00:00:00 ◼ ► This is the first week that the bootleg will be up. Well, we'll talk about that later, I guess.
00:00:05 ◼ ► Well, no, no, no, I actually have something to say about that. It occurred to me moments before starting the show when I was reinstalling Call Recorder as my backup recording, you know, for the 95th time in the last two weeks.
00:00:15 ◼ ► Me too. Because it keeps disappearing. It occurred to me that of the three of us, far and away, irrespective of what computer I'm using, it is my recording that fails most often. It's not even a contest.
00:00:29 ◼ ► And I would argue that it is not typically something that I have done, you know, there's no like negligence, no, no, no. Oh, come on. Come on. I would argue.
00:00:42 ◼ ► Weren't there at least a couple times where it was kind of your fault? I mean, not that your fault that it failed, but maybe your fault you didn't have a backup, right? Like, because something's going to go wrong and you know, maybe that's not going to be your fault. But that's why you have like backups and redundancies, right?
00:00:54 ◼ ► Well, maybe, maybe. And certainly spilling water on the computer that was broadcasting is a problem. And that was my fault. But that was all you. The third party Ram. Don't forget about that one. That was fun.
00:01:03 ◼ ► Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. My point, however, gentlemen, is that given that I am the one that typically causes the problems, be it deliberate or otherwise, if the bootleg is ever not there, or ever late for any reason, even if it's just that you want to go to bed immediately for some reason, if it's that one of us did something weird, whatever, it doesn't matter, no matter what, I'm going to be the default fall guy. And to be honest, I kind of deserve it.
00:01:31 ◼ ► So why are you the fall guy for the bootleg? I mean, you're saying if your audio gets like chopped up into multiple files or something like why is that on you?
00:01:37 ◼ ► Or just in general, if something goes south. Now, I guess, in theory, with Marco's fancy fancy pants, self degrading setup, then hypothetically, as long as Marco can see me, it's not a problem.
00:01:49 ◼ ► Right. That's the beauty of this system is that this system is immune to your audio being messed up. Because it's like whatever happened during the call, like this is like, you know, the call during the show that we broadcast over the live stream, like this is the bootleg period. I don't need your audio to create it. It is being created as we speak. And as soon as we stop recording, I can upload it and that's it.
00:02:12 ◼ ► All I know is it's going to be my fault whether I want it to be or not and I'm already sad about it. It hasn't even happened yet. That's okay.
00:02:19 ◼ ► Anyway, I guess this is a good time to tell our members that now the bootleg feed is live. It is in your member control panel. There's a second feed you can add. It's basically replace /rss with /bootleg and that's how it works.
00:02:35 ◼ ► But it's in the member panel if you want to have like a little quick adding actions and it's up. It is now a member perk. You will now get the bootleg, which is the recording of our live stream that is broadcast fully unedited, exactly what was broadcast over the live stream that is now available to you as a podcast feed.
00:02:53 ◼ ► The downside of this is that you get Skype audio quality and you don't get any fun edits that will make the show sound better, remove talkovers and everything, maybe add some sound effects here and there. None of those edits will be there.
00:03:07 ◼ ► The advantage is that you get to hear anything that we thought was too bad to keep in the show. You get to hear all the meta discussion of things like at the end we start talking about what titles to pick and everything like that.
00:03:20 ◼ ► You can hear whenever Casey breaks in and says, "Alright, programming notes. Should we do SKTP this time or not?" You get to hear any time Casey swears. Also, you get the show earlier this way because we try to publish it within a few minutes of ending the live broadcast instead of the edit, which takes me about half a day, usually goes up the next afternoon.
00:03:42 ◼ ► This is an option now for our members. We appreciate all our members. It's going very well, the whole membership thing so far. We appreciate you all very much. If you want to become a member, you can get the Bootleg feed now. If not, we're still cool.
00:04:18 ◼ ► There's no show notes. What I did was the Bootleg episodes have the same IDs and everything in the feed as the published episodes. Once the episode is published, the Bootleg gets updated to have the correct show notes, description, everything else.
00:04:36 ◼ ► That would require a readout on the files. That's not really possible easily. During the first 12 hours or so of the Bootleg, before I publish the edited show, it has no show notes. They will appear later if you happen to listen to them later.
00:04:51 ◼ ► Additionally, if we have an episode where there is no live broadcast, like sometimes if we have an Apple person on the show, we won't do a live broadcast just to make them more comfortable and then we'll just publish the edited show. Those will still go in the Bootleg feed.
00:05:14 ◼ ► Similarly, if your membership expires, the feed will be updated. You will still get the published versions of each show and they'll all just be prefixed in their titles and say, "Hey, your membership expired. Here's the ones who renew them."
00:05:27 ◼ ► It's a fully functional feed for people who want to listen solely or primarily to the Bootlegs. You can basically subscribe only to that feed and you won't miss an episode even if either your membership expires or we publish an episode that doesn't have a live broadcast.
00:05:42 ◼ ► Yeah, I thought the way you thought through this was both unsurprising in the detail you got into on this, but also really refreshing and great that you covered a lot of the edge cases that either I was worried about or hadn't even thought of in the first place.
00:05:58 ◼ ► And yeah, I think it's important to stress that there will be times that one of us, maybe me, you never know, might use a colorful, expletive adjective, etc. in order to explain something.
00:06:17 ◼ ► Additionally, I think you're downplaying the deftness and the skill that you bring to the table as an editor. That's not to say that the Bootleg feed isn't useful, it's not that it's not interesting, but I think in a lot of ways, some of the best moments of the show are results of Marco doing very surgical, precise, and clever edits.
00:06:40 ◼ ► And so I encourage all our members to certainly give it a try. It can't hurt to try it, but I wouldn't fault any of you if you thought, "Well, you know what? I'll wait the extra half a day to a day and get the pristine canonical version of ATP that Marco has sweat over."
00:06:59 ◼ ► In some cases, literally, his sweat over editing and making as perfect as we can possibly make it.
00:07:06 ◼ ► And so I think this is a very cool perk for those that are interested, but just like membership at all, if you're not interested, that's cool. We're just happy you're listening at all.
00:07:17 ◼ ► What you get from an unedited show, it sounds cool. If you're a superfan and you want to hear more of us, we are honored. It sounds really cool. It might not be as cool as you think in practice because it's a lot like DVD extras, like the cut scenes. And you watch them and you're like, "Oh, there's a reason that was cut. It actually wasn't as good as the rest of the movie."
00:07:39 ◼ ► So there is some value in editing of like, "Okay, you might get more of the stuff before and after of us messing around or doing administrative work or something. It might not be good."
00:07:54 ◼ ► So the main benefit of the bootleg seems to be people who want it quickly because it does get you the show about half a day earlier. And depending on what time zone you're in, that could be important for your weekly routine or commute or whatever else.
00:08:07 ◼ ► There is a lot of value to people getting it sooner and that's seemingly primarily why people want this kind of thing. But if you want it because you think we're withholding a bunch of amazing content from the main feed, I assure you that's generally not the case.
00:08:28 ◼ ► But for all three of you neutral superfans out there, if there's ever a time that Marco will cut something from the show, it's typically some sort of post-show neutral that often but not always I bring up and often but not always is indeed trash.
00:08:43 ◼ ► And so if you are one of the three neutral superfans, now is your opportunity. Please sign up to be a member and use the bootleg feed. You might enjoy that just a little bit more.
00:08:54 ◼ ► Just one other clarification. If you do sign up, you don't get all the historic bootlegs forever in the past. It's basically from this point forward. I think they have two or three of the last episodes in there but there's not a whole archive just because I haven't kept them all.
00:09:10 ◼ ► That's the other thing to think about for the bootleg. I don't know if this is a plus or a minus. Listeners can decide. But when we do the show, we talk about topics especially if they're difficult or controversial topics. And if we say something that we don't want in the show, it gets edited out.
00:09:26 ◼ ► We take a run at a topic and we change our mind and say something different or whatever. But that's all in the bootleg. So if you listen to the bootleg and one of us says something stupid, check to see if it's in the edited show.
00:09:40 ◼ ► Because if it's not, that's us going, "Oh, I said something stupid." And then we would go back and we'd try it again. People make mistakes. What I'm kind of afraid of is people listening to the bootleg and getting really mad that we said something.
00:09:53 ◼ ► Because that's the point of editing. We made another tri-edit. And if you listen to the show, maybe we cut out that whole segment because we thought our take on it was bad or wrong or changed our mind. That is what editing is for.
00:10:05 ◼ ► By seeing the unedited one, you were getting a peek into the process of creating a thing. We're letting you in on that. We don't want to be yelled at for making mistakes on our way to hopefully putting out a show.
00:10:18 ◼ ► You can yell at us about the actual published show. People do that all the time. But I feel like you're getting to see a private thing. Obviously, we stream it live to this tiny group of people who are able to listen live. Thank you, live listeners and chat room.
00:10:32 ◼ ► But now that we're releasing the bootleg to potentially more people who can listen to it at their leisure, keep in mind we're inviting you into this private space where we build the show that we then publish.
00:10:43 ◼ ► Lots of stuff doesn't make it to the show because it's not good, but sometimes it makes it there because we talk about it afterwards and you say, "You know what? We should just cut that whole segment because we're not happy with that. We don't want that to be in the published episode."
00:10:56 ◼ ► But guess what? It's going to be in the bootleg. And our discussion of it might not be in the bootleg. "I heard it in the bootleg, but you didn't say anything about it then."
00:11:02 ◼ ► We continue talking after we go off the air too. So keep that in mind. Please be nice to us. We're inviting you into our little recording booth. We're inviting a larger group into our little recording booth. The chat room, of course, is always good to us. Never says anything.
00:11:16 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a good point. Because part of the edits that I perform are, for instance, if we say, "Hey, what about that thing? How does that thing work?" And then somebody speculates on how something works and then it turns out we were totally wrong, I will usually cut that if I can, if it doesn't break any conversation around it or any future references that went back to it.
00:11:37 ◼ ► Because I don't want to have something in our show where we just kind of waffled around for a minute and all of us didn't know what we were talking about and we were all wrong and that doesn't have any value to listeners. So usually something like that happens. I will try to cut it if I can.
00:11:49 ◼ ► But other things might be things like social or speech habits that we're trying to get better at. So for instance, saying "guys" for everything. We've been really trying hard to be socially responsible, inclusive, as much as possible. And so certain speech habits, things like saying "guys" or unnecessarily making a gun reference by using certain vocabulary. I try to edit those out if any of us slip up and say that.
00:12:15 ◼ ► Using the wrong pronouns for a person. We are all trying super hard but we suck at me in particular. So we edit that out, we fix it in post, right? But during the bootleg you're going to hear us mess up. So that's part of the bootleg promise between us. You will be forgiving of our mistakes in exchange for being able to see them all.
00:12:35 ◼ ► Exactly. So anyway, it's a fun little member perk. I don't expect this to be a big thing. I would be shocked if we could have more than 100 people subscribe to the bootleg feeds. But for those of you who are out there who actually want the unedited raw livestream feeds and can't listen to the livestream directly, here it is. It's now a member perk. There you go.
00:12:56 ◼ ► And keep it down or John will have to turn that car around. You want bumpers? Fine. Here's a bumper. We're such jerky Steve Jobs free iPhone 4 bumper people now. We should cut this whole thing out of the show because we sound ungrateful.
00:13:18 ◼ ► So okay, I feel like I kind of have to whisper this because I don't just nobody nobody tell Apple, okay? And nobody tell like Mac rumors. But is it just me or is Face ID starting to work with masks?
00:13:34 ◼ ► I thought I saw that today. And then I decided I was crazy. And so I thought I was wrong. I thought I'd accidentally left my phone unlocked. And then when I went to use it, I had a mask on because I was picking up some barbecue takeout. And I didn't and I didn't have the week should actually explore this because this is the only good barbecue based on vinegar in the country. Don't fight me because I'm right. North Carolina barbecues trash at Marco Armond on Twitter if you disagree.
00:14:01 ◼ ► But anyway, the point being, I lost my barbecue place in COVID. I'm really sad. Wait, what? My barbecue place is gone. Like, I think so. I have the one the one back at home home. Yeah, there. It's gone. Oh, no, I really I don't know if I would. I would I don't know if I'm gonna be able to see you in the next 15 years.
00:14:19 ◼ ► One day that you and I could go because I'm not a connoisseur, but I do really like barbecue and I really want to try yours. Yeah, I'm really upset. Oh, that genuinely bumps me out. I'm I'm really sorry to hear that. You know, I think I've told the story on the show before. Now we're on like tangent number seven.
00:14:34 ◼ ► Hey, welcome bootleg people. But Declan and I, when he was pretty young, would do like baby gym. It's a place called Romp and Roll, but it was basically like, you know, baby, not even gymnastics, just like baby gym time. And he and I would do that on Sunday mornings.
00:14:51 ◼ ► And then we would go to one of my favorite barbecue places in the area and do lunch together. And we did this like every week. And we did this for probably six months or a year. And one day, I don't know, it was probably a year or two ago now.
00:15:06 ◼ ► It was the whole family. We were going to go into this barbecue joint and it just had suddenly closed out of nowhere. And I kid you not, I cried a little bit. I was so upset. Now the good news is it was a very small local chain. And so there's actually another one almost equidistant from my house. Don't be creepy from the one that closed.
00:15:24 ◼ ► But so we can still get our fix. But like, it's so funny that this this restaurant, which in the grand scheme of things, even though I would argue it's excellent barbecue in the grand scheme of things like it's a barbecue joint, who cares. But this restaurant had like such a defining moment or section of my life that I spent my time with my son every every Sunday morning or Sunday lunchtime with him.
00:15:45 ◼ ► And it just up and disappeared. And what really chapped my hindquarters was like six months ago, I said to Declan, you know, do you remember us going to Romp and Roll? And we would go we would go get Q and it was so good. And it was like, we did that all the time. Q barbecue, just literally the letter Q.
00:16:02 ◼ ► Yeah, sorry, I'm not like I'm not I'm not shortening. Sorry, sorry. Going to get the Q. We were going to the establishment named Q. That's better. Okay. Do you remember we used to go to Q all the time? We used to get barbecue just you and me. And he looked at me and blinked a couple times. No, no.
00:16:21 ◼ ► Oh, no, it's starting kids kids. I remember that stuff. Oh, no, it's starting this thing that was like so pivotal for me that involves you. And you just have zero recollection of it. It's starting now. He's five and a half years old. Remember my stories of my mother saying I'm making memories for my children. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:16:38 ◼ ► Yeah, same deal. Same thing with my son. My question for you is, did you do Romp and Roll with Michaela? Not nearly as much. Second child. I can give you 1005 reasons but second child is this. I had a thing that I did with Alex with a similar memory in place or whatever and asked him about it years ago. He has no recollection. I should take more pictures. My problem is Alex like it was it was like when, you know, cell phone cameras slash iPhone.
00:17:07 ◼ ► Touch cameras were bad and I never, you know, I don't have lots of pictures of it. It's like today I would have 100 pictures of it. That's that's one good thing. My daughter gets is because she was because she was born later. We have many more of those pictures, those casual things. But yeah, I'd go to a place with him practically every single day and we have this routine and he has no recollection of the routine. So it's just for me. Oh, no. I know we are so far. This is my fault. We are so deep in the tangents. I don't even know where we start. Where did this come from? You were talking about barbecue. Yeah, so it turns out that so far, we've had a lot of fun.
