00:00:00 ◼ ► I'm leaning towards Paint the Square just because we talked about like... You're always a sucker for the one that tells you what this show is about, but fine.
00:00:06 ◼ ► It at least gives us a hint of something. It's about Paint the Square. I like the ones where there's no way you could possibly know what it's going to be about. You won't guess. It's not a cliché and it's not a general statement about whatever.
00:00:30 ◼ ► It's like they talked about painting? Is it about painting pixels? Is there something in the news about painting? Something in the news about squares? No. No. Just totally random.
00:00:42 ◼ ► I've been talking on and off over the last few episodes about ISH, which is a kind of Linux shell on the iPad. And somehow we've caught the attention of the author and now I'm basically making verbal feature requests, which is magnificent for me. And as of the most recent version that was posted to TestFlight a couple of days ago, it now supports my beloved YouTube download, which is tremendous.
00:01:06 ◼ ► It is pretty slow to start the download, but once the download starts, it actually rips pretty well. And it works perfectly fine. I've been extremely impressed. Unfortunately, the Files app integration has had a bit of a bug happen to it, so I do not see any files in the Files app. So I have this wonderful media file sitting within my little Linux shell that I can't get anywhere.
00:01:30 ◼ ► So that's a little bit of a bummer, but one step at a time, everyone. Additionally, I should specify that there's no FFmpeg at this time, but I believe it is on the to-do list, although probably not immediately. But I remain incredibly impressed about what ISH does. It is extremely cool and you should check it out if you have an iPad. Actually, I think it works on iPhone as well, but especially if you have an iPad, it's good stuff.
00:01:51 ◼ ► Moving on, a lot of people have written in with some Google Photos workarounds for me. If you recall from last episode, I was complaining and commenting about how I really hate the Google Drive uploader.
00:02:05 ◼ ► And I was happy to hear, well, sad but happy to hear, that pretty much anyone who wrote in agreed with me that the new Google Drive Sync, whatever it's called, is a piece of hot garbage and doesn't work for almost anyone. And I'm kind of happy to know that I'm sharing in my misery.
00:02:23 ◼ ► A lot of people had recommended something I didn't even think about as an option, which I thought was brilliant, but I don't think will work? What was recommended was to use the Synology's Cloud Sync.
00:02:36 ◼ ► So if you don't have a Synology, the Cloud Sync basically lets you connect to Dropbox or Google Drive, among many other places, and let you sync up a local copy of all these things. So it acts as a Dropbox client, it can act as a Google Drive client, and there's many, many other services it can interact with.
00:02:52 ◼ ► And what they were saying was, just point the Synology Cloud Sync to your Photos repository and tell it to sync with Google Drive. And then you don't need to use Google's piece of monkey crap app on your iMac.
00:03:06 ◼ ► And that sounds all well and good, but first of all you have to coerce Google Photos to use Google Drive in a way that makes the photos available to Google Drive as a whole. Like it always uses the same storage area, if you will, but none of your photos are usually visible in Google Drive unless you check some checkbox somewhere, you'll have to Google for the link.
00:03:25 ◼ ► And I did that, and the problem I have is that the photos in Google Drive are all flattened into one gigantic folder, whereas all of them on my Synology are in this fairly deep folder structure where I have years and then I have months and then all the photos are in there.
00:03:46 ◼ ► And I'm really hesitant to try to tell the two to sync because I'm assuming this Synology is going to try to push all these folders up to Google Drive, and I'm guessing it's not going to be smart enough to de-duplicate, but maybe I'm wrong.
00:03:58 ◼ ► So if you have experience with this, please let me know. Just find me on Twitter or send an email or something. But I've not actually tried it, tried the solution, even though in principle I really like the idea of it.
00:04:09 ◼ ► Related to that, some people have written in saying that they had an idea, and that is to create a DMG on the Synology and then mount that on your Mac.
00:04:20 ◼ ► So that means your Mac treats this individual file on the Synology as an entire file system or volume onto itself.
00:04:28 ◼ ► So Paul Oswald wrote in, "My first instinct when trying to back up some stuff across various file systems and whatnot was to create a DMG, but the Synology doesn't seem to support creating or reading DMG files out of a directly attached disk."
00:04:44 ◼ ► "My next step was going to be to use a Mac to copy the disk over to the Synology as a DMG over the network, but I wondered if there was a better way to handle just backing up a disk to his Synology."
00:05:00 ◼ ► Well, there's a couple aspects to this. If people aren't Mac users or haven't dealt with disk images before, the idea is kind of like what Casey said, where it's not just a single file.
00:05:11 ◼ ► Actually, most of the good formats that you'd want to use are actually directories full of files that you can mount on your Mac.
00:05:17 ◼ ► And the Mac thinks they are a volume formatted with whatever you want them to format, APFS, HVSS plus, whatever.
00:05:24 ◼ ► So as far as the Mac is concerned, it doesn't know that this isn't really a disk attached to your computer.
00:05:34 ◼ ► The other aspect of that that's interesting, as mentioned by Paul Oswald, is that because it is a bunch of files on a NAS, but when mounted it looks like a volume of a Mac format.
00:05:48 ◼ ► If there are weird file naming things, like the rules for Mac file names are slightly different than the rules for file names in other file systems, especially in HFS plus where it does the Unicode normalization, it has all this other stuff, and there's different forbidden characters.
00:06:02 ◼ ► Like you can't use colons in HFS plus because that's actually the path separator under the covers.
00:06:07 ◼ ► Stuff like that can come up when, for example, if you tried to put a Apple Photos library onto a volume that's not one of Apple's volume formats, like if you put it onto your Synology and it's the X-T4 or BTRFS or something like that, you may find out that it can't even copy them over there, not even for backup purposes, because some of the file names inside the photo library run afoul of the rules of the target file system.
00:06:33 ◼ ► So, disk images let you get around that, like, "Well, I'm still putting the data on an X-T4 volume, on a BTRFS volume or whatever, you're still putting the data on a non-Mac volume, but because it's in a disk image, you get to pick the volume format and your Mac isn't any the wiser."
00:06:50 ◼ ► Now, all that said, the problems are, as Paul pointed out, like, well, your Mac can mount that as a disk image, but as far as anything on the Synology is concerned, it's just like a weird directory full of files. Synology can't make heads or tails of it. It doesn't understand that you're supposed to mount it and treat it as a volume, because all the software to do that is on your Mac.
00:07:07 ◼ ► And you're saying, "Yeah, well, you can just have a Mac do that for you." Like, that's basically the answer. I don't think Synology is ever going to add support for Mac-specific disk image formats, but I still think it is a semi-viable solution.
00:07:20 ◼ ► The problem, of course, is that you're going through two layers of abstraction here. So you've got the actual file system, which is organizing a bunch of things on the disk, and then you've got the disk image format.
00:07:28 ◼ ► Even if you pick the "most efficient one," like a sparse bundle or something where you don't have to pre-allocate all the disk space for it and it writes out these little stripe files that are like, I don't know, like 200 megs each or I don't know how big they are.
00:07:40 ◼ ► Anyway, these evenly-sized files that it writes, you're going through multiple levels of fakery, where the Mac thing is writing to an HFS volume that goes through the disk image driver that writes out the stripe files, and those in turn get written as actual files on the BTRFS volume.
00:07:54 ◼ ► That's all going over SMB or whatever thing that your Synology is mounted as. So I think it could work, but I wouldn't recommend it.
00:08:03 ◼ ► And if something goes wrong and something gets weird and corrupted inside your disk image, it's not easy to recover from.
00:08:10 ◼ ► What I'm saying is I wouldn't recommend this approach. The only time I've used this approach is for things like using SuperDuper to clone your drive to the Synology.
00:08:19 ◼ ► Again, unless you have HFS+ formatted volumes on your Synology, you can't do a direct clone, but you can tell SuperDuper to say, "See this disk over here? Make a Mac disk image of it over there."
00:08:31 ◼ ► And then you can put that disk image on any volume that can hold just plain old normal files, like no Mac-specific stuff.
00:08:37 ◼ ► So to answer this question in a long-winded way, I'm not aware of any solution other than having a Mac read and write those disk image files.
00:08:45 ◼ ► But it is something to keep in mind and to keep in your back pocket for situations where you want to do it temporarily, just to have some space to move stuff around in the tile game that is your storage life.
00:08:55 ◼ ► Or if you want to do backups of entire computers or volumes or whatever to a volume format that is not a Mac-specific one.
00:09:04 ◼ ► Moving on, we got some feedback from Chad Bailey with regard to how do you move from one career to another. And this is a little bit long. I've actually pared it down quite a bit, but it was really, really, really good.
00:09:16 ◼ ► So please bear with me. But Chad writes, "An increasing number of people I hire are coming from non-traditional backgrounds, meaning they went to a code school or otherwise self-taught.
00:09:24 ◼ ► They often end up being the highest performers on my team because they're consistently hardworking, eager, and adaptive.
00:09:31 ◼ ► At first I thought it might be because they're in their honeymoon period with the tech industry and haven't been burned by all its challenges yet.
00:09:36 ◼ ► But I'm realizing the thing that they all have in common is that they wanted something, a new career, and they were willing to work hard to get it.
00:09:41 ◼ ► You have to overcome the inertia of life to change career paths like they have, even more so as you get older.
00:09:47 ◼ ► So as someone who's worked in several different developer jobs and is now a manager, I'd so much rather work with someone who might not know the specifics of a technology in question,
00:09:56 ◼ ► but has demonstrated an eagerness to learn than I would someone who had a strong institutional background on paper but thought they were God's gift algorithms.
00:10:03 ◼ ► My advice to the listener would be this. It's important to have a goal to work toward and accomplish rather than just randomly learning and half-building things.
00:10:10 ◼ ► Having a specific thing you want to build is a good substitute. Keep making things until you've made something you're proud of enough to show off in an interview.
00:10:18 ◼ ► By the time you've built a few things, you'll start developing the taste you need to make that determination of what's "good enough."
00:10:23 ◼ ► In the interviews, lean hard on how hard you've worked to learn what you've learned so far and your eagerness to get better.
00:10:30 ◼ ► It'll ingratiate you to the interviewer so much more than someone who leans back in their chair and rolls their eyes when the interviewer mentions an older, cueing technology in one part of their app.
00:10:37 ◼ ► I thought that was really, really great and a really good summary of what we were, I think, all three of us trying to say last episode.
00:10:42 ◼ ► So in summary, of that summary, I would say give it a shot. If you want to change careers, you can't hurt to try and definitely give it a shot.
00:10:55 ◼ ► I think that advice is mostly for people who are hiring, not for the people who are interviewing so much.
00:11:01 ◼ ► Because although I think all that is true, there is still the other kind of interviewer who's like, "Well, you don't have all the check boxes," or "You don't have experience," or "I'm kind of wary of self-taught people."
00:11:14 ◼ ► The truth is, I think, what you just read, where showing that you're brave enough to make a career change and that you're able to do it successfully, showing that you've put effort into it, whatever, you're not just kind of sleepwalking through your career, is a great indicator that you might be a good hire.
00:11:31 ◼ ► Everything that Chad said is true, but there are definitely jobs out there, hiring managers out there, especially people who don't know much about technology but are in charge of hiring people to work on technology.
00:11:56 ◼ ► You don't want the job where the person hiring you doesn't know anything about technology, but beware of the others.
00:12:06 ◼ ► If you are a technical person and you know about technology and you're in charge of or contribute to the hiring of people, keep this in mind, because it's easy to fall back into the trap of like, "Well, there's these two people and I'm not sure this person doesn't have a degree."
00:12:21 ◼ ► "They say they're self-taught, but I'm a little bit wary. I feel more comfortable picking the person from MIT."
00:12:26 ◼ ► That's not the best instinct, especially if the other person used to be an accountant or something and has changed careers.
00:12:35 ◼ ► It does show wherewithal and motivation and eagerness that may not exist with the MIT person and just expects to glide right into the job.
00:12:43 ◼ ► I would also say, too, we got a couple of people who, in response to our bit about this last week, who said, "Well, if you're lucky, you have time to make a GitHub profile or to make your own code on the side to show them."
00:12:58 ◼ ► "But what if you don't have time? What if you're busy working a job and your previous jobs don't let you share your code or whatever else?"
00:13:04 ◼ ► We mentioned if you can show something you've done, either a personal project or GitHub contributions or something like that, that's powerful.
00:13:13 ◼ ► But I did want to mention here that I don't think I said enough last week that if you even have a GitHub profile with anything in it, you're going to be one of 1% of the applicants who have that.
00:13:29 ◼ ► If you can program at all, you're going to be already in the top quarter of applicants.
00:13:36 ◼ ► It's easy to hear about all the hotshots and all the high-end jobs from the big companies you know and to think, if you're new to the field or if you're trying to get into programming, it's easy to think that you're totally outclassed.
00:13:53 ◼ ► That everyone's way better than you and you're not at all qualified and you don't have any chance or whatever.
00:13:59 ◼ ► But in addition to just wanting it, if you have any aptitude at all for programming, if you can do it at all and they give you a coding test in the interview, and if you can actually complete the coding test, and even if it's simple things, you are going to be already in the top small percentage of people if you can even complete a coding test in the interview.
00:14:22 ◼ ► And if you've done anything on the side that you can show them, it will put you way ahead of everybody else.
00:14:28 ◼ ► You may not realize, because again, you see the high profile, the top tier, you hear about all these great developers, these great companies, but most applicants for most programming jobs just can't do it.
00:14:43 ◼ ► They just can't even program at all, and they don't care, and they can't learn. So if you can do any or all of those things, you will be ahead of them by a lot and you stand a better chance than you think of getting those jobs.
00:14:56 ◼ ► Yeah, then the more desirable jobs will want to test you more vigorously and you will have to not just be able to do it well, but to Marco's point, there's a reason the FizzBuzz test is a thing that people know about in the programming world.
00:15:13 ◼ ► FizzBuzz is a programming quiz, like here, solve this problem by writing a program to solve it, and the problem, I think it's based on a kid's game, but the problem is basically like, I forget, but if a number is divisible by 5, print Fizz, if a number is divisible by 15, print Buzz, and if it's divisible by both 5 and 15, print FizzBuzz.
