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ATP

482: I Should Probably Get Reading Glasses

 

00:00:00 ◼   ► So how is the honey do list?

00:00:02 ◼   ► Be it self-imposed or otherwise?

00:00:04 ◼   ► - Still working on it.

00:00:05 ◼   ► These things take so much longer than you think.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Oh, and I mean, we talked about this in,

00:00:10 ◼   ► did we talk about this in Slack?

00:00:11 ◼   ► Anyway, pre-show, COVID has visited my family.

00:00:16 ◼   ► - I did, I wanted to ask of what the status was,

00:00:18 ◼   ► and I meant to do it during the pre-flight and I forgot,

00:00:20 ◼   ► and then I took a mental note to ask you

00:00:22 ◼   ► after the show was over.

00:00:23 ◼   ► So now that you've brought it up, how's everyone doing?

00:00:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I mean, everyone's fine.

00:00:28 ◼   ► Like not a big deal, we're all vaccinated and boosted

00:00:31 ◼   ► and stuff like that, but we did have positive tests

00:00:34 ◼   ► and so far the rest of us are negative

00:00:36 ◼   ► and we're hanging in there.

00:00:37 ◼   ► But what this does relevant to your question,

00:00:40 ◼   ► all the things that we had like appointments to do,

00:00:42 ◼   ► like see people or like sign documents

00:00:44 ◼   ► or get things set up or whatever,

00:00:46 ◼   ► now it just gets pushed out.

00:00:48 ◼   ► 'Cause we're not gonna go anywhere or do anything.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Again, even though most of us are fine.

00:00:54 ◼   ► And of course we're taking tests every single day.

00:00:56 ◼   ► So my streak of never,

00:00:57 ◼   ► not only not getting COVID as far as I know,

00:00:59 ◼   ► but also not taking a test that has ended

00:01:01 ◼   ► and now the entire family is testing every single day.

00:01:03 ◼   ► Good thing we have a pretty big backlog of tests.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Testing is not fun.

00:01:08 ◼   ► It makes my eyes tear a lot.

00:01:10 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:01:11 ◼   ► - But yeah, that's what we're doing.

00:01:12 ◼   ► And so, yeah, that's totally screwed up my list of items.

00:01:16 ◼   ► So things that I thought I was gonna finally

00:01:18 ◼   ► be able to check off,

00:01:19 ◼   ► 'cause again, I only check them off list

00:01:20 ◼   ► when they're actually done done.

00:01:22 ◼   ► I did check off the car thing.

00:01:23 ◼   ► Like I said, last time the car is fixed,

00:01:26 ◼   ► You know, although, did I mention on the show

00:01:29 ◼   ► that they tried to clean the interior?

00:01:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, with Armor All. - I don't know if you

00:01:32 ◼   ► mentioned on the show, but you definitely told us.

00:01:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know if it was Armor All.

00:01:34 ◼   ► I don't wanna throw that brand under the bus,

00:01:36 ◼   ► but the garage is trying to be nice,

00:01:37 ◼   ► the body shop's trying to be nice,

00:01:38 ◼   ► like, oh, we'll clean your car for you,

00:01:40 ◼   ► and they vacuumed it and they washed it

00:01:41 ◼   ► and they tried to clean the interior.

00:01:43 ◼   ► And I'm just one of those people who does not approve

00:01:46 ◼   ► of the various, let's say, greasy protectants

00:01:51 ◼   ► that are often used on the interior of cars.

00:01:54 ◼   ► Do not approve of them. - I'm so surprised.

00:01:56 ◼   ► - I'm so surprised you have an opinion about this.

00:01:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, so they did that

00:01:59 ◼   ► and I spent a while cleaning that off.

00:02:00 ◼   ► But the main problem of course,

00:02:01 ◼   ► as anyone who's ever gotten body work done

00:02:03 ◼   ► is that it smells like drying paint

00:02:05 ◼   ► because they've repainted the thing

00:02:07 ◼   ► and you just deal with that

00:02:09 ◼   ► and eventually the volatile compounds dissipate

00:02:11 ◼   ► or react with the air and you don't smell it anymore.

00:02:13 ◼   ► But anyway, that did get checked off the list.

00:02:16 ◼   ► But that remember wasn't on the to-do list

00:02:18 ◼   ► until something happened to the car.

00:02:20 ◼   ► That was a fun incidental item.

00:02:22 ◼   ► - Of the items, of the big items that were there,

00:02:25 ◼   ► you know, like, I think they're all basically still there.

00:02:28 ◼   ► They're just, many new items have been added.

00:02:32 ◼   ► It's just, yeah.

00:02:34 ◼   ► The list is getting longer and not shorter.

00:02:36 ◼   ► - That's what happens.

00:02:38 ◼   ► Casey and I have been unemployed for longer than you,

00:02:40 ◼   ► and you'll notice that we are not like,

00:02:43 ◼   ► we don't have tons and tons of free time, right?

00:02:45 ◼   ► - Indeed.

00:02:46 ◼   ► - Like, stuff come, like, your time gets filled.

00:02:49 ◼   ► It's like hardware space, like, it gets filled.

00:02:50 ◼   ► Like, you think you're gonna have all this time,

00:02:53 ◼   ► and then it gets filled up with stuff,

00:02:55 ◼   ► and you're like, wait a minute,

00:02:56 ◼   ► the whole rest of my life before this point,

00:02:58 ◼   ► I was working all day at,

00:02:59 ◼   ► where did that eight hour block go in my current schedule?

00:03:03 ◼   ► And yeah, it gets consumed.

00:03:05 ◼   ► - Oh, I know where it goes.

00:03:06 ◼   ► I mean, the problem, I really do think

00:03:08 ◼   ► I will shrink this backlog,

00:03:09 ◼   ► but the problem was before I would just neglect

00:03:11 ◼   ► all these things, they were just all being neglected.

00:03:12 ◼   ► So it was no question to me, like, where'd the time go?

00:03:14 ◼   ► I just didn't do any of these things.

00:03:15 ◼   ► They weren't even on the to-do list anymore,

00:03:17 ◼   ► 'cause it's like, well, I don't have time

00:03:18 ◼   ► to deal with that right now.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I'll deal with that at some point in the future.

00:03:21 ◼   ► Well, now at some point in the future.

00:03:23 ◼   ► - All right, so let's do some follow up.

00:03:26 ◼   ► And we had a person write in by the name of Kyle,

00:03:29 ◼   ► and Kyle wrote, all right, I'm gonna really try hard.

00:03:32 ◼   ► I really am not trying to be sarcastic.

00:03:34 ◼   ► I'm really gonna try hard,

00:03:35 ◼   ► and I'm probably gonna screw this up, and I'm gonna try.

00:03:36 ◼   ► Okay, so Kyle wrote in about Bartosz Chihinowski.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Kyle wrote, "I happen to work with Bartosz,"

00:03:42 ◼   ► and yes, that's the same Bartosz,

00:03:44 ◼   ► who makes the delightful articles explaining how things work.

00:03:46 ◼   ► His most recently mentioned article

00:03:47 ◼   ► mechanical watch explainer. In addition to making these excellent guides, he's one of the best

00:03:51 ◼   ► software engineers I've ever worked with. I do have a little more to add about this, but Marco,

00:03:54 ◼   ► you were saying to us privately in the pre-flight that you had some thoughts about the mechanical

00:03:58 ◼   ► watch explainer. Yeah, I hadn't actually gone through it like in the last show, and I have

00:04:02 ◼   ► since, and you know, I'm a watch nerd, and when, you know, when everyone was saying, "Look, here's

00:04:08 ◼   ► a guide on how a mechanical watch works," I figured it would just be like, you know, the time hands.

00:04:13 ◼   ► here's an escapement and a mainspring

00:04:16 ◼   ► and a few gears in the middle and that's it.

00:04:18 ◼   ► And that would have been great just by itself.

00:04:21 ◼   ► This was, I kept going down and I kept seeing

00:04:24 ◼   ► the scroll bar is not reaching the bottom portion

00:04:27 ◼   ► of the screen here. (laughing)

00:04:28 ◼   ► There's a lot more to go.

00:04:29 ◼   ► And then Bartosz would go and explain,

00:04:32 ◼   ► and then what if we wanted to show the date?

00:04:34 ◼   ► And I'm like, really, he's gonna do a date movement on here?

00:04:37 ◼   ► And then I keep going, he added quicksetting to the date?

00:04:41 ◼   ► And then eventually I'm like, he's gonna do automatic.

00:04:44 ◼   ► Sure enough, the automatic rotor comes up,

00:04:46 ◼   ► it's a bi-directional winding automatic motor

00:04:49 ◼   ► of which not all watches are that,

00:04:51 ◼   ► not all watches have dates,

00:04:52 ◼   ► not all watches that have dates have quick setting

00:04:55 ◼   ► mechanisms to jump quickly between them

00:04:57 ◼   ► with a three position crown.

00:04:58 ◼   ► That's not, not every watch has it.

00:05:00 ◼   ► You have to go pretty, you know,

00:05:02 ◼   ► many hundreds of dollars at least before you get one

00:05:05 ◼   ► that has these kind of features,

00:05:06 ◼   ► and usually more than that.

00:05:08 ◼   ► And then at the end I'm like,

00:05:09 ◼   ► Then he throws in hacking seconds,

00:05:11 ◼   ► like where you pull the crown and it stops the time.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:05:14 ◼   ► Like these are features like,

00:05:16 ◼   ► I've bought watches before that don't have these features,

00:05:18 ◼   ► like for major brands.

00:05:19 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:05:20 ◼   ► So to have all of that in the basic explainer,

00:05:23 ◼   ► to have an automatic hacking seconds,

00:05:26 ◼   ► quick set date movement,

00:05:28 ◼   ► like that's what he's explaining.

00:05:29 ◼   ► That was quite impressive on so many levels.

00:05:31 ◼   ► So that was delightful and I'm very, very glad.

00:05:33 ◼   ► And there was a lot of stuff in there I didn't know.

00:05:35 ◼   ► You know, like stuff that like,

00:05:36 ◼   ► you know, I knew that watches did this,

00:05:38 ◼   ► but I didn't know how they accomplished that exactly.

00:05:41 ◼   ► And so it was really cool to go through all that.

00:05:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the entire internet is on my poo-poo list,

00:05:47 ◼   ► on my naughty list, because unbeknownst to me,

00:05:49 ◼   ► until I think when I was clicking around

00:05:51 ◼   ► while we were recording or maybe after the show,

00:05:53 ◼   ► there are a bunch of other articles

00:05:55 ◼   ► that I'm deeply interested in

00:05:56 ◼   ► and I haven't had a chance to read yet,

00:05:57 ◼   ► but more importantly, nobody told me,

00:06:00 ◼   ► where were all of you?

00:06:01 ◼   ► Nobody told me that Bartosz has GPS,

00:06:04 ◼   ► has curves and surfaces, naval architecture.

00:06:06 ◼   ► The one I did know about was the internal combustion engine, which I cannot say enough good things about.

00:06:10 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Cameras and lenses, lights and shadows, gears in general, and a bunch of other stuff.

00:06:16 ◼   ► Like, this is a treasure.

00:06:18 ◼   ► And I was happy to discover, and in the least slimy way possible, you know, if you look at his website on the header at the top,

00:06:27 ◼   ► you see, you know, RSS, email, Instagram, Twitter, and then, oh wait, that's the Patreon P, isn't it?

00:06:34 ◼   ► So you bet your ass I decided to be a patron.

00:06:37 ◼   ► And so you should do that too.

00:06:39 ◼   ► There's three membership levels,

00:06:41 ◼   ► and you get to see Bartosz who put up posts

00:06:44 ◼   ► about how the posts that he made on his website were made.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And I was saying to the guys before

00:06:52 ◼   ► that we started recording,

00:06:53 ◼   ► the post for the Mechanical Watch one

00:06:56 ◼   ► is a screenshot of all the CAD drawings and CAD work

00:07:00 ◼   ► that Bartosz had to do in order to make this article.

00:07:02 ◼   ► and it is freaking nuts.

00:07:05 ◼   ► So you should definitely be a patron,

00:07:08 ◼   ► you should check this junk out, because it is delightful.

00:07:10 ◼   ► So we will put links in the show notes

00:07:12 ◼   ► to all of these things, you should definitely,

00:07:14 ◼   ► definitely give it a whirl.

00:07:15 ◼   ► And in the unlikely event that Bartosz is listening,

00:07:18 ◼   ► I am so sorry that I butchered your name 85 times,

00:07:19 ◼   ► but hand to God, I've really been trying

00:07:21 ◼   ► really, really hard, so my apologies.

00:07:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that,

00:07:25 ◼   ► the internet used to have a lot more stuff

00:07:28 ◼   ► that was really good. - Yes, yes.

00:07:29 ◼   ► and kind of just, and good in an uncomplicated way.

00:07:34 ◼   ► This is just really good, and there's no ulterior motives,

00:07:37 ◼   ► there's no like, you know, ads plastered all over the thing,

00:07:40 ◼   ► unless my ad blocker blocked them, I don't know,

00:07:41 ◼   ► but probably not, there's no like, you know,

00:07:44 ◼   ► actually this is a wiki how, and we're gonna try to,

00:07:46 ◼   ► you know, like there's nothing like,

00:07:47 ◼   ► it's just a person who is an expert in something

00:07:50 ◼   ► making a really great thing and just putting it out there

00:07:53 ◼   ► for the world for free, that's amazing.

00:07:55 ◼   ► And again, there used to be so much more of that

00:07:57 ◼   ► on the internet and these days that stuff seems to be

00:08:00 ◼   ► not only produced less but harder to find.

00:08:04 ◼   ► And so this is just a gem to find

00:08:05 ◼   ► and this just made me so happy.

00:08:07 ◼   ► - Yep, and I mean like I said, the Patreon wasn't like,

00:08:10 ◼   ► hey, you know, smash that,

00:08:11 ◼   ► I know this is a Patreon, not YouTube,

00:08:13 ◼   ► but there was no equivalent of like smash that bell

00:08:15 ◼   ► or anything like that. - Hey guys.

00:08:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, hey guys.

00:08:17 ◼   ► Like there was nothing,

00:08:18 ◼   ► the only reason I knew that there was a Patreon

00:08:20 ◼   ► was 'cause I happened to realize that that little P

00:08:22 ◼   ► up in the upper right hand corner is the Patreon logo.

00:08:25 ◼   ► That was the only mention I saw of Patreon

00:08:27 ◼   ► was the little logo.

00:08:28 ◼   ► Like, there was no, like, HP.fm/join or anything like that.

00:08:32 ◼   ► It was just a little teeny tiny logo in the corner.

00:08:34 ◼   ► So, well done, just five stars, six stars,

00:08:37 ◼   ► if such a thing is possible.

00:08:39 ◼   ► John, tell us about the Apple Developer Center,

00:08:41 ◼   ► if you please.

00:08:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, they're pronouncing new words.

00:08:43 ◼   ► So Gruber had a post about some information

00:08:46 ◼   ► about the Apple Developer Center or some rumors about it.

00:08:49 ◼   ► Is the Apple Developer Center Tan Tau 14?

00:08:52 ◼   ► What's Tan Tau?

00:08:53 ◼   ► Is that like Tan Tan from the Flop House?

00:08:55 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:08:56 ◼   ► It's the road that goes along one side of Apple Park,

00:08:58 ◼   ► apparently.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And the rumor speculation is that Building 14 on that road--

00:09:05 ◼   ► what is it, Tantal Avenue?

00:09:07 ◼   ► Something like that, yeah.

00:09:08 ◼   ► --is, in fact, the developer center.

00:09:11 ◼   ► And as Gruber said, I'm sure we'll find out later

00:09:13 ◼   ► what the deal is.

00:09:14 ◼   ► But based on tips, he thinks it's Tantal 14 next

00:09:17 ◼   ► to the visitor center, which makes a lot of sense.

00:09:19 ◼   ► So Parker Orterland, he had a post

00:09:23 ◼   ► showing a map of where this stuff is

00:09:25 ◼   ► and some more information about it.

00:09:26 ◼   ► So if you look at the map, it's got the Steve Jobs Theater,

00:09:29 ◼   ► which is this little circular thing that's on Apple Park.

00:09:31 ◼   ► And if you basically go straight across the street,

00:09:33 ◼   ► straight across Tan Tao Avenue from Steve Jobs Theater,

00:09:36 ◼   ► there's a big, long, skinny building that's Tan Tao 14.

00:09:39 ◼   ► The theory is that is the building

00:09:40 ◼   ► that is going to be the new developer center.

00:09:43 ◼   ► And then next door to that

00:09:45 ◼   ► is the existing Apple Park Visitor Center,

00:09:47 ◼   ► which is a smaller, rectangular building.

00:09:51 ◼   ► And this makes some sense.

00:09:53 ◼   ► If you look at it, this gets into the idea

00:09:55 ◼   ► of like, Apple is inviting people to Apple Park.

00:09:58 ◼   ► If you think Apple Park is just the ring,

00:10:02 ◼   ► the big ring-shaped building,

00:10:04 ◼   ► and the land that is around that,

00:10:07 ◼   ► maybe that is too narrow of a definition,

00:10:10 ◼   ► because by that definition, the Apple Park Visitor Center

00:10:13 ◼   ► is not in fact in Apple Park,

00:10:14 ◼   ► it is across the street from that.

00:10:16 ◼   ► Same thing with this Building 14,

00:10:19 ◼   ► is also quote-unquote not in Apple Park,

00:10:22 ◼   ► but I think it's all kind of part of the same campus.

00:10:25 ◼   ► The theory of this building is that it will be,

00:10:28 ◼   ► this is the developer center that is a fancy new building.

00:10:31 ◼   ► It will be where the Apple developer,

00:10:33 ◼   ► like evangelist people work,

00:10:35 ◼   ► like their actual office building.

00:10:36 ◼   ► And it will also be where they would bring developers in

00:10:39 ◼   ► to do whatever it is that they do with them

00:10:41 ◼   ► in the developer center.

00:10:43 ◼   ► So we'll see if the speculation proves correct.

00:10:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, and we got, I mean, we didn't just get a birdie.

00:10:49 ◼   ► We got like a flock of seagulls telling us this.

00:10:52 ◼   ► It seems like this is pretty well supported.

00:10:55 ◼   ► - That's before your time, right?

00:10:56 ◼   ► - The band, yes.

00:10:57 ◼   ► - You might've heard it in the play pop hits of the '80s.

00:11:02 ◼   ► - There you go, there you go.

00:11:03 ◼   ► - I tell you what, man, so we're in the,

00:11:05 ◼   ► we just crossed over 1970,

00:11:06 ◼   ► and the rock hits go through of this, it's so much better.

00:11:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:11:12 ◼   ► - It's interesting what like, what are the rock,

00:11:14 ◼   ► like where does that pull from?

00:11:16 ◼   ► - I don't know, I mean, they're Apple Music playlists,

00:11:18 ◼   ► so somebody curated these lists at some point, I don't know.

00:11:22 ◼   ► But anyway, the rock version is really good.

00:11:24 ◼   ► We're significantly better for our tastes

00:11:26 ◼   ► than the pop version, which given that we've always liked

00:11:29 ◼   ► rock music, that's not that big of a surprise.

