ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Live from Wednesday night, it's a TV

00:00:03 ◼   ► I feel like if I had watched Saturday Night Live more frequently

00:00:07 ◼   ► I would have riffed on that whole announcer spiel. You would have realized how badly he mangled the

00:00:12 ◼   ► quote and reference live from Wednesday night

00:00:15 ◼   ► from Wednesday night, they play

00:00:19 ◼   ► Live from New York. They're definitely not from Wednesday. Yeah fair enough for Saturday. I have some pre-show announcements gentlemen

00:00:29 ◼   ► First of all, for the next few minutes, I'm a single parent.

00:00:33 ◼   ► So it is possible that I will need to depart if Declan wakes up,

00:00:37 ◼   ► as he has done recently, although usually at two or three in the morning,

00:00:41 ◼   ► explaining to me that he doesn't want to be asleep and that he wants to be awake.

00:00:45 ◼   ► - Mm, been there. - So if I disappear momentarily,

00:00:49 ◼   ► that would be why. And before any parents in the room

00:00:53 ◼   ► email me to say, "Oh, you need a sleep-to-wake alarm," we have one.

00:00:57 ◼   ► We have a nice little alarm clock that will turn green when it's time for him to wake up.

00:01:01 ◼   ► And even though I think of him as a...

00:01:04 ◼   ► I was gonna say reasonably smart kid, but you can't tell at almost three.

00:01:07 ◼   ► So as a not moronic kid, even with that said,

00:01:12 ◼   ► he seems to forget in the middle of the night that the green light is not yet on

00:01:16 ◼   ► and that he needs to go the f*ck to sleep.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Which, by the way, is a great bedtime story.

00:01:20 ◼   ► So we have that same alarm.

00:01:22 ◼   ► I have two other parent friends who have that same alarm for their two different children.

00:01:26 ◼   ► All of the children regard that alarm as simply

00:01:29 ◼   ► one input of many. - Suggestion.

00:01:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, it's advice.

00:01:33 ◼   ► The advice that says, "Hey, it's green,

00:01:35 ◼   ► "you might wanna wake up now."

00:01:36 ◼   ► But when it's not green, it's like,

00:01:37 ◼   ► "Hey, well, I wanna be up now,

00:01:38 ◼   ► "and I wanna go bother Mom and Dad."

00:01:40 ◼   ► So, you know, it's like, it is simply one input of many,

00:01:44 ◼   ► and they will choose to ignore it whenever they feel like it.

00:01:46 ◼   ► It isn't a matter of your kid being smart or not smart.

00:01:48 ◼   ► Your kid is perfectly smart enough.

00:01:50 ◼   ► Your kid is as smart as all the other kids

00:01:52 ◼   ► who have had these same alarms that have said,

00:01:54 ◼   ► Well, it's not green, but I don't care and it doesn't really matter, so I'm gonna go in there anyway.

00:01:59 ◼   ► I think it worked on my son. We of course have the same thing, but we didn't even try it on my

00:02:04 ◼   ► daughter because just personality-wise it would be useless. In fact, we had to remove all clocks. We

00:02:09 ◼   ► had still no clocks in her room. We had to remove all clocks from her room because she would stare

00:02:14 ◼   ► at them and be like, you know, whatever her bedtime was and like five minutes after and I'm still

00:02:19 ◼   ► awake and then so she'd be there like it's it's 134 and i'm still awake it's 247 and i'm still

00:02:24 ◼   ► she would just stare at it and and obsess about the fact that she's still awake so we had to

00:02:28 ◼   ► remove all clocks from her and we haven't put them back yet that was years ago we haven't put them

00:02:31 ◼   ► back yet probably we could but then again maybe not yeah so he actually does do a pretty darn

00:02:38 ◼   ► good job in the actual morning time uh when we really don't want him to like get fussy or

00:02:44 ◼   ► or anything like that before it's time for him to get up.

00:02:48 ◼   ► But in the middle of the night, like Marco said,

00:02:50 ◼   ► it seems to be but a recommendation and nothing more.

00:02:54 ◼   ► And so that's been the festivities of late,

00:02:56 ◼   ► but that's actually not the big announcement.

00:02:59 ◼   ► The big announcement is we have moved.

00:03:01 ◼   ► And by we, I mean just me, and I mean just the office

00:03:04 ◼   ► from one room in the house to another, but--

00:03:06 ◼   ► - You didn't talk about burying the lead.

00:03:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, right?

00:03:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:11 ◼   ► If I sound like garbage, don't blame Marco, blame me.

00:03:14 ◼   ► I've put up some sound deadening material on the wall

00:03:17 ◼   ► directly behind my 27-inch reflective glass,

00:03:21 ◼   ► but I may need more. - Oh my God.

00:03:23 ◼   ► Casey, for God's sake, why did you move?

00:03:26 ◼   ► - Well, because we need a place for a baby.

00:03:30 ◼   ► - Yes, okay.

00:03:31 ◼   ► Congratulations, it's about damn time.

00:03:33 ◼   ► You said it on the show.

00:03:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, so guess what, Erin's pregnant,

00:03:36 ◼   ► and that's super exciting.

00:03:38 ◼   ► - And based on your recent car purchase,

00:03:40 ◼   ► we can conclude she's having sextuplets, is that it?

00:03:42 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Exactly.

00:03:42 ◼   ► (both laughing)

00:03:44 ◼   ► - Exactly right.

00:03:45 ◼   ► Now, there's only one baby in there,

00:03:47 ◼   ► as has been confirmed numerous times.

00:03:50 ◼   ► But anyway, suffice to say I've relocated rooms.

00:03:53 ◼   ► This room is bigger, potentially more echoey,

00:03:56 ◼   ► maybe less echoey, who knows?

00:03:57 ◼   ► So Marco may be really, really have some fun

00:04:01 ◼   ► to do on this edit with what is the tool chain

00:04:04 ◼   ► that has like the thing that magically erases

00:04:06 ◼   ► John's air conditioner?

00:04:08 ◼   ► What is that called? - Well, there's a number

00:04:09 ◼   ► of tools that can do that that I have used in the past.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Audacity has the most basic one for free.

00:04:14 ◼   ► It's basically, it's like a noise profile remover,

00:04:16 ◼   ► so you select some of the recording

00:04:18 ◼   ► that's just the noise you wanna remove.

00:04:20 ◼   ► Like when no one's talking,

00:04:21 ◼   ► you just hear the background noise.

00:04:22 ◼   ► And then you say, all right, profile this,

00:04:24 ◼   ► and then you select the whole recording

00:04:25 ◼   ► and say remove that noise from this whole recording.

00:04:27 ◼   ► So Audition does it, Audacity does it.

00:04:30 ◼   ► The one I've been using most recently is the iZotope RX.

00:04:34 ◼   ► - That's it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:35 ◼   ► - Which has a number of other tools as well.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And that thing is amazing.

00:04:39 ◼   ► It is not cheap, but if you process audio

00:04:43 ◼   ► and need to remove annoying background noise

00:04:46 ◼   ► or echo or headphone bleed or hum or so many other things,

00:04:51 ◼   ► I have not found anything better than iZotope RX.

00:04:53 ◼   ► It is really something else.

00:04:55 ◼   ► Well, congratulations on the reason you moved

00:04:57 ◼   ► and don't worry about the audio, we'll figure it out.

00:04:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, so, yeah, thanks.

00:05:00 ◼   ► I forgot that we had talked about this in the post show.

00:05:03 ◼   ► I think it was like the post, post, post, post show

00:05:06 ◼   ► last week and it didn't even cross my mind

00:05:08 ◼   ► that that probably didn't make the released recording. So yeah, guess what? Aaron's pregnant,

00:05:11 ◼   ► and so far everything and everyone seems healthy, and we're super excited about it, and we'll

00:05:17 ◼   ► put a link in the show notes with a little bit of background information about that.

00:05:21 ◼   ► And an adorable picture of Aaron and Declan.

00:05:23 ◼   ► And for the people who are just going to listen to the podcast, the gender is sealed in an

00:05:28 ◼   ► envelope and Casey and Aaron don't want to know. Whether they're going to – did you

00:05:34 ◼   ► open it already since last week?

00:05:35 ◼   ► No, we haven't opened yet.

00:05:37 ◼   ► Did you see a clue on a sonogram or something?

00:05:39 ◼   ► Well, no.

00:05:41 ◼   ► But when we were told to turn around so the technician can figure out what the gender was, that took suspiciously little time.

00:05:51 ◼   ► So we'll see. That indicates to me that it was a suspiciously short amount of time to prove a negative.

00:05:59 ◼   ► But you never know. So we'll see what happens.

00:06:02 ◼   ► My kind of farmer's almanac tale or my experience, which is 150% anecdotal, and I recognize that,

00:06:11 ◼   ► is that if the woman tends to carry all of the baby like in the tummy area and doesn't

00:06:17 ◼   ► seem to get any bigger anywhere else, that seems to generally speaking be a boy amongst

00:06:21 ◼   ► the friends of ours.

00:06:22 ◼   ► This sounds not science.

00:06:23 ◼   ► Oh, this is completely anti-scientific.

00:06:24 ◼   ► No, no, no, no.

00:06:25 ◼   ► We're based in science in any way.

00:06:28 ◼   ► No, no, no.

00:06:29 ◼   ► There's no science involved.

00:06:30 ◼   ► This is all bull.

00:06:31 ◼   ► I recognize this is bull, I admit this is bull.

00:06:35 ◼   ► It was like a full moon when the child was conceived, then it's definitely a boy.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Do you know what?

00:06:41 ◼   ► That's rela- no, not really.

00:06:42 ◼   ► I'll tell you Kate's story.

00:06:45 ◼   ► So we went in for one, I guess it was the first ultrasound where you can actually find

00:06:49 ◼   ► out and they said, "Do you want to know?"

00:06:50 ◼   ► And we said, "Yes."

00:06:51 ◼   ► And they said, "It's a girl."

00:06:52 ◼   ► And we're like, "Great, because we already have a boy, so no, I want to eat, so that

00:06:54 ◼   ► would be great, okay."

00:06:55 ◼   ► Was that how I actually responded?

00:06:57 ◼   ► "Great, okay, now we want to meet."

00:06:59 ◼   ► All right, so and then like we were in for like another

00:07:03 ◼   ► Ultrasound I guess later in the pregnancy whenever you like do like the routine second wonder. I don't know but anyway later

00:07:09 ◼   ► We're in it was already we'd like oh

00:07:11 ◼   ► You know picking out girls things and thinking of girls names and stuff like that be going for one later

00:07:15 ◼   ► And they're like oh looks like it's a boy and like what wait

00:07:18 ◼   ► How do you say looks like a boy they told us it was a girl last time like no no looks like a boy

00:07:24 ◼   ► And then the person looks closer and like oh, maybe yeah, maybe you're right

00:07:28 ◼   ► maybe that was just a thumb. And they're like, "All right, anyway, everything's fine. You're

00:07:33 ◼   ► doing it like..." And so that, you know, let me know that it's not an exact science, first of all.

00:07:41 ◼   ► Anyway, she came out, she was totally a girl. It was fine. But not just a little bit. Yeah,

00:07:46 ◼   ► there was no confusion. But there's a lot of stuff. You've seen the ultrasounds. It's a

00:07:51 ◼   ► confusing picture. And it takes some skill and experience as a technician to interpret that as

00:07:56 ◼   ► anything and you know a thumb or a toe ends up in the wrong position with the

00:08:01 ◼   ► baby all twisted up you people can get confused but both people on their

00:08:05 ◼   ► initial proclamation sounded very very sure and the only reason the second

00:08:10 ◼   ► person kind of hemmed in hot after was because we said wait a second we've had

00:08:14 ◼   ► like a month and a half of thinking this is gonna be a girl and now you're telling

00:08:18 ◼   ► me boy yeah so you'll find out or you'll have in my situation it's like well

00:08:24 ◼   ► Well sometimes the baby is resting in such a way, in such a position, and you see something

00:08:29 ◼   ► that makes it very, very clear and it couldn't really be anything else.

00:08:32 ◼   ► And technicians are like, "Well, we're not really supposed to tell you yet."

00:08:34 ◼   ► But I'm like, "But yeah, what's that?"

00:08:35 ◼   ► And they're like, "Well, you know."

00:08:38 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:08:40 ◼   ► So yeah, so we asked the technician to put it in an envelope, seal it, and we're not

00:08:44 ◼   ► the kind of people that want to do a gender reveal party.

00:08:47 ◼   ► I understand that's very popular and fun and whatever.

00:08:52 ◼   ► But it's not really for us.

00:08:54 ◼   ► We just wanted to be able to change our minds in the future, if we so desire.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And so we have a sealed envelope with the gender in it.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And both of us are very, very Type A, very anal retentive.

00:09:05 ◼   ► So I would say, if you wanted to make a bet, that it's likely that we will probably end

00:09:11 ◼   ► up opening it.

00:09:12 ◼   ► I'm waiting for somebody to start an ATP pool to see what day it is we open it.

00:09:16 ◼   ► But sitting here now, the hope is we will hold out until the baby is born.

00:09:21 ◼   ► And we'll see what happens.

00:09:22 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:09:23 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:09:24 ◼   ► In any case, so yeah, I didn't mean to make that the entire pre-show, but yeah, that's

00:09:29 ◼   ► a thing.

00:09:30 ◼   ► So let's start with some follow-up, and as it turns out, the follow-up is the Marco

00:09:36 ◼   ► show today.

00:09:37 ◼   ► So…

00:09:38 ◼   ► Wait, what?

00:09:39 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, if you open the show notes…

00:09:40 ◼   ► I should really look at the document.

00:09:41 ◼   ► Yeah, if you open the show notes…

00:09:43 ◼   ► So as I hear Marco saying, "Oh, I should probably open the document," by the magic

00:09:48 ◼   ► of Google Docs, I see a new person open up the document.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Oh, look at that.

00:09:52 ◼   ► It turns out it's Marco Arment.

00:09:55 ◼   ► So yeah, so it turns out that iTunes U collections

00:10:00 ◼   ► are moving to Apple Podcasts, and that got you on,

00:10:03 ◼   ► I don't wanna call it a rant, but kind of a,

00:10:05 ◼   ► 'cause that implies negativity, but kind of a,

00:10:08 ◼   ► you got on your soapbox and talked about your thoughts

00:10:10 ◼   ► for the future of iTunes, so can you kinda

00:10:12 ◼   ► talk us through that?

00:10:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, basically there was this little news article

00:10:15 ◼   ► last week that said that iTunes U,

00:10:18 ◼   ► which is like the kind of educational course collection

00:10:21 ◼   ► and iTunes that have been around for quite a long time.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Do you guys remember when those launched?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Not recently, right?

00:10:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't think so.

00:10:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, so anyways, so iTunes U content,

00:10:30 ◼   ► which is actually wonderful and quite extensive,

00:10:33 ◼   ► that's been announced, that's moving into Apple Podcasts.

00:10:36 ◼   ► So it will no longer be a separate section,

00:10:39 ◼   ► it's always been like a section in iTunes,

00:10:41 ◼   ► and now that is moving to Apple Podcasts.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And I interpret this as, you know,

00:10:46 ◼   ► if it was just this by itself,

00:10:47 ◼   ► well, that's kind of a weird thing,

00:10:48 ◼   ► But when you combine it with things like the stopping

00:10:52 ◼   ► selling all iPods that aren't iOS based,

00:10:55 ◼   ► and just some other little moves we've seen here and there,

00:10:58 ◼   ► and just the timing in general,

00:11:00 ◼   ► I think this is just one of many signs

00:11:03 ◼   ► that they are preparing for the abandonment

00:11:07 ◼   ► or total deletion of iTunes.

00:11:09 ◼   ► Probably abandonment.

00:11:10 ◼   ► It's probably gonna sit around forever as like,

00:11:12 ◼   ► you know, in the utilities folder for the very few,

00:11:15 ◼   ► you know, niche use cases that people need it for anymore.

00:11:17 ◼   ► But I think iTunes is finally being relegated

00:11:21 ◼   ► to the dustbin of history,

00:11:22 ◼   ► as it should have been a very long time ago.

00:11:25 ◼   ► And they are, I bet, in the next version of Mac OS.

00:11:29 ◼   ► Not the one that's coming out in a month,

00:11:31 ◼   ► but the one that's coming out probably next year.

00:11:33 ◼   ► I bet we're gonna see, finally, a split up of iTunes

00:11:35 ◼   ► into brand new apps called things like music,

00:11:38 ◼   ► TV, podcasts, things like that.

00:11:41 ◼   ► - Do you remember the screenshots for some of the,

00:11:44 ◼   ► that dialogue box that's saying,

00:11:46 ◼   ► open document in movies or something like that.

00:11:48 ◼   ► Do you remember that?

00:11:50 ◼   ► - Oh, this just went through not long ago, didn't it?

