0:00:00[Coughing] Hi. Time of year. Merry Christmas, everybody. Yeah. Oh, my word. Are you home,
0:00:11or are you upstate? I am home for one day. Just you? Me and Tiff are here, and then we
0:00:17are going to Cancun tomorrow morning. Oh, nice. I've never been to Cancun, or Mexico,
0:00:22actually. Neither have I. Mostly good things. We discussed this on an earlier show, Casey,
0:00:26but you've forgotten already. Oh, yeah, this does ring a bell. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now
0:00:30I'm remembering. It's all coming back to me. I think there's like five of Casey, and only
0:00:33one of them is on the show at any given week, and then the next one shows up. It's like
0:00:37those TV shows where twins trade lives with each other, and they have to coordinate what
0:00:40each person knows. You'll never know, John Craig. You'll never know. You're the one who
0:00:45knows my middle name. So, John, what computer are you using this week? Dammit, Marco, you
0:00:51took it from me. I was about to ask. I'm on my Mac Pro. Yay! What monitor? Wait, they're
0:00:58both Mac Pros. I did the same joke both weeks, and you had different reactions both times.
0:01:02I'm on my Mac Pro. That's the joke. Does it have small holes or big holes in the front?
0:01:08It's fine, big. Everything old is new again. All right, what year did this Mac Pro come?
0:01:14Is this Mac Pro old enough to vote? No, not vote. Is it old enough to not drive? I don't
0:01:20know. Is it ancient or is it not? This is a 2019 Mac Pro. It actually shipped in 2019,
0:01:25and it's set up and running in 2019. We did it. 2019 Mac Pro. Are you using your ancient
0:01:32monitor or are you using something else? I'm using my PlayStation monitor. Because that's
0:01:38all I got, because my other one hasn't shipped. Destiny has been given a back seat? You've
0:01:43said to Destiny, "No, thank you. I have more important things." Not entirely. We'll address
0:01:48and follow up. All right, so a certain somebody I know sent you an early birthday present,
0:01:55since your birthday is coming up extremely soon. Why are you not leveraging that to use
0:02:00your ancient monitor? Because, A, my ancient monitor, by the time I got that thing, was
0:02:05already packed up and put Raiders of the Lost Ark style into my attic and is not easy to
0:02:11get at. And the second reason is that monitor was non-retina, and I just can't do that to
0:02:16my Mac Pro. You know, I don't blame you. So what do you have now? Like a 4K, 24-inch kind
0:02:21of thing? Yep. I'm actually kind of surprised they make the 4K monitors that small. It seems
0:02:26like nobody wants that, except Mac nerds. But it seems like everyone, like the entire
0:02:31PC and gaming worlds, want 4K resolution at much larger sizes, but nobody seems to want
0:02:39retina scale. It feels so tight to me. Again, obviously it's bigger than the other monitors
0:02:45I've replaced, but I'm used to the 5K iMac, and everything just feels so much bigger on
0:02:49this screen. I know 5K is not that much bigger than 4K, but I'm just like, "Wow, is that
0:02:55how big my browser window normally is? Why is everything taking up so much?" Like, the
0:02:59screen seems so short. Anyway, I'll be happy when I get my real monitor, but for now, it's
0:03:054K. And that has not even shipped yet, is that correct? It has not. So other people
0:03:09are getting scary messages that say that their shipment has been delayed, but so far I have
0:03:14not received that notification. So, fingers crossed. I feel like I should update you on
0:03:19my computer situation. Alright, go ahead. Wait, what? There shouldn't be an update.
0:03:26There shouldn't be. That's not a good thing. Well, it's me, and where would I be if not
0:03:31with—no, I'm just kidding, everything's fine. Oh, God. I was so afraid you messed
0:03:34with the RAM or something. No, not yet. Just don't case up this computer, please. Keep
0:03:42all liquids and third-party RAM away from it. No promises. No, everything is good. I
0:03:47will say, though, that I realized that one of the three of us is now running Catalina.
0:03:54Does that mean I can too now? No, I replied to you in Slack. You don't have to. I have
0:03:59to. I have no choice. My machine doesn't run anything earlier than Catalina, so I am
0:04:03stuck, but you don't have to upgrade. You can just hang out for a while. But Dad! Yeah,
0:04:08I've been running Catalina on my laptop all week as I've been moving around. As I've
0:04:12been using it for a week, I'm reminded why I don't have it on my desktop yet. So all
0:04:17kidding aside, tell me why, because I feel like any of the bad experiences I had with
0:04:21Catalina were really the hardware that I was running on, not the software, because on my
0:04:25MacBook, it's been fine. I can't think of anything that's been particularly wrong
0:04:29with it, although naturally I've been using my MacBook less and less recently. But what
0:04:34has reminded you of the bad—what are the bad that you've been reminded of? I've
0:04:39had two, maybe three issues so far. Two and a half issues so far. Number one is just the
0:04:45annoyance of all the stupid permission dialog boxes. Like, yes, for God's sake, I let
0:04:50this app that I just opened access the downloads folder or the desktop or whatever. It's
0:04:54like, yeah, I just put files there. That's what I want. It just feels like Windows Vista,
0:04:59which I never actually use, but it feels like what people say Windows Vista was like. It's
0:05:04just constant barrages of permission dialogs that you just think—I mean, this is well
0:05:10trotting ground. I don't need to go over it, but could there really have been no better
0:05:14way to do this? Was this really worth it? Was this really the right design for the security
0:05:19of the system? It just doesn't—it seems like this is going to be looked back on as
0:05:24a mistake. So that's one big problem. It's just the annoyance of all the permissions
0:05:30and everything. And then problem number two, which I'm not sure is a Catalina problem,
0:05:35but I sure as hell hope it is, is that I seem to be getting frequent keyboard input lag.
0:05:43And this is on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new keyboard, which has me slightly concerned.
0:05:47But I'm hoping—it feels like software because it isn't all the time, and I haven't
0:05:51been able to pin down when it happens exactly. It isn't just in one app, but I am definitely
0:05:57seeing keyboard input lag. And that is extremely concerning. But it feels like a software issue,
0:06:06so I'm hoping that's it. Yeah, this sounds familiar. Yeah, right? And I forget, that
0:06:11was with Catalina, wasn't it, on your old, you know, weirdo? It was definitely with Catalina
0:06:15because that's where it is right now. It has Catalina on it right now. I don't recall
0:06:20in this long and sordid tale if I had seen that in Mojave or not. I do remember that
0:06:25I had intended to downgrade to Mojave at the point in which I said, "Screw it all. I'm
0:06:30just going to get an iMac Pro." So I'm not sure—I can't recall—somebody would
0:06:34have to remind me where it was in the timeline, this terrible, terrible timeline that I was
0:06:40seeing the input lag and if it was in Mojave as well. But I don't think it was. Alright,
0:06:44alright. Well, so anyway, so I am seeing significant keyboard lag sometimes using the built-in
0:06:50keyboard with nothing else connected, and that is extremely concerning. So I'm hoping
0:06:55that's a software thing that gets resolved. And then finally, the touch bar seems buggier,
0:07:01which is funny because it doesn't seem like they've actually done anything to it. Like,
0:07:04it doesn't seem like it's different. The— Well, it is, though, because it's smaller
0:07:08because of the escape key. Right, but like— No, I'm serious. I'm not trying to be funny.
0:07:11No, you're right, but it seems like the software side of the touch bar seems pretty
0:07:15much unmodified from where it has been since 2016, which is funny. Like, if they're going
0:07:21to keep saying how nice it is and that they're not going to give us an option to not buy
0:07:25it, they're also not making it any better, which is, you know, I have issues with that.
0:07:30But anyway, it's— I have to more frequently do the— whatever the kill-all command is
0:07:35that like reboots the touch bar because it either gets stuck on something or it has an
0:07:40empty gap in the little control strip area or something. Like, it just— Function keys,
0:07:46man. Like, they worked every time. I just— Well, did they?
0:07:50Yes! Well, yeah, they did! Like, why, why, Apple? Why take something and make it worse
0:07:57and make us use it? Like, I just— Even if the touch bar worked 100% of the time, I still
0:08:04would prefer function keys, but the fact that it doesn't work 100% of the time and the
0:08:09fact that it goes to sleep all the time, which I also, like— It turned something that was
0:08:14one tap into two taps because you have to wake up the touch bar first and then tap the
0:08:19pause button or the brightness button or whatever. Like, I just— Ugh! Please, Apple, give us
0:08:24more touch bar free options. I'm sorry. Anyway, so those are minor issues. Other than those
0:08:29issues, I actually have been extremely happy with the 16-inch as I've been traveling
0:08:35and using it more. I still love everything else about it. It just does seem like there's
0:08:41these weird little software glitches with Catalina.
0:08:43I'm dealing with the permissions stuff, too, and in particular the strain of it that
0:08:47really bothers me is apps that were— They're like recent semi-modern apps but not quite
0:08:54modern enough to know that Catalina was a thing, and on first launch— Like, these
0:08:58are installing apps that I didn't have or reinstalling them or whatever. On first launch,
0:09:02they have some kind of first launch experience, whether it's prompting you to set something
0:09:07up, or even if they're just trying to run an auto-updater because I'm launching an
0:09:10older version of an app that needs to be updated. That process is not accounting for the fact
0:09:16that the OS is also going to throw stuff up in your face about permissions, and often
0:09:19they fight with each other. The app expects to be able to do a thing on first launch,
0:09:22but it can't because it hasn't been given permission yet. You have to pick which one
0:09:27of the dialogues you want to do, or do you want to go back to system preferences and
0:09:30try to give permission? When you give permission in system preferences, it requires you to
0:09:33quit the app, but it could be in the middle of the first run setup. It's just a mess
0:09:37figuring out, "All right, what state are we going to be in? Can I trigger the first
0:09:40run experience again? Do I have to go through it again? Has it already done it? Have I already
0:09:43signed up or registered or updated or downloaded?" Half the time the solution is to throw the
0:09:49app out, reinstall, go to system preferences proactively and add it to full disk access
0:09:54so you just don't get asked about it, but then what if it's asking about something
0:09:56different that doesn't have to do with full disk access? It's quite a long road,
0:10:01Mel. The one thing that Catalina is doing to me, and it's like, "This is a custom-tailored
0:10:05bug just for me because I've got to be the only person who cares about this bug in the
0:10:11entire universe. I don't know if you know this about me. Maybe you have seen me use
0:10:16my computer." I try mightily, as documented in 15 years of Mac OS X reviews, I try mightily
0:10:24to get the finder to behave how I'm accustomed to, not as a browser. Windows for each folder,
0:10:32no sidebar, no toolbar. I'm not against the browser. Sometimes I will open a browser
0:10:38window, so to speak, because the separation is not clean and has never been. But anyway,
0:10:43I try to get my finder windows with nothing on them. This is something that almost nobody
0:10:47ever does, so this is probably a problem they don't have. But, two, you can do this now.
0:10:50You're on your Macs. Go to the finder and pick a folder and try to make the window as
0:10:56I described. Maybe you don't even know how to do it because it never occurs to you to
0:10:59do this, but just try it.
0:11:00Status bar on or off?
0:11:02On.
0:11:03Okay, so you basically only have the top bar and the status bar below it.
0:11:09But when you say top bar, what do you mean?
0:11:11Like the title bar, sorry. Like with the traffic light controls and the name of the folder.
0:11:17Exactly. So that's how I try to have my windows. And of course, the finder in Mac OS X has
0:11:20always had no respect for me setting the state of any window because it doesn't associate
0:11:26windows with state and folders and yada, yada, yada, right? So right now I'm looking at my
0:11:30documents folder. It's in list view. It shows documents on the top and then it's got the
0:11:34status bar that says how many items and how much space is available and then it's got
0:11:37headers for name, date, modified, size, whatever, and then a bunch of folders, right?
0:11:42This is how I want pretty much all my finder windows all the time. This is how I set all
0:11:46my finder windows all the time. And Catalina Finder, if I have a bunch of windows open
0:11:52like this, I can watch it happen. I'll be working in one window or I'll switch to another
0:11:57app and I'll come back to the finder. On its own, without me doing anything in the finder,
0:12:02I'm not dragging anything into the finder, I'm not activating the finder, I haven't just
0:12:06done something with it. Just literally on its own, will say, "You know what? You're
0:12:10getting a toolbar." And all my finder windows will spawn toolbars spontaneously without
0:12:15the finder even being active. I swear to you, I'm doing nothing in the finder. I'm not sending
0:12:19an Apple event for another app. They will spawn toolbars. The first hundred times this
0:12:23event, I'm like, "I must be going insane." I swear, I just hit that toolbar with command
0:12:27option T. How does it have a toolbar now? In fact, I'm looking at documents right now,
0:12:31I'm going to go back to Chrome. I'll just hang out in Chrome. We'll see, maybe by the
0:12:35end of this episode, that window will have spawned a toolbar. They come back and I can't
0:12:39get rid of them. They refuse to stay dead. They just keep coming back. And you wouldn't
0:12:46think, "Well, who cares?" I made the toolbar icon only, I actually make it text only to
0:12:51make it even smaller, but I don't want the toolbar there. And by the way, it screws up
0:12:54the size of the window. So if you have an icon view window, like my applications folder
0:12:57is icon view, and I have it sized and set up so I can see an integer number of icons
0:13:01and rows and columns, right? But when the toolbar comes, the bottom ones get cut off,
0:13:05right? Because it doesn't push the view down. And I have literally never seen this bug in
0:13:12any other version of Mac OS or Mac OS X, where the view changes in currently open windows
0:13:18behind your back before your very eyes. I've seen it happen. It animates in. It's like,
0:13:23"What is going on?" I cannot figure it out, and it's driving me batty. So far, no input
0:13:31lag issues or anything like that. So yeah, it's just permissions and then the Finder,
0:13:36just really, really sticking it to me for no reason.
0:13:39Steve McLaughlin I'm so sorry, Jon. The struggle is real.
0:13:43Jon Patton I just realized when I had my keyboard input lag, I was using a Bluetooth Magic Mouse,
0:13:52which I normally don't use a mouse with my laptop, but at this time, there was one. This
0:13:58shouldn't affect the built-in keyboard, but it might be related to the bug. I don't know.
0:14:02Steve McLaughlin I saw much better performance when I put my
0:14:04trackpad in wired mode rather than wireless mode.
0:14:08Jon Patton Unfortunately, you can't really use the mouse
0:14:10in wired mode. Steve McLaughlin That is true. That is very
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0:16:12[Music]
0:16:13Steve McLaughlin I would like to quickly drop something in
0:16:18the chat room and I would like you guys to look at this. I stumbled across this earlier
0:16:22today and I thought it was hilarious. What I've put in the chat, in case you can't see
0:16:25it, this is AudioQuest Diamond USB cable, type A to type B, .75 meters, which is 2.6
0:16:33feet. So this is a cable that goes from the traditional USB that, you know, your lightning
0:16:39cables always used to come in, to one of those big, chunky USB things that, like, a printer
0:16:44would take in.
0:16:45Steve McLaughlin The connectors have names, Casey?
0:16:46Casey Neuman I said A to B, but that doesn't mean anything
0:16:49to anyone. Come on, man.
0:16:50Steve McLaughlin If it means anything to anyone, it's listeners
0:16:52of this show.
0:16:53Casey Neuman Although, doesn't type B come in two different
0:16:56shapes?
0:16:57Steve McLaughlin Well, there's the micro B, which is that
0:16:58weird, like, double, long, skinny rectangle thing.
0:17:00Casey Neuman Three different, is that micro? Because it's
0:17:02no smaller than this B.
0:17:04Steve McLaughlin Oh, it's mini B. Well, there's, so there's
0:17:06mini...
0:17:07Casey Neuman There's three shapes.
0:17:08Steve McLaughlin I rest my case.
0:17:09Casey Neuman A, but A, everybody knows. Anyway, yeah.
0:17:11Steve McLaughlin Anyway, this cable, AudioQuest Diamond USB
0:17:15cable, type A to type B, .75 meters, 2.6 feet. I haven't looked at Monoprice, but I would
0:17:21assume on Monoprice this cable is $4, something like that.
0:17:25Casey Neuman If that.
0:17:26Steve McLaughlin If that.
0:17:27Casey Neuman This is the kind of cable that, like, when
0:17:28you're going through your cable bin and trying to clean it out, you just throw away, like,
0:17:32five of these.
0:17:33Steve McLaughlin Right.
0:17:34Casey Neuman Because you just have these around. Like, they
0:17:35come with everything.
0:17:36Steve McLaughlin They call them printer cables nowadays, which
0:17:38is funny.
0:17:39Casey Neuman Yeah, exactly.
0:17:40Steve McLaughlin The history of things that have been called
0:17:41printer cables. In this current moment in time, this is what people call a printer cable.
