00:00:00 ◼ ► Sorry about the small delay there, we were chit-chatting. I guess that's kind of what the show is. Yeah. But we were chit-chatting about things that no one cares about.
00:00:06 ◼ ► And this is where somebody in the chat says, "No, we care about everything, of course." Which is very kind, but in this case, not true. Why don't you publish the unedited show? Because we swear like f***ing sailors, that's why. Also, it isn't as good. That's the biggest reason. It isn't as good. It sounds worse, there's talk-overs, there's boring stuff that I edit out, like, it's just not as good.
00:00:31 ◼ ► The people want to hear some thoughts about the bagel emoji. Is there much debate? I mean, it is basically depicting like a lender's bagel. I never thought of it that way, but that's so true. And that's a terrible insult, which I know was not an accident. I don't think it looks like a lender's bagel at all.
00:00:50 ◼ ► John, I'm curious, I look at this and I see a number of problems with this bagel. People who aren't familiar with bagels don't see any problem with it, which is interesting, because emoji are just... So you mean Californians? Yeah, like, you wouldn't...
00:01:04 ◼ ► They're supposed to more or less be universal, and I'm sure every item, were we to look at it, we would be like... Like the people do with the animals, so like that animal has the wrong number of body segments, like the wrong number of legs, like there's major problems with a lot of emoji. Especially since they show up small and people have different ideas how to draw them. So I don't think the bagel is any worse than... It's probably not as bad as an animal with the wrong number of body segments or legs, for example. All sorts of things are messed up.
00:01:28 ◼ ► But anyway, bagel you would think if Apple is drawing them and they're in America, maybe they'd know about bagels, but whoever drew this maybe doesn't.
00:01:38 ◼ ► There's a couple of problems. The first problem I think is... So bagels are... They look like rings, right? But you can draw all sorts of rings. You could draw a ring that's really, really skinny with a huge hole in it. You could draw them with a tiny, tiny hole in the middle. And the proportion of the hole to the diameter of the torus to the diameter of the entire bagel, there is a certain range in which something looks like a bagel.
00:02:07 ◼ ► And if you start moving outside that range, it starts looking, in the case of this thing, more like a donut. And you would think, "Isn't a donut the same as a bagel?" If you're not familiar with bagels, you might think that. But the answer is no.
00:02:17 ◼ ► Well, to be fair, it is a really difficult design challenge to try to design something that can look recognizably like a bagel instead of a donut at very small sizes. I get the challenge there, and I think the way they've done it here is very clever in that way. I don't think donut... First of all, because you can see the little place where... The little butt crack on top where the ends of the dough would have been joined together allegedly by hand.
00:02:41 ◼ ► So it's kind of like a seam in the bagel, which handmade bagels always have. That helps a lot, but I think the biggest thing that helps is the way it's sliced in half. You would never slice a donut that way. So that, to me, is the best disambiguation to say, "This is not a donut, this is a bagel," because of the way it is sliced and arranged in the frame.
00:03:01 ◼ ► That's why they made it that way, I'm sure. But the proportions of the Taurus volume... It's the wrong proportions, right?
00:03:11 ◼ ► It's the New York bagel. But it also looks like the way the bagels that were in my high school cafeteria in Ohio. Like food service crap bagels that are just... You serve them to high school kids for breakfast. It looks like that, proportionally, and in a number of other ways as well, but proportionally, that is roughly the proportions that those bagels had.
00:03:33 ◼ ► And it's not the same proportions as a lender's bagel, because lender's bagels are different portions. Anyway, it's too regular, so the diameter of the Taurus all the way around is very uniform, even with the bud in there. So that's not what real bagels look like or should look like.
00:03:48 ◼ ► But the biggest thing that jumps out at me at the size that we're all looking at, which is very large, like it's not normal size, is the texture, the cutaway part. You can see it's cut, and you can see the inside of the bagel.
00:04:02 ◼ ► And that texture looks for all the world like white bread. It's the wrong texture for a bagel.
00:04:09 ◼ ► It doesn't even look like white bread. White bread has more air bubbles than this. This is so dense. It actually looks kind of like... Like a pound cake? Yeah, like a bundt cake.
00:04:26 ◼ ► Yeah, or like angel food cake. And then the crust that they're trying to show, it looks a lot more like a cake than it does like a donut. So everything about it just says, "I'm either a terrible bagel, or I'm not really a bagel. I'm like a stunt dessert." You know when they make those desserts that look like one kind of food, but they're really made of cake?
00:04:45 ◼ ► This is like a bagel, but actually it's a cake bagel. Like it's actually a cake, but it's made to look like a bagel. The outside is all fondant, and the inside is angel food cake.
00:04:54 ◼ ► I give them pretty good credit. So not only did the slicing thing show that it isn't a donut unambiguously, but I do give them credit. I think the general coloration and shading on the outside of it is reasonable. I think they did a good job of that to make it look mostly bagel-like and not like any other round bread products.
00:05:14 ◼ ► I disagree. The color is off. I'm trying to place what's wrong about it. Maybe it's like...
00:05:23 ◼ ► It identifies clearly as a bagel. You are right about the finish though, and I'll get to that in a second. But coloration and shading, I think they did a pretty good job. But I agree. The density of the interior is what sets this off as like, "That looks crazy." It looks like it's made out of styrofoam or something.
00:05:42 ◼ ► It's definitely the uncanny valley. The correct definition of the uncanny valley is you get really, really close to what you think it's supposed to look like, and that's what's so upsetting. If you're really far in the uncanny valley thing, if you look nothing like a human, everybody's fine. And if you look exactly like a human, everybody's fine. But as you get really, really, really close to a human but not quite human, that's the uncanny valley.
00:06:00 ◼ ► So this gets close to a bagel, again with the slicing and everything, but it's so close to the parts that are wrong, I think it fixes it so easily. Change the proportions slightly, make it more uneven, fix that top texture and adjust the color slightly.
00:06:13 ◼ ► And make the outside of it less uniform. Because it's practically like a perfect circle on the outside of this thing. No actual bagel has this kind of perfect... The top has at least got the butt little thing to try to make it a little bit disproportionate.
00:06:26 ◼ ► But the bottom looks like just a perfect, ideal solid of pound cake or whatever the hell it's supposed to be. It was formed in a cake pan in a mold.
00:06:35 ◼ ► This is a kind of bagel, you'd see this at a hotel breakfast buffet, next to the big guillotine thing that you can slice it in half and then put it through the belt toaster. Real good bagels, as I've mentioned before on this show, have a slight sheen to them on the outside because they are typically boiled in water that contains some kind of sugar, usually a malt syrup or something like that.
00:07:00 ◼ ► They're boiled in water before they're baked and it gives them this coating of whatever the sweetener is in that water that gives it a slight shine. That is one of the major differentiating factors of a bagel versus other round bread products and this doesn't appear to have that.
00:07:16 ◼ ► And this is setting aside the issue, it also doesn't appear to have any seeds, which I think is a missed opportunity, but I'll set that aside because seeds are, I feel like it would be difficult to design the seeds on it in a way that wouldn't look like sprinkles on a donut.
00:07:30 ◼ ► I don't see why they didn't, but I think if they designed it like an everything bagel, where there's a certain distinct set of colored seeds that are on there that would never appear in a donut, I think making this an everything bagel would have been even more recognizable as a bagel and just better form because everything bagels are better.
00:07:47 ◼ ► Indeed. For one of you that has a fancy pants new phone, can you tell me about charging times with the bundled charger?
00:08:05 ◼ ► Timed how long it took to charge the iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max if you use the charger that comes in the box with the phone. We talked when the phones came out, they were disappointed that they didn't provide a new charger. It's still the same old, very, very tiny, but also very, very weak 5 watt charger that iPhones have come with for a long time.
00:08:22 ◼ ► I think when I was asked like, I wonder how long it takes. Well, someone timed it. So the iPhone XS, if it has no juice and you plug it into that charger, it will be fully charged in three hours and the XS Max in three and a half hours. And I guess some people are horrified by this, but I'm actually surprised it's that fast.
00:08:40 ◼ ► So, you know, it's probably time for a new charger, but on the other hand, the slower you charge, the healthier it is for the battery. And I mentioned, I think like, well, how long is it supposed to take? Well, overnight, right? Like you plug in, if the battery lasts all day, you plug it in before you go to bed and in the morning it's charged and you don't care that it takes three hours because hopefully you're getting more than three hours of sleep and charging more slowly is better for the battery and the phone than charging as fast as possible.
00:09:04 ◼ ► So it makes some kind of vague sense to have a five watt charger in the box, but probably they could go a little bit bigger, a little bit faster without worrying about overheating the battery or shortening its life or whatever. So there are the numbers.
00:09:18 ◼ ► Bottom line, if you are in a hurry, get yourself a different charger, a more powerful charger than the one that comes in the box. You don't have to pay Apple's prices where you can find, you know, another 10 watt or 12 watt charger and it will charge your phone faster.
00:09:30 ◼ ► That's good to know. Jon, I think this next follow up item has you written all over it.
00:09:34 ◼ ► Yeah, that was the last week I was noting the, what was it, speed something, some bench, some JavaScript benchmark that David Hennemeyer Hanson posted about where the iPhone 10s was faster than Marco's computer, the iMac Pro.
00:09:50 ◼ ► And I opined that, you know, benchmarks are weird and everything, but it's amazing that the phone can beat that computer in anything because the Xeon has more of everything than the phone system on a chip.
00:10:01 ◼ ► It's got more execution uses, more registers, more instructions in flight, like higher clock speed, like more memory and everything about it. There's more.
00:10:08 ◼ ► Well, Heinrich Watt wrote in to say that that's not actually true. The Xeon has more of everything except level one cache. Apparently the A12 has 128 kilobyte level one cache, 128 kilobytes for instruction, 100 kilobytes for data.
00:10:25 ◼ ► And those are, that's a very big size for an L1 cache. The Xeon only has 32 kilobyte. Of course it has up to 18 32 kilobyte caches because it's got 18 cores and each core has 32 kilobyte instruction, 32 kilobyte data.
00:10:38 ◼ ► That's a more reasonable size for level one cache. I'm assuming the reason, and I mentioned that, you know, your entire benchmark fits in your cache, it can make you go very, very fast. Maybe that's what's happening with the A12.
00:10:49 ◼ ► But one of the reasons you might have this gigantic L1 cache on a system on a chip is it doesn't have the crazy deep and huge cache hierarchies that a Xeon has. I didn't look up the other numbers, but I'm sure if you add up all the cache, L1 plus L2 plus L3, it's a huge amount of memory that is bigger than what the A12 has.
00:11:08 ◼ ► The A12 can't afford to have that much memory just because there's not enough die space for that much to have like a gigantic, you know, 32 megabyte L3 cache or something like that, right?
00:11:17 ◼ ► And so they have to, you know, like with all cache things, they don't just come up with a number for the heck of it or just like say how much space do we have and let's put as much cache in there as we can.
00:11:27 ◼ ► They simulate and, you know, test eventually different cache sizes to figure out what is the most beneficial for our workloads.
00:11:35 ◼ ► And it doesn't surprise me that if you have to spend your money and your die space, then making a really, really big L1, maybe not having any L3 and a skimpy L2 because those may be more distant, temporarily speaking, from the core than the L1.
00:11:52 ◼ ► Spend it all on a really, really big L1 because that gives you the best performance on your workloads.
00:11:56 ◼ ► But so there you go. The A12 does beat the Xeon in one spec in terms of, you know, any specs that you would think matter for a CPU.