00:11:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, someone had found some dialogue

00:11:55 ◼   ► in some version of Mac OS, some beta version of Mac OS

00:11:58 ◼   ► that in response to trying to open a video

00:12:01 ◼   ► instead of it opening in iTunes or QuickTime Player,

00:12:04 ◼   ► it said, "Do you want to open this in movies?"

00:12:06 ◼   ► - That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:12:09 ◼   ► - And it makes me think, if that's real,

00:12:11 ◼   ► that's why I wish I could still find it,

00:12:12 ◼   ► but I've lost track of it.

00:12:14 ◼   ► Is this a case where the replacements for iTunes were kinda almost ready but just didn't

00:12:20 ◼   ► quite make the cut?

00:12:22 ◼   ► Or is this the case where they're not gonna be ready for a long time but someone got ahead

00:12:28 ◼   ► of the game and did the easy part which is updating a dialogue box or something?

00:12:32 ◼   ► Like what I'm always trying to gauge is how close are we to the death of iTunes?

00:12:37 ◼   ► It's one of those things that probably is not, people don't care enough about it for

00:12:42 ◼   ► it to leak like iPhone parts. So we'll probably just kind of find out either when they accidentally

00:12:47 ◼   ► post a beta that they're not supposed to or when someone announces it on stage. I mean,

00:12:52 ◼   ► at this point, I kind of wonder how many people will even care, like, based on how many people

00:12:59 ◼   ► still use iTunes. I mean, it'll probably be a big deal in the tech press just because

00:13:02 ◼   ► tech press is full of old people who remember iTunes, right? But for everyone else, is it

00:13:06 ◼   ► going to be a significant moment? And what I'm worried about is all of the boringly named

00:13:12 ◼   ► apps, music, what other things would it be like? Music, movies, what else is it gonna

00:13:18 ◼   ► be?

00:13:19 ◼   ► >>T.V. probably, podcasts I would bet.

00:13:22 ◼   ► >>Yeah, maybe. Anyway, if those apps have to travel the same road as the new Photos

00:13:29 ◼   ► app did, I'll be kind of sad because Photos just started off very anemic and weird and

00:13:35 ◼   ► janky and it's a little bit better now and it's getting a little bit better still in

00:13:41 ◼   ► High Sierra, but it was like a big regression for my photo in terms of functionality and

00:13:47 ◼   ► just polish and everything.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Like it was a super simplified, it basically looked like a UI kid application that was

00:13:52 ◼   ► somehow ported to the Mac and everything was all stripped down and removed.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And it wasn't like tiny and quick and lightning fast with that stripping down.

00:14:00 ◼   ► It was like stripped down, but also still sluggish and annoying.

00:14:03 ◼   ► And I don't want that.

00:14:04 ◼   ► Like iTunes, you know, we don't love iTunes, but the functionality that it has for like

00:14:10 ◼   ► Finding a song and playing it more or less works and I can just imagine that exact same function of typing in something in

00:14:17 ◼   ► A search box and having it narrow list down and having me like double click on a thing to hear it

00:14:21 ◼   ► Adding the photos style lag to every one of those operations just a few extra milliseconds

00:14:27 ◼   ► To make you feel better and remove as many controls as possible

00:14:31 ◼   ► I kind of already moved a lot of controls but remove all the controls that you're used to so it's just like a big empty

00:14:35 ◼   ► blank window

00:14:37 ◼   ► Where everything is a little bit slower than you want it to be with less functionality than I had before

00:14:41 ◼   ► I'm hoping that's not the case. I'm hoping these new slim down applications

00:14:45 ◼   ► Give us the benefits that we want from them being slimmed down

00:14:49 ◼   ► Not just the lack of confusion about like this is just an app for playing music and you don't worry about anything else

00:14:53 ◼   ► But that the apps themselves are nicer and not they don't just look like hey

00:14:58 ◼   ► We took the music app from iOS and we put a Mac title bar on top of it

00:15:02 ◼   ► Here you go, because that will make me sad. I

00:15:04 ◼   ► I think the reason I'm kind of looking forward to this happening, assuming that this is on

00:15:09 ◼   ► the table, and I think it probably is, I mean, it does seem like this is the direction they're

00:15:13 ◼   ► moving, but one of the reasons why I'm interested in this is just on a basic level, I just appreciate

00:15:20 ◼   ► seeing significant effort into the Mac platform, you know, because it's so easy to look at

00:15:26 ◼   ► how Apple has operated over the last few years and conclude that the Mac is really being

00:15:30 ◼   ► neglected and they've done a few things in the very recent past, like basically in the

00:15:36 ◼   ► last year, they've done a few things that suggest that no, the Mac isn't being neglected

00:15:41 ◼   ► at least anymore, maybe it was for a little bit but now it isn't being neglected anymore

00:15:45 ◼   ► and here's some good stuff that's happening.

00:15:47 ◼   ► So any sign of significant investment into the Mac platform, which breaking up iTunes

00:15:52 ◼   ► and rewriting all these things as presumably new apps, that's a big undertaking.

00:15:58 ◼   ► It's not like a big undertaking at the low level OS level,

00:16:02 ◼   ► but it is a big undertaking for the app,

00:16:04 ◼   ► for basically the applications teams,

00:16:06 ◼   ► and the people responsible for all these media apps

00:16:09 ◼   ► and their back ends and everything else.

00:16:10 ◼   ► That's a big undertaking.

00:16:12 ◼   ► And so to have that, to take that on

00:16:15 ◼   ► when technically you didn't have to,

00:16:17 ◼   ► they could just keep iTunes going,

00:16:20 ◼   ► even though it's terrible, and they could just say,

00:16:22 ◼   ► "Well, it's not really worth ever fixing iTunes."

00:16:25 ◼   ► And that would be disappointing.

00:16:26 ◼   ► That would show that they don't really care

00:16:27 ◼   ► with the Mac anymore, but the fact that they seem

00:16:31 ◼   ► like they're probably going in this direction

00:16:32 ◼   ► if they do this, that's a very good sign

00:16:34 ◼   ► for the Mac platform in general.

00:16:36 ◼   ► And then secondly, in regards to the actual apps,

00:16:39 ◼   ► the answer will really be it depends.

00:16:40 ◼   ► I mean, a lot of the roles of some of these apps,

00:16:43 ◼   ► like podcasts, there has never been a podcasts app

00:16:46 ◼   ► on the Mac from Apple.

00:16:48 ◼   ► iTunes can play podcasts, but that's, you know,

00:16:50 ◼   ► it's pretty basic and it's really not

00:16:52 ◼   ► very well designed for it.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Similarly iTunes can also play movies and TV shows.

00:16:58 ◼   ► It pretty much sucks.

00:17:00 ◼   ► I've done it, it's not very pleasant

00:17:01 ◼   ► to play these things in iTunes.

00:17:03 ◼   ► Again, it works, you can do it, but it's not very good.

00:17:06 ◼   ► And then the music part of iTunes is this weird,

00:17:11 ◼   ► whatever the multi-headed thing is at the Hydra?

00:17:14 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

00:17:14 ◼   ► - Okay, so it's like this weird, thanks, reference check.

00:17:18 ◼   ► It's like this weird Hydra of you have this entire

00:17:21 ◼   ► local management thing, along with iTunes Match,

00:17:24 ◼   ► matches your local music to the cloud and everything. And then you also have this Apple

00:17:27 ◼   ► Music thing, which is really totally separate and works totally separate, but tries to integrate

00:17:32 ◼   ► into the same interface. And the combination of Apple Music into iTunes with your local

00:17:37 ◼   ► music library and things like that is a disaster in the UI. It's so clunky and confusing and

00:17:43 ◼   ► opens people up to weird bugs and accidental data loss and things. It's really not great

00:17:48 ◼   ► at all. So the idea of making a whole new music app I think raises the significant question

00:17:56 ◼   ► of whether it would be Apple Music only. And I think I would prefer if it was. Because

00:18:03 ◼   ► to me if they could remove Apple Music from iTunes and just let iTunes be the legacy app

00:18:10 ◼   ► that does your local music library and has nothing to do with Apple Music, then the Apple

00:18:15 ◼   ► music app could finally have its own coherent design that would be way less confusing, way

00:18:21 ◼   ► more lightweight, would solve people's issues with storage and cloud matching and everything

00:18:25 ◼   ► by basically just not supporting any of that stuff. That would be so much better. So I

00:18:29 ◼   ► hope that's the direction they're going. I don't know if it will be. I would give it

00:18:32 ◼   ► maybe 50/50 odds if they do this.

00:18:34 ◼   ► Are you saying that you wouldn't be able to have a local music collection in the music

00:18:38 ◼   ► app? Would iTunes stay around forever?

00:18:40 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:18:41 ◼   ► There are lots of ancient Mac OS apps that do basically stay around forever.

00:18:48 ◼   ► Many of them are better than the utilities folder, but they're all still there.

00:18:50 ◼   ► So if you wanted iTunes to be your local music player, fine, it can keep being your local

00:18:54 ◼   ► music player.

00:18:55 ◼   ► Also, it isn't the only one that exists in the world.

00:18:57 ◼   ► There are other local music players for Mac OS, and if Apple went in this direction with

00:19:01 ◼   ► the official music app, and also iTunes basically died eventually over time or immediately,

00:19:08 ◼   ► then there would be an immediate large market

00:19:10 ◼   ► for other people to make these apps.

00:19:11 ◼   ► So I wouldn't worry too much about that.

00:19:13 ◼   ► Even though, like I am a person who uses iTunes

00:19:16 ◼   ► almost entirely for local music.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And that's not going to change anytime soon.

00:19:21 ◼   ► But I recognize also that is like a dying breed.

00:19:24 ◼   ► And if Apple Music is able to be its own app

00:19:28 ◼   ► and basically kick it out of iTunes,

00:19:30 ◼   ► that's way better for both Apple Music

00:19:33 ◼   ► and local music libraries.

00:19:35 ◼   ► - I don't like that idea.

00:19:36 ◼   ► I want the, I think just an app just dedicated to music,

00:19:40 ◼   ► like the solution I think is not to say,

00:19:42 ◼   ► oh, it's confusing because you have iTunes match

00:19:43 ◼   ► and local files plus cloud files

00:19:45 ◼   ► and it's all confusing in iTunes.

00:19:46 ◼   ► The solution is not to not let people do local,

00:19:49 ◼   ► it's to make a dedicated music app that,

00:19:51 ◼   ► you know, makes it not confusing.

00:19:54 ◼   ► Like, so it's better about all the things

00:19:58 ◼   ► that we can play about iTunes about,

00:19:59 ◼   ► about not respecting your files on disc,

00:20:01 ◼   ► about improperly matching them,

00:20:03 ◼   ► about not respecting your metadata.

00:20:05 ◼   ► Like it has to serve the needs of the entire range of music you could have.

00:20:10 ◼   ► You could have music that you, from your own CDs or illegally downloaded or whatever, that

00:20:16 ◼   ► you've carefully tagged and organized over many, many years.

00:20:19 ◼   ► You could have a subscription to Apple Music.

00:20:23 ◼   ► All these are things that could be there and it has to respect them.

00:20:26 ◼   ► It has to, you know, it has to treat them, not treat them cavalierly and do a good job

00:20:32 ◼   ► backing things up and be reliable and all the things that you get a chance to do when

00:20:35 ◼   ► you start from scratch with a new application rather than saying oh this is just going to

00:20:39 ◼   ► be an Apple Music streaming player and we'll let you know a third-party opportunity to

00:20:43 ◼   ► do music because I don't think there's enough of a market for there to be you know because

00:20:49 ◼   ► I just don't think that many people have local music collections that they care that much

00:20:52 ◼   ► about for there to be a robust third-party music player especially if that third-party

00:20:57 ◼   ► music player doesn't support streaming services who's gonna make that application and say

00:21:01 ◼   ► say, "We're just going to sell to the diminishing proportion of the user base who have local

00:21:09 ◼   ► music that they care about."

00:21:10 ◼   ► Like, that's not a winning—even without iTunes in the picture at all, that's not a

00:21:14 ◼   ► winning formula.

00:21:15 ◼   ► So I really hope they don't do that.

00:21:16 ◼   ► I hope they have a music app that does everything that it needs to do.

00:21:22 ◼   ► You know, I think you underestimate how much both Marco and Steven Hackett would pay for

00:21:27 ◼   ► this sort of manager standalone music app.

00:21:31 ◼   ► But be that as it may, it's funny because I feel like my heart agrees with Marco and

00:21:37 ◼   ► left--if I were calling the shots, I would want there to be two different apps.

00:21:42 ◼   ► Like let iTunes stick around forever, but slim it down to be just managing your local

00:21:46 ◼   ► music library and/or iTunes match.

00:21:48 ◼   ► And you know, obviously there's some nuances there, but let's--for the purposes of simplicity,

00:21:52 ◼   ► let's call it that.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And then have, like Marco said, a brand new Apple Music app that's just for Apple Music.

00:21:59 ◼   ► And I think I would like that a lot.

00:22:01 ◼   ► And that's part of the reason why I've stuck with Spotify even after Apple Music became

00:22:04 ◼   ► a thing.

00:22:05 ◼   ► Part of it was because I didn't care for much of Apple Music in general.

00:22:10 ◼   ► But I also actually liked having that separation and continue to like having that separation

00:22:14 ◼   ► of the music that is legitimately mine and the music that I'm just renting, basically.

00:22:20 ◼   ► And having Apple Music versus iTunes would satisfy that.

00:22:25 ◼   ► But my brain, even though my heart agrees with Marco, my brain agrees with John, and

00:22:29 ◼   ► I think that the rightest answer to the solution is probably just making iTunes, or whatever,

00:22:34 ◼   ► replaces it not crappy, and have it more eloquently handle remote music versus local music, etc.

00:22:44 ◼   ► And the other thing I'm really wary of is even though I really would love to see iTunes

00:22:50 ◼   ► either die or get revamped such that it's not all things to all people.

00:22:56 ◼   ► I really worry, and Jon you were saying this earlier, I really worry that we're in one

00:23:00 ◼   ► of those photo scenarios when all of us was calling for, you know, "Oh, let's replace

00:23:05 ◼   ► photos.

00:23:06 ◼   ► Photos are so old, nobody's paying attention to it.

00:23:08 ◼   ► Let's fix it."

00:23:09 ◼   ► And then we got the fix and we were all like, "Ugh, this is not what we wanted at all."

00:23:13 ◼   ► Replace iPhotos, you mean, not photos.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Sorry, yes, yes, yes, thank you.

00:23:16 ◼   ► Replace iPhoto.

00:23:18 ◼   ► And obviously it's gotten a lot better, but it still was not really what we wanted.

00:23:22 ◼   ► Look at, what was it, Final Cut X?

00:23:24 ◼   ► Is that right?

00:23:25 ◼   ► Something like that?

00:23:26 ◼   ► I don't really do any video stuff.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:23:28 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:23:29 ◼   ► Oh no.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Oh no.

00:23:31 ◼   ► I'm sorry everybody.

00:23:32 ◼   ► He does that?

00:23:33 ◼   ► Gray does that, doesn't he?

00:23:34 ◼   ► I can't tell if he's doing it on purpose.

00:23:35 ◼   ► It has to be.

00:23:36 ◼   ► I mean, I totally did that on purpose.

00:23:39 ◼   ► Totally did that on purpose.

00:23:40 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm so sorry to everyone.

00:23:42 ◼   ► But the point is, when Final Cut Pro got redone and everyone was really perturbed about the

00:23:50 ◼   ► things that were dropped—I'm not saying unfairly, but was perturbed about the things

00:23:53 ◼   ► that were dropped, the features that were dropped—I fear that we're in a similar situation

00:23:57 ◼   ► with iTunes, and I don't see any way how we couldn't be, given that iTunes is all things

00:24:02 ◼   ► to all people, and there's so much code there.

00:24:07 ◼   ► And it's like, wasn't it Joel on Software, Joel Spolsky, that wrote a really good post

00:24:11 ◼   ► years and years and years ago about how you should never rewrite anything.

00:24:14 ◼   ► We discussed it on the show and I said it wasn't that good.

00:24:18 ◼   ► Like many things, that is a great rule.

00:24:21 ◼   ► It's a great input when you're making a decision, but like all rules, you have to decide when

00:24:26 ◼   ► you know how to break them or not.

00:24:30 ◼   ► If you say between this release of our product and next release of our product, we should

00:24:33 ◼   ► rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

00:24:35 ◼   ► Is the product still needing to do the same things?

00:24:37 ◼   ► What are you really getting out of that?

00:24:40 ◼   ► Whereas with this, it's like this is,

00:24:43 ◼   ► the needs of these products have changed so much over time

00:24:48 ◼   ► that keeping them around is actually more of a liability

00:24:50 ◼   ► in a lot of ways.

00:24:51 ◼   ► And not only from the code, but even from the design

00:24:54 ◼   ► of having this all be one app.

00:24:56 ◼   ► You're not, like we're not suggesting

00:24:58 ◼   ► that you rewrite iTunes from scratch.

