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268: A Tarnished Brass Age

 

00:00:00   Also my throat's burning from all the ginger I put in my lemon ginger honey thing.

00:00:03   I put too much.

00:00:04   Normally I just mince the ginger, but this time I decided to put a ginger and hot water

00:00:09   solution in my blender and really puree the crap out of it.

00:00:13   Really in there.

00:00:14   And wow, is it stronger that way.

00:00:16   You're using chemical weapons on yourself.

00:00:20   Next Marco pepper sprays his throat.

00:00:23   And then of course all the ginger particles sank to the bottom of the cup.

00:00:27   So the whole rest of the time I was drinking it,

00:00:29   I was like, oh, this isn't too bad.

00:00:29   But now, I mean, now I'm at the bottom.

00:00:31   And now, every sip is like fire.

00:00:33   - You just need to get crystallized ginger

00:00:36   so you can slowly eat the crystals.

00:00:37   (laughing)

00:00:40   - Did you know that ginger tea is almost always BS?

00:00:43   Like, if you try to get just like, bad ginger tea

00:00:45   so it's all dried, every single one of them I've ever seen

00:00:49   includes as one of the ingredients black pepper.

00:00:52   - What?

00:00:53   Why, is that BS?

00:00:54   'Cause you don't like black pepper?

00:00:56   because they're trying to make it feel like fresh ginger

00:00:59   with the burn in the back of your throat

00:01:01   by making you drink black pepper, basically.

00:01:03   - Does ginger, fresh ginger give you a burn

00:01:06   in the back of your, I guess I don't need enough

00:01:08   fresh ginger to know, I mean I--

00:01:09   - Ginger is spicy, it's like, there's like a spice to it.

00:01:12   But when you dry it out and make dry tea bags with it,

00:01:15   you lose that, and so to make you think you're tasting

00:01:19   more fresh ginger than you are, they add black pepper

00:01:22   to ginger tea bags to remind you of the burn

00:01:25   that you get with fresh ginger,

00:01:26   but it's like engine noises, it's totally fake.

00:01:29   - When do you eat fresh ginger other than this thing

00:01:31   that you're doing to yourself 'cause you're sick?

00:01:33   - I'm not sick, I just enjoy this.

00:01:34   - Yes, it's fresh, but then you chop it up

00:01:37   and then you cook it, you make it hot in some kind of pan.

00:01:40   - What about the ginger that comes with sushi?

00:01:42   - That's pickled.

00:01:43   - Ah, okay.

00:01:44   - And I don't eat sushi.

00:01:45   - Have you tried it?

00:01:46   - Mm-hmm, I don't like fish.

00:01:48   - Oh, John.

00:01:49   - Neither do I, I finally, so my problem is I don't like

00:01:52   fish and I'm allergic to avocado.

00:01:54   Try to find anything at a sushi restaurant

00:01:58   that contains neither of those things.

00:02:00   But anyway, I'm eating fresh ginger right now in this drink.

00:02:03   It's really good, but a little burny.

00:02:05   - But a little burny.

00:02:07   - Yeah, 'cause I'm making my own ginger tea

00:02:08   because actual ginger tea is bull (beep)

00:02:10   - Just because it contains pepper.

00:02:12   Like I'm not convinced that people

00:02:13   just don't like the taste of pepper.

00:02:15   You think it's ginger fakery,

00:02:17   but maybe it's just, it's positive peppering.

00:02:20   - If that's the reason they added it,

00:02:22   they would put pepper on the label.

00:02:24   They would advertise it as ginger pepper tea.

00:02:26   Zero of them do this.

00:02:27   (laughing)

00:02:29   - They don't put salt on the labels, they're salting.

00:02:31   (laughing)

00:02:32   - No, actually, I don't think so.

00:02:34   (laughing)

00:02:35   (electronic beeping)

00:02:37   - So let's do follow up.

00:02:38   Peter Kendall writes that he loves that, Marco,

00:02:40   you purchased some walkie talkies for your road trip,

00:02:42   since he is an amateur or ham radio operator,

00:02:45   and he is glad that they worked well.

00:02:48   Peter continues, "While walkie talkies

00:02:49   "don't have the best range,

00:02:50   "once one passes an amateur radio exam,

00:02:52   that you can get access to much more powerful radios. For example, one can get these mobile

00:02:56   radios that pump out 50 watts and are powered by the 12-volt battery in your car and have

00:03:01   a detachable head unit to put on your dash. There are other shapes and sizes as well,

00:03:05   including smaller ones that are basically glorified walkie-talkies but more powerful.

00:03:08   Holy monkey, 50 watts is--I don't know anything, and I know that's significant.

00:03:13   >> Yeah, I mean, for reference, the walkie-talkies max out at 2 watts, and you only get the 2

00:03:18   if you go, you're only legally supposed to use

00:03:21   the two watt versions, if you go to the FCC's website

00:03:25   and register for a GMRS license, which I actually did,

00:03:29   and I didn't want to get in trouble for using

00:03:31   the two watt channels, and I did it because it was

00:03:33   really easy and inexpensive to do it.

00:03:36   Going all the way for a full ham radio license

00:03:38   is considerably more involved, and I didn't think

00:03:43   it was necessary to communicate between two vehicles

00:03:45   that were usually at most a few hundred feet apart.

00:03:50   So it wasn't necessary for this use case,

00:03:52   but ham radio is one of those things,

00:03:54   there's a lot of overlap between ham radio and nerd culture,

00:03:58   and I respect a lot of it,

00:03:59   but I don't know that much about it.

00:04:01   But ultimately, I've never had much of a reason

00:04:04   to get into it, because the broadcast nature

00:04:08   of that hobby for me I've solved with podcasting,

00:04:11   and the short-range communication nature,

00:04:13   never really had a need until now, and walkie-talkies serve my needs perfectly well.

00:04:19   I put this in here because I feel like it fits well with Marco's vinyl revival and

00:04:25   Raspberry Pi stuff. Not that he's going to be into it now, but maybe this is like

00:04:30   the ghost of Marco Future when he wants another tech thing to get into, or maybe he finds

00:04:33   himself traveling to Upstate a lot, or maybe he retires to Upstate and needs to have walkie-talkies.

00:04:38   Seeing Marco take an amateur radio exam to get a license for a more powerful radio is

00:04:43   a thing that seems plausible to me.

00:04:45   So just put a marker here.

00:04:47   Come back in 20 years.

00:04:48   There is no way I would ever be allowed to put a giant antenna in my yard.

00:04:52   Once you have your giant compound upstate, you have plenty of land for that.

00:04:56   It's true.

00:04:58   There's some sort of ham joke here that I just can't put my finger on.

00:05:01   I'm more of a brisket person.

00:05:03   Nah, that's not the ham I was going for, but I'll allow it.

00:05:07   As long as one of us got one in, I'm good.

00:05:09   All right, Eduardo Ponce writes,

00:05:10   "If anyone's wondering whether the new onboarding screens

00:05:13   "on iOS 11.3 were all about GDPR, wonder no more."

00:05:17   And they include a link to a photograph of their Apple TV

00:05:22   where there are clearly some string,

00:05:26   what would you call these?

00:05:26   I don't know, like placeholders.

00:05:28   - There are localization identifiers, basically.

00:05:30   Like when you're writing an app

00:05:32   that's supposed to be localized to different languages,

00:05:35   you usually wrap the string calls

00:05:37   in some kind of localization layer,

00:05:39   like NS localized string or something like that.

00:05:41   And so the idea is you don't just hard code

00:05:45   the language strings that are gonna be shown to the user

00:05:47   in the source code, you have some kind of resource file

00:05:50   that is a strings file,

00:05:52   and then you can localize the strings file

00:05:54   that's just like a list of all the strings

00:05:56   that would be displayed to a user.

00:05:57   You can have that localized by translators,

00:05:59   and then you can have a whole bundle of those things

00:06:02   in your app, and you can have different ones

00:06:03   for different language and locale settings.

00:06:06   And your app simply, instead of saying,

00:06:08   ask the user, are you sure, the app says,

00:06:11   give me the string for the are you sure dialogue

00:06:12   on this page.

00:06:14   So it might have some kind of identifier for that,

00:06:15   some kind of like, are you sure dot identifier

00:06:18   dot setup dot one or something like that.

00:06:20   And so what we see here is there was some kind of problem,

00:06:25   some kind of bug or something where the string didn't load

00:06:28   and instead it just showed the identifier

00:06:30   and it has GDPR in the identifier,

00:06:33   in the name of the identifiers for the text

00:06:35   of this dialog for these boxes.

00:06:37   So clearly, Apple considers these GDPR dialogs.

00:06:41   - Right, so like a couple samples,

00:06:42   ATV for Apple TV, .videos.gdpr.welcometomovies

00:06:46   or ATV.videos.gdpr.continuebuttonlabel.

00:06:50   So yeah. (laughing)

00:06:51   It was funny to me because I was pretty darn confident

00:06:55   that this was, this boiled down to GDPR,

00:06:58   And man, there were not a lot of people who disagreed, but who boy did the people who

00:07:03   disagree, they were very confident that we were wrong.

00:07:06   And guess what?

00:07:07   Told you so.

00:07:08   Moving on.

00:07:09   Oh man, I did not think to figure out how to pronounce this.

00:07:14   Salian Kallion?

00:07:16   Mr. or Mrs. Babcock writes in, "I've dealt with technology at the high school and elementary

00:07:21   levels.

00:07:22   When it comes to cost and collaboration features, Google wins.

00:07:24   Since that device is configured and locked down, iOS doesn't count much.

00:07:28   As for video editing, it sounds cool,

00:07:29   but it's a huge time sink.

00:07:31   I didn't add this, who did?

00:07:32   What are we trying to say here?

00:07:34   - I just put a little bit of EDU feedback.

00:07:36   We got a lot of people replying,

00:07:38   so I just wanted to have a few samples

00:07:39   to sort of cover the range.

00:07:41   That's what the next few items are about.

00:07:43   - Fair enough.

00:07:44   Andrew Link writes, "Creativity is the peak of learning,

00:07:47   "but 40% of the time I'm dealing with

00:07:48   "quote unquote classroom management,

00:07:50   "and 50% is trying to even get students

00:07:52   "to reach the baseline.

00:07:54   "There are broad family and cultural issues

00:07:57   to address before tech really matters.

00:08:00   Andrew's school or whatever is implementing Google Suite

00:08:04   over the next two years, it's a mixed bag,

00:08:05   the software's okay, the network hit

00:08:06   is slowing everything to a crawl.

00:08:08   Also, tween memories and Google-level secure passwords

00:08:12   are a painful mix, in other words,

00:08:14   everyone's always forgetting their passwords.

00:08:15   Didn't one of your kids have that happen to them?

00:08:18   - Not me. - No, not me.

00:08:20   - My kid has good password hygiene.

00:08:22   - I don't even know if you're serious or not,

00:08:23   and I'm a little scared.

00:08:24   - The reason I picked these two bits here

00:08:26   is that we have a lot of people who are actually in education writing to us, and maybe not

00:08:33   all of them, but no matter what it was these people were using, everyone had complaints,

00:08:38   right? So it's not complaints about the thing they're not using, complaints about the thing

00:08:41   they are using, complaints about the difficulty of the job, about the difficulty of dealing with

00:08:46   technology, and no matter what it was they were using, if they were all Apple, if they were all

00:08:49   Google, if they were Mix, that everything had problems. We know this, we're a tech podcast,

00:08:53   we complain about technology and we know the frustrations that most people who aren't

00:08:57   tech enthusiasts feel about technology like they're just frustrated when it doesn't work

00:09:01   especially if it's you're supposed to be using as part of your job um so not not a lot of feedback

00:09:07   was like here's what we use and we love it and it's awesome awesome some people liked one thing

00:09:11   better than the other and would say i'm so glad i have x it's better than y but they all had

00:09:15   complaints about whatever it was they were using so no silver bullet for tech in schools and i

00:09:22   particularly like the idea of like that creativity is the peak of learning sort of like a pyramid of

00:09:26   like you know what was that uh is it maslow's hierarchy of needs somebody has a hierarchy of

00:09:32   needs yeah and it's like uh you know safety and blah blah and very other topics like self

00:09:37   actualization or whatever and so it's like in in the classroom get the kids to show up get them

00:09:43   to be safe uh get you know get them to pay attention get them to absorb something like

00:09:49   And creativity is like when you get all that other stuff taken care of and then finally

00:09:53   they're allowed to blossom.

00:09:55   And that's the aspirational nature of what Apple is pitching, that by buying our products

00:10:01   they will enhance the peak of learning, but you have to get to that peak first.

00:10:07   You have to have the students in the seats paying attention, absorbing the material,

00:10:11   and then spreading their wings and being creative with the things that you've successfully

00:10:16   taught them.

00:10:17   It was interesting to me that I felt like a lot of the feedback we got about education

00:10:22   was very contradictory.

00:10:24   Somebody would say, "Oh, of course you would want an iPad.

00:10:26   The total cost of ownership is so much better.

00:10:28   Oh, you could never get an iPad.

00:10:30   The total cost is so much worse."

00:10:34   It was very yin and yang, and it made me laugh.

00:10:37   Oh yeah, one more thing.

00:10:38   I didn't put anybody's feedback in.

00:10:39   I should have.

00:10:40   About the idea of Apple devices or whatever devices being expensive and then only being

00:10:45   available in "rich schools." Lots of people were—there seems to be a disconnect between

00:10:52   the students that attend the schools and a tax base that potentially feeds into them,

00:10:56   because a lot of people are like, "We have iPads in our school, and we're not in a wealthy

00:11:01   area." So it doesn't mean necessarily that the students who go to the school are well

00:11:09   to do, but it seems in some areas more than others, money somehow is getting to these

00:11:15   schools that is not directly attributable to the incomes of the individual students

00:11:20   who are attending. And I think that's just the nature of tax spaces. It depends on where

00:11:24   you live, it depends on how your taxes are distributed, it depends on if there's some

00:11:30   other program that's feeding money into the school to buy the fancy iPads for the school

00:11:35   that otherwise is not awash in cash.

00:11:39   I mean I can tell you the opposite here.

00:11:42   Where I live it's filled with rich people and yet a lot of the technology in the schools

00:11:48   that my kids attend, especially elementary school, is entirely funded directly by the

00:11:53   parents as in there is no money in the school budget for technology whatsoever.

00:11:58   And the only reason there's any technology is because all the kids' parents are rich

00:12:01   and give directly money to buy.

00:12:03   Like, if you want to see any computers in your kid's school,

00:12:06   you're going to have to collect money and give them to us,

00:12:09   right?

00:12:10   And is it because the tax base isn't big enough here?

00:12:13   No, that can't possibly be it.

00:12:15   It's just a question of budgeting

00:12:16   and how much money goes towards elementary

00:12:18   and how much priority they put on putting technology

00:12:22   in school versus tearing down one local elementary school

00:12:27   and rebuilding it to be this Taj Mahal multimillion

00:12:30   dollar amazing piece of construction, right?

00:12:34   That costs a lot more money than iPads, and that was not funded by people's parents

00:12:38   with direct contributions, but with good old-fashioned taxes and bonds.

00:12:42   Would one of you like to tell me about what happens when you open a new document in pages?

00:12:47   I think there is a video of it.

00:12:49   This is related to our topic for, like, how do you—how do people find help in iOS apps

00:12:54   when the screen is so small?

00:12:56   How do you communicate the features of your application so people know when it launches

00:13:01   what you can do with it?

00:13:02   Again, because the screen is so small and there's no omnipresent menu bar with a help

00:13:05   menu.

00:13:06   And we talked about the bad ways you can do this by circling a bunch of stuff on the screen

00:13:11   and throwing a bunch of words in people's faces and pointing a finger and saying, "Tap

00:13:16   this thing to do this.

