actually. Do you have a,
1:41:20I found the Intel die size, but I couldn't find the M one die size.
1:41:23So my impression is looking at the, I fix it thing is the M one die.
1:41:28Like it's not anywhere near the limits of what is reasonable to put on a
1:41:33single die.
1:41:34So if I imagine it in a Mac pro type system where you've removed the Ram from the
1:41:39package and also remove the GPU, there's plenty. And, and again,
1:41:43look at the cooling solution that the Mac pro case has available to it.
1:41:47It has so much available cooling for a chip that so far barely needs a wimpy
1:41:52laptop fan. You could make,
1:41:55I feel like you can make the M one four times as big ditch the,
1:41:58the Ram off the package and dip digit GPU off the package and still not put a
1:42:02dent in this thing, CPU cooling capacity. Right?
1:42:05So I think lots of things are possible
1:42:09depending on how far Apple is willing to go.
1:42:12And the Mac pro is the machine that has the least
1:42:16ambiguity about what they're going to do,
1:42:18because we know his whole purpose in life is to have huge capacity.
1:42:22So whatever it takes to get huge capacity, Apple will do that.
1:42:25Right? The real machines in my question are what do they do with the iMac?
1:42:28Because the iMac, you could squint and say, well,
1:42:30whatever you did for the 16 inch Mac pro do it for the iMac. But then again,
1:42:33what about the iMac pro? Well, then maybe we can do something in between.
1:42:36It's those types of machines where I'm interested in how they're going to make
1:42:39that trade off between just do what you did in the laptops,
1:42:43but more and faster.
1:42:44You could end up running into limits there because if you want a GPU that is
1:42:49bigger than you could fit in any laptop, iMac pro can support that.
1:42:52It's got the cooling solution for it, but you do eventually run into the limit of
1:42:57the quote unquote integrated GPU. You know, as far as we know,
1:43:00like what's the biggest GPU we've ever seen shoved onto a system on a chip.
1:43:03It's probably this current generation of consoles and it's pretty darn big,
1:43:07but you can get bigger and faster GPUs discreet, no problem whatsoever.
1:43:11So that's, that's really real question is,
1:43:14and that's just a trade off that Apple is going to make.
1:43:16But I think on the top end Mac pro,
1:43:20there is no reason that they can't have discreet GPUs,
1:43:23discreet Ram and still have amazing performance. It's just a,
1:43:27it's just a question of money. How do you make a very high bandwidth,
1:43:31a high speed Ram interfaces?
1:43:34You give the chip more power and you spend more money on intertext and you
1:43:38charge more money for the product. And Apple is really good at that.
1:43:40So I have some confidence that they will,
1:43:43they will sort this out for the Mac pro, especially if you consider, well,
1:43:47I mean, again, don't try to associate price with parts in the Mac pro.
1:43:50It won't add up for you,
1:43:51but those zions they buy from Intel are ridiculously expensive and they don't
1:43:56have any GPU in them that Apple is using in their Mac pros.
1:43:59They don't have a neural engine inside them that have any of that stuff in there.
1:44:02Right. And they cost so much money. Apple, you know, we'll get,
1:44:06Apple will get its M whatevers for the Mac pro.
1:44:08They'll get them at costs because they make them themselves, right?
1:44:10They just have to pay Taiwan semiconductor margin or whatever.
1:44:13So I'm hoping that whatever money they save by making the system on a chip
1:44:18themselves to the Mac pro, they can spend that on more exotic,
1:44:22faster memory interfaces and so on.
1:44:25And it will end up being a really good machine.
1:44:27Yeah. You've kind of convinced me a little bit because I was, I looked up the,
1:44:31the dye size numbers and I don't think anyone has measured the M one dye size
1:44:36yet, but that's what I couldn't find. Yeah.
1:44:38Like the eight 12 X for reference is about 128 square millimeters.
1:44:42And to put that in context, like the high Xeon core count,
1:44:45like the 18 core Xeons are in the like 500 square square millimeter range.
1:44:50So there's certainly a long way to go between, you know,
1:44:57eight 12 X size, which is probably a little bit smaller than the M one,
1:44:59but probably not that much smaller. You know,
1:45:02at 128 ish and the Xeons at like 500 ish.
1:45:06And remember they don't like, it's not like you take the M one and say, well,
1:45:09we'll just stamp out four of those because if you're multiplying the cores,
1:45:12the CPU cores are not a hundred percent of the chip.
1:45:15You're not adding a second neural engine, right?
1:45:17You're not adding a second image processing engine.
1:45:19Maybe you make those a little bit bigger,
1:45:21but you're just multiplying the core.
1:45:23So multiplying the cores does not multiply the size of the, you know,
1:45:27the dye area by the same amount. So if you had four times the dye area,
1:45:31you could,
1:45:32you can get more than four times the cores or you can get twice as many cores and
1:45:36twice as many GPU cores and still not be at a four X scaling.
1:45:39So there's breathing room there. And mostly what I think about is again,
1:45:42the cooling capacity of this gigantic computer, look at what it's cooling. Now,
1:45:46look how many Watts does the on takes,
1:45:48what how many Watts is the 28 core Xeon take to try many,
1:45:52try to use that power budget,
1:45:54try to use that power budget with Apple's processor.
1:45:57How big would you have to make this die?
1:45:59How high would you have to clock it to absorb that power budget?
1:46:03And that's assuming that Apple even wants to absorb that power budget.
1:46:06Like there's so much headroom that they can basically like, I was,
1:46:09I was thinking this idly the other day is like,
1:46:11if you took the M1 and you just put it straight into the Mac pros chassis and
1:46:16just overclocked it until you couldn't cool it anymore,
1:46:19how fast could you make it go? And it's not,
1:46:21I know cooling is not the only limiting factor on clocking.
1:46:23Eventually you're running to design constraints,
1:46:25having to do with pipeline depth and so on and so forth. But like,
1:46:27I feel like they have a lot of headroom to make faster computers once you can
1:46:33plug them in and put a huge fan on top of it.
1:46:36And that's what makes me fairly confident that technologically speaking,
1:46:39there's nothing stopping them from making an amazing Mac pro.
1:46:41The only thing that would be stopping them is like budgetary considerations.
1:46:45And we've talked to those before,
1:46:47like how exotic does Apple want to make things for the Mac so far?
1:46:51The answer is not that exotic because if you squint these,
1:46:54they look a lot like an a 14 X,
1:46:56which is the exactly the appropriate thing to do for the machines they've
1:46:59introduced.
1:46:59But Apple has not yet proven that they're willing to invest a huge amount of
1:47:04money to make a design that is radically different than, uh,
1:47:08than what they use their iOS devices.
1:47:10There have been a couple of interviews where Apple people have been insisting,
1:47:12no, no, this isn't just an eight 14 X. You see,
1:47:14we had to do X and Y and Z for the Mac.
1:47:16And mostly they refer to things like expected texture formats for the Mac
1:47:20operating system and stuff like that. And that's all true.
1:47:23Like it's not just a straight up,
1:47:25like we just took an eight 14 X and put it into a Mac. But the,
1:47:28but the tweaks are minor compared to the idea of like we made a whole new
1:47:32processor core or, you know, we, we invested, uh,
1:47:36in getting the GPU, uh, you know, the whole discrete GPU interface.
1:47:41And by the way, you can have a discrete GPU with still,
1:47:44still have a unified memory architecture.
1:47:45You can have the Ram off chip and still have a unified memory architecture.