00:25:00 ◼   ► We're suggesting that you break up this app

00:25:03 ◼   ► into like five different other apps,

00:25:05 ◼   ► each of which can be way better at solving the problem

00:25:08 ◼   ► it's meant to solve, then this one app that tries to solve all five of these things badly.

00:25:13 ◼   ► So here's my meta concern about this whole thing, and this is always, I was trying to

00:25:16 ◼   ► think of this while you guys were talking and I can't come up with something, maybe

00:25:19 ◼   ► you can. My question is, does Apple still know how to make really great Mac apps? I'm

00:25:25 ◼   ► trying to think of the last really great Mac app that Apple made. Maybe is it, is it maybe

00:25:33 ◼   ► Final Cut Pro 10 and iMovie, like when they revamped those, because those are pretty good,

00:25:37 ◼   ► But I'm not sure

00:25:39 ◼   ► Like it used to be you know

00:25:42 ◼   ► Apple makes the best Mac apps and if you're a third-party developer try to make your apps as good as them and it's slowly

00:25:46 ◼   ► Shifted to be like if you want to see the exemplars of great Mac applications

00:25:50 ◼   ► You have to look at third parties because all the first party stuff is either

00:25:52 ◼   ► Not half-butted in Marco's parlance, but like it's slight like for example

00:25:58 ◼   ► when they redid contacts and notes on

00:26:01 ◼   ► The Mac I mean you know there are right

00:26:06 ◼   ► They're not bad, but they're pretty slight right no one would say this is a tour de force Mac application of the Mac version of

00:26:12 ◼   ► Notes like it's alright. You know it's there

00:26:14 ◼   ► And now all the great Mac apps. It's like if you want to see an amazing Mac application

00:26:20 ◼   ► like you know look at look at panics you know transmit right or

00:26:23 ◼   ► Something from Omni right where it's like a full featured beautifully designed well thought out stable reliable

00:26:32 ◼   ► You know like the all all the things that you want from a great Mac

00:26:35 ◼   ► Application the kind of applications are BB edit for that matter kind of applications to make people love them and be dedicated to them

00:26:41 ◼   ► No one is known as dedicated to the Mac version of notes, right?

00:26:44 ◼   ► I mean the iOS version of notes is you know gotten way better and they're adding features left and right there

00:26:49 ◼   ► But I'm trying to think of what's the last great man. I suppose Safari Safari is pretty darn good, too

00:26:53 ◼   ► But that's that's all like the last great new Mac app Apple said in the past few years

00:26:58 ◼   ► it seems like every time they make a new Mac application,

00:27:01 ◼   ► it's all right.

00:27:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I feel like Photos is the best example.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Photos is the app that should have been

00:27:10 ◼   ► a great demonstration of what the Mac can do.

00:27:12 ◼   ► And it hasn't been at all.

00:27:14 ◼   ► And I would even broaden your question

00:27:17 ◼   ► of can Apple still make great Mac apps.

00:27:20 ◼   ► I would remove the word Mac from that

00:27:21 ◼   ► and say can Apple still make great apps.

00:27:25 ◼   ► Apple is remarkably good these days

00:27:28 ◼   ► at being a platform company.

00:27:29 ◼   ► Their OS is amazing, their APIs are amazing,

00:27:33 ◼   ► they keep adding new cool APIs like ARKit,

00:27:36 ◼   ► just to add to their other massive pile

00:27:38 ◼   ► of incredibly sophisticated APIs.

00:27:42 ◼   ► Apple is really good at the platforms,

00:27:45 ◼   ► the frameworks, the OS.

00:27:47 ◼   ► But I really have not gotten the sense from Apple

00:27:52 ◼   ► that they really know how to make great apps anymore.

00:27:54 ◼   ► And to their credit, they haven't made

00:27:56 ◼   ► very many new apps recently.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Maybe they realize this too.

00:27:59 ◼   ► Or maybe they've decided not to do that much anymore.

00:28:02 ◼   ► - They've been making good apps, I feel like.

00:28:05 ◼   ► Especially on iOS, I think they're making good iOS apps.

00:28:07 ◼   ► And I think a lot of the iOS ones are exemplars.

00:28:10 ◼   ► You could say, "Hey, you wanna make a good iOS app?

00:28:13 ◼   ► "Look at Apple's applications."

00:28:15 ◼   ► And that's kind of like the baseline, try to match that.

00:28:18 ◼   ► But none of them, I don't know on iOS,

00:28:20 ◼   ► but on the Mac anyway, I don't feel like any of them

00:28:23 ◼   ► are great. And kind of in the way that iTunes was great in the beginning, like, you know,

00:28:27 ◼   ► when iTunes sort of got the ball rolling and it was like, you could search for your music

00:28:31 ◼   ► so quickly and the interface was so straightforward and intuitive that anyone could figure out

00:28:35 ◼   ► how to do it with a three-pane browser and, you know, and then integrating the store,

00:28:39 ◼   ► that all seemed to work. Like, before iTunes became the jack of all trades, I think iTunes

00:28:44 ◼   ► was a pretty great application too, even though it was just SoundJam or whatever reskinned

00:28:47 ◼   ► to begin with, right?

00:28:48 ◼   ► >> Yeah, something like that.

00:28:50 ◼   ► I'm sure there is still the talent in the company

00:28:53 ◼   ► to make great applications, like what we're talking about,

00:28:57 ◼   ► if they prioritize them.

00:28:58 ◼   ► I think they just haven't prioritized them really.

00:29:00 ◼   ► They've been doing so much else.

00:29:01 ◼   ► They've been launching new platforms

00:29:03 ◼   ► and making new services and making the OSs better

00:29:07 ◼   ► and everything.

00:29:07 ◼   ► They've been doing so much else that it just seems

00:29:09 ◼   ► like they don't really put a lot behind

00:29:12 ◼   ► their first party apps anymore.

00:29:13 ◼   ► And that shows in some big end of life things

00:29:16 ◼   ► like Aperture and also just the kind of languishing nature

00:29:21 ◼   ► of a lot of their other apps,

00:29:22 ◼   ► along with apps that are revamped into new versions

00:29:26 ◼   ► that aren't necessarily as good as the old ones,

00:29:27 ◼   ► like the Photos app, when that replaced iPhoto and Aperture.

00:29:30 ◼   ► I think it is very clear, I would say,

00:29:34 ◼   ► I don't wanna put this entirely on Johnny Ive,

00:29:36 ◼   ► 'cause I do that a lot, but in the big shuffle up,

00:29:39 ◼   ► when Forstall was out and Ive's department became head

00:29:43 ◼   ► of software design as well as hardware design,

00:29:46 ◼   ► I would say since that happened,

00:29:48 ◼   ► Apple has seemed to be in a period of flux

00:29:51 ◼   ► with their application design skills

00:29:53 ◼   ► that have not been good.

00:29:55 ◼   ► And even going into iOS 11,

00:29:57 ◼   ► we still don't know what the new phone

00:29:58 ◼   ► and this potential notch is gonna look like,

00:30:00 ◼   ► but if that notch,

00:30:02 ◼   ► basically we're looking at the iOS 11 design

00:30:04 ◼   ► with these giant title bars

00:30:06 ◼   ► with the big white bold text titles

00:30:09 ◼   ► and basically making everything look like Apple Music,

00:30:11 ◼   ► which seems like a terrible idea

00:30:12 ◼   ► 'cause if you would have said after last year,

00:30:15 ◼   ► If you would have said after iOS 10,

00:30:16 ◼   ► we're gonna make all the apps in the system

00:30:18 ◼   ► look like Apple Music.

00:30:19 ◼   ► People would have thought you were joking.

00:30:23 ◼   ► But now that's the style.

00:30:25 ◼   ► That might make sense in some big grand vision here

00:30:28 ◼   ► that we have yet to see the final play of

00:30:31 ◼   ► when the new phone comes out.

00:30:33 ◼   ► It's also possible that Apple's just going through

00:30:36 ◼   ► this kind of design puberty period

00:30:38 ◼   ► where they're in between two different eras or ages

00:30:42 ◼   ► or they're trying to find their footing

00:30:44 ◼   ► or whatever the case may be, it seems like Apple has been all over the map with software

00:30:49 ◼   ► design in the last few years and they have not yet found the right place to be yet.

00:30:55 ◼   ► >> Yeah, I feel like Final Cut Pro X and the new iMovie that was before it, those were

00:31:02 ◼   ► actually I think the only Mac applications that could really be called great.

00:31:08 ◼   ► They were after the, you know, the skeuomorphic age, like GarageBand and stuff like that with

00:31:13 ◼   ► the wood paneling like that was you know an iMovie and the original digital hub like there's

00:31:17 ◼   ► a lot of great applications there but those were all definitely in the forestall skeuomorphic

00:31:22 ◼   ► whatever even though you know whatever that that era right and then where we are now is

00:31:28 ◼   ► the place where you know photos and the the revised uh you know contacts and and uh notes

00:31:36 ◼   ► and even calendar and stuff on the mac they're kind of you know they're right they're very

00:31:40 ◼   ► simple, they're slightly more of the Johnny Ive thing, and I feel like in between there

00:31:44 ◼   ► was the iMovie design, which was not super skeuomorphic, but was also not like, oh let's

00:31:50 ◼   ► remove every single control from the interface and make just giant expanses of white, or

00:31:54 ◼   ► in this case black. So I think maybe that is, and that's the last time I can recall

00:31:59 ◼   ► seeing one of those, maybe there's other applications that I don't use them, people keep bringing

00:32:02 ◼   ► up like the iWork suite and everything, but those aren't new applications, like they've

00:32:06 ◼   ► evolved and I could say those had the same kind of problem with syncing up with the UI

00:32:10 ◼   ► kit and syncing up with iOS features and losing stuff and coming back up. They've had their

00:32:17 ◼   ► own problems during their development. I don't think those are great applications yet and

00:32:23 ◼   ► even if they were you'd have to date them back to when they were introduced. So maybe

00:32:26 ◼   ► it's just iMovie and Final Cut Pro X and those were controversial as well.

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00:34:24 ◼   ► We have what is possibly my favorite line item that has ever appeared in follow-up ever,

00:34:31 ◼   ► and I will read it verbatim for the listeners.

00:34:34 ◼   ► The topic that we are apparently about to discuss is—

00:34:37 ◼   ► It's not a topic, it's a follow-up item.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:34:40 ◼   ► Good grief.

00:34:43 ◼   ► The follow-up item, Copyright 2011, John C. Hughes said that we are about to discuss is

00:34:47 ◼   ► as follows, "Advice for Marco's sensitive tushy." Would one of us, I'm assuming John,

00:34:55 ◼   ► like to tell us what his advice would be for Marco's sensitive tushy?

00:34:59 ◼   ► That's not my advice, it's listeners' advice. Last week we talked about Marco's sensitive tushy,

00:35:03 ◼   ► and how his bicycle seat hurt his bum, and people had advice for what he could do to make his bum

00:35:11 ◼   ► feel better. One piece of advice was to buy shorts with a pad in the butt, especially

00:35:17 ◼   ► made for people who ride bikes. I get made for mountain bikers. So apparently that's

00:35:22 ◼   ► a thing that you can get and someone suggested that. But the other suggestion that I think

00:35:27 ◼   ► that is even better is bicycle riders saying don't put all your weight on your butt when

00:35:31 ◼   ► you're riding your bike. Put some of your weight on the pedals and some of your weight

00:35:34 ◼   ► on the handlebars and some of the weight on your butt and then you won't have your entire

00:35:38 ◼   ► weight on the very hard seat and if you do that it will make any seat feel more comfortable

00:35:44 ◼   ► for you.

00:35:45 ◼   ► I would say the latter option of changing my biking technique to put less weight on

00:35:49 ◼   ► my butt, that is a good idea.

00:35:52 ◼   ► If I was a professional bike-ist, but I'm not.

00:35:55 ◼   ► You don't have to be a professional bike-ist in your words to do that.

00:36:00 ◼   ► You can change the way you bike and not be paid to be a bicycle rider.

00:36:04 ◼   ► That's something I will slowly work towards but that's like a gradual technique thing.

00:36:07 ◼   ► So a lot of the riding I'm doing around here is very slowly

00:36:10 ◼   ► because I'm riding with my kid,

00:36:12 ◼   ► who is now very well riding a bike.

00:36:14 ◼   ► That took no time, thank you John, you were right.

00:36:16 ◼   ► And it's awesome, so we're riding around,

00:36:18 ◼   ► but it's riding around very slowly,

00:36:19 ◼   ► so it's kinda hard to hold yourself up all that time

00:36:21 ◼   ► when you're going two miles an hour.

00:36:24 ◼   ► Secondly, the bike shorts with built-in butt padding,

00:36:27 ◼   ► I don't really see the point of that, honestly.

00:36:29 ◼   ► I mean, again, maybe this is something

00:36:30 ◼   ► that professional bike guests have some good reason for,

00:36:33 ◼   ► but if they're saying the seats shouldn't be padded,

00:36:35 ◼   ► your shorts should be padded.

00:36:36 ◼   ► - Well, I think they're both padded,

00:36:38 ◼   ► like you're doubling up the padding.

00:36:41 ◼   ► - I guess.

00:36:41 ◼   ► - Then you get to look like stupid sexy Flanders.

00:36:44 ◼   ► - I appreciate these two options

00:36:47 ◼   ► written in by the professional bike guests.

00:36:49 ◼   ► I'm not going to take either of them.

00:36:50 ◼   ► Instead, I did what I said I was gonna do last week

00:36:53 ◼   ► and I just went on Amazon and spent $18

00:36:55 ◼   ► on a really soft cushy seat and that's great

00:36:59 ◼   ► and it fixed it pretty much as well as anything

00:37:01 ◼   ► besides new tires could.

00:37:02 ◼   ► So, done.

00:37:04 ◼   ► Stupid sexy Flanders for skiing not biking. Wasn't there a Simpsons episode where Flanders had bike shorts too?

00:37:09 ◼   ► Anyway bike shorts you can kind of be an homage to stupid sexy Flanders.

00:37:13 ◼   ► Is this the first time I've ever had a podcast topic about my butt? I think it might be. Not the last.

00:37:18 ◼   ► Probably not.

00:37:21 ◼   ► And just to do a quick status check, how many bikes did you buy in the last week?

00:37:27 ◼   ► Well

00:37:29 ◼   ► How do I measure?

00:37:32 ◼   ► How many bikes did you return honey, but what what are the net bike flow?

00:37:35 ◼   ► Well technically I was asking to be funny and now you're giving me a legitimate friggin answer technically -

00:37:42 ◼   ► But one was a replacement for a defect woman one. All right. Oh my god. Yeah, the other one was the sand bike

00:37:49 ◼   ► It's amazing. I thought you weren't getting one

00:37:51 ◼   ► I thought you borrowed the neighbors and you were like, oh that's the saved me a lot of money now

00:37:55 ◼   ► I'm not gonna buy the thing cuz I know that it's hard work. Yep, and then I bought it

00:38:00 ◼   ► It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. How do we do this John John?

00:38:04 ◼   ► How do we how do we do it? You're gonna say my for Adam? He's got unlimited energy

00:38:07 ◼   ► He could just be whirring away in those pedestals forever. He's riding nine miles a day

00:38:12 ◼   ► Just get him a sand bike. He'll be down to like, you know, four and a half the same amount of effort

00:38:16 ◼   ► It's actually a lot easier to follow him in a sand bike

00:38:18 ◼   ► Because it's like you can go first of all, you can go slowly more easily because the tires are so big

00:38:23 ◼   ► It has five inch tires

00:38:25 ◼   ► And then the other thing is that when when he you know as you're going down, you know

00:38:30 ◼   ► some of the boring parts of the ride,

00:38:31 ◼   ► if you're on the sand bike,

00:38:32 ◼   ► you can go in like the sand berm

00:38:34 ◼   ► on the side of the sidewalk and have more fun

00:38:37 ◼   ► and jump over the various things there

00:38:38 ◼   ► and it makes it a little more fun.

00:38:40 ◼   ► The regular bike with the firm ride

00:38:43 ◼   ► is the way more practical one.

00:38:45 ◼   ► That is the one I should have

00:38:47 ◼   ► and the one I still ride a lot of the time.

00:38:49 ◼   ► The sand bike is the fun one.

00:38:50 ◼   ► That's the one that makes me smile.

00:38:52 ◼   ► - I can't believe you had a serious answer to that question.

00:38:55 ◼   ► I should have known better.

00:38:56 ◼   ► I should have known.

00:38:57 ◼   ► - Just wait until he starts using the sand bike in the snow.

00:38:59 ◼   ► Bring it back home for the winter. I actually was thinking about trying that

00:39:03 ◼   ► Attach jet engines to the side and put skis into the wheels

00:39:10 ◼   ► Okay, let's just move on to ask ATP

00:39:14 ◼   ► Robert

00:39:16 ◼   ► Prejudice, I'm so sorry Robert

00:39:18 ◼   ► Asks OLED or LCD for future iPhone in my experience. Oh, that is inferior burns out

00:39:24 ◼   ► Why does never white but rather pinkish or greenish?