00:13:17   Tap that thing to do that.

00:13:18   Tap that thing."

00:13:19   And expecting them to memorize it the one time they see it.

00:13:21   So this is Benjamin Mayo tweeted a little video of what happens in, I'm assuming this

00:13:26   is the new version of pages on iOS.

00:13:30   So they have, you know, what you do have visible in many iOS applications is a toolbar with

00:13:34   some glyphs on it of some kind, icons or glyphs, whether it's the top or the bottom.

00:13:39   And in pages, this looks like on a phone, you launch it and the new collaboration glyph

00:13:45   pulses.

00:13:47   Like it just gets a little bigger and smaller.

00:13:48   I don't know if it ever stops pulsing, because in the video,

00:13:50   it taps it right away.

00:13:52   But if you tap it, it takes you to this little video that

00:13:55   shows you, like, oh, the collaborate feature.

00:13:57   And it sort of does this wordless animation showing you

00:14:01   how collaboration might work.

00:14:02   It's a pretty good animation that communicates

00:14:04   without too much text, kind of what collaboration does.

00:14:09   It has a brief explanation, but then shows you

00:14:11   a bunch of things.

00:14:12   I don't know.

00:14:13   I think you kind of already have to know how collaboration works

00:14:15   to understand the video, frankly.

00:14:17   But that's-- I mean, I don't know

00:14:21   if I like that better than the overlay,

00:14:23   but I guess it's certainly trying to be more subtle.

00:14:25   I just can imagine people launching the app

00:14:27   and going, why is that button pulsing?

00:14:29   Especially if it doesn't stop.

00:14:30   Or if it does stop, you might think

00:14:32   you're going a little bit mad that like,

00:14:34   I could swear last time I launched this application,

00:14:36   part of the toolbar was pulsing.

00:14:38   And I'm pretty sure I wasn't on cold medicine or anything.

00:14:42   Anyway, I just thought it was interesting.

00:14:44   Here's Apple trying alternate solutions

00:14:48   to scribbling all over our screen with a bunch of arrows.

00:14:51   So, keep trying, Apple.

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00:17:03   (upbeat music)

00:17:06   Apple giveth and Apple taketh away.

00:17:09   Good news, 200 gigs of free iCloud storage,

00:17:12   for bad news, every managed Apple ID account

00:17:15   that's involved in education, womp, womp.

00:17:18   - I bring that up because we talk about,

00:17:19   oh, they need to give more iCloud storage to everybody.

00:17:22   And they haven't for a really long time,

00:17:25   someone put it how long it was,

00:17:26   like seven years or something since the five gig free.

00:17:29   - Yeah, I think it's since iCloud was introduced,

00:17:31   like it was never less than five gigs,

00:17:32   that's what it started at.

00:17:34   Yeah, and so for education, this is something

00:17:37   a lot of people cited in feedback,

00:17:39   including one that just came in just before the show.

00:17:41   Like, how much it costs to buy all the third party things you

00:17:43   have to buy to fill in the gaps in functionality

00:17:45   that Apple doesn't offer, including having cloud storage.

00:17:49   Which according to an email we just got, I believe,

00:17:51   a person said that there is no way

00:17:53   to pay for more iCloud storage for students.

00:17:55   Even if you wanted to give them more money for more,

00:17:58   you couldn't.

00:17:58   That seems very strange to me.

00:18:03   But anyway, Apple said, "Hey, we're increasing to 200,"

00:18:05   and got lots of applause, but why wouldn't you?

00:18:07   200 gigabytes free, up from five, that is a big increase.

00:18:11   But for people who are not students, still five gigabytes.

00:18:15   - And we've heard from lots of other podcasters

00:18:19   and fans and Apple users, I keep hearing

00:18:23   that everyone expects that, oh, well,

00:18:25   they're just waiting until WWDC in June,

00:18:28   and that's when they're going to raise the limits

00:18:30   for everybody for free.

00:18:32   I honestly would not consider that a safe bet at all.

00:18:35   In fact, I might even bet against that.

00:18:38   You know, the five gigs is indeed comically stingy,

00:18:42   and even was seven years ago when I'm pretty sure

00:18:45   Steve Jobs introduced it.

00:18:47   But it was bad then and it's bad now,

00:18:50   but services are Apple's biggest area

00:18:53   of potential growth, I think.

00:18:55   I don't think they're gonna wanna give up

00:18:57   services revenue that easily.

00:18:59   and this is probably not a small portion of it.

00:19:02   Like, you know, the people who upgrade to a paid

00:19:05   iCloud storage plan for basic functionality

00:19:09   of their iOS devices, really,

00:19:12   that's probably not a small amount

00:19:13   of their services revenue.

00:19:15   So I can't imagine them all of a sudden

00:19:17   raising it to a level that would cover

00:19:19   way more people for free.

00:19:22   It'd be nice if this happens.

00:19:24   Apple has, in the past, occasionally,

00:19:27   intentionally taken a hit on margin to do something really compelling for consumers,

00:19:31   and they'll usually even warn analysts of that in one of the earnings calls beforehand.

00:19:35   But honestly, I just don't see that.

00:19:38   I mean, that happened a lot more in the past than it does now, and I don't see them giving

00:19:43   up a big chunk of services revenue when that is clearly an area where they're focusing

00:19:48   a lot on and depending on for growth.

00:19:51   Yeah, I think the balance that they have to keep looking at is how many people are willing

00:20:00   to pay money for extra storage versus how many people are at their storage limits but

00:20:05   still unwilling to pay.

00:20:06   Because when you're at your storage limit and are still unwilling to pay, that becomes

00:20:11   Apple's problem if it starts to affect their satisfaction.

00:20:14   Like if they don't like Apple because they want to charge me money, I don't want to give

00:20:18   many money and my phone is constantly full because a constantly full phone is

00:20:21   a bad user experience. It yells at you about having too much storage, you can't

00:20:24   take pictures, you have to choose precious things that you want to delete.

00:20:28   It's a bad experience, right? And so it is in Apple's interest to get people

00:20:34   somehow to have more storage, ideally by paying Apple money, right? That's what

00:20:38   they prefer. But if it turns out that nothing they do can dislodge this very

00:20:43   large percentage of people who refuse to pay money and constantly have full

00:20:46   phones, that's not a good situation.

00:20:49   Maybe it's still just a fraction of people.

00:20:50   Maybe like people do in the end, they complain but they pay, and Apple may be willing to

00:20:55   do that and then people feel better.

00:20:56   But whenever I see somebody with a full iOS device who refuses to pay for additional storage,

00:21:04   I feel Apple's pain by proxy.

00:21:06   This person is dissatisfied or unsatisfied, whichever of those is the correct word, with

00:21:11   their product and there's an obvious solution that doesn't cost that much money but there's

00:21:18   no way you will convince them to pay for you know pay for nothing to pay for air to pay

00:21:23   for whatever storage should be free blah blah blah software should be free like it's it's

00:21:28   a tough sell but it really does affect their opinion of their device maybe not enough to

00:21:34   get them onto another device maybe eventually beat them on another device but they are mad

00:21:37   about it. So I think that's a problem Apple needs to address in some way. Maybe they can

00:21:41   address it just by reducing the prices or changing the tiers or cleverly arranging the

00:21:45   tiers such that people get on board, like with the thin end of the wedge, like get on

00:21:49   board a cheapo tier and then slowly ratchet up as they need storage to make it feel better

00:21:54   for people to pay for storage. Because I feel like that's the big barrier. The big barrier

00:21:58   is not how much it costs, it's getting people over the hump from not paying anything to

00:22:03   paying something.

00:22:04   - Oh yeah, because so much of this is psychological.

00:22:09   It's more about feeling than about whether you can afford

00:22:13   or not afford the, whatever the cheapest plan,

00:22:16   like three bucks a month or something.

00:22:18   A lot of it is more like, people are just kind of annoyed

00:22:21   on principle that they have to pay for this,

00:22:22   or they're annoyed on principle that their phone's

00:22:24   bugging them about this thing that they haven't even

00:22:25   actually really read or looked into,

00:22:27   they just know that their phone's bugging them.

00:22:29   Or they're annoyed on principle that they only get

00:22:30   five gigs for free and that bugs them,

00:22:33   or they look at the prices of additional storage

00:22:35   on other services like Dropbox and how it compares

00:22:38   and they're like, oh, well this is a bad deal.

00:22:40   And so it's so much more about like,

00:22:43   I don't want to pay,

00:22:44   than I can't afford the X dollars a month in a lot of cases.

00:22:49   - Or they're putting their money, like you said,

00:22:51   towards a different thing.

00:22:52   Like, well, if I'm gonna pay for storage,

00:22:53   I'm gonna get the most bang for my buck

00:22:54   and that takes people off Apple services.

00:22:56   If you're using Dropbox for all your file storage,

00:22:58   you know, it's actually even more viable now

00:23:00   that Apple has the, you know, the ShareChute integration

00:23:02   for Dropbox and stuff, but I think

00:23:06   Apple would be upset if people decided

00:23:10   to use Google Photos instead of Apple's photo solution.

00:23:12   I think Apple wants you to use their photo

00:23:14   solution for a variety of reasons.

00:23:16   Well, they should be trying a little harder

00:23:17   on a variety of fronts then.

00:23:19   True.

00:23:19   And I think Apple would tell you that their photo

00:23:22   solution is better on privacy and all those other reasons

00:23:25   why you might use it, but that's the feature

00:23:28   that Google has hammered Apple on.

00:23:30   If you're constantly running out of storage

00:23:31   because you're filling up your film with videos and photos,

00:23:35   and Apple wants you to pay more money,

00:23:36   and Google says, "Don't pay us anything.

00:23:38   We'll keep an unlimited amount of your photos,"

00:23:40   radius quality, asterisk, forever and ever.

00:23:43   People say, "Oh, well then why would I pay

00:23:44   for the Apple thing?

00:23:45   I'm just gonna use Google Photos,

00:23:46   and I'm gonna use the Google Photos app

00:23:49   instead of the Apple Photos app,

00:23:50   and I'm gonna use the Google website."

00:23:51   Apple doesn't want you to go all in

00:23:53   on the Google ecosystem, right?

00:23:54   So Apple should do something.

00:23:58   I don't know if that means increase the five gig tier

00:24:01   200 for everybody for free, but something would be nice.

00:24:03   You know what it is that bothers me so much about this is that I feel like 5 gigs is an

00:24:10   egregiously, obnoxiously paltry amount.

00:24:13   If it was maybe as much as the smallest modern iPhone, so let's say it's 30 or whatever

00:24:20   gigs, you know, 32 gigs or thereabouts, that at least feels like, okay, they're giving

00:24:24   you something reasonable.

00:24:26   If you have one single iPhone attached to your Apple ID, it stands to reason that you

00:24:31   should be able to back that up to iCloud for free.

00:24:35   That to me would be still more paltry than I would want.

00:24:39   Like something along the lines of 200 gigs sounds really great.

00:24:42   But let's say for the sake of argument, 32 gigs is what they're going to bring tomorrow.

00:24:49   Tomorrow you can have 32 gigs of storage.

00:24:50   Then I wouldn't be as offended by it.

00:24:52   I would be slightly annoyed, but I wouldn't be friggin' offended.

00:24:56   but five gigs is like, man, screw you.

00:25:00   We don't give you any storage.

00:25:02   But here, fine, fine, okay, we'll give you a little bit.

00:25:05   Be happy about that.

00:25:07   I just find it obnoxious, it's so little.

00:25:10   And that's the thing that bothers me.

00:25:12   - Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just like inertia.

00:25:15   Like, if they were launching this service today,

00:25:18   I doubt that the number they would pick would be five gigs.

00:25:21   But it's probably hard for them to,

00:25:24   first of all, in typical Apple fashion,

00:25:26   they probably don't look at this very often.

00:25:28   You know, like they set it up, it's going,

00:25:32   and it's probably, you know,

00:25:33   a lot like a lot of their hardware releases

00:25:35   where like it just gets ignored for years

00:25:38   until somebody realizes they should look at it eventually.

00:25:41   And so I'm guessing this hasn't actually been

00:25:43   reconsidered that often.

00:25:45   And then because there's the inertia

00:25:48   of having it there for so long,

00:25:49   the idea of increasing it by a large amount

00:25:53   probably does scare them on two fronts.

00:25:55   Number one, you know, margin, as I mentioned earlier,

00:25:56   they're probably afraid of that services revenue

00:25:58   going down or having the growth slow down.

00:26:01   And number two, every iOS device is a lot of iOS devices.

00:26:05   And so the scale at which they would have to scale this up,

00:26:10   they probably can't offer something like a terabyte

00:26:14   for free to everybody, 'cause there probably aren't

00:26:16   enough hard drives in the world, or something like that.

00:26:19   Like, there is probably some kind of major limit

00:26:21   on scale in place here.

00:26:23   I don't know where that limit is.

00:26:24   it's gotta be way higher than five gigs,

00:26:27   but they probably couldn't, say, offer 200 gigs

00:26:30   to everybody, like that might be too high,

00:26:33   or it might be just impractical, or it might be like,

00:26:36   maybe they can do it in a couple years, maybe not yet.

00:26:38   So there's definitely, I guarantee you

00:26:41   there's some kind of scale concerns there.

00:26:42   Whether they are impassable or not, I don't know.

00:26:45   But if you start doing the math of how many

00:26:47   active iOS devices there are out there,

00:26:49   and how many hard drives and data centers

00:26:53   they would need. It is pretty large numbers, so there is definitely a factor there. But

00:26:58   it might not, you know, it's gotta be higher than 5 gigs.

00:27:01   Well, there's a new single region only variant of S3 for 22% less than the regular price.

00:27:07   I'll get right on that. I'm trying to think back to when the 5 gig limit was introduced,

00:27:14   and I'm pretty sure that 5 gigs was always positioned as this is not enough for you to

00:27:21   to—this is not covering you.

00:27:24   Apple never sold a 5 gig device with a 5 gig of thing.

00:27:26   It was always so clearly the starter price, you get a little bit for free, but if you

00:27:32   use and fill whatever device you purchased, you're going to run out of 5 gigs.

00:27:37   So it was always with the expectation that if you fill the device, you need to buy more.

00:27:43   Five gigs today still is something that if you get it and you fill it, you have to buy

00:27:48   more.

00:27:49   It fills the same role.

00:27:51   It is equally able to cause people to hit the limit.

00:27:57   And arguably with the Heath, you know, H.265 stuff, you could hit your limits more slowly

00:28:04   now than you did last year because your images are half the size and stuff.

00:28:07   Yeah, now you can fit 10 minutes of 4K video.

00:28:10   Yeah, but in general, every photo and every video is so much bigger than it was back when

00:28:15   the 5 gig limit was introduced that it feels more punitive now than it did before.

00:28:21   It's just, it's a bummer.

00:28:23   Classrooms for Mac.

00:28:25   So there's already a classrooms app for iPad, maybe iPhone, I don't remember, doesn't really

00:28:29   matter for iOS.

00:28:30   And they said, "Classrooms for Mac is coming in June as a beta."

00:28:36   What?

00:28:37   Why not now as a beta?

00:28:39   Why June?

00:28:40   Well, there's one clear, well, I shouldn't say clear answer.

00:28:44   one clear theory about that.

00:28:47   There's one hopeful theory about that.

00:28:49   Yeah, exactly.

00:28:50   And probably a few other explanations that are less interesting.

00:28:52   Right.

00:28:53   And one of the less interesting ones is probably the accurate, you know, real answer.

00:28:57   But the fun theory that we can pontificate about is Marzipan, which is that supposed

00:29:02   cross-platform framework that is maybe but maybe not coming at WWDC.