00:12:09 ◼ ► Moving on, Chris Lattner has commented sort of about what we had talked about the prior episode with regard to bitcode and 64-bit watches.
00:12:18 ◼ ► And he commented on Twitter that hardware has multi-year timelines and we could see this coming, this being the 64-bit watch.
00:12:29 ◼ ► So that seems to me to be an implied, slightly implied statement that, yeah, this was in no small part directly about this very thing.
00:12:40 ◼ ► He even made a, like, you can link to the tweet in the show notes, he even made a sort of a sly comment about, like, people were saying, "Well, wait, I thought you said on ATP that it was, you know, bitcode was just about, like, well, for example, if we had a new instruction, you don't have to recompile your apps, take advantage of it or whatever."
00:12:59 ◼ ► And, you know, you can listen to what he said on our show about everything he said is true, but he wasn't going to say on our show,
00:13:05 ◼ ► "Oh, and by the way, we forced everyone to do bitcode for the watch because we knew the 64-bit watch was coming five years ago."
00:13:12 ◼ ► But now that it's out, he was willing to tweet something that hints in that direction, that, yeah, hardware timelines are very long, and, you know, as I speculated at the last show,
00:13:23 ◼ ► it's the type of thing that you could potentially foresee and plan for, especially when you're Apple and you make the CPU, the operating system, the compiler toolchain, the IDE, and you run the App Store.
00:13:34 ◼ ► These are the type of things that you can do and plan for and have it all come together.
00:13:38 ◼ ► "That justification was enough to get people to stop asking too much about it," with a smiley face.
00:13:43 ◼ ► "Hardware has multi-year timelines and we could see this coming. Making bitcode happen was a ton of work for many teams."
00:13:58 ◼ ► I was just going to mention that maybe Chris isn't old enough to know that show. I think he's a little bit younger than me, isn't he?
00:14:08 ◼ ► And since you are the token old man, that's a perfect segue to the next follow-up item.
00:14:12 ◼ ► You might, if you get a new watch, need to turn on the fall detection because even though you're an old man, you are not yet 65.
00:14:18 ◼ ► And apparently, the watch will look at the age you've entered into HealthKit and the Health app, and it will only turn on the fall detection if you're, I think, at 65 years or more.
00:14:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and this came up because I know of somebody, I don't want to mention anymore, who had a situation where they fell and fall detection could have, in theory, triggered, but didn't because this person is not 65 or older.
00:14:45 ◼ ► And so I think it's worth, you know, I guess it's up to each person, but be aware that just because you got the new watch and you think, "It's great, it has fall detection," it doesn't if you're under 65 and you haven't explicitly enabled it.
00:14:56 ◼ ► So consider that. If you want it, if you want fall detection, turn it on for yourself, right? And maybe you think you don't need it because you're not old and you don't fall down.
00:15:04 ◼ ► This person that I'm talking about is not super old. Sometimes people fall down. It might be worth looking into.
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00:16:00 ◼ ► And you can get it done there in like an hour. You give yourself an hour, set up a site at Squarespace and you can do this without even signing up because they have a free trial with no credit card required.
00:16:09 ◼ ► So you can see for yourself how great it is. You don't even have to take my word for it. Just go see squarespace.com/ATP.
00:16:15 ◼ ► But next time you're going to make a website, just try it there for an hour and you will be amazed at the tools you get. Everything is so easy to use. You're incredibly efficient with your time compared to any other option really.
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00:17:06 ◼ ► Linda Dong, who was a designer at Apple for a long time and now is working at Lyft, had commented on a tweet from Ken Kochenda, who you may recall was the author of Creative Selection.
00:17:24 ◼ ► His tweet read, and you'll note that I used the past tense here, it has since been deleted, but it read, "Steve Jobs once told me straight to my face that my work was 'dog feces.'" Except he used a euphemism there.
00:17:37 ◼ ► Or another word there. "He wasn't attacking me. He was saying my work wasn't good enough yet. And it wasn't. Criticism doesn't need to be constructive in the moment to be useful in the long run."
00:17:48 ◼ ► To which Linda replied, "I'm sorry, no. One of the worst parts of my time at Apple was the toxic culture that this line of thinking bred. Swearing at and insulting people's work is not okay and is never helpful. Criticism for criticism's sake is a power move."
00:18:02 ◼ ► And she goes on in a few more tweets, "It's worth reading this whole thread." In addition, there's a back and forth that I didn't see until I was looking at the show notes earlier tonight between Linda and Ken kind of going through this and talking about it.
00:18:15 ◼ ► I thought this was very interesting, and I can't say that I've ever really been in an environment where I've gotten like yelled at or said that this is, you know, crap in the same way that I'm sure happens quite a lot at Apple.
00:18:30 ◼ ► So I don't really see how it's that really helpful to be so vulgar is what I'm looking for. But I don't know, something that the three of us have talked about quite a bit is the difference in directness between your stereotypical Californian and your stereotypical East Coaster.
00:18:50 ◼ ► And I wonder if some of that is being reflected here, but I still think her point is fair. I know that's a lot of rambling and words. Marco, you haven't talked in a while. Tell me what you think.
00:18:59 ◼ ► I mean, it's hard to get too far into because it involves like the private personalities or the behind closed doors personalities or people who not only we don't know but are dead. So it's kind of difficult to get too far into it.
00:19:14 ◼ ► But I do think that berating people in like in unnecessary ways like that, like saying that their work is, you know, a swear word is unnecessary. And I think two things can both be true.
00:19:32 ◼ ► It could have produced good work in the past and also it didn't have to be done that way. There are ways to get good work out of people without insulting them and using like really like emotionally charged language.
00:19:48 ◼ ► And I don't think that kind of environment is necessary to produce good work. In this case, it did produce good work, but that doesn't mean it was necessary. That doesn't mean that was the only way to get it done.
00:19:59 ◼ ► I'm going to try to tell a story I think I've told on a podcast before. It's about something I watched on television as a kid and I always wish the internet had a way for me to find like where can I obviously every video is on the internet somewhere.
00:20:11 ◼ ► Can I find this television program from when I was a kid? The answer very often is no, because I don't remember enough about it. But I'm pretty sure it was an episode of Nova or some similar PBS series that I was super into when I was a kid.
00:20:24 ◼ ► I think it was talking about military training. And it was like it's like a voiceover of like that voice of God voiceover guy. He does the frontline stuff. I forget what his name is.
00:20:36 ◼ ► Talking about some of the techniques used in militaries throughout history and across the world to make an effective fighting force. And one of the things that we're talking about is boot camp or whatever things we've seen in movies where there is a very strict drill sergeant or someone who is training the troops, who is very harsh and cruel to the trainees.
00:20:58 ◼ ► And part of that is to build unit cohesion because they have sort of a common enemy, not an actual enemy, right, but like a common antagonist and the sort of collective punishment where if one member of the troop messes up, they all get punished.
00:21:13 ◼ ► And rather than berating the person who causes them all to get punished, they would try to lift each other up. And they're explaining this philosophy and also explaining gender differences and how men and testing men are more willing to do ridiculous things at the behest of the mean person.
00:21:33 ◼ ► Like accepting of the system that they're put into. I guess this is the system. I guess this guy yells at us and if we do anything wrong, we get heavily punished. So whatever they say to do, I'll do, which is important in combat because you want people to follow instructions without question.
00:21:44 ◼ ► You can't have people like debating whether they should or shouldn't go over that hill. You know, this is what the voiceover is saying while this voiceover is going and explaining this philosophy with like, you know, visiting professors and historians chiming in.
00:21:55 ◼ ► They're showing a bunch of people in military uniforms sitting at these really, really long tables and they're all like in sequence and they've got their lunch trays and someone is yelling. It's in a different language. So they're not in English. So they're in some other country and someone yells and they all sit down at the same time and they all put down their glasses and they all pick up like their forks.
00:22:15 ◼ ► And then as the voiceover is going, it's like it's building to a point or whatever, like they go making all the points they're going to make as the voiceover is sort of coming to its main point. Someone yells something in some other language and all of the people at the tables take their banana off of their tray because they'll have the same meal and they put it on top of their head.
00:22:34 ◼ ► They put the banana on their head and then balancing the bananas on their head, they all begin to eat while keeping the bananas on their head, right? Because that's what they've been ordered to do, right? And they're all doing it together. And as this is happening, the voiceover says, "These men are security guards at a mall."
00:22:52 ◼ ► And it's like the ultimate stab, which is saying the stakes can be so low, but if you yell at people and are terrible to them, everybody but particularly men will succumb to that and do whatever you tell them in a mindless fashion because they're so willing to go along with essentially the big angry ape who is in the room yelling at them like the alpha dog.
00:23:20 ◼ ► Whatever it is, the sort of primal animalistic thing. Even if you're not in the armed forces, even if the stakes are you're a mall security guard, right? A fleet of people who are all putting bananas in their head and eating because that's what you have to do to be a mall security guard.
00:23:35 ◼ ► I always think about that. The susceptibility of people to fall into this pattern of, I don't know if it's Stockholm syndrome, obviously I didn't pay enough attention to the parts that they were talking about because I just remember the mall security guard, banana on the head stinger.
00:23:51 ◼ ► So susceptible to accepting the idea that you can be treated poorly because you stop thinking about the fact that you're being treated poorly and you start thinking about, "I have to do what I'm told. This is how the world works." You accept the parameters that are set before you.
00:24:09 ◼ ► Everyone else around you is doing it. You learn through painful lessons that this is the only way to get along. This is the path of least resistance is to accept the yelling, to accept and just do what you're told.
00:24:20 ◼ ► That's probably far afield from what we're talking about here at Apple, but I think about it because there's some aspect of that culture in people who are in an environment that is essentially abusive where people are yelling at you or making you feel bad or whatever.
00:24:37 ◼ ► And many people will not just accept that but come to believe that there is no other way and that this is the best way. And Marco talked about, you know, it didn't have to be this way. You could have got to go work a different way.
00:24:52 ◼ ► Even that, I feel like, is accepting the idea that, like, well, of course it works to yell at people because yelling at people always works, but maybe there's another way. And I think Linda's point and the thing that I always think about is by yelling at people, like, the opportunity cost of being abusive in that way is not whether or not the people who work there thrive.
00:25:10 ◼ ► It's all the people who will never work there because they don't want to be abused or who did work there and were chased out. The cost of all those people who will not work in that environment for whatever reason is much higher than the potential cost of, well, the people you do have there, maybe they do better if you were nicer to them.
00:25:27 ◼ ► You should be thinking about people like Linda who left or other people who, like, will never work there when they hear a story like that. And again, it's not entirely gendered, but part of it is that in terms of—that was one of the major points of the NOAA thing—scientific studies showing how much more willing men are to put up with crap like that for whatever reasons.
00:25:43 ◼ ► They have all sorts of theories in the show with professors and historians and evolutionary biologists talking about why it may be that men are more susceptible to that. But I feel like that's the main point here is that regardless of who works well in that environment and regardless who thrives in it, regardless of the point that Ken made, which I think is absolutely true, criticism does not need to be constructive in the moment to be useful in the long run.
00:26:06 ◼ ► You can take a lesson from a terrible thing that happened to you. It can be totally unconstructive criticism, but you take a lesson from it. None of that changes the fact that all the people who you chased out of the company by being a jerk and all the people who never work there because they know to work there you're going to get abused.
00:26:24 ◼ ► That is a much higher cost than any cost of, "Well, I didn't get the optimal work out of this person because I yelled at them." There's a couple more stories in the thread about just bad things happen at every company. Apple's a huge company.
