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355: The Way Corn Grows

 

00:00:00   So Casey, are you recording? Yes, I am recording. It's sad, it is truly and utterly sad that you

00:00:06   kind of genuinely need to ask that six years on. God, I'm such a disaster. I just need my computing

00:00:12   life to be better. I feel like that's all I need. So we had three and a half minutes of flawless

00:00:19   content, absolutely perfect content that is lost forever because I forgot to start recording.

00:00:27   My room is so bright right now. Oh God, here we go. What have you done? Do you have like the studio,

00:00:34   like the LED packs where it's like, you know, 10 LEDs wide and 10 LEDs tall and you're just

00:00:40   blinding yourself? So not yet. So actually one thing, you know, oh man, we've had so many

00:00:45   recommendations. Thank you everybody for all the lighting recommendations. So many recommendations,

00:00:49   many of which were actually very good, many of which kind of like follow the same general themes

00:00:55   of basically install LED panels on the ceiling. And that would be a good idea if I was in an office

00:01:04   with a drop ceiling or you know, like where like it's made for that. That's what those are made

00:01:08   for. But I'm in a regular room in my house with like a regular solid white ceiling. And so any

00:01:14   kind of like, you know, thing made for offices where you just put a few big rectangles in the

00:01:18   ceiling is not going to fly. I also didn't mention last episode that my office is like a prominent

00:01:24   room in my house. Like it's, it's visible from the front. Like it's one of the first rooms you see

00:01:28   when you walk into the house. And so any solution for my lighting also has to look pretty good to

00:01:34   satisfy our desire for our house to look nice. And you know, we live here and we have people over and

00:01:39   you know, we want things to be nice. So many of the options for insanely bright lighting would not

00:01:45   pass the aesthetic requirement that I forgot to mention last episode. So I respectfully declined

00:01:50   many of the options. A number of people were, there was a guy who wrote a blog post about his

00:01:55   giant you know, corn light that he put in his room and how bright it makes it. And that like, that's,

00:02:00   that's great. And for those of you who know, the corn bulb is a style where it looks like corn on

00:02:06   the cob made of LEDs. Like I just bought one of those like two days ago. Yeah. I have one in my

00:02:10   garage. It's amazing. Yeah. They're wonderful for garages because garages, you don't care how it

00:02:14   looks like in a garage. Like you just want a ton of light. And usually you have like a one or two

00:02:19   like old light sockets stuck to the ceiling and you can just screw anything in there. And so you

00:02:23   put these things in the garage and they are just like cylinders covered with LEDs that you can get

00:02:29   insane brightness out of. As long as you don't care how they look. And those are wonderful for

00:02:35   garages. Those that's not going to fly in my office. So that, that option is out. One thing I

00:02:39   am a little bit curious about though, does anybody make a fixture that encloses a corn style bulb

00:02:48   in some kind of like fogged dome? Some kind of Dyson sphere to capture all the energy. Well,

00:02:54   no, like seriously, like just some kind of like, you know, translucent, like, you know, fogged dome

00:03:01   around one of those bulbs would be great. I have not been able to find such a fixture. I think the

00:03:07   fact that corn bulbs themselves usually aren't even like the bulbs aren't even covered, like the

00:03:11   little LED thing. That makes me think that the cooling requirements are such that a use in an

00:03:16   enclosed fixture is a no go. Well, leave the top open. Just have it be like, like the way corn grows.

00:03:21   You know, just like have like a cylinder and have the top be open and have it be a pole lamp.

00:03:29   Speaking of your LED things, like not all LED panel things require a drop ceiling. They make

00:03:35   a whole bunch of ones for residential use that just go right on top of your ceiling and just

00:03:38   screw into it. They don't help with your aesthetic requirements though, but just so you don't get

00:03:43   to many emails telling you that you can find LED panel lighting for your ceiling that doesn't require

00:03:48   a drop ceiling. I am actually very happy so far. So I have slightly brighter bulbs in my two IKEA

00:03:55   knot lamps next to my desk now. I bought but have not yet installed. It's funny, a lot of people

00:03:59   recommended, they're like, just paint the room white. I'm like, you know, I, I'm not going to do

00:04:06   that because I like my red office, but directly in front of me behind my computer, the entire wall

00:04:12   that's there, the section of wall directly in front of me that these two lights are up against

00:04:16   is covered in very dark gray acoustic foam. And so I have bought but not yet installed

00:04:23   white acoustic foam because it doesn't need to be gray and they make it because it's foam in

00:04:27   pretty much every color. So I bought new acoustic foam to stick behind my desk. I was going to do

00:04:30   it today if I didn't get, didn't get to it in time. I wanted to like have an update for the show.

00:04:34   So maybe for next week I'll have that done. Uh, but yeah, it's just like increasing the amount

00:04:38   of light that can reflect off the wall behind my desk is probably also a very good option.

00:04:42   I'm wondering if that's going to pass the historical commission.

00:04:44   It already has. Well, the, the, the idea of it has, we'll see how it goes in, in practice.

00:04:50   Cause like white, like, Oh, white, fine. White goes with red. That's no problem. And it's bright,

00:04:54   but is it white or is it like whitish? And does it change color over time? We'll see how this goes.

00:05:00   Yeah, that's always a risk with whites. So I guess we'll find out. Um, and then my final bit of light

00:05:04   follow up for the, for this week, at least part of the problem was that my, the two fixtures on

00:05:10   the ceiling in this room are enclosed and you put led bulbs in there and they die. Like they,

00:05:15   it just, it goes through bulbs like crazy. And so even though each fixture on my ceiling can hold

00:05:20   three bulbs and I can put super bright ones in there, realistically, they only last a few months

00:05:25   before I have to take them all out again. And I mean, one option could be, I might just replace

00:05:29   six led bulbs every, every three months and just deal with it. Um, but a friend of the show,

00:05:36   Marina Eppleman, uh, tweeted the other day about a new kind of X led I a X Lydia. I don't know how

00:05:42   that's pronounced. Uh, it's a, it's a new kind of led bulb that is officially certified to work in

00:05:48   enclosed fixtures. And it's like the only one in the market that claims this. They're really

00:05:54   expensive, like 50 bucks each. I took the risk. I put six of them in there. We'll see if they die.

00:05:59   The, the reviews on them on Amazon, many of them were great glowing reviews. And then some of them

00:06:03   were like, yeah, they died anyway. So we'll see what happens. Uh, but I do now have 600 watt

00:06:10   equivalent, 5,000 cables. It was the closest that came to 4,000, uh, in my, in my ceiling fixtures.

00:06:15   And that helps as well. So I'm sitting in right now, a very bright office late at night, and

00:06:21   I'm actually kind of happy with the slight level. I don't, I don't think I need much more than this.

00:06:25   So, so far so good. We'll see what happens when I put the white foam up and I will provide an

00:06:28   update next week on this exciting segment of Marco's light globe. Yeah. I forgot last week,

00:06:33   I should have written it down because I thought of it and then forgot to bring it up. Um, and a lot of,

00:06:37   uh, listeners, uh, uh, wrote in with the same idea, those seasonal effective disorder lights.

00:06:42   So they're just like this big, bright light that you're supposed to shine as your own face to make

00:06:46   you feel better about the fact that the sun isn't there. And I forget if you had one of those or

00:06:51   not. I don't think they're not meant to light up the room, but they do help. Yeah. So, so the,

00:06:55   I actually made the chapter art last week, a shot of my desk with these two IKEA knot lamps next to

00:07:00   it. And keen observers would have noticed that I actually had one of those on my desk pointed

00:07:04   directly at my face, sitting on top of my left speaker. And I actually just took it down today

00:07:08   as I was preparing to move my desk out of the way to put up the new foam. And, uh, I, I, I started

00:07:13   using that last year for the first time and it's fine, but I don't love having bright light shining

00:07:21   in my face directly. Like it actually is fairly intense and it's, it was fine a little bit. I

00:07:26   don't think it made as much of a difference as just having a super bright office in the first

00:07:30   place. Uh, so I'm, I'm, that's why I'm trying this right off at this time. And if I really

00:07:34   want to try the sad light as well, I guess I'll turn that on as well. But, uh, it's,

00:07:39   it, for the most part, I don't, I didn't get as much out of it last year as, as I, as I hoped I

00:07:44   would. And meanwhile, I think solving that, solving the better problem is just making the room

00:07:48   insanely bright. Do you need, it's like an Apple style solution where your entire ceiling just

00:07:53   looks like a normal ceiling, but there are actually tiny little pin size holes, millions of them. And

00:07:59   behind them is a full, uh, you know, field of RGB LEDs covering the entire ceiling. And then there's

00:08:05   software that controls it to the color temperature and the brightness. And it's like the sun rises and

00:08:09   the sun sets and the color changes. And when you turn it off, it just looks like a normal ceiling.

00:08:13   That would actually be kind of awesome. And very affordable, I'm sure. Well, you wouldn't need a

00:08:18   stand for it, so maybe it would be affordable. Uh, yeah, yeah. Well, I hope you get your, your

00:08:24   light situation squared away as soon as possible because nobody likes a sad Marco. You just got

00:08:29   your keyboard. Finally. We don't want you to get sad again. It's funny. I'm like, I'm adding up,

00:08:32   like the, the wattage of brightness that is in this room right now. I got 600 on the ceiling plus

00:08:39   700 in the pole lamps. Yeah. So I have, I have 1300 equivalent watts of light.

00:08:47   I was going to say that's equivalent, right? Yeah. I was going to, it's going to be more and

00:08:50   more difficult to explain to younger and younger people why we keep talking about light in terms

00:08:54   of wattage as if it's a measure of light output. Well, cause I really hope you don't have 1600 watts

00:09:00   of anything, uh, producing light, but what equivalent. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No,

00:09:06   there are a hundred percent LEDs and they use like a tent of that. Yep. That's the great thing about

00:09:10   LEDs. Like if I leave one on overnight, which I don't do often, I come downstairs and I'm like,

00:09:13   eh, Oh well. Whereas if I had, you know, the 300 watt equivalent light bulb in the garage,

00:09:19   you know, if I, or if I, I should say, you know, if I actually had a 300 watt light light on in

00:09:23   the garage all night, that would make a dent. See, and if you don't, if you like garage,

00:09:27   like if you don't care how, how bad something looks, garages have all sorts of options. Like,

00:09:31   you know, so they have the corn lights. Then they also, I discovered all these things when I was

00:09:34   looking at various bulbs, I could put in my knot lamps. They also have these things that look almost

00:09:38   like little fans. They have like three, like three or four or five like little panels that like fan

00:09:44   out from the center that are all just covered in LEDs. Like there's all sorts of crazy options out

00:09:49   there. And as long as you guys, as long as they can look hideous and be very harsh to look directly

00:09:54   at, uh, then it's, it's totally fine for garages and everything. So yeah, now I'm thinking like,

00:10:00   Oh, I could put more fixtures in my garage and have an even brighter garage for all the work you

00:10:05   do on your electric car. That sounds like me. We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start

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00:12:01   So gentlemen, I have to prepare the way. What are you preparing the way for? Oh,

00:12:10   wait, we have to ask Casey, what computer are you using right now?

00:12:14   All right, so I am still on the broken iMac that I have been using for far too long now.

00:12:22   And the funny thing is, after I had done my desperation install of Catalina, which I have

00:12:29   a little bit of follow-up about that in just a moment, but after I did my desperation install

00:12:32   of Catalina, everything was actually working really, really well for like a week and a half.

00:12:38   And I did order a computer on Black Friday, and we will talk about that in a moment. But when I

00:12:44   ordered the computer, things were actually still working pretty well on the iMac. And I couldn't

00:12:47   help but wonder, why did I just spend thousands of dollars? But in an absolutely wonderful turn

00:12:56   of events, the Sunday after I ordered the computer, so this past Sunday, I was using my iMac. And sure

00:13:03   enough, all of a sudden, the mouse just decided to not listen to me. And the cursor was delayed,

00:13:09   like it was walking through sludge. And the clicks were ignored until suddenly I had the machine gun

00:13:16   again. And in a way, I was almost relieved, because that meant, yes, this thing is still a piece of

00:13:22   garbage that still needs to go away. My quick follow-up with regard to the Mojave install,

00:13:27   if you recall, I intended to put Mojave on my computer because it seemed like everything still

00:13:32   worked on Mojave. And then when I went to install it from my USB key that I'd made way back when,

00:13:38   I clicked the continue button on one of the very first prompts in the installation process and just

00:13:43   hung. And there was no error messaging of any sort. We had discussed how I should have looked

00:13:47   at the console and didn't. And I had no idea what had happened. Well, several people, many people,

00:13:51   in fact, wrote in to remind me, which I did know but completely forgot, that the installer

00:13:56   certificate, if I understand correctly, had been expired. And so the installer that I built on this

00:14:04   USB key, you know, right when Mojave was new, surely that was one of the installers that had

00:14:08   the broken and expired certificate. And that's probably why the install didn't work. And so if I

00:14:13   really cared, I could build a new USB key and do the installation all over again and it would

00:14:18   probably work. But I appreciate people writing in. I had completely and utterly forgotten about that.

00:14:23   And while an unfortunate thing to happen, ultimately it was good to hear that I am,

00:14:29   well, I'm probably crazy, but at least not for that reason. So on Friday, I decided it is time.

00:14:37   I'm going to order myself a computer. And I am an easily influenced person. Sometimes I listen to

00:14:46   friends or people on the internet a little too much. And I decided I'm going to do that again

00:14:53   this time I bought an iMac Pro. So that is what I've done indeed. So through a series of events

00:15:01   that I'm not going to share, I was able to get a pretty solid discount on this iMac Pro from

00:15:07   a friend of mine. - You're friends with Tim Cook, aren't you? - Yeah, I spoke to Tim. I spoke to

00:15:11   Tim Apple and said, "Hey, Tim, can you hook me up on this?" And he said, "No problem." No, I got a

00:15:15   pretty good discount on it, which meant that I could afford to get a much nicer build than I

00:15:20   would have otherwise been able to do. Because up until knowing that I could get the discount,

00:15:25   I probably would have gotten that refurb that you had pointed out, Marco, which is genuinely

00:15:28   an extremely good setup. And I don't know if it's still available at this point. - Yeah. There were

00:15:33   a couple of good Black Friday deals too from various people giving at least the base model

00:15:38   was down I think to like 3400 on some sites. There were some good deals on that base model.