00:17:36 ◼ ► So it turns out that so masks so face ID and mask. Thank you. Wow. Wow. Did we get deep on that? Hold that back up. I can't tell whether this is a side effect of the way face ID works where it's training itself because like so. Okay, the way face ID and I don't know if touch ID work this way, but at least the way face ID works. I'm pretty sure is that if it fails to recognize you and then you input your passcode.
00:18:00 ◼ ► It feeds that into the learning algorithm of like, okay, it didn't recognize you, but this is you as verified by the passcode. So learn that this is you and try to get better next time. I think that's how it works.
00:18:11 ◼ ► I don't think so because you could that would make it learn random crap. I think what happens is every time you successfully unlock it like there's some distance you are from the ideal thing that it thinks here. It's looking for and there's some leeway to say well, it's not exactly what I was looking for, but it's close enough so you can unlock. I think those unlocks adjust the model right because if the failure is did it because then you just like pointed in the dirt and then unlock it with your code and be like, I guess you look like dirt now.
00:18:38 ◼ ► You can't have it learn based on failures because failures can fail for all sorts of reason. I think it's the successful unlock same thing with touch ID successful unlocks that are within the margin of error, but like it allows it to evolve over time. I guess I suppose it's the same way not that anyone's iPhone batteries last this long, but it's the same way it would work if as you aged right. You're always within the margin of error and slowly gradually you were changing the model. That's my guess. I don't know for sure.
00:19:02 ◼ ► Right or things like your beard gets longer or something. So there is some learning aspect to it where if it fails then you unlock it, but it was close or something. There's some element of it worth learning. So I don't know if it's that that is slowly learning what I look like with a mask and accepting it, but it started out like I had one masked unlock two weeks ago and I was like how did I do that? Wait a minute was that a fluke and I couldn't get it to happen again.
00:19:34 ◼ ► Well, but it wasn't it's I've been wearing mostly the same couple of types of masks for most of the time.
00:19:41 ◼ ► Mostly fish masks. Yeah, like if I'm in like a higher risk place or if I'm running like I'm in a high risk place. I have the K95 things. Please don't at me and then if I'm in the if I'm doing like a running kind of thing where I'm going to be sweating a lot in it.
00:19:56 ◼ ► I'll use I'll use a disposable like procedure mask like one of those like, you know square ones with the flaps because those like I don't mind messing them up and after a few uses I can throw it away and I feel bad to have a box of 50 of them or something.
00:20:08 ◼ ► So it's not not a big deal. I don't want to like mess up my fish mask with sweat to to unnecessarily.
00:20:14 ◼ ► I just hope people are picturing a giant scaly fish on the front of your face when they say this. I mean you say fish mask baby fish mask sweeping the nation another movie Marco hasn't seen from his list from five years ago.
00:20:25 ◼ ► Anyway, you know, it started out with like one unlock that I'm like, wait a minute that just did my mask and I couldn't get it to happen again and like the next day it happened again.
00:20:34 ◼ ► I noticed that like at if I would hold the phone from certain distances from my face or certain angles. It was more likely to succeed than others over the like over the next, you know, couple of weeks leading up to about now.
00:20:58 ◼ ► Yes, and so I thought it might be that but I heard from some friends who are using 13.6 the new the new 13 branch.
00:21:04 ◼ ► I've heard that it's happening there too. So here's the thing. So I don't know did Apple quietly tweak the algorithm to be more accepting which I think would inherently also make it less secure which is why they probably will not talk about it.
00:21:17 ◼ ► Or is it just a coincidence that my phone and many other people's phone seemingly are starting to learn what you look like with masks on and starting to accept it not intentionally, but just as a result of how the algorithm works.
00:21:29 ◼ ► So this is very interesting and I don't have I don't really know one way or the other but I will say based on only my own anec data.
00:21:38 ◼ ► So I could be dead wrong about this but there have been several times when I've had my mouth area. This is like pre mask you on the before times when we could see people.
00:21:48 ◼ ► I would have like my my mouth area covered up by I don't know like maybe I'm laying in bed and I have the blankets up really high because it's winter time and so like part of my mouth is covered or something like that.
00:21:57 ◼ ► And I feel like there's other examples but I can't think of any at the moment but basically when the lower say quarter or third of my face has been somehow occluded and yet face ID would still work.
00:22:08 ◼ ► Now this is not exactly the same as having a mask on but it's similar because I remember thinking to myself I feel like this is mostly about the eyes.
00:22:16 ◼ ► So I don't think it is actually just the eyes because if you look at the videos we saw back when face ID was first put out you'd see the big you know the IR dots all over the people's faces and it's like yes it does look at the eyes and everything like that to find the features and distances and angles between them and stuff but it's also the contours of the face that's the whole point you can't feel you can't fool it with a picture of yourself you have to have you know a 3D model of your face like it's this whole amalgam of things right so to the degree that the mask changes the shape of your face like it's not like it just cares about your eyes and your eyes.
00:22:45 ◼ ► And your nose it cares about the whole shape of your face if the mask is form fitting or if it's within the margin of error I can imagine eventually learning oh it seems like this face is all rumply and flat on the lower part and then it just would come to accept that although some people remember when we first started wearing masks people tried to train with the masks and that didn't work.
00:23:04 ◼ ► So maybe what they did was tamp down its sort of face normative coding where it expected everyone to have a mouth right and it said look if you don't even see a mouth something has gone wrong so try again and now it's like you know lay off on that if they train it or if that's the way to try it like erase your face from face ID and train it with the mask.
00:23:25 ◼ ► And if you can train it with a mask and it works 100% of the time it probably means they change whatever part of the algorithm that insisted on finding something that looked more like a mouth and it's okay for it to just be a blank down there.
00:23:37 ◼ ► The rejection of masked faces from the training screen might be a different set of criteria than what the learning algorithm of face ID permits so like maybe it won't let you train yourself with a face mask but it will let itself learn into that direction over time because that's like that's what I'm seeing is like it didn't work at first.
00:23:58 ◼ ► I tried all the training methods back you know a couple months ago when people started first experimenting with that with like you know you fold it in half or whatever I tried all those different things I couldn't get it to work but I have been using the same phone with face ID repeatedly with masks for months now and they're slowly starting to work and so that's why I feel like it's probably a learning algorithm thing but because I have recently installed the beta then I kind of felt like maybe you know maybe it's a 14 thing but but I don't know it's I'm happy it is this way.
00:24:27 ◼ ► Because it's one of those things where it would be better for all of society right now if it was more convenient to wear a mask. Face ID working is one thing that's within Apple's control to affect that pretty strongly and yet they're not going to get everybody to wear a mask by simply making this one change but it removes one you know one more element of friction to wear a mask and if for all the people out there who aren't wearing them or who are doing the kind of you know like the the the chin strap thing.
00:24:56 ◼ ► Which is not wearing one you know because because something about it irritates them or annoys them and they like I don't want to do this like any small thing that anybody can do to make wearing a mask easier and more universal and more accepted will have strong dividends here.
00:25:13 ◼ ► So Apple could have intentionally tweaked the algorithm to make it just accept that more but you know they could probably they would probably have to reduce the mathematical security of it to do that because they're they're reducing the amount of data that's recognized as valid.
00:25:31 ◼ ► So they would probably never be able to really say that publicly because they would probably get you know potentially trashed by various communities for reducing the security of it but it's best for the world if they do this.
00:25:43 ◼ ► So I'm not sure like whether whether this is just like an unintentional learning algorithm thing or they are slowly tweaking this over time because that is kind of like the most pragmatic thing for them to do but they could never talk about it.
00:25:58 ◼ ► I don't know. I'm going to have to keep an eye out on this especially with 13.6 and I think I'm crumbling on the beta on my carry phone. I think it's going to happen sometime in the next beta or two.
00:26:10 ◼ ► Like if we get three or four down that aren't complete disasters then I'm going to probably commit because I'm a big wuss and I'm not going anywhere anymore.
00:26:17 ◼ ► So I will caution you. So yeah steer me straight steer me straight. Okay so I've had the beta since day one like I've put it on my main phone on day one and now we're in beta two and the public beta I believe just started for for iOS.
00:26:32 ◼ ► It's fine but it's not like super amazing that you have to really have it for any real reason. So there's not a lot of like upside to it and there are still downsides. You know sometimes I have to reboot my phone to get like web views to work in any app.
00:26:49 ◼ ► Or there does seem to be some kind of change to the way things are fetched over the network in certain conditions. Sometimes like apps that fetch images or whatever will just stop until I either force quit them or restart them or reboot the whole phone.
00:27:04 ◼ ► Something's up with network fetches and connectivity and stuff like that. I don't know what it is yet but it's persisted through our betas one and two.
00:27:12 ◼ ► And there are like you know little things like that where like yeah this is actually really good for a beta one and a beta two compared to you know past years.
00:27:21 ◼ ► But it's still very much a beta. You still shouldn't install it unless you have a pretty good reason to because there are still beta bugs.
00:27:31 ◼ ► It doesn't work as well as you think it should yet because it is still really early. So if you're not really itching to install it for a particular reason that you know it will make better in your life or that you need to for work, I wouldn't recommend it still.
00:27:43 ◼ ► Yeah so here's the thing. I don't want to get specific about it but I want to have all of my health kit data in my test device. And currently my test device is Aaron's old iPhone 10 which is not logged in. I don't believe it's logged into my iCloud. It's not logged into really anything.
00:28:04 ◼ ► And I know I could log into iCloud and then it would sync up all my health data and that is the easiest way to do it but I'm trying to be a good boy and not put iOS betas anyway on iCloud.
00:28:17 ◼ ► And so I don't know. I don't think there's any good way of exporting and importing health data as far as I'm aware.
00:28:23 ◼ ► And so I kind of want to use the carry phone so I can get all that data but I know I shouldn't. But I think you've scared me enough to at least keep me as a good boy for at least another couple of weeks. But guaranteed it's only a matter of time before I cave because I'm a big wuss.
00:28:39 ◼ ► Yeah and it won't be the end of the world when you finally do. You'll see the same thing I do which is like yeah it's fine most of the time but every couple of days you'll be reminded oh this is very much a beta still.
00:28:53 ◼ ► In particular I would not recommend it on the Apple Watch. That is in a bit of a rougher state. In particular the battery life area is still pretty rough on the Apple Watch.
00:29:01 ◼ ► And I've also had occasional issues where like the face of the watch will just freeze for a while. Including the time part of it. Which is kind of important.
00:29:13 ◼ ► So yeah I've had more issues with the watchOS beta than with the iOS beta but neither of them are like fatal. But it's definitely not recommended that you install them unless you have a really good reason.
00:29:25 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Notion. If you want notes they have it. Docs you got it. Task management of course. Databases even those are in Notion.
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00:30:35 ◼ ► So stay on task, find what you need and collaborate efficiently all in one place with Notion. For 10% off a team plan, head over to notion.com/ATP.
00:30:48 ◼ ► That's notion.com/ATP to get 10% off a team plan. Once again notion.com/ATP. Thank you so much to Notion for sponsoring our show.
00:31:03 ◼ ► John, can you tell me about the mugs that everyone is getting but I haven't gotten yet? Please.
00:31:07 ◼ ► Yeah, when we do our sales we have like a store page where it's like a landing page at ATP.fm and that leads to the cotton bureau site where you can buy stuff and we have descriptions of the product or whatever.
00:31:16 ◼ ► And you know the deal is like you order your stuff and then the sale ends after some period of time and then all the stuff gets manufactured based on how many orders we got and then we ship it. Like that's the way we do these things.
00:31:26 ◼ ► But one of the side effects of that is that after you order something and all the pages go away, like we take down the store page and we say we're not having a sale now and all that other stuff, you can't, if there was like information about the products that were there, you can't go back and reference it.
00:31:41 ◼ ► Which usually doesn't matter because what are you referencing? But this is the first year we sold mugs and a question a lot of people have about the mugs, people were asking when they were ordering them, "Hey, is it microwave safe?"
00:31:53 ◼ ► And so we had that information. But another piece of information that now that people have the mugs that they want to know is, "Is it dishwasher safe?"
00:32:01 ◼ ► And I want to tell you, hopefully you're hearing this either before you got your mug or before you washed it, these mugs are not dishwasher safe. Do not put them in the dishwasher. They will burn your whole house down. No they won't. They're fine.
00:32:14 ◼ ► The logo will probably come off. So don't put your H-B mug in the dishwasher. Wash it by hand. Again, I hope the people who like the show enough to get a mug listen this far into the episode and hear me saying, "Don't put it in the dishwasher."
00:32:32 ◼ ► Because if you put it in the dishwasher, it might destroy the logo and that's the whole reason why you bought the mug. So wash it by hand.
00:32:39 ◼ ► Well to be fair, it is a very nice mug otherwise. However, I've been a fan of novelty printed mugs for a long time and I always hand wash my favorite mug.
00:32:50 ◼ ► Whatever my favorite mug is for that given year or two, I always hand wash it because I've had mugs that I didn't hand wash with any printer, pretty much any screen printed mug.
00:33:03 ◼ ► If you put it in the dishwasher on a regular basis, like if you do it once, you probably won't notice anything wrong. But if you do it on a regular basis, the logo, the printing will start to either fade or run or both.
00:33:19 ◼ ► And so it's just an effective printing thing. So hand wash your mug if you care about it. If you only intended to use it for a few months, maybe you might be able to get away with dishwashing it then. But yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.
00:33:31 ◼ ► It is microwave safe though. You're fine to microwave it. Just don't put it in the dishwasher. That is all.
00:33:36 ◼ ► We should make a mug addition that is not microwave safe because it has gold foil on it.
00:33:41 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the caveat about the mugs. If we had used them metallic ink, it wouldn't be microwave safe. Although it might put on quite a light show. But we did not use metallic ink so it is microwave safe.
00:33:52 ◼ ► We also, like man, we sure, we're not great at logo design. And the rainbow ATP logo that everyone loves is wonderful because it looks really great. But for me, like merchandise design perspective, it's terrible because it requires eight colors to print or whatever.
00:34:12 ◼ ► It's the most expensive logo ever made. It's like the Apple logo. I was telling the story of when Apple originally had the rainbow logo on its hardware when they were first manufacturing hardware, nobody wanted to put the rainbow logo on the Apple II because it's so expensive.
00:34:24 ◼ ► Like every additional color you add adds complexity and cost and it's just like, can we just put just a solid color silhouette? But of course, Steve Jobs insisted that it had to be rainbow striped.
00:34:34 ◼ ► Yeah, if we ever do mugs again, we might do a monochrome one. We might, we have all sorts of things we might look into, but that's, that's your future date. For now, everybody please enjoy your mugs.
00:34:47 ◼ ► Wait, what? So, okay. You don't drink coffee. What, what do the two of you put in mugs?
00:34:54 ◼ ► First of all, you want to get the merch for your own thing. In fact, I've, I've realized, I don't think I've talked about this, but I've realized over the last few months, particularly since, you know, I stopped leaving the house that basically my entire wardrobe is ATP t-shirts.
00:35:09 ◼ ► At least during the summertime. Like I am that guy that is wearing my own band t-shirt everywhere I go now because I have so many of them because I always buy, I buy at least one of every run.
00:35:19 ◼ ► Like I didn't get the addition way back when because I'm a fool, but, but you know, I, I got a different, I think I got the sport shirt, you know, during that run for example.
00:35:27 ◼ ► And so I have all these ATP shirts and I just wear them constantly and I wanted a mug because I think they look great and, and I wanted to have a copy of the thing that we made.