00:11:31 ◼   ► - There's a question, in the run throughs you did

00:11:33 ◼   ► the pop hits and now you're doing the rock hits.

00:11:35 ◼   ► I'm assuming fish does not appear anywhere on any of these.

00:11:39 ◼   ► - I don't know, I mean, I think the only place

00:11:41 ◼   ► they would potentially appear is when Farmhouse

00:11:43 ◼   ► was on the radio, I think in the late 90s for a brief time.

00:11:47 ◼   ► And that certainly would not have shown up on the pop list,

00:11:49 ◼   ► but maybe it might be on the rock list.

00:11:51 ◼   ► But I don't think it's--

00:11:52 ◼   ► - You can try the "alternative list,"

00:11:55 ◼   ► a category of music that didn't exist until the '90s,

00:12:00 ◼   ► alternative hits of 1955.

00:12:03 ◼   ► - Well, rock didn't exist until '65.

00:12:06 ◼   ► - I'm assuming that's when it starts then, right?

00:12:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, there is no after music rock hits 1964 or earlier.

00:12:13 ◼   ► So from '55 to '64, we just did pop hits again,

00:12:18 ◼   ► but this time doing it the right way

00:12:19 ◼   ► instead of asking Siri to play whatever

00:12:21 ◼   ► and a half her walk away after a few minutes.

00:12:23 ◼   ► But yeah, this time was just play the pop hits playlist

00:12:26 ◼   ► from those years, which were actually pretty decent.

00:12:30 ◼   ► The only weird thing about them is that,

00:12:32 ◼   ► you know, you play the pop hits of the mid to late 60s

00:12:35 ◼   ► and what you really should be hearing

00:12:38 ◼   ► is a heck of a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones

00:12:42 ◼   ► later on like Zeppelin.

00:12:43 ◼   ► But the people who make these lists,

00:12:45 ◼   ► they don't wanna put like six Beatles songs in a row.

00:12:47 ◼   ► And the list is pretty long for each day.

00:12:50 ◼   ► It's 20, 30 songs at least.

00:12:52 ◼   ► It's like an hour's long, I think.

00:12:54 ◼   ► And so you end up missing a lot of significant hits,

00:12:59 ◼   ► not because they weren't ranked high in the charts,

00:13:02 ◼   ► but because they were spread out by a human

00:13:04 ◼   ► on this playlist so you didn't hear too much

00:13:06 ◼   ► of the same band in a row.

00:13:08 ◼   ► That's the only downside of this approach.

00:13:09 ◼   ► So otherwise, it's not, you know,

00:13:12 ◼   ► I have no other faults with the exception

00:13:14 ◼   ► that my home pods keep dying.

00:13:15 ◼   ► - Oh, well, well.

00:13:17 ◼   ► They just ran, Marco.

00:13:18 ◼   ► They ran so far away.

00:13:19 ◼   ► They're so dying.

00:13:21 ◼   ► I'm still holding on, but this is,

00:13:25 ◼   ► I mean, my holding onto these,

00:13:27 ◼   ► this is worse than Casey's iMac at this point.

00:13:29 ◼   ► Like, it's just, they're rebooting every day.

00:13:31 ◼   ► Like, it's just, they're in bad shape.

00:13:34 ◼   ► I really should replace them,

00:13:35 ◼   ► but I just, I can't make myself do it.

00:13:39 ◼   ► - I'm so sorry.

00:13:40 ◼   ► Speaking of things I'm sorry about,

00:13:41 ◼   ► John, how's that multi-factor authentication dance going?

00:13:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was a follow-up on the college account stuff,

00:13:48 ◼   ► So I dealt with that.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Where did I leave it?

00:13:50 ◼   ► I did say I was going to have to contact them.

00:13:52 ◼   ► So that's what I did.

00:13:53 ◼   ► I contacted the help desk or whatever.

00:13:55 ◼   ► So here is what the deal was.

00:13:58 ◼   ► So the problem that the college had is that they have the system where there's a page

00:14:03 ◼   ► where you say, you know, set up multi-factor authentication.

00:14:06 ◼   ► Or if you already have it set up, it says reconfigure multi-factor authentication.

00:14:09 ◼   ► And then it also says disable multi-factor authentication.

00:14:13 ◼   ► As I said, I was having trouble with it, couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.

00:14:15 ◼   ► So I hit disable and it was disabled and then it changed to say setup multi-factor authentication.

00:14:22 ◼   ► The disable button was gone and it was replaced with a button to set it up.

00:14:25 ◼   ► But I wanted to leave it unset up and of course that didn't work.

00:14:28 ◼   ► Every time I tried to log in it kept asking me for multi-factor and eventually I got logged

00:14:31 ◼   ► out of everything.

00:14:32 ◼   ► So that was the problem.

00:14:34 ◼   ► And I sent an email to the support and explained the situation.

00:14:36 ◼   ► It was very clear in my support email and usually pretty straightforward thing.

00:14:39 ◼   ► It's like I disabled multi-factor authentication but now when I log in it asks me to do multi-factor.

00:14:44 ◼   ► I feel like it's a succinct summary of the problem.

00:14:47 ◼   ► So help, because I can't log in, because it prompts me

00:14:50 ◼   ► for multi-factor.

00:14:51 ◼   ► But as far as I know, I disabled it,

00:14:53 ◼   ► so I don't have anything to enter.

00:14:58 ◼   ► And the email reply from a human was, oh,

00:15:01 ◼   ► if you're having trouble setting up multi-factor,

00:15:05 ◼   ► do this, that.

00:15:06 ◼   ► It was telling me what I should do to set up multi-factor,

00:15:09 ◼   ► or how different apps I can use for it or whatever.

00:15:12 ◼   ► And I felt like the response didn't acknowledge my statement,

00:15:16 ◼   ► which was I've disabled multi-factor.

00:15:18 ◼   ► That's what I opened with.

00:15:19 ◼   ► My opening was, I have disabled multi-factor authentication.

00:15:22 ◼   ► But when I log in, it prompts me.

00:15:24 ◼   ► And so they were just trying to help me, like, oh,

00:15:26 ◼   ► why can't you log in with your multi-factor?

00:15:28 ◼   ► I'm like, because I disabled it?

00:15:30 ◼   ► Anyway, after contacting human via telephone,

00:15:34 ◼   ► what they said was, oh, you can't disable multi-factor.

00:15:37 ◼   ► It's required.

00:15:38 ◼   ► The college requires it for all logins,

00:15:40 ◼   ► which is a reasonable policy.

00:15:41 ◼   ► But why is there a big button that says disable multifactor?

00:15:45 ◼   ► Well, it turns out that this third-party product

00:15:47 ◼   ► they're using for like--

00:15:49 ◼   ► it's some third-day product that any college

00:15:52 ◼   ► can buy that helps kids organize their schedule or whatever.

00:15:57 ◼   ► I'm not actually entirely sure what it does.

00:15:59 ◼   ► But that third-party product has its very own login system.

00:16:04 ◼   ► And it has its own account page.

00:16:05 ◼   ► And on that account page, it has a bunch of multifactor stuff.

00:16:08 ◼   ► But the implementation in this college

00:16:10 ◼   ► doesn't use its own login, it uses your college login,

00:16:14 ◼   ► you know, like your account for the college,

00:16:16 ◼   ► and then it just does single sign on basically

00:16:18 ◼   ► to get you into that other thing.

00:16:19 ◼   ► So you never actually log into this third party system,

00:16:22 ◼   ► but the third party system has an account page,

00:16:25 ◼   ► and also it's by the way,

00:16:26 ◼   ► you land on this third party system, like when you log in,

00:16:29 ◼   ► so it makes it seem like you've logged in,

00:16:31 ◼   ► here you are, here's your thing,

00:16:32 ◼   ► and there's a big, you know,

00:16:33 ◼   ► your little silhouette of a person and go to account,

00:16:36 ◼   ► and it makes you think that this is your account.

00:16:38 ◼   ► This is where you'd go to change your password,

00:16:40 ◼   ► set up multi-factor or whatever,

00:16:41 ◼   ► but that multi-factor stuff has absolutely no effect

00:16:44 ◼   ► on your ability to log into your school account.

00:16:46 ◼   ► The school account, it turns out,

00:16:47 ◼   ► is just Microsoft Active Directory, blah, blah, blah, right?

00:16:49 ◼   ► And it uses single sign-on to this third-party product.

00:16:52 ◼   ► But I said to the person,

00:16:53 ◼   ► you should really remove all those buttons

00:16:56 ◼   ► that say change your password, set up multi-factor,

00:16:58 ◼   ► 'cause those have no effect on your actual account.

00:17:00 ◼   ► So it turns out I was just messing with multi-factor stuff

00:17:03 ◼   ► for an account that I was never gonna log into.

00:17:05 ◼   ► And because the first time I set it up,

00:17:08 ◼   ► I deleted the previous multi-factor

00:17:09 ◼   ► and entered the new one that I thought was the new one

00:17:11 ◼   ► when I reconfigured it, right?

00:17:13 ◼   ► I had just deleted the one and only valid multi-factor

00:17:15 ◼   ► to actually log into the AD thing, right?

00:17:18 ◼   ► And now I was just messing with this third party thing

00:17:20 ◼   ► which was never gonna have any relevance whatsoever

00:17:22 ◼   ► to anything that I ever did.

00:17:24 ◼   ► So multi-factor was reset.

00:17:26 ◼   ► Now with my new found knowledge

00:17:27 ◼   ► that I should just completely avoid that entire account page

00:17:30 ◼   ► and don't touch any of that multi-factor stuff

00:17:31 ◼   ► 'cause it's totally irrelevant,

00:17:33 ◼   ► I got multi-factor set up everywhere.

00:17:34 ◼   ► And yes, I did use the thing on the phone.

00:17:36 ◼   ► If you do it in iOS, you can just point the camera

00:17:38 ◼   ► the QR code and it reads it. I still have a to-do item to get some stuff together for Ricky who

00:17:45 ◼   ► works on this team at Apple to figure out why Safari on the Mac wouldn't let me right click

00:17:51 ◼   ► after I replaced the URL and I think my suggestion that the Mac be able to also accept QR code input

00:17:56 ◼   ► either through the camera or by dragging an image or something like that. I think that

00:18:00 ◼   ► feedback was also heard so fingers crossed for the future but anyway it is all sorted out

00:18:04 ◼   ► And it just goes to show the dangers of, I don't know,

00:18:08 ◼   ► like slightly too much knowledge, too little knowledge.

00:18:11 ◼   ► I don't know, I still feel like the whole page is a trap

00:18:13 ◼   ► because anybody who wanders over to that page

00:18:14 ◼   ► and goes to their account and sees all this stuff

00:18:16 ◼   ► about passwords and multi-factor, it's totally a trap.

00:18:19 ◼   ► Almost anything you do there is at best

00:18:21 ◼   ► gonna have no effect and at worst gonna confuse you

00:18:24 ◼   ► into locking yourself out.

00:18:25 ◼   ► - I will say on this topic that this whole story

00:18:28 ◼   ► kind of inspired me to try to put some of my most

00:18:32 ◼   ► frequently used two factor logins

00:18:34 ◼   ► into Apple password system, whatever.

00:18:37 ◼   ► Is it called like Keychain?

00:18:39 ◼   ► - I call it Keychain.

00:18:40 ◼   ► - Okay, so yeah, putting it into that

00:18:42 ◼   ► because I still use 1Password,

00:18:44 ◼   ► but 1Password is increasingly clunky in my experience.

00:18:49 ◼   ► I haven't yet been updated to 1Password 8 yet.

00:18:55 ◼   ► They just did a big new release,

00:18:56 ◼   ► so maybe it's improved there, I don't know.

00:18:58 ◼   ► But the interaction between 1Password and my browsers

00:19:01 ◼   ► on both the Mac and on especially the iPhone

00:19:04 ◼   ► seems very fragile and seems to miss a lot.

00:19:09 ◼   ► And so I'm interested now in moving

00:19:13 ◼   ► some of the most common things to the Apple system

00:19:15 ◼   ► just so it fills faster and more reliably and stuff.

00:19:17 ◼   ► So anyway, so I learned that there's a really nice

00:19:21 ◼   ► export process from 1Password.

00:19:23 ◼   ► You can export any item or set of items

00:19:26 ◼   ► into an iCloud keychain CSV file.

00:19:30 ◼   ► Now, this is comically insecure while it's on disk

00:19:33 ◼   ► because this is literally a file

00:19:34 ◼   ► with unencrypted password data sitting in plain text

00:19:39 ◼   ► on your disk.

00:19:40 ◼   ► And what's nice is that if you go into the Apple password

00:19:44 ◼   ► pref pane, in one of those little dropdown boxes,

00:19:47 ◼   ► there's an option to import this specially formatted CSV.

00:19:50 ◼   ► And it of course yells at you,

00:19:51 ◼   ► this is really insecure by the way.

00:19:52 ◼   ► But then once you do it, it actually gives you

00:19:54 ◼   ► a little button that deletes the file immediately

00:19:57 ◼   ► and bypasses the trash system on the Mac.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So that's nice in the sense that this is only

00:20:02 ◼   ► in your disk for a short time

00:20:03 ◼   ► and this little convenience thing is there.

00:20:05 ◼   ► And anyway, the two-factor stuff that I transferred over

00:20:07 ◼   ► transferred perfectly.

00:20:09 ◼   ► Whatever the format is of this file,

00:20:11 ◼   ► I looked at one of the files, it's just literally like,

00:20:13 ◼   ► it's like website, username, password,

00:20:15 ◼   ► and OTP basis or whatever.

00:20:18 ◼   ► And it worked great.

00:20:19 ◼   ► So now I have some of my most common two-factor things

00:20:22 ◼   ► in iCloud Keychain and as far as I can tell,

00:20:25 ◼   ► it just kinda works.

00:20:26 ◼   ► So I might start moving more stuff into that

00:20:29 ◼   ► or at least copying it, and I've decided finally,

00:20:33 ◼   ► like literally like yesterday,

00:20:35 ◼   ► remember when I mentioned months ago

00:20:37 ◼   ► that I had the ridiculous setup

00:20:39 ◼   ► where both 1Password and iCloud were prompting me

00:20:42 ◼   ► to fill in every single password field in Safari?

00:20:45 ◼   ► I maintained that until yesterday.

00:20:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:20:48 ◼   ► - Oh my word.

00:20:49 ◼   ► - It was a mess.

00:20:50 ◼   ► I finally got fed up.

00:20:51 ◼   ► And so I decided, I finally turned off

00:20:56 ◼   ► the auto-prompting of, like, in every input field

00:21:00 ◼   ► for 1Password.

00:21:01 ◼   ► So I'm gonna leave Apple to auto-prompt me

00:21:04 ◼   ► and kind of leave 1Password as like a lookup system

00:21:08 ◼   ► and see how that goes.

00:21:09 ◼   ► But anyway, I just wanted to bring up the migration thing

00:21:12 ◼   ► 'cause you can really easily export from 1Password

00:21:15 ◼   ► into iCloud Keychain in a way that I didn't think

00:21:17 ◼   ► would work at all, let alone that everyone

00:21:19 ◼   ► would have made so easy.

00:21:21 ◼   ► - Two things on that.

00:21:22 ◼   ► One, do you ever find yourself in a situation

00:21:24 ◼   ► you have a file that like you know a file is going to be fully your passwords briefly or whatever and

00:21:28 ◼   ► if you're super paranoid about it it's a good idea to have somewhere on your folder structure

00:21:35 ◼   ► in your home directory a dedicated directory i just call mine do not back up it's a folder that

00:21:42 ◼   ► you just mark as you exclude from time machine i have lots of stuff excluded from time machine if

00:21:46 ◼   ► you don't know how to do this you go to system preferences go to time machine click on like

00:21:48 ◼   ► options or something and it lets you basically drag in or hit the plus button and select a folder you

00:21:53 ◼   ► you want to be excluded from Time Machine, right?

00:21:55 ◼   ► But just having a dedicated location

00:21:57 ◼   ► that you know is always excluded from Time Machine,

00:21:59 ◼   ► like a Do Not Backup folder,

00:22:01 ◼   ► that is a great place to store these files

00:22:04 ◼   ► that you only want to exist for a brief timing and deleted,

00:22:06 ◼   ► because you never know,

00:22:07 ◼   ► maybe Time Machine was in the middle of running

00:22:09 ◼   ► and the time file appeared

00:22:10 ◼   ► and Time Machine was just about to go through that folder

00:22:12 ◼   ► and it picked it up and shoved it

00:22:13 ◼   ► into a Time Machine backup,

00:22:14 ◼   ► and now, unbeknownst to you,

00:22:15 ◼   ► you have every single one of your passwords in plain text

00:22:17 ◼   ► and Time Machine backup for who knows how long.

00:22:19 ◼   ► But if you put it in the Do Not Backup folder,

00:22:21 ◼   ► it'll never do that.

00:22:22 ◼   ► Same thing with Backblaze,

00:22:22 ◼   ► You can exclude folders.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Just have this one location that you're sure is excluded

00:22:26 ◼   ► from all the backup systems that you use,

00:22:28 ◼   ► and any time you ever need to put something on disk

00:22:30 ◼   ► that you don't really want on disk,

00:22:31 ◼   ► put it in the DoNotBackup folder.

00:22:33 ◼   ► Second thing is related to exports and everything.

00:22:36 ◼   ► I talked about before, when we had the two factors set up,

00:22:39 ◼   ► I just wanted to get that information out,

00:22:41 ◼   ► and it was set up in the Google Authenticator app,

00:22:43 ◼   ► and I said I basically ran out of time

00:22:44 ◼   ► when I was trying to reverse engineer the format,

00:22:47 ◼   ► 'cause if you do an export from Google Authenticator,

00:22:49 ◼   ► it'll give you a QR code, and so I save that QR code,

00:22:52 ◼   ► and then I decoded the QR code,

00:22:54 ◼   ► and then within that decoding of the QR code,

00:22:56 ◼   ► there was some more information to decode,

00:22:57 ◼   ► and eventually it decodes into like a,

00:22:59 ◼   ► there's a big chunk where it's like a protobuf,

00:23:01 ◼   ► 'cause Google loves its protobufs,

00:23:03 ◼   ► and I was decoding that, and I got that decoded,

00:23:05 ◼   ► but then there was more binary data in it,

00:23:07 ◼   ► and I just ran out of time before I could get it all down.

00:23:09 ◼   ► And other people were like, what are you talking about?

00:23:11 ◼   ► If you just decode the QR code,

00:23:13 ◼   ► it's a simple plain text thing,

00:23:14 ◼   ► and the thing field called secret

00:23:16 ◼   ► is just what you put into that sort of setup code

00:23:18 ◼   ► in the Apple thing.

00:23:20 ◼   ► That's true, but the Google Authenticator app exports

00:23:24 ◼   ► is not the whatever is OTP, whatever URL scheme.

00:23:28 ◼   ► It is a special Google Authenticator thing.

00:23:30 ◼   ► And it's not like it's encrypted or hidden or anything.

00:23:33 ◼   ► The information is there.

00:23:34 ◼   ► Obviously that's how QR codes work.

00:23:35 ◼   ► The information is in the QR code.

00:23:37 ◼   ► It's not like it's hiding the information from you.