00:39:27 ◼   ► I don't have very many thoughts on this other than to say the only

00:39:31 ◼   ► OLED screen that I'm aware of that I have is my Apple watch because that's OLED right and

00:39:36 ◼   ► And I haven't noticed any of these issues personally that doesn't mean he's wrong by any means

00:39:43 ◼   ► I just it just means I haven't noticed them

00:39:46 ◼   ► So androids been a lot of androids has been OLED for a long time and we were like why why is Apple still have LCD?

00:39:53 ◼   ► The one of the theories is that Apple's standards for color reproduction and

00:39:59 ◼   ► yeah, like just

00:40:02 ◼   ► general image quality

00:40:04 ◼   ► Have not been able to be met by OLED screens. So we're all you know, the practically speaking like

00:40:10 ◼   ► Oh

00:40:11 ◼   ► Well that or LCD future for iPhone. Well, the new iPhones coming out are gonna be all that certainly the pro one

00:40:17 ◼   ► Maybe the other ones as well, right?

00:40:18 ◼   ► So there's that practical thing of like hey the next new iPhones you're gonna get some OLEDs on

00:40:22 ◼   ► Long-term, does that mean like all phones are gonna be OLED going forward?

00:40:26 ◼   ► If Apple puts an OLED in their fancy new phone, it probably means they were able to get

00:40:32 ◼   ► the quality up to their standards, so it's as good as and certainly better in black levels than the LCDs ones to replace them.

00:40:40 ◼   ► So, Apple has waited a long time to jump from LCD to OLED, but they're doing it now,

00:40:45 ◼   ► which probably means they're gonna be good.

00:40:46 ◼   ► And if they are good,

00:40:48 ◼   ► the potential power saving advantages of the mean that there's no reason for them to go back to LCD and

00:40:53 ◼   ► You know and the the black level improvements on so I think that the future of the iPhone line is all

00:41:01 ◼   ► OLED as soon as Apple can swing that in terms of cost

00:41:03 ◼   ► Maybe right now their fancy OLED screen and the volumes they can get produced and mean that they'll have to keep shipping LCD

00:41:10 ◼   ► iPhones for a long time and certainly the step-down models all are going to be LCD for their lives until they get replaced by

00:41:16 ◼   ► step-down OLED models. For burn-in, you know, image retention, whatever, LCD still has that.

00:41:22 ◼   ► OLED is supposedly worse, we'll find out how much worse. But, you know, we've seen LCDs with really

00:41:27 ◼   ► bad image retention and LCDs with not so bad image retention, presumably the same is true,

00:41:32 ◼   ► OLEDs we'll find out. And white being never white or pinkish, that goes back to quality. Like,

00:41:37 ◼   ► presumably the screens that Apple's got don't suffer from that problem. So, short answer, OLED.

00:41:44 ◼   ► Josh Stager writes, "What is Marco's process for reselling his myriad of machines? Would

00:41:49 ◼   ► this work for someone without 100,000 Twitter followers?"

00:41:53 ◼   ► So basically, my process is when I want to sell something, whether it's a laptop or,

00:41:58 ◼   ► you know, something else. When I want to sell something that I think anybody on Twitter

00:42:01 ◼   ► might want, you know, it moves fast. The reason it moves fast, yes, part of it is that I have

00:42:07 ◼   ► a lot of followers, so I kind of have an unfair advantage there. Part of it is that I know

00:42:11 ◼   ► how much it cost me to sell something on eBay.

00:42:14 ◼   ► If you sell something on eBay,

00:42:15 ◼   ► you're gonna lose roughly 15%

00:42:18 ◼   ► in various fees and everything.

00:42:20 ◼   ► So eBay is great if you search completed items

00:42:22 ◼   ► and more specifically, sold items.

00:42:25 ◼   ► It's great to tell you kinda what something is worth.

00:42:27 ◼   ► And I know that if I sell it on eBay,

00:42:29 ◼   ► I'm only gonna net 15 or 20% under that price.

00:42:33 ◼   ► So then I just post it on Twitter saying,

00:42:35 ◼   ► hey, I'll sell this for 20% under eBay's price, whatever.

00:42:38 ◼   ► And it moves fast.

00:42:40 ◼   ► because it's both being shown to a lot of people

00:42:43 ◼   ► and it's also a really good deal.

00:42:45 ◼   ► I value simplicity and speed of the deal

00:42:48 ◼   ► over getting the absolute maximum price for it.

00:42:52 ◼   ► So if you wanna sell things,

00:42:54 ◼   ► you have two tools at your disposal.

00:42:56 ◼   ► You can either go for a big audience,

00:42:59 ◼   ► which if you don't know a lot of Twitter followers

00:43:03 ◼   ► or followers elsewhere, eBay is your best chance there,

00:43:05 ◼   ► or you can just sell it for a very, very attractive price

00:43:08 ◼   ► if you just want it to move fast.

00:43:09 ◼   ► and I choose to do both of those things.

00:43:12 ◼   ► - So I don't think it's really the follower count

00:43:14 ◼   ► that is as big a deal.

00:43:16 ◼   ► I mean, certainly that helps,

00:43:17 ◼   ► but I obviously needed to be above some threshold

00:43:21 ◼   ► to have any idea of selling,

00:43:22 ◼   ► but the key factor for why,

00:43:25 ◼   ► once you get above a certain number of followers,

00:43:27 ◼   ► why Marco in particular has success selling things

00:43:31 ◼   ► in addition to the pricing that he just talked about

00:43:33 ◼   ► is that lots of people feel like they know Marco

00:43:37 ◼   ► from all the things that he does in public.

00:43:38 ◼   ► And so there's a certain level of trust that is implicit, trust that he's not just some

00:43:43 ◼   ► random scammer.

00:43:44 ◼   ► And not just trust like, "Oh, he seems nice on podcasts, so I think he's a nice person."

00:43:49 ◼   ► It's sort of a mutually assured destruction thing.

00:43:51 ◼   ► If you are a "public figure," if you have a public reputation and something to lose,

00:43:57 ◼   ► chances are good that you're not going to be an internet famous nerd person with 100,000

00:44:02 ◼   ► followers and then scam someone by taking their money and never shipping the machine

00:44:05 ◼   ► to them.

00:44:06 ◼   ► Right?

00:44:07 ◼   ► that because that person's gonna be like, "Hey," they'll write a blog post that'll be like,

00:44:11 ◼   ► "I tried to buy Marco Armond's computer and he took my money and never sent me the computer."

00:44:16 ◼   ► And that would get a bazillion hits and it would be all over the internet like, "Marco has

00:44:19 ◼   ► something to lose," his reputation. And people would care about that story. People would listen

00:44:24 ◼   ► to that person's story, but it's like, "Oh, famous person doesn't mean anything." Whereas

00:44:27 ◼   ► random scammer takes your money and doesn't send you the thing on eBay and you write a blog post

00:44:31 ◼   ► about it, no one's gonna post that on Hacker News. No one's gonna, you know, it's not gonna be on

00:44:36 ◼   ► tech crunch front page. It's not going to be in tech meme. No one cares. It'd be like,

00:44:39 ◼   ► "Oh, so you got scammed by someone on the internet. That's great." Right? So I think

00:44:43 ◼   ► the combination of people understanding that Marco has something to lose and people generally

00:44:47 ◼   ► think feeling like they know him from all of his podcasts and his work say that he's

00:44:51 ◼   ► probably really got this computer. He's not lying about it. He's going to ship it to me

00:44:55 ◼   ► like he says he's going to. And that peace of mind does not exist on eBay, whether buying

00:44:59 ◼   ► or selling or Craigslist or anything like that. It's like, "I don't know these people.

00:45:04 ◼   ► This could not be a person at all.

00:45:05 ◼   ► This could be a bot somewhere in Lithuania.

00:45:08 ◼   ► I have no idea about any of this.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Whereas it's not like buying it from a friend because they don't know Marco or know him,

00:45:14 ◼   ► but the combination of mutually assured destruction, public figure thing, and the general nice

00:45:20 ◼   ► feelings people have for people that they read their blog posts and listen to their

00:45:24 ◼   ► podcasts, that is super important on top of the large number of followers.

00:45:27 ◼   ► Now, does that mean all this advice is completely useless for everybody?

00:45:30 ◼   ► I think Marcos advice is the most useful like price it to move and it'll move

00:45:33 ◼   ► but you still have to find some venue for putting your offer in front of people and then you have to

00:45:39 ◼   ► Marcos got this on his side. You have to deal with the person who makes the offer you write the thing on Twitter

00:45:44 ◼   ► Hopefully you're narrowing down to people who follow you on Twitter and know to find your stuff there as it's not just a bunch of random

00:45:50 ◼   ► individuals but you still have to

00:45:52 ◼   ► Deal with that person and hope that they you know

00:45:55 ◼   ► You get the money from then you're gonna send them the thing and all that stuff like that

00:45:57 ◼   ► that. So I don't think there's any easy answers here, but if you can, if you can

00:46:04 ◼   ► at all get yourself a hundred thousand Twitter followers and have a public

00:46:08 ◼   ► reputation on the internet for a decade or two that really helps out with

00:46:11 ◼   ► selling stuff. I'd also like to add that if you're willing to trade a little bit

00:46:17 ◼   ► of lost money, so to speak, for convenience, Gazelle, who I honestly don't

00:46:23 ◼   ► remember if they were a past sponsor of the show, they probably were, but I've

00:46:27 ◼   ► I've used them by choice.

00:46:29 ◼   ► And there are other equivalent people as well.

00:46:31 ◼   ► But Gazelle is super nice for technology-related things, so like old computers, old phones,

00:46:36 ◼   ► et cetera.

00:46:37 ◼   ► And basically you just tell them, "Hey, I've got such and such device.

00:46:40 ◼   ► It's of approximately this quality."

00:46:43 ◼   ► And they mail you a box.

00:46:44 ◼   ► You put your device in the box, you mail it to them, and they will give you, I think it

00:46:47 ◼   ► used to be, I don't know if this is still true, like an Amazon gift card or I think

00:46:51 ◼   ► like a check or something like that.

00:46:54 ◼   ► And typically these prices are not as good as they would be if you did like an eBay or

00:46:58 ◼   ► something like that, but they're not terrible.

00:47:01 ◼   ► And if you're willing to trade a little bit of money for supreme convenience, and you

00:47:08 ◼   ► don't have 100,000 Twitter followers, I definitely recommend looking into one of these places

00:47:13 ◼   ► like Gazelle.

00:47:14 ◼   ► I've heard very good things about some sort of quasi-equivalent thing, or maybe it's more

00:47:18 ◼   ► like eBay that Amazon does.

00:47:20 ◼   ► I don't know anything about it really, but I've heard good things.

00:47:24 ◼   ► But there are ways you can do this,

00:47:25 ◼   ► is what I'm driving at,

00:47:26 ◼   ► there are ways you can do this

00:47:27 ◼   ► without having 100,000 Twitter followers.

00:47:29 ◼   ► - I would also say if what you are selling

00:47:32 ◼   ► is an Apple product, if you're gonna go that route,

00:47:35 ◼   ► check out Mac Me and Offer.

00:47:37 ◼   ► This is something I learned from Paul Haddad of Tweetbot.

00:47:41 ◼   ► I got a great deal on one of my MacBook Pros

00:47:44 ◼   ► that I sold last year by just selling it to them instead.

00:47:46 ◼   ► There's a bunch of these sites that buy this stuff.

00:47:50 ◼   ► Most of the time, the deals that you get are awful.

00:47:54 ◼   ► A big site like Gazelle, the prices you get are hideously bad.

00:48:00 ◼   ► You only sell to them if you really, really don't want to go to eBay or something like

00:48:05 ◼   ► that.

00:48:06 ◼   ► But yeah, sometimes it doesn't work out.

00:48:08 ◼   ► Sometimes one of the things I've found is when you're selling something that is not

00:48:13 ◼   ► that old but not that popular or not selling very well.

00:48:16 ◼   ► So for instance, when I sold my 15-inch touch bar last year or when I sold the 12.9-inch

00:48:23 ◼   ► iPad Pro. Those were things that because I guess they weren't selling that well, Apple

00:48:30 ◼   ► was discounting them pretty deeply in both their refurb store and through partners like

00:48:34 ◼   ► Best Buy and Target that are like Apple's official retailers but that like things go

00:48:40 ◼   ► on sale there mysteriously when Apple needs to move more of them even when Apple themselves

00:48:44 ◼   ► never puts anything on sale. So if the thing you're selling is one of those things, you

00:48:49 ◼   ► might like you might be stuck with something that's not worth nearly what you paid for

00:48:52 ◼   ► or what you think it should be worth.

00:48:54 ◼   ► But if you go to one of these sites,

00:48:56 ◼   ► you can usually get a bunch of offers

00:48:59 ◼   ► and pick whatever one is easiest for you.

00:49:01 ◼   ► - All right, the final Ask ATP for this week,

00:49:06 ◼   ► T. Delm writes, "Have any of you ever seen a doctor

00:49:08 ◼   ► "or physical therapist because of RSI?

00:49:10 ◼   ► "I will start because I have a boring answer,

00:49:12 ◼   ► "which is no, I haven't.

00:49:14 ◼   ► "Every great once in a while,

00:49:16 ◼   ► "one of my wrists will hurt ever so slightly

00:49:17 ◼   ► "and I'll adjust my positioning or whatever the case may be

00:49:20 ◼   ► "and I've been lucky enough that it tends to go away

00:49:22 ◼   ► away very quickly. This is where the entire internet writes in to say, "Oh, you've already

00:49:25 ◼   ► got it. It's too late." That's probably true and that's okay. I will try to do this in

00:49:31 ◼   ► order of severity of RSI problems, so I will move on now to Marco.

00:49:36 ◼   ► I don't think I've ever seen a doctor for RSI. I did have a major back issue that put

00:49:41 ◼   ► me into physical therapy for a little while, about 10 years ago. But that was, you know,

00:49:46 ◼   ► I asked a few RSI related questions during that whole process, but I made a few changes

00:49:50 ◼   ► that happened to be similar because it was about like sitting too much and stuff, but

00:49:54 ◼   ► otherwise the answer is generally no. I've only had very minor RSI problems and I have

00:50:01 ◼   ► solved them mostly by reading a few books and articles and making changes to like, you

00:50:08 ◼   ► know, make sure my desk is the right height, make sure I have an appropriate chair and

00:50:12 ◼   ► I switched to a natural keyboard with the split layout. And those things were basically

00:50:17 ◼   ► enough for me to solve my minor issues so far.

00:50:21 ◼   ► All right, Jon. I'm buckled in. Let's hear the story.

00:50:25 ◼   ► So I have gone to a doctor. My first really bad flare-up was back when I lived in Georgia

00:50:28 ◼   ► shortly after graduating college. And I went to a general practitioner and got referred,

00:50:38 ◼   ► and nothing really came of that. And then everything they recommended was not useful.

00:50:43 ◼   ► I eventually came up to, moved back up to Massachusetts and same deal, went to a general

00:50:48 ◼   ► practitioner, got referred, eventually found a physical therapist who actually helped me

00:50:56 ◼   ► and kept going to see that person for a while and did a bunch of adjustments and life changes

00:51:01 ◼   ► and stuff like that and now I'm basically managing it.

00:51:04 ◼   ► The difficulty with this is it's basically it's hard to find doctors or specialists or

00:51:10 ◼   ► GPs who

00:51:12 ◼   ► Understand RSI like at all right a lot of a lot of doctors have a vague surface level understanding

00:51:20 ◼   ► It's basically at the same level of the average person where think our

00:51:23 ◼   ► RSI synonymous with the carpal tunnel and don't really know about any of the details and give you dumb advice or tell you to take

00:51:29 ◼   ► Advil all which is useless

00:51:31 ◼   ► If you do find someone who actually understands RSI and treats RSI and

00:51:39 ◼   ► and takes it seriously and actually knows what will help people because they have lots

00:51:46 ◼   ► of patients that do this, that's great but it takes a lot of tries to get there.

00:51:53 ◼   ► I don't think anyone ever needs their general practitioner to do anything for them, mostly

00:51:57 ◼   ► you need to find some kind of specialist, whether it's a specialist doctor or occupational

00:52:04 ◼   ► therapist or physical therapist or whatever it may be.

00:52:10 ◼   ► I always tell people that they, I would tell Casey, see a doctor, but it's good advice

00:52:17 ◼   ► because it's something they should do, but it's bad advice because I know if I tell them

00:52:19 ◼   ► that and they go see their doctor, their doctor is almost certainly not going to help them

00:52:22 ◼   ► at all.

00:52:23 ◼   ► But you have to keep going and finding, you have to use the internet, find other people

00:52:28 ◼   ► in your area who have RSI.

