00:00:00 ◼ ► I have a tweet I would like to propose to you, which Aaron told me not to tweet, but I need somewhere to get it out of my system, and this pre-show is all going to get tossed anyway, so I'm going to use you as my guinea pig.
00:00:11 ◼ ► No wait, are you suggesting that I tweet something, or are you drafting a tweet that you're going to write and running it past your review committee here?
00:00:20 ◼ ► Alright, so, I accidentally deleted it because Tweetbot crashed, but it was something along the lines of, "I have found potty training Michaela to be less challenging than working with the HOA board in my neighborhood. I am on the HOA board in my neighborhood."
00:00:47 ◼ ► I don't see the connection between the potty training and the HOA board. I understand you're trying to compare two difficult things, but there's no connection there.
00:00:57 ◼ ► Well, because that's the thing, is that Michaela getting potty trained has actually been pretty easy so far.
00:01:02 ◼ ► Yeah, but the person reading the tweet doesn't know that. You've got to either connect those things or leave them aside. I think the idea of the HOA board being annoying and you being on it is solid. We could work with that, workshop that a little bit.
00:01:20 ◼ ► Regardless of how you're going to phrase it, you are basically inviting lots of useless and annoying and high-friction comments from two different groups. Three, actually. From all parents.
00:01:44 ◼ ► Right. So you already know where the toddler is. You're going to hear from all the parents why this is wrong or stupid or whatever. Then you're going to hear from all the people who are not in HOA situations who will ask you why you're in one.
00:01:58 ◼ ► And then you're going to hear from all the people who are in HOAs who both love them or hate them or both.
00:02:03 ◼ ► So you're basically inviting a whole bunch of useless, annoying comments that are all going to be completely unhelpful in whatever your problem is.
00:02:16 ◼ ► Even we can't resist nitpicking the premise. That's the worst part when you're asking for help or when you're posing a question or something like that.
00:02:26 ◼ ► Like on StackOverflow this is the worst. You say something like, "How do I get this function to work?" And the first three responses are, "Why are you using that function?"
00:02:37 ◼ ► But StackOverflow at least has rules to try to stop that. That's not acceptable behavior. It is behavior, but the whole system is made to avoid that happening.
00:02:46 ◼ ► Right. But in this case you're posing a funny tweet that is basically a rant about how... Wow. Tough crowd.
00:03:00 ◼ ► So you're basically posing a rant because there's no way for people to actually help you with this.
00:03:05 ◼ ► So you're posing a rant and what you're expecting is to get it out of your system. This is what a rant is for.
00:03:10 ◼ ► Get it out of your system and maybe have other people be like, "Yeah." But you're not going to get that.
00:03:14 ◼ ► Instead you're going to get other people who are going to just make you madder in minor, annoying, paper-cut ways.
00:03:22 ◼ ► See, now instead if you were to describe what's going on in the HOA thing that's annoying you, that can be the source of humor.
00:03:31 ◼ ► Again, we're going to leave the potty training aside because that's not necessary for us to discuss the absurdities of your HOA.
00:03:38 ◼ ► Ultimately it doesn't matter. Basically there's... I'm trying to give the ultra-bridged version rather than the three-hour version of the story.
00:04:01 ◼ ► I'm going to go with "home owner" being hyphenated, although I don't think it is in any of the documentation.
00:04:09 ◼ ► See, that's the question. I think "home owner" is one word. If you were to write it as two, it would get a hyphen.
00:04:18 ◼ ► So, I don't know a whole lot about really anything, but particularly when it comes to HOAs.
00:04:23 ◼ ► But I do know that my neighborhood, which is, I don't know, 50 houses, something like that, has a Home Owners Association.
00:04:39 ◼ ► And if we didn't find a series of individuals to step up and do it instead, some like boogeyman, dead man switch gets flipped.
00:04:47 ◼ ► And then we have to give like the same management duties, and I'll explain what those are in a second, which is basically nothing.
00:04:58 ◼ ► and "Oh, our HOA fees will go from effectively zero all year round to millions of dollars a month. That's the only way this could go."
00:05:08 ◼ ► You know, they have that, like, you know, if you don't pass a budget, everybody gets fired thing. Isn't that how Australia works?
00:05:27 ◼ ► I apologize. So a Home Owners Association ostensibly is to make sure that the people within the neighborhood are self, not governing, but for lack of a better word, governing, maybe managing is a better word.
00:05:36 ◼ ► So that if one neighbor has way too much time on their hands and notices that another neighbor hasn't mowed their lawn very recently, they can go to the HOA and levy a complaint.
00:05:45 ◼ ► And the HOA can say to that, you know, offending homeowner, "Hey, we would really like it to, we would really like you to mow your lawn.
00:05:53 ◼ ► And if you don't, we're going to put a fee or whatever, like a penalty against your house.
00:05:58 ◼ ► And then if you go to sell and you have one of these, what is it, a lien, L-I-E-N, something like that? No, that's not right.
00:06:06 ◼ ► It's like if you don't pay your taxes, they put a lien. It's basically like an unpaid loan obligation or something, like an unpaid debt obligation.
00:06:12 ◼ ► Yes, that. So again, I'm not a lawyer. I probably have the terminology wrong, but you and I are saying the same thing.
00:06:21 ◼ ► Can you pop up on level, by the way? You gave a good example of a specific case, but can you pop up one or two levels?
00:06:32 ◼ ► So, you know, what you described is like it's a governing body that the people who are governed participate in in some form.
00:06:41 ◼ ► Its purpose, like you gave the example of someone has an unkempt lawn and then it can levy fees if you don't follow the rules.
00:06:47 ◼ ► Essentially, these associations exist to enforce conformity to a particular standard set by the worst people who live in the area.
00:07:03 ◼ ► But it is absolutely a sort of like a way of enforcing conformity to the ruling class has decided this is the way things should be.
00:07:18 ◼ ► And they want the power to enforce that over everybody who lives in the area around them so that they can maintain not only the way they live, but also the way that everybody else lives.
00:07:28 ◼ ► That is exactly right. And ostensibly, so ostensibly, the reason this exists is because let's say I never mow my lawn.
00:07:36 ◼ ► Let's just say, for example, I never mow my lawn. It is overgrown. It's half as tall as my house.
00:07:40 ◼ ► You could make an argument one way or another, but one could make an argument that if my neighbor goes to sell their house and a prospective buyer to my neighbor's house sees that their future neighbor, me, has never taken care of their lawn, they're not going to want that house.
00:07:56 ◼ ► Or if they are going to get that house, they're going to want to pay a lot less for it.
00:07:59 ◼ ► So in summary, the ostensible purpose of an HOA, a homeowners association, is to maintain everyone's property values.
00:08:05 ◼ ► If somebody is in charge of micromanaging, I mean nitpicking, I mean paying attention to all of the yards in the neighborhood, I mean the state of the properties in the neighborhood, then that makes sure that everyone's home values are as great as they can possibly be.
00:08:20 ◼ ► Because we all look the same, we all act the same, we are all stepped for husbands and wives and so on.
00:08:27 ◼ ► And more importantly, that there is a specific set of rules that determine high value in real estate.
00:08:32 ◼ ► As in, we have decided that having a lawn with grass on it equals high home value, whereas if you have a lawn with rocks on it and you don't live in Arizona, that does not equal high home value.
00:08:43 ◼ ► There is no connection between the idea of what constitutes high home value and what does not. There is just a decision about what constitutes high home value and what does not.
00:08:52 ◼ ► And that's the true nature of this, the true insidious nature of it is that we're trying to make sure we maintain property values.
00:08:59 ◼ ► Okay, well what determines something that makes property values go up or down? Whatever I say.
00:09:04 ◼ ► Whatever we have decided as the social cultural norm that we will enforce, ipso facto, it leads to high property values.
00:09:14 ◼ ► And nothing else can possibly ever lead to high property values or higher property values, that's insane.
00:09:20 ◼ ► It's just conformed to our set of rules. You can imagine what the rules look like, you can imagine what the rules demand, and that's why they're generally frowned upon.
00:09:29 ◼ ► Because no one likes the idea of their property values going down because their neighbor does something that makes the neighborhood a less pleasant place to live.
00:09:38 ◼ ► But the far opposite end of that spectrum is, I've decided exactly what will make the neighborhood a nice place for me to live because I know what I want and everyone else will do that.
00:09:49 ◼ ► One of the good things about an HOA, well, mega air quotes good, things about an HOA is you in most cases, and in the case of my neighborhood, need to go to the HOA to get approval on improvements you do to your house.
00:10:01 ◼ ► Now that sounds bananas at first, but the thought here is if you say to the HOA, I would like my house to be fire engine red and be the only fire engine red house in the entire neighborhood, they're gonna say no.
00:10:11 ◼ ► It's gonna look out of place, it's gonna make everyone else feel weird, it's gonna make, well, see here again, we're getting to what you're driving at, John, who's the arbiter of what is weird?
00:10:19 ◼ ► That sounds awesome. I mean, you were talking about things like not mowing your lawn or I'm gonna build a giant upside down crucifix on the roof of my house, but no.
00:10:28 ◼ ► It's like, what color is your mailbox? And everybody knows that if you have a red mailbox, property values will go down, right?
00:10:34 ◼ ► So again, paint colors. Paint colors, and not like, oh, I'm going to paint obscenities all over my house and have flashing lights, but just like, do you really want your house to be blue? Can this neighborhood really handle a blue house at this time?
00:10:48 ◼ ► It seems like so many other things, like governments or unions, where it's like some amount of power is good and helps everybody, but I imagine many HOAs go overboard and either have bad standards or have too overbearing of standards, and that's where the problems lie.
00:11:05 ◼ ► Can you let me finish my story? You've just told me, you've told the punchline already.
00:11:10 ◼ ► I joke, I joke. I'm not actually upset because you hit the nail on the head, and the newest president of the HOA, he is ready and willing and able to throw violation letters at everyone who doesn't have utterly perfect manicured blades of grass.
00:11:26 ◼ ► And if their driveway happens to be gravel and not like concrete or cement or something, you better not have a single weed in that driveway because gosh darn it, that's going to make my home value go down if you have weeds in your gravel driveway halfway across the neighborhood.
00:11:39 ◼ ► I've been dealing with that and trying, I don't know, is it libertarians that are like, man, just let people live and do their thing. Is that the libertarian point of view?
00:11:55 ◼ ► It really boils down to let me do what I want whenever I want and let me make you do what I want as well.
00:12:02 ◼ ► Like all dim political philosophies, that's always what it boils down to. There's always some reason.
00:12:07 ◼ ► It's just like HOA's. It's like, look, I'm going to do whatever I want and I know what's best for everyone and my system will be flawless and will always work and will work for everybody.
00:12:16 ◼ ► And there's so many pathologies in it. Like a weed in someone's gravel driveway ten blocks away. Like, that doesn't actually affect the value of your home, right?
00:12:26 ◼ ► Even if you are across the street from it and this one little weed doesn't affect it. But in that person's mind, in the mind of a person who is very upset by weeds, they don't like seeing a weed in their neighbor's driveway, right?
00:12:37 ◼ ► And you would think that the reaction would be, why don't you offer to go and weed their driveway every afternoon if it bothers you so much?
00:12:42 ◼ ► But it would be much better if you could fine them for not removing that weed from their driveway, wouldn't it? Isn't this a better system? It's not actually a better system.
00:12:50 ◼ ► So anyway, it's a five-member board and I joined the board only because I didn't want this mythical dead man switch to flip where apparently our, I think it's literally $150 a year, which as HOA's go is effectively free.
00:13:02 ◼ ► And that's because we don't have a pool in the neighborhood. Like HOA's can also in some cases manage a neighborhood pool that's only your neighborhood is allowed to go to that pool.
00:13:14 ◼ ► Which in that case, that can be really nice or maybe some other like athletic facility or something like that. But for us, we have a little teeny park in the neighborhood and that's about the only common property.
00:13:24 ◼ ► And again, in a perfect world, like an HOA is ostensibly going to do like social events when we're allowed to have social events.
00:13:32 ◼ ► And they manage like the landscaping of the common areas and things of that nature. But in reality, a month into being on HOA, I'm basically trying, me and one other person,
00:13:42 ◼ ► the two of us are trying to pump the brakes on like micromanaging everyone else's yards and driveways.
00:13:47 ◼ ► I think we have a good project here now, a project that we can assign to you, Casey. It sounds like you and your other friend, right thinking friend, the project should be to pull from the historical playbook of government in these United States and systematically change the rules that govern the HOA such that idiocy is no longer allowed.
00:14:13 ◼ ► Right. But like, you know, don't worry about fighting over individual sort of cases of is this allowed, is this not allowed.
00:14:21 ◼ ► All you care about are like the bylaws. Like how does this body function? Can a single person objecting stop anything from happening?
00:14:28 ◼ ► If not, maybe that would be a good thing to add because then you have complete control over this body if you as long as you stand and just object to everything.
00:14:34 ◼ ► Can the laws be changed? If the change is not unanimous, you got to put that in to just like construct a gamified system such that you as an individual can stop anything from happening and then also get rid of like the dead man switch sort of, you know, you just slowly change that stuff without anybody noticing.
00:14:55 ◼ ► Maybe employ a lawyer to make some large thing that's too long for anybody to read that eventually gives you complete power.
00:15:05 ◼ ► And then maybe put in the, and then we put in like some kind of consequence of inaction that causes the HOA to dissolve, right?
00:15:14 ◼ ► Like, for there no longer to be an HOA and then, you know, see how hard people have to work to try to form a new one or something like that.
00:15:21 ◼ ► The other thing I don't understand, like once you have an HOA, can you ever go to a state where you don't?
00:15:28 ◼ ► I don't think there's any threat of one appearing where I live and I don't think, you know, because you have to get everyone to agree to be bound by it, right?
00:15:36 ◼ ► Yeah, and who, why would anybody who didn't buy a house that had one of these, why would they volunteer to add restrictions to their own property?
00:15:44 ◼ ► Like that seemed, I would imagine this happens a lot like in like planned housing developments where you can kind of sell them all at once under the same terms.
00:15:52 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's so common in the US. I imagine that's probably where most of them come from.
00:15:56 ◼ ► Or like, you know, like HOAs are probably similar or identical in function to things like condo boards where if you have like an apartment building, you know, you have to like work together with the other owners of the other apartments, you know, on certain things.
00:16:08 ◼ ► Like, you know, so that it, it makes sense like when you're building everything at once, but yeah, if you don't already have an HOA on your property, I don't see why a logical, you know, well thinking person would agree to have this imposed on them.
00:16:21 ◼ ► Which is another way of saying that it's not actually about property values because everybody cares about their property values, but no one is racing to form an HOA with their, all their neighbors if they're in a situation where they don't have one.
00:16:40 ◼ ► Yeah, well town ordinances cover safe things. You can't have a gigantic tank full of oil in your lawn.
00:16:45 ◼ ► Well, but you know, town ordinances and building codes and everything, they also do cover some of these aesthetic things. Not usually as much as an HOA can and often does cover, but you know, things like, you know, you have to keep your lawn to some degree of, of, you know, keptness.
00:17:01 ◼ ► Yeah, like, like there are like building, building codes and local zoning boards and, and you know, architecture boards, like they do cover a lot of this stuff without an HOA and with a much more accountable system of government.
00:17:11 ◼ ► But, but that, those are laws that have to pass like in a much, in a much more representative system of people who are sane and don't, aren't just, you know, like the safety related ones and the sort of general upkeep are lenient enough that no one's going to yell at you for a weed in your gravel driveway.
00:17:27 ◼ ► And mostly it mostly boiled down to safety or, you know, very large issues of property values of like, look, if your, if your lawn becomes a hazard because wild animals are living in it and it's in an unkempt jungle, like that would run afoul of whatever town ordinance says that you have to maintain your property to some minimum standard otherwise you forfeit yada yada yada.