00:23:38 ◼   ► But I think they came up with their format

00:23:40 ◼   ► because if you export multiple items

00:23:43 ◼   ► from Google Authenticator, it gives you one QR code,

00:23:45 ◼   ► which is super convenient if you ever need to copy it

00:23:47 ◼   ► to another device.

00:23:48 ◼   ► I think it lets you do 10 or so at a time.

00:23:51 ◼   ► But that means they're not using the same format,

00:23:52 ◼   ► because the regular format is like,

00:23:54 ◼   ► it's some plain text URL that says, basically,

00:23:57 ◼   ► website blah, blah, blah, secret equals this value.

00:24:00 ◼   ► It looks like a URL.

00:24:01 ◼   ► But if you're doing 10 at once,

00:24:02 ◼   ► you can't just use a single URL.

00:24:03 ◼   ► So what they do is some other URL format

00:24:05 ◼   ► where it says like data equals giant base64 encoded thing.

00:24:09 ◼   ► And that base64 encoded thing is the protobuf thing,

00:24:11 ◼   ► and then you should decode the protobuf,

00:24:12 ◼   ► and that's got information inside it,

00:24:14 ◼   ► including some binary numbers that are,

00:24:18 ◼   ► Number is not encoded as ASCII, right?

00:24:21 ◼   ► Actual binary values of 16, 32, 64-bit values.

00:24:25 ◼   ► I think those are the secret.

00:24:27 ◼   ► I didn't get to the point where I could decode those,

00:24:29 ◼   ► but for people wondering why just decoding the QR code

00:24:31 ◼   ► wasn't sufficient, it's for this reason,

00:24:33 ◼   ► because Google Authenticator has an export format

00:24:35 ◼   ► of a QR code that is essentially only understood

00:24:37 ◼   ► by Google Authenticator, because it's to export

00:24:40 ◼   ► these things to, like if you wanted to put it from,

00:24:42 ◼   ► you know, if you wanted to have it on two phones

00:24:43 ◼   ► or on a phone and an iPad, you have Google Authenticator

00:24:46 ◼   ► in both, that's what you use.

00:24:47 ◼   ► So the information is in there and you could,

00:24:49 ◼   ► in theory, extract it, but I never got to that point.

00:24:52 ◼   ► There's lots of like Python libraries

00:24:54 ◼   ► and JavaScript libraries to actually decode them

00:24:56 ◼   ► if you really want to.

00:24:57 ◼   ► Again, it's technically possible,

00:24:58 ◼   ► but once I sorted out all the stuff,

00:25:00 ◼   ► I knew I had to reset everything anyway

00:25:02 ◼   ► because I was totally locked out.

00:25:03 ◼   ► So when I reset my stuff,

00:25:06 ◼   ► I was at the point where I had the real QR code

00:25:08 ◼   ► in front of me and then I just put all the devices

00:25:11 ◼   ► in front of it and got it all set up.

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00:27:02 ◼   ► - So Marco has a computer that cannot

00:27:04 ◼   ► successfully record a podcast,

00:27:06 ◼   ► and you are also having some amount

00:27:09 ◼   ► of computer trouble it sounds,

00:27:10 ◼   ► So I can hardly wait to hear what I'm spilling on my laptop

00:27:14 ◼   ► or what ailment is going to befall me soon,

00:27:17 ◼   ► since everything happens in threes anyway.

00:27:18 ◼   ► But tell me, Jon, what's going on with your computer.

00:27:22 ◼   ► - It's not, it's just a follow-up from a past thing.

00:27:24 ◼   ► Remember I talked about, I had this,

00:27:25 ◼   ► I did this long audition of many,

00:27:27 ◼   ► many different mice from my computer,

00:27:29 ◼   ► and I ended up picking the one I wanted.

00:27:30 ◼   ► It was this Microsoft mouse,

00:27:31 ◼   ► and then I used it for a while,

00:27:33 ◼   ► and then like the rubber on the side

00:27:34 ◼   ► where my thumb touches it started to wear down

00:27:36 ◼   ► or feel kind of gross.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And I'd bought a backup one,

00:27:39 ◼   ► I went through that whole rigmarole where they had to like,

00:27:41 ◼   ► have me take a video of it.

00:27:42 ◼   ► That was many episodes ago.

00:27:44 ◼   ► I couldn't find the episode, but anyway,

00:27:45 ◼   ► a while ago that happened.

00:27:47 ◼   ► So I've been using the new replacement,

00:27:49 ◼   ► not replacement, the backup mouse.

00:27:50 ◼   ► They sent me, I sent my mouse in 'cause it was broken.

00:27:53 ◼   ► They sent me a refurb one.

00:27:54 ◼   ► I thought the refurb one looked kind of gross,

00:27:55 ◼   ► but I had previously bought a backup mouse.

00:27:57 ◼   ► I was using the backup mouse.

00:27:59 ◼   ► And now the backup mouse has worn in that same spot

00:28:02 ◼   ► where my thumb goes.

00:28:03 ◼   ► So I'd looked at the dates

00:28:04 ◼   ► and I ordered this mouse on April 2nd, 2021.

00:28:07 ◼   ► And on May 8th, 2022, the little thing was worn.

00:28:11 ◼   ► So that's 401 days, just slightly over a year.

00:28:14 ◼   ► So the Microsoft Precision mouse, my favorite mouse,

00:28:16 ◼   ► the mouse I really, really like, essentially lasts a year

00:28:19 ◼   ► and it costs $99.

00:28:20 ◼   ► So I guess I'm gonna pay $100 a year

00:28:23 ◼   ► to keep using this mouse or probably what will happen is

00:28:26 ◼   ► I will tolerate the fact that there's a little thing

00:28:29 ◼   ► that I can feel under my thumb by the side of the mouse.

00:28:31 ◼   ► But I really wish they had just used,

00:28:33 ◼   ► like they should talk to Logitech.

00:28:34 ◼   ► Whatever rubber Logitech uses on its mice,

00:28:37 ◼   ► I think it is way sturdier.

00:28:38 ◼   ► Maybe it's not as supple and soft and velvety

00:28:42 ◼   ► as the rubber they use on the Microsoft mouse,

00:28:45 ◼   ► but I think it's more durable.

00:28:46 ◼   ► And I don't dislike the other mice that I bought.

00:28:50 ◼   ► I have an MX Master 3, I have a Logitech gaming mouse,

00:28:54 ◼   ► I have a different, some other mouse

00:28:58 ◼   ► that my wife is using on her computer.

00:29:00 ◼   ► I still like the Microsoft one the best.

00:29:02 ◼   ► I just wish it was slightly more durable.

00:29:05 ◼   ► We had some good feedback with regard to async/await

00:29:07 ◼   ► and combine, which was an Ask ATP from last week.

00:29:10 ◼   ► This feedback was from Patrick Niemeyer,

00:29:11 ◼   ► and I thought I'd just quote it real quick.

00:29:13 ◼   ► Async/await is syntactic sugar for asynchronous callbacks,

00:29:16 ◼   ► making code simpler and more readable

00:29:18 ◼   ► by virtue of being more, quote, unquote, declarative.

00:29:20 ◼   ► APIs like Combine and RxSwift generalize this further,

00:29:23 ◼   ► letting you think of the callbacks as streams of events,

00:29:25 ◼   ► which can be reasoned about over time,

00:29:28 ◼   ► allowing them to be filtered and orchestrated

00:29:29 ◼   ► across multiple sources, also in a declarative way.

00:29:33 ◼   ► When possible, it is always better to tell code

00:29:35 ◼   ► what you want to do rather than how you want to do it.

00:29:38 ◼   ► This generally improves the readability and maintainability

00:29:40 ◼   ► of the code while simultaneously allowing it to benefit

00:29:43 ◼   ► from improvements in the underlying APIs, compilers,

00:29:45 ◼   ► and tools that they improve.

00:29:47 ◼   ► I thought that was really well put.

00:29:48 ◼   ► This is a lot of the same argument for SwiftUI over UIKit.

00:29:50 ◼   ► You're just saying, you know, hey, I want a list here.

00:29:53 ◼   ► I want within the list a text, a vertical stack,

00:29:56 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:29:57 ◼   ► So this is a lot of the same reasons

00:29:59 ◼   ► why I've come to like SwiftUI.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Also for me, it's worth noting,

00:30:03 ◼   ► think I belabored this point appropriately last week, but one of the things I really

00:30:07 ◼   ► like about RxSwift and Combine is that, in functional reactive programming, is that if

00:30:12 ◼   ► you're smart about it, it's very, very easy, generally, to write kind of state-free apps.

00:30:19 ◼   ► And obviously every app has state, but when you're just processing an input and then potentially

00:30:24 ◼   ► generating, kind of atomically generating a new state of the world, you don't have to

00:30:29 ◼   ► really store the state, it's just you react to the next version of the state.

00:30:33 ◼   ► This is hard to paint a word picture about, so I probably lost everyone and I'll just

00:30:37 ◼   ► let it go, but suffice it to say, you can get rid of a lot of state in your app by not

00:30:43 ◼   ► having to store things and simply reacting to events as they happen, which is exactly

00:30:47 ◼   ► what Patrick was saying as well.

00:30:48 ◼   ► So I thought that was pretty cool.

00:30:49 ◼   ► All right, so this is Inwall Ethernet Corner.

00:30:53 ◼   ► I got a lot of feedback about this, which was good.

00:30:56 ◼   ► I appreciated all of it.

00:30:57 ◼   ► I tried to at least acknowledge most, if not all, of it.

00:31:00 ◼   ► If I didn't acknowledge your feedback, don't think that I didn't read it.

00:31:03 ◼   ► I absolutely read everything.

00:31:05 ◼   ► One of the things that I loved about this adventure so far is that I got these two pieces

00:31:09 ◼   ► of feedback, I think the same day.

00:31:12 ◼   ► First from Daniel.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Daniel says, "Absolutely do not bother with Cat6a."

00:31:16 ◼   ► And Daniel writes, "I am not sure what the price difference between Cat6 and Cat6a in

00:31:20 ◼   ► the US is, but for me in Australia, the only thing for me that would warrant the extra

00:31:23 ◼   ► expense of Cat6a would be if the run was long or extremely hard to repeat in the future.

00:31:27 ◼   ► achieves 10 gig at distances shorter than 55 meters, so that would be fine in a home network.

00:31:33 ◼   ► The same day, I received the following from Josh Hattersley. "Absolutely use Cat6a cable for your

00:31:39 ◼   ► interior wall/attic/subfloor runs. It's a nice bit of future proofing and given that you should never

00:31:44 ◼   ► have to touch those wires again, worth the extra time and pain in the tuchus of working with

00:31:48 ◼   ► stiffer cable." Josh also pointed out, I think it was Josh, pointed out a few other things,

00:31:54 ◼   ► including, Josh wrote, "Note that they're both

00:31:57 ◼   ► "unshielded 6A-U or UTP and shielded 6A-F UTP."

00:32:02 ◼   ► - Does an F UTP sound like a show

00:32:05 ◼   ► that our haters would make?

00:32:06 ◼   ► - Probably, yes, actually very well done, indeed.

00:32:09 ◼   ► Don't give them ideas, please.

00:32:11 ◼   ► So anyway, additional level of shielded cable available.

00:32:13 ◼   ► - I like the butterfly keyboard.

00:32:16 ◼   ► - F U A T P.

00:32:17 ◼   ► - What if it would be all about Elon Musk, NFTs,

00:32:21 ◼   ► and the butterfly keyboard, maybe Android?

00:32:23 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:32:25 ◼   ► There's an additional level of shielded cable available,

00:32:28 ◼   ► 6A SFTP, that's S/FTP, not SFTP.

00:32:33 ◼   ► That is not only an outer screen braid,

00:32:35 ◼   ► but also individually foil wrapped twisted pairs.

00:32:37 ◼   ► Unshielded 6A will likely be fine,

00:32:38 ◼   ► or go for FUTP at the most.

00:32:41 ◼   ► And we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:32:43 ◼   ► I know, I know.

00:32:44 ◼   ► We'll put a link in the show notes

00:32:45 ◼   ► to pictures of all these things.

00:32:46 ◼   ► - Follow up, you suck.

00:32:47 ◼   ► - Here we are again on the FUTP podcast.

00:32:52 ◼   ► and they still suck.

00:32:54 ◼   ► - Why don't they just switch to Windows?

00:32:56 ◼   ► - Right. (laughs)

00:32:57 ◼   ► If they hate the Mac so much, they're so critical.

00:33:00 ◼   ► If they're so hypercritical.

00:33:03 ◼   ► Anyway, all right.

00:33:04 ◼   ► So a lot of people said to use Cat6 or even 5e cables

00:33:09 ◼   ► to get from the jacks to your equipment,

00:33:11 ◼   ► Cat6a is not at all flexible compared to other Ethernet

00:33:14 ◼   ► cables and a pain to use in patch length scenarios.

00:33:17 ◼   ► If you actually need higher rated patch cables

00:33:18 ◼   ► down the road for 10 gig E,

00:33:20 ◼   ► you'll be opening up a whole new can of worms anyway, and you'll need to replace those cables regardless.

00:33:24 ◼   ► So that was mostly, if not entirely, from Josh.

00:33:27 ◼   ► I really appreciate that. Some more general observations, other than everyone disagreeing over what kind of cable to run.

00:33:32 ◼   ► A lot of people said use pass-through crimpers. I may or may not have mentioned this last episode,

00:33:37 ◼   ► I don't recall, but when you crimp an RJ45 end onto a cable, when I was doing this 20 years ago,

00:33:42 ◼   ► you had to get the eight little teeny tiny wires all the way up to the end of the

00:33:47 ◼   ► connector and then you had to use a little tool to crimp down and hope that none of those eight wires shimmied

00:33:52 ◼   ► forward or back even the tiniest bit and it was a nightmare.

00:33:55 ◼   ► Well, apparently there exists now pass-through crimpers where you just shove the eight lines all the way through the

00:34:02 ◼   ► RJ45 and then you crimp it and some of the really nice crimpers will just slice off the extra or worst case you take

00:34:10 ◼   ► wire cutters and slice off the rest, which is super cool. And everyone pretty much universally said use those.

00:34:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually, when I was trying to fix my Cat 7,

00:34:18 ◼   ► my couple of bad Cat 7 cables and jacks myself,

00:34:21 ◼   ► I actually tried one of these,

00:34:23 ◼   ► but the problem was I could not, for the life of me,

00:34:25 ◼   ► find pass-through cable ends that would fit the thickness

00:34:29 ◼   ► of the Cat 7 little cables.

00:34:32 ◼   ► And it's yet one more reason not to use Cat 7

00:34:35 ◼   ► for most people.

00:34:36 ◼   ► So I can strongly recommend doing this the correct way

00:34:39 ◼   ► and not doing what I had.

00:34:40 ◼   ► - And I have heard some people say that 6A,

00:34:44 ◼   ► The individual 8, individual wires in 6A are often a little

00:34:47 ◼   ► bit bigger than 5 or regular 6, so you do have to be a little

00:34:51 ◼   ► careful with the components you buy.

00:34:53 ◼   ► But nevertheless, it seems a lot less bad than Cat 7.

00:34:59 ◼   ► This was mentioned by Josh earlier, but I also heard

00:35:01 ◼   ► pretty much unanimous agreement that I should not do

00:35:04 ◼   ► what kind of started me down this whole path in the first

00:35:06 ◼   ► place, which was, oh, I can have the exact length patch

00:35:09 ◼   ► cable I want.

00:35:10 ◼   ► I'm not really clear why everyone is so against this,

00:35:13 ◼   ► except if you're using big thick cable like 6a but pretty much everyone agrees that I should not do that and I should just buy

00:35:19 ◼   ► Patch cables, I don't know

00:35:20 ◼   ► I mean, I think depending on what I end up buying if I do this at all, we'll see how it goes

00:35:24 ◼   ► I like I said apparently 6a is really crummy for cabling or patch cabling because it is so physically

00:35:30 ◼   ► Can you buy is it easy to find stranded?

00:35:32 ◼   ► Cable because patch cables are always with stranded. We're in best branded is that within each individual conductor

00:35:37 ◼   ► It's made up of a bunch of tiny little

00:35:40 ◼   ► conductors like you've seen this if you ever cut open a wire and instead of seeing a solid copper

00:35:43 ◼   ► Conductor in there you see a whole bunch of little tiny hair thickness copper things that stranded wire

00:35:49 ◼   ► That makes the wire more supple and easier to bend

00:35:52 ◼   ► It's not stiff, right?

00:35:54 ◼   ► And so that's what patch cables are made out of you just buy a commercial ones if you're gonna make your own patch cables

00:35:58 ◼   ► You'd have to find

00:36:00 ◼   ► Stranded cable and then crimp the stranded cable. I don't even know how that would work, right?

00:36:04 ◼   ► I don't know if that's easy to do or not

00:36:06 ◼   ► But I would never want to make like setting aside the difficulty of like making it yourself and how stiff it is

00:36:12 ◼   ► Just like I wouldn't want a patch cable that's not made with stranded and once you're making it out of stranded stuff

00:36:17 ◼   ► I feel like you might as well just buy it at that point because

00:36:19 ◼   ► It just seems like a whole different thing than making maybe it's just the same as making a regular one

00:36:24 ◼   ► But anyway coming from office environments like you know

00:36:26 ◼   ► Okay

00:36:26 ◼   ► See like didn't your work also have like someone in the IT department or whatever the networking department made the patch cables and weren't they?

00:36:33 ◼   ► Not pleasing to use

00:36:35 ◼   ► - You know, I don't, it's been a long time

00:36:38 ◼   ► since I worked at a place that used ethernet.

00:36:41 ◼   ► Like I demanded it because I'm that guy,

00:36:42 ◼   ► but pretty much everyone else at my last jobby job,

00:36:45 ◼   ► they were just sitting on wireless all day every day.

00:36:47 ◼   ► - Oh, well we had plenty of patch cables

00:36:49 ◼   ► that were made by the networking people

00:36:50 ◼   ► and they were not stranded wire

00:36:52 ◼   ► and they didn't have nice looking connectors on the end

00:36:54 ◼   ► and they were just a pain to deal with

00:36:56 ◼   ► and they didn't, they were just, they were not pleasant.

00:36:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, they don't usually have like nice

00:36:59 ◼   ► strain relief boots and stuff either.

00:37:01 ◼   ► - Exactly, right.

00:37:02 ◼   ► - They're just never, they're never nice to use.

00:37:04 ◼   ► They, self-made cables end up looking

00:37:07 ◼   ► like cheap knockoff cables.

00:37:08 ◼   ► - And if they're not made with stranded wires,

00:37:11 ◼   ► they're really stiff and awkward

00:37:13 ◼   ► and often have their own kind of bends in them

00:37:15 ◼   ► from however they were stored and wherever they were

00:37:17 ◼   ► and so you try to hook up your thing to them.