00:29:08   And perhaps that's why we can't talk about it, because there's more things to come in

00:29:15   June at WWDC, and then it'll all be made clear.

00:29:17   Well, that's why you can't download it.

00:29:20   Because if you download it, then everyone would just run GlassStump or whatever and

00:29:23   look at the frameworks.

00:29:25   But speaking of frameworks, the much more boring explanation is it's UXKit, the same

00:29:28   thing that Photos and stuff is made out of.

00:29:30   When Apple has been in situations in the past where there's an iOS device and they want

00:29:35   something more or less like that iOS device on the Mac,

00:29:38   they have ways of doing that that don't involve

00:29:40   the rumored cross-platform framework thing.

00:29:44   - Yeah, and also, it just might not be ready yet.

00:29:46   Like, it actually-- - Yeah, that's the most

00:29:47   boring explanation is they're just not done writing it.

00:29:49   - And that, I think, is by far the most likely.

00:29:51   I love the idea of this Project Marzipan thing.

00:29:54   I really hope it's real, and I do think this summer

00:29:57   would not be an unreasonable time to launch it into beta.

00:29:59   That would be a really fun explanation for this.

00:30:02   It's much more likely that it just isn't ready yet,

00:30:04   because it is not like, the fact that Apple said,

00:30:08   "Here's an event that we're going to announce something,

00:30:10   "but you can't actually see it or buy it

00:30:13   "or use it yet for a few months."

00:30:15   That's so common now.

00:30:16   Like that's constantly used for all sorts of reasons,

00:30:21   for all sorts of products.

00:30:23   The most rare thing now is when they have an event

00:30:26   and they announce something, that's ready right then.

00:30:28   You can buy like today or tomorrow.

00:30:29   That's the less common case now.

00:30:31   So the fact this isn't ready yet,

00:30:32   I really, I think it's unlikely that it has any other

00:30:36   meaning other than it's not ready yet.

00:30:38   - But it probably is using UXKit,

00:30:40   'cause I don't see why they would port something from iOS

00:30:42   and not use the framework they have

00:30:44   that they have used successfully to port a bunch of stuff

00:30:46   from iOS, right?

00:30:47   That's not the cross, that's not Marzipan,

00:30:50   but it is a way that Apple has done this in the past,

00:30:52   and I'm sure it saves them time.

00:30:54   - Especially if Marzipan requires support at the OS level

00:30:58   on the Mac side, which it probably would,

00:31:00   they probably wouldn't have that support in High Sierra.

00:31:03   It would probably be pushed to the next version of Mac OS,

00:31:06   or maybe even the one after that,

00:31:08   if it's gonna launch in beta,

00:31:09   and that's not gonna be ready in time

00:31:11   for this coming school year.

00:31:13   It's gonna be launched probably in October or something,

00:31:15   and no IT administrator should be installing it in October.

00:31:19   So, it's probably just not ready yet.

00:31:23   - And setting aside UXKit,

00:31:28   I perceive lots of new Apple applications to be iOS-like, whether or not they use UX

00:31:34   under the covers, when they just feel like an iOS app.

00:31:36   Photos certainly does.

00:31:38   I think maps, maybe contacts or notes, depending on how you squint at them.

00:31:44   Reminders, calendar.

00:31:45   Yeah.

00:31:46   It could be argued that this is actually not iOS-like, but merely the modern Mac way.

00:31:50   Like Apple's trying to say this is what modern Mac apps sort of look like.

00:31:53   But if you use iOS a lot, a lot of things look mighty familiar.

00:31:57   And again, I'm not class-numping every single one of these apps to see do they actually

00:32:02   use the same framework as Photos or is it, you know.

00:32:05   But from a user's perspective, they feel very iOS-y.

00:32:09   In this case, we know it's an application that already existed in iOS and so it makes

00:32:13   sense that they would use some technique to reuse some of the work that they've already

00:32:17   done in iOS rather than re-uploading it from scratch in AppKit.

00:32:21   But I'm sure when this application comes out, some of them will tell us definitively.

00:32:26   Steve Trout and Smith.

00:32:27   Steve Trout I have one quickie I just wanted to share.

00:32:30   I have finally joined the world of inductive charging and by and large my phone for the

00:32:36   last couple of weeks now has not had anything plugged into it.

00:32:41   And inductive charging is pretty cool, it turns out.

00:32:43   Steven McLaughlin Who knew?

00:32:44   Oh, that's right.

00:32:45   I told you this a long time ago.

00:32:47   Steve Trout Well, but the difference between you and me

00:32:49   is I didn't crap all over inductive charging.

00:32:51   I just said, "Oh, that sounds neat, sir."

00:32:53   Anyway, the point I'm trying to say is, the Mophie base that I think you and most of the

00:32:58   rest of the world recommended is really great.

00:33:01   And I got what appears to be, like what is aesthetically a terrible mount for my car,

00:33:08   but in functionality is a really great mount for my car.

00:33:11   And so what I can do is, I can get in my car, I can just kind of drop my phone in this little

00:33:16   mount and it starts charging.

00:33:18   And when I want to leave my car, I just pick it up out of the mount.

00:33:21   And it's super convenient.

00:33:22   I'm only ever in my car for like two minutes at a time,

00:33:24   so I'm doing this just 'cause I think it's cool,

00:33:26   not because it's ever particularly useful,

00:33:28   but inductive charging, super cool,

00:33:30   and it is super weird after having had an iPhone

00:33:33   since the 3GS to have gone for like two weeks

00:33:36   without having plugged anything into my phone.

00:33:38   So odd, but I love it.

00:33:40   - Yeah, it's like, I know a lot of people try it

00:33:43   and it's not for them, that's cool.

00:33:45   I find it very much for me as well,

00:33:48   like I really, like now, plugging in my phone

00:33:51   and when I travel it just feels barbaric.

00:33:54   It's like, man, I have to plug this in?

00:33:56   This is so weird.

00:33:57   The one thing I will, I do still plug it in in the car.

00:34:00   I did, so in our episode about my $7 piece of garbage

00:34:04   that I was using to mount my phone in my car before,

00:34:06   a bunch of people wrote in to recommend better phone mounts

00:34:10   and by far the most commonly recommended one

00:34:12   is the ProClip line of products.

00:34:14   And you basically, you go on ProClip's site

00:34:17   and you buy a certain base that's made to fit

00:34:20   exactly your model of car, and then you buy

00:34:23   like the second part of it, which is like the phone part

00:34:26   that you buy exactly the one for exactly the phone you have

00:34:29   and they interface in some kind of standard way.

00:34:32   And so like when you get a new phone,

00:34:33   you can just replace the phone part.

00:34:35   And you get a new car, you just replace the car part.

00:34:37   And it's not cheap, the combination of both sides of this

00:34:42   was $90. (laughs)

00:34:45   - Holy hell!

00:34:47   - And you have to mess up your dashboard too, right?

00:34:49   - Well no, so it does a pressure fit

00:34:52   inside one of the air vents.

00:34:53   So it's like pushing against the top and bottom

00:34:56   of the air vent to kind of wedge itself in there

00:34:58   with a little rubber pad under it to keep it in place.

00:35:01   And I gotta say, it is really, really solid.

00:35:05   Like, it is the only thing I've seen

00:35:08   that actually keeps the phone totally still.

00:35:12   You know, you can run over a bump or anything.

00:35:14   The phone does not move.

00:35:16   It is attached very firmly to the car.

00:35:19   It was very easy to get and install.

00:35:22   The cable routing, I got the kind, I got the, let's see,

00:35:26   the adjustable iPhone holder for lightning to USB cable.

00:35:30   So what you do is it has like a little clamp in the bottom.

00:35:32   You actually stick an Apple cable into it,

00:35:34   and this is where I used my one black Apple lightning cable

00:35:38   from my iMac Pro. (laughs)

00:35:39   I used it here 'cause it looked better in black.

00:35:41   (laughs)

00:35:43   And it is basically a dock,

00:35:45   and so I just stick my phone into it

00:35:47   and it is getting a wired charge

00:35:49   and it just stays right there and it's awesome.

00:35:52   The only major downside to this is that

00:35:54   it's $90 for this combo.

00:35:56   It was 30 for the car part and 60 for the iPhone

00:36:00   adjustable thing with the cable.

00:36:02   So again, not cheap. - Oh my goodness.

00:36:04   - Way more than my $7 piece of garbage.

00:36:06   However, also way nicer than my $7 piece of garbage

00:36:10   and I can see myself keeping this up.

00:36:13   As long as I continue to use Waze

00:36:14   on a semi-regular basis in my car.

00:36:17   I think as I get new phones and new cars down the road,

00:36:20   I think I will probably stay in the ProClip ecosystem

00:36:22   for now 'cause it is surprisingly nice.

00:36:25   Like, you can take the phone out with one hand

00:36:28   and the mount doesn't move and stuff like that.

00:36:30   It's just nice.

00:36:32   It's solid and heavy duty and just really nice.

00:36:36   The reason I stick with wired charging,

00:36:38   which is why I thought of this here,

00:36:40   is that Qi charging is not fast enough

00:36:44   to charge the phone and run Waze.

00:36:47   It can keep the phone at about the same charge level

00:36:51   it's already at, or maybe very slowly trickle charge it.

00:36:55   But the charge rate really requires a 10 watt plug,

00:36:59   like what you get from the iPad bricks

00:37:01   or from the high powered USB chargers.

00:37:03   So it really requires that to both run Waze constantly

00:37:07   and also charge the phone at a meaningful rate.

00:37:10   And right now I don't think any Qi chargers,

00:37:12   even the 7.5 watt Mophie one,

00:37:15   I don't think any of them can actually do it fast enough.

00:37:17   So, for Qi charging in cars,

00:37:20   I still honestly can't recommend that,

00:37:22   unless you are very light with your phone's usage in the car

00:37:26   but for wired stuff, I can recommend ProClip

00:37:28   if you are willing to spend $90

00:37:31   on a clip for your phone in your car.

00:37:33   - This is the difference between you and me in summary.

00:37:36   You bought one car charger for $90.

00:37:39   you could buy three and a half of the inductive chargers

00:37:44   that I just bought, which admittedly are not nearly as nice,

00:37:47   I'm quite sure, but--

00:37:49   - Three and a half of the chargers

00:37:50   still can't charge my phone for ways.

00:37:52   - You know what I'm saying though,

00:37:53   like it's just, this is you and me in a nutshell.

00:37:56   - I don't need three and a half chargers,

00:37:57   I need one charger.

00:37:58   - Yes, yes, yes, I'm just saying.

00:38:01   Also, before we get a bazillion pieces of email,

00:38:04   do we really care about the report that came out recently?

00:38:08   I don't remember where I saw it, about how wireless charging destroys your battery because

00:38:12   it's when it's trying to keep your battery topped up, it's like discharging, recharging,

00:38:17   discharging, recharging, discharging, recharging.

00:38:19   I don't think I really care that much.

00:38:23   And maybe I will if I see that my battery is not doing well, which maybe I could do

00:38:28   in this new battery window or screen in settings.

00:38:31   But I don't know, man, like, especially as someone who keeps iPhones only for a year,

00:38:36   I just don't care.

00:38:37   Like Apple wouldn't have made this a thing

00:38:40   if they thought it was going to nuke their batteries.

00:38:42   So #Yellow.

00:38:43   - I thought the pitch was that it was heat.

00:38:46   - Yeah, part of the idea was that

00:38:48   because Qi charging generates some heat,

00:38:51   like a little more heat than regular charging,

00:38:53   that charging your battery in a hot environment

00:38:56   is worse for it.

00:38:58   Operating your battery in a hot environment is worse for it.

00:39:00   So there might be something to that.

00:39:03   I can't imagine, 'cause it's,

00:39:05   Apple is doing the management of the charging on the phone end in their firmware.

00:39:09   I can't imagine they would allow it to abuse the battery like that.

00:39:14   I think they would control that a little bit better.

00:39:15   Well, that's not abuse.

00:39:17   Everything does that.

00:39:18   Laptops and phones, they allow it to discharge a little bit and then trickle it up and then

00:39:22   discharge a little bit.

00:39:24   Every Apple device has done that forever.

00:39:26   That's good.

00:39:27   I don't think Inductiv does that anymore than plugged in because like Marcus said,

00:39:31   Apple is controlling it.

00:39:32   if all charging things produce more heat for equivalent power transfer to the battery,

00:39:37   which makes sense to me for an inductive type thing, then maybe you have a little bit extra

00:39:42   heat.

00:39:43   - Yeah, but regardless, I think just using your phone on a regular basis is probably

00:39:49   doing way more wear on the battery than the minor differences in how you charge it. Generally,

00:39:57   charging it more slowly is usually better for its long-term health, which in which case

00:40:04   Qi chargers should actually be really good for, in theory. It's the kind of thing,

00:40:09   like we talked about it before, if you just use your phone normally, you're going to

00:40:12   burn through batteries over a year or two. Now that Apple's offering less expensive

00:40:18   battery replacements, I think if you care about this kind of thing, it's much more

00:40:23   - I think it's more reasonable to just go in

00:40:24   after two years and get a new battery for 30 bucks

00:40:27   than to have to micromanage your entire life

00:40:30   around not using convenient things

00:40:32   or trying to like tiptoe around the battery

00:40:34   'cause you know what, no matter what you do,

00:40:35   it's gonna wear out in a reasonable amount of time.

00:40:38   It's gonna wear out probably around the same amount of time

00:40:40   as it would have no matter what you did.

00:40:41   So you might as well use your phone

00:40:43   to its fullest potential.

00:40:45   Use whatever's convenient about it.

00:40:46   Use it how you wanna use it.

00:40:47   And if your battery wears out in a year and a half

00:40:49   or two years, just get a new battery for 30 bucks

00:40:52   plan for that ahead of time.

00:40:53   And try to live a healthy life so you can live long enough for some battery technology

00:40:57   to come out that has way longer charge cycle failure rates.

00:41:01   Like I don't think we can expect infinite, like I can charge and recharge and uncharge

00:41:04   this a million times and it never degrades, right?

00:41:07   But if you can just change it from whatever these batteries are rated at, like they're

00:41:10   rated for like a thousand cycles or something before they're put, if that was, you know,

00:41:14   100,000, it would seem like that you could use a phone basically forever and the battery

00:41:19   was as good the day you bought it as the day it went away.

00:41:21   We are not living in the current time with that technology available, but there are lots

00:41:26   of research things that are all the cliched five to ten years away.

00:41:32   So stay alive long enough and you might see one of those happen.

00:41:35   I will also say if you are interested in getting a battery replacement, maybe wait on that

00:41:41   a little bit.

00:41:42   You have no choice.

00:41:43   The wait time is like four months now, right?

00:41:44   Yeah, yeah.

00:41:45   We keep hearing from people that the wait times span from weeks to months for getting

00:41:50   new batteries, you know, there's so many people going in now after the battery gate scandal

00:41:54   and now with 11.3 actually telling them, you know, whether the battery is degraded or not.

00:42:00   There's a lot of people going in and apparently the wait for the batteries at the Genius Bar

00:42:05   is literally like weeks or months in a lot of places. And so, by the time, you know,

00:42:10   if you buy a new phone now and you cheat charge it all the time, by the time the battery wears

00:42:14   out, you should probably be able to get one.

00:42:17   It might not be $30 anymore.

00:42:19   That's probably true.

00:42:20   Oh, and one more thing on this ProClip thing.

00:42:22   I remember when you mentioned your clip and people sent in stuff.

00:42:26   I went to this site because I was looking for similar clips.

00:42:29   I think I had just bought one for my wife and I was wondering if there were better ones.

00:42:33   And on the ProClipUSA.com website, the image they have in the background at the top of

00:42:38   the page shows a mount that goes into the gap in the dashboard between the top stuff

00:42:46   and the thing that has the vents.