1:47:48Cause unified memory architecture just means no separate VRAM,
1:47:51the GPU and the CPU all at the same pool of memory. You can,
1:47:54there's no reason you can't continue to do that no matter where you put the GPU,
1:47:57no matter where you put the Ram.
1:47:58It just gets much more difficult and expensive and takes an investment because
1:48:02iOS devices and the M1 work, nothing like that. So you'd have to invest in saying,
1:48:07okay, I'm going to make a chip that supports this, you know,
1:48:10a huge number of PCI express lanes and has more Thunderbolt connectivity and can
1:48:14drive umpteen 6k displays and knows how to talk to the external
1:48:19discrete Apple GPU and shares its fast Ram pool with the CPU.
1:48:23And it's all soldered to the board and you have to pick when you buy,
1:48:25whether you want the one terabyte configuration or the five 12 or the 64,
1:48:29you know, whatever they come up with. Right. Um, or they could just down the capacity.
1:48:33Like it's not outside the realm of possibility that the first ARM based Mac pro
1:48:36does not support 1.4 terabytes of Ram.
1:48:38And Apple just has a story for you about how it doesn't need it.
1:48:40I can see that happening too because it's all soldered to the board and the
1:48:44biggest configure they have is a 768 and yada yada. Like,
1:48:47but that would still be an amazing machine. So yeah.
1:48:50And as we all suspect,
1:48:52like that will probably be the last machine they introduced. Uh,
1:48:56and in the meantime, we will get to see how much of an appetite Apple has to,
1:48:59to crank this thing up and to make more exact designs with things like the iMac,
1:49:04which I think is the first point where we could reasonably assume that the
1:49:07machine could support something other than an M one style thing
1:49:12where everything is in the same place. It's just bigger.
1:49:14I think they're going to do that all the way through the whole laptops.
1:49:16Then the iMac is the first and maybe just the iMac pro if they have one is the
1:49:20first opportunity where they probably should consider doing something
1:49:25other than exactly the same thing they've done for the laptops. So bigger.
1:49:28Marco, how, how much Ram did your prior Mac book,
1:49:34I guess your Mac book pro, how much Ram does that have? Is it 32 gigs? Nope.
1:49:3816. I've been getting 16 for awhile. Oh, okay. So wait,
1:49:42I think something actually don't know. Wait a minute.
1:49:44Whatever the stock configuration is at the slightly higher than base level.
1:49:51Let me see. I don't even move on. I'll answer it in a second. All right.
1:49:55So the reason I bring this up is because I,
1:49:58how do I not know?
1:49:59Because it ultimately doesn't really matter. I agree that,
1:50:04especially the Mac pro probably needs a
1:50:08crap ton. Okay.
1:50:10It probably needs a metric crap ton of Ram for certain use cases. You know,
1:50:14not most people, certainly not the three of us, but in certain use cases,
1:50:18you probably do want to have a metric crap ton of Ram in the Mac pro,
1:50:22but for everyone except those, you know, odd balls,
1:50:26I keep thinking about how I heard a lot of people like me
1:50:32complaining about 16 gigs of Ram as the maximum in these new M one max,
1:50:36but I haven't heard anyone who has had one and used one
1:50:42really complain about it not having enough Ram,
1:50:45which has many words to say,
1:50:48I don't know if we should really judge them the same, these M one max or is
1:50:52Apple Silicon max.
1:50:53I don't know if we should judge them the same way we judge Intel max.
1:50:56Cause my, my 13 inch MacBook pros, 32 gigs of Ram.
1:50:59And I think that that's probably as low as I would want to go on an Intel
1:51:02machine in 2020 or 2021 is we're almost there,
1:51:04but on a Apple Silicon Mac,
1:51:07I would probably entertain 16 now that I know a little more.
1:51:12So I'm going to push back on this.
1:51:13I still see this conversation happening and I tried to wave people off from her
1:51:16last time and I'll try again.
1:51:18The architecture and the unified memory thing does not make Mac iOS
1:51:24use less memory. Oh no, totally. Now the code page,
1:51:29you know, the,
1:51:29the code segment of executables may be different size on arm versus
1:51:34x86.
1:51:35Although I wouldn't necessarily imagine that it will be smaller on arm because
1:51:38x86 has variable with instructions and arm I believe does not.
1:51:41So that actually can make the arm executables bigger. But anyway, um, well,
1:51:44there is, there is the texture format thing that,
1:51:46that often needs like multiple copies of video memory,
1:51:51uh, on Intel machines. But you know, that's, it's still not going to be everything.
1:51:55I'm not saying they're exactly the same cause they're not,
1:51:58but they vary in ways that are not like, Oh, well I could get away with, with a,
1:52:02uh, an eight gig arm Mac, but I would require a 16 gig Intel. No,
1:52:06there is nothing with the architecture.
1:52:08There's nothing with anything that has changed in the hardware or the operating
1:52:12system that makes that a reality. What has changed is, you know,
1:52:16three times the memory bandwidth and just faster overall. Um, and so,
1:52:21and you know, the SSD and the air got twice as fast.
1:52:24All that can contribute to make swapping more tolerable. But in the end,
1:52:28if you need to have some thing that's bigger than eight gigabytes in,
1:52:32in working memory at the same time and on,
1:52:34you get a machine that they can't support that and it has to swap,
1:52:37it's going to be slower,
1:52:38slower in a way that you will notice and feel sad about.
1:52:41It's just that most people don't have those kinds of workloads.
1:52:43The closest people have is they open lots and lots of apps and the ones they
1:52:47don't use get paged out and they switched to them and they get paged back in.
1:52:49Right. But once they're in there, they're working okay. Right. So there is,
1:52:53there's nothing about like, you know, the,
1:52:57the changed arm that is making it so suddenly you can get away with half as much
1:53:01Ram.
1:53:01And I would tell people that the trend always goes that you need more Ram in the
1:53:06future, not less.
1:53:07So don't certainly don't skimp on Ram by getting an arm based Mac that has less
1:53:11Ram than you, than you're currently using that you think you need.
1:53:14And in fact,
1:53:15maybe consider getting more that even if you're getting away with an eight gig
1:53:19machine now get a 16 gig one anyway,
1:53:21just because that's the one of the best things you can do to future proof a
1:53:24computer like this. And it's not that too costly of an upgrade, right? It,
1:53:28you know, and, and this is in contrast to iOS,
1:53:31which does handle memory very differently from Mac iOS,
1:53:34which lets iOS devices get away with having a lot less Ram than a Mac.
1:53:38But trust me, you would not want a Mac that handles memory the way iOS devices do,
1:53:42because it would drive you up a wall in general on the Mac it's frowned upon to
1:53:46kill an application out from underneath someone while they're using it.
1:53:48Whereas an iOS, that's just the way everything has always worked. So, uh,
1:53:52once again, get, I'm not saying everyone needs 16 gigs cause maybe they don't,
1:53:56right. And if you're pushing the limits on eight,
1:53:59having faster memory bandwidth and a faster SSD in your MacBook air is going to
1:54:04make it feel a lot better than an Intel machine with eight.
1:54:07But if you have a need 16 now don't get an eight gig
1:54:11M one Mac, you'll be sad. Yeah.
1:54:14And I would also push back a little bit on the argument too that like, you know,
1:54:17people are saying, Oh, maybe, maybe the, these things are so fast that, you know,
1:54:21machines like the Mac pro don't need more than X, whatever that,
1:54:24whatever you guess that number to be.
1:54:26But the point of machines like the Mac pro is
1:54:31to be that relief valve of like Apple makes a decision for quote,
1:54:36almost everyone for the rest of their lineup. But something like you can't,
1:54:41this is the lesson we've learned with like Mac pro neglect over the years.
