00:00:11 ◼ ► Not true. That's totally true. Name one podcast where you speak first. You didn't say first. You said not until spoken to or about, which is different than first.
00:00:23 ◼ ► I could not be spoken to and not be spoken about and still speak second. Oh, my word. Is it going to be like that? That's how tonight's going to go.
00:00:34 ◼ ► You know, when Marco called early, I was speaking the praises of the two of you. I was telling him I wasn't quite steeled, stolen, steeled. I don't know. S-T-E-E-L-E-D.
00:00:43 ◼ ► What are you trying to go for? Just I wasn't steeled for the awesome that comes out of the two of you.
00:00:49 ◼ ► Stolen? Yeah, I don't know where that went. I don't know where that went. The root word of that expression is not the thievery one, but the metal one.
00:00:58 ◼ ► Yeah, well, hey, I recovered. I recovered. Anyway, the point is I was singing your praises before you showed up, and now I see how it's going to go.
00:01:09 ◼ ► All right, so let's start with some follow-up, and we have some sad news from Safari. Jon, can you tell us about this, please?
00:01:15 ◼ ► Last week was the second time I mentioned what I thought was my solution to my Safari extension woes, which was an option at the bottom of the develop menu that said allow unsigned extensions.
00:01:26 ◼ ► Since then, I've learned that that option either doesn't do what I think it does or doesn't do anything.
00:01:32 ◼ ► And by the way, even if you check it, if you quit Safari and relaunch it, it forgets that you checked it.
00:01:38 ◼ ► So that setting is useless for my purposes, and even if it did work and stick, I'm not even sure it does what I want it to do.
00:01:46 ◼ ► So we are back to square one, which is every time I launch Safari, I have to manually load my extensions, which I continue to do because it turns out I don't launch Safari that often.
00:01:55 ◼ ► I launch it after one of the computer boots, and I just leave it running all the time. So it's not great, but that's what I'm doing.
00:02:02 ◼ ► In other news, Adobe is rethinking apps, or their apps. John Alper writes, "They seem to be taking the Photoshop approach you've been recommending to evolve Premiere."
00:02:12 ◼ ► So Premiere is their video editing app, I believe, and it's their equivalent of Final Cut Pro.
00:02:17 ◼ ► And they've said that they're announcing a new project that just came out at VidCon, and they're announcing a new project called Project Rush, which is, and now I'm quoting from a link we'll put in the show notes,
00:02:29 ◼ ► "A new cross-platform editing application that's not released yet, but users can apply to be on the beta."
00:02:34 ◼ ► And I guess this is just a rethinking of Premiere, kind of like how Final Cut Pro was a rethinking of Final Cut whatever was before it, 9? I don't know.
00:02:44 ◼ ► No, you're thinking of Final Cut Pro 10. Well, I mean, actually, I don't know if we mentioned this on the last show where we were talking about the clean sheet designs to applications like,
00:02:53 ◼ ► "Oh, we've got a popular app, but what if we just rethought everything about it and threw out all the old stuff and just started fresh?"
00:02:59 ◼ ► And if we didn't mention it, we should have. The iMovie was the first time Apple did that in a big way where they had a new idea about how iMovie could work.
00:03:08 ◼ ► And there was at least a year where they shipped both the old and the new one, or supported both the old and the new one, because the new one was so new and didn't have all the stuff that the old one had.
00:03:18 ◼ ► But they were so excited to be able to show us the new iMovie, and you may not be ready, but this is the future, so get used to it.
00:03:33 ◼ ► And it went from Final Cut Pro 7 or whatever the version was to Final Cut Pro capital letter X, which may or may not be 10 depending on who you ask.
00:03:43 ◼ ► I'm pretty sure it's 10. Is it 10? I forgot. Yeah, it's always 10 with Apple. I don't think they've ever used it to actually say X.
00:03:49 ◼ ► Anyway, and they didn't keep the old version of Final Cut around, and a lot of the Final Cut people were angry and kept using the old version for a long time.
00:03:57 ◼ ► Those clean sheet designs were more like, "We have a new idea about how the interface should work."
00:04:02 ◼ ► The Adobe ones, I think, are also part of leaving behind legacy code. I'm not sure how much code was shared between the old and the new iMovie, but I think it was mostly about the interface.
00:04:10 ◼ ► But anyway, this Project Rush thing seems like it's similar in that it's not just like, "Oh, we're going to design the app UI and everything a different way."
00:04:18 ◼ ► But it's like, I think the reason it was related to VidCon is it's cross-device, so it will run on iOS devices and on the desktop and on phones.
00:04:29 ◼ ► Because people who are making YouTube videos or whatever might actually be shooting and editing them on their iPad or on their phone, not just on their desktop.
00:04:36 ◼ ► And you have to have a very different application if it's going to run in all those different environments.
00:04:40 ◼ ► And you have to start with a clean sheet. You can't put Adobe Premiere on your phone because it would be a mess.
00:04:52 ◼ ► But I think that Apple did something similar with the Clips application of, like, let's rethink what a video-related application looks like in the world of smartphones.
00:05:04 ◼ ► We had a lot of people write in, probably five to ten, maybe even fifteen people write in with examples of programs or scripts that they had written to find duplicate files.
00:05:14 ◼ ► I think every single one that I noticed was Swift. That's probably not 100% true. I'm sure there were other ones that snuck by.
00:05:27 ◼ ► He said that someone on the show was asking for a utility to find duplicate files, he made a tool to do just that, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
00:05:34 ◼ ► This is just one example of many. It might have been the first example. I don't really recall. I didn't choose it.
00:05:38 ◼ ► John writes, "The interface is all command line. It doesn't try to manage your duplicates at all, it just gives you a list of duplicates in singletons."
00:05:45 ◼ ► And so this all stemmed from, what was it Marco, it was trying to figure out when there were duplicates in TIFF's photo library, is that right?
00:05:51 ◼ ► Yeah, because basically TIFF's computer over the years has evolved through a whole bunch, because it's been like one installation that's been carried forward for like a decade.
00:05:58 ◼ ► So it's evolved through a whole bunch of different photo management apps and solutions and archive drives and backup drives and everything else.
00:06:09 ◼ ► And I figured, hey, why don't we take the APFS free cloning feature and basically find all these duplicates and replace them with APFS clones of one original.
00:06:19 ◼ ► That way the duplicates can stay where they are so we don't accidentally lose things, but they can at least not take up duplicate space.
00:06:28 ◼ ► That would be nice. But yeah, basically we got a whole bunch of people responding, almost all of whom had written their own scripts to do this.
00:06:38 ◼ ► And my thinking after all that is, wow, I should write my own script to do this sometime.
00:06:45 ◼ ► Yeah, the reason I put this one in the notes is because it doesn't try to do anything with them, and that's where the danger is.
00:06:50 ◼ ► Like a lot of the other scripts, I mean, people would even say, like, you know, use it if you want, I don't vouch for it or whatever.
00:06:55 ◼ ► It's like finding the duplicates is great. That's a read-only operation. It's then deciding what to do where you can really hose yourself.
00:07:00 ◼ ► I mentioned the metadata issues before, but just the potential to destroy data is high.
00:07:05 ◼ ► So that's why any programmer looking at this might think of themselves like Marco just said, I should write one of these on my own.
00:07:12 ◼ ► Because at least when you write it yourself, you know exactly what it's doing, and if you hose yourself, you kind of have yourself to blame.
00:07:17 ◼ ► I would not run any of these random things on here, which is why I linked to this one, which doesn't do anything to your files.
00:07:22 ◼ ► It just prints out the duplicates. And by the way, it's written in Rust, which I thought was novel.
00:07:47 ◼ ► This has nothing to do with Jon's particular app. I'm just saying I do not miss the days of writing C++ for a living.
00:07:57 ◼ ► A fan writes that, "PSA, iOS 12 now randomizes your music collection rather than simply selecting the first track in your collection when your car starts." I tried to find the episode where we were talking about this earlier tonight. I was trying to look it up.
00:08:16 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. I'll have to look again. Anyway, maybe somebody in the chat room can find it and I'll put it in the show notes.
00:08:23 ◼ ► But what we were talking about was, whatever is the alphabetically first song in your library, which is in some cases like the A-Team theme song, which I saw on this Reddit link we'll put in the show notes.
00:08:36 ◼ ► Maybe it's like 10,000 Maniacs or some other numeral-based... I think that comes first. It might not. It doesn't matter.
00:08:43 ◼ ► One way or another, it typically ends up that you'll always hear the same song when iOS doesn't really know what else to play and you've started Bluetooth playback and it just has to figure something out.
00:08:53 ◼ ► Well, apparently in iOS 12, it will just randomly select a song from your library. So I think the three of us can claim this as ours. I think this is our feature and you're welcome, everyone.
00:09:05 ◼ ► I'm not sure that this is new. I started noticing six months ago or a year ago that at least if you have Apple Music enabled on your iPhone, it would seemingly just play a "stuff you might like" kind of thing from Apple Music.
00:09:24 ◼ ► I didn't confirm this, so that's why I put this link in there, but I didn't actually... Well, I don't know how I confirmed it. I have iOS 12 and an iPad. But when I upgraded all my devices, I think I would be a good test case for this because I continue to get fooled by this.
00:09:40 ◼ ► My pattern matching is not working with it. I'm a random play/shuffle person, right? And I, much to the consternation of everybody who was ever in a car with me, I want the play to be random, but I also want to skip if I'm not in the mood for that song.
00:09:57 ◼ ► So it's basically like a radio station is like, "How about this song?" And I go, "Nah, not that one." "How about this song?" "Nah, not in the mood for that one." "Oh, that's a good..." That's how I choose to do music. That's what I like. Don't at me, as they say. I get enough of it from everyone in my family who can't stand to hear me skip tracks.
00:10:11 ◼ ► But anyway, the reason this comes up is because it takes me an average of like 5.7 tracks for me to figure out that it's playing out. Because it'll be like, "I'm not in the mood for that one." "I'm not in the mood for that one." "I'll play that one." "I'm not in the mood for that one." "I'll play that one."
00:10:29 ◼ ► And then right about there, I'm like, "Wait a second. All these tracks begin with the letter A!" My thing is hosed again, and it very often happens because my iPod that I keep in the car for listening to music will go like thermally shut down and have to reboot and whatever.
00:10:44 ◼ ► It forgets my state entirely, so it starts playing from the A. So if that never ever happens to me again, I will know that whatever this random thing is working is. But rest assured, if this is not a real thing, I will skip my way through five A tracks before I stupidly realize that one of these songs begins with A.
00:11:02 ◼ ► Well, you're welcome everyone. And speaking of things that clearly we can take credit for, Marco, you've had your moment in the sun. Apple has announced a keyboard repair program.
00:11:14 ◼ ► Which is weird because they did the very, very non-confident thing of releasing this at like five o'clock on a Friday evening, which is not a terribly good look. Like, I understand it, but it does not imply a position of confidence or strength in any way, shape, or form.
00:11:31 ◼ ► But basically it says on the top of this article, which we'll put in the show notes, this is from Apple.
00:11:37 ◼ ► "Apple has determined that a quote, well this is my quote, "small percentage of the keyboards in certain MacBook and MacBook Pro models may exhibit one or more of the following behaviors.
00:11:46 ◼ ► Letters or characters that repeat unexpectedly, letters or characters that do not appear at all, or keys that feel, this is their quote, "sticky" or do not respond in a consistent manner."
00:12:02 ◼ ► Then you can get your keyboard, either the key replaced or the entire keyboard replaced on any of the butterfly switch keyboards since early 2015 on the MacBook Adorable.
00:12:15 ◼ ► So your congratulations are hopefully rolling in right now, Marco, so congrats. You have accomplished it. I expect to see you on an aircraft carrier with Mission Accomplished behind you any day now.
00:12:28 ◼ ► Oh God. Yeah, I don't take credit for this. One person complaining on a podcast is not going to make Apple launch a probably very expensive repair program.
00:12:43 ◼ ► Yeah, so Apple had to do this because it really is a real problem that like their number started showing, "Oh crap, this is a real issue."
00:12:51 ◼ ► There was a pretty good discussion about it on Connected this week. What's interesting about it, I see two sides to this.
00:13:02 ◼ ► There are some computers that Apple doesn't even update every four years. What do they think is the lifespan of a Mac?
00:13:07 ◼ ► Like, what I see, I mean look, the computer I'm using is a 2015 computer. So I could have bought it then, it would now be almost three years old.
00:13:16 ◼ ► It's still totally fine and I expect after they make new ones, which we'll talk about in a second, and I will presumably buy one of those.
00:13:37 ◼ ► But it's like, this one I have, a 2015 model, it's already 2018 and it's totally fine. I'm probably going to give it to somebody who's going to use it until 2021.
00:13:46 ◼ ► How long does Apple think that laptops last? I have a feeling they know as well as I do that if there's some kind of critical flaw, because here's the thing.