00:15:32 ◼ ► It sounds like the world's easiest programming problem. You can see the code in your head if you're a programmer, right? Why is this a thing? Why would you ever give someone this test? It's practically like asking them to write "Hello World."
00:15:44 ◼ ► It's like, well, are you going to give me a problem or are you just going to, whatever. FizzBuzz seems to have no utility in the interview process, and yet, FizzBuzz is described in this page that we'll put in the show, it probably is,
00:15:56 ◼ ► a way to filter out the 99.5% of programming job candidates who can't seem to program their way out of a white paper bag. It actually is a useful tool. You would think that it's not a useful tool at all.
00:16:07 ◼ ► It's like, I'm asking you to do literally the minimum necessary in any language you want, just to show that you can program almost anything. It's harder than "Hello World," but not much harder than "Hello World."
00:16:18 ◼ ► And yet, it ends up making interviewer's lives easier because you just quickly eliminate the people who just can't do it at all. I'm trying to think of an analogy for another job, but it's like if you're hiring somebody to be a painter and you brought in a one square foot piece of wood and said, "Please paint this piece of wood," and 99% of them couldn't do it.
00:16:42 ◼ ► You're like, "Well, I eliminated all the painters who can't paint at all." You're not even judging them how well they paint, how elegant the solution is. You're just like, "Paint this square," and if someone gets a bucket of paint and pours it on their head, you're like, "Okay, well, you have to leave."
00:16:53 ◼ ► You didn't get any paint on the square, and the job of painting really does involve putting the paint where we want you to. That's FizzBuzz, and it's not an obscure thing in the world of programming interviews. It's kind of a sad statement, but it's true.
00:17:07 ◼ ► But like I said, if you do want to get a job at Google or something, they're going to ask you to do a hell of a lot more than FizzBuzz, but not every job is Google. Maybe even though Google gives you free food and does your laundry or whatever the hell they do, you can find a really good programming job at much smaller, less high-profile places.
00:17:24 ◼ ► So thanks again to Chad. I thought that was really good feedback. Finally, John, what happened to 5K displays? And this is relevant because my dad actually just today received a brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
00:17:38 ◼ ► And quick aside, his initial response to the Touch Bar was positive. He seemed really into it based on 15 minutes of use, but I was somewhat surprised by that.
00:17:47 ◼ ► But nevertheless, he has also bought himself the LG 5K display. I haven't told him how hit or miss those things are.
00:17:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm trying not to open that can of worms. But nevertheless, a year or two ago when I was looking into this for work, I was looking into potentially getting a 5K display. I ended up getting a 4K display, or two 4K displays actually, and they worked really well.
00:18:11 ◼ ► And at the time, there were at least a handful of options for 5K displays, most notably Dell made one that seemed to be reasonably well received. But it seems, John, that they're all gone now. Tell me about this.
00:18:24 ◼ ► I thought of this because of how upset I was when Apple said they were going to stop making displays. And of course, now Apple said they are going to make displays, so we're in the good times now.
00:18:33 ◼ ► But in the bad times, I was like, "Oh, Apple should make a display because then I listed all these reasons why I like Apple displays." But even then, even in my depths of despair, I didn't think, "Okay, well, if Apple stops making displays, I would have to buy a Dell display or LG display that we just talked about, or an Asus display, or who knows, an NEC display.
00:18:56 ◼ ► I'd have to buy a non-Apple 5K display." Since I haven't been paying attention to this market at all, Adam Angston Tidbits writes that if you want to buy a 5K display, it's not like you can go to all those vendors that I just listed and just get some weird bargain basement one from Korea with a no-name brand.
00:19:13 ◼ ► You don't have a lot of choices. In fact, if you want to buy one, your only choice is the LG Ultrafine 5K display if you want to buy it today and you would have to order it online. You can't even see it displayed in any place unless maybe you go to the Apple store and see it.
00:19:30 ◼ ► There are a bunch of other ones that aren't for sale but are listed from these weird brands or whatever, but people in general are not making 5K displays. It's not a popular resolution. Obviously, panels are made by whoever Apple uses for their iMac, so the panels are out there.
00:19:46 ◼ ► It's kind of depressing that no one else in the market seems interested in making displays like this. It makes some sense because all the gaming monitors are going to be 4K because no game consoles put out 5K. PC gamers, maybe they could take advantage of it, but honestly, if they get a 4K display and they could drive that at a high frame rate, I think they'd prefer that over a 5K display that sacrifices frame rate for the sake of some extra pixels that a game might not even use effectively.
00:20:15 ◼ ► And of course, multiple monitors are more common now than they used to be. So maybe one big honking display is not a thing that is desired by the market, but I was surprised to learn that how many years after the 5K iMac came out, you can't just go to any monitor vendor and get a 5K display.
00:20:37 ◼ ► You're stuck with the LG one or even sketchier things, and if you don't want that, you can just wait with the rest of us for the summer when presumably Apple will introduce its presumably 5K display for its presumed Mac Pro.
00:20:52 ◼ ► So a few things about that, but first of all, are you sure, because Dell had theirs, but it seemed like it was maybe being discontinued, the UP2715K, is that a thing that still exists or is that gone?
00:21:06 ◼ ► Well, we'll link to the article, because I know an article about this and it's tidbits and it's out of thanks, so I'm pretty sure he was thorough in looking at what you can get. He lists a bunch of things that look promising but aren't actually available.
00:21:18 ◼ ► There's one that says on Amazon that ships directly from Japan but has no ratings or reviews.
00:21:24 ◼ ► Is it the Planar one? The Planar IX2790 that has zero reviews. It claims to be this thing, and the reason I know about this is that when I was trying to figure out how to test the iPad Pro's 5K support, the iPad Pro can't use the LG 5K, because the LG 5K requires a Thunderbolt signal, not just USB-C DisplayPort.
00:21:49 ◼ ► So the LG 5K, and this alone is kind of a hilarious mess, the iPad Pro supports 5K displays over the USB-C connector.
00:22:00 ◼ ► The LG 5K monitor that's sold in Apple stores and compatible with almost every Mac has a USB-C looking plug on the end of its cable, but it does not work with the iPad Pro, or the 12-inch MacBook, by the way.
00:22:14 ◼ ► And so, as far as I know, what you need to get 5K support for the new iPad Pro is you need a 5K monitor that accepts that signal over a USB-C plug, but using the DisplayPort protocol.
00:22:30 ◼ ► And as far as I could find, zero monitors on the market that can do this exist, except maybe this Planar IX2790, but I was unwilling to actually try to buy one for $1,000 and try to figure out if it actually worked or not.
00:22:45 ◼ ► Look at the data on this article, it says, "The Wikipedia page for 5K resolution lists a small number of 5K displays, including displays from Dell, Philips, and HP, but as far as I can tell, none are currently for sale, apart from a handful of ultra-wide monitors with unusual aspect ratios like 64 to 27 and 32 by 9."
00:23:01 ◼ ► Right, and there was, I think yesterday there was a review on The Verge of there is an LG monitor that's 5K across, but only like the 4K vertical resolution, and it's like 34 inches, so it's like really big and wide.
00:23:17 ◼ ► So it would not be suitable for a Mac, because that's neither, again, obligatory link to the Bajango article on what makes good retina resolutions at good screen sizes, it's like it's too big of a size to run it at retina size, but it's too small of a size to run it at 1x, so it's a very strange intermediary size.
00:23:38 ◼ ► But I was thinking too, so assuming that 5K monitors basically barely exist, because that does seem to be the status quo here, and assuming that PC monitor buyers seem totally uninterested in them, which does seem to be the case after all these years of them existing on the Mac side in the form of the iMac,
00:23:54 ◼ ► I do wonder, do we think there is a chance, because one of the responses that we got when we talked about this last year, when I talked about this on Twitter, I forget how it came up, one of the responses was that all the high-end monitor makers and video card makers and everything are skipping 5K and going straight to 8K.
00:24:14 ◼ ► And I have not heard anything more about this, there is an 8K Dell monitor that is for sale for only $4,000, and it does, the reviews of it say like, yep, it is indeed a 5K monitor, although it's too, sorry, 8K, but it's too small.
00:24:32 ◼ ► See, if you go back to that Bezango chart of what makes for a good, what makes for correct sizing on a Mac of either, whether you're going to run the monitor at 1X or 2X, you want things on screen to fall within a certain physical size range that's kind of like a traditional size range, so that things on screen don't look too big or too small.
00:24:51 ◼ ► They just look either sharp or not sharp, right, whether you're running in Retina or non-Retina. The correct size for an 8K monitor to be in that range is about 37 inches.
00:25:03 ◼ ► So, I'm wondering, A, why Dell didn't go bigger with theirs, because it's probably cheaper to go bigger, so why they only went for like 32 or 34, whatever it is, I don't know, and B, do we think Apple might be doing this, do we think that the Apple Pro display that's rumored for, or that's stated to be released sometime in 2019, do we think that will be 8K, and do we think it'll be 37 inch range?
00:25:31 ◼ ► We talked about that back when we were talking about our Mac Pro dreams, and there were a bunch of rumors about it being 8K. I mean, the obvious application of 8K is so you can watch 8K video at native resolution.
00:25:43 ◼ ► I mean, it does. Like, 8K video exists, cameras exist that, you know, like it's not common, but it is a thing.
00:25:51 ◼ ► No, no, I'm just saying like for video, like, we'll take, we'll shoot, and very often, a video is shot at a much higher resolution that it's going to be mastered at or whatever, right, but so you can shoot at 8K and then you could crop to a 4K, you know, sub-rectangle, anyway.
00:26:04 ◼ ► Shooting at 8K is a thing, and it would be weird if you could shoot in 8K, but you could never actually view it in 8K, right?
00:26:11 ◼ ► So there has to be something out there like this Dell Ridiculous 8K monitor, and the fact that it's not the right size for, you know, basically using a UI might not be that bad if the only thing you're using it for is essentially a display monitor to show you, like, your rendered video outputs.
00:26:26 ◼ ► You can look at it and see how everything is coming together or whatever, and you're still doing your editing on your 4K monitor with the down-sambled stuff.
00:26:34 ◼ ► And that's why I think, I mean, the Mac Pro should be able to drive an 8K display if there's a, you know, video card that can do it, but I don't think it's time for Apple to introduce an 8K display, just for the reasons you said, that if it's appropriately sized, it would be huge.
00:26:48 ◼ ► And who actually needs that? It's either people doing 8K video, in which case maybe that size actually isn't that good because they might want something that's a more reasonable size even if it's like "too small" for a UI.
00:27:00 ◼ ► They're not going to put their UI on it anyway. And 5K has been Apple's standard. I think you have to bend your neck more.
00:27:08 ◼ ► If you sat in front of a 37-inch thing, like, just to look from one side of the monitor to the other. I mean, I guess people with dual monitors do that all the time.
00:27:15 ◼ ► It just seems like it might be over the limit of single monitor size. At that point, you might want to have two monitors that you can arrange.
00:27:24 ◼ ► So, I don't rule it out because, you know, with Apple you don't want to rule anything out, but I mean, I hope Apple doesn't skip 5K because I feel like 5K is a really good sweet spot.
00:27:33 ◼ ► It's a beautiful-looking, really big monitor where everything is, you know, if you make it the same physical size as the iMac display, that's good.
00:27:42 ◼ ► That is a good, really good single monitor that's a nice compromise between having two monitors in one, and it's very sharp and crisp, and they have the panels and yada yada.
00:27:50 ◼ ► Like, don't overthink it, Apple. Just make a 5K display. If they want to offer an 8K as well, that would be awesome, but every discussion of Apple's upcoming display has been singular, not plural.
00:28:00 ◼ ► So, I'm not willing to believe that they're going to come out with two, but if they come up with one monitor and it's 8K, I'm actually going to be disappointed because it's going to be tons of money.
00:28:09 ◼ ► And if it's not 37-inch, the UI will be the wrong size. If it is 37-inch, I don't know if I can fit it in my house.
00:28:15 ◼ ► I don't know. I think it might be like, you know, we say this now, but if you would have asked me in, you know, 2001 whether I thought that I would be using a 27-inch monitor, I would have said, "That's ridiculous."
00:28:28 ◼ ► The 17-inch monitor I'm looking at now is already almost too big, right? Like, it seemed really big at the time.
00:28:35 ◼ ► And yes, you know, eventually you do hit, like, field of view, ergonomic issues, or like, you know, distance to the monitor.
00:28:41 ◼ ► You know, you do hit issues like that eventually, but, you know, Apple used to sell a 30-inch monitor, and they took that same resolution and crammed it down to 27, and it made everything a little bit smaller.
00:28:57 ◼ ► And I know a lot of people who ran either multiple, well, not multiple 30s. I mean, I know Al Gore did, but no one else really.
00:29:05 ◼ ► But, like, I know people who would run a 30-inch, and then next to it, a second monitor that was smaller, maybe a 24 or something.
00:29:14 ◼ ► So, like, that was actually fairly common that I saw, like, you know, in programming jobs and everything.
00:29:24 ◼ ► And so, if you think about, like, if somebody can use a 30-inch with a 24-inch next to it and make use of that space, then having a, you know, having a 27-inch just add, like, 50%, roughly, to its area or whatever it would be, that's actually not that crazy.
00:29:44 ◼ ► Like, that's, it's in a similar vein as people who would run a 30-inch with anything else, or people who today have an iMac, a 27-inch iMac, and might run a second monitor next to it.
00:29:53 ◼ ► Like, you're talking about roughly the same, like, width, or even actually less width than that if you did an 8K at 37 inches.
00:29:59 ◼ ► So, it actually might, like, it seems crazy now, but I bet, like, that statement won't age well.
00:30:07 ◼ ► Like, I bet if you, if these things actually do exist at some point, and we can buy wonderful 37-inch 8K displays, and that's what's on all of our desks in 10 years, that might be totally fine.
00:30:19 ◼ ► Like, I don't think the, I think the physics of, like, you know, the field of view and how far you'd have to be from it and everything, I do think that seems like it's really pushing the boundaries and might be over the line, but I can't say for sure that it is.