1:54:44Like you can't just not serve extreme needs at all in your entire product lineup
1:54:49when you are the only vendor of all hardware that your software platform can run
1:54:54on. Like you have to,
1:54:56there's has to be some something in your lineup that people who have really
1:55:00specialized needs can have those needs satisfied by.
1:55:04And the Mac pro and the Mac mini are the, are those things like those two
1:55:08products combined do a huge,
1:55:12they carry a huge amount of weight from special needs.
1:55:16And so, you know,
1:55:18the reason the Mac pro now can be configured to one and a half terabytes of Ram
1:55:23is that people need that. Not a lot of people, probably not you,
1:55:28definitely not me, but there are people out there who need it. And to them,
1:55:32that's like that, that could make the difference between being able to use this
1:55:36computer for their intended application or just not being able to use a Mac at
1:55:40all and having to go to, you know, Linux or something, God knows what.
1:55:44So like we do need those extreme needs to be servable and served by something
1:55:49like the Mac pro, even if you know,
1:55:55most of us quote most of us or most people don't need that.
1:55:59It is important to have those needs served somewhere. And so I am not advocating
1:56:04in this transition for things like the Mac pro to get significantly reduced in
1:56:09the usefulness. And I, and I,
1:56:13I hope that's not the direction Apple goes and that's why it's such an
1:56:16interesting thought experiment to try to figure out like, okay, well,
1:56:20how do they scale this up? You know,
1:56:22there are so many advantages to the M one that we see now that you think about
1:56:27how they scale it up and it's non-trivial cause it's like it again,
1:56:29what we've been saying, saying like,
1:56:30how do you scale up to these massive amounts of Ram?
1:56:32How do you accommodate Ram slots if you still want to do that,
1:56:36which is pretty important to that market. What about error correcting Ram,
1:56:40ECC Ram? So far, Apple has never made a memory controller that supports ECC Ram.
1:56:45Can they probably, will they, who knows? Uh,
1:56:48that becomes pretty important when you have that much of it. Uh, you know,
1:56:51like there's, there's all these,
1:56:52all these questions that we just have yet to have answers for with the arm
1:56:57transition and some of them, the answer is going to end up being, yeah,
1:57:02they just don't support that anymore.
1:57:03And I hope there's not many things where that's the answer,
1:57:06but the higher end they push these new chips,
1:57:10the more we're going to get those answers and the more curious I am to see what
1:57:14the answers are. Honestly,
1:57:15Colin Devereux writes,
1:57:18it seems like the next few years are going to continue to be incredibly exciting
1:57:21for the Mac. My question,
1:57:22is there any concern over the longevity of these chips Intel based Macs have a
1:57:25habit of lasting five years or more.
1:57:27I love being able to buy a Mac and use it for many years that even needing to
1:57:31think about buying a new computer, unlike the three of us,
1:57:33should there be any discussion around how long the M1 chips will last? I mean,
1:57:38I don't see why it would be any different. I mean,
1:57:40we have exemplars sort of, of this with iOS devices and you know,
1:57:45I have iOS devices in the house that are many years old that haven't been turned
1:57:48on in years that I like just the other day I did this with one of my iPad minis.
1:57:52It hadn't been on in at least a year, maybe even two years. And I turned it on.
1:57:55It worked no sweat. And I take the point,
1:57:58but I'm not personally worried about this. Should I be,
1:58:01I mean, my question about this question was,
1:58:03is this about the reliability of the chip as in it'll break after five years or
1:58:08like how long will these machines still be useful as in like,
1:58:11can I keep using a computer for 10 years? And by the way,
1:58:14buying a new computer every year, unlike you blokes, not me,
1:58:17I'm the one who had a computer for 10 years. Um, so for the,
1:58:21for the chip reliability question,
1:58:24I see no reason why Apple's system on chips would be any less reliable than the
1:58:28ones they've been making for years and years in their phones and iPads.
1:58:31So if you've had an iPhone or an iPad, like in general,
1:58:33iPhones and iPads die usually because the batteries go bad or someone drops them
1:58:37and breaks the screen. Or eventually if you actually let them survive long enough,
1:58:40they just get too slow. Uh, so, but no, none of it has had to do with like, Oh,
1:58:45the chip fries itself or something. That's, that's not a problem.
1:58:48So I don't worry about that in terms of Mac usefulness. This really depends.
1:58:52Like I've been thinking about this with everyone, uh, gushing over the,
1:58:56the M1 max, right?
1:58:57We were in a bad period where Intel's performance was not getting much faster
1:59:01year after year, right?
1:59:03And Apple just leaped frog all of their Intel max with these and one base
1:59:08max. Um, and this is just the first round.
1:59:11The second round will be faster still in the third round will be faster still.
1:59:14But once that happens, kind of like me getting the 6k display,
1:59:17it very quickly becomes the new normal, right? And you're like, Oh,
1:59:21I'm just used to this. Now. This is just the way things are.
1:59:23If you get used to M1 and like, you know, your M1 Mac and you know,
1:59:28two years ago by the transition is complete. Every single Mac Apple has his arm.
1:59:32And you have the, you know, $999 M1 arm.
1:59:37Suddenly you have the slowest computer Apple sells.
1:59:40You were so overjoyed because it was faster than the fastest laptop Apple sells
1:59:44when you got it. But now that they've made the transition,
1:59:47now yours is the slowest. Does, you know,
1:59:50does that make your computer less useful to you two years later? Well, no,
1:59:55it's just as useful as it was before. Like,
1:59:56I don't think it's going to get any slower,
1:59:58but faster options will become available. And then like, you know,
2:00:02by that point,
2:00:03maybe the M2 based Mac book air is out and you have the M1 based Mac book air and
2:00:07you look at the M2 based one and you're like, huh,
2:00:10that one's only $999 too and it's whatever amount faster than this one.
2:00:14And your computer didn't get any slower,
2:00:17but you know there are faster ones available. Uh, so if you,
2:00:21if you look at the M1 now, it's like, this is gonna,
2:00:23this is gonna last such a long time because I'm getting high end Mac performance
2:00:27at a low end price.
2:00:28But that high end Mac performance is going to move on and leave you behind.
2:00:33And so you may find that not that it isn't useful anymore,
2:00:38but that you can get, you know, if things continue to go at this pace,
2:00:42so much better performance by buying the two or three year newer Mac book air
2:00:47model to replace it in two or three years.
2:00:49So overall I would say it's probably about a wash because the good thing about
2:00:55the Intel computers has been since their progress has been so slow.
2:00:59If you buy an Intel based computer setting aside the stupid keyboard crap,
2:01:02which really threw a monkey wrench into this. But let's say like,
2:01:04I was gonna use the Mac mini. That's a bad example too. And iMac,
2:01:08if you bought an Intel based iMac, there's a safe machine,
2:01:10but an Intel based iMac three years ago before the end, you know,
2:01:15right today, how much faster of an iMac can you get?
2:01:18You look at them and you're like, my Mac's still pretty good. It's still,
2:01:21you know, 90% as fast as the fastest iMac that you can get today. Yeah,
2:01:24I'm good for a few more years, right?
2:01:26Whereas we made this huge leap to the arm based Macs,
2:01:30but if they keep going on a trajectory that is,
2:01:33has a steeper slope than Intel max in terms of performance year over year,
2:01:37it's going to make your M1 Mac feel slower relative the best to the best you
2:01:42can buy more so than the Intel ones.