00:35:38 ◼ ► But beyond that, when it gets cold, I love me a hot chocolate. Hot chocolate is delightful. And so that's what I'll be putting in there. And that's at least a lot more interesting than water. Right, John?
00:35:48 ◼ ► I'm drinking nothing out of my mug, although at work back when I used to go to work, I have a, I have a mug that's like a, like my company logo on it that I got like as part of your welcome, your new employee, you know, like first day package of stuff.
00:36:02 ◼ ► 11 years ago. That's not even our company logo. We had a logo redesign since then or whatever. And so I was, I was, so it was a point of pride that I've got one of the super old mugs. But anyway, I would drink water out of my mug at my desk.
00:36:14 ◼ ► I've done that for a decade. Water. You had to come in in the morning, I'd get my mug, I'd go into the little kitchen area, they have little water machines there that will give you both ice and water.
00:36:24 ◼ ► And I would fill it up with water, bring it back to my desk. That's all I do all day is refill my cup mug with water. Why was I using a mug? Because they gave me a mug and it's got the company logo on it.
00:36:32 ◼ ► But when I'm at home, even though I have these mugs, I don't use them, I just use regular glasses. I got the mugs because my daughter uses mugs for various tea concoctions that she's into lately.
00:36:42 ◼ ► And also I just wanted to have, like Casey, just want to have a copy of the mug or whatever. And me being me, I got one for my daughter to use and I got one for me to keep pristine. It's up in the attic now.
00:36:54 ◼ ► And then my wife wanted a mug too. And so we have three mugs. So my wife's got one, my daughter's got one, and I've got one in the attic. Most of the merch that I buy, I don't tend to wear on my own shirts.
00:37:04 ◼ ► I have a million podcast shirts from other podcasts. That's mostly what I wear, but I do want pretty much one copy of most of the shirts that we make. And so they're all neatly folded in the attic, including the addition, which I will sell to Casey for a huge amount of money in his retirement.
00:37:25 ◼ ► You know, if it weren't for you sharing, at least with us, I don't think they were shared publicly, but you shared with the two of us, I don't know, maybe around the time of Mac Pro, I believe.
00:37:35 ◼ ► You shared with us photos of your attic and I've seen it and there's a lot of stuff up there, but it's not nearly as bad as I had envisioned.
00:37:43 ◼ ► But the way you talk about it and the way you talk about how your house is supposedly crumbling, I am surprised that your attic has not become your second floor.
00:37:52 ◼ ► The attic just hasn't fallen through and has taken the place of the second story of the house.
00:38:04 ◼ ► I mean, it's a lot of stuff. Like you saw the picture, it's things stacked basically to the ceiling, to the angled ceiling.
00:38:09 ◼ ► Not enough stuff has left the attic. Really, most of the stuff up there is like baby and toddler stuff that we need to get rid of.
00:38:18 ◼ ► But on the computer side of things, it's just boxes and boxes filled with computer hardware.
00:38:27 ◼ ► So I was going to give you crap about using a coffee mug as your work water cup, because it doesn't hold that much for a water cup.
00:38:37 ◼ ► But then you said, "All I do all day is go back and refill it." And then I realized, "Ohhhh."
00:38:55 ◼ ► But I didn't have anything in the work day back when I had a real job that would give me an excuse to get up and leave my desk on a regular basis.
00:39:10 ◼ ► And now I realize if I was using a 12 ounce coffee mug, that would have been way better because I could get up and refill it twice as often.
00:39:19 ◼ ► I'm mostly just sipping it. I would fill it in the morning and then I wouldn't have to fill it up again until lunch time or after lunch.
00:39:25 ◼ ► So I'm not guzzling it down. It wasn't so I could take more frequent trips. It's just that's what I had.
00:39:39 ◼ ► Because of the work I did not practice the thing of keeping the drink on a different level than my computer.
00:39:44 ◼ ► Back when I had a desktop, it was because the desktop was on the floor and the drink was on top and they were on opposite sides.
00:39:50 ◼ ► So that was all set. Now I've got a laptop and I had the laptop on the same level, albeit at the far other side of the desk.
00:39:56 ◼ ► Because I got my drink by my right hand and the laptop would be way over in the left hand corner.
00:40:09 ◼ ► Yeah, this topic is always confusing. It will eternally be confusing, not the least of which because there are cables that look the same on the outside and have no markings on them but behave incredibly differently.
00:40:19 ◼ ► Last show we talked a little bit about USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3 and 4 and I was saying a Thunderbolt 4 doesn't get any faster, but it has some different constraints than Thunderbolt 3.
00:40:29 ◼ ► And apparently I got some things wrong about USB 4 versus Thunderbolt 3. Imagine that because it's so confusing.
00:40:34 ◼ ► Jonathan Deeds wrote in with some more information. So what he says is, while USB 4 is conceptually based on Thunderbolt 3, there are material differences regarding implementation such as signaling rates and coding schemes, etc.
00:40:46 ◼ ► According to the USB 4 specifications, interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 products is only optional for USB 4 or hosts and devices.
00:40:53 ◼ ► This is where you get into this whole world of like, well, I have this port and this cable and this thing.
00:40:58 ◼ ► Like, there are lots of things in these specs that are optional, right? So USB 4 being "the same" as Thunderbolt 3 is not really true.
00:41:06 ◼ ► It's just that USB 4 can optionally be interoperable with Thunderbolt 3 but doesn't necessarily have to be.
00:41:13 ◼ ► Which is just maddening, right? And so interoperability is enabled by using the USB Type-C Thunderbolt alternate mode.
00:41:21 ◼ ► The bulk of the USB 4 spec explains how USB 4 works and a single chapter is devoted to covering what you need to do differently in order to be compatible with Thunderbolt 3 products.
00:41:40 ◼ ► Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 are the same, but with mandatory support for Thunderbolt 3 interoperability.
00:41:46 ◼ ► Let me read that sentence again. "Thunderbolt 4, on the other hand, is the same protocol as USB 4 but with mandatory support for Thunderbolt 3 interoperability."
00:41:54 ◼ ► So if you have a Thunderbolt 4 port, you know it's compatible with Thunderbolt 3 because that's a mandatory interoperable thing.
00:42:05 ◼ ► Anyway, Thunderbolt 4 uses USB 4 as its primary protocol, but Thunderbolt and DisplayPort alternate modes are also required.
00:42:14 ◼ ► All I can say is expect more confusion about what the USB-C-shaped holes on the sides of your Mac do.
00:42:20 ◼ ► I mean, Apple's already said in that we talked about last week that they're going to support Thunderbolt on their Macs, which shouldn't be a surprise.
00:42:30 ◼ ► If Apple ships a USB 4 port that is Thunderbolt 4 compatible, we can just call it a Thunderbolt 4 port because if we called it a USB 4 port, we might not know if it has Thunderbolt 3 compatibility, so they'll call it.
00:42:41 ◼ ► Oh, it's so freaking confusing. We'll get on the other side of this eventually, but not for the next five years, I guess.
00:42:49 ◼ ► In the meantime, Thunderbolt 4 is still the best because it is compatible with the most things, but the top speed of Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3 is exactly the same, so you're not getting a speed advantage.
00:43:01 ◼ ► I think we will be revisiting this topic in the future when the ARM Macs come out and we can figure out what the hell the ports actually do.
00:43:11 ◼ ► Fair enough. And speaking of ARM Macs, the rumors haven't mentioned touch screens yet, but there are some other things that have been mentioned, including the thought that the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro with a form factor similar to the current 13.3-inch MacBook Pro could be the first one to get an ARM-based chip.
00:43:32 ◼ ► Well, this is like in the last show we were talking about the potential ARM Mac hardware. Kasey, you were the least optimistic that we would be getting something radically.
00:43:42 ◼ ► I think maybe if we have that eventually, but the first crop of ones will just look like the current Macs, but have different things on the inside.
00:43:48 ◼ ► And there was another crop of these rumors, like, oh, which ones are going to be the first ARM ones? Maybe it's going to be a 13-inch. Previously, there were rumors about a 16-inch and mini-LED screens and all sorts of hardware rumors.
00:43:59 ◼ ► But when these went around again, I think because most of the people in the tech sphere had been listening to podcasts like ours where we were discussing the potential features of ARM Mac hardware, everyone commented, hmm, more rumors and still nothing about touch screens.
00:44:15 ◼ ► Now, maybe that's because, I don't know, like the parts leaks are from the panel source, but not the digitizer thing if those two things can be separate. Like, I don't know. Maybe it just hasn't come out yet.
00:44:26 ◼ ► But the longer these rumors go on and we still hear nothing about touch screens, the more it seems like Kasey is right and that the first crop of ARM Macs won't have touch screens.
00:44:34 ◼ ► I still don't understand, like, unless it was some kind of emergency and they just wanted to ship and somehow couldn't do it. Like, it seems like it would be so much cleaner.
00:44:44 ◼ ► That's why everyone has been talking about it in their podcast, including us. So much cleaner to ship the first ARM Mac with touch screens because then you have from day one, oh, you know, all those Macs that can run iPhone and iPad apps?
00:44:54 ◼ ► Yeah, they're all touch. So no problem. Like, there's no confusion about, well, how the hell do I use this iPhone app on my Mac? It's a touch screen. They're all touch screens. All the ARM ones are touch screens.
00:45:04 ◼ ► And the Intel ones don't have to be because they can't run iPhone and iPad apps. Like, it would just be so clean, such a clean break of, like, the old world when a Macs couldn't do this stuff and the new world when they can.
00:45:15 ◼ ► And for all the other reasons we've listed and we'll talk about more later maybe. But these rumors so far aren't mentioning it.
00:45:21 ◼ ► And it made me rethink something I said in the last show where I said, like, these ARM Macs are going to come. It's not like they're going to have, when we're talking about touch bars, it's not like they're going to have a separate T2 running the touch bar and then another ARM system on a chip running the whole rest of the system. Why would they do that? It would be so wasteful.
00:45:39 ◼ ► But if they're really shipping a line of ARM Macs that are basically just like the Intel Macs you know but we swap out the Intel CPU and maybe the discrete GPU for a system on a chip but everything else stays the same, maybe they come with a touch bar.
00:45:54 ◼ ► And maybe that touch bar is run by the T2 for the reasons I was mentioning in the last show. Why they wouldn't do it is, like, they don't want to have to re-architect it.
00:46:01 ◼ ► The T2 runs this different OS that runs the touch bar and it's own little separate computer that communicates with the main computer. And if, you know, they'd have to re-implement all of that if they want to keep the touch bar because these are the Macs that are basically just like the old Macs but different guts on the inside.
00:46:18 ◼ ► Maybe they would ship, like, it would be so gross to have an ARM system on a chip and also a T2 in there. But if these rumors that don't mention touchscreen and just keep talking about, you know, sort of models similar to our current models are true.
00:46:34 ◼ ► Maybe, like, I don't know, I don't want that to be the case but it's more of a possibility now than I thought it was. The rumors also mention a "all new form factor design" which is in the future, the 2021 models, right?
00:46:49 ◼ ► So that would be like the, okay, well, this first crop are not like that but the second crop are the ones that have all the rounded corner screens and the touch screens and all that other stuff.
00:46:58 ◼ ► I don't know. We're still far away from ship dates. All we know is that the first ARM-based Macs will ship before the end of the year so just assume, like, December or holidays or whatever. Like, I don't know.
00:47:09 ◼ ► It'll be a while still. I'll be keeping my eye on these rumors but the fact that the rumors never mention touch screens has really dumped a bucket of cold water on all my optimism from last show.
00:47:19 ◼ ► I'm not sure we can actually really read much into that because the rumors so far about whatever the, you know, future Mac hardware is have been so thin.
00:47:29 ◼ ► And they're all over the map. They predicted, like, every possible Mac you can imagine in every size has been predicted at some point.
00:47:40 ◼ ► So this is some feedback from Remy Vachon. Since they announced ARM Macs officially, I've been thinking about the fact that the iPad Pro with a keyboard and mouse is very close to being an ARM Mac on the hardware side.
00:47:52 ◼ ► This is assuming, like I said in last show, that they make these ARM Macs that have almost all the features of an iPad. A curved screen, a touch screen, all those things or whatever.
00:48:02 ◼ ► I'm thinking about the possibility of Apple letting users install Mac OS on iPads, especially Pro ones. If Apple releases a new ARM based Mac with a touch screen, rounded corners, cellular antenna, etc.
00:48:11 ◼ ► that does sound an awful lot like an iPad Pro. I just can't picture the idea of going to an Apple store, having the iPad Pro and the new ARM Mac next to each other with almost the exact same hardware feature set.
00:48:22 ◼ ► The only difference being that Apple forbids you from installing Mac OS on the iPad and you can't install iPad OS on the Mac, right?
00:48:30 ◼ ► We think the hardware is going to be similar. We think the Mac system on a chip, especially for the low to mid-end laptops, is going to be based on the same design as the iPad system on a chip.
00:48:39 ◼ ► It's not going to be exactly the same, but the A14 core, that design we think is going to be used in Macs as well.
00:48:46 ◼ ► If they all have touch screens, obviously the Mac would have more RAM, it would have more storage, it would be bigger, it would have an attached keyboard, all that other stuff.
00:48:53 ◼ ► But hardware-wise, the distinction we've been making so far is that the Mac can run all the stuff. It can run iPad apps, it can run iPhone apps, it can run Mac apps.
00:49:06 ◼ ► But if you're looking at an iPad and saying, "Okay, but why can't this run all the things?"
00:49:11 ◼ ► One excuse would be, "Well, that iPad has 6 gigs of RAM and that's just not enough to run a lot of Mac apps."
00:49:17 ◼ ► So I think, to answer the question here, why wouldn't they let you run MacOS on the iPad? It'd be tight.
00:49:23 ◼ ► Like, you'd have to give the iPads a lot more RAM, at which point you're just basically turning into a Mac.
00:49:28 ◼ ► The second thing is that MacOS for ARM is going to be adjusted to run on whatever Mac ARM hardware Apple ships.
00:49:44 ◼ ► Because iPads aren't exactly the same as the ARM Macs are going to be. A lot of the guts are similar, but not exactly the same.
00:49:50 ◼ ► There are things that are different about them. The hardware is different, in particular the power tuning or whatever.
00:49:58 ◼ ► All the stuff they're going to do with power on the ARM Macs, it's going to be different than what's done on the iPads.
00:50:04 ◼ ► Just because the batteries are bigger and there's different expectations about battery life and all that other stuff.
00:50:10 ◼ ► What I think is product line differentiation. Everything I just talked about results in a price difference and a capability difference.
00:50:16 ◼ ► That's how you segment your product line. The Macs cost more, they're bigger, they're heavier.
00:50:22 ◼ ► For the most part, all this is true. They have more stuff, more storage, more RAM. Maybe they have more options to configure them.
00:50:31 ◼ ► That's how you segregate a product line. It may seem weird, like, "Oh, why do they have a whole different OS?"
00:50:37 ◼ ► The point of this platform unification is, yeah, they have a different OS, but they look kind of the same.
00:50:42 ◼ ► You can run iPad apps in both places, it's just that one has more. The Mac, you can run all that stuff and then more.
00:50:48 ◼ ► Why can't I run Mac OS on the iPad? Because the iPad is not the machine that lets you do the more stuff.
00:50:54 ◼ ► That's what the Mac is for. I don't think it's too confusing. I can see how you can squint, especially if you're looking at the lowest and lightest weight Mac laptop and the highest and heaviest iPad.
00:51:05 ◼ ► And start seeing a little bit of crossover there. But there is a worthwhile distinction between them.