0:17:43Casey Neuman Exactly, exactly.
0:17:44Steve McLaughlin You can find it under that name on Amazon.
0:17:45Casey Neuman So, it would appear that this kind of cable,
0:17:49and maybe Marco can fill in for me, this kind of cable is occasionally used for audio purposes.
0:17:54And I can tell you that certainly the XLR box that I'm using to speak to you right now
0:18:00takes in a USB Type B, you know, the big, kind of chunky one. And on the other end of
0:18:04that is currently USB Type A, but what started me down the search was me thinking I have
0:18:09all these USB-C ports. Maybe I'll just get a USB-C to USB-B. Yes, I think I have that
0:18:13right. It doesn't matter. Anyway.
0:18:14Steve McLaughlin Yep.
0:18:15Casey Neuman So, that is an example of a piece of audio
0:18:17equipment that perhaps would use one of these style cables, but I don't know what else there
0:18:22is. Maybe, does your DAC use this, Marco, or anything like that?
0:18:25Steve McLaughlin This is the kind of cable that any USB DAC
0:18:29that is, or any USB sound card that is, you know, that is not super portable, like a desktop
0:18:36one, this is the kind of cable that almost all of them would use.
0:18:39Steve McLaughlin I'm speaking to you right now through a cable
0:18:41just like that. In fact, one I just bought new. I'll have some cable follow-up related
0:18:45to this, actually.
0:18:46I'm also speaking to you through actually two of these. One of them is going to my main
0:18:50DAC and one of them is going from my microphone interface to the computer.
0:18:53Marco
0:18:53Yeah, so all three of us are speaking to you through one of these cables. Now, mine very
0:18:57well may be a Monoprice cable, which, by the way, Nietzsche in the chat has pointed out
0:19:02on Monoprice, $1.27. I have been procrastinating in telling you that this exact cable on Amazon.com,
0:19:08$599.95. This is a USB cable that is less than three feet long, $600. And sure, I look
0:19:17at the reviews thinking, "Surely that can't be right." Ridiculously expensive, but it
0:19:22sounded really good. Five stars. Listen to this USB cable before making judgment. This
0:19:27last one continues, "So I'm amazed at how many people have had reviews without ever
0:19:30listening to the cable."
0:19:31Steve McLaughlin Ah, what the hell? Hold on, a ladybug just
0:19:34landed on my...what? Sorry.
0:19:36Steve McLaughlin First the cricket was killed with an iPad 2. 2019 ladybug massacre. Do you have any devices heavy enough to kill a ladybug anymore, Marco? Oh, there it is.
0:19:47Marco Yep, a 30 watt USB-C power brick. There you go. They're pretty small.
0:19:52Steve McLaughlin Well, anyway, so I just wanted to point out $600 for this friggin' cable. Why? Why?
0:19:57Marco My favorite review is one star, subject line, all capital, LOL period. I said they put the period.
0:20:06Steve McLaughlin Period and capitalized it. I like that.
0:20:07Marco Review text, LOL period.
0:20:09Steve McLaughlin Seventeen people found this helpful.
0:20:12Marco I'm gonna rate that helpful. Yeah, this is, I mean...
0:20:16Steve McLaughlin Oh, audio files. You're so crazy.
0:20:18Marco There are some places where cable quality matters,
0:20:23but way fewer than most people think, and the ceiling of how much it matters is usually
0:20:29reached at far lower of a level than anything marketed to audio files. This is all mumbo
0:20:37jumbo BS, and you know, audio, yeah, audio sound quality is famously easy to fool, just
0:20:45similar to like wine tasting. There's all sorts of like wine gadgets that are mostly placebo
0:20:49effect as well, but you can also kind of argue that like the, that, you know, the placebo effect
0:20:55is real and you can say like people who pay a lot of money for something and then think
0:21:01it sounds better are getting their money's worth. Like if they, if they pay something
0:21:07ridiculous and then they get enjoyment out of it, even if it's totally fake, they did
0:21:14pay to, for it to get a better experience and they are tricking themselves into believing
0:21:18they are getting a better experience. So you can kind of argue that maybe it works, but
0:21:23yeah, this is all BS and it's not really changing anything.
0:21:25I like how you're trying to move on real quickly from you killing a ladybug, one of the cute
0:21:30bugs, Marco. It's not cute when it lands on your hand as you're trying to use your computer.
0:21:34All right, well, let's let Marco know how you feel about killing ladybugs. Don't we
0:21:39have a surplus of them? I think, I think we do. Aren't they like invading the entire continent?
0:21:45Like isn't it actually like a big problem in a lot of places? I don't know. I think,
0:21:49I think it actually is. All right, maybe we should start with some
0:21:53follow up 20 minutes. Andrew Woods has some information about MagSafe connectors that I
0:21:59don't even understand why we're talking about this. What did I forget this time?
0:22:02Cause there was like the, the cable that was hooked up to my old monitor that had like
0:22:05the, uh, that split into multiple cables that split into mini display port and USB. And
0:22:10also there was the MagSafe ones. You could connect your laptop right to it. And I was
0:22:13like, I don't like that magnet wanging around cause I'm trying to, you know, I don't have
0:22:17anything to do, but I didn't want to have like this powerful magnet touching like electrical
0:22:23cables and everything like that. Well, it turns out that in MagSafe, that part, the
0:22:29part that like connects to the laptop does not actually have any magnets in it. It's
0:22:34just a ferrous block of metal. So I shouldn't have worried too much about it being in your
0:22:38other cables. Um, so that's good to know. Uh, the magnet's on the computer side, not
0:22:42on the cable side. You still have to find a place to put it. And it is kind of heavy
0:22:46and you know, flopping around. But anyway, I just thought that was worth throwing in
0:22:50there in case people wondered, uh, MagSafe magnets on the computer. I am unable to find
0:22:55a definition of Wang as a verb. You just heard it. You got to use the context clues. Marco
0:23:01closest I can find is wangle, which means a Wang is the, is it going to be the new yeet
0:23:07to obtain by persuading others to comply such as I think we should be able to wangle it
0:23:13so that you can start tomorrow or I wangled limitation to her party. There you go. But
0:23:18wanging around does not have to be an actual word. Take that dictionary and yeet it over
0:23:23here and then I'll wang it over to the KC and we'll be all set. It's just wanging around.
0:23:27Before we move on, it just occurred to me, I have two questions. One, we just get banned
0:23:32in England. One, Marco, have you ordered a Mac pro yet? What do you think? I don't think
0:23:41so, but I am not confident about this at all. So December is coming to a close as we record
0:23:48this and therefore that 6% incentive is coming to an end. Oh, here we go. I also just got
0:23:52a whole bunch of gift card credit to the Apple store from trading in a bunch of old devices.
0:23:56Oh, here we go. But I still haven't ordered anything and I'm not going to. Oh, okay. Good.
0:24:00I got you there. Now would you tell us if you had, if you asked, I mean like I wouldn't
0:24:04volunteer it necessarily, but if you asked, I wouldn't lie. But no, I really, again, my
0:24:11opinion remains, I'm still extremely happy with my iMac pro and there is nothing about
0:24:17it that is in dire need or motivation to upgrade. Like I'm very happy with it. And like it'd
0:24:24be different if I was like, you know, constantly hitting its limits or if I was like, you know,
0:24:28if I had bought too small of an SSD with it or I needed more RAM, like if there was something
0:24:32like that about my computer that I was like kind of itching for an upgrade, I would probably
0:24:37do it even though I shouldn't. But the fact is none of that is true. Like I'm extremely
0:24:42happy with everything I have in my iMac pro currently. I'm not, I'm not pushing any of
0:24:46its limits yet. And so as long as that remains the case and as long as it still continues
0:24:50to work properly, I think I'm going to keep it the way it is.
0:24:53All right, good. I'm glad. I'm surprised when I'm glad. All right, moving on. John, tell
0:24:57us about setting up your Mac pro please. Yeah, so I did finally decide to set it up because
0:25:01I had the time to do it and I had a gap in my podcast schedule, which is basically what
0:25:05I was looking for. And the earlier episode you'd reminded me about the HDMI connection.
0:25:09So I'm like, I can just bring my PlayStation 4 monitor. So I began the process of setting
0:25:14things up and I think I said this last show, I decided not to do ethernet. I decided to
0:25:19do direct connection of one of the, took the SSD out of my old Mac pro and connected it
0:25:23to my new one. And that went by surprisingly quick, the magic of SSDs. They're very high
0:25:28bandwidth. I put it in a, not the fastest external case in the world, but it was like
0:25:3310 gigabits, which is 10 times better than one gigabit now, isn't it? I don't know how
0:25:37fast it actually went, but anyway, it didn't take too long. I used migration assistant.
0:25:41Everything seemed fine. I spent a long time deleting tons of 32 bit applications, sadly,
0:25:48but God, so many of them. Installing application updates, getting stuff to work with for the
0:25:52most part, it has been pretty smooth. A couple of things I want to talk about in using this
0:25:58thing. The first is like, you know, all right, these days computers don't get that much faster
0:26:02year over year, especially desktop. So we've talked about this many times. You're lucky
0:26:05if you get a single digit percentage increase in single core performance, maybe you get
0:26:09one with more cores, maybe you get one with less, but they're not, it's not like it wasn't
0:26:12the nineties where your new computer that you buy a couple of years later is like twice
0:26:15as fast, right? But I was replacing a 10 year old computer. So you would think this thing's
0:26:19going to seem a lot faster. You would hope. Yeah. And it absolutely does. I mean, just
0:26:23if you wait 10 years, the computer seems a lot faster. Not only does it seem faster,
0:26:27it also seems faster than my wife's 5k iMac, which granted is also old. And this computer
0:26:32probably isn't, it might not even be faster than single core. I haven't even compared
0:26:35it to her old iMac, but yes, it feels faster. But the thing I feel the most, and this is
0:26:40part of the most fun of having a new Mac, I feel like, and Marco has touched on it in
0:26:44the past, is the effect of having so much more storage and so much more RAM. Because
0:26:50these days, unless you're, you spend a lot of time doing things that are very CPU intensive,
0:26:56like all you do all day is like, you know, encode or decode video and it takes a long
0:26:59time and you're waiting on the computer. These days, the thing you will feel the most is
0:27:03the removal of previous limits. And if you're replacing a computer, probably the limits
0:27:08that you had have to do with RAM or disk space, both of which were smaller many years in the
0:27:11past, either because you always kind of buy a computer for the same price or, or, you
0:27:15know, and then, you know, the storage goes up a year over year, or usually when you replace
0:27:18it, you want to replace it with something bigger. So this has so much more RAM than
0:27:21my other computer. Like it basically has infinite RAM. I keep looking at the RAM diagram. I
0:27:25don't think I've hit quarter full, right? So I may have overbought on the RAM, but the
0:27:28point is RAM no longer exists for me. It's just an abstract concept. I don't care about
0:27:33it anymore.
0:27:34And you use Chrome, right? That's saying something. You can keep Chrome and Slack open
0:27:38at the same time.
0:27:39Yeah, I mean, I haven't really, yeah. So RAM is fine. And then storage. I went from
0:27:43a one terabyte SSD to four. And granted, I brought over my entire photo library. So I
0:27:48immediately used half of that four terabytes. So I'm slightly over two terabytes, but
0:27:53still, my disk is half full. And this is after living for many years on the ragged edge of
0:27:58the one terabyte. I was so close to the edge of the one terabyte that I didn't even have
0:28:01my own photo library on it. Like not even an optimized storage mode. I just literally
0:28:05didn't have iCloud photos enabled because I just ran out of room. So having that breathing
0:28:10room and just feeling like, you know, I was doing some stuff where I was copying some
0:28:14things around. I'm like, I can copy, you know, a couple of 500 gig files on here just temporarily.
0:28:20Why not? I have so much room. I brought them over copies from there. Like just the luxury
0:28:23of having all that extra space. And you can have this extra space with a Mac mini to be
0:28:29clear, you know, in a Mac Pro to feel these effects. That's what I'm getting at. Just
0:28:33get a new computer or, you know, on your existing computer, add more RAM and more storage, like
0:28:38humongously more, not 5% more, but like double, triple, quadruple. Feels super awesome. So
0:28:43I'm enjoying that. The next thing I experienced with this is I, when I was setting it up,
0:28:48I had the opportunity, I had no reason to go inside it, but come on, you get a Mac Pro.
0:28:51You got to, you got to look inside. So I took off the, the case, which was surprisingly
0:28:58difficult. I mean, it was the granted it was up on a high desk, but like you have to pull
0:29:01it straight off and straight up and there's a lot of friction there and you have to keep,
0:29:06you know, you just want to like yank it off like voila, but you have to pull it exactly
0:29:10straight. Otherwise it doesn't come up and it goes very slowly. And also I echo what
0:29:14other people have said about the, the turny thing on the top, like the little handle that
0:29:17you turn, it's like metal on metal inside there. It's not scratchy or scrapey, but it's
0:29:23not smooth either. It is, you know, I'm assuming machined aluminum against machined aluminum.
0:29:27So it is not a particularly pleasing untwist. It's a little bit like, like you would imagine
0:29:33aluminum rubbing against aluminum, right? Which is probably good for precision and fit,
0:29:37but it's not good for feel. Not that this matters in the grand scheme of things, but
0:29:40lots of people commented on it and I agree. But it is very precise fitting. So anyway,
0:29:46I got it off and I'm looking around inside it and yes, it's beautiful in there. Lots
0:29:50of YouTube videos out there that show sort of teardowns. And in particular, one thing
0:29:54I took note of after mostly after seeing these videos, like I had been telling people about
0:30:00it, you know, people in my family, anyone else who's interested, my children who don't want
0:30:03to hear about it. But anyway, that, you know, it's not just like a tower computer. It's very
0:30:07neat inside there. And I had been referring to it with the same language as I had talked
0:30:11about my power Mac G5 or the G3 for that matter, or my, you know, my Mac Pro 2008 macro that
0:30:18everything sort of fits in and you don't see any cables flopping anywhere. Like all the
0:30:22cables and everything are routed so that like it looks like just, you know, this, everything
0:30:26is perfectly fit. Like that if you were, if you could manufacture everything to be exactly
0:30:29the right length and, you know, sort of hidden behind things. Like if you looked at those,
0:30:33you know, my old Mac Pro or the G3 tower, it's hard to even find like where they routed
0:30:38the cables because they put them like behind the motherboards and up through little plastic
0:30:41things and just, you know, it looks beautiful and clean. And of course this Mac Pro is all
0:30:45color matched and it's all black inside there and it's very sleek and cool looking. But
0:30:49the thing I hadn't realized until I had seen people like actually disassemble this computer
0:30:53down to the studs like I fix it or whatever. Is that as far as I'm aware, this computer
0:30:59has no cables inside it. How do they connect with components? Like, I mean, it's got,
0:31:05for example, it's got a bunch of fans. Surely the fans connect with little cables to power
0:31:09the fans, otherwise how the fans get power. The power supply that's got to plug into
0:31:15something with power, right? But if you think about it, first of all, a lot of things in
0:31:19this are our card slots. The SSDs, they're not cables. Those are, they go into little
0:31:23connectors, right? You've seen what those are like. PCI cards like the, you know, or
0:31:26the video cards, those go into connectors. Again, no cables. And because of the MPX module,
0:31:31they don't need like a cable from the power supply to power the GPU because they have
0:31:34a second connector. They get all the power through the slots. The CPU, obviously no cables
0:31:39there. There is no hard drive. There is no optical drive. The USB ports, again, on a
0:31:45card, so no cables there. The fans, where you think, surely this is the place where
0:31:48they have to be cables. No, they have like these, you know, contacts essentially. There's
0:31:53contacts on the fan assembly and there's contacts on the motherboard and they like, you know,
0:31:58mechanically friction fit against each other to power them. The power button and the ports
0:32:02on top all sort of go down and do pressure fit contact things. Like this is so over engineered
0:32:09and ridiculous and awesome and I love the inside of it and I just think about it and
0:32:12it makes me smile. So this is one of the other nice benefits of having a machine like this.
0:32:17It is better designed and more beautiful inside than the Mac Pro in the same way that the
0:32:22Mac Pro is better than the, you know, Power Mac G3, G4. The G5 and the Mac Pro are similar
0:32:29but this is like the next step up. Like everything in it is custom and beautiful and color matched
0:32:34and has, I don't know, I love it in there. I could live in there. I could make a little
0:32:39like apartment design like that. It's amazing. I should have found one of the better links.
0:32:44I forget who it was but somebody had a really good just like literal disassembly of let
0:32:48me take all the pieces out. iFix did it as well but they did it more towards an eye of
0:32:51repairability. This person was just doing it to say look at how this thing is put together.
0:32:55I was super impressed by it.