00:17:46 ◼ ► Like, that's the level those things work. We already have a thing called government that does those things. HOA is your mailbox can't be that color.
00:17:54 ◼ ► Yeah, no, you're exactly right. And as an example, this is an honest to goodness example of the HOA. What are the standards or whatever they are in our bylaws? We are not allowed to have our trash cans visible from the road.
00:18:06 ◼ ► Now, granted, 90% of the neighborhood has their trash cans like on the side of their house perfectly visible from the road. But like this sort of micromanagement I just find completely distasteful.
00:18:15 ◼ ► Another great example on all our mailboxes we are apparently we must have screw in numbers on our mailboxes to indicate our home numbers or home number can't have a sticker that's worth you know, we can't have stickers 1234
00:18:36 ◼ ► Someone would be going to buy your neighbor's house and they'd be like, Oh my, we're going to knock 50 grand off this. That guy has a sticker on his mailbox.
00:18:42 ◼ ► Easily 50, probably 75. Now, fun fact, I also have stickers on my mailbox because I don't care.
00:18:49 ◼ ► See this, I'm leaning more towards John's alternate plan for you here of just like slowly dissolve the HOA's power from within. Like, you know, now that you have power, you just like slowly reduce what they can do, like reduce the scope of the types of things they can regulate.
00:19:04 ◼ ► And make it much more difficult to actually do anything like require unanimous consent for every single thing.
00:19:16 ◼ ► So you start by making bylaws that say the number of people who need to be present for things to be passed is very small and all you need is a majority of the people present. Like you got to, it's a long, it's a long system. You build your way up to it.
00:19:29 ◼ ► I've had, I've had good examples of how to destroy a governing body's ability to do anything by looking at our own government.
00:19:35 ◼ ► Yeah. Oh goodness. And Tom Hartnett is writing in the chat and I think it's tongue in cheek, but it's a fair question. I probably am painting my neighborhood to be this like super swanky, super amazing. It's not, it's a regular Schmoe's neighborhood.
00:19:46 ◼ ► That's the best part about the day choice. It's always, it's not in the neighborhood where everyone is a bazillionaire because those people don't have problem keeping up appearances. They hire giant staffs of people to maintain their houses.
00:19:55 ◼ ► Right. It's always the ones that are like, we would like to think of ourselves as the good people. So A, don't let any minorities buy houses here and B, make sure we have an HOA that is, you know, that, that, that enforces a standard of beauty that very often is difficult to maintain and expensive to maintain.
00:20:15 ◼ ► And thus also keeping out those, those people, you know, who we think don't have enough money to live here. Right. Before when you said art, your neighborhood had been, had been created in the late nineties. I laughed at that because in the Northeast where it's, you know, as you know, coming from here, like all the land is already taken. Right.
00:20:31 ◼ ► So there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of housing developments that are being created from scratch in the nineties. And these type of ideas are definitely, you know, attractive to anyone who is buying up a bunch of previously barren land and turning it into a planned housing development.
00:20:50 ◼ ► Right. Because they do want to have a sales pitch and have something that looks like a, what is it, hill valley from back to the future where they're planning on, they have a big happy family, smiling.
00:21:02 ◼ ► Yeah. I know what you're thinking of. Yep. Yep. Let's do some follow up. Tell me about Mac pro wheel stability. I re I genuinely would much rather talk about this than spend any more energy on my stupid HOA. So John, tell me about the Mac pro wheels.
00:21:15 ◼ ► Well, you're in luck. We'll look at all this Mac profile. I'm so excited. This is a, was a suggestion by several people, uh, based on our, uh, continuing discussion of the Mac pro wheels and how expensive they are and how slightly they are and how they don't have little breaks on them.
00:21:29 ◼ ► Lots of people suggested the idea of putting wheels on just two of the feet and then leaving the plane feet on the other two. So you'd have two wheels in front and there's little stubs in back or vice versa. That's very clever.
00:21:39 ◼ ► That way when you wanted to roll it, you could lift it. So the little feeties are off the ground and, and roll, roll, roll. And then when you wanted to put it to stop, you could put it down. The problem is I have no idea if the wheels are the same height as the feet.
00:21:51 ◼ ► I imagine the wheels are way longer, way taller than the feet. And so that wouldn't quite work. So what I'm hoping is that some YouTuber with more money than sense, not talking about anybody in particular here, but you know, um, we'll actually do this and put on two wheels and two feet and see how it goes.
00:22:07 ◼ ► I mean, I think the feet might need a little extenders. Again, I hear there are a lot of YouTubers with more money than sense that also have 3d printers. So maybe they could mock something up. So then you could get the best of both worlds. A Mac pro that rolls when you want it to and stays put when you don't.
00:22:21 ◼ ► And head effects on Twitter has some thoughts about your video card, which also apparently has some drama associated with it. So take this in whatever order you would like.
00:22:31 ◼ ► Yeah, my video card has not yet arrived. It's supposed to come tomorrow. Unfortunately, we didn't quite wait long enough for that to arrive. But anyway, it's the what a Radeon pro W570X, whatever the hell it's called. And I was saying the previous show that it's, you know, you could get an equivalent PC video card, the Radeon RX 5700 XT or whatever for way less money for like less than half the price.
00:22:53 ◼ ► Head effects was saying that actually $1000 for this W5700X is actually a pretty good deal because the PC equivalent is actually an $800 card and you know, just allow for the $200 MPX module overhead or whatever.
00:23:08 ◼ ► It's not the same as the RX 5700 XT, right? Because that's just the gaming card and this is the W model which has more cores enabled or has a bunch of other features. But anyway, the bottom line is for my purposes, if I'm going to use it to run games or whatever, it is actually about the same speed or potentially slower depending on the game than the roughly $300 card.
00:23:31 ◼ ► In some ways, Head effects is right. If you wanted to get exactly the same card on your PC, it would cost you about $800. But I would never want this card on my PC. I would just get the gaming card that costs way less money.
00:23:42 ◼ ► So it's the eternal struggle buying a machine that I shouldn't be buying that has video cards for uses that I'm not going to use them for. And I'm just trying to find one that has decent gaming performance and doesn't cost $2500.
00:23:56 ◼ ► And so I have, I found it. I didn't complain about the price. I ordered it the day it came out. I'm excited to install it. But apparently, it's not as bad a deal as I thought it was.
00:24:05 ◼ ► All right, now what happened with your order? You said it's supposed to arrive tomorrow. So I guess everything's good?
00:24:10 ◼ ► Yeah, mostly it's just I had a little some weird experiences with this. So when it came out, I was in, you know, I just I don't know, through whatever channel it came through a slack channel, Stephen Hackett messaged me, I don't know, like the second it came out, I knew that this video card was available for I remember was like the whole day it was not available for order, but then it was available in the UK and then it was available. Anyway, I was like, on my bed or something when it came out, I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna order this right away. Because I didn't want to be like getting in a line and who knows what the Coronavirus stuff, but there'd be shipping delays, I need to order this right away.
00:24:39 ◼ ► So I'm like, order, order, order, use the Apple Store app, try to order it. I don't remember how I actually ordered it. But I did, you know, use my apple card, get the 3% or whatever. Orders done, I get an email says, Here's your order, here's the expected ship date, yada, yada. And then like, I think that same day, I tried to go to my orders in the Apple Store app to see when the expected ship date does again, because I'd forgotten. And the top item in my orders was my little bent piece of metal for the hard drives.
00:25:08 ◼ ► Like, I'm like, I did just order this card, right? So go back to the email. Yeah, sure enough, it's confirmation email says, Here's this thing you totally ordered. Here's the estimated ship date or whatever. So I got my answer. Like, why didn't it show up in my orders? And being a multi apple ID person, I'm always like, never, never keeping track of exactly which Apple ID I'm signed into, because all of mine, like the name is my first and last name and the Apple ID and Apple doesn't do a good job of showing you the actual Apple ID in various places. It just says my first and last name.
00:25:37 ◼ ► And so I can't I never know in what browser in what tab and what whatever, you know, incognito window versus on a which one Apple ID am I logged into here?
00:25:46 ◼ ► Are you saying you might have too many browser windows open john? No, I have too many Apple IDs. The problem? Oh, yeah, that's the problem. It is. The fact that I use two browsers helps because I tend to segregate this Apple IDs in this browser and this Apple IDs in that browser. Right. But sometimes I cross the streams a little bit. I know where they all are. I can find anything.
00:26:03 ◼ ► Yeah, it's true. But yeah, so I have this app store connect angle here that I'll get to in a second, which is another exciting Apple ID thing. So I'm like, well, my, my Apple ID that I normally order all my stuff on is the one that I'm signed into on my phone. It's my like my phone Apple ID or whatever. And the apps, it's obviously I didn't order it through that Apple ID. But I'm like, I got the email at that Apple ID email.
00:26:26 ◼ ► I got like the order email that applied email. So how did I manage to order something such the receipt comes to my Apple IDs email, but it does not associate with Apple ID. So anyway, in the email, I click on the your order status link. And it opens the you know, I click on the link, it opens a thing. And then I get a screen that says something went wrong. There was a problem with your request. Please try again.
00:26:47 ◼ ► That's not good. And I'm I see that pretty frequently. Look, I'm looking at our status, but I don't understand why it appears. And I'm like, well, maybe I'm logged into the wrong Apple ID on this thing. I tried on my phone to click on the order status link.
00:27:03 ◼ ► And at first it was taking me to the Apple Store app. And then it was taking me to a browser and getting the same thing. And like it's I don't know how a regular person who doesn't who's not a web developer would deal with this because basically it was like impossible for me to see the status of my order.
00:27:18 ◼ ► All I got was a something went wrong page. If I if I got an order page on my Apple ID would just wouldn't show that order. But I'm pretty sure I actually ordered it. My phone could apparently do nothing with my other Apple ID because my phone like the Apple ID and system and system, whatever called settings is like my phone's Apple ID.
00:27:38 ◼ ► Just try doing anything with a different Apple ID than the one your phone is actually signed into on an Apple website because it constantly sends you back and expects you to be in the Apple ID that your phone is connected to.
00:27:49 ◼ ► It's like, no, I don't want to use that one. I want to sign into the other Apple ID and look at that app by these orders. And the phone's like, no, that's never going to happen. Like, I suppose I could have signed out of my Apple ID on my phone, but I would never want to do that because we just destroy all my data anyway.
00:28:03 ◼ ► Back on my Mac, I'm like, okay, well, we're going to nuke and pave. And so I went and deleted all the cookies related to everything having to do with Apple in one of my browsers and signed into my other Apple ID and didn't see the order there either and signed in and did the same thing and signed into my first Apple ID and didn't see the order there either.
00:28:21 ◼ ► But I'm like, but I've got an email that says I ordered this thing, so what the hell's the deal? Eventually, after deleting more cookies and local storage and all sorts of other crap in ever wider targets of just apple.com and bigger things.
00:28:35 ◼ ► Anyway, eventually I got to the point where I could click on the link to check my order status and instead of a something went wrong page, I got a page that said something to the effect of, would you like to link this order to an Apple ID? What the hell? How did I order it and not be associated with an Apple ID?
00:28:54 ◼ ► How did I even physically do that? I'm like, fine. That's pretty much exactly what I'm going to do. Please do connect this order with an Apple ID. So I click on the link to connect this order to an Apple ID and I get a page that says something went wrong. There must be a problem with your request. Please try again.
00:29:08 ◼ ► So it was a couple days of this where I would click on the -- I would try in every browser on every device with every set of things cleared to try to use their helpful link, the blue button or whatever that said connect this order to an Apple ID.
00:29:19 ◼ ► Eventually, I don't know why, you know, trial and error over many days and many browser cache clearings and stuff, I got it to associate this order with the Apple ID that I wanted to and now when I go on my phone and I go to the Apple Store app and I go to orders, I see the order there.
00:29:32 ◼ ► But boy, how long has Apple been selling things online? I don't even know what happened and I don't understand how I could have screwed things up and I don't understand why their website doesn't work out of time.
00:29:44 ◼ ► And the little corollary to this is App Store Connect, everyone's favorite website. I never got to use iTunes Connect. I just started developing in the App Store Connect world.
00:29:53 ◼ ► Yeah, well, I never saw the old one. The new one, as far as the website goes, seems okay. Like it mostly works and does what it's supposed to.
00:30:00 ◼ ► But for the past week or so, I've been trying to load App Store Connect in my App Store Connect browser, in my App Store Connect browser window in a particular place that I have hanging around.
00:30:12 ◼ ► And it would load and my apps would be there. I'd click on apps or whatever and they would show like a spinner and the spinner would just spin forever.
00:30:23 ◼ ► Then I'd try the same thing the next day and be like, "Huh, spinner in the same place."
00:30:27 ◼ ► Eventually after several weeks, I was like, "Look, does App Store Connect not work anymore?"
00:30:33 ◼ ► Why can I get to App Store Connect but anytime I want to do one particular thing, I just get a spinner forever.
00:30:38 ◼ ► What's the solution? Every web developer knows. Delete all cookies in local storage. Hey, App Store Connect works again.
00:30:48 ◼ ► It should not be possible to have a series of cookies or things in my local storage that cause your website to spinner forever over the course of weeks.
00:31:09 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Mack Weldon. Better than whatever you're wearing right now.
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00:31:55 ◼ ► If it's still cold where you are, I strongly suggest their long sleeve tees and their warm knit waffle shirts.
00:32:01 ◼ ► I love those all winter long. I just love Mack Weldon's stuff. They have amazing quality.
00:32:07 ◼ ► If you buy a pair of underwear from them, try it out. If you don't like your first pair of underwear,
00:32:13 ◼ ► they will refund you and you can keep it. They don't want it back. You can just keep it and they'll refund you, no questions asked.
00:32:19 ◼ ► That's how confident they are that you're going to like it. I can totally back this up.
00:32:23 ◼ ► I was a Mack Weldon customer way before they were a sponsor of ours. That's why I wanted to get them as a sponsor so I could tell you how great their clothing is.
00:32:30 ◼ ► They look good. They perform well for the active wear type of stuff. They have all sorts of wonderful products.
00:32:37 ◼ ► They also have a customer loyalty program that's really, really nice called Weldon Blue.
00:32:41 ◼ ► You create your free account, place any order for any amount, and after that you will never pay for shipping again.
00:32:47 ◼ ► Once you purchase $200 worth of products from Mack Weldon, not only will you keep receiving free shipping,
00:32:56 ◼ ► This also grants you access to new products before they're released to anyone else, as well as free gifts added to future orders.
00:33:24 ◼ ► I have a new toy, and I think Marco has a new toy, and John doesn't believe in toys, so he didn't get a new toy.
00:33:30 ◼ ► Before you two talk about your new toys, I have an opening statement about your new toy, because I don't have this new toy,
00:33:37 ◼ ► But I wanted to open this conversation with a brief note about a thing that thus far I haven't heard anybody else talk about in relation to this new toy,
00:33:46 ◼ ► but I think is extremely relevant. It's something that I brought up multiple times over the many years that we've been doing this show.
00:33:52 ◼ ► It never seems to get any traction with anybody except for me, but every time I hear a discussion of iPad keyboards, spoiler,
00:34:01 ◼ ► I think this, and I think it's so much more strongly now, and I don't understand why it's not everyone's first reaction to every single review of this device,
00:34:08 ◼ ► including your reviews that you're going to give in a moment. The iPad Magic Keyboard, the Magic Keyboard, whatever.
00:34:14 ◼ ► Every time I see stuff like this, I think to myself, is it two words? Yeah, I guess. Two words. Two words that have been discussed in this program many times.
00:34:24 ◼ ► iOS laptop. Now, I know people used to freak out a lot about this. I think they should be freaking out much, much less as the days pass.