00:15:44   - Yeah. But what I ended up doing, because again, I got a very, very, very steep discount. It is new.

00:15:51   I got one with the 10 core processor. I went very back and forth on this, but I figured if I'm going

00:15:58   to be spending 5,000-ish dollars on a computer, I might as well do it right. So I got the 10 core

00:16:02   processor, 64 gigs RAM, and in no small part because of Marco Arment, as always, convincing

00:16:08   me to spend more money than I want to. This is how our friendship works. - You're welcome.

00:16:12   - This is how our friendship works, and I am usually thankful for it. I ended up getting the

00:16:16   four terabyte drive as well. I almost said hard drive. I'm trying to break myself in that habit.

00:16:20   I got the four terabyte drive as well. - Disk, I believe, or I guess, I mean,

00:16:24   I know you can say SSD, but like, I mean, because like drive is kind of like--

00:16:29   - That's true. - Hard drive, it's also hard. Like it's not soft. It's not floppy.

00:16:33   - Oh man, that's funny. But yeah, so that's what I've done, and it was a lot of money, and I am not

00:16:44   overjoyed at having spent that much money, but I am overjoyed to receive it. In fact, earlier today,

00:16:50   I got the notification that it went from processing to preparing for shipment. One of the,

00:16:55   I forget how you phrased it, Marco, but to butcher your line and to steal your line,

00:17:00   one of life's great joys is being able to tick the Express shipping box on a custom built order

00:17:07   computer, because on this $5,000 plus computer, the Express, and it's a heavy computer, by the way,

00:17:13   I don't know how much they weigh off hand, but it's not light. I mean, ask Marco. He carries his,

00:17:16   the peach every year. But anyway, on this Express computer, or on this large S-off computer,

00:17:22   Express shipping was a totally unaffordable $8. So I absolutely ticked that box. I think it saves you

00:17:30   like two or three days or something like that on the delivery time. - And the Express shipping from

00:17:35   Apple is always ridiculously cheap. Obviously, they're subsidizing most of the cost of it.

00:17:39   And I figure at that point, if it's like $8 or $9 on a $5,000 computer, why don't they just always

00:17:45   include Express shipping? Like why isn't it even an option? - I don't even know. But anyway, so I

00:17:50   have a new iMac Pro, a new two-year-old iMac Pro coming my way, and I am genuinely very excited.

00:17:57   Now the question, however, the question is two questions, and one really. One, is it going to

00:18:03   come with Mojave? I believe Mike's did, and he bought his just like a month or so ago. And if it

00:18:08   does come with Mojave, am I going to be a moron and put Catalina on it, only to create more of

00:18:14   the same problems for myself? So we'll see how my willpower goes. But I'm very excited. I appreciate

00:18:21   you and the listeners for putting up with my waffling and indecision over all this. But hopefully

00:18:26   this story is coming to an end sometime in the next seven to 10 days. - Well, and also, even if it

00:18:32   comes with Catalina, that machine is compatible with Mojave, because it came out before Catalina

00:18:37   did, and it is originally shipped with Mojave. So you can always download a Mojave installer

00:18:41   and wipe it and put that on there if you wanted to. - Yeah, that's true. I don't know. We'll see

00:18:45   what happens. I'll probably just live with whatever. I'm telling myself I'm gonna live

00:18:49   with whatever's on it. That's such a burden. You know what I mean, though. I'm just going to stick

00:18:53   with whatever's on it, and we'll see how all that works out. There's, outside of dark mode,

00:18:58   which I actually have come to like, and is that unique? No, that's not unique to Catalina, is it,

00:19:03   come to think of it? Okay, nevermind. 'Cause dark mode is the one thing that I'm really,

00:19:07   really enjoying on this iMac right now that I thought was Catalina only until two seconds ago.

00:19:12   So I might not even bother for a while. We'll see. But I am super excited. I appreciate all

00:19:17   the help and tutelage from the two of you and the listeners in getting this squared away.

00:19:21   A couple of quick things that a lot of people have said. You know, why not a 16-inch Macbook Pro?

00:19:26   Ultimately, it's something that I think Marco said, which really was probably John,

00:19:31   'cause it's always John. I don't really want a 16-inch computer. I don't want a 16-inch laptop,

00:19:36   and I'm not discounting the fact that it's amazing. Not at all. I'm just saying that's not

00:19:40   a size that I really want. And so, from the beginning, a 16, for me, would have been a

00:19:46   compromise. And it would have been a beautiful compromise. An incredibly easy and great, and I'm

00:19:51   very lucky to have it compromised, but a compromise nonetheless. And so I decided not to do that.

00:19:56   A lot of people wrote in to ask about a Mac Mini, and it's a fair question, but in a lot of ways,

00:20:03   I felt like the Mac Mini half-solved all of my problems, but didn't completely and utterly

00:20:08   solve all of them. As silly as I would then need to get a monitor. And yes, there are monitors on

00:20:13   the market, but the one I would get would probably be the LG, and that's another $1,500 or something

00:20:19   like that. Or $1,300, I think. And so, and this was another thing I ran into with the 16-inch.

00:20:25   I would want to get a monitor. I would want the 5K LG, etc., etc. And the 16-inch Macbook Pro,

00:20:30   when specced the way I wanted it, and with the monitor I wanted, was effectively iMac Pro money

00:20:36   anyway. Now, yes, to be fair, I can't pick up the iMac Pro and take it to my local grocery store,

00:20:42   unless I have Marco's fancy carrying case. But nevertheless, it just seemed like the 16 was just

00:20:48   a compromise, and a Mac Mini just half-solves many problems. A lot of problems, but only half-solves

00:20:56   them. And the iMac Pro, it really effectively and efficiently, well, except financially anyway,

00:21:02   efficiently solves every one of my problems with the exception of portability. And hopefully,

00:21:09   sometime next year, I can scrounge up enough money to get myself like a base model 13-inch Macbook

00:21:15   Pro with a refresh keyboard. Yeah, now you've got something to look forward to, because now you,

00:21:19   instead of being saddled with that 16-inch that you didn't really want, and by the way,

00:21:22   I think both Marco and I said that multiple times, because it's true. You'll be able to anticipate

00:21:28   the small laptop that you actually wanted, and be able to buy one that is not, you know,

00:21:34   stuffed with all the most expensive stuff you can put in it, because you don't need it for that,

00:21:37   because you've got your desktop. Exactly. One thing you didn't mention is what GPU you got.

00:21:41   Whatever the stock standard one is, I don't even remember off the top of my head. I did not tick

00:21:46   any upgrades other than processor RAM and disk space, however we're facing. What input peripherals

00:21:54   did you get? I already had purchased Underscore's black keyboard and trackpad and mouse off of him

00:22:01   when he got his iMac Pro, so I just left the defaults, because even though I am... You left

00:22:06   the defaults? Yeah, well, it's default, I guess, because the keyboard is the keyboard, but yes,

00:22:11   exactly. Aren't they going to give you the tiny keyboard with the terrible half-size arrow keys?

00:22:16   No, the one I have has faults. I don't know. I understand your question. I don't know. I'm

00:22:21   nervous for you now. But it doesn't matter. I'm not going to use it. I think they gave you the

00:22:24   big one with the iMac Pro. I think it's the big one as well. Yep, I can confirm. I guess we'll

00:22:28   cross the room at Tofs because she uses it. It's the one with the full numpad. Yeah, okay,

00:22:31   then that's one I'm using. Dodge that bullet. I remember a couple years ago they changed the

00:22:34   default to be the tiny half-size keyboard. It's like, no, it's not the right default.

00:22:39   Well, that was the default on the iMac since I can remember. No, it's bad. It's bad.

00:22:44   I actually, I really like that keyboard if you're willing to. Not only do they have the same

00:22:48   keyboard on their 12-inch and 15-inch and 16-inch laptops, but also on your expansive desk,

00:22:53   same keyboard. It's not a good plan. Well, in any case, I just left the defaults because I'm not

00:22:59   going to use them, and the defaults being the big keyboard, like Marco said, and the

00:23:03   Magic Mouse. And even though I've become more of a trackpad guy over the last year,

00:23:07   much to my own surprise as we've talked about in the past, it didn't seem worth the 50 or 70 bucks,

00:23:12   whatever it was, to upgrade to a second Magic trackpad since we already got one. And a black

00:23:17   one, no less. Or a space gray or whatever. So yeah, so I'm excited. And I mean, if either of

00:23:23   you have questions, I'm happy to talk about it, but otherwise we can just move right along.

00:23:25   One more thing on the Apple keyboards. Now that we're talking about the keyboards Apple offers

00:23:30   for their desktop computers, which we don't talk about too much, mostly because Marco doesn't use

00:23:35   one, so we don't have to hear him complain about it. There have been issues with the current line

00:23:41   of Apple's desktop keyboards, which are very thin and very small. And the current, like,

00:23:49   very long extended one has bendy problems. Supposedly by typing on it with your little

00:23:54   fingers, "tapity tapity tapity," you slowly bend it. And it's very close to the ground anyway,

00:24:00   but apparently originally only had like feet at the four corners. And so you'd bend it down just

00:24:05   so it curved a little bit because it was so thin that your tapping would bend it. And then it would

00:24:09   kind of like spin on the part where it hits in the middle. And that's no good. So no one wants

00:24:14   a bent keyboard. I don't know if they've addressed that at all, but I've heard, I mean, obviously you

00:24:17   can address it yourself by putting your own little feet in the middle. Maybe the new ones come with

00:24:20   the feet in the middle. I don't know. I always liked it when the, I mentioned this before,

00:24:24   when the function keys were a little bit farther away from the number keys. Again,

00:24:27   there's lots of room on my desk slash keyboard tray. I don't need the function keys jammed right

00:24:32   up against the number keys, even though it looks nicer. I don't care. Move them a half a centimeter

00:24:38   up, please. I can afford the desk space. And then as many people are running on the chat,

00:24:42   lots of people don't like the numpad. Righties don't like the numpad because it puts your mouse

00:24:46   farther away from your keyboard, which is one of the many reasons that Marco doesn't use a keyboard

00:24:49   like this. It would be nice if Apple offered a, what they call 10 keyless or whatever, that has,

00:24:54   it's like the same as the Apple extended thing, but just cut the numpad right off. So you still

00:24:58   get page up, page down, home end, and your full-size arrow keys and their own little area,

00:25:02   but you don't have the numpad. I don't like the numpad either, but I do actually use it occasionally.

00:25:07   Like I use it to enter numbers. I don't know. Maybe I'm from growing up with pieces or whatever,

00:25:11   but it does push my mouse farther away and I don't like that part of it.

00:25:14   Yeah. The, my, my preferred keyboard, the Microsoft sculpt ergonomic comes with a separate

00:25:20   wireless numpad that you can put anywhere. I mean, I think I've thrown away six of those things so

00:25:25   far. Nice. I forgot to mention earlier, by the way, Friday morning, I forget when it was, I think

00:25:35   I was not at the computer when it happened, but I came back to the computer sometime after I had

00:25:41   ordered the iMac Pro and I come back to my iMac and it had rebooted itself and there was something,

00:25:47   I forget the exact file name, but there was like an EFI check dump file or something like that,

00:25:52   which I had never seen before in my life and doing just a spot of Googling made me think that

00:25:58   apparently there is some periodic task that will check the EFI, the bios, so to speak. I know it's

00:26:05   not actually bios, but for the sake of discussion, it'll check the EFI and make sure it's like valid

00:26:11   and I don't know, checksums are right and maybe certificates or what have you. And I guess my

00:26:15   iMac failed that check at some point, which is super concerning in a billion different ways.

00:26:21   Yeah, that's not good.

00:26:21   So here again, it is time for this thing to go away. I honestly don't know what I'm going to

00:26:26   do with it. I haven't figured that out. I feel like throwing it away is not the right answer,

00:26:31   but at the same time, I don't feel like I necessarily want to give it to anyone or even

00:26:34   sell it to anyone.

00:26:36   If you've listened to Casey complain about this computer for a month and a half and you would

00:26:39   like to buy it, please send us an email.

00:26:42   Yeah, let me know if you want it, but I don't think you do. So anyway, I don't know what I'm

00:26:47   going to do with this. If somebody has smart ideas, I'm all in.

00:26:50   Apple will recycle it for you.

00:26:51   You can harvest that awesome third party RAM from it if you want.

00:26:56   Have you done the trade in wizard to see what it's worth?

00:27:00   I haven't lately, but I thought...

00:27:03   Don't check the haunted checkbox when you see the numbers. By the way, is this Mac haunted?

00:27:09   Don't check that one.

00:27:10   But the thing is, I would need to buy a new Mac in order to get the trade in money back.

00:27:14   Well, you're going to do that when the 13 inch comes.

00:27:16   No, no, no. They just give you a gift card. They literally just give you a gift card. You

00:27:20   don't need to be buying it at the same time. Go to the link in the chat. Google for Apple

00:27:25   trade in or go to that link. And then they just want the serial number and then they

00:27:28   look up the model number from that and that's it. It's super easy.

00:27:31   I'm going to do this right now and find out how much my Mac Pro is worth. Let's see.

00:27:36   Serial number. Mac. Do you think it's going to let me do it?

00:27:43   I believe that's going to be a recycle option.

00:27:45   Get credit towards the... Do I have to hit shop Mac or is that...

00:27:49   Scroll down to get an Apple store gift card. Then hit computer.

00:27:52   Oh, check that out. I didn't know that.

00:27:54   It turns out web pages can scroll sometimes.

00:27:56   Who knew?

00:27:56   There's more content than what's just in the first window.

00:27:59   All right. I'm doing this now as well. This is excellent audio material right now.

00:28:03   I just sent them three old iPhones, one old iPad and an Apple watch that I bought this

00:28:08   summer for my testing that I sent back to them for almost exactly what I paid for.

00:28:13   Oh, wow. Nice.

00:28:14   Oh, this is not great. I entered my serial number and it says,

00:28:16   "Which model do you have?" I gave you the serial number. Surely from that you can tell.

00:28:21   Yeah, I'm going through the same thing.