0:32:56Yeah, I too found a couple videos that mentioned the whole no cables inside thing and it blew
0:33:01my mind. I'm like wait a minute. Yeah, there aren't any cables in there.
0:33:06And by the power supply, I mentioned it briefly, it goes into like a slot type thingy too.
0:33:11Like it doesn't have a cable. It's just into a slot with connectors.
0:33:15Yeah, that's incredible. I mean it was probably not necessary to design this this way. Like
0:33:22you know when as the pro community and people who wanted this computer to exist, as Apple
0:33:28was taking its sweet ass time making this computer and developing it, we were all saying
0:33:33like just ship a PC tower. It's not that hard. Like it isn't like everyone else does it and
0:33:39it's fine and if you want to do something fancier later, great but just ship a PC tower
0:33:42now while we're waiting. And you know that's not really Apple's style. They're not going
0:33:45to like you know quote just do things the way everyone else does them for better and
0:33:48for worse. And all the time that it took them to develop this computer, because again like
0:33:54I have a pretty good sense of how and when this thing started with all the different
0:34:01things we've heard and picked up over time and things we've whispered and everything.
0:34:04It really does seem like the development of this project started very shortly before they
0:34:09held that Mac Pro Roundtable. Like it wasn't already in the works for three years before
0:34:15that. They started it fairly recently before that. And so it basically took them about
0:34:21three years to develop this. And this is why. Because they didn't just do a tower and this
0:34:28is also why it cost $6,000. Like they really over engineered the crap out of it and it
0:34:35took them three years and they're selling it at a very high base price because it's
0:34:39a very fancy design. They did things the best way not the most economical way. They're
0:34:45going to sell this thing in very low volumes and so they have to make up all their R&D
0:34:49costs with low volume. So if you're going to amortize out the cost of all that development
0:34:57and engineering per unit you have to do it over fewer units so each one bears more of
0:35:01that cost. And not to mention the fact that they leave their healthy profit margin. So
0:35:06like there's a reason why this machine is so expensive. There's a reason why it's
0:35:11so nicely made inside and so nicely designed. I hope it has no major flaws and so far no
0:35:17one seems to have found any. And so like it does seem really awesome. Now we can argue
0:35:23and many people are whether that's the right decision. Whether they should have made this
0:35:27crazy fancy thing that kind of maybe had to be very expensive depending on how it's
0:35:32designed and how they're budgeting for and everything. Like yeah they probably should
0:35:35have made a cheaper one but if you are willing to swallow these costs it does seem like this
0:35:41is a really awesome computer. And pretty much the only reason I don't have one yet is
0:35:48because I don't have any need for all this upgradability at the moment. But if I did
0:35:54like our friend Stephen Hackett bought one and he's been documenting like the various
0:35:58upgrades he's done to it so far and it started out with like a storage upgrade. He bought
0:36:03that drive enclosure thing that goes in the top slots and put some SSDs in it. And like
0:36:07that's just really cool that you can do that. And you know right now I don't have the
0:36:10need for more internal storage than what I have on my Mac Pro. But if I did the ability
0:36:16to just pop in a bracket with an SSD on it from Amazon or like a PCI card with an SSD
0:36:23module on it like that's awesome. And I don't know if I'll ever need that kind of
0:36:28upgradability again but if I do I'm going right to the Mac Pro.
0:36:32But more on that later and follow up about expandability in the Mac Pro. But for now
0:36:36let me say like this strategy that you just described of like making a very nice tower,
0:36:42Apple has always done that strategy. It's just that time marches on, tech marches on
0:36:46and Apple gets better at it. I think there is a fairly linear progression from the G3,
0:36:52G4, the Yosemite L-cap tower case to the Power Mac G5/Mac Pro cheese grater case to this
0:37:01case, taking a detour into the trash can. In terms of how many components are there,
0:37:07how much does it look like a PC, how much can we hide the cables, like what can we do
0:37:10to make this accessible with a door and what's on the door and what's on the case and how
0:37:15easy is it to remove things and what kind of tools you need. They have always tried
0:37:19to make a computer like this. It's just they are getting better at it and tech gets
0:37:22better. Like I don't think you could have made this computer for you know any reasonable
0:37:28amount of money or even a slightly unreasonable amount of money back when the blue and white
0:37:32G3 was made but they did the best they could. That case was amazing. It's like wow, you
0:37:36can just open it up, pull this handle up, look at the side and here's all the components.
0:37:39First of all, there were so many more components and many of them had to be like commodity
0:37:43data, optical drives and hard drives which Apple does not make so there's a limited
0:37:46amount you can do and you don't want to make that proprietary. It just so happens that
0:37:49in this technical error, they can do this type of design. It must have, when they were
0:37:54talking about it like, "Oh, we want to do this and that," and it's like, "Wait
0:37:56a second. We don't have any of those things that we absolutely have to have a cable for.
0:38:00So why do we have to have cables for anything? Forget about routing them cleverly behind
0:38:04things so they're not in people's faces and they look needy and make them the right
0:38:07lengths. Why do we need cables at all?" That wasn't the case on the earlier computers
0:38:10but they've always tried to custom engineer and arguably over engineer. That's what
0:38:18Mac users like. I mean it's kind of a tautology and a self-fulfilling prophecy but it's
0:38:22like people who buy Macs and like that type of thing, these tower computers that are accessible
0:38:27and cleverly designed, it's something that people like and are willing to pay for. In
0:38:33this case, I'm hoping that this design has not sort of gone too far and sacrificed reliability
0:38:39for aesthetics. We've talked about this a lot in the past. It could be that this is
0:38:45more reliable than having cables everywhere or it could be much worse and those connections
0:38:48corrode and we're all going to be sad and I'll sell this sooner rather than later
0:38:52to get an RMac or something. Time will tell but for now, I appreciate the engineering
0:38:55involved. It is aesthetically beautiful and from an engineering perspective, it just pushes
0:38:59all my buttons. I think also, I think that seeing quite how over engineered and just engineered
0:39:08this product is suggests to me that this is not a one-off, that this is not intended to
0:39:15be a short-term product. I don't think they would have put this much effort and this much
0:39:21development into this product if it was going to be one and done, just a temporary patch
0:39:27until the arm transition or they just want to satisfy people once and then never update
0:39:32it. I don't think that's what happened here because if that was their goal, I think
0:39:37they would have done a much smaller scale job on it. It wouldn't have been this custom.
0:39:42It would have been maybe more like the old cheese grater or something. It wouldn't
0:39:47have been so much new custom high-end development and design but it is and that suggests to
0:39:54me that this is a product category and form factor that they're intending, at least
0:40:01at this moment, to keep around for a long time. It does raise the increasingly worrisome
0:40:07question for me of will the iMac Pro ever be updated again because I look at this and
0:40:14the more I think about it, the more I think that the iMac Pro was intended to be the long-term
0:40:22thing, they changed their mind and made the Mac Pro instead, released the iMac Pro as
0:40:27it was but are now not going to put any effort into it because why would they? Because every
0:40:32iMac Pro buyer is somebody who, if the iMac Pro didn't exist, would be very likely to
0:40:38buy a Mac Pro instead. And so it seems like they have a severe cannibalization angle to
0:40:43never update the iMac Pro again which I would be very unhappy with.
0:40:46I don't know if I agree with that because an iMac Pro is an all-in-one system. Everything
0:40:52is ready to go right out of the box for about five grand, right? That's where it starts
0:40:56or is it?
0:40:57Yep, five grand.
0:40:58Five, right? So you can have, for $5,000, a completely functional computer which is
0:41:03to my eyes and amongst anyone I can think of probably the upper limit of what an average
0:41:11person would do even for people like us that are independent professionals, right? I don't
0:41:17think most normal independent professionals would look at a $7,000 to $15,000 computer
0:41:24purchase and say, "Oh yeah, that's the breaks." So I think I understand what you're saying,
0:41:28Marco, and I'm not feeling confident about the iMac Pro getting updated but I wouldn't
0:41:32necessarily say that the Mac Pro is taking that spot in the lineup. I think that the
0:41:38iMac Pro has a very clear spot in the lineup. The question is whether or not Apple cares.
0:41:43Well yeah, that's the thing. I'm not saying that there's no room for it but I think
0:41:49the way Apple developed the Mac Pro, I think they're going to want people to buy it and
0:41:54they're going to want to funnel the iMac purchasers who are going for the iMac Pro
0:42:01upmarket into the Mac Pro. They're going to want to upsell us basically and enough
0:42:06of us will come along for the ride that they will because most of the people I know who
0:42:10have iMac Pros right now didn't have Mac Pros before, they had regular iMacs because
0:42:16the regular iMac is also a damn good computer. So I think what Apple might see is, "Hey,
0:42:23why don't we just split this market up and down basically that people who really need
0:42:28the Pro hardware, we want them to now buy our higher end Mac Pro, not the iMac Pro,
0:42:34and those who don't want to or can't spend that much money on it, they'll be well
0:42:38served by our consumer iMac line." I'm not saying I agree with that statement but I think
0:42:43that's what Apple very well might want us to do. Because if you think about it, we've
0:42:48heard from a couple people now, I think I haven't verified this, I'm sorry, but I
0:42:52think the next processors that would go in the iMac Pro are out by Intel. I think they're
0:42:58available, they're out. Somebody said they're also a lot cheaper actually than the current
0:43:03ones because Intel is getting a lot of competition from AMD recently and so they're competing
0:43:09on price a little bit with some of these lines. And so apparently we have what we need to
0:43:16have an updated iMac Pro and it hasn't happened yet. And I was thinking, I mean this is kind
0:43:21of a cynical thought but like, why would Apple update the iMac Pro right now? Because if
0:43:26they update the iMac Pro anytime soon, it's probably going to make their brand new Mac
0:43:31Pro look bad. Because it's probably going to beat it on single thread and it's at least
0:43:36going to perform extremely well and it's going to almost certainly give it a really good
0:43:42run for the money for value because it does now. Unless they dramatically raise the price
0:43:47on the iMac Pro, I think it will continue to be a way better value than the Mac Pro.
0:43:53And so if they release a new iMac Pro anytime soon, I think it would make the Mac Pro look
0:43:59bad. And if you follow that logic, like okay, well that kind of makes sense why they wouldn't
0:44:03update the iMac Pro now, but why would they ever update the iMac Pro if that's the logic?
0:44:09So again, I don't know if this is how they're thinking, but I think it's likely that this
0:44:14is probably what's going to happen. I think the iMac Pro is not going to be updated again
0:44:18and that makes me very sad to think about.
0:44:20I don't know why, unless you have some info that I don't, I'm not as pessimistic as you
0:44:23about that. I mean, and getting back to your other point about the Mac Pro being the case
0:44:27being designed for a long term, if you look at Apple's tower case history, they've gotten
0:44:32a lot of mileage about all of them, again starting from the G3 Yosemite style case.
0:44:38I know it's confusing because it's an OS, but anyway, the case with it looks like a square
0:44:44with handles coming out at an angle and it was all plastic and had the door on the side.
0:44:47They used essentially that same case design, although they changed the colors, blue and
0:44:51white G3, then the G4, then what, Quicksilver, mirror drive door, like they got a lot of
0:44:57mileage out of that.
0:44:58They did a lot of surface finish changes like car models do by changing like the front and
0:45:02rear fascia, right, but otherwise it's basically the same chassis. And then of course the cheese
0:45:05grater launched with the Power Mac G5 and they kept using it right through the Intel
0:45:09transition, basically the same case with different ports and stuff on the front and the back
0:45:14and they changed the fan holes and changed all the internals, but that case lasted a
0:45:17long time. And this case, assuming they continue to make tower computers, they'll keep using
0:45:22it straight through the ARM transition if they have one. If you look inside that case,
0:45:27it's a good design that can support basically any kind of computer that has a motherboard
0:45:30and stuff stuck into it. So it is very versatile and I think they'll keep going with that.
0:45:35The iMac is another example. We've had essentially the same iMac design ever since someone came
0:45:39up on stage at an Apple keynote and said "friction stir welding" and I remember how many years
0:45:43ago that was. Even though the iMac Pro is totally different on the inside and shares
0:45:47zero parts with that original iMac that shipped in this case, you look at it from the outside
0:45:51and you're like "yeah, if I made a mold of that case it would basically be the same as
0:45:54that first one", right? And so they got a lot of mileage out of that case because it
0:45:57was, you know, hard to design. I think an iMac redesign is coming. If they do it Porsche
0:46:02911 style, they'll redesign the iMac and they won't touch the iMac Pro and Mark will be
0:46:08like "see, I told you, they're not making an iMac Pro, they just came out with a new
0:46:11iMac and it looks different and whatever the hell, but it's an all in one computer and
0:46:15it is a different physical case, but there's no new iMac Pro and I'm sad". But when Porsche
0:46:20comes out with a new 911, they don't launch with the 911 Turbo, right? They just give
0:46:24you the Carrera 4S or whatever and then you wait and then the Turbo comes out and same
0:46:29thing with the BMW and the 3 Series. Like the M3 doesn't launch with the new generation.
0:46:32In fact, for some period of time, if you get an M3 you get the previous gen because the
0:46:36new gen isn't out, right? So maybe the iMac Pro ships later in the new form factor.
0:46:40Obviously I think the iMac is going to stay around. I think it's due for a redesign. I
0:46:44think they'll keep making an iMac Pro just because they either have to make a new iMac
0:46:48Pro or they have to make a non-obscenely priced monitor because no one who is buying an iMac
0:46:54Pro is going to be upsold on the Mac Pro if the only monitor available is that thing or
0:46:59the LG. So I still have more faith than Marko, let's say, that the iMac Pro will be updated
0:47:05even if the iMac gets redesigned and the iMac Pro doesn't come with it. I expect the iMac
0:47:09Pro to come later.
0:47:10I hope so. I really do because I just, speaking for myself, there's no way I'm going to be
0:47:15pushed into a Mac Pro. It's just not happening. I would get a Mac Mini and a crappy LG monitor
0:47:20before I would get a Mac Pro.
0:47:22You would just get the other iMac.
0:47:23But the reason people got the iMac Pro though is because the iMac Pro is the best iMac.
0:47:28It's not because it's fast, not because of Xeon, it's not because of ECC. It is a better
0:47:31iMac. Its cooling system is better and apparently its reliability is better so far, right? Is
0:47:37it because of the Xeon and ECC? Probably not. Probably just because they put more engineering
0:47:41resources into better design and cooling system and drop the support for the spinning hard
0:47:45drive that let them have the bigger fan and yada yada. We've talked about this before.
0:47:49It's the best iMac. It just also happens to be darker colored and have a fancier CPU and
0:47:54ECC RAM. But I really hope and whatever the next iMac is, we'll share, even the plain old
0:48:01regular 5K iMac or 6K or whatever the hell, whatever they call the base iMac, I hope it
0:48:05inherits all of the good sort of runtime performance characteristics of the iMac Pro even if it
0:48:11doesn't have a Xeon or any of that stuff in it. That's my hope for the model. And when
0:48:15that comes out and there's no new iMac Pro, I still hope and believe that there will be
0:48:19a subsequent iMac Pro that will be sort of the all-in-one sibling to the Mac Pro. I think
0:48:25there's enough differentiation for Apple to do that and I don't think they're going to
0:48:28try to upsell people.
0:48:29I'm just surprised when you brought up the 9/11 that you weren't making a joke about
0:48:33how the iMac will always and forever look the same just like 9/11.
0:48:36I look the same, man. 9/11's involved too. It gets bigger and wider every year. Almost
0:48:42every year.
0:48:43Plus 10% every year.
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0:49:54What are you doing about Time Machine in your Mac Pro, John?
0:49:59This is one thing about my setup experience. I've got all this data on here. I copied
0:50:04the photo library from a different SSD, because my photo library is an external SSD. At first,
0:50:09I was like, "Oh, just sign in to iCloud, and it will sync this stuff down." But iCloud
0:50:12does not sync your projects, which sucks. It syncs your photos and your keywords. It
0:50:19syncs a lot of stuff, but not everything. In particular, projects, like I do all those
0:50:22photo books, iCloud does not sync those. So I had to actually physically copy my photo
0:50:27library, which is on an external SSD. I just brought it over here, hooked up to this one,
0:50:34copied it over, launched it. Then I have to allow iCloud to get itself in order and be
0:50:40like, "Oh, what are all these new pictures? I feel like I need to upload these, but it
0:50:43doesn't, so it has to go through all of them." So I was doing that, and then of course I've
0:50:46got Backblaze. I had to inherit my backup history and Backblaze, and no, you don't need
0:50:51Backblaze. You don't need to re-upload everything. This has a lot of the same data as my old
0:50:55computer. I didn't have to transfer the license. It basically thinks this is my old computer,
0:50:59so I had to let Backblaze run. I'm like, "All these things will take time." Those things
0:51:03finish relatively quickly. The photo is synced. Backblaze is all set. Everything is good.