2:01:45Because the good thing about Intel Macs not getting much faster is it made your
2:01:48Intel based Mac not feel that slow year after year. Um,
2:01:52so I feel like those two things are going to balance each other out.
2:01:56That I do feel like, especially in the laptop realm,
2:02:00Apple has passed a new threshold of performance
2:02:05and battery life that puts it up into like,
2:02:09like we've seen with the iPad puts it up into a category where they're really
2:02:13satisfying most people's needs.
2:02:15Like there's a reason iPad battery life hasn't doubled because it doesn't need
2:02:18to double iPad battery life is pretty good for most people doing most things,
2:02:23right? It has been for years. And most people who have iPads don't say,
2:02:27I like iPads, but boy, the battery just dies after it's just too, you know,
2:02:31I can't stand the battery life. It's terrible.
2:02:32People don't say that about iPads, right?
2:02:34And the same way I feel like that that Mac book air that you bought,
2:02:38its performance will still be acceptable for all the things you do on it.
2:02:42If you're happy with it now and it's battery life may have passed some
2:02:46threshold where it is now close to being acceptable. So in that respect,
2:02:49it will last you a long time, but on the other side of it,
2:02:52you should be able to get a much better Mac book air in two years and you will be
2:02:56tempted to do so.
2:02:56So that's why I'm just going to call it a tie and say whatever lifetime you've
2:03:01been getting out of your Intel based Macs,
2:03:03expect to get a similar useful lifetime out of the ARM based ones.
2:03:06It's just that the factors influencing your decision to upgrade may be a little
2:03:10bit different.
2:03:11All right. Finally, Nick asks,
2:03:12I just accidentally spent 200 pounds on cable management stuff for my three
2:03:16screen desktop setup.
2:03:17The daily paper cut of kicking cables and seeing the mess made me finally snap.
2:03:21Do y'all just leave your cables where they may fall or do you get super
2:03:24particular about it like I just did or do you land somewhere in between?
2:03:27I have tried off and on over the years to do anything related to cable
2:03:31management. It never sticks. And then I just regret the waste of time.
2:03:35I had trying to make everything pretty so I don't bother with it at all.
2:03:38My desk is an absolute mess in the back. John,
2:03:41I would love to hear what you have to say about this.
2:03:44So I have two things going for me and against me when it comes to cable
2:03:49management. Uh, and they're both the same thing. Uh, my,
2:03:52my computer desk is up against the wall. I don't have a lot of room.
2:03:56My computer, my quote unquote computer room is not that big.
2:03:58It's also got my PlayStation in it. It's kind of tight in here.
2:04:01I've got big bookshelves. Um, but my computer is up against the wall.
2:04:04That's a pain for cable management because to manage cables,
2:04:08you kind of get to get to where the cables are,
2:04:09which is in the couple of inches between my desk and the wall.
2:04:13And no my desk isn't on wheels and no, it's not a standing desk.
2:04:16So to do anything back there is really difficult, you know,
2:04:21cause there's a wall there and you gotta be like on your back looking up or
2:04:24coming from above and behind and you can't see anything.
2:04:26If my desk was like in the middle of a giant open area,
2:04:29I could just walk around to the side of the desk and do all my beautiful cable
2:04:32management and tie everything off and put it in the little chat, but I can't,
2:04:34it's all like trying to work on the underside of a car without jacks.
2:04:37It's really torturous.
2:04:39But that exact thing is also my saving grace because it's against the wall.
2:04:45Nobody can see what's going on back there for the most part. So,
2:04:49and the second thing I have going for me is that my desk that's up against the
2:04:52wall has a big piece of metal that goes from basically from near the top of the
2:04:57desk, about halfway down to the floor.
2:04:59And that piece of metal can hide a lot of sins.
2:05:02So my main cable management strategy is to make things look neat from the
2:05:07perspective of someone who's in the room or someone who's sitting in front of
2:05:11the computer and to hide all my sins between the wall and that piece of metal.
2:05:16Right. So I don't want to see cables snaking around. I don't want to,
2:05:21you know,
2:05:21I want them to basically just go from the devices straight to the back of the
2:05:25desk and downward. And then I never want to see them again until they emerge
2:05:29beautifully and plug into the computer they're supposed to plug into.
2:05:31And I have mostly achieved that,
2:05:33but were you to look behind my computer,
2:05:36you would see where all the bodies are buried.
2:05:38You would see that it's not really that neat back there. And yeah,
2:05:42all the cables do beautifully go over the edge of the desk and reappear where
2:05:45they need to. But in between bad things happen.
2:05:48Same thing for because I use a wired keyboard and mouse just because I do the
2:05:52wires that go from my keyboard and mouse,
2:05:53you know, go from my keyboard tray and they somehow go up and they don't dangle
2:05:57and I don't kick them or whatever.
2:05:58And they appear in the back of my computer and how do they get there? Well,
2:06:01if you lay on your back and slide yourself under my desk,
2:06:03you will see a series of cable clips that are snaking their way in a random
2:06:07pattern from my mouse and my keyboard to my computer.
2:06:11So I guess the answer to that question is I'm not
2:06:17carefully arranging my cables,
2:06:20arranging my cables, but I'm providing the illusion.
2:06:24I'm carefully managing my cables by hiding all the,
2:06:28it's like this shoving everything in the closet version of cleaning the house.
2:06:31Like the house looks neat, but don't open the closet.
2:06:33Yeah, I, I do a little bit better,
2:06:38but I still wouldn't say I do a great job of this.
2:06:41I do have a standing desk and that helps a lot for two main reasons. Number one,
2:06:46when you are arranging your cables,
2:06:49you can raise the desk so that you can more easily fit under it and it's more
2:06:53comfortable to be down there and to, you know, to do things nicely. Um,
2:06:57but the number two benefit,
2:06:58which is probably the bigger one of standing desks in this area,
2:07:01is that if you routinely raise and lower the desk,
2:07:05you have to have a certain amount of good cable management.
2:07:09Otherwise stuff will be pulled off the desk every time you lift it up.
2:07:14So it kind of forces you to keep things a little bit tidier. Um,
2:07:18and you know, just cause it has,
2:07:20your desk has to be a little bit more mobile and you have to be able to move it
2:07:24knowing that cables are going to get pulled and then, you know,
2:07:27there'll be some slack out of them when the desk goes down.
2:07:30And so you kind of have to accommodate for that in your arrangement. Um,
2:07:33that being said,
2:07:35my methods of cable management are pretty simplistic.
2:07:39I'm actually kind of surprised that Nick somehow managed to find a way to spend
2:07:44200 pounds on cable management stuff, which was like a thousand dollars.
2:07:48Like I don't even know how you do that. Like, I mean,
2:07:51I guess there's probably like some cool boutique specialty stuff that's made of
2:07:56walnut and hand carved or something.
2:07:58But my management strategy has usually been based on zip ties or Velcro cable
2:08:03ties or both.
2:08:04And there's not much that you have to do that costs a lot of money in this area.
2:08:10One of the best things you can do if you want to set more poundage on fire is a,
2:08:17to get new cables that are exactly the length they need to be and no more.
2:08:22Because cable excess length is one of the biggest causes of desk cable clutter.
2:08:29And if you can minimize that excess length, you know,
2:08:33method number one is just take a zip tie or cable tie and just bound up the
2:08:36excess length somewhere along the along the cable where you can kind of tuck it
2:08:39away and hide it in useful way. But method number two,
2:08:42which just sets more money on fire is to buy new cables that are shorter.
2:08:46If you can for, you know, for whatever devices that you can do that for.