00:51:11 ◼ ► The iPad presumably would get better battery life. It would be simpler. It can only run iPad apps. It can't run Mac apps.
00:51:18 ◼ ► And that's a feature, because the people who want an iPad don't want the complexity of Mac OS.
00:51:23 ◼ ► So I don't think this will be a problem, even if from a technological perspective it seems a little bit weird.
00:51:29 ◼ ► The way you design the hardware is just so incredibly different. Think about the weight balance.
00:51:37 ◼ ► If you have an iPad and a keyboard and mouse, the iPad has to operate independently of everything else.
00:51:43 ◼ ► So it has to be able to be detachable, so it has to have all of its computing guts, the battery, everything, all in the tablet itself.
00:51:55 ◼ ► And a Mac, where the screen is not detachable, at least not if you want it to keep working, they can put all that stuff in the bottom.
00:52:02 ◼ ► And the weight balance is totally different. And if you're going to use it on your lap, a Mac laptop is way more comfortable and pragmatic in most ways than an iPad with a keyboard stand and a mouse or something.
00:52:15 ◼ ► Because it's designed to sit in your lap. It has all that weight on the bottom and the screen is super thin and light and doesn't tip forward or stays in your lap.
00:52:24 ◼ ► That's the weird thing about this, though. Whatever you're saying is true, but you could say, "Okay, that's what the Mac is for."
00:52:31 ◼ ► And of course, the iPad is for the thing where you're going to touch it. But touching the screen of a laptop like the Mac is better than touching it on the iPod and the keyboard.
00:52:49 ◼ ► I know everyone likes their Magic Keyboard thing. Actually, we just got one of those now, so it's kind of neat, right?
00:52:54 ◼ ► And yeah, you can use your iPad by touching the screen, but it would actually be a better touchscreen if all that weight was in the base.
00:53:04 ◼ ► But it's less tippy. It wouldn't bounce around more. Assuming the hinge is just as stiff, and I think it is, there's less danger of it tipping over.
00:53:11 ◼ ► I don't think that's a big deal anymore. I don't think people are tipping over their iPads. People don't accidentally poke them with all their force and they go flipping over, right?
00:53:18 ◼ ► But in the grand scheme of things, it would probably be better if... I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's also the inertia thing of, well, it has more mass, so it's harder to get moving.
00:53:30 ◼ ► Either way, I feel like that move of mostly using touch for a screen that's mostly vertical is not ideal.
00:53:39 ◼ ► When people have their iPads in that case, it's because they want to use the keyboard and the trackpad.
00:53:44 ◼ ► And yes, also the touch thing at the same time, but they've decided when you're in that configuration that they're not really doing touch primary.
00:53:51 ◼ ► That's the whole reason the keyboard is there. That's the whole reason everybody likes the trackpad.
00:53:56 ◼ ► It's because I'm saying, "When I'm in this mode, I'm not mostly going to be using touch."
00:54:00 ◼ ► And the other factor I would throw in here is convertible Macs. None exist now, but once they can run iPad apps, that's on the table for Apple to pick up at any point.
00:54:11 ◼ ► Yeah, and honestly, I think that would be a really cool feature set to explore for them because the PC industry did that a long time ago.
00:54:19 ◼ ► And not everybody needs it. Not everyone uses it. But it is kind of cool for the people who do want it.
00:54:25 ◼ ► And we don't have to fantasize about what if somebody made a computer that could flip around and be a tablet.
00:54:44 ◼ ► John, you kind of breathed over it earlier, but you don't fully appreciate until you think about it quite how low-end iOS hardware is in a lot of ways compared to Mac hardware.
00:54:56 ◼ ► And not in all ways. Things like processors are going to be, processors in iOS hardware now are very competitive with Macs.
00:55:03 ◼ ► And I'm sure they're going to continue to be for the foreseeable future into the ARM Mac world.
00:55:24 ◼ ► And that isn't all because Intel is greedy. That's part of it sometimes, but that's not most of the reason.
00:55:30 ◼ ► Most of the reason is Macs have way more memory, way more disk space, way more expansion ports, PCI lanes, throughput, controllers, peripheral support.
00:55:47 ◼ ► And iOS as an operating system is optimized for this super low-resource environment because it was made for the phone first.
00:55:56 ◼ ► And so it's optimized for very low RAM, very low disk space, super limited multitasking, very, very limited app resource control to make sure apps aren't burning too much of your battery or using too many resources or whatever else.
00:56:13 ◼ ► Macs aren't. Macs have a lot more software variability, a lot more hardware support, much higher ceilings on all the various resources that are available to them from most of the hardware resources.
00:56:25 ◼ ► It's a whole different world. And while you could technically probably make an iPad run Mac OS, like if you were Apple, it would be a really low-end Mac.
00:56:37 ◼ ► And I just don't think Apple wants to make the high-end version of this other product line attempt to behave like the worst low-end version of a different product line.
00:56:49 ◼ ► I think Apple would rather have the really great iPad be a really great iPad and then if you want a really great Mac, you can buy a really great Mac.
00:56:57 ◼ ► And I don't think they want to make the iPad look bad by making it try to be a bad Mac.
00:57:02 ◼ ► It wouldn't burn through that battery so fast if you ran Mac OS on it. It would just be a bad experience.
00:57:07 ◼ ► But I think the main thing is the complexity of Mac OS is not a plus on the iPad. I think all iPad customers appreciate the things they don't have to worry about on the iPad that they do on the Mac.
00:57:21 ◼ ► Bringing that experience over to the Mac and also having terrible battery life and all the other things you mentioned.
00:57:26 ◼ ► Small screen, too. The biggest iPad they sell is the size of the smallest Mac screen they sell.
00:57:33 ◼ ► So anyway, I think this differentiation is not going to be a problem in the short term.
00:57:39 ◼ ► Despite the fact that I feel like it will be an homogenous family and you will have to explain at some point.
00:57:44 ◼ ► It's easy to explain. It's like the biggest one that can do the most is the most expensive and the one with the most variability is the Mac.
00:57:56 ◼ ► It's just that we know the details of it and the historic names like this one is called Mac OS and that one is called iPad OS.
00:58:01 ◼ ► But it's something people forget. I see lots of these articles, especially when they're from people who are not technical articles.
00:58:07 ◼ ► They're just coming from a consumer's perspective and they're saying, "Boy, it must be hard for Apple to have three different OSes."
00:58:12 ◼ ► We forget this, but we shouldn't. This is all based on the same technology as Mac OS X.
00:58:18 ◼ ► It's the stuff they got from Next. It's the mock kernel. It's the BSD layer. It's Darwin, which is Apple's open source thing.
00:58:24 ◼ ► That's underneath all of them. It branches once you get up to the higher levels and there's different frameworks.
00:58:29 ◼ ► There's UIKit versus AppKit, but even that is kind of merging as we've discussed in past shows.
00:58:34 ◼ ► But it's not three entirely different OSes. Even though they have different names, just like good examples,
00:58:47 ◼ ► It's still the same under the cover. There's not seven different kernels. They're not totally different OSes from the ground up.
00:58:53 ◼ ► Apple has effectively a unified base OS model across all their products, even the watch, like everything.
00:59:02 ◼ ► It's just what's built on top of that, how much stuff is built, which framework is there, whatever.
00:59:07 ◼ ► So they're actually in a pretty good position from a technological perspective for family Unity.
00:59:13 ◼ ► It's just that from a marketing perspective, they look more different than they really are.
00:59:16 ◼ ► The other thing I think that it's worth remembering is that today the DTK is the A13X, A12X, I always get the name of it wrong, but it's the same thing.
00:59:40 ◼ ► but I don't think the first shipping Mac is going to have an A12Z or maybe not even an A13Z.
00:59:46 ◼ ► And I'm not talking about the name as much as I'm saying, I think it's going to be a very different CPU that's going to be considerably faster and considerably more powerful,
00:59:57 ◼ ► Because there is not an iOS device that I'm aware of that has a fan, and you can do some very different and interesting things if you are able to cool a lot more aggressively.
01:00:06 ◼ ► So, yeah, I think today, in terms of components, it's the same basic ingredients across an iPad Pro and this DTK,
01:00:15 ◼ ► but I think it's going to be quite a bit different once real honest-to-goodness Macs ship and not just a developer transition kit.
01:00:29 ◼ ► And when we say A14, we're talking about sort of the computational cores, but the number of cores and the size of the GPU.
01:00:34 ◼ ► GPU is very easy to scale up because you just add more execution units because they're facing an embarrassingly parallel problem.
01:00:40 ◼ ► So I can imagine the system on a chip on the Macs, like they have a power budget, and like you said Casey, they can decide is this going to be a fanless model or is it going to be one with a fan?
01:00:47 ◼ ► They can just basically choose. They can pick a power envelope and they say, "What's the biggest system on a chip we can fit in there?
01:00:53 ◼ ► How many A14 cores can we fit in there? How big can we make the GPU? How much power and everything does the Thunderbolt stuff that's going to be built in there add to the system on a chip?"
01:01:02 ◼ ► And they can just do that math. The reason I'm excited about them is that math is going to work out to be a much better machine than the Intel ones that we have now.
01:01:10 ◼ ► That's what's exciting, but Apple has complete flexibility to basically make whatever kind of Mac they want and whatever they choose, it's going to be so much better than what they have now.
01:01:19 ◼ ► And like you said, certainly better if they go with something with a fan. That's going to be so much more capable than the fanless iPads or whatever just because they will spend that power budget on more CPU cores, more GPU execution units, more everything, higher clock speed.
01:01:35 ◼ ► They'll spend it, and you will reap the benefit of that. It's hard to see now because we're like, "How will our current iPads are faster than our Macs?" And it's all depressing.
01:01:43 ◼ ► It's like, "Yeah, because they're using Intel chips." That's not going to be the case. Even if you just took the A12Z and put it in a system with a fan and overclocked it, I don't think that's what the DTK is doing.
01:01:55 ◼ ► But even if you took that two-year-old chip, it would be better. And when the A14 comes out, I fully expect these Macs to kick major butt or be fanless.
01:02:05 ◼ ► Because if the first one introduces the adorable replacement and it's fanless, it'll be plenty fast, way faster than any adorable has ever been.
01:02:14 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. It'll be embarrassing if the fanless adorable replacement is faster than the highest-end MacBook Pro. That's going to be embarrassing for Apple.
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01:04:06 ◼ ► Last show we had some homework, and that was for Casey to stop having his hard drive be called Macintosh HD and stop having his computer's name in the sharing preference pane be Casey's MacBook Pro and to give his computer a name.
01:04:19 ◼ ► It has to be one name, and then you just name your computer that, and the sharing thing, you name your boot hard drive that.
01:04:36 ◼ ► You don't have a, you don't, because the second item here is if you have not done this homework, we will suggest names for you.
01:04:48 ◼ ► Can't you think of some kind of name that you think, here's my suggestions for naming your computer and your hard drive.
01:04:53 ◼ ► If possible, pick a name that is short-ish, because long names, they don't look good on the desktop if you have your hard drive's management on the desktop, and long sharing names don't fit in the sidebars, and it's just, it's generally unwieldy.
01:05:10 ◼ ► I understand where they're coming from, but one of the beauties of being on a modern computer is that you don't have drive letters, and you can have names with spaces in them, and the world doesn't end.
01:05:19 ◼ ► So, you don't have anything, like, you shouldn't be on the nose, like it's not just the name of your favorite band or something like that, but like, you name your cars, right?
01:05:32 ◼ ► I don't think I've ever named any of my cars. Like any sort of real name. Like I will call, like I called the BMW the Beemer or the BMW, but I never had like, Susie or something like that.
01:05:43 ◼ ► Beemer would be a perfectly good, if you were still into BMWs, B-E-M-E-R, would be a good name for your computer and your hard drive, as an example.
01:05:55 ◼ ► The only good suggestion I have heard, which came from Jelly, and I think one or two people on Twitter, was using characters from the Hunt for Out October, so like, I don't know, Rameus being perhaps the iMac Pro, for example.
01:06:09 ◼ ► But I just, I don't have a need for cutesy names for any of this stuff. I really don't.
01:06:18 ◼ ► For the same reason you give names to anything, so you can identify it at a glance without reading.
01:06:22 ◼ ► I mean, to be fair, like, KC-S iMac-Pro, like that does actually uniquely identify the machine. It's just a bad name, but it does work.
01:06:33 ◼ ► If you have multiple MacBook Pros, it's a problem, and if you have like KC's Mac Pro, KC's iMac Pro, KC's MacBook Pro, at a glance, those aren't easily distinguishable.
01:06:42 ◼ ► You name them after Hunt for Out October characters, it would be way easier to distinguish them.
01:06:49 ◼ ► But you will! Do you remember what you named your kids? Like, once you give something a name, once you give it a name, it has the name.
01:06:59 ◼ ► You called your Synology, like, Synology or something. You're not confused about what that is. Like, you just, you have a couple of Macs, you give them names.
01:07:10 ◼ ► Or emoji names is another possibility, because we live in the modern world, you could give your computer...
01:07:25 ◼ ► I will disagree with John. I do think that if you can keep it to not have spaces, that is more graceful.
01:07:32 ◼ ► Because all the contexts in which it will, you know, use that in a way that it can't have spaces, like a hostname, if it'll automatically create one.
01:07:48 ◼ ► That's ugly. Like, if you can avoid that, that's better. So having your computers have a name that is lowercase and free of spaces will make it appear the same way everywhere.
01:08:05 ◼ ► And, you know, my theme, I use the Legend of Zelda theme, my boot drive and my computer are Link, which is four letters long and has no spaces, and I have my icon as a little icon of Link.
01:08:23 ◼ ► Yeah, right. But, like, it's Link. You look at my desktop, there's Link. He's sitting there, right?
01:08:32 ◼ ► Not only do you have your hard drive as an icon on your desktop like an animal, but you changed the icon?
01:08:43 ◼ ► Of course you changed the icon. That's part of the fun. Once you pick, like, whatever, Rameous or, you know, what is it, Typhoon or whatever, like, you just, if you pick Typhoon, for example, is the name. You'd get a Typhoon class submarine icon.
01:08:58 ◼ ► You'd get the icon of the Typhoon class submarine, a really good-looking icon of that, and you'd put that there, and then you'd show your volumes on your desktop so you can look at that every day.
01:09:07 ◼ ► Like, that's the identity of my computer is the top right corner where the boot hard drive is. There's a little picture of Link, and underneath it it says Link.
01:09:14 ◼ ► And my super duper backup is Hyrule. I've got a drive called Zelda. Like, there's a lot of single, fairly short names in the Zelda universe and lots of really awesome icons that you can apply to them.
01:09:27 ◼ ► Anyway, we're trying to help you, Casey. Have some fun. Give your computer a name. Let it be a free elf. I don't know.
01:09:36 ◼ ► I mean, to be fair, nothing would be more Casey than to name your computers after, like, mediocre 90s movies that only you care about.
01:09:53 ◼ ► You know, I wasn't really on board until—it was 1990, by the way—I wasn't really on board until you said I could change the icon.
01:10:00 ◼ ► Well, two things. You said use the subs, not the characters, which, okay, I think I can get behind that.
01:10:05 ◼ ► But then saying, like, if I could find good icons—which I can't, I'm sure—but if I could find good icons—
01:10:10 ◼ ► You can. They're out there. I have a vast icon collection. Ask me. I can see if I can help you out.
01:10:15 ◼ ► I do choose based on what kind of icons I have. I have a bunch of good Zelda icons that definitely factors in.