00:30:34 ◼ ► It's not the 8K that's over it. I feel like it's the 37 inches it's a little bit over, because I don't think we've ever, like, the biggest we've had is, like, maybe 34-inch, but they have 34-inch CRTs, maybe I'm misremembering.
00:30:45 ◼ ► But I feel like the 37 inches, especially the aspect ratio of the current 5K display, it's not, it's a little bit, a little bit big out of your field of view.
00:30:56 ◼ ► And, like, you really need to start switching to two monitors, unless you go really wide, obviously. You could have a single monitor that is just, you know, one of those wraparound things or whatever, but.
00:31:03 ◼ ► By the way, those exist and people love them. Like, they have those ultra-wide, you know, mostly it's PC people who buy them, because the Mac isn't that great at those resolutions, but, like, they, those exist already.
00:31:13 ◼ ► And they're actually quite plentiful these days. They're not that expensive. And the people who buy them usually really love them. So we're, we already have monitors that are, like, in this width class.
00:31:24 ◼ ► But that's just multiple monitors without gaps between them. Like, I mean, regardless of how it's actually implemented behind the scenes, that's like you are signing up to turn your head, right?
00:31:32 ◼ ► But if we also told you you have to move your head up and down, like, it starts to become a little bit silly. I don't know.
00:31:40 ◼ ► Yeah, 8K resolution is, you know, definitely doable. Like, if they did a 30-inch with, like, a 6K resolution, I think that would be a better sweet spot for where we are.
00:31:49 ◼ ► And once you start, you know, going way bigger than your field of view, I start thinking, like, can we just go to glasses? Like, at that point, like, what are we even doing, you know?
00:32:00 ◼ ► Like, once it starts being floor to ceiling, wall to wall, and you have to, like, look under your desk to get to the dock, like, there is an actual physical absurdity limit to the field of view that you can fill with pixels that you want to use your screen.
00:32:14 ◼ ► You do want it to be more or less in front of you, not around you and above you and behind you.
00:32:19 ◼ ► Unless you're, like, doing some, you know, again, you're basically reinventing VR with, like, a giant sphere that encompasses you as grateful flight simulators, and racing games maybe not so great for using Excel.
00:32:31 ◼ ► Did you see one of the things on the Cards Against Humanity Black Friday sale was basically the chair out of Grandma's Boy? I kind of really wanted it.
00:32:45 ◼ ► Oh, everyone can tweet at Syracuse. Everyone can tweet at Syracuse and tell him how good Grandma's Boy is.
00:32:52 ◼ ► That thing, that was just, like, the monitor they showed, which by the way, I'm sure didn't come with the chair, the monitor they showed was actually a tame version of one of those very wide, you know, curved displays. It didn't even look that wide.
00:33:05 ◼ ► Over the last, I think, 24 hours, Apple has formally announced the Apple Entrepreneur Camp. Did we already know this was coming?
00:33:16 ◼ ► Okay, that's what I thought too, but then I convinced myself that I'd heard of it and then forgotten. This is what happens when you have a terrible memory.
00:33:22 ◼ ► Anyway, the Apple Entrepreneur Camp is once a quarter. It's in Cupertino. You can apply for it and your applications are kept on file for a year, and they are for organizations that are founded and led by women.
00:33:36 ◼ ► So in order to get into the Entrepreneur Camp, up to three members of your company may attend, but at least one must be a woman developer, one must be the woman co-founder, founder, or CEO, and the third member of your team can be any gender.
00:33:51 ◼ ► And Apple clarifies in a little asterisk, they say the following quote, "Apple believes that gender expression is a fundamental right. We welcome all women to apply to this program." Which I thought was really cool.
00:34:01 ◼ ► Continuing on, for this camp, the participants will meet with Apple executives, although they didn't specify who, and leaders on a variety of topics.
00:34:11 ◼ ► And then additionally, and this is where I start to have my eyes bulge out of my head, the woman founder, co-founder, or CEO, and the woman developer will receive tickets to Apple's worldwide developer conference directly following lab attendance.
00:34:25 ◼ ► They will be connected with peers, meet other women in technology, and attend a special Apple Entrepreneur Camp alumni event at the conference. How freaking cool is this?
00:34:33 ◼ ► One thing I know, who's noted on Twitter, was it Chris Espinosa? Maybe someone else who works at Apple. The language that you read, that you quoted from Apple about Apple believes that gender expression is a fundamental right, blah, blah, blah, that is a nice change from the boilerplate you see in a lot of other places.
00:34:52 ◼ ► What I'm getting at, for people who don't know the code and the lingo or whatever, is what they're trying to say is it's inclusive of transgender women. And the way that's often expressed in these type of requirements, by companies that are trying to say, "We're not going to discriminate. Everyone welcome."
00:35:09 ◼ ► What they say is, "Women or people who identify as women." I see that language all over the place. I don't know how transgender people feel about that, but to me it always seemed like it was still binning and putting in a category. It's like, "Oh, women."
00:35:24 ◼ ► And then as a second category, "People who identify as women." Saying, "Okay, there are actual women, and there are people who merely identify as women."
00:35:32 ◼ ► That's not what they mean with that language. They're trying to say the exact opposite. They're trying to say, "All are welcome." But the language doesn't read that way. It never occurred to me what a better way to say that was, but every time I read it, I felt like you're trying to be inclusive, but you're kind of singling people out.
00:35:48 ◼ ► And so this language, which I have never seen before, maybe I don't look at enough of these things, was, "They have the little Apple beliefs blah blah blah, gender expression fundamental blah blah blah." "We welcome all women to apply to this program." That's the correct language, because it doesn't put people into two separate bins.
00:36:04 ◼ ► All women, transgender women are women, all women are welcome. And so whoever came up with that copy, whether they copied it or not, I applaud them because I think it is a great innovation in corporate boilerplate for trying to say that we're not going to discriminate.
00:36:19 ◼ ► Yeah, I just thought this whole camp seems really cool. And I am very curious to hear what it's like. And they've announced the dates. Let me stall for time while I try to figure out when they are. But there are four of them they've announced. The first one is January 28th through February 8th of this upcoming year.
00:36:37 ◼ ► And then, April Fool's Day through the 12th and then July and October of next year as well. So maybe mid-February we can start to hear about how this goes. And I am super duper curious. I would really love to hear more about this because it seems really cool and a really nice way to try to get, you know, at least one underrepresented group, a little more exposure. And I think that's super awesome.
00:37:01 ◼ ► And, again, if you're hearing about this and you're like, "Wait, what are they doing? Why would they do this thing just for women? Is it some sort of holiday that I don't know about?" We've asked a lot in the past about what a company can do about the fact that most of the people who are working there in technology jobs are white males.
00:37:23 ◼ ► What can you do about it? It's like, "Well, you know, they just don't apply to our jobs." Or, "Our hiring process and bias is a pipeline problem." There's all sorts of things you can come up with.
00:37:33 ◼ ► And so level one is, are you doing anything as an organization that discourages anybody except for people who look like you currently work there from applying? Is the language in your job description sort of excluding people? Does your culture exclude people? There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do as step zero.
00:37:53 ◼ ► Are we, as an institution, doing anything that is essentially keeping people away? We don't even know we're doing it. Maybe every single picture on our homepage is a white guy smiling. There are many things that you can do accidentally that's going to make someone go to your page and go, "I guess this isn't the place for me, because I don't see anybody like me who works there."
00:38:11 ◼ ► So that's step zero. But say you've done all that, or you're working on that, and you're like, "We're not doing that. We're really careful with the language of our job descriptions. We try to show all people that we're not there yet. We know we're still 90% white guys programming, but we want to get there, so we want to make sure we're not scaring people away."
00:38:27 ◼ ► What's our next step? What do we do next? Can we get more people to apply? Can we work on a hiring process? What they're doing here is another next step. It's an active measure, essentially, saying, "No matter how good we are at being welcoming and making an unbiased hiring process and doing all that stuff, we can't just sit there and say, 'We're doing everything right, and so this problem will solve itself.'"
00:38:51 ◼ ► Instead, they're going to go out there and get these people, which is smart if you're a company. Smart from a financial and performance perspective, because there's untapped talent out there that you can go get that other people aren't going to get. They're either going to actively scare away, or they're not going to make an effort to go get them.
00:39:08 ◼ ► This is an untapped resource. This is a competitive advantage to go find these people. Apple wants these people. They want them to be developers on that platform. Maybe they want them to work for them. They want these people. They're going to go and get them. They're going to say, "We will make this thing just for you people, not for the people who we already are getting, for the people who are the untapped resource, and we're going to actively spend money and essentially recruit you, recruit you to our platform, to our market, or whatever, hopefully give you a good impression of Apple."
00:39:37 ◼ ► I think that is incredibly smart, and it's the obvious next step. Not to say that Apple has solved all the other problems in terms of hiring bias and corporate culture and all that stuff. I'm sure they're still working on those.
00:39:48 ◼ ► They can't be your only solution. If you just sit back there and say, "We are completely unbiased and awesome, and we'll just wait for the women and minorities to come rolling in." Don't wait. Go out and get them. It's the smartest thing ever.
00:39:59 ◼ ► I think Jessie Char had a good thing with one of the people who runs Layers. The Layers conference that runs concurrent with the WRC had a good YouTube video explaining all the secrets behind Layers, which I don't think she should have done because they're awesome secrets.
00:40:12 ◼ ► But anyway, now the world knows the secrets, and what does she do to get cool people at her conference? She goes out and gets them. She gives them tickets, says, "You're a cool person. I don't see lots of people like you at conferences. Here, have a free ticket. Come to my..."
00:40:23 ◼ ► And it makes the conference better for everybody else who's there. And it makes them like the conference and able to come by next year. It's just smart business. So if you're wondering, "Why is Apple doing this thing with women?" It's just smart business, and it's the obvious next step to take in trying to not be a homogenous company filled with all the people who have been there for decades.
00:40:42 ◼ ► Do you think this is largely about hiring for Apple, or do you think it's just to get these women onto the platform?
00:40:48 ◼ ► I don't know if they're trying to hire them to work at Apple, but recruiting them as developers on the platform, all that helps Apple. Come develop on our platform, not on other people's platforms. Come work for us, not for other people. It's an untapped resource of talent.
00:41:03 ◼ ► And you know, companies that are more diverse do better. They make more money. They have more innovative products. This is what you want. And other people aren't going out to get it. You go get it. It's a no-brainer.
00:41:24 ◼ ► This is a super old topic that's been in there since we were talking about the iPad Pro. But when we were talking about the iPad Pro and its performance and all that stuff, I did a bunch of graphs. And I know this is a podcast and we can't explain the graphs to you that well.
00:41:39 ◼ ► So maybe we'll put a link into the Google Sheet that is publicly accessible that you can look at the graphs for yourself. But I was trying to answer this question.
00:41:48 ◼ ► Okay, we see the iPad Pro and we were getting some Geekbench numbers for whatever and we know how much the iPad Pro costs. If you wanted to get the same performance of insert compute intensive job, how much would you have to pay for some other Mac?
00:42:03 ◼ ► I was picking laptops, but I suppose you could pick a Mac Mini or whatever. I threw a bunch of stuff in there and I tried to graph it. So a couple caveats before we go into these graphs. They're Geekbench numbers, right? Geekbench, like all benchmarks, is not...
00:42:18 ◼ ► It's not representative of what it's representative of. It's a bunch of tasks that are mostly real world tasks. They're not completely synthetic benchmarks, but it's a weird mix of them. And maybe you do one and not the other and like yada yada. It's not the be all end all, but it's a number that we have that we can compare roughly what's going on.
00:42:33 ◼ ► The other thing about Geekbench is you run it and then your computer submits the numbers that it ran or whatever. So the numbers vary for the same computer and you could lie and report your computer as the wrong thing.
00:42:43 ◼ ► These aren't like set in stone or whatever, but it's just trying to give us a ballpark. The reason this came up, by the way, is Steve Trout and Smith tweeted a while ago that if you look at one of the things that Geekbench does is an LLVM compiler component, basically the back end of Apple's compilers.
00:43:05 ◼ ► It's not by a little bit. The scores are 10,000 versus 8,900. So, I mean, it's...yeah. Anyway, it depends on what you want.
00:43:16 ◼ ► So, graphing these things. And the reason you graph things is like you can look at a table of numbers, you can compare numbers, and you can say, "Well, how much bigger is 10,476 than 8,941?"
00:43:27 ◼ ► You can kind of get a feel for eyeballing the numbers, but I certainly, and I think most people do better when they see graphics. You can see curves, you can see trends, you can see how things change.
00:43:37 ◼ ► So the first graph we're going to look at is the Geekbench scores for single-core and multi-core for a whole bunch of computers, like the MacBook Air, the old MacBook Air, the old MacBook, the 2018 MacBook Air, and then all of the...
00:43:52 ◼ ► The MacBook Pro, the Escape model, and the 13-inch, and then all the 2018 MacBook Pro, and then the iPad.
00:43:59 ◼ ► So it's got basically Apple's entire laptop line, a little bit of the past and all of the present, plus the iPad Pro.
00:44:08 ◼ ► And if you look at the single-core line, because it's a graph that concludes both single-core and multi-core, the single-core line, sorted from sort of lowest to highest, is almost a flat line.
00:44:18 ◼ ► At the very low end is the 2017 MacBook Air, with whatever score it has. And then, it's not entirely horizontal, but it goes up a little tiny bit.
00:44:29 ◼ ► On the right side of the graph, maybe this is like a one-degree slope line. It doesn't go up that much.
00:44:35 ◼ ► So yes, the single-core score for the 2.9 GHz 2018 i9 15-inch MacBook Pro, it is higher than that. It's like, what is it? Let me look at the actual numbers. It is like 5,800 vs. 3,300.
00:44:51 ◼ ► That's not as big a difference as you think it is when you see them graphed, especially when you see all the points in between.
00:44:56 ◼ ► But the good thing about it is that the slope, you know, there is a nice progression. Each step-up machine does a little bit better than the one we saw in single-core.
00:45:04 ◼ ► When you look at the multi-core line, it kind of follows the same slope until you get halfway through the graph.