0:51:08Time machine. Now, I don't have an internal time machine drive yet. I'm still letting
0:51:13Steven Hackett be the pioneer here and figure out what the good internal storage solution
0:51:16is. Again, more on that a little bit later. But I have my Synology, where my old time
0:51:21machine backup was for my Mac Pro with a very long history because I had a generous amount
0:51:25of time machine space on there. I didn't want to lose all the history, so I had time machine
0:51:29inherit that backup history. Time machine is like, "Okay, I'm doing that, and I've got
0:51:33to go through all your stuff, and then plus you have all this new stuff for me to back
0:51:36up because this photo library is new, and it's like a terabyte photo library that I've
0:51:41got to deal with." Time machine has got a lot of work to do. Time machine has been running
0:51:48on this computer for four days, five days. It is not completed yet. It is showing me
0:51:55new kinds of progress messages that I've never seen before. If you see time machine go, it
0:52:02does preparing to back up and then backing up and backed up X amount of Y. You can look
0:52:06at the preference pane in time machine, and it will show a little message underneath in
0:52:12a progress bar. You can look in the little menu and see what it shows. It has given up
0:52:17trying to give me any progress other than telling me how much it has backed up. Right
0:52:21now it is saying backed up colon 1.41 terabytes. It doesn't give me X out of Y. It doesn't
0:52:28give me percentage. The progress bar in this preference pane is indeterminate. It is doing
0:52:33work. Occasionally I peek at it with FSU usage and say, "Backup D, are you doing anything?"
0:52:36It's totally doing stuff. In fact, for the past day or so, it has been wandering over
0:52:41all of the individually stored messages that Outlook shoves in some obscure folder. It
0:52:45makes one file for each email message. It has been going for a long time. I made a mistake
0:52:52after the first day of trimming the exclude list in time machine, and it was like, "Oh,
0:52:56I have to start over." I trimmed from the exclude list directories that no longer exist.
0:53:02I don't know why they were in there. It was like my PS4 movies folder back from when I
0:53:07was using a DLNA server with my PlayStation 3. I'm like, "Oh, I don't need that. I'm
0:53:11just going through everything, getting rid of old stuff. Let me trim that." Time machine
0:53:14says, "Stopping backup." I'm like, "Oh, no." It says, "Preparing backup." Normally,
0:53:21I stop time machine when we record podcasts because I'm paranoid, but I've got 12 chorus,
0:53:26and there's no way in hell I'm stopping it, so time machine has been running this
0:53:28entire time. Since this is the first recording on this computer, I'm hoping everything
0:53:32will go off well, but just so you know, I have been running a time machine backup this
0:53:35whole time, which shouldn't cause this computer to break a sweat. Speaking of that, I've
0:53:42got this computer here. It is on my little end table thingy, so it is up off the ground,
0:53:47about two and a half feet-ish. It's a lower level table than my desk, but it's higher
0:53:54than the floor. I mentioned that I had my Power Mac G5 and various points of my Mac
0:54:00Pro on the desk next to my monitor, but it was just too loud. Power Mac G5 was way too
0:54:06loud, and I had a chirping power supply that was bad. My Mac Pro, in general, was quiet,
0:54:10but it was still too loud to have on my desk. This computer is quieter than my Mac Pro,
0:54:17my 2008 Mac Pro. Definitely quieter than my Power Mac G5. It is not quieter than my wife's
0:54:245K iMac when it's not doing anything.
0:54:26Ah, interesting.
0:54:27So the 5K iMac is basically silent if it's not doing anything. Obviously, as soon as
0:54:33you do anything, the 5K iMac makes a racket, right? But if you're idle, the 5K iMac is
0:54:39almost entirely silent. At idle, sitting not on the floor, but raised up sort of, you know,
0:54:47I can touch it with my left arm, barely, you know, like I'm touching it with my left arm
0:54:51now without moving my body, but barely can reach it. It's right there. It makes a noise
0:54:56that's kind of like, imagine like the wind moving through like a deserted Grand Central
0:55:03Station after the apocalypse.
0:55:04A terminal.
0:55:05But not a strong wind. Just kind of like, or it's not like the, what do they call it?
0:55:12Mark would know this. What is it called? Room noise? What is that called? An audio engineer?
0:55:16Yeah, room tone.
0:55:17Yeah, there you go. It's not the same as the Star Trek room tone or the sci-fi ship room
0:55:22tone, but it's very kind of like, but in really low volume, right? Like you think at first,
0:55:29like am I hearing anything, but if everybody else is really silent, you can kind of hear
0:55:35like even with my headphones on, I can kind of hear it, but it is like all the stuff I
0:55:40talked about of like randomizing the fan blades, like it has no discernible frequency and it
0:55:45is very sort of, it's like the most inoffensive, it's not even fan noise. It's like, it's like
0:55:50air noise, right? If it was under my desk, I think it might be entirely silent. So, so
0:55:57far I've had it up here and I'm probably going to keep it up here because I don't mind it
0:56:01because like it's the type of noise that if you're not concentrating on it, it disappears
0:56:04entirely. For about 20 minutes today, earlier today, I figured I really need to stress this
0:56:11thing because I've been messing with it in backblaze and running a time machine has been
0:56:14running and I've been deleting stuff and copying things and installing programs and whatever
0:56:17I'm like, but I need to like see what this thing, so I ran a handbrake thing for 20 minutes.
0:56:22Saw all the, you know, 24 threads, 12 CPU cores being pretty much pegged. It didn't
0:56:29make any different noise like ever. The noise that I've described to you, that's how it
0:56:36has sounded the entire time I've owned it. They don't even spin up when you boot. Like
0:56:40I don't know what these fans sound like if they ever get loud. Like I have, I'm pretty
0:56:45sure the volume has never increased and there's nothing I can do to it to make it increase.
0:56:50I've played Destiny on this more than that in a little bit and it sounds the same. So
0:56:55I'm not sure. Is the computer on? Like in this way it is like the iMac Pro but more
0:57:02so. Like I, I honestly, let me tell you how deep, I installed iStat Mains. Can I see the
0:57:08fan RPMs? Because I was like, tell me, are the fans spinning any faster? Because it would
0:57:12make sense that I don't hear any noise if the fans are not spinning any faster because
0:57:16they're the only moving part in the machine. Like there's no hard drives, there's no optical
0:57:20drives. Like only, there's only three fans and then a blower fan in the back. So there's
0:57:25four spinning things in here. And I don't know, iStat Menu couldn't make heads or tails
0:57:29on this computer. It gave me a bunch of temperature stuff, all of which was like ridiculously cool.
0:57:33I couldn't get any fan RPMs out of it. I'd have to buy it or register. Anyway, I installed
0:57:37it. You know. That's what I always do with iStat Menu. I install it and I'm like, alright,
0:57:41I want you to stop now. And the only option is to uninstall. So I can't figure out how
0:57:45to make this thing make any more noise. So the noise that it makes, like I said, so much
0:57:48quieter than my previous towers. But I feel like an iMac at idle is still more silent
0:57:54than this because this is moving a lot of air through it somehow magically. I am a little
0:57:59bit disappointed that you can hear it at idle though because the iMacs that Apple has made
0:58:05in recent years, especially the iMac Pro, are so damn quiet. That's because the fan
0:58:09is on the other side of you. That's what it is. Like you have a screen between you and
0:58:12the fan whereas these fans like, it's like open air headphones. Like these are open air
0:58:17fans. They're right there. Like huge openings are in front of them. There's no way, like
0:58:21if they're moving air through it, you're going to hear it. Whereas in the iMac, it's all
0:58:25just like behind you. Like I bet if you turned your iMac around and stared at it that way,
0:58:30you'd hear it at idle. But you don't. You stare at the screen side. Like closed back.
0:58:34I mean, you have a closed back Mac. I have an open.
0:58:37Yeah, yeah. I think I would have to keep it on the floor for that reason because I'm spoiled
0:58:42now. Like now that I have had, you know, basically silent iMacs for, geez, six years, something
0:58:50like that, five years, I'm now ruined and I really don't want to ever hear my computer
0:58:56again.
0:58:57Yeah, it couldn't, I don't think you would like it on the desk like next to you. Again,
0:59:00mine is off the side of the desk. Like if this was one foot farther away or it was under
0:59:05the desk, I wouldn't be able to hear it probably.
0:59:07That's good. And especially because like it's such a massive thing that I think almost everybody,
0:59:11myself included, would not keep it up on anything. Like I'd keep it on the floor. So it wouldn't
0:59:15be, it wouldn't be a problem.
0:59:16Yeah, I'm keeping it up. I mean, I said for, you know, because the floor is a dangerous
0:59:19place for a fancy computer, but also because it's nice to look at it and I like to look
0:59:22at it. It may eventually like graduate to slash be relegated to the floor later in its
0:59:27life. But for now, I'm happy to have it up here so I can look at it and appreciate it
0:59:32because it is like, like a lot of new cars that look kind of weird when you first see
0:59:37them cyber dark excluded, which will always be weird. This has really grown on me. And
0:59:42just having this in your house is a beautiful thing to look at, which again is one of my,
0:59:46one of my sort of fitness criteria for having a Mac. I enjoy, I enjoy looking at it. I enjoy
0:59:50seeing it there. It's a nice thing to have in your house.
0:59:57So more, more setup stuff. I know Casey used to joke like, oh, that's the Mac Pro. We're
1:00:02going to be talking about the Mac Pro for such a long time. Like, how much is there
1:00:05to talk about it? I now concede that Casey was correct. Mostly because like, mostly because
1:00:11the setup process like is never ending. I don't even have the monitor yet. Like this
1:00:15is going to get dragged out. I feel like it's not entirely my fault, but it's partially
1:00:19my fault. It's entirely your fault. No, because if I had everything, I can get it all out
1:00:23in one show, but you're going to be hearing more about the stupid Mac Pro for a while.
1:00:27No, I'm sorry. But hopefully I'm touching on topics that are at least educational or
1:00:31interesting. Here's one that is not Mac Pro specific, but it's, well, you'll see. So I've
1:00:37got this thing. It's still on my PlayStation monitor. I want to play Destiny. I can of
1:00:41course just bring the monitor back and forth. And I did that a couple of times, but that's
1:00:44a pain. You got to go into the desk and find the stupid power brick for the LG monitor.
1:00:48And then it's just carried over and reconnected and it's a pain. And I did want to also play
1:00:55Destiny on this computer to see what it's like to play at more than 30 frames per second.
1:00:59Because as I noted in the last show, for people who don't know, Destiny on PlayStation runs
1:01:02at 30 frames per second. Destiny on PC runs at whatever frames per second that your computer
1:01:08can run it at. And there's some speculation about how crappy the base video card is, what
1:01:12it would be able to do, but I wanted to try it. So to run Destiny on this Mac, obviously
1:01:16I need to install Windows. To install Windows, I need to do Boot Camp. Boot Camp is always
1:01:21sort of this mystery. We've joked about if it's still being supported. You know, would
1:01:25it run? Does it still work? It is apparently still supported. When I ran Boot Camp Assistant,
1:01:34it wanted to install Boot Camp partition on my boot drive, basically. And I didn't want
1:01:42to do that because I'm not even done setting up my boot drive and time machine is running
1:01:47and I don't want to repartition it and I didn't know what it was going to do. I'm like, no,
1:01:51don't touch. Don't touch my 4TB SSD. Leave it alone. That's just, that's mine. I don't
1:01:55want Windows taking any of that space. That's a precious commodity. I enjoy having a lot
1:01:59of it. I don't want you messing with that. I'm going to install Boot Camp on an external
1:02:04drive, which is exactly what I had in my Mac Pro. I had a whole, I had a hard drive mechanism
1:02:07in there that was my boot camp. My quote unquote boot camp partition, but it was a whole drive.
1:02:12That was ages ago. Like, you know, 2008 I installed it. I had Windows XP on it originally. I think
1:02:17I might still have Windows XP. Anyway, I need Windows on this thing. I have an external
1:02:22drive. I hook up an external SSD. I'm going to be fancy. I got this temporary. I'm just
1:02:26going to use it to see how Destiny runs. I go, you know, I connect them to the SSD. It's
1:02:31an external USB-C connected again, 10 gigabits per second, but it's plenty for playing Destiny.
1:02:37And I go launch boot camp assistant and boot camp system is like, you have an external
1:02:42drive attached to your computer. Get that crap out of here and then relaunch this program.
1:02:48And not to say I can't install boot camp or Windows on external drive. It said you can't
1:02:54even run this program if external drives are connected to your computer. I'm pretty sure
1:03:01I unmounted the drive and it still said, looks like you have external drives connected to
1:03:06your computer. You got to get that crap out of here. I'm like, it's unmounted. To physically
1:03:11disconnect it, but like, here's the thing. I want to install boot camp on an external
1:03:15drive and boot camp assistant is like, nuh-uh. No, you are not going to do that. I'm like,
1:03:22what? I guess I don't, you know, so many times I'm like, oh, I just want to just go through
1:03:26the system and let it do it to my boot drive. I'm like, but you know what? No, I don't know
1:03:29how to get rid of that partition. I don't know what it's going to do. Will Shipley just
1:03:32had a question on Twitter right before the show. It was like, does it do the APFS volumes
1:03:36thing where you can easily add and remove volumes to an APFS container? You know that
1:03:40whole thing, like how easy it is to add them and they share the space. And I was like,
1:03:44I don't know, but I didn't want to find out. Like it made it look like it was going to
1:03:47partition. Like there would be the APFS container and then there would be like these sort of
1:03:50a, you know, GPT partition level thing. And then there would be the, like, I didn't want
1:03:54to find out. And I was like, but it would work and it would be fast. And I'm like, no,
1:03:57I'm going to do this. I'm going to figure out how to get boot camp installed on an external
1:04:03drive. And thus began probably the worst computer battle experience I've had in the last five
1:04:09years, maybe the last 10 years. I can't, nothing in memory was worse than this experience.
1:04:16You know, and as many of these things do these days, it starts with, you know, you do a Google
1:04:21search because surely someone else has had this problem. And boy, Google searches come
1:04:25up with a lot of results, which is usually a blessing and a curse because it shows lots
1:04:29of people have this problem. But if there was one answer, they're feeling like there
1:04:33would be fewer results. So we're going to put a bunch of links in the show notes. I
1:04:38put a bunch of links to things that I found in the show notes. None of these links had
1:04:45a procedure that would work for me to accomplish the task. I'm going to put them all in there
1:04:50though just to show you kind of what's involved and what's involved. And the solution that
1:04:57I actually did do is like a modified mix of these, but it more or less starts with installing
1:05:05VirtualBox, which is a bad sign. Yeah, which is because the free version of VirtualBox,
1:05:12like there are ones that use VMware too. And I own a copy of VMware. VirtualBox is free.
1:05:17People don't know it's an emulator that runs like x86 OS is like VMware. So you can install
1:05:21Windows and VMware. You can install Windows or Linux and VirtualBox and it runs like natively
1:05:26on your Intel Mac alongside your other thing. Anyway, this is also, you can get yourself
1:05:34to a situation where the virtual Windows machine thing that's running inside VirtualBox views
1:05:41your external drive as if it is like the one in all the internal drive and can install
1:05:50Windows onto it. So you end up creating like a VMDK virtual disk thing in raw mode against
1:05:59your unmounted drive using the device. This is all command line stuff. Using your drive's
1:06:04device number, which is a terrifying experience when you're typing. Anytime you find yourself
1:06:07typing /dev/disksomething in Mac OS, it's like, "Oh my God. Let me just take this opportunity
1:06:14to reiterate one of my rules of computing for young people and old people like do not
1:06:20type things on the command line. Do not type process IDs. Do not type device numbers. Do
1:06:25not type things on the command line." Because you know what happens when you type things?
1:06:29You get typos. Kill -9 PID and you type out the PID. Oops, you killed in it because you
1:06:35put a space before the first one. Device numbers /dev/disk5. Oh, I typed 4 instead. I just
1:06:42deleted my boot drive. When you're running all this as root, do not type things. Copy
1:06:49and paste. Copy and paste and also confirm because you can copy and paste and think you
1:06:53copied but really you did and you pasted the previous number. But yeah, do not type things.