00:13:58 ◼ ► It covers you for four years after purchase. So you can, if you have a flaky keyboard, bring it in, they'll cover it.
00:14:04 ◼ ► If you paid for a keyboard repair on any of these butterfly keyboards, you can request a refund for that repair.
00:14:09 ◼ ► But I think four years is kind of cheap because I know that they're going to be able to repair these.
00:14:29 ◼ ► Anyway, so for this announcement itself, I think what's interesting about it is it's one of the very few occasions where they've announced, basically they've admitted to a hardware flaw in a product line that not only is still for sale, but is still top of the line.
00:14:51 ◼ ► You cannot buy an Apple laptop today, except for the old models that are still for sale, but you can't buy a modern Apple laptop today that doesn't have this keyboard problem that they just admitted to.
00:15:03 ◼ ► And nowhere have they said, we've had press people ask them, nowhere has Apple said that the new keyboards they're putting into these won't have the same problem.
00:15:14 ◼ ► And I think the silence of that is deafening. People have asked them lots of other questions. They've been very forthcoming in answering questions from the press on anything except that.
00:15:24 ◼ ► People have asked them and the press people have said Apple did not reply to that question.
00:15:28 ◼ ► So it seems pretty clear what pretty much we all knew, which is this keyboard just has this flaw and Apple seems unable to fix it in this keyboard.
00:15:46 ◼ ► Even the one you buy fresh today after this has been announced has a useful lifetime of four years.
00:15:51 ◼ ► And after that it's just a huge risk and it could break at any moment and cost you $700.
00:15:55 ◼ ► And keep in mind during those four years you may have to take it in any number of times to get it fixed for free, but still inconvenient.
00:16:02 ◼ ► And people are saying, who are starting to bring it in, that they're being quoted repair times of like five business days without it.
00:16:09 ◼ ► That doesn't make it okay to have these computers because if you are buying a $3,000 MacBook Pro and it maybe once a year or once every two years requires all of a sudden to be out of commission for a week to go get repaired, you probably can't afford to lose it for that long.
00:16:27 ◼ ► And so anyway, I'm glad they did this. In typical Apple fashion, they admitted to a hardware flaw and started a repair program only very reluctantly, very late, and kind of are doing the minimum possible to kind of get out of it.
00:16:43 ◼ ► But I do think it's interesting that they announced it. There was enough pressure on them to announce it before they have new models for sale.
00:16:53 ◼ ► And we're all assuming, we all thought they were going to have them in June. The chips are out now. It seems like they should be able to have them.
00:17:01 ◼ ► So hopefully this fall, I hope at the latest, in October event, we'll get these things.
00:17:09 ◼ ► And I hope the next, it may be the reason that laptops are now going to be a few months later than everyone thought.
00:17:15 ◼ ► Maybe they pushed forward a design refresh that was, maybe they were planning on having it start like next year, but they push it forward to this year because of all these keyboard problems.
00:17:25 ◼ ► But I'm happy they did this. They could have done it better, but I'm not surprised they didn't.
00:17:35 ◼ ► I still think it is the elephant in the room that these are the current models and that there is no keyboard for sale right now that Apple makes on a laptop that is now known to be reliable.
00:17:49 ◼ ► Yeah, their statement of the problem is pretty damning. Not that they're doing the wrong thing again, they're doing the right thing finally, more or less.
00:17:58 ◼ ► But the four-year limit, as you said, emphasizes the fact that Apple itself has no expectation that their fix will solve the problem.
00:18:06 ◼ ► All it will do is start the timer again. That's why it's four years. That's why it's not forever.
00:18:15 ◼ ► What they don't mention and what we all know is it's every single computer that ever shipped with this keyboard.
00:18:20 ◼ ► Every variant. It's all of them. It's not like specific models. It's not just the 2017.
00:18:25 ◼ ► So think of this. In 2015 you're excited by the new really, really skinny MacBook because you hate ports and you love lightweight things.
00:18:38 ◼ ► And when they acknowledge it, it's going to go all the way back to your model and great, you can get your money back for your repairs or however many of them you had done.
00:18:45 ◼ ► But this shows that Apple had this keyboard and just like, well, maybe there's problems with 2015s, but let's soldier on.
00:18:53 ◼ ► Like as we said on many of our shows, let's put this keyboard in every computer we make for every laptop we make for the next three years.
00:19:04 ◼ ► The 2017, now make it a little bit quieter. The 13 inches, the touch bar is just we're going to keep using this keyboard.
00:19:12 ◼ ► You know, they must have known surely by 2016 or early 2017 that there was a problem, but they just kept making computers with the keyboard.
00:19:19 ◼ ► And part of that is just like the pipeline, like, you know, well, we assume we would use this keyboard for the next three years.
00:19:24 ◼ ► And, you know, this is a big ship and it takes a while to turn, but it just honestly just doesn't look good, especially that they didn't have new laptop hardware.
00:19:33 ◼ ► Now, it seems like it was full steam ahead on all their laptops having this keyboard and either they just couldn't bring themselves to admit that there was a problem or they learned there was a problem early and it takes this long to like turn things around.
00:19:46 ◼ ► But it just it just it's not good. You know, if you wanted to if someone says, oh, what laptop I should buy.
00:19:53 ◼ ► And we're all like, oh, well, depressed about Apple laptops. Like, oh, you're just depressed about laptops.
00:19:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't you know, who cares? You follow them too closely. You're worried about small details.
00:20:12 ◼ ► This is why. Because no matter what you buy, you know, you are in for potential repairs.
00:20:19 ◼ ► And after four years, you're on your own and the repairs are really expensive and there is no safe haven for the past three years.
00:20:25 ◼ ► All the new laptops have been like this. So, you know, I kind of understand why Apple would want to hide this story.
00:20:33 ◼ ► But it's it's the most it's the most troubling and concrete evidence that now is not a good time to buy an Apple laptop except for the 2015 model.
00:20:42 ◼ ► Yeah, it's and I think, you know, if the explanation for this, which I'm sure will never actually be told,
00:20:48 ◼ ► but but if the explanation for this is truly that like, oh, it turns out in, you know, late 2015,
00:20:54 ◼ ► after the MacBook one had been out for like six months, they realized, oh, these keyboards fail a lot,
00:20:59 ◼ ► but couldn't turn the ship around, as you said, John, and can't fix or replace or reengineer a high failure rate critical component of their main computer for like three years.
00:21:13 ◼ ► I think that signifies a pretty large problem in their process. Like they it's not like Apple is like strapped for resources here.
00:21:21 ◼ ► And I know things take time and I know things are complicated, but that's a pretty major flaw to be not able to fix for three years for a company of their of their scale and their resources.
00:21:34 ◼ ► If that is the explanation, that is unacceptable. And if the explanation is instead that it took them a while to realize it was a problem,
00:21:43 ◼ ► then I think there's a huge problem in the pipeline somewhere because the users were realizing it in in mid 2015. After a few months with those MacBooks, people said, you know, these keyboards fail a lot.
00:21:55 ◼ ► I remember back in back when it came out, I remember hearing from a couple of like little birdies that one of the problems with the MacBook, the very first one that came out was that they had a lot of trouble manufacturing those keyboards and getting yields,
00:22:08 ◼ ► which means that many of the ones they manufactured didn't pass verification or didn't work or whatever else. So like, this was a problem back then.
00:22:17 ◼ ► Why did it take them until apparently now to finally realize this? Or why have they not been? Why did they realize it earlier and have not been able to actually fix the products that they're shipping to people and that people are buying brand new and possibly having their first experience with an Apple laptop?
00:22:35 ◼ ► Like, why? Why are they burning all these people for like three years? Something went really wrong in this process. Same thing like that with trash cam Mac Pro. Same thing like that had all sorts of engineering problems that had the the GPU failure issue on that, which by the way, that was another example of a product that got a repair extension program while it was still the current top of the line product, which by the way, it's still, I guess, technically, I guess the iMac Pro is now the top of the line.
00:23:04 ◼ ► product. But like, you know, that too, it had GPU failures from from design flaws, and GPUs would overheat and die. And that problem was never fixed in the trash cam Mac Pro. It just is always a problem. If you have a trash cam Mac Pro, your GPU is very likely to fail at some early point compared to the rest of the computer, and there's not much you can do about it. You know, same thing with the old nv to GPU stuff. Anyway, the problem of these laptops is so and this isn't even the only problem with these laptops. They also have like weird thermal issues.
00:23:33 ◼ ► Where like the hinge will pop, or other things will like kind of like metal will pop it when it gets warm, even regular levels of warmth, like just being used. Like metal keeps popping and things like that. The USB C ports, at least in 2016 had a lot of problems, especially the MacBook escape, where like, if you plugged in certain third party adapters, the Wi Fi would cut out and stuff like that certain hubs just didn't work, or they've worked only on some ports or work with only some things like there were a lot of problems in laptops. And so I, it was a problem.
00:24:02 ◼ ► I, in addition to the keyboard issues, like, I think this points to larger problems with Apple's engineering quality control. Why did these things get out? And then why they're taking so long to finally fix.
00:24:16 ◼ ► So part of the human nature and you know, Apple can do company is like, focusing on the potential for like the yields being bad and the original ones like, Oh, well, it's a product ramp, like we just started making these the hard to make surely we're gonna we're gonna undertake we're a smart company, we're undertake a program to get our yields up. And I bet they did. I bet when they manufacture these keyboards in the beginning was really hard to get them to pass verification. And they had some metric that said, you know, x percent or failing verification. And they reduce that to like x divided by 20.
00:24:42 ◼ ► Like, or, you know, x divided by 100. And now it's like practically all of them are perfect off the line. We did it. We made it better. Right. And the same thing with the failure is like that, you know, you're thinking, well, maybe we modified in some way and put those rubber gaskets that'll help both of the sound and reliability and we can't really tell until they get out of the field.
00:25:00 ◼ ► And then finally, just the money thing. It's like, well, some of them are failing. But how much is it really costing us versus how much would repair program costs? Let's do the math and say we'll just continue to, you know, is it hurt actually hurting our customer satisfaction? Can we just afford to, you know, can we take this hit? Like, what is the actual monetary cost? Like, you know, not thinking, oh, they didn't know about the problem or didn't care. They knew and cared. But it was a question. What, what's the best thing to do about it? And it's potentially, you know, any big company is going to say, Well,
00:25:29 ◼ ► you know, what do we care about here? What matters? Do we care? We care about customer satisfaction. We care about money. So what's the best way to balance those two with this problem? And only at a certain point does it tip over to say the best way to deal with this is this repair program.
00:25:46 ◼ ► Whereas every point before that when they did the math, the best way to deal with it was just on a case by case basis, and things are under warranty and so on and so forth. So yeah, it's not it's not good. You don't have to think that Apple is nefarious merely that it's just made up of humans who have the same foibles as any other human. We hope Apple would be better and learn from this. But as the history of repair extension programs shows, like this is kind of Apple's mo like this is how they handle issues like this.
00:26:13 ◼ ► It doesn't seem to be evolving too much or changing. It's that's that's why we could predict Oh, here's what's gonna happen with this keyboard and it just happened again. Like, that's, that's how they deal with manufacturing problems. And the only real solution seems to be and this is always a terrible solution of like, you know, when you do a postmortem, let's just be more careful in the future, which is not a solution to anything. But effectively is what they do with the phones. They have had problems with the phones, but it's clear that they are much more careful about hardware problems with the phones.
00:26:42 ◼ ► Which are arguably more complicated and more difficult to get right than something larger like a laptop just because everything is so small and crammed in there. And they they have this huge manufacturing lead times is that to make millions and millions and millions of them.
00:26:54 ◼ ► And in recent years, they've been doing a pretty good job of not having any kind of catastrophic problem even of this magnitude with the phones. And that's extremely difficult to do, especially since the going the phones improving it faster and are radically different like the iPhone 10 and everything.
00:27:08 ◼ ► So, you know, the final factor and all this might just be that they pay more attention, spend more time and resources on the product that makes them more money. And so the Mac gets short shrift and result of that is business as usual with hardware problems and how long it takes to get a repair program going.
00:27:30 ◼ ► It was funny because this all happened, like I said, on Friday evening. Saturday, I'm using my beloved MacBook Adorable. And as I think I've said in the past, this keyboard, when it works, has actually won me over is my favorite Apple keyboard. I used to love the Magic keyboard.
00:27:46 ◼ ► I still do love the Magic keyboard, the external ones. But this one, when it is working is my favorite Apple keyboard. And as I'm typing something at my parents, it turns out one or two my keys got sticky and was like not really working. And so I asked that, Hey, do you have any compressed air?
00:28:03 ◼ ► What I forgot was that Dad is an amateur mechanic and has a three horsepower air compressor in his garage. So he said, Yes, I do. And so we walked into the garage.
00:28:16 ◼ ► Yeah, how much do you need? And he took me to his three horsepower, something like 60 gallon air compressor wherein I used that in the tip of like a inflate a basketball. I don't know the name of the term for this, but you know, the little tip you would stick inside a basketball to inflate it.