2:08:49Also it was obviously the strategy of if you can consolidate your devices
2:08:55themselves, like all your peripherals,
2:08:57if you can get away with one thing to do the job of what you currently have four
2:09:01different things with four different power bricks to do,
2:09:03like by all means do that. But obviously that's, that's not always possible.
2:09:07The other thing I would say is one of the standing desk advantages of keeping
2:09:14things tidy is that when you're designing a cable setup for a standing desk,
2:09:19one of the easiest places to put something,
2:09:24whether it's a cable or a small peripheral,
2:09:27like an external hard drive or something is the underside of the desk,
2:09:30which I feel like is an area like literally attaching things to the underside of
2:09:36your desk is an area of cable management,
2:09:40real estate that most people under use.
2:09:43So I would strongly suggest consider that when you're arranging things.
2:09:48So for instance, on the underside of my desk,
2:09:50I have two external hard drives plugged into a USB hub.
2:09:56All of those things are adhered to the underside of my desk with command strips,
2:10:01the Velcro ones. So they, they hold a ton of weight,
2:10:04but because they're Velcro and in two pieces you can like take the thing off and
2:10:11then you can do the command, you know, slow pull to detach the top strip thing.
2:10:16So you don't have to like reach behind a hard drive and try to pull a little tiny
2:10:18tab. Like you can take the device off, then you have full reach on the tabs.
2:10:22So it makes command strips way better to do the two piece Velcro ones and they
2:10:26hold a bunch of weight. So like, you know,
2:10:27I stick two of those on the bottom of a hard drive or something stick on the
2:10:31bottom of my desk. It's fine.
2:10:31I have a speaker ramp stuck to the bottom of my desk that way.
2:10:34It's not a large speaker ramp mind. It was one of those like $50 SMSL things,
2:10:39but the speakers on my desk are powered by an amp that is a command strip to the
2:10:44bottom of my desk. It works. And it's,
2:10:48they're very secure and you know, cause they, you know,
2:10:51they're made to hold like five pounds each.
2:10:53I put two of them on something that weighs one pound and you know,
2:10:56I have a lot of, a lot of leeway there. But anyway,
2:10:59so use the underside of your desk as well.
2:11:02Undersides of desks usually also provide some amount of, you know, framing,
2:11:07some kind of bars that go across it or somewhere.
2:11:09And those are also good things to attach cables to or to run cables along.
2:11:15Again, zip ties and cable ties are your friend here.
2:11:18But ultimately the end game of my desk setups,
2:11:24my cable management setups is I think a very common story.
2:11:29I'll get it set up really nicely and it'll be really nice for like two months and
2:11:35then I'll add something or a cable will break or I'll have to rearrange
2:11:38something. And then I, okay, well now I just,
2:11:40I'll just plug this in real fast and I'll get back to my job.
2:11:43And then few months later I'll add something else.
2:11:46I'll just plug this in real fast and get back to my job.
2:11:48And eventually there's so much crap built up and I can't move my iMac anymore
2:11:54cause some cable is being pulled too taut and I can't tilt the screen with the
2:11:57right, you know, tilt level anymore. And at some point I'm like, all right,
2:12:02I'm just going to start all this over again, clip all the zip ties,
2:12:05take all the cables out, unplug everything, do it all over again.
2:12:09And that's just, that's just the cycle of this kind of thing. And I don't,
2:12:12I think the reality of your desk setup is that it changes over time.
2:12:18That's the nature of technology. It's the nature of computers,
2:12:21the nature of being a nerd. So you can have the best setup in the world,
2:12:25but in a year you're going to want to redo it.
2:12:29And instead of trying to fight that or feel bad about it, just accept like, yeah,
2:12:33this is what's going to happen. You're going to make it really nice.
2:12:36And in a year it's not gonna be nice anymore. It's going to be full of, you know,
2:12:39knots and dust and bees and God knows what else.
2:12:42And then you're going to have to just redo the whole thing again. And that's,
2:12:45that's just how it goes and go into it with that in mind and you'll feel a lot
2:12:49better when it happens.
2:12:50I think, I don't know if I spent 200 pounds,
2:12:53I don't know what a pound is of the same as a quid. I kid, I kid.
2:12:57But I did spend a lot of money on cables when I got my Mac pro set up.
2:13:01And it's just for the reason Marco said, not because I needed the cables,
2:13:03although I didn't need a few of them,
2:13:04but mostly because now I had new distances to things because my Mac wasn't going
2:13:09to be underneath the table and I had, you know,
2:13:11the new monitor and different things were connected to hubs and they weren't
2:13:14before. And so I got cables that they're not exactly the right length,
2:13:18but they're in the ballpark.
2:13:20So I don't have any excess that I have to side and also none of them are pulled.
2:13:23So taught that they are visible. Cause again,
2:13:25that's my main concern about hiding things. I need mine to sort of loop down out
2:13:28of sight and then come back back up out of sight and go into the computer.
2:13:33And so they can't be too sharp, but they also can't be too long.
2:13:35And that's why I got all these new cables.
2:13:37Thanks to our sponsors this week, flat file, hello fresh and purple.
2:13:42And thank you to our members who support us directly.
2:13:44You can join at ATP dot FM slash join. We will talk to you all next week.
2:13:52Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.
2:13:56Cause it was accidental. It was accidental.
2:14:01John didn't do any research.
2:14:04Marco and Casey wouldn't let him cause it was accidental.
2:14:09It was accidental.
2:14:11And you can find the show notes at ATP dot FM.
2:14:17And if you're into Twitter,
2:14:21you can follow them at C A S E Y L I S S.
2:14:26So that's Casey lists M A R C O A R M N T Marco Arment S I R A C U S A
2:14:32Syracuse. It's accidental.
2:14:40They didn't mean to. Accidental.
2:14:46Tech podcast. So long.
2:14:52A few weeks ago, I said very,
2:14:54very quickly as part as like a lead into some other segment that I had thoroughly
2:14:59ruined my peak design everyday backpack.
2:15:01And I was about to tell you how it went. And then we just,
2:15:04we got sidetracked and started talking about other stuff and just never came
2:15:07back to it. Yeah. Right. And,
2:15:09and people have been asking literally every week since then.
2:15:12So what happened to the backpack? Um, so here,
2:15:17here's the quick story on that. I was going to one of my trips,
2:15:22you know, to go run some errands off the island.
2:15:25So I had my backpack full of stuff and I had like my dog and I had like a bottle
2:15:30of water for the dog and I had a bottle of water for me and I wanted to carry a
2:15:34coffee as well because part of these errands involves a long drive and I put my
2:15:39coffee as I always do in my Zojirushi travel mug.
2:15:44Zojirushi makes awesome travel mugs for coffee. They come in all different sizes
2:15:48and they have these flip top lids that you can close and you can lock.
2:15:53Normally I would have used the external, uh,
2:15:59cup holder on my backpack,
2:16:01but in this case the two external cup holders or external bottle holders rather
2:16:06on the backpack, the ones on each side were already occupied.
2:16:09I decided to put the coffee in the top compartment of the backpack and it was
2:16:14kind of padded with like a jacket on one side so it couldn't tip over and it
2:16:20turned out I this one time had forgotten to lock the lid.
2:16:25Oh no.
2:16:26And this one time as part of the process of getting myself and my dog and my
2:16:31stall,
2:16:33the stuff I was carrying between the house and the walk and the boat and the
2:16:39car at some, somehow the lid, I had,
2:16:42I had forgotten to lock the lid and somehow in the shuffling around something
2:16:47had pushed the button and it had popped open. And so my,
2:16:50my full thing of coffee in my Zojirushi travel mug had the opportunity to spill
2:16:55not even all of it, but maybe a quarter of itself into the backpack.