00:28:22   I'm guessing Johnny's recycling case is maybe 200 bucks.

00:28:25   So I'm going down the Mac Pro alley and it says, "What year is it? Guess what the options are for

00:28:29   the joys." It's re-joke. Oh, no. 2013 and that's it?

00:28:33   2013 and other. All right. And I've gotten to the end of the thing and I'll, you want

00:28:42   me to tell you what it says? Recycle.

00:28:44   Based on what you've told us, your Mac is ready to recycle. Harsh. Harsh.

00:28:50   Based on what you've told us, your Mac is not even worth recycling. The aluminum has broken down.

00:28:54   We can't, we have no idea what to do with this.

00:28:58   We are happy to recycle it into one Coke can. All right, I did get a dollar amount. Would you

00:29:04   like to guess, gentlemen, what that is? $200.

00:29:06   Oh, wait. I'm going to guess now. Let me see. What year is your iMac?

00:29:09   It is late 2015. It is 4 gigahertz quad-core i7 with 32 gigs of questionable RAM and a

00:29:18   1 terabyte drive. This is a, like, you know, this is a few-year-old iMac that at the time

00:29:23   you bought it would have been something like $3,000, right?

00:29:26   Something like that, yeah.

00:29:27   Um, I'm going to say $800.

00:29:29   Well, if we're playing Price is Right rules, Marco won. But you are closer. $580.

00:29:36   Whoa, that's lower than I thought.

00:29:37   Oh, take it. Take this deal.

00:29:39   I absolutely will take that deal without question. I didn't even know this was a thing. I thought

00:29:44   you had to buy another computer.

00:29:45   Yeah, they send you a box and everything. No, they just send you a gift card, like in

00:29:49   a couple of weeks, and then you can use it whenever you buy anything next from Apple,

00:29:52   and you can stack them up. You can use more than one.

00:29:54   That's excellent. I'm glad we had this conversation.

00:29:56   Yeah, so thank you.

00:29:58   Like, and this is, I get rid of a bunch of stuff this way because it's not, you know,

00:30:01   I know that when you sell things privately, you can get more money, but it's also a pain

00:30:06   in the butt.

00:30:06   But then you'll be inflicting this computer onto a private citizen, which no one wants

00:30:10   that.

00:30:10   No, I genuinely, I don't want to do that.

00:30:12   Exactly. Like by doing this, like, this is going to go into like, you know, refurbishment

00:30:17   and parts and all sorts of crap. Like, this is going to be like no longer your problem

00:30:22   and also not the problem of anybody you know or directly took money from.

00:30:26   Right. Now I am really, really genuinely happy about this option. I did not even know that

00:30:30   was a thing.

00:30:30   That's excellent. Thanks, man.

00:30:32   So yeah, so cases computer corner. I'm sure we'll do a small update when this thing arrives,

00:30:37   which might be by the next time we record, but probably not. But otherwise, I am super

00:30:42   pumped and God willing, and hopefully it won't be a problem.

00:30:46   Actually, I expect to have no problems with this computer because I did tick the $150

00:30:50   or whatever dollar AppleCare+ box when I ordered it, thinking to myself, well, given the

00:30:55   great track record you have with your iMac, you might as well play it safe. But since

00:31:00   I have gotten myself protection, that stands to reason that I will not need it.

00:31:04   Yeah, I was even going to suggest that like, now that you've ordered the replacement

00:31:08   computer, your current computer is going to be perfect now. It's never going to have

00:31:10   any problems again.

00:31:11   Exactly. I'm happy to report that my computer is still a piece of garbage. Don't worry.

00:31:16   Yeah, it's just passive aggressively leaving like a little notes on his desktop telling

00:31:19   you how broken it is.

00:31:20   Yeah, exactly.

00:31:21   Just so you know, while you were gone, I'm corrupt.

00:31:24   Yeah, exactly right.

00:31:25   Yeah, a couple things. So we mentioned this back when the iMac Pro first came out, but

00:31:30   for whatever reason, the AppleCare on the iMac Pro is at the same price as the regular

00:31:35   iMac, even though it's a $5,000 and up computer. And so it's like $160 or something for AppleCare.

00:31:40   No matter how much you can spec it up to like a $10,000 configuration, it's still $160 or

00:31:47   whatever dollars for the AppleCare. So it almost doesn't make sense not to get it.

00:31:51   Even I got it for my iMac Pro because it was so cheap relative to the cost of any repair

00:31:56   to this computer that might ever happen. And so that was a good move.

00:32:01   And then finally, I also wanted to mention that over this past week, being Thanksgiving

00:32:05   and everything, I traveled with the 16 inch for the first time. And actually, I spent

00:32:11   a lot of time on it, a lot of work on it. And I am just continuing to be so happy with

00:32:18   this computer.

00:32:19   Oh, good. That makes me happy.

00:32:21   It's finally good. It's so it's like, this is how I used to feel about all my previous

00:32:27   laptops 2015 and earlier. They were just good. I never had like, yeah, I had like little

00:32:32   tiny nitpicks here and there mostly about like, I wish the battery lasted longer like

00:32:36   it. But there was there were never like fundamental problems of things I really hated with these

00:32:40   laptops before 2016. Like it was just now it's back to the way it was before. This is

00:32:45   just a nice Apple laptop. It's fast, it's capable. I loved having the giant screen.

00:32:50   I never felt like it was too big. It was just a really nice I got serious work done on it

00:32:55   and a bunch of you know, slacking off and shopping like it was a combination of everything

00:32:59   I do on computers like all done over a few days while traveling and it was just fantastic.

00:33:04   When turbo boost was off, which I left it that way most of the time, it had totally

00:33:10   adequate performance for Xcode and everything because like, yeah, I'm slowing down the

00:33:14   core speed, but there's also eight of them. So it can make up the difference pretty well.

00:33:19   And meanwhile, again, with turbo boost off, it had amazing battery life. It actually would

00:33:24   last like six or seven hours of programming or like 10 hours of web crap. It was it was

00:33:30   never hot. I never heard the fan. It never like made my hands sweaty. It was just great.

00:33:35   I just really am really enjoying this computer. I have no problems with it. Some people reported

00:33:40   there's a problem with the speakers popping during certain transitions and I haven't had

00:33:44   that happen, but I watched some videos on it. It looks like it's probably a software

00:33:47   bug. So that's I expect them to fix that with the firmware update probably pretty soon.

00:33:52   But otherwise, yeah, that doesn't that hasn't affected me. And I just I love this thing.

00:33:56   It's finally a laptop that I really love again. And I can get back to not thinking about

00:34:01   laptops as much as I have for the last three years anymore.

00:34:03   That genuinely makes me very happy. Now hearing you say, oh, it was sufficient for Xcode.

00:34:12   I almost wonder if I should send you my adorable whenever I'm done with it. So you can occasionally

00:34:19   just periodically try to use that for Xcode and realize how good you have it because,

00:34:24   oh, man, I love this adorable. I really do. But doing any real work on it is so friggin

00:34:30   painful. It's so, so frustrating. No, and I will I will again make the argument.

00:34:35   I should blog about it again. I will again make the argument for a true Mac OS low power mode.

00:34:42   Because using these these amazing fast high core count laptops with turbo boost disabled

00:34:48   when you want it to be disabled is really nice because not only do you get really nice battery

00:34:53   life, but again, it's also it keeps the laptop cooler and quieter. Like I hate when I'm using

00:34:58   my laptop and my and it's getting so hot that it makes my hands sweaty. Like that's a gross

00:35:02   feeling. Nobody wants that. Right? Like if you can avoid that if you can keep it cool enough,

00:35:06   and that makes a difference between your hands being sweaty or not. That's a huge like just

00:35:10   kind of quality of life improvement, right? Not to mention the fact that like sometimes you do need

00:35:14   maximum battery life and sometimes you don't care that much about performance. And so it really to

00:35:19   have a proper low power mode. I really I'm going to keep campaigning Apple until until they do this,

00:35:24   because there's there's significant value to be had there. And it could be as simple as

00:35:29   disabling turbo boost and disabling photos indexing like that. That could be it. That

00:35:35   literally could be it. And that has a big impact right there. Would you choose but if you had to,

00:35:41   if you could only have one, would you choose low power or low data, you know, like tethering mode

00:35:45   for your for a MacBook? I would choose low power mode. No question. The reason why is because

00:35:49   tethering mode you can accomplish with third party apps in ways that seem Catalina friendly,

00:35:54   like trip mode is I think the most popular one. It's great for that turbo boost switcher pro has

00:35:58   this kernel extension to make itself work. And as far as I know, it's signed in such a way that it's

00:36:05   one of those things that like it says it works in Catalina, but it probably won't work in the next

00:36:09   version of the OS as they keep locking down kernel extensions further and further. So I'm guessing

00:36:14   that is probably not long for this world. And so probably a year from now, whenever the next Mac

00:36:20   OS comes out, I'm guessing there has to either be an Apple provided solution or there won't be

00:36:25   a solution. And I will be sad when that happens because that will mean that my laptop will get

00:36:30   significantly worse to use when I, when I'm in certain conditions that are actually pretty common

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00:38:30   So I, uh, I also made an impulse purchase on Monday.

00:38:37   Oh, I'm just, I'm just burning money up. Call me Marco Arment. Wait,

00:38:43   so you actually proved cyber Monday to be a thing? Well, except I went to a retail store and walked

00:38:48   out with a box, but yeah, you're doing it wrong. He's also proving that people are spending their

00:38:54   time buying themselves things instead of buying gifts for other people. Oh yes, yes. That's also

00:38:58   true. Actually. Yeah. I bought a whole bunch of crap over the weekend and I would say only about

00:39:04   a third of it was for other people. Well, how many thousands of dollars in lights did you spend over

00:39:10   the whole last week? That's rhetorical. It's rhetorical. I don't even want to know. So on

00:39:15   Monday, it wasn't thousand on Monday. It was $999 Bob. On Monday, one dollar. I went to the local

00:39:26   Costco and I bought myself and by that I mean the family, a brand new LG C9 55 inch TV, which is

00:39:34   there, which is their OLED. It is the first 4k TV that has entered our house. It is actually the first

00:39:40   TV that Aaron and I have purchased possibly ever. So we got a 720p TV, which at the time was pretty

00:39:50   nice. Like I think 1080 was just starting to be a thing when this thing was new. This was '07

00:39:54   because it was when we got married. And then a few years later, I think it was in like 2011 or

00:39:59   thereabouts, we were gifted a 1080 TV, a 40 inch 1080 TV. That was our TV up until Monday. And now

00:40:08   we have this 55 inch monstrosity that is up above our fireplace, which yes, I know is a terrible

00:40:13   place for TV. But if you've seen the way our living room is set up, it's really the only place

00:40:17   for it. Marco can vouch. And so anyway, so we got this new 4k TV and it's lovely and I really like

00:40:23   it. The problem is I have no way to feed it 4k content at the moment because I have a 1080 Apple

00:40:28   TV. So it does have an internal YouTube app, which I've used briefly and was good. It has an internal

00:40:36   Netflix app, which I haven't tried yet. I want to see if there's like a, internal isn't the right

00:40:40   word for it, but you know what I mean, if there's a Plex app for it. So I wouldn't potentially,

00:40:45   may not even need an Apple TV anymore at all. Who knows? I don't know that there is a Plex app for

00:40:49   it, but I haven't had a chance to look yet. But it seems really nice. It has HomeKit support,

00:40:53   which really only means like power and inputs on this particular TV. But it's still kind of neat.

00:40:59   Yeah. You were, you were asking about that. Speaking of HomeKit, you were asking about

00:41:02   HomeKit support for your television and the whole time I'm thinking, what do you do with a TV with

00:41:09   HomeKit integration? Like, can you explain like what you're, what you're looking to automate or

00:41:13   make work with HomeKit? Is it just saying a word?

00:41:19   Well, so really what it came down to is I viewed it as a similar thing as I did CarPlay. And just

00:41:26   hear me out for a second. When we got our two most recent cars, I was insistent that we get CarPlay

00:41:32   because I felt like, and I do still feel like, it was kind of future-proofing. Because at some point

00:41:38   I'm going to be disgusted by the onboard navigation in either car, or I'm going to want functionality

00:41:43   that, that either car didn't come with that's available via CarPlay. And so I wanted to make

00:41:46   sure that both of these cars had CarPlay because it will, to me it helps them, you know, unlike

00:41:52   Teslas, you don't usually get updates to your car's infotainment. And so I felt like it would keep

00:41:57   them more modern even as the cars themselves get older. And with HomeKit on the TV, it was a similar

00:42:02   thing in spirit in that I don't know why I need it. And to be honest, it's kind of whatever. But

00:42:08   I just felt like since I know it's a thing, why wouldn't I try to get a TV where it has HomeKit

00:42:16   support? And actually went through a really frustrating several hours. I know life is terrible

00:42:21   for me around these days. But I couldn't get HomeKit to work on my brand new TV. You guys,

00:42:27   the struggle is real, I gotta tell you. And what it turned out was--

00:42:30   - Let's just disclaim that most of the things we talk about on this show are incredible first world

00:42:35   problems and privileges, et cetera. Okay, let's move on.

00:42:37   - Exactly. So anyway, so I couldn't get it to work. And I don't have the gentleman's name,

00:42:43   there are actually two different people that wrote in, but the first person was a gentleman that had

00:42:47   said to me, "Hey, if you get the TV hooked up with your cable box," and remember, I'm a Fios TV

00:42:53   subscriber as well, "If you have it hooked up to your cable box such that it can control the cable

00:42:58   box," which I had done, "It won't let you add the TV to HomeKit." And this was extremely frustrating

00:43:06   to me because when I went to pair, not pair, but add this accessory to HomeKit, it put up

00:43:12   a QR code on the TV, I scanned the QR code with my phone, and my phone says, "Nope, didn't work."

00:43:18   And the TV was like, "Yes, we're good to go." Okay, so as far as I was concerned, the TV was happy

00:43:26   and it was Apple that was the problem. And Apple put up a tremendously useful error screen, and

00:43:32   I'll put a link to my tweet about it in the show notes where I was whining about it. But basically,

00:43:40   the dialogue said something like, "I think I could go back, dismiss, or hit OK," or something like

00:43:46   that. And it basically just said, "Couldn't add accessory. Back, dismiss, or OK." Like,

00:43:51   guys, can I have some amount of feedback here? Please? Anything? Anything would be lovely.