00:45:09 ◼ ► And once you go from the 2018 MacBook Air and you start getting out of the MacBook and MacBook Airs and into the MacBook Pros, suddenly the multi-core line takes a big jump up.
00:45:20 ◼ ► And so there's basically the haves and the have-nots in multi-core. And it's like, how many cores do you have?
00:45:24 ◼ ► If you don't have a lot of cores, your multi-core score is like double your single-core score and you're just hanging out over there.
00:45:30 ◼ ► If you have lots of cores, suddenly your multi-core score is like five times as high as your single-core.
00:45:35 ◼ ► So if you look at this graph, it's got the multi-core line that goes and then just makes a big jump and then the single-core line is like that.
00:45:41 ◼ ► And then, I mean, because the text is really, really small when you look at this in the Google Sheet, you're like, where is the iPad in this graph?
00:45:48 ◼ ► The iPad, perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not if you've heard us rave about it for forever, is in the right-hand side of the graph with the MacBook Pros.
00:46:02 ◼ ► The only two MacBook Pros that have better single and multi-core scores are the 2018 2.6 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro and the 2.9 GHz i9 15-inch MacBook Pro.
00:46:19 ◼ ► But that's where the iPad Pro is. The iPad Pro is not with the fanless MacBook on the left-hand side.
00:46:25 ◼ ► It's not with any of the MacBooks. It's not even with the Escape. It is in a totally different category.
00:46:30 ◼ ► So if you had to categorize, hey, what's the iPad Pro like? It's faster than Apple's low-end laptops.
00:46:44 ◼ ► Categorically, it's with the Pro model. So seeing that graphically illustrated, seeing the iPad Pro hiding there amongst the MacBook Pros is kind of startling.
00:46:54 ◼ ► Again, remember, this is a machine that's 5.9 millimeters thick and has no fan and runs on a battery.
00:46:59 ◼ ► Yeah, like it's like, and like the funny thing is like you not only have to go to the 15-inch MacBook Pro,
00:47:06 ◼ ► but not even the base processor of the 15-inch should do it. Like you need to go, you need to upgrade the processor from the base model to a more expensive one in order to beat the iPad Pro that,
00:47:17 ◼ ► yeah, as you said, like costs a lot less even when fully specced up and is, you know, like a 15-watt machine.
00:47:27 ◼ ► So there's one other graph that I think is interesting in the Google Sheet and that's the price graph.
00:47:37 ◼ ► It's basically from the lower performance to higher performance. But this graph doesn't go in a nice sort of like gradual slope.
00:47:44 ◼ ► It goes sort of a steep stair step up and then it drops back down and then another steep couple steps and then drops back down and then another steep couple steps then drops back down.
00:47:53 ◼ ► So it's like if you if you pick a model and you start getting the better and better performance, like say you pick the 2017 MacBook, right?
00:48:02 ◼ ► The 12-inch MacBook one. If you buy a low on one of those, you know, it's like the second dot on the graph.
00:48:09 ◼ ► Like it's way on the left-hand side. It's a low performance. But the next three dots on the graph, performance-wise, they just barely slope up.
00:48:19 ◼ ► So if you want the top-end MacBook one, the top-end 12-inch MacBook, it's a pretty high bar.
00:48:25 ◼ ► Once you go to the next model, again, this is the next highest performance model. It's faster than the model before.
00:48:31 ◼ ► The price goes way down. The base model 2018 MacBook Air, which has better performance than all the ones I just listed over there, suddenly the price drops by hundreds of dollars.
00:48:47 ◼ ► And the next big drop is the iPad Pro, which is like the lowest bar in the entire chart because it gets to our point that it's a very inexpensive thing.
00:48:56 ◼ ► Then you go to the MacBook Pros and you go into the Stratosphere and they're huge and they get bigger and bigger.
00:49:03 ◼ ► They're actually pretty fast and they're priced pretty cheaply. But of course, they don't come with a keyboard, a mouse or a screen.
00:49:08 ◼ ► So, you know, anyway, the price graph I just hope is interesting to remind you that if you decide which model you want based on this performance chart,
00:49:16 ◼ ► but then when you go to spec it out, you're like, "Well, I want the good CPU. Well, I want the big SSD."
00:49:25 ◼ ► Like if you can get away with the base model or the base config, maybe it's a good deal.
00:49:28 ◼ ► But if you find the car you think you want, but then start adding like the carbon ceramic brakes and the luxury package and all that other stuff,
00:49:36 ◼ ► you end up spending so much money that you could have bought like the E-Class instead of the C-Class in Mercedes-Benz.
00:49:44 ◼ ► So be aware that, and I find myself doing this too, like you pick the model you want based on what you think the price performance is.
00:49:51 ◼ ► Like, "Yeah, this is a great deal for price performance." And then you just add options to make it such a worse deal.
00:50:04 ◼ ► Like you've moved on to the configuring phase and you're just bargaining with yourself.
00:50:17 ◼ ► So anyway, if you're interested in spreadsheets and graphs and vague, fuzzy geekbench numbers, we will put the links in the show notes.
00:50:24 ◼ ► Yeah, this is why I really am very excited for and bullish about a possible ARM Mac transition.
00:50:35 ◼ ► Because yeah, I know it wouldn't be perfect. I know there would be stuff I'd complain about.
00:50:38 ◼ ► But the performance is already there. In a much smaller and lower powered chip, the performance is already there to make really compelling Macs using Apple's ARM chips already.
00:50:53 ◼ ► And that's Apple's 5 or 10 watt ARM chips. If they actually wanted to make a 40 watt, 15 inch configuration, that could be way faster even than this.
00:51:05 ◼ ► And so people do assume, whenever people try to predict what would happen in an ARM transition, they do assume it would be a low end model.
00:51:15 ◼ ► And I've said before, I think they would probably start at the low end to do the transition. They'd probably start with the MacBook One.
00:51:21 ◼ ► Or a similar product. But I don't think that they would do that because they don't have the performance headroom.
00:51:30 ◼ ► I think they would do it for other market reasons and practical reasons. But clearly, Apple's chip team can deliver this kind of performance.
00:51:39 ◼ ► It isn't a question of maybe in the future they can do it. No, they're doing it now. They're already delivering it.
00:51:45 ◼ ► This is incredible. It's just so wild that something that runs, like you guys had said, off of a battery, something that uses almost no power.
00:51:57 ◼ ► One of the key priorities when designing the iPad CPU has got to be power consumption. And that's to say very little power consumption.
00:52:06 ◼ ► Which is the opposite of having high performance. If you're using very little power, you're presumably not going to have high performance.
00:52:14 ◼ ► Yet somehow the iPad Pro has its cake and eats it too. And if power was unhinged, power was no longer a constraint.
00:52:35 ◼ ► But it just seems like if they can do this much with so little electricity and with so little cooling, imagine what they could do with a fan and with a whole pile of electricity.
00:52:48 ◼ ► And I know you guys just said that, but it's really worth reiterating that it could be really, really, really impressive.
00:52:55 ◼ ► Is it impressive enough to have, say, emulation that runs at the same speed as an Intel chip? Probably not, but you never know. You never know.
00:53:06 ◼ ► I think the cooling is the big story here. Because I imagine for the iPad Pro, and someone should probably test this, but I bet the iPad Pro is a lot like the recent MacBook Pros.
00:53:16 ◼ ► In that it's designed with the idea that most of the time you're not using all of the cores and all of the GPU all the time.
00:53:26 ◼ ► The whole reason it can be so thin and so light. And in fact the CPU architecture itself is designed this way with the low power cores and the high power cores.
00:53:35 ◼ ► They expect most of the time it's not doing anything too stressful. And when it's not doing anything too stressful, it saves a ton of power by not using the high power cores if it doesn't need to, by using fewer cores.
00:53:44 ◼ ► If you were to use it all the time, as Marco experienced with using the recent generation of MacBook Pros, if you really want to stress it and use all the cores and do some multicore encoding process or compiling that's parallelized, you will kill your battery.
00:54:00 ◼ ► So this is not to say that we expect, "Wow, the iPad Pro is faster than everything except for the best Mac Pros, and it's so thin you'd kill that battery in two seconds if you just used all the cores all the time."
00:54:14 ◼ ► It is so thin, its battery is so small, there's no magic involved there. It's just that iPads aren't used like that.
00:54:20 ◼ ► But the cooling is undeniable because you can, I think, use the iPad Pro, peg all the cores and just let it sit there. And it won't melt itself. It will run. Will it throttle? Will it clock? Will it downclock itself? Maybe a little bit.
00:54:35 ◼ ► But the fact that it's got no fan, it has no significant heat sink or anything to speak of like the back of the device is the heat sink essentially.
00:54:43 ◼ ► If given any kind of reasonable cooling solution, it's got to have so much headroom because to get similar performance, they have to put two fans in the MacBook Pros, and only two of them are faster in multicore.
00:54:57 ◼ ► So it's so far ahead on cooling. And the battery, obviously you can solve that by plugging it into a wall and getting a real computer like a desktop, or by just putting way more battery in it.
00:55:06 ◼ ► So I think the cooling is the most impressive thing and the thinness and everything like that is just, you know, the iPad Pro is not designed to be used by a MacBook Pro, like a MacBook Pro, let's put it that way.
00:55:21 ◼ ► Which is an interesting constraint because Apple is like, "Oh, hook it up to a 5K display and do all these fancy Pro stuff on it." I think you will really slaughter your battery on your iPad Pro if you do that.
00:55:30 ◼ ► But if you have it plugged into a 5K display, hopefully you have some dongle that lets you also connect to power. And hopefully that dongle can keep up with it because there were situations, I think Mark described these ones, where there's ways you can plug in.
00:55:40 ◼ ► Was it your iPad or your laptop where the charger couldn't keep up with the power drawing? You'd actually slowly lose battery power? Was that you talking about that?
00:55:49 ◼ ► Yeah, this has been a problem with a number of Apple high-end products recently. The 15-inch laptops do it, like the biggest devices running the very highest processors when they're stressing both the CPU and the GPU.
00:56:01 ◼ ► Yeah, so I imagine an iPad fully loaded, driving a 5K display with a 12-watt charger or something might be in a similar situation. But when we're looking at these numbers, we're looking at how well it's doing with so little. Because again, its comparable computer is the MacBook One.
00:56:21 ◼ ► The MacBook One is way on the left side of this chart in a whole different neighborhood of performance. That's the one with no fan. That's the one that's got the equivalent cooling capacity.
00:56:33 ◼ ► I've got to tell you, I think I might have said this last week, or I said it somewhere, maybe not on this show, but one way or another, I have found myself using this iPad Pro quite a bit more than I'm using my beloved MacBook One, not only because it's the new shiny, but because it's just faster.
00:56:51 ◼ ► And I know that the MacBook One is slow. I know you're being funny, but I know you're also right. It really isn't hard, and these graphs bear it out. But in the past, I would use my iMac and it would be fast. This is a fairly old iMac now. It's a late 2015 iMac, but it's fairly quick even today.
00:57:12 ◼ ► And then I would use my MacBook One and think, well, I'm portable now, so it's just not going to be very quick, and that's okay. But now I'm using this iMac Pro and thinking, holy hell, it's both portable and really freaking fast.
00:57:24 ◼ ► And I've realized I can have the best of both worlds. And so because of that, I've found that I am more apt to use the iPad Pro than the Adorable these days. And my poor Adorable is almost collecting dust now. It's been quite a 180 from just a few weeks ago.
00:57:40 ◼ ► Yeah, I got to say, over Thanksgiving, I brought my new iPad Pro, the 11-inch. I brought that, and I also brought my 13-inch MacBook Pro. And I didn't use the MacBook Pro at all.
00:57:56 ◼ ► I only used the iPad. And I brought it because Tiff had to do something with it, and I thought, just in case, maybe I'll get some work done, like some coding work done or something like that. And first of all, I didn't. There was never a good time for that.
00:58:10 ◼ ► And so I just had the iPad, and it was great. It was totally fine. It was really nice, actually. And yeah, I still love the Mac for doing a lot of other stuff. But the iPad Pro was a fantastic only travel computer. And I think in the future, I will be more inclined to possibly travel with only it.
00:58:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel the exact same way. It's tough because I still feel like I want the parachute of having a "full or real" computer. And I'm sorry, Mike and Federico, I hope you understand the premise of what I'm driving at.
00:58:51 ◼ ► But ultimately, I really don't think I need to bring a laptop in almost any case. The only thing that I really still feel like I need a laptop for is perhaps dealing with photos coming off an SD card. Because if I want to do that triage while I'm kind of on the road, I don't have file access and files, so I need to do it on a "real" computer.
00:59:11 ◼ ► But that's the only thing I can think of at this point that I really need a computer for. And even the thing I've been whining about a lot lately, which is my financial management app, I've finally taken a plunge and started using, what is it called, Banktivity? I think that's right.
00:59:26 ◼ ► And that has Mac and iOS apps, and so that problem is now solved as well. And so there's almost nothing that I really need a traditional computer for anymore. And that's a weird feeling. It's been a long time since I've felt that way.
00:59:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I'm mostly finding that most of the time when I'm not at home, I'm not at my office, I'm not at my giant iMac Pro screen, I'm not getting much done on my laptop that I couldn't do on an iPad.
00:59:57 ◼ ► The only things that I really can't do without my MacBook if I'm traveling are, I do oftentimes get a decent amount of coding work done on long flights, where I'll code a whole feature on a long flight. But I hate every minute of it, and it doesn't happen on most of my flights.
01:00:19 ◼ ► If I'm honest, most of my flights, I'm just fussing around on Twitter and stuff. That's what I do most of the time. The times when I'm actually really productive on a flight or on any travel are the exception, not the norm.
01:00:33 ◼ ► And so I don't see any reason to stop bringing my MacBook with me yet, because I have it. I might as well keep using it, you know. But if I only had an iPad Pro for my travel needs and I just did all my programming on my desktop Mac, that would be fine, because that's actually what happens most of the time anyway.