00:34:36 ◼ ► When I say iOS laptop, what I'm thinking of is a laptop where there's a keyboard that contains a battery, a CPU, a GPU, and a couple of ports,
00:34:46 ◼ ► and then there's a hinge, and then there's a screen, and you open it up, and the hinge is on one side, you open it up,
00:34:54 ◼ ► and there's a keyboard and trackpad and everything, and those are on your lap, and that's where the heavy part is,
00:34:59 ◼ ► and there's a skinny part where there's the screen. People used to freak out about that because they would say,
00:35:04 ◼ ► "You don't understand, man. That's not what iOS is about. iOS isn't about keyboards and trackpads. It's about being a tablet.
00:35:12 ◼ ► It's about being a touch device. You can't have a touch laptop. It doesn't make any sense.
00:35:19 ◼ ► And then they slowly added everything that you would want in a laptop to their existing iOS device upside down and backwards.
00:35:28 ◼ ► So now we have this thing, this wobbly goblin with this huge, heavy thing that contains an incredibly powerful CPU and GPU combo
00:35:37 ◼ ► and an amazing screen, and all those guts are suspended on some weird magnetic thing with the skinny little keyboard underneath it
00:35:46 ◼ ► that the whole thing has to weigh as much as the device itself, and it's still wobbly, and it can't open at an angle,
00:35:55 ◼ ► Why can't they just make an iOS laptop? Now, the one remaining argument is going to be, "You don't understand, man.
00:36:02 ◼ ► I need to be able to use it as a tablet. How the hell am I going to use a laptop as a tablet?"
00:36:07 ◼ ► This is a solved problem in the world of very bad PCs, and I think Apple could solve it in a nice way.
00:36:14 ◼ ► You can just either A, have the thing fold back on itself, or B, have the screen both twist and fold back on itself.
00:36:20 ◼ ► And why do I think this is a good idea? Aside from it being a sane laptop with the weight in the right place
00:36:26 ◼ ► that would be a much more pleasant experience as a laptop, you save so much in terms of volume and weight
00:36:36 ◼ ► when you don't have to make—this is a naked robotic horror thing—when you don't have to make a thing with a shell and an innards
00:36:42 ◼ ► and a second thing with a shell and innards, and then have them connect to each other with magnets
00:36:46 ◼ ► that burn so many millimeters, that burn so many pounds. There's a reason this monstrosity weighs more than a MacBook Pro
00:36:53 ◼ ► whereas if you made it like a laptop, it could be like Casey's terrible one-port 12-inch MacBook.
00:36:59 ◼ ► It would be so much thinner and so much lighter, so thin and so light, that it would be perfectly good as a folded back on itself
00:37:07 ◼ ► or twisted around and folded back on itself tablet. Like, it wouldn't be too heavy to be a tablet with the keyboard with it all the time.
00:37:18 ◼ ► So, we will discuss this as a really cool device that you can connect your existing iPad to, and I think that type of thing
00:37:26 ◼ ► that's a convertible, transformable thing has its place, but I really, really think we're getting to the point now
00:37:32 ◼ ► where an iOS laptop is a device that makes sense and Apple could make a really good one
00:37:38 ◼ ► that would still be a really good tablet and be a way better laptop. Maybe they could charge $350 more for it
00:37:45 ◼ ► and that would, you know, maybe people would pay that. They would. They absolutely would, because it would be lighter
00:37:49 ◼ ► and a better laptop and it would just, anyway. So, go on. How are your toys now that I've ruined them for you?
00:37:59 ◼ ► Okay. So, this has been a little bit of a journey for me. When this was first announced, I was super excited and I have been using the word "amped" to describe it
00:38:09 ◼ ► and I'll probably overuse that word in this episode, but I will try to avoid it. But I was really amped to get this.
00:38:15 ◼ ► In no small part because I really just want a more flexible display stand than the Smart Folio.
00:38:24 ◼ ► Now, I like the Smart Folio, but as everyone has said a million times, there are two angles on the Smart Folio and they both kind of suck.
00:38:32 ◼ ► There's basically vertical, which is only particularly useful if you're pretty much at eye, if your head is at eye level with the device itself.
00:38:40 ◼ ► So, maybe if you're on your back and you've propped it on your belly to watch a movie or something like that.
00:38:45 ◼ ► And then the other angle, I don't know how many degrees it is, but it's just barely acceptable enough to not actively piss you off constantly, but it's not good enough to make you happy.
00:39:00 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. It's still kind of like, "Ugh, can I just get a little bit more, please? Just a little."
00:39:06 ◼ ► However, the thing is super light. I actually find it to be, this is the Smart Folio, I find it to be a pretty nice keyboard to type on.
00:39:14 ◼ ► It's kind of weird. It's that kind of fabric-y, cloth-y covering over everything, but I like it.
00:39:20 ◼ ► Mine is looking a little bit rough a year and a half on, and I don't think I've treated it egregiously.
00:39:26 ◼ ► Like, it's starting to, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's looking like it's got some age to it.
00:39:33 ◼ ► More age than I would have expected, given that I've only had it since the end of 2018.
00:39:40 ◼ ► Taking the iPad out of it is actually not, it's not hard by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not, like, convenient.
00:39:47 ◼ ► And flipping the keyboard around to the back, it's fine. I think it's a little weird, but it's not great.
00:39:58 ◼ ► And then I start hearing reviews, both from people who know and from just random people who happen to get theirs early.
00:40:04 ◼ ► And everyone's saying, "Well, eh, it's really heavy," and, "Oh, well, you can't really open it as easily because it's really, really stiff,"
00:40:13 ◼ ► and, "Oh, eh, well, it's kind of thick," and there's a lot of grumbling and hemming and hawing.
00:40:18 ◼ ► And I kind of got sad because I was really excited for this, and now I'm like, "I don't know if I want this after all."
00:40:25 ◼ ► And the other thing I should note is, I don't really care, sitting here today, I don't really care about a trackpad for the iPad.
00:40:31 ◼ ► Like, that doesn't seem to solve a problem I have. Remind me of this in, like, a week when I decide it's the best thing ever.
00:40:39 ◼ ► But I really just wanted a much more flexible way to view my iPad, and I didn't really care what kind of keyboard is attached to it.
00:40:49 ◼ ► And, as it turns out, this is just a very clever and interesting-looking, like, as a piece of engineering, I think it's extraordinary.
00:40:56 ◼ ► Whether or not you like it, I think we can all agree, I think I can speak for you guys, that it's a very interesting and cool piece of engineering.
00:41:04 ◼ ► Now, I got it this afternoon. I haven't spent an overabundance of time with it, but I've spent some time with it for sure.
00:41:12 ◼ ► It is heavy, I think, for -- and I should state I have an 11-inch iPad Pro, again, from 2018, I did not get the brand new one.
00:41:24 ◼ ► I don't think it's egregiously heavy. I think it's right on the borderline between acceptably heavy and too heavy, but I think it's fine.
00:41:32 ◼ ► The keyboard feels very different than the Smart Keyboard Folio, which, at first, I actually found a little bit off-putting, because, like I said, I really like the Folio.
00:41:41 ◼ ► But it's really -- it's just that it's a laptop keyboard, which everyone has been saying, to be clear. Like, this is not news.
00:41:47 ◼ ► But for some reason, I didn't -- I never really grokked that, and I never really accepted that in my brain.
00:41:52 ◼ ► I still thought of it as, like, the Smart Keyboard Folio style, but with the much cooler mount, and that is not the case.
00:42:01 ◼ ► The mount, I do like it a lot. I still want, like, five degrees more tilt, maybe even less than that.
00:42:14 ◼ ► But it's still -- I would -- god, I would just kill for a little bit more tilt, just a little bit.
00:42:20 ◼ ► And you know why you don't have it, right? You know why you don't have that tilt. Like, it's been discussed to death.
00:42:28 ◼ ► If you tilted it back more, the thing would fall over, and then you'd be like, "Oh, this stand sucks. It keeps falling over."
00:42:33 ◼ ► You can't -- like, you have to -- you know, it's a fight between -- if you tilt it over more, then to get it not to tip over, you need to bring the front edge forward more.
00:42:41 ◼ ► And now the front edge isn't just covering the number keys. It's floating over, like, the home row.
00:42:49 ◼ ► And so they've struck a reasonable compromise. In fact, I'm pretty -- it's pretty amazing how good the compromise is, even though you want just five more degrees or whatever.
00:42:57 ◼ ► I think the range of motion and the fact that you can adjust to any position within that range is pretty good.
00:43:03 ◼ ► Like, I think they struck a nice balance between, like, the floating idea, as we said when we first saw this thing.
00:43:08 ◼ ► Like, that's there so that the front edge of the iPad can extend over where the keys would be and still let you type on them by sort of reaching under it.
00:43:16 ◼ ► It's very clever, but they've gone about as far as they can with the weight distribution the way it is.
00:43:26 ◼ ► We've got an iPad. That's where the screen is. We want it to be tilty. We want to have a nice keyboard.
00:43:30 ◼ ► We want an overall package not to weigh too much, and it's just compromises all around.
00:43:34 ◼ ► Yeah, and you know it's the end of days if John Siracusa is arguing in favor of a laptop, but be that as it may, I really like typing on the keyboard.
00:43:47 ◼ ► The keys are a little bit small in a couple places. I actually forgot to bring up my smart keyboard folio into the office with me tonight to compare.
00:43:54 ◼ ► It is inverted T, which I love. The trackpad, I think, is where this thing really falls down. On the 11-inch.
00:44:01 ◼ ► I can't speak for the aircraft carrier size, but for the 11-inch, I feel like the trackpad is way, way, way too squat.
00:44:15 ◼ ► I think some of the reason I feel that way is because I'm used to these mutant seven-story tall or humongous trackpads that Apple's putting on everything these days.
00:44:26 ◼ ► And this is probably exacerbated by the fact that, as I think I've said a few times on the show, for the last six to twelve months I've been full-time on a Magic trackpad on my iMac Pro.
00:44:35 ◼ ► I used to use a mouse on my iMac, and then I would use the trackpad on my laptop only if I had to.
00:44:51 ◼ ► I was wondering before I received the Magic keyboard if I would use a trackpad a lot, as a legitimate alternative to stabbing at the screen.
00:45:02 ◼ ► But I think on the 11-inch, it's going to be me just using it for text selection and a few other smaller use cases like that.
00:45:13 ◼ ► I don't really see myself using it a whole lot as an input mechanism more than I do how one would potentially use a Wacom tablet attached to your computer.
00:45:26 ◼ ► Overall, when I opened the box today I was unsure given the reviews I had heard whether or not I was going to keep it.
00:45:39 ◼ ► I do like it a lot. I went from extraordinarily excited to kind of a tepid "eh, it'll probably be nice" to "no, this is pretty good, I think I like it."
00:45:49 ◼ ► We'll see where I end up after another week or so, or I guess two weeks when I would have to return it. I'm not even sure how that would work these days, but whatever.
00:45:56 ◼ ► But overall I like it. The other thing I will say is, it is legitimately, I think the weight is overblown. It is certainly heavier, no argument.
00:46:04 ◼ ► I don't think it's quite as dramatic as people are making it out to be, or at least not for the 11.
00:46:14 ◼ ► I'm not trying to say it's difficult. It's not that it's difficult, but you could whip that smart keyboard folio around with momentum and a flick of the wrist, like a Wingardium Leviosa or whatever.
00:46:24 ◼ ► And you could get that thing whipping around and it would be fine, you could put it behind the iPad just with momentum or whatever.
00:46:32 ◼ ► This thing is stiff. Now, in the grand scheme of things, I think that's probably a good, not a bad thing, but it was a little bit off-putting at first because it just wasn't what I was used to.
00:46:43 ◼ ► As I'm getting used to it, I think it's fine. And as I'm getting used to it, I like the fact that it feels really frickin' sturdy.
00:46:50 ◼ ► Like, really frickin' sturdy. Surprisingly sturdy. Even on my lap, mashing on the iPad screen itself, it's still pretty darn sturdy.
00:46:58 ◼ ► So, overall I think I like it. Oh, and the other thing I forgot to mention, I'm sorry Marco, I promise I will give you a chance here.
00:47:04 ◼ ► The second USB-C port, you know, turns out fellas, on a computer, it's nice to have more than one port. Who knew?
00:47:12 ◼ ► It's like, super cool! I wish I'd known this six years ago. Now, it is really nice, for no other reason, just to have the ability to plug in power on the other side, first world-iest of first world problems, I'll be the first to tell you.
00:47:24 ◼ ► But, I have a USB-C power charging cable strung through our sofa because I'm typically using either the iPad or the laptop down there at some point in the evening, and it just so happens to be on my left side.
00:47:36 ◼ ► And there was enough slack to it that I can certainly drag it across the front of the couch and stick it on the right-hand side of the iPad, but now, I don't have to do that.
00:47:46 ◼ ► And it occurred to me, like, I could plug in a phone and charge it if I wanted to on the other USB-C port. I don't know why I would do that, but just go with me here.
00:47:56 ◼ ► And it also occurred to me, like, hey, I actually don't think Xcode is coming to the iPad in any meaningful way, although there's been rumors about that lately.
00:48:03 ◼ ► But, you know, you could power the iPad through the keyboard and then have a single cable going from iPad to iPhone if you wanted to make an iPhone app.
00:48:15 ◼ ► So, overall, I do think I like it quite a bit. I am not as overjoyed as I thought I would be when I was super amped about it early on.
00:48:23 ◼ ► But, I do like it, and I am now bracing for impact as Marco tells me why he hates everything about it.
00:48:34 ◼ ► Yeah, but I will say that, you know, you said a few moments ago that you're, like, 90% towards keeping it. I think I'm about 90% towards returning it.
00:48:43 ◼ ► Okay, so tell me why. First impressions, I pick up the box off my porch and I think, uh-oh.
00:48:50 ◼ ► Yes, I agree. I absolutely agree. Because I pick up the box and it's like, uh-oh, this is heavier than I expected.
00:48:55 ◼ ► Yes, I completely agree. Which, I'm sorry, are we on an 11 for you or are you on the 13?
00:49:02 ◼ ► And I think it's important, I'm going to mention this later, it's important to realize that all of those pre-release press reviews were all sent 12.9s.
00:49:09 ◼ ► So, keep that in mind. Okay, so, so I pick it up and I think, oh no, this feels pretty heavy from the box.
00:49:16 ◼ ► Take out of the box, maybe the cardboard is heavy. Take out of the box, nope, it's just really heavy.
00:49:23 ◼ ► Alright, now for context, I use an 11-inch iPad Pro. I have used it with the Smart Keyboard Folio, which is still for sale and I hope they still keep making them for reasons I'll get into.
00:49:34 ◼ ► I've been using that full-time since it came out a year and a half ago and before that, I used the 10.5-inch iPad Pro with its Smart Keyboard cover and before that, I used the 9.7-inch iPad Pro with its Smart Keyboard cover.
00:49:45 ◼ ► So I've been using keyboard covers on iPads in this size class, 9.7, 10.5, 11, since the 9.7 Pro came out, whenever that was, four or five years ago.
00:49:56 ◼ ► So, my context of using it is it's my kitchen and living room and downstairs computer when I'm not at my real desktop.
00:50:04 ◼ ► So, it's usually based in the kitchen or the dining room table and that's where we play podcasts with breakfast and if I want to look something up while I'm in the kitchen or wherever else.
00:50:18 ◼ ► So, it's doing a lot of casual home tasks, maybe responding to some emails as I'm drinking my coffee after breakfast is over and Tiff and I are on our phones and iPads sitting at the table, we haven't gotten up yet, that kind of thing.
00:50:29 ◼ ► So, it's like casual but very frequent use and I love keyboards on iPads ever since this.
00:50:37 ◼ ► This has, before the iPad Pro with its keyboard cover, I would buy each iPad telling myself, "This time I'm really going to use it." I just never would and the keyboard changed it for me completely.