00:42:47   It doesn't go inside the vents like you were just describing.

00:42:50   And I have one right now that goes inside the vents.

00:42:52   That's usually a typical way to do it.

00:42:54   You see that on the website?

00:42:55   It's like going--

00:42:55   Yeah, I do see what you mean.

00:42:57   Mine does not do that.

00:42:59   Mine presses against the top and bottom inner edge of the vent.

00:43:02   Right.

00:43:03   And so when I saw this, I was like, well, forget that.

00:43:05   I'm not jamming anything into the cracks in my dashboard.

00:43:08   If it had just gotten into the air vent,

00:43:10   I probably would have been like, oh, well,

00:43:11   that's how they all work.

00:43:11   So it would be fine.

00:43:12   So that scared me away.

00:43:13   So I guess it depends on your exact model of car.

00:43:16   but I really don't want anything.

00:43:18   Because once you do that, you know if you ever take that out,

00:43:20   now you have giant gaps,

00:43:21   where that thing had been wedged in

00:43:23   for the past six months or whatever.

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00:45:19   - Bloomberg reports that Apple was planning

00:45:25   to use its own chips and Macs,

00:45:26   starting in just a couple of years

00:45:28   and giving Intel the boot.

00:45:30   I feel like we on this show have flirted

00:45:34   with this topic on and off pretty much

00:45:36   since the show started in 2013.

00:45:39   So on the one side I find this fascinating

00:45:42   and I feel like we should talk about it.

00:45:43   On the other side, I feel like we've been around this topic

00:45:47   so many times, I'm not sure what else there is to say.

00:45:49   But yeah, Intel has not had the dramatic improvements

00:45:54   that they used to have.

00:45:55   Their, what is it, TikTok cycle has been slowing down

00:45:58   and now they've basically said,

00:45:59   "Yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore."

00:46:01   So Apple may be taking matters into their own hands

00:46:04   when it comes to CPUs,

00:46:05   and they may just start putting those in computers

00:46:09   rather than just iPhones and fake computers, I mean iPads.

00:46:14   So what are our thoughts?

00:46:17   Because what we assume, we don't know,

00:46:19   but we assume these would be ARM processors,

00:46:21   which is different than the Intel processor in a Mac.

00:46:23   It's a different instruction set,

00:46:24   which means things would have to be,

00:46:26   you know, all your apps and the operating system

00:46:28   would have to be compiled again.

00:46:29   Like there are many, many, many things

00:46:31   that fall out of this.

00:46:32   It would basically be the PowerPC

00:46:34   to Intel transition all over again.

00:46:36   How do we feel?

00:46:37   Are we excited, are we bummed?

00:46:39   I mean, let's start with Marco, what do you think?

00:46:42   - Ah, I don't really know what to think yet.

00:46:45   At a high level, it seems inevitable

00:46:48   that if Apple wants to keep maintaining the Mac,

00:46:52   competitively, and if they wanna push it forward,

00:46:57   basically, if they're gonna care about the Mac again,

00:47:00   this does seem like an obvious direction to take it.

00:47:02   And we have seen rumblings

00:47:04   that they are caring about the Mac again.

00:47:05   I mean, the iMac Pro, I think, is one of the biggest ones.

00:47:08   Like, there's a lot of things about the iMac Pro

00:47:10   that they didn't have to do, but they did it anyway,

00:47:14   and they made a really great product.

00:47:17   And so, I'm heartened to see, like,

00:47:20   they are actually investing, you know,

00:47:22   non-trivially into Mac hardware,

00:47:25   and I hope to see more of that as the year goes on.

00:47:27   I hope to see fixed laptops.

00:47:29   I hope to see the Mac Pro.

00:47:31   We'll see how that all turns out.

00:47:32   but clearly they have had some kind of change of heart

00:47:36   or at least change of direction with Mac hardware.

00:47:39   If they're gonna keep doing stuff like that,

00:47:41   this does seem like an obvious place to go

00:47:42   because Intel really is holding them back in a few areas.

00:47:45   Now I wouldn't say all areas,

00:47:47   as some people have pointed out,

00:47:49   we haven't seen what Apple's chip design department can do

00:47:54   for competing with like the Xeon in the iMac Pro.

00:47:58   They could probably do a pretty good job if I had to guess,

00:48:00   but we don't know that yet.

00:48:02   What we do know is that Apple can definitely compete

00:48:05   with Intel with their chip designs

00:48:07   at lower ends of the power spectrum.

00:48:10   So that would be most important in, frankly,

00:48:13   the most commonly sold Macs, small laptops.

00:48:16   Like that's where this makes a huge difference.

00:48:18   Like if you can actually have, say,

00:48:21   something like the size of a MacBook 12 inch,

00:48:24   or if you can have something like a real computer size,

00:48:26   like a 13 inch, you can get serious gains in battery life,

00:48:30   and maybe even performance at the same time

00:48:34   by switching to a modern Apple arm design

00:48:37   and these things probably.

00:48:38   So it does seem like that's a really clear place to go.

00:48:41   In addition, Intel has been a pretty crappy supplier

00:48:45   to Apple I think in recent years,

00:48:47   and not even that recently, like over a long time now.

00:48:51   Intel has really had a lot of problems itself,

00:48:54   a lot of problems shipping its chips on time,

00:48:57   getting its fabs going and whatever it's needing to do,

00:49:00   a lot of problems with performance per watt

00:49:02   compared to ARM chips.

00:49:04   In a lot of ways Intel is really not delivering very well

00:49:08   on supplying Apple with what it actually needs.

00:49:11   And this isn't that different from when IBM

00:49:14   was not delivering very well on PowerPC

00:49:18   and Apple made a switch, in that case to Intel

00:49:21   'cause they were doing great then.

00:49:22   But it wouldn't surprise me at all

00:49:24   if Apple decided to take this kind of move

00:49:26   as long as they care enough about the Mac

00:49:28   to push this kind of thing through.

00:49:30   'Cause it's a big job, it's a really big job.

00:49:33   It requires tons of major and long running changes.

00:49:38   It's going to be a heck of a transition if it happens.

00:49:42   It's gonna really need a lot of work, a lot of time.

00:49:45   It's gonna be a little messy.

00:49:47   However, I do think where they would end up

00:49:50   could be really nice.

00:49:52   Even if it doesn't even go to the whole line,

00:49:54   even if it doesn't do the high end,

00:49:55   like the desktops and the Xeons,

00:49:57   even if it just stays in the smallest laptop line,

00:50:00   maybe even the 15 inch doesn't even have it,

00:50:02   but maybe the 12 inch and 13 inch do,

00:50:05   it'd probably start on the 12 inch, honestly.

00:50:08   That would be really, really competitive for those products.

00:50:10   You could get really good battery life,

00:50:12   you could get pretty competitive performance.

00:50:15   And many of the apps that people use,

00:50:18   first of all, many of the apps people use

00:50:19   are the built-in OS apps that come with the system,

00:50:22   and so those would all be ready on day one, probably.

00:50:25   And then a lot of apps people use

00:50:27   be simple recompiles or not that much work to get them updated for it or recompiled for

00:50:31   it. So like, I think that could be a really great direction for the products to take.

00:50:38   The downside to this, where I'm concerned, and I did a little quick tweet about this

00:50:42   earlier, the main reason I'm concerned about this is that if this is true, which that's

00:50:45   a big if, I worry, will Apple in the near future or ever place enough priority on MacOS

00:50:56   to really make this happen well on the software side.

00:51:00   Because ever since iOS came out,

00:51:03   Mac OS has been really a distant second priority.

00:51:06   They have made no efforts to hide that,

00:51:08   and I think it's obvious to everybody.

00:51:10   And you could argue that that should be how it is,

00:51:12   'cause iOS devices sell so much more than Macs,

00:51:14   and really are the bulk of the company's income

00:51:16   and everything, so like,

00:51:18   Mac OS is really not a priority for them,

00:51:21   and hasn't been for a long time.

00:51:23   And what we see every time they do try

00:51:25   to update Mac OS, they seem to be getting messier

00:51:30   and sloppier and introducing more and worse

00:51:34   and more embarrassing bugs.

00:51:36   Every time they rewrite a subsystem,

00:51:39   it comes out buggier than the one before it.

00:51:42   And maybe it might eventually catch up,

00:51:44   but it usually takes a few releases at least.

00:51:47   There's a lot of problems with Mac OS,

00:51:50   and it seems like they're incapable of touching it recently

00:51:54   without breaking stuff.

00:51:56   And a lot of times the stuff they break never gets fixed.

00:52:00   So I'm concerned if they're going to approach

00:52:03   this kind of move to ARM,

00:52:06   like a whole architecture transition,

00:52:08   if they're going to approach that

00:52:09   with the same level of, frankly,

00:52:12   I don't know if it's carelessness,

00:52:15   but at least they are not giving it the resources

00:52:17   that they need to make quality so far,

00:52:20   if they're gonna attack this problem like that,

00:52:23   then they might just break everything

00:52:25   and make everything way worse

00:52:27   and maybe never fix it or fix it very slowly

00:52:30   or never fix certain parts of it.

00:52:32   That's where I'm concerned is like,

00:52:34   I really want the Mac platform to be brought forward

00:52:38   in big ways, it needs it.

00:52:40   However, if it's going to do that

00:52:43   with the same amount of starved resources

00:52:46   and seeming disregard for quality

00:52:49   in exchange for ship dates,

00:52:51   That, I don't think, is beneficial to the platform.

00:52:55   So that's my concern.

00:52:56   So getting back to what you kicked us off with, Casey, the fact that we've discussed

00:53:00   this many times in the past, this is a bit of an inside baseball meta concern, but I'm

00:53:06   always worried about how much to repeat something that we've said on a past show, because

00:53:13   you can't assume that everyone listening now has listened to all the dozens of hours

00:53:18   we've talked about this same topic.

00:53:19   but on the other hand, if you have listened to them, you really want us to hear us say the same things again.

00:53:23   So on this topic, I'm looking for two things, and I think Marco was at least looking for one of these,

00:53:30   which is, one is something new to say on the topic, which I think Marco has found with his concern about the

00:53:36   care and attention that they've shown to macOS being applied to a hardware transition, right,

00:53:41   which we haven't really talked about that much in the past, because I think the past few times we

00:53:44   talked about this, we weren't collectively as disgruntled about the quality of macOS, right?

00:53:49   And the second one is specifically for the story when stuff like this comes out I'm looking for

00:53:52   is there any new information in this story? Like is there any information period other than

00:53:59   hey guess what Apple could could transition Mac to a different processor that it makes itself.

00:54:04   And in this story there isn't really much new information except perhaps some dates.

00:54:15   Whole lot of hedging this this line from the article is great. I would call this

00:54:19   comprehensive butt covering

00:54:22   Apple could still theoretically abandon or delay the switch

00:54:27   Theoretically is the icing on the cake there, but Apple could still abandon or delay. It's like you're reading this whole article

00:54:33   Let me tell you Apple's gonna do this thing halfway through the article says and by the way, they might not do this

00:54:37   It's like alright we get it. You're covering yourself. Okay, you can say well, we didn't say that we're gonna

00:54:43   we just said they they're gonna but they might not and then theoretically abandon or delay

00:54:48   theoretically they can abandon or delay it there's no theory you don't need to anyway uh i'm not a

00:54:55   big fan of the article but uh as in all these things set aside the article and just take it as

00:55:00   a data point as another little pebble to the pile uh you know maybe this pebble you know we'll see

00:55:07   like where there's smoke there's fire kind of as you see more and more stories about a topic maybe

00:55:11   start taking it more seriously than just like when we've talked about in the past, it has

00:55:16   just been sort of idle musing, like, because it's an obvious thing.

00:55:19   Like, Apple is really good at making and getting better at making ARM processors, and Apple

00:55:24   likes to control this stuff, and Apple is trying to make more and more of the stuff

00:55:28   themselves or design more and more of the stuff themselves and have it fab, and Intel

00:55:31   has been falling behind.

00:55:32   Like, there's lots of reasons to talk about this.

00:55:34   So I don't want to rehash all the things we've discussed about in the past, but I mean, actually

00:55:44   I kind of do, but I don't—I want everyone who's listening now to know all the hours

00:55:49   of discussion we had about this, because I want us all to get credit for having the foresight

00:55:53   and wisdom to have discussed these issues well in the past.

00:55:55   But I don't want to have to repeat them for everybody now.

00:55:58   The only one I will repeat explicitly is one of the things that is in tension about this

00:56:04   topic is the idea of Apple spending the money that would be required to make an ARM chip

00:56:12   that is essentially useless for iOS devices, right?

00:56:15   To make an ARM chip for the Mac Pro, for instance, right?

00:56:19   150-watt Mac Pro-caliber chip.

00:56:23   To make something like that, to design it, is a lot of work, and you can reuse a lot

00:56:29   of the work you did for the lesser chips that are in phones and iPads, like to use the cores

00:56:33   and assemble them or whatever, but a lot of the stuff you do will only be for that Mac Pro.

00:56:37   Like, you won't be able to use that chip anywhere else because nothing else has that power envelope.

00:56:44   And in the past when we've talked about this, the question was always,

00:56:48   "All right, well, so Apple can reuse a lot of the chips directly like in the MacBooks and stuff,

00:56:53   but when it comes to the Mac Pro, if they're going to transition the whole line, they have to make

00:56:56   that chip themselves from scratch. There is no, you know, and that's a lot of money to invest.

00:57:02   Does Apple really want to invest that amount of money solely in the Mac?

00:57:06   As Margaret just said, in our modern iMac Pro having error, we can say, "Hey,

00:57:11   they actually spent a lot of money, money they didn't necessarily have to spend,

00:57:14   reusing and adapting technology from iOS things in an application that basically is only useful

00:57:23   in the iMac Pro." Like, that T2 chip is probably not going into an iPad anytime soon. It's probably

00:57:28   not even going into a laptop, right?

00:57:30   Because that, who knows, they've got a T1 in there,

00:57:32   we'll see, but they spent a lot of time and money

00:57:36   building the iMac Pro and they made a good product

00:57:38   out of it and like the Touch Bar before it,

00:57:40   as much as we may or may not like it,

00:57:41   it shows a willingness to invest in Mac hardware

00:57:44   that is probably out of proportion financially

00:57:47   to how much money the Mac brings in,

00:57:49   because as we've pointed out and as Apple now seems to agree

00:57:53   the Mac's importance is also out of proportion

00:57:56   to the amount of money it brings in.

00:57:57   It's important to the overall Apple platform, and not just because you develop iOS apps

00:58:02   for it, but that's part of it.

00:58:03   But Apple seems to be on the same page with all of us now about, you know, pro Mac users

00:58:11   are an important constituency.

00:58:12   They had that roundtable a year or so ago or whatever, and Apple said they agreed, and

00:58:17   it's made us all happy for a long time when we're patiently waiting for the fruits of

00:58:20   that labor.

00:58:21   The iMac Pro is one of the fruits of that labor, and it's good, right?

00:58:24   It came out good, right?

00:58:25   So we're all enthusiastic about that.

00:58:27   But that makes it more and more likely that they would be willing to spend the amount

00:58:33   of money they would need to spend to make a bunch of ARM CPUs reusing cores and other

00:58:38   technology and stuff from elsewhere, but in a big, giant, high-power blob that is not

00:58:44   useful anywhere except for Macs.

00:58:47   So this story is another pebble in the pile, the iMac Pro and that roundtable, some more

00:58:53   pebbles.

00:58:54   So it's starting to look more and more likely.