2:17:03It turns out that when you spill a quarter cup of coffee inside a backpack,
2:17:09it goes everywhere.
2:17:12You'd be shocked how much of the bag in how many different surfaces and
2:17:18different materials and everything,
2:17:21how much of it gets surprisingly wet from a quarter cup of coffee.
2:17:26The problem that I have with this kind of thing, you know I love coffee.
2:17:31I love lots of food and drink type things,
2:17:35but after I have cooked and eaten a meal,
2:17:38I don't want to be like going to bed at 10 o'clock that night and still be
2:17:43smelling the food that I cooked four hours ago. Like I want this,
2:17:47I want the smell of food to be there while I'm cooking and eating and then
2:17:52ideally to instantly disappear. And similarly,
2:17:55as much as I love coffee,
2:17:57I don't want my entire backpack to smell like coffee all the time.
2:18:03So I have this backpack that's full of coffee somehow with a quarter cup,
2:18:08but trust me, it went everywhere. Uh, and I got,
2:18:12I'm like every time I open it up, you know, I try, I tried, you know,
2:18:15some wet paper towels and wet cloths here and there to try to like blot it and
2:18:19wipe some of the surfaces down. But like it's really in the fabric.
2:18:22Every time I would open it up, it just smelled like now old stale coffee.
2:18:26And everything in it smelled like coffee.
2:18:29And I had to like take everything out and wash every like, you know, wipe or wash,
2:18:33everything that was in it. But still the whole bag just reached of coffee.
2:18:37And no amount of cleaning I was doing to it was helping.
2:18:40I even like brought it into the sink and I just started running water over parts
2:18:44because I'm like, it's already, I already don't want to use this bag anymore.
2:18:46So if I happen to ruin the structure of it in some way, Oh well,
2:18:50I've already ruined it. And so I, then I started washing it like crazy.
2:18:53I started like, you know, soaking parts, um, you know, really like hosing it down.
2:18:58I left it outside on the deck through three different rain and wind storms,
2:19:03hoping that it would like air out and really get,
2:19:07and nothing I did could make this backpack stop smelling like stale rotten coffee.
2:19:13They've actually since revised the bag. Um, they,
2:19:18they've made a version two of it about a year ago and Tiff has one of the
2:19:22version two ones.
2:19:23And there are certain things about the version two that are significantly
2:19:26better, but there are also certain things about that.
2:19:28I actually like a lot less than the version one. And so I'm like, I want,
2:19:33I just, I just want to replace this backpack, but I don't want the current ones.
2:19:37I kind of want the old one. And fortunately on Amazon,
2:19:41they seem to be unloading old stock of the old bags for discounted prices at
2:19:45Amazon. So I'm like, you know what, this is available right now.
2:19:49It's not that much money. Let me just buy a spare. Sure enough, the spare comes.
2:19:53I get it. It's fine. It's perfect. I'm happy with it.
2:19:56I now am keeping the old stale coffee one as the spare and that's it.
2:20:01I, I, there is no ending to the story. This is not a very interesting story.
2:20:05I was totally unable to remove the coffee smell from his backpack.
2:20:09So I must caution you all out there.
2:20:12Don't carry liquids inside your peak design everyday backpacks unless you are
2:20:17really, really sure that you have locked the lid on said liquids.
2:20:21But to be extra sure,
2:20:24just keep it in the outside pocket and that's a, you know, they,
2:20:27the bottle holder pockets, they're there for a reason.
2:20:29That's probably a better place to put liquids.
2:20:31I thought the moral of the story was the coffee ruins everything.
2:20:35You took the words right out of my mouth, John Syracuse. Well done, sir.
2:20:40Well done.
2:20:41Stale coffee reminds me of when I used to visit my mom's office.
2:20:44That's what it smelled like. Like, you know, coffee and like the little, uh,
2:20:47what do you call them? The hot craft, hot plates things.
2:20:50Yeah. Well, I mean that's a really bad coffee. Like at least this was good coffee,
2:20:53but even good coffee,
2:20:54once it has soaked into your backpack fabric becomes bad coffee pretty quickly.
2:20:58Well, I'm saying like this is the eighties and there was no,
2:21:00no Keurig machines or anything like that.
2:21:01It was all there was was the little whatever coffee things for the office,
2:21:04but it smelled like old burn coffee.
2:21:06Are you using Keurig machines as a good thing here? You're saying? No,
2:21:09I'm saying certainly they make better coffee than these things.
2:21:12They cause this was like the glass, like you get in a hotel room,
2:21:14a glass pot that you put on a hot thing with a little drip and the coffee would
2:21:18just sit in there and sometimes it would sit in there and get burned or whatever
2:21:22and just the office permanently smelled like the worst of like three day old
2:21:27burned coffee in one of those things. It was just a permanent smell.
2:21:30I can imagine your backpack smelling worse than that. Yeah. Like, cause again,
2:21:34the coffee was great when it was fresh and when it was not in the fabric of a
2:21:38backpack that I've been using constantly for four years, whatever. But yeah,
2:21:42when they combine,
2:21:44when you have an unwelcome food or drink smell, uh,
2:21:47it at in a place or at times when you don't want to be smelling that,
2:21:51it becomes significantly less pleasant. So the only thing that could be possibly,
2:21:56well, two things could be worse than that. One, I know,
2:21:58I know this from recent experience at my current job.
2:22:01One of the people who sat like a diagonal to me,
2:22:04one of my desks that I had, what did he had?
2:22:07He had a bottle of bourbon, I think like a glass bottle of bourbon.
2:22:12It was used for sort of after work activities and it was stored under his desk
2:22:18and somehow got kicked into a metal thing and cracked and leaked bourbon all
2:22:22over the floor. And I can tell you that is a strong smell that is difficult to
2:22:26get rid of.
2:22:26But the good thing alcohol goes over it is volatile and a lot of it does
2:22:30dissipate. Right. Uh, but the real worst one is, uh,
2:22:34I think this was my younger brother spilled milk in the back of our station
2:22:38wagon once.
2:22:39Oh, that's just getting into the carpet and you're like you try to blot it up,
2:22:43but whatever.
2:22:44But then you come back in the next day after it's been in the hot sun, rotten
2:22:48milk soaked into car, like, you know,
2:22:50not just the carpeting that you can take out,
2:22:52but like soaked into like the stuff that is actually stuck to the, you know,
2:22:56metal panel. Boy, that smell, I'll remember that forever.
2:22:59And it never really goes away. The goat,
2:23:01the ghost of rotten milk haunted that station wagon forever. Yeah. That's,
2:23:06you're, you're never getting rid of that smell.
2:23:07You can't just buy a new Volvo station wagon. I guess you can,
2:23:10but it seems the shame.
2:23:13All right. Titles made of Walnut.
2:23:16I got nothing. That's the, but the town of the zeros.
2:23:20Yeah, I said it, but it's not bad.
2:23:22Walnut has ruined all cool products.
2:23:26The nut or the wood.
2:23:28Well, the nut ruins everything. It's in the nuts.
2:23:31I'd rather have a backpack full of coffee than like a brownie that has one
2:23:35walnut somewhere in it.
2:23:36But I have a,
2:23:39I have a Walnut acclimation story actually.
2:23:42Oh yeah. What does that even mean? I was with, I'm with you mostly on walnuts.