00:52:29 ◼   ► I think everyone has learned now in this age where everybody sits in front of something

00:52:34 ◼   ► and types for long periods of time that, you know, if you're certainly in our tech nerd

00:52:39 ◼   ► programming circles, right, but I think just in general, the number of people that we all

00:52:45 ◼   ► know that have RSI is way bigger than people think.

00:52:47 ◼   ► Some people just don't talk about it, but just think about it.

00:52:49 ◼   ► Who do we know that has had RSI?

00:52:51 ◼   ► You both know me.

00:52:52 ◼   ► Marco's had it a little bit.

00:52:54 ◼   ► We know Mike Hurley, who just got through all the Relay family.

00:52:56 ◼   ► Ray has RSI problems, like there's a lot of people have it.

00:53:01 ◼   ► And so there is a market for helping these people.

00:53:05 ◼   ► So you should be able to find, it'll be difficult.

00:53:08 ◼   ► I admit it will be difficult.

00:53:09 ◼   ► It will not be easy, but you should be able to find someone

00:53:11 ◼   ► who could help you in your area.

00:53:15 ◼   ► And what will help you?

00:53:16 ◼   ► What kind of doctor will help you?

00:53:18 ◼   ► What kind of treatment will help you?

00:53:19 ◼   ► I don't know, but you should,

00:53:21 ◼   ► the worst thing you can do is ignore it.

00:53:23 ◼   ► So you have to go through that annoying,

00:53:25 ◼   ► terrible US healthcare system rigmarole of doing whatever you have to do to get whatever

00:53:31 ◼   ► referrals you need to have. And if your referral is crappy, go back to your GP if you still

00:53:35 ◼   ► need a referral and say, "I would like you to refer me to this person." Or sometimes

00:53:38 ◼   ► you just can't, you know, this person is out of network and you have to pay out of pocket.

00:53:42 ◼   ► You have to do what you have to do, but ignoring it is the worst thing you can do. So, short

00:53:46 ◼   ► answer to that question, yes. Some of us have seen a doctor/physical therapist because of

00:53:50 ◼   ► our side.

00:53:51 ◼   ► Oh, my word.

00:53:52 ◼   ► - We should answer the next yes or no question we get.

00:53:55 ◼   ► We should just ask each of us,

00:53:57 ◼   ► give a yes or no answer.

00:53:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, okay.

00:53:59 ◼   ► I'm not sure I'm capable of that,

00:54:01 ◼   ► and with respect, I am positive that you two are not.

00:54:05 ◼   ► - I could totally do it.

00:54:06 ◼   ► - No, you're wrong, sir.

00:54:08 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week by Aftershokz

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00:56:38 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:56:40 ◼   ► I got two pieces of bad news this week.

00:56:45 ◼   ► I'm going to start with the easy one, because that's not a

00:56:46 ◼   ► topic, but it's just sad.

00:56:48 ◼   ► And if people have workarounds, I want to hear it.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Apparently, there's a new version of the

00:56:53 ◼   ► Google Photos uploader.

00:56:55 ◼   ► And in that new version, I'm being told by a friend of mine,

00:56:59 ◼   ► it does not recognize network--

00:57:03 ◼   ► or perhaps there's just no place to add a network share.

00:57:07 ◼   ► I have not yet updated, and now I fear it.

00:57:09 ◼   ► But there will probably come a time that I will need to

00:57:11 ◼   ► update, and I don't know what I'm going to do, because I

00:57:14 ◼   ► I currently have it pointed at a folder on my Synology

00:57:17 ◼   ► that has all of our pictures,

00:57:18 ◼   ► because now that we have a child,

00:57:20 ◼   ► there is an insurmountable,

00:57:22 ◼   ► just indescribable amount of photos,

00:57:24 ◼   ► and I need the disk space on the Synology to hold them.

00:57:27 ◼   ► That was bad news number one.

00:57:29 ◼   ► Bad news number two.

00:57:30 ◼   ► - The M5 only comes in automatic now?

00:57:33 ◼   ► - Oh, that's right.

00:57:34 ◼   ► - I didn't tell both of you this like four weeks ago.

00:57:38 ◼   ► - I didn't wanna believe you.

00:57:39 ◼   ► - I didn't either.

00:57:40 ◼   ► - It was not a rumor.

00:57:41 ◼   ► It was like, it's the real news.

00:57:43 ◼   ► Anyway, go ahead.

00:57:44 ◼   ► Well, so that was bad news number two.

00:57:45 ◼   ► And not only that, but I would like to publicly concede to Marco that I believe you and I

00:57:50 ◼   ► had an argument.

00:57:51 ◼   ► I don't remember if it was public or not.

00:57:52 ◼   ► I don't remember if this was neutral time or not.

00:57:55 ◼   ► But you were adamant that the next M5 would have all-wheel drive.

00:57:58 ◼   ► And I don't think I was adamantly opposed, but I was definitely very opposed.

00:58:03 ◼   ► And you were correct, sir, that the next M5--

00:58:06 ◼   ► I can't believe you're conceding this now, because I also believe on this very show,

00:58:09 ◼   ► like a year ago, I said, hey, guess what?

00:58:11 ◼   ► Marco was right.

00:58:12 ◼   ► drive. Like, and again, I wasn't relating to you a rumor. I was telling you a fact,

00:58:16 ◼   ► but apparently only now that it is announced to the public, you're like, "Oh, wow, it's

00:58:21 ◼   ► real."

00:58:22 ◼   ► I was holding out hope.

00:58:23 ◼   ► No, like, when I told you, it was like, this was a done deal. Done. Anyway, you guys don't

00:58:28 ◼   ► listen to me.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Well, why would we? What do you know about anything? Anyway, the actual piece of bad

00:58:34 ◼   ► news that I'm meandering toward that I really wanted to talk about now is that my backup

00:58:39 ◼   ► provider, I don't know if I would even say of choice, I feel like this was kind of a

00:58:45 ◼   ► I have no other options that I cared for so this was the only option I had, which was

00:58:50 ◼   ► CrashPlan, has decided to sunset their consumer business.

00:58:55 ◼   ► So the reason I chose CrashPlan is because you can have it back up a network drive and

00:59:02 ◼   ► it's considered to be part of your computer and thus, I honestly don't remember what I

00:59:07 ◼   ► was paying crash plan a year, but it was somewhere between $5 and $10 a month.

00:59:12 ◼   ► And you could have it back up for, in my case, for example, the Synology, and it is just

00:59:17 ◼   ► part of my $10 a month, or whatever the number may have been.

00:59:21 ◼   ► And perhaps in part because of people like me, they've decided, "Okay, we're not going

00:59:26 ◼   ► to do the consumer side anymore.

00:59:28 ◼   ► We're only going to do small business and enterprise."

00:59:33 ◼   ► And it's not going away for, I think, over a year.

00:59:36 ◼   ► And so I have plenty of time to figure out the answer.

00:59:38 ◼   ► But I've already been wanting to move away from Crash Plan because they have the world's

00:59:46 ◼   ► worst native app, which isn't really that terribly native.

00:59:50 ◼   ► It's a god-awful Java app.

00:59:52 ◼   ► Is god-awful in Java redundant?

00:59:54 ◼   ► I think it is.

00:59:55 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:59:56 ◼   ► I thought they had a real native app.

00:59:57 ◼   ► No.

00:59:58 ◼   ► I believe they promised native apps basically every three months for the last two years

01:00:03 ◼   ► and never actually delivered them.

01:00:04 ◼   ► No, I think they have one, but it might only

01:00:07 ◼   ► be for the business customers and not for the consumer ones.

01:00:09 ◼   ► That's exactly it.

01:00:10 ◼   ► So the thing I've been told-- and again,

01:00:13 ◼   ► I don't know if this is true or not--

01:00:14 ◼   ► is that it is only for the business side.

01:00:16 ◼   ► So one of the options that I have as a CrashPlan user

01:00:20 ◼   ► is I could change to a business plan.

01:00:24 ◼   ► And I didn't think I wanted to do that on account of the fact

01:00:28 ◼   ► that I didn't want their god-awful Java-based client

01:00:32 ◼   ► app.

01:00:33 ◼   ► But as we just established, perhaps the business app or the business side wouldn't be so bad.

01:00:38 ◼   ► But I haven't had an overwhelmingly positive experience with CrashPlan. It just hasn't been

01:00:44 ◼   ► negative enough for me to do anything about it. So at this point, I'm starting to explore,

01:00:48 ◼   ► okay, what are my other options? And not only because they've sponsored the show, and so,

01:00:52 ◼   ► you know, they've given us some money in the past, and I'm kind of endeared to them for that.

01:00:57 ◼   ► But because everyone I know genuinely has said that CrashPlan is, or excuse me, that Backblaze

01:01:02 ◼   ► is phenomenal, I've been looking at Backblaze.

01:01:05 ◼   ► But the problem with Backblaze is you can't do a network share

01:01:10 ◼   ► and have that as part of a regular home Backblaze plan,

01:01:14 ◼   ► which is, if I'm not mistaken, why Marco is running iSCSI,

01:01:17 ◼   ► or was at the very least running iSCSI on your Synology.

01:01:20 ◼   ► There you go.

01:01:21 ◼   ► Because then it's treated as sort of kind of a local drive

01:01:26 ◼   ► as far as Backblaze is concerned.

01:01:28 ◼   ► And so you can upload your Synology

01:01:30 ◼   ► and still have a regular consumer plan. So I could go iSCSI, but I've heard Marco say in the past a

01:01:37 ◼   ► lot of terrible things about it, and justifiably, like, given what you've told me about your

01:01:41 ◼   ► experience, I am fearful of going down that road. Nobody should do it. So there you go. So I've

01:01:48 ◼   ► heard some stories about, well, and somebody's saying in the chat right now, well, you can mount

01:01:53 ◼   ► it as via NFS and do some Munich-sy things and maybe that would work. Okay, maybe. I've had a

01:02:01 ◼   ► lot of people recommend using Backblaze B2. Hold on, Jon. I'm almost done, I promise.

01:02:06 ◼   ► Jon Streeter I was going to say, people saying maybe that will work. It does work. People do

01:02:10 ◼   ► do this. It is the thing you have to futz with, but it absolutely is the thing that works with

01:02:13 ◼   ► Backblaze. You can trick Backblaze into backing up your network share either by using iSCSI like

01:02:17 ◼   ► like Marco, which no one should do, or by using the various means to mount your thing

01:02:22 ◼   ► through NFS or RFS or whatever, and that will work as well, but that's also annoying.

01:02:27 ◼   ► Right, and that's the thing, is I want something that's not fiddly, because for all the bad

01:02:31 ◼   ► things I have to say about Crash Plan, it was not fiddly, which is good.

01:02:34 ◼   ► So what was my final option?

01:02:37 ◼   ► Oh, Backblaze B2, that's what it was.

01:02:39 ◼   ► One of the things that Backblaze is offering is instead of doing the traditional Backblaze

01:02:47 ◼   ► offering, you can do Backblaze B2. And I'm not entirely clear on the delineation between

01:02:52 ◼   ► the two, but for the purposes of the conversation so far anyway, it's basically a different

01:02:57 ◼   ► kind of storage plan, a different kind of setup, where it's half a cent a gigabyte per

01:03:02 ◼   ► month in order to back up to there. And if you were to download more than just a pittance,

01:03:08 ◼   ► then there's a charge for that. But that would hypothetically work for the Synology. And

01:03:13 ◼   ► And in fact, either they have software, or I think it's actually the Synology itself

01:03:17 ◼   ► has a front end that can upload directly to B2, such that it would be very not fiddly.

01:03:25 ◼   ► However, I have personally between four and five terabytes of stuff on the Synology that

01:03:30 ◼   ► I think is worth backing up.

01:03:32 ◼   ► Now, a lot of that is, say, ripped copies of Blu-rays that I still own before anyone

01:03:38 ◼   ► starts calling the RIAA.

01:03:40 ◼   ► MPAA?

01:03:41 ◼   ► That too, thank you.

01:03:43 ◼   ► My bad. But anyway, yeah, I realized that after you said it. But the point being, like,

01:03:48 ◼   ► you know, I'm not even talking about things that have fallen off of trucks. A lot of this

01:03:51 ◼   ► stuff is stuff that I have in Plex for convenience, if nothing else. And I recognize that I could

01:03:55 ◼   ► rebuild it and I could perhaps exclude that from the backup. But here again, my preference

01:04:01 ◼   ► is I am willing to throw some modicum of money at this problem in order to make my life easier.

01:04:08 ◼   ► This probably sounds familiar given our conversation about Marco selling things.

01:04:12 ◼   ► So if I wanted to go to B2, which is my current theory, it equates to roughly 20 bucks a month,

01:04:20 ◼   ► which is a far cry from I think the 60-ish dollars a year that I was giving to Crash

01:04:25 ◼   ► Plan.

01:04:26 ◼   ► So I think the two most appealing options for me, and then I'm going to stop talking,

01:04:29 ◼   ► is go to the Crash Plan small business plan, which is probably approximately the same money

01:04:34 ◼   ► I was paying, and it should in theory capture the Synology like it used to.

01:04:40 ◼   ► And there's a lot of me that's thinking that may be the right answer.

01:04:43 ◼   ► Or finally use this as the excuse to divorce from Crash Plan, and just use a combination

01:04:49 ◼   ► of B2 for the Synology and regular Backblaze for my iMac, and just do it that way.

01:04:54 ◼   ► So that is a lot of—I know that was not a very brief summary, but there's a lot here.

01:04:59 ◼   ► So let me, I guess, start by saying,

01:05:02 ◼   ► Marco, what are your thoughts on iSCSI?

01:05:05 ◼   ► And then John, I think you're in a similar scenario to me,

01:05:07 ◼   ► so I'd like to hear your thoughts

01:05:08 ◼   ► on a more general level after Marco's.

01:05:11 ◼   ► - Well, first let me step back a little bit.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Let me say my opening statement,

01:05:15 ◼   ► 'cause I know John's gonna give his.

01:05:17 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:05:18 ◼   ► I have my chance.

01:05:20 ◼   ► I do think it's worth considering how much giant storage

01:05:25 ◼   ► you actually need to keep and back up and everything.

01:05:28 ◼   ► We as nerds and as computer power users have,

01:05:32 ◼   ► for years, many of us have kept these giant media libraries,

01:05:36 ◼   ► giant media collections.

01:05:38 ◼   ► And for some people, if you actually go and watch

01:05:41 ◼   ► those things on a regular basis,

01:05:43 ◼   ► maybe it's worth keeping those things.

01:05:45 ◼   ► But a lot of us, I think, rip them from this

01:05:47 ◼   ► artificial scarcity, like when we were growing up

01:05:50 ◼   ► and bandwidth wasn't a thing, really,

01:05:53 ◼   ► and computer media was hard and rare.

01:05:56 ◼   ► it's like Depression-era grandparents.

01:05:58 ◼   ► Like, you know, you grow up hoarding this stuff.

01:06:00 ◼   ► So now we have these giant hard drives,

01:06:03 ◼   ► giant bandwidth, you know, media that's easy

01:06:05 ◼   ► to rip off these giant disks.

01:06:07 ◼   ► Like, now we wanna hoard it all, right?

01:06:09 ◼   ► But the fact is, like, if you actually want

01:06:12 ◼   ► to finally go back and rewatch something

01:06:15 ◼   ► that you've been saving all this time,

01:06:17 ◼   ► like, is it really worth having paid

01:06:20 ◼   ► all the money in the meantime on disks,

01:06:23 ◼   ► on backups of those disks, on electricity

01:06:26 ◼   ► to power these things in your house that are on all the time.

01:06:29 ◼   ► Suppose you wanna watch one movie a month

01:06:31 ◼   ► from your collection.

01:06:32 ◼   ► You can just pay like five or 10 bucks to buy it

01:06:35 ◼   ► or whatever, each time you wanna watch it,

01:06:38 ◼   ► the very few times that you actually wanna watch

01:06:40 ◼   ► from out of that giant library

01:06:42 ◼   ► and you might very well come out ahead.

01:06:44 ◼   ► And you also gotta think like in that scenario

01:06:46 ◼   ► where like suppose you don't store all these files

01:06:49 ◼   ► and you occasionally have to rebuy something

01:06:52 ◼   ► to watch it again.

01:06:55 ◼   ► might you even not even have to buy it?

01:06:57 ◼   ► Will it probably be available from Netflix

01:07:00 ◼   ► or Amazon Video or HBO or some other service

01:07:03 ◼   ► that you might already be paying for?

01:07:05 ◼   ► Many of the things that I've ripped,

01:07:07 ◼   ► I've ended up never watching because,

01:07:09 ◼   ► oh, I can just get them on Netflix.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Also, then you have to deal with,

01:07:13 ◼   ► suppose you have this library of ripped movies.

01:07:16 ◼   ► Well, suppose you rip them as DVDs.