00:37:19 ◼   ► And like, for example, when we all got the stupid

00:37:23 ◼   ► MacBook Pros without any ports on them

00:37:25 ◼   ► and we all got these little like USB breakout boxes

00:37:28 ◼   ► so we could connect stuff to them,

00:37:30 ◼   ► often one of the things that you would connect

00:37:31 ◼   ► was ethernet and you'd put in

00:37:33 ◼   ► the non-stranded patch cable,

00:37:35 ◼   ► and it would lift the thing off the table,

00:37:36 ◼   ► 'cause they're so small and lightweight,

00:37:38 ◼   ► and the cable was so stiff,

00:37:41 ◼   ► that you'd plug it into the ethernet,

00:37:42 ◼   ► and then it would just lift off the table,

00:37:43 ◼   ► or one side would lift off the table,

00:37:45 ◼   ► and it just looked ridiculous.

00:37:47 ◼   ► - You know, I'm glad you said that

00:37:48 ◼   ► about stranded versus solid copper,

00:37:50 ◼   ► 'cause I never put that together,

00:37:51 ◼   ► and I genuinely did not understand

00:37:53 ◼   ► why it would be so much worse to do it with the cable,

00:37:56 ◼   ► the bulk cable I might be buying,

00:37:58 ◼   ► but hearing you say that, it makes perfect sense,

00:38:00 ◼   ► and I get it now.

00:38:00 ◼   ► - I'm talking about like a cable,

00:38:02 ◼   ► like three feet long or like it goes from your computer to the little you

00:38:05 ◼   ► know USB-C breakout box like you don't it doesn't matter you don't need a

00:38:09 ◼   ► anything fancy and so you like Marcos did you want to have the strain relief

00:38:12 ◼   ► boot because things get yanked around and you want to look nice and yeah you

00:38:16 ◼   ► know aesthetically pleasing you don't want it to look like a cable shoved into

00:38:20 ◼   ► a little plastic connector yeah a lot of people pointed out oh guess what you're

00:38:27 ◼   ► - We're back in the T568A versus B discussion

00:38:30 ◼   ► all over again, which made me very sad.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Yeah, that made me very sad to realize.

00:38:34 ◼   ► - We're not back into it, we resolved this before.

00:38:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, but what did we resolve it to?

00:38:38 ◼   ► I don't remember.

00:38:39 ◼   ► - The resolution is it doesn't make a difference,

00:38:42 ◼   ► so just pick one, and which one you pick,

00:38:46 ◼   ► it doesn't really matter, but people have a preference

00:38:49 ◼   ► to B just because it's one more than A, isn't it?

00:38:51 ◼   ► - Well, and a lot of people just said B was used

00:38:53 ◼   ► for residential and A is for commercial.

00:38:55 ◼   ► I remember going through this a couple of months ago.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I don't need to reopen the whole thing.

00:38:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was like their compatibility with phone system

00:39:00 ◼   ► and things that are irrelevant to your scenario.

00:39:01 ◼   ► - It doesn't matter.

00:39:02 ◼   ► - So it doesn't matter.

00:39:03 ◼   ► - It doesn't matter, just take each system.

00:39:04 ◼   ► - The whole point is do not mix them.

00:39:06 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:39:07 ◼   ► - Just pick one and stick to it.

00:39:09 ◼   ► - Good tip from Ron Disho.

00:39:11 ◼   ► He had said, "Mark your cables.

00:39:12 ◼   ► "Either use a label maker or mark them

00:39:14 ◼   ► "with a Sharpie or something.

00:39:15 ◼   ► "For example, use an increasing number of tick marks

00:39:17 ◼   ► "that match on both ends."

00:39:19 ◼   ► Something obvious, but I don't know

00:39:20 ◼   ► that I would have thought about that,

00:39:21 ◼   ► so that was a great tip.

00:39:22 ◼   ► - The tick mark system, I like the idea of doing this,

00:39:25 ◼   ► but then I'm like, what if you're in an office

00:39:27 ◼   ► and you're sitting there,

00:39:28 ◼   ► I can see someone counting the ticks, one, two, three,

00:39:30 ◼   ► like are you supposed to do the slashes

00:39:31 ◼   ► and then if you do five, you know, four vertical,

00:39:33 ◼   ► and then diagonal slash, it's like, we have numbers,

00:39:35 ◼   ► just write them in and then, yeah, anyway.

00:39:38 ◼   ► - I hear you.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Also, a lot of people were sending in recommendations

00:39:42 ◼   ► for cable, which I appreciate,

00:39:44 ◼   ► but since I'm planning to go through old HVAC tubing,

00:39:47 ◼   ► if I do this at all,

00:39:48 ◼   ► I should probably get plenum rated cable.

00:39:50 ◼   ► So I don't remember if we talked about this last episode,

00:39:53 ◼   ► but there's riser rated cable,

00:39:54 ◼   ► which is about what the fire resistance of it is.

00:39:59 ◼   ► And with riser rated cable, it's somewhat fire resistant.

00:40:02 ◼   ► And that is not designed to be in like air ducts

00:40:05 ◼   ► or anything like that.

00:40:06 ◼   ► If you're in an air duct, certainly an active air duct,

00:40:09 ◼   ► I think it's a little kind of dealer's choice

00:40:11 ◼   ► if you're in an inactive air duct like I would be.

00:40:14 ◼   ► But if you're in an air duct,

00:40:16 ◼   ► you're supposed to get what's called plenum rated cable.

00:40:18 ◼   ► And that is extremely fire resistant

00:40:22 ◼   ► as compared to the riser stuff.

00:40:23 ◼   ► And it's made of materials that when they burn off,

00:40:26 ◼   ► they're not releasing toxic fumes into the air.

00:40:30 ◼   ► Because if it's in an active HVAC system,

00:40:32 ◼   ► then you're pumping these toxic fumes all over the building,

00:40:35 ◼   ► or whatever the case may be.

00:40:36 ◼   ► So I think in my case, if I do this at all,

00:40:40 ◼   ► I'm probably gonna go with plenum-rated cable,

00:40:41 ◼   ► which of course makes the already expensive cable

00:40:43 ◼   ► even more expensive, especially if I'm thinking 6A,

00:40:46 ◼   ► which I'm still thinking-- - But why?

00:40:46 ◼   ► You're not putting it in an active air duct.

00:40:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it just seems like why wouldn't I do this?

00:40:50 ◼   ► Especially since it's better at resisting fire,

00:40:53 ◼   ► and God forbid the house tries to light up.

00:40:55 ◼   ► I'm sure the ethernet cable would not be the thing

00:40:57 ◼   ► that carries it all around, but hey, it could be a toaster,

00:41:00 ◼   ► and that's a reference for some of you.

00:41:02 ◼   ► So anyway, so the point is,

00:41:04 ◼   ► I just feel like getting plenum-rated

00:41:05 ◼   ► would be the right-er answer.

00:41:06 ◼   ► - Wouldn't that just make it more difficult

00:41:08 ◼   ► to work with possibly,

00:41:09 ◼   ► and also it would make it more expensive,

00:41:10 ◼   ► which might make you not do this whole project

00:41:12 ◼   ► in the first place?

00:41:13 ◼   ► - Yes to all of those things.

00:41:14 ◼   ► - Oh, he's doing it, I think it makes it more difficult.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Like I said, I think the difficulty, yes,

00:41:18 ◼   ► you're making it more annoying for yourself,

00:41:20 ◼   ► and I think you don't need plenum-rated cable,

00:41:22 ◼   ► But in the grand scheme of things,

00:41:23 ◼   ► this project is not too large.

00:41:25 ◼   ► I feel like no matter what you do,

00:41:26 ◼   ► you're gonna get it done,

00:41:27 ◼   ► 'cause you have like three things to connect,

00:41:28 ◼   ► and you're done.

00:41:29 ◼   ► - Well, yeah, about that.

00:41:31 ◼   ► Also the-- - Has the scope expanded?

00:41:33 ◼   ► - Oh, has it ever.

00:41:35 ◼   ► It's so funny.

00:41:36 ◼   ► It's so funny being on the other end of scope creep.

00:41:39 ◼   ► So if you're not a developer,

00:41:41 ◼   ► especially if you're a consultant,

00:41:43 ◼   ► sorry, let me try that again, that made no sense.

00:41:45 ◼   ► If you're not familiar with how software development works,

00:41:49 ◼   ► particularly in the world of consulting,

00:41:51 ◼   ► What'll happen is, you know, as a software developer

00:41:53 ◼   ► and maybe a project manager and a couple other people

00:41:54 ◼   ► will go to a client and say,

00:41:55 ◼   ► "Okay, what would you like us to build?"

00:41:56 ◼   ► And they'll say, "We would like A, B, and C, please."

00:41:59 ◼   ► And you say, "Okay, great, that'll take, you know,

00:42:00 ◼   ► 45 hours," or whatever the case may be.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Inevitably, the client then comes to you and says,

00:42:04 ◼   ► "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

00:42:05 ◼   ► we need D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P."

00:42:08 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:09 ◼   ► Okay, that's what developers call scope creep

00:42:13 ◼   ► because the scope of the project has now crept to be larger.

00:42:17 ◼   ► And typically, I joke, but typically it's more like,

00:42:19 ◼   ► Oh, oh, oh, we need D fast forward three weeks. Oh, oh, oh, oh, we also need E fast forward a month.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Oh, and F and G. I forgot about F and G. We definitely need those. And that's scope creep.

00:42:30 ◼   ► Well, I have scope creeped myself to death already. And as I was thinking about this project,

00:42:36 ◼   ► well, if I'm going to be in the walls anyway, and if I'm going from like the downstairs to the

00:42:40 ◼   ► upstairs, I'm going to want to do all the possible runs that I would need to go between, you know,

00:42:46 ◼   ► upstairs and downstairs at once.

00:42:48 ◼   ► And well, Michaela's room was my old office,

00:42:53 ◼   ► and that's tiny, and the guest room is the current office,

00:42:57 ◼   ► and that's much bigger.

00:42:58 ◼   ► And it wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the future,

00:43:00 ◼   ► the 35 ports that I, figuratively speaking,

00:43:03 ◼   ► that I need in the existing office,

00:43:05 ◼   ► well, what if I end up needing those

00:43:06 ◼   ► in Michaela's current room,

00:43:08 ◼   ► because what if Michaela and I flip-flop rooms

00:43:11 ◼   ► so that her room is the office

00:43:13 ◼   ► and my office becomes her room?

00:43:15 ◼   ► well shoot, then I need like six or eight drops in both her room and the guest room,

00:43:20 ◼   ► because you never know which one will be the office, it's just exploding. So I was in the

00:43:25 ◼   ► attic this morning and let's just say the Historical Planning Commission is not necessarily

00:43:33 ◼   ► on board with the project in the home at this juncture. So this may or may not be happening,

00:43:38 ◼   ► we'll see, but... So I'm curious, which part of the project would be the most objectionable

00:43:44 ◼   ► to a historical planning commission.

00:43:46 ◼   ► - I think the thought of me putting my fist,

00:43:48 ◼   ► or not even my fist, my foot through the ceiling

00:43:51 ◼   ► of the upper story, because not all of our attic

00:43:54 ◼   ► has boards on it, especially the parts

00:43:56 ◼   ► that I need to be crawling through.

00:43:58 ◼   ► I think the historical planning commission

00:44:00 ◼   ► is extremely unenthusiastic about the idea

00:44:03 ◼   ► of having to do a ceiling drywall repair

00:44:06 ◼   ► at any point during this project.

00:44:07 ◼   ► And knowing how much of a clod I am,

00:44:10 ◼   ► that is exceptionally likely to be a plausible outcome.

00:44:13 ◼   ► Don't forget, I don't know what your eye looks like, but don't forget the hazard in the other direction,

00:44:17 ◼   ► which is standing up too quickly and getting your roofing nail into the top of your head.

00:44:21 ◼   ► Oh, that's that is a fear that I did not have until just now. Thank you so much.

00:44:25 ◼   ► Do you have open stud bays in your in your uninsulated southern house?

00:44:29 ◼   ► I mean, I don't remember there being nails just hanging down into the living area.

00:44:35 ◼   ► Look up when you're in the attic, point your iPhone upwards carefully without dropping it.

00:44:40 ◼   ► - And take a picture of the ceiling

00:44:41 ◼   ► and see if you have open stud bays,

00:44:44 ◼   ► you will have roofing nails coming through,

00:44:46 ◼   ► the sheathing on the outside of your house

00:44:48 ◼   ► and pointing downward into the room you're in.

00:44:49 ◼   ► If you get up quickly,

00:44:51 ◼   ► that nail will go onto the top of your head

00:44:52 ◼   ► and you will be sad.

00:44:53 ◼   ► - I would say I would be very sad indeed.

00:44:55 ◼   ► And so will you too,

00:44:56 ◼   ► because I will probably not be around for the show anymore.

00:44:58 ◼   ► Maybe you'll be happy.

00:44:59 ◼   ► - You won't die, you'll just bleed a lot.

00:45:01 ◼   ► Get some stitches.

00:45:02 ◼   ► - Stu Penders.

00:45:04 ◼   ► Moving right along.

00:45:05 ◼   ► So there was also near universal agreement

00:45:07 ◼   ► that if I am wiring any room,

00:45:09 ◼   ► it'd be at one or 10 or whatever, if I'm going to any room,

00:45:13 ◼   ► don't be an idiot, wire at least two wires.

00:45:16 ◼   ► If you're gonna have one, have two.

00:45:18 ◼   ► If you think you need two, put in four.

00:45:21 ◼   ► And that's how I got to like eight in the office,

00:45:24 ◼   ► 'cause I think I might legitimately need that many, but.

00:45:26 ◼   ► - You realize with this project,

00:45:28 ◼   ► you are essentially in a race with wireless technology?

00:45:31 ◼   ► - I know, that's a very good point.

00:45:32 ◼   ► - 'Cause we've already talked about

00:45:34 ◼   ► people getting ridiculous 5G signals, right?

00:45:36 ◼   ► If you happen to be right near

00:45:37 ◼   ► one of those millimeter wave things or whatever.

00:45:38 ◼   ► So yeah, this whole project and any wiring project

00:45:43 ◼   ► is racing against the advancements in wireless.

00:45:46 ◼   ► Now, the good news is Wi-Fi standards move not slowly,

00:45:50 ◼   ► but at a fairly steady pace.

00:45:52 ◼   ► They don't seem to be accelerating, right?

00:45:54 ◼   ► So you could probably graph out how much faster

00:45:56 ◼   ► Wi-Fi has gotten over x number of years

00:45:57 ◼   ► and figure out when is it going to catch up

00:45:59 ◼   ► with 10 gig or whatever.

00:46:01 ◼   ► And really, it doesn't matter too much

00:46:02 ◼   ► if it doesn't keep up with your internet connection, which

00:46:04 ◼   ► is moving much more slowly than that.

00:46:06 ◼   ► But, you know, as future proof,

00:46:09 ◼   ► that's why Cat 7 is such a ridiculous thing,

00:46:11 ◼   ► 'cause like as future proof as you think you're making it,

00:46:14 ◼   ► like just, you know, this type of thing,

00:46:17 ◼   ► assuming wireless technology, you know,

00:46:18 ◼   ► just within the house,

00:46:19 ◼   ► assuming wireless technology continues,

00:46:21 ◼   ► eventually, you know, when you're all dead

00:46:24 ◼   ► and this house gets sold to the next family,

00:46:26 ◼   ► presumably Wi-Fi will be like 10 gig or better

00:46:28 ◼   ► and no one will care about what you put in your wall

00:46:30 ◼   ► and they'll just laugh at it the same way we laugh

00:46:32 ◼   ► at the weird, old-timey things you find

00:46:34 ◼   ► in old people's houses.

00:46:35 ◼   ► like razors in the walls.

00:46:37 ◼   ► - Counterpoint though, look at the history

00:46:39 ◼   ► of these two technologies

00:46:40 ◼   ► and what actually happens in practice.

00:46:42 ◼   ► So, ethernet doesn't move that quickly

00:46:46 ◼   ► and requires you to put wires in places.

00:46:49 ◼   ► However, those wire standards, again,

00:46:51 ◼   ► like I put cat six in my house 10 years ago,

00:46:56 ◼   ► 12 years ago, whenever it was, that's still fine.

00:46:59 ◼   ► I still don't have networking gear

00:47:00 ◼   ► that can exceed the capacity of those wires

00:47:02 ◼   ► I put in my house 10 years ago.

00:47:04 ◼   ► And meanwhile, 10 years ago, they promised gigabit speeds,

00:47:09 ◼   ► and they delivered gigabit speeds.

00:47:11 ◼   ► And this entire time, they have been reliably delivering

00:47:14 ◼   ► gigabit speeds, no matter what I have done.

00:47:16 ◼   ► As technology has moved forward,

00:47:17 ◼   ► that's always been very reliable 100% of the time.

00:47:20 ◼   ► The fastest internet service I can get to my house

00:47:22 ◼   ► is gigabit, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

00:47:25 ◼   ► So then, look at WiFi.

00:47:28 ◼   ► WiFi always promises more, more, more.

00:47:31 ◼   ► In practice though, Wi-Fi tends to hit a ceiling

00:47:35 ◼   ► of substantially less than whatever speeds

00:47:38 ◼   ► they claim it can hit in most people's actual real world use

00:47:42 ◼   ► because you have things like walls and other people's Wi-Fi

00:47:45 ◼   ► and the person next door who still somehow

00:47:47 ◼   ► has a cordless phone on the 2.4 gigahertz

00:47:49 ◼   ► and five gigahertz networks at the same time somehow

00:47:52 ◼   ► spreading broad spectrum interference all over the place

00:47:54 ◼   ► or they have a microwave or something like,

00:47:56 ◼   ► Wi-Fi is better in theory in a lot of cases

00:48:00 ◼   ► but in practice rarely matches Ethernet.

00:48:03 ◼   ► So, WiFi has a history, and probably a future,

00:48:06 ◼   ► just because of things like physics,

00:48:08 ◼   ► of potentially being really good,

00:48:11 ◼   ► and in certain cases being really good,

00:48:13 ◼   ► but not being as rock solid, reliable as wired Ethernet

00:48:17 ◼   ► when it's available.

00:48:18 ◼   ► And so, for a situation in your own house

00:48:21 ◼   ► where if you have an opportunity to wire things

00:48:25 ◼   ► that are generally not moved,

00:48:27 ◼   ► things like your TV setup, your office desk, you know,

00:48:32 ◼   ► if you can wire those things, wire them.

00:48:35 ◼   ► Because not only will they be more reliable and faster,

00:48:38 ◼   ► but then they will free up wireless spectrum and bandwidth

00:48:42 ◼   ► for your WiFi only devices like your phones, laptops,

00:48:44 ◼   ► and stuff to have more speed for what they are doing.

00:48:48 ◼   ► So I think there not only is still a role

00:48:51 ◼   ► for Ethernet today, but I think that role

00:48:53 ◼   ► will kind of continue indefinitely.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Again, I'm not making an infinite time scale

00:48:57 ◼   ► argument here, but I think Ethernet has still

00:49:01 ◼   ► quite a lot of years that we will still want to use it

00:49:04 ◼   ► when we reasonably can.

00:49:06 ◼   ► - I'm not arguing it's wiring things with Ethernet,

00:49:08 ◼   ► obviously all my stuff is wired with Ethernet

00:49:09 ◼   ► for those exact reasons.

00:49:10 ◼   ► What I'm saying is for most people,

00:49:12 ◼   ► Ethernet is already pointless.