2:23:45The worst nut, right? It looks like brains. It tastes bad.
2:23:49I don't want them in my brownies. Like the whole,
2:23:53the whole nine yards on, you know, anti Walnut. Right.
2:23:55But one of my favorite ice cream flavors, Ben and Jerry's,
2:23:59New York super fudge chunk has come with walnuts in it forever for the history
2:24:04of the flavor.
2:24:05And I love the flavor and I would get it and I would eat around the walnuts
2:24:09carefully. Like I'd extract them and put them aside and say,
2:24:12I'm not eating that and they eat everything else.
2:24:13And how long has that flavor been around decades?
2:24:16I've been eating New York super fudge chunk for,
2:24:18I think I had some like three days ago. Like I eat,
2:24:21I eat a lot of ice cream first of all. And second of all,
2:24:23you have a lot of New York super fudge chunk. And over the decades,
2:24:26I slowly stopped extracting the walnuts and started just
2:24:31eating them. I don't like them. Walnuts are still bad.
2:24:36I don't want them in my brownies.
2:24:38I would like it better if they weren't in this,
2:24:39but now I can eat them without, you know,
2:24:43having a feeling of revulsion. I don't like them,
2:24:47but I don't hate them as much as I used to, at least in this one context.
2:24:51So I feel like I've, I've turned a corner on walnut and I like, now it is,
2:24:55it is not worth the effort to extract them.
2:24:58I merely just the way I get rid of them now is I eat them.
2:25:00Glowing endorsement.
2:25:02I mean, what can you do with longs? The other thing is, you know,
2:25:06when I grew up, we had one of the traditional courses,
2:25:09Italian American meals,
2:25:10the nut course before dessert and they would bring out a big thing of nuts in the
2:25:14shelves.
2:25:15And half the fun of that is just getting to play with the nutcrackers and crack
2:25:17open the things or whatever.
2:25:18And walnuts are the biggest and the most fun to crack.
2:25:21But then you've got a bunch of walnuts and who the hell wants those?
2:25:23So I always give them to like my uncle or grandfather and they would eat them.
2:25:25I think we talked about this a year or two back. So my mom's parents,
2:25:31my grandparents are Italian American and I grew up with similar,
2:25:35although perhaps less devout traditions as you, John.
2:25:37And one of the things that was always on display and out for consumption when I
2:25:42visited them was pistachios.
2:25:44And the thought technology of using a
2:25:49previously cracked pistachio shell as a screwdriver or lever to
2:25:54open a nigh uncrackable pistachio shell was something I just discovered
2:25:58like a handful of years ago.
2:26:00It doesn't have to be previously cracked. You just need to just need a little,
2:26:03you just need a Pacman mouth and you can use that. Yeah.
2:26:05Otherwise you've got to check an egg situation.
2:26:07How do you get the first one open? Right. Right. Right. But uh, anyway,
2:26:10that was thought technology that just blew my mind and it has changed my life for
2:26:14the better ever since.
2:26:15I regret to admit that I've actually,
2:26:18I've actually switched to like shelled pistachios.
2:26:24What is it? Is it unshell? Is it shellless? What is the one that don't have shells?
2:26:29Yes. The ones that do not come with shells.
2:26:31I've switched to those for pistachios because that takes away to some of the tea
2:26:35ceremony. I know I was on your side for many years, but I have since switched.
2:26:40But now you just, you crave pistachios so much.
2:26:42You can't be slowed down by the shells. Yeah. I just kind of just shovel them in,
2:26:46pour them into my face. Now that's really,
2:26:49really putting a damper on your nut based calorie intake rate.
2:26:54It's best not to look at how many calories are in nuts. Don't,
2:26:57that's what I'm saying. It's the price. God, pistachios are so expensive.
2:27:01Yeah. Well actually I've been, I've found a nice solution to that. There's,
2:27:05what's the, the brand that comes in the green bag, like the good or whatever.
2:27:09It's like some generic brand name. Whatever national advertising brand. Yeah.
2:27:13Yeah. But they have, they have now these little,
2:27:15these like those like foil tube packs that you buy a box.
2:27:20It has like eight of them in there. And so you, it's pre-portioned.
2:27:23Oh yeah. The wonderful brand. Thank you Steve Mull in the chat. Um, yeah,
2:27:29the wonderful brand. Uh, and yeah, so you can, you can like,
2:27:31just had these little like 120 calorie packs and like these little like foil
2:27:35tubes. It's like three pistachios. It's not that many, but you can,
2:27:39but like it's nice that you could just grab one of those and then you,
2:27:41you kind of,
2:27:42you know how many calories you're eating in three seconds instead of just like,
2:27:46and so,
2:27:46and you can basically pour it into your face and like two or three pores and
2:27:51then you're done and you can move on. Yeah. My dad, he loves pistachios.
2:27:55He's also allergic to them and it's just like, I mean,
2:27:58it could be right out of the Simpsons. Like, you know, it's like,
2:28:00but you're allergic to these. Like, but I love them.
2:28:02So he would just sit there and eat them and just get all puffy and just,
2:28:04you can't stop. It's like, it's worth it. I guess. I don't, it's not,
2:28:10it hasn't killed them yet, but it's not. Yeah.
2:28:13Pistachio ice cream is a pretty,
2:28:15pretty good way because you know there's not a lot of pistachios in pistachio
2:28:18ice cream, but there's enough that you feel like you're getting something.
2:28:20Of course, the rest of it is ice cream, which isn't great either.
2:28:22Yeah. From a calorie point of view, yeah. Although pistachio ice cream is very good,
2:28:27but so hard, it seems like it's very difficult to do well.
2:28:32Yeah. Ben and Jerry's has the best pistachio ice cream. No contest.
2:28:35Haagen Dazs makes the pistachios too small and any ice cream that is green,
2:28:40forget it.
2:28:42Yeah. The ones that are like neon green to try to indicate pistachio-ness.
2:28:46No, that's not, that's still fake. Whatever. Yeah. Ben and Jerry's pistachio.
2:28:50What is it called? Pistachio pistachio. I forget the flavor name. Yeah.
2:28:53They are the only good store bought pistachio ice cream I've ever found.
2:28:56In conclusion, walnuts are dicks.
2:28:58And coffee ruins everything.
2:29:01Spill walnuts in your backpack and it's not going to ruin it.
2:29:03Yeah, that's right. Well, it depends. I mean, they're really bad.
2:29:07Just pick those walnuts right out of there. Anyway. Bye everybody.
2:29:10Thank you for listening. Happy Thanksgiving. Yeah. Happy Thanksgiving. That's right.
2:29:14Don't put walnuts in your stuffing. Use pine nuts instead. They're better.
2:29:17Yeah. Yeah, actually that's true for sure.
2:29:19And also since many people are not traveling for Thanksgiving,
2:29:23ourselves included.
2:29:25All people are not traveling, right? Everybody who's listening. Yeah.
2:29:28Please don't travel. But yeah, for all of us who are not traveling,
2:29:30the great thing about this is that you can edit what you have to be only the
2:29:36stuff you like. So like normally if you go to Thanksgiving at your parents'
2:29:41place, whatever, and you know, there's always like, first of all,
2:29:44there's always the Turkey and Turkey is usually terrible. Agreed.
2:29:48Disagree. Oh no, Marco is a hundred percent right.
2:29:51There are ways to make it decent, but most people don't or can't do those.
2:29:55So the result is Turkey is usually pretty bad.
2:29:59But you don't have to have Turkey or you don't have to have a whole Turkey.