00:26:39 ◼ ► Another person tweeted that, "My second week someone came by my office and said they didn't think my interview was up to par and would make sure my manager knew I shouldn't be at Apple. He says it wrecked me and continues to bother me."
00:26:50 ◼ ► So awful. Wow. There is no like, "Oh, well, it's tough," or, "Well, people are being direct." Those are excuses made by people who are putting bananas on their heads, essentially.
00:27:00 ◼ ► Like, you've got the banana in your head and it's like, "Well, some people can't hack it in this machismo and it's tough and it's direct and we're just not, you know, you just got to toughen up," or whatever.
00:27:09 ◼ ► You are all bored with the banana on the head train. You are putting the banana on your head as a mall security guard and you're eating because that's what everyone else is doing and that is total BS.
00:27:17 ◼ ► So, like, I come down pretty strongly on being emotionally abusive is never the right thing to do in any work situation and people shouldn't tolerate it.
00:27:25 ◼ ► And the fact that good things can come out of that is ridiculous because, again, great things come out if you're not emotionally abusive and don't chase away all the people who won't work for you anymore.
00:27:35 ◼ ► So I'm with Linda on this, but like the truth is, when I mentioned—I didn't get into this too much—when I mentioned there's certain categories of people who seem to get along well and thrive at Apple,
00:27:45 ◼ ► part of it is there is a subset, a subcategory, a subfeature of people is they're willing to put up with people being jerks to them and are able to not have it absolutely crush them, which is terrible.
00:27:56 ◼ ► Like, you know, again, they're really good at putting bananas in their head and not feeling foolish. Like, it's true that that is a skill that makes you successful at Apple, but it's a shame.
00:28:05 ◼ ► It shouldn't be required to work there and it shouldn't be something that you ask of people.
00:28:15 ◼ ► Single routers just don't cover our houses very well, no matter how many antennas you put on top of them.
00:28:20 ◼ ► Because it's just physics. There's things like walls and dead zones and you just can't do that with one point.
00:28:25 ◼ ► Now, multi-point wireless coverage has been available for, like, businesses and schools for years, but it's been really hard to use, really expensive, really hard to maintain.
00:28:33 ◼ ► You basically had to be a network admin to set it up. Eero brings this to everyone with not only incredibly nice-looking routers, incredibly well-priced routers, incredibly well-specced routers.
00:28:45 ◼ ► So, for instance, their routers have three 5 GHz radios now and the new second-generation routers.
00:28:53 ◼ ► And all of this is brought to you in these nice little compact packages and they're super easy to set up and run.
00:29:10 ◼ ► If you need any help, they do have support, but I bet you won't even need it, honestly. It's super easy to use.
00:29:15 ◼ ► I've used Eero now in a couple of places. I've given them as gifts as well. They're wonderful. It really is an incredible system.
00:29:26 ◼ ► For free overnight shipping to the U.S. or Canada, select "Overnight Shipping at Checkout" then enter code "ATP" to make it free.
00:29:54 ◼ ► Okay. I've installed it on my Adorable. I have not installed it yet on my iMac, but I will probably do so in the next week or two.
00:30:01 ◼ ► What are your thoughts, John? Would you like to do the oral retelling of the review that you haven't actually written?
00:30:08 ◼ ► No, I'm so far out of the loop. Not only am I – I haven't even gotten to the point where I finish reading other people's reviews about it.
00:30:15 ◼ ► I know nothing about Mojave, which again, it's like I'm overcompensating for 15 years of knowing every intimate detail of the stupid thing before it's even sold out.
00:30:27 ◼ ► I installed the final version. I never even installed any of the bit. I just installed the final version.
00:30:33 ◼ ► So what's new in this operating system? I have no freaking idea. What are the apps again? Stocks? Voice memos?
00:30:48 ◼ ► I had to do a couple of like give this application full disk access like for the Backblaze backup thing.
00:30:54 ◼ ► But it was a non-event as far as everyone in my family is concerned, which I consider a plus on any upgrade.
00:31:03 ◼ ► Like they didn't go, "What did you do to my computer?" And nothing broke, and it didn't take a year and a day and fail halfway through or anything like that.
00:31:19 ◼ ► We talked about that. When did we talk about that? Back when Marzipan was announced a little bit after W2C,
00:31:23 ◼ ► we had a couple of long discussions about what that means. It was that episode called Extinction Level Event, I think.
00:31:35 ◼ ► I'm kind of glad voice memos exist because my kids sometimes need to record themselves saying things for classes in school, believe it or not.
00:31:43 ◼ ► These are the assignments kids get these days. Please record yourself saying it for Spanish class or whatever.
00:31:48 ◼ ► And they've been using QuickTime Player, but VoiceMentalist is honestly a nicer interface to do that than what you have to do in QuickTime Player to make it happen.
00:31:56 ◼ ► It's not as obvious as it is in VoiceMentalist. But other than that, they're super weird.
00:32:01 ◼ ► I launched one of them, and you can't help it. I know it's Marzipan. I know it's just an iOS app.
00:32:05 ◼ ► I know I shouldn't expect it to be Mac Live, but in the Stocks app or whatever, when it's got a bunch of stocks in the side, I want to delete a bunch of them.
00:32:12 ◼ ► So I right-clicked them, but it's like, "Right-click? What are you thinking? That's not going to do anything."
00:32:17 ◼ ► And it didn't do anything. Maybe if I swipe to the left with my mouse cursor, I'm trying to go into iOS mode with a mouse pointer.
00:32:27 ◼ ► It's like when you learn a language, but you're still translating in your head to your native language. You're not fluent yet.
00:32:44 ◼ ► If you remind me what's supposed to... Oh, I played with the desktop backgrounds that changed based on the time of day. That's nice.
00:32:49 ◼ ► I like that the... Maybe you guys don't see the screen that much, but my wife's computer is always on the login screen where it shows all of our different little icons for the users.
00:33:02 ◼ ► Our whole family is lined up there, and you click on whoever you are, and then you type in your password.
00:33:16 ◼ ► I don't think I've done much of anything with it, so I don't have much to say beyond those very vague first impressions.
00:33:26 ◼ ► I thought it was interesting that when you log in for the first time, it asks you, "Hey, do you want dark mode or light mode?"
00:33:34 ◼ ► I picked light mode for my account, but I did go to the preferences and turn on dark mode.
00:33:39 ◼ ► I never expect to use dark mode. No matter how good it is, even if everything was all super consistent and awesome, you never got that thing where all of a sudden you open a window and there's a white light.
00:33:51 ◼ ► I just wouldn't use it. I don't want it to be dark. Even though it looks kind of cool in screenshots, and I think some apps look very, very pretty, that's not my style.
00:33:59 ◼ ► I'm never going to run it, but I did enable it just to see what it's like. It's just not a thing for me.
00:34:05 ◼ ► I do like the highlight colors, though, whatever they're called. The thing that changes all the parts of the controls from blue to whatever color you pick.
00:34:15 ◼ ► Various older versions of Mac OS had features similar to this that lets you add a little personality to your computer.
00:34:24 ◼ ► Of course, you can mix and match them. You get dark mode with an orange highlight, you got a Halloween type thing or a red highlight, and it looks kind of sinister.
00:34:30 ◼ ► I'm happy they're doing something with the appearance of the Mac. And for people who like dark mode, thumbs up, but it's not my bag.
00:34:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I have been running dark mode since I installed around a week ago. It was a day or two before we recorded last week's episode.
00:34:46 ◼ ► And I have kept it on non-stop on my adorable to get really used to it and see whether or not I liked it. I don't like it.
00:34:55 ◼ ► And I think the thing I don't like most of all is that so much content is just super bright white, because for 30 years or whatever, we've typically had bright user interfaces.
00:35:08 ◼ ► And so it's not unreasonable for something to be bright white, but something that I've seen a fair bit of recently is, say, when I get an email from YouTube about something, that is just glaring.
00:35:20 ◼ ► It's just an incredibly bright white. And that's not the only example, but it's a great example.
00:35:25 ◼ ► And I don't suspect that dark mode is going to be popular enough or big enough, or tell even the Mac is popular enough or big enough,
00:35:34 ◼ ► that somebody like YouTube is going to figure out a way to turn things dark when the system is dark.
00:35:49 ◼ ► And Weed Mountain in the chat is asking, "Did I try haze over?" which I've heard about, but I've not tried.
00:35:56 ◼ ► My understanding is it takes a best guess at flipping style sheets into a pseudo dark mode, and that doesn't strike me as though it would be great.
00:36:07 ◼ ► I haven't tried it, so maybe it works better than I expect, but I just don't think dark mode is for me.
00:36:11 ◼ ► I wanted to try it for a while and see what I thought, and I have, and I don't like it.
00:36:15 ◼ ► I will say that the screenshot stuff is really good, though. The same sort of thing you have in iOS where it has a little floating icon in the bottom of the screen,
00:36:26 ◼ ► and then you can take action on that screenshot and then delete it immediately. I really, really like that, and I'm really glad that's on the Mac.
00:36:36 ◼ ► On the dark mode, light mode thing, I think I've said this before, but to me, being a super old person,
00:36:42 ◼ ► one of the defining characteristics of the Mac was that it came at a time when pretty much every computer, the aesthetic,
00:36:51 ◼ ► and not just for aesthetic reasons, but practically, there's a bunch of practical reasons, is you had a black screen, like 100% black,
00:36:59 ◼ ► and the text on it would appear in whatever color. Like if it was a monochrome monitor, you'd get just the one color, green, amber, whatever.
00:37:07 ◼ ► So it would be a black background, a black screen, and it would light up the letters. And that was the aesthetic of all computers, essentially, especially before the GUI.
00:37:17 ◼ ► You didn't have to be that way, because the screens lit up. All the screens that had amber or green, they could have been an amber background,
00:37:25 ◼ ► and then black out the pixels where the letters were, but they didn't. Nobody did that. That's not what computers look like.
00:37:29 ◼ ► When you think about computers those times, you think of a black background and light up colors.
00:37:34 ◼ ► And the Mac was the first computer that I had ever seen that totally reversed that aesthetic.
00:37:39 ◼ ► So it had proportional fonts, a bitmap display, a monochrome monitor, and it could have, it's monochrome monitor-wise, wouldn't it be exactly the same as anything?
00:37:47 ◼ ► It's like a monochrome, you know, it was a CRT, just like every other thing. Why wouldn't it be a black background? Because that's not what paper looks like.
00:37:52 ◼ ► Paper is white, and the ink is dark. And so everything on the Mac was a white background with dark ink.
00:38:00 ◼ ► And I related to that, you know, the intersection of liberal arts and whatever, which would only come decades later, right?
00:38:06 ◼ ► That I said, "Yes, that's what I want. I like books, I like paper, I like printing, and these are proportional fonts.
00:38:13 ◼ ► Of course it should be a white background with dark ink, which is what it's been for, you know, centuries, millennia. Like, that is the way writing should look."
00:38:22 ◼ ► I've never looked back. Like, word processing to me on the Mac, like, saying, "Oh, it's like a typewriter even.
00:38:27 ◼ ► You put a white piece of paper to the typewriter and you have a black ribbon and a little thing strikes it, right?"
00:38:32 ◼ ► So that's the way computers should work for me. It has a resonant, emotional, and sort of like revolutionary meaning to me.
00:38:42 ◼ ► That it was a stake in the ground saying, "Computers are not a black endless void with green and amber text on top of them."