00:43:56   But it turns out it was not an Apple problem, and it was actually an LG problem. And there's

00:44:01   something about when the LG is hooked up to the cable box that it will not allow or will not work

00:44:06   with HomeKit. Something that people theorize that's something related to Bluetooth, I don't

00:44:09   know. But once I disconnected the cable box in a figurative sense, so it's still connected via

00:44:14   HDMI but it's not doing any of the fancy channel surfing and so on and so forth, then I was able

00:44:19   to add it to HomeKit no problem. And in this particular setup, the only thing it lets me do

00:44:23   is turn it on or off or set an input. And since I am an HDMI CEC unicorn, I don't really need that

00:44:32   often, because if I want to watch the Apple TV, I just turn on the Apple TV and it turns on the TV

00:44:36   and it makes it jump directly to the correct input. So that is many, many words to say,

00:44:41   Jon, there is no damn point to me having HomeKit on this TV. But I knew it was a thing,

00:44:46   and so I wanted to have it. A real-time follow-up, you can indeed get Plex for your television.

00:44:50   Oh, excellent. LG has like a whole app store, basically. It's a content store. The name of it

00:44:56   is LG Content Store, which is not a good name. No. I suppose they can't use App Store because,

00:45:01   you know, Apple and lawyers or whatever, but. Whatever. I don't know if it has an Apple TV app.

00:45:06   I need to look into that. Oh, and I will say that in theory, sometime in the next two or three

00:45:12   weeks, I will get a voucher for a year of Disney+. I was dragging my feet on subscribing because there

00:45:17   was nothing that I personally was like dying to watch. Yes, I know the Mandalorian is a thing. Yes,

00:45:22   I should probably be excited about it, but whatever. The thing I was actually most and am

00:45:25   most excited to watch is there's apparently an Imagineering documentary series or something

00:45:30   like that, which I'm super amped to see. Well, anyways, apparently there's a promotion where if

00:45:34   you get an LG OLED TV, of which this is, then you can get a year of Disney+. So you had to upload a

00:45:42   scan of your receipt and so on and so forth, which I've done. And I guess sometime in the next month,

00:45:47   they're going to email me a code so I can get a year of Disney+. I'm pretty amped about that.

00:45:50   I know there is a Disney+ app on their home screen, App Store, whatever you call it. I didn't

00:45:56   look for Plex, but the chat room is saying, "Yes, Plex is the thing that I can install." So I'll be

00:46:00   checking that out too. Maybe I won't need an Apple TV 4K. Who knows?

00:46:03   The question you haven't answered yet though is, did you calibrate your TV?

00:46:07   So by John's definition, no. By my definition, yes. So when I got this TV, John immediately said,

00:46:16   "You must use the THX tune-up or whatever it's called app in order to get it calibrated." I did

00:46:22   not do that. I might. But what I did do was the other thing you suggested, which is use, what is

00:46:27   it, Artings or something? And use their calibration guide to just get it close. And that is what I've

00:46:34   done. Did you see here, but the thing about Artings settings, they have settings on their

00:46:38   website, rtings.com, and you find your model TV and you can look at what their settings that they

00:46:43   recommend are. But they are not religiously anti-motion smoothing. So very often, they

00:46:49   will tell you to turn down the motion smoothing or to pick a particular option in the motion

00:46:53   smoothing. So I would say, get your settings from rtings.com and then disable all of the motion

00:46:59   things. Anything that inserts frames of video that did not exist in the source, you want to turn that

00:47:03   off. I know it's hard to tell what those things are because they all have lots of weird names, but

00:47:07   the Artings site will usually explain to you, this is the thing that does motion interpolation,

00:47:11   frame interpolation, whatever. Turn them off, not low, not medium, off, off, off. So I would

00:47:18   suggest you do that. I think I have, but knowing me, maybe I didn't, so who knows. But anyway,

00:47:24   but I am, I'm really pleased with this. It's really neat to have a very pretty and big TV and,

00:47:29   and it, you know, it seems to have taken place on my other TV really well. I have a very odd

00:47:34   home theater setup, which the details are not particularly interesting, but this was basically

00:47:38   able to slide into place in using all of the connectors that were already there. I didn't

00:47:43   need to like get rid of component cables for the sake of argument and like put in HDMI or anything

00:47:48   like that. Everything worked out just like I wanted, which is super great. And I'm so far

00:47:52   really, really pleased with it. And webOS is first time I've used webOS and I mean, it's fine.

00:47:57   Seems good for the most part, but I like it. It's a, it's a nice TV. So that's it.

00:48:02   Do you notice the picture quality difference?

00:48:04   I don't know. Not really.

00:48:07   Really? I asked the person with terrible vision.

00:48:10   Well, not only do I have terrible vision, but remember, I'm not really, I've only watched

00:48:14   one or two things in 4k. Like I quickly played a Casey on cars for like 30 seconds just to see it.

00:48:18   You would notice when you turn on the television at night, at night, if I don't know what the splash

00:48:23   screen is for when you turn on the TV, but often the splash screen is black with like a logo or

00:48:26   something in the middle. Just that screen alone should look very different.

00:48:29   That's true. That's true. I don't, I see the problem is I'm not as discerning as either of

00:48:33   you. And so like, yes, I can recognize when I pay attention that the blacks are the blackest black,

00:48:38   but in general, I don't think about that that much and I'm fairly easily impressed. So I do like it

00:48:44   very much. I'm not saying it's not great and it definitely does look beautiful, especially in the

00:48:48   blacks, even when I'm looking at 1080 content. But I really, I really want to just properly set it up

00:48:54   with like, well, I was going to say Plex, but honestly that's all 1080 anyway. But, you know,

00:48:58   get a Apple TV plus app if there's, if there is such a thing or alternatively get a 4k Apple TV

00:49:04   and hook it up. Actually, I meant to bring that up. Something that does concern me,

00:49:08   moments after I said, Oh, all my old, old cables worked great. There were no problems.

00:49:12   Something that concerns me is I put HDMI or had HDMI put through the walls or through the wall

00:49:16   in order to go from where the receiver and cable box and whatnot are to behind the TV, which is

00:49:22   again, mounted up on the wall. And I'm deeply concerned that whatever HDMI cable that I put

00:49:26   in there literally 10 ish years ago, isn't going to have support for all the new fancy stuff. And

00:49:32   I'm gonna have to get somebody. It absolutely doesn't. It does not.

00:49:36   So then I'm gonna have to go through the walls myself or get somebody to go through the walls

00:49:40   and replace it. Well, you don't, if you don't use that fancy stuff, if you don't use enhanced

00:49:44   audio return channel and you don't use like the latest ethernet or power tunneling things,

00:49:49   like if you don't use any of those features, it should be okay. But what about like HDR and all

00:49:54   that other fancy stuff? Yeah, that's might be okay. What you really have to worry about is HDCP, the

00:50:01   copy protection crap, depending on what you connect to it, try it. It will be clear when it doesn't

00:50:06   work. HDR is a whole other realm of calibration and settings and stuff that I haven't actually

00:50:12   dealt with, but it should also be obvious if you run any sort of test things, whether HDR is

00:50:17   quote unquote working or not. But I think like most cases, HDMI, you either get a picture or you don't.

00:50:24   And when you don't, something is wrong. You won't be able to do high frame rate. You won't be able

00:50:28   to do the wide color gamut stuff, like lots of stuff you won't be able to do over that 10 year

00:50:32   old cable. Well, and that's the thing that I'm worried about is that it will show me a picture,

00:50:35   but I, but it won't be as fancy and nice a picture as it could have been like it will be

00:50:40   non HDR for the sake of discussion. There should be some, I don't, I don't know this particular TV,

00:50:44   but it's usually some way that you can put an overlay where it shows information like what is

00:50:48   the frame rate I'm currently getting? What is the color space? What, you know, and then you can look

00:50:51   at that information and figure out what's broken about it. But yeah, that's unfortunately HDMI,

00:50:57   uh, standards, uh, march along and this, the TV you got is the one that has the,

00:51:02   I think the most support for the latest HDMI spec, HDMI 2.1 includes lots of features. This TV

00:51:08   doesn't support all of them, but it supports more of them than the other, it's other contemporary

00:51:12   television. So would behoove you to get a new cable that supports all the fancy stuff.

00:51:16   - Yep. So that's the thing, which I mean, it's a self created problem, but, uh, I'm gonna probably

00:51:22   need to work that out at some point, but sitting here now, I it's a very nice TV. Who'd have thunk

00:51:26   it? I'm really pleased about that. - So you can have an, you can have an empty tree this year.

00:51:32   It's just going to be Christmas morning and you got a lump of coal. It's like, well, Casey,

00:51:36   you already bought yourself every present you could possibly want. So yeah, you don't get

00:51:40   anything. - That's very true. Uh, John, you apparently had a new experience sometime recently.

00:51:44   You want to tell us about that? - Got to try out a new gaming system without buying anything,

00:51:49   which is always the best way to do it. Uh, Stadia launched Google Stadia. We talked about it many

00:51:53   shows ago. Uh, I talked mostly about the, this idea of streaming gaming services, why people

00:51:59   keep trying to do it and why people will keep trying to do it. And we didn't know if Stadia

00:52:03   would finally succeed where all those other services have, uh, have failed. Uh, it's from

00:52:09   Google. They have a lot of money. They talk a lot about their cool technology, whatever. Anyway,

00:52:13   they launched their service and because it's basically a service and not a game console,

00:52:18   they don't technically need to launch any kind of hardware because you can play Stadia games.

00:52:24   Uh, on any device that's supported as sort of a client, including your computer with a web browser.

00:52:30   So on your Mac launch Chrome and go to whatever it is. It's like Stadia.google.com or stadia.com.

00:52:36   I don't know, whatever it is, stadia.tv. I forget this. - Stadia.google.com. - There you go.

00:52:40   Anyway, go to that in your, in your web browser. Yes. Your web browser on your Mac and boom,

00:52:46   you're playing a console game that's running in Google's data centers. You can play it on,

00:52:50   I think your iPad and iPhone or maybe just pixel phones. Eventually it'll be on your iPad and

00:52:55   iPhone. Um, you can play it on your television if you have a Chromecast, but then you need a

00:53:00   controller. And the one hardware thing they do sell you is there's like a Google Stadia controller

00:53:05   that is basically everything you need. Like it, it connects to wifi. It does, it does all the stuff

00:53:10   that you can, your Mac would be doing in its web browser or whatever. It does all the connection

00:53:14   stuff. And then it sends to a Chromecast on your television. So if you want it, you can buy that.

00:53:19   And in fact, that's the only way, or was the only way at launch where you could play Stadia is if

00:53:24   you gave them like 130 bucks for the controller. And I think maybe it came with a Chromecast,

00:53:29   I forget. Um, and you would get this little box and you would, you know, they had all the YouTube

00:53:34   people opening up their box of their Stadia controller and trying it out and so on and so

00:53:37   forth that Google sponsored a bunch of those videos, but I didn't do that. I'm not going to

00:53:41   pay $130 for a controller. I probably won't like for a gaming thing. And it probably won't like,

00:53:45   so I'm like, Oh, I have to wait until they eventually let you try Stadia for free just

00:53:48   in your web browser. But it turns out that everyone who got one of those, uh, cool,

00:53:52   I think they call them like the founder's box. Like if you were, if you gave them money ahead

00:53:57   of time or pre-ordered for it or whatever, uh, you got that, but you also got invite codes. So

00:54:01   somebody sent me an invite code and I was able to join Stadia and go through sort of the account

00:54:06   creation process and all that other stuff. Uh, before I get to the gaming part of it,

00:54:11   this is the part, this is the part that made me dislike Stadia the most and has nothing to do with

00:54:16   playing games on it. Surprisingly, you go through the setup process, like, Oh, welcome to Stadia,

00:54:22   blah, blah, blah, enter a bunch of information, uh, inevitably like as you would imagine for

00:54:27   any sort of network based service, it makes you pick a name, a quote unquote gamer tag

00:54:32   as the kids say. Um, cause that's how people relate to each other online.

00:54:40   I have a gamer tag, uh, that I've been using since college and I have it on PSN and I have it on

00:54:47   X-Box and I have, I have a different one on steam. Um, and I typed that in and it went to the next

00:54:53   screen. Like, great. I must've gotten in early enough because none of the, none of the small

00:54:56   group of founders took my preferred gamer tag, which is a weird word and not, you know, any part

00:55:01   of my name or whatever. Um, and so I'm glad I got my name and then the next screen said, okay,

00:55:08   here you go. And by the way, it showed at the bottom, a like a number sign and then four hyphens

00:55:14   and said, and by the way, to distinguish your name, uh, a number may appear after it to, uh,

00:55:22   differentiate it from anyone else who may have the same name. I'm like, Oh my, that's weird. Well,

00:55:26   I suppose if someone else picks the same name as me, I guess we're both going to get numbers.

00:55:30   Or maybe if we're both in the same game, we'll get numbers after our things. Anyway,

00:55:34   I just sailed through because, you know, whatever. And then I started playing something and my name

00:55:41   had a number after it had a hash mark and a number after a four digit number. Like, okay,

00:55:46   there are not, you know, 9,999 other people pick this name. There's 500 people on the service total

00:55:53   at this point. Like no one is using this. Why do I have a number after my name? With a little bit

00:55:59   of research, I mostly figured out that the only way you're ever going to see your name without

00:56:06   a number at the launch of this service is if you are one of those founder people, everybody else,

00:56:11   no matter what name you pick, we'll get a number after your name. This is apparently a thing that

00:56:16   lots of services are doing to try to avoid, I guess, names, place pollution, and let people

00:56:21   be happier to get their names. But let me tell you, this is the wrong choice from a human factors

00:56:26   perspective, right? Not being able to get your name is bad and makes people sad. I understand that.