00:50:48 ◼ ► I really need to just interrupt you and say that I could not possibly agree with you more. If you're still a person who has not tried an iPad with some sort of keyboard permanently attached to it, and that can be the smart keyboard folio.
00:51:00 ◼ ► I'm not saying this $300 monstrosity, just having a keyboard always attached to it dramatically changed the way I feel about the iPad and made it considerably more useful to me.
00:51:14 ◼ ► I'll also say my year and a half old smart keyboard folio is showing signs of wear but not the keys, only the rubbery part of the rear cover.
00:51:24 ◼ ► Basically where my fingers touch when I pick up the iPad by the cover, by itself as it's open, I pick it up and move it as it's open all the time.
00:51:33 ◼ ► To go from kitchen to dining room or whatever. I'm constantly picking it up and moving it from one room to the next room very, very frequently every day.
00:51:40 ◼ ► And so I'm getting oil and rubbery stretch marks almost on some of the rubber. Anyway, it doesn't affect the functionality at all.
00:51:49 ◼ ► It looks kind of bad from the back now. It looks kind of like a black plastic MacBook after six months of use.
00:51:54 ◼ ► Roughly that level of weirdness. Anyway, so I got this new Magic Keyboard today. I've had about half a day of playing with it.
00:52:03 ◼ ► I wrote a bunch of notes using it. I use it a lot this evening. So it is, as people reported, significantly heavier than the smart keyboard folio.
00:52:13 ◼ ► The way John describes how he doesn't use covers or keyboards with his iPad, he just picks up the naked iPad and it's so light.
00:52:21 ◼ ► And that's true. When you pick up a naked iPad and you're not used to that, it's so light.
00:52:25 ◼ ► And then you put it before in the smart keyboard case and it just feels so much more bulky.
00:52:30 ◼ ► This is like taking that same step again. So it's like going from the way no case to smart keyboard makes it significantly heavier and bulkier.
00:52:50 ◼ ► And this is not to say this is heavy in absolute terms. You know, I'm an adult. I can lift it up. It's fine. I have no ability that would prevent me from doing this.
00:53:12 ◼ ► You know, so getting on to actually using it. The magnets are, as people say, they are extremely strong. The hinge is very stable.
00:53:20 ◼ ► There is, as you're tapping the screen when it's open, there is a bit of wobble. Like the iPad kind of vibrates. I think to improve it they would probably have to make it a heck of a lot heavier or make the hinge even tighter.
00:53:32 ◼ ► So I guess I understand why they don't improve that. But it's something to realize that when they're up on these stands, they do occasionally wobble when you touch them and it's a little bit annoying.
00:53:57 ◼ ► The smart keyboard cover before, as far as we know, we think it's a butterfly mechanism.
00:54:03 ◼ ► And so it kind of makes sense. It's what you'd expect. However, what made it so good was that fabric covering before.
00:54:24 ◼ ► And this is something, again, I've argued about this forever with the butterfly keyboards on the laptops, that when you have bigger key caps in the same physical total footprint and you have to shrink the margins around them, it makes it harder to type accurately.
00:54:37 ◼ ► It makes it harder to find the edges of the keys with your fingers. And it's easier, in my experience, to accidentally slip off the side and hit the key next to one that you mean to hit.
00:54:46 ◼ ► So key margins are important for typing, especially on a smaller keyboard, so you can just kind of feel where the keys are.
00:54:58 ◼ ► So the key switches, I think, are nicer key switches. They move from butterfly to scissor and everything.
00:55:07 ◼ ► The keys on the Smart Covers weren't great, but they were way better than a butterfly key switch would suggest because of the different construction and different size.
00:55:26 ◼ ► It's just the key shape got bigger and flatter, and the other one, I think, was more accurate.
00:55:38 ◼ ► I'm surprised how different it isn't. The way the travel and the feedback, it's not that much different.
00:55:52 ◼ ► The new keyboard, because the key mechanism is more open, it doesn't have that fabric cover, like, muffling and everything, it is louder.
00:55:58 ◼ ► I don't know if that matters to you. It's about the same loudness as a laptop, so it's not super loud, but it does matter.
00:56:04 ◼ ► It feels, because of the, I think, partly because of the trackpad, and partly because of the shrunken key margins, it feels more cramped than before.
00:56:16 ◼ ► And this applies to both the keyboard, and also I find the trackpad feels very cramped on the 11 inch.
00:56:22 ◼ ► And I haven't tried the 12.9, but I think there's a good reason why Apple seeded all the reviewers with the 12.9 instead of the 11.
00:56:30 ◼ ► Part of that is because they tend to do that with any iPad, any new iPad hardware, they tend to see the biggest size of the reviewers.
00:56:35 ◼ ► So that's, you know, it could have just been that. But I think also, this is something that, on the 12.9, probably feels a lot closer to a laptop.
00:56:43 ◼ ► Whereas on the 11, where the previous keyboard cover felt like it was exactly the right size, like the 9.7 felt like it was a little cramped.
00:56:53 ◼ ► And then once they moved to 10.5, it was like, ah, okay, that was a little bit extra we needed, and now it feels right, you know, now it feels good.
00:57:00 ◼ ► And when they moved 10.5 to 11, I think it was about the same. It wasn't a big difference.
00:57:04 ◼ ► So again, the 11, it felt great, right? Maybe this is because I'm used to it for so long, but this, it looks like the keys might have the same overall,
00:57:12 ◼ ► like the key area, I don't think they've shrunken it, or if they have shrunken it, it's only by a millimeter or two, it wouldn't be by a lot.
00:57:20 ◼ ► But it feels cramped. And so again, I don't know if the key margins have gotten so much smaller, I don't know if it's because of that, or because of the different shape of the keys compared to the old cover, but this now feels cramped.
00:57:33 ◼ ► And I think on the 12.9, it probably doesn't. That, I think, is telling, it's one of the reasons why I think this is probably an easier sell, or an easier recommendation for 12.9 users, and a little bit iffy for 11-inch users for that reason.
00:57:49 ◼ ► It just does feel a little bit cramped. So going on, the trackpad, actually using it, I find, like Casey, I find it a bit strange.
00:57:58 ◼ ► It works well in many ways. It works weirdly in some ways. I never actually used the trackpad support in iPadOS, like when it came out last month or whenever, I never plugged in a trackpad to try it.
00:58:10 ◼ ► I wanted to wait for this, to really get the full experience. So this is my first day doing it, maybe that's why. I did find it a little bit odd.
00:58:17 ◼ ► The trackpad click, it's not a force-touch trackpad, it's like a real click trackpad, and it's a very, like, loud, kind of cheap sounding click. It kind of sounds, you know, inelegant, ungraceful.
00:58:28 ◼ ► It's not a good click. I tried it for a while, and I hated it so much that I eventually switched to tap-to-click mode.
00:58:33 ◼ ► To switch to tap-to-click mode, I decided, all right, let me go in and change some keyboard and trackpad settings. So first I wanted to change some keyboard settings.
00:58:40 ◼ ► I hit Command + Space. Great, it brings up Spotlight. You know, I've used a keyboard on an iPad for a while, I knew how most of this works, but just to give you some idea, so Command + Space brings up Spotlight, great.
00:58:51 ◼ ► So I typed in settings. Well, first I typed in system preferences, and I realized, oh, that's wrong. Back, back, back. Settings. And, great, Settings app comes up, hit Enter, good.
00:59:01 ◼ ► Then, what I would have done on a Mac is hit Command + F and type keyboard. So I tried that on the iPad. The Settings app has a search box, so I entered Settings, hit Command + F, and nothing happens.
00:59:13 ◼ ► Because they haven't mapped it. They haven't, like, they didn't just bring over Mac OS, they're doing everything from scratch.
00:59:19 ◼ ► And so the people making iOS have to both know what the Mac does, appreciate what the Mac does, and have the time and permission to actually add that behavior to iOS.
00:59:29 ◼ ► All of those are not givens. So, many Mac OS behaviors have not made it over. Some of them, it's just a matter of time, some of them never will.
00:59:36 ◼ ► But, you know, there is no Command + F in Settings. It doesn't bring up the search box.
00:59:40 ◼ ► So, you have to go up, tap it, and this is like, where the trackpad really falls down. It feels kind of like using the iOS simulator for developers.
00:59:48 ◼ ► Like, you have to, like, move over to a scrollable area that you know is scrollable, and then you get, wait, can I scroll this with my fingers on the trackpad? Maybe.
00:59:55 ◼ ► Many of them work, some of them don't. It depends on, certainly depends on the app in some cases.
01:00:00 ◼ ► But, like, you might be able to scroll over your fingers. I found, I guess, eventually just reached up and dragged it with my finger normally.
01:00:05 ◼ ► Because I'm like, I don't know how to do this with the trackpad, or it doesn't feel right doing it with the trackpad, or it's slower doing it with the trackpad.
01:00:11 ◼ ► So, I, you know, go up to the search box, I start typing in keyboard. The only things that show up are the accessibility settings for keyboard.
01:00:18 ◼ ► None of which are, like, the key repeat rate, or, you know, stuff like that. I wanted to change cap lock to escape, which now you can do, but I wanted to find that setting.
01:00:26 ◼ ► Eventually, I just had to go, like, to general, and to keyboard. After I had done that, trying the same process again, when I would type in keyboard in the search field, would then bring up the general keyboard pane.
01:00:39 ◼ ► So, I don't know if it wasn't indexed before, or if it's doing some kind of predictive, what I might want kind of ranking, I don't know, but it just didn't work right the first time.
01:00:49 ◼ ► And the second time it worked right. So, again, iOS, this is, like, again, like, iOS weird software issues are holding back things, right?
01:00:57 ◼ ► I also had a reliability issue. Within the first half hour of using the keyboard, I invoked Siri to turn some lights off, and then after Siri had come up, the keyboard and trackpad totally stopped working.
01:01:08 ◼ ► Nothing worked, like, no, I tried going in and out of apps, going to the app switcher, going in and out of Siri again, nothing would make the keyboard or trackpad work again until I pulled the iPad off the keyboard and put it back on.
01:01:18 ◼ ► I've had occasional keyboard bugs like this with every smart keyboard for every iPad Pro. So, I don't know if it's a hardware flaw with the smart connector, if so, it'd also apply to the 10.5, 9.7 smart connectors.
01:01:32 ◼ ► It's more likely, I think, to be a software bug, but, again, iOS bugs, I think, are holding back the quality and consistency of this experience.
01:01:40 ◼ ► But, anyway, they do seem to be prioritizing this more and more over time, so hopefully this gets better.
01:01:45 ◼ ► Overall, like, I just, I don't think I like navigating iOS by trackpad. It is unquestionably a win for text editing.
01:01:54 ◼ ► You know, people who do a lot of writing on their iPads are gonna love this thing, and the press reviews that are so glowing about it are largely that group.
01:02:04 ◼ ► It's largely people who write a lot on iPads. Of course, Apple enthusiasts, who oftentimes are iOS enthusiasts and iPad enthusiasts, who want to do as much of their work as possible on iPads, who are also professional writers, and many of whom were already using keyboards like the bridge, you know, that are big and heavy.
01:02:22 ◼ ► Of course they're gonna love this thing, because it's a really good implementation of that.
01:02:27 ◼ ► But for me, as more of like a prosumer or middle of the road iPad power user, I'm not doing most of my work on it. I am answering a lot of emails and, you know, tweets and stuff like that on it, but I'm not really doing significant work other than that on it.
01:02:41 ◼ ► I don't think I like the trackpad, not only because it's so small and the click sucks, but I don't think I like navigating iOS by trackpad. It feels like it's slower than using the touch screen a lot of the time, and it feels bolted onto the OS.
01:02:58 ◼ ► Apple did a really good job integrating trackpad pointer stuff with like toolbars and buttons and everything, but it still feels bolted on. Just exactly the same arguments when people say you can't just take Mac OS and add touch to it, because that would be clunky.
01:03:13 ◼ ► This feels clunky in the exact same way. It feels like I'm navigating the simulator. It feels like in a couple of contexts, like text editing, it's great. When navigating UIs, I don't think it's great at all.
01:03:25 ◼ ► I do like having the multi-finger gestures for app switching and for getting back to the home screen. That's nice, but the home indicator on the screen is not so far away. That's that big of a difference.
01:03:38 ◼ ► So ultimately, it still feels like this is not a pointer device. This is a hack on a touch device. So overall, if you want your app to become a laptop, and you've already used big heavy keyboard covers, and you're really interested in the trackpad stuff, and maybe if you do a lot of text editing on your iPad, maybe this is for you.
01:04:02 ◼ ► I don't think it's for me, because I basically paid $300 to make my iPad a little bit better in some ways and a lot worse in a couple of important ways. And I don't think that's a good trade-off for me, so I don't think I'm going to keep it.
01:04:18 ◼ ► And I hope for that reason, I hope they continue to make the Smart Keyboard Folio, not only for this iPad, but for future iPads, to make something like that, some kind of thin, light keyboard that is not as fancy as their full hinge and trackpad model. Because I just like the old way better.
01:04:38 ◼ ► I think the thing about your usage that I hadn't thought about until you described it in more detail now is that it's not just a thing you use in the kitchen, where I thought this would be ideal, but that you take the entire thing, keyboard and all, to other places.
01:04:54 ◼ ► Even though it's not a lot of other places, it is other places, and that's where I think this really runs afoul of. I was thinking of it as your kitchen computer, it's perfect for that, because you would put this in the computer, like lots of people are describing this, and I think it's a good way to conceptualize it, as a stand for your iPad.
01:05:08 ◼ ► You would put this stand in the kitchen, right, there, stiff, sturdy, ready to receive your iPad, and when you wanted to go to another room, you'd just yank that iPad off and you'd take it to another room. But you don't want to do that. You want to take the whole thing, including the keyboard, to the other room, because you're going to use the keyboard in the other room, too.
01:05:24 ◼ ► And now you're picking up the whole big conglomeration, and now the weight becomes a factor, and now you start thinking about whether you really want that trackpad, and the keyboard differences, and everything else you talked about, right?
01:05:35 ◼ ► I think if you think you have a place in your life for an iPad stand that has a really good keyboard connected to it, and a trackpad or whatever, then this is for you.
01:05:46 ◼ ► I look at this thing, and I guess for traveling, too, if you're going to travel with something and you like iOS better than MacOS, and you want to essentially have a bad laptop, then this is the best bad laptop compromise.
01:05:57 ◼ ► Because then it's in your backpack, and it weighs as much as a MacBook Pro, but you're taking it instead of a MacBook Pro, right? So I can see those use cases for it, but the folio fills the need for you, which is like, I want this light thing that I can kind of bring around my house with me, and also it's nice to have a keyboard.
01:06:12 ◼ ► And the trackpad, if the trackpad was better, both in terms of the hardware, like imagine if it felt like a laptop trackpad, you'd like that better, and also the software, and the software thing has obviously got to evolve.
01:06:23 ◼ ► So that's the very first cut at this, right? Hopefully, if things go well, application developers, including Apple, can update their applications to be better about the keyboard, right?
01:06:33 ◼ ► And if the trackpad itself got better, it may become more attractive. But yeah, as someone who doesn't even like to have a keyboard attached to his iPad, this is definitely not for me.
01:06:43 ◼ ► But I did think about it, and the case you described, perhaps having it on your lap and just using it as a stand to watch video on it. I think this is way overkill for a video stand, but my current solution for watching video on my iPad, it does not have an adjustable viewing angle, and this does.
01:07:00 ◼ ► So even that makes it somewhat attractive. So despite both of your reviews, I'm still curious. If the world ever returns to some semblance of normalcy and I can actually go to an Apple store, I would love to try this thing out and see what it's like.
