00:00:00 ◼ ► Casey has just seen the modern version of Skype for the first time, like the one that the rest of us have been seeing for like six months or something.
00:00:07 ◼ ► This is, it is hilariously bad. Just truly hilariously bad. I can't, there's a, the entire window is one humongous pane of blue that shows Marco's floating head until I mouse over it, and then I get a whole bunch of what the cool designer kids called "fabs". Are you familiar with this trend, Marco?
00:00:28 ◼ ► No, it's like, not like silicon manufacturing production facilities, but like something else?
00:00:38 ◼ ► Oh god, is that, so when I hover and get all these round things, that's what these are?
00:01:01 ◼ ► And why is John's head floating in the middle of the screen while your head is up on the upper right next to mine?
00:01:06 ◼ ► Well, see, you're, you're my floaty guy title, and John is just relegated to the corner.
00:01:17 ◼ ► So if you were on like some big conference call with a bunch of people you didn't know, you could tell who's talking, which is really nice.
00:01:43 ◼ ► It's the kind of thing that like, it's like why don't you try, you know, new toilets in your house?
00:01:48 ◼ ► It's like, it just, you know, this is serving a function for us that we need to just work, and we're not that interested in exploring a bunch of other things.
00:02:03 ◼ ► Yeah, the only reason I upgraded, or, I don't know if this is really an upgrade, side-graded, downgraded?
00:02:11 ◼ ► The only reason I did is because the old Skype that actually made some amount of sense was pegging my CPU on my 5K iMac, anytime it was open.
00:02:20 ◼ ► And so I figured, okay, I might as well just bite this bullet, and wow, do I regret it.
00:02:32 ◼ ► We are recording our 300th episode, and we are going to skip follow-up on Mino's to Jon for a few minutes, and mention that this is the 300th episode.
00:02:43 ◼ ► How have you two been able to stick with me for this long, and more importantly, how have we not killed each other?
00:02:50 ◼ ► Yeah, that's kind of impressive. By the way, I should just claim right up front, I have a cold and my voice is going.
00:02:55 ◼ ► So, I sound worse already, and I might sound worse as the 300th episode of "Partacular" goes on. We will find out.
00:03:01 ◼ ► Anyway, so, that aside, I think part of the reason why this has worked so well for so long for us is, you know, first of all, it's easy.
00:03:10 ◼ ► We all, all three of us have no trouble talking tech. There has never been a week out of 300 weeks that we have not had enough to talk about, or that we have had trouble filling the time.
00:03:20 ◼ ► So that's part of it. Part of it is that all of the practical stuff, the technical stuff, the scheduling stuff, all pretty much works out, you know?
00:03:30 ◼ ► The three of us are all within the same time zone. We all have really good, solid internet connections. We never, seriously, no, you laugh, but when you're doing a podcast with somebody for a long time, that kind of stuff matters, right?
00:03:43 ◼ ► We never have severe technical problems. Even John's Mac Pro has not lost more than one recording.
00:03:50 ◼ ► So, like, you know, all the technical stuff is good, but ultimately, you know, we're friends, and we talk well together, and I think we have good chemistry. I don't think it's boasting for us to say this.
00:04:01 ◼ ► And so, I think, you know, we just, we like BSing with each other, and you like listening. That's all that really matters, you know? Like, everything else is secondary.
00:04:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I completely agree. And as the chief mush of the three of us, the chief emotional one of the three of us, self-anointed, I should add, I would just like to say that it is our tremendous pleasure, the three of us, to be able to be, to do this at all, much less be compensated for it, much less be compensated reasonably well for it.
00:04:30 ◼ ► So, it is because of all the listeners who listen to us, who spread the word about the show, who buy our t-shirts and other merchandise, who do iTunes reviews, which we haven't talked about in like 200 episodes, but that still, I guess, maybe counts.
00:04:44 ◼ ► But anyway, it is because of all of you that we are able to do this and enjoy doing this. And, you know, there wouldn't be Ask ATP without you. There really wouldn't be ATP without you.
00:04:53 ◼ ► So, if you are listening to the words coming out of my mouth right now, then thank you, because it is because of all of you that we are able to do this.
00:05:01 ◼ ► Well, there would be Ask ATP without them. It would just be a once-a-year show of the three of us BSing in the W2C keynote line with each other.
00:05:14 ◼ ► That would be a long episode. That was a lot of reminiscing. I put the item in the list here for episode 300. We normally don't do anything for occasions, and I plan on not doing anything for this occasion.
00:05:24 ◼ ► But I figured this was a good time for me to reflect on what I always reflect on when we have anniversaries. But this time, I actually looked up some information about it.
00:05:31 ◼ ► And that is the fact that we have been surprisingly very, very consistent. So, our first episode was released on February 7, 2013. That was five years, nine months, and approximately eight days after you're probably listening to this.
00:05:46 ◼ ► 2,107 days ago. And I looked up our release schedule, and we released that first episode, which, if you don't know the origin of the show, like, it's in the song, but kind of.
00:05:58 ◼ ► But it actually was an accidental show. We were doing Neutral as Car podcast, and we talked about tech after the episode of Neutral was over.
00:06:05 ◼ ► And those sort of neutral aftershows about tech became the first episodes of Accidental Tech podcast. So the first episode was like 36 minutes or something ridiculous like that long, because it was just an aftershow for another podcast.
00:06:16 ◼ ► So we released that, and then there was a two-week gap, and then we released episode two. And that two-week gap was like, I don't know, we were just figuring out if this is a thing we're going to do, or like, I don't even remember. Do any of you remember why there was a two-week gap?
00:06:28 ◼ ► Well, the first episode was like on SoundCloud. Like, we didn't even have a website or anything, because we didn't think it would be a thing. We're just like, hey, we kept the recording going after Neutral and talked about tech in a way that maybe our audience would want to hear. Let's just put it up somewhere and see what people think.
00:06:43 ◼ ► Well, slow down, though, because if my recollection serves me and I have a terrible memory, that wasn't we that decided that. That was 100% Marco that decided to just throw this up on SoundCloud. You probably ran it by us. Like, it's not that you did it in a nefarious way.
00:06:56 ◼ ► But either way, it was because of your insight that you put that up on SoundCloud. You're absolutely right about that.
00:07:03 ◼ ► And I thought it was like three or four episodes before we really realized, oh, this is what we should have been doing this whole time, and this car stuff, while entertaining to the three of us, is really not our bread and butter.
00:07:16 ◼ ► Yeah, like, I'm pretty sure it only took until the second episode before we had outdone Neutral's traffic. It was real quick.
00:07:24 ◼ ► Yeah, but anyway, the release schedule, according to our SS feed, which may or may not reflect the actual schedule of the way things dribbled out, we have that two-week gap, but after that two-week gap between episode, quote-unquote, "episode one," which again was very abbreviated in episode two, after that, from episode two through episode 300, we have done one episode a week for five years, nine months, and eight days.
00:07:47 ◼ ► It doesn't mean we do them all exactly on a Wednesday, because we have vacations and we arrange things, but the bottom line is they're 52 weeks in a year, and every year we're putting out 52 episodes for five years, the only exception being that little gap when the thing was getting started with the weird episodes at the beginning, which are totally weird.
00:08:03 ◼ ► Like, the people who go back and listen to episode one, A, I salute you, and B, boy, it must be really weird to hear those first episodes.
00:08:10 ◼ ► So that's one of the things I'm the most proud of, and for lack of a better name, even though Marco said this is easy, our work ethic. Like, yes, it is easy, but we all have lives and other things going on.
00:08:20 ◼ ► Try doing anything every single week for five years and having any other kind of obligations, let alone families and kids and, in my case, another job to go to and all the other stuff.
00:08:32 ◼ ► So that's it. That's all I wanted to mention, to give our, you know, we're already up our own butts about this whole thing, to give ourselves a pat on the back about the fact that we've done a thing every single week for five years.
00:08:47 ◼ ► And we cheat a little bit by, like, you know, if there's a holiday or somebody's traveling, we will, like, double record one week and maybe, you know, release it, like, a little bit later.
00:08:54 ◼ ► Yeah, but we're just trying to provide a consistent product. You know, 52 times a year you'll get an ATP episode.
00:08:59 ◼ ► So while we're in the mushy butts segment, I also just wanted to point out that this, about, I don't know, about a year ago or something like that, this surpassed my previous longest job as this is now my longest job I've ever had.
00:09:13 ◼ ► And this is for about, you know, five and three quarters years. Previously, Overcast is the runner up because I started Overcast only a few months after we started the show.
00:09:23 ◼ ► It wasn't launched yet but I started working on it, like, roughly that June. So Overcast started, you know, roughly, you know, June 2013.
00:09:31 ◼ ► So that's about five and a half years. And then Instapaper was next longest. Tumblr was actually the least long until, like, all the way back to my job in Pittsburgh.
00:09:40 ◼ ► That was only two years. But, you know, Tumblr was a little over four. Instapaper was four and a half. Overcast five and a half. And ATP about five and three quarters.
00:09:47 ◼ ► So this is my longest job I've ever had. And it's going to stay that way for a long time, probably, because Overcast started after it did. So, yeah, it's pretty cool.
00:09:59 ◼ ► You know, it just occurred to me, just this moment, that's true for me too. Because my longest stint was when I first moved to Richmond.
00:10:07 ◼ ► I worked for a company for four and change years or something like that. So I knew that this was the longest for you. And that's because, haha, Marco always changes his job, hahaha.
00:10:16 ◼ ► But, no, actually, for me as well, it's the same story. It just occurred to me now. I never even realized that. Wow, that's wild.
00:10:23 ◼ ► It's kind of wild to go to catch up with me. I think I'm about double that in my current job.
00:10:32 ◼ ► It's a lot of Pearl. All right, so, you know, when we were realizing, when we had come to the realization that we were approaching episode 300,
00:10:41 ◼ ► we all kind of looked at each other, well, as much as you can inside a Slack chat room. We all looked at each other and said, kind of, are we going to do anything?
00:10:51 ◼ ► And in typical ATP fashion, the answer was basically no. But I was trying to rack my brain for something.
00:11:02 ◼ ► Well, and my contribution to not recognizing this 300th episode and not making it that spectacular is I wanted to ask you two, what is your favorite episode or perhaps moment that you can think of in the run?
00:11:17 ◼ ► And this came from me thinking, not that I necessarily wanted to do a clip show, but it would be fun to have gotten like a handful of clips from years past and handed them to Marco to staple in.
00:11:29 ◼ ► But actually, so it actually crossed my mind, like, wouldn't it be fun to make like a clip show as a joke really?
00:11:38 ◼ ► You know, like when like a TV show makes a clip show, it's great because like they don't have to like have all the actors come in and shoot new scenes.
00:11:44 ◼ ► It's way less work for them because they can just have a couple interns going through clips and pulling things together.
00:11:48 ◼ ► Whereas like when you are the editor of the podcast, a clip show is actually way more work for you than it is to just record a new episode.
00:11:56 ◼ ► Exactly right. So we're not going to do a clip show, but I ask and I will start with Marco, what is your favorite episode or perhaps moment from the show that at least sitting here today, maybe change your mind, but sitting here now, what was your favorite episode?
00:12:13 ◼ ► It was, I think it was, not only was it incredibly entertaining, but it revealed, it was like the best kind of thing. It's like, I don't even remember what the rest of the episode was about. I don't care. It's just the after show. It was revealing.
00:12:34 ◼ ► So we have no idea what happened in the show. There's so many episodes to remember. I'm sure we'll get corrections.
00:12:41 ◼ ► But it was just like, you know, as a listener of shows, you know, like the kind we listen to and hopefully the kind we make, I care much more about the people than the topics. And it's my favorite moments of podcasts are when the people have a really funny moment with themselves, where like their chemistry just works really well together and they like uncover something crazy about another host or one another and they all laugh about it.
00:13:07 ◼ ► Like that's not an uncommon pattern. Like, you know, that happens a lot on the kind of shows that we make, you know, the kind of like unscripted shows about friends, you know, with friends talking.
00:13:16 ◼ ► And I think that was one of our moments, you know, when we discovered the way Jon runs his windowing on his computer and quite the extent of which that happens.
00:13:27 ◼ ► I think that was a moment for our show. It was my favorite as the host of the show. And I've heard a lot from listeners that it was their favorite as well.
00:13:40 ◼ ► It's tricky. Like as a listener, I bet listeners to the show have different favorite episodes than we as hosts do. Trying to think of favorite episodes, last moments, one of my favorite moments, which probably does not rate for highly and listeners minds is our first live show when the audience sang the song.
00:13:59 ◼ ► I thought that was cool. Like a lot of people don't like our live shows and they're definitely different than a regular shows. And if you're not at the live show, I can kind of see where you're coming from.
00:14:07 ◼ ► It's like, well, can I just have a regular episode? And I was all this weird audience noise and the shows are shorter and like blah, blah, blah.
00:14:14 ◼ ► But if and I don't know how it's like to be there, but I can tell you to be the person doing the live show and to have the audience sing your theme song.
00:14:21 ◼ ► That's really cool. So for me personally, that was a really cool moment. And my honorable mention in Top Four Fashion is this is kind of a typical Marco fashion is not actually an episode, but a category of episodes.
00:14:34 ◼ ► It's again, this is just strictly as a host. And so like occasionally I'll have, you know, just I guess there's a typical day at work or whatever, work and family stuff.
00:14:46 ◼ ► Right. And at the end of my long day, I have an episode of ATP and I know sometimes it can seem like, oh, you've had you've had a full day and now you have to sit down and record.
00:14:58 ◼ ► You have to keep working. There's more stuff that you have to do. Right. And then you just have rad that you're going to go to bed and go to bed.
00:15:04 ◼ ► It can feel like a very full day. But my favorite kinds of episodes are the ones where I had a crappy day or like just a tiring day.