00:38:48 ◼ ► We can, in the computer, make something that brings the best of the things we've made outside of the computer in.
00:38:55 ◼ ► It should look like beautiful paper with proportional fonts and, you know, fine lettering and all that other stuff.
00:38:59 ◼ ► So I don't think, I don't want, I don't, you know, when I do programming, I don't want it to be a black background with light text, which all the kids love these days.
00:39:08 ◼ ► Because every text editor that you get, like all the modes that come in are a black background with, like, candy colored letters on top of it or anything.
00:39:15 ◼ ► I don't want that. I don't want it on my word processing. I don't want it on my web pages.
00:39:18 ◼ ► And, you know, I don't want my window chrome to be like that because it's, you know, it's jarring if you have the white against that.
00:39:24 ◼ ► I just want the whole thing to look like beautiful pieces of paper with, you know, a nice little chrome or platinum or whatever surrounds.
00:39:32 ◼ ► So I don't think I'm ever going to be aboard the dark mode chain, even though I think it does look cool in screenshots a lot.
00:39:41 ◼ ► Hazeover doesn't do the flipping style sheets thing, although I could swear something I heard about does do that.
00:40:03 ◼ ► No actual complaints. I mean, dark mode isn't for me, but that's not a complaint. It's just not for me.
00:40:08 ◼ ► The finder stuff, I haven't really gotten that into, but that might be because the adorable has a postage stamp size screen.
00:40:16 ◼ ► So I feel like all my finder windows are extremely tiny now because I've allowed space for that sidebar.
00:40:55 ◼ ► But like, you know, unforeseen bugs, things that aren't compatible, things that used to work that don't, stuff like that.
00:41:00 ◼ ► Well, what about like almost every version of macOS in the last decade or so, probably ever.
00:41:14 ◼ ► And everything all of a sudden in that subsystem, like, oh, in this version USB audio devices are wonky.
00:41:33 ◼ ► so much of it being rewritten in Metal or changed around to enable eGPUs, whatever's going on there.
00:41:55 ◼ ► I hope it actually fixes an audio issue, which I've actually found somewhat a solution to.
00:42:02 ◼ ► And one of them lately has been when I come in on Monday after my computer has been sleeping at home for the entire weekend,
00:42:11 ◼ ► I come in on Monday, I open the lid, and I'm usually able to fingerprint my way into it, but then I get beach balls.
00:42:19 ◼ ► Like, maybe I can click a few things and bring a window to the front or two, but then it starts beach balling.
00:42:23 ◼ ► And then, you know, maybe your cursor changes when you mouse over the dock, but then it beach balls.
00:42:34 ◼ ► Like, I give it five minutes, ten minutes, and eventually it's like, look, I think I have a meeting coming up,
00:42:38 ◼ ► and I can't look at my calendar until my computer comes back, so I basically need to hard reboot it, right?
00:42:46 ◼ ► But the second one is that every once in a while, usually when I'm about to do a stupid WebEx meeting with somebody, right,
00:42:56 ◼ ► So I get on the WebEx thing, and I can't hear them. I can see the little lines on the little microphone icon going,
00:43:05 ◼ ► Then I, you know, I go to iTunes won't play. I make sure the output is set to internal speakers.
00:43:20 ◼ ► Yeah. And audio just, audio stops playing. You will never hear another sound from the computer.
00:43:24 ◼ ► I finally came up with a solution that is better than rebooting, which is kill all core audio D, which depresses me.
00:43:29 ◼ ► But what I'm hoping is that maybe, because that will kill that audio D in my name, my computer makes sound again.
00:43:49 ◼ ► And work, of course, is blocking the upgrade to Mojave until they decide that it's safe.
00:44:27 ◼ ► Like, iOS 12 is also, like, since the beta was rock solid, like, I ran the beta all summer, it was fine.
00:44:36 ◼ ► So, props to Apple for, you know, lots of complaints about stability of the OS releases,
00:45:00 ◼ ► Like, I'm pretty sure no one's job in Apple is make WatchKit apps to make sure WatchKit works.
00:45:06 ◼ ► And so when they did the new watches, basically the new watches, because they have curved edges,
00:45:38 ◼ ► Like, in the current Overcast watch app, you'll see that if you try to scroll the list views,
00:46:08 ◼ ► if you have a page view controller on the Apple Watch, which is the kind that has the dots on the bottom
00:46:16 ◼ ► the page view controllers calculate the safe area inset incorrectly and apply it basically twice.
00:46:22 ◼ ► And so apps that use page view layouts on WatchOS can't put controls in, like, the lower 40 pixels of the screen.
00:46:32 ◼ ► So we have significantly reduced height. If we do try, it'll just be scrollable unnecessarily, which nobody wants.
00:47:00 ◼ ► And so I got to give them credit. This recent round of releases has been pretty damn good.
00:47:40 ◼ ► And hopefully it's because they... We had those rumors a while back that we talked about on the show
00:48:12 ◼ ► It only takes a couple. You know, like shortcuts alone, which was basically mostly an acquisition
00:48:17 ◼ ► app play with some OS integration, but not like a major new deep OS thing like multitasking
00:48:25 ◼ ► or notification center or that type of thing. But it's a significant new feature that some people are...
00:48:44 ◼ ► The built-in apps maybe to be a little better, but mostly it may be better performing than the old OS
00:48:48 ◼ ► on their existing phone or whatever, but mostly they just don't want their phones to break at this point.
00:48:52 ◼ ► So I don't think people are... It's like, "Yeah, they're stable, but iOS 12 was a dud."
00:48:57 ◼ ► No, I think people like it. People like the new features. They're not missing whatever was pulled from it.
00:49:02 ◼ ► I think overall, we'd much rather have a release like this that has enough new stuff to be interesting
00:49:08 ◼ ► as opposed to cramming everything in and having one or two of those things spoil the whole barrel of apples.
00:49:21 ◼ ► Yeah, because even if everything else works great, but whatever the major new feature is is flaky,
00:49:25 ◼ ► that just makes the whole phone experience bad. And it could take down the whole thing and cause springboard
00:49:30 ◼ ► to reboot or if there was a keyboard problem, it would come up in every app that has to bring up a keyboard.
00:49:46 ◼ ► Like I said, I'll probably put it on my iMac sooner rather than later. It's been going really well.
00:49:51 ◼ ► One thing, though, that I did want to bring up is a series of tweets by a friend of the show, Steve Trouton Smith,
00:49:57 ◼ ► wherein he started thinking about Marzipan, which again is the iOS apps on Mac OS kind of cross-framework thing.
00:50:07 ◼ ► So Steve wrote, "Everybody's looking at Marzipan and going, 'Wow, these apps will never fit in on Mac OS.'
00:50:12 ◼ ► And I'm here going, 'Wow, this is what Mac apps are going to all be like in a few years.'"
00:50:17 ◼ ► So to rephrase, Steve is saying, "The way that Marzipan apps look and potentially function is probably,
00:50:33 ◼ ► Did I just say "the Macs"? Oh my God. Anyway, "that makes the grumpy old men like us really grumpy."
00:50:38 ◼ ► So Steve continues, "Logically, I expect Marzipan to get better on the desktop, visually and functionally,
00:50:44 ◼ ► iOS-based apps to dominate and subsume Mac OS-based apps, and many of iOS's paradigms to win in this transition,
00:50:56 ◼ ► So he wraps up with, "Mac OS is Apple's incompatible niche non-touch fork of their dominant software platform,
00:51:07 ◼ ► Let me read that first sentence again. "Mac OS is Apple's incompatible niche non-touch fork of their dominant software platform."
00:51:29 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, we went through a lot of this when Marzipan was announced, or discovered, and then later announced,
00:51:49 ◼ ► but the perspective of Apple, a company run by a bean counter that has iOS as its dominant platform by a long shot.
00:52:15 ◼ ► iOS has already been dominating all of their attention for the last decade, and it's going to continue doing that.
00:52:23 ◼ ► So, as much as we love the Mac, and need the Mac to continue, and to grow, and to mature, and to get attention,
00:52:31 ◼ ► the fact is, Apple hasn't been giving it that much, and while they've made great strides in the last year or so, it seems,
00:52:39 ◼ ► it doesn't seem reasonable to expect the Mac to ever be a high priority in this company again.
00:52:46 ◼ ► It isn't even just about being a priority to Apple, it's also about being a priority to all other developers out there in the world.
00:52:53 ◼ ► You know, it's really hard for companies to justify building really great Mac apps when they can get so many more people on iOS.
00:53:03 ◼ ► So often, the Mac is relegated to just a web app, or an Electron kind of thing, which is just a web app, really.
00:53:10 ◼ ► It's so often, like, the Mac is kind of lumped in with, like, web and other, like, from software development perspectives,
00:53:22 ◼ ► You get, like, a native iOS app, if you're lucky, you get a native Android app if you're lucky,
00:53:30 ◼ ► There is no future here where the Mac continues with lots of attention paid just to it,
00:53:38 ◼ ► and there's all these, like, wonderful boutique Mac apps, like, native Mac, you know, app kit kind of apps that are highly polished for everything we need to do.
00:53:54 ◼ ► Like, that's, we have some great Mac apps, but we don't have a lot, and we're probably not going to have a lot more.
00:54:01 ◼ ► You have to come to the realization, as Apple probably has, and as many developers have, and as many companies have,
00:54:09 ◼ ► you have to come to the realization that, like, if the Mac isn't worth supporting for most people to a large, like, with a large investment,
00:54:19 ◼ ► how does the Mac continue? Does it just continue getting, like, neglected and having a very small number of good apps being made for it,
00:54:27 ◼ ► while the entire world passes it by? Or is there some way to harness what the entire world is doing anyway to make the Mac better?
00:54:39 ◼ ► Apple saw this coming. They, at some point in the last few years, had a wonderful change of heart about the Mac,
00:54:46 ◼ ► that they seemed to just want to die for a while, but now they seem to not want it to die anymore, which is,
00:54:55 ◼ ► So they have to bring the Mac forward somehow when both they and everyone else can't justify pouring tons and tons and tons of ongoing effort into it.
00:55:08 ◼ ► So what do you do? Find a way to leverage your iOS code base, both Apple and developers.
00:55:14 ◼ ► And I'm one of these developers. Like, this is, you know, I'm not trying to hide this or minimize this.
00:55:20 ◼ ► It is not worth bringing my app to the Mac, because it's too much work for too small of an audience.
00:55:25 ◼ ► And part of that is just because not a lot of people listen to podcasts on the desktop, so my audience is even smaller than, you know,
00:55:33 ◼ ► But it is not worth me rewriting my entire UI for a platform that's probably going to have less than 5% of my user base,
00:55:43 ◼ ► and then having to maintain that entire UI over time is also not a trivial amount of work.
00:55:48 ◼ ► So, if Apple gives me a way to bring my iOS work to the Mac with minimal effort to make it work, that changes things completely.
00:56:01 ◼ ► Then I can still be maintaining one code base, one UI layer, and only have minimal changes like what I do on the iPad.
00:56:08 ◼ ► Because the iPad has about 5% of my usage, but it's okay, because it takes less than 5% additional work to make that happen, so I do it.
00:56:24 ◼ ► And we have seen, again, we've seen for the last few years the kind of attention Mac OS gets from Apple.
00:56:32 ◼ ► It's not enough. If the Mac is going to move forward and mature and ever have meaningful progress made on it, from a software point of view,
00:56:42 ◼ ► it needs Apple's attention much more than it has, and it needs developers' attention much more than it has.