00:28:33 ◼ ► I used that to clean off my MacBook adorable and it worked much better thereafter. But it was kind of funny to me that this was the first time this had happened in a few months. And I needed to take compressed air to it in order to clear it out.
00:28:48 ◼ ► And I did. And then the problem moved to another key. And then it went away a few minutes later. And it's just, it's just frustrating. And I hope that whenever the next laptops come, I hope that even if the feel of this keyboard has to change, and even if I personally find it worse,
00:29:10 ◼ ► I too, am annoyed enough by it that I would love to have a new keyboard design that is more reliable even at the cost of what I consider to be an almost perfect feel.
00:29:23 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Away. For $20 off your suitcase, visit awaytravel.com/ATP and use promo code ATP during checkout. Away makes really great suitcases at a much lower price compared to other brands by cutting out retail people and middlemen and selling directly to you.
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00:31:28 ◼ ► Marco, you were talking about this this MacBook Pro is though you're using it right now. Is that what you're doing? No, it's using it right now.
00:31:36 ◼ ► Okay, but what are you using in general for your computing needs at the beach? Because last I heard you got a super sexy carrying case for your iMac Pro and were treating that as your purse as you were walking around the beach. Is that not the case anymore?
00:31:51 ◼ ► Alright, so I discussed last week how I had decided to bring an iMac to the beach and I was probably going to bring my iMac Pro and I had ordered a big fancy Gator case to carry it in a nice big padded way.
00:32:10 ◼ ► And I was leaning towards bringing my iMac Pro not like Tiff's old iMac that we were preparing to sell. And that's exactly what I did. I brought my iMac Pro and to just give a brief review of this case, the case, the Gator case for the iMac Pro, or just for any 27 inch iMac.
00:32:29 ◼ ► It actually is a really nice case. It is nicely made, it seems nicely padded, it has a bunch of pockets like dedicated pockets for things like if you want to take the stock keyboard, mouse and trackpad and has dedicated pockets for those little icons on the outside.
00:32:44 ◼ ► It includes a rain poncho cover and a dedicated pocket just to hold the rain poncho when it's not in use. And it has a really nice strap, you know, it makes carrying the weight, you know, as easy as it can. The downside is that the case itself weighs nine pounds empty.
00:33:04 ◼ ► Oh, that is a lot. Yeah. Yeah, Mac Pro weighs about 22 pounds. So the combined weight once you throw in the power cable, the mouse and the trackpad was about 32 pounds. And it's not small. So to have a, you know, pretty hefty 32 pound large rectangle hanging off your shoulder is very heavy and very awkward to carry for any length of time.
00:33:30 ◼ ► Now I had to walk with it for about a half mile or so. It was a hell of a walk. It was not fun.
00:33:43 ◼ ► You should have waited patiently by the dock with your with your giant suitcase filled with either a body folded in half or an iMac Pro and had someone come back to you with a little wheelie wagon and then you could have you could have wheeled it around like your child beloved child that it is.
00:33:57 ◼ ► Yeah, but but the wagon that came with this house weighs the wagon that came with the house you're constrained by the wagon that came with the house. It's not a new modern wagon. It seems like it was made before plastic or aluminum were known materials to work with.
00:34:12 ◼ ► I was saying like you feel like you shouldn't be constrained by the wagon that came with your house. You can get a new wagon your car and your damn computer from you know. Anyway, anyway, how's your shoulder doing?
00:34:26 ◼ ► My shoulder has recovered, but it was it was not comfortable. I will say so you know, this is not something I would ever want to do on a regular basis. The idea of like carrying this to Panera or to a coffee shop or something or doing what that guy in that picture was doing even with the one that weighs a lot less and has the foot hanging out flapping in the wind. That's a completely ridiculous idea.
00:34:51 ◼ ► I can't I can't see anybody ever actually wanted to carry their 27 inch iMac anywhere on a regular basis, but as a way to just like, you know, to do like large moves with it to transport it infrequently. It did indeed work.
00:35:09 ◼ ► There is actually a fairly humorous unexpected bonus to this. Let me ask you a theoretical question. If you put your desktop computer into a bag and walked a half mile with it, what kind of surprises do you think might await you when you open it up?
00:35:40 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know that the logistics of the case but is like are all the peripherals like separate in separate pockets like nothing is mixing in there with it, right? Yes. All the peripherals are in separate pockets. It is nicely, you know, padded and isolated. But something did indeed fall out of the computer spiders large blobs of dust.
00:35:58 ◼ ► Oh, nice. Oh, gross. Because the iMac Pro intake vents are on the bottom edge of the screen facing down. I didn't think of this like when I before I put it in, I like dusted off the back like the foot. I dusted the whole like outside of the computer, but I didn't like run a towel under the lip of the bottom edge.
00:36:18 ◼ ► So I opened it up to you know, when we get to the house and I, you know, open a mixture of things. Okay. And I'm like, what the heck is all that stuff at the bottom? Sure enough.
00:36:29 ◼ ► Yep. Pringles dust. Yeah, lots of dust blobs that fall out of the computer. Can you imagine if you were walking with like a like a cheese grater Mac Pro tower like all the dust would fall out of that. The dust in my Mac Pro is structural now though. It's load bearing dust. Yeah, it's Yeah, those things those things are quite impressive for their dust anyway.
00:36:51 ◼ ► So I am ultimately though, you know, so I even though it was kind of ridiculous getting it here and it's going to be equally ridiculous getting it back. I am really happy I brought my Mac Pro because I am getting tons of work done here.
00:37:07 ◼ ► And it's really, you know, it's this is this is what everyone always says about laptops. It's really nice having all of my files and my apps already here and set up the way I want and everything like I know how everything is going to behave. And I'm doing an unexpectedly large amount of work this summer.
00:37:27 ◼ ► It's very heavy work that is maxing out my cores and my screen space, which is basically remaking from scratch the overcast Apple Watch app. I don't want to spoil anything or pre announce anything yet except to say the overcast Apple Watch update this fall is awesome already.
00:37:44 ◼ ► And it's not even July yet. It is almost done. I mean, I'm just at the pausing stage now, but I am now taking walks every day with standalone watch playback of podcasts. And it is fantastic. It works. Apple finally gave me what I need to make this good.
00:38:02 ◼ ► And I've made it and it's almost done. Like it's, it's basically done now it's gonna I'm gonna start the beta pretty soon. I think it is so good. I'm so happy. I've taken the opportunity that they gave me to that that standalone audio now works to also revamp revamp some other parts of the watch interface.
00:38:18 ◼ ► And so it's really, really good. And it's way better than than than the watch app I had before. And back during that brief period where I had offline playback, it's way better than that was. So I'm very, very happy with this. I'm, I'm feeling really good right now about this.
00:38:34 ◼ ► And I'm so happy I brought my iMac Pro out here every time I'm doing some kind of big build. And I look up at menu at my iStat menus, and I see all 10 cores pegged for a little while. I'm like, Yep, this was the right decision, even right now, as I talk to you.
00:38:50 ◼ ► And I'm not hearing fan noise from from my from a laptop somewhere that's like, working like crazy used to just to drive the screen. I'm really happy I didn't buy the Dell 24, whatever, whatever 4k display and use that on my 2015 laptop because that wouldn't have been enough screen space.
00:39:08 ◼ ► You know, as, as Casey, you know, and as many of our listeners know, iOS development burns screen space, as I mentioned last week. So like, the last thing you want is significantly less screen space when you're having like an iOS development heavy summer. So I'm just I'm really glad I brought this computer. I'm doing tons of work on it. This is a very work heavy summer for Overcast. And, and I'm really, really happy with how the watch update is turning out.
00:39:36 ◼ ► You're the only person I know that does his work while he's at his vacation home. You can't do work at your actual home, you have to go to your vacation house in order to get work done.
00:39:48 ◼ ► I think it stops being a vacation, maybe the second month that you're there. Like this vacation in there is here's where we live during the summer.
00:39:56 ◼ ► I don't really take like for me, like vacation to me ends after like four or five days at most, like that's that's about as long as I can go on vacation. I'm like, I have to turn my brain back on now. Like I just I can't, I can't let my brain just like stagnate and jello forever.
00:40:14 ◼ ► That's another thing that I've come to appreciate here. I brought both of the home pods here. I figured what you know, had that big carrying case with two more home pods strapped to your hat. They're heavy.
00:40:26 ◼ ► They bounce on your head like a water jug. Like beer cans. Home pods are ridiculously heavy. Like when I bought the two at first, like I bought two at a time and just carrying like one in each hand in a little square bags back to my car, like which required, you know, maybe a quarter mile walk like that back to like the parking garage.
00:40:44 ◼ ► They were really heavy. I was like, damn, like these handles are digging into my hands and they're filled with all that bass.
00:40:55 ◼ ► Oh, that's great. Anyway, so I now have had a lot more experience using the home pod, not just as my computer speakers, but now like, you know, I brought them here for the summer to test with, but I'm not doing Airplay two stuff yet.
00:41:07 ◼ ► I'm still in the in the watch app, so I just put them out in the living room and like one kind of like off the side of the kitchen ones in the living room still is like a big stereo pair.
00:41:15 ◼ ► It's kind of one big room. I got to say, I really like the home pod just as a music speaker that's like in your living room. It is really good.
00:41:25 ◼ ► It, you know, as other other viewers have mentioned, it hears you from great distances at very low speaking volumes and you can talk really fast and music can be playing.
00:41:36 ◼ ► So like there can be a song playing at moderate volume and I can say from like 20 feet away, hey Siri, stop. And it does.
00:41:45 ◼ ► Like I'm amazed like how well it hears me and I don't have to like really try hard for it to hear me.
00:41:53 ◼ ► This is something that, you know, I have a lot of experience now with the Amazon Echo family of products and the Echo hears you decently.
00:42:01 ◼ ► But it's this is another league like in both the consistency of how it hears me, like how often it hears me and in what conditions it hears me with the Echo.
00:42:11 ◼ ► The Echo hears pretty well when there's not a lot of noise. But if there's really any like room noise, you got to be pretty close for the Echo to hear you.
00:42:20 ◼ ► And also if music is playing, whereas the home pod really beats it in that. I'm still not thrilled with Siri, of course.
00:42:29 ◼ ► The intelligence of Siri is not that much of a problem in the context of using it as a music speaker so far.
00:42:37 ◼ ► The thing that really bugs me is that it's so verbose in its response. It's just like, you know, again, just like Siri everywhere else.
00:42:43 ◼ ► Like, but when you're used to the Echo where it's just like, OK, and it just goes, Siri is so verbose and what it says back to you unnecessarily.
00:42:52 ◼ ► So it's almost like it's trying to be your friend. And like, I don't I don't want to be your friend, Siri. I just want you to say OK and move on.
00:42:59 ◼ ► You aren't a human. But otherwise, as it stands right now, I would say, you know, in the kitchen, no contest.
00:43:06 ◼ ► The Echo is still the device to have. But, you know, Siri could add just one feature to almost completely close that gap.
00:43:15 ◼ ► Multiple named timers. Why that feature is not there yet, even after WBC everything is beyond me. I have no idea.
00:43:25 ◼ ► So my only assumption is that maybe they're maybe they're going to mention the HomePod in the fall event, maybe give it a small update or price drop or something.
00:43:33 ◼ ► And maybe they'll announce it there. Who knows? Like multiple named timers. I don't think they should be very difficult.
00:43:41 ◼ ► I really hope they add that soon, because that's really like that could close the gap for how good these are in kitchens really well.
00:43:49 ◼ ► Also, I've had a little more experience using just, you know, playing music on the HomePod since then, just not for my computer, but from everywhere else.
00:43:57 ◼ ► Airplay, too. And the integration it has with Control Center on iOS and the music app on iOS is actually really nice.
00:44:05 ◼ ► You can use voice to control it, but you can also just like, you know, control it from your iPad or from your iPhone, because when you force push in the music thing on Control Center, it pops down and you can see like one of the entries in there is whatever's going on in the HomePod right now.
00:44:20 ◼ ► So any device on your network can control that and can change it to be what they want to be playing.
00:44:26 ◼ ► And that's just really or you can just do the simplest things like adjust the volume by your finger instead of saying, you know, hey thing volume 25 or whatever. It's really very nice.
00:44:35 ◼ ► Built integration with iTunes on the desktop, as mentioned last week, is pretty crappy, but is sometimes convenient.
00:44:41 ◼ ► Once you figure out that weird thing, you have to like drop it down and like scroll down past the separate entries to get to like the combined one, which is kind of weird.
00:44:50 ◼ ► So really, and one of the major area that the HomePod is way better than both the Alexa family of products and also the Sonos family of products is if you have your own music collection that you want to play from.
00:45:07 ◼ ► I tried I've had all these products I've had Sonos I've had echoes and I have tried Amazon's thing first to like import my music from my computer. I paid for their weird upload thing, which I think they have just discontinued.