1:06:56So I'm carefully doing this and then I'm running Windows in the virtual machine. I have a legit
1:07:01copy of Windows 10, a Windows 10 ISO that I purchased and downloaded for this purpose
1:07:05and you can make that be the optical drive for the VirtualBox thing. And you go through
1:07:11this whole procedure and you have to type in your, in VirtualBox, type in your Windows
1:07:17product key. It doesn't allow copy and paste. There's no copy and paste from the Mac world
1:07:22so I typed that Windows product key so many times that I almost have it memorized. It's
1:07:26one of those things that I may remember portions of that Windows product key. Oh my God, I
1:07:30typed it so many times. I actually did have my college Windows XP key memorized. Yeah,
1:07:34it's a good thing to know. I also installed it on a lot of computers. Anyway, you follow
1:07:40the procedure in one of these things and they're like, they're like, you know, use VirtualBox,
1:07:44get the thing set up as a drive, partition it with DiskUtil and then, you know, reformat
1:07:50the partitions during the Windows setup process and do a custom thing and type in your Windows
1:07:54key and then let the Windows 10 installer run and this is my favorite part of the procedure
1:07:59that I ended up doing. RM233FR4RHJP89H, I forget the rest. Damn it. I was hoping I could
1:08:09do that. No free copy of Windows XP for anyone listening. Sorry, you can get, you almost
1:08:13got it but not quite. If you know the checksum rules, maybe you can figure out what the missing
1:08:17numbers are. And the, and they let's, you're supposed to run the Windows installer and
1:08:22the instructions say, did I say 2PRQQ? That was in there somewhere. The instructions say,
1:08:27when it says we need to restart Windows, like after like all the little progress steps go,
1:08:34power down the VirtualBox thing. So like hard power off, like hit the red button, red window
1:08:38widget on the thing and it's like power off because you don't want it to continue the
1:08:42process. You want it, the thing was like, at this point you have a, you have taken your
1:08:48actual external drive connected to your Mac and convinced the VM that it's one of its
1:08:52virtual drives and it has installed Windows on it to the point where now your Mac can
1:08:55boot from it. Oh my goodness. So you're basically using VirtualBox instead of the boot camp
1:08:59assistant to do that. You also, there's also another step where you download the drivers
1:09:03for boot camp, which they actually do make easy in the boot camp assistant. You can download
1:09:06just the drivers and put them on like a fat 32 USB key and then copy them onto the thing.
1:09:10Like that, that's a side, like that's part of it more or less worked. But this part of
1:09:14it, it's like do this procedure, set up this disc, which is a pain because you have to
1:09:17unmount it and then it gets auto remounted. Then you have to unmount it again and then
1:09:21set up the virtual drive and you can't give it the same name twice because it thinks it
1:09:24knows about the virtual drive, but the UUID is different and it's a whole bunch of details
1:09:27that make it more complicated. But the point is I did this fairly lengthy procedure many
1:09:31times and then I would reboot my Mac and hold on the option key and it would not see my
1:09:35external drive. Like it wasn't an option. It would just show my internal drive, the
1:09:39external drive would be connected and it would not show it at all. And I was like, what?
1:09:45But just I'm doing what it says and people saying there because I tried the VMware approach
1:09:49and similar type of things. Like my Mac would not see that external drive. I'm like, maybe
1:09:54it's lying to me about the partition format. Maybe it shouldn't be master boot record.
1:09:58Maybe it should be GPD. Maybe it should be a FAT32 versus NTFS. Then just I went around
1:10:05and around in circles forever and just trying to get it to the point where the thing would
1:10:08even see my external drive. This took many, many hours alone to convince myself that I
1:10:14was at the point where I thought I was right. And then there was one instruction like I
1:10:17found the comment someone's articles like pages of comments and one is like everything
1:10:21this article works up to step 36. This is not a joke. Up to step 36 and then it says
1:10:28you're supposed to do X, Y and Z. But it turns out what you're supposed to do is when you
1:10:31get to that step in the Windows installer, delete all your previous partitions and then
1:10:35just let the Windows installer run and it will create the correct partitions for it
1:10:39to be bootable. That's a lie and this person is wrong.
1:10:43Oh no. But I was at the point because he's basically
1:10:47saying, the instructions say this but instead you should do the opposite. But I was at the
1:10:51point where I had done this so many times and was so familiar with what it was trying
1:10:54to accomplish. I read that comment and I had, speaking of Galaxy Brain, I had that moment
1:10:59like this would be like the dramatic music. I looked at that comment and I said, "If I
1:11:03do the opposite of this comment, I bet it will work." So I did the opposite of the comment.
1:11:11Instead of deleting those partitions or whatever, I set them up the way the comment said they
1:11:15shouldn't be and I left them there. I'm like, "This has to be it." I figured it out. I figured
1:11:21it out by reading an article that's wrong and then reading a comment and then knowing
1:11:25that I have to do the opposite of the comment. Even though the comment says, "Hey, I read
1:11:29the article and it didn't work and I had to do something different," do the opposite of
1:11:32that. I was so proud of myself. I'm like, "This is awesome. This is going to work."
1:11:38I rebooted and it wouldn't see the drive. It just does not see the drive. This is where
1:11:46being old is bad. This is where being like Casey who doesn't remember what happened previously
1:11:49on the show. In my memory bank somewhere was the information I needed to figure out the
1:11:53final piece that I needed to know because at this point I had installed Windows 10 like
1:11:56a dozen times. I'm an expert Windows 10 installer. I'm an expert VirtualBox virtual machine setter
1:12:03up. I did all sorts of other experiments by setting up multiple virtual machines and having
1:12:05one talk to the other. I did lots of stuff. I'm like, "This should work." Further Googling
1:12:13tickled something in my mind. I'm like, "Wait a second. People who are listening to this
1:12:18are shouting right now. They're shouting at me right now. They all know what my problem
1:12:21is. You two also know this information because we talked about it in ATP, but then we all
1:12:26forgot."
1:12:27Yeah. Didn't I create an external boot disk to play inside?
1:12:30Yeah, but what is the key piece of information that I'm missing that's thwarting me? Assume,
1:12:35which is the correct assumption I can tell you right now, that I had correctly put the
1:12:39bits on that external drive. What's my problem? Why is this not working?
1:12:44Is it a weird Catalina thing that it's not booting some kind of unapproved drive? You
1:12:50got it. Remember when we discussed this back like ... It was actually when that ... Not
1:12:53Catalina but like the T2. Remember when the T2 Max first came out and we just talked about
1:12:57the T2 Max?
1:12:58No. Is it a T2 thing?
1:13:00Yeah.
1:13:01What is it that we know about the T2 in terms of security?
1:13:03That would be why some people in the comments would have this issue and some people wouldn't.
1:13:07If they had a new Mac, they would have this issue.
1:13:10No one in the comments as far as I could see had this particular issue. They were just
1:13:13arguing about how to get the bits onto the disk and they were all wrong and so was the
1:13:16article. I eventually got the right bits onto the disk. The T2, the reason you can't take
1:13:21the SSD out of the Mac Pro and just put it in a third party one is because it's paired
1:13:25to the T2. It's paired to the T2 so it can have a secure boot environment where it boots
1:13:30knowing that what I'm booting from is a known good secure disk that has had system integrity
1:13:35protection that is keyed to the T2. You know all that crap?
1:13:40I hope nobody at Apple who worked on all that crap heard you summarize it that way.
1:13:45It's basically trying to ... Like we have discussed and I have made this exact analogy
1:13:48many times, the assumption used to be that when you have physical access to a Mac, all
1:13:53security bets are off because you could just boot from an external drive and you own the
1:13:56thing, right?
1:13:57Yeah.
1:13:58Assuming the disks aren't encrypted whereas the assumption with the iPhone has been like
1:14:00even if you have physical access, it's really hard to get in. The Macs with T2 are trying
1:14:04to be more like iPhones. Even if you have physical access, if I encrypt the disks and
1:14:07put a firmware password on, you shouldn't be able to just boot from an external drive
1:14:11and I'll be able to run hacking software and try to crack your thing. T2 Macs will not
1:14:16boot from an external drive, period. There's a security setting in T2 Macs that says, "Hey,
1:14:25should I allow booting from an external drive?" If you don't turn that on, it will never see
1:14:29an external drive that you've just installed Windows from and it will never boot from it.
1:14:33It will never even show it. That was the final piece of information. I boot into recovery
1:14:37mode and I go to the setting and it says, "Hey, do you want this Mac to be able to boot
1:14:40from external drive?" I said, "Yes. Yes." That's what I've been trying to do over the
1:14:44past literally 10 hours. It's like 3 a.m. at this point. I'm like, "Yes. Boot from the
1:14:50external drive." I reboot, hold down the option key and there it is. There it friggin' is.
1:14:55Oh my gosh.
1:14:56My boot camp disk and I boot from it and Windows 10 launches and I'm in Windows 10 and I can't
1:15:01do anything because it doesn't see my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. But that aside, this is
1:15:08my first Mac that I've had a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard because they came in the box
1:15:11and I really like this keyboard. This is my favorite keyboard feel. The key layout is
1:15:14still – I wish the function keys were far away from the numbers but I like the big escape
1:15:17key. I really like these key switches. The mouse, I hate. I've used it for a week now.
1:15:22I knew I would hate it. I still hate it. Anyway, maybe I'll talk about them a little more
1:15:25later but when you reboot into Windows, it has no freaking idea what input peripherals
1:15:31are so I had to get a wired mouse and keyboard, connect them so I could type in my username
1:15:34and password and blah, blah, blah. Then get it to pair with the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard
1:15:38and every time I reboot into Mac OS, it's the same deal.
1:15:41But other than that, I was so relieved. So if you have a T2-based Mac and you are trying
1:15:46to install anything on an external drive and boot from it, be readvised as discussed on
1:15:54past episodes of ATB that we all forgot about. It's a setting. You have to allow external
1:16:00booting. Otherwise, you can't boot from an external drive. So that's my boot camp
1:16:07battle. It was long and terrifying. Anything that involves like a 30-minute install process
1:16:14as your sort of iteration step size, it's just bad. Even if I only did it like 12, 13
1:16:21times, it seems like forever and each time I was just banging my head against the wall.
1:16:25So all the end of that story is I installed Steam, installed Destiny, ran it. The answer
1:16:30to the question is this crappy Radeon 580X. It can run Destiny at like 90 frames per second
1:16:39in 1080 in 4K. When you run it in 4K, it gets more than 30 frames per second but it dips
1:16:47below 60. So luckily, Destiny has lots of settings on PC. So I basically set the screen
1:16:51resolution to 4K and the render resolution to 75% and that gets pegged at 60 frames.
1:16:58And I have a 60 hertz monitor anyway so there's no point in being faster than that. So I did
1:17:02get to play Destiny at 4K at 60 frames per second a lot. And it's really good. I love
1:17:07the wider field of view. It's super smooth. I enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy playing against
1:17:11PC users with mouse and keyboard because they kill me a lot but it was fun. There were more
1:17:19battles with Steam by the way because I have a PlayStation controller and I've paired it
1:17:24with my wife's iMac to play on Geforce Now and Stadia that I've talked about in the past.
1:17:29I'm like, "Oh, I'll just pair my PlayStation controller with this Windows 10 computer that
1:17:33I'm booted into and I'll be able to play Destiny with my PlayStation 4 controller on this."
1:17:38And I pair it and it works fine and I'm using it to move around the Steam user interface.
1:17:44So I know Steam sees the controller. Every time I launch Destiny, all it sees is the
1:17:47mouse and keyboard. I'm like, "I used the controller to launch this game. Steam knows
1:17:52about the controller. I can customize the settings in Steam. Why, Destiny, do you not
1:17:56see the controller?" You know when you get in that mindset after you've battled with
1:18:01the computer for -- this is the next day at this point but I went to bed at like 3 a.m.
1:18:04This is the next day. I'm like, "Now I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and I can't
1:18:08get the controller to work." I tried mouse and keyboard. I suck so bad at mouse and keyboard
1:18:12in Destiny. There's just too many controls. I cannot handle it. I am garbage. So I'm like,
1:18:15"Well, back to controller for me." I couldn't get it to see. I was so just distraught that
1:18:21like nothing on a computer will work for me ever again. Like that's it. Last night was
1:18:24all -- I gave all I had and I succeeded but now nothing will ever work. I think people
1:18:31who play Destiny on PC know the answer to this question and would be yelling at it and
1:18:35say, "You dummy." Yes, of course, the PlayStation controller works in Steam and your PC recognizes
1:18:41it and it's paired but Destiny does not use Steam's control thing. It does its own thing
1:18:46and Destiny has no friggin' idea about Bluetooth's PlayStation controllers. You have to plug the
1:18:50PlayStation controller into your "PC" with a USB cable and then Destiny sees it. And
1:18:57so yes, I finally played Destiny with a controller at 60 frames per second at 75% resolution
1:19:01on a 4K monitor and it was good. This entire segment has been the biggest advertisement
1:19:08for just getting a gaming PC that I think we've ever had. Well, this segment is an advertisement
1:19:14for getting your monitor shipped to you at the same time as your computer because I don't
1:19:17plan on playing on PC. I'm going to play on my PlayStation but this thing is hogging the
1:19:21PlayStation's monitors. If I want to play it, it's just such a pain to carry it back
1:19:25and forth. I did it a couple of times and it's just... yeah. So I'm not going to use
1:19:30this as a gaming PC. I'm not going to reboot into Windows 10. I can be a little bit more
1:19:35familiar with Windows 10, by the way, doing this, which is not as terrible as I thought
1:19:38it was going to be. But I'm comparing it to Windows 7 and 8 and XP, I suppose. I don't
1:19:44have much experience with it. But anyway, I got Steam installed and I ran a game. But
1:19:47yeah, not recommended. All this to say is that 580X is a garbage gaming card and yeah,
1:19:53I look forward to my next GPU.
1:19:57What are you using for peripherals other than this PlayStation controller?
1:20:01Yeah, so like I said, the keyboard, I would like to keep this. It annoys me that like
1:20:08I don't think... the solution that is being recommended to me is unpair it from your Mac
1:20:12before you reboot into Windows and then maybe Windows will pair with it. But I wish it was
1:20:18the case that when I rebooted into Windows, it would remember that it was paired with
1:20:22this one. I wish I didn't have to do anything. I wish I could just reboot and then it would...
1:20:26it doesn't matter. I'm not going to be rebooting into Windows anymore. But having done it like
1:20:29a dozen times trying to fight with this thing, it annoys me that I can't do that. So I kind
1:20:33of wish this keyboard could be wired because I don't care if my keyboard is wired. I have
1:20:37little wire guides under the desk. It doesn't affect my life. But I really like this keyboard.
1:20:42So I'm going to use the wireless keyboard even though I wish it was wired. And I think
1:20:46maybe one of you can confirm, I'm assuming if I were to plug it in with the Lightning
1:20:50USB thing, that's just power, right?
1:20:52>> No, no. I believe it makes it a wired keyboard.
1:20:54>> Does it?
1:20:55>> Yeah.
1:20:56>> All right. Well, I might try that then if I can get a cable long enough to reach
1:20:58my computer because the one it comes with is not going to reach like under the desk
1:21:01and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go or wherever. But I would like to try
1:21:05that because I think that would make my life a lot easier. The mouse do not like it. And
1:21:11for a new reason, like I'm having... I don't like it. I've been using it. I don't like
1:21:16it because it's low and it's not shaped the way I like it.
1:21:18>> But you weren't gaming with that mouse, are you? The Magic Mouse?
1:21:21>> No, no.
1:21:22>> Okay. I was going to say, like I love the Magic Mouse but I would not game with it.
1:21:26>> The thing I did actually try like on the first launch to, you know, I was just trying
1:21:29to get stuff to work. And something, I'm pretty sure this is physically impossible with this
1:21:33mouse but it didn't occur to me until I tried to do it. People who don't know the Apple
1:21:37Mouse looks like a piece of sushi. It has one flat surface on top of it. Like just the
1:21:42top surface is one continuous thing. There are no seams or gaps in it anywhere. But it
1:21:46does handle right click because it senses where your fingers are. Like it's got a touch
1:21:49surface on top. So if you click on the right side of the mouse, that's right click. And
1:21:53if you click on the left side, that's left click. But every time you click, the whole
1:21:55mouse surface goes down, right? There is no... It's just one big button.
1:22:00So in Destiny, I get right in the game and I go to ADS and then I go to Fire and the
1:22:05default key bindings and setup is ADS is right click and Fire is left click. ADS, for you
1:22:12too who are listening have no idea what I'm talking about, is Aim Down Sights. I thought
1:22:15it was ADS because Destiny is a game where you aim down sights and then right click for
1:22:20ADS. You cannot right click to ADS and then left click to Fire on the Apple Mouse. Because
1:22:24as soon as you right click to ADS, the button is down already. You can't left click because
1:22:31it's in the middle of a click. You're holding it down. Now you can do right click toggle
1:22:36ADS. I thought maybe it would be touch sensitive and I could tap the left side of the mouse
1:22:39while holding the right, but that didn't seem to work. Anyway, it's not a gaming mouse.