01:10:20 ◼ ► When you say the subs, is it like, you know, Meatball, Turkey? Like, what are we talking about?
01:10:27 ◼ ► Yeah, go ahead, listeners, and find me some really high-quality Hunt for Ed October icons in the year 2020 for a 30-year-old movie.
01:10:37 ◼ ► Well, see, the thing about modern icons—it used to be harder back when they were pixel art, back when they were 32x32 pixels in the classic Mac-o-days,
01:10:44 ◼ ► But icons are so big and so high-res now that if you can find a good, like, photo with a transparent mask on it,
01:10:56 ◼ ► It's obviously not as good as an actual hand-drawn Icon Factory icon, although Icon Factory occasionally does do icon sets for popular movies.
01:11:03 ◼ ► So for all I know, they did a Hunt for Ed October one, and you can just grab some of those.
01:11:09 ◼ ► But if you can just find a good photo of your submarine and "shrink it down" to 1024x1024, which is the largest-size icon on Mac-o-es these days, you're good to go.
01:11:22 ◼ ► You have to make sure it doesn't turn into mud when you scale it down to 48x48 or whatever size you have it on your desktop.
01:11:28 ◼ ► But you have a lot more options than back in the day when you had to actually have a 32x32 256-color pixel grid that somebody painstakingly made.
01:11:39 ◼ ► This is a whole lot of work for something that really does not bother me. I'm sorry it bothers you.
01:11:44 ◼ ► You should call your hard drive "clock" and have it be a high-heeled shoe clomping on a wooden plank.
01:11:50 ◼ ► There you go. Biological clock. It's ticking like this. You got the shoe, you got the...
01:12:13 ◼ ► Marco's seen like six movies, but it's weird when one of the six movies he's seen is not one of the movies that you've seen because you figure he's...
01:12:23 ◼ ► I think we have one more thing, one more actual topic here that I want to hear about. It's another Casey topic.
01:12:30 ◼ ► Yes. So there's a bunch of more WWC stuff, most of which we'll probably skip over, but there's one thing that Casey mentioned in a couple past shows and factors into this topic that's been in the WWC list, which is how Big Sur looks different.
01:12:47 ◼ ► So I want to hear more about that. Casey, are you presumably even running Big Sur? You have it on another drive or something?
01:12:54 ◼ ► I have been running it pretty much full-time on the MacBook Pro, actually. It's the dual-boot setup that I think it was Jalkit had advised with, and I'm sorry, Jon, I'm getting this wrong, but what is it, different volumes rather than different containers or something like that?
01:13:09 ◼ ► Okay. Well, anyway, so I did that on the MacBook Pro. I do have it on a physically separate hard drive for the iMac Pro, and I think I booted to it like once, and that was that.
01:13:25 ◼ ► So anyway, so yeah, so I've been running it almost full-time on the MacBook Pro, and please, I don't want to hear email about this, please, no. But I think it looks really good. I really honestly do.
01:13:36 ◼ ► There are problems. There are absolutely problems. I am not saying it's flawless. I think it looks really good. I think it looks modern without completely losing what makes the Mac the Mac, and it just looks like somebody has taken some time to freshen things up a bit.
01:13:52 ◼ ► You know, it's like when your kitchen maybe isn't spotless. I don't know if either of you can relate to this, but like your kitchen isn't spotless, and then you take the time and you just like really clean it nicely. You clean it up well. You get around the burners, you know, because we have a gas stove.
01:14:07 ◼ ► You spend the time to scrub around the burners, and you clean off the countertops and spray the countertops down. You don't just swipe it with a paper towel like you do when you're rushing between kid issues.
01:14:17 ◼ ► You actually like properly clean it, and it's just, your kitchen, it just looks good, and that's what I feel like Big Sur is. It just looks good, as long as you're not looking at sheets. You know, the pop-ups once were sheets, and now are God knows what, and as long as you're not trying to figure out what the active window is, oh, and you're not looking at the battery icon in System Preferences. As long as you're not doing any of those things, it looks really good.
01:14:36 ◼ ► What is your favorite aspect? You know, I guess you're saying about looking cleaner, but like how does that manifest? Is like what aspect of it do you feel looks cleaner or more modern? Is it like, I mean, I can name some attributes of it. Like I feel like it's brightened up. Like most of the places where there was gray in the earlier version of the OS are lighter gray now. Is that part of the airiness feeling that you're talking about?
01:14:59 ◼ ► I think so. I think to some degree. I also think that I really like the simple iconography. So for example, I'm looking, see, I can't talk to you about this because now you're going to yell at me about having the finder sidebar open, but I do have the finder sidebar open. I like the finder sidebar, and I think the iconography there is really good. You know, it looks very SF symbols-y, which I like.
01:15:20 ◼ ► Yeah. So I, I, I like the way that looks. The freshened, like something as simple as like the way an external hard drive looks when you plug it in, like the iconography there looks nice. I do like that it's brighter.
01:15:33 ◼ ► I like that it, it seems to have lost a lot of the texture, which generally I think is good, but in certain cases is very bad. Like everything looks more like lines than it does like things.
01:15:46 ◼ ► And I think I like that. And I think it's certainly very trendy. But that does cause problems from time to time. And like I said, one of the things that really drives me nuts is that I am, I still find it, even after running it almost full time on one of the two computers I use very often.
01:16:01 ◼ ► And I've been doing a lot of work on this particular, on the MacBook Pro lately because I'm doing some stuff for iOS 14. And so I only have the Xcode beta on the, on Big Sur on the MacBook Pro. So I've been spending a lot of time in it. Time that I would normally spend on the iMac Pro.
01:16:17 ◼ ► So anyways, one of the things that drives me nuts all the time is I can never tell which friggin window is the active window because I feel like the difference in tint or whatever is nowhere near strong enough to make it obvious which one is the active window. That really, really annoys me.
01:16:33 ◼ ► Is it a sheet, an action sheet? Is that right? It used to drop down from the top of the, probably from the title bar. Now it does not. Is that the correct term for it?
01:16:42 ◼ ► Yeah, it's just called a sheet and now it dims the background. Right. Close your eyes for a second. Stop looking at your Big Sur computer. Is the active, what distinguishes the active window without looking? What distinguishes the active window from the inactive window?
01:16:55 ◼ ► So I'm going to cheat because I was just looking at it a minute ago, but what I was going, what I would have said up until a minute ago was that the active window is darker, but I don't believe that's true. It's that in Big Sur, the active window is like white and the inactive windows are darker. If I'm not mistaken, did I get that right?
01:17:12 ◼ ► I'm not in front of Big Sur, so I don't remember, but historically speaking on the Mac and in most of Apple's interfaces, the things that are not active are, you know, the phrase we often use is dimmed. That can mean a bunch of different things.
01:17:28 ◼ ► Obviously inactive buttons are "dimmed." On the original Mac, the dimming of menu items famously was like the reason they used the Chicago font and the reason it looks like it does is because they had to dim them on a monochrome screen so you could knock out every other pixel but still be able to read them because there was no grayscale.
01:17:42 ◼ ► So dimming meant like, well, the regular menu items that are active, they're black. Like the text is black. What they were trying to do was make the dim ones gray. And so you could still read them, it doesn't have gray, but you can still read them, but they're dimmer.
01:17:58 ◼ ► Same thing with the background windows. The front-most window, whatever the look of the OS was, it was that. It was fully saturated. If it was pinstriped, if it was the platinum, you know, Copeland look or whatever it was, that was the front-most window. It had maximum contrast. It was whatever style it was, it was there.
01:18:14 ◼ ► The windows that were not the front-most were sort of dimmed, meaning less saturated, maybe lighter colored, maybe that reads as lighter colored, maybe they didn't have pinstripes, right? But in general, they were lower contrast, less detailed, seemed to be faded, as if in a fog.
01:18:34 ◼ ► The same way things farther away in real life get dimmer, right? I think that's the sort of physical analogy they're going for, so that it became clear that the focused window is the one that doesn't have fog in front of it, essentially, right?
01:18:47 ◼ ► And Big Sur, they kind of stick to that a little bit. Again, I'm not looking at it, so I don't recall offhand, but my recollection is the front one is brighter white than the background ones, which you can say, well, that means the background ones are dimmer. But really what happens in real life is that the fog tends to make things less saturated, lower contrast.
01:19:09 ◼ ► But there's, you know, I don't know, it's certainly not a change in detail. It's certainly not like the front one has more sorts of intricate detail. Like you said, it doesn't look like a thing. It doesn't look like a plastic or metal bar. There are no pinstripes, there are no grooves, there are no grippy things. It is very sort of line art, solid thing.
01:19:29 ◼ ► And I have the same problem. Like, maybe it's because I'm used to all those years and decades of Mac doing the dimming thing. But I think it's really more profound than that, and that we expect things that are, we expect the active thing to be more saturated and detailed than the inactive things.
01:19:47 ◼ ► And it's such a close contest. Like I can't even recall off the top of my head what the difference is. My recollection is they're not as different from each other than you would think. And one of them is not, even whatever difference does exist, it's possible to argue that it's not actually dimmer or more distant or more fogged than the active window. It's just different, but not that different.
01:20:09 ◼ ► So anyway, you're sitting in front of it. Go make a bunch of text edit windows. Tell me what distinguishes the front one from the back ones.
01:20:15 ◼ ► So I'm actually, I'm using Finder at the moment, and I have two Finder windows open. The one that is active, the sidebar looks translucent to me. So it's got a little bit of color to it because I'm using the default Big Sur background, but it's translucent.
01:20:30 ◼ ► And the stoplight in the upper left, whatever you call them, they're obviously red, yellow, and green. The title, so I happen to be looking at a folder called Development, the title blends into the columns, so there's no clear delineation between the title of this window, which is the folder name, which is Development, and there's no delineation between that and name, date modified, size, etc.
01:21:00 ◼ ► This is the foreground window. Now by contrast, the background window, the sidebar is the same color as the title. The title does have a difference between the whole title area, so the title and all the icons in the toolbar, and name, date modified, size, kind.
01:21:20 ◼ ► So in the inactive window, the sidebar is the same color as the title bar, and it is different than name, date modified, size, kind, etc. In the active window, the sidebar is translucent, it is a very different color than the title bar, and the title and toolbar do blend into name, date modified, size, kind, etc.
01:21:39 ◼ ► That I really don't care for. I really, really genuinely think that it's very difficult to tell what is active and what is inactive.
01:21:45 ◼ ► I think there's too much stuff in that window. I think what you need to do is hit Command-Option-T. You can imagine, that's why I was saying TextEdit as having a window, because in the minimal case, all you've got in a window is a title bar.
01:21:55 ◼ ► There's no sidebar, there's no controls, like a TextEdit window. You've got a title bar.
01:22:01 ◼ ► Because that's what you have to distinguish. Like in TextEdit, when you make a new document twice, there's one in the front called "Untitled 2" and the one in the back called "Untitled 1". And the only thing you have to go by, there are no controls, there's no sidebars, no nothing. You have a white document window that I presume is white in both cases, as you tell me, and then you've just got the title bar and the little window widgets. So what does that look like?
01:22:21 ◼ ► So the differences are that the inactive window is a darker color, like the title area. I'm sorry, let me try that again, because the composition area, you know, where you actually type into TextEdit, that is identical as far as I can tell. Or I think it's identical, it's hard to say.
01:22:46 ◼ ► Oh, goodness. All right, another one I haven't seen. Anyway, so the title area in the active window is lighter and the stop lights are colored. The inactive window, the stop lights are not colored and the title area is darker. But otherwise they look identical.
01:23:08 ◼ ► No, I'm sorry, that's a good point I had not considered. Untitled 2 is the active window right now, it is black. Untitled is inactive, it is more of a gray.
01:23:16 ◼ ► So there is a little bit of dimming, but it's a little bit reversed in that the title bar of the foreground window is brighter, is whiter. So this is the problem. Whiter versus brighter. Like, as things get farther away and they go into the haze, they do get whiter.
01:23:30 ◼ ► They never go completely white though, probably. So bright white should say to us foreground, but seeing the darker window in the background is, I don't know. I don't want to belabor this because we do want to get to Ask ATP.
01:23:44 ◼ ► I wanted to hear what you liked about the thing. Maybe next week I'll talk about all the things I don't like about it and we'll go into more detail about that.
01:23:51 ◼ ► But for now, I think it's, I mean, I wanted to get your opinion just because I don't hate it. Like I said when we first talked about this, I pretty much always like it when they change the way macOS looks just because if it's not to my taste, I know they're going to change it in a couple years anyway and I just like things, like Casey with the laptops. I just like it when they change sometimes. It's kind of cool, I'm not particularly married to any look.
01:24:13 ◼ ► It's just that Big Sur seems like it might have more on fourth errors than normal, but it's still early beta, they can still change things.
01:24:21 ◼ ► You never know. Like the leopard title bar, the leopard menu bar, they changed it due to complaints during the beta. It's been known to happen, we'll see how it goes. But yeah, I think we'll talk more about this next week. I just wanted to get Casey on record with his undying love for the coolest of his, Big Sur.
01:24:37 ◼ ► I put in the chat and I'll put in the show notes the two text edit windows next to each other and it's a little screenshot of it and you can check it out for yourself.
01:24:57 ◼ ► He put them side by side. Have you ever seen Overcast? Have you ever played a podcast, Casey?
01:25:10 ◼ ► I see it, looking at this picture now. Much more efficient than having Casey describe it. Yeah, there is definite dimming. Look at the toolbar items. I forgot that, I was trying to say text edit because I thought the windows was simple, but I totally forgot text edit has a stupid toolbar too, doesn't it?
01:25:30 ◼ ► That I feel like is the, yeah. It's dim. There's definite dimming going on. I see it there.
01:25:35 ◼ ► I mean this is better than windows that have toolbars, like the regular Mac kind of toolbar where it gets integrated in the title bar.
01:25:42 ◼ ► Because that I feel like, you know, the alerts and the sheets are two areas where I agree with most of the criticism that they are massively worse in Big Sur.
01:25:52 ◼ ► But one area that I'm not hearing a lot of criticism about that I really keep running into in usage of being kind of horrible is the way toolbars are treated for apps that have like regular standard, you know, app kit toolbars where you have a group of things.
01:26:07 ◼ ► You can show icon or text or both and you can customize it with the customizer window. Like that's the regular style, you know, app kit toolbar.
01:26:15 ◼ ► I think in Big Sur they look and work way worse. Both in the iconography style, which is I think yet another example of something that maybe looks good in a screenshot in marketing or something.
01:26:36 ◼ ► And I also find that the new design of basically having very few dividing lines or anything like that and certainly no color make title bars of rich applications that have a lot of functionality, much of which is in toolbars and app kit.
01:26:50 ◼ ► It makes what title bars really get very crowded and get very hard to visually distinguish where stuff is and what these buttons are supposed to do. There seems to be a bigger difference than usual with this design between how it looks in idealized screenshots and how it looks in reality.
01:27:08 ◼ ► When people actually have real apps with real content running on real devices and real screens. Like this design does not survive contact with the user nearly as well as previous designs have.
01:27:19 ◼ ► Some previous designs. Like many of my Mac OS X reviews had sections demonstrating this exact thing where I'd show the beauty screenshots, sometimes Apple's own beauty screenshots or my own beauty screenshots.
01:27:30 ◼ ► And then I'd say, "This is what it looks like when you've got a bunch of windows all over your screen." And then you'd be like, "Ugh." Like I remember I think in the very first, maybe it was a public beta or maybe it was the very first release, the title bar of inactive windows in very early Mac OS X was super translucent.