00:58:57   Things against it, I tried to come up with a new angle on this, and the new angle that

00:59:02   I have, not against this theory, because it doesn't mean they're not going to do it, but

00:59:06   something that if they did do it would be a disadvantage to Mac users, it would be a

00:59:12   step down from where they are today, is that none of the stories I've seen, rumors or whatever,

00:59:20   suggested that what Apple would actually be doing is making a new line of CPUs that they

00:59:25   would use in Macs and that they would also sell to the whole rest of the industry. I

00:59:31   haven't even seen that suggested. No one even dares speculate about that, let alone say

00:59:35   that they think it's something that Apple's going to do. So we always just assume, yeah,

00:59:39   Apple would make its own CPUs because they like to make their own whatevers, and they

00:59:43   make their own A-series system-on-a-chips, and then they make their own Wi-Fi—not Wi-Fi,

00:59:47   not Wi-Fi, whatever, the W1 chip, and they make all sorts of stuff, right? Not make,

00:59:52   but design and have someone fed for them. And they don't sell them to the rest of the

00:59:56   industry. Yeah, they license the W1 for the purposes of peripherals and stuff like that,

00:59:59   but they're not selling the A11 chip to other cell phone makers. This is not a thing they

01:00:04   do. And we just assume if they were going to make chips for the Macs, they also wouldn't

01:00:07   say, "Oh, this is our new business now, by the way. We're selling chips to everybody

01:00:10   industry. And what that would mean is that Macs would have CPUs that are not the same

01:00:19   as the CPUs that are running in other things in the industry. And what—so what is it?

01:00:24   Who cares? What does it matter? Don't we just care if we have a nice CPU on our Mac?

01:00:27   Well right now we are in a—I don't know what you would call it—a golden age? It

01:00:34   used to be a golden age. Now it's not quite golden. Now it's more of like a tarnished

01:00:38   brass age. Anyway, where Macs use the same CPUs that are also used in the servers that

01:00:46   we run server-side software in, which means that if you're writing server-side software

01:00:49   and using the Mac as your dev environment, you can run VMs and you can run Docker and

01:00:54   you can do all sorts of things and run the same software that's running on your server

01:00:58   locally on your Mac, because they're both x86-64 CPUs, right? And to a lesser extent,

01:01:06   You can also run Windows stuff because Windows runs on x86 and you can run Windows in virtualization

01:01:10   at high speed and so on and so forth.

01:01:13   And those are real advantages for certain constituencies of pro Mac users who use the

01:01:19   Mac as like a development platform for writing server-side software.

01:01:22   And maybe it's just because I'm in that world that I see it a lot, but I have been shocked

01:01:26   over the course of my career how prevalent Macs have become for people who, essentially,

01:01:33   who pejoratively use them as glorified terminals, right?

01:01:36   I don't think that's really true,

01:01:37   because lots of people do local development.

01:01:39   Like they will run Docker on their Mac,

01:01:41   they will run a virtual box on their Mac or whatever,

01:01:43   and they will use software and binaries

01:01:48   that run on the server, they will run them on their Mac.

01:01:51   And so they're not just using this glorified terminal,

01:01:53   they're actually doing local development.

01:01:55   That is one class of software developer,

01:01:56   the server-side software developer.

01:01:58   So if Apple makes a CPU transition,

01:02:01   The Mac as a server-side software dev platform becomes far less attractive because Apple's

01:02:08   not going to sell those CPUs to run on the server.

01:02:11   Now it could be if they just use the same instruction set and somehow ARM on the server

01:02:15   becomes a thing.

01:02:16   Lots of companies have been trying to make ARM on the server a thing for a long time.

01:02:20   It hasn't quite happened, but if Apple's not going to make it happen and no one else

01:02:26   makes it happen and Intel continues to – or even AMD – continues to dominate the server

01:02:31   space with x86-64, it makes the Mac less attractive in one particular area.

01:02:37   And same thing for Windows.

01:02:38   I'm just making this example, but if you rely on the ability to run Windows, virtualize

01:02:42   Windows at full speed as part of some important business that you do that lets you use a Mac

01:02:47   when previously you couldn't because you can also run Windows on it.

01:02:50   I know Windows is ported to ARM as well, right?

01:02:53   But it really just depends on do people port all their Windows software to ARM?

01:02:57   Do they recompile it for ARM?

01:02:58   most PCs sold become ARM. Ideally, whatever transition Apple makes, the whole rest of

01:03:07   the industry would also make, PCs, servers, everything, whether or not Apple helps them

01:03:13   make it. I think Apple will not help them make it. So the only way we can get, maintain

01:03:18   the golden age where everything runs on the same platform is if the rest of the industry

01:03:22   also transitions more or less at the same time without any of Apple's help, which seems

01:03:27   unlikely to me. So that would make me slightly more sad and I think it would make the Mac

01:03:33   slightly less desirable or even viable for certain pro applications.

01:03:40   Everything else that the Mac normally does, no one cares. You can develop Mac software

01:03:43   on it, you can run all your applications, you can browse the web, so it's probably not

01:03:46   that big of a deal, but it is the one angle that I have found myself pondering, you know,

01:03:50   if I'm able to bring myself to believe that they're really going to do this. What would

01:03:54   What would that actually be like?

01:03:55   How would it change my experience of Macs?

01:03:59   And I didn't even get into playing Windows games or whatever, because who cares, that's

01:04:02   really small.

01:04:03   But I look around my big company full of hundreds of developers and how many Macs I see and

01:04:06   everything they're doing with them and think, "What if that Mac was ARM but all of our

01:04:11   servers were still x86?"

01:04:13   How would that change how viable the Mac is for you?

01:04:16   And I think it would be worse.

01:04:18   So that's one more thing for me to not look forward to.

01:04:21   On the flip side of that is what Mark was talking about, how awesome it would be on

01:04:24   laptops and, frankly, I think how awesome it would be on the Mac Pro.

01:04:27   I would love to see a massive multi-core Apple-designed ARM processor that outperforms a Xeon with

01:04:33   less power.

01:04:34   I would love that.

01:04:35   And I think it's 100 percent possible maybe on Apple's second or third try and, hell,

01:04:38   maybe on their first try.

01:04:39   Those people are really smart.

01:04:41   But there are some things I would miss.

01:04:43   One other thing to think about is, like, we're assuming that if Apple does this transition,

01:04:50   that the processors being in their hands

01:04:53   would be a good thing, and that they would outperform,

01:04:57   they would match or outperform what Intel is doing.

01:05:00   And the assumption in that is that they will always,

01:05:02   or at least for a long time, outperform

01:05:05   what the rest of the PC industry is doing.

01:05:07   But that might not hold.

01:05:08   Like, it might be.

01:05:10   What if they complete this transition,

01:05:12   and then they find themselves actually

01:05:15   not doing as well as the PC industry,

01:05:16   or not caring as much about the processors

01:05:20   for the Mac and therefore, today we have the issue of,

01:05:24   it doesn't seem like they care as much about the Mac

01:05:26   as they do about iOS, so they have these product lines

01:05:29   that just sit around forever.

01:05:31   When Intel does make a new generation of processor,

01:05:36   it's not that much work to update these new product lines

01:05:40   to use that new component.

01:05:42   It's way less engineering resources to take Intel's

01:05:46   newest chip and stick it in the Mac you already have

01:05:49   designed than it is to design the next version of the A10,

01:05:54   quadruple X, whatever it is that would be the high

01:05:59   performance version of this year's A series processor.

01:06:03   It's very possible that could backfire on us.

01:06:06   It could be that Apple takes it over, then down the road

01:06:10   decides the Mac is not that important to them,

01:06:14   which wouldn't be unheard of because that's already

01:06:16   how it's been, and then they just never update those chips

01:06:20   for the Mac, and because, as John said,

01:06:24   because they're not selling these chips outside of Apple,

01:06:26   which I can never see them doing,

01:06:28   there'd be no other pressure for them

01:06:31   to keep those chips updated.

01:06:34   So it actually might make them,

01:06:35   like it would basically raise the cost

01:06:38   of updating the Mac line to keep pace

01:06:41   with the latest and greatest hardware.

01:06:44   And I think the last thing Apple needs

01:06:46   is for that cost to be raised.

01:06:48   Because right now they already seem to have

01:06:50   a lot of trouble justifying investment in the Mac.

01:06:53   So if it's more expensive to update the Mac,

01:06:56   to update Mac hardware to the latest generation of whatever,

01:07:01   that actually could really backfire quite badly on us

01:07:04   and that could result in even less attention,

01:07:08   even fewer updates, even less competitive performance

01:07:11   what the rest of the industry is doing.

01:07:13   - It's like the trash can Mac Pro,

01:07:16   we were like, oh, why isn't Apple updated

01:07:18   to use the latest Xeon?

01:07:19   Well, imagine there were no latest Xeons

01:07:21   and Apple could say, we're using the highest performance

01:07:24   A whatever processor available.

01:07:26   It's like, yeah, but well, you got me there.

01:07:29   I mean, they are.

01:07:30   (laughing)

01:07:31   They just haven't made another one.

01:07:32   So technically it is still using the fastest one, yeah.

01:07:34   - Right, like you get the good and the bad

01:07:36   with like bringing this stuff in house to Apple,

01:07:39   You get probably pretty good performance

01:07:41   and power efficiency gains,

01:07:43   but at the cost of now you're at the whims of Apple.

01:07:47   And Apple is fickle and in many areas unreliable.

01:07:52   And you would be at the whims of whatever they felt

01:07:57   worth doing even more than you are now

01:08:00   because the cost of keeping things updated

01:08:03   would be higher to them.

01:08:04   - That's worth mentioning the other angle

01:08:06   that a lot of people are talking about,

01:08:07   mostly because this Bloomberg article is so careful not to say anything definitive about

01:08:12   anything. They're like, "Well, you know that Bloomberg doesn't actually say ARM anywhere.

01:08:15   They just say Apple would make its own chips. What if they make their own x86 chips?" And

01:08:20   they could do that. You know, money solves a lot of problems. Patents, licensing, instruction

01:08:26   set, whatever, you know, dealing with Intel, like, assuming you threw enough money at the

01:08:31   people you need to throw money at to be allowed to do that, Apple could probably make a pretty

01:08:34   good x86 chip. I have a hard time believing Apple could make a substantially better x86

01:08:41   chip than Intel, because Apple's expertise thus far has been in making ARM CPUs, and

01:08:48   x86, even just plain old x86-64, is a much more, let's say, wordy instruction set than

01:08:57   ARM. It has got a lot of history behind it. It's weird in lots of interesting ways, and

01:09:03   Intel has a lot of experience in instruction decode hardware and all sorts of chip-within-a-chip

01:09:10   ways to crack apart those big variables with instructions and feed it into a machine that

01:09:15   works more like a modern processor on the inside.

01:09:18   I mean, it's not as big a difference as people think because modern ARM RISC-style processors

01:09:25   also have to do lots of weird stuff internally as well.

01:09:28   But there's a lot of institutional expertise that both AMD and Intel have that Apple does

01:09:33   not have when it comes to figuring out how to make the x86 instruction set faster, even

01:09:37   just the x86-64 one, which is much nicer than the 32-bit, let alone the 16-bit or whatever

01:09:43   variants.

01:09:46   So that seems much less likely to me.

01:09:51   It really hammers on what Marco was getting at, which is like, "Okay, Apple, now you have

01:09:56   something to keep up with.

01:09:57   You're making your own x86 chips."

01:09:59   And so we can still ask the question, "Hey, Apple, you have an update, the whatever chip

01:10:02   and your whatever Mac for a long time. Meanwhile Intel has released three new chips that are

01:10:05   faster. What's the deal? You could just use those Intel chips. Why did you go on your

01:10:09   own? Or at least if they do ARM, we can't tell them unless someone else decides to make

01:10:13   like 17 core ARM chips that they're stubbornly refusing to use in their new ARM Mac Pro or

01:10:21   whatever.

01:10:22   So I think this realization and everything we're talking about is leading people to talk

01:10:27   more around this Bloomberg story about—I think for the first time I'm hearing people

01:10:30   speculate more seriously about the idea of them having x86 at the high end and ARM at

01:10:36   the low end, like for some sustained period of time, rather than having a transition where

01:10:40   you just say, "All the x86 Macs are gone, and all the Macs are A-whatever ARM chips."

01:10:46   But rather instead saying, "We're never going to make the investment to compete with Xeon's."

01:10:51   Those are always going to be Xeons in the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro, and we will keep

01:10:54   up with Intel's line as much as we always have, and we're just not going to do stuff

01:11:00   But for all of the Macs that can essentially take drop-in chips from our iPad and phone

01:11:07   line, maybe with some minor tweaks in terms of adding more cache or maybe some more cores

01:11:11   and a beefier GPU and stuff like that, those will get ARM.

01:11:16   And as Marco said, those are the majority of Macs sold.

01:11:20   And the x86 Macs will just be this technical curiosity that nerds and developers use, but

01:11:26   Macs that most people buy to do basic computing stuff and word processing and run Office and

01:11:33   web browsing and run spreadsheets and watch Netflix and whatever else people want to do,

01:11:39   those will all be ARM.

01:11:42   And that would be an unprecedented move because Apple has never had a sustained dual CPU strategy

01:11:49   on the Mac.

01:11:50   It has always been a transition.

01:11:52   Old chip goes out, new chip comes in, new chip has lots of advantages, everyone loves

01:11:56   the new chip, look how fast it is, look how fast Graphing Calculator runs on the PowerPC,

01:12:00   look how fast everything runs on x86 versus these ancient PowerPCs that IBM doesn't update

01:12:05   anymore. I am not enthusiastic about that future, even though it makes sense from a

01:12:12   technical perspective in terms of what you want to spend money on and what you don't,

01:12:16   because to Marco's earlier point, dealing with an OS that runs on two different platforms

01:12:24   is a, who is it, I think ATP Tipster said it on Twitter,

01:12:28   is a bug multiplier.

01:12:29   Like, potentially there are new bugs

01:12:32   that might only exist on one platform or another.

01:12:34   Throwing another, it's not double the bugs, right?

01:12:36   Because not every bug is architecture specific.

01:12:38   But throwing another variable into the mix,

01:12:41   especially as variable as significant as the instruction set

01:12:44   is not the best way to drive down bugs and cost.

01:12:50   And it could be that the software,

01:12:52   maintaining the software and dealing with the bugs

01:12:54   And the changes there is actually more expensive

01:12:56   than dealing with the hardware.

01:12:57   I don't know how that shakes out in the grand scheme of things

01:13:00   and exactly how many millions of dollars it would cost

01:13:02   to build a Xeon competitor yourself

01:13:03   versus how many millions of dollars it would cost

01:13:05   to maintain in perpetuity, or at least for a decade or so,

01:13:09   two architectures that you make the same OS for

01:13:14   with the same apps compiled to STAB binaries

01:13:16   and two tool chains and all this other stuff.

01:13:17   So that also strikes me as non-ideal.

01:13:19   Like the simplest solutions are

01:13:22   that Apple Note doesn't do this transition

01:13:23   that they transition everything to the same architecture on all their devices.

01:13:28   Any sort of hybrid thing, though it might make sense from a nickel and dime perspective,

01:13:33   I bet if you had to pitch it to the board of directors, it would seem too much like

01:13:37   a half measure.

01:13:38   And they would say, "Why don't we just all go?"

01:13:40   If you had to pitch them and say, "We're going to go all ARM and it's unified and we

01:13:43   have a unified framework and a unified architecture and we own all this stuff," that is way easier

01:13:47   to sell to a board of directors than any of the more technical solutions where you leave

01:13:51   the Pro Max's x86 and you support both of them and have two toolchains, two compilers,

01:13:55   and fat binaries, and you don't transition, I don't think that's a winner.

01:14:02   It's funny because I'm of two minds about this whole thing.