1:22:43That's not why I don't like it. The new reason that I dislike this mouse, other than the
1:22:47ergonomics which alone would be like they don't match the way I want to use a mouse,
1:22:51right? But the new thing that's driving me nuts is it's like the Apple TV remote. The
1:22:56way I just go and grab my mouse, I end up accidentally swiping the thing and my windows
1:23:00are scrolling all over the place and I'm activating mission control. It's like my computer is
1:23:06haunted like my TV. Like every time I try to pick up that remote, it's like, "Why is
1:23:08it fast forwarding? Why did it skip around? What is it doing? Did it go to the next episode?"
1:23:12Because my fingers brush the touch sensitive surface. This is not what I want in a mouse.
1:23:17Looks nice. It's black and sleek. I think it's a beautiful piece of art. I don't want
1:23:20to use it as a mouse. Yeah, in all fairness, I disabled most of those gestures the first
1:23:24time I set up a Mac. Even just horizontal scrolling like swipe sideways or swipe vertical
1:23:29for crying a lot. Like I'm not going to disable scrolling, right? I'll go to grab the mouse
1:23:33and in the act of grabbing it, I will scroll my window two lines that I didn't mean to
1:23:38do because my fingers just hit it. So anyway, I'm not going to use this mouse. So I've been
1:23:41in the market for a new one and I have ordered two mice, two mouses, two mises. I tried both
1:23:47of them in person and I couldn't really decide if either of them, if I would like them, but
1:23:52I'm going to give them both a try. I got an expensive one and a cheap one. I'm hoping
1:23:57I like at least one of them because it's been slim pickings. Like these are the least objectionable
1:24:02mice that I have found. They both have things about them that I don't like and I'm not really
1:24:06a fan of, but I think hopefully one of them will be okay. I have coming to me the Microsoft
1:24:11Precision mouse, which is Microsoft's current normal mouse. It's not super gamey. Yeah,
1:24:20exactly. But it's also their fancy one. So it's got the thing that Marco talked about
1:24:25where almost every mouse that has a score wheel has this feature where it's either in
1:24:31clicky mode or free spinning mode. Oh, they'll do that now? Yeah, well, not all of them,
1:24:36but the nice ones do it. In fact, Microsoft sells the same mouse without the mode switch
1:24:41that just is clicky. Anyway, it's got one of those. Logic has a name brand for it. And
1:24:46the switch that switches the two modes is really nice and satisfying, which I enjoy.
1:24:51It's got three side buttons that I hope to never use. It's got a left and a right button
1:24:55and it's got that little flange off to the left. Like if you know the Logic MX Master
1:24:59has like a huge shelf over there for you to like put your rest your hand on or some shopping
1:25:04or groceries, this has a tiny flange, which I'm like, you know what? I've never used a
1:25:09mouse with the flange. This flange is very small. I don't find it particularly objectionable.
1:25:13If I just pretend it's not there and grip the sides of the mouse, maybe it'll be fine.
1:25:17So this is the fancy mouse. This is like 70 bucks. So I'm getting this one. And I think
1:25:24it's Bluetooth, which may or may not be an issue depending on how Catalina's Bluetooth
1:25:27issues evolve for you too. So far, I haven't seen any of the stuff you've described, but
1:25:31I'm on the lookout for it. And the other one is the Logitech Marathon Mouse M705, which
1:25:36is one of the cheaper Logitech mice. It's also one of the simpler ones. I think it also
1:25:42has the mode switch wheel, less satisfying. It has two side buttons instead of one. And
1:25:47it also has a small flange for your thumb. And it's just generally like, this is 30 bucks.
1:25:52It's a $30 mouse. It is not Bluetooth. It's Logitech's weird RF thingy, which I actually
1:25:59kind of like because my experience that RF thing they use is rock solid and doesn't interfere
1:26:04with Bluetooth. Yeah, if it's for a desktop, those are way better, honestly. Yeah. So I
1:26:11mean you don't have that choice on the Microsoft one. It just it is Bluetooth or whatever.
1:26:14So I got that one. My plan is whichever one I don't like, I'll try to pass off the other
1:26:19one to my wife because she has a Logitech wireless mouse now, but it's one of those
1:26:22portable ones. Right. And I always thought it was silly for her to use that at her desk.
1:26:27It's like one of those little it's it's miniature. It's like 75 percent of a normal size. Oh,
1:26:32yeah. I don't mind it. But anyway, so I'll keep you updated on those two mice. And also
1:26:39the final thing I've ordered is way too many cables for what? So many things. Well, this
1:26:46is this is the problem when you get new things. I did the you know, the preparing the way
1:26:49the new power supply just ripples outward like I mentioned this on a past show. I want
1:26:55everything to be braided in black. I don't want any white cables. I don't want any plastic
1:27:01cables. I don't want to buy anything sold, bought or processed. I want everything to
1:27:06be black braided cables. Why braided? Why? Who cares about braided braided cables appeal
1:27:12to me because they are less, less kinky. Oh, boy. Like if you have a typical plastic cable,
1:27:19it comes to you in a package that's usually tightly wrapped in either a circle or an oval
1:27:23or whatever, and you sort of unfurl it and those kinks kind of stay and you can kind
1:27:28of resonate. It's like, well, these kinks are ever going to go out probably sometimes
1:27:32eventually. But then you might sort of bend in new kinks. Braided cables, in theory, remain
1:27:37supple and able to sort of flow and don't they don't come with you get out of the package
1:27:41and you just string it out and it hangs pin straight straight down for like six feet.
1:27:45Right. That never happens with a plastic cable. And then in theory, if you use them for a
1:27:50long time, they won't pick up kinks from the other places. Oh, I said in theory again,
1:27:55I'm sorry phone. Oh, man. So black braided everything. So any cable that I had in my
1:28:03life that was not black and braided needs to be black and braided. Of course, the computer
1:28:08comes with a black braided power cable and a black braided USB-C to lightning cable to
1:28:13charge harpoon your turtle mouse and to charge your keyboard. And that sort of began the
1:28:19whole thing. So I have a black braided USB-C to USB-C for my portable hard drive, another
1:28:26black braided USB-A to B to connect my existing black USB hub, like a black braided speaker
1:28:35cable to connect my speakers and going a little overboard. I mean, cables are cheap. Like
1:28:39when you buy expensive computers, like I can get a cable for five dollars. I should buy
1:28:42two of them. They're five dollars. And so I did. So I've been buying cables.
1:28:48So I'm not entirely in the braided cable lifestyle. I have a few here and there. But do they not
1:28:54just wrap like a cloth braid around the same rubber that every other cable has on the outside?
1:29:00So first of all, I think no, I think they don't. I think the braiding replaces the rubber.
1:29:06The second thing I worry about is that they are less well shielded than the other ones.
1:29:09Like, you know, it's used like a foil wrapper and then inside of the actual conductor is
1:29:13each of which is separately insulated. And then around that they have plastic. I think
1:29:16it's all the same except the outer plastic is replaced with braids. I don't know. I honestly
1:29:22don't know anything about cables. And these are all like five dollars. So I have no idea
1:29:25what the hell I'm buying. Although I did buy a Thunderbolt one that was like 30 bucks or
1:29:30whatever because I'm pre buying for stuff that I think I'm going to get. Like, I think
1:29:34I will eventually have some high speed external SSD peripheral thing. But yeah, I'm assuming
1:29:42that is the only difference is a aesthetics and B how the cables flop. Basically, I'm
1:29:49hoping there's no C interference. Susceptibility is worse. I'm hoping that's not true. Anything
1:29:54else about the Mac Pro, John? Are we done? No, we're not. Sorry. One more thing. Oh my
1:30:00God. This is not for me though. This is from I've been consuming lots of Mac Pro content
1:30:05as you can imagine. There's lots of good YouTube videos. So am I apparently. Yeah. Well, you
1:30:09you're mentioning something. So Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs is had one of the many videos
1:30:14that's like, hey, I got this Mac Pro. What the hell can I put in here? And a lot of these
1:30:18YouTube channels are not Apple specific. So they have tons of, you know, essentially PC
1:30:21hardware hanging around. We will put a link in the show notes to this particular video.
1:30:25He said, let me just shove some stuff in there and see how it goes. So the first thing he
1:30:30stuck in was a USB card to put a bunch more USB ports on the thing. And that didn't work
1:30:39because there was no drivers for it. He's looking around inside the case for power connectors.
1:30:46Most PCs have SATA style power connectors coming off the power supply. That is not the
1:30:50case in the Mac Pro, which is why there's that $80 Belkin thing, because they've got
1:30:53a proprietary power header on the motherboard so you can add cables to your previously cableless
1:30:57Mac. Like there are no Molex style connectors. There's no place in there except for the Apple
1:31:03proprietary place to connect to things. So anything that requires power, you have to
1:31:06get at least that power cable thing from Belkin, which I think is the only one that makes one
1:31:13for now, or have something that's powered through the slot. There's the Pegasus drive
1:31:17bay thing that Steven Hackett bought. It's $400 for a bracket plus an eight terabyte
1:31:21hard drive. Steven said that hard drive is incredibly noisy, so that kind of turned me
1:31:27off. Like I wasn't a fan of buying that anyway, but I certainly don't want a noisy spinning
1:31:31hard drive in there. And that comes with its own power thing, or do you have to buy it?
1:31:37I think it comes with its own thing too.
1:31:39It does, yeah.
1:31:40Anyway, PCI Express cards that you put M.2 SSD or NVMe things in, that worked right out
1:31:48of the box, is a tiny little PCI card that connects into your PCI slot, and it's got
1:31:52a tiny little M.2 slot where you put one of those little NVMe sticks in there. Stick not
1:31:58included. Work fine, no drivers, you can boot from it. You buy an NVMe SSD for however much
1:32:04they cost these days and you plug it in there, the card itself is $13. $13. $100 for each
1:32:11wheel on this machine, but if you want to, you put an NVMe SSD in there, for $13 you can
1:32:16do it. And then you can spend $400 on a 2TB NVMe SSD, and for $413 you have 2TB worth
1:32:23of very fast bootable stuff. He also tried U.2 SSD cards, which is the standard for those
1:32:30enterprise over-provisioned SSD things. And that didn't work, even though it had worked
1:32:35in previous ones, and it turns out that it's because Catalina is missing drivers for the
1:32:38Intel U.2 drive that he tried. But that's $50 for the card if you want to get one of
1:32:43those fancy enterprise SSDs, you just need to use a mechanism that has drivers. Mojave
1:32:47had drivers for this thing, but Catalina doesn't for whatever reason. He did a bunch of RAM
1:32:53upgrading and saw the cool RAM slot advisor thing that tells you, "Hey, you got your DIMMs
1:32:57in the wrong place, and put this one here and put that one there." So that's a cool
1:33:02feature and app if you ever want to upgrade the RAM, but like I said, I probably don't
1:33:05because I've already got tons in here. Blackmagic video capture card, hey, it worked magically,
1:33:11even though it's more or less PC hardware, that worked fine. Sound Blaster, which one
1:33:15of you was talking about Sound Blaster? They still make products apparently for PCs.
1:33:21That was the bigger shock is that they're still in business.
1:33:24Yeah, and he bought a Sound Blaster card and put it into his Mac, and the Mac was like,
1:33:28"Nope." Unless you also buy this external box that they have and use it in Windows, then
1:33:33it works. And a bunch of other people have tried other things in it. So right now, in
1:33:38the absence of any Mac Pro-specific products like the Pegasus thing that Apple sells, and
1:33:44like I'd imagine third-party Apple-specific vendors will sell, you can try shoving in
1:33:50lots of PC hardware. Some of it might work in Windows, and some of it might work in Mac
1:33:53OS. It's somewhat hard to tell, but I am excited that literally any of it works with
1:33:58like no drivers and no awareness. They just plain work like that PCI Express thing because
1:34:02that basically means if you want to have a bunch of internal SSDs, you can buy those
1:34:06NVMe sticks and just slap them in there. They have cards that hold four of those NVMe sticks,
1:34:10and you can mount it as a single drive and get insane speeds if you can afford all that
1:34:16NVMe storage. The card itself is like nothing. Although one of them I did see had a fan on
1:34:20it, which is a little upsetting. Anyway, of course. I am excited about putting things
1:34:27into my Mac Pro, and I am plotting what those things might be, but I'm not in a rush because
1:34:31it seems like the video card options—that was another thing. Lots of people were trying
1:34:33different video cards in there. Video card options are not currently great. As we've
1:34:37discussed in the past, I want something that's an MPX module if possible, so I'm just waiting.
1:34:41The final thing Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs talked about, which hadn't occurred to me
1:34:44but looking at all the pictures, but I know I had been thinking about it the wrong way.
1:34:48Even after I had taken the case off, my Mac Pro didn't realize this, but obviously we've
1:34:52said before when you take the case off, the computer powers down. You can't have it turned
1:34:57on. There's a literal physical power disconnect thing that if those contacts are not touching
1:35:04from the top of the case down to your Mac, it will not run. The power will not be connected.
1:35:08The circuits will not be complete. So you have to turn your Mac off to take the case
1:35:12off, but what people might not have mentioned, people realize now that they have them, is
1:35:16not only do you have to turn it off, you have to unplug every cable from the back of your
1:35:21computer, because the case in the back is not like a U-shape, like there's a bar on
1:35:28the bottom, and so as the case comes up, that bar goes chu chu chu chu, and if the cables
1:35:32are in the way, it will block them. So you have to unplug every single cable, the power
1:35:36cable, all the USB cables, your display cable, any cable that is connected to the back of
1:35:40his computer needs to be unplugged to take the case off, which is kind of a shame because
1:35:44you're like, "Okay, fine, the power has to be off, but do I have to unplug all those
1:35:47things?" Because if you have a lot of stuff connected, especially if you have cards installed,
1:35:50like lots of people put in different video cards, and you can have all these monitors
1:35:54connected, you can do all sorts of cool stuff, you've got to disconnect all of those, and
1:35:58if it's on a desk or in some place deep, it's hard to see back there, and they might
1:36:02slide down, and it's just not convenient at all, but it's so clear that Apple does
1:36:08not want you mucking around inside this thing when it's anything close to being plugged
1:36:12in or turned on.
1:36:13Doesn't that also make it so that it's not grounded anymore?
1:36:14Yeah, that's one of the many theories I'm working with, is I'll keep it plugged in
1:36:21so it's grounded, but you should also have a grounding strap separate from that. It doesn't
1:36:25mean you can't plug it back in after you get the case off. You could plug the power
1:36:27cable back in. It just means it has to be out to get the case off.
1:36:30Yeah, because I was always told, "Keep the power supply plugged in when you're working
1:36:36inside of a PC because then it keeps it grounded, and then you have extra ESD protection through
1:36:39the case."
1:36:40Yeah, I suppose we haven't seen the repair guide for this computer. I imagine it might
1:36:44still tell the repair technician to do that, but I don't know how he's got to unplug
1:36:48everything because otherwise that case is not coming off.
1:36:51There's also, you can look at the picture we'll put in the show and the tweet, someone
1:36:54was mentioning the BNC connector that's poking out here. I think that's what it's
1:36:59called. That's from the Blackmagic card. Someone said, "Hey, do you have 10 base 2
1:37:02Ethernet on that thing?" But anyway, if you have a long enough connector poking out of
1:37:06the back of your computer, it could be that you can't get the ... Well, I suppose you
1:37:09couldn't get the case on then because you'd insert the card and then when you tried to
1:37:12put the case back on, it wouldn't go down because it would hit the connector. But that's
1:37:16not the case. It clears the Blackmagic card, obviously. But I can imagine there might be
1:37:20some card somewhere that expects you to ... expects to be able to stick out the back of your computer
1:37:25as long as it needs to, and that's not going to work on this.
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1:39:17All right, now that we're done with follow-up, let's start the show. All right, well, we're
1:39:24out of time, so let's move on to Ask ATP. Dimitri Tabakuro writes, "My relatives and
1:39:30I have iPhones and we use iCloud photo sharing. It was working fine until my father decided
1:39:34to print some photos from one of the shared albums. He is not able to get full res images
1:39:39from shared albums, only images resized down to about 2048p. Am I supposed to send zip
1:39:43files to my parents so they can print photos? Also, why does it appear that photos are downloaded
1:39:47to the local device before adding them to a shared album? Can't Apple do this process
1:39:52on the server side? It's very inconvenient when I want to share a lot of photos from
1:39:55some trip when those photos already exist on the cloud. It takes up to tens of minutes,
1:39:59fails often, and so I have to share photos by batches. I hope you'll help me so I'm not
1:40:03going back to Google Photos/OneDrive." I don't use iCloud photo library. I do use iCloud
1:40:09sharing, but only very sporadically, so I haven't really personally run into any of
1:40:13this. John, I think you're the heaviest user of this stuff out of the three of us. Any
1:40:19other solutions? I like this question because it highlights many failings of iCloud, like
1:40:26all the major failings of iCloud sharing things. This is true in things that a lot of people
1:40:30don't realize if you're not a computer nerd into these things, that shared albums don't
1:40:36share photos at full resolution. You might not notice the end, you're like, "I've got
1:40:40the picture," and you give it to your relatives, they're happy to have the picture, but if
1:40:43they ever try to print it, like in a photo print, especially if they want to make an
1:40:46eight by ten, it's not happening. They're not high enough resolution for that, which
1:40:50is a shame. I understand that Apple does it to save space and whatever, but this is a
1:40:54decision that was made many years ago, and they should revisit it because then the next
1:40:58question is, "Okay, well, whatever. Shared albums is just so people can see them on their
1:41:01phone. What if I want to give the full res ones? What do I do then?" There are tons of
1:41:06ways to do it, but none of them are part of Apple's photo experience, except maybe AirDrop
1:41:12or iMessage, and even iMessage, I'm not sure. For downscales, I think there's a preference
1:41:15for downscaling somewhere in the iMessage settings. You can email them. My solution
1:41:21is usually to use Google products, as in I put them in Google Drive and send them a link.