00:15:13 ◼ ► And then we do an ATP and by the end of the ATP, like I feel better. Like, you know, it's not usually not that impressive of an episode, but we just had a good time.
00:15:22 ◼ ► We talked about we talked about fun things like it cheers me up at the end of the day. Like those are my favorite kinds of episodes for me as a host is when just had just a grind of a normal day.
00:15:32 ◼ ► And, you know, maybe I'm not even looking forward to doing like, oh, I got to do a podcast. But by the end of the episode, I go to bed happy.
00:15:38 ◼ ► Those are my favorite kinds of episodes there where we're like the additional quote unquote work I have to do that day actually makes the whole rest of the day better.
00:15:46 ◼ ► And I have a surprising amount of those. I'm always sometimes it makes it hard to go to sleep at the end of it because I'm like happy and jazzed about whatever it is we talked about it again.
00:15:53 ◼ ► I don't know if those are the episodes that end up being favorites of the people listening, but as the person who does the episodes, I really like that.
00:16:00 ◼ ► So to answer my own question, I have two honorable mentions because I also listen to top four honorable mention number one was the two minutes that just happened because now I'm all misty eyed and that's adorable.
00:16:25 ◼ ► Okay. That was like on the one side, I think all three of us kind of expected it to happen, but actually witnessing it happening was bananas was utterly bananas and extremely, extremely cool.
00:16:40 ◼ ► And to be in front of a thousand people that are genuinely jazzed to see you and your two really, really good friends is a really messed up feeling in the best possible way that I don't know how to describe.
00:16:52 ◼ ► And that is a true honorable mention. But if I had to choose only one moment, I can tell you off the top of my head, it is the end of episode 96, which is called the Windows of Syracuse County.
00:17:05 ◼ ► Because as Marco said, I was, my recollection anyway, and this was a couple of years ago now, but my recollection is that I was literally crying.
00:17:15 ◼ ► I was laughing so hard, listening to John and ribbing John and just everything about it, Marco and I going back and forth in various states of utter disbelief, utter hilarity, and like almost anger that John was defending himself with this.
00:17:33 ◼ ► And you have to understand that. What was John the episode of Hypercritical that involved Syracuse County? Do you remember off the top of your head?
00:17:41 ◼ ► Okay, there you go. Right, right, right. Okay, because it was Madison County and knockoff on Madison County. Is that right?
00:17:45 ◼ ► And so because of that episode, Bridges of Syracuse County, for the longest time, every single, and this actually still kind of happens sometimes, and that was episode 15. Holy smokes. I didn't realize it was that early in Hypercritical's run.
00:17:59 ◼ ► So anyway, so episode 15 of Hypercritical was Bridges of Syracuse County, and so every time we had somebody in the chat room, you know, suggesting titles for all of these ATPs, for 95 episodes, they would always come up with, you know, something of Syracuse County titles, to the point that I coded the showbot to give a snarky reply about, "Oh, you can do better than that," anytime somebody suggested that.
00:18:20 ◼ ► And at the end of episode 96, it was clear, at least to Marco and I, if I remember correctly, that we had no choice but to use a Syracuse County title. And our agreement, if I recall correctly, Marco, was that this is the one and only time that will ever happen, and it will never happen again for the rest of the run.
00:18:38 ◼ ► And I stand by that decision because, oh my word, that episode is great. And if you haven't heard it, you need to go listen to it.
00:18:45 ◼ ► Yeah, I firmly stand by that, like, we made the right call that if we're gonna ever do this once, this is the time to do it. And sure enough, you know, almost four years later, that was still the right call.
00:18:55 ◼ ► I would also say, so now that I knew that it's okay to, like, recommend, you know, topics instead of just, you know, episodes, my favorite type of diversion is the food diversion.
00:19:09 ◼ ► This is a recent trend. I don't know if we're all hungry because we're on diets now or something keeps coming up on this show.
00:19:14 ◼ ► Well, it's great because all three of us feel very strongly about food and cooking and how we make things and what is good.
00:19:23 ◼ ► At the same time, though, our taste in those things and our opinions of those things have fairly little overlap.
00:19:29 ◼ ► And so it's a very, very good area for us to go into. And the audience seems to enjoy it quite a bit as well, so it isn't just us who like it.
00:19:38 ◼ ► They're all on diets, too. I had someone, a young person at work ask me today what Sicilian pizza was, if you want to know what kind of day I had.
00:19:49 ◼ ► I pulled up a picture on the internet of my favorite pizza in the entire world, which happens to be Sicilian. I said, "It's this."
00:20:05 ◼ ► That's not the major difference. The major difference is it's not a giant weird cornmeal bucket filled with sauce and cheese.
00:20:12 ◼ ► I don't even know what you're talking about. It's not even. Have you had deep dish pizza and have you had Sicilian? They're not the same thing.
00:20:22 ◼ ► See, I don't think I've had deep dish, at least not proper Chicago deep dish. I have had Sicilian a lot, though, and I like it.
00:20:28 ◼ ► But it is a lot of bread. There's so much more dough in it that you fill up on so much bread so fast.
00:20:39 ◼ ► But my favorite pizza in the world happens to be Sicilian, not because from two particular places all around.
00:20:49 ◼ ► That's odd to me that a true-to-form, proud New Yorker would enjoy a pizza that does not require it to be folded.
00:20:57 ◼ ► That's my point. But to me, you would know a New Yorker because they immediately fold their pizza whether or not they really need to.
00:21:10 ◼ ► But even once I learned the way of the fold, I don't do it because when you fold it, the little crease in the back becomes a dripping spout of grease.
00:21:22 ◼ ► Right, and I don't like getting my hands greasy or anything like that, so there's a high risk of hand greasiness if you fold it.
00:21:41 ◼ ► But no, thank you to the listeners one more time for indulging us not only over these last few minutes, but over the...
00:21:47 ◼ ► Somebody should add up exactly how much time all these 300 episodes have added up to be because, oh, my word, we've talked to each other for a lot.
00:21:54 ◼ ► And I am very proud of the work we've done. I'm very proud of our work ethic because, like Jon was saying, it takes some pretty significant scheduling hurdles and gymnastics in order to get this stuff done, especially over summertime,
00:22:08 ◼ ► where it has come to my conclusion that the three of us are extremely talented at picking not overlapping times to go on vacation because, especially I think this past summer, it was basically three straight weeks that one of us was going to be gone
00:22:21 ◼ ► and in a position where recording would be very uncool. So it isn't that hard in the grand scheme of things, but it's hard.
00:22:30 ◼ ► And I'm proud of us, and I'm proud of our listeners for sticking with us, and I appreciate all of our listeners for sticking with us. And thank you.
00:22:38 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Change the Terms. Visit changetheterms.org to learn more.
00:22:43 ◼ ► Following the deadly events of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, the tech industry finally started to take real steps to address the spread of hate speech online and the ways their platforms are used to organize, fund, and recruit for white supremacists and other hateful movements.
00:23:02 ◼ ► But there's a group of organizations looking for the tech industry to do more to protect people of color, women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities, and other marginalized communities.
00:23:12 ◼ ► For the past year, Change the Terms, which is made up of civil rights, anti-hate, and open internet organizations, has been working on a set of corporate policies to help tech companies stop hate and extremism online.
00:23:25 ◼ ► The coalition has shared these policies with tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The corporate policies that Change the Terms developed are intended to help internet companies reduce hateful activities that are taking place on their platforms.
00:23:38 ◼ ► By implementing and following these policies, tech companies can help stop the spread of hateful activities via social media, web hosting, and online financial transactions.
00:23:47 ◼ ► Change the Terms is asking internet users to call on tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to lead the industry in stopping online hate.
00:23:56 ◼ ► To learn more and to help out, visit changetheterms.org. Once again, visit changetheterms.org to learn more.
00:24:07 ◼ ► We should probably do some follow-up. Let's start with Apple making a MacBook Air with Retina Display battery replacements easier so that it no longer requires replacing the top case. How excellent is that? Do you want to tell us about this, John?
00:24:25 ◼ ► You look at the iFixit teardown of the new MacBook Air. It's got some interesting things in there. Of course, iFixit's whole position is they want everything to be repairable, and Apple's position for the past several years is they don't care about that.
00:24:37 ◼ ► So they would make these devices, obviously the phones and the other iOS devices, but even the Macs, sealed up with no room to spare for anything and lots of components glued inside it.
00:24:51 ◼ ► Or lots of components combined together into a single thing. We talked a lot about replacing any part of the keyboard on one of the 2016 and 2017 and probably also 2018 MacBook Pros.
00:25:04 ◼ ► You had to replace the entire top case. You couldn't just replace the keyboard part of it because everything was all glued together.
00:25:09 ◼ ► So the new 2018 MacBook Air has some interesting developments, sort of reverting to a simpler time of Apple laptop design, where the batteries are, yeah, okay, so there's lots of things that are still glued in there, like the speakers and the batteries.
00:25:26 ◼ ► But they're on these little, I don't know how to describe it, but you guys know those 3M strips where you can put a hook on the wall, but they know that you're going to have to take it off because you rent the apartment.
00:25:36 ◼ ► And there's a little pull tab at the bottom of it and you pull, like there's adhesive on the back and you stick it to the wall, but there's a little dangly bit of the adhesive that hangs down.
00:25:47 ◼ ► You grab that little dangly bit and pull it, it stretches the adhesive out and in the course of stretching it out, it lets it disengage from the wall in theory without damaging the wall.
00:25:56 ◼ ► So a whole bunch of the components, including the batteries and the speakers inside the MacBook Air have these little pull tabs on, which is way better than the thing being glued down there and having to pry it up or melt the glue.
00:26:07 ◼ ► They're designed with the knowledge that, look, you might need to replace a battery on this. And actually the MacBook Air has two batteries, one on each side of the laptop that you can replace individually.
00:26:16 ◼ ► Same thing with the speaker assemblies. They've done this for a while, but noted in the Mac Fixer thing as well, that the precious few ports that are even in this thing are all on secondary circuit boards.
00:26:29 ◼ ► So if someone jams something into one of your USB-C ports or someone breaks off the headphone thing and the precious headphone jack is on the side or whatever, you don't need to replace the entire motherboard such as it is.
00:26:40 ◼ ► You just need to replace this tiny, tiny little daughter card that's connected by a ribbon cable to everything else. Lots of Apple laptops have done that for a while.
00:26:47 ◼ ► And just in general, the ability to get into the thing and take pieces out and replace them is better than it has been in the past.
00:26:55 ◼ ► And this is especially impressive considering that the MacBook Air is not a roomy machine. It's not like, well, this is the big one where there's tons of room.
00:27:02 ◼ ► No, it's very skinny and things are very tightly packed, but it is better designed for repairability than the other ones. So I thought that was worth noting because it is a trend in the right direction.
00:27:12 ◼ ► That also brings up a secondary topic. This is based on some conversations I think people have been having in Slack lately and elsewhere.
00:27:23 ◼ ► The MacBook Air that we see now, is this a product that was started many years ago and has finally come out or is this a product that was created in haste based on feedback from the beginning of 2015 line of laptops?
00:27:36 ◼ ► Obviously, Apple is never going to tell us. But looking at the inside of the thing, I don't know.
00:27:42 ◼ ► I'm thinking there are some things to suggest that this was not a hastily slapped together laptop. But there are also things to suggest that its design reflects feedback received from the 2015, 2016, and maybe even 2017 years of MacBook Pros.
00:28:01 ◼ ► The trend is in the right direction and I'm not sure which would be more reassuring if this was hastily assembled based on poor sales or the MacBook escaped or if this was a three or four year project that just happened to come out when it did.
00:28:17 ◼ ► I like to believe that it was a longer running project and they really incorporated feedback into it as it was being developed.
00:28:23 ◼ ► Again, we'll find out in 50 years when people write their tell-all books, if they can still remember what the heck happened because we can't even remember what happened five years ago on our show.
00:28:32 ◼ ► I'm one of the people who thinks that they probably started this about two years ago. When it became clear that the reactions to the MacBook Pro line launched two years ago were not as positive as they wanted them to be.
00:28:44 ◼ ► Because this does incorporate a lot of feedback from those. It is improved from those in a number of ways while still being one of those generation machines.
00:28:52 ◼ ► I don't think back then Apple thought they had to replace the MacBook Air. I think they thought the new MacBook Pros would eventually come down in price and be able to get cheap models to replace it.
00:29:09 ◼ ► I'm very happy to see these design updates. It's not major in the sense that it doesn't have things I wanted. It doesn't have a new keyboard. It doesn't have more ports or the return of a card reader or anything like that.
00:29:27 ◼ ► This is not a machine that is ideal for me. But I got to say people do seem to be liking it a lot. And liking it a lot more than they have liked say the MacBook Escape. Which is very similar.
00:29:42 ◼ ► As I talked about before with this machine. On paper if you weren't buying the MacBook Escape for some reason I don't see why that reason still applies. And all of a sudden people want to buy this and all of a sudden people want to buy that.
00:29:57 ◼ ► But they do. And over the weekend I was in a store a couple times and I got to pick one up and play with it for a little bit longer.
00:30:06 ◼ ► And you know I got to say it does feel a lot better. Like I've been carrying around the 13 inch MacBook Pro for a while now. Which is very similar. It's only a quarter pound heavier.
00:30:17 ◼ ► And it's a little bit thicker at the front. It doesn't have the wedge shape. But the air feels better. Like the difference in how good it feels is bigger than you would expect.
00:30:29 ◼ ► Like when you're carrying it. When you're holding it. When you're using it. It really is a nicer feeling computer than my 13 inch MacBook Pro. And there's a few reasons. A few areas.
00:30:38 ◼ ► A lot of it just comes down to the size. Like how easy it is to pick up off the table. You know John's favorite argument. It's super great picking it off the table.