01:14:05   The KC from a couple of years ago that lived in VMware Fusion in Windows but on a Mac would

01:14:13   most likely really hate this.

01:14:16   And this is exactly what you were talking about earlier, Jon, that one of the advantages

01:14:19   of being able to virtualize an OS or a platform that's based on the same platform you're running

01:14:26   is that it happens really, really fast, right? This is in contrast to this hypothetical future

01:14:31   when you're trying to emulate x86 on top of ARM. And who knows, maybe this phantom Apple

01:14:36   processor would be so damn fast that you could get away with it, but the likelihood of that

01:14:40   is not good. And so, you know, past Casey, who was doing Windows development on his Mac,

01:14:46   not want this at all. And I think the last time we really spoke about this seriously,

01:14:49   I was still that Casey that does not want this at all. But the current me that only works on

01:14:57   Xcode and you know other things that are native to the Mac, and I haven't run Windows in at least

01:15:03   a year if not more, I don't feel like I have a problem with this. And the thought of my beloved

01:15:09   12-inch MacBook being faster with a battery that lasts even longer, which to be fair I don't have

01:15:15   any particular complaints about the battery on this thing, but that being said, you can

01:15:19   always have more. More is always better. So having a 12-inch MacBook that is considerably

01:15:23   faster and yet has much better battery life, that sounds friggin' awesome! Like, I totally

01:15:28   want that. But what I'm not really doing is considering what am I losing out on, because

01:15:33   maybe there's some app that's vital to my workflow that I won't be able to use anymore.

01:15:40   Like, you know, FFmpeg, I believe, is open source, so presumably I could compile from

01:15:44   source if I needed to, but just let's suppose for the sake of discussion that FFmpeg was

01:15:48   never built for ARM, could not be built for ARM, like that would stink. I use FFmpeg all

01:15:53   the time for stupid stuff that doesn't matter, but it, but you know, whether or not it matters,

01:15:57   it's important to me. It matters to me. Wait, to be clear, you use it on the 12 inch?

01:16:02   Uh, every great once in a while, not usually, but yeah, this is perhaps not my best choice

01:16:08   of analogies or examples, but, but you get my point, right? Is that there, maybe it's

01:16:13   something else. Maybe it's the app Rocket, which lets you, you know, easily insert emoji

01:16:18   pretty much anywhere in the system. You know, Rocket is a modern app. I would assume if

01:16:23   this arm thing happened, that Rocket would get updated. But what if, for the sake of

01:16:28   discussion, Rocket isn't updated? I use Rocket constantly, probably hundreds of times a day.

01:16:34   And if it didn't get updated, that would really bum me out. And so there are probably tradeoffs

01:16:39   that I'm not considering, but on the surface and going on the assumption that in, you know,

01:16:45   a this phantom new Apple processor that goes in the 12 inch MacBook is, you know, five

01:16:51   times faster and uses half as much power or whatever the case may be. Like that sounds

01:16:55   frickin great. And Apple being in control of its own pipeline sounds frickin great.

01:17:01   But who knows? I mean, like you guys were saying, maybe it would be that Apple makes

01:17:06   crummy desktop-level CPUs. Maybe it would be that they're even slower than Intel. Like,

01:17:11   we don't know how it would turn out. But on the surface—

01:17:14   Or maybe they're faster and then they don't make a new one for three years.

01:17:19   Like, you never know how it's going to turn out, but the optimist in me thinks, "Hell

01:17:25   yeah." Like, even if it's painful at first, because some of the things I really love don't

01:17:31   get, you know, don't get moved to like fat binaries or whatever they end up doing.

01:17:35   In principle, this sounds great.

01:17:37   I'm all in on it.

01:17:38   I think I'd really like to see how this plays out.

01:17:41   But it sounds like we're waiting until at least 2020, if not after that.

01:17:46   So we'll see.

01:17:47   I don't know how much steak you want to put in dates in this article.

01:17:49   I was thinking of your Windows VM thing.

01:17:51   Like I think that's definitely a pretty rare case, because you really, really wanted to

01:17:55   use a Mac, but we're kind of doing Windows development and you can get away with it because

01:17:58   of VMware.

01:17:59   I'm honestly I'm surprised you were able to tolerate that because that's no way to live in a Mac constantly be

01:18:03   Using VMware to do Windows stuff. What's my alternative use Adele? I'm not a monster. Yeah, I know

01:18:08   Well at some point maybe that's better but like the reason I brought up so no point is that better?

01:18:13   Yeah, the reason I brought up service side of stuff is not just because it's what I do for a living but because

01:18:19   They're there, you know think of the big the big tech companies, you know, you've got

01:18:27   Apple, what is it, Apple, Google, Amazon, maybe Microsoft, Facebook, right?

01:18:34   Facebook, Amazon, increasingly Microsoft and Google write a lot of or mostly server-side

01:18:43   software.

01:18:44   And when you picture the stereotypical developer who works at any of those companies and you

01:18:48   picture them using a Mac and being a cool tech nerd hipster person, they're writing

01:18:53   writing server-side software on the Mac, and I have to think that there is some aspect

01:18:59   of having the same CPU architecture as all of their servers makes that a more desirable

01:19:06   development platform. And there are a lot of those people. I don't know how many people

01:19:11   are using a Mac to do Windows development because they hate Windows so much, but there

01:19:15   are a lot of people writing server-side software, and my impression is that Macs are very prevalent

01:19:21   at those companies. And that's why I think it's a use case that actually may raise to

01:19:26   the level of being a factor in Apple's decision, that they will at least consider it, right?

01:19:32   Because you know, like, just think of the Apple says, well, we considered it, but it's

01:19:37   not important enough use case. It's too small. Like we care about consumers, right? So fine.

01:19:41   Ten years from now, if you went into Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Amazon and looked

01:19:49   to all the developers who are doing server-side development, what would it look like? Would

01:19:53   it still be filled with Macs? Or would they be mostly gone now and people switch to what?

01:19:59   To Windows? To Linux? I don't know, something that's still on x86? Or it could be that by

01:20:04   initiating this thing that Apple finally kick-starts all other companies to start pushing ARM on

01:20:10   the server more and Amazon rolls out ARM on the server for all your EC2 instances and

01:20:14   everything and Microsoft ARM on Windows really starts to take off and Intel just really has

01:20:21   a bad decade and really just fades from prominence and we're all happy because we're all using

01:20:27   ARM everywhere.

01:20:28   That's a possibility I suppose, but the big tech companies these days aren't the big tech

01:20:35   companies because they make native applications and hardware.

01:20:40   Most of the big tech companies are big because they run server-side software on cloud infrastructure

01:20:47   on x86 CPUs, and their developers all use Macs and run Docker and stuff.

01:20:53   Yeah.

01:20:54   Just to clarify what I was saying earlier about FFmpeg, that was really a crummy example

01:20:57   because FFmpeg is open source.

01:20:59   So presumably, like I think I said it earlier, but that could be rebuilt from source.

01:21:03   But there's got to be some closed source thing.

01:21:05   Maybe it's an Adobe product, which doesn't typically get updated very well.

01:21:08   Maybe it's some other thing.

01:21:10   Maybe it's MakeMKV, maybe it's any number of other apps that maybe you wouldn't be able

01:21:15   to recompile yourself from source and maybe won't ever get upgraded, or updated I should

01:21:19   say, for this new platform, and then you would never be able to run that app again, and that

01:21:23   would really stink.

01:21:24   Or you would have to be using some sort of, what was the virtualization, not virtualization,

01:21:27   but the thing that, thank you, where you would have some sort of Rosetta-style situation

01:21:31   where, yes, you can still run it, but it's at, you know, a compromised performance and

01:21:36   blah blah blah.

01:21:37   That's the thing that worries me, is that sitting here now, I'm all enthusiastic and

01:21:41   it sounds great, yeah, give me my ARM MacBook Adorable, give it to me tomorrow.

01:21:45   But maybe I'd get that ARM MacBook Adorable and realize, oh, this grass isn't quite as

01:21:49   green as I thought.

01:21:51   Marco, any other thoughts on this?

01:21:52   >> Yeah, I think the software argument is a good one.

01:21:56   Like, I think in any transition like this, one of the big risks and problems is that

01:22:01   you do lose some apps, you lose software.

01:22:04   Like, you know, when we went from PowerPC to Intel,

01:22:06   not everything made it along that transition.

01:22:09   And now, the Mac is in a very different place

01:22:13   than where it was in 2006,

01:22:15   when that transition really happened.

01:22:17   You know, now, a whole lot more Mac software

01:22:20   is really in maintenance mode,

01:22:22   or being totally unmaintained,

01:22:25   and the software that people still use.

01:22:27   Like, a lot of developer attention moved to mobile,

01:22:31   and a lot of Mac developers no longer work on their apps,

01:22:35   or rather the developers of a lot of Mac apps

01:22:39   are no longer working on them.

01:22:41   So the Mac is in a kind of a bad spot

01:22:44   to go through an architecture transition

01:22:47   with no other modifications.

01:22:49   I think this is possibly one of the reasons

01:22:51   why I'm so excited about this idea of Project Marzipan

01:22:54   of having iOS and Mac kinda cross,

01:22:56   having cross compatibility between the apps

01:22:59   is that I think that could really revive

01:23:01   the Mac software market.

01:23:03   That would dramatically, I think, increase

01:23:08   the developer interest in the Mac

01:23:10   and developer support of the Mac

01:23:13   because it would lower that barrier,

01:23:14   allow more skills to be shared,

01:23:15   allow more code to be shared, et cetera.

01:23:17   So, you know, we talked about that before.

01:23:18   So, anything to revive software interest in the Mac

01:23:23   among developers would be very well timed

01:23:26   to go before or during a partial

01:23:29   a partial or full architecture transition.

01:23:33   Because that's when you need the developers

01:23:37   to be active on the Mac.

01:23:38   'Cause right now, if you look around,

01:23:39   like we're about to lose 32-bit probably this fall.

01:23:43   Almost everyone probably has something that will break.

01:23:46   You know, we saw this on iOS too,

01:23:47   like when iOS dropped 32-bit,

01:23:49   almost everyone lost something.

01:23:50   And you might not have been using it anymore,

01:23:52   but not everything made it.

01:23:55   And that's how this is gonna be too.

01:23:57   Like if Macs transition away from Intel,

01:24:00   not everything's going to make it.

01:24:01   We're already losing a lot of things with 32-bit.

01:24:05   And so to do that without significant destruction

01:24:09   and problems for your users, you need a healthy

01:24:12   and well-maintained software ecosystem.

01:24:15   The Mac had that in 2006, and that's why

01:24:19   PowerPC to Intel went so well.

01:24:22   It's hard to say the Mac has that now.

01:24:24   So this kind of transition, I think,

01:24:26   it would be a very bad idea unless and until

01:24:30   the Mac has more active development

01:24:34   from third parties on it.

01:24:35   And right now, I don't see that happening

01:24:38   without some kind of major intervention,

01:24:40   and Project Marzipan could be that,

01:24:43   and so that's one of the reasons, again,

01:24:44   I really hope that happens.

01:24:46   - Yeah, I think the good news is that

01:24:47   if either one of these things happen,

01:24:49   I don't think anyone can imagine a sequence

01:24:51   in which the Marzipan-y thing doesn't come

01:24:53   before or simultaneous with the CPU transition.

01:24:56   Just because it takes so long to make CPUs and Apple has already dabbled in what it takes

01:25:03   to reuse stuff that you wrote on iOS on the Mac.

01:25:06   So that just seems so much closer to being a reality to me than a CPU transition.

01:25:12   So I think we will get something to address the GUI API parity between iOS and the Mac

01:25:22   before any CPU transition or at exactly the same time as a CPU transition, for the reasons

01:25:27   you just said, because Apple, I think, recognizes the same thing, that going through a transition

01:25:32   with the Mac market the way it is is just going to make more people say, "Well, that's

01:25:35   the last straw.

01:25:36   Screw it.

01:25:37   I'm just going to be an iOS developer or do something else."

01:25:39   Well, see, it's exciting times ahead, maybe, possibly.

01:25:43   You never know.

01:25:44   All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:25:47   OhPlease writes, "Hey, will Lyft be generally available during WWDC, as in not swamped with

01:25:52   users, or should I rent a car if I want to see the things around San Jose, like the Computer

01:25:56   History Museum?"

01:25:59   In my experience, from only one year of WWDC in San Jose, it was fine.

01:26:04   I can't remember ever waiting on a Lyft for any particular reason or for any particular

01:26:08   amount of time.

01:26:09   I didn't have any troubles.

01:26:10   I don't know about you guys.

01:26:11   Compared to San Francisco, San Jose is like a neutron bomb went off.

01:26:14   Like, there's nobody there.

01:26:17   There is a weird side effect though.

01:26:18   Like, so you're right, first of all, San Jose is empty.

01:26:21   The, relatively speaking.

01:26:22   The problem with San Jose, so it's kinda like

01:26:25   the inverse plot of The Truman Show,

01:26:29   where it seems like you walking around

01:26:32   are the only human being there,

01:26:35   and everyone who works at every establishment in San Jose

01:26:40   seems like they're an actor,

01:26:42   and for the very first time ever,

01:26:44   you're asking them to do their job.

01:26:46   (laughing)

01:26:48   That is a bit much, but you are closer to the truth

01:26:51   than I really want to admit.

01:26:52   - Well, welcome to California.

01:26:54   - Like, it really does seem like

01:26:56   you are like the first customer everyone's ever had.

01:26:58   Everyone, it's their first day on the job.

01:27:01   Like, it's, we found this to be the case last year

01:27:05   almost everywhere we went, almost every day.

01:27:08   It like, and in various different contexts,

01:27:11   like, it just seems like the city,

01:27:13   it seems like this is the first time

01:27:15   people have ever come here.

01:27:17   And I know that's not the case,

01:27:18   like I know this is a big city,

01:27:20   like obviously people are here all the time, but--

01:27:22   - Well, it's not that big, that's the thing,

01:27:25   it's not a big city.

01:27:26   - So anyway, hiring lifts and stuff for your time there,

01:27:31   you might have to tell the person how to drive.

01:27:33   You are the first person to ever ask them to do their job

01:27:36   in all likelihood, or at least that's how it will seem.

01:27:38   So I don't know what happened in San Jose

01:27:41   to make everybody behave this way,

01:27:42   but that's how it felt the entire time.

01:27:45   San Jose from the perspective of an adopted New Yorker.

01:27:48   - You ain't wrong.

01:27:53   All right, Bart Hoefs writes,

01:27:55   "Hey, should I use the new Cloudflare DNS thing

01:27:58   or should I stay with Google's DNS thing?"

01:28:00   So to recap, Google has a free and not open,

01:28:05   but a free DNS.

01:28:07   It's the DNS servers,

01:28:08   actually the IP address 8.8.8.8.

01:28:11   And what you can do is you can use Google's DNS,

01:28:13   which is supposed to provide perks,

01:28:15   although honestly I'm not even sure what they are anymore.

01:28:17   The last time I used it,

01:28:19   the only thing it really provided for me

01:28:21   was making things like YouTube slower

01:28:23   because I was hitting servers that were very far away

01:28:26   from where I was sitting.

01:28:27   I guess one of the advantages is it prevents your ISP

01:28:31   from knowing as easily what web addresses you're going to

01:28:34   and things of that nature.

01:28:35   Instead, you're giving it to Google

01:28:37   because that's a better choice, I guess.

01:28:41   But nevertheless, but yeah, so that was a thing.

01:28:45   It is useful if your ISP's DNS craps the bed,

01:28:48   which I know is a Comcast-ic thing to happen,

01:28:52   but I don't know, I've never really had that trouble

01:28:55   on files.