00:56:31   But saying that everybody is going to have numbers after the name is worse. And even worse than that

00:56:37   is saying a tiny elite set of people won't have numbers and everyone else will have numbers,

00:56:42   even if the name you picked, nobody else picked that name. This you think wouldn't make any

00:56:48   difference. Who cares what your name is online? Who cares if you have numbers after that? That's

00:56:53   a big issue for me. If I had known that I was going to have numbers after my name,

00:56:56   I would have picked a different name. It turns out it doesn't matter what name I picked,

00:56:59   I would always have numbers after it. That's bad. I don't want to have numbers after my name.

00:57:02   I try to teach my children that. I think it's a lesson for everybody. If the name you want is not

00:57:08   available in the service that you're using, find a different name. Don't put the year of your birth

00:57:14   after it. Anyway, that's like personally identifiable information. Don't put a seven

00:57:18   digit number. Don't put 420. Don't put 69. Don't put 1138. Don't put 42. Don't put 360.

00:57:24   Do not put those numbers. Don't add numbers. Don't put two. Don't put three. Don't put seven.

00:57:29   The only thing I allow for young people only basically is ASCII art based on little letters

00:57:35   like lowercase x, capital X, underscore, underscore. If your name is underscore,

00:57:39   feel free to use as many underscores as you want, but no numbers. So I'm unreasonably upset

00:57:48   about the fact that my gamertag has a hash mark or whatever, you know, and a four digit number

00:57:56   after it every time you see the name and it's like an animal. And then it's alongside sometimes

00:58:03   people who don't have numbers. The haves and have nots in Stadia. Oh, John, I'm so sorry.

00:58:08   Anyway, obviously I play Destiny. Destiny recently rolled out cross save, which is

00:58:14   these amazing terms in the industry for incomplete features. What you would expect is if Destiny is

00:58:22   supported on multiple platforms and it's an online game where, you know, go and play online,

00:58:27   everyone be able to play with everyone because, hey, it's the Internet. That is not the case.

00:58:30   If you're on PlayStation, you can play with other people on PlayStation. If you are on

00:58:34   Xbox, you play with other people on Xbox. Back in Destiny one, if you are on PlayStation three,

00:58:38   you can only play with PlayStation three players. If you're on PlayStation four, you can only play

00:58:41   with PlayStation four players and on and on. If you're on PC, you can only play with PC players.

00:58:45   If you're in Stadia, you're going to play with Stadia. Aha. Now they have cross save,

00:58:49   which means you can only play with people on the same platform as you. But anything you do on any

00:58:55   platform shows up on all the other platforms. So if I play Destiny on my PlayStation and then I

00:59:00   quit my PlayStation, turn it off, and then I go over and play in Stadia, I see that same player,

00:59:06   all my same stuff, everything is the same over there. So cross save is better than nothing,

00:59:11   but it's not the same as cross play and I really hope cross play is coming. Anyway,

00:59:15   all that is to say I was able to play Destiny with my actual characters, with a mouse and a keyboard,

00:59:20   on my Mac and Chrome, a 5K Mac and Chrome, like zoom to full screen. And I've done this before

00:59:28   with the GeForce Now service, which is a Nvidia streaming gaming thing. They also had PCs and you

00:59:34   could play the PC version of Destiny over the internet. And Stadia, it's better than GeForce

00:59:42   Now in particular. I think there were fewer huge hitches in frame rate and the image quality seemed

00:59:48   a little bit better and the launch time and everything about it seemed a little bit faster.

00:59:53   And it's like a technical miracle that it works at all. But for games like Destiny, first person

01:00:00   shooters against other human beings, the technology is still not quite there. I have gigabit fiber to

01:00:06   my house. I'm in an area that's not too far away from major switches on the internet. Maybe all of

01:00:12   the Stadia servers are on the West Coast and that's what's killing me, but it was not good. So if

01:00:16   you're wondering, has streaming gaming arrived for the hardest of hardcore games against other human

01:00:22   beings? The answer is no. But if you're looking for a way to play games that don't require Twitch

01:00:28   reflexes and you want the cheapest way to do it and you want to be able to play from any one of

01:00:33   your devices, including your phone, your iPad, your television, or just bring a controller with

01:00:37   you to a hotel and be able to play there, it's technically impressive and is probably the best

01:00:42   one of these services that I've ever tried. And I think I've tried most of them. So yeah, we're

01:00:49   still waiting for that technical breakthrough. And I guess we're still waiting for that marketing

01:00:54   breakthrough where someone can convince people who are not hardcore gamers that don't worry about it

01:00:59   if you can't play Destiny. Destiny is a weird complicated game anyway and you're never going

01:01:03   to get into it, but this is the best, cheapest, most convenient way to play all those other games

01:01:08   that don't require millisecond precision. So yeah, I guess that's sort of a thumb sideways on Stadia.

01:01:16   And everyone complained about the launch because they had very few games available. Most of the

01:01:20   games are already available on other platforms and there's all sorts of complaining about the launch.

01:01:24   It doesn't seem like the service is off to a really great start and it doesn't seem like any

01:01:29   of the technical aspects have surprised anybody with how good they are. They're not way worse

01:01:34   than people thought, but they're not way better either. So I feel like Stadia is kind of landing

01:01:38   with a thud at this point. A glowing review. But hey, for something that I paid zero for,

01:01:45   I got to add a reminder. I did have to sign myself up for a monthly thing, but I think you get a one

01:01:53   month free trial. I need to cancel this because I'm never going to use Stadia. Although, speaking

01:01:58   of Destiny, which I just was, someone was asking me today, "Hey, when you get your new Mac Pro,

01:02:03   are you going to play Destiny on it?" And you know, I hadn't really thought about that, but I

01:02:08   think I probably will try it. Obviously, Destiny doesn't run on the Mac, but assuming bootcamp is

01:02:14   still supported, which Apple people continue to tell me that it is, despite all evidence to the

01:02:18   contrary, as far as I can tell, that bootcamp is still a thing. If I can run bootcamp on my Mac Pro,

01:02:23   I will indeed install some weird version of Windows and install Destiny for the PC, and I suppose buy

01:02:28   Destiny for the PC if I don't already own it. I think I did buy Destiny for the PC once, but I

01:02:33   don't know if I need to buy it again. It's confusing. Anyway, I will do that. So I can

01:02:37   try Destiny on my Mac and see how that goes. The advantage, by the way, is like, why would you

01:02:42   want to do that? For some people, it's mouse and keyboard to be able to use the mouse keyboard. I

01:02:46   can't do that for RSI reasons, so I would probably still be using a controller when I played it on my

01:02:51   Mac. But on the PlayStation 4, the frame rate is capped at 30 frames per second, and the frame rate

01:02:57   is uncapped when you play on a PC or a Mac Pro. And of course, the resolution is better and all

01:03:03   that other stuff, so I'd really love to see Destiny at higher resolution and much higher frame rates,

01:03:07   just to see what that's like. But you don't need to buy a Mac Pro, John. That's what Jason told me.

01:03:12   I don't. To run Destiny, again, as someone pointed out to me, if I put like a modern NVIDIA GPU in my

01:03:20   2008 Mac Pro, it would run Destiny at 60 frames per second. It doesn't take much to be faster

01:03:27   than PlayStation 4. Even my Mac Pro could do it if given a $600 GPU. But you still are buying that

01:03:34   Mac Pro, huh? Sure am. You don't need it, though. I don't. Absolutely do not. He has to buy it at

01:03:41   this point. Oh, no argument. No argument at all. I want to buy it. That's the word that keeps me

01:03:45   laughing. I want to buy it. You also have to buy it. I mean, let's be honest. I don't have to.

01:03:50   My computer is the one that works, but I want to buy it. And as we've talked about before,

01:03:57   I do occasionally dread that I'm going to get this insanely expensive new computer that's going

01:04:01   to be obsolete in two years when Apple switches to ARM, and it's going to be flaky, and I'm going to

01:04:05   have nothing but problems with it, and I'm not going to be able to record podcasts. We'll see

01:04:09   how it goes. Hey, I've been there, John. You can make it through. Trust me on this. I'll get the

01:04:13   Apple care. Don't worry. Yeah, I recommend it. And you're still not getting one, Marco?

01:04:18   I don't have any plans to. I'm extremely happy with my iMac Pro. You're so adorable. What if it

01:04:25   comes with an LED light? I mean, how bright is it? That's right. It comes out of all the holes.

01:04:31   Those holes were there for airflow, but it's also for light. It's a billion nits. That's the thing.

01:04:36   You don't even need that. Imagine how crazy it would be if Marco buys the Pro Display XDR

01:04:43   because of the bazillion nits, but doesn't bother connecting it to the Mac Pro. Can the iMac Pro

01:04:49   drive the 6K? I don't think it can, right? I think so. They have not said, I don't think. All they

01:04:55   have said is that the 16-inch MacBook Pro can drive two of them, but I don't think they've

01:05:00   actually documented or said anywhere what else can drive them and how many. Yeah, I'm guessing

01:05:06   no based on the age of the computer, but who knows? You're making me feel real great about

01:05:10   my purchase, John. You're not going to buy an XDR. Yeah, are you going to put the 6K monitor next to

01:05:16   your iMac Pro? Nobody wants to buy that except for a very small group of people. Even I don't

01:05:20   want to buy it. But you will. You could almost buy two of your iMac Pros for the price of the XDR.

01:05:25   Yeah, instead of dual monitors, just do dual iMac Pros and two totally different computers and just

01:05:30   use a KVM to con-slate. Oh, what was that software that let you do like a fake software KVM over the

01:05:37   internet? I can't remember the name. Oh, God, I can't remember it either now. It's not Hammerspoon,

01:05:42   that's the config one. Oh, it's going to drive me nuts now. Knifey Spoonie? Spoonie Knifey?

01:05:48   Synergy! There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, that's it, that's it. Oh, man, I am so excited for

01:05:54   Marco to cave on this and buy himself a Mac Pro. Look, you'll be the first ones to know.

01:05:59   No, we won't. Well, the business rep at the Apple store might be the first one to know.

01:06:03   And then Tiff. Yeah, well, I think Tiff might know first. Yeah, we'll see.

01:06:07   We need to get there and say, if Marco just quietly leaves the house and ask him where he's

01:06:12   going, are you going to buy a Mac? No, I'm not buying a Mac. I'm coming to the store, I'm getting

01:06:16   milk, not buying a Mac Pro at all. The best, the best will be if the way I find out that Marco's

01:06:24   bought a Mac Pro is suddenly out of nowhere. Someone freezes his credit because the purchase

01:06:29   is too big. No, I think even better would be out of nowhere. You know, I come home in the afternoon

01:06:33   from wherever and I see there's a big package on my front porch and I think, oh, that's weird. I

01:06:37   wasn't expecting anything. And I bring it in and I see it's from the town in which Marco lives. And

01:06:41   I think, well, what would Marco have sent me? I wasn't expecting that at all. And I open it up and

01:06:45   I realize, oh, it's an iMac carrying case. Oh my God, I know what he's done. He would never give

01:06:52   up the iMac Pro. That would be, that would be his portable desktop. The stationary desktop and the

01:06:57   portable desktop. Yeah, my travel computer. Oh my gosh, that is funny. We are sponsored this week by

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01:08:55   sponsoring our show. All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And someone, probably Joel, wrote in,

01:09:04   "Hey, what do you think of developers trying to be fun in Apple Store update notes?" I, generally

01:09:09   speaking, don't like it, but there are exceptions where it's really good. If you are lucky enough to

01:09:15   be on the GIF-wrapped beta, on the TestFlight beta, I think Jelly does this for the actual

01:09:20   release notes too, but the GIF-wrapped beta is worth the figurative price of admission for the

01:09:27   release notes alone because I don't even, I don't have any in front of me, but Jelly's release notes

01:09:32   for the GIF-wrapped beta are phenomenal. It's like a story in and of themselves and they're so good.

01:09:38   When like big companies try to be cutesy and funny, I think it almost always fails and is

01:09:42   garbage and I hate it, but when smaller independent developers try it, usually they are still connected

01:09:48   enough with reality that it can work and work well. But that's just my two cents. Let me ask

01:09:53   the old and stodgy ones, starting with Marco, what do you think? I think it used to matter what you

01:09:59   put in those release notes. Oh, that's true too. That's a very good point. But nowadays, like with

01:10:04   AutoUpdate being on by default and with the updates being buried, further and further buried in the

01:10:10   App Store app with every time they change anything about it, I don't think it matters anymore,

01:10:15   honestly. I think this fight is long lost and now it's just irrelevant. Yeah, and you're not wrong.

01:10:23   Jon, what do you think? I think like any sort of content exercise, whether that's the text in your

01:10:29   dialogue box or your menu item names or help text or anything where you have to write something or

01:10:37   create graphics or whatever in your application, it is an opportunity to do a good job and make

01:10:42   your product feel better. And that includes release notes. Very few people will ever look at them,

01:10:49   fewer now, like Marco pointed out, than ever before because of the changes Apple has made.

01:10:53   But the people who do look at them are looking at them because they feel better about knowing what

01:10:58   the changes are, whether they need to know what the changes are or not. They want to know what

01:11:02   the changes are. And when you have well-written release notes, content that is informative,

01:11:09   concise, but also fun to read, it makes the person reading them feel better about your application.

01:11:14   And those people tend to be the sort of most loyal, hardcore customers. Depending on the

01:11:19   type of application you make, that customer group may actually be important to you. They may be the

01:11:25   people who are keeping you in business year after year because you have a niche application that

01:11:29   caters to enthusiasts, and they're going to seek out those release notes. And so I think it is an

01:11:34   opportunity for you to excel and for you to make your application, make your customers happier and

01:11:40   make your application more valuable to them and increase their affection for it. You just have to

01:11:45   know, am I making that type of application? Does literally anybody look at my release notes? Or am

01:11:49   I making a mass market application that is not the type of thing where release notes matter at all,

01:11:53   in which case I don't have to care about that. But what do I think about trying to be fun?

01:11:56   I think it's perfectly fine and could possibly be beneficial. And then the final thing is,

01:12:01   even if nobody reads them, if it makes you happy to do it as like sort of celebrating like a cherry

01:12:07   on top of you getting a release out, and you just do it because it's a fun thing that you enjoy

01:12:11   because you like writing, and maybe like you and five-year friends ever look at them and get

01:12:14   amused by them, that can be a perfectly valid thing to do. It's not like we're asking, you know,

01:12:18   the act of writing release notes is not writing a novel. It's like hopefully a very small amount

01:12:23   of text. And if it makes you feel good to do it, then do it. But as Casey pointed out, try to

01:12:29   ask a trusted friend whether you're actually making amusing release notes or whether you are

01:12:36   not doing a good job in that task, in which case it could actually be harmful.