1:41:26It really depends on what the person on the other end has access to. If they have Apple
1:41:32things, I know I can use that Apple Mail thing where it doesn't actually attach it to the
1:41:37message. It puts it at a public iCloud link. You know that feature? It was in Sierra or
1:41:42something. I always try to do that, and people in my family always yell at me mid-sentence
1:41:47and say, "Don't do that! It's too big to be an attachment!" I'm like, "It's not going
1:41:50to actually attach it. That's the point. It's going to put it in iCloud, then it's going
1:41:55to send them an email with a link, and then they're going to click the link." I like that
1:41:58system because it gets around the attachment stuff, and you know they're getting the full
1:42:00res thing, but it is easier and better if you know everyone on both ends to do Apple
1:42:04stuff. iCloud and iCloud. Google Drive, if you just put it into Google Drive, Google
1:42:10Drive just thinks it's a file. You can make a public link that can download the file.
1:42:13The web interface to Google Drive will try to be clever and say, "Oh, this is an image.
1:42:18I can present this to you." You have to tell -- this is the annoying thing -- you have
1:42:22to send them, "Don't just click on the image and right-click or drag to your desktop or
1:42:26whatever. Go find the download button, which is a download-facing arrow." You have to actually
1:42:32not let Google Drive try to be nice and decode the thing for you. You just want the file.
1:42:38The zip file, although it's stupid to zip JPEGs, which are already compressed and you
1:42:41won't save space, at least that will make it so that everything in the chain understands
1:42:46like, "I don't know what this is. It's just a file. I'm just going to send you all the
1:42:48bits. Here are the bits." Then you have to worry about attachment stuff. If you put that
1:42:51zip file in Google Drive and have people download the zip file, and hopefully Google Drive doesn't
1:42:55crack the zip file open for you conveniently, see how complicated this is? It shouldn't
1:42:59be this difficult. The thing about copying it down to the device, he's right. Apple does
1:43:03have it. Why, if you want to send it to somebody else or add it to a shared album, do you have
1:43:08to bring it down to the device and then put it back up to the shared album? It's both
1:43:12in the same place, but that's, I don't know if it's a privacy thing or they don't want
1:43:17to do it server-side. There's lots of inconveniences for people with bad, slow connections or not
1:43:21a lot of space on their phones. They have to end up fighting with Apple's photo system.
1:43:26I don't have a great solution to this. There are tons and tons of mediocre solutions, most
1:43:30of which I get by with, but I really wish Apple would do this better.
1:43:32Yeah, we also got a question from Todd Vaziri, I don't know, in the last week or so, saying,
1:43:38"Hey, when is family-based, like, shared photo libraries ever going to be a thing?" And,
1:43:44"Oh, do I ever want it to be a thing, but I don't see that being a thing anytime soon."
1:43:48Yeah, we talked about that a lot. His question, he listens to the show, so he knows, like,
1:43:52his question was not, "How can we do that?" It was like, "Are there any indications, as
1:43:57in any birdies or any hints anywhere, is there any hope saying, 'Yes, Apple is going to address
1:44:02this need?'" I haven't heard anything, but as we've discussed in past shows, Apple has
1:44:08taken many steps over the past decade to prepare for that by having families and iCloud photo
1:44:14library. Like, all those are prerequisites. I just don't have any actual information about,
1:44:18"Oh, in the next year or two or three, they're going to roll out this feature." They desperately
1:44:23need to, and they have laid a lot of the foundations. I just haven't heard anything rumor-wise.
1:44:27JK Cross writes, "I remember Marco saying something like, 'Swift is such a d*ck' in an episode
1:44:32a few months ago. As someone who has been writing almost exclusively in Swift so far,
1:44:37I've been wondering, would you please elaborate on that statement, Marco? And I would just
1:44:41like to say, I didn't implore this to happen. I didn't bring this up at all. I didn't even
1:44:45put this in the show notes. So I am excited to get in a fight with you. I mean, to discuss
1:44:50this with you." I mean, it's a matter of style and preference. I mean, lots of people like
1:44:56d*cks. And so, you know, we just have different preferences, I guess. That's totally okay.
1:45:03You know, there are trends and waves in programming languages, and we've gone through the history
1:45:10of programming languages. We've gone from, you know, very strict to more flexible languages,
1:45:17more dynamic languages, and now we're kind of in a wave that's swinging back towards
1:45:21very strict languages, very, like, you know, super strictly typed and everything. And this
1:45:26is what Swift is. You know, Swift is extremely strict and rigid and picky. And, like, in
1:45:35the way that, like, you know, some languages don't require you to differentiate between,
1:45:40like, levels of integer precision. Like, you can cast a 64-bit integer to a 32-bit integer
1:45:45context transparently, and it doesn't bother you about anything. And that's the kind of
1:45:49thing where Swift will generally bother you about stuff like that. It is not the only
1:45:53language that does this and things like this. This is not the only thing it is a d*ck about.
1:46:00But just as I am using Swift, which honestly I haven't been doing a lot of recently because
1:46:04I've been working in an existing Objective-C code base, so I've been mostly writing that,
1:46:08but whenever I write Swift, it just nitpicks everything I do to death in a way that I understand
1:46:16what it's doing. I understand that it wants everything to be explicit and correct and
1:46:19everything, but it just, in a way that is not logical or, you know, or factual, it is
1:46:27just, it seems like it's being a d*ck to me. I don't know, it's hard to explain.
1:46:34I think I understand what you're saying. Obviously, I have a very different opinion about what
1:46:40is happening and why it's happening. I think, even as someone who quite likes Swift, it
1:46:45is extremely picky. I don't really see there's any two ways about that. It is very picky.
1:46:51It wants you to do things in the safest way possible. It wants you to be as explicit as
1:46:57possible. To me, Objective-C is much happier shooting from the hip and just pew pew pewing
1:47:04all over the place. And that's fine. I think for certain developers, that's how they prefer
1:47:10to work, and that's great. For other developers, that's not as great. I think that the thing
1:47:16that bothers me about Swift is, to my eyes, the language nerds have not only gotten hold
1:47:24of it, but have performed a hostile takeover of it. And I feel like early on, you know,
1:47:31in the first couple of years of Swift, it had a lot of these jerky tendencies, but was
1:47:36workable. And decisions were made pragmatically relatively often. And I wish I could cite
1:47:43a specific example, and I can't off the top of my head, but I try to keep up with the
1:47:47general gist of what's going on in Swift evolution and the general kind of trends and what's
1:47:52going on in Swift. And even as someone who I think is more language nerdy than your average
1:47:59developer, and I am not bad at all, I'm just saying more than your average developer, I
1:48:02think I appreciate the nuance of a lot of languages. I don't care for the direction
1:48:10Swift is going, which is, let's let the academic language nerds just go bananas and eschew
1:48:16any sort of pragmatism whatsoever. And I'm sure that that's not literally what's happening,
1:48:21but that is what appears to be happening to me. And man, I do not like it. I do not want
1:48:26it, and I do not like it. And I don't know, that frustrates me. That frustrates me a lot.
1:48:32And that is where I think Swift is taking a turn for the worse. But I don't know, maybe
1:48:38that's just me. John, do you have thoughts on this?
1:48:40I do, that's why I put the question in.
1:48:42Oh, okay.
1:48:43I wanted to hear about Marco's assessment of Swift's dickishness. My own assessment
1:48:50of it, like I spent my career programming what they call dynamic languages, which are
1:48:54the least dickish of any, depending on how you look at it. If you ask someone of a dickish
1:48:59language, they will say the opposite. But like, yeah, in Perl, JavaScript, anything
1:49:04goes to the nth degree, right? That's the beauty and some would say the curse, right?
1:49:10And my impression is that what I thought Marco was saying when he said Swift is such a dick,
1:49:14like I thought I understood what he was saying, because I feel the same way about statically
1:49:19typed languages. Basically, any language that has a strong, complicated type system that
1:49:26you have to participate in, I find it annoying to be writing a program and for it to say,
1:49:32your program's cool and everything, but like, this is not the exact type that that says
1:49:37it is. And you're like, oh my God, they're trivially convertible with each other and I
1:49:40know this thing is always going to be in this range and it's fine. And it's like, yeah,
1:49:42but I'm the language and you, I can't, I'm not going to take your word for it. You have
1:49:46to actually make the types match. For me, any amount of brainpower and time I spend
1:49:52dealing with a type system annoys me. For other people, types are your whole program.
1:49:58My problem is solved by defining types. Once I've defined the correct types, the problem
1:50:03practically solves itself. Furthermore, I cannot be reassured that anything I write
1:50:07is remotely correct in any way if I am not assured that all the types are matched up
1:50:11down to the nth degree, because that makes me feel comfortable that it, well, my logic
1:50:16might be wrong, but at least I know all the types thread through the system and that makes
1:50:19me feel reassured. Lots of people have that as a big security blanket and they flip out
1:50:23in any language that isn't that strict and they're like, how can I use this language?
1:50:27This, I don't know if it's an integer or it's a string, how do you write anything that works?
1:50:30And yet gigantic companies in millions of lines of code have been produced and work
1:50:35just fine without that. And those people can't even imagine how can you have millions lines
1:50:39of anything with note, with quote unquote, no types, even though there are types, but
1:50:42not the types of types they're interested in. Strings being coerced into numbers and
1:50:47vice versa, nothing will ever work and that's just not true. So that's the divide. And I
1:50:51think languages that appear dickish to people who are accustomed to working in a sort of
1:50:56a loosey useier language are like, oh God, don't make me tell you again about the types.
1:51:01I don't care, or like, why can't I just have this thing as a bucket of things that all
1:51:06conform to this protocol? Oh, I'm not allowed to have that? Oh, then I have to figure out
1:51:09some other way to do it. Just take a bunch of things of type ID, like an Objective-C,
1:51:13like just, you always want to just have that out to say, I don't want to deal with types.
1:51:17Just like, and so that's my impression of the dickish, non-dickish divide, which is,
1:51:22it's not an accurate assessment because depending on which camp you're in, the other side is
1:51:25a dick of saying like, oh, you're just going to let me pass a string to this thing that
1:51:29takes a number and you're going to give me an answer and not say anything? You're going
1:51:31to let me call a method and you have no frigging idea whether that method exists? Oh, sorry,
1:51:35you're going to send a message and you don't know if that you didn't even receive this
1:51:38message? How does that even compile? You don't know if this thing has a foo message and you're
1:51:44just going to let that compile and I'm going to find out at runtime that it doesn't have
1:51:47a foo message? How can you write anything in this language? Obviously, everyone knows
1:51:50you can't write anything useful in Objective-C because you can send a message. You can send
1:51:54a message to nil and it's a no op? What the hell? You'll never be able to make a successful
1:51:59commercial system in this language, as we all know. There will never be any successful
1:52:03products or a company based on a language that acts like this without static types,
1:52:07nothing works. Obviously, you know which side of this I fall down on. Swift tends to be
1:52:12more dickish in that way. When I wrote that long thing about Swift when it first came
1:52:17out, which I smuggled into a Mac OS X review because that's the forum I had for a lot of
1:52:21my writing, I described all of that. But my perspective on it then and still mostly now
1:52:27is that Swift is dickish in this way to a much greater degree than Objective-C because
1:52:33that's how it can figure out how to make your code run fast. And its ambition was to be
1:52:38expressive and able to write cool programs, but also as fast as it can possibly be, like
1:52:43a systems programming language. Like you could write an operating system in it, like it is,
1:52:47you know, you should never have to resort to C because this should be just as fast.
1:52:51And there's no way a language can be that way unless it knows down to the minute detail
1:52:56exactly how everything is set up and the fact that they match up. It needs to know that
1:53:00method exists, so it knows that it can call it, so it doesn't have to do like a method
1:53:04table lookup or a runtime check or no runtime coercion. Like you have to know everything
1:53:09that it does down to memory allocation and stuff and with ARC, you know. Anyway, that's
1:53:13one reason it's like that. But I think Swift also, this gets to Casey's point, again, you
1:53:20two use the language way more than I do. I read about it, but I'm not actually using
1:53:23it. But my impression from reading about it of the debates among the language nerds, as
1:53:27you derisively called them, those are my people as far as I'm concerned, which may sound weird
1:53:31based on what I said there, but my people were like the Perl language nerds, which is
1:53:34a different breed of language nerd. But anyway, based on those conversations, I think what
1:53:37they're trying to do is say, Swift needs to know about all the crap in the program so
1:53:42it can make an efficient and so it can turn runtime errors into compile time errors and
1:53:47help you in that way to make a secure, more correct program that runs really, really fast.
1:53:52But we don't want it to bother you that much. We don't want it to be so d*ckish. That's what
1:53:55type inference is about. And half of the Swift stuff is, how can we make it so you can write
1:54:01something that looks simple and the compiler can figure out what it is that you meant and
1:54:06whether it's valid without having to ask you, cast this to that or reassure me that this
1:54:11conforms to that protocol or don't say anything about types at all and I'll figure it out.
1:54:15Like the whole type inference engine and all the type erasure and the protocol system and
1:54:20all their generics and everything like that, they're trying, I think, to make a language
1:54:25that has all the attributes of the, you know, the, I forget what the Perl people used to
1:54:29call it, the something in bondage. It was a sex analogy. I'm sorry, nerds in the 90s.
1:54:36Anyway, the bondage and discipline languages that want you to say everything about types,
1:54:41you want to get all that performance, we don't want you to have to deal with that. And I
1:54:43feel like that's what they're trying to do. Pragmatically, like the number of times they
1:54:47change the string system. They need it to be efficient. They need it to not have to
1:54:49go through conversions. They need it to like, to be able to efficiently get offsets and
1:54:55split and join strings without you having to worry about all the Unicode stuff, but
1:54:58they want it to be really fast under the covers. So that's why they get rid of UTF-16 behind
1:55:02the scenes, even though that's what Objective-C and a string use for all those years, because
1:55:06it was back when UTF-16 they thought would be the thing, right? And for backward compatibility,
1:55:10it was good to do that, but they changed the system again and all the different methods
1:55:14to get offsets and indexes and just, I see the Swift language people trying to make Swift
1:55:20less of a dick while also making it blazingly fast and convenient to use and expressive.
1:55:26Obviously they're failing to a degree that Casey feels like he's getting put upon by
1:55:30new things. That's why I wish you had some more concrete examples, you know, where you
1:55:33feel like it's getting more dickish, not less. But for sure, Swift is on the bondage and
1:55:38discipline side in terms of the compiler needs to know what the hell's going on, right? But
1:55:43I think they're trying to be much less dick. They have the whole dynamic dispatch thing
1:55:47they added for Python support and everything like that, where you can actually call a thing
1:55:50that you're not sure exists at runtime, but they try to do it in an efficient way. And
1:55:54maybe it's easier to be a fan when you're not forced to write programs in the language.
1:55:58And maybe someday I'll write something significant at Swift and then come on the program and
1:56:01complain about all the dickishness that I just described. But I feel like Swift is trying
1:56:06to not annoy you with the type system, but it's never going to give up that type system.
1:56:09It loves its types.