00:45:21 ◼ ► With Sonos, I installed their Mac software and it like index my library and how to play off that and everything. Both the Amazon Echo and the Sonos systems for playing your own collections are buggy as hell and basically unusable. They effectively don't work.
00:45:41 ◼ ► So if you want to play things out of your own collection, the HomePod is where it's at because you can literally just ask for things by voice or start playing something on your iPad so you can pick like exactly which fish performance you want to play, you know, and and it just does it and then you have the voice interaction for that music of yours.
00:46:03 ◼ ► So that's pretty nice. Overall, I really do like it a lot for music. There are the caveats that it doesn't have, you know, good support for things like Spotify or other services like that.
00:46:15 ◼ ► So if you need a speaker that is probably not in your kitchen and you can probably afford two of them at $350 each because they it really does like if your room is larger than a small room, if you have like a medium or large size room, you're going to want to home pods to fill that room.
00:46:35 ◼ ► So if if you fit into this very narrow case of like, you don't mind spending $700 for a pair of them. And also, it's not going in your kitchen, you don't need timers. And also, you either want to play your own music collection from iTunes slash Apple Music Cloud and everything or you're an Apple Music subscriber, then the HomePod is really great.
00:46:59 ◼ ► But if any of those things are Oh, and also, you also don't need these $700 pair of speakers to have inputs from your TV or anything. So with all those caveats, it's really nice.
00:47:11 ◼ ► So, you know, fortunately, there are a couple of places in my life where this is nice, like here, for instance.
00:47:18 ◼ ► So I think I'm, I'm looking forward to how Apple matures the HomePod product line, I really hope they put some resources behind it, like I hope they don't just Apple TV it and just kind of, you know, half asset forever.
00:47:30 ◼ ► It really could be great. It's already like getting there. But there are some shortcomings here. There's limitations here and there, some of which can be solved by pricing or hardware updates, some of which are just kind of fundamental things like Siri.
00:47:53 ◼ ► You just better hope they don't iPod high fi it. Forget about Apple TV of have a sing it for a few years. How about just nope, we never make another one big mistake.
00:48:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I thought about that. Actually, I really hope they don't do that. But this is see, this is the kind of thing that I see Apple actually doing pretty well. Because, you know, it's, it's kind of like, you know, AirPods being being a big thing.
00:48:17 ◼ ► AirPods are a way for Apple to flex really over the top hardware engineering and industrial design without having to worry about pesky UI design. Because UI design is hard and app platforms are hard.
00:48:33 ◼ ► And all these things that play like the Apple TV or like, those are hard. Those are like big problems over time. The only hard problem about the HomePod that Apple needs to work on over time is the quality of Siri. And that is again, that is hard. It is certainly a more a larger impediment to the HomePod than it is to the AirPods.
00:48:52 ◼ ► But this is also a case where like, Apple can sell the same household, a lot of these things, and they can update them over time and sell them even more. And they can change the shape or the size or the input situation and sell them to their existing customers again.
00:49:10 ◼ ► And so this is actually the kind of thing Apple does pretty well these days. Like, Apple does like fancy over engineered, over designed hardware with no UI and that you can make $300 from all of your customers with every couple of years. Like, yeah, Apple's pretty good at those things now.
00:49:28 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host. Go to linode.com/ATP to learn more and get a $20 credit. Linode is frankly, a great web host. I have been with a lot of web hosts in my day. I think I started buying web hosting in about the year 2000. Like, no numbers after it, just 2000 with all zeros after it. So it's been a while I've been with a lot of different web hosts, lots of different types of web hosts.
00:49:53 ◼ ► And Linode is the one I've been with the longest. I think I've been with them for about eight years now. I've stuck with them the longest and I've slowly moved all of my stuff to Linode because it's just nicer than everything else I've used. The services are great. The pricing is incredible. The prices started just $5 a month for one gig of RAM.
00:50:10 ◼ ► Now, when I first signed up, I think I was paying something like $50 a month for like 120 megs or something like that. But back then, that was a great deal. But today, it's an even better deal. I've never found a better value on an ongoing basis in the web hosting business.
00:50:25 ◼ ► Sometimes somebody else will like tie them for a little while, but then six months later, Linode beats them. It's just it's such a great service. They have all sorts of features that you might need. Backups, load balancers, stats services.
00:50:36 ◼ ► They have a full blown API that you can use to script the creation and resizing configuration of instances. So you can have a whole complicated application that automatically scales if you want to.
00:50:45 ◼ ► All this is running with native enterprise grade SSDs, a 40 gigabit network, and my favorite Intel Xeon E5 processors.
00:50:54 ◼ ► There's so much more to recommend about Linode. But what you need to know right now is that plans start at just $5 a month. It gets you one gig of RAM in the Linode cloud.
00:51:02 ◼ ► They have all sorts of bigger and better plans above that if you have higher needs than that, although you can do a lot with that, honestly.
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00:51:14 ◼ ► If you need a web host, Linode is the place to go. Go to Linode.com/ATP and see for yourself why I love it so much.
00:51:22 ◼ ► You get a $20 credit with that link. And so if you only use that $5 a month plan, that could be four free months. Once again, seven day money back guarantee on that.
00:51:29 ◼ ► Thank you so much to Linode for keeping all my servers running for so long, for at least eight years now. I love Linode so much. And for sponsoring this show.
00:51:41 ◼ ► Let's talk Marzipan. We've kind of made brief mentions of this in the last couple of shows, but the end, it was the end, right, of the WWDC keynote was all about this technology which was never really named, but was about bringing iOS apps onto the Mac.
00:52:02 ◼ ► And the general gist of it is UIKit on the Mac, which is something that we as a community have been wondering, "Hey, is this a thing? Could this be a thing? Would this be a thing?"
00:52:15 ◼ ► And this was in no small part inflamed by or spurned on by the discovery of UXKit, which apparently was this sort of a thing, but it was for just photos. Is that right on the Mac?
00:52:30 ◼ ► It was just one or two apps that were using this thing called UXKit that Apple apparently had written as kind of like a shim between the app written for UIKit and AppKit, which is what you use on the Mac.
00:52:43 ◼ ► So there's been a lot of chatter about Marzipan, what it means, where we're going to go from here, and I'm not sure what...
00:52:53 ◼ ► We don't really have a narrative arc with the stuff in the show notes, so I'm just going to start picking it off one by one.
00:53:06 ◼ ► Yeah, there is a bunch of random stuff in the notes, but there is an arc, an overall arc, at least as far as I'm concerned.
00:53:12 ◼ ► We talked about this WWDC and haven't talked about it much since, and part of that, at least for me personally, is that I've been kind of ruminating on it.
00:53:24 ◼ ► I didn't want to rush to judgment. I needed some time to sit with this and just really think about what this is going to mean.
00:53:34 ◼ ► I think maybe I mentioned on the WWDC episode potential parallels with Carbon and Cocoa, which were the two APIs for making Mac OS X applications back when Mac OS X was launched.
00:53:49 ◼ ► Carbon came from the Classic world and was a bridge to the Classic world, and it was an evolution of the Classic Mac toolkit and all that stuff.
00:54:04 ◼ ► A lot of WWDCs were like, "We introduced a new control, and it's only available in Cocoa," or "Only available in Carbon," or "Last year, this thing was only available in either Carbon or Cocoa, but now it's available in both," or "Now we're going to update them in parallel," and then eventually it evolved to, "You know what? Not so much Carbon anymore.
00:54:20 ◼ ► Everything is going to be in Cocoa, and eventually Carbon doesn't even make it to 64-bit, and eventually we crown a clear winner, which is Cocoa. Say goodbye to Carbon." But that took many, many years.
00:54:30 ◼ ► And thinking about the marzipan stuff, I know lots of people have been discussing this. I didn't know how I felt about my gut instinct towards who's in the battle of marzipan, about a UI kit versus app kit.
00:54:48 ◼ ► Is one of them a Carbon and one of them is a Cocoa, or is that analogy not fit and neither one fits neatly into any of the slots and the historical precedent doesn't make any difference?
00:54:58 ◼ ► But what does this do? So I kind of have been setting aside the Carbon versus Cocoa thing and start thinking more in terms of animals and nature and invasive species, and somehow that got its hook into my brain.
00:55:13 ◼ ► I really hope some other podcast didn't already use the exact analogy. I've been consciously avoiding reading and listening to anything having to do with this topic just to give myself time to stew with it.
00:55:21 ◼ ► But I keep thinking of UI kit on the Mac as like, I'm probably going to make a bunch of bad analogies based on half-remembered things from popular movies.
00:55:32 ◼ ► Like introducing rabbits to Australia or bringing some invasive plant or fish species into North America that wasn't previously here.
00:55:39 ◼ ► Or such situations where you have an ecosystem that is what it is and you bring some unexpected item into the ecosystem and it's not equipped to deal with that.
00:55:51 ◼ ► Whether it's a predator that starts eating everything or a prey animal that reproduces very quickly or a plant that can grow in more harsh condition that totally shuts out all the other plants.
00:56:00 ◼ ► Those are all sort of like thinking of it as a bad way. But just that I feel like the Mac ecosystem as it exists today, the Mac software ecosystem is not like dropping UI kit into there is going to have a big effect.
00:56:19 ◼ ► Because the ecosystem itself is not prepared for that. It's not strong. The Mac software market is not the powerhouse that it once was.
00:56:36 ◼ ► There are way more iOS developers than there are Mac developers of any stripe that will seemingly continue to be the case.
00:56:44 ◼ ► And you're going to drop UI kit onto the Mac. And I'm trying to think of any scenario in which this doesn't spell doom for app kit and traditional Mac applications not written in something that is derived from UI kit.
00:57:06 ◼ ► And that sounds like overblown. That's why I've been thinking about this for a while. That's your gut instinct. But come on. Mars Band is some weird separate process that variant of the iOS simulator that takes your iOS applications and run them in little windows.
00:57:20 ◼ ► How is that a threat to real native Mac applications? They're nothing like native app. They don't look like it. They don't behave like it. They have their own little engine running with their own little version of iOS.
00:57:28 ◼ ► And you can't even mix app kit with them? How is that a threat to anything having to do with the Mac? Kind of like introducing that one weird snail or rabbit or vine species. Seems like it's not going to be a big deal.
00:57:43 ◼ ► But then fast forward a couple years and all of a sudden you realize you've made a terrible mistake. And suddenly Mars Band is out of the little iOS system support thing and applications are able to link against both app kit and UI kit and mix and match them within the same application.
00:57:57 ◼ ► And the frameworks are just loaded as normal and the UI kit variant for the Mac starts having the ability to use more Mac like controls and spawn new windows and do toolbars and all the other things that the Macs can do.
00:58:09 ◼ ► And I mean this is where I'll throw it to you guys. Am I being too pessimistic? Do you see a scenario in which app kit long term, not like this year or next year, but app kit can survive a successful invasion by UI kit on the Mac platform?
00:58:29 ◼ ► What if, you know, if you look at like, well there's the native way to write apps with app kit and you can make the best quality apps with that, that have the most native system behavior, the most system integration, feel the most quote Mac like.
00:58:45 ◼ ► But there's also then this cross platform thing that you can write apps for that can run the same system. Won't everyone just start making apps for that? Won't it mess up the conventions? Won't it do things like that? And you could say the same thing about when web apps became a thing.
00:59:02 ◼ ► We already have a cross platform system where things that are kind of app like run in kind of windows with this kind of cross platform language, they're called web apps. And so maybe the effects could be similar to that.
00:59:16 ◼ ► Which is, and I think the economics are similar to that, which is the people who are real Mac enthusiasts or are real hardcore Mac developers or are companies that have the resources to, where making a native Mac app makes sense, will continue to make app kit apps.
00:59:42 ◼ ► But there's this other thing that in the past has been web apps and now could be the iOS unified code base with with Mac and stuff where they if they don't have the resources or don't want to spend the resources to make an app kit app, they're going to make one of these cross platform apps.
01:00:01 ◼ ► And in the past again, in the past, that was the web app in the future, maybe maybe it'll be marzipan app also, or instead.
01:00:09 ◼ ► So I think the effects of it could be seen similarly to how to the effects of what web apps have done to the platform, which is, yeah, we're going to see a lot of them.
01:00:20 ◼ ► A lot of things are going to be marzipan only on the Mac, they're not going to have native Mac apps.
01:00:25 ◼ ► And it is going to mess up some stuff. But I don't think it's necessarily like a massive threat to the platform any more than web apps and the economics of cross platform development have been.
01:00:40 ◼ ► That being said, it depends a lot on implementation. It depends a lot like on how good are these apps? How usable are they? Is it like web apps where they can be functional, but that they always kind of feel a little bit off in the environment that they never quite feel like Mac app that they never quite feel right.
01:00:59 ◼ ► You can always tell, you know, is gonna be like that, or are they going to add enough functionality to them that you can actually make one pretty well that you kind of don't notice that it's not like not a quote real Mac app or you know, not a nap kit app.