00:49:14 ◼   ► How many people do you know who it's super important

00:49:16 ◼   ► in their house that they have Ethernet drops to every room?

00:49:18 ◼   ► Only the weirdest of computer nerds.

00:49:20 ◼   ► Everybody uses WiFi.

00:49:21 ◼   ► WiFi is the home networking solution,

00:49:24 ◼   ► despite the fact that it has worse latency,

00:49:26 ◼   ► that it has worse bandwidth, it has interference,

00:49:28 ◼   ► and your microwave messes it up sometimes.

00:49:30 ◼   ► Despite all of that, WiFi has already won that.

00:49:33 ◼   ► And what I'm saying is if you graph how much better WiFi,

00:49:36 ◼   ► how much faster is WiFi getting better

00:49:38 ◼   ► versus Ethernet standards,

00:49:40 ◼   ► which are only tangentially relevant

00:49:42 ◼   ► because people don't even have Ethernet wires

00:49:44 ◼   ► in their house, and internet connections,

00:49:46 ◼   ► which are getting better much more slowly,

00:49:49 ◼   ► and especially if you throw 5G in there,

00:49:52 ◼   ► and the possibility of 5G penetration,

00:49:54 ◼   ► especially people who live in urban areas,

00:49:55 ◼   ► 5G is already faster than gigabit ethernet,

00:49:58 ◼   ► if you are lucky enough to look out your window

00:50:00 ◼   ► and see a millimeter wave thing or whatever.

00:50:01 ◼   ► And obviously it's not as wall penetrating

00:50:03 ◼   ► and so on and so forth,

00:50:04 ◼   ► but like wireless has already won that battle.

00:50:05 ◼   ► And so that's what I'm saying, like,

00:50:06 ◼   ► what you're racing against is even for the tech nerd,

00:50:09 ◼   ► it's possible, depending on where you live,

00:50:11 ◼   ► that either advancements in wifi

00:50:13 ◼   ► or advancements in 5G penetration

00:50:16 ◼   ► could give you more bandwidth than wired gigabit.

00:50:19 ◼   ► Still wired is better for reliability, for latency,

00:50:22 ◼   ► which is why I recommend that

00:50:23 ◼   ► If you're playing any kind of games, connect your consoles to Ethernet.

00:50:26 ◼   ► Do not connect your consoles to Wi-Fi no matter how good your signal is.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Get that little extra edge.

00:50:30 ◼   ► It's good.

00:50:31 ◼   ► But I feel like that is what is probably going to, arguably, has already "obsolete" the Ethernet

00:50:38 ◼   ► because the limitations of Ethernet, "Oh, I have to have a jack.

00:50:41 ◼   ► I have to have a wire.

00:50:42 ◼   ► I have to be near that jack.

00:50:43 ◼   ► If it's not already amassed, I have to have it," already makes wired Ethernet feel like

00:50:48 ◼   ► the same kind of relic as having two phone jacks in every room where if we saw that,

00:50:52 ◼   ► who cares who uses phones you use your cell phone or you get a wireless phone I

00:50:55 ◼   ► don't need a phone jack in every room and you say well phone jacks are more

00:50:58 ◼   ► reliable than these wireless things you can get interference in your wireless

00:51:01 ◼   ► like no I don't need a phone jack right never mind that the phone system is

00:51:05 ◼   ► ancient and gross or whatever but I feel like we're already there with wired

00:51:08 ◼   ► ethernet that already looks weird and for Casey's particular scenario if for

00:51:12 ◼   ► example he had chosen a wiring standard that maxed out at one gig I feel like

00:51:16 ◼   ► within his lifetime of owning this home it's possible the wireless would be

00:51:19 ◼   ► defeating that. 10 gig he's probably got plenty of headroom but certainly you

00:51:22 ◼   ► don't need more than that and I still think if he does you know go whole hog

00:51:28 ◼   ► and put away wires into every single room the next person to buy this house

00:51:32 ◼   ► to be like what kind of person owned this wire these holes in the wall what

00:51:34 ◼   ► is this like they won't even know what it is like because Wi-Fi is just so

00:51:38 ◼   ► ubiquitous and you know this is was it an office telephone system you know I

00:51:43 ◼   ► don't even know if they'll be able to identify it because you know to Casey's

00:51:46 ◼   ► point even many workplaces people don't have you turn out to their desks it's

00:51:49 ◼   ► all of this Wi-Fi. Yeah, I agree with both of you, and as a kind of anecdote

00:51:55 ◼   ► that puts the period on the sentence, if you will, when we were doing the screened-in

00:51:58 ◼   ► porch, I think I mentioned several times that one of the things I demanded from

00:52:01 ◼   ► the electricians and paid them to do was to put an Ethernet drop in the

00:52:06 ◼   ► screened-in porch. So it's on what was once the exterior wall that, well I guess

00:52:09 ◼   ► it's still strictly speaking the exterior wall of the house, it's just,

00:52:12 ◼   ► you know, undercover now. And I will, if I'm sitting down on the screened-in porch

00:52:16 ◼   ► working for, which I do often, and if I'm doing that for more than like half an

00:52:21 ◼   ► hour, I will grab an Ethernet cable and I will plug it into that port because even

00:52:26 ◼   ► though the Wi-Fi is just fine in the screened-in porch, it's still so much

00:52:29 ◼   ► faster and so much better. Even considering the fact that this

00:52:33 ◼   ► particular Ethernet port has to go through coax, through two mocha bridges

00:52:36 ◼   ► and coax in between them to get to anything, it's still so much better and

00:52:41 ◼   ► more reliable than Wi-Fi. And I have the most modern eero hardware one can get,

00:52:45 ◼   ► and this is not an indictment of Euro. It's just that Wi-Fi is a miracle that it works at all,

00:52:50 ◼   ► and so I agree with what you guys are saying, that you know, when you have something that is a direct

00:52:55 ◼   ► cable to the other things you're trying to reach, it's just so much faster and so much more reliable.

00:52:59 ◼   ► And so speaking of future-proofing, Matt Van Ormer writes, "Forget future-proofing for bandwidth. The

00:53:06 ◼   ► hardest part of running Ethernet is running the Ethernet. So if you're fishing a wire through the

00:53:09 ◼   ► wall, fish at least two. Then worst case, if you want to plug in another device in the room,

00:53:13 ◼   ► You don't need to dangle a switch off the back of your studio display.

00:53:15 ◼   ► Which here again, is just if you're gonna run one, run two, if you're gonna run two, run four, etc.

00:53:19 ◼   ► Also, patch panels are a thing, and I should probably figure out how rack mounts work, because I vaguely understand

00:53:28 ◼   ► what one U, two U, etc. means, but I've never really had to understand what all that is.

00:53:32 ◼   ► And I didn't really think about, okay, if I'm having a central terminus for all of this Ethernet that the Historical Committee may or may not approve,

00:53:39 ◼   ► Then where is that going to be both in the house?

00:53:42 ◼   ► And where is it going to be as in what does it look like? Is it just a bunch of RJ45 connectors hanging out?

00:53:47 ◼   ► of a wall or ceiling somewhere

00:53:49 ◼   ► And so yeah, I guess getting a patch panel is a thing and it makes sense

00:53:53 ◼   ► I just didn't even think about it. And then we I had a bunch of suggestions for specifically Keystone patch panels

00:53:59 ◼   ► so a lot of patch panels apparently have

00:54:02 ◼   ► Just a gazillion connectors on the back, you know, each individual Ethernet connection has eight strands on the back

00:54:08 ◼   ► You know in your you're tapping all of these yourself and apparently that's a real pain in the butt

00:54:12 ◼   ► So what you can do is you can get Keystone patch panels

00:54:15 ◼   ► We're basically it may not literally be a square

00:54:17 ◼   ► But basically there's an empty square at each spot and then you slide in the particular connector you want there now

00:54:23 ◼   ► Obviously in most cases that would be an Ethernet terminus

00:54:25 ◼   ► But you could put like HDMI there if you so desired so Ron to show again

00:54:30 ◼   ► If I have ten draw this is with regard to why it's better to do Keystone over the other kind of patch panels if I

00:54:36 ◼   ► I have 10 drops and want to add another. I have to pull the entire panel off.

00:54:39 ◼   ► I have those mini wall jacks like Marcos's, Ron.

00:54:41 ◼   ► And along with dealing with the existing 10 cables to get the 11th into place and terminate all of them while hoping none of my

00:54:47 ◼   ► existing connections loosen etc. With the Keystone ones,

00:54:50 ◼   ► you can just deal with them individually. Terminate the Keystone and pop it in the hole through the back.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Not to mention if for some reason you have a need for it, they make Keystones for all sorts of connectors. HDMI, RCA, USB, etc.

00:55:00 ◼   ► I'm almost done, I promise. Cameron McKay also had a great tip. Cameron says,

00:55:05 ◼   ► "I'm glad I had our kids, age 6 and 8 years old, help out with testing the runs. They

00:55:09 ◼   ► plug the laptop into each port, run ifconfig to check for a gigabit duplex link, and then

00:55:14 ◼   ► run the ookla speedtest app to check for expected performance. They loved doing this and felt

00:55:18 ◼   ► proud to be trusted with an important job." Which, another great tip. And then finally,

00:55:23 ◼   ► something I saw I was messing about in the garage, just trying to get an eyeball and

00:55:28 ◼   ► a rough guesstimate of, "Okay, how much cable am I really going to need if I do this? Because

00:55:32 ◼   ► I think I want to terminate everything into the garage. I don't really have a good closet for it

00:55:36 ◼   ► I don't have a basement. I have a I think I said last week

00:55:41 ◼   ► I have a like a meal space rather than a crawl space

00:55:44 ◼   ► And the attic it gets really really hot in the summer

00:55:48 ◼   ► So the base or excuse me

00:55:50 ◼   ► The garage seems like the best place to be the central hub and I was looking at it and just because of the way things

00:55:56 ◼   ► Are laid out in my garage. I think I would need roughly

00:55:59 ◼   ► 25 feet or about 8 meters of

00:56:02 ◼   ► cable for each and every drop just to get from the garage either to the crawl space or to the

00:56:09 ◼   ► The ductwork that takes me up into the attic. So each and every single one of my runs

00:56:14 ◼   ► I think is 25 feet at a minimum and if I think about the runs to the office

00:56:17 ◼   ► Which is up and across the house each of those runs is probably a little less than 100 feet

00:56:25 ◼   ► I think if I'm doing this math, right? I might be wrong, but just back in the envelope

00:56:28 ◼   ► It's like 30-ish meters for each of these runs.

00:56:31 ◼   ► And so I'm not yet hitting the 55-meter wall that is 6--

00:56:36 ◼   ► not 6a, but 6 maximum distance for gigabit-- or 10 gigabit,

00:56:42 ◼   ► excuse me.

00:56:43 ◼   ► But I'm close enough that I think--

00:56:44 ◼   ► I really think I want to go 6a.

00:56:46 ◼   ► And I'm probably going to regret it, but here we go.

00:56:48 ◼   ► So that's KC's Ethernet corner.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Again, the Historical Planning Committee is not

00:56:53 ◼   ► on board with this yet, so there may not be any action on

00:56:55 ◼   ► this for a while.

00:56:56 ◼   ► but I will let you two know if there is.

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00:58:44 ◼   ► Thanks to Mack Weldon for sponsoring our show.

00:58:46 ◼   ► (jazz music)

00:58:49 ◼   ► - I have other problems in my life, I gotta be honest.

00:58:54 ◼   ► A lot of people are getting these delightful looking

00:58:57 ◼   ► yellow objects, and although I do have one on order,

00:59:00 ◼   ► I am not in the first batch, I am in the second batch

00:59:04 ◼   ► somewhere, don't really know where.

00:59:06 ◼   ► I have no idea when my delightful little yellow object

00:59:09 ◼   ► is arriving, and I'm really jealous.

00:59:12 ◼   ► Jon, do you have a delightful little yellow object?

00:59:15 ◼   ► I don't really play handheld systems just because the RSI issues make it difficult for

00:59:19 ◼   ► me to hold a small thing.

00:59:22 ◼   ► Typical handhelds are very small and not particularly ergonomically friendly to use so I don't really

00:59:27 ◼   ► use handheld stuff but the play date is just so adorable.

00:59:30 ◼   ► I just feel like even if I never played the thing I just wanted to have one just because

00:59:33 ◼   ► it's kind of amazing that it exists at all.

00:59:35 ◼   ► And I know the people at Panic and I think it's just wonderful that a thing they made

00:59:40 ◼   ► so I'm like look I'm going to get this.

00:59:41 ◼   ► the same reason I got the paper copy of Next Generation with Playdate on the cover.

00:59:53 ◼   ► I have a nice pristine paper copy of that and I did order myself a Playdate but I did

00:59:57 ◼   ► enough hemming and hawing over whether I should get one or not that I am just so far back

01:00:02 ◼   ► in the line.

01:00:04 ◼   ► No idea when I'm going to get one.

01:00:07 ◼   ► 23 maybe so

01:00:09 ◼   ► You know I console myself because I did get to see and play with the play date. What a wwc

01:00:14 ◼   ► 2018 that the play dates been there's a great podcast about that

01:00:19 ◼   ► There's a couple of podcasts about this is the panic podcast that they talk about the play date on now

01:00:23 ◼   ► There's a dedicated play date podcast try to find a link for for the show notes

01:00:27 ◼   ► To hear the story of play date. This is something they've been working on what for a decade now

01:00:32 ◼   ► It's not like they just did this this year. Oh, it's a kickstarter. It'll be done soon

01:00:35 ◼   ► They've been working on it for like at least 10 years

01:00:36 ◼   ► so

01:00:37 ◼   ► so yeah

01:00:38 ◼   ► I did actually hold and play with a play date very early on and I feel very excited and privileged to have done that and

01:00:44 ◼   ► That will tide me over as I wait for my play date to come

01:00:48 ◼   ► I mean, it'll come after I'm at studio, but maybe before the heat death of the universe, so I'm being patient

01:00:54 ◼   ► Do you know what group you're in or what you're like order number is or anything my I'm in like the

01:01:01 ◼   ► thousands and I think like now I don't even know if they've broken into the thousands like people who are getting there is there aren't their

01:01:06 ◼   ► Numbers like in the hundreds or maybe the single that one thousands. I thought they were in the thousands

01:01:10 ◼   ► But I'm at 20,000 whatever group that's in like, you know, I I'm my own fault. I waited too long. What can you do?

01:01:16 ◼   ► Oh, man, I'm in the 11,000. I'm way before you baby. Yeah. Oh

01:01:20 ◼   ► Well, one of us did get one though, and I'm very jealous. Hey

01:01:24 ◼   ► Alright, so I got my play date. I was in group. I was like number four thousand something

01:01:31 ◼   ► and it's just delightful.

01:01:34 ◼   ► So here's the thing, if you want a cutting edge game system,

01:01:39 ◼   ► the Playdate is not one of those.

01:01:41 ◼   ► It has this monochrome, very high resolu,

01:01:45 ◼   ► and again, monochrome is not grayscale.

01:01:48 ◼   ► The pixels on the screen are just black or white,

01:01:51 ◼   ► no shades of gray.

01:01:53 ◼   ► It's very dense, it's a very high resolution screen

01:01:56 ◼   ► for its size and it is not backlit,

01:02:00 ◼   ► which means you are relying on the light

01:02:01 ◼   ► of the room around you, and certain angles

01:02:04 ◼   ► that you hold it against the light

01:02:06 ◼   ► are much more visible than others.

01:02:07 ◼   ► And so it does feel a little bit primitive in the screen

01:02:12 ◼   ► in the sense that, I think the lack of a backlight

01:02:16 ◼   ► is what really makes it feel different and weirdly old,

01:02:21 ◼   ► but yet the extremely high resolution of the screen

01:02:24 ◼   ► makes it feel newer than that.

01:02:25 ◼   ► So I don't know, it's a fun combo.

01:02:27 ◼   ► Did you ever have a front light for your Game Boy?

01:02:30 ◼   ► - I never had a Game Boy.

01:02:31 ◼   ► - So like the original,

01:02:32 ◼   ► obviously the screen technology was way worse.

01:02:34 ◼   ► I think they even use like passive matrix.

01:02:36 ◼   ► - Yes, it was a blurry smeary mess.

01:02:38 ◼   ► - But they didn't have back lights

01:02:40 ◼   ► and they didn't have edge lights,

01:02:41 ◼   ► but you could buy like a basically like a reading light

01:02:44 ◼   ► for your Game Boy.

01:02:45 ◼   ► They would like attach to your Game Boy

01:02:47 ◼   ► and shine the light down to the thing,

01:02:48 ◼   ► which isn't great 'cause it's not like it's E Ink.

01:02:51 ◼   ► It's not like it was a reflective screen,

01:02:53 ◼   ► but if you wanted to play in a dark car ride

01:02:55 ◼   ► on the way home or something,

01:02:56 ◼   ► you literally couldn't see the screen without some kind of light shining out.

01:02:59 ◼   ► So they'd sell you this little attachment.

01:03:00 ◼   ► I know.

01:03:01 ◼   ► I mean, the play date, like to your point,

01:03:03 ◼   ► the play date is much more modern technology, incredibly high DPI.

01:03:06 ◼   ► I'm sure it's incredibly crisp and much better battery life.

01:03:09 ◼   ► But it is in the end, it is not an ink display

01:03:13 ◼   ► and it has no light emitting from it on its own.

01:03:16 ◼   ► If you were in a completely dark room with it,

01:03:17 ◼   ► you would not be able to see anything because it doesn't

01:03:20 ◼   ► unless you have some source of light.

01:03:22 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:03:23 ◼   ► And I will say, compared to the black and white LCDs of old,

01:03:27 ◼   ► not only, again, is it super high resolution,

01:03:30 ◼   ► but motion is perfectly smooth on it.

01:03:33 ◼   ► Again, the old Game Boy and stuff,

01:03:35 ◼   ► it was just smeary and blurry.

01:03:38 ◼   ► This does not have that problem.

01:03:40 ◼   ► This is incredibly fast, clear.

01:03:43 ◼   ► Like, it's almost like a printed page that is animated.

01:03:48 ◼   ► It's just extremely clear and sharp.

01:03:53 ◼   ► It is not retina in the sense that I can see the pixels,

01:03:56 ◼   ► but they are pretty small.

01:03:58 ◼   ► So the actual hardware is, I can't say enough, small.

01:04:04 ◼   ► Everything about it is very, very small.

01:04:07 ◼   ► Like it fits very comfortably in your hands.

01:04:10 ◼   ► It's almost too small for some adults.

01:04:12 ◼   ► I think some adults might find it too small.

01:04:14 ◼   ► I actually, I think this might be my first hint

01:04:17 ◼   ► that I might be getting slightly farsighted

01:04:20 ◼   ► because it's a little bit hard for me to see

01:04:23 ◼   ► some of the really tiny details

01:04:25 ◼   ► in some of the games on the screen.

01:04:26 ◼   ► - Oh, here we go.

01:04:28 ◼   ► - So we'll see.

01:04:29 ◼   ► I mean, I've never had to correct anything before

01:04:32 ◼   ► and I'm about to turn 40, so that wouldn't be unheard of.