00:56:48 ◼ ► And the only way to do that is to help reduce the differences of working on and targeting Mac OS as a platform.
00:56:58 ◼ ► That all being said, all these reviews coming out about Mojave and about how much the Marzipan apps suck,
00:57:11 ◼ ► They gave us very little information because they knew people would find stuff in Mojave, so like, alright, we have to tell people what this is.
00:57:21 ◼ ► I continue to believe that, like, look, there's a reason why the apps they brought over from the iPad versions were these kind of like low-priority apps.
00:57:44 ◼ ► Like, if voice memos sucks on the Mac, well, there wasn't a voice memo on the Mac before,
00:57:52 ◼ ► If, you know, news is probably not that bad because it's mostly about just browsing what's basically big web views anyway,
00:58:02 ◼ ► Stock people don't usually have great taste so that they don't really care what their app looks like.
00:58:05 ◼ ► And then you have HomeKit, which is apparently really horrible, but it's pretty horrible on iOS too.
00:58:27 ◼ ► Like, all of these apps, like significantly more complicated and higher profile and more frequently used apps,
00:58:48 ◼ ► But also, I still believe that the rumblings we heard earlier this year about new UI frameworks and stuff like that,
00:59:01 ◼ ► like, I still continue to believe that maybe there's something else on the horizon here,
00:59:22 ◼ ► That's why, like, they wouldn't want developers using whatever they're using now to start porting their apps over
00:59:29 ◼ ► if they're going to be replacing it in a year with, like, a brand new, you know, type of UI framework or something
00:59:44 ◼ ► it's hard to say, well, the future of the Mac is horrible because it's going to be filled with all these crappy iOS ports,
00:59:51 ◼ ► because I think there's really good reasons why they ported what they did and only what they did,
00:59:57 ◼ ► and possibly why they aren't trying too hard to make those old UIKit widgets in those apps better on the Mac,
01:00:10 ◼ ► And, I mean, in my magic wand-waving perfect world, you know, the Mac would get at least as much, if not more, attention than iOS.
01:00:39 ◼ ► And so I would love to have the Mac get all the attention and have the Mac get all these wonderful first-class apps,
01:00:52 ◼ ► And so if it's not worth it for you, it's not going to be worth it for most other software developers, big and small.
01:01:01 ◼ ► And I could not possibly agree with you more that I think we're just seeing the first ripple in the water, if you will,
01:01:20 ◼ ► That's the episode entitled Extinction Level Event, which is related to what I think these APIs arriving on the Mac might mean.
01:01:29 ◼ ► The only thing I think maybe I didn't cover in that episode that occurs to me as I look at Steve Tran Smith's tweets about this is the idea that, like, so these APIs come, there's tons of developers who know them.
01:01:42 ◼ ► You know, how can traditional Mac apps stand up against that, changing definition of what makes a Mac app, like that's always been evolving.
01:01:52 ◼ ► But the one thing, and maybe I did mention this on the show, I don't remember what I said.
01:01:55 ◼ ► One thing that gives me a little bit of pause is, like, just because if there's some unified API that works across iOS and macOS,
01:02:03 ◼ ► and just because every iOS developer, all thousands of iOS developers, it becomes, like, really easy for them to make a Mac app.
01:02:09 ◼ ► Right, they can practically take their app as is with some minor changes and run it on the Mac, right?
01:02:13 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that there will be a huge bounty of new Mac software development to the degree that it will revitalize the Mac and make it as popular as, you know, as iOS, right?
01:02:28 ◼ ► Like, you know, obviously it's going to help tremendously, and that's what we talked about in 280, and that's what Marco was talking about.
01:02:33 ◼ ► It's like, it's a huge change, but the example that I think of is the iPad, which already lets you run iOS apps on it, you know, with some minor changes here and there.
01:02:45 ◼ ► How many people who make iOS software can be bothered to, A, make an iPad app at all, and B, make a decent one?
01:02:53 ◼ ► And the iPad, like, that's like the best case scenario for the Mac. If only the Mac could be as compatible with iOS and as easy for iOS developers to develop for as the iPad.
01:03:08 ◼ ► It's got a different size screen, and, you know, there are some other issues involved in it, and you should really change your app a little bit, take advantage of that, but it's nothing like the Mac where you have things in Windows and giant screens and all sorts of stuff like that.
01:03:18 ◼ ► So, you know, if you build it, a bunch of people will come, but I don't expect, like, I still expect it to be the distant third place or fourth place, depending on how you count the watch or whatever.
01:03:30 ◼ ► It's like, you know, well, we make a phone app, and maybe if our app is the type of app that benefits from an iPad, we'll make an iPad app, but Mac users can just go to the web, right?
01:03:40 ◼ ► But it's so easy to port your app, like, it's not even harder, you can run iOS, it's like, eh, maybe. Can't they just, can we make an Electron app or something and use it on Windows too?
01:03:49 ◼ ► Like, it's gonna take, you know, I'm not that down on the Mac, because I still think, as Mark was pointing out many times in the past, and as all is implicit in what we're talking about, lots of people still use the Mac to do their work.
01:04:03 ◼ ► Like, lots and lots of people still use PCs to do their work, and lots and lots of people still use the Mac to do their work, and they need some applications to do them, and there's a reason they use the Mac and not big iPads, part of it is because Apple hasn't advanced iPads and hasn't made big enough ones or whatever, but like, until that changes, you're not gonna be able to actually get rid of the Mac, or PCs in general, right?
01:04:22 ◼ ► I mean, I suppose Apple could just stop making it and never has to use PCs or whatever, but like, it fills a role.
01:04:27 ◼ ► So there's some baseline level of support and usage that's gonna keep happening until something can replace it. So, I don't think, like, the Mac will just fade away and everyone will do all their Photoshop work on their phones, because that's not gonna happen, right?
01:04:39 ◼ ► And if Apple never makes an iPad bigger than the current ones, it's also not gonna happen, because no one wants to do Photoshop on their dinky 12-inch iPad.
01:04:47 ◼ ► People want a big, honking retina display on a powerful computer, and a drawing tablet, and all that, you know, like, whatever. That's still gonna happen, it's just a question of how the development is gonna happen, as long as you can get along with just using applications that were developed in an age when the Mac was much more dominant, right?
01:05:04 ◼ ► So, one possible solution is essentially the Mac becomes, you know, a big iPad in terms of software support, not in terms of, like, the software is there, but it's like, you know, if you want to make an app like that, take your phone app and make it really big, or develop for the iPad first, and make, you know, like, the Affinity Design apps for iOS and everything like that.
01:05:23 ◼ ► So, I think it's gonna be a long time before we figure out how software is gonna work on the Mac, but unless something, unless probably one of Apple's platforms comes to replace it, and unless it goes away entirely, it has built-in life support based on the fact that there is no replacement for certain things that you do on the Mac.
01:05:45 ◼ ► So, I think that will help with this, you know, this battle for the future of the Mac in terms of what do Mac apps look like, what APIs do people use, like, the reason this battle is taking place at all is, you know, Apple even recognized at this point, you can't just, like, well, we don't really have to worry about the Mac, it'll gently fade away.
01:06:03 ◼ ► It won't gently fade away, because there's nothing to replace it yet from Apple, like, they have an advanced iOS to the point where it can do everything the Mac does, so we have to figure out something to do with the Mac.
01:06:15 ◼ ► So, it is a possible solution, but it's gonna take a while to sort out, and they have the luxury of having that time, because it's not like it's a race against everyone just abandoning Macs entirely, because there's nothing for them to abandon them for, except, I suppose, Windows, which, you know, is a somewhat legit threat now that Microsoft's making its own hardware and everything, but everything I hear is that the OS and experience is still not quite up to stuff, so I'm still mostly ignoring it, but, you know, we've all talked about how attractive and interesting Microsoft hardware is.
01:06:49 ◼ ► You know, something that occurred to me, and you kind of glanced off of this point a little bit yourself a minute ago, is that, it's hard for me to articulate, but let me take a stab at it.
01:07:01 ◼ ► So, when UIKit was new, when the iPhone was new, and they had AppKit, which was the kind, well, at that point it wasn't legacy, but now is the legacy, like, UI framework to generate apps and create apps for the Mac, and they had AppKit, and they thought, "Yeah, you know, let's redo this, let's take some lessons we learned from AppKit, and let's do them a little bit better," and that's how, I'm obviously deeply oversimplifying, but that's how UIKit came to be.
01:07:29 ◼ ► And UIKit is what we use on iOS, and to some degree on some of the other IOSC platforms like tvOS and watchOS, kind of, sort of, but UIKit is generally understood to be better in most ways than AppKit, and certainly more approachable in a lot of ways.
01:07:49 ◼ ► And so, for a new developer to any Apple platform, you know, it seems silly to go for AppKit because it's old and slightly busted, why not use UIKit?
01:07:59 ◼ ► And now with Marzipan, we're bringing UIKit onto the Mac to kind of either replace or supplement AppKit, but what if some of this is going to go the other direction as well, and what if, you know, and I'm thinking specifically about the rumblings we've heard about 4K external displays on iOS.
01:08:18 ◼ ► What if we do need windowing on iOS? What if we do need some of these things? What if we need a menu on iOS? What's that? I'm less convinced it's true, but what if?
01:08:29 ◼ ► You know, what if some of these uniquely Mac traits need to go toward iOS, and what if we're on the precipice of some new thing that replaces UIKit?
01:08:38 ◼ ► Now I'm kind of bringing in what Marco was saying earlier. What if we're on the precipice of some new thing that's UIKit 2, if you will, that is kind of the all-consuming new version of UI programming for Apple platforms that can handle windowing or not, it can handle a menu bar or none, it can handle touch or not, and it just becomes all things to all people.
01:09:02 ◼ ► I don't know. I don't know if that's what's going to happen, but I can certainly see a future where iOS starts borrowing from macOS, macOS starts borrowing from iOS, and this is what I think Steve Trouton Smith was also driving at. Suddenly the delineation between the two gets much smaller.
01:09:19 ◼ ► You still need to convince people to make, again with the iPad, you need to convince them to make a bigger version of your phone app that takes advantage of the iPad screen. So many people just can't be bothered because there's not enough customers. It's not like they're mean people. It's just like, well, most of my users are on the phone, some people have iPads, especially with the universal apps where you can't charge again for it.
01:09:39 ◼ ► Like Apple wants you to make one app that runs on both. You could make two separate apps, but it's not the thing to do these days. So in any future where there's any kind of unified API across all of Apple's platforms, whether it's the new thing you described or whether it's just UIKit as it is or whatever, I think the apps will sort themselves by expected work.
01:10:01 ◼ ► So apps that take advantage of the Mac and take advantage of the things the Mac has to offer are going to be apps that are expensive things for professionals who need them to do their work and who derive value from them.
01:10:14 ◼ ► Anything that you can't charge a lot of money for is just going to be like a phone app that runs on your Mac, right? Because it was developed for the phone, most people use it on the phone. It's cool and nice that you get to use it on your Mac.
01:10:24 ◼ ► But if you complain to that developer, I'd really like it if you supported the Mac better and supported more multiple windows and had right-click menus on things and had a better menu bar.
01:10:34 ◼ ► And they're going to be like, just be glad you can run my app at all. It's not worth it to me to do that. It's not that type of app. It's not Photoshop. It's not one of the Affinity graphics apps. It's not a CAD application. It's not an IDE. It's not a programmer's text editor.
01:10:49 ◼ ► To really do a good job on the Mac requires a lot of effort and you know you're not going to sell that many because there's not that many Macs out there.