01:12:40   Mike Bullock Ziegler writes, "I am getting iPads for out-of-state grandparents to make it easy to

01:12:45   share photos of my son and FaceTime with us. Neither are tech savvy. Neither of them use as

01:12:50   much tech outside of a TV remote. Any setup tips or suggestions outside of accessibility settings

01:12:55   for elder-proofing it?" You know, I don't have any great answers for this, so I'm really curious

01:12:59   if you guys have any really clever ideas. I actually, I did this with both of my

01:13:05   grandparents over the last decade or so. It's hard, you know, obviously do what you can,

01:13:09   you get all the updates on, bury all the apps that they won't use and we'll just confuse them

01:13:14   in a folder, like, you know, an Apple folder, bury as much as you can so that they can just have one

01:13:20   page of springboard. They don't have to like swipe to different pages, like, have everything on one

01:13:24   page, show them, obviously, you know, the best thing you can do is like be there with them when

01:13:28   they first get it, show them how to use it, you know, show them the basics. And then one thing

01:13:33   that, you know, depending on what your budget will allow for this use, get them the cellular ones and

01:13:40   activate the plan with something that you pay for and you control because then they never have to

01:13:45   worry about Wi-Fi or connectivity. They're just always online. You know, like, I don't know what,

01:13:52   what, you know, this person's grandparents' situation is at home, but like my grandparents,

01:13:56   when I, when I did this for them a few years back, they didn't have an internet connection at their

01:14:00   house yet because they didn't have a computer. So I decided, let me just avoid this problem entirely

01:14:06   because like, once you involve an internet connection, then they know they have to call

01:14:09   the cable company or whatever and have them bring out their stupid Wi-Fi router and deal with all

01:14:13   that crap. And like, that's, that's a whole other level of complexity and costs for them to deal

01:14:17   with. And if you're trying to minimize that impact on them, if you can spare the money, just set it

01:14:22   up with cellular and on your own plan that you pay for that, they don't even need to think about it.

01:14:27   To them, their iPad is just always online. That's a good idea. John, any thoughts?

01:14:31   The only thing I'd add is, uh, so Apple's devices and their iOS devices have tons of accessibility

01:14:39   settings, but the only way you're going to know which one should be enabled and what they should

01:14:44   be said to is to sit down with the person who's going to be using the person or persons who are

01:14:48   going to be using the device and try each one. Do you like this better? Do you like that better?

01:14:53   What do you think of this? What do you think of that? And then when you, when you, uh, change the

01:14:57   accessibility settings, in particular things having to do with font size and weight, also then

01:15:02   try the applications that they think they're going to be using, because despite all of Apple's WRC

01:15:07   session is trying to tell you how to make your layout still work when the dynamic text changes

01:15:12   and everything, even Apple's own applications can have serious layout problems when you really crank

01:15:16   up the text, uh, especially on smaller devices. So like, just run, you know, go through the whole

01:15:23   accessibility screen, sit there and try to get something that, you know, is, you know, works well

01:15:29   for the people who are going to use it and go through the applications, show them how to use

01:15:33   them, show, you know, send test emails, they know how to get it, send test FaceTime calls, show them

01:15:37   how to call things, set up their contacts, put little, you know, images on all their contacts,

01:15:42   get everything pruned down, like Margo said, to adjust the things that they care about.

01:15:45   You can now quote unquote delete lots of built-in applications where it just hides them or whatever,

01:15:51   do that, um, and then just go through the entire settings screen and set up everything in a

01:15:55   reasonable way. It's going to take a long time, um, but that's the way to do it. The only part

01:16:00   where I have some trepidation is I still find, and maybe it's because I'm just not in the loop

01:16:04   on this, maybe someone who's more hardcore into iOS can tell me, but I still find that the ultimate

01:16:09   out that I talked about on the past, uh, episode of taking control of someone's screen remotely,

01:16:16   I don't think you can do that in iOS. Do you know if that's possible?

01:16:20   I don't think so. I don't think it is, but man, I, I have wished for that. Like, there have been

01:16:26   times when one of my grandparents would call with a question and I'd have to talk them through

01:16:30   something over the phone and it, you know, it's hard because you know, like if, you know,

01:16:34   I don't know, depending on what your grandparents like, you know, exposure to computers before this

01:16:39   has been, my grandparents were starting from zero. And so it's hard to even try to get each other to

01:16:45   explain with, with clear terminology, like what's going on, what to do, what, you know, have them

01:16:50   explain what it's, what's happening on the screen. And then you tell them what to do on screen. Like

01:16:54   when they lack basic terminology, cause they don't have any experience with the computer before this,

01:16:58   even that part becomes very difficult. Like, and so obviously if you can be in person, that's great.

01:17:03   In my case, at the time I was doing all this, I lived in New York and they lived in Phoenix.

01:17:07   So that didn't, you know, that wasn't really easily possible most of the time.

01:17:10   So I just had to do it, do tech support over the phone and it was really hard. And there were a

01:17:14   couple of times where I had to say, I'm sorry, I don't know what to do. Next time you're in the

01:17:19   mall, bring it to the Apple store and they'll help you. Cause like, cause I just couldn't,

01:17:22   we couldn't figure out communication wise, like how to work it out over the phone. It was really hard.

01:17:27   And so I would have loved some kind of like remote screen control thing in that kind of situation.

01:17:32   But as far as I know, that's not possible. Chat room says you can share the screen,

01:17:36   but not control it. But anyway, that's the, that's my only trepidation. Macs by far way harder for

01:17:41   people who, who aren't into computers to be able to deal with, but they do have that one advantage.

01:17:46   The hack way that I've done in the past, even before the screen sharing days, I used to actually

01:17:53   use VPN to do it, but it was hard keeping third party VPN stuff going. And then I chat came and

01:17:57   allowed to screen. Anyway, the hack way is if they have a phone, they can do video chatting,

01:18:04   or at least just have the camera and they know how to text you pictures. You can, you know,

01:18:07   you get the, someone can hold the phone up to another computer screen and say, this is what

01:18:11   I'm seeing, which helps a lot. Or they can take pictures of a screen and send them to you. But

01:18:16   yeah, I kind of wish. Yeah, if they have a phone, just do FaceTime.

01:18:18   Yeah, I mean, it depends. It depends on what their problem is. Like exactly the worst,

01:18:23   the worst case is that their, their internet's not working. So they're on the actual

01:18:26   landline telephone with you. Yet another reason to go cellular.

01:18:29   Yeah. So that's, that's the only sort of caveat. I would say that iPads are the best thing to give

01:18:36   to, you know, non-techie grandparents to see pictures and stuff. They're way better than a

01:18:41   Mac. I just wish they had a way for you to take control of the screen. So then you wouldn't have

01:18:45   to do this back and forth and you wouldn't have to look at the screen and direct them to do things.

01:18:48   You could just say, just sit back and I'll fix it. And you can explain it to them while you fix it,

01:18:53   if you want or not. And they don't care about that stuff. They just, they just make it work again.

01:18:56   That's the suggestion for Apple, but yeah, sitting down, my suggestion is sitting down with them and

01:19:01   going through all the settings is the best way to get it set up right.

01:19:04   Can the Apple classroom stuff allow for screen control? If I recall correctly,

01:19:09   the teacher could like snoop, for lack of a better word, on all of the students, but could

01:19:15   the teacher actually control any of the students iPads? Do you have any idea?

01:19:20   Don't know. Never used it.

01:19:21   No, obviously I haven't either, but I only ask because maybe it's,

01:19:25   it's somewhere in the system. Just not, not exposed to us. I don't know. And finally,

01:19:29   Greg would like to know, Marco, I'm sure you've been asked before, but is there any chance you

01:19:32   would port Overcast to the Amazon talking tube ecosystem? Also would be curious as to the

01:19:38   challenges if you decided to, or what the issues are that caused you not to pursue it.

01:19:42   For me, the biggest challenge, it's not something that I, that I have strong feelings on. It's

01:19:48   something that people have occasionally asked for. Not as much as when the Echo first came out.

01:19:54   Very similar to, I think an Apple TV app. People think they will use this,

01:20:00   like when they first get these devices and so they request it, but then after a few months,

01:20:05   like people mostly stop asking for it because they realize that they use these devices in

01:20:08   different ways that maybe this wouldn't actually be that useful for. So for the most part, demand

01:20:13   has been fairly weak, it seems. And so I largely haven't looked into it much because there's always

01:20:20   something else more pressing. You know, with podcast apps, and there's at least one of my

01:20:25   competitors I know of that is on the Alexa family of devices, and I don't hear about it that often.

01:20:32   Like I'm not seeing reports from people constantly saying, you know, I was gonna go with you, but I

01:20:37   went with them because they have this. Or I'm leaving you because they have this. Like I hardly

01:20:41   ever hear anybody even mention it. So I think it's one of those things that's just not super

01:20:45   important. The thing is, and I say this as somebody who spent quite a lot of time building this,

01:20:51   you know, massive sync engine to sync between iPad and iPhone and web for Overcast, most people

01:20:58   only listen to podcasts from their phone. Almost none of my user base uses anything besides a phone.

01:21:03   I use the iPad app every day myself and that's why I maintain it. But otherwise, like, the vast

01:21:10   majority of Overcast users use it on one device, their phone, and that's it. Because most people

01:21:17   listen to podcasts, first of all, most people only have a phone. That's problem number one. But even

01:21:22   for the people who have multiple gadgets, most people just listen to podcasts by themselves

01:21:27   in situations where they are on the go. They're going to work, they're taking a walk, whatever it

01:21:33   is. That is by far the majority of podcasts listening, you know, commuting or exercising,

01:21:38   whatever else. And so they're not even at home necessarily. And if they are at home, many, many

01:21:44   people simply just play the podcast out of their phone's speaker, like the built-in speaker on the

01:21:49   phone. They crank it up, they just play it on the countertop or whatever, and it's fine. So any

01:21:55   feature that I have to invest a lot of time in that is about like multi-platform or multi-device

01:22:00   support, not only is there a low demand for it, but it's also usually so complicated and so costly

01:22:08   that it's not even worth doing. Because any time I would spend making the phone app better,

01:22:15   addressing people's wishes for features in the phone app, that is almost always time better

01:22:21   spent. So it isn't that I am never going to do this. It's just a much lower priority than most

01:22:28   people would want it to be, of the few people who do want this feature. It's a low priority,

01:22:32   and it might never get done, because there's just always more important stuff that's more pressing.

01:22:38   Fair enough. Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:22:42   Alexa, no, just kidding, Away, Squarespace, and Handy, and we will talk to you next week.

01:22:47   [music]

01:22:48   [music]

01:22:49   [music]

01:22:50   [music]

01:22:52   [music]

01:22:53   even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:23:00   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental,

01:23:08   oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:23:17   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey

01:23:24   Liszt M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.

01:23:33   It's accidental, accidental, they didn't mean to, accidental, accidental.

01:23:46   Tech podcast, so long.

01:23:50   Oh man, I had to go appliance shopping, our washer died, we had to get a new clothes washer.

01:23:57   Clothes washer, as distinguished I guess from a dishwasher?

01:24:01   I don't know what people in other countries call their washing machines, I figure just

01:24:03   in case it's the laundry machine that does your, that washes your clothes. If it doesn't

01:24:08   dry them, that's a different machine in our country usually.

01:24:10   Unless you have a combination.

01:24:11   Right, that's very rare in America though to have the combo machines, cause usually

01:24:14   we have these giant places that we can fit two huge machines. I think the combo machines

01:24:19   are more common like in Japan and Europe where they actually have space issues. But anyway,

01:24:24   so yeah, so had to replace our washing machine and that was a whole thing. Because like we

01:24:30   had a front loader, because when we moved into our house and we had to get a new washing

01:24:35   machine, the one that came with the house was broken and so we had to get a new washing

01:24:38   machine and everyone was getting front loaded. This was 10 years ago, 9 years ago. Everybody

01:24:42   was getting front loaded, so alright, fine, we got a front loader. And we heard, hey they

01:24:46   stink after a while because water basically sits in the bottom of them when they're not

01:24:50   in use. You know, anytime you have standing water, you're gonna have stink problems or

01:24:55   mold problems or whatever. So we did all the precautions. We always left the door a little

01:25:00   bit open. We would always pull out the detergent drawer thing when it was not in use so like

01:25:06   everything could dry out. Everything was open to the air and could dry out all the time

01:25:09   when it wasn't in use. We would run the cleaning cycles. We tried the special afresh things

01:25:15   that the washer, I guess, wanted us to use. We did all the stuff reliably and we cared

01:25:22   for this thing perfectly and it's still slowly starting to stink. Granted, it was 9 years

01:25:27   old. Slowly starting to stink. That still didn't get us to replace it eventually. Because

01:25:32   we learned like, oh, just run the first wash. Like if we were gone for like, if we were

01:25:36   out of town for a week, run the first wash empty maybe and it'll squirt out all the stinky

01:25:42   water and then we can run our wash after that. That would be, you know, normal-ish. But finally

01:25:48   it died. Finally it started throwing error codes that when looked up on Google were things

01:25:53   that were very expensive to fix and wouldn't spin anymore. So we figured, alright, now

01:25:58   finally we have a motivating reason. Let's get a new washer but let's get a top loader.

01:26:03   And it turns out, according to the appliance salesman and the installers who came to install

01:26:08   the thing, turns out lots of people have made this exact same move from the front loaders

01:26:14   that seem really nice and are super efficient but really have stink problems moving back

01:26:20   to the old top loaders. So we'll see how that goes. The reason I wanted to mention all this

01:26:24   is that we also really hate our fridge. This is not for any, you know, incredibly major

01:26:32   reason. It keeps our food cold. You know, it works in most ways. But it has a water

01:26:39   dispenser on the inside of the fridge. And so you have to open the door and it's not

01:26:46   even on the opening side of the door. It's on the hinge side of the door. So you have

01:26:53   to open the fridge all the way and reach in and basically like hang out in the fridge

01:26:59   holding down the water button and your cup under the water thing. This is mostly, most

01:27:03   of the time, a two-hand operation to just get a cup of water. And we work at home and

01:27:08   we drink a lot of water. So this happens all the time. And we're like, okay, this is stupid.