01:04:35 ◼   ► - So do you need to like,

01:04:37 ◼   ► I'm assuming you don't need to extend your arms

01:04:39 ◼   ► at full extension to see the details,

01:04:41 ◼   ► but you can't hold it touching your nose

01:04:43 ◼   ► like you used to be able to.

01:04:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:04:46 ◼   ► I have to hold it,

01:04:47 ◼   ► the distance that I'm looking down

01:04:49 ◼   ► the keyboard on my desk.

01:04:50 ◼   ► That's about the distance that I have to hold it

01:04:52 ◼   ► to see everything totally sharp.

01:04:53 ◼   ► - That's pretty far.

01:04:55 ◼   ► - So that's probably.

01:04:56 ◼   ► - That's one advantage to having,

01:04:59 ◼   ► to being incredibly nearsighted is that in my old age,

01:05:03 ◼   ► my distance vision has gotten slightly better.

01:05:05 ◼   ► And although my closeup vision has gotten worse,

01:05:07 ◼   ► I can still hold things way closer than Marco.

01:05:09 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:05:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:05:11 ◼   ► So anyway, so the entire system so far,

01:05:14 ◼   ► the first run experience, of course,

01:05:16 ◼   ► it's what you'd expect from Panic.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Very well done, very pleasant experience.

01:05:20 ◼   ► I did a software update earlier today on them

01:05:24 ◼   ► and it shows little fireworks

01:05:25 ◼   ► when it's installing this software update.

01:05:26 ◼   ► Like it's just so cute.

01:05:27 ◼   ► Everything is like so nicely done.

01:05:30 ◼   ► The hardware feels great.

01:05:33 ◼   ► It's USB-C, this yellow plastic, like the matte finish.

01:05:37 ◼   ► It just feels good in the hand.

01:05:38 ◼   ► Buttons are nice and clicky.

01:05:39 ◼   ► The D-pad's like clicky and nice.

01:05:41 ◼   ► It just, everything feels solid and intuitive.

01:05:44 ◼   ► Right now, there's only two games for it

01:05:46 ◼   ► because the way they stage out the game,

01:05:48 ◼   ► so I think it's gonna be two games every week or two

01:05:51 ◼   ► that come out for the first 24 weeks.

01:05:55 ◼   ► They're calling it a season of games,

01:05:57 ◼   ► hence the name Playdate.

01:05:58 ◼   ► It's kind of like scheduled releases automatically

01:06:01 ◼   ► and all these games are included with every purchase

01:06:03 ◼   ► so you don't have to buy them separately.

01:06:04 ◼   ► So that's a cool idea and what this does,

01:06:08 ◼   ► we are in a time now where we live in a world

01:06:13 ◼   ► of incredible abundance, especially in the area

01:06:16 ◼   ► of games, you know, we have millions and millions

01:06:19 ◼   ► of games we could play.

01:06:20 ◼   ► Now, when it comes to like, you know, handheld games,

01:06:24 ◼   ► and especially this has kind of like a,

01:06:26 ◼   ► I wouldn't call it an eight bit vibe necessarily,

01:06:30 ◼   ► because the graphics are significantly more advanced

01:06:32 ◼   ► than you'd ever see on an eight bit system.

01:06:34 ◼   ► The sound is eight bit inspired,

01:06:37 ◼   ► and the gameplay I think is kind of a combination

01:06:39 ◼   ► like eight and 16 bit, but monochrome.

01:06:41 ◼   ► But anyway, I also have upstairs,

01:06:45 ◼   ► an NES and a Genesis and a Super Nintendo

01:06:48 ◼   ► that have game cartridge on that have hundreds

01:06:50 ◼   ► or thousands of games on each cartridge on these ROM carts

01:06:52 ◼   ► and I can pick any game I want from thousands of choices.

01:06:55 ◼   ► And most of the time that means I pick nothing

01:06:57 ◼   ► because it's overwhelming.

01:06:59 ◼   ► And so what's interesting about the Playdate is that

01:07:02 ◼   ► here's this device that right now

01:07:04 ◼   ► I only have two games for.

01:07:05 ◼   ► Only two games are available right now for it.

01:07:09 ◼   ► And next week or whenever they do the next drop,

01:07:11 ◼   ► there will be a couple more.

01:07:13 ◼   ► And so what this made me do

01:07:15 ◼   ► It's kind of like when I got my Sega Genesis,

01:07:18 ◼   ► which was my first video game system when I was a kid,

01:07:21 ◼   ► it came with the game Altered Beast,

01:07:23 ◼   ► which is not a good game.

01:07:25 ◼   ► - Oh, you bite your tongue.

01:07:26 ◼   ► I love that game, and I didn't even have a Genesis.

01:07:28 ◼   ► - It's, yeah.

01:07:29 ◼   ► Anyway, I got it for my birthday in June,

01:07:32 ◼   ► and from June until Christmas that year,

01:07:35 ◼   ► Altered Beast was the only game I had.

01:07:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:07:39 ◼   ► And at Christmas, for Christmas, I got two more games.

01:07:43 ◼   ► And then that was the only three games I had for a long time.

01:07:46 ◼   ► - I feel like this is a good definition of the difference

01:07:49 ◼   ► between Sega and Nintendo, the Sega Nintendo experience.

01:07:53 ◼   ► It's one of the complaints about, for example,

01:07:55 ◼   ► Nintendo 64, oh, there's no games for it, right?

01:07:57 ◼   ► So I got a Nintendo 64 and I had one game for it.

01:08:01 ◼   ► But that game was Mario 64.

01:08:04 ◼   ► And I didn't care it was one game

01:08:06 ◼   ► 'cause it was like the greatest game of all time.

01:08:08 ◼   ► You had Altered Beast as your one game.

01:08:10 ◼   ► So having just one game for your system

01:08:12 ◼   ► can seem very limiting, but if that one game is Mario 64,

01:08:16 ◼   ► it's all good.

01:08:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's true.

01:08:19 ◼   ► I had a friend who got the N64 at launch

01:08:22 ◼   ► and had Mario 64 and Pilotwings,

01:08:25 ◼   ► which were the only two games for a couple of weeks

01:08:26 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:08:27 ◼   ► - Well, what about Wave Race?

01:08:29 ◼   ► Wave Race was the best.

01:08:29 ◼   ► - That wasn't a launch game.

01:08:30 ◼   ► - It wasn't a launch game.

01:08:31 ◼   ► It was literally just-- - Are you sure?

01:08:32 ◼   ► - It was just Mario 64 and Pilotwings for a little while.

01:08:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, you could put Pilotwings,

01:08:36 ◼   ► that can, like, if you have a table that's wobbly,

01:08:38 ◼   ► you could put that under the table

01:08:39 ◼   ► and you could play Mario 64.

01:08:40 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:08:42 ◼   ► That's about the use they got, yeah.

01:08:44 ◼   ► But anyway, so by having this limited choice right now,

01:08:47 ◼   ► there's only these two games,

01:08:48 ◼   ► right now it's this game called Whitewater Wipeout,

01:08:51 ◼   ► which, okay, a long time ago I had,

01:08:53 ◼   ► my cousins had a Sega Master System,

01:08:55 ◼   ► which was the, most people don't even know this existed.

01:08:57 ◼   ► It was Sega's competitor to the original NES.

01:09:01 ◼   ► So it was before the Genesis,

01:09:02 ◼   ► it was an eight-bit system from Sega.

01:09:05 ◼   ► And they had this game called California Games,

01:09:07 ◼   ► which was basically a mini-game collection of like,

01:09:09 ◼   ► you know, hacky sack and surfing and roller skating, everything. White water wipeout for

01:09:15 ◼   ► the play date is very similar to a modern ish reinterpretation of that surfing game

01:09:20 ◼   ► from California games for the second master system. And so I already knew how to play

01:09:25 ◼   ► it. And you basically use the crank to like surf on a wave and make jumps and make spins

01:09:30 ◼   ► and everything to get more points until you crash. And that's a really fun little action

01:09:35 ◼   ► It's fun like and this is I mean I would probably not have found this in an app store

01:09:40 ◼   ► With a hundred games in it or a million games in it, but here it is

01:09:44 ◼   ► I got the plate I take it out and there's two games already on it. I didn't have to buy them

01:09:47 ◼   ► They're just there and it's two games. That's it

01:09:50 ◼   ► Then this other game casual birder is this kind of like a little adventure game where you're going around taking pictures of birds and you know

01:09:56 ◼   ► Solving this these little you know adventure puzzles and I spent like an hour earlier today playing this game

01:10:02 ◼   ► I would never have played this otherwise. I would never have like again found this like in a giant app list or app store or whatever.

01:10:08 ◼   ► I would never have gone through that but here I found it and because it's here and it's my only two games

01:10:14 ◼   ► so I was forced to play it and I really enjoy it actually and I'm glad I was forced to play it and

01:10:19 ◼   ► What's nice about this system is that

01:10:21 ◼   ► You know modern modern gaming I think

01:10:26 ◼   ► Has a severe lack of fun

01:10:31 ◼   ► Most modern games are not as fun as we want them to be.

01:10:36 ◼   ► In fact, I would even say,

01:10:39 ◼   ► I have a very hard time finding almost anything

01:10:42 ◼   ► on iOS that's fun.

01:10:44 ◼   ► iOS games have been so instrumented

01:10:49 ◼   ► to be money extraction machines from people

01:10:53 ◼   ► that it's really hard to find anything on the iPhone

01:10:56 ◼   ► that's new, that's fun.

01:10:59 ◼   ► They do still exist, but they're really few and far between.

01:11:03 ◼   ► And unless a friend somehow finds it and tells you about it,

01:11:07 ◼   ► you'll never find it yourself on the App Store.

01:11:10 ◼   ► It's so little fun to be had out there on iOS these days.

01:11:13 ◼   ► And the big consoles, I think Nintendo's still

01:11:16 ◼   ► pretty good with fun.

01:11:18 ◼   ► They still do it pretty reliably.

01:11:20 ◼   ► The other is it's hard.

01:11:23 ◼   ► There's so many games that are like, hardcore,

01:11:25 ◼   ► let's shoot a bunch of people, arrgh.

01:11:27 ◼   ► And that's not my scene.

01:11:29 ◼   ► And there's so many other games that are like,

01:11:32 ◼   ► here's an artsy look at,

01:11:34 ◼   ► we're gonna run through a field.

01:11:36 ◼   ► And it's like, okay, that's nice,

01:11:37 ◼   ► it's an interesting experience.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Not sure how fun it is.

01:11:40 ◼   ► The Play Date is just fun.

01:11:42 ◼   ► The hardware is fun.

01:11:44 ◼   ► The two games that exist so far are fun.

01:11:47 ◼   ► They're really simple.

01:11:49 ◼   ► And I'm really glad I have this little stupid thing.

01:11:51 ◼   ► Like it's so delightful and fun.

01:11:54 ◼   ► in the broader world of games where that's hard to find now.

01:11:58 ◼   ► These games have no in-app purchases,

01:12:01 ◼   ► they don't want me to sign up for their mailing list,

01:12:04 ◼   ► they don't want to run in the background,

01:12:06 ◼   ► they don't want me to create an account,

01:12:07 ◼   ► they don't want, they don't need me to buy DLC packs,

01:12:11 ◼   ► they don't need me to buy coins or gems

01:12:14 ◼   ► or any of that crap.

01:12:16 ◼   ► They're just games that are made to be

01:12:18 ◼   ► little fun distractions for a little while

01:12:20 ◼   ► on this cute little yellow thing that fits in your pocket.

01:12:23 ◼   ► And that's fantastic.

01:12:24 ◼   ► And even though it's not going to take over the world,

01:12:27 ◼   ► and I probably should get reading glasses to play it,

01:12:31 ◼   ► I still, I'm still really happy that this thing exists.

01:12:35 ◼   ► And there's a whole other world of it

01:12:38 ◼   ► that I haven't explored yet, which is,

01:12:40 ◼   ► they've made some pretty incredible looking

01:12:42 ◼   ► developer tools for it at very different skill levels.

01:12:45 ◼   ► They have like a web-based thing where you can

01:12:47 ◼   ► literally make games with a web app

01:12:49 ◼   ► that seem like it might be a pretty approachable thing

01:12:51 ◼   ► possibly for my son to start doing,

01:12:53 ◼   ► which I want to start exploring soon.

01:12:55 ◼   ► And they also have a C API and a Lua API and all these tools.

01:13:00 ◼   ► So I think this is going to have an interesting developer story

01:13:03 ◼   ► as well.

01:13:05 ◼   ► People keep asking me, hey, you should port Overcast to it.

01:13:08 ◼   ► I don't think that would be a good idea

01:13:10 ◼   ► for a number of reasons.

01:13:12 ◼   ► I don't think this is going to be a device that people ever

01:13:16 ◼   ► carry around when they don't have a phone on them.

01:13:18 ◼   ► and a phone is a much better device

01:13:20 ◼   ► to be a podcast player for so many reasons.

01:13:23 ◼   ► So I don't think that's what this is going to be.

01:13:25 ◼   ► This is not gonna become like,

01:13:27 ◼   ► this is not gonna have a bunch of different types of apps

01:13:29 ◼   ► on it for most people to actually wanna use.

01:13:32 ◼   ► It's gonna have games on it.

01:13:32 ◼   ► It's gonna have fun little games on it.

01:13:35 ◼   ► For that, I think it's going to be a really neat thing

01:13:39 ◼   ► and I really hope it takes off.

01:13:40 ◼   ► I hope people make stuff for it.

01:13:42 ◼   ► I hope the games take off.

01:13:44 ◼   ► I hope that maybe my son gets into making,

01:13:47 ◼   ► you know, playing with the, you know,

01:13:49 ◼   ► experimenting with the game maker things.

01:13:51 ◼   ► Maybe I will, maybe K2 should, I don't know.

01:13:53 ◼   ► - You're gonna make your total annihilation clone for it.

01:13:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, that'll be good. - Oh, that's a solid call.

01:13:58 ◼   ► And you could use the crank to like aim and stuff.

01:14:00 ◼   ► - No, that's not how TA works.

01:14:02 ◼   ► Anyway, so. (laughs)

01:14:02 ◼   ► - Oh no, what am I thinking of then?

01:14:04 ◼   ► - You're thinking of scorched earth.

01:14:06 ◼   ► - That's what I'm thinking of, sorry.

01:14:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, scorched, actually, yeah,

01:14:08 ◼   ► 'cause like TA requires a mouse.

01:14:10 ◼   ► But, so, and what's nice about this too,

01:14:11 ◼   ► you know, it has a D-pad and an A and a B button.

01:14:14 ◼   ► And so, again, it's simple, which keeps it--

01:14:17 ◼   ► - And a crank. - And a crank.

01:14:19 ◼   ► So it's simple and it keeps it fun,

01:14:21 ◼   ► but it also, it allows you to do things,

01:14:24 ◼   ► like any kind of game that works really well with a D-pad

01:14:28 ◼   ► generally sucks on a phone.

01:14:30 ◼   ► Like this would be a great thing for Tetris-style games,

01:14:34 ◼   ► stuff that you just can't really play very well on a phone

01:14:38 ◼   ► 'cause you need a D-pad to really do it well.

01:14:40 ◼   ► So I'm very much looking forward to what this becomes.

01:14:45 ◼   ► I'm delighted with what it is already

01:14:46 ◼   ► even with just two games on it.

01:14:49 ◼   ► And I'm so happy this exists.

01:14:51 ◼   ► It really is, you know, it's like,

01:14:53 ◼   ► CableSats with personality, like in a product.

01:14:55 ◼   ► It's like this force of positive energy,

01:14:59 ◼   ► shamelessly positive and delightful,

01:15:02 ◼   ► in a category where we really haven't seen

01:15:04 ◼   ► a lot of that recently.

01:15:05 ◼   ► So I'm very happy to see this.

01:15:07 ◼   ► It is refreshing and promising and just fun and delightful.

01:15:12 ◼   ► And so I strongly suggest, you know,

01:15:14 ◼   ► if you really want one, you can buy one on eBay right now

01:15:16 ◼   ► for about $450.

01:15:19 ◼   ► I wouldn't necessarily think it's worth that much,

01:15:21 ◼   ► but I strongly suggest if you are on the fence about this,

01:15:26 ◼   ► put in a pre-order, get on the wait list,

01:15:28 ◼   ► you can always cancel if you want to,

01:15:30 ◼   ► get on the wait list for it because this thing, I think,

01:15:32 ◼   ► is gonna be a lot of fun for a while.

01:15:34 ◼   ► - What is the actual price?

01:15:34 ◼   ► Is it $200?

01:15:36 ◼   ► - 200 bucks, it's like 180 or 200 with the little flip case.

01:15:39 ◼   ► And I did buy the flip cases, little purple things,

01:15:42 ◼   ► and they're nice too.

01:15:43 ◼   ► I mean, I don't have much to say about them yet.

01:15:44 ◼   ► They're fine, but I'm mostly holding it without the case,

01:15:48 ◼   ► 'cause it's just this cool little yellow thing

01:15:49 ◼   ► that's more delightful without it, I think.

01:15:51 ◼   ► - And you keep saying it's only two games,

01:15:53 ◼   ► but it's like, just to be clear, it's time to release.

01:15:55 ◼   ► Like, it's instead of like Netflix dropping

01:15:57 ◼   ► the whole season at once, they do,

01:15:59 ◼   ► they're doling out the game slowly,

01:16:00 ◼   ► so that's supposed to be part of the fun,

01:16:02 ◼   ► and your doling out of games begins

01:16:04 ◼   ► when you buy your device, right?

01:16:06 ◼   ► So it's not like everyone is in sync with each other.

01:16:08 ◼   ► - Oh, I didn't realize that.

01:16:09 ◼   ► That's a really good, smart way to do it.

01:16:11 ◼   ► - Well, if you listen to the podcast,

01:16:13 ◼   ► they talk about the debates they had,

01:16:14 ◼   ► Like, should they try to make it so there's like, you know,

01:16:16 ◼   ► everyone's on the same schedule

01:16:17 ◼   ► or should they try to do a timed

01:16:18 ◼   ► and there's plus and minuses of each one's.

01:16:20 ◼   ► Again, lots of discussion, this is the podcast,

01:16:22 ◼   ► but yeah, the whole first season of games,

01:16:23 ◼   ► as far as I know, is done, right?

01:16:25 ◼   ► They're just doling them out to you a little bit.

01:16:26 ◼   ► So it's supposed to be like,

01:16:27 ◼   ► not only are the individual games fun,

01:16:29 ◼   ► but it's like on a regular schedule,

01:16:31 ◼   ► you pick up your thing and oh,

01:16:32 ◼   ► here's a new game that wasn't there before.

01:16:35 ◼   ► And you don't have to select the game or whatever.

01:16:36 ◼   ► The games just arrive on your play date

01:16:38 ◼   ► according to the schedule of the season.

01:16:40 ◼   ► And by the end, you have them all.

01:16:42 ◼   ► And of course, you know, we talked about this when we talked about Playdate, really, not

01:16:45 ◼   ► only is there a web-based SDK and a regular one, but every single Playdate is essentially

01:16:49 ◼   ► a dev kit, there is no special dev kit version of that.

01:16:52 ◼   ► Anyone who owns a Playdate can make games for it, and you don't have to go through an

01:16:56 ◼   ► app store to distribute those games.