01:11:00 ◼ ► So you have to charge a lot of money and you can only charge a lot of money if it provides a lot of value for someone who probably uses it for their work.
01:11:06 ◼ ► Which is most of the best Mac apps have almost always been. It just so happens we also had the fun little apps. But now all the fun little apps are on iOS.
01:11:14 ◼ ► That's where the big money is for anything casual. The only reason serious apps aren't on the phone or the iPad is because those platforms are just not capable of supporting something that you could do on a 5K iMac with Photoshop.
01:11:25 ◼ ► The screens aren't big enough. You don't have precise pointing even with the pencil. There's no paradigm for menus and windows and stuff like that.
01:11:32 ◼ ► So I think that sorting regardless of the API will happen and is a fine thing to happen. I think we would all be fine with that.
01:11:40 ◼ ► We want the Macs to do the things that Macs are good at and I would be perfectly okay with access to all the software that's available on the iPhone and the iPad in some semblance on my Mac that is better than the Marzipan apps in Mojave.
01:11:54 ◼ ► Obviously like we all assume this is going to evolve. But I don't think it has to be super Mac-ified. I'll just be glad to have access to that software.
01:12:02 ◼ ► I will be happy to be able to run or even rebuy an app for a dollar or two and be able to use it on my Mac and have the developer essentially have one code base with some minor differences.
01:12:14 ◼ ► That's perfectly fine with me as long as there is some good pro photo application. Maybe Apple should get in on this business. They should think about making a pro photo app.
01:12:24 ◼ ► What do you guys think? Is that a viable business? Or Photoshop or Affinity or BB Edit or any of the applications that are Chrome and Safari for that matter.
01:12:34 ◼ ► The fact that Chrome on the Mac is more full featured than Chrome on iOS is. I like that.
01:12:40 ◼ ► Those types of applications that I use every day, as long as those continue to exist and be developed by somebody on the Mac, I'm okay with my IRC client being a port of some iOS port or whatever.
01:12:54 ◼ ► Being essentially something that was developed primarily for the phone or the iPad. Just because it means it will have active development, it will be sustainable for the developer in theory because they have a larger customer base and all that.
01:13:04 ◼ ► So I don't fear the future. I've lived through many changes in the Mac. Nothing could be, I was going to say worse, but nothing could be more traumatic or dramatic than the classic to Mac OS X transition.
01:13:17 ◼ ► So I feel like I'm ready for this. Obviously they could still blow it and do terrible things and Windows could still come from behind and eat their lunch.
01:13:23 ◼ ► But right now I'm still optimistic, even if, as Marco pointed out, the Marzipan apps in Mojave are a little bit silly. But consider it a technology preview.
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01:15:30 ◼ ► "Besides newer surge protectors, is there anything we can do to protect our electronics?"
01:15:34 ◼ ► One key thing that I think most people don't understand about surge protection is that surge protectors can be used up. They can wear out.
01:15:49 ◼ ► If you've ever seen on a surge protector some kind of second light that says, "protection" or something like that,
01:15:57 ◼ ► "This is what you're looking for," some of them can tell you if they have basically failed or not.
01:16:04 ◼ ► The problem is that the way most surge protectors fail, if they've given up their capacity to protect you,
01:16:11 ◼ ► is not by stopping working, which would indicate to you, "Oh, this thing doesn't work anymore. I should replace it."
01:16:22 ◼ ► So what you need from surge protection is, first of all, it should be good quality, which is not easy to find,
01:16:30 ◼ ► and you need some way to indicate and to clearly see on a regular basis whether the protection has failed or not.
01:16:36 ◼ ► Ideally, it would actually stop the outlet working if it fails, but I don't think many of them offer that.
01:16:42 ◼ ► And it's hard to find good quality because this is one of those areas where so much of what you buy,
01:16:47 ◼ ► at every price point, you can buy mostly crap because it's mostly just the same cheap garbage on the inside no matter what you buy.
01:16:58 ◼ ► If you can't do something very sophisticated like a whole house protector, which they do exist, I don't know anything about them,
01:17:07 ◼ ► so I can't tell you about those, but if you don't have a whole house surge protection in place,
01:17:11 ◼ ► if you can find something good quality, great. What I have found is the Triplight Isobar series.
01:17:20 ◼ ► They're like these big, chunky metal enclosure things, and if you look at reviews of these things,
01:17:24 ◼ ► people have taken them apart, and they can actually see the components inside are actually good quality components,
01:17:29 ◼ ► actually providing a good level of protection, and it actually provides, of course, the clear light that shows you you are protected or you are not protected.
01:17:38 ◼ ► I would strongly suggest putting one of these, like I actually like the direct plug-in two outlet thing,
01:17:45 ◼ ► where it's literally just like, it looks like an outlet sitting in front of your outlet,
01:17:48 ◼ ► and so then you can plug into this any number of like, you know, outlet strips you want, basically,
01:18:02 ◼ ► You need good surge protection, and then you can multiply the outlets with whatever else you want,
01:18:06 ◼ ► whatever other cheap stuff you want. These outlet things from these Triplight Isobars are about 25 bucks for the little plug-in kind that I use.
01:18:12 ◼ ► I suggest you put them on all your major appliances, washer, dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator,
01:18:32 ◼ ► And just check it every so often, like put, ideally, I mean, they're kind of ugly, so you don't want them too visible,
01:18:37 ◼ ► but ideally, just like, you know, walk around and check them every so often, just to make sure that protection light's still on.
01:18:49 ◼ ► because the components inside need to be a certain, you know, just quality and strength level to absorb the surge,
01:18:58 ◼ ► instead of passing it along to your equipment, and then also be aware that they do wear out.
01:19:19 ◼ ► The other thing I'd add is, the thing a lot of people don't think about is like, when you charge your phone at night,
01:19:29 ◼ ► you take a little cable that came with your phone and you snake it down to the little power brick thing,
01:19:41 ◼ ► Very often people plug that directly into the outlet that's behind their nightstand or something.
01:19:47 ◼ ► You're leaving that plugged in all night long where there could be a thunderstorm that you sleep through or whatever.
01:19:55 ◼ ► directly to something that could be affected by a lightning strike, your phones and iPads are high on their list.
01:19:59 ◼ ► So, you know, think about this, but get a surge protector for your bedroom or for wherever you have your thing plugged in.
01:20:06 ◼ ► I don't know if the little white power bricks have any kind of protection in them, but I'm just going to assume they don't.
01:20:13 ◼ ► You're leaving it plugged in there for eight hours. Get a surge thing for that, for wherever you do that.
01:20:19 ◼ ► Matt Taylor writes, "Should I buy a tennis for the camera or a $1,000 actual camera? Use case, we have a newborn."
01:20:28 ◼ ► I have an opinion about this. I suspect that Marco will disagree with me and John, I'm thinking, will agree with me.
01:20:50 ◼ ► And the reason I say that is I was very hesitant about buying my Micro Four Thirds camera.
01:20:58 ◼ ► And I was very hesitant to buy it and spend about as much for my prime lens as I did for the body, you know, the camera itself.
01:21:07 ◼ ► And then I spent about as much again for a zoom lens as I did for the other two things.
01:21:26 ◼ ► Because, and again, I don't have an iPhone tennis, but I don't see how, even with the computational photography,
01:21:35 ◼ ► how the new iPhones can get most of my pictures to look as great as they do coming off of a camera with just way more glass.
01:21:44 ◼ ► And so, you know, you can get a pretty decent fake bokeh, bokeh whatever it is, off of the iPhone,
01:22:10 ◼ ► And while it is not as good at most metrics in a camera than a decent standalone camera,
01:22:23 ◼ ► And the big thing is, if you optimize for like, what is the best picture you can shoot of your kid,
01:22:54 ◼ ► - And also a pretty common thing that people want to do with photos of their kids is share them.
01:23:00 ◼ ► And ultimately, the reality is, you will get more total picture quality, I guess, out of the phone
01:23:29 ◼ ► So, take a real hard look at, if you can't get both, or maybe if you can't step back to the iPhone XR
01:23:39 ◼ ► and apply that savings towards a camera, keeping in mind also that whatever you buy with the real camera setup
01:23:45 ◼ ► will last you more than a year or two. The iPhone's going to last you between one and three years,
01:24:07 ◼ ► Because the camera is so good, it also matters what your skill level is, what your artistic sensibilities are.
01:24:14 ◼ ► Do you want to get really into the camera stuff and get a lot of different lens focal lengths?
01:24:27 ◼ ► Do you want the pictures to look kind of okay as JPEGs, but maybe you want to actually edit the RAW
01:24:34 ◼ ► If you want to do that level of processing and work and manual control and artistic variance,
01:24:40 ◼ ► then, by all means, get the real camera, it'll give you that control and it'll give you that headroom to do all that stuff.
01:24:46 ◼ ► But, if you're mostly just going to shoot stuff right out of the camera and you want to post it to Instagram or something,
01:24:58 ◼ ► So, it's really kind of an unfair comparison. It's such a different beast, the fact that you're always going to have that.
01:25:07 ◼ ► And the camera is not. The camera is going to be in bags or closets a lot of the time when you wish you had it with you.
01:25:15 ◼ ► So, I really would urge you, if you can find a way to get both a really great phone camera and a stand-alone camera, go for it.
01:25:24 ◼ ► But, if you had to pick only one, obviously you're not going to go without a phone, but if you had to pick only one, I would go with the phone.
01:25:43 ◼ ► - All right. - Everything Marco said is true, except he forgot one major factor here, because we have a use case here.
01:25:50 ◼ ► We have a newborn. You are incredibly motivated to take pictures and to carry a big camera with you when you have a kid.
01:26:08 ◼ ► You want to get the very best picture. So, all the downsides of the camera, that it's big, that it's bulky, that it's a pain to share, you are very motivated to share those pictures.
01:26:19 ◼ ► You are the most motivated you will ever be to deal with all the things that are disadvantages of a real camera.
01:26:25 ◼ ► And you will get better pictures of it and you will never have a chance to take a picture of your kid at these ages.
01:26:31 ◼ ► You can never go back when you get a better camera. I look now like we bought our first digital camera before we had our son, but he's in high school now, so the pictures are terrible.
01:26:41 ◼ ► I wish I had, because digital cameras were terrible, because we didn't get the world's most expensive one, I wish I had had a better camera.
01:26:48 ◼ ► So, I would say in this particular situation, not like in general, like what should I buy, I've got a thousand dollars, should I buy the camera, but you have a newborn, spend the money on the big fancy camera.
01:26:58 ◼ ► Take as many pictures as you can, because you will be very motivated to do so, you will thank yourself later.
01:27:03 ◼ ► The other nice thing is newborns, like real honest to goodness newborns, don't move that much.
01:27:08 ◼ ► And so it gives you the chance to get used to taking pictures of what are effectively still lifes.
01:27:14 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. And I mean that genuinely, because it is hard for me to get a good picture of Declan these days, because he's moving so darn much.
01:27:22 ◼ ► Whereas Michaela has gotten more mobile recently, but especially early on for both of them, it was relatively easy to capture a decent picture of them.
01:27:36 ◼ ► So, in that to some degree makes Marco's point even stronger, but yeah, I still think get yourself a decent camera with a decent lens, even just one prime lens is all you need.
01:27:46 ◼ ► That's all I had for like the first year or two that Declan was alive. And that'll be really incredible.
01:27:52 ◼ ► And the other thing I would suggest, regardless of what you do, you get a phone, Marco's right also about the video.