01:28:56   - Or if your ISP does stupid redirects,

01:28:58   where they take over the DNS when you typo something

01:29:02   and throw you to some stupid page

01:29:04   that has a bunch of corporate stuff on it.

01:29:04   - Oh God, of course, yes, that is terrible.

01:29:06   - That's the main reason not to use ISP DNS,

01:29:08   'cause they do that.

01:29:10   who also, like, you know, I really don't trust ISPs

01:29:13   to be ethical at all, because they have shown in the US

01:29:15   that they're not, like they're just not.

01:29:17   They will do anything and everything

01:29:19   to be as sleazy as possible,

01:29:20   because what are you gonna do about it?

01:29:22   There's no competition,

01:29:23   and now there's no FCC to regulate them.

01:29:25   So they can do whatever they want,

01:29:27   and they know it, and they do.

01:29:29   Like, I would actually trust Google

01:29:31   more than I would trust Verizon, which is my ISP,

01:29:34   or any major ISP in this country,

01:29:37   because at least Google, there's a lot riding on that

01:29:41   if they mess up, if they do something creepy.

01:29:43   So I think they're less likely to try creepy stuff,

01:29:47   and if they do creepy stuff, they're less likely

01:29:48   to get hacked and have my information legal over the place.

01:29:52   So there's a few reasons why I think

01:29:54   I would trust Google over any ISP.

01:29:57   That being said, I think I trust Cloudflare

01:30:00   more than any of them because A,

01:30:04   they're not an advertising company,

01:30:06   and B, they've spelled out in their post announcing this

01:30:09   why they're doing this for free, what's in it for them,

01:30:12   like what is their business plan here,

01:30:14   and their business plan is in part because they seem

01:30:16   to honestly care about making the internet a better place,

01:30:19   and in part because they offer enterprise DNS services

01:30:23   that would be better and are faster if more people

01:30:27   who access the enterprises' sites

01:30:29   are using their DNS on the client side.

01:30:31   So there is a clear business reason

01:30:34   why this benefits Cloudflare to do

01:30:37   that does not depend on creepy stuff

01:30:40   that I don't want them to be doing.

01:30:42   - Yeah, so this sounds good.

01:30:43   I'm not using it personally,

01:30:44   but I will say that I would be far more likely

01:30:48   to use this than Google's thing.

01:30:50   I do use my ISP's DNS because I don't often fat-finger URLs,

01:30:54   so I don't see that god-awful Verizon search page

01:30:57   that I hate, that it hijacks when you enter a bogus URL.

01:31:00   - They used to have a way for you to turn that off,

01:31:02   by the way, like you could go to Verizon's preferences

01:31:04   and find it somewhere and say, please don't do that.

01:31:06   - There still is, it's poorly documented,

01:31:08   but if you change the last digit of your DNS servers

01:31:12   in a certain way, you get alternate ones.

01:31:14   - Yeah, that used to be the way,

01:31:16   but there's a lot of outdated documentation in that,

01:31:19   and sometimes what used to work stops working,

01:31:21   and it's annoying.

01:31:23   - So anyway, I dig it.

01:31:24   - And on your concern, Casey, about 888 and 8844,

01:31:29   the other one, that was my concern and my experience

01:31:32   them as well as like a lot of the ISP DNS, like the sort of local DNS, use the fact that

01:31:39   that DNS is local to give you different names for common services so you get the closer

01:31:46   incarnation of it. And if you use the Google one, so the theory went that it didn't know

01:31:50   where you were to as much, you know, like, and it would just send you to a server far

01:31:54   away or that has a worse route to you. I'm pretty sure Google, with its 888 thing, does

01:32:01   a bunch of stuff to try to make that less severe. In other words, you're not going to

01:32:05   some central DNS server in the middle of the country that gives everyone the same number

01:32:09   for all of the different services, and that's why it tries to be local. Like all Google

01:32:15   things, it's massively distributed. It's not just one thing in one place. But my experience

01:32:20   has been that whatever that local thing is, it's not local enough, and still occasionally

01:32:25   I will get poor performance. On the flip side, sometimes you'll get better performance, because

01:32:29   if you try using your ISP's DNS.

01:32:31   I found ISP DNS to be unreliable,

01:32:33   as in no name resolves,

01:32:36   or crappy as in it gives me like the same IP for that name

01:32:40   as everyone else was on the same ISP as me,

01:32:43   and it's crowded, and if I switch to 888,

01:32:45   I get better traffic.

01:32:46   But either way,

01:32:47   I think Cloudflare is probably doing the same thing

01:32:52   as Google in that regard.

01:32:53   I didn't read their full blog list,

01:32:55   But that concern is real and does sometimes have ramifications.

01:33:01   And that's why I hesitate to suggest to non-technical friends and family,

01:33:05   oh, you shouldn't use the ISP DNS, just always use 888 or 1111 or whatever.

01:33:11   Because if they do find themselves in a situation where they're being sent

01:33:15   to a server far away and they get terrible performance, they're going

01:33:17   to have no idea how to debug that.

01:33:18   And I feel like it's better for them to just use the ISP DNS so then at least

01:33:22   when it breaks, they know the number to call and complain to people.

01:33:25   and the complaint will be legitimate and they won't find themselves in a situation where

01:33:29   they

01:33:29   the ISP support person eventually discovers that they have some weird DNS and say

01:33:33   "Oh, well there's your problem!" just

01:33:35   they're at the mercy of their ISP in more ways than one

01:33:39   but even for me I think maybe half of the devices in my house use the Google DNS

01:33:44   but

01:33:44   the other half use the native ones and I choose based on

01:33:48   how important it is for that device to get good video streaming from like

01:33:51   Netflix or whatever

01:33:52   Not an ideal situation.

01:33:54   An ideal situation would be if the kind of

01:33:59   technical expertise, general morality,

01:34:02   and aligned business incentives demonstrated by Cloudflare

01:34:07   actually existed in ISPs,

01:34:08   but we do not live in that country.

01:34:11   - No, not even close, which is too bad.

01:34:13   All right, so Josh Rappaport asks,

01:34:16   "Hey, Jon, with the release of Mac OS 10.3.4,

01:34:19   have you considered getting an external GPU enclosure

01:34:21   a fancy graphics card to do more gaming on your Mac. Can your Mac even support this?

01:34:26   Isn't it way too old for this?

01:34:27   It doesn't even have Thunderbolt.

01:34:28   Yeah, I don't, I can't even, I'm running El Capitan. I can't even run Sierra, let alone

01:34:33   the latest version of High Sierra.

01:34:35   John's Mac doesn't even have USB 3.

01:34:37   Nope. But more generally to the question about external GPUs, I think those are a good solution

01:34:49   for people who need to use GPU-intensive things on a computer that can't fit an internal GPU.

01:34:54   So laptops, right?

01:34:56   And my main concern in the laptop realm is, based on my experience using my 2017 15-inch

01:35:05   MacBook Pro at work, constantly connecting it and disconnecting it to my monitor and

01:35:10   a hub thing that gives me USB-A connections and, you know, what else comes off of that?

01:35:17   well, many display port for my old monitor or whatever.

01:35:19   Anyway, I plug it into a thing that periodically makes it,

01:35:23   forces it to turn on the discrete GPU

01:35:26   and connect up to an external monitor.

01:35:31   And the reliability of that is terrible.

01:35:35   There, I have to do all sorts of weird dances

01:35:37   and do things to make sure the machine

01:35:41   doesn't feel too rushed or too hassled

01:35:43   by me plugging and unplugging things.

01:35:45   Very often I plug it in and it just ignores me.

01:35:48   Then I'll unplug it and plug it in again.

01:35:50   Oh, maybe now it'll pay attention.

01:35:51   Sometimes, no matter how many times I plug it in

01:35:53   and unplug it, I have to pull the power cord

01:35:57   out of my hub thing that it's connected to

01:36:00   and basically reboot the hub thingy.

01:36:02   Sometimes it freezes with a black screen.

01:36:04   And so like all this is making me think,

01:36:07   do I really want to be plugging and unplugging a GPU

01:36:10   and thinking this operating system

01:36:11   is gonna handle that gracefully?

01:36:12   'Cause it can't even handle plugging it

01:36:13   into an external monitor in a consistent manner.

01:36:16   So I am not optimistic about how good an experience

01:36:21   it will be to use an external GPU,

01:36:24   but especially to connect an external GPU to a system

01:36:28   that didn't previously have it and disconnect it

01:36:30   without doing all sorts of dances and jumping through hoops

01:36:33   and bending over backwards to make sure the machine isn't

01:36:34   too rushed or isn't too upset by me plugging in the second GPU.

01:36:39   So my faith in the reliability of the Mac operating system

01:36:43   to handle this is shaken.

01:36:44   Despite the fact that I realize

01:36:46   this is a revolutionary feature for people

01:36:49   who are on the go previously had no way

01:36:51   to increase the GPU power of their portable machine.

01:36:56   Like there's only so much you can fit in that case.

01:36:58   And it was just the fans would be spinning,

01:36:59   you get the hottest one you could

01:37:00   and it would still be terrible.

01:37:01   And now all of a sudden you're telling me

01:37:02   I can get this little external enclosure

01:37:05   and have massively more powerful GPU.

01:37:07   Maybe they'll just deal with the bugs

01:37:08   and they'll just be worth it for them

01:37:09   to be able to do like live video previews

01:37:11   4K video or whatever they're doing with their GPU rendering

01:37:15   stuff like that.

01:37:16   But for me personally, like I would not,

01:37:20   my choice of a gaming rig would not be a Mac laptop

01:37:23   with an external GPU.

01:37:25   There's a reason I'm waiting for the Mac Pro.

01:37:26   So I don't know, I'm not personally interested in this.

01:37:29   Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:37:31   Casper, Squarespace and Rover.

01:37:33   And we'll see you next week.

01:37:34   (upbeat music)

01:37:37   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:37:39   They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:37:44   (Accidental)

01:37:45   Oh, it was accidental.

01:37:46   (Accidental)

01:37:47   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:37:54   (Accidental)

01:37:55   Oh, it was accidental.

01:37:57   (Accidental)

01:37:58   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:38:02   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:38:12   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:38:16   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:38:24   It's accidental (It's accidental)

01:38:27   They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)

01:38:32   Tech podcast so long

01:38:36   So Casey, I think I have a solution to your BMW problem.

01:38:43   If I'm trying to solve my BMW problem with more BMWs and a shed load of money, then yes,

01:38:51   you have definitely found a solution for me.

01:38:53   BMW has come up with a subscription service.

01:38:57   You heard that right, that is not a joke.

01:39:00   It is now offering a subscription service only in Nashville, or I'm sorry, will be offering

01:39:04   a subscription service only in Nashville for $2,000 a month.

01:39:10   And up!

01:39:11   $2,000 a month.

01:39:14   You can choose between X5s, 4-Serieses, 5-Serieses, plug-in hybrids, etc.

01:39:22   And they will deliver with like white glove service, they will deliver the car you want

01:39:25   to your door, they will take away the car you already have, and you can be assured that

01:39:30   the car you are given is freshly detailed, etc. etc.

01:39:35   For $3,700 a month, you can alternatively get access to M4, M5, M6 convertibles, as

01:39:43   well as X5M, X6M, etc.

01:39:47   None of these apparently offer the 7 Series, but you know, whatever.

01:39:50   But what's interesting about this is it includes not only access to the car, but insurance,

01:39:54   maintenance, roadside assistance, etc., etc., etc.

01:39:56   So if you're willing to trade an asinine amount of money for a fair bit of convenience, you

01:40:02   can get a suite, or a fleet, I should say, of BMWs at your disposal.

01:40:07   And I think in general, this is a pretty cool idea, as long as you don't have kids where

01:40:15   you have to plug in a car seat, as long as you're not the kind of person that likes to

01:40:18   have a whole bunch of things sitting around in your car, be that a rag or a charger, perhaps

01:40:24   a obscenely overpriced car charger to go with your obscenely overpriced BMW subscription.

01:40:29   **Matt Stauffer** Wait, wait, wait. Do you have a rag in your car?

01:40:32   **Jaren L

01:40:32   Yes, I have a rag in my car. Why wouldn't you have a rag in your car?

01:40:35   Where—what kind of rag do you have and where is it?

01:40:37   I believe—well, so generally speaking, it is a blue surgical rag that was never used for surgery,

01:40:44   but my uncle was a eye surgeon for the longest time, and he would either purchase or snag a

01:40:51   series of these blue rags that are probably about a foot square, and they are the best rags for

01:40:56   general-purpose use. And they're intended to be used in, like, surgeries and things,

01:41:00   but he would just grab them and then give a batch to my dad or me and it is

01:41:05   sitting in the little container compartment whatever in in the driver's

01:41:08   side door so if I ever have to say wipe off the inside of the inside of the of

01:41:14   the windshield because maybe I've had my windows open and some like you know that

01:41:17   kind of like film that gets on the inside after a while you can wipe it off

01:41:21   with that if you ever have to kill a spider because somehow spiders found its

01:41:24   way into your car even then you're then you're smearing spiders all over the

01:41:28   windshield after the next time you clean it. Yeah, yeah. So the reason I asked about it

01:41:31   is because it brought back memories of my grandfather who also had a rag in his car,

01:41:37   but it was a filthy rag and it was in the trunk and it was used to clean off the dipstick

01:41:41   when you're checking the oil. Yeah, that's the only way I've ever seen. I'm more curious,

01:41:45   what are these rags used for in the surgery? I think to mop up blood and things like that.

01:41:49   Oh, jeez. For an eye surgeon, that's not terribly useful, right? Or one would hope

01:41:53   not anyway. But for general purpose surgeries, I'm assuming that's what they're for.

01:41:57   Speaking of surgery and surgical cleanliness, the reason I was moaning about your use of

01:42:03   this rag that you keep in the door pocket to clean the inside of your windshield is

01:42:09   because first of all, the inside of your windshield is a hard spot to clean. It's inconvenient.

01:42:14   It's hard to reach, right? You know, like just arm angle-wise. And stuff does. All sorts

01:42:21   of film of your human grossness collects on there and everything. But the other problem

01:42:25   especially I imagine in Casey's car,

01:42:27   well, you can correct me if I'm wrong,

01:42:28   is that potentially you may use something

01:42:32   to clean the dashboard that is right below the windshield,

01:42:35   some kind of product to keep that clean

01:42:38   or maintained or protected from UV or whatever.

01:42:40   - You're thinking like Armor All or equivalent.

01:42:42   - Or anything like that, right?

01:42:43   Something, something other than just a completely dry rag

01:42:46   to clean that part of your dashboard and make it look nice.

01:42:50   If you touch the rag that you're using

01:42:53   to clean the inside of your dashboard,

01:42:54   any part of it to the inside of your windshield,

01:42:58   if you touch that to the dashboard

01:42:59   and then bring that to your windshield,

01:43:01   you are in for a world of hurt.

01:43:02   Because the last thing you wanna do

01:43:04   is have even a corner of that thing,

01:43:06   touch your Armor All Covered dashboard

01:43:08   and then smear that all over your window

01:43:09   'cause you will spend the rest of your life

01:43:11   with your arm at a weird angle

01:43:12   trying to get that stuff off the inside of your windshield

01:43:14   and it is not easy.

01:43:15   So there's some good YouTube videos about this,

01:43:17   but the correct and only sane way

01:43:21   to clean the inside of your windshield

01:43:23   involves basically surgical cleanliness.

01:43:25   It's like you're in a silken chip fab clean room.

01:43:30   You must use a rag, perfectly clean,

01:43:33   freshly clean, has not touched anything else,

01:43:35   use it to wipe off the gross film,

01:43:37   then maybe you can use the other side of that rag

01:43:39   and then it's done.