01:07:19 ◼   ► Then HD comes out, then Blu-rays come out,

01:07:22 ◼   ► then 4K comes out, then 4K HDR comes out.

01:07:26 ◼   ► By the time you actually wanna go back and watch the thing,

01:07:29 ◼   ► is your version of it even still the best quality?

01:07:32 ◼   ► Or can you go on the Netflix app on your TV

01:07:37 ◼   ► that comes with your TV for free

01:07:39 ◼   ► and watch the same thing in 4K now?

01:07:42 ◼   ► I highly suggest that anybody who's dealing

01:07:46 ◼   ► with this problem of how do I back up

01:07:48 ◼   ► a massive collection of media,

01:07:50 ◼   ► really do some introspection here as like,

01:07:53 ◼   ► do I really need to be storing all this stuff?

01:07:56 ◼   ► And if I am storing all this stuff,

01:07:57 ◼   ► do I really need to be backing it up

01:08:00 ◼   ► as much as I'm backing up my family photos?

01:08:03 ◼   ► Or is this a lot less important?

01:08:05 ◼   ► And can I either delete it and stop worrying about all this?

01:08:08 ◼   ► Or not be backing it up in so many different places?

01:08:12 ◼   ► So, that being said,

01:08:15 ◼   ► if you are going to back up stuff like this,

01:08:17 ◼   ► We have these network attack storage devices

01:08:20 ◼   ► from Synology that they sent us a long time ago.

01:08:22 ◼   ► It was very nice of them.

01:08:24 ◼   ► Network attack storage devices are very complicated.

01:08:28 ◼   ► They're a huge solution to what might be a small problem.

01:08:32 ◼   ► If your problem is I need more disk space,

01:08:35 ◼   ► a NAS is massive overkill for that problem

01:08:38 ◼   ► because they are big, they're expensive,

01:08:40 ◼   ► they are entire other computers that you need to manage,

01:08:44 ◼   ► you need to run separate software updates

01:08:46 ◼   ► is they have their own software,

01:08:47 ◼   ► usually they're Linux based or something,

01:08:49 ◼   ► and because they're kind of their own computers,

01:08:51 ◼   ► their own kind of servers,

01:08:52 ◼   ► but they don't quite run Mac OS or Windows

01:08:56 ◼   ► or anything that you're used to using

01:08:58 ◼   ► on a regular computer,

01:09:00 ◼   ► they have their own special applications,

01:09:01 ◼   ► they can't run the applications that you might want,

01:09:04 ◼   ► the processors they run are usually very low end,

01:09:06 ◼   ► so certain things like Plex transcoding are very limited

01:09:09 ◼   ► or you need certain models with certain accelerators

01:09:11 ◼   ► or whatever else.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Running a NAS, they're very powerful

01:09:16 ◼   ► because they are their little app platforms.

01:09:18 ◼   ► But if your main problem is I want more disk space

01:09:22 ◼   ► for apps that run on a Mac,

01:09:25 ◼   ► I would say a NAS is really quite overkill.

01:09:28 ◼   ► In the years since we've all gotten

01:09:30 ◼   ► these network tech storage NAS things,

01:09:32 ◼   ► is it okay to say NAS?

01:09:33 ◼   ► I never quite know.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Is that like saying NAS, or is it actually acceptable?

01:09:39 ◼   ► - I think it's acceptable, unlike Nitrous socks,

01:09:42 ◼   ► no, not, whatever the Nitrous is that you're using.

01:09:44 ◼   ► This is why our car show was never good.

01:09:45 ◼   ► Anyway.

01:09:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:09:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, so also in the time since we've gotten

01:09:49 ◼   ► these NAS devices, hard drives have gotten way bigger.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Like we got these when the biggest disk you could buy

01:09:55 ◼   ► at the time was four terabytes.

01:09:57 ◼   ► Now you can get 10 terabyte drives.

01:09:58 ◼   ► And while the 10 terabyte ones are kind of expensive,

01:10:01 ◼   ► they're like about 500 bucks, eight terabyte ones,

01:10:04 ◼   ► which are barely smaller, are like 300 bucks now.

01:10:07 ◼   ► Like these are really, like hard drives are massive.

01:10:11 ◼   ► They're way bigger than they were even just a few years ago.

01:10:14 ◼   ► and they cost very little per terabyte.

01:10:17 ◼   ► The amount of stuff that we need to store,

01:10:20 ◼   ► it seems like if you're able to use

01:10:23 ◼   ► full-size three and a half inch hard drives,

01:10:26 ◼   ► the hardware capacity has dramatically outpaced our needs

01:10:29 ◼   ► for most of the things we're storing.

01:10:32 ◼   ► You're storing, you said about five terabytes.

01:10:34 ◼   ► On my sonology, I have something like 16 terabytes

01:10:39 ◼   ► of usable space with the way I've arranged all the drives

01:10:41 ◼   ► with RAID and everything.

01:10:42 ◼   ► I've used, out of the 16 terabytes,

01:10:44 ◼   ► I've used about 10 or eight,

01:10:47 ◼   ► but I've used it very irresponsibly.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Just like, 'cause I knew I had like infinite space,

01:10:52 ◼   ► so I'm just like throwing stuff all over it.

01:10:54 ◼   ► - Same here, same here.

01:10:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, tons of duplication,

01:10:57 ◼   ► movies that I will probably never watch, stuff like that.

01:10:59 ◼   ► I just use it incredibly irresponsibly.

01:11:01 ◼   ► Now, if I wanted to store my incredibly irresponsible,

01:11:04 ◼   ► roughly 10 terabytes of stuff,

01:11:06 ◼   ► I could get two 10 terabyte hard drives

01:11:08 ◼   ► and put them in RAID 1 and be done.

01:11:10 ◼   ► So a NAS, first of all, I don't think the complexity

01:11:12 ◼   ► of a NAS makes sense if you're gonna have fewer

01:11:14 ◼   ► than about five or even eight disks.

01:11:17 ◼   ► And if you're gonna have it, it's this massive thing.

01:11:20 ◼   ► So if you're gonna have a NAS at all,

01:11:23 ◼   ► I think you need to have a really good reason

01:11:25 ◼   ► for why specifically that's the right approach for you,

01:11:28 ◼   ► as opposed to any other option that's simpler,

01:11:31 ◼   ► that's maybe more local to a computer.

01:11:34 ◼   ► - You know, I understand and mostly agree

01:11:37 ◼   ► with everything you've said.

01:11:38 ◼   ► However, I think I would be remiss to not mention

01:11:43 ◼   ► that there are a lot of things that my Synology does that I am glad I have the Synology to

01:11:49 ◼   ► do it.

01:11:50 ◼   ► So as an example, I really like that I can have my Synology act as a VPN endpoint.

01:11:57 ◼   ► I really like that I can have my Synology act as a downloader for torrents such as Linux

01:12:05 ◼   ► distros and other legal things.

01:12:07 ◼   ► Or if I wanted to download some sort of binary from a news group, again, nothing but legal

01:12:12 ◼   ► things, then I can do that sort of thing.

01:12:15 ◼   ► Now to be fair, all of those can be done on my iMac.

01:12:18 ◼   ► That is also usually on 24/7.

01:12:21 ◼   ► But I do like that there is something off to the side that handles these sorts of things.

01:12:26 ◼   ► And so I agree with you that if all you're looking for is a big hard drive, there are

01:12:32 ◼   ► better ways to solve this problem.

01:12:34 ◼   ► But in a lot of cases, you may want just an absurdly large hard drive, which this functions

01:12:40 ◼   ► as, and that allows you to treat it as infinite storage, because I've done the exact same

01:12:44 ◼   ► thing you've done, or maybe you want to actually leverage some of the features of this computer

01:12:52 ◼   ► that's always on on your network. So there's something to be said for that, too.

01:12:56 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely. And there are other options for that, too. And so before I forget to cover

01:13:03 ◼   ► the iSCSI topic, because I want to then move on to just attaching disks to a Mac, but before

01:13:08 ◼   ► I forget to cover iSCSI.

01:13:10 ◼   ► So for those unfamiliar, the way iSCSI works

01:13:13 ◼   ► in a NAS situation like this is basically

01:13:15 ◼   ► the NAS treats a disk partition,

01:13:20 ◼   ► usually you say like, all right, these four disks,

01:13:22 ◼   ► whatever, make these into like a RAID 5 or RAID 10 set.

01:13:25 ◼   ► This is now an iSCSI volume.

01:13:27 ◼   ► And then you need to get iSCSI software

01:13:29 ◼   ► called an iSCSI initiator for some reason,

01:13:32 ◼   ► not a driver, not software, not an app,

01:13:33 ◼   ► call it an initiator, don't know why, don't care.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Please don't email me about that.

01:13:37 ◼   ► So you get the iSCSI initiator,

01:13:39 ◼   ► which is $200 or so on the Mac,

01:13:43 ◼   ► because it's not built into macOS,

01:13:45 ◼   ► and that allows the Mac to mount that giant block of storage

01:13:50 ◼   ► on the NAS as a local disk.

01:13:53 ◼   ► And it treats it like a local disk,

01:13:54 ◼   ► the Mac, like the applications of the Mac

01:13:56 ◼   ► all see it as a local disk, including backblades,

01:13:59 ◼   ► which is why this works.

01:14:01 ◼   ► And the Mac, you actually format this virtual drive

01:14:05 ◼   ► from the Mac's file system.

01:14:06 ◼   ► Like you format it as HFS Plus or I hope eventually APFS.

01:14:11 ◼   ► And then as far as Mac is concerned,

01:14:14 ◼   ► that's a hard drive put into it.

01:14:15 ◼   ► It's if it happens to be over your network

01:14:17 ◼   ► and being hosted physically by the NAS.

01:14:21 ◼   ► This has a number of advantages.

01:14:23 ◼   ► It does allow things like backblaze to work.

01:14:26 ◼   ► It also lets the Mac think the drive is native.

01:14:29 ◼   ► So if you're only using network shared drives

01:14:33 ◼   ► in the regular NAS way where the NAS

01:14:35 ◼   ► just opens up shares over NFS or SMB

01:14:38 ◼   ► or whatever protocols it's using.

01:14:41 ◼   ► Certain things on the Mac don't work very well,

01:14:43 ◼   ► like because it's a network share,

01:14:45 ◼   ► so it doesn't automap for one usually,

01:14:47 ◼   ► and then things like Spotlight don't work very well,

01:14:50 ◼   ► like searching a network share doesn't work very well.

01:14:51 ◼   ► Certain applications don't like running on network shares

01:14:54 ◼   ► or operating on files on network shares, stuff like that.

01:14:56 ◼   ► On iSCSI volume, because it is just like dumb block storage

01:15:00 ◼   ► over the network, there is no sharing of it.

01:15:02 ◼   ► Like only one thing can be connected to it at a time,

01:15:04 ◼   ► that is its disk, whatever computer is running the initiator,

01:15:08 ◼   ► that's the one that's using it.

01:15:10 ◼   ► There's no sharing, you can share it from that computer

01:15:13 ◼   ► as a Mac share, which I actually do on mine,

01:15:16 ◼   ► but then all the NAS's built-in applications,

01:15:20 ◼   ► if there's a media server application

01:15:22 ◼   ► or a Plex on the NAS or whatever else,

01:15:23 ◼   ► all these applications can't see this data anymore

01:15:26 ◼   ► because as far as the NAS is concerned,

01:15:28 ◼   ► this is just a big block of bits.

01:15:29 ◼   ► It cannot see the file system that's running on it,

01:15:31 ◼   ► it is not interacting with it at all,

01:15:33 ◼   ► So it's really a pretty big waste of a NASA's capabilities to use iSCSI.

01:15:40 ◼   ► Also iSCSI is fragile.

01:15:42 ◼   ► Because you're treating the network like a local disk, it must be on a wired connection.

01:15:47 ◼   ► If that connection drops for a second, it unmounts.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And that could be damaging your data or whatever else if it comes at the wrong time or whatever

01:15:54 ◼   ► else happens.

01:15:55 ◼   ► And it's certainly inconvenient if it unmounts.

01:15:58 ◼   ► And in general, I don't recommend iSCSI to anybody

01:16:01 ◼   ► because you are wasting the NAS's abilities

01:16:04 ◼   ► as an application platform.

01:16:06 ◼   ► You are needing to have another computer

01:16:09 ◼   ► be an always on computer on the network.

01:16:11 ◼   ► You know, like in my case it's a Mac Mini

01:16:13 ◼   ► and this Mac Mini does a few different things for me

01:16:15 ◼   ► and it hosts this giant iSCSI volume off the Synology.

01:16:19 ◼   ► So like you're already using a computer

01:16:22 ◼   ► that's on all the time anyway,

01:16:23 ◼   ► but using a NAS as basically a giant hard drive enclosure.

01:16:26 ◼   ► which is fine if you already have one,

01:16:29 ◼   ► but I would never in a million years

01:16:31 ◼   ► recommend that anybody who's starting fresh

01:16:33 ◼   ► and doesn't already own a NAS do this.

01:16:35 ◼   ► It is a terrible idea and nobody ever should do this.

01:16:38 ◼   ► - All right, Jon, you've been very patient.

01:16:41 ◼   ► I appreciate it.

01:16:42 ◼   ► Tell us your thoughts.

01:16:44 ◼   ► - Well, I was gonna talk about alternatives to CrashPlan,

01:16:48 ◼   ► but now apparently I have to defend the concept of a NAS.

01:16:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:16:53 ◼   ► And also the idea of keeping movies on them.

01:16:55 ◼   ► So the one area that I think didn't get mentioned in my market, and one of the main reasons

01:17:02 ◼   ► that I use in NAS, aside from the things Casey was talking about, like having a little computer

01:17:05 ◼   ► and all the applications, which I do use and enjoy, is that, you know, so the hard drives,

01:17:10 ◼   ► these hard drives are big and cheap, 8 terabyte hard drives, 10 terabyte hard drives, whatever.

01:17:15 ◼   ► That whole discussion was about spinning disks.

01:17:17 ◼   ► These are all spinning disks.

01:17:18 ◼   ► They're, you know, 8 terabyte SSDs are not cheap.

01:17:21 ◼   ► All right?

01:17:22 ◼   ► Right?

01:17:23 ◼   ► You can buy them, not cheap.

01:17:24 ◼   ► Right?

01:17:25 ◼   ► spinning disks are big noisy and hot I like big cheap storage especially for

01:17:32 ◼   ► stuff like movies where it's just sequential reads and stuff like that I

01:17:34 ◼   ► do not like spinning disks anywhere near me so I like the idea of bunch of big

01:17:41 ◼   ► cheap hot noisy expensive disks far far away from me and far far away means

01:17:48 ◼   ► network means network attached storage so even if I just wanted the cheapest

01:17:53 ◼   ► bucket of drives to throw crap into and even if a NAS had no applications I would still

01:17:59 ◼   ► want a NAS just to get those disks far away from me and I would only be using them not

01:18:04 ◼   ► for like primary storage but for very large files that will mostly be read sequentially

01:18:09 ◼   ► so I wouldn't put my photo library on a NAS don't do that you'll probably be sad right

01:18:13 ◼   ► I wouldn't put my applications there or anything like that just put big data files there and

01:18:19 ◼   ► of course a NAS doesn't just give me a big bucket of stuff because you know the other

01:18:22 ◼   ► So that's that's why I think about this a lot like at my sonology down there

01:18:24 ◼   ► I think about ripped out all those drives and replace them all with eight terabytes

01:18:28 ◼   ► How much space would I by the way unlike the two of you? I?

01:18:31 ◼   ► Don't know I kind of do know I know how this happened

01:18:34 ◼   ► But I'm I have not been using my we have the same amount of storage. I've not been using my storage for Leslie I've

01:18:40 ◼   ► Been using it carefully like I I delete I don't know

01:18:44 ◼   ► Movies after I watch them right like if I ever watch a movie and it was crap immediately

01:18:49 ◼   ► deleted. If I rip a movie, but then a new version comes out, I delete that and rip the

01:18:56 ◼   ► new version, right? I have been using it frivolously, and yet my Synology has been basically on

01:19:04 ◼   ► the verge of being full, meaning like only a few hundred gigabytes available in various

01:19:08 ◼   ► volumes for almost this entire life. The main reason is I do time machine backups to it.

01:19:15 ◼   ► If you have a couple of machines with a terabyte internal hard drives plus some external drives,

01:19:22 ◼   ► both time machine backing up to your Synology, your backups get pretty big pretty fast.

01:19:27 ◼   ► So I've allocated a chunk of it for backups for my two Macs, right?

01:19:32 ◼   ► That's two terabytes just for their internal drives plus the three other internal drives

01:19:36 ◼   ► that are on my Mac Pro and the external drives that are attached to my wife's iMac.

01:19:40 ◼   ► So that's a couple of terabytes there.

01:19:43 ◼   ► I have that on a RAID set with some redundancy protection.

01:19:48 ◼   ► It's not RAID 0, right?