01:27:56 ◼ ► Like you should have something to shoot video that's not your fancy camera, because iPhones will do better video than that, right?
01:28:01 ◼ ► So hopefully somebody has a phone that does video. I think video is less important than it'd be like 4K 60 or whatever.
01:28:06 ◼ ► Like just get some video, because sometimes you forget to take video and then you don't get to hear their squeaky little voices and see how they moved and all this stuff.
01:28:13 ◼ ► But anyway, the other thing I would suggest is if you can get professional pictures taken at some milestone interval, because the professional picture taker is going to have a better camera than you.
01:28:25 ◼ ► And that actually does make a difference. So that even if the camera you get isn't the best in the world, or maybe you just get the phone, you decide to just go with the phone, right?
01:28:33 ◼ ► If you have like a one year old, a two year old, a three year old, a six month, like at some interval, pay somebody with a very, very expensive camera to take decent pictures for your kids.
01:28:43 ◼ ► So at the very least, and then make prints of them, and put them on your walls, and do all that stuff, at the very least you will have the best image capture possible at certain milestone ages for posterity.
01:28:57 ◼ ► Even if all the other pictures you have, like mine, like my kids, right? My digital camera in 2004 was crap, and the pictures from it are mostly crap.
01:29:06 ◼ ► But we paid a professional photographer to take formal portraits of six months old, one year old. The intervals slack off as the second child comes, as everybody knows.
01:29:15 ◼ ► But yeah, having those is good. So it all doesn't really highlight how bad my pictures were at those times, but I'm glad that we paid someone to take the pictures with a fancy camera.
01:29:25 ◼ ► It's not that expensive. You can just go to the mall and do it. These days, any professional with any decent camera is going to be way better than yours, and they're going to look fantastic compared to your phone camera.
01:29:40 ◼ ► Finally, Benjamin Jacks writes, "File systems make sense. There's a trunk, and you create branches of subdivision to make sense of your files." John, what are tags for?
01:29:57 ◼ ► Semantically, there is no difference between tags and quote-unquote "file systems" and directories.
01:30:07 ◼ ► When you say, "This is in /usr/local/user/local," it's like, "Oh, that's a directory." You're building this mental model of this tree of things and branching hallways.
01:30:22 ◼ ► But semantically, when you look at the contents of that directory, whether with the ls command or opening a Finder window or any other way you can do it, all you're doing is showing all the files in the file system that have the tag "directory is /usr/local."
01:30:41 ◼ ► Directories are just tags, semantically. If you add more tags, "Cool," "updated recently," just any other thing, you can ask for all the files that have the tag "cool."
01:30:56 ◼ ► But wait, those aren't in the same directory. Yeah, but the ones in that directory also don't all have the tag "cool." They're just a different way to ask for files.
01:31:04 ◼ ► Directories are just tags. Now, implementation-wise, most file systems are not implemented that way. Some of them are, though. There is no distinction.
01:31:12 ◼ ► So all tags are is giving it a different name for like, "What if instead of just having one tag for everything, and that's the way we always ask for them, give me all the things with a tag of /usr/local, give me all the things with a tag of /usr/john?"
01:31:26 ◼ ► Instead of doing that, we have another thing you can put on it. You could have /usr/john, but you can also have a tag that's a color or a name or arbitrary text or whatever.
01:31:38 ◼ ► And yes, you can ask for all the files that have that tag or all the files that have a combination of tags. It's just different ways of slicing and dicing the same data, and none of them are any different from each other, except for the fact that we decide that a file can't have—well, not every—
01:31:53 ◼ ► I was going to say a file can't have more than one directory tag, but with hard links to files and hard links to directories, and even that's not true. So, you know, you've got to free your mind.
01:32:01 ◼ ► Directories are not semantically different than tags. They are actually all the same thing, and once you realize that, you will be enlightened and realize that it's just giving you more ways to view the same data.
01:32:14 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Eero, and we'll see you next week.
01:32:19 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:32:31 ◼ ► John didn't do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:32:42 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM, and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
01:33:00 ◼ ► A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
01:33:21 ◼ ► So you appear to have sent us a photo or a video that includes a very high perspective of your house, so it seems as though you have a drone.
01:33:31 ◼ ► Sort of. So a listener and viewer, I can now say, was kind enough to send me, for a short-term loan, a DJI Mavic Pro.
01:33:44 ◼ ► And he shipped this to me with like, you know, 305 spare batteries, and it even has like a VR headset thing, which I haven't tried yet, but a controller and everything else.
01:33:55 ◼ ► And this listener, Eric V, was kind enough to not only ship it to me, but include a return label, so I don't even have to pay to ship it back.
01:34:03 ◼ ► So he has sent me his like $1500. It's amazing. He sent me like this $1500 drone or whatever it is. It doesn't really matter how expensive it is. It's a lot of money.
01:34:13 ◼ ► The Mavic Pro, which I think is a little bit like a year or two old at this point, but it's amazing. But I'll get to that in a second.
01:34:20 ◼ ► But yeah, not only did he ship me like the thing in a backpack, which to be fair, the backpack is obviously padding, but anyway, this thing with the backpack and the controller and extra batteries and the full-on VR headset, and it cost like, yeah, and it cost him like $30 to ship it to me, but then he included a return label.
01:34:38 ◼ ► Like I should have been paying him to ship it. Anyway, it was the nicest thing in the world. So thank you, Eric V. I really appreciate it.
01:34:43 ◼ ► But this is the first time I've ever really used a drone. And again, it's a Mavic Pro. And this thing is amazing.
01:34:52 ◼ ► This might be the coolest piece of consumer technology, except maybe a smartphone, that I have ever seen.
01:35:00 ◼ ► The things that I can do as the world's most ham-fisted and inexperienced drone pilot are amazing.
01:35:08 ◼ ► Like you plug in your phone to this little like holster below the controller, and you tell the thing, "Take off now."
01:35:15 ◼ ► And it says, "Okay, I've recorded where we started, and I will take off and I will go to," I think it's like a meter and a half or, you know, maybe it's six feet or something like that.
01:35:24 ◼ ► It takes off and just hovers. And just chills. And when you want to move it, you move one of the sticks, and it moves.
01:35:30 ◼ ► And you move the other stick and it, you know, twists or goes up or down or whatever the case may be.
01:35:34 ◼ ► It is extremely fast. And like I was watching a video of it, and apparently it will track a car.
01:35:40 ◼ ► I haven't tried this myself, but it will track a car, and I have tried it tracks toddlers, because Declan and I went to a local park this morning.
01:35:48 ◼ ► And we were in the middle of like this big open area with, you know, soccer, like three or four soccer fields. Nobody was there because it was, you know, 10 o'clock in the morning on a weekday.
01:36:06 ◼ ► You know what I mean. You know what I mean. I had it track Declan. And as he's walking around and running, it's tracking him no problem.
01:36:14 ◼ ► This is the coolest thing in the world. And I'm not trying to say that this is the best drone that's ever existed. I know there are much newer ones.
01:36:23 ◼ ► I am not trying to make a declaration about DJI being better than anyone else, although it seems like they are from everything I can tell.
01:36:31 ◼ ► Just as someone who has never had or even piloted a drone briefly before, this is the coolest thing in the entire world.
01:36:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I've had an occasion to fly a drone. And the immediate things that you notice about it are A) it's insanely loud, B) everyone around you knows it's a drone, and C) most people are very annoyed or offended by drones.
01:37:06 ◼ ► Yes, all of these things seem to be true. And when I was at the park, everyone was giving me a copious amount of side-eye, but nobody seemed to be genuinely perturbed that I was there.
01:37:16 ◼ ► But I've flown it above the house, and I'm waiting for the next door post that Merlin loves to bring up.
01:37:22 ◼ ► And where somebody's been buzzing my--now, to be fair, I've been just basically circling my own house.
01:37:28 ◼ ► But I'm waiting for--somebody's been buzzing my house with a drone, and they're trying to spy on me, and I don't know what's going on, and I've called the cops.
01:37:37 ◼ ► And can you blame them? Like, I know you did that video of you--the thing going up over your house.
01:37:42 ◼ ► But you can also see the neighbors' houses once you get to that height. Like, you can't help it.
01:37:45 ◼ ► You are accidentally filming the neighbors' yards. And if they're out there sunbathing naked, they're like, "Great, I don't really appreciate the drones going up over there."
01:37:54 ◼ ► Totally. And I mean, it does make sense, but the funny thing about it is, to go back to our camera conversation, if I really and truly wanted to, like, spy on somebody,
01:38:01 ◼ ► I would be much better off, I think, going up to them with my telephoto, you know, like, zoom lens on my big camera, than with the drone.
01:38:10 ◼ ► Like, I was purposely flying up near my own house when Declan was in his bedroom, and it was hard to see him.
01:38:18 ◼ ► And this is a really nice drone that shoots 4K video. It was hard to see him through the window.
01:38:23 ◼ ► And then at one point, I was flying up to the kitchen window, and Erin was, like, making dinner or whatever, and I couldn't see her at all because of the reflection in the window.
01:38:30 ◼ ► I'm not saying that you can't spy on a person with a drone, and certainly outside all bets are off, but if you, like, were trying to quietly sneak up on somebody,
01:38:39 ◼ ► that is impossible with a drone, because just like Marco said, they're louder than hell.
01:38:43 ◼ ► And either way, the only way that you're going to get a decent shot of this person is if they have windows that are mammoth, or it's outside.
01:38:51 ◼ ► But all of that aside, it is so frickin' cool. It is so cool. And at one point, I was, like, flying up toward myself, and I was above my own head.
01:39:03 ◼ ► Like, I was a solid foot or two above my head, but I was kind of buzzing myself, if you will, and it got within, I don't know, three or four feet of me,
01:39:11 ◼ ► and all of a sudden, the thing pitches back real hard and stops dead, and I look down at the controller, and it says something like "obstacle" or something like that.
01:39:20 ◼ ► And what happened was, it just didn't want to get that close to me, which was super cool.
01:39:25 ◼ ► And I haven't yet crashed it, although Declan grabbed the stick at one point and got me really, really close.
01:39:31 ◼ ► But this thing is so cool, and I know that this is very old news, and I know this is another example of me or us coming upon technology that's been around for a long time.
01:39:39 ◼ ► But wow, what an awesome device. And I could see this being extremely cool for my car videos, but there's a couple problems associated with that.
01:39:49 ◼ ► One, I'm not sure if that would classify as commercial use, which creates a whole crud load of red tape that I really don't want to have to go through.
01:39:57 ◼ ► And two, I don't really know where I could do it, because I would want to do it on a road or something, but that's deeply dangerous and unwise, whether or not it's legal.
01:40:06 ◼ ► I don't know if the letter to the law says it's legal, but even if it is, I wouldn't really be comfortable with it.
01:40:11 ◼ ► So, again, leaving aside all the red tape stuff, I want to try this on the next video, but darned if I know the mechanism by which I can do that. You know what I mean? But super cool stuff.
01:40:25 ◼ ► The biggest challenge with drones is, they're super cool if you have somewhere to use them where there's nobody around for miles, and you could drive your car on the private road.
01:40:38 ◼ ► That would be awesome, but that's not the reality of where you live and where you're going to be operating this.
01:40:48 ◼ ► Ultimately, there is a valid question to ask, "What should you use the drone for? What value does it have?"
01:40:57 ◼ ► I think there are a lot of values it can have, like basically in removing the need or reducing the need for fancy dollies and stuff or other ways to get smooth panning shots or shooting around a circle view of the car.