01:43:40   Then you have to get your next rag

01:43:42   and you can't touch it to any part of the trim

01:43:44   or anything else that might have Armor All on it

01:43:45   'cause it's a disaster. - Oh my God.

01:43:47   All right, I have an alternate policy.

01:43:49   No Armor All ever goes in my car.

01:43:52   I hate Armor All.

01:43:53   I hate the idea that I touch any surface and it's greasy.

01:43:55   That is awful.

01:43:57   There was one time where a detailer used it without asking,

01:44:01   (laughs)

01:44:02   and it drove me nuts.

01:44:04   I was taking a beach towel, wiping it,

01:44:07   trying to wipe it all off.

01:44:09   It was horrible.

01:44:10   - Probably smearing it all over the inside

01:44:12   of your windshield.

01:44:13   Armor All is the worst, but there are lots of things

01:44:15   that you can use to clean the inside of your car.

01:44:16   All of them have, in various ways,

01:44:19   you do not want them touching your windshield at all.

01:44:21   - No, they don't.

01:44:22   vacuum cleaner and cloth.

01:44:24   That's all you need to clean a car.

01:44:25   You don't need to coat your dashboard with grease.

01:44:30   - Unfortunately, even water, even dampness,

01:44:34   the problem is the grease comes from you.

01:44:36   The grease comes from your body.

01:44:37   What's collecting on the inside of your windshield

01:44:40   is human scum, right?

01:44:42   It's coming from inside the car.

01:44:46   That also settles on your dashboard.

01:44:47   So even just rubbing it with a dry cloth,

01:44:49   you're picking up some grease.

01:44:51   And if you would like to rub the top of your dashboard with a dry cloth and then take that

01:44:55   same dry cloth and rub your windshield, you are adding to the mess on your windshield.

01:44:59   Cleaning the inside of your windshield is really hard to do.

01:45:02   And I'm terrible at it, by the way.

01:45:04   Don't think just because I reference those YouTube videos that show you how to do it

01:45:06   right, I am terrible at it, which is why I know how difficult it actually is to do.

01:45:11   Maybe I'm just not as greasy as you guys.

01:45:14   I am Italian.

01:45:17   I hardly ever have to clean the inside of my windshield.

01:45:18   I just don't touch it.

01:45:20   And by not touching it, I almost never have to clean it.

01:45:23   That is a reasonable policy, because a lot of people make the mistake of getting something

01:45:28   on their windshield, and then they try to rub it with their hand or something, and everybody

01:45:31   has grease on it.

01:45:32   And now you've just started the cycle of grease grossness.

01:45:35   But Casey's rag, that thing, I would never touch that to the inside of my windshield,

01:45:39   because I think you're just making it worse.

01:45:41   Casey, you need to come on.

01:45:43   You are fancy enough of a car person.

01:45:45   and you need to come on board the like,

01:45:46   time to crack out the completely sealed,

01:45:49   completely sterile, never seen the light of day rag,

01:45:52   which I will carefully handle with my perfectly clean hands

01:45:56   and wipe down the inside of my windshield,

01:45:58   maybe not even the whole windshield,

01:46:00   but just half of it and then throw that thing away.

01:46:03   And then your rag just keeping the trunk

01:46:05   for dipstick checking.

01:46:06   - Or you can just have lower standards.

01:46:07   Can we get back to the point?

01:46:09   So BMW has a subscription service.

01:46:11   - So do you think the BMW Concierge would do this for you?

01:46:14   (laughing)

01:46:16   'Cause he was listening like,

01:46:17   "What if you have a car seat?

01:46:18   "What if you have a rag?"

01:46:19   - I mean, 'cause they say they would,

01:46:20   they will personally deliver the vehicle.

01:46:23   They arrive fully fueled and freshly detailed

01:46:25   with personal preferences already pre-set.

01:46:28   - He's like, "Can I get a filthy rag in the door pocket?"

01:46:31   - Yeah, what do you mean by personal preferences?

01:46:33   Is it just like where the seat is, or can it be like,

01:46:36   can you also install this particular brand of car seat

01:46:38   in this spot, load the pocket below it

01:46:40   with these three toys my kid likes

01:46:41   and wants to play with in the car today,

01:46:43   put my brand of sunglasses in the sunglass holder

01:46:45   that is probably not there,

01:46:46   'cause BMW doesn't put sunglass holders anywhere.

01:46:48   How far will this go?

01:46:50   Could you get them to--

01:46:50   - You can pick your scent in the 7 Series, I think.

01:46:52   - Yeah, like could you get them to include

01:46:55   one of these surgical rags that mops up

01:46:57   Casey's uncle's eye blood in the door pocket

01:47:00   so you can reach it,

01:47:01   and can they pre-clean the windshield for you

01:47:04   so that you don't get anyone else's ambient grease

01:47:07   on your windshield?

01:47:08   - Well, they say it is detailed,

01:47:09   so you shouldn't have to do anything with it.

01:47:11   windshield should be sparkling clean when you get it.

01:47:13   Yeah, but I just think this is an interesting thing. The first I'd heard of this was actually

01:47:17   with Volvo with the new XC40, where you get your own XC40 and you can—the interesting thing about

01:47:27   this actually is I could swear I'd read that you can do this all via an app on your phone,

01:47:32   which how does that make sense when there's payment involved?

01:47:35   It's like Netflix for cars. You just constantly get a bill for $3,700 every month,

01:47:40   and that covers all the cost of you picking whatever vehicle you want. Like, it more than

01:47:45   covers the cost. They just charge you too much. Yeah, but in the case of Volvo, you know, they're

01:47:50   saying, "What makes Care by Volvo unique?" which is what they're calling their subscription service.

01:47:55   "No down payment, no price negotiation, one flat monthly fee with no surprises, includes premium

01:47:59   insurance no matter where you live, maintenance and excess wear coverage, upgrade to a new Volvo

01:48:02   in as little as 12 months, subscribe easily online or via the app, and a 15,000 mile allowance per

01:48:07   year. Like, if I was interested in an XC40, which that's not the kind of car that I particularly

01:48:13   want, this is a really, really cool idea. I don't know how much the Volvo setup costs,

01:48:19   and oh, there you go, starting at $600 a month for the base model, $700 a month for their

01:48:24   equivalent of the M Sport, which they call R-Drive. Or, excuse me, R-Design. But the

01:48:29   BMW version is, you know, many times that. And yes, I think it's a cool idea, and I kind

01:48:37   of like where this is going. The thought of just paying one monthly fee to have everything

01:48:41   taken care of is really cool.

01:48:43   Yeah, but believe me, they're charging you for it. Like this is not a good deal financially

01:48:48   speaking. None of these things are good deals financially speaking. Peace of mind wise,

01:48:51   it may be appealing to you to say, "Oh, now I just don't have to worry about it," but

01:48:54   you are paying not to worry.

01:48:56   And you're paying a lot. Like for the $3700 a month one for the high one to get like the

01:49:01   the M cars, like you can lease an M5 for like $1,000 a month and insurance on it is gonna

01:49:09   be less than that more. It's not gonna be another $1,000 a month.

01:49:13   - So you can lease three M5s and you can just rotate them each day.

01:49:16   - Yeah, and the funny thing is like Casey, you just said like, "Oh, wouldn't it be great

01:49:19   if you could just pay a monthly fee and have everything taken care of?" You can do that

01:49:23   already, it's called leasing. It already takes care of almost all of this.

01:49:27   - Well, but it doesn't do insurance, like not to say that paying an insurance bill is

01:49:31   But it does include maintenance and roadside assistance.

01:49:33   And you get a Concierge to your house.

01:49:34   Did I never tell you about that?

01:49:35   And it's the same car all the time.

01:49:37   I mean, this is totally for rich people who are like, oh,

01:49:38   today I want to try this car.

01:49:39   Oh, today I want to try-- oh, baby,

01:49:40   that we came out with a new car.

01:49:41   Is that included in my Netflix for Cars?

01:49:43   Sure it is.

01:49:44   I'll trade this in.

01:49:46   I feel like you really have to have a lot of time, and also,

01:49:48   to Casey's point, not a lot of junk in your car

01:49:51   to do this kind of rotation.

01:49:52   Although, I was trying to think of things in my life

01:49:54   that have been like this that actually have

01:49:56   been ridiculously good deals.

01:49:58   And I thought of one, which I'm sure this

01:50:00   this doesn't exist anymore but someone can write and tell me.

01:50:02   When I was a kid I went skiing almost every year.

01:50:06   And when I was a teen I wanted to buy fancy new skis for myself for a huge amount of money.

01:50:13   And the only way to know which skis you want to buy is to try a bunch of skis, kind of

01:50:17   like test driving.

01:50:18   And at the mountain they would have demos.

01:50:21   You could go to the ski shop and say I want to demo skis and you'd give them some paltry

01:50:25   amount of money.

01:50:27   I don't remember what it was.

01:50:28   Maybe it was $15, $10, $20.

01:50:32   - How much could it be on a cost?

01:50:33   - Yeah, exactly.

01:50:35   But it was a really,

01:50:36   I remember it seeming small to me then, right?

01:50:39   And in exchange for that, all day,

01:50:41   you can go to the ski shop and point to the $700

01:50:46   in 1990 money ski behind the counter

01:50:48   that you wanted to try and say, "I wanna try that one."

01:50:50   And you'd give them your ski boot

01:50:51   and they would adjust the bindings and say, "Here you go."

01:50:53   And you'd go up and take a run, you come back down

01:50:55   and you'd say, "All right, let me try that one."

01:50:56   and you'd point to the $800 1990s money ski over there.

01:50:59   And they would take your boot and adjust the bindings

01:51:01   and give it to you and you'd go up and come back down.

01:51:03   You can do that all day.

01:51:04   Exchange skis as many times as you want,

01:51:06   no additional fee each time.

01:51:09   Every time they would adjust the bindings

01:51:10   for your ski boots and your weight

01:51:11   and you would get to try hundreds and hundreds

01:51:13   and hundreds of dollars of skis in one day

01:51:16   for one flat fee of like 10 or $15.

01:51:18   Now granted, the lift tickets were 100 bucks in 1990 money,

01:51:21   but my parents were paying for those

01:51:22   so I don't have to worry about it.

01:51:23   I just remember being amazed at what a good deal it was.

01:51:28   There was no equivalent to that.

01:51:29   It's as if you could, for a fee of like $80, try as many B&W uses you wanted for a week

01:51:36   and just every time you wanted to go back to the dealer, "I'm going to try that one

01:51:38   now."

01:51:39   And you don't have to buy anything at the end of it, and I didn't buy anything at the

01:51:41   end of it.

01:51:42   I tried all these skis on real ski mountains, which is how I found my beloved Rossignol 7S

01:51:48   to be the ideal ski for me, which I still own to this day.

01:51:52   And that actually is one possible reason why somebody could reasonably want a plan like

01:51:58   this is like, I don't know if they have minimum terms, but if you could just sign up for one

01:52:03   month and if you wanted to buy one of these cars but you couldn't decide which one and

01:52:09   you didn't want to make an expensive mistake, you kiss $2,000 goodbye or whatever and just

01:52:15   try basically having a one month test drive of all these different models and you could

01:52:20   you could make your decision that way.

01:52:21   Or, say if you were trying to get a car review channel

01:52:24   off the ground on YouTube, and you needed access

01:52:26   to a bunch of cars to review, and you could schedule it

01:52:29   so you had all of them, you could do them all in one month.

01:52:31   Like, imagine being able to review like seven different cars

01:52:35   in one month because you'd have access to them.

01:52:37   - They have to pay Casey for that,

01:52:39   so we can have his little Demuro ad in the front

01:52:41   and say, "I got this car courtesy of, you know,

01:52:44   "whatever Toyota, blah, blah, blah."

01:52:47   Like, you could do a little ad for that.

01:52:48   I'm like, "They pay you."

01:52:49   - Oh, this is why I'm not a YouTube car journalist.

01:52:52   - Yeah, well, neither am I these days.

01:52:53   Apparently, Porsche also has one called Porsche Passport,

01:52:57   which is so illiterate.

01:52:57   - Good, so you could try all two of their cars?

01:53:00   - They have so many SUVs and plus up some other cars.

01:53:03   - In any case, I just think it's a very cool idea.

01:53:05   I don't know that it's gonna work for most people,

01:53:08   not the least of which, because it's an obscene

01:53:10   amount of money, but like you guys were saying,

01:53:12   this is trading money in favor of convenience.

01:53:16   And, you know, to your point, Marco, if you're gonna go this route, like, there's an argument

01:53:21   that leasing would be just as good or almost as good.

01:53:26   You don't get a guaranteed one-year upgrade in a lease, or most leases anyway, like you

01:53:31   would with, in the case of the Volvo one.

01:53:33   And you don't get access to many cars in a lease, like you can in the BMW or Porsche

01:53:38   ones.

01:53:39   But I do think it's a cool idea, and if you have more money than sense...

01:53:43   I mean the good thing is this makes leasing

01:53:46   look pretty reasonable by comparison.

01:53:48   (laughs)

01:53:49   And leasing, yeah, you don't get every year's new model,

01:53:53   but most cars, every year is a really minor update.

01:53:57   Most cars, they only change in substantial ways

01:54:00   every three to five years, so you don't need to get

01:54:04   every single year, and while I would miss the,

01:54:08   or while you would miss the concierge with your blood cloth,

01:54:13   I think there's a pretty good argument to be made

01:54:15   that the parts of this that are appealing to you right now,

01:54:19   in theory, are really directly saying,

01:54:22   you're ready for a lease.

01:54:24   That's what this means.

01:54:25   You are so ready for a lease, because you're like,

01:54:27   oh, I can just pay a flat monthly fee,

01:54:30   and then maintenance is included.

01:54:33   Yes, there are ways to do that,

01:54:35   and you don't have to worry about upgrades down the road.

01:54:39   Yes, yes, exactly.

01:54:42   You can do it.

01:54:43   Now I can offer you a wonderful deal

01:54:46   where I will offer you most of this service

01:54:49   for a quarter of the price

01:54:51   and you don't even have to be in Nashville.

01:54:52   - Aw, that sounds great.

01:54:53   - For the main reason, I think,

01:54:54   that leasing is not for Casey,

01:54:56   it's because it will force him

01:54:57   to make a new car buying decision every three months

01:54:59   and I don't think the show can handle that

01:55:01   every three years, rather.

01:55:02   - Yeah, even every three years.

01:55:03   Yeah, it's true.

01:55:04   If people just made cars I wanted to buy,

01:55:06   it would be so much easier.

01:55:07   Like, just make the Model 3 have an actual dashboard.

01:55:10   Make the Model S not a bazillion dollars.

01:55:12   Make BMWs that don't break.

01:55:14   Any of these would be reasonable options.

01:55:16   Make a Golf R with a sunroof.

01:55:18   - But here's the thing.

01:55:19   If you lease, if you start a three year lease today,

01:55:22   what you're doing is just kicking that can down the road

01:55:25   for three years.

01:55:25   - Sounds great.

01:55:26   - No, but you can say like, you know what?

01:55:28   I would rather not think about this

01:55:29   for the next three years.

01:55:31   I'll get back to it then.

01:55:32   It's like snoozing your car angst.

01:55:34   Like you just snooze it for three years

01:55:36   and you know, remind me in three years

01:55:38   to revisit my car craziness.

01:55:41   In the meantime, I will happily drive this thing

01:55:43   that's being taken care of by the lease plan

01:55:46   and I don't have to worry about its maintenance costs.

01:55:48   And that thing could be like an M3 or something.

01:55:50   - Casey's just waiting for BMW to have a round table

01:55:53   about manual transmission, reliable cars,

01:55:58   but I don't think that's in your future.

01:55:59   - No, I don't think so.

01:56:01   (door slams)