01:07:15 ◼ ► Because I'm not above, as you know, someone sitting next to this ridiculous computer, I'm not above paying $300 for a thing that makes it easier for me to watch video on my iPad. I think they're probably better applications of that.
01:07:30 ◼ ► But anyway, like I said before, I think this is a very well engineered solution within the problem space that they have been presented. But the possible exception of the trackpad, which I'm kind of disappointed to hear is as janky as it is.
01:07:42 ◼ ► But everything else about it, the functionality, the way they were able to get more tilt angle out of the thing, the way they were able to fit a trackpad at all while keeping the keyboard essentially the same size and have it all basically be sturdy and work well with not lots of fasteners and everything.
01:08:01 ◼ ► It's a very clever and interesting product. It's just that they're fighting an uphill battle and what they should really make is an iOS laptop, which I think would be extremely popular if done well. Extremely popular.
01:08:13 ◼ ► I don't really see why anyone would ever want the combination of this and this stand when they could get the iOS laptop that I'm describing that is essentially the same weight as the 12 inch MacBook was and you could also fold over on itself or twist and fold. Do you know what I'm talking about when I say twist and fold? I'm afraid someone's going to...
01:08:43 ◼ ► The keyboard on the backside is not great. It's like, "How am I going to use my iPad as a tablet?" If you allow it to twist so that the monitor is facing backwards and then fold, the keyboard is now sandwiched between the very skinny screen surface and the other thing. Anyway, the product I'm describing is not easy to make. If you look at the convertible PC ones, there's a reason they weren't popular products.
01:09:06 ◼ ► But the same very clever, very skilled engineering that allowed this conglomeration to exist, I think would allow Apple to make a pretty good iOS laptop that has basically none of the hardware compromises you just described.
01:09:22 ◼ ► The software compromises are a separate issue. That's a separate team. But none of the hardware compromises you described, and it would weigh less. And I think it might fulfill your... You mentioned the floppy rubbery parts of the Folio wearing out. I've seen that with my kids too because they're monsters and they all have covers on their iPads.
01:09:42 ◼ ► That's the weak point of all of these sort of smart cover type things. They don't expect the rubbery parts to start to wear. And I've seen my kids and myself pick up an iPad that has one of these things on it, whether it's in stand mode or it's a keyboard fold.
01:09:57 ◼ ► For example, you're trying to pick up two things at once. You're trying to pick up the iPad and the thing that's attached to it. And there are magnets and they mostly hold together, but you're aware that they're two separate items. So there's very often the grip you do that's like, "I'm gripping the iPad and also a little bit of the case because I'm afraid the keyboard might fall off if I yank it too hard or whatever."
01:10:17 ◼ ► That's where the super strong magnets and the new one come in handy. But having that structure, trying to lift and carry that structure from room to room, laptops also do that better because they're just so much simpler and more appropriately designed for the task.
01:10:33 ◼ ► They pick up laptops by the screen and carry it from place to place, which is terrible and no one should ever do. But practically speaking, it actually works and nothing falls apart. Most people will pick it up by the base and carry it from room to room.
01:10:51 ◼ ► Civilized people will close it first before carrying it from room to room. That's the approach I recommend. But the point is that a laptop will endure all manner of being carried from place to place in any form without coming apart at the seams, without the loose rubbery bits falling apart.
01:11:07 ◼ ► And never will the keyboard separate from the screen when you're carrying it in that way unless you're really being rough with it. Whereas with any of these iPad conglomerations, it's a concern.
01:11:16 ◼ ► That's another area where I think the new one seems like it does better. The magnets are so strong and have so much surface area that I think, I mean, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but do you feel more confident picking up this collection of items just by the iPad screen part and feeling more?
01:11:33 ◼ ► I guess you can't because the thing goes all the way up to the back, right? Do you still feel the need to do the three finger pinch where two fingers are pinching the iPad and two other fingers are pinching the case? Or do you feel like you can pick it up by just the keyboard or just the screen and it feels secure?
01:11:48 ◼ ► I always pick it up basically as if I'm covering up the camera with my palm. Like I put a thumb on the front of the screen, I write my hands behind it, and so I'm picking it up touching both the iPad and the keyboard. And that's true of both the Magic Keyboard Cover and the Smart Keyboard Cover.
01:12:03 ◼ ► Would you feel comfortable if you have it in front of your neck? Like if you just grabbed it from the bottom part, let's say. Let's say just grab it from the bottom part and carry it from room to room. Would you ever do that or would you think no way?
01:12:13 ◼ ► It feels like it is secure enough to do that, but I would never do it. Also, it needs two hands to do that because you need to get under it to get a good grip. And it's so thin on the bottom half.
01:12:26 ◼ ► Yeah, it has that little hard plastic seam lip. So you can't really get under it without using a second hand to help lift it up.
01:12:32 ◼ ► That's another thing, by the way, laptops have. If you look at them, they all have curved edges. And the reason they can afford to have that curve is because they are one solid unit on the bottom. They aren't two separate hardware products that must mate to each other, right?
01:12:43 ◼ ► So that's why they can afford to have a curve because that curve would be taller than the bottom part in total. You don't even have enough room to complete a MacBook-style curve in the bottom of this case. It's too thin.
01:12:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I always pick up my iPad and keyboard combo with one hand and it's always by picking it up by the top half on the side.
01:13:04 ◼ ► Yeah, that's typically how I grab it as well. Holding it now, and I will say that in terms of stability, keeping the iPad to the keyboard when grabbing by just the keyboard, it is stable enough to do that.
01:13:18 ◼ ► I feel, though, that I'm on the edge of bending the keyboard. I don't think I actually am, but that's what it feels like.
01:13:27 ◼ ► Right. The keyboard is too flimsy and that I'm going to bend it if I carry it this way.
01:13:33 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. I don't think that would happen, first of all, that it would actually bend, but it just feels wrong to carry it that way.
01:13:45 ◼ ► Right, but in terms of will the iPad stay connected to this keyboard thing, yeah, I think it absolutely would. It is surprisingly sturdy. And people have said, "Oh, you can totally rip it off with one hand." I mean, you can, but I don't know.
01:14:03 ◼ ► You can't just like, if you don't touch the keyboard cover at all, here, let me see if I can do it.
01:14:12 ◼ ► You can do it if you basically peel upwards on the bottom. It's really hard to do, though, to separate it without touching the keyboard part.
01:14:21 ◼ ► That part, I agree with Casey, it is very, it seems much more stable than I would have guessed it would be. And much more securely attached.
01:14:29 ◼ ► I was afraid that if you pick it up or shake it around a little bit, that the iPad would fall off the stand.
01:14:34 ◼ ► Because that's kind of how the magnet's always felt with the keyboards. If you would disconnect the, you know, unmount it from its base, that always felt like that would happen.
01:14:42 ◼ ► And that's not the case here at all. It is surprisingly strong. So that, I'm not worried about it.
01:14:46 ◼ ► It's just like, as I'm operating it now, it's just so damn heavy and bulky. And I think, Jon, you're right, and everyone else is right, when they're comparing this to a stand,
01:14:55 ◼ ► if you think about it as a stand with an iPad that you rarely move, that is mostly stationed.
01:15:01 ◼ ► Or that you move without the keyboard. You move the iPad, but the keyboard thing stays.
01:15:18 ◼ ► But, you know, I see the market for this. Like, I'm not it. Just, in the same way, I'm not the market for the 12.9. Like, the 12.9 is way too big and heavy for me. I don't like it at all.
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01:17:35 ◼ ► Let's continue with some Ask ATP. Andreas Baier-Baudin writes, "There's one particular setting in the energy saver preference pane that I've found to play a massive role in how these slower spinning hard disks perform.
01:17:49 ◼ ► I used to have the 'put hard disk to sleep when possible' enabled, but I found that whenever I woke my computer that my cursor would beach ball like I'd never seen before.
01:17:58 ◼ ► Now that I've disabled this feature, what I'm wondering is, am I significantly shortening lifespan of my drives and my USB RAID array by not allowing them to sleep whenever possible?
01:18:07 ◼ ► Should I just live with the sluggish performance that I experience after waking my computer or is deselecting it like I did fine? Do you guys leave this on or off?"
01:18:15 ◼ ► I don't really ever attach platters to my computer except to like make a backup and then it gets disconnected.
01:18:21 ◼ ► But that being said, the drives in my Synology, probably not a good example right now, but nevertheless, the drives in my Synology have been running for some as many as seven years non-stop and it's fine.
01:18:34 ◼ ► So I don't really have strong opinions about this, surprise, surprise, one way or the other.
01:18:38 ◼ ► I turn that off so I do not let my drives sleep. Because first of all, I'm pretty sure it does nothing with SSDs and I think all of my Mac connected drives now are SSDs and have been for a while. So, you know, maybe a bad example for me.
01:18:52 ◼ ► But even back when they were hard drives, the problem is, and the reason why I find they're beach balls for a while when you are waiting for a drive to wake up is that, you know, when hard drives power down, they literally turn off their motors, like they don't spin anymore.
01:19:04 ◼ ► And it takes hard drives usually a good five or ten seconds to fully spin up and be ready. And so if you think about it from like the programming perspective, think about like, all right, so you're doing an operation and normally you can expect hard drive IO to take what, maybe five or six nanoseconds?
01:19:27 ◼ ► The milliseconds is the seek time, but that's how long it takes the head on average to move from one place to the other that assumes it's already spun up and it doesn't account for transfer time.
01:19:35 ◼ ► Right, right, that's right. Sorry, it's been a long time since I've looked at hard drive seek times and access times.
01:19:40 ◼ ► Okay, so suppose it's like, you know, ten milliseconds in a good case for, you know, waiting for a hard drive transfer.
01:19:47 ◼ ► But sometimes it takes ten seconds, right? And that's what the programs are dealing with and so typically, you know, lots of stuff will beach ball if it's waiting for a hard drive to spin up.
01:19:59 ◼ ► Because you can do asynchronous tasks to a certain degree, you can say, all right, queue this IO to happen and then call me back on some thread when it's ready.
01:20:09 ◼ ► And that's a harder way to program in some cases, but you know, you can argue that when you're dealing with slower storage, that's the right way to do it a lot of times if you can.
01:20:18 ◼ ► But even then, during that ten seconds, the app is probably going to hit some other thing that it has to wait for because it's still waiting for the IO operation or something.
01:20:27 ◼ ► And it's like, all right, when you can do no IO for like ten straight seconds, you're going to get a lot of things that just beach ball.
01:20:32 ◼ ► There's no way around it or the way around it would be so complex no one's ever going to program around that, especially now in the age of hard drives, you know, going out of fashion.
01:20:40 ◼ ► So that's why that happens. And I always found that so annoying back when I would have direct-to-text hard drives to my Macs that I would turn that off because I would like open up a drive and, you know, just sit there and wait and wait.
01:20:53 ◼ ► And you hear, and you just sit there and wait. Oh, now it's going, okay. And it was just so annoying.
01:21:00 ◼ ► So whether it actually has any impact on drive lifespan, the answer is probably it depends.
01:21:07 ◼ ► Certainly there is a savings of drive wear and tear for it not to be spinning a lot of the time.
01:21:12 ◼ ► But there's also a wear and tear cost to it spinning up and down to go in and out of power save mode.
01:21:20 ◼ ► If you're only going to be accessing the files, you know, rarely, relatively rarely, and it can stay powered down most of the time and not go through a lot of power up, power down cycles,
01:21:29 ◼ ► it's probably going to lengthen the drive's lifetime. But if it's going to be going through a lot of those cycles, it might actually make it worse.
01:21:36 ◼ ► So the answer, of course, is it depends. But the real answer is go to SSDs as soon as you can.
01:21:44 ◼ ► So the spinning down thing, I tended to like that because, of course, spinning disks make noise and I don't want them to make noise.
01:21:51 ◼ ► But in in Mac OS over the years, it's become more and more common for the application you're using or some component of the operating system to want to get some information about all attached drives.
01:22:09 ◼ ► To give an example, it's like it's not you're not doing anything like I'm not going to that disk.
01:22:21 ◼ ► Just opening an open save dialog, even if the open save dialog is not going to show a folder on that thing is just the open save dialog and it's like pointing to your desktop.
01:22:31 ◼ ► Right. That's not a spinning disk that could cause all of your disk to have to spin up because the open save dialog box or some component of it wants to know stuff about all attached volume so it can populate menus so that when you click on them later, the menu will display and show you all of the volumes or wants to populate the sidebar.
01:22:46 ◼ ► Whatever. Tons of stuff that you don't control that you might not think is important may want information about all attached volumes and may need to get that information by causing your thing to spin up.
01:23:02 ◼ ► This is kind of like the whole eternal debate that used to be about -- there's lots of silly debates that have no bearing in factor, more sort of myths of like, does it take more gas to start a gasoline engine?
01:23:18 ◼ ► No. Then to just leave it idling. How long would you have to idle for it to be worthwhile for you to turn the engine off and to start it or whatever, which maybe made some more sense in the days of carbureted engines.
01:23:27 ◼ ► But today the answer, spoiler alert, is turn the engine off because it uses way more gas when it's idling than it does to start the engine. It uses nothing to start the engine in a modern car.
01:23:34 ◼ ► Anyway, wear and tear is the same thing. Is it better for me to have a hard drive that is spinning for a short period of time during the day but goes from spinning to not spinning five times?
01:23:45 ◼ ► Or is it better to let it spin all day long even though I'm not using it, but at least it never has to go from spinning to not spinning?
01:23:50 ◼ ► This gets into the more modern question of auto stop-start systems for car engines. When I come to a stop light, is it good for my auto start-start system to turn the engine off and then to turn it back on again and then turn it off and then turn it back on? Isn't that destroying the engine?
01:24:06 ◼ ► And again, the answer is not as simple as people think because modern car engines that have start systems are made to do that.
01:24:11 ◼ ► But on the other side, there's no fighting the fact that there is more friction and wear and tear from doing stop-start than it is for it running all the time.
01:24:18 ◼ ► Anyway, all that applies to hard drives too. Depending on your scenario, how many times you stop and start and how much that hard drive expected to be stopped and started frequently is how well it's going to fare.
01:24:31 ◼ ► If you applied an auto stop-start system to a car engine from the 80s, it would probably destroy it.
01:24:36 ◼ ► But modern car engines know they're going to be cooked up to a stop-start system and have certain parts that would wear out or whatever beefed up to handle better the situation they know they're going to be in where they're going to be constantly stopped and started.
01:24:49 ◼ ► If I had to pick a kind of hard drive that doesn't expect to be stopped and started frequently, it's like a data center or a NAS hard drive.
01:24:56 ◼ ► They don't expect to constantly be spun up and spun down. They expect to be running all the time. That's the use case they're used for. If you have them in your thing, don't allow them to spin down.
01:25:06 ◼ ► My preferred solution to all this these days is to not just keep them spun down, keep them unmounted.
01:25:12 ◼ ► Because then, your open and save dialog box, if everything goes well, can't possibly spin those drives up. They'll just always stay spun down and they'll stay unmounted.
01:25:22 ◼ ► Mac OS is very clever, though, and very often it can mount your drives behind the scenes in a way that is not even visible in the Finder, and somehow you'll hear them spinning up and you're like, "Wait a second. I unmounted that. Why is that spinning up now?"
01:25:36 ◼ ► That can be managed for the most part. So anyway, that's my recommended solution. If you have a hard drive connected to your Mac that you mostly don't use, leave it unmounted.
01:25:44 ◼ ► And when you want to use it mounted, there are many utilities and menu bar things and all sorts of other stuff right down to just having an alias in your sidebar that will allow you to quickly and easily mount a drive.
01:25:54 ◼ ► I even have stuff in Quicksilver. I have command space and then drive names to get them mounted quickly. I have a million ways to quickly mount and unmount drives. That's the answer.