00:30:45 ◼ ► Opening and closing one handed. The wedge feels really nice. If you remember I had a very obscure complaint with the 13 inch MacBook Pro. Which I think applies to all the 2016 and forward MacBook Pro models.
00:31:00 ◼ ► Where like the ridge under the left and right front side of the case. Which I believe is an intake vent. There's a ridge on both sides.
00:31:09 ◼ ► And when you pick up a laptop your fingers go into that ridge and it's sharp. And it feels pretty unpleasant to actually hold the laptop by those edges.
00:31:16 ◼ ► The MacBook Air doesn't have those ridges. It's a totally different design on the bottom.
00:31:21 ◼ ► And so like I found it really nice and really pleasant to pick up and carry around and use the MacBook Air. In ways that the 13 inch and 15 inch touch bar models don't feel that nice.
00:31:32 ◼ ► So I can see why people like this thing. Even though it's not completely rational or not completely based on specs.
00:31:40 ◼ ► Because the specs I think aren't a very good deal for the money. What a lot of reviewers are finally noting is that the screen is also a lot less bright.
00:31:49 ◼ ► It's only 300 nits instead of 500 compared to the MacBook Pro. So like it's not a very bright screen. It is a nice screen but it's not a bright screen.
00:31:56 ◼ ► It's pretty slow. It's roughly MacBook class. And reviewers are saying that you hear the fan spin up a lot when it's working hard.
00:32:04 ◼ ► And because it's MacBook class that's often. And so there's reasons why it will remind you it's a low end machine.
00:32:11 ◼ ► But it does seem really nice. And so I'm understanding now a little bit better why people who didn't like the Escape or 13 inch Pro like the Air.
00:32:23 ◼ ► Even though on paper it doesn't make sense. We have ours here now as well. And I've been using it.
00:32:30 ◼ ► And if I don't think about the price, it's nice. You know having touch ID with no touch bar is really nice.
00:32:39 ◼ ► It seems nice and quick. The wedge shape, to your point about it feeling nice. I talked a lot about this over the past year or so.
00:32:47 ◼ ► But the wedge shape really is a perceptual thing that makes the thing feel different and better.
00:32:54 ◼ ► And familiar to people who like the MacBook Air. And I was replacing a 2011 MacBook Air with the 2018 one.
00:33:00 ◼ ► So it all fits together well. I like the fact that it's smaller length and width wise than the 2011 that it's replacing.
00:33:08 ◼ ► But that it has an equal screen more or less if you run it in non-native res which is still a bit of a sore point.
00:33:15 ◼ ► But yeah it looks like a machine that's well put together. I really wish it had more ports. I really wish it didn't have this keyboard.
00:33:23 ◼ ► We've already talked about this before. But in the grand scheme of things it is a reasonable, what we hope is the last gasp of this particular laptop design.
00:33:38 ◼ ► All that stuff about command strip pull tabs on all the stuff and being able to replace pieces individually. That's all good.
00:33:48 ◼ ► Yeah especially for the MacBook Air line. I mentioned when we were talking about this new model.
00:34:00 ◼ ► Because it is used so often in places like schools where they're going to get beaten up.
00:34:06 ◼ ► A lot of kids use them. A lot of careless adults use them. Or they use it in environments that are just difficult environments.
00:34:22 ◼ ► Everything else seems like they really addressed the needs of the MacBook Air market pretty well.
00:35:28 ◼ ► as a concession that the touch bar is imperfect or do you think it is strictly and only a financial problem?
00:35:36 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean I think what will answer that question for us is like when there is a next generation of MacBook Pros,
00:35:48 ◼ ► Is the touch bar totally gone from them or does it become optional or replaced with this as one of the other options?
00:36:09 ◼ ► And even if they could have put it in there and maintained pretty good margins otherwise,
00:36:17 ◼ ► Like the touch bar, whether or not it costs them extra money, it is used to justify higher prices on the higher end models.
00:36:26 ◼ ► So if they put it on the lower end models, that removes a key difference from them and that makes the pricing jump less justifiable to customers.
00:36:41 ◼ ► You will never guess, particularly Marco, what the URL for the Command Strips is, what host name it is.
00:37:08 ◼ ► What about config.sys? Anyway, tell me, one of you who put this in the show notes, about Mac Pro going ARM in 2020.
00:37:15 ◼ ► This is actually related to, or moments ago I'm using it about the timelines associated with the MacBook Air.
00:37:22 ◼ ► So this quandary that I brought up a couple shows ago about the new Mac Pro coming and Apple ever more strongly signaling that they're going to put ARM chips in Macs because the ARM chips are awesome and they would work really well in Macs, as the primary CPU that is.
00:37:40 ◼ ► And Mac Pro, like, okay, well, the Mac Pro is coming. They said it's coming. It's a 2019 product. Will this be the last great Intel-based Mac or will it be the first, hopefully, great ARM-based Mac?
00:37:53 ◼ ► And this is me getting nervous about buying it because both cases have upsides and downsides.
00:37:58 ◼ ► Obviously, if it was the last great Intel Mac, it's kind of weird to be buying the last of a generation, but then it's kind of good to get just one more Intel Mac.
00:38:04 ◼ ► And if it's the first ARM one, it's like, well, is it going to run all my software? How's it, you know, all sorts of other issues related to being ARM.
00:38:14 ◼ ► But the ARM thing, a lot of people say, well, how can they be ready to have an ARM Mac?
00:38:20 ◼ ► Yes, I know we've been waiting two years for the Mac Pro, but if they just decided two years ago that they're going to do a Mac Pro at all, that's not enough time to make a Mac Pro-caliber ARM CPU and to make a new Mac and to ship it all.
00:38:39 ◼ ► But in thinking about timelines, you have to remember the butterfly effect alternate timeline where the Mac Pro never existed and Apple never decided to make another one.
00:38:53 ◼ ► And that timeline, which was our timeline for a long time, the iMac Pro was the only Pro Mac at the top end, the Pro Desktop Mac.
00:39:04 ◼ ► The decision was, you know, two years ago, oh, actually, that's not enough. We have to make a proper Mac Pro with the separate display and all that other business. Right.
00:39:13 ◼ ► But before they made that decision, it is conceivable that they said, we're going to do the ARM transition.
00:39:20 ◼ ► And, you know, in 2019-ish, 2020-ish, we want to release our first Macs with ARM processors in them.
00:39:29 ◼ ► And, you know, maybe one of them will be at the high end. So their plan could have been, OK, in 2019-2020, that's when we release the iMac Pro with an ARM processor.
00:39:42 ◼ ► And that ARM processor could have been in the planning and design stage five years ago. Right.
00:39:48 ◼ ► So I feel like the decision to make a Mac Pro can be entirely separate from the much more distant past decision that Apple made to bring a high end ARM chip out suitable for its high end desktop computers.
00:40:02 ◼ ► And that you could decide to make a Mac Pro. It's not impossible that it could be ARM, provided that the previous plan was to bring out an ARM iMac Pro.
00:40:14 ◼ ► So that's got me thinking more seriously about the prospect of the new Mac Pro being ARM.
00:40:22 ◼ ► Whereas before I couldn't think about it seriously at all, because there's just not enough time to make it, you know, a Pro caliber ARM processor.
00:40:27 ◼ ► But if I just think, well, it's just going to use the one they would have otherwise used in the iMac Pro.
00:40:31 ◼ ► And that one they started planning five or six years ago. That at least is conceivable. Is it true? Do we have anything to support it? No, I'm just musing or whatever.
00:40:39 ◼ ► But I thought I would bring that up just because it's something that I hadn't heard offered on this show or elsewhere.
00:40:46 ◼ ► And it makes me start entertaining for real the idea of an ARM Mac Pro, even though I still think it's a distant second to the much more obvious choice of it just being, you know, a Xeon.
00:40:58 ◼ ► Is there a particular preference that you have? You know, if they called you in and said, "John, it's up to you. ARM or Intel, what are we doing?"
00:41:07 ◼ ► ARM would definitely be more exciting. And also you have to believe that ARM would be faster at this point.
00:41:18 ◼ ► But I'm scared about compatibility. And as weird as it would be to have like the last one of the last round of Intel Macs.
00:41:28 ◼ ► I don't know. I'd probably be okay with it. I'm okay with either one. Like they're both exciting for different reasons.
00:41:35 ◼ ► I wouldn't be super disappointed. It's not like I wouldn't buy it if like Intel Mac Pro comes out and then like six months later, the, you know, the ARM MacBook Air comes out and it's amazing.
00:41:44 ◼ ► I'm not going to mind about that. Like, I don't know. I don't feel like I have a strong preference.
00:41:49 ◼ ► The ARM one is more technologically exciting, but the Intel one will probably be a more useful machine for longer.
00:41:54 ◼ ► And I don't plan to keep my next computer for 10 years like I've kept this one. Like it's never the plan.
00:41:59 ◼ ► You know, five years maybe, three years maybe, ten years, no. That is never the plan. Just things have gone awry.
00:42:13 ◼ ► Oh, I think it was the Ars Technica interview of Anand Lalshimpe and Phil Schiller talking about the A12X and how awesome it is.
00:42:23 ◼ ► And I was wondering like, you know, they mentioned, you know, one of the reasons why iOS is able to be so fast is that it has unified memory architecture between the CPU and the GPU.
00:42:33 ◼ ► There's just one bank of RAM and it's very fast, you know, one bank of very fast RAM that is fast enough to be video RAM that is also used as the main CPU RAM.
00:42:43 ◼ ► And that way, you know, like in PCs and Macs, the GPUs have their own separate banks of video RAM and you have to be shuffling data back and forth over these buses to get data from main memory or from the CPU, you know, to the GPU texture memory or video memory and vice versa if you do computation back and forth and everything.
00:43:03 ◼ ► And so that shuffling data back and forth between main memory and video memory is like a major performance bottleneck and there's a lot of effort that needs to go into like, you know, optimizing for that when you're designing stuff that uses the GPU on Macs and PCs.
00:43:17 ◼ ► And with iOS, it's just way, way simpler because it's just one bank of RAM that's all super fast that the CPU and GPU can access.
00:43:24 ◼ ► So I was wondering, in a situation where they go to ARM for Macs, would they go to a unified memory architecture also?
00:43:40 ◼ ► A shared memory architecture is a pejorative term for it. It's like, oh well, cheap computers can't afford to have dedicated VRAM so they have, they just share the RAM between, like that was, for many years that was the slam against the low end Macs. It's like, ah, but you don't get dedicated VRAM.
00:43:55 ◼ ► Right, they have to because where else do they get, they don't have room for a bunch of VRAM.
00:44:02 ◼ ► At the high end, like, you can buy GPUs with like, what, 12 gigabytes of RAM or something just for the GPU, like separate from the system memory and...
00:44:12 ◼ ► But those are like Mac Pro level GPUs. Like, what do gamer ones have now, like three or six?
00:44:16 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, well, a lot of it, but the other thing about the RAM that's dedicated, you know, next to the GPU is that it is designed differently than just generic memory.
00:44:27 ◼ ► Like, the bus widths are insane, right? So it can be accessed in parallel by a huge number of things in the GPU.
00:44:34 ◼ ► Now, it's still true that getting information to and from the CPU and memory and stuff like, is more of a pain, but once you're there, the GPU and its dedicated VRAM have a relationship that cannot be matched by the relationship that most CPUs have to their local RAM.
00:44:51 ◼ ► Because the VRAM on GPUs and the whole bus architecture around it is specifically designed for GPUs only, and it doesn't have to keep up with all the demands that regular memory has to keep. It just has to be super wide and super high bandwidth, and...
00:45:05 ◼ ► I think the simplification for the iOS devices is it's much easier to optimize for energy efficiency and for, just in general, dealing with bugs and optimizations when you have a single, simple, known architecture and you don't have to deal with, "Well, sometimes it's over here, and sometimes it's over there, and sometimes we have to shift between."
00:45:22 ◼ ► But part of the point of Metal, there are many purposes to Metal, but one of them is making more efficient use of the bandwidth between a CPU and a dedicated video card in terms of command sequences and how many times you have to communicate back and forth between the two areas.
00:45:39 ◼ ► So, I think on the high end, things are still going to necessarily be more complicated for a long time to come.
00:45:47 ◼ ► On the lower end, obviously, I think Apple has shown that you can do a "integrated GPU" better than Intel has done it, or better than Intel seems to want to do it, because occasionally Apple has pushed Intel to put beefier integrated graphics, the whole Iris graphics architecture around it, CPUs...
00:46:13 ◼ ► ...because Apple wanted better integrated GPUs that can do more of the stuff that, at the time, Mac OS needed to do with GPUs.
00:46:24 ◼ ► So, I think on all but the highest of high end, Apple can do a pretty good job of its "integrated GPU" being sufficient, certainly through the whole Macbook line and the Macbook Air, maybe even well into the Macbook Pro line,
00:46:39 ◼ ► especially with the ability to use external GPUs, they can just say, "Look, the new Pro way to do it is we give you a pretty awesome integrated GPU on your ARM Macbook Pro, and if you need something even beefier, then do eGPU."
00:46:52 ◼ ► I think that is a reasonable position, and we'll have all the wins that you talked about in terms of simplification and optimization and battery life, hopefully, and all that other stuff.
00:47:03 ◼ ► So, the prospect of an ARM Mac, again, looking at the new iPad Pros, the prospect of an ARM Mac has never been more tantalizing and easy to see, because if you look at what they've been able to do in a completely fanless 5.6mm thin slab,
00:47:19 ◼ ► it's like, what could they do with a full laptop with a huge battery and two fans in it? The power would be unbelievable.
00:47:27 ◼ ► Well, see, that's why I think, because the ARM designs would most likely lack Thunderbolt, because Thunderbolt is an Intel technology, and I think Intel's now willing to license it, but...
00:47:39 ◼ ► Money can fix that problem, like I said before. I believe in the power of money, and Intel's need for that money.