01:19:49 ◼   ► So there's more drives being used up.

01:19:51 ◼   ► So a lot of my—

01:19:52 ◼   ► Well, slow down, slow down, slow down.

01:19:53 ◼   ► You have your time machine volume with RAID redundancy?

01:19:59 ◼   ► Yes.

01:20:00 ◼   ► Yeah, see, I'm not going to say you're wrong there.

01:20:05 ◼   ► But when I was asking Marco—because I think Marco had either gotten his Synology before

01:20:09 ◼   ► me or maybe just set it up before me—I'd asked Marco, you know, "How did you do this?"

01:20:12 ◼   ► We have 8-Bay Synologies, and what Marco recommended, which I think was a good call, was do, what

01:20:20 ◼   ► was it, RAID 0 for two of the physical drives.

01:20:22 ◼   ► So basically you're making one large hard drive out of two physical hard drives, but

01:20:28 ◼   ► having absolutely no redundancy.

01:20:30 ◼   ► And the only thing that goes on that volume is my time machine backups.

01:20:34 ◼   ► So if I drop one, eh, I lose my time machine backups.

01:20:37 ◼   ► I cannot tell you the last time I've needed a time machine backup.

01:20:41 ◼   ► I still use it because I want it to be there, but I haven't used one in forever.

01:20:46 ◼   ► And yes, this is where everyone writes this and says, "Oh, RAID 0, you should never use

01:20:50 ◼   ► that, blah, blah, blah."

01:20:51 ◼   ► It's just for Time Machine.

01:20:54 ◼   ► That's it.

01:20:55 ◼   ► And--

01:20:56 ◼   ► - Also, I should follow up that I think, I can't tell from here, but I think I actually

01:21:00 ◼   ► switched it over to RAID 1 when I upgraded its storage capacity a few years later.

01:21:06 ◼   ► But I would also say also, it also only makes sense to do RAID 0 on Time Machine.

01:21:10 ◼   ► if Time Machine is not your primary backup.

01:21:13 ◼   ► You know, which for us it isn't.

01:21:15 ◼   ► Like, I have a super duper clone

01:21:17 ◼   ► that's local to the computer.

01:21:18 ◼   ► It's like a little local SSD that I tape under the desk.

01:21:20 ◼   ► And so like, that is my primary backup for my main drive.

01:21:24 ◼   ► Time Machine is a convenience historical backup only.

01:21:28 ◼   ► I also have cloud backup.

01:21:29 ◼   ► Like, there's the, you know, we have multiple things.

01:21:32 ◼   ► So if Time Machine is one of multiple things,

01:21:35 ◼   ► and you are, and you want to not waste

01:21:37 ◼   ► too much hard drive space on it,

01:21:40 ◼   ► that's when I recommend using RAID 0

01:21:41 ◼   ► if you're gonna do something like this.

01:21:43 ◼   ► But even today, again, a lot of this made sense

01:21:46 ◼   ► back when we were doing it,

01:21:48 ◼   ► when we were setting this up, what, three years ago?

01:21:50 ◼   ► But these days with the hard drives just so big,

01:21:55 ◼   ► it really removes a lot of the need to use RAID much at all.

01:21:59 ◼   ► Or if you're going to use RAID now,

01:22:01 ◼   ► you could much more often just use RAID 1,

01:22:03 ◼   ► which is just straight mirroring.

01:22:05 ◼   ► And the loss of the disk space

01:22:06 ◼   ► doesn't really matter as much.

01:22:08 ◼   ► That's less space efficient than the other raid schemes that let you use more of the

01:22:12 ◼   ► space.

01:22:13 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm more inclined to use raid 0.

01:22:15 ◼   ► I don't do this now, but I'd be more inclined to use raid 0 for my media because media has

01:22:18 ◼   ► less churn and there's less versions.

01:22:21 ◼   ► You know, I have Super Duper clones too, right?

01:22:23 ◼   ► But Super Duper don't save all versions.

01:22:25 ◼   ► I want to save as many old versions as possible.

01:22:28 ◼   ► And if I had raid 0 and one of the discs died, I've lost all versions of Time Machine backups

01:22:33 ◼   ► for two entire max.

01:22:34 ◼   ► Right?

01:22:35 ◼   ► Now I have other Time Machine backups too.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Anyway, I have a little bit, I understand I have a little bit of a nice, but anyway,

01:22:39 ◼   ► that, that burns a lot of discs.

01:22:41 ◼   ► And then of course I have my media.

01:22:42 ◼   ► I don't have a lot, a lot of media and I do delete stuff from it, but it adds up.

01:22:47 ◼   ► Cause I also have stuff in there.

01:22:48 ◼   ► Like every WWDC video that Apple has ever released in the highest definition.

01:22:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:53 ◼   ► That's the perfect thing for that.

01:22:54 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:54 ◼   ► And it's like, Oh, are you ever going to watch it?

01:22:56 ◼   ► I'm I'm archiving it.

01:22:58 ◼   ► I can't easily get that stuff again.

01:22:59 ◼   ► I have lots of crap like that.

01:23:01 ◼   ► And so that's my Synology basically filled up.

01:23:04 ◼   ► So anyway, I, I like it.

01:23:05 ◼   ► I like having a NAS.

01:23:06 ◼   ► I like the big spinning noisy disk far away from me and despite how huge it is, I would

01:23:12 ◼   ► even want more of it.

01:23:13 ◼   ► And like Casey said before, that's why I'm using CrashPlan and not Backblaze is because

01:23:18 ◼   ► on my Mac I use Backblaze, on my wife's Mac I use CrashPlan and on her Mac I mount the

01:23:25 ◼   ► Synology and I have CrashPlan back up the Synology volumes just like any other thing

01:23:30 ◼   ► because it does network backups.

01:23:31 ◼   ► Now CrashPlan, like Backblaze, is a flat fee for unlimited data.

01:23:36 ◼   ► And like Casey, I take advantage of that and I have about five terabytes pushed off the

01:23:40 ◼   ► CrashPlan.

01:23:41 ◼   ► It's like, you said there's as many times as you want, so I did.

01:23:45 ◼   ► That's just for Jason Snell.

01:23:46 ◼   ► I probably blew the quote.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Sorry, Jason.

01:23:48 ◼   ► So, yeah, so it was a great deal, right?

01:23:51 ◼   ► And maybe that's why they're not offering it anymore.

01:23:52 ◼   ► It was like, we can't afford to do that, right?

01:23:54 ◼   ► So I'm in the same situation as Casey where they're sunsetting their consumer product,

01:23:59 ◼   ► to have to figure out what I'm going to do about it.

01:24:04 ◼   ► I forget how much I'm paying for a crash plan per year, but it's super cheap, especially

01:24:08 ◼   ► for the amount of data I'm putting on it.

01:24:10 ◼   ► The offer they have for the small business thing, it's at least twice as expensive as

01:24:18 ◼   ► the consumer one, but still only like $10 a month per device.

01:24:22 ◼   ► For people with multiple devices, that's a problem, but I've only got one device, it's

01:24:25 ◼   ► my wife's Mac that I'm doing that with, so I don't mind that much.

01:24:29 ◼   ► small business thing we'll have a link to the crash plan fact one of the

01:24:33 ◼   ► questions on the fact is can I still move to crash plan for small business

01:24:36 ◼   ► even if I'm not a small business the answer yes you can anyone can migrate it

01:24:41 ◼   ► like I don't why is it it's just called small business you don't have to be a

01:24:45 ◼   ► small business although annoyingly they make you enter a company name so I

01:24:47 ◼   ► entered some bogus thing or whatever but you do not have to be a small business

01:24:51 ◼   ► use a small business and it's $10 per month per device but if you're a current

01:24:56 ◼   ► Crash Plan subscriber, there's an apology price for one year that is 75% off. So it's $2.50 a month

01:25:05 ◼   ► to upload unlimited data to Crash Plan. And if you already have a Crash Plan thing, you don't have to

01:25:13 ◼   ► re-upload your 5TB. It will migrate your existing 5TB backup and you'll just continue as normal.

01:25:19 ◼   ► That deal was too good for me to pass up. $2.50 a month for a year starting at the end of my current

01:25:25 ◼   ► subscription that was extended for 60 days for unlimited backup? Yes, please, right? Even when

01:25:31 ◼   ► it goes up to $10 a month, I might keep paying it just for the convenience. I'm pretty sure I'm

01:25:35 ◼   ► still running the Java application. And no, it's not the most efficient thing in the world. And it

01:25:39 ◼   ► fills my disk with big files and takes a lot of memory and does stuff. But in general, I have

01:25:43 ◼   ► enough control to make it lay off when I'm using the computer in only room and I'm not using it.

01:25:47 ◼   ► And for the most part, it's done its job they do they do, you know, it does a pretty good job of

01:25:52 ◼   ► finding the files and backing them up. And I just can't beat that pricing, right? And

01:25:57 ◼   ► so after the end of 2018, when my gravy train ends and I have to decide whether I want to

01:26:06 ◼   ► start paying $10 a month for my five terabyte backup, I might be like, "Okay, I'll just

01:26:13 ◼   ► unsubscribe from Hulu or whatever the hell streaming service that I haven't used in a

01:26:17 ◼   ► Take that money and and put it towards this or I might use one of the alternatives you listed

01:26:23 ◼   ► But for now the sort of what's the least I can do to not have to think about this problem until the end of 2018

01:26:29 ◼   ► it was

01:26:30 ◼   ► Do the small business migration a lot of people are mad at crash-plan like oh, I'm never giving them business blah blah blah

01:26:35 ◼   ► They should have handled the transition better

01:26:37 ◼   ► Arguably the 60-day extension could have been like a one-year extension or whatever

01:26:42 ◼   ► but there's no real easy way to do this. I made a plea to Backblaze, which I use and

01:26:48 ◼   ► enjoy but that doesn't do network volumes, on Twitter, which is where you interact with

01:26:52 ◼   ► brands in case you didn't know. Sorry, where you engage with brands. I engaged with the

01:26:57 ◼   ► brand on Twitter, and I said, "Hey, I would love it if you could back up network shares."

01:27:03 ◼   ► And the disembodied voice of Backblaze, the corporation, said on Twitter, "Unfortunately,"

01:27:07 ◼   ► Unfortunately, they left out a comma,

01:27:09 ◼   ► our business model would need a lot of reworking

01:27:12 ◼   ► for us to offer NAS/server for a fixed rate.

01:27:15 ◼   ► So basically it's saying like we don't, you know,

01:27:17 ◼   ► well I said to them back, so obviously they can't,

01:27:21 ◼   ► they would need to figure out how they can pay for that.

01:27:23 ◼   ► I said, well, you don't need to do what CrashPlan did,

01:27:26 ◼   ► which is whatever the thing was,

01:27:27 ◼   ► like $60 a year for unlimited.

01:27:29 ◼   ► All you need to do is match CrashPlan small business

01:27:32 ◼   ► because CrashPlan for home is gone.

01:27:33 ◼   ► You don't have to match their price anymore.

01:27:35 ◼   ► Like apparently that was an unsustainable model, right?

01:27:37 ◼   ► Presumably CrashPlan for small business

01:27:40 ◼   ► is a sustainable model at $10 per month per device.

01:27:44 ◼   ► So I would love it if Backblaze did that.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Even if they put a limit on it,

01:27:47 ◼   ► they said like, you know, five terabytes

01:27:50 ◼   ► for $10 a month per device, including network things.

01:27:55 ◼   ► You know, like I would try that, right?

01:27:58 ◼   ► So I don't know what they're gonna do there.

01:27:59 ◼   ► I think B2 is their preferred solution for that,

01:28:02 ◼   ► which is not really a service.

01:28:04 ◼   ► It's a play on S3.

01:28:06 ◼   ► It's just like a storage backend.

01:28:08 ◼   ► But it has, I think the cheapest rates.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Let me look at that.

01:28:12 ◼   ► I have their pricing page up.

01:28:13 ◼   ► Anyone else have it already?

01:28:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the cheapest, like large online block storage thing.

01:28:17 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's a .005 cents per gigabyte per month for storage and .02, oh no, that's not

01:28:27 ◼   ► the damn dollar sign in front of me.

01:28:30 ◼   ► Sorry.

01:28:31 ◼   ► I was going to say, my calculations are all wrong.

01:28:33 ◼   ► One and a half a cent for storage and two cents per gigabyte for download.

01:28:40 ◼   ► And it is less than S3 and Azure and Google Cloud, which are the ones they put in here.

01:28:44 ◼   ► They also have a price calculator at the bottom where you can say, "Here's what my initial

01:28:47 ◼   ► upload is.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Here's what my monthly upload is.

01:28:49 ◼   ► Here's my monthly delete and my monthly download," and it will price it out for you.

01:28:53 ◼   ► And it's not that bad.

01:28:54 ◼   ► For my data, for reasonable values, it comes out to like $20 or $30 a month.

01:28:58 ◼   ► But that's still three times what $10 a month is.

01:29:02 ◼   ► But that's just storage.

01:29:03 ◼   ► you can back up directly to B2, so I could do that. But when I asked on Twitter, as soon

01:29:09 ◼   ► as this announcement was made, okay, what's everybody's favorite thing that will back

01:29:13 ◼   ► up a Mac, including a NAS? And in that tweet, just to save my—tried to save myself a little—it

01:29:18 ◼   ► didn't work, but tried to save myself a little time, I said, "What's the best thing

01:29:22 ◼   ► on the Mac that backs up to a NAS, or the backup network that drives?" Is it ARC,

01:29:28 ◼   ► or is it something else? Because I knew everyone was going to say ARC. And I know about ARC,

01:29:32 ◼   ► and I wanted to preempt them by saying,

01:29:34 ◼   ► "Yes, I'm aware of Arc.

01:29:35 ◼   ► I'm checking in with everybody to see

01:29:37 ◼   ► is there something else out there that's better?"

01:29:39 ◼   ► And some people did get alternate suggestions

01:29:40 ◼   ► that I looked at, but then a thousand people were applauding,

01:29:42 ◼   ► "You should try Arc."

01:29:43 ◼   ► Anyway, Arc is a Mac application,

01:29:47 ◼   ► a third-party Mac application that will back up your Mac.

01:29:49 ◼   ► It's been in development for a long time now,

01:29:52 ◼   ► and it's sort of novel thing is that you choose

01:29:56 ◼   ► and pay for whatever storage backend you want.

01:29:59 ◼   ► So if you want to pay for Amazon Glacier

01:30:01 ◼   ► or Amazon Drive or S3 or B2, Arc will back up to any of them.

01:30:07 ◼   ► Arc is a backup program.

01:30:08 ◼   ► It just says, just point me at your place where you want me to put the data.

01:30:12 ◼   ► And it will put its data there and its format or whatever it does, blah, blah, blah.

01:30:15 ◼   ► But you have to choose the storage thing and you pay for the storage thing.

01:30:20 ◼   ► So, and you could change, like you could, you know, stop paying for B2 and switch to Amazon Drive or something,

01:30:26 ◼   ► presumably have to, you know, transfer your backup over there, whatever.

01:30:29 ◼   ► So it's a nice divorce from the backup program and the storage backend.

01:30:33 ◼   ► And a lot of people use that and they enjoy it and they've been successful with it.

01:30:37 ◼   ► But given the storage backend pricing, none of these come close to matching

01:30:41 ◼   ► crash plans pricing, pricing or backblazers pricing for that matter, if

01:30:44 ◼   ► you're not doing network attached storage.

01:30:46 ◼   ► So it seems like Arc is sort of the power user fancy thing where you get

01:30:50 ◼   ► to pick the components and assemble it.

01:30:52 ◼   ► But if you have a huge amount of data, like I do, it just can't match the price

01:30:57 ◼   ► of one of these all you can eat things.

01:30:58 ◼   ► And the all-that-you-can-eat things, I'm being subsidized by people who back up like 100

01:31:02 ◼   ► megs, right?

01:31:03 ◼   ► That's how they can be so cheap is because I'm paying the same amount per month for backblazer

01:31:07 ◼   ► for CrashPlan as somebody who backs up like their 100 megabyte little folder of stuff,

01:31:12 ◼   ► right?

01:31:13 ◼   ► And so that's how Amazon can, you know, that's how these services can afford to give you

01:31:16 ◼   ► the flat rate.

01:31:17 ◼   ► Because most people don't upload five terabytes.

01:31:20 ◼   ► It's just the stinkers like me and Casey that are, you know, ruining it for everybody else,

01:31:24 ◼   ► right?

01:31:25 ◼   ► That's how they have to figure out their sort of histogram of how much people upload and

01:31:29 ◼   ► make all the math work out.

01:31:31 ◼   ► Whereas things like S3 and B2 where they're just selling you storage, they just charge

01:31:35 ◼   ► you for the storage.

01:31:36 ◼   ► Like it's all completely chunked out.

01:31:38 ◼   ► It's like, well, we're just a storage backend and you don't get to pay us less for your

01:31:44 ◼   ► storage just because someone else stores a little bit less than our thing, right?