01:27:14   We're hanging out in the whole fridge. Every time we need to get water, this has to be

01:27:18   incredibly inefficient to be losing all this cold air as we're sitting here with the door

01:27:22   open filling up one or two glasses of water. We've hated the fridge forever.

01:27:26   That's not the only reason that's stupid. I think I talked about this on my big refrigerator

01:27:30   episode, but I would suggest to people, and I know lots of people have some sort of conditioning

01:27:35   against this. And sometimes there's a reason for it, but I would suggest to you, because

01:27:41   I know where you live, that during the winter half of the year at least, you can get cold

01:27:48   water from your tap that tastes good to drink. You do not need to get water through some

01:27:52   weird filter thing, through a bunch of plastic tubes sitting stagnant in your refrigerator.

01:27:57   It's plenty cold out of the tap in the winter, and your water is not chlorinated and doesn't

01:28:01   taste weird.

01:28:02   No, our water tastes delicious. That's actually not a bad idea. Maybe I'll start doing that.

01:28:06   During the summer, you have to let it run for a while for it to get cold, which is wasteful,

01:28:09   so maybe you shouldn't do that. But people from my childhood, nobody drank bottled water.

01:28:16   Bottled water was not a big thing in my childhood. But then eventually as it became into adulthood,

01:28:19   water became a thing, and then eventually it became clear to me that whole swaths of

01:28:23   the country would never even consider drinking water that came from the tap.

01:28:27   Sometimes again, it's founded because your water has chlorinated or has weird minerals

01:28:32   in it, and you don't want to drink it and it tastes bad, or maybe it's filled with lead,

01:28:35   or who knows what's the problem with your tap water. It's part of the reason we have

01:28:38   these terrible bottles of water. But everybody loves those refrigerator things, and as far

01:28:44   as I'm concerned, they taste like a filter. I can't stand the Brita things. I can't stand

01:28:48   water on the door. I want water out of the faucet. That's my preferred drink, and I would

01:28:52   suggest to everyone that if you are mindlessly getting water out of the little plastic tubes

01:28:56   in your fridge, consider trying something different.

01:29:00   That's, you know, you might have convinced me to try that because our tap water is fine.

01:29:05   Maybe I, yeah, because you know, because I'll tell you what, so we ran into issues with

01:29:11   the idea of trying to replace our fridge.

01:29:14   Tell me about it.

01:29:16   Yeah, so, so again, anybody who has not listened, you have to go listen to Jon's episode of

01:29:22   Reconciliable Differences where he gets a new fridge from a few months back because it is

01:29:27   amazing. It is a masterpiece. It is a Syracuse masterpiece. It is, if you're a fan of anything,

01:29:35   Jon, which if you've made it this far listening to our podcast, I assume you are, you must

01:29:41   listen. It's a masterpiece. It really is. So we'll link that in the show notes again.

01:29:45   I feel like that is the naked robotic core of Jon's Syracuse, that episode.

01:29:48   It's not. It's just an episode, but here's my pitch. You'll learn stuff about refrigerators

01:29:52   and buying them. If you're in the market for a refrigerator and you have similar tastes

01:29:57   to mine and you were nodding your head when I was telling you not to drink out of the

01:30:00   plastic straw filter water from your fridge, this will tell you what the landscape of refrigerators

01:30:05   looks like in 2019-ish, so it will be informative.

01:30:09   Yes. Anyway, so our current fridge is a 36-inch wide, 70-inch tall, counter-depth which you

01:30:20   use about 25 inches deep.

01:30:22   Oh no, counter-depth ruins everything.

01:30:24   Right. It is built into a cabinet-style enclosure. There's a cabinet above it. There's a wall

01:30:31   on the left side, but we want the hinge to be on the left side. And so it has to, the

01:30:36   door when it swings open, can't extend very far past the left edge of the fridge. We only

01:30:41   have about an inch.

01:30:42   Oh, you're using single door, right?

01:30:45   Single door, and we only have about an inch on the left of a gap before it hits the wall.

01:30:49   So the door has to mostly swing like with the hinge in place. It can't swing very far

01:30:55   to the left of the fridge's bounds. And so we thought, let's look at everything available.

01:31:02   And if we can find a good fridge, we're buying a washer too, we'll get some kind of combo

01:31:06   deal on it, we'll discount both things, we're buying two at once, we'll save on installation,

01:31:10   so let's just replace the fridge that we hate. And there's other issues with it too, like

01:31:14   all the drawers are all cracking and they don't slide well anymore. There's all sorts

01:31:18   of other issues with it. So we figure like, while we're getting one appliance, let's see

01:31:22   what they can do for two. I don't think there's a single fridge on the market today that would

01:31:28   fit in our fridge hole that we would actually like more than the one we have, let alone

01:31:34   like we're trying to get something better than what we have. I don't even think we can

01:31:39   find one that's as good as what we have, because this style of fridge that we have, which is

01:31:45   a single door on top and a drawer freezer below, seems to not exist anymore.

01:31:51   - Not in counter depth.

01:31:52   - Yes, so we have, counter depth is one problem, which I didn't even realize, like I just measured

01:31:57   three dimensions of our fridge and I went to the store, I'm like, "Alright, what do you

01:31:59   have, it's this dimension, figuring this must be a common dimension." Nope.

01:32:04   - You don't realize how big everyone else's fridges are, yours is so shallow, you can barely

01:32:08   fit anything in there.

01:32:09   - Yeah, so not only, so most of the fridges are like eight inches deeper than ours, and

01:32:14   we have no extra space right there, so it would have to just then stick out from the

01:32:17   front by a significant more--

01:32:19   - Just gotta renovate your kitchen. Just throw money at this problem and solve it.

01:32:24   - Which I really don't want to do, for lots of reasons, but like, so, this kitchen was

01:32:29   only built, this kitchen I think is about 12 years old. Like we didn't do it, the previous

01:32:34   owners did it, but they did it pretty recently, you know, before we bought it. So like it's

01:32:38   about a 12 year old design, the fridge is probably about that age as well, and I assume

01:32:43   like you know, as they boxed out the fridge hole when they first built it, this seemed

01:32:47   like a common size. And if you look at any kitchen remodel that was done around like

01:32:52   2000, I don't know, 2007, eight-ish, anything that was done around that time, they all had

01:33:00   these same fridges, these like Whirlpool/Gen Air, it's all the same company, these like

01:33:05   you know, these stainless steel drawer fridges on the bottom, single door on top, water dispenser

01:33:09   on the stupid hinge, like, we've seen the same fridge in many people's houses that were

01:33:14   done around the same time.

01:33:15   - Yeah, and cabinet depth is still popular, like people like it because it doesn't stick

01:33:18   out so far into your kitchen, like if you build the cabinets out to that depth, they

01:33:22   become like oppressive and make your kitchen smaller, and it's just nicer, you get less

01:33:26   storage, but you know, counter depth is still popular, but it's popular, kind of like my

01:33:31   problem with trying to find one without a water feature, on the quote unquote high end,

01:33:34   like the cheap fridges, the ones that don't follow the fads, the ones that have a single

01:33:39   door on top, those are not counter depth, because if you're shopping in the cheap end,

01:33:43   where you have no water feature and a single door and it's not counter depth, you don't

01:33:47   get any of the features, it's only when you go up to the nicer ones that it's counter

01:33:51   depth, and the nicer ones always follow the fads, and as you know, the fad is not currently

01:33:55   drawer on the bottom, big door on top.

01:33:56   - Yeah, the fad is, so, as far as I can tell, and like we talked to the appliance guy, we

01:34:01   looked at all the things that were in this store, I looked then later at Home Depot and

01:34:05   Lowe's, like, so we looked at everything, high end, low end, and it seems like, first

01:34:10   of all, almost no one makes drawer freezer and top single door fridge anymore at all

01:34:15   at any size.

01:34:17   Most of them now are Frank's doors, where you have two doors on top and a drawer freezer

01:34:22   on the bottom.

01:34:23   - That's mine.

01:34:24   - I don't like that arrangement very much, I don't like Frank's doors.

01:34:27   - It's really nice, it's really nice, you get used to it very fast, and I understand

01:34:31   it won't work in your fridge hole, but it is, I am a total convert.

01:34:36   - Yeah, it won't work in our fridge hole anyway, because the left door can't open, basically,

01:34:40   because they slide way out of the hinge.

01:34:42   - Yeah, yeah, but if it could work, it is actually really nice, even if you, like, the

01:34:46   main reason that that came out is if you have a small kitchen, it's great to have a smaller

01:34:50   door that opens into it, but once you get used to being able to open just the right

01:34:53   or just the left, it's really convenient.

01:34:55   Kind of the same way the drawer fridge sort of took over.

01:34:57   It took over for a reason, because the old fridge, whether it was, like, when I was a

01:35:00   kid, it was freezer on top instead of freezer on bottom, but when I was a kid, they also

01:35:05   had some that were freezer on bottom, but the drawer is superior to both of those arrangements,

01:35:09   because you get to pull the thing out.

01:35:11   Most of the fridge, I call them fads, but these are innovations in the fridge space.

01:35:16   They catch on for a reason, because they are more convenient, better use of space, fit

01:35:21   into more people's kitchens, so on and so forth, so I don't, you know, even though the

01:35:26   French doors seem weird, I think if you got them and they could fit, you would get used

01:35:30   to them very quickly and not be able to go back.

01:35:32   - Maybe.

01:35:33   Unfortunately, they don't fit, because the left door can't swing open without hitting

01:35:36   the wall with itself, like with the hinge part, so that's, I don't know why the hinges

01:35:40   are designed that way and why the other ones aren't, but for whatever reason, that's how

01:35:43   they're designed, so I can't, so we can't do a French door fridge.

01:35:46   In at least any model I've seen.

01:35:48   The only options we seem to have are to either get a fridge that is skinnier than our fridge

01:35:52   hole, that is not 36 inches wide, that's more like 30, which is a pretty significant capacity

01:35:57   reduction and would leave a big gap that would just be weird.

01:36:00   - No, that's not good.

01:36:01   - Or to remove the cabinet above our fridge and get one of these new like eight feet tall

01:36:05   ones.

01:36:06   - Yeah, that's the Marco, the Marco fridges.

01:36:08   - Yeah.

01:36:09   - I was waiting for you to get to the Marco fridges, I knew you would eventually.

01:36:11   - All the Marco fridges now, like all the fridges that are nice now cost $6,000, oh gosh.

01:36:19   - At least.

01:36:20   - And are, they're so tall that I can't reach the top shelf inside of them.

01:36:25   Like we have, we have like a little like step stool thing for our seven year old son to

01:36:30   be able to get things in the fridge.

01:36:31   I would need to use that to get things in my own top shelf in my fridge.

01:36:35   - And they have the compressors on top of much of them, a lot of them have, because

01:36:38   the, you know, the fridges go all the way to the floor, but the compressors on the fancy

01:36:41   $10,000 fridges are all on the top as well, so you need even more, sometimes you need

01:36:45   very high ceilings and you certainly can't have cabinets as big of cabinets on top of

01:36:48   them.

01:36:49   - See, I wouldn't even mind having the compressor on top, because that, 'cause like the compressor

01:36:54   takes up space in whatever is on the bottom of the fridge, so usually it's, you know,

01:36:57   in these days it's usually the freezer, like, so you got this super tiny freezer or this

01:37:01   weird like trapezoidal cutout out of your freezer that you can't use that space.

01:37:05   So putting the compressor on top makes total sense if you're gonna make the fridge super

01:37:08   tall, because you don't need to reach the compressor, but you do need more capacity

01:37:12   in the bottom, so that, I'm actually fine with that, but like, how is a very common

01:37:18   size of fridges 10 years ago now seemingly no longer made at all?

01:37:24   - It's the arrangement of the doors that's not made, a counter depth single door on top,

01:37:28   I mean, maybe you could find one of them, but they're all the French doors, 'cause that's

01:37:31   better.

01:37:32   Now, I would blame the people who remodeled your kitchen not thinking that like, oh, there's

01:37:35   never gonna be a problem because we'll just make the hinge open on the other side, that's

01:37:39   not good forethought, you should always have a little bit of room, especially if it's

01:37:43   not just like, if it's a wall that's there that can't like, are you in the middle of

01:37:48   a long expansive wall or are you right near a door opening, like could you widen a door

01:37:52   opening by six inches and make it so your fridge hinge fit?

01:37:56   - I don't, we would have to open up the wall there to see like what's behind it, like

01:38:00   are we dealing with like big supports that we can't easily move or, like we don't,

01:38:04   it would take like, it would take opening up a wall to answer this question, but--

01:38:07   - But you can't like make a door opening six inches bigger and make it, it's like how far

01:38:10   is it from the nearest opening?

01:38:13   - The way the kitchen is arranged, there is no other option of where to put this fridge

01:38:17   or how to widen its space without literally knocking down a wall that we're not even sure

01:38:22   we can remove.

01:38:23   - That's what I'm getting at, the wall that it's up against, how far does that wall extend

01:38:26   past the fridge?

01:38:27   - Oh, I see what you mean.

01:38:29   Probably a good two or three feet at least.

01:38:31   - Yeah, all right, so you can't, I mean, you can't make that opening two or three feet

01:38:35   wider and suddenly have it.

01:38:36   - No.

01:38:37   - Yeah, no, that's a shame.

01:38:40   God, I don't, this is, you just gotta make sure that fridge doesn't break, I mean, we

01:38:44   have the same problem, like I, in many ways, as you know from listening to the program--

01:38:48   - Yeah, like we've gone from, like we've gone from us hating this fridge and we're like,

01:38:54   we would joke because it's the only appliance that came with the house that still works.

01:38:59   All the other ones broke within the first year of us being here and we had to replace

01:39:03   them all, except the fridge that we hated, and that works forever, right?

01:39:07   It'll never die.

01:39:09   And we kept joking, like, let me, somebody will sabotage the fridge so we can break it

01:39:12   and finally get a new one.