01:26:02 ◼ ► I would recommend against the spin down thing, except maybe in laptops with spinning disks, but honestly, who has one of those these days? So yeah, the answer is don't leave your drives mounted.
01:26:14 ◼ ► All right, Nate J. writes, "I recently graduated with a computer science degree. As I look for a job and sharpen my skills, I find it easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged. My level of skill seems puny compared to what is out there.
01:26:26 ◼ ► With seemingly thousands of frameworks, languages, and technologies that are all built on top of each other, I find it hard to know what to focus on. So the questions are, what were some experiences you gentlemen had right after getting out of school, and what advice would you give to a programming newbie?
01:26:38 ◼ ► Everyone says to build projects and put them on GitHub. I'm a decent coder, but I always hit a wall when trying to think of what novel problems, what novel projects solve a problem while being within my skill level.
01:26:50 ◼ ► So my favorite story to tell about this, which I'm sure I've told a couple of times during the run of this show, is when I got to my first job out of school. So I went to Virginia Tech for computer engineering, which at the time was basically half electrical engineering, half computer science.
01:27:06 ◼ ► And I did plenty of computer science stuff, and I got a job writing software. And I got there, and my first day they said, "Okay, well, we're using Perforce for source control, and here's the server and all that. Why don't you go grab the source and take a look through it?"
01:27:24 ◼ ► And I said, "I'm sorry, what's source control?" Because I had never had the occasion to use it in college. And at that point, I'm sure it's different now, but at that point, Virginia Tech didn't teach it, because source control was a thing. It had very much been a thing for decades, but it just wasn't part of the curriculum.
01:27:40 ◼ ► And it was quickly apparent to me that I had a whole lot to learn. To give more concrete advice, though, as Marco discussed last episode, there are so many levels and layers to everything that's built today. It's daunting.
01:27:58 ◼ ► Even for me, and I wrote my blog engine in 2014, it scares me to think about doing that again in 2020, because there's so many layers and so many levels and so many things. Now, the reality of the situation is you don't have to use any of them.
01:28:11 ◼ ► As Marco said last episode, you can use JavaScript without jQuery. It's a thing. It's a thing you could do. So you don't necessarily have to go that deep into all these bananas, multilayer cakes and whatnot.
01:28:24 ◼ ► But ultimately, in order to learn really anything, and I've said this for years, and I'm not the only one who said it, you need to have a specific problem to solve. And yeah, you may not be able to come up with novel projects to solve a problem, but you'd be surprised how difficult a to-do list can be.
01:28:39 ◼ ► Once you get past it only being on one computer and the to-do list only existing in memory. You'd be surprised how complex something as simple as that can be. And so I would say find something that you would like solved, or maybe some app that you use but isn't exactly the way you want it, and try to make it better. I don't know. Marco, thoughts on this?
01:29:02 ◼ ► First of all, I should disclaim that with a few exceptions, like meeting my wife, I did almost everything else in college wrong.
01:29:13 ◼ ► Like in retrospect, or even at the time I knew it was wrong, like many things I just did wrong. What matters in the job market, especially when you're first starting out, more than anything else, is who you know.
01:29:28 ◼ ► We all like to think everything's objective when it comes to applying for jobs, but it's not, not even close. What matters is who you know.
01:29:36 ◼ ► So the best thing you can possibly do as a college kid are get internships or other work experience during the summers or even during those years if you can, so that you know more people in the field.
01:29:49 ◼ ► Because when you graduate and you're ready for a full-time job, that's going to be the people who are going to be most likely to hire you by far.
01:29:58 ◼ ► You can apply blindly, as I did, to all the big companies, and all of them will probably ignore you like they did for me. Part of that was because my grades sucked, but that's another story as well.
01:30:09 ◼ ► One of the other many things I did wrong in college. Also didn't quite graduate on time. Anyway, so there's a lot of things I did wrong, but this is the biggest thing. Basically every summer I would just go and work a regular job somewhere, like at Staples or whatever.
01:30:21 ◼ ► I wouldn't actually try to get work in the field. Part of that was because it's hard because a lot of internships are unpaid, and that's a really crappy thing in general for society to have these unpaid internships because that basically creates an opportunity gap where people who can't afford to not get paid all summer therefore can't get these job opportunities.
01:30:38 ◼ ► And that's a whole thing. So I hate unpaid internships. I was fortunate enough never to have to take one. The one internship I got was just basically doing like Excel macros at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived.
01:30:51 ◼ ► And that wasn't really anything like software engineering related. It was just like a computery job loosely at an office building. You know where they hired me? Because my mom knew a guy who worked there. Again, it's all about who you know.
01:31:04 ◼ ► After college I got hired not by Google, Amazon, Apple, all these companies I was applying to. Nope, they all ignored me. I didn't even get a call back from most of them. Amazon took me around for a while, but it ended up going nowhere. None of those places would hire me.
01:31:19 ◼ ► The place I got hired was because someone I knew in my comp sci class got a job at this little company in Pittsburgh. She knew that I was decent at CS stuff from school, and she recommended me. And I went and interviewed, and I did okay on the interview, and that's why they hired me.
01:31:37 ◼ ► It wasn't anything about my resume or anything because I didn't have anything useful on my resume. Later on I talked to the people who hired me at that first job, and for some reason the subject of hiring came up.
01:31:50 ◼ ► And I learned one of the reasons they hired me and were willing to overlook my terrible grades is that I had done side projects, and all I had to show them at the time was a half working Scorcher-esque Tank Wars demo that I had written in C++ in DirectX for Windows.
01:32:09 ◼ ► And I'm like, "Here, look, here's something I did." And it kind of works, and it kind of puts some rendered polygons on screen. That's about it. It didn't do much else, but it did something. It was pretty basic.
01:32:21 ◼ ► And I also, during the interview, they had given me a fairly straightforward programming test. It was one of those, like, you know, because the job was going to be programming in C. That was the job.
01:32:33 ◼ ► So it wasn't unreasonable for them to ask me stuff to program in C. And they asked me during the interview to write, it was one of those things, like, you know, one of those exercises of, like, write a quick function here that counts the number of duplicate lines in the input.
01:32:45 ◼ ► You know, so it basically involves, you have to do memory allocation, you have to do realloc potentially because, you know, you don't know how many lines of input there's going to be.
01:32:53 ◼ ► Realloc might fail if it's out of memory. You know, there's all these little implementation details they can check for to just kind of gauge your level of, do you know what you're doing at all? This was not on a whiteboard.
01:33:03 ◼ ► They actually, like, sat me in a private office, gave me a computer with a compiler, and said, "Take as long as you need it." So it wasn't, like, a super high pressure thing. Like, just, here's a text editor in a C compiler and a command line. Just write this and let us know when you're done.
01:33:16 ◼ ► So it was a very, like, humane way to do this. I'd been in other interviews before that were not that humane, that were more like, you know, Google style, like, "Do this hard math problem on this whiteboard in front of us right now." And I failed all those miserably.
01:33:30 ◼ ► So I, like, you know, the one thing I didn't check during the program was I didn't check the result of realloc to see if it failed, but otherwise I got everything else pretty much correct.
01:33:37 ◼ ► And they said that I was the only applicant who even came close. And I thought that was absurd because these people were all way smarter than me. Like, I learned, I thought I was hot s*** when I got out of college because I was a programmer and I was smart.
01:33:52 ◼ ► And boy did I learn how much I didn't know during those first couple years of that job. Oh my God. Because, you know, the people I was working for were way smarter than me, and people I was working for and with were way smarter, they were all way smarter than me.
01:34:06 ◼ ► Every, like, you know, 22 year old has to kind of have that beaten out of them. That kind of like, "I think I'm hot s***, I know everything. This is stupid, why do you do it this way?" Like, all that stuff. You know, I had to have all that beaten out of me slowly with just embarrassment and being put in, you know, over my head a little bit.
01:34:21 ◼ ► But anyway, I learned throughout that job and throughout some experience later also that most programmers who apply to most jobs don't know how to program. And I don't mean well. I mean at all.
01:34:37 ◼ ► And part of, you know, we were discussing during last week's intro my whole complaint about the PHP stuff. Was that last week? Whatever that was. Part of the feedback that we got both from you guys during the show and then from the audience is that testable systems and hierarchies and hierarchies of classes and everything are in part made to be able to take a large number of very low skilled programmers and try to get some kind of useful output out of them and try to control them in some way and try to make their code somewhat usable as output.
01:35:06 ◼ ► And the reason why is because most people programming as a profession, as the job, they're being paid full time to do it, can't program. Or barely know how to do it.
01:35:17 ◼ ► So what most people don't realize is that if you know what you're doing at all, you are in the top like 5% or 1% of applicants that any job opening is going to get.
01:35:27 ◼ ► How you compare to the people within that 5% or 1%, you know, you're comparing yourself to the whole world. It's like when you look at Instagram and you're like, "Man, that person is a really good photographer. I'm never going to be as good as them. I am just crap as a photographer."
01:35:43 ◼ ► You don't realize that you are comparing yourself to the top echelon of everybody in the world whose stuff is showing up or who got popular on something or whatever. You don't have to be the best programmer in the world.
01:35:57 ◼ ► You just have to be the best programmer in the room sometimes. Not even all the time. You just have to be the best programmer in your office of one.
01:36:06 ◼ ► There is so much potential of making good things, being a good programmer, being a useful programmer, having a full time job as a programmer, where if you're just an okay programmer, you'll do great.
01:36:19 ◼ ► You don't have to be the best of the best. I'm not. I've made my entire career being a decent but not amazing programmer.
01:36:27 ◼ ► I'm not trying to be overly modest here. I think I'm a decent but not amazing programmer. And if you're looking at stuff and you're saying, "I mean, I know some of this stuff, but a lot of this is over my head," you're still way ahead of everybody because you care.
01:36:42 ◼ ► And that is more important than any other thing. Again, you'd be surprised how many people applying for how many jobs don't even really seem to care.
01:36:54 ◼ ► So if you show up to a job interview, first of all, try to get to know as many people in the field as possible, as it is earlier. It's much more about who you know.
01:37:01 ◼ ► Who you know will get you into the interview. It won't necessarily get you the job, but it will get you to be called or interviewed at all.
01:37:09 ◼ ► That's the main challenge in most of these. Most big companies, you can't even get them to call you or to consider you or to look at your resume.
01:37:16 ◼ ► But if you can actually get somebody to look at it through whatever connections you might be able to pull, do that.
01:37:21 ◼ ► And once you're in the interview, realize that if you just care, if you just show that you are enthusiastic about the field, that you actually are genuinely interested in this,
01:37:33 ◼ ► you're not just doing it because you want to make money, you genuinely are interested in this, and you show that you have the capability to learn,
01:37:40 ◼ ► then don't worry, and they won't worry if they're any good, about whether you know the specific stuff they're doing.
01:37:46 ◼ ► Because whether or not you know the framework they're using or the specific technology they're using, first of all it's going to change next week anyway.
01:38:04 ◼ ► Even if it's a language and a framework that you're familiar with, you're still going to have to learn their code base,
01:38:09 ◼ ► so there's going to be a learning curve to any new hire, to any programming job, no matter what it is.
01:38:22 ◼ ► Now, there are many companies who hire for programming jobs who don't know what they're doing,
01:38:31 ◼ ► Don't take it personally when you run into these, because if you apply for more than a couple jobs, you're going to run into these.
01:38:36 ◼ ► I applied to so many crappy, terrible companies, because I didn't have anything else to apply to for a long time.
01:38:43 ◼ ► I had so many, I must have had at least three or four hilariously bad interviews from companies who barely knew what they were doing.
01:38:50 ◼ ► One company wanted me to rewrite their entire product from, I think it was Pascal, to C++ or C in two weeks.
01:39:01 ◼ ► And the question they asked me for the interview was, "What kind of computers do I have at home? Please list them and their specs."
01:39:20 ◼ ► So anyway, do what you can to be an enthusiast, to care, to show that you can learn, to have side projects at all.
01:39:35 ◼ ► Once you get it, if you have any of this stuff, if you are interested, if you care, you're going to have a pretty easy time getting the job or at least getting an offer.
01:39:43 ◼ ► So the hard part is just getting that interview in the first place, and that's where people you know, internships you can have, that will help you and that kind of thing.
01:39:58 ◼ ► Once you have your first job, you will meet a bunch of other programmers who will have worked with you and possibly for you.
01:40:09 ◼ ► And you might be working on something people have heard of, or you might be able to do stuff on the side or release libraries or make blog posts or talk at conferences, something like that.
01:40:17 ◼ ► There will be ways to get your name out, either to the general public in some kind of public way like that, or to at least the people you're working with.
01:40:24 ◼ ► And then once you have that one job and have worked there for a while, as long as you don't totally mess it up, which you won't because you care, then you can use those people to get all future jobs.
01:40:41 ◼ ► Once you have that, that is much easier to build upon because you start building that professional network and you start building that resume with more important stuff than just, "Well, I was in college."
01:40:53 ◼ ► So good luck. This will work. You will probably run into crap situations and crap offers like my weird, "rewrite our whole product with your computers that you list at home" job.
01:41:03 ◼ ► Thank God I didn't take that job. But this will work out. Just care, and you'd be surprised how far ahead that puts you.
01:41:14 ◼ ► Yeah. When I was interviewing to have somebody join a team that I was either working on or in charge of, one of the things that I was always looking for, and again, this is not unique. This is not a new invention.
01:41:28 ◼ ► One of the things I always looked for was eagerness and eagerness to learn. Because just like you said, Marco, no matter who is coming in to interview for this job, unless they had worked there before, left and came back, at the very least, we're going to need to learn the code.
01:41:42 ◼ ► And if somebody's coming in thinking they're hot stuff and saying, "Oh, React Native is the only way to go," and all this Swift and Objective-C stuff, it's garbage.
01:41:52 ◼ ► Well, let me talk to you about how we've architected our Swift code base. Are you ready? As long as you're not hyper-opinionated and you're willing to learn, that will put you in front of a lot, a lot of people.
01:42:04 ◼ ► John, what are your thoughts? As the oldest of the three old men, what do you think about this?
01:42:08 ◼ ► I'm the person who's had the most jobs, right? I don't know if that's true, actually. I've had my fair share.
01:42:14 ◼ ► No, most jobs, yeah. How many places have you worked, Casey? I've never got more than Marco. That's not easy.
01:42:20 ◼ ► Let's see, one, I think five, six, something like that. But you tend to stay places for a pretty long time.
01:42:27 ◼ ► It might be a tie. I think I'm around seven. Anyway, I should look at my resume and see how many places I have. I can't actually enumerate them anymore because I'm too old.
01:42:36 ◼ ► So the bit about making something, a project or whatever, the reason that's such a useful thing, not the whole idea of you've got to have this amazing GitHub resume with a thousand things and a million stars and whatever.
01:42:50 ◼ ► But just the idea that you have literally ever made anything ever is because that's a quick way for people in the industry to tell essentially whether you can program at all, like Marco was saying.
01:43:02 ◼ ► Because if you do any project, if you actually do it yourself, you will be forced to deal with all the things that have to do with the project.
01:43:12 ◼ ► Oh, some language thing is stumping me. The build system is being weird. I found a bug and I can't figure out how to fix it.
01:43:20 ◼ ► Does this feature work? Is this feature any good? Like tackling all those annoying details yourself and getting something, anything, literally anything out the end that does a thing.
01:43:31 ◼ ► And you can say, here you go. It's like, OK, well, we know now that you can actually program again, assuming you did that all yourself, you will have had to tackle all these tiny little problems to make basically any application.
01:43:44 ◼ ► In the absence of that, it's surprisingly difficult to tell in the moment whether someone can program or not.
01:43:51 ◼ ► That's why they make you type things and write programs, either on a whiteboard or on a computer.