01:16:57 ◼   ► You can give them to anybody, they can put them on, there is no "side loading", it is

01:17:01 ◼   ► an entirely open platform.

01:17:03 ◼   ► So if you make a game for Playdate, you don't even have to tell Panic about it, you can

01:17:06 ◼   ► just give it to all your friends and play it.

01:17:08 ◼   ► It is like the PC of handheld consoles, which really hasn't existed in a popular form anyway.

01:17:15 ◼   ► The personal computer has been like that, but most game consoles, and especially handheld

01:17:19 ◼   ► game consoles, have been owned by some platform owner that controls what kind of games get

01:17:22 ◼   ► to go on it.

01:17:24 ◼   ► Not true of Playdate.

01:17:25 ◼   ► So if you get a Playdate, you can make a game for it, you can get a game from anyone else,

01:17:29 ◼   ► you can put the game on there, and by the way also, you can buy future seasons of these

01:17:34 ◼   ► Playdate games from Panic.

01:17:37 ◼   ► season comes with the thing and then after that I think you'll have to buy the seasons

01:17:41 ◼   ► if you want to. But if you don't you can just download free games that people put up on

01:17:44 ◼   ► their websites or whatever. Yeah, I think it's going to be so fun to go through that

01:17:48 ◼   ► because like you know part of the appeal as I was saying was like I only have these two

01:17:53 ◼   ► games and so I'm actually playing them both and I'm actually spending decent time with

01:17:56 ◼   ► them both. If it just came with 24 or 100 games available for it I wouldn't be doing

01:18:03 ◼   ► that. I would like pick and choose. I would have trouble choosing, finding one. Oh that

01:18:06 ◼   ► one looks kind of, I don't know if I'd like that, I'll skip it. Now I'm actually just

01:18:09 ◼   ► trying them all. And so by having that kind of gradual trickle of new games coming in,

01:18:13 ◼   ► it is making me try them all just like I used to do with my old consoles back when I had

01:18:18 ◼   ► no money and games cost $60. So I would get one new game maybe every couple of months.

01:18:26 ◼   ► It wasn't a frequent thing to get a new game and then be able to spend a lot of time with

01:18:31 ◼   ► it because it's all I had. And so to have that in this little thing, I think it's going

01:18:34 ◼   ► to be a lot of fun and this has made me smile more than any game I've found on my phone

01:18:40 ◼   ► in the last year.

01:18:41 ◼   ► And to be clear, there's a blog post on the Playdate website where they talk about a bunch

01:18:47 ◼   ► of other games that you can either buy or get right now. Like, you can buy, not through

01:18:53 ◼   ► Panic, through other people, you can buy other games. Like, there's one called Bloom that's

01:18:59 ◼   ► ten dollars and they say in the blog post, "Bloom is the first commercial Playdate game

01:19:03 ◼   ► outside of our season. And so there are other things you could get if you so

01:19:07 ◼   ► desired, but you certainly don't have to. And like you said, you can wait and

01:19:11 ◼   ► just get more when they show up. There's also a pocket planner, which I think is

01:19:14 ◼   ► very funny, where you can... it's like a calendar on your playdate. I want one. I'm

01:19:21 ◼   ► glad I pre-ordered, because when the pre-orders were starting this was

01:19:25 ◼   ► classic Casey Fomo, right? Like, "Oh, I don't think I want this. Oh, but everyone else

01:19:29 ◼   ► is getting it. Oh, I don't know. I don't want to be that guy that doesn't have one.

01:19:32 ◼   ► and it looks neat, okay fine, I'll buy it.

01:19:34 ◼   ► And I don't know if I'll use it after the first year,

01:19:37 ◼   ► but for a couple hundred bucks to try something out

01:19:39 ◼   ► from some people I at least casually know,

01:19:42 ◼   ► I think it's worth it, and I'm looking forward

01:19:44 ◼   ► to getting mine whenever that may be.

01:19:45 ◼   ► So hopefully sooner rather than later.

01:19:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, here's a general strategy.

01:19:49 ◼   ► If all your tech friends are hyping up this thing

01:19:52 ◼   ► that you think you might someday want

01:19:54 ◼   ► and there's a pre-order thing,

01:19:57 ◼   ► if you can afford to, just place the pre-order,

01:19:59 ◼   ► because you can usually cancel them.

01:20:01 ◼   ► They usually let you cancel them very easily

01:20:04 ◼   ► and either get the refund or never having been charged

01:20:07 ◼   ► in the first place.

01:20:08 ◼   ► And so just put the order in,

01:20:10 ◼   ► because it can't hurt to have the order in

01:20:12 ◼   ► as long as you can afford to actually buy the thing.

01:20:15 ◼   ► It can't hurt to have the order in

01:20:16 ◼   ► and you can always cancel it

01:20:18 ◼   ► if you change your mind down the road.

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01:22:19 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:22:23 ◼   ► - We do have to pour one out

01:22:24 ◼   ► for something that's canceled though,

01:22:26 ◼   ► and the iPod Touch is no more.

01:22:29 ◼   ► It has been discontinued.

01:22:30 ◼   ► The music lives on, gentlemen, but the iPod Touch does not.

01:22:33 ◼   ► What an odd news release it was.

01:22:36 ◼   ► -It was such a weird press release, right?

01:22:38 ◼   ► So the story is that Apple's not gonna be selling

01:22:40 ◼   ► the iPod Touch anymore.

01:22:41 ◼   ► It's still available while supplies last,

01:22:42 ◼   ► but once they're all sold out, that'll be it, right?

01:22:45 ◼   ► And they have a press release. Fine, whatever.

01:22:47 ◼   ► The press release spends a long time

01:22:50 ◼   ► talking about all the different ways

01:22:53 ◼   ► that Apple has available to you to listen to music.

01:22:56 ◼   ► "The Music Lives On" is the title,

01:22:58 ◼   ► and it says the iPod touch, subtitle iPod touch will be,

01:23:01 ◼   ► not the iPod touch, because Apple would never say that,

01:23:03 ◼   ► iPod touch, no article, will be available

01:23:06 ◼   ► while supplies last.

01:23:07 ◼   ► And then it just goes on talking about the iPod

01:23:10 ◼   ► from 20 years ago, and it talks all about

01:23:11 ◼   ► the different kinds of iPods,

01:23:13 ◼   ► and has a little slideshow showing them,

01:23:15 ◼   ► and then saying all the different ways

01:23:16 ◼   ► you can listen to music today,

01:23:17 ◼   ► and just like, couple paragraphs of that,

01:23:21 ◼   ► and then in the very last sentence

01:23:24 ◼   ► of the entire press release, it says,

01:23:25 ◼   ► customers can purchase iPod touch through Apple.com,

01:23:27 ◼   ► Apple store locations and Apple authorized reacceleration

01:23:29 ◼   ► while supplies last.

01:23:30 ◼   ► That is the entirety of the content of this press release

01:23:33 ◼   ► that tells you anything about the fate of the iPod touch

01:23:36 ◼   ► other than the subtitle that I just read, which is weird.

01:23:39 ◼   ► But anyway, so yeah, this, you know, as Marco said

01:23:43 ◼   ► in another channel, and I'm sure as many people thought,

01:23:45 ◼   ► Apple was still selling iPod touches?

01:23:47 ◼   ► Yeah, Apple was still selling iPod touches.

01:23:49 ◼   ► I mean, it hasn't been updated in three years,

01:23:51 ◼   ► but even that, Apple updated the iPod touch three years ago?

01:23:55 ◼   ► Yeah, they did, they put different guts in it.

01:23:57 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, sort of, yeah.

01:23:59 ◼   ► So the iPod Touch has the guts, the current iPod Touch,

01:24:02 ◼   ► I guess now outgoing iPod Touch,

01:24:04 ◼   ► has the guts of the iPhone 7, roughly.

01:24:07 ◼   ► It's the iPhone 7 CPU, I think the camera's probably worse,

01:24:09 ◼   ► but otherwise-- - No Touch ID.

01:24:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, no Touch, yeah, but it's the approximate guts

01:24:13 ◼   ► of the iPhone 7, and so that's already,

01:24:15 ◼   ► most people don't realize that the last three major versions

01:24:20 ◼   ► of iOS, 13, 14, and 15, all have the same supported hardware

01:24:25 ◼   ► So 14 and 15 did not drop any supported devices.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Like, you know, when iOS 16 comes out,

01:24:31 ◼   ► presumably being in beta in about a month

01:24:34 ◼   ► and then coming out this fall, it

01:24:36 ◼   ► would not be unreasonable for them

01:24:38 ◼   ► to drop multiple old hardware generations.

01:24:41 ◼   ► Right now, the 6s is the minimum supported CPU.

01:24:44 ◼   ► It's possible iOS 16 will drop the 6s and the 7 CPUs.

01:24:49 ◼   ► So it's possible they're about to release a version of iOS

01:24:51 ◼   ► that drops support for this version of the iPod Touch

01:24:54 ◼   ► anyway and that wouldn't be unreasonable given its age.

01:24:57 ◼   ► So anyway, this announcement, again, number one,

01:25:02 ◼   ► I think most people were like, wait,

01:25:03 ◼   ► they were still selling the iPod Touch.

01:25:05 ◼   ► But everyone's saying, oh, now the iPod is finally dead.

01:25:10 ◼   ► And I understand the sentiment, but I think the iPod died

01:25:13 ◼   ► as soon as it became an iOS only product line.

01:25:16 ◼   ► Like the iPod Touch is not an iPod, it's a cut down iPhone.

01:25:21 ◼   ► And it was never an iPod.

01:25:23 ◼   ► they use the name, but really, when you say iPod,

01:25:28 ◼   ► that's not what most people think of.

01:25:29 ◼   ► Most people think of the music players

01:25:32 ◼   ► that didn't run iOS that had some kind of wheels

01:25:36 ◼   ► or buttons or whatever.

01:25:37 ◼   ► Like, even the later generation iPod Nanos

01:25:40 ◼   ► that had the kind of fake iOS-looking home screen

01:25:44 ◼   ► with the touch screen, most people didn't even know

01:25:47 ◼   ► those existed and have never used one.

01:25:49 ◼   ► When you say iPod, you're thinking of the iPod Classic,

01:25:52 ◼   ► the iPod mini, the iPod nano, like that's maybe the shuffle

01:25:56 ◼   ► if you are a glutton for pain.

01:25:58 ◼   ► That is what you think of.

01:26:00 ◼   ► - The shuffle was one of the best iPods ever made.

01:26:02 ◼   ► What are you talking about?

01:26:04 ◼   ► - Disagree.

01:26:05 ◼   ► But that product line ended a long time ago.

01:26:09 ◼   ► To say now that this thing that was basically an iPhone,

01:26:13 ◼   ► that, the death of that thing is the death of the iPod line,

01:26:16 ◼   ► I think is, there's a lot of asterisks on that.

01:26:19 ◼   ► So I, you know, I'm not, I don't wanna yuck on anyone's yum

01:26:22 ◼   ► but I think the end of the iPod happened a long time ago.

01:26:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean this is, this price release doesn't say,

01:26:28 ◼   ► but this is the end of the iPod branding.

01:26:31 ◼   ► Like Apple, they used the iPod brand,

01:26:33 ◼   ► they slapped it on this thing that's not an iPod,

01:26:35 ◼   ► because the iPod brand had value.

01:26:36 ◼   ► And because also people knew what that was

01:26:38 ◼   ► and it communicated back in 2007 that you could buy this

01:26:43 ◼   ► and it was like an iPod, like it was not a phone.

01:26:45 ◼   ► It's basically what it's communicating, not phone.

01:26:48 ◼   ► There's no, you're not gonna make any calls from it.

01:26:49 ◼   ► It's an iPod, but it's an iPod Touch.

01:26:51 ◼   ► it's an iPod that you can touch.

01:26:52 ◼   ► Really, it's an iPhone without the phone.

01:26:54 ◼   ► But they put the iPod branding on it

01:26:56 ◼   ► because that was a good way to communicate its purpose

01:26:59 ◼   ► and to put it into a family of incredibly successful products

01:27:02 ◼   ► with a name that people loved.

01:27:04 ◼   ► And the retiring of the name,

01:27:05 ◼   ► the retiring of Apple will no longer sell any products

01:27:08 ◼   ► with iPod in the name.

01:27:11 ◼   ► That means that not only is the iPod gone,

01:27:13 ◼   ► which, like Marco said,

01:27:15 ◼   ► it's been, the iPod went away a while ago,

01:27:17 ◼   ► but that the brand is now so kind of retro

01:27:21 ◼   ► that it no longer has enough value for Apple to continue to stick it on a product.

01:27:25 ◼   ► And furthermore, the product that they're making here doesn't really have a place in

01:27:29 ◼   ► the market anymore for them to be worth making.

01:27:32 ◼   ► So arguably it didn't have a place in the market for many years, which is why they had

01:27:35 ◼   ► to go years and years without updating it.

01:27:37 ◼   ► But basically the role of a touch device that's not a phone, that is less expensive than a

01:27:42 ◼   ► phone, has been filled, for kids, has been mostly filled by cheaper iPads or by hand-me-down

01:27:49 ◼   ► phones or used phones. Now you can say, okay, well nothing really fills this role, and I

01:27:53 ◼   ► would agree there is nothing that is exactly as cheap and exactly as small and exactly

01:27:57 ◼   ► as convenient and without the caveats about trying to find used phones and their batteries

01:28:01 ◼   ► are worse and blah, blah, blah. Like there's, you're right that it doesn't actually, there

01:28:05 ◼   ► is kind of a hole, but it's a tiny hole. And in general, I think history has shown that

01:28:10 ◼   ► kids would rather have a small iPad or a big iPad or any, literally any iPad than this

01:28:17 ◼   ► stinky thing because kids aren't on the go and want to have this device as they go off.

01:28:21 ◼   ► That's a phone, right?

01:28:23 ◼   ► And for not-phone, kids prefer something with a bigger screen because who wouldn't?

01:28:27 ◼   ► Even an iPod mini, iPad mini has a bigger screen than this.

01:28:30 ◼   ► So this is a product that really no longer has any place in our lives and it goes out

01:28:35 ◼   ► and with it leaves the iPod product line which I feel like hasn't had a cachet in a really

01:28:41 ◼   ► long time and certainly for the kids that you would be buying this iPod touch for, they

01:28:46 ◼   ► have never even seen an iPod and have no idea what it is.

01:28:49 ◼   ► It's just a thing that their parents tell them about.

01:28:51 ◼   ► So it's sad.

01:28:54 ◼   ► As we talked about ages ago on the show, I loved my iPod Touch.

01:28:57 ◼   ► It was what I bought when I didn't want to pay for a plan

01:28:59 ◼   ► for my iPhone.

01:29:00 ◼   ► And I used iPod Touch just for many years.

01:29:02 ◼   ► And I still haven't seen anyone mention it

01:29:04 ◼   ► until people came close.

01:29:05 ◼   ► I always bring it up.

01:29:07 ◼   ► There was a very, very, very, very brief moment in time

01:29:10 ◼   ► when the iPod Touch was the highest performing iOS device

01:29:12 ◼   ► that you could--

01:29:13 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:29:14 ◼   ► Before it was called iOS.

01:29:15 ◼   ► It was called iPhone OS and it ran on your iPod touch,

01:29:18 ◼   ► which I wasn't even called iPhone OS.

01:29:19 ◼   ► It was just a firmware, right?

01:29:20 ◼   ► That ran on your iPod touch.

01:29:22 ◼   ► I think it was the,

01:29:24 ◼   ► it must've been the first generation iPod touch.

01:29:26 ◼   ► Actually it was a little bit faster than the phone.

01:29:28 ◼   ► They were always thinner, as Gruber talked about.

01:29:30 ◼   ► Like if you wanted to see the future of the iPhone,

01:29:32 ◼   ► you used to be able to look at the iPod touch

01:29:33 ◼   ► 'cause it was the iPhone without the phone

01:29:35 ◼   ► and the phone bits used to take up a lot of room in there.

01:29:37 ◼   ► And so the iPod touch was always thinner.

01:29:39 ◼   ► So I have an attic full of old iPod touches

01:29:41 ◼   ► and iPod touch was stolen out of my car,

01:29:43 ◼   ► as I mentioned in a previous show.

01:29:45 ◼   ► I've had a lot of them, I had a lot of affection for them,

01:29:47 ◼   ► but it's very clear that the time for this product

01:29:50 ◼   ► has come and gone.

01:29:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, and if anybody out there is feeling very nostalgic

01:29:56 ◼   ► about the iPod era, rather than jumping to go try to buy

01:30:00 ◼   ► one of these outgoing, you know, slow old iOS devices.

01:30:04 ◼   ► - I think they're kind of already sold out

01:30:05 ◼   ► from what I've been seeing, like I think--

01:30:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think so.

01:30:08 ◼   ► - Anyone who was even, like, 'cause a lot of people are like,

01:30:09 ◼   ► oh, this is a testing device,

01:30:11 ◼   ► or it's nice to have a slow device,

01:30:12 ◼   ► or I just wanna have one for my kid.

01:30:13 ◼   ► everybody who is just like, you know, thinking about that,

01:30:17 ◼   ► but never actually following through and buying it,

01:30:20 ◼   ► as soon as they announce cancel,

01:30:21 ◼   ► I think all those people just said, "Buy."

01:30:23 ◼   ► 'Cause it's cheap enough, it's like an impulse purchase,

01:30:25 ◼   ► and they are very difficult to find now.

01:30:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I have heard, you know,

01:30:28 ◼   ► I said on Twitter like who even use these anymore,

01:30:31 ◼   ► and I have heard from a lot of people who said like,

01:30:33 ◼   ► they have some kind of special use for them.

01:30:35 ◼   ► Like, one of them was like people

01:30:36 ◼   ► who do audio tours in museums,

01:30:40 ◼   ► they have these things in special record cases,

01:30:42 ◼   ► or people who have certain things

01:30:43 ◼   ► where they have to give a fleet of them

01:30:45 ◼   ► to children in school for some reason.

01:30:47 ◼   ► There are people who use these,

01:30:50 ◼   ► but yeah, I think that's a dwindling group.

01:30:53 ◼   ► And the fact is that if this market

01:30:56 ◼   ► was already being served enough

01:30:59 ◼   ► by still selling iPhone 7 guts in 2022,

01:31:04 ◼   ► then it probably is not that big of a market.

01:31:06 ◼   ► But that being said,

01:31:07 ◼   ► so if you want to experience iPod nostalgia,

01:31:11 ◼   ► here's what you do.

01:31:12 ◼   ► Don't buy one of these things for $200.

01:31:14 ◼   ► Go on eBay and buy a second generation iPod Nano

01:31:18 ◼   ► for like 30 bucks.

01:31:19 ◼   ► 'Cause there's always, I know this 'cause I did this

01:31:22 ◼   ► for as part of a thing I was doing last fall.

01:31:25 ◼   ► I actually bought an iPod Nano from eBay for 30 bucks.

01:31:29 ◼   ► It had like a refurbished with a new battery in it

01:31:32 ◼   ► and it was fine and it worked and it was really fun.

01:31:36 ◼   ► And modern Mac OS still supports syncing to an iPod

01:31:41 ◼   ► as long as you can dig up a dock cable somewhere

01:31:43 ◼   ► or possibly buy one of those on eBay as well.