01:39:13   Now, it's the opposite, now we're like, oh crap, this fridge can never die because we

01:39:17   can never replace it.

01:39:19   - Yeah, or you can replace it, but it's much more complicated than the fridge part of it.

01:39:24   - Yeah, we can replace it only after a cabinet remodel and buying one of these giant ones

01:39:27   that I can't reach, or having something that's way worse than what we have now.

01:39:31   Great.

01:39:32   - Yeah, and you know, the other thing with the Margot fridges is the trend in that sort

01:39:36   of price class is not just to buy one of those.

01:39:39   They make those counter-depth so your kitchen can look nice and sleek and everything, but

01:39:43   incredibly wide, like not as big as two fridges side by side, but close to it, and then they

01:39:47   have like two of them.

01:39:49   One of them is like, you know, 1.5 fridges side by side that's really just one giant

01:39:54   refrigerator, and then a second one that's just freezer and then a thing for wine, like

01:39:57   ... And they're all, they have the cabinet front.

01:40:00   So much money can be spent on these sort of quote unquote commercial quality fridges,

01:40:05   which by the way, kind of like Viking stoves as you've experienced, is not any guarantee

01:40:08   that they'll be any higher quality.

01:40:10   In theory, they keep the temperature more even inside there, and they're more powerful,

01:40:14   and they have multiple compressors, which a lot of the consumer ones too and everything,

01:40:18   but like it's one of those things where you don't actually get what you pay for always,

01:40:22   so I would be leery of the super expensive fridges, even if they did solve your problem.

01:40:27   - Which they won't.

01:40:29   - Yeah.

01:40:30   - Also, like there are surprisingly few fridges that actually have the water, the ice and

01:40:36   water dispensers on the outside.

01:40:37   Like why is that so rare?

01:40:39   Like when we were growing up, that was a common thing, and I've never had one.

01:40:42   My entire life, I've never had a fridge that had a freaking water dispenser on the front,

01:40:46   and I've always wanted one.

01:40:47   - No, you don't want that water.

01:40:49   It's bad tasting, and the ice cubes, you don't want them either.

01:40:52   - There's plenty of ones with this stuff on the outside.

01:40:55   Did you see all the double door ones?

01:40:57   Not double door, did you see the ones that I talked about on the rectives episode where

01:41:00   they have the little glass door on the front so you can kind of--

01:41:03   - Yeah, our friends have one.

01:41:04   It's weird.

01:41:05   Whenever I go over there and take them out of their fridge, I always pull the wrong button,

01:41:08   and so only the front half opens.

01:41:11   I don't think that's a thing that matters.

01:41:13   - That is not going to stick around, I think.

01:41:16   - It seems like a weird gimmick that just complicates the mechanism and takes up more

01:41:20   space.

01:41:21   - Yep.

01:41:22   - I mean, I see the advantage, I see the potential savings, I see the convenience angle, but

01:41:25   it's just such a compromise in terms of storage space.

01:41:30   And that's the other thing.

01:41:31   If you ever got a non-counter depth one, you'd never be able to go back to counter depth

01:41:34   because you'd feel like you're using half a fridge.

01:41:39   - I see what looks to be a more modern version of our refrigerator that includes Wi-Fi on

01:41:46   it.

01:41:47   - Of course they do.

01:41:48   - I'm not really sure why.

01:41:49   - Oh yeah, some of them have screens and everything.

01:41:50   - Maybe you can get apps for your fridge.

01:41:51   Maybe you can get Plex for your fridge.

01:41:56   You can get it from the content store.

01:41:57   - Nice.

01:41:58   Oh my goodness, I put a link in the show notes in the chat room.

01:42:01   So this is not our fridge, we bought ours several years ago, but this is a rough equivalent

01:42:06   visually to our fridge.

01:42:09   So anyway, it has the water feature on the front, apparently it has Wi-Fi for reasons

01:42:13   I still don't understand.

01:42:15   But yeah, this is about what we have.

01:42:17   It's an LG fridge and it looks roughly like that.

01:42:19   So basically, I think our only option is to either blow out the cabinet up top and get

01:42:25   a crazy tall $6,000 fridge or blow out the wall next to the fridge and get a Frank's

01:42:30   Door one.

01:42:31   - And so the thing is, as I talked about on the Rec Diff episode, eventually if you did

01:42:37   find one that fit your dimensions and features, you'd open it up and look inside and you'd

01:42:42   be like, "I don't like this fridge.

01:42:43   These drawers are terrible.

01:42:44   I don't like these shelves."

01:42:45   You have no choices, you narrow it down so much to find one that actually can work at

01:42:51   all and then your choices is, "Well, it's this one or nothing."

01:42:54   And you look at this one, you're like, "But I don't like this one."

01:42:56   - Yeah, too bad.

01:42:57   - All good, yeah.

01:42:58   Shopping for fridges and stuff.

01:43:00   And the thing is, I meant to talk about this when you were talking about your washing machine,

01:43:04   there is a good subculture, if you want to check it out on YouTube, of people essentially

01:43:09   complaining that they don't make them like they used to, especially when it comes to

01:43:13   washing machines and dryers, they absolutely do not make them the way they used to.

01:43:17   In some ways, good, because the new ones use less energy and less water and do a better

01:43:21   job and yada, yada, but in many ways, very bad in terms of quality of materials and durability

01:43:26   and expected lifetime, which is why you may have some relative or your parents or whatever

01:43:31   that has like a 25 or 30-year-old washing machine that's still going strong.

01:43:35   And if you buy a modern one at great expense, there's no way in hell it's going to last

01:43:39   20 years.

01:43:40   They don't even have to replace everything inside that thing three times over for it

01:43:43   to last that long, because they just don't build them with materials that are even designed

01:43:47   to last that long, from the outer case of the thing all the way down to every motor

01:43:53   bearing the whole nine yards.

01:43:55   So if you do find a fridge that you actually like and fits in this space, don't expect

01:43:59   it to be there probably as long as this one was, because they're all made of cheaper materials

01:44:04   with lower reliability, and it's just a sad state of affairs.

01:44:07   Except for, I suppose, the Marco ones, which will be exactly as unreliable as the Marco

01:44:11   fridge from the '70s or whatever the equivalent was.

01:44:13   Yeah, right.

01:44:14   No, I tell you, I actually did stumble into that area of YouTube briefly when we were

01:44:18   researching washers, because I had the same thought.

01:44:21   "Hey, why don't we try to find a really good one?"

01:44:23   And if you look at the reviews for every single new washer, with one exception, the reviews

01:44:29   are all the same.

01:44:30   They're all like, "Well, it doesn't use much water, cycles take a very long time,

01:44:34   and it doesn't clean very well."

01:44:35   I was like, "Yeah, that's..."

01:44:37   Because the water and energy conservation standards basically require them to be this

01:44:42   way, and there's good reasons for that.

01:44:44   Water's in short supply in the world and everything, so it's fine.

01:44:46   But the result is that they don't clean very well, and they have other problems too.

01:44:51   And there's one type of machine that exists out there that seems to still be the old kind.

01:44:58   It's the Speed Queen.

01:45:00   And not even every Speed Queen.

01:45:01   The Speed Queen TC model, not the newer models.

01:45:05   Have you looked at the controversy on YouTube of the new Speed Queens aren't as good as

01:45:08   the old ones?

01:45:09   People are angry about that too.

01:45:10   Yes, I saw those videos.

01:45:13   I saw a video of a guy who, all he seems to do is take videos of laundry cycles start

01:45:19   to finish, and so you can see how it washes the clothes start to finish from a camera.

01:45:25   And the commentary is amazing, I love these videos.

01:45:27   But yeah, so Speed Queen, there was this big controversy that they changed everything to

01:45:31   be energy efficient for the 2018 models, and then in 2019, they brought back one model

01:45:36   that is the old kind, that's the TC instead of the T, whatever the other letter is.

01:45:41   C I guess for classic.

01:45:42   And so you can still buy that, and we almost did, we almost bought it.

01:45:47   That was my vote for which one we should buy, but ultimately Tiff got final say because

01:45:52   she does like 99.999% of the laundry in our household, so it's her machine.

01:45:59   And this problem with the Speed Queen is that they only made them a fairly small capacity,

01:46:06   and we frequently want to put a queen size comforter in there, and that's not going to

01:46:13   fit in that, so we had to get a bigger one.

01:46:15   But it's tricky because all the reviews for all these machines are basically like, yeah,

01:46:19   they're terrible, and they last three to five years maybe.

01:46:23   Well, it should last a little bit longer than three to five years, but yeah, you should

01:46:26   just think of them as a wear item like your brake pads.

01:46:28   It's not going to last 35 years.

01:46:30   If you get 10 years out of it, consider yourself lucky, replace it every 10 years.

01:46:35   In general, the ones that were in our house maybe before we moved in or maybe the ones

01:46:41   we brought with us, they lasted a really long time.

01:46:44   The new ones that we bought after that were more expensive, but I think they were also

01:46:48   better.

01:46:49   They were quieter.

01:46:50   I think they washed the clothes better, certainly with less water, and in particular the spin

01:46:55   dry on them was way better than the old top loader that we had.

01:46:59   So there was an improvement, but of course the reliability was worse.

01:47:02   So within eight or nine years, they were sort of on their way out.

01:47:06   So now I'm just basically resigned that every decade or so we're going to have to get a

01:47:10   new washer and dryer, which helps me to try to control the cost of like, don't try to

01:47:14   get a fancy high-end one because they're just going to last eight to 10 years anyway.

01:47:18   So get one that you like that has good ergonomics if you can.

01:47:21   We kind of failed on that the last time.

01:47:23   Our dryer is actually up on blocks, so it's for a variety of reasons to try to get it

01:47:28   up higher.

01:47:29   Did you encounter this, by the way, when you were shopping, that they will sell you basically

01:47:33   the equivalent of Apple's monitor stand for your washer?

01:47:36   The drawers?

01:47:37   Yeah, they'll sell you a thing that basically, it is a stand.

01:47:40   It is a thing that makes your washer or dryer be higher off the ground.

01:47:43   Yeah, we actually had those for our outgoing one.

01:47:47   It only works on a front loader because obviously if you do that on a top loader, you won't

01:47:51   be able to reach in.

01:47:52   Unless you're very tall.

01:47:54   Which you know I'm not.

01:47:55   But anyway, we actually have, we spent the stupid money on the previous machines because

01:48:01   they were something like $200 each and it's just like a stand that contains a drawer.

01:48:05   It's a metal box.

01:48:06   Yeah, it's a metal box and a drawer.

01:48:07   And I got to say, it makes it a lot nicer.

01:48:10   When you have a front loader, it's much nicer.

01:48:13   It's also like $300 for a metal box, which is just galling compared, and since the washer

01:48:18   itself costs so much money, it really bothers me.

01:48:21   Anyway, ours is up on blocks of wood, which are much cheaper than that.

01:48:26   You have to be careful of that because obviously they shake around and everything.

01:48:29   We just needed to get it a little bit higher so it would clear our laundry basket because

01:48:32   nothing worse than putting the laundry basket in front of your dryer, opening the door and

01:48:34   it hits the laundry basket.

01:48:36   That's no good.

01:48:37   Oh yeah, geez, you can't have that.

01:48:39   So ours is just up a little bit.

01:48:40   But yeah, I'm sure ours are going to die in about three or four more years and then we'll

01:48:45   get new ones and it'll be fine.

01:48:47   Well the reality is, the one we got, the one that we're replacing, we got it, we got it

01:48:51   nine years ago and it was, I forget exactly, but it was somewhere around $1,100, $1,200,

01:48:56   something like that.

01:48:58   And the new one we got is only $500.

01:49:01   And so it's almost like, well, you know, if this only lasts five years.

01:49:04   Wow, you got a cheap one.

01:49:05   Yeah, because top loaders aren't that fancy.

01:49:08   If you get the front loaders, those are still around $1,000 mostly.

01:49:13   It was also Black Friday so that helped a little bit.

01:49:17   Our washer did us one favor.

01:49:19   It died right before Black Friday.

01:49:23   But like, you know, so you know, only 500 bucks for this thing.

01:49:26   Like yeah, you know what, if it sucks, I don't feel so bad about it because like, yeah, things

01:49:31   these days are built like crap and they don't last as long.

01:49:35   But if they're cheaper, well, you know, it's not good from a waste perspective, but at

01:49:38   least you don't feel like you're getting as ripped off.

01:49:40   Like if you're going to pay a lot for something that's terrible, that's a difference.

01:49:44   You know, like the Marco fridge, like that's why I don't want to do that.

01:49:45   I don't want to spend a $6,000 on a fridge because I know it's going to be the same garbage

01:49:49   as the $1,000 one just with a fancier plate on the front of it.

01:49:53   Well, if a classic more aggressive wash action is your preferred way of washing, Speed Queen's

01:49:57   TC5 top load washer is the machine for you.

01:50:00   Oh, yes, we mentioned and did we mention it doesn't have a lid lock?

01:50:04   The marketing copy on this is incredible.

01:50:06   Your pets can dive right in.

01:50:08   Yeah.

01:50:09   Like it's amazing to see the reviews for the Speed Queen after you've seen the reviews

01:50:15   for all the other washers.

01:50:17   It's like these it's like a cult.

01:50:18   You look at the reviews like Amazon's full of everything.

01:50:20   You look at the reviews and you're like these people are like my house in my entire house

01:50:23   smells better as a result of this machine.

01:50:27   They're like Tesla customers.

01:50:28   It's all the positive reviews like I'm sure people do have problems with the Speed Queen's

01:50:33   and like they're, you know, in some respects don't do something as well as the modern ones,

01:50:37   but those people aren't going to be in the reviews.

01:50:38   It's going to be all the enthusiasts.

01:50:40   No, it's it's it's the difference.

01:50:42   You have to read these reviews.

01:50:44   It's amazing.

01:50:45   It's almost like like those those cultures of like Reddit people who go and infect Amazon

01:50:49   reviews with like totally over the top like humorous.

01:50:53   It's almost like that, but they're real like it.

01:50:56   It's amazing.

01:50:57   It's like these people.

01:50:58   It's like this washing machine changed my life.

01:50:59   Like it's it's really quite something.

01:51:01   [BEEPING]