00:47:45 ◼ ► Well, sure. But they would lack Thunderbolt, probably, at least at first, and they would also probably lack a lot of the huge high bandwidth PCI express lane arrangements.
00:47:57 ◼ ► I know internally, I think modern iOS devices do have PCI express, but I don't know if they would have so many lanes of it that they could offer Mac Pro level bandwidth and throughput to things.
00:48:07 ◼ ► That's why I think it is much more likely that the first ARM Mac start at the low end, especially the 12" MacBook, seems like an obvious...
00:48:15 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, they could have been making them for years already. You just look at the chips that are in the iOS device, you could take those and just slap them into a MacBook and it would be unbelievable.
00:48:23 ◼ ► So that's the obvious thing people expect. But I think the iPad Pro, the most recent one, showed me that they've got enough grunt now, that already, with the things that they've released now, today,
00:48:35 ◼ ► are within striking distance if you just double the number of cores and increase the clock speed and put a fan and a big cooler on it. They're already within striking distance.
00:48:43 ◼ ► So again, I'm just suggesting things that make me put it into the realm of possibility, not that make me think that they're going to do it instead of a laptop, because a laptop is a much more obvious win.
00:48:55 ◼ ► What's also interesting to think about, to me anyway, is that I feel like we're starting to have these multi-headed laptops, because the T2 chips, they're all ARM, like old 8-whatever chips, aren't they?
00:49:14 ◼ ► Well, not quite, but I think the T2 is roughly an A10 in performance. It's not like they didn't just literally take those chips unmodified, but I think, architecturally, I think it is roughly A10 class.
00:49:26 ◼ ► Yeah, the CPU cores, that's how they're classifying them. It's not an A10 system on a chip, but if you look at the CPU core part of it, it looks like the same architecture as the cores that were used in the A10.
00:49:37 ◼ ► Yeah, so that has kind of come out of nowhere over the last couple of years, and it seems like the T chips are taking on more and more and more of a role within Apple laptops.
00:49:50 ◼ ► So do they just kind of, you know, envelop them, you know, white blood cell style? Like all of a sudden there's no Intel chip left, or the Intel chip is only for, you know, things that haven't been compiled for ARM,
00:50:05 ◼ ► which I know it's not quite that simple, but just for the sake of discussion, you know, over time, does the T2 chip kind of just subsume and consume whatever the needs that Intel was previously serving?
00:50:19 ◼ ► You've got such a big power budget inside a laptop, you can have the T2 and the regular system on a chip.
00:50:26 ◼ ► You can combine them, but having them both is not entirely insane. I mean, it's a little bit insane. The thing is that the T2 is basically running the show in the new Mac architecture.
00:50:37 ◼ ► It's the thing that starts the computer, and it's the thing that starts the Intel CPU, right? So it is the computer at this point, and the Intel CPU is basically the co-processor in terms of the secure startup process and validating the images and doing all this stuff, right?
00:50:53 ◼ ► So, you know, a cleaner architecture would be, "Okay, well now you go to the big hunkin' ARM CPU and the Intel one is out of there, and you just need one of those."
00:51:01 ◼ ► Because you put all the different things that you need inside it, whether on a system on a chip or on a, you know, a package with multiple dies inside it or whatever,
00:51:12 ◼ ► and there's no reason to have one dedicated little thing that starts up the computer in a secure way and kicks it off to the other thing. You can just combine it into one.
00:51:20 ◼ ► But for practical reasons, in the short term, it may be more expedient to go with an arrangement with two ARM chips.
00:51:26 ◼ ► The Intel chips, though, the whole point is you've got to get them out of there, because they cost a lot of money, and they use a lot of power, and they just need to get them out.
00:51:33 ◼ ► We're all hoping that they'll be able to emulate Intel on ARM processors in some way that isn't super-duper painful, because that's kind of essential for the transition.
00:51:44 ◼ ► A real-time follow-up is an article someone just put in a link to remind us, and I think we talked about this on the show, this is from 2017, that Intel is making Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free.
00:51:55 ◼ ► I don't know about the details of it, I think they mostly just mean in terms of if you want to make devices that, you know, use controller chips and stuff like that.
00:52:02 ◼ ► Does it also mean if you're going to make host computers? Maybe. Anyway, the point is Intel is already opening up Thunderbolt more than they had in the past,
00:52:11 ◼ ► which means that they want it to be widely adopted, which means they're even more amenable to any kind of arrangement they might need with Apple.
00:52:18 ◼ ► Again, if Apple says, "We're not going to buy CPUs from you anymore," Intel, although they'll be cranky, is probably going to say, "Well, you'll still buy modems from us, right? Sell modem chips?
00:52:31 ◼ ► Are you interested in licensing some sort of Thunderbolt controller chip or technology?"
00:52:37 ◼ ► Intel still needs to sell things, right? Once they've failed to change Apple's mind, they're not just going to go away and never have a relationship with Apple again.
00:52:46 ◼ ► They still want to sell Apple stuff so they can make money and stay in business because Apple's got all the money.
00:52:51 ◼ ► So I'm very hopeful about a continuing fruitful relationship between Intel and Apple in areas where it needs to exist.
00:53:10 ◼ ► Almost everyone takes and shares pictures, but very few of those pictures these days end up actually being printed, and even fewer end up being displayed anywhere.
00:53:19 ◼ ► Focus on the moments that mean the most in your life by turning your favorite digital memories into meaningful photo décor.
00:53:26 ◼ ► Fracture prints are made by printing directly on glass and come ready to display right out of the box.
00:53:46 ◼ ► And please, if you want to get a holiday order in for Fracture, hurry up and do it soon because all Fracture prints are handmade by human beings, by nice people, and given to you.
00:53:55 ◼ ► They're made by human beings, by nice people in Gainesville, Florida, from U.S. source materials, in a carbon neutral factory.
00:54:02 ◼ ► This also means that in the holidays, because they're human-made, they can get backed up.
00:54:06 ◼ ► And so if you want a really great holiday gift, and Fractures do make amazing gifts, you want to get that order in ASAP.
00:54:48 ◼ ► They will ask a one-question survey after checkout that basically says, "What show sent you here?"
00:54:55 ◼ ► All right, so last week, Marco, you had a pre-release iPad Pro or a review unit iPad Pro.
00:55:27 ◼ ► Well, actually, my most recent iPad Mini was a gift, so I haven't purchased an iPad since, gosh,
00:55:40 ◼ ► I did get the Smart Keyboard Folio, and I am glad that I wasn't paying close attention to how much it was
00:56:06 ◼ ► Did I say it was cellular? It is cellular because even though I was planning not to go cellular this time,
00:56:12 ◼ ► eventually Marco, amongst others, convinced me, Marco and Jason Snell especially convinced me,
00:56:17 ◼ ► that that was a poor choice, and certainly my own experience for buying iPads for the first few years
00:56:26 ◼ ► People in the US, interesting tip, if you're cheap like me and don't want to add, you know,
00:56:31 ◼ ► 10 or 20 bucks monthly to your cell phone bill, T-Mobile actually allows you at least once,
00:56:38 ◼ ► I don't know if it's more than once, to buy for $10 one time, to buy, I think it's a 5-gig, 5-month pass.
00:56:49 ◼ ► or I want it just for this week or this month and then it disappears, you know, prepay plan.
00:56:54 ◼ ► But T-Mobile offers you a 5-gig for 5 months for 10 bucks, which is, I think, an unbelievably good deal.
00:57:06 ◼ ► T-Mobile in the past had offered 200 megs for free every single month, which they don't do anymore,
00:57:15 ◼ ► Because even with it being easy enough to just go into settings and say, "Tether to my own iPhone, please,"
00:57:26 ◼ ► And yes, it is possible, and yes, I do still tether this to my phone from time to time,
00:57:32 ◼ ► But Marco in private conversations with me and Jason Snell in private conversations with me were right.
00:58:17 ◼ ► It's way better on your lap than the previous one, but it's not as good on countertops.
00:58:49 ◼ ► But it's also way faster than Touch ID in other cases or it's more convenient in other cases.
00:58:55 ◼ ► It's especially more convenient when you are using the iPad and have to authenticate for things like passwords.
00:59:02 ◼ ► It just sees you and it's like, "Oh, hey, it's still you. Okay, cool. Let's see you in."
00:59:12 ◼ ► So it is still the same fingerprint magnet that the previous generation was that every iPad Pro has been.
00:59:35 ◼ ► Maybe they just haven't found a better oleophobic coating yet that can work with a pencil.
00:59:53 ◼ ► And I really, really hope that the new iPhones next year follow this industrial design.
01:00:00 ◼ ► Yeah, so like I said, my most recent iPad that we had in the house was a fourth-gen iPad Mini.
01:00:18 ◼ ► And I still used the iPad Mini from time to time but had mostly abandoned it at this point.
01:00:26 ◼ ► And I did get this iPad Pro because the hardware was just too good-looking and too sexy to pass up.
01:00:33 ◼ ► And so I got it on launch day. I just sauntered into the store and made it happen, thanks to my business contact there.
01:00:45 ◼ ► I did not have any iPad Pro in the past, and so I didn't have a lot of experience with the Smart Keyboard Folio, whatever thing, from prior years.
01:00:54 ◼ ► But I remember always seeing it and seeing how it was kind of stepped, and there was a thick part and a thin part.
01:01:02 ◼ ► And this one is even the whole way around. It is pretty sturdy in the lap, which my understanding of past years is that that was not the case.
01:01:15 ◼ ► There are basically two different positions you can put it in, one that is kind of vertical and one that is at a very slight angle.
01:01:25 ◼ ► And the vertical one, the only time I have really used that is if I am in bed and watching something.
01:01:43 ◼ ► Because if you are sitting up close to it and your head is considerably above the screen, I don't feel like the angle of the other position is really steep enough, which is a little frustrating.
01:01:55 ◼ ► But, overall, I love this thing. I am really surprised by how much I have enjoyed using it.
01:02:03 ◼ ► And I took it with me on a small trip that we went on over this past weekend to watch some dear friends of ours get married.
01:02:31 ◼ ► I even figured out on the plane to California, I figured out how to post to my blog from just the iPad.
01:02:46 ◼ ► And that turned out to be the app Working Copy, which is a really powerful Git client for iPad.
01:03:04 ◼ ► And if you recall, or if you were not aware, I wrote my own blogging engine in Node years ago.
01:03:10 ◼ ► And the input to that blogging engine is basically just a folder full of markdown files.
01:03:26 ◼ ► And I was able to create a hook in Heroku to say, "Hey, when I push to this particular branch of this particular repo in GitHub,
01:03:35 ◼ ► And so twice for two different blog posts I wrote on my website, I did that from the plane,
01:03:41 ◼ ► all completely on the iPad, which is something that I hadn't really been able to do before,
01:03:47 ◼ ► The only things that really fell down are, and we talked about this actually somewhat recently,
01:03:53 ◼ ► the particular app I use to manage, to kind of balance our checkbook, if you will, and manage our money is called MoneyWell.
01:03:58 ◼ ► I like it a lot, except it is not updated terribly frequently, and they don't really have a sharing story
01:04:12 ◼ ► And the best I could do is using screens by some friends of ours, which is a VNC client.
01:04:17 ◼ ► I could remote into my iMac and do that, but that's fairly clunky, not because screens is bad, screens is fantastic.
01:04:26 ◼ ► It's just that's always going to be clunkier than doing something on an app on your device.
01:04:31 ◼ ► Additionally, there was an instance where I wanted to grab a movie from, actually a friend's Plex,
01:04:41 ◼ ► and I didn't have the sync permissions on that person's Plex server, but if you know what you're doing
01:04:50 ◼ ► and have YouTube DL, which is one of my favorite command line tools in the entire world,
01:04:54 ◼ ► you can actually download pretty much anything on a friend's Plex server via YouTube DL.
01:05:00 ◼ ► And though somebody in just the last week or two, or I guess just the last few days, has released ISH via TestFlight,
01:05:13 ◼ ► Yes, and I tried installing YouTube DL, which did work, but the second I tried to run it, it was like, "Ha ha, no."
01:05:23 ◼ ► Yeah, it is very interesting. It reminds me a lot in spirit, and I'm sure this is technically inaccurate,
01:05:29 ◼ ► but it reminds me a lot in spirit of Cygwin, C-Y-G-W-I-N, which was basically an interpreter between Bash
01:05:41 ◼ ► and the Win32 subsystem, so you could basically run an almost true-to-form Bash shell on Windows.
01:05:49 ◼ ► So for certain things you can do, if you're doing more basic stuff that the author/authors have intended or tried,
01:05:56 ◼ ► it works okay. So VI works, but my preferred editor, which happens to be Emacs, please don't @ me.
01:06:04 ◼ ► That doesn't work. It's what I got used to before I knew what I was doing, and I've got a lot of momentum there,
01:06:09 ◼ ► and I don't care passionately about it. Whatever, it's just what I'm used to. So anyway...
01:06:16 ◼ ► Well, I'm okay with that. So anyway, I'm trying not to get derailed. I couldn't do YouTube DL from my iPad,
01:06:24 ◼ ► and I had to do that on my MacBook. And the reason I wanted to do that, not just stream it from Plex,
01:06:28 ◼ ► which I absolutely can do on my iPad, is because I wanted to prepare to be able to watch it on the plane,
01:06:33 ◼ ► and so this way I would just have the file on my MacBook and be able to just watch it on the plane, disconnected.
01:06:47 ◼ ► However, it does not show the particular flavor of RAW files that my camera generates, and this is important,
01:06:54 ◼ ► not because I necessarily want to do any editing of RAW files on my iPad, and frankly, I don't really do any editing of RAW files anyway,
01:06:59 ◼ ► but I do shoot in RAW and JPEG, and basically my workflow is, if there's anything I think I might want to blow up
01:07:05 ◼ ► or maybe touch up one day in the future, I'll keep the RAW, but generally speaking, I just delete all of them.