1:56:11Yeah, and I think, again, I wish I had a more concrete example, just like you said, but
1:56:16I feel like so much of the stuff I see in the newsletters that I read and stuff like
1:56:22that, and I'm not deep into Swift evolution, so it very well could be that there's plenty
1:56:27of pragmatic people arguing the way I would argue and I just don't see it. But so much
1:56:31of the stuff I see flying around is like super esoteric, really weird stuff that I as a traditional
1:56:38Swift user, a commoner, like the common folk like me, I don't think care about, will rarely
1:56:44see, none of that stuff matters. And so that's the stuff that I think once ABI stability
1:56:49came in, in Swift 5, I think it was, once the ABI stability train had reached the station,
1:56:57I feel like all of Swift evolution just went to, all right, my one super nerdy language
1:57:02thing that nobody else gives a flying fart about, that's what we need to perseverate
1:57:06on right now. And some things have gotten better, like Codable and Decodable, or Codable,
1:57:12Incodable, Decodable, I think that's right, it's been a while since I've written any of
1:57:15that stuff, which is basically JSON encoding and decoding. That was an absolute win, and
1:57:19that came in in the last couple of years. And everyone and their mother had written
1:57:24a JSON parser in Swift, and some of them were good and a lot of them were crap. But with
1:57:29Codable, a lot of that was brought into the language, and I, or into the framework anyway,
1:57:34and I think that that works really, really well. And it was really well-abstracted in
1:57:38the way that a lot of Objective-C shines. Like, there are things about Objective-C and
1:57:44Foundation that bother me, and I've said this example before on the show, and I'll say it
1:57:49again. Now coming from C# to Objective-C, there was, I believe, if memory serves, it's
1:57:54been a long time now, there was one DateTime class in C#, and that did anything related
1:57:59to dates. And then I get to Objective-C and there's Date, there's like NSDate and NSCalendar,
1:58:04and some series of classes and objects with regard to time, and it all seemed friggin'
1:58:09overkill. But as it turns out, it was really just that it was properly abstracted, and
1:58:14that time is friggin' hard. Who knew? And I think that, you know, the Codable stuff in
1:58:22Swift, I think that that's properly abstracted. And if you want to do something super basic,
1:58:27it's actually very straightforward to do. And if you want to do something really esoteric
1:58:30and weird, it's doable. I just wouldn't say it's straightforward. And that's a great example
1:58:35of things going the right way. But so often I feel like there's just weird decisions with
1:58:40regard to weird corners of the language that's oftentimes bubble into my world, either via
1:58:46newsletters, or actually into my code, that I'm just like, "Come on, people. This is not
1:58:52something we need to worry about." Like, a silly example of this was like the removal
1:58:56of the pre-increment post-increment operators, plus plus.
1:59:00Oh, you're going to bring that chestnut back.
1:59:01I mean, it was years ago. It was years ago.
1:59:02I don't think that's a good supporting example of what you were describing. That's more of
1:59:06a bike shedding thing. I would say, like, a better example, and I think this is a beneficial
1:59:10attribute to Swift, is they will take multiple runs of this stuff. Like, they -- how many
1:59:14times have they changed strings? And they should, like, they tried it, they tried it
1:59:18again, then they tried it again. But it's good. Like, they should not have stuck with
1:59:21the first one the first time they didn't get it right.
1:59:23No, no, it was garbage.
1:59:24Right? So, like, they keep trying. Sometimes -- and even the codable stuff, I think it
1:59:27took at least one other run at that type of thing. You know, or they keep changing equitable
1:59:31and hashable stuff. Like, because they realize people use them, and there's some things that
1:59:35are a little bit more annoying, where they add features like the, you know, default initializers,
1:59:38and it becomes easier to write certain things, and they redo them. It's annoying for people
1:59:42for source compatibility and so on and so forth, but I think it's the right call. Like,
1:59:45if you didn't get strings right the first time, don't be like Java and be like, "Nope,
1:59:48we did strings. That's it." I mean, that's unfair to Java, but other languages --
1:59:52No, it's not.
1:59:53Other languages evolve more slowly, let's say, than Swift, and I think one of Swift's
1:59:56advantages is their willingness to rip everything up, and the fact that they implemented so
1:59:59much in the standard library that it's not part of the quote-unquote "language." They
2:00:02can say, "Hey, we're not changing the language that much. We're changing the standard library,"
2:00:06which is mainly how people use the language. But no, I'm a fan of the process, and I think
2:00:12they're headed in the right direction. They are the only criticism -- it's not a criticism,
2:00:16but the thing that is not to my taste is they are doing this in a language that is pot-committed
2:00:21to efficiency. That's how I always think about it. What I want -- if I ever have to deal
2:00:27with bondage and discipline, you damn well better run fast. That is the only reason I
2:00:31will tolerate this kind of garbage, because otherwise I'll just write it in JavaScript,
2:00:35for crying out loud, because if you're going to run slow, no way I want to deal with your
2:00:39types. But if you deal with types, this is all me, the programmer, doing work so that
2:00:43you, the compiler, can make this thing run as if it was written in assembly. That's what
2:00:47I want out of this language.
2:00:50And then finally, Tom Bornholdt writes, "I had a dream that I was road tripping with
2:00:53the ATP crew. To ensure the dream's accuracy, if the ATP crew took a road trip together,
2:00:59who would be driving, who would be in shotgun, and who would be in the back seat?" Let's
2:01:03have Marco start with this. I will go next, and Jon can finish this out.
2:01:08Jon would be driving, because there is no way in hell that Casey or I would want to
2:01:14drive with Jon as a passenger.
2:01:18You have driven with me as a passenger, both of you, I think.
2:01:21Yeah, but not for a long road trip.
2:01:22All right, okay.
2:01:24That's a lot of pressure, and you're going to have opinions, and it's not worth it.
2:01:29It's like selling you an old computer, like, "No, bad idea."
2:01:32You two would never have opinions about driving, I'm sure.
2:01:34No, not a bit.
2:01:37So Jon would be driving, and then the question of opinions would come up, and Casey would
2:01:42have much more opinion than I would. And so Casey would be in the passenger seat, and
2:01:47I would go in the back. Also, they're both taller than me, so I can fit in the back more
2:01:50easily with my shorter legs. And so I would just go in the back and look out the window
2:01:56or look around at my laptop or whatever, and they would talk cars, and I would zone out
2:02:03probably, or fall asleep. And from the back, I can fall asleep without them noticing as
2:02:07easily.
2:02:08Well, that's an interesting point. Okay, so I started with, there was no way, there's
2:02:13no way that Jon wouldn't let anyone else drive. But then I got to thinking, and I think Jon
2:02:19would enjoy just spacing out, just like you were saying. I think Jon would enjoy just
2:02:24spacing out. I don't know if Jon's capable of it, especially as we've heard him, his
2:02:28airplane passenger tendencies, but I think he would enjoy it.
2:02:31So I think a happy medium for Jon would be riding in the passenger seat, and Aaron has
2:02:36driven Jon semi, like a mini road trip. It was like half an hour, I think, each way,
2:02:41something like that. I was not in the car at the time. And I don't remember her coming
2:02:44back traumatized, so I consider that a good sign. I think I would want to drive, but in
2:02:53all likelihood, I would have said, and so now I'm cheating because you've gone before
2:02:58me, I would have said that, "Marco, you would have been more opinionated about being the
2:03:03one in control, and I am a comparatively more passive person, and I would resign myself
2:03:08to the back, and Marco, you would drive." Although hearing what you said a moment ago,
2:03:12maybe I would switch you and me. I'm not sure. Jon—
2:03:14Who's car are we driving? It's an indeterminate, some crummy rental
2:03:18car. Oh, I'm definitely not driving that.
2:03:22Remember gentlemen, the rental car is the fastest car in the world.
2:03:26Unfortunately the rental car probably has a CPT, so Jon won't drive it either.
2:03:30All right, Jon, what do you think? So when I see my interpretation of this question,
2:03:35there's lots of things left unsaid, but road tripping, I think of that—if it's
2:03:41a question worthy of considering who's going to do what and it's some rope trick, I'm
2:03:46thinking of an epic road trip. And very long road trips, the dynamic, if you've ever
2:03:50been on one of these, especially with people who aren't your family members and you haven't
2:03:54been on road trips before, is such that a few things are true. One, it is basically
2:04:00impossible and even if it is possible, it's a terrible idea to have a single person drive.
2:04:04So I was assuming that we would all take turns driving, because if you're on a really long
2:04:08road trip, it's dangerous for one person to drive for like 12 hours in a row. You have
2:04:14three people in the car and three people who can drive. You should change drivers.
2:04:18Second thing is that however you might start the road trip, when hour 27 rolls around,
2:04:24it's a different vibe in the car. Everyone is comfortable with each other to the point
2:04:30where even after 27 hours in the car, a thing that I would never even consider doing, I
2:04:36would be open to it, which is sleeping in the backseat while someone else drives. Which,
2:04:39you're right, normally if someone else was driving, I would have to be mentally backseat
2:04:45driving the entire time to try to keep myself alive, but at a certain point, everyone's
2:04:49exhausted. You need to sleep because it's going to be your shift to drive for another
2:04:52four hours. So all of a sudden, I'm in the backseat and I'm asleep and Mark was in
2:04:59the front, but he's asleep too. The person on the practice sheets should stay awake to
2:05:02keep the other person awake and you're rotating drivers and you're stopping for food.
2:05:06A different set of rules engages at a certain point in a road trip, in which case this question
2:05:10takes on a whole new dynamic. I feel like that's how all road trips have to go. You
2:05:15rotate drivers, you rotate seats, the person in the back is sleeping and the person in
2:05:20the front is there to assist the person who's driving. That I feel like is how it would
2:05:24have to go. For a shorter thing, obviously you're both
2:05:28considering short, but for a shorter trip, I would probably want to drive. I don't
2:05:35think I've ever driven with Casey. I don't know if he's a maniac. He might be. I've
2:05:42driven with Marco and he drives fine. Obviously, I would be backseat driving from the front
2:05:47seat like I do with literally anybody else, but I wouldn't have any particular objection
2:05:53to Marco driving. I don't think he's a dangerous or reckless driver. Casey might
2:05:56be. Dangerous or reckless driver, I don't know. Marco nailed it before. I would definitely
2:06:03want to be in the passenger seat. It's a legroom issue. I feel like this is heightism,
2:06:07but yeah, you can get more legroom in the front. Marco, I feel like, would have a higher
2:06:11chance of being, depending on the size of the backseat. If it's a tiny backseat, everyone
2:06:14would be uncomfortable that you should rotate. I would like to be in the passenger seat or
2:06:18the driver seat. Also, for car sickness, I need to look out the front window. You can
2:06:22do that from the backseat, but it's harder. I would probably be driving. The longer the
2:06:28trip gets, the more I would be very open to passaging because I would be tired of driving,
2:06:34but then I would be backseat driving from the passenger seat. Then in a really long
2:06:37trip, I'd be sleeping in the back. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace,
2:06:41Linode and Collide, and we will see you next week.
2:07:11Bye.
2:07:18[music]
2:07:25I forgot to mention that when I was trying out mice, I had occasion, the first ever occasion,
2:07:51to go into a Microsoft store. It's right near the Apple store in my mall. There were
2:07:56lots of people in there, surprisingly. Really?
2:07:59Not as many as the Apple store, but there was at least one person per table display
2:08:04area kiosk thing, which is way more than I'd heard stories of. Again, it wasn't packed
2:08:09like the Apple store where every table had people around it shoulder to shoulder, but
2:08:12there were people there. I went in to feel the mice, as you do. I think they had all
2:08:19of them set up. It's just their current product line, but that's how I got to try them out.
2:08:24One of them was actually connected to a computer, so I got to use it and mess with the tracking.
2:08:27Obviously, the computer's running Windows, yada yada. The only thing I was disappointed
2:08:31is they didn't have any Xbox Elite controllers out anywhere. I wanted to try one of those.
2:08:36I'd never used one in person. I thought it would be cool to try. Maybe it's because the
2:08:39things come off magnetically and people will steal them out of the store. I'm not sure.
2:08:42Anyway, it was pretty nice. People there were nice and helpful. Two thumbs up for the Microsoft
2:08:47store.
2:08:48I have never seen the Microsoft store in my mall have more customers than employees there.
2:08:55This definitely had more customers than employees.
2:08:58Usually at least two or three of the employees at the Microsoft store are playing the Minecraft
2:09:04booth that's set up because they don't have anything else to do.
2:09:07This thing had a booth that was set up. It was a Disney+ booth. The one right next to
2:09:11the hallway, the mall thoroughfare, was a bunch of seats that were previously used for
2:09:18VR or something.
2:09:22It had a big Disney+ thing and they were showing episodes of The Mandalorian. It was like,
2:09:26"Is there some deal with Microsoft and Disney for them to sell Disney+ subscriptions?" I
2:09:30don't understand what they were demoing, but that's what it was.
2:09:32There were tons of Xboxes set up too and kids playing games. Maybe that's why. Maybe it's
2:09:36kids who wanted to play games and their parents were just milling around. I don't know.
2:09:39The Surface Studios were there. I still think that's really cool.
2:09:43Has that gone anywhere? It's a cool idea, but I haven't heard a thing about it since
2:09:48launch.
2:09:49I would love it if Apple made an iMac like that. A gigantic touchscreen that can go down
2:09:54to drafting table mode and up into regular 5K screen mode. If the hinge feels good, the
2:09:59form factor was cool, it's underpowered. It's overpriced. We've talked about it.
2:10:03That's an interesting idea.
2:10:04Yeah.
2:10:04I don't know. It runs on Windows, so there's that.
2:10:07Other than that, I looked at that and I looked at the iMac and the iMac looks like a previous
2:10:11gen product. It's like, "Oh yeah, I remember when computers used to be just like an L-shaped
2:10:14foot and then a screen with no touchscreen on it."
2:10:18That's how, when I was in the Microsoft store looking at laptops last year, that's
2:10:21how I felt with laptops too. You saw the super skinny bezel laptops with that one with the
2:10:27pop-up camera and the F and keys. It really does make a lot of Apple designs look very
2:10:34dated by comparison. Which is funny because it used to be the opposite.
2:10:36Or at least less daring. It makes them look more conservative. You look at anything in
2:10:41the Microsoft store and you see Apple's design from three years ago. The reason all
2:10:45their keyboards look like they do, they borrow so much from Apple's design aesthetic, but
2:10:50they're so much more daring.
2:10:52Unfortunately it's more than three years ago though. It used to be that PC designers
2:10:58looked, it looked like PC designs looked like Apple products from two or three years ago.
2:11:04Now it looks like PC designs looked like Apple products ten years ago.
2:11:08In two or three years?
2:11:09Yeah.
2:11:10Oh.
2:11:11Or no, yeah, I guess in, yeah, you're right, it's like the other direction.
2:11:13The keyboard aesthetic of this current keyboard, like that it's sitting in front of me now,
2:11:17the flat keys on the thin key frame thing with the very squared off edges and like whatever,
2:11:23Apple pioneered that aesthetic in their laptops and it spread through Microsoft's products.
2:11:27And the aesthetic Microsoft has of like the gray on gray rectilinear brushed aluminum
2:11:33thing owes a lot to Apple. But then Microsoft takes that ball and runs with it. Like the
2:11:37Surface Studio, I mean the fact that it just looks like a big screen, like what do you
2:11:41expect screens to look like? The fact that it has a black bezel around it, it looks a
2:11:45little bit iMac-y, but that chrome hinge is like a remix of the arm on the, you know,
2:11:50the flower iMac thing. And then the little case is like an oversized Mac mini in a different
2:11:56color of beige. Like you see how it's a kind of a mishmash, but then the Surface stuff
2:12:01is Microsoft's own thing that if anything Apple has followed along a little bit in sort
2:12:06of squaring off the edges on the iPads and stuff. I don't know, it's a good mix. And
2:12:09I think Microsoft, Microsoft like has taken up residence as a semi-premium PC vendor.
2:12:18I'm not going to say the most premium PC vendor because there are fancy PCs and there are
2:12:22ones with different aesthetics like the, you know, Alienware, Origin or whatever all these
2:12:26gaming PC makers are. And some of that stuff is really cool too. But that's one of the
2:12:30reasons I'm ordering this Microsoft mouse. I tried it and I'm like, you know what? These
2:12:33buttons feel good. This wheel feels solid. This mode switch feels satisfying. Seemed
2:12:39like a quality-made peripheral and it was priced like one. Like it's not a $30 mouse.
2:12:44So I'm optimistic that I will actually like that product when I get it.
2:12:48Yeah, Microsoft has always been really good about input devices. Like their keyboards
2:12:53and mice have always been really rock solid.
2:12:57I mean I hated the, you know, the beginning, the Microsoft's first peripherals, their
2:13:02first mouse and their first keyboards, I hated those with a fiery passion. They felt cheap.
2:13:06They weren't shaped the way I wanted them. But the new ones are more premium. They feel
2:13:11solid or they cost five times as much, right? Like they've done, they've amplified themselves.
2:13:17But those old peripherals had a particular style and tons of people love them. Like how
2:13:22many people have Microsoft mice on their PCs for years and years? It was like defacto,
2:13:27you know, the standard mouse that you would see on anyone who cared anything about mice,
2:13:31you'd get the Microsoft one. PC vendors ship them. So, you know, they've just sort
2:13:35of moved up market a little bit.
2:13:37[BEEPING]