01:41:14 ◼ ► There are lots of things you could do. I don't think having it follow you while you are driving is a good idea.
01:41:20 ◼ ► You could try it. I don't think that's a good idea. I certainly wouldn't try it with someone else's drone.
01:41:27 ◼ ► I think as you have probably found, flying a drone well takes 100% of somebody's attention.
01:41:43 ◼ ► You can't say, "Oh, follow this car," and then you just get in the car alone and it just follows you. That's not going to happen.
01:42:01 ◼ ► You're saying this, I think, from the perspective of somebody who lives in a fairly urban area.
01:42:05 ◼ ► And having been to your home, your neighborhood is not unlike my neighborhood, but the difference between us is that I can get to relatively rural places very quickly.
01:42:16 ◼ ► So I'm thinking more along the lines of my understanding of where Tiff's parents lived, where there is the space and the lack of activity for me to probably be able to do this on a road in a situation where it really wouldn't be dangerous.
01:42:29 ◼ ► But the problem I have with that is the most obvious and clear example to me is my mother-in-law's house, which is only about 20 minutes from where I live.
01:42:38 ◼ ► But unfortunately, it is just barely within five miles of a little teeny tiny like Cessna Airport, like not even a regional airport, but you know what I'm talking about? Like the little local Yokel Airport?
01:42:48 ◼ ► And because of that, it means, if I'm again going to follow the letter of the law, I would need to phone the airport every time I fly the drone in order to say, "Hey, is it cool if I'm flying 4.9 miles from your tower?"
01:43:03 ◼ ► Because, strictly speaking, if I understand the rules correctly, at least in America, if you're within five miles of any airport, even a little tiny one that does little Cessnas and nothing else, you still need to call the tower and tell them what's going on.
01:43:16 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it's just like there are so many problems and challenges of using drones like this that I can't see it being worth it for the, like I can't see it being worth the hassle.
01:43:30 ◼ ► Like, they're a cool toy to play with, they're really cool, and they are really super impressive, like what the modern DJI ones can do, like they're super impressive, but they conflict so badly with reality in so many ways, especially if you care at all about what other people might think of you, or really angering other people, or getting the police called on you, or having, you know.
01:43:59 ◼ ► There's so many downsides to it. Is all of that worth getting a couple of shots that you could also get with a gimbal pretty well?
01:44:08 ◼ ► Because we don't need to see the car from space, like, you know, for the most part, you could replace the entire drone, you could replace it with a person holding a camera and panning it on a tripod or walking around with a gimbal.
01:44:22 ◼ ► I feel like this is, it's a tool that is better used probably by larger and more specialized types of production staffs. For your use, making car videos mostly by yourself, I don't think it's a good idea.
01:44:38 ◼ ► I think it would be way more trouble than it's worth, and I think you would end up getting not that much footage out of it for the amount of money you would spend on it.
01:44:47 ◼ ► - Yeah, I think that's the thing, is that I have not looked at how expensive this drone is, but I think it was over $1,000, and certainly once you add a couple extra batteries and this and that and the other thing, and not to say that I would have to get a Mavic Pro.
01:45:01 ◼ ► - I mean, it's a good value for what it is, but it's such a specialized tool, and it comes with such massive costs and downsides to use, that I don't think it's what you need right now for the kind of stuff that you do.
01:45:16 ◼ ► I think it would be a fun toy to play with, which you know now, because you are playing with a fun. It's kind of like your wrangler face like it's.
01:45:23 ◼ ► It's a fun toy to play with, but I think you probably have already found. If not, you will find that to actually own it is probably not a good idea for you for you for you doing because again, like it needs.
01:45:40 ◼ ► It needs an environment you don't live in, and it needs like an operator, and you tend to shoot most of your stuff alone.
01:45:48 ◼ ► - Yeah, and that's the thing. What I would want to do is get footage on a road, and it may be like the little access road on the way to my old office, which is a road that has a couple of turns,
01:46:03 ◼ ► but really it's just like almost. It's one of those situations where it's almost like a parking lot access. You know what I mean?
01:46:09 ◼ ► The only reason you go on this road is to go into one of the several parking lots off of it.
01:46:13 ◼ ► So I think I could go there on like a weekend or something like that when there's almost no traffic because it's nothing but business buildings, office buildings back there.
01:46:24 ◼ ► And I could probably have it track me, you know, because if I just get over the trees vertically speaking, if I just get it over the trees and tell it track the car,
01:46:34 ◼ ► this road is like a quarter mile long. It has a couple of turns in it. That's all I would need. I think it would be enough.
01:46:40 ◼ ► But the thing that actually turns me off, there's two things that deeply turn me off about it. Number one, in order to do that, I would need to have a drone, which is, you know, $1,500 or $1,000 or something like that,
01:46:50 ◼ ► which is, I think, not a great return on investment to your point, Marco. And number two, if I really wanted to do this properly, I think even though I've made,
01:46:58 ◼ ► I actually have not received any money from YouTube, but hypothetically, YouTube owes me like $30. So I think strictly speaking, this is commercial, which means I need to go through like this apparently reasonably involved licensure process.
01:47:12 ◼ ► And so it's just, it's not, I don't think that juice is going to be worth the squeeze, even though, oh my God, I want it so bad.
01:47:20 ◼ ► But again, I think ultimately you are, you should only be looking at stuff like this, A, if you're a bigger production, but B, if you have someone dedicated to operating it.
01:47:31 ◼ ► This is going to solve some problems for you that you wouldn't have if you just had a second person operating a camera on a tripod or if you had a second driver.
01:47:39 ◼ ► Like I noticed Aaron was in your last video for like two seconds doing one driving shot, because I guess you were operating the camera.
01:47:44 ◼ ► If you just do that more, like you can just, if you have somebody operating a camera while someone else drives the car, that solves a lot of your problem for you.
01:47:53 ◼ ► And with, at no cost using the stuff you already have. By the way, also a little thing about drones, they can't include audio because all you would hear would be their propellers.
01:48:03 ◼ ► So you have to also have audio separate and you can't be recording the audio from what the drone is seeing, even if you use an external microphone like down on the ground, because it'll just hear the drone.
01:48:14 ◼ ► Like they're so loud. Like unless the drone's like 500 feet in the air, right? So like it's such a specialized tool and it is such a cool toy to play with.
01:48:22 ◼ ► And so it's easy to say like, yeah, they're wonderful. Like they're, you know, buy one. They're so much fun.
01:48:28 ◼ ► But I bet a lot of people have drones sitting in boxes and closets not being used because it turns out they're a pain in the ass to use.
01:48:34 ◼ ► Oh yeah. If it wasn't for the car videos, there is zero doubt in my mind. I would spend a whole pile of money on one, use it like twice, and just like you said, it would just collect dust until the end of time.
01:48:52 ◼ ► Step one, get a second person to just hold an iPhone and turn it on a tripod as you drive by.
01:48:59 ◼ ► That's step one. And you can already do that today. And if you really can't find another person to help you out that often, you shouldn't get a drone because you will need another person to help you out that often to operate that drone.
01:49:12 ◼ ► That's more boring than a drone shot. I mean, it's not a replacement for a tripod. I mean, like I think the drone, it's not that much more expensive than an iPhone.
01:49:19 ◼ ► If you just got it because it's a fun thing to have, that's a perfectly good reason to get it. Like say this is going to be just a hobby thing. Even if you're not making car videos, you just want a drone because they're cool and they're fun to have.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And you want to take it on vacation and fly low over the waves at your beach house and make a cool video. You know, whatever. Like, I think that's fine. But like, eventually for the car videos, like it's silly, obviously now, but you could graduate to it.
01:49:40 ◼ ► You could get those four magic words that I know you aspire to, Casey. Professional driver closed course.
01:49:46 ◼ ► Go to a race track, drive the car on the race track and have someone fly the drone over you as you drive around the corners of the race track. Every car show does that, right?
01:49:57 ◼ ► You get, in theory, you get clearance from the track to say, I'm going to drive on your track. I'm going to rent it for the day. I'm going to fly a drone. They're like, go ahead. Close course. Do whatever you want.
01:50:06 ◼ ► And that shot is always there. And you don't need audio because it's the part where the music's playing and you're doing a voiceover and you're talking about the car and the drone comes in and flies down over the car as it races around the race track.
01:50:15 ◼ ► That's, that's a thing that you could do with technology and budget you have available. It's not going to make your video that much better that you're going to make that money back for sure. But it's really cool.
01:50:25 ◼ ► Like, I feel like the drone, if you want a drone, you should get it because you're going to do fun things with a drone and it's like a hobby. Like the same reason you get like, you know, just something fun to play with.
01:50:35 ◼ ► Like, I don't know if it would be worth it for me to play with, but if you like, I think you could get a thousand dollars of fun out of a drone over the course of a year.
01:50:43 ◼ ► And maybe after a year you get bored or whatever. No, you can't fly around your neighborhood and annoy your neighbors. But if you're ever going on vacation or you're going to someone's house who owns acres of land or you're going somewhere where there aren't a lot of people and you just want to take cool videos that you're never going to upload to anybody, you're just going to have them for yourself because they're cool.
01:50:59 ◼ ► That's one of the things you can do with technology. Right? You know, let's not forget about fun. But for the car stuff, yeah, you do need a crew. Renting the race course is going to be a lot more expensive than the drone. Right?
01:51:14 ◼ ► But that is a shot that everybody does. And that's the difference between that and a tripod because no one on a tripod can fly over you as you go around a racetrack. Right? That's the shots that you can only get with a drone.
01:51:24 ◼ ► And they're very popular. It used to be that you could only get that shot with a helicopter in the 80s. We could call them helicopter shots. But now when I watch them, I realize sometimes, you know it's not a helicopter. Right?
01:51:34 ◼ ► You know no one's renting a helicopter for this. It's just some person with a drone controlling it with their phone. But it looks just as good as a helicopter shot.
01:51:40 ◼ ► So I don't know. I always find it fascinating that you can get those shots. And people who just take the thing. Like we see some friends on Instagram do this. They take it on vacation. They take it to the beach. They go up over the hills. They skim down along the beach. They go over the water. They look awesome.
01:51:54 ◼ ► Like there's no point to it other than, "Hey, look at this awesome video." And then eventually, you know, it crashes into the waves and you lose your $1,000 thing in the water and you feel sad. But that's like it's part of the experience. It's like a remote control airplane.
01:52:05 ◼ ► People don't buy remote control airplanes because they think they're going to help them make better car video. They're just like because they're a fun thing to fly. And they cost a lot. And they're hard to, much harder to deal with and control than a drone. And eventually they crash and all your money is gone. That's all part of the experience.
01:52:20 ◼ ► So yeah, get it if this is going to be a hobby for you. Like a fun thing to play with and a hobby for the car videos. Maybe. Like we can all see the shot, right? The one over you driving on a race course. We can all see it on our head.
01:52:33 ◼ ► Someday, someday I feel like you could pull off that shot. Maybe you don't buy one. Maybe you rent one. Maybe you get a friend who's going to control the thing, who brings their drone and they fly it. So if it crashes, it's not your fault, right? And they fly over you and you rent the race course, right? I don't know.
01:52:46 ◼ ► You know, it's serious when of all the people in the world, it is Marco telling me not to spend money because Marco's profession at this point is basically to get all of his friends to spend obscene amounts of money.
01:53:04 ◼ ► He did try to tell the person to get the phone and the real camera. So I feel like he's met his quota for the episode.