01:31:48 ◼   ► It's exactly dollars per gigabyte, very granular service that doesn't care what you're doing

01:31:53 ◼   ► with the storage, you just pay for what you use.

01:31:56 ◼   ► And plus the paying for transfers is another thing that really bites you depending on how

01:31:59 ◼   ► much transfers you do.

01:32:02 ◼   ► So that was my choice for now, is that basically I'm punting it down the road, I'm going to

01:32:07 ◼   ► continue using CrashPlan for as long as I can.

01:32:10 ◼   ► Also because I don't want to upload 5TBs any of myself again, I mean I have a fast connection,

01:32:14 ◼   ► but that would take a long time and during that time I would have no cloud backups of

01:32:18 ◼   ► my thingies.

01:32:19 ◼   ► To get back to Marco's point about not backing up, not even having stuff on there in the

01:32:24 ◼   ► first place for like ripped movies that you're never gonna watch and other big stuff like

01:32:28 ◼   ► that, you could just, you know, pay $5 to get it online or stream it from Netflix or

01:32:33 ◼   ► whatever.

01:32:35 ◼   ► That only works for the people who aren't using a NAS like Casey was just describing

01:32:39 ◼   ► where they're, or like I have tried to do but had to bail on and may try again.

01:32:45 ◼   ► Blu-rays without recompressing them right because there is nothing I'm recompressing them

01:32:51 ◼   ► I'm not like you are all right well anyway a lot of people

01:32:55 ◼   ► Rip them and don't recompress them just so they don't have to deal with blu-ray discs

01:32:58 ◼   ► Which has been established in the show are terrible right so you just get rid of everything except in the movie

01:33:02 ◼   ► The actual movie file you hit play and it starts playing the movie right that actually is not a bad idea at all

01:33:07 ◼   ► yeah, but the thing is they're humongous and

01:33:11 ◼   ► You know even if you watch them rarely is that oh, it's easy just to buy it on iTunes

01:33:15 ◼   ► you can't get a you know a 4k you know if you have a 4k blu-ray thing UHD

01:33:22 ◼   ► blu-ray and you rip that losslessly there is nothing you can get online

01:33:26 ◼   ► streaming that can match that quality there's just nothing like it's not even

01:33:28 ◼   ► close even like 4k Netflix is just so massively compressed compared to what

01:33:31 ◼   ► you get off of that plastic disc so if you care about that and you have some

01:33:35 ◼   ► giant NAS somewhere with all these 50 to 100 gigabyte rips of these things right

01:33:40 ◼   ► there is no like oh I'll just get it online if you don't care about that well

01:33:44 ◼   ► then why are you ripping a bunch of movies to, you know, I guess to get rid of the menus, whatever,

01:33:48 ◼   ► but then the Marco systems are to look better and better the less you care about the quality of your stuff, right?

01:33:53 ◼   ► I'm kind of in the middle where I do care about it, but I don't have any way to play things like that on there.

01:33:57 ◼   ► So sometimes I have

01:33:59 ◼   ► like

01:34:02 ◼   ► versions of things for kids on there with like English dubs and other more rare materials.

01:34:08 ◼   ► Sometimes I've transferred things from my TiVo to there to free up space on my TiVo,

01:34:12 ◼   ► Which is terrible because the compression is anyway, it's bad. I don't do that stuff, but it has happened

01:34:18 ◼   ► so there's a lot of churn in it, but

01:34:21 ◼   ► It's not always the case that you can or even something like home movies like I have all of my

01:34:27 ◼   ► All my home movies taken with my camcorder because I'm old and my kids are old now and my camcorder, right?

01:34:34 ◼   ► I need to get that the video off of the camcorder is DV at least it's not analog off of the camcorder and

01:34:41 ◼   ► Someplace else it's all ripped to the Synology than all gets backed up

01:34:45 ◼   ► So if I had to do sort of like a trimming and so you can't back up five terabytes anymore deal with it

01:34:50 ◼   ► I would try to stop backing up all of my media that is replaceable

01:34:56 ◼   ► But I would still back up like all my Apple videos. I would still back up all my kids videos

01:35:02 ◼   ► And stuff like that and that's probably like half of the stuff because I don't have that many movies

01:35:07 ◼   ► I mean, I think I've shared my Plex thing with both of you guys.

01:35:11 ◼   ► Like there's not that many movies in there.

01:35:13 ◼   ► Like my movie collection is mostly on shelves on plastic discs and I still take them out

01:35:16 ◼   ► of the containers and put them in.

01:35:17 ◼   ► I just did it this weekend.

01:35:19 ◼   ► I took a plastic disc out of a case and put it into a slot and watched a movie.

01:35:24 ◼   ► It's a thing I still do.

01:35:25 ◼   ► It was a...

01:35:26 ◼   ► Like an animal.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah, really.

01:35:28 ◼   ► It was a Blu-ray.

01:35:29 ◼   ► It was a Criterion Collection and it looked really good.

01:35:32 ◼   ► Not 4K though, but soon, like Marco said, I'll have to be getting the 4K versions of

01:35:36 ◼   ► all of my favorite movies, which is fine.

01:35:38 ◼   ► I'm fine with it.

01:35:40 ◼   ► Anyway, yeah, so Crash Plan, sad.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Don't poo-poo the small business thing.

01:35:46 ◼   ► Take a look at it.

01:35:47 ◼   ► Arc seems to be the consensus for other things

01:35:49 ◼   ► that you might want to try.

01:35:51 ◼   ► And if you don't have network attached, discs back place.

01:35:54 ◼   ► I think you've convinced me that I should just bite the bullet

01:35:57 ◼   ► and move to small business, because that is definitely

01:36:00 ◼   ► the price performer.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Didn't you tweet earlier, Casey, that there

01:36:04 ◼   ► was a five terabyte limit on it?

01:36:06 ◼   ► - No, I don't think so.

01:36:07 ◼   ► - I checked, it's unlimited.

01:36:09 ◼   ► - Okay, so then if it's basically the same thing

01:36:11 ◼   ► you were getting before, just now it's gonna be

01:36:13 ◼   ► 10 bucks a month after the apology period instead of five,

01:36:16 ◼   ► that's, you know, yeah, bite the bullet,

01:36:18 ◼   ► that's still a pretty good deal for unlimited space

01:36:20 ◼   ► with network volumes.

01:36:21 ◼   ► Like, Backblaze beats it by I think about half

01:36:25 ◼   ► for local files, but to include network files in that,

01:36:29 ◼   ► that's, yeah, just pay it, that's fine.

01:36:31 ◼   ► Like they're really showing you a price hike here,

01:36:35 ◼   ► but that's totally fine.

01:36:37 ◼   ► Your other alternatives are all going to be

01:36:40 ◼   ► more disruptive and probably more expensive.

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01:37:59 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:38:02 ◼   ► We've talked about doing a NAS,

01:38:05 ◼   ► we've talked about doing a NAS with iSCSI,

01:38:08 ◼   ► we've talked about trying to just not need any of this.

01:38:10 ◼   ► What if you still need lots of storage

01:38:11 ◼   ► and you don't want a NAS?

01:38:13 ◼   ► And I wanted to close my topic, hopefully this topic,

01:38:17 ◼   ► with the other option, which is,

01:38:20 ◼   ► if I were starting over today, how would I do it?

01:38:23 ◼   ► 'Cause the only reason I have iSCSI on my NAS now

01:38:25 ◼   ► is because I already had a NAS full of big disks,

01:38:28 ◼   ► And I was like, well, I already have all this hardware,

01:38:30 ◼   ► might as well use it.

01:38:31 ◼   ► What I would do today if I was starting fresh,

01:38:34 ◼   ► I already have a Mac Mini server in my home.

01:38:37 ◼   ► I would just get a small number,

01:38:40 ◼   ► probably either two or four,

01:38:42 ◼   ► eight terabyte or 10 terabyte disks,

01:38:45 ◼   ► put them into very basic enclosures

01:38:47 ◼   ► that have pretty much no intelligence to them whatsoever,

01:38:49 ◼   ► and plug them into the Mac Mini.

01:38:52 ◼   ► And have it be in the basement or garage or whatever else

01:38:56 ◼   ► so the noise doesn't bother me, or it's just in the closet.

01:38:58 ◼   ► And just run either no RAID whatsoever,

01:39:01 ◼   ► or the built-in Mac OS X RAID,

01:39:03 ◼   ► or there's an app called Soft RAID

01:39:06 ◼   ► that is almost certainly the best option

01:39:09 ◼   ► for any kind of advanced use as software RAID on the Mac.

01:39:13 ◼   ► It's kind of expensive, it's 180 bucks

01:39:15 ◼   ► for the full-length RAID 5,

01:39:16 ◼   ► or if you just need RAID 1 or 0, it's 50 bucks.

01:39:20 ◼   ► And again, these days, you can get two eight terabyte drives

01:39:25 ◼   ► for a total of 600 bucks.

01:39:27 ◼   ► You get software aid light edition for 50 bucks,

01:39:31 ◼   ► put them in raid one, and you have really safe

01:39:34 ◼   ► eight terabytes of storage for under $1,000.

01:39:38 ◼   ► - You just build a Mac OS NAS, you realize.

01:39:41 ◼   ► - Yes, I know.

01:39:42 ◼   ► Well, so basically here's where this benefits.

01:39:46 ◼   ► Well, the downside I think is obvious,

01:39:48 ◼   ► that you have to then run on a Mac OS,

01:39:51 ◼   ► you won't get some of the advanced raid features.

01:39:54 ◼   ► Most NASA's these days, including the synologies we have,

01:39:56 ◼   ► have some kind of system to automatically expand,

01:40:00 ◼   ► or at least somewhat gracefully expand capacity

01:40:02 ◼   ► down the road without having to blow away your whole volume.

01:40:05 ◼   ► This is a system similar to what Drobo

01:40:07 ◼   ► has offered for years.

01:40:08 ◼   ► Drobo made it famous, but Drobo is terrible.

01:40:10 ◼   ► Nobody should ever use Drobo's.

01:40:12 ◼   ► They are incredibly unreliable.

01:40:14 ◼   ► If you ask around, you will see so many horror stories

01:40:17 ◼   ► from people who have trusted Drobo

01:40:19 ◼   ► and have had that trust be violated.

01:40:21 ◼   ► So I would not recommend Drobo.

01:40:23 ◼   ► And so other NASs offer features like that

01:40:26 ◼   ► where you can expand volumes over time

01:40:29 ◼   ► by replacing a small hard drive with a big one

01:40:31 ◼   ► and then letting the thing rebuild

01:40:32 ◼   ► and then eventually you can replace the next drive

01:40:35 ◼   ► with another big one, let that rebuild and everything.

01:40:37 ◼   ► It's a slow process but it does indeed work.

01:40:39 ◼   ► You can't do that with iSCSI unfortunately

01:40:42 ◼   ► 'cause iSCSI has to be that one big block

01:40:45 ◼   ► and can't resize a file system that it doesn't know about.

01:40:48 ◼   ► You also, as far as I know, can't do that

01:40:50 ◼   ► if you do a direct attached MAC method.

01:40:52 ◼   ► like what I'm saying here,

01:40:54 ◼   ► just get some drivers, plug them into a Mac.

01:40:56 ◼   ► As far as I know, you can't do that in any way on the Mac

01:40:59 ◼   ► that's at all reasonable,

01:41:00 ◼   ► except if you use a drawer by which again,

01:41:01 ◼   ► you should not do.

01:41:02 ◼   ► Other than losing dynamic expansion though,

01:41:06 ◼   ► a lot of the other stuff I actually find

01:41:08 ◼   ► to either be a wash on the Mac or to be better.

01:41:10 ◼   ► So software wise, if you think about all the stuff,

01:41:14 ◼   ► Casey, you run on your Synology,

01:41:16 ◼   ► you run Plex, you run a VPN server,

01:41:19 ◼   ► you run photo hosting,

01:41:21 ◼   ► I honestly don't know what VPN server options exist for Mac OS, but I'm sure they exist.

01:41:25 ◼   ► Oh, definitely. Definitely.

01:41:26 ◼   ► You can definitely run Plex, because I do. And so I know that works. It's even better,

01:41:31 ◼   ► because you have more processing power, right?

01:41:34 ◼   ► Right. To quickly interrupt and to be absolutely clear, the particular NAS that we have, it

01:41:38 ◼   ► is not powerful enough to be the Plex host. So really, my Plex host is the iMac. It's

01:41:46 ◼   ► simply serving the content off of the Synology.

01:41:49 ◼   ► It's totally powerful enough. I use my Synology as my primary Plex server. Only when I have

01:41:55 ◼   ► in the rare case where it can't transcode, I switch to the iMac Plex server.

01:41:59 ◼   ► So you know, this is an aside that I wouldn't have interrupted had I realized we were going

01:42:03 ◼   ► down, but since I've interrupted, here we are. What I noticed was when I first started

01:42:09 ◼   ► using the Synology with Plex being served on the Synology, it could not keep up with

01:42:16 ◼   ► media I was looking at at the time. However, I have been extremely diligent for literally years

01:42:24 ◼   ► that anytime I add something to the Synology, I make sure I convert it to MP4. So,

01:42:30 ◼   ► hopefully it can send that natively to whatever Apple-based client I am viewing it upon. And it's

01:42:37 ◼   ► rare I use anything to look at Plex, other than an iPad or an Apple TV or something like that.

01:42:42 ◼   ► So I wonder if it actually isn't that bad if as long as I'm not doing like an MKV or something

01:42:47 ◼   ► like that, which sometimes is already in H.264 anyway, but I guess that's a roundabout way of

01:42:53 ◼   ► saying I should probably try that again. And mess with the settings. Like go to original quality so

01:42:58 ◼   ► it allows it to do with not transcoding. And it doesn't have to be M4V or MP4. It can be MKV.

01:43:03 ◼   ► Like I've had a lot of success, but obviously H.265, forget it. Like if anything's H.265,

01:43:10 ◼   ► I worry that my iMac is not going to be able to do it until High Sierra or whatever, the

01:43:14 ◼   ► Synology can't do it, but I just, it's my go-to.

01:43:18 ◼   ► When I have the big choice of which Plex thing do you want to pick, Synology is the one I

01:43:22 ◼   ► pick only after I try it first and it fails.

01:43:25 ◼   ► Actually if I try it first and it fails, the next thing I usually try is Infuse on my Apple

01:43:29 ◼   ► TV, where it supposedly does the decoding on the Apple TV's CPU.

01:43:35 ◼   ► And then my third choice is Plex on the iMac.

01:43:39 ◼   ► So the reason I brought all this up,

01:43:41 ◼   ► and I'm sorry for interrupting, Mark,

01:43:42 ◼   ► but the reason I brought this up is to say you're right

01:43:44 ◼   ► that I'm using my iMac to serve Plex,

01:43:48 ◼   ► and that's basically what you're talking about doing as well.

01:43:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:43:53 ◼   ► Like, you know, if you have, like,

01:43:54 ◼   ► basically a headless Mac that is running

01:43:57 ◼   ► as a server in your house,

01:43:58 ◼   ► and it doesn't have to be a Mac Mini.

01:44:00 ◼   ► It can be just like an old laptop or something.

01:44:03 ◼   ► You know, it can be anything.

01:44:05 ◼   ► I think it's important, though,

01:44:06 ◼   ► that it's serving literally a server role,

01:44:09 ◼   ► that it is not used for anything else,

01:44:10 ◼   ► and then you can put it somewhere so it's out of the way

01:44:13 ◼   ► so you don't have to deal with hard drive noise,

01:44:16 ◼   ► like what John hates, if you don't like

01:44:17 ◼   ► the falsest hard drives, and you can dedicate it to roles.

01:44:21 ◼   ► So not only can you do things like we were talking about,

01:44:25 ◼   ► Plex and stuff, you can also do things

01:44:27 ◼   ► that are exclusive to Apple platforms.

01:44:29 ◼   ► Like I mentioned last week, or two weeks ago,

01:44:31 ◼   ► that I actually have my server Mac Mini

01:44:35 ◼   ► logged into iCloud Photos, and the Photos app

01:44:38 ◼   ► downloads originals to that Mac Mini.

01:44:41 ◼   ► And then Backblaze backs up those originals

01:44:43 ◼   ► from that Mac Mini, even though in addition

01:44:45 ◼   ► to the ones that I have on my main computer,

01:44:47 ◼   ► just 'cause there's one more place

01:44:48 ◼   ► you can have your originals.

01:44:49 ◼   ► And then maybe you can have a laptop

01:44:52 ◼   ► that doesn't have a hard drive

01:44:53 ◼   ► big enough to store your originals,

01:44:55 ◼   ► but you know you have your originals

01:44:56 ◼   ► on this other computer in your house

01:44:58 ◼   ► that is being backed up to a cloud backup service.

01:45:00 ◼   ► Also, because it's a Mac,