01:07:10 ◼ ► And what I'd like to be able to do on the iPad is just tap through and say, "That one's garbage, that one's garbage,
01:07:15 ◼ ► that one's garbage, that one's garbage. Okay, delete all those off the SD card and move along with your life."
01:07:19 ◼ ► And that doesn't seem to be possible because, I think, because of the particular flavor of RAW files that my Olympus camera generates.
01:07:27 ◼ ► From what I understand, that is not true of every camera's RAW files. I just got unlucky.
01:07:31 ◼ ► So, all told, I spent the entire weekend remotely doing things that you could even call work all on my iPad,
01:07:40 ◼ ► and as I got more and more used to the multitasking features in iOS, well, I guess it was like 9 or 10 or whatever that these came out,
01:07:51 ◼ ► It is not always as quick as my MacBook is, but especially now that I actually have a keyboard attached to my iPad,
01:07:59 ◼ ► because again, I've never had an iPad Pro before, and this is what Marco actually had said just an episode or two back,
01:08:06 ◼ ► once you have a keyboard connected to your iPad Pro, it changes everything and makes it so much better a computer than it was before.
01:08:16 ◼ ► So, all told, two thumbs up for this thing, man. I really, really like it, and I can't stress enough,
01:08:23 ◼ ► and I think I said this last episode, I am really looking forward to iOS 13 or whatever's coming next year,
01:08:29 ◼ ► because I just get this sneaking suspicion that a lot of these pain points are either going to go away or be a lot less painful in the future.
01:08:37 ◼ ► I still just want to use my iPad as an iPad, and I'm still holding out hope for an iOS laptop.
01:08:47 ◼ ► but to me, as good as it is and how much it changes how the iPad is, I think it would be better still if it was an actual hinge laptop thing,
01:09:00 ◼ ► like Jason Snell's beloved Brydge keyboard, but made by Apple, and not two separate weird things.
01:09:07 ◼ ► Not that I have a yearning for that, but I feel like that's the point at which I will start entertaining putting a keyboard on it,
01:09:13 ◼ ► because in my life, the role of the iPad fills is the role of the tablet, where I do stuff that doesn't require typing on a keyboard,
01:09:21 ◼ ► although I do answer short emails and stuff and send people messages or whatever, and that's fine,
01:09:30 ◼ ► Now, if I was to go somewhere and only bring my iPad with me, as I've done the past couple of WWCs, I don't even remember.
01:09:38 ◼ ► I only really use my iPad at WWCs, but I'm not doing any typing anymore at WWC, I'm mostly just reading things and sending random messages or whatever.
01:09:46 ◼ ► So I'm still a little bit down in the hole. This turns your iPad into a heavier iPad with a floppy keyboard,
01:09:54 ◼ ► so that's still not particularly appealing to me, but I do want to check out this new one, because, you know,
01:10:00 ◼ ► although as Marco determined it is heavier, but it's also flatter and not as lumpen, and maybe I'll change my tune.
01:10:08 ◼ ► I would still love to have one of these, just not sure I have a pressing need to buy one quite at this moment.
01:10:20 ◼ ► Especially since the accessories that I was so excited about, the Smart Folio case, it's getting kind of mixed reviews.
01:10:28 ◼ ► Not the keyboard one, but the non-keyboard one. Mix reviews as compared to the old arrangement.
01:10:33 ◼ ► My current arrangement that I have, in the whatever model I have, like the original 9.7" iPad Pro,
01:10:46 ◼ ► and whatever that back shell case is, and they're matched to each other, they're the same color, and they're all this kind of rubberized material.
01:10:52 ◼ ► I really love that arrangement. I would love it more if it didn't make the iPad wider and taller, because it goes all around the edges,
01:11:04 ◼ ► But mixed reviews I'm hearing from people about the material of the case, and how it compares to the old ones,
01:11:11 ◼ ► and weird issues with the bazillion magnets, so I gotta go to the store and check them out.
01:11:18 ◼ ► You know, I really, really like it, and again, I can't stress enough that I do not have a prior gen to really compare to,
01:11:24 ◼ ► but I really like the case. I don't think the materials are bad. I think it works pretty well, again, with my small lamentation about angles,
01:11:31 ◼ ► particularly on the 11". However, something that I couldn't put my finger on until I read Jason Snell's review that just came out earlier today as we record,
01:11:41 ◼ ► is that it is just this grand expanse of grey that is the cover, in fact. When you close it all up and are looking at what would be the front of the iPad if the cover wasn't in the way,
01:11:53 ◼ ► it's just nothing but grey. There's no ridges, just a slab of grey. And I couldn't figure out why I kept looking at that and thinking I should put a sticker on this,
01:12:02 ◼ ► because that is not usually my thing. I did on my work laptop, because who cares, it's not mine, but I've never stickered up any of my devices,
01:12:10 ◼ ► and I'm really thinking about stickered the hell out of this, my curly style, because it is just grey. It's just a slab of grey, and I don't really love it.
01:12:20 ◼ ► Yeah, like for a device that is so creative-focused and artistic-focused and so fun in so many other ways, the design of the dark grey, flat, bland keyboard cover
01:12:36 ◼ ► doesn't even have an Apple logo on it. There was a good segment on upgrade about this a few days ago, yesterday rather. And also the new cover design also picks up any crumbs off your counter,
01:12:48 ◼ ► because it's just this flat rubber I have right here. It just looks so bland. It looks like it is punishing you for wanting nice-looking things.
01:12:59 ◼ ► It's such a contrast to the iPad itself, which is just ridiculously nice-looking. The actual iPad looks gorgeous. It's such an amazing piece of industrial design.
01:13:17 ◼ ► I don't know if I would personally describe it as actively ugly, but it is certainly not great-looking. And I think I will probably end up putting some stickers on mine at some point or another.
01:13:29 ◼ ► All in all, I do love having a keyboard attached to an iPad, and I also do love the industrial design of this iPad. I love having the flat sides.
01:13:39 ◼ ► It reminds me of how much I miss the feel and to some degree the look of the iPhone 5 era with the flat sides. I wish that would come back on new iPhones, and I don't think it will.
01:13:52 ◼ ► Or if it does, I'll be surprised. But I do love having the flat sides. Occasionally I stand by what I said about being a little bit of a pain to pick up off a flat surface, but that's not something I run into often.
01:14:02 ◼ ► But no, I love this thing. I've been impressed by it. The sound is pretty darn good. Again, I have a three-year-old mini to compare to, so all of these comparisons take with a grain of salt.
01:14:13 ◼ ► But the sound is good, the screen is good, the face ID is wonderful. Everything about this I've been really, really impressed by.
01:14:21 ◼ ► Speaking of picking it up, I think someone tweeted at us a video of an alternate technique for if you wanted to pick up your 11-inch iPad Pro off the table with one hand.
01:14:34 ◼ ► If you can manage it, you can put one finger on one side and your thumb on the other side and pinch it and pick it up like that.
01:14:51 ◼ ► I actually can pick it up with one hand only if the keys part of it is face down, so it creates a little bit bigger of a gap.
01:15:00 ◼ ► So if the keys are face are on the bottom side and the keyboard cover is closed and I put my hands around the binding side of it, then I can pick it up with one hand.
01:15:12 ◼ ► Oh, actually, you know what? I was looking at the wrong dimension. I was looking landscape like an idiot.
01:15:16 ◼ ► No, I can almost get it up. Yeah, you're right. I can almost do it. I can almost do it. It's close.
01:15:21 ◼ ► Yeah, if you have the 12.9-inch, it would take quite a finger span to pull that off, but it's possible.
01:15:28 ◼ ► That's nice. But anyway, no, I really like this thing. I've been quite impressed by it.
01:15:32 ◼ ► The only problem I have with it is now that I see that ISH is a thing, now I'm just waiting for support that just a handful of things I really wanted to support, which it probably never will.
01:15:43 ◼ ► But I would love for that to happen. And certainly in a lot of cases, I can just use, you know, what is panic's thing? Is it prompt? Is that right?
01:15:52 ◼ ► I can just use prompt and, you know, SSH into my iMac. But it would be nice to be able to do some of that stuff locally.
01:15:58 ◼ ► And I think one of the things that the developer, and this is all open source, one of the things the developer is looking to do is support node, for example.
01:16:04 ◼ ► And I think PHP might have support. I'm not sure about that. But it would be cool to be able to, you know, write a little bit of code natively on this device.
01:16:13 ◼ ► Write some scripts too. Like, put like, you know, ImageMagic on it and like do some scripting. Like, there's all sorts of stuff I could do with this.
01:16:20 ◼ ► Don't you get an incredibly uncomfortable feeling? Like, you know there's Unix under there that you could be running an actual shell on the actual hardware.
01:16:28 ◼ ► But Apple doesn't let you. So here, to get around all the App Store restrictions, they're running a user mode x86 emulator so you can run a shell inside it on a system that is already like, just...
01:16:42 ◼ ► I do! Like, it's ridiculous. Like, this is another... I know Jason Snell had a rant on, what was it, the most recent upgrade? I haven't heard the episode but I've heard a lot of people talk about it.
01:16:51 ◼ ► Complaining that, you know, the iPad hardware, you know, the theme that we've heard many times, the iPad hardware is amazing but the software doesn't...
01:16:58 ◼ ► The software prevents certain things still. He was complaining that Apple doesn't create its own pro applications for the iPad.
01:17:06 ◼ ► It just gives you the more cut-down versions of it which doesn't make any sense given the incredible power of the iPad Pro other than Apple's general lack of commitment to its pro applications.
01:17:18 ◼ ► And this is another one of the areas. All the restrictions which make some sense for historic and current security reasons but...
01:17:25 ◼ ► Like, you can't offer an iOS application that lets you run a shell even though those capabilities are sitting there completely untapped inside the hardware.
01:17:38 ◼ ► Again, makes sense from a security perspective but it is entirely within the reason for Apple to provide ability to have sort of a ch-rooted, secure, sandboxed environment where you run a native shell that nevertheless is restricted from doing any damage to the system because it is confined to its little pinned-in world or whatever.
01:18:01 ◼ ► Where you don't have to run an x86 emulator on your ARM CPU just so you can get a shell prompt. Like, you mentioned Sigwin. I don't think Sigwin was that bad but it reminds me of, going back even farther, Mac Mint.
01:18:11 ◼ ► Which was a system that I believe it was like a port of an Atari, Unix-y flavored thing to the 68K classic Mac.
01:18:22 ◼ ► And the whole reason I ran it on my Mac was guess what? It lets you have a TCSH prompt on your Mac that you could, you know, go and wander around your Mac's directories from an actual shell running this weird, mutant Atari, Unix on top of your Mac.
01:18:38 ◼ ► But classic Mac OS wasn't Unix, it didn't have a shell prompt. Like, that's the same thing with Windows. It wasn't on top of something that was already there, it was adding something that didn't exist at all. This, the ISH thing, I applaud the developer for making it happen but it depresses me that this is the extent we have to go to to get this functionality when it's sitting right there, just completely untapped.
01:19:01 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. But it is cool as hell and I'm really hopeful now that it's getting some attention, you know, because Steve Chaunce Smith has been talking about this for the last day or so.
01:19:12 ◼ ► I'm hopeful since it's open source that we're going to see a lot of progress on this and maybe get a reasonably full featured shell natively on the iPad. Which would be cool.
01:19:22 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Linode. You can get a $20 credit when you visit linode.com/ATP and use promo code ATP2018. Linode lets you instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud.
01:19:36 ◼ ► You can get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, node location and so much more.
01:19:42 ◼ ► Linode has 10 data centers around the world for you to put your nodes in. Plans start at just $5 a month. That gets you 1GB of RAM and of course they have all sorts of plans above and beyond that depending on what your needs are.
01:19:54 ◼ ► Including high memory plans starting at 16GB of RAM. You can get a server running in under a minute.
01:20:00 ◼ ► And all of these wonderful plans and great values too have hourly billing by default and then there's a monthly cap. So you never have to worry about whether you're picking the right billing mode or whether you're spending too much. You always know what your budget is here.
01:20:12 ◼ ► And let me tell you, I've used Linode myself for something like 8 years and they're just great. I love them. I have all my stuff hosted there now because they've just blown away every other web host for me.
01:20:23 ◼ ► Not only is it a great value, I can't find a better value on a sustained basis in the hosting industry. So not only is it the best value I've seen, but it's also just really nice to use.
01:20:32 ◼ ► They have a really nice control panel. Their support is top notch on the very few times I've actually needed to contact them for anything. And it's a real pleasure to use.
01:20:40 ◼ ► And I've used a lot of web hosts before and let me tell you, Linode really is a wonderful pleasure to use.
01:20:46 ◼ ► It's also just good hardware, good software. They have native enterprise-grade SSD storage, 40 gigabit network, Xeon E5 processor. So this is really top notch stuff at a really great price.
01:20:56 ◼ ► So check it out today. Also, if you happen to be looking for a job in the hosting field, Linode is hiring. If that interests you, go to linode.com/careers.
01:21:04 ◼ ► Otherwise, you can get a $20 credit when you visit linode.com/ATP and use promo code ATP2018. On that $5 a month plan, that could be four months free. So that's pretty cool.
01:21:17 ◼ ► $20 credit when you visit linode.com/ATP using promo code ATP2018. Thank you to Linode for sponsoring our show.
01:21:34 ◼ ► I guess we've kind of already covered that. I mean, I haven't learned that much exciting about it. It hasn't yet been dropped. Kids are using it. They don't seem to have any complaints. Touch ID is great. Kids are already forgetting their passwords.
01:21:46 ◼ ► Apparently, in a recent user version of Apple, they didn't want you to have the same password for your Apple ID and for your Mac account. Well, that was the default, I think, maybe. That you'd set up your Apple ID.