01:27:47 ◼ ► It was kind of like the glass appearance that Windows did. It was very clear frosted glass but very translucent. So if you had a bunch of overlapping windows, yeah, the one in the front was opaque and you could read the title, but the ones in the background because they were so translucent, the text of the names, if they overlapped in any way, it just became a complete jumble.
01:28:05 ◼ ► And that's what you're talking about. It's like, okay, you got two windows, you're active, you're inactive, you're beautifully arranged in a screenshot, it looks nice. You get a bunch of windows overlapping and now you can't tell what the hell anything is. So this is not a new problem, but the fact that it's not a new problem shows that Apple should have learned this lesson.
01:28:21 ◼ ► And it's repeated itself many times over. Yosemite had a similar problem. And I would encounter this when making screenshots because I'd always have to make that choice. Am I making a beauty screenshot to demonstrate a feature or am I making a screenshot to show you the failure modes?
01:28:36 ◼ ► And Yosemite with all the transparency, I did both. I did a beauty screenshot to say, look, this can be really beautiful OS. And then I did the ugly screenshot to say if your backgrounds are unfortunately colored and it pulls them through into your UI and all of a sudden your app has a bunch of color coming through that you didn't plan to and it makes it hard to read and gross looking, right?
01:28:52 ◼ ► So it's kind of frustrating to see them recycle these same mistakes, but I think they have learned, like, again, if you go through my reviews, the specific mistakes they made, they're not repeating. Like, except for maybe the menu bar.
01:29:07 ◼ ► But things like the translucent sidebar and all that stuff, they've worked really hard on the algorithms to defend against the worst of the failure modes. But it's still kind of frustrating to see that, like, yeah, but to what end? Why do you continue to pursue this?
01:29:22 ◼ ► What benefit are we getting as the users? The same thing with the toolbars that you're just mentioning. Like, the distinguishing characteristics that anchored that design before are now missing.
01:29:31 ◼ ► And so you're trying to make it coherent within this design, but then what's the benefit that we get? I mean, the benefit is presumably like uniformity with iOS and all sorts of other benefits that are not like, oh, it makes this app easier to use. It just makes it like a family resemblance.
01:29:44 ◼ ► But I see where you're coming from looking at some screenshots. This is the problem. I wish I could be running Big Sur during the podcast, but I'm not Casey, so I'm not going to do that.
01:30:00 ◼ ► I don't think I have another computer that can boot this. I suppose Big Sur is on an external drive. Maybe I can boot my work cloud, Tom. But like I said, next week I want to talk about this more. I'll either take a bunch of screenshots myself or I'll have another computer running Big Sur that I can look at and poke at things.
01:30:15 ◼ ► But I think I didn't want to make this go negative. I just wanted to hear what Casey liked. But next week I think I and probably Marco will go more in depth about where Apple has screwed things up. If Apple hasn't already fixed it by then, right?
01:30:30 ◼ ► I think in general it just feels like a nice fresh coat of paint. And like I said, I have problems with it. The alerts, the sheets, I'm sorry, the sheets are... they're so bad.
01:30:40 ◼ ► At first I was like, why is everyone so upset about the centered text on these dialogues? But no, everyone should have been.
01:30:52 ◼ ► I thought everyone was getting grumpy for no good reason, but no, everyone was right and they should have been grumpy because it's terrible.
01:31:03 ◼ ► Well, that's a perfect example. Like if you're going to show a screenshot of a perfect idealized dialogue, you can make the text only one line. And if it's only one line, it'll look okay if it's centered.
01:31:15 ◼ ► But as soon as you have a real dialogue where that text wraps onto a second line, it instantly becomes worse.
01:31:22 ◼ ► This is a problem with almost every Alan Dye software design I've ever seen, where it looks good in screenshots and it just does not survive the real world.
01:31:32 ◼ ► It works worse once it gets to the real world, once it gets to real content and non-ideal circumstances, real apps.
01:31:46 ◼ ► And I don't know how to teach a designer that user content matters, but it shouldn't be my job.
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01:33:54 ◼ ► Steve Letter writes, "Could you explain what Intel has been struggling with in recent years?
01:34:02 ◼ ► How can Apple be so much better at making chips and meeting goals? What went wrong at Intel?"
01:34:17 ◼ ► But just to reiterate, Intel's biggest problem was they were delayed and are now very far behind with their next process shrink.
01:34:24 ◼ ► So part of what silicon chip manufacturing has been powered by is every couple of years we're able to make the little transistors on the chip even smaller.
01:34:34 ◼ ► And that has many benefits. You can fit more of them in the same amount of area. They generally use less power.
01:34:38 ◼ ► If you look at the very first microchips, Intel 8080 or whatever, I forget what the name of the first one was.
01:34:52 ◼ ► I can't pull out real numbers, but it was thousands of transistors in a chip that you could hold in your hand.
01:34:58 ◼ ► And then eventually you could fit millions in that same size and eventually billions in that same size.
01:35:07 ◼ ► The shrink that Intel missed on was they were making 14-nanometer chips, which is like the feature size.
01:35:18 ◼ ► You can imagine the smallest feature, the distance between two of the smallest things is 14 nanometers, which is very small.
01:35:23 ◼ ► They were going to make a shrink down to 10 nanometers, and they missed their schedule for that.
01:35:27 ◼ ► They said, "Well, here's our 14-nanometer chips, and in a couple of years we'll have 10-nanometer chips."
01:35:32 ◼ ► They had this big roadmap, and then their deadline came and went, and they didn't have 10-nanometer chips.
01:35:37 ◼ ► They said, "Oh, we'll have them next year." And next year they didn't have them either.
01:35:47 ◼ ► They have 10-nanometer chips now. I think Apple is shipping them, but they're way past the schedule when they were "supposed to" have them.
01:35:53 ◼ ► That was Intel's big lead, that they could make chips at a smaller feature size reliably and economically.
01:36:04 ◼ ► While Intel dropped this ball and wasn't able to get their next processor shrink on time, the rest of the industry caught up and eventually surpassed them.
01:36:12 ◼ ► Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, TSMC, is now shipping chips that are "7-nanometer."
01:36:20 ◼ ► It's complicated by the fact that Taiwan Semiconductor's 7-nanometer is comparable to Intel's 10-nanometer, but all you have to know is that the competition event essentially caught up.
01:36:29 ◼ ► These new Macs, I think, are going to come with 5-nanometer chips. The A14 is going to be 5-nanometer, I believe, TSMC 5-nanometer design.
01:36:48 ◼ ► The second thing is, Intel has had the benefit of x86, but has also been saddled with x86.
01:36:55 ◼ ► x86 has tons of historical baggage. It doesn't mean it's impossible to make them fast or anything like that.
01:37:00 ◼ ► It just means that implementing a compatible, compliant x86-64 chip is way more complicated because the instruction set has so much historical baggage.
01:37:13 ◼ ► So there's whole features on Intel chips that are taking up dyes, base, and power. Granted, not a lot, but some.
01:37:19 ◼ ► But really, it's like the complexity of verifying, "Will this be compatible with all that existing x86 binary software that's out there?"
01:37:28 ◼ ► I don't want to get back into the whole RISC-CISC debates of the early 2000s. It's not actually that big of an issue, and internally, a lot of chips work the same.
01:37:36 ◼ ► But all of the things being equal, it is more straightforward to deal with a simpler architecture like ARM than it is to deal with x86-64.
01:37:43 ◼ ► Like, if you had a whole group of silicon designers, and you can design a chip, and here's your budget, and here's your amount of time, and so on and so forth,
01:37:51 ◼ ► and you can choose the instruction set, would you like to choose x86-64 and it has to be compatible with all that existing software,
01:38:00 ◼ ► They'd pick ARM, because there's just fewer edge cases, less weird stuff, less historical cruft.
01:38:11 ◼ ► And the final thing is, a company that's in the lead, technologically speaking, has no right to be in that lead forever.
01:38:18 ◼ ► A company is just a group of people. People get old and retire, new employees are hired.
01:38:30 ◼ ► What is the educational pipeline for producing those people? Do they want to work at Intel where the things are located?
01:38:38 ◼ ► Do they want to work in the United States at all? Where are the brightest minds in the world? Are they all in America or are they elsewhere?
01:38:44 ◼ ► All that changes over time. So it's not inconceivable that just, even if none of the other stuff that I said was true,
01:38:50 ◼ ► that over the course of many decades, the best chips and the designers in the world might not be at Intel anymore,
01:38:56 ◼ ► they might be someplace else. They might have left to start a startup that Apple then bought.
01:39:00 ◼ ► Apple bought PA Semi and got a lot of talent. Maybe some of those people came from Intel.
01:39:09 ◼ ► But anyway, personnel, human beings, who are the best group of people who come together in jail under the right leadership,
01:39:19 ◼ ► I think all that stuff combines to the point where Apple is unquestionably making the best "cell phone chips," system-mounted chips,
01:39:31 ◼ ► that anyone in the world, and Intel is not. So I'm not here to instruct Intel on how to catch up,
01:39:40 ◼ ► but they have lost a lead over the course of many, many years with a couple of easily identifiable strategic errors,
01:39:49 ◼ ► but lots of much smaller, harder-to-pin-down, intangible things that have all added up to put them in the position that they're in now.
01:40:00 ◼ ► Joseph Barron writes, "I've really been enjoying ATP and wanted to know your take on how the iOS/iPad 14 announcements affect the ability to replace a computer or laptop with an iPad or iPhone,
01:40:10 ◼ ► specifically for aging parents or grandparents. Maybe connect an external monitor, mouse and keyboard, what would you do here?"
01:40:17 ◼ ► I don't know. It's so hard to make any sort of recommendation like this, because it all depends on what people are doing with it.
01:40:24 ◼ ► My dad is a grandfather, and he's extremely technically savvy, and I don't think he would be happy with just an iPad.
01:40:32 ◼ ► But my grandparents, they do have a PC, which I never talked to them about because I refused to do any sort of tech support for it.
01:40:46 ◼ ► And I'll leave that as it may. They do have, I think it's my iPad 3rd gen, whatever the first Retina iPad was.
01:41:00 ◼ ► And the only thing they really want to do with a computer is look at email and look at news and so on.
01:41:05 ◼ ► So for them, they probably would be just fine with an iPad. I don't think they would need an external monitor.
01:41:17 ◼ ► So it all depends on the situation. I don't think there's any easy way to make any sort of recommendation.
01:41:22 ◼ ► Now Marco, I thought you were doing something like this with your grandparents, is that right?
01:41:32 ◼ ► So first of all, I would say that if you're connecting a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse for whatever needs,
01:41:40 ◼ ► if that's a requirement, if you need a keyboard, mouse, external stuff, I would say go for a laptop at that point.
01:41:47 ◼ ► Go for a Mac, something that's designed first and foremost to be a laptop with keyboard, a mouse or a trackpad or whatever,
01:42:00 ◼ ► Because generally speaking, you can do all that stuff with an iPad, but it's just a little more seamless
01:42:15 ◼ ► And iPads, I think for the most part, setting all that aside, I think iPads would still be my recommendation
01:42:24 ◼ ► for simplified computer devices, for maybe elderly relatives that need things to be simpler for whatever reason.
01:42:32 ◼ ► My grandfather, he's now 96, we had to shop for a cell phone for him recently, and it was unbearable,
01:42:50 ◼ ► He doesn't hear very well anymore, he doesn't have a lot of fine motor control in his hands.
01:42:57 ◼ ► You want what you'd expect for a cell phone for a 96-year-old. You want big buttons, easy to see,
01:43:10 ◼ ► And all of our options were terrible in various ways, and the one we went with is not great.
01:43:22 ◼ ► And the only reason that we had so few options was because the phone world has matured and progressed so much,
01:43:34 ◼ ► and the functionality of phones has gotten so rich and complex now that there is no more simple phone.
01:43:46 ◼ ► try to make things that are kind of simple, but they're not as simple as you would like,
01:43:54 ◼ ► But it's mostly because the market is so mature and so developed that what everybody wants in most of the market
01:44:04 ◼ ► is competing on features. Everything needs to get bigger, better, faster, and do more all the time.
01:44:11 ◼ ► So if you're the person looking for something that does less, you have very few to no options.
01:44:16 ◼ ► The fact that when the iPad first came out, it was a great option for your grandparents' computer
01:44:23 ◼ ► because it was so simple. There was almost no way to screw anything up in a permanent way.
01:44:29 ◼ ► Everything it could do, because it couldn't do that much, everything it could do was significantly more understandable
01:44:40 ◼ ► And so one of the reasons why iPads were such a popular choice and such a good, you know,
01:44:46 ◼ ► occupant of this role is that they were so much simpler. But part of that was because they were a simpler design,
01:45:04 ◼ ► And so today, if you want something that somebody can understand that really needs things to be very, very, very simple,
01:45:12 ◼ ► it still is probably the best option there, but what you want doesn't really exist anymore.
01:45:18 ◼ ► Like the ideal tablet or computer for someone to use who has very low needs and just basically wants to, like,
01:45:26 ◼ ► use Facebook and get baby pictures from their grandkids or whatever, like, that doesn't exist anymore.
01:45:32 ◼ ► And it's a shame, because that market is still there. And granted, it's probably shrinking, but it's still there.
01:45:39 ◼ ► In the same way that the market for a very simple, like, flip phone with big numbers and that doesn't have a volume rocker
01:45:45 ◼ ► on the side where they can hold it and accidentally mute themselves, there's lots of potential market for stuff like this,
01:45:50 ◼ ► and it just doesn't exist, because the market's too mature. And the same thing, unfortunately, is true for computers now and tablets.
01:45:57 ◼ ► That all being said, I still think that an iPad is usually the best choice for this kind of role.
01:46:06 ◼ ► If they don't have needs where you'll have to venture into, like, iPad power user territory.
01:46:12 ◼ ► Like, if they have needs that are like, "Okay, well, sometimes I have to, like, you know, get this file off of this thing
01:46:16 ◼ ► and then do this thing with it," like, okay, that's—a laptop will very likely be simpler.
01:46:21 ◼ ► If anything they ever have to do involves multitasking or a shortcut or a web service to take an API thing to transform this thing,
01:46:30 ◼ ► like, there's lots of crazy hacks that iPad users have to jump through to do, like, power user stuff on it.
01:46:41 ◼ ► But if they can use iPads, like, in the ideal case with multitasking disabled and, you know, just basic usage of the built-in apps,
01:46:53 ◼ ► Leave it to me to read the question as usual. This is—was asking how iOS and iPad OS 14 change the ability of it to replace a laptop.
01:47:04 ◼ ► I don't think it makes that big of a change. It says specifically for aging parents or grandparents,
01:47:09 ◼ ► but, like, to go off of the stuff that Marco was saying, you know, there are many aspects of computing that need to be tailored to people who are aging
01:47:21 ◼ ► and have the disabilities that come with aging. In general, I think it takes a lot to recommend a computer over an iPad
01:47:31 ◼ ► when you get to the extremities of age, just because, as Marco just noted, you can disable things like multitasking
01:47:42 ◼ ► The biggest weakness that I feel like the iOS devices have specifically that is not changed by iOS 14 or any of that stuff is that—
01:47:55 ◼ ► And so if any of your issues have to do with fine motor control or vision, having everything compressed into a 12.9-inch diagonal thing
01:48:03 ◼ ► that you have to semi-precisely manipulate is not great for either one of those things.