01:00:55 ◼ ► Listeners, if you ever want to know when Marco is flying, you know how he occasionally does those impromptu AMAs? That's when Marco's in a plane. That's your cue. That's when he's in the air.
01:01:09 ◼ ► I'm amazed you can get that wifi to work. Not that I use it on planes, because all I can do on planes is look out the windows, but occasionally I need to use it in an emergency. I think I used it once to tweet something at Casey or something, didn't I?
01:01:19 ◼ ► It certainly doesn't work well, and it works better on iOS devices than on a Mac, because Macs have all the--and yes, I know, you run trip mode Dutch to fix it, but there's so much stuff on a Mac that just assumes that any connection it gets, it can just monopolize and just suck as much bandwidth as it possibly can.
01:01:40 ◼ ► And if you try to do that on airplane wifi, you just get nowhere. It just kills the whole connection, and nothing ends up getting through to your computer. So iOS is much better at managing that than Mac OS is, so it's actually a very nice low connectivity or bad connectivity operating system.
01:02:00 ◼ ► And all the apps tend to manage it pretty well too, because they're all written for cellular iPhones and everything, so it's nicer.
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01:03:27 ◼ ► Before we get off this hardware topic, there's another subtopic that, again, this is mostly old news, but it's worth reflecting on now that we just talked about the performance of Apple's various portable products.
01:03:38 ◼ ► And as it relates to the price, you know, the iPad Pro being an amazing performance for, you know, very, very tiny price compared to its contemporaries in the chart of Geekbench scores anyway.
01:03:48 ◼ ► And that is about something we've talked about many times in the past, the price increases of Apple's product lines in recent years.
01:03:57 ◼ ► Rodrigo Orojo put some numbers to it, and I think it's a tweet that we'll link to, and percentage increases again, because if you just look at the absolute value, it's hard to know exactly what they're doing.
01:04:07 ◼ ► But so the MacBook Air, the Mac Mini, the iPad Pro, the small and the big iPad Pro all saw price increases for like, what's the minimum cost you can get into this model?
01:04:16 ◼ ► Obviously the new models are better than the old models, right? So it's not the same product, right?
01:04:21 ◼ ► Well, see, that's BS. There's a number of good reasons and bad reasons why, and you know, some of them are valid, some of them aren't.
01:04:28 ◼ ► But like, if you say like, "Well, this should be priced higher because it's better than the old model," that's not how the technology business works.
01:04:36 ◼ ► The technology business makes better things available all the time at the same prices or less than the previous models.
01:04:42 ◼ ► So, you know, the fact that it's better, yeah, it's better because it's newer, it's using newer technology, that doesn't mean it has to be more expensive.
01:04:48 ◼ ► Well, but I'm bringing it up for two reasons. One, for things like the Mac Mini, which is just super ancient, because it's not like, well, that's not just like a year increase, right?
01:04:56 ◼ ► It's significantly better. And the second reason I'll get to it in a second, but just to get the percentage numbers here.
01:05:01 ◼ ► So the MacBook Air, you know, we have a modern MacBook Air, the old MacBook Air was very old and arguably was a lower end product.
01:05:07 ◼ ► That is a 20% price increase. The Mac Mini, 60% price increase, but that thing had been left alone for years and years.
01:05:20 ◼ ► Especially with the iPads, like, that's not that old of a product. Like, the 10.5" and 12.9" were like last year's models, right?
01:05:27 ◼ ► So a 20% increase in a year, which is what all the non-Mac Mini models are hovering around, 20% increase, that's big.
01:05:35 ◼ ► And this is not just like what the high end costs, this is like the baseline. Like, it's a reasonable machine, it's probably got not as much storage as you want, and doesn't have the fanciest anything, but like, that's the bottom level price.
01:05:46 ◼ ► And this is what we've been talking about, that almost everything that Apple come out with, whether it's a little tiny white cube that charges your device, or a cover, or the actual products, you know, it extends to pretty much every product line.
01:05:59 ◼ ► The new ones that replace the old ones are not just like 10 bucks more expensive, or like 1% more expensive, or 3% more expensive, but big, big jumps.
01:06:09 ◼ ► Sometimes they're explained by like, "Well, but the iPhone X, it's so fancy and it's got this face thing, and it's the first one of its kind," or whatever, but that price increase didn't go away when it became commonplace.
01:06:21 ◼ ► Like, the price increases I think are significant. And we've been complaining about it because we're like Apple's, you know, testing limits of whatever the term is, price elasticity, like how much, you know, this is supply and demand.
01:06:35 ◼ ► We have a product you want, if we keep increasing the price, presumably fewer of you will buy it, but how many fewer, and is it fewer enough to make up for the price difference?
01:06:43 ◼ ► I'm sure there's economic terms that apply to this, but Apple's been turning that dial, and as I've said in the past, it's kind of terrifying to think about how much they could turn that dial.
01:06:51 ◼ ► Like, is there a point where, "Oh, we've turned it too much. Now the MacBook Air costs $10 million, and only one person buys one, and we're not making it up in volume," right?
01:06:59 ◼ ► So, like, there is obviously a limit, but they're testing the limits, and so far their experiments have been pretty successful in that, like, the number of iPhones they sold didn't go down, like, that's the whole thing. They're trying to not even report unit sales anymore.
01:07:14 ◼ ► Like, the unit sales are like flat, or maybe a little bit down, but the price increased so much that both revenue and profit are up.
01:07:21 ◼ ► And the one, and, you know, we've talked this to death before, but the one subtle point I want to add in here is, this doesn't explain or excuse Apple's prices, but it is something to keep in mind that I think consumers of all kinds don't keep in mind, that I'm reminded of every time I look at, like, game consoles from the past, because game consoles expand much farther back than, like, the MacBook Air line.
01:07:42 ◼ ► You get used to buying things for a certain price, like a cheap laptop, right, a cheap Mac, alright, qualified, a cheap Mac laptop, $1,000, right?
01:07:53 ◼ ► Obviously, cheap PC laptops are, like, 99 bucks, whatever, but a Mac laptop, like, when they, around $1,000, there haven't ever been a lot of Mac laptops that have been cheaper than $1,000.
01:08:03 ◼ ► But anyone that breaks down into three digits, like $999 or whatever, like the MacBook Air was, like, that's pretty much the floor. Or take something as simple as, like, a little white cube that plugs into the wall that charges stuff.
01:08:14 ◼ ► Like, how much does a charger cost from Apple? Obviously, the price, you know, they're not cheap, right, but whatever the price is, whether it's $29 or, you know, $49 or whatever, or a lightning cable or a charging cable, USB, a cable that I plug into something to charge my phone, that costs, like, $19.95 or whatever.
01:08:32 ◼ ► If you've been an Apple customer or any kind of customer for a long time, you start getting used to whatever that price is, and you just say, "That's the price of this thing. A USB charging cable is $19.95."
01:08:41 ◼ ► And if you're an Apple customer for 15 years, you're like, "USB charging cable should be $19.95," and 15 years later, you're like, "This cable should be $19.95."
01:08:50 ◼ ► In 15 years, inflation becomes a factor. If the price of the thing you're buying literally never changes, it's getting cheaper over time. Now, obviously, Apple's got the headroom to make it cheaper. I'm not going to argue, like, Apple shouldn't do this or can't do this or whatever, but in the realm of game consoles, it's interesting to consider because you might say, "Well, game consoles should be $299.
01:09:11 ◼ ► Atari 2600, that's not true, but it was $299, and the PlayStation was $299, and the GameCube was $299." These are all not real prices, but you start getting the idea that whenever I buy a game console, I bought a game console when I was 10, I had a paper route, and it was $299, and now when I buy the PlayStation 5, it should be $299.
01:09:30 ◼ ► $299 in 2020 dollars, when the PlayStation 5 comes out or whatever, is not the same as $299 in 1978 dollars. Do the math to figure out how much did that Atari console cost in 2020 dollars, and you'll find out it was like $800.
01:09:45 ◼ ► You just get it into your head like the price should be $299 forever. So what it means is your current game console, your PlayStation 5, is way cheaper than your Atari game console from the '70s or '80s was. Way cheaper, like four times cheaper, and as Mark will point out, it's the mark of technology and progress or whatever.
01:10:04 ◼ ► And the reason I bring this up for Apple is because until recently in the Tim Cook era, Apple had a thing where they never wanted to change their prices and kept them within a product line pretty constant.
01:10:17 ◼ ► And if that product line lasts for 10 years, the product actually was getting cheaper even though Apple "never changed the price," just due to inflation.
01:10:27 ◼ ► And again, I don't say this excuses or explains any of the huge price increases that we're getting here, but if Apple literally never increased the prices, they would essentially be slowly eroding their traditional, very large, healthy Apple margins.
01:10:43 ◼ ► So what I would expect instead of what we're seeing if Apple was to say, "We're happy with our margins the way we are, and we don't think we can wring any more money out of the customer base," is that the price of Apple's products would increase slowly over time, tracking inflation, which would show up in sort of non-round numbers, and you wouldn't always be $499 for like the entry-level Mac Mini or something, and it would be like, it would have to go to like $510 and $520 and weird numbers like that that aren't good for marketing purposes and stuff like that.
01:11:12 ◼ ► Or they can keep it as $499 for like five years and then for the second five years make it like $549 or do like step jumps instead of tracking it exactly.
01:11:24 ◼ ► You might think, "Oh, they must have kept the prices of these the same for 20 years, and now they have to make a 20% jump." That's not true. They haven't done that. It doesn't excuse or explain it.
01:11:34 ◼ ► But this is a strange and subtle point to bring up here. I do want to point out to people that if the price of something never changes in terms of the number that's on the price tag, it actually is going down in price over time.
01:11:47 ◼ ► And if you don't think about that and you live for a really long time, you realize the thing you're paying the "same amount" for is actually getting cheaper.
01:11:54 ◼ ► It sure doesn't feel it, though. That's the thing. I agree with everything you just said. Obviously, you're right. But it doesn't feel it.
01:12:01 ◼ ► Well, it's not true for the Apple products aren't doing that. Inflation has not gone up 20% since last year. Apple's margins are so healthy. What they're doing is seeing how much money they can get.
01:12:12 ◼ ► But for certain commodity stuff, I am aware that I shouldn't expect that whatever it is, a USB cable will be $19.95 when I'm 80 years old.
01:12:24 ◼ ► It will be more expensive if the Apple is still around and they have their margins. Because if it's still $19.95, Apple has become monoprice. That's not going to happen.
01:12:33 ◼ ► Apple has to increase the prices of things at some point. They just don't have to do it 20% every year.
01:12:39 ◼ ► There's a lot of excuses people can make. Some of them are valid or partly valid. One excuse is sometimes they do actually need to raise the price for newer components if they just have higher costs than before.
01:12:58 ◼ ► That's not usually the case, but sometimes it is. Sometimes they have to adjust for new foreign currency rates. If we think the pricing in the U.S. is bad, you should see the pricing in other countries right now. It's way worse everywhere else.
01:13:13 ◼ ► They're a U.S. company, so our fluctuations are explicable to us, but the fluctuations due to exchange rates are just not explicable. With all these things, it's like, "Why doesn't Apple just eat the costs?" Well, they didn't get to be the richest company in the world by eating the costs. That's not how business works.
01:13:28 ◼ ► Part of it is currency fluctuations, economic things like trying to forecast future currency fluctuations because they tend to want to leave prices where they are for a product's entire cycle. If they want to sell this iPad, say, when they're setting prices in Europe, then they set a certain euro price.
01:13:53 ◼ ► They have to also predict what the economy is going to be doing in these areas over the next year and a half or two years that we're going to be selling this product. Will this price still be okay for our margins and everything with whatever is expected to go on in the economy of this country over the next year and a half?
01:14:10 ◼ ► They've built in some tolerance there. There's various issues of taxation in different countries and everything, but there's also people who said, "Component costs are rising all over the industry." Sometimes that's true. Sometimes DRAM gets short-supplied or an earthquake hits a factory somewhere and production's down or something.
01:14:31 ◼ ► There's just huge demand from crypto coin miners for GPUs or whatever. There are factors that do affect pricing across the whole industry. There is the current US situation of these crazy tariff proposals and weird protectionism things that we're trying to do that will destroy our economy.
01:14:51 ◼ ► They have to consider that and what that's going to do to their margins and how that's going to affect them. But none of that actually accounts for the entirety of Apple's price increases over the last few years.
01:15:05 ◼ ► It's really simple. Apple needs growth. Their core businesses and core profit centers have not been delivering new customer growth or unit sales growth at the rates they used to. With that slowing down, Apple now needs to extract more money out of its existing customers.
01:15:26 ◼ ► This is a pattern across all Apple product lines, across their services as well as their hardware. Apple is just turning the screws, cranking it down, getting more money out of everybody, and that's going to only continue.
01:15:44 ◼ ► They are now in a position with their finances, with their sales, with their revenue growth, with their stock, that they have to just keep cranking. They have to keep making more money out of each customer. And they're going to keep turning these dials for the foreseeable future.
01:16:00 ◼ ► They're really good at it. Tim Cook is really good at it. He's really stingy and he knows that we're going to pay whatever they ask, whatever pricing they ask. Yeah, raise the price to 25% in one year and look, we all bought it anyway. All the accessories are more expensive, all the cables and everything, they're all expensive.
01:16:20 ◼ ► They can remove all the optional dongles, remove the cables. What are you going to do, not buy the Mac, because we don't include the cable? No, you still buy it.
01:16:30 ◼ ► Right, exactly. And every one of those things, they can point to some rational reason that's not just we want to make more money from you.
01:16:36 ◼ ► Not everybody uses that cable and the packaging is smaller and we save our carbon per friend. There's all sorts of reasons.
01:16:42 ◼ ► And those are all partly true. Yeah, it is kind of environmentally unfriendly to ship a cable in the box that most people are going to throw away. Yeah, that's true. But that's not most of the reason.
01:16:55 ◼ ► Most of the reason is this will make us more money and we need to find ways to make more money from everybody. That's it. That's the reason.
01:17:04 ◼ ► Everything else is an excuse, not a reason. And it's not going to stop. This is just new Apple. This is what we have in Apple for the foreseeable future is they're basically going to just keep extracting more from us.