2:30:03Like we decided for our little, you know,
2:30:05Thanksgiving here for our little family here at the beach,
2:30:08we decided we're not going to have a whole Turkey cause there's only three of us.
2:30:11But we bought a Turkey breast cause you can buy just the breast and you can roast
2:30:15just that and brine it and everything. You can do all sorts of fun stuff and it's
2:30:17way smaller. You got the worst part of the Turkey. Congratulations.
2:30:21It's way smaller and way easier to deal with. Or you can, if you,
2:30:24if you like the dark meat, you can buy a couple of eggs or whatever. Like you,
2:30:26you can buy just parts of the Turkey or you can cook any other type of meat or
2:30:31no meat. You can have Thanksgiving. That's all side dishes.
2:30:34You can have Thanksgiving. That's a steak or a roast or anything else.
2:30:37Like it doesn't have to be Thanksgiving. Oh, I'm on board. I'm Marco.
2:30:42I'm coming to that Thanksgiving next year. Yeah.
2:30:44Take this opportunity that you are forced by major world events to have a
2:30:50different kind of Thanksgiving that is both smaller and much more within your
2:30:54control.
2:30:55Take the opportunity to make your Thanksgiving that like pistachio ice cream
2:31:01for dinner. Yes. You can, if that's what you want,
2:31:04you can have Thanksgiving.
2:31:05That is only the things that you want and no other things you can control the
2:31:09ratios. If you want to have a Thanksgiving dinner, it's three quarters stuffing.
2:31:12You can do that. Like that's, it's up to you. You can,
2:31:15you have full control over what you make. So, you know,
2:31:18take this opportunity that you're forced to do something different and actually
2:31:22do something that you might enjoy a little bit better or at least at least the
2:31:25food part can be better while you talk to your family over FaceTime and you look
2:31:29at their dry Turkey and you're like, ha ha, I don't have to eat that.
2:31:31Alternately you could take this Thanksgiving away from family as an opportunity
2:31:36to practice making Turkey so you don't ruin it because Turkey is good practice
2:31:40in a judgment free environment. It's not that hard to make Turkey people.
2:31:44Just, just, anyway, I love Turkey.
2:31:47I'm going to have Turkey this Thanksgiving.
2:31:49It's possible to make it without ruining it.
2:31:51Yeah. I mean it's, it's possible. It's just very unlikely.
2:31:54I don't know. I think people,
2:31:56I think people just cook it at too high a temperature. Lots of meat things.
2:31:59Like if your problem is that you keep screwing it up,
2:32:02it's probably because you're trying to cook it at a too high a temperature,
2:32:04especially for something big. You just cook it low and slow.
2:32:07Then your only real problem is like the outside can be crappy,
2:32:09but then you just do high heat at the beginning of your end and you solve that
2:32:12problem and it's not that hard. You know, instant read thermometer is your friend.
2:32:17Well, but yeah, yes.
2:32:19But a thermometer tells you when the inside is done,
2:32:22when the outside is totally dried out and burnt. Doesn't, it doesn't prevent the,
2:32:26well, the outside won't be totally dried out and burned if you cook it at a
2:32:29lower temperature. Yeah. It's,
2:32:31it's very hard to cook a very large piece of meat that you are leaving whole in
2:32:36its whole form. Like practice.
2:32:38It's very hard to do that in a reasonable amount of time in a regular household
2:32:43oven. Like if you, if you were, if you're going to like, you know,
2:32:46smoke it and smoke the Turkey over like 12 hours, there are ways to do it.
2:32:51Like there are lots of low and slow cooking methods,
2:32:53but most people either aren't set up for them or don't have the skill for them.
2:32:58And it, the result is usually not great.
2:33:02Enjoy your Thanksgiving, whatever it is. And, uh,
2:33:06if you want to make something better than Turkey, feel free. Ham's good.
2:33:09Yeah. It's more of a Christmas thing though. I think, but or, or Easter. I've had,
2:33:14I've had good spiral hams more often than I've had good Turkey.
2:33:18Oh, bleach. And I should clarify, I don't like ham that much.
2:33:23Like I actually don't like ham in general. Like I'll eat it,
2:33:27but I'd rather eat something else. You should try the borscht ham.
2:33:30They may, they sell like the big ones. Yeah. Non spiral cups.
2:33:33Just one big hunk of ham, but it's already cooked. You just heat it up.
2:33:36It's so much better than that spiral slice stuff that you're getting.
2:33:40I guarantee. Can you still put the big pineapple rings on the side?
2:33:45I mean, it's, you know, like the spiral slice, it's already cooked.
2:33:47So you're just heating it through and you could do whatever you want with it.
2:33:50But I would, if you just get the borscht ham,
2:33:52you can get like a small one that's like small enough for like one meal for a
2:33:54family. Get, I mean, it's very expensive, but try it.
2:33:57And then take a buy a spiral slice one too,
2:34:00and then put them side by side and AB test against them. It's like,
2:34:03it's no contest.
2:34:03And I would say too, like on the, on the pricing side,
2:34:07like if you're buying so much ham that the price of it is a problem,
2:34:12I would venture to say you're probably eating too much ham.
2:34:15Well, if you have a big family dinner and you're going to buy a ham,
2:34:18that's going to feed the whole family. You do have to buy a bigger ham. But, uh,
2:34:22but yeah, we made the mistake of,
2:34:23we've been doing borscht hams for usually for Easter for a long time. We're like,
2:34:26Oh, we couldn't find that. We bought a different brand and it was so disappointing.
2:34:29I was like, Oh my God, we can never,
2:34:31we can never buy this non borscht ham ever again.
2:34:34Borscht stuff is phenomenally expensive, but is phenomenally tasty.
2:34:39Like I could sit, I know you two are going to judge me for this,
2:34:42but I swear to you I could sit and eat a pound of borscht white American like it
2:34:45was nothing.
2:34:46We know you and your white American cheese. We know about it.
2:34:48No, we've actually, we've been, we've had the, uh,
2:34:50the borscht yellow American is our primary cheese of our household because like
2:34:55the,
2:34:55the little grocery store here didn't have good like Kraft single kind of cheese
2:34:59like the pre wrapped singles for Adam all summer like to make grilled cheeses for
2:35:02for our kid. And so we just,
2:35:04we've switched the entire family over to just using borscht yellow deli American
2:35:08for pretty much everything. And it's fantastic.
2:35:11Mm hmm.
2:35:12The Aaron's entire family is like very much on the anti American cheese
2:35:16bandwagon and they're all wrong. They're all wrong.
2:35:19I, the only thing I'll say about the borscht cheese is for grilled cheese.
2:35:24Full fat Kraft is still a real cheese, not the singles,
2:35:28not the cheese food. Kraft American actual Kraft American actual cheese is
2:35:33still better in grilled cheese sandwiches.
2:35:34That's probably true. I'd buy that. I might not.
2:35:37Have I, I know I had, I grew up with borscht cheese.
2:35:40I know exactly what you're talking about. I ate tons of it. I still like it.
2:35:43But for a grilled cheese sandwich straight up American do the full fat whole
2:35:48milk real American Kraft cheese versus the borscht and just do make,
2:35:53make two sandwiches and see which one you like better.
2:35:56I think the Kraft one is better because that is its element.
2:35:59The artificial Kraft American cheese and the grilled cheese sandwich.
2:36:03That's true. That's fair.
2:36:05I will also argue once again that American cheese is the best cheese for
2:36:09hamburgers by live listeners. Thank you for listening.
2:36:11And we will talk to you next week. Oh my God. We were still live. Yeah. Oh God.
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