01:48:09 ◼ ► My own mother, who still has good motor control but has terrible vision, ends up using—she has an external monitor,
01:48:17 ◼ ► a much larger external monitor that she either connects her iPad to or her Mac to, like, because she just basically needs a bigger screen.
01:48:23 ◼ ► If she could get, you know, an iPad with a 27-inch screen, like the whole drafting table thing, and if that thing could be put into—
01:48:30 ◼ ► I keep thinking of AtEase, which is an older version of this—but if there was a simplified interface that she could get
01:48:35 ◼ ► where it mostly just made the elements on the screen bigger, like, she would use that device,
01:48:41 ◼ ► and it would find it much more valuable than any—like, the simplest phone, the simplest iPad, none of those can get around the fact that they're just small.
01:48:51 ◼ ► So you gotta hold them real close to your face, or, like, if you have bad vision and can't see things that are small.
01:48:56 ◼ ► Yeah, you know, she cranks up the dynamic text size, she changes the resolution to have everything—like, she's doing all the things,
01:49:02 ◼ ► and it's good that Apple has those accessibility options, but in the end, no substitute for cubic inches, as they say in the car world.
01:49:10 ◼ ► You need—sometimes you just need a big honking screen, and in that respect, Macs are just so much more capable.
01:49:16 ◼ ► They're multi-resolution, you can have monitors of any size, you can choose how big you want the elements on the screen to be
01:49:24 ◼ ► They're worse at dynamic text in a lot of applications, although it depends, but they're better in terms of the input flexibility.
01:49:30 ◼ ► So I still think there's a ways to go here, but in terms of technological complexity, Mac OS and any type of computer like that
01:49:37 ◼ ► has so many more places that people can go wrong that I just feel like if they want to have any fighting chance of surviving and not screwing stuff up,
01:49:45 ◼ ► an iOS device, despite all the things I just said about the size limitations and everything, is a much safer bet.
01:49:50 ◼ ► And I don't think any of the enhancements they've done to iPad OS have made it so that iPads are now so complex that it flips that equation.
01:49:58 ◼ ► Like, people—you're never going to be able to explain mounting a disk image to someone who's 90-something years old, who does not know or care about technology.
01:50:11 ◼ ► So what you really want them is like the biggest iPad you can get for them with nothing on the home screen except for the three icons they have to pick that launch.
01:50:19 ◼ ► Maybe make a shortcut for them that launches directly into the photo stream that has the pictures of the grandkids on it, right?
01:50:27 ◼ ► But the point is there's very little they can do by stabbing their fingers at the iPad screen that's going to like break it, whereas there's a million things—let me tell you, there's a million things they can do to screw up their Mac.
01:50:38 ◼ ► I'm in the middle of a fairly long tech support saga with my mother about her Mac right now.
01:50:43 ◼ ► Like Macs are just so much more complicated still than iPads and, you know, forget about things like OS updates or Macs getting too old or what's going to happen to all the audiobooks that I ripped from CD that are on my Mac with an optical drive.
01:50:56 ◼ ► Like just things like that can't get their foot in the door so far on the iPad, and that is a blessing.
01:51:03 ◼ ► You made a car reference earlier, so let's round the show out with a little bit of neutral.
01:51:09 ◼ ► Gavin Shanley writes, "Please give us a bit of welcome distraction this week," although this was written like three months ago, "and talk about the new BMW 4 Series and its questionable grille. What do you guys make of it?"
01:51:22 ◼ ► I mean, this picture that we have—we'll put it in the show notes or the show art or the chapter art or something like that—this picture, I feel like, paints this grille in the most flattering possible light.
01:51:38 ◼ ► In that I feel like the picture works hard to minimize it. Having the European proportion license plate going right through the middle of it makes it so that from a distance, if you look quickly, you can be forgiven for thinking, "Oh, it's just a double kidney grille on a BMW."
01:51:57 ◼ ► And it's actually not a bad-looking BMW. It's sporty, it's a coupe, it's modern-looking design, it looks pretty good. But then you look closer and you realize, "Wait a second. That grille goes from the top all the way down to the bottom, and the license plate is in the middle of the grille. What is this, a Lexus? Is this an Audi? What is this?"
01:52:18 ◼ ► And those kidneys are less kidneys and more like potatoes. I don't know, like robo-potatoes, because the corners are sort of squared off, chopped off Battlestar Galactica style.
01:52:35 ◼ ► I put a link in the chat, it'll be in the show notes as well, to Car and Driver, here's what we know so far about the 2021 BMW 4 Series. Look at this. Look at the grille. Why?
01:52:48 ◼ ► See, the picture at the top of the link you just put is a less-flattened gringle, because now from this angle you see not only is that grille really big, but it protrudes like weird pig nostrils. It's on the surface of a pimple that's sticking forward from the thing, and that hasn't been the case.
01:53:10 ◼ ► The BMWs that we love, if anything, the grille was underneath an overhang, sort of tucked in, or at least flush with, but I know they're trying to make the front of the car pointy.
01:53:20 ◼ ► This trend, which is sort of sweeping the industry, I mentioned Lexus and Audi, Toyota is doing it now, of having just massive front, I don't know if you want to call them grilles, because most of the time it's just like hexagonal or diamond-shaped plastic pieces, but just a huge gaping maw, as if suddenly we've created engines that need way more air intake, but they don't, so most of it is actually blocked off.
01:53:44 ◼ ► So there's just a little section where the air goes through. It's weird, and it's especially weird that BMW is hopping on that train, because BMW's characteristic, their branded characteristic, is the double kidney there, the two little openings, which have changed size and position and moved all over the place, but that's their branding.
01:54:02 ◼ ► Other car companies that are doing this, that's not a really big part of their branding. Lexus is trying to make it part of their branding, but they have different brand identifiers that are not so focused on the grille, where they have the flexibility to change the grille around to follow trends, but it still looks like a car of that brand base and other characteristics.
01:54:20 ◼ ► So it's kind of weird that BMW is chasing a fad and allowing that fad to infect the most important visual branding element of their cars, which is this front part here.
01:54:31 ◼ ► I don't even know if it's the most important. To me, I see these giant girls, and Lexus can be forgiven, because Lexus is a company that is run by very boring people trying to make exciting cars.
01:54:44 ◼ ► I mean, arguably they started this trend too. I think they were first out the gate with this.
01:55:02 ◼ ► I hate to be an electric car guy all the time, but we are rapidly in a world and definitely heading towards more of one where cars don't need front girls nearly as much at all anymore, and BMW is going in that direction too, reluctantly, finally, slowly, late, and poorly, but still, they're getting there.
01:55:24 ◼ ► Are they going to hold on to this thing forever? Is it a BMW if it has a kidney grille, or is it a BMW if it's a good car? That seems like a thing they should care about more, and that's the area they've been suffering in recent years more than they should.
01:55:38 ◼ ► Why do people buy BMWs? Is it because it has a two-piece grille on the front? Not really. People buy them for lots of reasons. That isn't a big one.
01:55:49 ◼ ► I don't know if I agree with that, because I think a lot of people buy BMWs because they want to be seen getting into a BMW.
01:55:56 ◼ ► But no one's going to know this is a BMW, though. The thing that Marco laid out is there's no trade-off between those two things. They can make good cars with kidney grilles and bad cars with kidney grilles, and I don't even think it's an electric thing, because the beauty of the kidney is you can make it super tiny like it was on the H50, you can make it huge like it is here.
01:56:13 ◼ ► There's nothing about the kidney that requires air to enter it at all. It's just two chrome shapes. You can put it on the front of an electric car, and if you looked at it, people would be like, "Oh, it doesn't look like the kidney anymore." Sure, of course it does. The kidney is all about the shape. You don't need any actual air. It doesn't need to be a grille. It's like a logo. It is a slightly 3D silvery logo. Sometimes it's body-colored. I feel like that visual branding can survive the tech transition no problem whatsoever, unlike, for example, the Lexus thing, which is all about being open to the air because it's not part of their brand.
01:56:42 ◼ ► But, yeah, they have to keep that grille because it's not a BMW without that. They absolutely have to keep it. It doesn't have to be big or be small or be wide or be tall. They have many options. Look at the history of BMWs. They have moved that thing around all over the place. It can be minimized. It can be maximized.
01:57:05 ◼ ► But they have to keep it because they are wedded to that as the visual distinguishing branding characteristic. It's like saying you're going to have a Mac without an Apple logo anywhere on it. It doesn't make any sense. You have to have it.
01:57:18 ◼ ► Wherever it happens to be, whatever it happens to look like, if it's a rainbow color, if it's big, if it's light up, if it's opaque, if it's shiny, you can have an Apple logo on it. That's how you can tell it's a Mac laptop, for instance.
01:57:30 ◼ ► So I don't think the kidney is going away. I just think they need to, at various times, they've incorporated it into their designs in more or less successful ways. And this one is where they're following the industry trend of the bigger grilles, which, as Marco pointed out, doesn't make much sense if we're going towards electric.
01:57:46 ◼ ► But it's not a deal breaker in the end. But it's not serving their grille well. From most angles, this looks less attractive. It draws attention to itself in an unflattering way, which is a shame because I think the rest of the car is a reasonably nice shape.
01:58:01 ◼ ► And the headlights are nice, right? And the rest of the front is fine. The wheels are nice. It's not a terrible styling error for BMW, except for their treatment of the kidneys.
01:58:13 ◼ ► Agreed. And I was looking into this briefly. And the M340i, which I believe is the equivalent of my car, but 10 years newer-- actually, literally 10 years newer-- it is 3,800 pounds, which is not obese for a car of this caliber. But it's not light.
01:58:34 ◼ ► And it is $67,000 for a 3 Series. However, I remember-- and maybe I have this wrong, because this was 30 years ago-- but I remember my memory of reading like Car and Driver and Road and Track or whatever when I was eight years old or thereabouts was that supercars of the day would get into the low four seconds to get to 60.
01:58:59 ◼ ► So, like, a Lamborghini Diablo I think was somewhere around like 4.1, 4.2 seconds to 60. If I'm wrong, it's no big deal. But it's something along those lines.
01:59:12 ◼ ► Well, there's that. Actually, I'm not sure this BMW would do much better, but that's neither here nor there.
01:59:20 ◼ ► Yeah, right, right. Well, no clutches anymore. None of the 3 Serieses get a six-speed in America anyway, which is another terrible thing. But anyways, the M340i, 3,800 pounds, $67,000, 0 to 60, 3.8 seconds. 3.8 seconds to 60 miles an hour.
01:59:39 ◼ ► That is supercar fast 20, 30 years ago and is still blisteringly quick today. And I don't remember off the top of my head how fast, Marco, your Tesla will get to 60.
01:59:51 ◼ ► I don't doubt it's faster. There's no doubt in my mind that it's faster. But is it that much faster? I don't even know.
02:00:01 ◼ ► Well, that's also true. That is also very, very true. And last I heard, Marco, you were a very anti-ludicrous mode. What is it? No, there's something more than ludicrous now, isn't there?
02:00:11 ◼ ► Well, yeah, because I don't get the P version. I get the long-range version. So what I currently have is a 100D, which I don't know how fast it is. But it's faster than I need it to be, that's for sure, and I'm very happy with it.
02:00:23 ◼ ► I just paste it into the chat and also in our Slack, the 850, in case you don't remember what that looked like. I think this is probably the most minimized, although the i8 is pretty minimized. Well, maybe it's just stretched out. But anyway, this is probably the tiniest it's gotten.
02:00:38 ◼ ► I honestly don't even know if air was allowed to enter those. I suppose it was. It might have all been coming from the bottom. But this was the time when cars having very pointy fronts was sporty. So they just took a BMW and they made it super pointy.
02:00:51 ◼ ► They're like, "Oh, but we've got to have the kidney." And so they did. There it is. Two tiny little... And I remember thinking at the time, it was kind of embarrassing for them because they were like, "Well, you have to have it because it's our branding, but there's so little room for it." And they're like, "Eh, we can fit it."
02:01:07 ◼ ► And so they did. They made it little, tiny little nostrils in the front of the car. It looks a little bit silly, but looking back on it with now decades of hindsight, I don't think it looks bad. I mean, it looks like a car from the '80s or the '90s. That's what it is. But it doesn't look bad.
02:01:23 ◼ ► When we look back on these cars, they will look like cars of their time. I'm not sure in the end, 20 years from now, if we hold the 850 versus these 4s. I think I'm going to like the 850 better, just from an aesthetic perspective. Just because I'm not big on the giant gaping maw styling trend at all on any brand.
02:01:44 ◼ ► And so I'm also not going to like it on the BMW. It can be made to work, I think. I think Audi has had the most success just because they tend to break it up with a lot of horizontal lines. And so it tends to be a little bit more coherent.
02:01:56 ◼ ► But yeah, the giant scoop thing, even if it's all blocked off, it's still not great aerodynamically. And I feel like it looks less slippery. Like this 850 looks sportier because it has lower frontal area. It is a smaller car, it is sleeker, it cuts through the wind better because it's not a gigantic vertical wall trying to plow through the air.
02:02:18 ◼ ► I don't know. I've said this a thousand times and I'll say it again. This was not my theory. I've heard this before. But everyone always says that the BMW that you own is the last of the good BMWs.
02:02:34 ◼ ► And I really think that for me, the E90, which was the late 2000s, early 2010s, like this is before electric steering, before they started really removing the six speed, I really think that the E90 might have been it. And actually, I really, really, really liked your M5, Marco. What was that, an F10? Is that right?
02:02:54 ◼ ► F10 M5, yeah. It shared a lot of the nice aspects of the E series without going too far into the worst parts of the F series.
02:03:04 ◼ ► Yeah, but either way, I feel like the super late aughts, early to mid 2010s, that was when I think BMW really lost its way. And last I recall, they haven't used the ultimate driving machine in quite a while. And if you look at your average BMW, I would argue it's not the ultimate driving machine. Like they're definitely very good BMWs to this day.
02:03:28 ◼ ► I mean, again, this M340i, 3.8 seconds. Like I can't get over how fast that is. But your average like 320i that you see running around where I live, I'm sure it's nice, but I wouldn't say it's the ultimate driving machine or anything like it.
02:03:46 ◼ ► It bums me out. In the same way that, and I think I've said this before on the show, as a kid, I really enjoyed Sony stuff. Like I had a Walkman, an actual honest-to-goodness Walkman. And then I had a Discman, an actual honest-to-goodness Discman after the Walkman.
02:04:02 ◼ ► And Sony, and we had a Trinitron TV, which I think we just spoke about fairly recently. All of this stuff was so good at the time. And I loved Sony so much. And now, like I could not possibly care less about Sony. I can't even think of the last Sony product I owned, much less if there's anything in the house now.
02:04:21 ◼ ► And I feel like BMW has fallen out of favor for me in a very similar way. Like I was, maybe I was obsessed. I don't know if I was obsessed, but I was darn close to obsessed if not obsessed.
02:04:33 ◼ ► And in the trip that you and I went on Marco, that was at the pinnacle. That was before my car exploded every 10 minutes. And I loved being in Munich and going to BMW Welt and seeing all of the BMW history.
02:04:48 ◼ ► And every part of that trip was so amazing. And now I would be flabbergasted if I ever owned another BMW for the rest of my life.
02:04:56 ◼ ► I don't know. I've never owned a BMW, so I can't be infected with that. The one that you owned is the one that you like. And I think I have some favorite eras of BMW. And I think honestly, this current crop of cars is on the upward trend.
02:05:09 ◼ ► They made some very bad choices for a couple of generations, and they're trying to correct them, setting aside the styling and everything, just sort of the feature set and how they do things. I think they're getting better.