01:17:19 ◼ ► They're basically rent-seeking. Whatever they can get to extract more out of us, they're going to turn that dial because that's what they have to do for their stock growth and whatever stuff that we don't care about, but that becomes our problem very quickly.
01:17:35 ◼ ► This is not actually a thing they just discovered and thought they'd try to do. It's when the growth slowed and stopped that they turned to this. When growth is going on, they might be scared to do this. It's like, "Don't do anything to mess up the growth."
01:17:49 ◼ ► When the iPhone growth curve was going up and they kept selling more and more phones every year. We sold so many more phones than we sold this year than the last year. You're kind of wary of someone might say, "I bet we get more money."
01:17:59 ◼ ► And the other thing is, don't do anything that might mess up the growth. Increasing prices might slow the growth. Everybody loves the growth.
01:18:06 ◼ ► That is the reason, if anybody out there is ever upset why their favorite VC-funded company is not charging money for anything. They're like, "Please, charge me money for something so I know you can be sustainable. I want to get a business model."
01:18:21 ◼ ► "Let me support you so you won't flame out and sell." The VC-funded companies don't want to impede growth at any cost. They know that if they can keep growth up, they can raise more money when they run out at better terms and better terms and better terms.
01:18:38 ◼ ► The reason why VC-backed startups don't charge for anything is because it would slow down growth. If they slow down growth, they're dead. They can't raise any more money if their growth goes away and their company crumbles because it was never sustainable to begin with.
01:18:53 ◼ ► That's why they do that. Commentators are often like, "This is dumb. You should be charging money for this." I know. I was there. I was one of those people. But the reality is, growth is everything as long as you can get it.
01:19:08 ◼ ► But as you're saying, John, when you're at Apple and you sold billions and billions of phones and made billions and billions of dollars, at some point you start reaching saturation levels in some of these markets and the growth slows down. And then you have to transition to making more from each customer through various ways.
01:19:25 ◼ ► Yeah, so the obvious other strategy that Apple has turned to at various times is like, "Well, you need something to get the growth back." Right now, you're doing this thing, which is like, "Make yourself more money from the customers you have." But how are you going to get the growth back? And we've got the whole services story and yada, yada.
01:19:40 ◼ ► But also one possible strategy if you just set aside the services thing is like, "Okay, well, if you're not getting any more growth, we know you're not the majority of the market. Android still sells so many more phones than you as a collective. You could get more growth, perhaps, by going into lower-end markets, sell more cheaper products instead of your current high-end ones."
01:20:03 ◼ ► And Apple has done that with Mac in the past. It's kind of dabbled in doing that with the laptops at various times. Phones, not really that much, but that's not Apple. Apple doesn't want to get into that cycle where the only way they think they can find more growth is by selling cheaper and cheaper phones and trying to essentially compete with Android for the low-end of the market.
01:20:22 ◼ ► Apple always wants the most profitable section of the market, which it basically has with the iPhone. It just turns out the most profitable section of the market is whatever percentage they have worldwide, like 20% or whatever they're at, and much more in the U.S. than outside the U.S.
01:20:37 ◼ ► But thus far, they've not said, "Let's reignite the growth of the iPhone by expanding the people who we can sell to this." Tons of people who just won't buy an iPhone because it's too damn expensive. Obviously, by raising the prices of the iPhone, they're not addressing that market in any way whatsoever.
01:20:53 ◼ ► They're just testing that market that we have. How much more money do those people have, which is a viable strategy. But another strategy is, if we sold a cheaper phone, could we start eating away and instead of being an 80% Android, 20% Apple, do 75, 25? Can we start getting growth back?
01:21:10 ◼ ► The answer is probably you can't get that much more growth back, because at a certain point, you're not going to wipe Android off the face of the map, and if you want to compete with it at a price for real, you're going to have to sell some really cheap phones that wouldn't be up to Apple's standards, and you have the image and so on and so forth.
01:21:24 ◼ ► The real growth that Apple is looking for, I'm sure, is going to come from AR goggles or whatever, like a new product category. Potentially, it could have been the watch, but so far, it hasn't been. But just as the iPod is the thing that kick-started Apple's growth, it wasn't finding a way to sell more Macs.
01:21:41 ◼ ► It wasn't a low-end Mac that could suddenly compete with PCs, it was the iPod. And what's the thing that gave them the next growth spurt? It was the iPhone. It wasn't a way to sell even cheaper and cheaper iPods. At the end, iPods, I should have thought of that. That was the market they went down.
01:21:54 ◼ ► At the end, you could buy an iPod Shuffle for like $50, which is incredibly low-end for anything Apple sells. You can't even get a power adapter for that price for the big laptops anymore. They pursued the iPod strategy down to the point where basically, if you can afford any kind of digital music player, you can afford an iPod because we sell one for $49, and maybe you can find it on sale.
01:22:18 ◼ ► They saturated the digital music player market. They had more than 20% of the digital music player market. With the phones so far, they haven't been willing to do that. And I would argue even the lowest-end iPod was still a pretty good music player.
01:22:30 ◼ ► The buttonless Shuffle aside, which was a little bit, hmm, the Shuffles with the buttons, I used them for years, and I thought they were a pretty good iPod, all things considered. They sucked.
01:22:39 ◼ ► No, I mean, I could use the buttons, feeling them with just my fingers. They clipped onto your clothes. They sounded fine. I liked them just fine. Anyway, I should have thought of an example of where they've gone down scale, but it doesn't look like they're going to do that with the phone.
01:22:53 ◼ ► So I think what Apple is doing is rapidly trying to find whatever the next growth thing is, whether it's going to be a new car or Apple AR glasses or whatever else, like a new thing, a new product category that will be their next growth vector.
01:23:12 ◼ ► But in the meantime, their strategy with the phones so far, and with all their products really, seems to be, see how much money we can extract from the people who are already buying it, don't pursue the low end in any of our product lines.
01:23:23 ◼ ► Like, the Macs are moving farther from the low end. The phones are also moving farther from the low end, and the Mac Pro is not going to help them there as much as I wanted to come.
01:23:33 ◼ ► And then do the whole services thing, which we don't have time to talk about it, but Ben Thompson had a really good story about that. Maybe we'll link it in the show so everyone can read it and we can talk about it in a future show if we want.
01:23:45 ◼ ► But I feel like we'd just be repeating what's in his article, and I think he covered those spaces pretty well.
01:23:51 ◼ ► The thing he brings up, which I also don't have time to discuss today, is what this could do to Apple's strategy.
01:23:57 ◼ ► If you keep pursuing the strategy, does it change the nature of the company? Do you eventually lose the things that make Apple, Apple?
01:24:03 ◼ ► If you keep pursuing the strategy of putting less and less stuff in the box and charging higher and higher prices and not pursuing the low end at all.
01:24:10 ◼ ► I agree that you do lose some of the characters that made Apple, Apple, and that's why we're all hoping that Apple can figure out what the next big thing is sooner or later.
01:24:23 ◼ ► So, I was looking through my old Apple receipts, and I found from around this time in 2013, this is five years ago, I ordered an iPad Mini with Retina display, Wi-Fi, and cellular with 32 gigs.
01:24:40 ◼ ► It was $629, and I got a smart cover that was $40. So all in, I spent with tax $703.40.
01:24:48 ◼ ► And I got myself an iPad with a cover. Now, I understand that that was an iPad Mini. I understand that it was a long time ago.
01:24:57 ◼ ► But for $703.40, I got myself an iPad Mini and a cover. No keyboard, no pencil, but an iPad Mini with cellular and a cover.
01:25:06 ◼ ► I don't have my receipt from a couple of weeks ago in front of me, but to the best of my recollection, I spent $1,300 on an iPad Pro and a keyboard.
01:25:23 ◼ ► Again, I recognize they are different products at different price points, but it's hard to remind my heart, if you will.
01:25:38 ◼ ► But to me, five years ago, I bought an iPad for $700, and five weeks ago, or not even, I bought an iPad for $1,300.
01:25:46 ◼ ► And that's almost two times what I paid five years ago. But I got the same thing on the other end, right? I still just got an iPad, right?
01:26:02 ◼ ► And yeah, I understand that the keyboard is way more complex than the little floppy cover that came on the original iPad Mini with Retina.
01:26:09 ◼ ► It's a lot more complex, and I understand that a pencil is more complex, although I didn't order a pencil.
01:26:18 ◼ ► But I mean, regular people are noticing these things. Like, my dad is a pretty big geek, but he doesn't follow this stuff like I do.
01:26:24 ◼ ► And he said to me when he was buying his computer, "Holy hell, this is really expensive."
01:26:28 ◼ ► And I don't remember exactly how much he paid, and admittedly he had loaded it up pretty well, including a 1TB drive, which is not cheap.
01:26:34 ◼ ► But still, he said, "Holy smokes, I don't know if I want to spend all this money on a computer."
01:26:39 ◼ ► And I think that a lot of regular people are noticing this and getting a little turned off by it.
01:26:52 ◼ ► That's not long it lasted. I stopped the clock, yes. The aluminum piece, presumably sturdy aluminum case, has already been damaged by it.
01:27:00 ◼ ► I don't know what it is. It must have been another piece of metal, because it's like you can feel it with your finger.
01:27:09 ◼ ► I think one of them told me the Chromebooks at school don't have any nicks on them, but the corners of all the Apple laptops are dented at school.
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01:29:18 ◼ ► Let's do some Ask ATP and let's start tonight with Angelo Fiorentino, who coincidentally, as this episode will be released,
01:29:29 ◼ ► I guested on Angelo's podcast Double Density this week, so you can check that out. We'll put a link in the show notes.
01:29:35 ◼ ► But anyway, I did not add this to the show notes, so we have our journalistic integrity intact.
01:29:44 ◼ ► What are your thoughts on shutting down sleeping or always running your Mac? Is there actually a right answer?
01:29:51 ◼ ► For me, I leave my iMac on pretty much always. It's probably been off a total of three hours in the three years that I've owned it.
01:30:00 ◼ ► I leave it running pretty much all the time. I don't probably need to, but because I serve several things off of this,
01:30:14 ◼ ► I personally am of the opinion that now that I don't have a spinning disk in this thing,
01:30:20 ◼ ► that there's arguably no reason to really turn it on and off, but I am anxious to hear the two of you correct me.
01:30:27 ◼ ► For laptops, obviously I put them in my bag. For desktops, I leave my laptop on all the time.
01:30:37 ◼ ► I have the screen go to sleep after 15 minutes or something like that, but otherwise it's on all the time.
01:30:42 ◼ ► If you run a laptop like a desktop, where it's open all the time, I'm not sure I would go for that,
01:30:54 ◼ ► because laptops have very different thermal environments. They're not made to be run 24/7.
01:31:00 ◼ ► You can, and many people do, and it might be okay, although I would suggest that if you're actually running a laptop 24/7,
01:31:08 ◼ ► maybe that should be a desktop instead of a laptop. You're never likely to bring it anywhere.
01:31:13 ◼ ► But you can do it. I don't recommend it for laptops. For desktops, they are made for that.
01:31:21 ◼ ► Over the years, ever since the dawn of home computing, there have been lots of myths, possibly true myths,
01:31:31 ◼ ► "Oh, well, if you turn on and off the hard drive a lot, power cycling the hard drive will wear it out faster."
01:31:36 ◼ ► And maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't, I don't know. But these days, you don't have a lot of hard drives in desktops anymore.
01:31:41 ◼ ► If the only thing that you're power cycling is the fan, and everything else is a non-moving part,
01:31:47 ◼ ► I can't imagine that's going to make that big of a difference. So ultimately, what you're probably looking at here is
01:32:08 ◼ ► And so it doesn't take more energy to boot your computer than it does to keep it running for a long time.
01:32:14 ◼ ► So in the interest of, if you're looking for the most responsible thing to do, it's to put it to sleep,
01:32:21 ◼ ► because the energy usage will be substantially reduced, and the world could use more energy consumption reduction.
01:32:32 ◼ ► I don't do that because, I don't know, I guess I'm selfish or lazy or it's an old habit from forever ago,
01:32:48 ◼ ► I put this question in here, even though I know we've actually answered this question before,
01:32:53 ◼ ► because I think there are certain categories of questions that it's worth us answering again and again,
01:32:59 ◼ ► because they're common questions and people don't listen to every episode. Maybe someone started listening.
01:33:05 ◼ ► I think it's worthwhile, even though I'm 99% sure we've answered this exact question before.
01:33:13 ◼ ► Anyway, both of you, particularly Marco, are undercutting what I want to say about this question.
01:33:29 ◼ ► I mean, they're probably not listening to this podcast, honestly, but people who aren't super into technology,
01:33:34 ◼ ► their instinct, especially older people, is to treat technology like a light. When you're not using it, you turn it off.
01:33:42 ◼ ► It's just a sensible thing to do. No one's in the room, turn off the lights. Everybody knows that, right?
01:33:47 ◼ ► And the most extreme version of this, which I think I've described in the program before,
01:33:51 ◼ ► are people who, when they're done checking their email or checking Twitter on their phone, shut it down.
01:33:57 ◼ ► Like, hold down the power button, wait for the big slider to come up, and slide the big red slider.
01:34:03 ◼ ► If they want to send a text message or read their email or whatever, they boot their phone.
01:34:09 ◼ ► White Apple logo appears, they wait, they wait, they wait, they wait. It boots, they enter their passcode or whatever,
01:34:15 ◼ ► and they check their email. I hope everyone listening to this program knows that's not the right way to use an iPhone.
01:34:22 ◼ ► You can do it, and you might be like, "I'm saving battery power," and this, I think, is actually a case where,
01:34:27 ◼ ► actually, it does take more battery power to boot an iPhone from cold and shut it down again than it would take if you left it on.
01:34:34 ◼ ► I'm using this as an example of, A, it's a real thing that people do. I've seen it with my own eyes,
01:34:39 ◼ ► and I have failed in person to tell people not to successfully convince people not to do it.
01:34:44 ◼ ► This is a surprisingly hard thing to do if you're talking to someone who's not into technology.