01:21:59 ◼ ► I don't know. Both kids ended up in a situation where their password to get onto the Mac was the same as their Apple ID password, which I understand why Apple doesn't want it. It's not a good idea. You shouldn't reuse passwords. But anyway, now Apple forces you not to do that. So now they have slightly different passwords for the Mac and for their Apple ID.
01:22:17 ◼ ► But because there's Touch ID, they never have to enter the Mac one. They just swap back and forth. They come to the computer. They don't even need to click on their face or whatever. They just put their finger on their fingerprint thing, and their fingerprint is only associated with a single account, and it just logs them into that account. And it's great.
01:22:31 ◼ ► As great as it is, though, it still kind of burns me that we don't have Touch ID on a Mac yet. So hopefully that will be on my fancy Mac Pro someday. But other than that, nothing much to report. Everything going fine. Oh, I guess one additional thing is MagSafe. Stupid MagSafe.
01:22:51 ◼ ► Not that anyone has tripped over the cord, but now we have a place for the laptop. It goes right where the old MacBook Air went. Two things that are pretty big quality of life downgrades from before, and neither has to do with tripping over the cord.
01:23:07 ◼ ► One, I was using the MagSafe adapter that was designed for the original MacBook Air that couldn't accept MagSafe that came in from the side. It looks kind of like a toothbrush. It comes in from the back.
01:23:23 ◼ ► And that was super convenient, because the most convenient place for the cord to go away was back behind the desk that the thing is sitting on for me. It also meant that enough of the cord was on top of the desk that when you disconnected the laptop, the cord just sat right there, waiting for you to bring the laptop back and put it on. It didn't slide off the desk because there was enough of it pulled onto the desk.
01:23:42 ◼ ► Yeah, that was a much nicer design to use. Yeah, so that's totally gone, because if there's a right angle USB-C power adapter connector, I haven't found it yet. I think Monoprice has a couple. I looked at them, but they're like ugly adaptory things. It's not an all-in-one. It's just not as nice.
01:24:01 ◼ ► Second thing is, given that now the plug has to snake up from the side, when you disconnect the laptop, that cord just slides right off and goes back down the side of the desk, because there's not enough of it on the desk.
01:24:16 ◼ ► Now, I actually have a little weighted metal thing that you hook the cord into that we're kind of using, but because the cord is so thick and unruly, it doesn't really stay. The little thing doesn't grab it. It's not like a grippy thing. It's more like just a little slot.
01:24:32 ◼ ► So it's not easy for the kids to disconnect the cord and put it in the thing. So very often, the cord just falls down the side of the desk. I'm working on something to make that more reasonable, maybe something that actually grips the cord.
01:24:44 ◼ ► The third thing is, actually connecting and disconnecting the USB-C thing is more of a pain than MagSafe was. For me, definitely, you've got to see where the little thing is. I'm trying to be careful not to scrape up the side of the computer.
01:24:59 ◼ ► Because it's a new computer and a new power cord, it's still very stiff. It clicks in and it's actually kind of hard to plot. I'm sure that will change as the cable gets looser and looser over time. But right now, it's very stiff to get in and out of there.
01:25:15 ◼ ► And you have to pull it out straight, because you can't pull it out at an angle. This is not going to come out. You're just making your life more difficult. And the kids have much more difficulty than I do with it, because they're not as careful as I am.
01:25:29 ◼ ► And the holes are very small, and you have to be precisely aligned. They're just like, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape, until it eventually goes in, which just puts my teeth on edge. So, big downgrade in terms of the basic experience of, "Hey, go put the laptop away and plug it in," or, "Hey, go get the laptop."
01:25:48 ◼ ► I'll figure out the cord issues, but the plugging and unplugging, I feel like, is not going to get any better. In fact, it's probably going to get worse, and the thing will get looser and looser, so it'll come out more easily than it does right now.
01:26:01 ◼ ► I kind of like the fact that it stays in very well right now, because everything's new, because I don't have to worry about someone moving the laptop around and it becoming disconnected. But, ugh, downgrade.
01:26:13 ◼ ► To that end, something I meant to bring up earlier, and I completely forgot, I haven't really noticed this with USB-C charging cables quite as much, but when plugging in the Apple, whatever they call it, the Apple HDMI adapter, I forget what it's called, the official name for it.
01:26:33 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, I think that's it. Thanks. And the Monoprice SD card reader, that probably cost me 10 or 15 bucks. Plugging those into the iPad Pro, plugging it in was fine, but removing them was actually genuinely difficult.
01:26:48 ◼ ► The iPad Pro is more grippy than I remember the MacBook Adorable ever having been. And I don't know if it's just me, and I'm crazy, I was talking to, I think it was Gruber about this, and he said that he had seen a lot of the same.
01:27:04 ◼ ► But I'm curious, you know, if the listeners find that the iPad Pros are all so much grippier. Like, Marco, have you noticed this with things other than power cables, or have you only really plugged in power cables so far?
01:27:15 ◼ ► I mean, this is just what USB-C feels like. USB-C is, you know, it takes more effort to pull out the cable than Lightning and than most cables when the cables are new.
01:27:27 ◼ ► Over time, the cable ends, like the pins inside of them do wear down and get easier to pull out, often to a fault where they stop making good connections and you have to replace the cable, or at least turn it around if it's a C to C cable.
01:27:44 ◼ ► I mean, I haven't ever noticed my Switch, my GoPro, or my MacBook, adorable, all of which are USB-C. I've never noticed them grip onto something nearly as much as an iPad Pro has.
01:27:57 ◼ ► And it was striking how much of a difference it was with the same, like, dongles, because I use that same digital AV adapter with my MacBook, and the MacBook's barely holding onto it.
01:28:09 ◼ ► And again, it's a year older, so your point is fair, Marco, but I can't verbalize how strong a hold this thing had on my dongle. This is going nowhere good.
01:28:20 ◼ ► That's another thing about things being hard to pull out. It just encourages kids to pull by the cord even more, right? Because it is hard to pull out and because they're kids and have no patience.
01:28:28 ◼ ► Like, any chance I had of them trying to get them to pull any cord out by the stiff part of the connector, which is the correct way you should do it, people who are destroying your cords, they're like, "Forget it. They've just totally abandoned any pretense of ever trying to do that."
01:28:40 ◼ ► And with MagSafe, you could basically yank by the cord, because you just learn to kind of yank on an angle, and it disconnects, right?
01:28:47 ◼ ► They have not destroyed any MagSafe connector that we've had in the house, which is quite a feat, because they've destroyed many, many Lightning cables, right?
01:29:00 ◼ ► All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Fracture, Linode, and Change the Terms, and we'll talk to you next week.
01:29:42 ◼ ► E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Kasey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Anti-Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C USA-Syracusa, it's accidental (it's accidental)
01:30:28 ◼ ► Alright, so so in between the recording of the last episode in this one I released two YouTube videos
01:30:41 ◼ ► I had severe audio sync issues, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but for the most part otherwise it was fairly decent
01:30:56 ◼ ► First touch bar MacBook Pro a few technical things that I learned in making these videos
01:31:22 ◼ ► Bracket with a reflective piece of glass on top of it that you put an iPad under and the iPad was not included in the press
01:32:00 ◼ ► you know looking down to the left a little bit because that's where that's where my like bullet points were that I was reading from and
01:32:09 ◼ ► You know not particularly useful, and so I I bought the teleprompter right after making that video
01:32:17 ◼ ► Because I've never made another video after that until like you know last week or whatever
01:32:25 ◼ ► I will I'll do it right with teleprompter this time you know I'll write out bullet points of what I want to say and have them
01:32:42 ◼ ► Behind the teleprompter is basically like a big black nylon bag that like you put the camera into so the camera doesn't see
01:32:50 ◼ ► Reflections on the back of the teleprompter and that works fine when it's a camera lens that you're sticking in that black bag
01:32:57 ◼ ► It's really clumsy when it's an iPhone because you have to reach into it to see the screen and to push the buttons on the
01:33:09 ◼ ► Indeed with the Mac mini video. I did I didn't with the iPad video. I'll get to that in a second
01:33:14 ◼ ► I also decided I wanted to shoot all the day all the b-roll and everything with my iPhone
01:33:33 ◼ ► you know I had the stand so I could like you know put it on the stand and I can like hold the thing and
01:33:36 ◼ ► Move it around and and get good b-roll with the camera being steady and then also with the Mac mini video
01:33:41 ◼ ► I took a lot of shots where the camera was moving like panning around something and I did most of those using my
01:33:57 ◼ ► It's it was very very nice to have an app that had all the manual video controls readily accessible and and everything else
01:34:10 ◼ ► And it was just fantastic and I thought the main video as well one of the things you can do with filmic Pro is
01:34:15 ◼ ► Record video without audio. I figured well. I'm recording the audio onto my audio recorder. I
01:34:24 ◼ ► So the result was that the audio recorder had my audio track the video had no audio and
01:34:32 ◼ ► Therefore Final Cut could not automatically sync the audio to the video now. I thought well
01:34:55 ◼ ► That is that for anybody who doesn't know that is basically when like, you know, the audio
01:35:05 ◼ ► You'll have to like real line it at many different points because it'll just drip like you can sync it up at one point
01:35:17 ◼ ► So it's in sync again, and I had ridiculous drift. I again. I don't know why but it doesn't matter and
01:35:24 ◼ ► I tried to sync it up so much and I synced up so many things and like I think I had in in the
01:35:36 ◼ ► It was it was ridiculous and and I could I just couldn't quite get it right and that's why
01:35:42 ◼ ► When I published the final video, it was just the audio sync was off and that's that's a huge technical problem with it
01:35:53 ◼ ► Now if you happen to record the video on the camera with just like, you know recording off the camera mic
01:35:59 ◼ ► Which sounds like garbage, but if you happen to record that with the video and you have an audio track recorded by a nice microphone
01:36:04 ◼ ► Or audio recorder somewhere final cut will automatically sync that up with like, you know
01:36:08 ◼ ► You right-click on the clips and you say synchronize and it's it's it works seemingly perfectly, which I did
01:36:17 ◼ ► Yeah, so the audio sync on the Mac mini video was a mess and that's why because I didn't record the audio with the video
01:36:22 ◼ ► Because I was using filmic Pro and I didn't record audio for any of the b-roll shots because I didn't you know
01:36:27 ◼ ► I wasn't gonna use it. I was gonna use the one continuous take of audio from my like, you know
01:36:31 ◼ ► Stand-up shot even though I was sitting down, but I think they call it a stand-up and and then you know
01:36:35 ◼ ► The b-roll shots are gonna be silent and I just I didn't enable the audio recording for that big long sit-down shot
01:36:49 ◼ ► car stuff which actually coincidentally I am going to be doing that all day tomorrow if all goes according to plan, but
01:36:55 ◼ ► One thing I've learned is that whenever I start recording this is outside or in a car where there's a lot of noise
01:37:01 ◼ ► Typically whenever I start recording I you know start recording the audio I start recording the video
01:37:13 ◼ ► Very loudly to make sure that every audio recording both the video audio and the you know, the lavalier audio
01:37:29 ◼ ► Something like that when you when you've done the small things you need to do on your end to give Final Cut what it needs
01:37:44 ◼ ► But if you don't give it, you know that tool if you don't give it is the audio to sync off of then
01:37:52 ◼ ► Having been through of videos with crappy audio. I'm just glad that I am not alone in this
01:37:57 ◼ ► Yeah, welcome to the club and and I had you know, I really wanted my audio to sound good
01:38:04 ◼ ► I did you know, my my first my MacBook Pro video two years ago. I was using a lavalier mic and
01:38:17 ◼ ► Road link wireless and whatever might comes with that and I honestly I hate the road link wireless. It's it
01:38:32 ◼ ► spectrum instead of like one of the you know, TV signal ones that the other ones use and
01:38:36 ◼ ► So there's just constant interference from everything like it's just not a very good setup
01:38:40 ◼ ► So I didn't want to reuse that although I did try because you know the issue with getting good sound
01:38:51 ◼ ► But what matters a lot more is proximity to your mouth and you know, I've told you this
01:38:56 ◼ ► As you're making your videos like yep a crappy microphone close to your mouth almost always will sound better or will be able to sound better
01:39:14 ◼ ► You can either use some kind of lavalier or maybe like some kind of discrete headset thing
01:39:19 ◼ ► Which usually is not very discreet and lavaliers have their own challenges to like, you know placement and picking up
01:39:26 ◼ ► If you turn your head at all lavaliers dramatically change the way they sound and dramatically pick you up less or more
01:39:38 ◼ ► You can pull some tricks with wardrobe to try to hide lavaliers, but you don't always succeed and it's it's tricky
01:39:54 ◼ ► Something 600 maybe I bought it two years ago. It's like a video microphone. That's shotgun style
01:40:03 ◼ ► The boom got a little closer the microphone that I'm using for that. Oh, I even tried like my awesome podcasting microphone
01:40:10 ◼ ► Just like, you know, basically boomed above my head slightly out of frame. What ended up being the best was that Sennheiser?