02:05:21 ◼ ► And Sony, I know what you're talking about with the dissolution of Sony, because they were sort of kings of the world at a certain point and then sort of were dethroned and lost their way.
02:05:29 ◼ ► But Sony does still make some good stuff. People forget, of course, that PlayStation is Sony. That's a pretty darn good game console. And they didn't win the last console generation just on a fluke.
02:05:39 ◼ ► Sony is very good at a lot of things, even the TVs they make, even though they're using LG panels in their OLEDs and all sorts of other realities. A lot of the stuff they do, their strengths are evident.
02:05:49 ◼ ► Their image processing is best in class of all the televisions. Again, they're not innovating in the panels anymore, so they can't really compete on that front, but they can compete on all the computer stuff.
02:06:01 ◼ ► Same thing they've been applying to their cameras. Their lenses are surprisingly good in many cases, and their electronics and their cameras are the leaders for certain aspects for certain applications.
02:06:12 ◼ ► So I think their cameras are pretty good. Their sensors are amazing. A lot of people use their sensors in other cameras and other applications, unlike the panels that they buy from LG. They are making sensors.
02:06:22 ◼ ► Sony still has its strengths, and I think it's a good example that a once great company can do things that are great again. I feel like Sony's strengths have never really changed.
02:06:32 ◼ ► The things they're good at are things they've always been good at, and things they're bad at are still basically the same, but it's just like, well, how many hits do you get? How are you leveraging your strengths to make good products?
02:06:43 ◼ ► Sony, there's a through line to Sony products that I think is still there. BMW, I think, lost its way in terms of, like you were saying, the ultimate driving machine. I don't know what the status of that marketing is, but bottom line is they took a diversion in two.
02:06:56 ◼ ► But it seems like our biggest customers want luxury cars, and the enthusiasts, the loud enthusiasts, kind of like the Mac Pro users or the people complaining that Apple isn't paying enough attention to the Mac. Apple's like, "Ah, Mac users, they just need some computers they can use."
02:07:09 ◼ ► And the fringe group is like, "No, we want you to pay attention to the Mac, and we want you to make this big, impractical Mac Pro." And it's like, we don't need to do that. It's stupid. So few people buy those.
02:07:18 ◼ ► But in some respects, you need to set your sights on the fringe enthusiast users to not have your whole line lose its spirit and just become like, "Oh, it's a German luxury sedan that just starts to feel mushy and indistinct."
02:07:38 ◼ ► It starts to be less distinguishable from your competitors. It's like, "Well, now they're all basically the same. It used to be BMW were the sporty ones, Mercedes was the squishy ones, Audi were unknown or not competitors, VW were the cheap ones."
02:07:52 ◼ ► And BMW had staked out that identity as the ultimate driving machine. They built cars based on that. And to the extent that they have deviated from that sort of mission statement, their cars have gotten worse.
02:08:04 ◼ ► They're not bad cars, but people who want a BMW instead of a Mercedes or instead of an Audi are looking for that ultimate driving machine experience. And I think they're finding their way back to that now.
02:08:15 ◼ ► They really messed up the 3 Series for a couple of generations and are just slowly finding their way back. The 5 got mushy but then got better. I think Marco's generation was the return to form of the 5, and the current 5, by all accounts, is really good as well.
02:08:28 ◼ ► The 7 has always been weird because that's the big lug-so boat, but for it's supposed to be an ultimate driving machine, it's very confusing. And the electrics, we don't know how things are going to shape out in the electrics, but when everyone starts feeling their full line of electrics, will BMWs be the...
02:08:42 ◼ ► A good example is Porsche with the Taycan, is that how you pronounce it? I forget. They've staked out, "We make the sporty electric. We're going to brag about how you can do 0-100-0 all day long and we'll just do it. We're going to brag about our Nurburgring times."
02:08:58 ◼ ► I mean, it makes sense, that's Porsche's brand, we're a sporty car, but guess what? We're electric, same deal. We're doing the same thing. We are the sporty car company. If you want an electric car and you want it to be a sporty electric car, we're going to try to make that for you.
02:09:10 ◼ ► When BMW goes electric, are they going to say we're the ultimate electric driving machine? Is that where they're going to shoot for? Are they going to say, actually for the electric it's all going to be about hush quiet and long mileage or something or whatever.
02:09:21 ◼ ► I feel like BMW, like Volvo, they have it so easy. Volvo is the safety brand, right? So if you buy Volvo, whoever owns them now or whatever, it's not a question about what distinguishes a Volvo, why would someone buy a Volvo? Safety, the word is safety.
02:09:36 ◼ ► That choice has been made. If you buy Volvo, you better make it a really safe car. You better invest money in safety because that's your brand and that's who buys your car. You can change your mind about that and say, "Oh, Volvo is going to be the sporty brand." But you're going to lose all your safety customers and chances are good you're not going to gain a sporty one.
02:09:51 ◼ ► BMW, sporty. Sporty cars. They pioneered that. That's their brand. You can decide to change it, but you'll lose all your sporty customers and now you're competing with the other people who might not be in that spot already. So I would advise BMW to get back that ultimate driving machine spirit as they have been and to maintain it through the electric era.
02:10:11 ◼ ► Learn from Porsche. It's possible to do that. It's possible to say, "There are a lot of electric cars in the market, but ours is the one that's sporty." Go with that and make the real small one.
02:10:23 ◼ ► All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Folli, and Notion. And thank you to our members. If you want to join up, go to atp.fm/join. And we will talk to you next week.
02:10:35 ◼ ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
02:10:57 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
02:11:16 ◼ ► A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
02:11:36 ◼ ► So I haven't had the time to look into this literally at all. I have spent probably 15 seconds looking at this, but have either of you guys paid any attention to the new Ford Bronco? And if so, can you give me the quick summary of it?
02:11:54 ◼ ► So it's because it seems to me, I guess there's like three different trims or models or something like, I guess there's a two door, four door and then some sport model, which I'm not familiar with what makes that sport.
02:12:04 ◼ ► There's like six trim levels that go from 30K at base to 60K at the top. It's kind of like the Jeeps in that regard in that it is a base, it's a foundation for a car that you can mold to your tastes and budget.
02:12:18 ◼ ► And yeah, it's a big, it's like a Tonka truck. It's like a toy truck with big knobby wheels and you know, and it's like, what do you want to use it for? Are you mostly just going to drive to the mall? You can set it up that way.
02:12:32 ◼ ► Are you actually going to go off-roading and use it to camping? You can set it up that way and you could do it all the ways in between two door, four door interior that looks like a luxury car versus the one that looks like, you know, it's all vinyl and plastic.
02:12:44 ◼ ► Do you want to have winch accessory? Do you want to have a tent thing like it's, it looks like a very versatile platform that's squarely aimed at customers. This type of car appeals to, and it's a great, I admire their flexibility because they know, look, some people are going to buy this and they're just going to, you know, drive to the grocery store.
02:12:59 ◼ ► So it has to serve that need. It has to be an okay car for doing that while also looking like a fun little truck. But also some people are actually going to take it off road. So it has to be able to do that too.
02:13:09 ◼ ► And to the extent that we can make it legit as in like, Oh, this really can go off road. Like this really can go up the side of a mountain and have a winch that reflects down the whole rest of the line, legitimizing the person who's just taking you to the grocery store to saying, I have a Bronco too.
02:13:23 ◼ ► And they can think in their heart of hearts. If I just change the wheels on this thing, I can go up the side of a mountain too, even if it's not really true because they didn't get like the transfer case or whatever features that allowed, you know, I don't know, the truck details.
02:13:34 ◼ ► I'm not into trucks, but I think this product looks like a good product for its target market. Again, not having read any reviews, maybe it has terrible quality and the engine stinks or something. We'll find out. But just from sort of the design and features that are available on it.
02:13:49 ◼ ► It's like a pretty good job and judging from, you know, the few people we know who are into trucks, mostly just Steven Hackett, he seems, he seems excited about it. Now I've seen online lots of people talking about the Bronco people who are into trucks and fantasized about driving around a big Tonka truck seem to be enthusiastic about it.
02:14:07 ◼ ► Yeah. And from what little I've gathered in, I might be way off base because again, I have not really looked into this, but from a little, what little I've gathered, you can take the doors off a Jeep Wrangler, which again, like we can argue about whether or not that's cool or fun or safe or whatever.
02:14:22 ◼ ► But as someone who has experienced it many, many times, I can tell you that I really enjoy doing that. So you can take the doors off. I guess there's like hundreds of accessories that Ford is coming out with.
02:14:31 ◼ ► You can take the roof off. You can put on different doors. You can get a hard top or a soft top. You can get doors with windows in the bottom of them. You can take the doors off. You can have two or four of those.
02:14:41 ◼ ► Yeah. All of this seems extremely well thought out. Like, like somebody who actually cares about this sort of thing was leading the charge to make a Wrangler, not a Wrangler killer necessarily, but a Wrangler equivalent.
02:14:53 ◼ ► And you know, in the same way that for me, I'm a single issue voter when it comes to cars and that is three pedals. Well, first of all, this has a seven speed in certain trims, apparently, which is the default.
02:15:11 ◼ ► Be still my heart. You have to pay extra for the automatic, like the old days. Be still my heart in 2021, a brand new car getting a set, well, six slash seven speed, seven speed in this case as the default.
02:15:26 ◼ ► Bravo, Bravo, Ford Bravo indeed. But no, I think that this, I don't see myself buying a Bronco, but man, if I was still in my Wrangler phase, I think this would be very interesting to cross shop.
02:15:42 ◼ ► Very, very interesting indeed. And, and I just really think this is a very cool and different approach to making a car where you have like, you know, this Tonka truck, like Tinker toy sort of thing where you can make of it, whatever you want.
02:15:56 ◼ ► And I love that. And I feel like in, in the Wrangler world, from what I've seen, which I haven't looked at this in a year or two now, you certainly could get some options from, from Jeep, but it wasn't the over abundance of stuff.
02:16:10 ◼ ► Now, absolutely. There is a infinite world of possibilities with the Wrangler when you consider the aftermarket, but for first party OEM stuff, I don't think there was near as many options as, as you can get on the Bronco.
02:16:23 ◼ ► And I just think this is super duper cool. I think it's a reasonable way to reboot an old name. I, it just, from what little I've seen of this five stars, I am, I'm really pleased that Ford has gone this way.
02:16:45 ◼ ► I was saying it was like a target toy just because the, the proportions of this car of just like tall with giant wheels and a big ride, it looks like a toy car. Like it's not the reason you don't build real cars like that is because they'll roll over if you turn too fast. Right.
02:17:10 ◼ ► And they look like, like cartoons of themselves. Right. This looks like that cartoon, right? You can buy it with comically huge wheels. You can buy it with a factory, you know, whatever kit that raises it up. So the ride height is like an extra foot higher.
02:17:23 ◼ ► Like all those things are there to make it basically a worse car for taking to the grocery store by all possible measures. But I feel like the way it competes with the Wrangler is that like we were saying about the, with the hose down interior.
02:17:35 ◼ ► And you said in the slack, like, Oh, just like every Jeep ever. It's like, yeah, but this is just, this is a real car. Like it's not like a Jeep is like so utilitarian. They try to dress it up, but it's always just noisy and rough and awkward and weird and like, yeah, but that's not what it's for.
02:17:49 ◼ ► It's a Jeep, right? This, the Bronco feels like it's trying to say, let's make a car that if you just drive it to the grocery store, it just feels like any other like mini SUV. It feels like a RAV4. Right. I'm not sure they've achieved that. I'll have to wait till I see reviews, but it seems like they want to reach down to that side.
02:18:04 ◼ ► You know, you can buy the one that there are no winds, uh, wishing by there are no rattles. There are no creeks. The ride is gentle. It's like you're in a really tall tippy Camry. Like make it work for that, but then also make it tough enough. Uh, and built sturdily enough that if you outfitted it the right way, you can actually take it off road and actually make it, make it out of durable materials and rubber seal all of the controls.
02:18:30 ◼ ► So you can spray down the dashboard and nothing will short out right. And offer it with vinyl seats. Like a lot of it is just choices of options. Like I look at this and I think of like, imagine if Apple made a laptop to bring it back to tech for a second, made a laptop with this range of options. Right.
02:18:44 ◼ ► Like you can get the one that has the giant battery pack or that's water sealed, but you could also get the one that's as thin as possible. Like that's the beauty of this product line. Again, if it's a car, it's worth a damn at all. I haven't read any reviews of it.
02:18:56 ◼ ► If the engine is decent, if the transmission is decent, if it really is tough, if the reliability is okay, they seem to have built a platform that has a lot of flexibility and it can last them a lot of years and serve a lot of different customers and all that crap with those options. That's all gold. Right. Like I should ask Porsche. Right. That's just, you know, this car is expensive. Like it starts at 29 K. It's not like you can get into this for $16,000 or something. Right. Starts at 29. So it's, it's, I put myself on this as a big tangent, but what I was trying to get at is the fact that it's a very, very expensive car.
02:19:25 ◼ ► What I was trying to get at is this is trying to appeal to people who know what the hell the Bronco is. Like the retro styling, like Mustangs have been doing this for years, like a modern car that evokes design characteristics. Not just like the kidney grill, like BMWs, but like reminds you of a specific Mustang. Right.
02:19:41 ◼ ► Ford has done it with Mustangs for years. Oh, this reminds, this is a modernization of the '68 Mustang or whatever it is. Right. And you see it, right. This is a modernization of, I think the original Bronco design. Like you look at it, you can see the family resemblance. It doesn't look exactly the same. It's not like some of the cars that have come out of American car companies. They're really just giant inflated cartoon versions of an exact car from the past.
02:20:06 ◼ ► But the Bronco is trying to specifically evoke the old Bronco. And every time I see that, I'm like, that's cool and everything. And you're going to get those customers who are now older and have the money to buy a car that starts at 30 K because they remember the original one.
02:20:19 ◼ ► But that road is eventually a dead end. You need to always be creating new models that become that for the next generation. To give an example, the Acura Integra was a thing that did not exist.
02:20:33 ◼ ► Honda made it. And now when those people get older, I fully expect someday Honda to come back and say, we're going to, well, Honda doesn't really do this that much, but you could come back later and say, hey, all the people who grew up loving the Integra, they're old now and have a lot of money.
02:20:48 ◼ ► So let's make a modern Integra that evokes the design of the 1992 Integra and get all those people to buy it for a lot more money. Right. You have to always be creating new models like that.
02:20:59 ◼ ► If all you ever do is go back to the past and say, remember that Bronco that everybody loved? Here's another modern reinterpretation of it. That's a dead end. You will run out of things to keep reinterpreting.
02:21:10 ◼ ► You have to always have new models that didn't exist before. It's like making new IP. You can't just keep making Marvel movies forever. At a certain point, you have to have new intellectual property like Star Wars was new until, believe it or not once, was new intellectual property.
02:21:22 ◼ ► It was not based on something that came before it. It was not based on a comic book. It wasn't based on an existing franchise. It was entirely new. You have to do that every once in a while.
02:21:30 ◼ ► And sometimes I wonder if American car companies are able to do that at all. Like Jeep is just going to make new things called quote unquote Wrangler forever with round headlights and vertical slots in the grill.
02:21:40 ◼ ► They're just never going to make it. I mean the Cherokee I guess is a new IP kind of. I think this Bronco is great, but what's the next new brand name? What's the new IP for an American car company that 25, 30 years from now someone's going to be looking back with nostalgia and buying the much more expensive version of that?