01:01:14 ◼ ► The other thing to consider is that app kit, you know, as you mentioned, it's it's not in a good place right now. The ecosystem is not in a strong place right now. It's it's really very vulnerable to to attack because it's been just beaten down by iOS and general neglect and cross platform frameworks over the last 10 years.
01:01:37 ◼ ► Maybe it's time for app kit to go the way of carbon. I don't know, I don't think it is yet. But I think that time is not that far off if it's coming.
01:01:48 ◼ ► I want to address your earlier point about comparing to the web stuff, although I think you could probably argue against your your own point if you stood on it a little bit, but like there's some there's some prerequisites for that to happen. And one of the prerequisites is that UI kit, that's why I mentioned Mars Benning being the weird thing that it is now. The UI kit on the Mac
01:02:10 ◼ ► stays as like, oh, it's a way to get iOS applications to get in your Mac as opposed to it evolving into the new way to write Mac applications. Again, we're far from that now with the demos that we've seen and with the stuff that Apple is running in Mojave. Right.
01:02:24 ◼ ► But my assumption, based on all the conversations and all the information I was able to glean from being at W.W.D.C. and putting my ears to the ground or whatever, is that the current weird implementation of Mars, the pan and Mojave is not representative of the long term vision of how this is supposed to work. It is merely what had to be done to make it happen in this time frame.
01:02:45 ◼ ► And on top of that, I feel like once you're out of this weird implementation of of Mars, the pan and into a more like, oh, I just link against UI kit in my application.
01:02:58 ◼ ► I don't see any reason for Apple not to continue to evolve UI kit on the Mac in a Mac like direction they already have. They added a bunch of classes to UI kit when it runs on the Mac to be able to do things like have a menu bar, which you can't.
01:03:10 ◼ ► You know, there's no menu bar on iOS, right? There is in the Mac ones. They added classes to UI kit. That makes me think they're not going to leave UI kit as a cross platform thing.
01:03:19 ◼ ► They're going to try to make it into the new way to write Mac applications. And the biggest difference, the two biggest differences between this and Web stuff is one, it really is actually native.
01:03:29 ◼ ► It's not a Web view like it is. Isn't it as native as native can be right and to Apple is using it to make its own applications. That's one of the few things we can pull from the notes here, right?
01:03:40 ◼ ► So we have the four demo applications, which are iOS ports, right? But there are a bunch of applications on the Mac that are extremely likely candidates for Mars.
01:03:50 ◼ ► A pan conversion to just one example that has existed for years and I feel like it's got to be right up there in the list is messages on the Mac, which does not have feature parity with the iOS version.
01:04:03 ◼ ► Despite being written in app kit and despite Apple presumably having app kit developers, the easiest way to get feature parity for messages on the Mac is to replace messages on the Mac with.
01:04:15 ◼ ► Messages from iOS tweaked to be a Mars ban app. That is way easier than, you know, adding the features that are in the iOS version to the app kit version on the Mac.
01:04:27 ◼ ► And by the way, speaking of Web views, it's my understanding that the message list that you see and messages on the Mac is, in fact, a Web view, which explains why it might be difficult to implement, say, the laser beams or any other special effects.
01:04:39 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe they use Web GL, but then the thing would probably crash. There are lots of applications like that that on the Mac do not have feature parity with their iOS counterparts and the Mac ones are written in app kit.
01:04:50 ◼ ► Apple will ship UI conversions to those applications, whereas Apple would probably never say, we're replacing messages with an Electron app.
01:04:59 ◼ ► We're replacing messages with a Web kit view and it will be entirely Web based. We're replacing pages with iCloud.com's version of pages and it's just a giant Web view.
01:05:08 ◼ ► Apple would not do that. Apple will do that with UI kit. They will be native. And, you know, if Apple continues to pursue that type of strategy and doesn't just say this is just a way for you to quickly port your iOS application to the Mac.
01:05:21 ◼ ► Again, I see it as an extinction level event for app kit, which I'm not making any technical judgments. Like you mentioned, like maybe it's time for app kit to go.
01:05:29 ◼ ► I don't know. Like I don't have experience writing applications. I have no idea what the pros and cons are and understand obviously app kit has more cruft and so on and so forth.
01:05:38 ◼ ► But I mentioned all those months ago that like we don't know what Apple's opinion of like what is the best thinking about how to make a GUI application.
01:05:45 ◼ ► And to me, the Mars event effort makes me think that Apple thinks UI kit, what we've been doing in iOS.
01:05:52 ◼ ► That's our current best thinking on how to make applications for any platform where you have a GUI and there's a GUI on the Mac.
01:05:58 ◼ ► And so the best way to make Mac applications will be a variant of UI kit extended with classes that do Mac specific things.
01:06:07 ◼ ► And, you know, granted this implementation is weird, but slowly over time will expand it. It will be very native.
01:06:13 ◼ ► If anything, it will be, you know, it has the potential to be faster than app kit because it's things that were originally designed to run on a phone and has more modern thinking and takes advantage of more modern hardware.
01:06:26 ◼ ► So I think I have an optimistic view of this. I think that UI kit kind of appearing on the Mac is, you know, Jeff Goldblum uploading his virus into the Independence Day alien spaceship.
01:06:48 ◼ ► I do think that it is quite likely that that is going to be the first step in the either death or significant reworking of app kit.
01:07:08 ◼ ► The difference between the way I think you're thinking of it, Jon, and the way I think of it, though, is that I do think that Apple believes that UI kit is their best and greatest approach to GUI development.
01:07:24 ◼ ► And I think that it could very well be that UI kit coming to the Mac today seems like it is very, not even half-baked, like quarter-baked, but that's why it's a preview and it's not, well, with the exception of the four apps that they're shipping, but it's in general a preview.
01:07:41 ◼ ► And that's why we don't really have access to it except for what Steve Trout and Smith and Mr. Rambo himself, if you please, have been doing to kind of make this work anyway.
01:07:52 ◼ ► But I feel like, and I hope, that if app kit does have to wither and die, that this new marzipan, you know, it's UI kit, except it isn't, will expand in such a way that it will embrace all the unique things that makes a Mac a Mac.
01:08:15 ◼ ► It will embrace a preferences window in a way that maybe it isn't doing today, and so on and so forth.
01:08:20 ◼ ► Because if you look at the way things are today, as someone who really loves the Mac, and I really love the Mac, and I don't know which one of the three of us loves it the most, doesn't really matter, but I love it a lot.
01:08:38 ◼ ► I really, fine, as the guy who hates the Mac on the show, I really love the Mac, and I feel most at home on the Mac, and I don't want the Mac to change, and I am not, change in ways that are unfamiliar and scary.
01:08:52 ◼ ► But I do think that this very well could be a time where this change is healthy, and it will be for the best.
01:09:00 ◼ ► Now, I can give you a million and seven ways where this could go all kinds of pear-shaped and terribly wrong, and where we only get half-baked apps, we get, it's basically the second coming of Electron, it's just mildly less offensive.
01:09:12 ◼ ► We get apps that are clearly a five-minute port from iPad or iPhone, where the menu bar is just an afterthought, and so on and so forth.
01:09:21 ◼ ► Like, there's a million ways where this can absolutely go wrong, and we will be really, really, really sad pandas.
01:09:27 ◼ ► But there's several ways, I think, where this can go right, and I think that for now, I'm going to choose to be optimistic and think that, you know what, this isn't 100% there today, but it may be 100% there in a year or in a couple of years or in a few years.
01:09:46 ◼ ► And anything that I can do to get more native, not Electron apps, onto the Mac, I think is a win.
01:09:53 ◼ ► I'm on the same page with you with the extending. Like I said, they already extended it with menu bar stuff.
01:09:57 ◼ ► I truly believe that if things go according to Apple's plan, you know, and plans change, that they will improve UIKit on the Mac.
01:10:05 ◼ ► They will add even more classes to extend more functionality, like that their goal is not just to make ports.
01:10:10 ◼ ► And we will get the shovelware, 100% we'll get the shovelware. There's no avoiding that.
01:10:14 ◼ ► And there'll be a long period of time before UIKit on the Mac can match all the features that are available to AppKit.
01:10:20 ◼ ► But it just like to do the reverse of it, just to figure out like, you know, can you envision the opposite where UIKit and AppKit continue to march along,
01:10:32 ◼ ► each one of them being enhanced and improved long term? I can't envision that scenario.
01:10:39 ◼ ► Obviously AppKit is not going to like disappear. There's a huge legacy code base that will continue to work for a long time.
01:10:44 ◼ ► Auguste Mueller, creator of Acorn and many other great pieces of software, had a good piece on trying to figure out how Apple could ever leave AppKit behind.
01:10:54 ◼ ► And he pointed out that the place, the convenient place that Apple has frequently dropped frameworks and stuff has been architectural changes,
01:11:07 ◼ ► Those are great inflection points to be able to finally drop the legacy framework or the, you know, drop support for all the things that you previously could never get rid of.
01:11:20 ◼ ► That's how they got rid of carbon. They couldn't get rid of carbon until 64 bit came along.
01:11:24 ◼ ► Because if some point before that they had said, yeah, we decided Cocoa won, we're not going to do carbon anymore.
01:11:30 ◼ ► They'd be like, but wait, we ported Photoshop to carbon, Office isn't carbon, the Finder isn't carbon.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Like, what are you even doing? You can't do this. And it's like, OK, how about this? How about when we go 64 bit?
01:11:40 ◼ ► That's the time we'll drop it. Although we'll completely develop carbon 64 and just change our mind at the last minute.
01:11:45 ◼ ► Like, and I think that was probably a wise decision. Whoever made that call probably was like, we really dodged a bullet there.
01:11:50 ◼ ► Because otherwise they'd still be supporting carbon and we'd still be running carbon applications.
01:11:54 ◼ ► So how can you get rid of AppKit? Gus is saying, hey, when the ARM Macs come out, that's a perfect time to say, well, Cocoa's not coming to ARM.
01:12:06 ◼ ► But, you know, I mean, depending on the timing of these things, that may not work out because you can't drop Cocoa until UIKit on the Mac is way better than it is now.
01:12:15 ◼ ► Right. But, you know, the only way I can see this going, AppKit surviving long term is that it has to win the sequence in battle.
01:12:27 ◼ ► And we were going to take a different approach, like they changed their mind or they bail out or they say like, oh, it's just a way to support iOS applications.
01:12:34 ◼ ► But we're not committed to we were we were on that path of like, we're going to keep enhancing it and make it the great new Mac framework where we decide now we're not going to do that.
01:12:42 ◼ ► And that would leave room for that. OK, well, AppKit is still king of the hill because its competitor ran away.
01:12:50 ◼ ► And as for optimism and pessimism, like the shovelware stuff aside, which is going to be gross, but still better than Electron, like we're going to have to live through that no matter what.
01:13:01 ◼ ► I'm not entirely sure. Like, I don't I don't have enough, you know, knowledge or experience of developing applications to say whether like.
01:13:09 ◼ ► I know everyone loves UIKit and there's tons of UIKit developers, people who never learned that could think UIKit is better.
01:13:14 ◼ ► But there's also a lot of people who I know and respect who think AppKit is pretty great.
01:13:22 ◼ ► And obviously, technology aside, it's good because like there's tons more iOS developers and, you know, the more popular platform and so on and so forth.
01:13:30 ◼ ► But technology wise, part of me wonders if, you know, if if the early our earlier discussion in Mars, a band of like, what did they make a new framework that is better than both AppKit and UIKit and is able to write applications for both platforms?
01:13:43 ◼ ► Not that you write one application around in both places, but the framework spans everything. It can do menu bars, it can do toolbars, it can do all the stuff on iOS, it can do touch, it can do mouse pointer, it can do stylus, it can do everything.
01:13:54 ◼ ► And you use that one new framework that is that is better than the thinking UIKit, better than the thinking AppKit, has all new ideas and, you know, whatever is Swift native from top to bottom, whatever you want to do.
01:14:04 ◼ ► They didn't do that. They're instead saying we're going to go with UIKit and we're going to make UIKit better and bring it to the Mac and extend it to the Mac functionality.
01:14:12 ◼ ► I do wonder tech nerd wise whether, you know, it's always nice to kind of like I did with like the language that replace Objective C.
01:14:19 ◼ ► Let's imagine the most magical, wonderful language there ever could be unconstrained by practical concerns.
01:14:25 ◼ ► It's just merely better than everything that came before it. And turns out that's really hard to do.
01:14:34 ◼ ► But I'm not either optimistic or pessimistic about it, but I am I have sort of accepted or come to terms with the idea that this the things you know, things don't look good for AppKit.
01:14:51 ◼ ► And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but I think it's going to be a big change on the Mac.
01:14:58 ◼ ► Hopefully a positive one, just because for all of the great AppKit apps that start to get left behind, presumably they'll be replaced by even more great applications written by formerly iOS developers.
01:15:12 ◼ ► I'm willing to I don't know if we have time to get to this in this episode, but I'm willing to I have to have been willing to accept the idea that what makes a Mac application, a Mac application changes over time because it has.