01:40:16 ◼ ► MKE whatever on a boom a little bit of frame like basically like above my head pointing kind of diagonally down in my mouth
01:40:32 ◼ ► So I tried like, you know putting out all my sound dampening panel like I have all this acoustic foam
01:40:41 ◼ ► You could only buy a certain box size and so I have a lot of extra that's just like normally lives in the basement
01:40:46 ◼ ► So I I brought it upstairs and I basically laid acoustic foam all over the floor of the room
01:40:55 ◼ ► Just trying to just trying to reduce reflections around the room and make it sound less echoey so that a microphone that is
01:41:00 ◼ ► Two feet away from my mouth can actually sound like it's closer to my mouth and I succeeded somewhat. I
01:41:07 ◼ ► Still ended up post-processing the audio with isotope to run a little bit of D reverb which helped a little bit
01:41:14 ◼ ► I can't use too much of it because because it starts sounding weird if you use too much of it
01:41:18 ◼ ► It's kind of artifact II but I did use a little bit of D reverb a little bit of EQ as well
01:41:23 ◼ ► Because I'm a audio nerd for podcasting and so I'm not gonna just leave my voice on EQ'd like an animal
01:41:28 ◼ ► And and the combination of those plus a little bit of noise removal just to get a little bit of you know
01:41:53 ◼ ► I realized after I was setting this up and I took a picture and I sent it to you guys of like the state of
01:42:07 ◼ ► Everywhere and part of it's my fault because I had a lot of crap out just because I was working with a lot of crap
01:42:12 ◼ ► You know during that week and part of it is just because like I had unload all this video stuff
01:42:17 ◼ ► Take it all out of the closet unbox the teleprompter, you know, set it all up have foam panels all over the floor have lights
01:42:22 ◼ ► You know on sitting on various things to boost up my light a little bit. It was just a mess and
01:42:31 ◼ ► taking it all down and and you know after after like the shoot was done and I and I figured I had my take and I
01:42:37 ◼ ► Reviewed it and look pretty good and I started started the edit and I'm taking all the stuff down and I'm like, you know, I
01:42:41 ◼ ► Don't want to do videos anymore. Like I this this is just time for another two-year break
01:42:47 ◼ ► Yeah, buy a bunch of stuff right now put it in the closet in two years from now. You can make some more videos
01:42:52 ◼ ► So I was this is after the Mac mini videos this I still made the iPad video after I don't get to that
01:43:16 ◼ ► then I posted it and when I when I released it and it's the blog post with it and like and like I
01:43:23 ◼ ► Like it was it got a very strong reception way stronger reception than I thought and this is for the Mac mini which you know
01:43:31 ◼ ► it was I was very I was blown away by the positive reaction of the Mac mini video and I'm like
01:43:43 ◼ ► Like I need some kind of like something I can leave set up or at least leave mostly set up
01:43:52 ◼ ► To polish my process a little bit to improve to fix the issues like the audio sync I had
01:44:00 ◼ ► actually want to do more of this and also I think professionally I think it's a good idea to
01:44:05 ◼ ► You know to grow my audience in a in an area that I don't have one yet and that area would be YouTube and video
01:44:22 ◼ ► And so we basically move the furniture around in the office and and she said why don't you just leave the camera?
01:44:27 ◼ ► tripod and everything set up like just leave it up like we'll find a place to put it in the office and
01:44:32 ◼ ► so we did so we we like turn the whole office sideways made, you know rearrange this whole midsection of the room and
01:44:46 ◼ ► Actually make a video with way less setup and way less disruption to the office and then way less tear down afterwards
01:44:53 ◼ ► What I put in the tripod for the new video setup is one of our Canon 5d mark d or 5d mark force
01:45:03 ◼ ► Usually TIFF ends up only using one like we bought a pair because the previous 5d mark twos
01:45:12 ◼ ► Usually she brings the Sony and one 5d mark 2 or mark 4 so she so we basically have one 5d mark 4 that we don't
01:45:19 ◼ ► Use very much. So I mounted that like semi permanently as my video camera in the tripod
01:45:25 ◼ ► Works way better than teleprompter. I have a nice lens for it. That's good for video. Nice 24-70. So I'm like, alright
01:45:32 ◼ ► Try number two iPad video. I'm still shooting all the b-roll with my iPhone because it's just better and easier
01:45:39 ◼ ► But I could now I will set up the Canon and it's and it's nice too because like the Canon I
01:45:44 ◼ ► Have like a little tiny extra monitor a big shout out to the company Neewer. I think it's pronounced neewer
01:46:11 ◼ ► I have two little lights for the iPad mini video both Neewer lights, but they are they are battery powered only and
01:46:16 ◼ ► Batteries are a pain and I'm charging batteries and managing and swapping batteries is a pain
01:46:26 ◼ ► that could just plug into the wall and I could just leave them put into the wall most of the time and when I want to
01:46:42 ◼ ► You can adjust on the back is basically it's like a panel of alternating white and yellow LEDs
01:46:46 ◼ ► So you're basically adjusting the brightness of either the whites or the yellows and you can achieve all different color temperatures
01:46:50 ◼ ► they're super bright and it was only 150 bucks for two of them with stands and AC adapters and
01:46:59 ◼ ► $400 for that kind of light for just the light without the stand with heads like okay, so this is
01:47:06 ◼ ► I'm not I don't need a 400 our light yet. I'm not to that point. Hopefully I never get there. So anyway
01:47:11 ◼ ► So I got I got my new Neewer lights I got my camera in my fancy video tripod I bought two years ago and
01:47:18 ◼ ► I'm just very very happy with that setup. Now like it's easy to turn on it's easy to set up. I
01:47:33 ◼ ► I don't know what I'm gonna do about this yet. I probably should just use the Sony because it's a way better video camera
01:47:40 ◼ ► So I should probably just tolerate the Canon but the Canon does have a couple of issues that I ran into with the iPad video
01:47:54 ◼ ► The iPhone records its 30 frames per second as 30 frames per second exactly 30 frames per second
01:48:04 ◼ ► so whatever I set the Final Cut project to one of them has to be like reinterpreted and so
01:48:11 ◼ ► Moving around the Final Cut timeline dropping in the clips previewing them was way slower when I made the iPad video
01:48:18 ◼ ► Then when I did all the footage on the phone and therefore nothing was requiring any kind of frame rate conversion or anything like that
01:48:25 ◼ ► So problem number one is the frame rate between my b-roll camera and the Canon can't match up
01:48:31 ◼ ► At least not not if I stick with 4k, which I do want to so it was the Canon that got interpolated, right? I
01:48:42 ◼ ► So I'm just looking at the iPad video now and now that you mentioned that one of them has interpolation
01:48:54 ◼ ► So the Canon the the Canon shot in the chair, I actually had to rotate it slightly. So it's like it's like one degree rotated
01:49:05 ◼ ► That and and movie people are always complaining that things that claim to shoot or display
01:49:43 ◼ ► I insert the very last b-roll clip I inserted I noticed that on the far left and right sides are these thin red strips
01:50:08 ◼ ► Every b-roll clip by like, you know five percent or something and then make sure it fit like a you know
01:50:13 ◼ ► Pan it slightly to make sure it fits, you know, make sure nothing's weird getting cut off and everything and also
01:50:34 ◼ ► took final cut a very long time to render at full resolution like in the preview window and
01:50:40 ◼ ► it also takes a long time to pull off a bestie cards and everything and so it's just like
01:50:48 ◼ ► I'm going to have to do something about the frame rate issue. I think if I want that to
01:51:02 ◼ ► That's not like a super high-end one or something because it doesn't need to be for my purposes. I don't know but
01:51:10 ◼ ► I'm otherwise very very happy with this setup the the iPad video. I had a similar audio set up people keep asking me about my audio
01:51:27 ◼ ► I went so there's this there's this wonderful YouTube channel called by a guy called Curtis Judd
01:51:36 ◼ ► he does all sorts of tutorial videos and reviews of camera lighting gear and audio stuff for video and
01:51:46 ◼ ► I've learned a lot from them and I I went and bought his mic that he uses for this purpose
01:51:51 ◼ ► Which is the audio technica AT4053B. It's like $600. So this is not something I can recommend to everybody
01:52:11 ◼ ► Post-processing with isotope to reduce the reverb a little bit and to denoise a little bit because it is still
01:52:18 ◼ ► but one of the good things about using the Canon as the camera instead of using my iPhone is that
01:52:37 ◼ ► but I was able to use almost none of it because it was just the 2x lens has such a has a narrower aperture and
01:52:48 ◼ ► So I ended up I think the Mac mini video. I think all of the iPhone video I have for that
01:52:56 ◼ ► And as and the like the the sit-down shot where I'm talking is also using the wide lens as far as I remember
01:53:03 ◼ ► The problem is that if you have a boom mic that needs to be as close to your mouth as possible
01:53:19 ◼ ► So the closer you're willing to zoom that lens in the closer you can get the mic to the to you to you
01:53:29 ◼ ► Wanted one of the reasons I switched to the Canon for the next video was this and I'm not gonna switch back to the iPhone
01:53:40 ◼ ► It's so noisy and I and it's so awkward to use that inside the teleprompter. I'm not a big fan of that
01:53:49 ◼ ► But it's but some of the point I like that's that's one of the reasons the audio was so much better in the iPad video
01:53:57 ◼ ► But also the microphone was able to be a lot closer to me and it was a better microphone
01:54:23 ◼ ► You've suffered the same exact problems that I have although you have also accelerated probably even quicker than I have in fixing them
01:54:30 ◼ ► In the first video as you discuss the audio was not great in the second video. I I think that the framing is great
01:54:43 ◼ ► But you have not yet solved the problem that I am getting better at solving but also have also not solved which is being more
01:54:59 ◼ ► But it's taken me what for videos to get to the point that I'm not I don't think it's a problem for me anymore
01:55:13 ◼ ► Having the teleprompter if it is more than bullets and you had previously meant said it was just bullets for one of the videos
01:55:20 ◼ ► If it is more than bullets, I wonder if that's kind of letting you down and and if it is just bullets
01:55:25 ◼ ► and you just need to crank up the silly or maybe not silly isn't the right word for it, but crank up the the
01:55:33 ◼ ► You weren't being a robot but you were way more robotic than I know you to be and that's because again having just been there
01:55:47 ◼ ► I mean look at me when I did my voiceover stuff for my first few and actually even the most recent video
01:55:55 ◼ ► Energetic as my other stuff because I am doing it in the house oftentimes at night oftentimes
01:56:01 ◼ ► I get you're sleeping your voiceover is like not trying to wake up your kid. Exactly. Hey, I really love this car. Yeah
01:56:10 ◼ ► The problem is even if you recognize it, which it sounds like you already did recognize it
01:56:14 ◼ ► It is a hard thing to fix it just takes time, but that is the only thing that that I was let down by
01:56:25 ◼ ► You need to just like me you need to be less of a robot and it's something I'm working on and I'm sure it's something
01:56:30 ◼ ► That you're gonna work on too and and for clarification and so like what was on the teleprompter?
01:56:39 ◼ ► Like so I remember like good wording that I wanted to say one of the key differences between the two is
01:56:52 ◼ ► Basically, whenever there's a whenever there's a b-roll shot in the neck mini video chances are what you're coming back to after that is a different
01:57:02 ◼ ► because with the Mac mini video I had much I had more of the sentence is fully written out and
01:57:15 ◼ ► For and and so I ended up having a tweak a lot like having like, you know add new lines between things or you know
01:57:26 ◼ ► But you know, I adjusted the speed in the app because you can adjust the speed but you know
01:57:31 ◼ ► It's still it's still like a fixed speed if you're doing it that way for the iPad video for the second one. I
01:57:54 ◼ ► It's a box you put on the floor with two buttons on it and you can map those two buttons to whatever you want them
01:58:07 ◼ ► So I could at any point I could just pause it if I needed more time on something and then unpause it
01:58:12 ◼ ► and that helped a lot with like being able to deliver things a little more smoothly and you know if I and it allowed me to
01:58:20 ◼ ► certain things because I could just pause it and riff for a second and then unpause it and it would it would resume instead of
01:58:25 ◼ ► Having to like try to like keep up with oh, it's all I'm gonna miss it. You know, I better keep going
01:58:45 ◼ ► Record with two cars and then drive home and I basically have one day to get all this done. And so because of that
01:59:09 ◼ ► I briefly looked into doing a teleprompter kind of thing and what I think I'm just gonna do is just read it right before I
01:59:21 ◼ ► 15 takes and eventually I find one that I think is pretty decent the whole way through and occasionally, you know, like you said
01:59:27 ◼ ► Once or twice I've swapped between takes in using b-roll, but generally speaking if it's you know me
01:59:32 ◼ ► Outside of the car especially in the intro and conclusion. I'll just do one shot maybe 15 times
01:59:39 ◼ ► But I'll do one shot start to finish and and so I'm very interested to see how this goes tomorrow because I've put a lot
01:59:53 ◼ ► I would also say too like I don't I don't think you would have much use for a teleprompter because I
01:59:57 ◼ ► Can't imagine it would be it would work very well outdoors and you tend to do all of your stand-ups outdoors
02:00:14 ◼ ► The same comments I always have on all these videos more b-roll less you I don't need to see you
02:00:20 ◼ ► That's you did have tons of b-roll as compared to your previous one, which is good big upgrade
02:00:29 ◼ ► Talk and show me the thing that you're telling me and it was like I had the moment that I always have in all these
02:00:34 ◼ ► Videos all cases and all yours the one that sticks out to me the most is when you were talking about how?