01:34:47 ◼ ► Try to convince somebody who like, just the way I like to use my phone, try convincing them not to do it.
01:34:52 ◼ ► Of course, their phone, they can do what they want, but anyway, I'm using this example where it seems extreme,
01:34:57 ◼ ► mostly to talk to the people who either don't realize or have habits that are formed in error when Macs didn't have, essentially, sleep.
01:35:07 ◼ ► Like, all Macs these days can sleep. It's not the same as turning them off, but it's also not the same as leaving them on all the time, either.
01:35:15 ◼ ► So, for people who are still in a lifestyle where they sit down on their computer, boot it, use it, and shut it down,
01:35:22 ◼ ► I would suggest to them to try the sleeping lifestyle, which, again, is not the same as leaving it on all the time.
01:35:30 ◼ ► And by the way, even when you shut it down, you still have parasitic power losses to the power supplies and stuff like that.
01:35:39 ◼ ► When a computer is sleeping, whether it's a laptop or a desktop, no, it doesn't use as little power as when it's turned off,
01:35:50 ◼ ► And modern Macs have a feature that will let them, like Power Nap or whatever, that will let them kind of wake briefly without turning on any of the fans
01:35:57 ◼ ► and do stuff like check your email or your time machine backups, whatever. You can disable that if you want to save more energy,
01:36:07 ◼ ► Because having a Mac that basically puts itself to sleep after it hasn't been used for five minutes
01:36:11 ◼ ► frees you from having to remember to shut it down, frees you from having to wait for it to boot up,
01:36:22 ◼ ► Because you come to it and you hit a key, and it should, if you have a decent computer,
01:36:25 ◼ ► spring to life and let you start using it immediately, so there shouldn't be any long wait, certainly less time than booting.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And if you have Power Nap and stuff enabled, like if it's something that's plugged into the wall and you can leave all that stuff enabled,
01:36:43 ◼ ► It's not the best in the world. You might still have to do stuff when it wakes you from sleep.
01:36:50 ◼ ► And do not turn off your phone when you're done using it and reboot it, because that's crazy.
01:36:55 ◼ ► I don't consider shutting down your Mac at the end of the day to be that ridiculous, but I would consider,
01:37:03 ◼ ► And then 20 minutes later, I come back, I want to check my email again, I boot it, check my email and shut it down."
01:37:08 ◼ ► Like, don't do that. If you're going to be the person who shuts down your computer, say, boot it in the morning and shut it down in the afternoon or night or whatever.
01:37:15 ◼ ► Don't boot shut down, boot shut down, boot shut down, boot shut down, because that's not making anybody's life better.
01:37:20 ◼ ► But overall, I would say consider sleeping. And personally, if you don't know what I do,
01:37:24 ◼ ► none of my Macs ever turned off unless we go on vacation, but they sleep. They all sleep.
01:37:29 ◼ ► Paul Walker writes, "I would love to understand your photography workflow. How do you import photos from your DSLR?
01:37:35 ◼ ► Where do you edit them? How do you organize them for archive and sharing? And what chaps do you use?"
01:37:43 ◼ ► I don't know if I have the most or least complex workflow, but for me, I will go through using Finder.
01:37:52 ◼ ► I will insert the SD card from my camera. I will use Finder to page through them, which I know Jon was probably screaming right now.
01:37:59 ◼ ► But I will use Finder to go through them and delete any of the RAW files that I don't think are pretty much stellar.
01:38:15 ◼ ► I wrote a Mac OS app that will basically inspect each of those files, figure out when they were taken,
01:38:25 ◼ ► and then rename them to be the date and time they were taken and stuff them into a directory structure that I was alluding to earlier this episode.
01:38:36 ◼ ► So for example, a picture taken today would go into 2018/11 and then the name of the file would be 2018-11-27 and then a space and then whatever time it was taken.
01:38:49 ◼ ► Oh, I forgot to step up before I suck everything in and those all end up on the Synology, by the way.
01:39:00 ◼ ► And what that lets me do is geotag the photos, so things that are coming off my iPhone obviously are already geotagged,
01:39:11 ◼ ► I have to basically tell, I have to use an app to track my location and then upload them to the camera.
01:39:17 ◼ ► So generally speaking, I'll use Geotag to geotag them because it is not unusual for me to want to look up pictures by location they were taken.
01:39:24 ◼ ► And that's most of it. As you've heard recently, I use Google Photos somewhat begrudgingly.
01:39:35 ◼ ► Marco, I think you might be next in line in terms of fiddliness, so would you mind going next and telling me about your workflow?
01:39:50 ◼ ► What I tell myself I do is that my iPhone photos, I take photos in the camera app and they go in iCloud Photo Library, so that's easy.
01:40:01 ◼ ► My fancy camera photos, which honestly I don't take very many of, but my fancy camera photos, I usually will import those into Lightroom first.
01:40:11 ◼ ► And the idea is to pick through them, process the ones I decide to keep, and then export the final JPEGs to Apple Photo Library.
01:40:22 ◼ ► What actually happens in practice with this system is I don't take very many photos with my big camera.
01:40:35 ◼ ► I might process one that I want to post to Instagram or something, and then the rest I'm like, "I'll deal with this later."
01:40:45 ◼ ► So I end up having a whole bunch of unprocessed, unpicked through, unfiltered Lightroom collections, with some of them being copied into photos.
01:40:57 ◼ ► So I have these two parallel libraries, with the Lightroom one being really half-butted.
01:41:05 ◼ ► I have gone through over time, and sometimes there was a period of a few years where I only used Lightroom.
01:41:11 ◼ ► I think when I moved to Apple Photos, I think I copied those photos all into iCloud Photo Library.
01:41:22 ◼ ► So I think maybe I didn't import them all, maybe there's something still in an old Lightroom library,
01:41:36 ◼ ► I'm sure I'm wasting tons of disk space on duplicating photos between the two programs, or between multiple Lightroom libraries, or who knows what.
01:42:05 ◼ ► So your spouses have phones, they take photos with their phones, and Tiff has fancy cameras, she takes photos with those.
01:42:15 ◼ ► For us, on the 15th or thereabouts of every month, I steal her phone for like an hour, and I import them using the same basic process.
01:42:23 ◼ ► I'll suck them into photos. I'll make a photos library. I don't typically keep a photos library around.
01:42:28 ◼ ► I will make one, suck all the pictures in, because when you use photos, it comes in as Heek or Heef, whatever the hell it's called, and whatever the native formats are.
01:42:56 ◼ ► Well, no, but the thing is that I know exactly where all of my pictures are. They are in that folder structure in the Synology.
01:43:06 ◼ ► Right. So in the case of her phone, I will take the most recent month or so worth of pictures.
01:43:18 ◼ ► So she always has a month's worth of pictures on her phone, because more often than not.
01:43:38 ◼ ► Well, but I mean, to be honest, for either of our phones, it is very rare that there is something that is taken that we really and truly cherish.
01:43:47 ◼ ► And if there is something that we've taken that we really and truly cherish, then it gets immediately sent to each other.
01:43:53 ◼ ► And so there'll be a record of it in like an iMessage or something like that. But your point...
01:43:57 ◼ ► They still sign up for iCloud photo library for the phones. It's cheap and it's reasonable.
01:44:01 ◼ ► Well, we have photo stream. So remember that that's still a thing. So the most recent thousand pictures or whatever are also in the iCloud.
01:44:14 ◼ ► And yeah, so basically the 15th of the month or thereabouts, I do one of the phones and the first of the month or thereabouts, I do the other phone.
01:44:22 ◼ ► That is correct. Although actually we just, a few days ago, just got the Mark III version of our Olympus OM-D E-M12.
01:44:30 ◼ ► And so technically speaking, if she and I can split the lenses, she could have her own fancy camera, but she doesn't really have the interest in it that I do.
01:44:42 ◼ ► Man, if you think my system is bad, you should see Tiff's system. Like she has her own...
01:44:47 ◼ ► I have my own crazy system that involves multiple programs and multiple copies of files and not really being able to find things very well.
01:44:54 ◼ ► Hers is in that same direction, but even worse. Like multiple apps, multiple files. She's an Adobe Bridge user.
01:45:16 ◼ ► About a year and a half or two years ago, upon seeing this crazy system one too many times, I forced her to configure and set up iCloud Photo Library.
01:45:32 ◼ ► But the big camera stuff is all separate. Like she has her own like folder structure basically.
01:45:37 ◼ ► Just keeps stuff in folders based on what, you know, what kind of shoot it was, whether it was for a client or not, whether it was a family thing or whatever else.
01:45:48 ◼ ► And I don't understand the entire system and she doesn't understand mine and here we are.
01:45:55 ◼ ► And then if you want to find a picture, you have to remember who took the picture and whose library is it in and then like whose Mac is it on or whose cloud storage is it in.
01:46:04 ◼ ► And then you have to remember, was it a good picture so it's in this like, all right, well that's...
01:46:08 ◼ ► See, I don't have that problem. I have problems. Don't get me wrong, but I don't have that problem.
01:46:13 ◼ ► Yeah, your problem is you take the photo on like a magical journey through like seven different locations and applications until finally landing, hopefully intact in the final destination.
01:46:25 ◼ ► You import it into photos and then you have something crawl the photos library structure, which is not supposed to be a thing that you're crawling.
01:46:35 ◼ ► So, well, you're not going to like what actually happens, but you are overcomplicating it. So it's sucked into photos and then immediately exported as the originals somewhere else.
01:46:48 ◼ ► And then once it's dropped somewhere else, my little app goes and sucks them up and spits them out on the Synology.
01:47:01 ◼ ► No, no, no, no. It's not on the camera. So I have... There's an Olympus app on your phone that you have to go into the app and say...
01:47:17 ◼ ► GPS on the phones is a GPS. It's assisted GPS. It's assisted by the cell towers and it helps them lock on a lot faster to satellites and get more precise and stuff.
01:47:31 ◼ ► In comparison, trying to get geotagged stuff from regular cameras that have their own GPS, not only does it slaughter your battery, but it just hardly ever gets a lock in a reasonable amount of time.
01:47:45 ◼ ► So like, you can be shooting... First of all, if you're shooting indoors, forget it. You have no chance of that working.
01:47:50 ◼ ► And even shooting outdoors, it takes them usually longer to pick up a GPS signal than you're using them for.
01:47:58 ◼ ► It's not a very good feature on cameras. It doesn't work the way you think it does. And it makes it not very useful.
01:48:11 ◼ ► So let's say I'm at Cars and Coffee or a park or something like that where I'm moving a lot, or an amusement park, or the fair, or something along those lines.
01:48:19 ◼ ► Then I'll actually spend the time to go into my phone, turn on tracking, and then when I'm done, turn off tracking, upload the tracking data to the camera, blah blah blah.
01:48:27 ◼ ► But more often than not, I'm at my parents' house, or at home, or something like that, where I don't necessarily need to have the exact longitude and latitude of every single picture.
01:48:38 ◼ ► I just want to know that this was taken at my house, or mom and dad's house, you know what I mean?
01:48:43 ◼ ► And in that case, doing it via geotag is very simple because I just grab the batch of photos that is all at the same location, and then drop a pin on the map, and that's that.
01:48:53 ◼ ► So it is probably more complex than the most best possible answer, but it's not as complex or time consuming as you may think.
01:49:05 ◼ ► I don't do GPS on my things at all, I do what you just said, if I really care, I will just manually tag them all at the location, but most of the time I don't because I can see whose house it's at, and their house isn't moving so it's fine.
01:49:16 ◼ ► And now I don't enable it on my phone because I have a Sony camera with a small battery and I can't afford that kind of battery life.
01:49:26 ◼ ► Obviously dealing with the family situation is not any better because Apple still doesn't have a good solution to this, but I use Apple Photos, I connect my fancy camera to my computer, or I take the SD card out and stick it into the back of my computer.
01:49:44 ◼ ► Apple Photos is on my wife's account because she's the current family owner of the family photo library.
01:49:49 ◼ ► There is only one family photo library, family just meaning me and my wife. My kids have their own photo libraries but we don't touch their pictures because they're all garbage.
01:49:56 ◼ ► My wife's pictures from her phone automatically go into this library because she's the owner of the photo library, Play for I go photo library, so I don't have to ever touch her phone.
01:50:10 ◼ ► My phone I periodically take to the computer, plug it in, and import pictures from my phone into her library. So we have one library in Apple Photos with all the pictures in it.
01:50:25 ◼ ► I go through the photos and I mark the decent ones as favorites and I lightly edit them if I have time.
01:50:32 ◼ ► That's my main workflow. So if we were to look at my gigantic 100,000 photo library and click on the favorites collection, it probably narrows it down by a factor of 100, maybe more.
01:50:43 ◼ ► And those are all decent photos. So what this lets me do is like the screensaver on her Mac is the photo slideshow thing.
01:50:51 ◼ ► I pointed at the favorites collection so now when her screensaver turns on on her computer, in the brief time between when the screen dims and when her Mac goes to sleep, it shows a bunch of pictures, all of which are good.
01:51:05 ◼ ► And if I ever need to make a book of a vacation or make a calendar or whatever, I just go to the favorites collection.
01:51:15 ◼ ► I converted all my stars into labels so I still have all my old star ratings, but that is the key component of my workflow, which is I take a ton of pictures and I go through them all, if only briefly to say, you know, look at all the pictures in photos after they've been imported.
01:51:33 ◼ ► I had a favorite. And if I say really good one, like I'm going to share this with the family, mess with the picture, crop adjust or whatever, the one downside to this is when it comes time for me to like make a photo book or something, I realize I edit very, very few pictures.
01:51:46 ◼ ► And so when I want to make a photo book, yeah, I have my collection of favorites. I'm like, great.
01:51:52 ◼ ► And it's about enough to fit in a book because most of them aren't favorites. But then I have to edit every single one of those pictures because there's no way I'm printing a hundred dollar book without cropping and editing and adjusting every single picture.
01:52:05 ◼ ► I'm better about that now with like beach vacations. I will do all the crop edit, adjust and everything of all my favorites while I'm on vacation, sort of like the end of each day.