01:15:24 ◼ ► Believe me, what makes a Mac application in 1984 is not the same thing as it makes now. And there's been a million iterations of it.
01:15:31 ◼ ► Becky Hansom I asked on Twitter, you know, like, can anyone have written a rundown of the unique characterizations characteristics of native Mac app?
01:15:39 ◼ ► Like, what is it that makes a Mac app an app? I don't want to delve into that type because I think it's too big a topic.
01:15:49 ◼ ► And UI kit coming to the Mac necessarily will change that, hopefully for the better. It's changed so many times before and mostly it has been for the better.
01:15:57 ◼ ► So I'm I'm not pessimistic about that, but I am, as with the Mac OS 10 transition, as with many transitions before.
01:16:04 ◼ ► And as Casey pointed out, there is great potential for things to go terribly wrong and you're not going to get every decision right.
01:16:10 ◼ ► File name extensions. So we have to be on the lookout for things that get screwed up along the way.
01:16:16 ◼ ► But I think I'm like both terrified and cautiously optimistic. Is there some combination emoji for that, Casey? Maybe you can look that up for me.
01:16:26 ◼ ► Well, I also would not rule out the possibility. You know, John, you know, you mentioned earlier, like we talked a little while back about a new cross platform framework.
01:16:36 ◼ ► Possibly that seems to be what Mark Gurman was talking about at some point or what John Gruber was talking about at some point and what Mark Gurman named.
01:16:43 ◼ ► Like, I don't think that what we see what we've seen so far from this UI kit on the Mac effort.
01:16:50 ◼ ► Rules that out, basically, because when you're talking about running UI kit on the Mac, you're talking about a number of different things.
01:16:58 ◼ ► One of them, which they talked about, was reunifying all the underlying frameworks, the networking frameworks, the graphics frameworks, like the sound for like all that stuff that has diverged from between iOS and Mac over time.
01:17:11 ◼ ► You know, reunifying that. That's not a small job. That's probably actually more work than the interface side.
01:17:17 ◼ ► The other part of it that they're doing is like making UI kit work on the Mac. Well, UI kit has been running in the simulator for a decade.
01:17:24 ◼ ► So the actual like part of making it operate in some functional form on Intel Macs, that like they did that already.
01:17:35 ◼ ► And so now it's just down to the details of like, okay, giving it a window, making it, you know, giving it a menu bar, you know.
01:17:42 ◼ ► And again, that's not a small amount of work either. But I think the all the underlying system stuff is probably more work than that.
01:17:49 ◼ ► You know, they're selling this right now as look, here's a way to take this handful of, you know, random, fairly low effort Apple apps and make basically bring their iPad versions to the Mac.
01:18:00 ◼ ► But what if that's just like the demo? What if that's just what we get this year? And that what if one of the reasons why we can't write these yet is that they would rather us use the new thing that's coming out in the future?
01:18:16 ◼ ► Well, it can it can be a separate UI framework. Like they do have this significant problem of they have multiple different platforms that all use different UI frameworks for the most part.
01:18:28 ◼ ► Like they have app kit, they have UI kit on the Mac, or they do UI kit on iOS, even though UI kit on the iPad is kind of weird in certain ways and kind of need some things from app kit.
01:18:40 ◼ ► As they as as they push more into like iPad Pro areas and multiple windows, multiple apps or anything like that. It kind of needs to borrow from that stuff.
01:18:49 ◼ ► The tv OS and the watch OS stuff are totally different each totally different from each other and from everything else.
01:18:56 ◼ ► tv OS kind of runs UI kit, but only parts of it and it has all of its own stuff it has to add on top of that.
01:19:03 ◼ ► Watch OS has watch kit, which is nothing like UI kit has no support for UI kit. And, and it's this whole different thing.
01:19:10 ◼ ► Not to mention you have Swift, like that's a huge thing. And you have changing paradigms in what is considered, you know, a good way to write UIs from the old like, you know, manual state based way to the more, you know, modern like, you know, reactive slash declarative ways that Casey knows about.
01:19:28 ◼ ► Like, this is a pretty good time to take this opportunity to launch a new UI framework, if they want to do that.
01:19:36 ◼ ► And I don't think anything we've seen precludes that I think this these these are not mutually exclusive things like they could run UI kit on the Mac and also support a new framework for apps to use.
01:19:48 ◼ ► Well, there are always lots of projects in flight at Apple. So I don't I totally believe that something like this could have happened. And like it is important to remember that Apple hasn't committed to anything yet because like the commitment event is essentially the publishing of a public API for third party developers.
01:20:02 ◼ ► And they're pointedly not doing that this year. Like there's no there's no API for you to use like yeah, Apple's doing it, but that's not for you. It's just like you.
01:20:09 ◼ ► Apple did it with UI. The difference is this time, like they're they're hinting at the idea that next year, this will be a thing that you can do, right?
01:20:18 ◼ ► But they have an entire year to decide. Is this what we're doing? Are we going to let people use our Mac version of UI kit with a bunch of extra classes for menus and toolbars?
01:20:28 ◼ ► Or to your point, Marco, what about that other project that we had doing for and I don't want to call it a cross platform framework.
01:20:35 ◼ ► I want to call it like a platform spanning framework, which I feel like is different. Cross platform is like I write one set of code and when it runs here, does this one runs here, one that does that.
01:20:43 ◼ ► A platform spanning set of code is basically if you took app kit plus UI kit and union them and say, here's an API that can do everything.
01:20:50 ◼ ► You can't call the menu bar ones on iOS and you can't call the touch ones on the Mac for now.
01:20:56 ◼ ► But it's just a framework that spans everything. Yeah, they could have a new framework like that.
01:21:00 ◼ ► And then the more but the more tame version, assuming they stick to their current plans is, oh, now you can have an application that forget about that.
01:21:10 ◼ ► The basically the the iOS simulator that's not an iOS simulator that lets your iOS applications have little windows and do all that crap that runs all your stuff, which is why you can't link against app kit.
01:21:21 ◼ ► Like it will forcibly not let you link against app kit if you're running inside that thing instead of that.
01:21:26 ◼ ► Just have your Mac application link against UI kit for the Mac link against app kit and then mix and match them the same way you can mix and match mix and match carbon and cocoa or whatever.
01:21:36 ◼ ► I think I think the fact that they went public with this means some kind of decision has been made that if there was a like let's here's a new way to here's a platform spanning API that we can eventually extend to everything.
01:21:53 ◼ ► And and this definitely feels like a, you know, Swift aside, it feels like a more Apple way to do things in that they've kind of picked a winner like they picked a winner with cocoa and the winner is UI kit.
01:22:04 ◼ ► And they realize the new API will be UI kit on the Mac extended with ever more classes that are Mac specific.
01:22:13 ◼ ► They did like the minimum possible classes that you needed to get anything running in a reasonable way for for, you know, the Mojave thing, but they could double the size of UI kit on the Mac.
01:22:26 ◼ ► And that would be the new API because it would be a bunch of new classes that never existed before that are basically UI kit of five ways to do things that it can do.
01:22:38 ◼ ► I remember seeing that slide and being super excited about it, but it's hard for me to gauge exactly how far they've drifted, like because the core has been the same forever.
01:22:46 ◼ ► Obviously, they had to hack it to hell to get to work on the original iPhone and this tech that and this drift and so on and so forth.
01:22:52 ◼ ► But I hope they haven't drifted so much that that actually is the bigger job. It could be. It could be the bigger job.
01:22:57 ◼ ► I don't know how I don't know how bad how badly they've they've spread from each other.
01:23:02 ◼ ► I don't know how much tech that has accumulated there. But at this point, like the iOS devices are just as powerful as most of the Macs.
01:23:08 ◼ ► There's no real reason for that drift. I'm glad to see them unifying and I'm hoping it's not a big job.
01:23:12 ◼ ► But the I think the job of, hey, make UI kit ish versions of all that stuff that app kit does is a huge job just because of like the the psychic weight of like knowing that this API that you come up with, you're going to be stuck with for a long time.
01:23:29 ◼ ► You know, same thing with UI kit, like any making a public API, a public API, Apple making a public API is one of the most dangerous and scary things that Apple can do because of Apple's policy of trying to support it.
01:23:43 ◼ ► Like you can't just make an API and say, oh, we made a terrible mistake. Never mind. Like people build apps on it and you have to support them.
01:23:50 ◼ ► And like that's why they're taking so long with the ABI compatibility and Swift. It's like you get one chance to get this right.
01:23:55 ◼ ► You can't really say, oh, yeah, we tried last year, but we changed our mind. All your applications are going to break.
01:24:08 ◼ ► What is the may you live interesting times, the curse, whatever. It's an exciting it's an exciting, terrifying time for the Mac.
01:24:16 ◼ ► These next few years are going to be, as many people have pointed out, the biggest change in the Mac's history since the classic Mac OS X transition, maybe not potentially not as big, but also potentially bigger.
01:24:31 ◼ ► Like it's not with the OS transition. It was so clear. It's like old OS gone, new OS here, like very little shared between except for carpet and this.
01:24:38 ◼ ► It could be a gradual evolution or that invasive species could rush through our ecosystem and just change it overnight over the course of like a year or two.
01:24:53 ◼ ► Some people would say it's stagnating or not evolving as much as it was before. And regardless of how this goes, I don't think our complaint over the next five years will be a lack of change or or excitement or terror on the Mac.
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01:26:58 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some Ask ATP. Let's start with an interesting kind of simulation or scenario, is a better word for it, from the comedian James Veitch who wrote, "I'm placing all three of you in charge of security at Apple.
01:27:16 ◼ ► Putting to one side the leaky supply chain, how are you going to work out how Germin and other people like him are getting his information and how are you going to put an end to it once and for all? Tim Cook is relying on you guys.
01:27:27 ◼ ► Casey, you have a desk job again. Marco, you have a job. And John, very little has changed for you. You have an unlimited budget. Be reasonable with this, John.
01:27:35 ◼ ► Things to consider. How is Germin getting his stories? Is it just friends in high places or does he have other more nefarious means? Remember those health app mockups? Why did Germin get those so wrong?
01:27:45 ◼ ► And case manufacturers got it really wrong with the iPhone Nano and the teardrop iPhone. James writes, "I've often wondered whether schematics for one or both of these products were disseminated in an attempt to root out the leakers.
01:27:55 ◼ ► And I find this fascinating. So what would you do?" I think that last thing is the thing that I find most interesting and most exciting is deliberately telling people the wrong data just to see where it ends up.
01:28:09 ◼ ► Another thing I would do is just figure out like what did the CIA and like FBI do in these sorts of scenarios? Like presumably there have been people in intelligence operations, presumably, that have tried to figure this out before.
01:28:22 ◼ ► You know, what do they do? How do they sniff out when there's a leak? And how do they figure that out?
01:28:30 ◼ ► Additionally, I mean, I've heard, well, we have heard as a community and I've heard from friends that work at Apple that disclosure is a big thing.
01:28:38 ◼ ► Like my understanding is there is actually an app or it's part of an app that Apple has where you can look up, "Okay, Marco and I both work at Apple. I want to talk to Marco about Project Titan.
01:28:48 ◼ ► Let me go look real quick and see if Marco is disclosed on Project Titan. Oh, no he's not. Okay, well Marco, let me just tell you what I'm working on these days.
01:28:59 ◼ ► Something interesting. And that's all I can tell you. So compartmentalizing even more, that's a roundabout way of saying compartmentalizing even more is probably a good way to prevent the problem.
01:29:09 ◼ ► But in terms of sniffing it out, that's a tough question. And other than planting bogus data, I'm not sure what to say. Marco, how would you handle it?
01:29:17 ◼ ► I mean, there are certain things you can do to actually track down and catch individual leakers. I'm sure Apple's, I mean, the fact is none of the three of us have ever worked in this kind of field before of secrecy and security and stuff as far as I know.
01:29:35 ◼ ► So I don't know. Well, but were you in charge of enforcing it and tracking people down?
01:29:40 ◼ ► If we were, we couldn't say. But yeah, so like, you know, these suggestions might be ridiculous, you know, compared to people who actually know what they're talking about in this area.
01:29:51 ◼ ► But with that disclaimer, you know, obviously one angle is to catch the people who are existing leakers and you do that. Who knows? One idea is, you know, what you mentioned, like kind of like fake leaks, like, you know, just to kind of find out like where things are leaking from.
01:30:06 ◼ ► Like one little idea I thought of, which I'm sure they've thought of and might even do is, you know, there's been a lot of leaking of memos recently.
01:30:15 ◼ ► What if every copy of an email memo that went out to everybody had software that slightly varied some of the wording?
01:30:25 ◼ ► Because you could do things like try to embed like, you know, invisible Unicode space characters and stuff like that. But, you know, that's easy to filter out.
01:30:31 ◼ ► But like changes to the wording are not easy to detect if like you're like, if you want to report on a quota memo, unless you have more than one copy, then you can like diff it.