02:00:40 ◼ ► Apps don't like fill the the 12.9 inch iPad like they look awkward because the screen is so big
02:00:53 ◼ ► Don't tell me that and don't show me an app show me what you it's a thing that we can't do on
02:01:00 ◼ ► But on video you can finally I was like fine. I'm gonna get to see the awkward app layouts that he's talking about
02:01:17 ◼ ► But I because like I mean I was in manual focus mode and I had Tiff sit in the chair first and I focused
02:01:25 ◼ ► Maybe you're leaning forward or back more but your your I your eyeballs look soft as compared to the the nose of the the fake
02:01:31 ◼ ► yeah, I mean and I think I could have also been just like it could have either been lighting or it could have been a
02:01:36 ◼ ► Result of of the of the alien rotation of the video that I had to do everything who knows
02:01:41 ◼ ► Yeah, and the whole the whole idea both of you that you have to have a single take stand up like forget about that
02:01:56 ◼ ► Don't put this pressure on yourself to perform the soliloquy in a single take and doing it 15 times like again
02:02:07 ◼ ► But very briefly and then it's off to whatever it is that we're talking about and this person is still talking
02:02:14 ◼ ► But once I get the idea of you're in a chair and you have a dog and you're talking about a thing
02:02:21 ◼ ► I thought I thought that most of the bureau work really well like for the most part you were showing me
02:02:34 ◼ ► The action shots the here here you are using your iPad doing a thing in various environments
02:02:45 ◼ ► Where we don't have to hear the audio from that because you're just doing the voiceover
02:03:05 ◼ ► If hops is getting adequately compensated for his performance work as a part of the screen Actors Guild
02:03:18 ◼ ► I don't think I've seen them in real life the little little dolls of your family that you've got on the chair
02:03:24 ◼ ► I did notice also that you had to rearrange the room like I didn't realize it was for the purposes of the video
02:03:29 ◼ ► I thought oh, I guess they just rearrange their room at some point since last time I was there
02:03:57 ◼ ► Maybe even like Stephen Hackett have a camera up above the thing so you can have sort of a
02:04:03 ◼ ► Now switch to the overhead camera, and you continue to talk about the thing that you're manipulating your hand
02:04:08 ◼ ► But I get to see it from above anyway. There was all just vague thoughts, but in general
02:04:21 ◼ ► But it really makes it very difficult to watch the video because you're like is something wrong with my computer
02:04:26 ◼ ► It's it's like it's this video lagging is this some sort of problem with the HTML 5 video, but it's like no
02:04:34 ◼ ► And there were a number of good excuses for why some of the things you just mentioned are the way they are or were
02:04:46 ◼ ► I wanted to hit it because it's like this is the first time they've given me review hardware
02:04:53 ◼ ► But I'm like I wanted to really make sure like I woke up at 6 in the morning to make sure I hit that embargo
02:04:59 ◼ ► Like to hit publish and everything like and I really wanted to do it right so I had that kind of hard
02:05:04 ◼ ► deadline there and then with the iPad one we were going out of town for the weekend and
02:05:16 ◼ ► About 15 minutes before we left and I drove for two hours like it's like I didn't see any of the feedback
02:05:30 ◼ ► we were going to Philly for the weekend and we were like oh this is when we're going and
02:05:33 ◼ ► part of the reason why there wasn't b-roll showing how the apps are too wide on the 12 9 is because I had thought of that as
02:05:59 ◼ ► But like I wanted to get this video out while it was still iPad launch week. I wanted to be reasonably current
02:06:06 ◼ ► I thought it was ended up being kind of a good thing that I only had a very small amount of time to do it in
02:06:15 ◼ ► Probably would have even done a whole different set of takes for the main stand up because like there were things in the main stand
02:06:26 ◼ ► Like if I had more time, I would have reshot that whole thing just to fix stuff like that
02:06:38 ◼ ► Closer to a perfectionist and just try to reshoot everything do everything exactly perfectly and it would take way too long
02:06:47 ◼ ► You know like and then they put all this stuff back in the closet for two years. So like
02:07:01 ◼ ► So that was very nice and then I do agree with you that I don't have the ideal furniture for this
02:07:11 ◼ ► But long term I do agree with you that like some kind of desk or table in front of me and maybe I could be
02:07:18 ◼ ► Would be probably better. That's a much bigger operation than just moving the stuff in the room around
02:07:32 ◼ ► you know more takes and more perfecting the shots you have I would concentrate the perfectionism on kind of like the
02:07:41 ◼ ► when things are in storyboard where it's just a bunch of like sketches up on pieces of paper up on a big board because that's
02:07:51 ◼ ► Rearranging that and then and then even if your execution once you finally come out with the way it's going to be done once you have
02:07:56 ◼ ► All the shots laid out then if your execution is not great because you don't have a lot of time fine
02:07:59 ◼ ► it's much better to invest the time into getting the correct flow of shots and script and
02:08:14 ◼ ► you know, I mean like that the the more important harder thing to get right is the the general script and structure of shots
02:08:24 ◼ ► especially like we don't care how beautifully framed and how nice we can see you sitting on the chairs are and we do want to
02:08:38 ◼ ► Get getting the shot sequence and the script right is so much more important than the individual shot
02:08:45 ◼ ► The next time you do a video that's where I would invest it because honestly the audio and video quality is
02:09:14 ◼ ► The vast majority of the time that you know of like the overall production of these videos. I wonder if people have other
02:09:24 ◼ ► You just kind of get used to it and you just kind of like go in there you say a bunch of stuff and then you
02:09:31 ◼ ► If you're not on camera not expected to do a continuous take stand up and you're just seeing someone's hands anyway
02:09:40 ◼ ► If there's a particular turn of phrase you want to say have that on a note card somewhere
02:09:43 ◼ ► You can go but in general like when I watch these technology videos, I'm thinking nobody scripted this
02:09:49 ◼ ► They talked about it for a while and then they cut it together and cut out the boring parts and spiced it together and maybe
02:09:55 ◼ ► Did one additional audio recording of a thing they forgot to say and that's it. They were done like it's a it's a high bar
02:10:00 ◼ ► I mean, I think it's more important unfortunately for Casey to script it because it's like car reviews are
02:10:05 ◼ ► More of a structured thing and you can't really like ramble while you're driving because this you know
02:10:20 ◼ ► you know make sure that we're looking at b-roll or your hands manipulating a device and not your face in your mouth moving and you can
02:10:32 ◼ ► And I do intend to get less scripted as I go like these I scripted it simply because I was brand new at it
02:10:40 ◼ ► And and I didn't like I wanted to hit certain points and I wanted to be careful on how I word of them
02:11:02 ◼ ► So I arrange them and you know make an outline, you know make some actual like, you know
02:11:19 ◼ ► There are two or three things like in an intro or a conclusion that I really really want to say because I think they're clever
02:11:26 ◼ ► They're funny or what have you and then everything else is a lot more malleable than I think it is and
02:11:32 ◼ ► And as long as I nail the two or three things that I'm really really entranced with whatever they may be
02:11:54 ◼ ► That was like a favorite moment for a lot of people in the video, so yeah, I guess I'll start you know scripting less
02:12:00 ◼ ► Let me discourage you and Stephen Hackett. Please stop throwing things on video. You just you're gonna break something. It's very upsetting
02:12:07 ◼ ► He's always throwing stuff in his video now. You're doing it. It was a very soft carpet. Don't throw your hardware
02:12:13 ◼ ► Yeah, yours was less egregious than us. He threw like the $300 Apple book. I remember that that was just throwing his iPads
02:12:21 ◼ ► He's throwing devices on top of each other into the frame of the camera. It's like stop stop throwing your hardware. It's expensive. It's fragile
02:12:39 ◼ ► He does wonderful backpack reviews and stuff on his YouTube channel and actually I do want to I mentioned last week
02:12:45 ◼ ► I've been on kind of a backpack Odyssey, and I do want to do a couple of videos on my backpack stuff
02:12:50 ◼ ► And it's gonna be very hard, you know similar to like how it's hard for Casey did not just try to be Doug DeMuro
02:12:55 ◼ ► It's gonna be very hard for me to not try to be chase Reeves because I'm not chase Reeves and I could never be
02:12:59 ◼ ► But I do want to do stuff like that also like it isn't just gonna be like here's the newest Apple thing
02:13:06 ◼ ► Cuz I don't have one Apple didn't give me one and I'm not gonna go buy one just for that
02:13:12 ◼ ► but I do want to do other things like, you know backpack stuff and travel stuff and maybe coffee stuff and
02:13:18 ◼ ► Other kinds of stuff. I don't know you did a demure injury realized on your on your iPad per review
02:13:32 ◼ ► This is the whatever it's that they all start with that every single one. That's it. I mean, that's a stick
02:13:37 ◼ ► He's got he's got a format and that's the format but you unknowingly exactly match the format damn it
02:13:45 ◼ ► You just watch my four videos over and over and over again. You don't you don't do anything. You're interested
02:14:05 ◼ ► Well, just think of me and wish me luck tomorrow as I try to cover two cars in the span of like six hours
02:14:11 ◼ ► Well, I usually have a week you could do three cars in that amount. He could he could I'm not Doug DeMuro
02:14:17 ◼ ► Well, but again, like that will probably help you the same way my deadlines helped me some credit
02:14:23 ◼ ► well the thing is the problem I have with it is that I think it will help me in the broad like in in the
02:14:32 ◼ ► But I am really scared that I will take all this time and and take some time from a friend of mine
02:14:48 ◼ ► I won't have enough to make one good video out of which song I'm intending for this one video to be both cars
02:14:54 ◼ ► I'm not intending to get two videos worth of stuff out of this but but I'm scared that I'm gonna spend
02:15:08 ◼ ► You can always fall back to I mean, I don't know how much you've done this in other videos
02:15:11 ◼ ► but this seems to me the the easier route is you've got a bunch of footage and maybe you've got a bunch of audio with
02:15:19 ◼ ► But it has the moments that you wanted in it that you narrate over footage that already is health has its own audio
02:15:28 ◼ ► Commenting on the video and that is the final video because if you just present the video as is like it's too like it's not
02:15:46 ◼ ► Record a voiceover that explains what's going on in the video that you couldn't explain in the moment
02:15:50 ◼ ► But you you know you caught some funny moment that you showed something or you're explaining
02:15:53 ◼ ► What is not very apparent on the video and the fact that it's revealing about the cars or whatever so you can always do that
02:16:07 ◼ ► Potentially a second shooter, which is both good and bad because that makes me even more self-conscious about all the stupid things. I'm saying
02:16:15 ◼ ► And in a lot more of a plan that I've ever had before but still kind of shooting for that from the hip
02:16:21 ◼ ► So we shall see I will say dealing with the YouTube back end. It is as bad as everyone says
02:16:28 ◼ ► Like hmm one of the things so like I I decided you know I wanted to make sure now that we taking this more seriously
02:16:45 ◼ ► Maybe not always automatic, so I wanted to make sure like I want that I want to get my URL setup
02:16:57 ◼ ► Once I found out how it's like like I can't just be slash mark arm. I have to be like slash mark
02:17:25 ◼ ► Characters to get my name that is not taken in these other places and turns out oh well
02:17:45 ◼ ► And so eventually I learn I have to be a partner so I go in our how do I become a partner?
02:18:00 ◼ ► He's like I don't I'm not gonna make money from this in any meaningful way for a long time if ever so like I'm just like
02:18:15 ◼ ► Unless I turn on ads basically and so I alright fine. I'll turn on ads so I applied to the essence account
02:18:22 ◼ ► I get an email day later saying you already have an Adsense account limit one per person and the one I had is the old one
02:18:49 ◼ ► How do I close that because that's I don't want to reuse that account that's for overcast. It's a whole different business
02:18:54 ◼ ► It's a different. You know LLC like I just I want a separate one for just me as you know as the youtuber
02:19:09 ◼ ► It'll it says you know because in in the in the email that you get that says you have a duplicate account
02:19:17 ◼ ► And you can follow everyone of those instructions and the things that it says are there aren't there
02:19:25 ◼ ► It says to go here to this page and then click the button, but the button it says will be there isn't there
02:19:33 ◼ ► Eventually, I think I found like a Quora post that linked directly to some like customer service form on Google site that you could fill
02:19:40 ◼ ► Out to request cancellation of your of your account, which is linked to seemingly nowhere else
02:19:46 ◼ ► I did eventually figure it fill that out like after verifying is this even real like am I getting fished like what?
02:20:01 ◼ ► We've canceled your old account. We'll be sending you $18 somehow, and then I finally could get my partner program
02:20:22 ◼ ► I hope for monetization that I don't want so I can just get the URL I want it is a total disaster
02:20:33 ◼ ► Syracuse so the spelling is in the theme song for this podcast and you will find my beautiful correct URL for my youtube channel
02:20:46 ◼ ► The most important thing you can do with every service is reserve a good URL for yourself
02:20:50 ◼ ► So let this be a lesson to you Marco always reserve a cool URL for yourself even when you have no plans to make videos
02:20:55 ◼ ► And I put up a new video since we last recorded - by the way oh yeah, no audio sync issues to speak of
02:21:06 ◼ ► So sorry about that Snipes awakening doesn't features any pictures of me or anything in my house or any products
02:21:22 ◼ ► These like you know special events special achievements. You've gotten and and I'm curious like you know both well
02:21:29 ◼ ► You haven't watched my videos. Why do you have this question? You should go to my channel watch all my videos
02:21:32 ◼ ► I'm watching this now, and I don't know what's going on your view count will be significant
02:21:39 ◼ ► Significant contribution will be lost in the noise in a popular channel, but in my channel
02:21:44 ◼ ► I'll see your video like look Marco watched it the number went up by one so I am curious like you know
02:22:06 ◼ ► As many people have noted in the years since the ps4 has come out when they introduced the ps4
02:22:11 ◼ ► And it showed that one of the buttons on the controller the precious controller real estate had been dedicated to a button
02:22:17 ◼ ► Simply had the word share under it like the share button of all the things you're gonna put on the controller a button called share
02:22:25 ◼ ► How dumb is that what you will come to regret this that you wasted a button on the controller face for?
02:22:36 ◼ ► And you make it really easy to share anything cool that has happened who cross fades on your on your console
02:22:53 ◼ ► It saves the last like configurable amount of video likes of the last 15 minutes or whatever that I've done
02:22:58 ◼ ► And then every once in a while. I pull that video off and I cut together into some kind of
02:23:07 ◼ ► Cool things that have happened to me or that I've done or that are interesting to me in destiny
02:23:13 ◼ ► And there's no way I would do it if it was like there was some kind of burden where I had to like get some
02:23:18 ◼ ► Sort of recording equipment and premeditate and think I'm gonna I'm gonna record some stuff or whatever
02:23:22 ◼ ► This is just like I play my PlayStation all the time. I play destiny a ton and if something interesting happens
02:23:30 ◼ ► Then every few months I have all this footage and I can put it together and make something out of it