01:52:13 ◼ ► I do a full import and then I do crop edit and adjust all the favorites, but that is incredibly time consuming even just to do it to the favorites, but pays dividends later when I want to make a calendar or a book or something.
01:52:25 ◼ ► I forgot to mention that I do in the case of indoor shots, try to do color correction at the import time.
01:52:36 ◼ ► But that's about all I ever do for editing. I don't understand how to do the magic that Marco and you and Tiff can do, but that's okay.
01:52:45 ◼ ► Moving on, Dustin Goldman writes, "What kind of hardware and processes does Marco use to measure battery usage and power draw over USB?
01:52:53 ◼ ► He briefly mentioned doing something like this with the new iPad PowerBrick, but I know that he's also taken deep dives into optimizing power usage for Overcast."
01:53:00 ◼ ► This is actually two different approaches. So the iPad Pro PowerBrick testing was actually the much easier one.
01:53:07 ◼ ► I have a little dongle from Pluggable that is basically a USB-C power meter and it has a USB-C plug on one side and a port on the other and you can connect it any way you want to, USB-C signal chain.
01:53:23 ◼ ► And it will tell you in which direction power is flowing and how much of it is flowing, what voltage and what amperage.
01:53:30 ◼ ► That's how I'm able to tell, okay, there is 19 watts traveling from this PowerBrick to this iPad.
01:53:37 ◼ ► Now, of course, you have to consider things like power losses, efficiency losses, stuff like that when you're quoting wattages.
01:53:44 ◼ ► It's complicated. Batteries don't charge at the same rate constantly. They fluctuate depending on their current charge levels and whatever else.
01:53:52 ◼ ► But anyway, that is how I measure that. How I measured Overcast power consumption on the phone is different and a little bit older of a method that I haven't done in probably a good six months at least.
01:54:04 ◼ ► But that was using a private framework, using IOkit on the iPhone to basically try to record the iPhone battery level and then just kind of graph it or record it over time as Overcast is running so that I can get a more precise look at how much battery consumption has happened over time.
01:54:27 ◼ ► And I would use different conditions and retest and run the same thing again. That requires getting precise battery info from the software framework.
01:54:35 ◼ ► Unfortunately, over time, the precision that that framework has given has decreased. So you can still do it. I think it might even be down to like 5% intervals now.
01:54:48 ◼ ► At first it was like it would give you like a nice big floating point number. Then it was down to like then it would only give you 1% intervals. And now I think it's 5% intervals.
01:54:57 ◼ ► So only very long running tests are very useful at this point for that. And so I don't do a lot of that anymore.
01:55:05 ◼ ► Cool. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and Jamf Now. And we will talk to you next week.
01:55:12 ◼ ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.
01:55:23 ◼ ► John didn't do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.
01:55:34 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
01:55:49 ◼ ► That's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental.
01:56:09 ◼ ► We got a lot of feedback about Thanksgiving. People really enjoyed it. They enjoyed our discussion of it.
01:56:19 ◼ ► And I gotta say, the photos Casey that you sent us of what you had at your Thanksgiving dinner,
01:56:27 ◼ ► and the photos that John sent of what he had with the antipasto followed by the very traditional Thanksgiving meal,
01:56:33 ◼ ► it was exactly, you know, you all listeners, I don't think they're gonna want to share these cause they're like pictures with their family,
01:56:38 ◼ ► but it is exactly what you expect it to be. Like it is precisely what you would guess from Casey's description of basically having like stove top stuffing and packaged ham,
01:56:49 ◼ ► and John's description of a regular Thanksgiving dinner preceded by like two Italian antipasto plates of like rolled up salami and stuff.
01:57:03 ◼ ► Let's get my dessert. My very traditional dessert. We just had, you know, apple pie and stuff.
01:57:08 ◼ ► Well yeah, I mean that's like, you know, I think for however fancy you want to make Thanksgiving, you know, food and everything,
01:57:14 ◼ ► I feel like there's actually less excuse to deviate in the dessert department because like traditional Thanksgiving desserts of basically like pumpkin pie and maybe apple pie and other kind of like, you know, fruit pies for the most part,
01:57:27 ◼ ► that is delicious. Like you don't need different things. Like you don't need to like, there's a lot of like, you know, campaigns right there at there to like only have side dishes
01:57:36 ◼ ► or to like replace the turkey with, you know, fancier meats like not ham, but things like, like turducken or like, you know, barbecue things or whatever else.
01:57:45 ◼ ► And those, you know, I get the appeal of some of those things, but I don't get people who try to get all fancy with the desserts because to me like a really good pumpkin pie,
01:57:56 ◼ ► I'm happy to say we had, is just great. Like it doesn't need to be like fancied up and hipsterized into some other kind of crazy thing. Like a really good pumpkin pie is just really good.
01:58:06 ◼ ► Well honestly, we normally have Italian pastries and cookies as an addition to whatever other desserts we have to. We just didn't have them this time because we didn't get around to getting them, but they go with everything just like, you know, all the other Italian bracketing foods.
01:58:20 ◼ ► See, and I say this as an Italian American, my half my family is Italian and so I'm half Italian and I grew up eating a lot of Italian American food.
01:58:31 ◼ ► I have never really felt like the Italian American cuisine really was very good at dessert.
01:58:49 ◼ ► Italian food is not one of those cuisines that doesn't have lots of good well-known, well-loved desserts. It's just not. I mean, maybe you don't like them, but they...
01:58:57 ◼ ► What am I not thinking of something? Like I'm thinking of things like cannolis and cookies and stuff like that.
01:59:10 ◼ ► Even in New York, even like the nice ones that I can get here. I always try them and I always want them to be really great and they just never fulfill my expectations.
01:59:19 ◼ ► They are really great if you get good ones. Well, maybe you haven't found a good spot. I don't know, but because they are really terrible when they're terrible, you know, and basically in most places, but you should be able to find good ones there.
01:59:46 ◼ ► I like the way all those things look. But so often they end up tasting like nothing or they just taste like vague sugar dust, right?
01:59:57 ◼ ► I mean, tiramisu can be really screwed up too. I'm sure you've had really bad tiramisu at places too, right?
02:00:02 ◼ ► I've had bland tiramisu before where it's like all whipped cream or something, but when you do it right, and I mean, I actually made tiramisu when I was a teenager.
02:00:11 ◼ ► Like when you do it right and you have like the lady fingers and you have the real espresso and you have Kahlua and you have mascarpone cheese and everything, like it can be amazing.
02:00:19 ◼ ► But a lot of restaurants don't want to do all that. They don't want to have all these expensive ingredients around and so they substitute stuff out or they omit stuff.
02:00:26 ◼ ► And it can be somewhat bland, but for the most part, like if you go into a restaurant and you order a tiramisu, if the restaurant is a decent place, especially if it's like an Italian place, that's probably going to be pretty good.
02:00:38 ◼ ► Whereas if you order, you know, I mean restaurants don't really serve like Italian cookies and cannolis very often, but like if you go to a good Italian bakery and you get those things, I feel like your odds are actually not that great that they'll be anything special.
02:00:48 ◼ ► Well, you just got to find good ones. And I'll warn you, lots of Italian restaurants do offer cannoli on their dessert menu. It is almost universally terrible. Don't even bother.
02:00:56 ◼ ► Like it's like meatballs. It's like you never, you don't know what you're going to get and it's not going to be right. So just don't bother.
02:01:01 ◼ ► It's very rare to find any restaurant that has an even passively acceptable cannoli. Cannolis are difficult, I admit, but Italian cookies and other pastries should be easier for you to find good examples, especially where you are.
02:01:15 ◼ ► No, I agree. It should be easier, but for whatever reason, I just like almost every Italian cookie that I try is just tastes like nothing.
02:01:25 ◼ ► And I always want them so badly to be better than they are because they look great and I, some of them like I've had really good ones, so I know how they're supposed to taste and I just can't find it.
02:01:33 ◼ ► I don't think I've had real good true Italian dessert cookies and things of this nature. Like I've had cannolis in the past, but I don't think they were particularly remarkable examples.
02:01:48 ◼ ► Well, you've only had bad ones. It's like saying you don't like pizza because you live in California.
02:01:54 ◼ ► No, but I've had ones that other people consider good. Someone will be like, "Oh, I brought this from X&Y Bakery and it's fantastic." And I try it and I'm just like, "Oh, okay." I just smile and nod, but it's so bland to me.
02:02:07 ◼ ► Well, there's lots of variety, so you have to find the things that you like. There are some things that you may find boring or not to your taste, but there's lots of, in the cookie realm, there are many, many different kinds of cookies.
02:02:18 ◼ ► I got to say, I think in the cookie realm, well, does France make cookies? I know they have a lot of other good desserts there.
02:02:26 ◼ ► I think ultimately, I think France wins on dessert overall as a category. And if I had to pick somebody who won cookie specifically, I think I'd pick America.
02:02:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I think you're right. I think that makes sense. What's a traditional French dessert? Like, I'm drawing a blank here.
02:02:40 ◼ ► Éclairs, tarts, Italian, those tarts, I mean, I know they're kind of a French thing, but a good Italian bakery, you know those fruit tarts that you love? You can find those there.
02:02:49 ◼ ► And they're probably technically not Italian, but because they're always at the bakery that has the Italian stuff, I count it. I don't know if that counts.
02:02:57 ◼ ► Yeah, macaroons, as Rick Allen in the chat pointed out, creme brulee, these are all French things.
02:03:04 ◼ ► Creme brulee is another thing where it's like, you can order creme brulee at a restaurant and it's almost always at least decent.
02:03:08 ◼ ► Like, they can, if they really mess it up, like, usually the way they mess it up is by firing the sugar incorrectly on top. Like, if they do it too little, then you get the granules of sugar under the surface.
02:03:19 ◼ ► If they do it too much, they burn it. And if they do it too far in advance, you don't have that, like, layer of, like, sheet ice that you can chip your spoon through on top.
02:03:28 ◼ ► You know, Marco, I am right there with you on pretty much every one of the opinions you've had today, which means you are really screwed, because you must be very raw.
02:03:35 ◼ ► I'm honestly, I'm very scared how much you agree with me, because I agree that that's not a good sign for food taste.
02:03:43 ◼ ► Maybe it is Italian. I just googled Italian fruit tart, and maybe the thing that you think is French actually is Italian. It's always at the Italian bakery.
02:03:50 ◼ ► When I was talking about French tart, I was thinking more things like, you know, like the citrus tart and stuff like that.
02:03:54 ◼ ► No, but I'm talking about your fruit tart. Exactly the thing that you talked about on top for, that I like too.
02:04:01 ◼ ► You know, the apricot glaze on top and the blueberries and the raspberries and the vanilla cream and the tart shell.
02:04:14 ◼ ► Oh, wait, wait, wait. What are these called, John? Pizzellis? I'm sure I pronounced that wrong.
02:04:19 ◼ ► Pizzelli, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're, talk about boring, but they're, you know, they're fun.
02:04:35 ◼ ► I've consumed some chocolate chip cookies in my day that were remarkably good, especially for such a on-the-surface simple recipe.
02:04:42 ◼ ► But yeah, I cannot say that I've ever had a canola. And again, maybe it's because I've just never had a good one, which is what John was saying earlier.
02:04:54 ◼ ► Well, no, but there's a place in Little Italy that, in Manhattan, that I know that people from the area swore by.
02:05:01 ◼ ► I couldn't tell you the specific name of the base. Oh, no, Arthur Avenue. Somewhere on Arthur Avenue. Does that sound right?
02:05:06 ◼ ► Does that make any sense? I think that's right. Anyway, there's a place in Manhattan, a mythical place, where I'm told the Italian desserts are phenomenal.
02:05:15 ◼ ► And I have had desserts from this area. And I thought they were good. But me. They were good. They're fine.
02:05:22 ◼ ► And I'm sure we're going to hear from lots of people like John who are going to be like, "Well, you just haven't tried my favorite bakery."
02:05:28 ◼ ► But I'm telling you, if there was anything to it, you can go anywhere and get Creme Brulee or Tiramisu, and it's probably going to be pretty great.
02:05:37 ◼ ► See, I don't agree with that. Tiramisu I find to be dire almost everywhere, and Creme Brulee is like 50/50.
02:05:58 ◼ ► Also, real-time follow-up from me to me. Arthur Avenue is in the Bronx, not Manhattan. And I'm sure I've already gotten 13,000 emails about that.
02:06:06 ◼ ► It doesn't matter. Basically, if there is great Italian, cookie, and cannoli types of desserts, I've never found them.
02:06:22 ◼ ► And if you're in the middle of Long Island, I can tell you where to get good stuff. That's about it.
02:06:36 ◼ ► The cannolis are not as good as they used to be. They used to make them smaller, and the cream was a little bit different.
02:06:41 ◼ ► But Alpine Bakery is really good. And then in Boston, Mike's Pastry is the go-to place.
02:06:46 ◼ ► They're a little bit monstrous and weird in New England-y, and they have a thing they call a lobster tail, which is not obviously an Italian thing.
02:07:03 ◼ ► See, my problem with cannolis is it's just too much cream. I don't want a dessert to be that much of a cream and sugar bomb.
02:07:11 ◼ ► Well, they have the ones that are chocolate dipped or with chocolate chips inside them. There are ways to break it up.
02:07:24 ◼ ► I don't know. It's not my style. I do love that last week we had a Thanksgiving show, and now we had a Thanksgiving dessert show.
02:07:38 ◼ ► Oh, okay. Biscotti, you're good. Although, again, it's one of those things where it's real hard to find good biscotti.
02:07:54 ◼ ► It's an accessory to coffee, and it's a very good accessory to coffee, but I don't know if I would classify it as its own thing, really.
02:08:01 ◼ ► It's dessert. Haven't you had the ones my wife makes with the chocolate inside them and then chocolate dipped?
02:08:07 ◼ ► I haven't had hers. I have had ones that are like chocolate drizzled or chocolate dipped, and they can be excellent as well.
02:08:12 ◼ ► But, I don't know, it always seems like it's not really a standalone thing. It seems like you get those to dip into your coffee.
02:08:19 ◼ ► They're plenty standalone. We eat multiple dozens of them during Christmas, and none of us have coffee.