01:43:55 ◼ ► They're trying to figure out if you can program, but that, even the one where they give you a computer and a room, I feel like even that's unfair because to get a finished, completed, working, non-trivial program often takes more than the amount of time you're willing to sit in a room and do a thing.
01:44:11 ◼ ► So I don't think it should be a prerequisite, but I think it's important to you, not to the person who's going to hire you, but to you just to show yourself, A, do you like being a programmer?
01:44:19 ◼ ► And B, can you actually do it? Make a thing that does a thing, not a school assignment, not a homework problem set, something, anything that does a thing, and polish it like it's an actual finished product of some kind.
01:44:37 ◼ ► I would say it's not even that high of a bar. One time we were trying to hire somebody at Tumblr and we were interviewing a bunch of programmer candidates and we asked everybody, "Please bring in some code you've written. Any code that you can show us, any code, just bring it with you."
01:44:53 ◼ ► I think one applicant did. It was shocking. Nobody could bring any code they had written. And you could say, "Well, maybe their code for previous jobs they weren't allowed to bring." Fine. You've never written and can't now write any code that you can show us, literally anything. Shockingly few people could even do that.
01:45:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and a working thing is even better than just the code. It's like, "Here's the code, but also, by the way, here's a thing." Even if it's Marco's weird thing that throws polygons on top and does a thing. He had an idea for a thing and he made it. And the number of weird little hurdles that you had to overcome to get to that point is surprisingly high.
01:45:28 ◼ ► We weren't even asking for that. We were asking for two pages of code, just something we can look at. They couldn't even do that.
01:45:34 ◼ ► So for the experience I had getting out of school, it's related to this question. I started working for the company that I eventually got a full-time job at when I was still in school. Again, to Marco's point about contacts or whatever, how did I get the job out of school? Because I'd already been working for them part-time as a student. It's a great way to get a job out of school.
01:45:53 ◼ ► I was doing web development, and I knew everything there was to know about web development because there was nothing to know, because the web was brand spanking new. It was 1991, 1992, whatever. The web was new. Nobody knew anything about the web.
01:46:09 ◼ ► Tim Berners-Lee didn't know anything about the web. There was so little information at the beginning that if you got in on the ground floor, it was possible to know everything there was to know, basically, about the web. And so that's where I'm coming in as. I certainly didn't know everything there was to know about all these technologies that predated me. I was still learning the basics of Unix, the basics of C and C++, the basics of Perl. I didn't know how to do decent X Windows programming. All my X Windows applications would crash and I didn't understand why, and it was a mess.
01:46:37 ◼ ► But because the web was new, I knew everything about it. So I was primed to have a crisis just like it's being described in this question. It's like, "Oh, it just seems like there's so many things out there." Because I was doing web dev, I'm like, "Oh, well, I feel overwhelmed by other stuff, but I'm going to be a web dev." And I know everything about web dev, so I'm all set.
01:46:55 ◼ ► So I get my job out of school and I'm doing web dev and I'm doing it with the cutting-edge technology of the time, Perl CGI scripts. It's like where it's at, Apache Perl CGI. It was super cutting-edge stuff. And I knew all of it from top to bottom. I'd written my own web servers in C, I'd written CGI engines, I knew all the nuts and bolts, I knew how HTTP worked and all the three web browsers that were out. I knew all about those. Everyone's good to go.
01:47:22 ◼ ► But then, sure enough, the next wave of web tech came and it was like, "Forget about CGI scripts. Forget about Perl. Forget about Apache. Certainly forget about C and C++." The future of web development is all about Java and XML and this thing called SOAP and WSDL and a million other academic suits.
01:47:42 ◼ ► And I was like, "Well, wait a second. I already know everything about web dev and you're telling me you're going to throw 17 pounds worth of phone book-sized tech manuals of new technology that I've never heard of on top of me and saying, 'Guess what, supposed web developer, do you know this stuff?'" And my answer was, "No. I don't know that stuff. I mean, I know a little bit about Java. Isn't that that thing that was going to run on set-top boxes? What the hell are you talking about?"
01:48:09 ◼ ► And I was like, "Do you know about XML? And do you know about all the…" And I was like, "And do you know about SOAP?" And as an actual working web developer took one look at SOAP, I'm like, "Are you kidding me?"
01:48:19 ◼ ► So A, it didn't appeal to me and B, it was like, "There's all this knowledge." So I panicked. I bought tons of books about XML. I bought XML, the annotated spec, so I could not only learn XML but learn what the people who made XML thought about XML. I brought the big Java books. I got the big Java Enterprise edition. I got the Java beans thing. Because I'm like, "Oh, my God. If I'm going to do this as a career, suddenly I'm miles behind. I thought I knew everything and then I don't know anything."
01:48:46 ◼ ► And the lesson I learned from this experience was that two things. One, new technologies will always come along to replace old ones. Two, it's not the end of the world if you don't enter a field knowing everything about it. In fact, it's almost impossible to ever do that unless you happen to be at college just as the web was appearing like I was. That's never going to happen. Probably not going to happen for you and your technology, so don't worry about that.
01:49:10 ◼ ► And then three, very often new technologies come and everyone thinks it's the next big thing and they suck or they're awesome and you never learn them but you're still okay. It's not possible to know everything. So that overwhelms feeling you have.
01:49:25 ◼ ► You both need to get used to it and also not worry about it. It's not like you can ignore it. You can't just be like, "Well, I never lean to learn a new thing," because you will. But the whole point is you will learn new things. It's okay. You'll learn them at the pace that regular humans learn them.
01:49:41 ◼ ► It's unreasonable, getting to Marco's point about bad jobs, it's unreasonable for any employer to expect you to immediately know everything about a new technology that comes down the pike. You won't and you can't. And if they expect you to, they're a bad employer and that's the place you don't want to work.
01:49:59 ◼ ► So don't worry about that. Just worry about the basics. Can I program? Do I enjoy it? And am I able to learn new things in any capacity?
01:50:11 ◼ ► And then my final point that hasn't been brought up here is forgetting jobs and having done a lot of hiring, especially for big companies that need to hire a lot of programmers, the bigger your company is, especially if you're not one of the big top three brand name companies,
01:50:26 ◼ ► if you're just a big company that needs to hire a lot of programmers, and there are a lot of them out there, because big companies have a lot of code and they need a lot of people to wrangle it, but they're not Apple, Google, or Amazon, or Facebook.
01:50:38 ◼ ► You can't hire for, you just can't say we need someone who knows Insert Technology Platform Framework or whatever here, because you will narrow your pool of potential applicants so much if you demand that you have to know Angular, but it has to be Angular 2, and you have to know this version of Node, and you have to know this version of Unix, and you have to know this database, and you'll never find any, but you can't hire that way.
01:51:03 ◼ ► Instead, what you hire for are things other than A, can you program, which is really important for programmers, right, that's always there, but B, are you someone that the other people who work here want to work with?
01:51:15 ◼ ► Are you a decent, nice, reasonable human being? Are you pleasant to work with? That's one of the most important questions, is like, would you want to work with this person? Would you want this person on your team?
01:51:27 ◼ ► And that question has nothing to do with if you can even program, has everything to do with what are you like as a person, how are your communication skills, do you seem like you're pleasant, right, do you seem like you'll be able to show up on time, right, just basic sort of human factors.
01:51:45 ◼ ► In practice, if you are, you know, Marco had a good phrase, I think six months ago, if you are reasonably smart and care, then you're way ahead of almost everybody, and again, I didn't mention any skills there, and part of caring is, do you care how other people are feeling?
01:52:03 ◼ ► Do you care about how you present yourself? And you know, so you just need to be, you need to be a nice person, like if no one wants to work with you in group projects at school, this is a bad sign, right? Because work is a never-ending group project, right?
01:52:18 ◼ ► Unless you want to be a lone wolf and start your own company and just do your own thing, fine, but if you're going to work in a place with other people, you need to be able to get along with other people, no matter what you're doing.
01:52:28 ◼ ► It's not anything to do with programming, and I feel like the longer I spend in companies doing hiring, the more important it is to me to say, all right, this person has never programmed and never seen a computer, but I'll hire them any day if they are smart and can communicate, and I would like to work with them, because again, in big companies, we'll teach you whatever, we'll teach you, for example, working in a company that uses Perl, like we'll teach you Perl, we don't expect you to know Perl, we know nobody knows Perl, like you're a new graduate from computer science, but are you smart?
01:52:57 ◼ ► And personable and seem like you can learn things? You'll learn our stupid technology stack, like that's no problem, like as long as you're willing to learn it, welcome aboard, we'll teach it to you, right? It's just, can you program and are you a nice person?
01:53:10 ◼ ► So I would concentrate more, like after you do your first project and say, yes, I can program and it's a thing I vaguely enjoy doing, I really do want a job in this field, find that out for yourself, and once you find that out, make sure that your performance in the interview, like, there's only so much you can do in a few minutes, right?
01:53:26 ◼ ► There's only so much you can do on the tech side, so delve into it as much as you want, but make sure that you come across as a person that people say, I'd like to be on a team with that person, it seems like they would be nice to work with.
01:53:37 ◼ ► If they're not thinking that, you're not going to get hired unless the company's really bad at hiring again, because lots of companies say, well, I hated this person, but he solved our programming quiz, so I guess we have to hire him again, you don't want to work with those companies, you really don't, and you don't want to work with those people either, so be excellent to each other, as they say.
01:53:56 ◼ ► What's the JAWN software guide to interviewing or something like that? It is excellent, and one of my favorite takeaways from it, and not everyone can do this, but one of my favorite takeaways from it was, in so many words, and he does a much more eloquent job of it, default to no, and if you're really just bowled over, say yes.
01:54:13 ◼ ► And one of the things that he drills in in this post, I'll put it in the show notes if I can find it, is, oh, this person's good for that team over there, nope, that's a no.
01:54:26 ◼ ► I got one of those, I got one of those, like, this team doesn't want you, but this other team might take you. You can come here and work on a trial basis, yeah, I got one of those, that was fun.
01:54:31 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a no. It's a very well-done post, like I said, I'll see if I can dig it up, but you should read that, but even if you're interviewing, to get a job rather than being the interviewer, it's a really, really good post.
01:54:42 ◼ ► Yeah, and we have to mention FizzBuzz again, because some will mention it if we don't. Like, that's the whole point of the FizzBuzz thing, is that people are always trying to find a quick way to answer the "can you program" question, and FizzBuzz is one of them.
01:54:52 ◼ ► I still forget what the details is, like, if it's divisible by 15, type Fizz, if it's divisible by 5, type Buzz, and if it's divisible by both, print something else.
01:55:02 ◼ ► It's like the simplest program you can have, and you would say, "Surely, there is nobody who cannot program this, but that's not the case." So that's their quick litmus test of "can you program?"
01:55:13 ◼ ► Unfortunately, it being so popular, people just probably memorize how to do FizzBuzz and they can still fake you out, which is why it's even better if you've made something yourself.
01:55:21 ◼ ► I would also say, just kind of career direction-wise, you know, John mentioned a lot about when he was entering the workforce, the web was just getting going, and that was a big deal for a while. I was entering the workforce in 2004, and moved within the workforce in 2006, and that was peak time for Web 2.0.
01:55:41 ◼ ► That was when all the Ruby on Rails movement was happening, and Web 2.0 was a really big deal. It's always a good idea with your career to enter a field that is in its ascent.
01:55:54 ◼ ► And computer science and programming, this field is so big, there's always going to be different ways of different types of things.
01:56:00 ◼ ► I would say today is probably not a good idea to enter the field of writing generic web apps, because that era, while it's still here and it's still big, the ascent of that has long since passed, and it is now in the stable state, maybe a decline over time. I haven't followed it too closely recently.
01:56:22 ◼ ► Ten years ago, apps were really young and were taking off like a rocket, and I think they have probably leveled off. If they haven't already leveled off, they're going too shortly.
01:56:35 ◼ ► They're in a stable state now. There's lots of jobs writing app code, but what would be best, ideally, is definitely try not to enter something that's declining, unless you want to be a COBOL programmer, and in most cases you'll be employed until the end of time.
01:56:53 ◼ ► But otherwise, don't get into something that is declining if you want to make a lot of money. You can get stock options and growing stuff and make more money there, but also if you just want better job security and more exciting jobs to do, getting into something while it's young is generally better for that.
01:57:12 ◼ ► So right now, I don't know what that is, because I'm now old and boring and I'm no longer looking for those young things, but it's probably something more related to ML and data analysis kind of stuff, if I had to guess.
01:57:26 ◼ ► But I don't know. But if you can get into something that's earlier in its growth cycle and its lifespan, that's generally better than hopping on something that's already in its golden years.
01:57:39 ◼ ► Well, it depends on what you want. If you want that experience of the excitement of the new and the more risk-reward, but some people come out of college and they want to just get a stable job so they can go work for a bank, which I wouldn't recommend because I hear horror stories from it.
01:57:50 ◼ ► But anyway, banking is not an industry that's going away anytime soon, and they always need people who know how to program, so if that appeals to you, go for it.
01:57:57 ◼ ► But if you want excitement and a potential upside, yeah, look for an industry that's young and in the upswing rather than going to work for a bank. Again, I can't stress this enough to not work for a bank.
01:58:07 ◼ ► I have so many friends, programmer friends, who have gone to work for banks, and I have never heard a single one tell me a good story about working in finance with computers.
01:58:15 ◼ ► Actually, the company that gave me the terrible interview where I failed all the math questions that they had me do on the whiteboard, which was the same company as the one that told me their team didn't want me but some other team would take me on a trial basis.
01:58:29 ◼ ► Yeah, they were a bank. They were a big New York bank that became a mayor at some point.
01:58:33 ◼ ► Sometimes boutique banks, like if you work for a hedge fund or some other weird super rich person thing, occasionally they have interesting programming jobs and they pay lots of money and it makes up for it.
01:58:42 ◼ ► But just a generic bank, the base level of finance, too many people I know in the industry and they just all tell me bad, bad stories.
01:58:50 ◼ ► I mean, I work in healthcare and that also has a terrible reputation well earned for computers, but there's lots of good companies in the healthcare computer space. The products aren't great, but the companies are reasonable places to work.
01:59:03 ◼ ► Knowing people is where you can ask them, "Hey, do you work for a insert company here?" Whether it's a gaming company, also a terrible industry, but you can ask them, "What's it like to work for a bank? What's it like to work for a hotel chain? What's it like to work doing data analysis for a fast food chain?"
01:59:19 ◼ ► "Is your fast food chain different from other places you work?" That's another reason knowing people is good, not just because they can get you an interview or a job, but because you can ask them what it's like and get the real answer and not just like...
01:59:31 ◼ ► From the outside, before you get any real jobs in the industry, it's very difficult to gauge what a job would be like. When you're in college having not had a real programming job, you might think, "What would it be like to work at Apple and Facebook?"
01:59:45 ◼ ► Maybe you have some idea from when you read articles and stuff, and you're like, "What would it be like to work for a bank, for example? For work for a high-speed training company? What would it be like to work for a networking company? What would it be like to work for Akamai?"
01:59:57 ◼ ► And you have an idea in your head of what's that like, and I almost guarantee that unless it's a very public company like Apple or Google or something where you constantly see what it's like to work there, you have no idea what it's actually like until you talk to somebody who really works there.
02:00:11 ◼ ► Even if you talk to somebody, it's like, "Well, I work in the whatever department, and that's a hellhole, but the other department in the same company is much better."
02:00:18 ◼ ► You know, it's funny. What you're describing is Capital One, which is... It might be officially based out of the DC area, but effectively is based out of Richmond.
02:00:25 ◼ ► And from what I understand, Capital One is reasonably forward-thinking when it comes to their tech stack, but it's still an enormous, enormous business.
02:00:33 ◼ ► And from what I've gathered, typically people are well-compensated, both in terms of salary and total comp, but beyond that, I've heard from many different people in technology and outside that it's all about what team you're on.