01:30:42 ◼ ► And so I said that, but like, if you only got one copy, then, you know, you can, you could basically make enough minor wording variations in it that you can kind of, you know, binary search it down to whoever is doing leaking.
01:30:55 ◼ ► So that's part of it too. But ultimately, I think most of it's probably less on the technical side and more just on the human side.
01:31:03 ◼ ► You know, we, there have been over time, a lot of crazy Apple leaks and most of the recent ones, honestly, have boiled down to, you know, Apple slipping up and just like, you know, accidentally publicizing HomePod software, things like that.
01:31:21 ◼ ► You know, that's, that's been a lot of them recently. But otherwise, there are human factors involved in like, what makes someone leak? What, what motivates people to do that?
01:31:32 ◼ ► Oftentimes, those are issues that you can't really do anything about. Like, oftentimes, it's people who are mad, they maybe lost an argument internally, or that the product they're working on was gutted, or they have some of their ax to grind with the company.
01:31:48 ◼ ► And so they leak stuff that will basically argue in their favor, or that will kind of, you know, make the company look bad in a way that gives them some kind of vindication.
01:31:59 ◼ ► And those people like, you're kind of always going to have that risk. And I'm not sure there's that much you can do about that, except what Apple is doing about that, which is basically like scaring people into saying, look, if you do this, we're probably going to catch you and you might go to jail.
01:32:13 ◼ ► Like, that's a pretty effective thing, actually. You know, they've also seen it seems like from their language around this recently, it seems like they have tried to lean heavily on like, the appeal to emotion, you're letting the team down, if you leak, you know, stuff like that.
01:32:29 ◼ ► Honestly, that probably isn't very effective. I can't see that being a major thing. But, you know, ultimately, you're always going to have some amount of leaks. And I'm not sure they're necessarily that bad.
01:32:45 ◼ ► I mean, sure, you know, you want the official company line to be leaking is bad, you're letting the team down, you shouldn't do this, you'll get in trouble. But these leaks are also really good PR, usually, and they're they like they have they cultivate this, this like community around Apple and this hype around Apple, that we're all just so excited about what they might do in the future, that there's this huge demand for leaks and rumors about things.
01:33:14 ◼ ► They might be working on. And that that all plays into the reputation, the brand, the hype, the PR cycle. I think I think most of the time, the dreamers actually help Apple.
01:33:27 ◼ ► So leaks are helpful. Marco, you're fired from your security job. That's the wrong attitude for your position. Unfortunately, James Silvicton to one of the classic blunders. The most famous as you know, Casey is what?
01:33:53 ◼ ► Yes, the classic blunder that he felt like he knows he felt like he says it right here in the question. Here is the problem with your question, James. You have an unlimited budget. Be reasonable with this, John.
01:34:06 ◼ ► I love that he knew that case and I wouldn't give two crap with that line. And he knew you would focus in on that.
01:34:12 ◼ ► That is the crux of the entire question. The easy solution. This question is how do you stop Mark Gurman from leaking? You have an unlimited budget. I would pay Mark Gurman whatever he wanted to pay. Everyone has a number for the rest of his life. And boom, problem solved. I get promoted.
01:34:29 ◼ ► As Marco was talking, I was thinking to myself, you know, if I really want to just think outside the box, what if I just said, and I was taking a more negative approach, you know, what if you said if you can get us, if you can lead us to a leaker, your bounty is a billion dollars. Like literally a billion dollars. Because money no object, why not?
01:34:47 ◼ ► You don't have to lead to a leaker. You know it's Gurman. Just get him off the board. Pay him a hundred million dollars a year, your Gurman problem goes away. Hundred percent guaranteed.
01:34:54 ◼ ► Yeah, but there's always going to be more Gurmans. Gurman wasn't, Gurman's not the only person.
01:34:59 ◼ ► Well, I mean, before there was Gurman, how many Gurmans were there? Gurman is like, you know, to deal with the Gurman issue, so buy Bloomberg, buy the whole company that they work for. You have an unlimited budget, the question says. So this is a very bad question, James. You told me to be reasonable, but it's not possible. The terms of your question is you have an unlimited budget and, you know, that just destroys it. So try to be more precise next time.
01:35:21 ◼ ► Okay, well, how about this? You have a budget of whatever Apple has in the bank right now.
01:35:28 ◼ ► And that's also pretty much an unlimited budget. We can move on, but James, if you would like to reword your question, perhaps we'll approach it another time.
01:35:37 ◼ ► This is your one and only chance to ever get an Ask ATP question given the huge volume of questions we get.
01:35:44 ◼ ► Robert Burat would like to know, on a recent show, Marco advised that when getting a 4K monitor, you shouldn't get anything bigger than a 24-incher. Can you elaborate on why this is, please? And actually, I can field some of that.
01:35:56 ◼ ► When I was exploring a 4K monitor, really what I wanted was an external retina monitor at work. This was like a year ago. And we had gotten in a 27-inch 4K monitor.
01:36:09 ◼ ► And when I sat down at it, it was clear to me that I could actually see pixels. And if you remember way back when to the original retina screen announcement, was that iPhone 4? Is that right?
01:36:21 ◼ ► The colloquial definition, if you will, was that you wouldn't be able to see the pixels at the distance at which you would generally hold the device.
01:36:29 ◼ ► They also gave like a DPI number, whatever the hell it was, but they basically said, thank you.
01:36:36 ◼ ► But they basically said, hey, listen, you can't see the pixels. And that's the whole point.
01:36:40 ◼ ► And on a 27-inch 4K monitor, even with my crummy eyes, I could see the pixels. Or maybe I felt like I could.
01:36:48 ◼ ► But with about a 22 to 24-inch 4K monitor, I could no longer see those pixels. And to my eyes, that was the sweet spot.
01:36:58 ◼ ► So if you're going 24 or below, 4K is fine. If you're going above 24, you need 5K. Otherwise, you're not really living the retina dream after all.
01:37:07 ◼ ► You're just living a very, very large amount of real estate dream, if that makes any sense.
01:37:16 ◼ ► You know, as computer monitor technology has advanced, we've kind of had like standard-sized monitors for most of personal computing history.
01:37:25 ◼ ► They're kind of evolved to the standard density range of like, this is roughly the DPI range that monitors were.
01:37:34 ◼ ► And so like for LCDs, you had like the 15-inch monitors. I think those are usually like 1024x768.
01:37:40 ◼ ► The 17-inch was 1280x1024. The 19-inch was 1600x1200. And then the 24-inch class monitor was 1920.
01:37:52 ◼ ► And then the 30-inch class monitor was 2560 across. And then in the retina era, the way that most monitors have gotten retina is by just doubling the pixels in each dimension.
01:38:06 ◼ ► So that way the OS can render everything at a perfect 2x. It makes a lot of things simpler. It makes a lot of things look nicer.
01:38:18 ◼ ► So the problem is 4K is double the 1920 wide resolution that was the common resolution on 24-inch monitors.
01:38:36 ◼ ► 24-inch monitor resolution of 1920 across or just 1080p as, well that was the shorter version, but yeah anyway, we'll ignore that difference for, the 16x9 versus 16x10 difference, we'll ignore that for now.
01:38:46 ◼ ► Sorry 16x10 fans, we lost. I was one of you, but we lost. Anyway, at some point like maybe 10 years ago, they started making 21-inch monitors that actually had the resolution of 24s.
01:39:01 ◼ ► And 27-inch monitors starting with 27-inch iMac that had the resolution of previous 30-inch monitors.
01:39:07 ◼ ► So there is a slight correction downward where you had the same number of pixels just in a slightly smaller monitor.
01:39:18 ◼ ► Now, that correction makes for 4K being the ideal size at either the old pre-correction size of 24 inches or the new post-correction size of 21.5 inches, which is why the 4K iMac is 21.5 inches.
01:39:34 ◼ ► The correct, quote, correct version of 5K is, as Casey said, 27 inches or 30 inches depending on what you can find. I don't even know if anybody makes a 30-inch 5K, but this is like the standard sizes.
01:39:46 ◼ ► So the problem is if you get something that falls between them, so for example, 4K at 27 inches, which is what the question is about, you have to either run the monitor at 2x, which I would want to run a 4K monitor at 2x unless it's like 40 inches wide.
01:40:03 ◼ ► So run it at 2x, which means at that size everything will be like, quote, too big compared to most other computer monitors you've seen.
01:40:13 ◼ ► Or run it at 1x, which means you're going to have things be really tiny. You will have a lot of real estate, but it will be really tiny.
01:40:22 ◼ ► And if your eyes are good enough for that, more power to you, but I think most people would not probably want to run that at 1x.
01:40:27 ◼ ► So that is why. And there's lots of other screen sizes out now. We're kind of in a glorious heyday of inexpensive but really good monitors out there.
01:40:38 ◼ ► Like you can get, there's now that whole class of ultra-wide ones. Have you seen those? They're like 34 inches wide but kind of short.
01:40:45 ◼ ► So it's almost like having two 20-inch monitors next to each other, kind of like that. But in one big screen.
01:40:52 ◼ ► Those are not yet available in anything I would call a high DPI resolution at that size. I think you pretty much have to run those at 1x.
01:41:02 ◼ ► And so you're getting real estate but not really getting retina quality. But a lot of people love those things and they're not that expensive.
01:41:09 ◼ ► So anyway, you have a lot of choices these days, but the reason why there are these certain sizes that make sense for certain resolutions is just because we've had these conventions for so long.
01:41:21 ◼ ► That the OS's all assume will be in place when they size elements on screen. And so if you run them at 1x versus 2x, things will either be too small or too big.
01:41:30 ◼ ► Unless you're in the certain size ranges. And then finally there's a great blog post by our friends at Bajango who make iStat menus for the Mac.
01:41:38 ◼ ► They have a great blog post that I think we linked to last time we talked about this but I'll link to it again.
01:41:42 ◼ ► That basically shows you the two good ranges. The good range of 1x and the good range of 2x and what size and resolution monitors fall on which part of that spectrum.
01:41:53 ◼ ► Alright, Will Law writes in to say, "What kind of sick, sad world do we live in where WWDC comes and goes and there is no discussion of box lunches or cuisine? I expected more of you all."
01:42:08 ◼ ► I am deeply disappointed in myself that we did not talk about this in any way, shape or form.
01:42:14 ◼ ► I only ate like one or two WWDC lunches this year because I was running around like a crazy person.
01:42:21 ◼ ► The keynote day, by the time I made it to the lunch area, the particular lunch I wanted was long since sold out, if you will.
01:42:31 ◼ ► It's not actually for sale, but all of them had been cleaned up and people had claimed them.
01:42:37 ◼ ► Also, I would like to file a formal complaint that I only had one bottle of Mango Tango Odwalla.
01:42:45 ◼ ► This is unacceptable. I only saw it once, very briefly, and it was actually a friend of mine that grabbed it for me.
01:42:52 ◼ ► I am upset. This is not the way the Odwalla containers or the Odwalla selection should be.
01:43:03 ◼ ► John, as the only other person who was in the conference, anything you would like to add about the cuisine this year?
01:43:11 ◼ ► So I think I had a box lunch every day. I think I even had breakfast every day, so I'm on my normal WWDC meal plan.
01:43:22 ◼ ► It's the second year at San Jose, and the second year they've done a thing that I don't like for the breakfast,
01:43:35 ◼ ► The variety consists of taking what used to be at breakfast at WWDC and taking one-third of it on this day,
01:43:42 ◼ ► So some days just have doughnuts. Some days just have bagels. Some days just have little pastries.
01:43:46 ◼ ► You've got to have doughnuts, bagels, pastries, cream cheese, all of it every day. Why?
01:43:53 ◼ ► At Moscone, it was so much better for food service in terms of traffic law and everything,
01:44:01 ◼ ► I don't like coming out on a day where there's just doughnuts. I don't want to have a doughnut for breakfast.
01:44:06 ◼ ► You've got to have everything every day. I have to decide, "You know what? Today is the day I'm going to have a doughnut,"
01:44:12 ◼ ► and make it my call, not like, "Oh, guess what? You have doughnuts today because that's the only thing."
01:44:16 ◼ ► So setting that aside, oh, and on the wall off front, I never even saw a container of odd wall.
01:44:21 ◼ ► I didn't even physically see one in someone else's hand. I have no idea where they were.
01:44:32 ◼ ► I mean, it was still there, which is better than a couple of years, but I only saw it a couple of times.
01:44:37 ◼ ► And like I said, it was a friend of mine that actually saw the mango tango and grabbed it and tweeted at me to say,
01:44:43 ◼ ► "Hey, I've got a mango tango if you want it." So if it wasn't for him, I would not have had one at all.
01:44:49 ◼ ► But yeah, I could not agree with you more about breakfast. I didn't even think about the breakfast scenario,
01:45:00 ◼ ► like, they truly and utterly do not grasp what a bagel is, much in the same way Montreal doesn't.
01:45:06 ◼ ► But with that said, at least give me your crappy bagel-esque baked good so I can slather some cream cheese on it,
01:45:17 ◼ ► assuming I can open the container. I can slather some cream cheese on it and use that for my breakfast every day.
01:45:24 ◼ ► But yeah, one of the days I went in for breakfast, I really, really wanted this bagel-like contraption,
01:45:29 ◼ ► and it turned out they only had like really crappy pastries, which I had zero interest in.
01:45:40 ◼ ► Gotta have all the breakfast options every day. Also the butter balls, meaning they had like little tiny grape-sized balls of butter.
01:45:47 ◼ ► Wait, just like loose? Yeah, like in a bowl. A bunch of butter balls in a bowl with a knife.
01:45:52 ◼ ► And you just go like grab one? Yeah, those individually foil-wrapped pats of butter are way better choice
01:45:58 ◼ ► when you're trying to serve a lot of people. Otherwise, people are trying to dig out these butter balls with the butter knife
01:46:02 ◼ ► and just like put the ball on their plate and then hope that when they get back to their seat,
01:46:06 ◼ ► it's softened enough so they don't break their plastic knife trying to spread it anyway. Breakfast had problems.
01:46:11 ◼ ► But to get to the box lunches, it was an interesting turn of events this year on the box lunches.
01:46:16 ◼ ► You know, I've complained a lot about them in the past. Externally, like they looked about the same.
01:46:20 ◼ ► Like it wasn't the same as every year, but there was a difference. They leaned much more heavily on salads this year than usual.
01:46:28 ◼ ► It used to be that they would lean a lot on sandwich things and things that looked kind of like dinner meal
01:46:36 ◼ ► and then there'd be like one salad. I saw a lot of salads and this protected them from one of their biggest problems,
01:46:44 ◼ ► which was historically anything they try to make a sandwich has either terrible bread or bread that might have been good
01:46:51 ◼ ► except it ended up sitting in some liquid so it got soggy. And a sandwich with soggy bread is no good, right?
01:46:56 ◼ ► So they did a lot of salads and the salads are good because if they're not out in the sun,
01:47:02 ◼ ► and you know, the pro tip I learned from last year, get your lunch indoors, not outdoors,
01:47:11 ◼ ► Like it's like greens and fruit and some dried thing. Like there's nothing really to get soggy.
01:47:18 ◼ ► Like the salad dressing is usually on the side in a little container and if a little bit spills out, it's not a big deal.
01:47:25 ◼ ► And it avoids them having to find some way to get decent bread or decent filling for their sandwiches.
01:47:31 ◼ ► So I mostly give a thumbs up to that because I feel like the average quality of the lunch I had was higher than in years past.
01:47:39 ◼ ► That said, I like a good sandwich and I miss the sandwiches. So I'm not sure what they need to do.
01:47:45 ◼ ► Like they haven't cracked the sandwich code, so now they're just avoiding it by avoiding their weakness
01:47:55 ◼ ► Now I was going to just move on from this topic, but it occurred to me Marco also had conference issues at your conference, from what I've understood,
01:48:05 ◼ ► because my understanding is social policy did not have a good system set up for them either.
01:48:12 ◼ ► He ordered lunch at social policy every day, but only received one, and presumably his other six lectures are arriving now to whoever is sitting at his table.
01:48:23 ◼ ► That, yeah. Social policy, as much as I love it as a hangout spot, the food service part of it seemed to only get worse this year, not better.
01:49:05 ◼ ► Like if you want beer, they have like 60 beers. If you want sausage, they have like 60 sausages.
01:49:10 ◼ ► But then they also have like, what's that weird Montreal fries and duck fat and curds dish?
01:49:19 ◼ ► They have a bunch of different kinds of sausages and French fries. That's all you need.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And it's like, it's not cheap, cheap, but like for $10 or $11, you get a very filling meal.
01:49:46 ◼ ► Yeah, that place. Also, I went across the street from social policy across the little plaza to Tacomania one time.
01:49:53 ◼ ► And that was surprisingly good. Like it looks like some kind of weird cheesy chain thing, but you go in and it's surprisingly good.
01:49:59 ◼ ► And I would say, you know, it still has some of like San Jose-ness to it, but it's almost normal.
01:50:09 ◼ ► 100 percent normal. They hustle. They get you your food. They find where you are. They bring it to you and you don't have to wait long.
01:50:15 ◼ ► Yeah. The beer and sausage place is by far like the most up to speed, like consistent eatery I've found there.
01:50:23 ◼ ► I also also a good word to. Is it called Good Karma? The vegan place across the street from that.
01:50:36 ◼ ► Again, you know, somewhat limited menu. But if what you want is on their menu, it's good.
01:50:42 ◼ ► And the service is pretty good, too. So I think what I've what I've found is I've explored San Jose one more year is in a one block radius of the hotel.
01:50:52 ◼ ► Yes. Yes, exactly. Is that yeah. Social policy. I ate very few like lunches there because I was just finding better places for lunch.
01:51:02 ◼ ► Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Away and Linode. And we will talk to you next week.
01:52:16 ◼ ► I've had we've had a bit of a falling out already. It's been what, like a week and a half or something.
01:52:22 ◼ ► Yes, I'm like that was Father's Day that it was Father's Day that I got it. And I think what I've realized is
01:52:38 ◼ ► I think some of this would get better with a more modern Jeep and or if I treated the Jeep more like a traditional car and less like an erector set.
01:52:51 ◼ ► But because it's rare that I have a car that's that's convertible and even more rare that I have a car that the doors can come off.
01:52:59 ◼ ► Not in because the summertime naturally I've been trying to roll with this with the doors off and the top down as much as possible.
01:53:06 ◼ ► However, what I forgot about is that in Virginia, it's like a light version of Florida when it comes to weather, summer weather,
01:53:22 ◼ ► Because my experience of Florida is that every friggin day it is unbearably humid, then it torrentially rains for about four and a half minutes,
01:53:38 ◼ ► Well, Virginia is kind of like that, but way less extreme in every measurable way. Not as humid, humid but not as humid.
01:53:51 ◼ ► The problem though is if you're going to go and park a vehicle with no top and no doors outdoors for eight hours, say if you're, I don't know, at work,
01:53:59 ◼ ► all you end up doing is looking out the window to see, "Oh, it's getting a little dark. Oh, it's getting a little dark.
01:54:08 ◼ ► So I've been every day like running out in panic because I've decided to at least put the top up.
01:54:16 ◼ ► So there'll still be rain coming in from every measurable part of the car except the roof.
01:54:27 ◼ ► Putting the top down by one, as a single person is pretty easy, but putting it back up is a little bit of a pain.
01:54:47 ◼ ► So what ends up happening is I just stress out all day about whether or not my dad's car is going to get rained on.
01:54:52 ◼ ► So I could, of course, like I could absolutely just leave everything put together and just treat it as like a regular SUV.
01:55:02 ◼ ► Right, exactly, exactly right. But where's the fun in that? It's a Wrangler. It's a Wrangler for a reason. It should be fun.
01:55:08 ◼ ► So what I'm realizing is it's probably, it's one of those things that I think we've talked about many times, although I can't think of a specific example,
01:55:26 ◼ ► You've said many times that it was fun in principle, but the reality of it was that it was just kind of a pain in the butt.
01:55:36 ◼ ► And then this was the deal, I mean it's still a possibility officially speaking, but the deal was really sealed when we had all four of us in the car top down and two things happened.
01:55:47 ◼ ► Number one, anytime we stopped moving, the poor kids in the back roasted because there's no top blocking the Virginia sun and there's no airflow.
01:55:55 ◼ ► Because even though I cranked the AC and pointed it directly at them and not at me at all, it's a wide open car.
01:56:02 ◼ ► Of course it's just going to flutter out into the surrounding area. So I was trying to air condition all of Richmond in order to lightly cool my children.
01:56:15 ◼ ► And then as we're driving somewhere, and this was all at surface streets, Aaron and I got to talking about what it would be like if we got in an accident with no doors on the car.
01:56:29 ◼ ► Yeah, again, this is just a curse to you now. We've been yelling at you about this for months.
01:56:46 ◼ ► Oh, man. So anyway, she did not say that this is not an option, but I'm starting to feel like maybe I should explore other alternatives.
01:57:02 ◼ ► I keep coming back to I feel like my only choices that I'm interested in are GTI or Golf are...
01:57:30 ◼ ► I'm trying very hard, you guys. I expect to see this on my performance review next quarter.
01:57:40 ◼ ► And everyone I know, and I think I've made this speech many times, everyone I know who's ever driven a GTI says it is the far and away best all-arounder that you can buy today.
01:57:50 ◼ ► That if you wanted to have a car, if you want to be a one-car person, but that one car can do anything, within reason, of course, get a GTI.
01:57:58 ◼ ► But I kind of like the idea of the Golf R, and if I got a GTI, I think I would always say, "Well, why didn't you get the R?"
01:58:03 ◼ ► Conversely, if I got the R, I would always say, "Man, I really wish I had a friggin' sunroof."
01:58:07 ◼ ► Also, the Golf R's wheels are not good in the 2018 models. The 2017 models were great. The '18s are no good.
01:58:17 ◼ ► Well, I could get a 2017... actually, could I? That is the same generation. Maybe I should just get a 2017 and see if I can find one.
01:58:25 ◼ ► The other thing I looked at was, you can get OEM 2017 wheels for like $1500 or something like that.
01:58:32 ◼ ► And you can actually get... apparently, my friend recommended a company out of Canada called Replika, I think.
01:58:40 ◼ ► But there's a company out of Canada that basically does fake OEM wheels that... yeah, it's Replika.
01:58:46 ◼ ► R-E-P-L-I-K-A. And they have a version of the wheels that I like that are like $150 a wheel, so it would be what, like $600 or something like that for all four?
01:59:03 ◼ ► I plan on test driving the stupid Accord, which I'm fearful that I'll actually love, in which case I don't know what I'll do.
01:59:10 ◼ ► You should bring your family so they can bask in exactly how much room there is in that backseat compared to a Golf.
01:59:19 ◼ ► Yeah, then I plan to test drive the Golf and I plan to test drive the GTI and see what I think.
01:59:27 ◼ ► Really, my life would be... on the one side, my life would be so much easier if I was willing to get an automatic.
01:59:41 ◼ ► Let me point out, too, like, with your Jeep experimentation here, your very quick Jeep phase...
01:59:47 ◼ ► And by the way, thank your dad profusely for making you not actually need to buy one to get this out of your system, right?
01:59:55 ◼ ► So, anyway, you've already said by trying the Jeep experiment and by almost convincing yourself to buy a Jeep that fun and stick is more important than speed and luxury.
02:00:14 ◼ ► I know I should. I just don't... it's so boring. I'm sorry, Jon, I don't mean that to be offensive, but it strikes me so boring.
02:00:35 ◼ ► So, I don't know, I mean, this can be an exercise for the listener/for me/for you guys to think about, but I don't know.
02:00:47 ◼ ► I mean, if you look at my total cost of ownership at the BMW over the six years I've had it, it's been like $500 a month.
02:00:53 ◼ ► And it occurred to me, when I don't have a traditional job, I could lift a lot of times for $500 a month.
02:01:00 ◼ ► And it would not make me as happy, but it would save money, which right now would be very useful.
02:01:09 ◼ ► $500 a month is a lot more than you would pay to lease something new. That's fairly reasonable.
02:01:14 ◼ ► Like, if you wanted to lease a new stick version of an Accord, you're probably looking at well under that.
02:01:30 ◼ ► I honestly think you would have, first of all, you get a lot more utility out of being a family person now.
02:01:59 ◼ ► They're a great balance of, like, good driving dynamics versus also having pretty good cargo space.
02:02:04 ◼ ► And it's really hard to beat the Accord for that, for the kind of variables that you are prioritizing.
02:02:11 ◼ ► And, when you're self-employed, things like being able to have predictable cash flow become more valuable to you.
02:02:25 ◼ ► After all the costs of getting a lease started, you're probably into it for like under $2,000.
02:02:30 ◼ ► And then you pay a couple hundred bucks a month, and you know it's going to be only that.
02:02:36 ◼ ► And you know it's going to be three years from now that's going to end, and you can start a new one,
02:02:47 ◼ ► Because, like, what you want right now is more things that you, more of your financial and hassle life,
02:03:04 ◼ ► And so the more things you can fix down to a predictable level in both money and in hassle, the better.
02:03:11 ◼ ► This is why I think no matter what you get, I think a lease is the way to go for you right now.
02:03:17 ◼ ► And also, I think separately from that, I think you should also seriously consider the Accord stick,
02:03:29 ◼ ► Because don't they petulantly insist on putting the sunroof controls to the left of the steering wheel, which is barbaric.
02:03:50 ◼ ► No, no, what I want, the problem is what I really want, what I really, really want is a 3-series, is a new 3-series.
02:04:03 ◼ ► Well, it looks like you can get this Accord really nicely done if you don't want to have a 6-speed.