02:00:47 ◼ ► And some of the teams are really great and really lovely, and some of them are just friggin' nightmares. Carmax as well, actually.
02:00:52 ◼ ► We heard the same thing about Apple. Remember, there was just a story going around of whatever it was, like that wing of Apple that handles IT stuff and they hire a bunch of contractors, that that was the group you did not want to work in, and Apple was really bad.
02:01:04 ◼ ► But of course we all know other groups in Apple that are awesome to work in. So the bigger the company, the more likely it is that there are pockets of terribleness, or maybe pockets of greatness or whatever.
02:01:15 ◼ ► Assuming you can ever leave your house and search for a job, it's a tough old world out there.
02:01:21 ◼ ► It is. All right, final Ask ATP. Asajj writes, "Hypothetical. PHP is killed off from support tonight, and tomorrow you realize you need to write a new server system. Marco, what are you writing it in? I'm partial to Ruby or Go myself," says Asajj.
02:01:35 ◼ ► So this is an interesting question. I mean, in reality, this would never happen for lots of reasons. I mean, not only is PHP very popular and widely used, but also, like, what does it mean to be killed off from support?
02:01:47 ◼ ► PHP is open source, and enough people use it that somebody, some company or companies or entities would pick it up and would just start, you know, they would fork it or they would maintain it or whatever, and so it would be maintained for a while, and so that would be fine.
02:02:02 ◼ ► But if I go with the spirit of the hypothetical and actually assume that I really shouldn't be writing new PHP code immediately, because it will never get updated again, you know, eventually that'll cause probably security issues, then what do I do?
02:02:17 ◼ ► The very first thing I would do is really consider whether I need to be running my own servers anymore at all. I wrote the Overcast backend before CloudKit was released, like right before, which was kind of frustrating, but it was like a year before.
02:02:34 ◼ ► But now, you know, now that I'm pretty much only focused on Apple platforms, I'm never gonna make an Android app, and I don't care about the web app, you know, that much, so really, like, if I'm just gonna serve an iOS app, and by the way, frankly, most podcast app users don't need sync at all.
02:02:56 ◼ ► Most podcast app users use it just on their phone, and that's why a lot of leading apps don't even have sync, and it's fine. They don't really lose a lot of customers over it, because most people don't even use this feature at all.
02:03:08 ◼ ► Also, you can use CloudKit from the web, by the way. The CloudKit team wanted me to tell you that.
02:03:12 ◼ ► I have written a CloudKit web login, so you can actually, it's not linked publicly yet, but if you go to overcast.fm/login_icloud, you can log in with CloudKit instead of using an email and password. Anyway, I would very much first investigate, do I need a backend anymore at all?
02:03:30 ◼ ► Can I do most or all of what I need to do with CloudKit, and just, you know, whatever small features I would lose from not having a web backend, oh well, I would be saving thousands of dollars a month and would not have this giant backend to maintain, so, you know, maybe that would be worth it.
02:03:45 ◼ ► I bet you're keeping to the spirit of the question. The spirit of the question is, you need to write a new server system, and you're keeping to the spirit of the question, you said, but what if I didn't?
02:04:03 ◼ ► The question is, you need to write a new server system. He wants you to pick a language.
02:04:17 ◼ ► The question is, is that running the servers for it is incredibly easy, because PHP does not have persistent processes for each request, or for different requests, so like, you make a request, and even though it's optimized and has op-caches and everything, the way it seems to you as the programmer is there's no shared state in memory of the PHP process, so when you make a request, you get a PHP process that happens for that individual web request, and then that's it.
02:04:45 ◼ ► So there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't have to worry about. For instance, memory leaks are just not a thing in PHP. You don't have to worry about that unless you're running long-running scripts, and I have some, but for the most part, there's things like that that you don't have to worry about. There's things like shared mutable state and parallelism. PHP has no built-in parallelism. There's no multithreaded code support at the language level.
02:05:07 ◼ ► Don't forget my favorite thing from the P languages, Python, PHP, Perl. If it's segfaults, it's not your fault.
02:05:15 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. There is basically nothing you can do in your PHP code to make it segfault on a regular basis unless there's a serious bug in PHP or a module you're using.
02:05:26 ◼ ► Yeah, it's not your fault. It generally isn't your problem, and chances are Facebook has already hit it and fixed it way before you did. What I love about PHP is that there's a lot of classes of problems I don't have to think about just by running PHP servers that in other languages where there's an app process that handles requests, multiple requests in parallel or in series, whatever.
02:05:45 ◼ ► When you have persistent long-running processes, you have to think about a lot more things that in PHP I don't, and a lot of problems that other things have, like, "Oh, the app server crashed." That literally never happens to me. I've never had that problem.
02:05:57 ◼ ► It can't really happen with a properly configured and running PHP instance. So there's a lot of stuff that I just, it's just easy to run PHP servers from a practical standpoint.
02:06:07 ◼ ► And a lot of the new languages don't have those luxuries because they're more sophisticated, they're more advanced. They're not just made for answering web requests. They're also made for writing whole applications and everything else.
02:06:16 ◼ ► So they have larger scopes of what they do, but that also means that when you're running servers, you have more types of problems to worry about.
02:06:23 ◼ ► So I would want to pick something that is simpler, that doesn't necessarily have all that baggage. At the same time, I really do like old established languages, like PHP, like Perl even, if I have to say it.
02:06:38 ◼ ► And Ruby, Python, these would all be certainly worth considering because the ease of running servers for old established, and I've talked about this many times before, I love running old boring server code, or server packages and languages and stuff, because old boring software tends to work a lot better and with less fussing from me.
02:06:58 ◼ ► Because I hate being a sysadmin. I do it because I have to to do the rest of my job. I don't love any sysadmin type work I do. I do it because it's required to do other stuff I care about.
02:07:09 ◼ ► And so I want to spend as little time doing sysadmin work as possible. I don't want to have to babysit the servers. And I don't want to have to be woken up in the middle of the night by some process crashed and something is broken now.
02:07:20 ◼ ► I don't want to do any of that. And so sticking with older, more boring, more established tools, not using cutting edge frameworks or languages or OSs or anything like that, databases certainly, that's my style.
02:07:34 ◼ ► So I would look mostly at the old stuff. I like Go for certain things. I do use Go for my crawlers, not for the whole stack, just for the part that pulls the web pages and tells the PHP code, "Hey, this feed has now updated. Go check it."
02:07:49 ◼ ► But Go is weird in a lot of ways. And I find it cumbersome to write significant Go code. There's a reason why I kept only a very simple part of my app in Go and the whole rest of it is still PHP.
02:08:01 ◼ ► So I don't know if I would pick Go. And then there's the question of Swift. Because I'm learning Swift slowly anyway because I have to for this other half of my job that I care more about.
02:08:11 ◼ ► And I certainly would love to only learn one new language instead of two and really master that one instead of splitting my knowledge continuously and splitting the tools continuously.
02:08:21 ◼ ► So I would actually, even though it goes against everything I just said, I would consider Swift simply so I could consolidate language knowledge and tools and just master one new language.
02:08:34 ◼ ► But again, because it would be cutting edge and weird and not meant for this task at all, I'm not sure I would stick with that.
02:08:41 ◼ ► There's also the option of going for the more abstract app platform kind of languages where you write something in JavaScript or something and it just runs in some weird abstracted node.
02:08:53 ◼ ► Not the language, but some kind of app server node, like Casey's weird show bot thing, wherever that runs.
02:08:59 ◼ ► There's that kind of running on Google App Engine, there's always those kind of options. Frankly, what people do with those never strikes me as anything compelling.
02:09:08 ◼ ► Not that your server sucks, but the experience of running it sounds awful. The problems people have to deal with, those things crash.
02:09:18 ◼ ► They don't seem like they're particularly performant or economical. So I probably wouldn't do that either.
02:09:25 ◼ ► One of the things I care a lot about is hosting things cheaply. And it's not because I'm a cheapskate, it's because I want to keep the cost of the entire business low enough that I don't have to outsource things to other services.
02:09:38 ◼ ► And that I don't have to charge for sync and stuff like that. Like I wrote my push notifications stuff last week, that's what I was talking about.
02:09:45 ◼ ► I can send push notifications for nothing. Because I write my own low level code, I don't bring in a whole bunch of packages, I'm using fast easy languages that don't need much.
02:09:55 ◼ ► I don't need to call it to some other service that's going to charge me a fee or take a percentage of my income to do simple stuff like push notifications, subscription management, stuff like that.
02:10:05 ◼ ► So anyway, to still not fully answer the question I guess, I think the first thing I would ask is do I still need the server backend. And if I really really need one, I would take a quick look at Swift, probably run away screaming, and then go to something boring like Python.
02:10:22 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and Mac Weldon. And we will see you next week.
02:11:03 ◼ ► E-y-l-i-s-s, so that's Casey Liszt, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m, Auntie Marco Airmen, S-i-r-a-c, U-s-s-c-Racusa.
02:11:32 ◼ ► We did delay this week, partly for my kid's birthday and partly because of magic keyboards
02:11:44 ◼ ► Although I don't know if that's actually true. I ordered a car battery too, and that car
02:11:47 ◼ ► battery is having a lot of delivery exceptions. It's hard for me to tell whether anything
02:11:56 ◼ ► Delivery exception. What does that mean? Well, it means there's been an exception to delivery.
02:12:08 ◼ ► I was surprised that my local dealership wouldn't deliver a battery. They'd deliver anything.
02:12:31 ◼ ► Yeah. I found this out. I've been driving my car every week or two just to keep it driving,
02:12:59 ◼ ► I know how to push start a car. I've done it before, but given the choice, I would much
02:13:05 ◼ ► Oh, but where's the fun in that? That's like one of the few advantages anymore of having
02:13:11 ◼ ► I was all excited to clean the battery terminals, but you know what? You could eat off of them.
02:13:16 ◼ ► Oh, God. No, but seriously, that's like one of the only fun things about having a stick
02:13:38 ◼ ► So I've never actually done a push start. So do you literally just like get it rolling,
02:14:28 ◼ ► and it's just not going to do anything because you didn't crank the starter, and you probably
02:14:32 ◼ ► can't crank the starter. Otherwise, why would you be push starting it? And you skateboard
02:14:40 ◼ ► Or you have somebody push behind you, or you're skateboarding out the side or both. Then once
02:14:45 ◼ ► you've gotten to like five-ish miles an hour, enough that you're getting a pretty good clip
02:14:49 ◼ ► for having pushed the car, then you get in the car if you're not already in it. You know,
02:14:55 ◼ ► push down on the clutch, put it in second gear, make sure it's in run, dump the clutch,
02:15:14 ◼ ► motor. Well, if you connect a spinning transmission to the flywheel by taking your foot off the
02:15:19 ◼ ► clutch, guess what you're doing? You're spinning the motor, or spinning the flywheel and hopefully
02:15:40 ◼ ► Because I guess everything that's in a car is DC then. So why is it called an alternator?
02:16:11 ◼ ► all, you have to be outside the car, pressing against the A-pillar with all your might,
02:16:30 ◼ ► if the problem wasn't just that it was a bad battery? What if there's something else wrong
02:16:33 ◼ ► with your crap box? Now you have a car that you are now rolling in that has not started,
02:16:38 ◼ ► even though you jumped the clutch. And then hopefully your brakes, you know, you're able
02:16:42 ◼ ► to stop the car with either the parking brakes or whatever force you can muster into the
02:16:46 ◼ ► hydraulic system from, you know, that's old cars are a little bit better in this regard
02:16:49 ◼ ► than new ones. These are all reasons not to do this. Use, you know, jumper cables attached
02:16:58 ◼ ► Now do you go, do you, I haven't jumped a car in a couple of years now, but do you connect
02:17:17 ◼ ► the BMW had a post, a specific post specifically for grounding specifically for jumping. If
02:17:26 ◼ ► painted metal. And in case you're wondering, no, it does not work through the paint. Like
02:17:30 ◼ ► I tried it. I'm like, well, maybe they just, maybe it'll work and maybe the little, no,
02:17:34 ◼ ► I had to do it to the terminal because I couldn't find an unpainted piece of metal on the engine.
02:17:39 ◼ ► But I didn't look at the owner's manual. Maybe there is some post I'm supposed to look into.
02:17:43 ◼ ► But bottom line is the reason they're telling you to do that is like outgassing and exploding
02:17:46 ◼ ► batteries and yada, yada. And it's like, again, in modern cars, much less likely than before.
02:17:51 ◼ ► Not that I, you know, kids read your owner's manual. That's the actual way to do it, but
02:17:55 ◼ ► I couldn't be bothered. The real challenge was, the real challenge was, hey, do you know
02:18:00 ◼ ► where the jumper cables are? I was so excited. I found the jumper cable box. Guess what was
02:18:10 ◼ ► I think he was, he was cleaning up in my garage and he found a bunch of cables and he found
02:18:14 ◼ ► a box and it was like just a bunch of household extension cords. It was like the exactly right
02:18:18 ◼ ► weight for it. I opened it up. It's just a bunch of extension cords. Like finding stuff
02:18:29 ◼ ► Where were they? Did you not have them in the, in the note or whatever it was? I didn't
02:18:37 ◼ ► they? No, actually I didn't, I didn't even end up finding the jumper cables. What I found
02:18:40 ◼ ► was my car starting thing that I had from, it's even older that basically has the equivalent
02:18:59 ◼ ► don't see it happening. If I had to, I could do, but I would only do it in an emergency
02:19:03 ◼ ► situation. That's the only time I did it in the past too, emergency situations. Like the
02:19:12 ◼ ► you're at the beach at night when you're not supposed to be like you come back to the parking
02:19:15 ◼ ► lot and the dome light drains your battery. That's what, I don't know if that dome light
02:19:18 ◼ ► was like halogen. I don't understand how it could have been. I was like, you're not leaving
02:19:22 ◼ ► this beach unless you push start this car. And that's, you know, in the dark. Oh, that's
02:19:26 ◼ ► fun. No Hills, no Hills. This is pancake flat parking lot. You know what it's like, you know,
02:19:30 ◼ ► you're out on the barrier beach and it's just one big flat parking lot. That's why you gotta
02:19:47 ◼ ► Sorry. Yes, yes, yes. Um, you know, what, what, what if I literally don't have enough juice
02:19:51 ◼ ► to even get it into run? Like presumably there could be a state where it has enough juice
02:19:56 ◼ ► to activate it, to activate like the car computer and so on and so forth, but it just can't
02:20:00 ◼ ► turn over. Right. But what happens if I don't even have enough juice for that? Like, could
02:20:05 ◼ ► I push started? That's the problem with modern cars. You need some minimal electricity for
02:20:09 ◼ ► anything to work. Whereas old cars were so mechanical. Like, I don't know. I don't know
02:20:13 ◼ ► if the compression ignition is a real thing or just I'm imagining it, but I always imagined
02:20:26 ◼ ► whereas now, like you said, if what if, what if you can't even boot up the systems that
02:20:35 ◼ ► plugs? No, I mean, at this point, like, you know, any modern car, you have this similar
02:20:38 ◼ ► situation as like, you know, if something goes wrong with your Apple product, the answer,
02:20:48 ◼ ► like still jumpstart cars if you can find the battery. In fact, I looked at the battery
02:20:57 ◼ ► the art technology and battery terminal cleaning is. That was a YouTube rabbit hole that was
02:21:12 ◼ ► this can't be the way to do it. This is the way that you're doing it person on YouTube,
02:21:16 ◼ ► and you do not seem authoritative. Let me continue searching. Marker's car doesn't move
02:21:20 ◼ ► when his battery is dead either, you know. That's true. There's nothing you can do about
02:21:24 ◼ ► that. Try jumpstarting that. Push it all you want. It's like going anywhere. I would just