01:31:46 ◼   ► Or it might come with it depending on what kind of seller

01:31:48 ◼   ► you buy it from.

01:31:49 ◼   ► But as long as you still have or can get a dock cable,

01:31:52 ◼   ► and you can plug it into any modern Mac,

01:31:55 ◼   ► and you can sync songs to it from the now Finder interface

01:32:00 ◼   ► for plugging in an iPod, and it works.

01:32:02 ◼   ► The iPod Nano 2nd Gen, I think, is the epitome

01:32:05 ◼   ► of what people think of when they think of what an iPod is.

01:32:10 ◼   ► You're usually not thinking of the later,

01:32:13 ◼   ► again, like the big, kind of all screen models.

01:32:15 ◼   ► You're even not really thinking of the ones

01:32:17 ◼   ► that have really fancy color to show video

01:32:21 ◼   ► and big album art and everything,

01:32:23 ◼   ► the ones that look like iOS.

01:32:24 ◼   ► That's not what you're thinking of.

01:32:25 ◼   ► You're thinking of either an iPod Classic or an iPod Nano

01:32:28 ◼   ► and even then, like the earlier Nanos,

01:32:30 ◼   ► not even the later Nanos.

01:32:32 ◼   ► And you can get that experience for 30 bucks on eBay.

01:32:35 ◼   ► And then you can try it for a few days

01:32:39 ◼   ► and you can realize, okay, this was fun and nostalgic,

01:32:42 ◼   ► but it's so much better to just use my phone

01:32:45 ◼   ► with my wireless earbuds and my streaming services

01:32:48 ◼   ► and my cell connection if I forgot to download something

01:32:51 ◼   ► and my easier navigation and my much larger collection.

01:32:54 ◼   ► You start realizing, okay, actually,

01:32:57 ◼   ► there's a reason why we replaced

01:32:59 ◼   ► all of this category with phones.

01:33:01 ◼   ► And that's where it really killed the iPod

01:33:02 ◼   ► was when we all got iPhones.

01:33:05 ◼   ► Then there was no reason,

01:33:07 ◼   ► All of us, we loved our iPods.

01:33:09 ◼   ► And when we got our phones, we would tell ourselves,

01:33:11 ◼   ► I'm still gonna carry the iPod too.

01:33:13 ◼   ► Maybe it'll serve its role,

01:33:14 ◼   ► maybe I'll keep it in the car or whatever.

01:33:15 ◼   ► And they just slowly fell out of use

01:33:17 ◼   ► because phones are just so much better for this role.

01:33:20 ◼   ► So this is a wonderful piece of nostalgia.

01:33:23 ◼   ► It's great to go the eBay route

01:33:25 ◼   ► if you wanna have some fun with one for a little while,

01:33:28 ◼   ► but then you'll move past it

01:33:29 ◼   ► because what we have now is better.

01:33:32 ◼   ► So it was a great era, that era is over.

01:33:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, my first Apple device of any sort

01:33:37 ◼   ► was the original iPod Nano, which I coveted.

01:33:40 ◼   ► I wanted one so badly.

01:33:42 ◼   ► And if I'm not mistaken,

01:33:43 ◼   ► it was one of Aaron's first big gifts to me.

01:33:46 ◼   ► I think that's correct.

01:33:47 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that's right.

01:33:48 ◼   ► And I don't even know if I still have it or not,

01:33:50 ◼   ► but I wanted that thing so bad when I got it, I loved it.

01:33:55 ◼   ► Gosh, did I love that thing.

01:33:57 ◼   ► And I take a slight issue with what you said earlier, Marco.

01:33:59 ◼   ► The iPod, I think, died with iOS 5,

01:34:03 ◼   ► and I was running through the screenshots on Wikipedia.

01:34:06 ◼   ► I had forgotten that the music app on iOS 1 through 4,

01:34:10 ◼   ► iPhone OS 1 through 4, was called iPod.

01:34:12 ◼   ► And it was iOS 5 that it became--

01:34:14 ◼   ► - Was it? - Music.

01:34:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I did not remember that at all.

01:34:17 ◼   ► - Oh, wow.

01:34:18 ◼   ► And that's not just when the iPod touched,

01:34:20 ◼   ► on the iPhone build as well?

01:34:21 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no.

01:34:22 ◼   ► Not three separate devices, are you kidding?

01:34:23 ◼   ► There's an iPod app, there's Internet Communicator,

01:34:26 ◼   ► which is Safari, and there's the phone icon.

01:34:28 ◼   ► - Yep. - Oh, wow.

01:34:29 ◼   ► - I had completely forgotten about that.

01:34:31 ◼   ► And so anyway-- - I was right about that too.

01:34:32 ◼   ► - So iOS 5, when it became music,

01:34:34 ◼   ► that's when the iPod really truly died.

01:34:36 ◼   ► All right, let's do some Ask ATP.

01:34:38 ◼   ► - No, I gotta do one more canceled product.

01:34:39 ◼   ► - No, it's gonna take too long.

01:34:41 ◼   ► - It's not gonna take too long, it'll be fine.

01:34:42 ◼   ► - Okay, here we go, everyone look at your talk.

01:34:44 ◼   ► - You have tons to say about this?

01:34:45 ◼   ► I don't think you do.

01:34:46 ◼   ► - I have hours of content about this, Jon.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Hours, I tell you.

01:34:50 ◼   ► - This is a few weeks old, but it's in the same category

01:34:54 ◼   ► that Apple canceling products,

01:34:55 ◼   ► they finally put to bed Mac OS Server.

01:34:59 ◼   ► And you may be wondering, what the heck is Mac OS Server?

01:35:01 ◼   ► Do you mean Mac OS X server?

01:35:03 ◼   ► No, I do not.

01:35:04 ◼   ► This is another one of those products

01:35:05 ◼   ► that Apple had for many years that slowly faded away,

01:35:09 ◼   ► kind of like the iPod slowly faded away

01:35:11 ◼   ► until finally it goes away and people are like,

01:35:13 ◼   ► what's going away?

01:35:14 ◼   ► What are you talking about?

01:35:15 ◼   ► Not to give too much history, but back before Mac OS X,

01:35:20 ◼   ► there was a product Apple sold called Mac OS X server

01:35:23 ◼   ► that was based on, it was not based on the same code base

01:35:27 ◼   ► that Mac OS X 10.0 was based on.

01:35:28 ◼   ► It was based on the Rhapsody code base from ages ago.

01:35:31 ◼   ► So it's really confusing.

01:35:32 ◼   ► They released a product called Mac OS X Server, right?

01:35:35 ◼   ► But that was not based on Mac OS X.

01:35:38 ◼   ► Then Mac OS X came out, you know,

01:35:40 ◼   ► and we got Jaguar, Puma, you know,

01:35:41 ◼   ► Cheetah, Jaguar, Puma, blah, blah, blah,

01:35:43 ◼   ► the whole nine yards, right?

01:35:44 ◼   ► And they also introduced a new product

01:35:46 ◼   ► called Mac OS X Server that had really no relation

01:35:49 ◼   ► to the previous Mac OS X Server,

01:35:51 ◼   ► but was instead the server variant of Mac OS X.

01:35:55 ◼   ► So, you know, you get Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar,

01:35:59 ◼   ► and you'd get the server variant.

01:36:01 ◼   ► I forget what year the server variant came out.

01:36:02 ◼   ► I don't remember all 10 through 10.

01:36:03 ◼   ► I never reviewed Mac OS X server, right?

01:36:05 ◼   ► But it existed as a companion

01:36:07 ◼   ► with the regular Mac OS X thing.

01:36:09 ◼   ► And then at some point in the past,

01:36:11 ◼   ► they said, you know what, we're not gonna do that anymore.

01:36:13 ◼   ► We're not gonna have a server version and a regular version

01:36:15 ◼   ► 'cause we're just tired of supporting the server version.

01:36:17 ◼   ► And we're just gonna have one version.

01:36:19 ◼   ► We're gonna call it OS X by this point,

01:36:21 ◼   ► I think it was called.

01:36:22 ◼   ► And the server part of it will just be an app

01:36:26 ◼   ► or a set of apps that you'll be able to get and install

01:36:29 ◼   ► on plain old Mac OS X that will provide you

01:36:31 ◼   ► server functionality.

01:36:32 ◼   ► So if people are wondering what is Mac OS X server,

01:36:35 ◼   ► what did it have, it had like a mail server

01:36:37 ◼   ► and you could manage other people's Macs with it

01:36:40 ◼   ► and what else did it have?

01:36:41 ◼   ► Like a directory service, like it had server type stuff

01:36:44 ◼   ► that you could run on a Mac if you wanted a Mac

01:36:46 ◼   ► to be a server.

01:36:47 ◼   ► Usually a server for a bunch of other Macs

01:36:49 ◼   ► but the services would be cross platform.

01:36:51 ◼   ► And they just consolidate a lot of stuff into apps

01:36:54 ◼   ► or an app called server or whatever.

01:36:56 ◼   ► And so Mac OS X server was no longer a product

01:37:00 ◼   ► that you could buy.

01:37:01 ◼   ► But you could still buy Mac OS X or whatever it was called

01:37:05 ◼   ► and then put this server stuff on it.

01:37:06 ◼   ► This disinclination is now we're not even

01:37:08 ◼   ► going to give you that server stuff.

01:37:09 ◼   ► We're tired of having a directory server.

01:37:11 ◼   ► We're tired of having a mail server, a file sharing

01:37:14 ◼   ► server, a time machine server.

01:37:16 ◼   ► We're not going to have that as a separate product.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Most of those things have been built into plain old Mac OS.

01:37:23 ◼   ► So you don't need a special server variant.

01:37:25 ◼   ► It's just part of the OS now.

01:37:26 ◼   ► and the things that weren't built in,

01:37:28 ◼   ► we're just not going to make them anymore.

01:37:31 ◼   ► And Apple points you to third parties

01:37:32 ◼   ► that do things like this.

01:37:33 ◼   ► So if you wanna use mobile device management,

01:37:35 ◼   ► there are third party ones for that.

01:37:37 ◼   ► If you wanna use some other feature

01:37:38 ◼   ► that is not built into the US,

01:37:40 ◼   ► here are some third party companies that provide that.

01:37:42 ◼   ► And I feel like this kind of,

01:37:44 ◼   ► this is the sort of end of the road,

01:37:46 ◼   ► and not really the end,

01:37:46 ◼   ► because like it's been,

01:37:47 ◼   ► the writing's been on the wall for ages, right?

01:37:49 ◼   ► But Apple slowly but surely exiting the server space

01:37:55 ◼   ► saying that's not what Macs are for.

01:37:57 ◼   ► You don't run a Mac to be a server

01:38:00 ◼   ► for your fleet of other computers, right?

01:38:03 ◼   ► Apple wanted to be in that business

01:38:05 ◼   ► back when the PC was kind of the center of gravity

01:38:07 ◼   ► of the market and then it tried to play there.

01:38:10 ◼   ► Apple made servers, the X server,

01:38:11 ◼   ► recommended Mac server, they made a server OS,

01:38:14 ◼   ► they said you can use a Mac to be a server

01:38:17 ◼   ► and some people were into that but not enough people

01:38:20 ◼   ► and just eventually Apple said, you know what, Microsoft,

01:38:23 ◼   ► because that's what we're talking about here,

01:38:25 ◼   ► you can have this market.

01:38:27 ◼   ► And so for a brief moment, Apple was like,

01:38:29 ◼   ► we're gonna fight against Exchange and Active Directory,

01:38:31 ◼   ► and we're gonna have our own products,

01:38:33 ◼   ► and some of them are gonna be open source,

01:38:34 ◼   ► and we're gonna be a great server for Macs,

01:38:36 ◼   ► well, we can serve other things too,

01:38:37 ◼   ► and you can buy a really nice looking server

01:38:39 ◼   ► and rack mount it, and pay way more than you'd pay

01:38:41 ◼   ► for an Intel, Unix, or Windows based server,

01:38:44 ◼   ► but it looks really nice,

01:38:46 ◼   ► and we'll run our server OS on it,

01:38:49 ◼   ► and it just never really got going

01:38:52 ◼   ► for lots of very good reasons that never really got traction.

01:38:56 ◼   ► And so I don't-- this is not a surprise

01:38:58 ◼   ► that Apple is just finally completely totally exiting

01:39:01 ◼   ► and saying, look, we're not even pretending

01:39:03 ◼   ► we're doing anything remotely in this space.

01:39:06 ◼   ► We'll just disband all those teams.

01:39:07 ◼   ► Any part of this that we thought was useful,

01:39:09 ◼   ► we shoved into Mac OS proper, and it is there,

01:39:12 ◼   ► and it is useful, and you can have it.

01:39:13 ◼   ► But we're not pretending Macs are servers.

01:39:16 ◼   ► And kind of like the iPod Touch, like, OK, this all makes sense.

01:39:20 ◼   ► You write it down on paper, like, I can see,

01:39:22 ◼   ► This is not a market Apple wants to be in.

01:39:24 ◼   ► But in kind of the same way as Apple getting out

01:39:26 ◼   ► of the wifi market, well, maybe not quite the same way,

01:39:28 ◼   ► but like I find it a little bit sad

01:39:30 ◼   ► because it is essentially, you know,

01:39:33 ◼   ► reseeding the market to Microsoft.

01:39:36 ◼   ► Not that I have anything particularly against Microsoft,

01:39:38 ◼   ► but Microsoft's complete dominance in the world

01:39:41 ◼   ► of corporate IT of like, hey, you have a company

01:39:45 ◼   ► and people in your company have computers

01:39:46 ◼   ► and you need to have like a directory service

01:39:49 ◼   ► so people can look up other people's email addresses

01:39:50 ◼   ► and you need to have a mail server and so on and so forth,

01:39:53 ◼   ► having Microsoft continue to just completely dominate

01:39:56 ◼   ► that field does not make me particularly happy.

01:39:59 ◼   ► And it's not just because everyone ends up getting Slack

01:40:02 ◼   ► and liking it and then Slack gets replaced

01:40:03 ◼   ► with Teams that everyone hates, but that is part of it.

01:40:06 ◼   ► That's an example of-- - That's so true.

01:40:07 ◼   ► That is so true in so many places right now.

01:40:09 ◼   ► - Even before Slack and Teams.

01:40:11 ◼   ► It's like example of just like, look,

01:40:13 ◼   ► you're gonna have to pay Microsoft anyway

01:40:15 ◼   ► 'cause every company pays Microsoft

01:40:17 ◼   ► 'cause there's something you need from Microsoft.

01:40:18 ◼   ► And why do you need something?

01:40:19 ◼   ► you want your people to have corporate email, right?

01:40:21 ◼   ► And you want to do, like, anything you think you want to do,

01:40:24 ◼   ► Microsoft is the default.

01:40:25 ◼   ► And if you decide, well, I don't want to pay Microsoft

01:40:27 ◼   ► for everything, not that it's impossible

01:40:31 ◼   ► to find alternatives, like Google will sell you

01:40:32 ◼   ► all that stuff too, right?

01:40:33 ◼   ► But Microsoft is still dominant in this business.

01:40:36 ◼   ► Microsoft is the best at it,

01:40:37 ◼   ► they've been doing it the longest.

01:40:40 ◼   ► And when I say the best at it, they're the best

01:40:42 ◼   ► at selling companies things that companies want to buy

01:40:45 ◼   ► or think they want to buy.

01:40:47 ◼   ► But in my experience using these products,

01:40:49 ◼   ► Google's not great at it either,

01:40:51 ◼   ► but like Slack is the great example.

01:40:53 ◼   ► How about someone who's not Microsoft or Google?

01:40:55 ◼   ► Can they make a product that can help enterprises

01:40:57 ◼   ► do the things that enterprises wanna do?

01:41:00 ◼   ► And that users don't actively hate?

01:41:02 ◼   ► Yeah, they could.

01:41:03 ◼   ► And for a brief moment, there was a product

01:41:04 ◼   ► that people didn't, you know, same thing with Dropbox.

01:41:06 ◼   ► For a brief moment, there was a product

01:41:08 ◼   ► that users didn't actively hate

01:41:09 ◼   ► that businesses seemed to like.

01:41:10 ◼   ► But Dropbox was replaced by either Box or OneDrive,

01:41:15 ◼   ► and the Google stuff is replaced by Microsoft

01:41:17 ◼   ► and it's just, I know I'm kind of out of the corporate

01:41:21 ◼   ► rat race and this is really not relevant

01:41:22 ◼   ► to my life anymore, but I look at this and I say,

01:41:25 ◼   ► there was a moment that people never really believed

01:41:28 ◼   ► was real, but it really was when Apple was like,

01:41:31 ◼   ► you know what, we're gonna get right in there

01:41:33 ◼   ► and we're gonna fight for this market

01:41:35 ◼   ► and we're gonna fight for this market with Apple-y products,

01:41:37 ◼   ► unashamed Apple-y products, and they fought and they lost

01:41:41 ◼   ► and they lost big and then they ran away.

01:41:44 ◼   ► And I feel like it's not good for no one to be fighting for this.

01:41:48 ◼   ► You can say, "Well, Google's fighting Microsoft," but on the other hand, Microsoft's fighting

01:41:52 ◼   ► Google.

01:41:53 ◼   ► I feel like just the number of competitors is too low and none of them seem to have—I

01:41:59 ◼   ► don't know.

01:42:01 ◼   ► There's a reason I'm a Mac user and not a Windows user and that appeals to my tastes.

01:42:06 ◼   ► And I guess there's a reason that businesses choose Windows for their servers, even as

01:42:10 ◼   ► businesses increasingly choose Macs for their end user things.

01:42:17 ◼   ► I feel like I don't want to live in a world where the only two choices are Microsoft and

01:42:21 ◼   ► Google and that Microsoft is dominant.

01:42:23 ◼   ► I think that is emblematic of the entire enterprise software problem where the people who choose

01:42:27 ◼   ► what to buy are not the people who use the software.

01:42:32 ◼   ► Users continue to be somewhat put upon by the corporate solutions they're forced to

01:42:37 ◼   ► to deal with and every other competitor that tries

01:42:39 ◼   ► to fight for that market ends up getting squished

01:42:42 ◼   ► and running away.

01:42:43 ◼   ► - I'm sorry, Jon.

01:42:45 ◼   ► All right, let's do some Ask ATP,

01:42:46 ◼   ► and Robert Boyle writes,

01:42:47 ◼   ► in your discussions of the MacStudio versus MacPro,

01:42:49 ◼   ► you focus on modularity differences.

01:42:51 ◼   ► In the past, you've said that ECC RAM was a big issue

01:42:54 ◼   ► for you, which the M1 doesn't have.

01:42:57 ◼   ► Do you think Apple will offer ECC RAM

01:42:59 ◼   ► in the Apple Silicon MacPro?

01:43:01 ◼   ► - So the point of ECC RAM is, you know,

01:43:03 ◼   ► if there are errors, they'll be detected,

01:43:05 ◼   ► error correcting code, right?

01:43:06 ◼   ► So we can figure out if there's some kind of RAM error.

01:43:09 ◼   ► And the more RAM you get, the more likely

01:43:11 ◼   ► you are to encounter a RAM error, just because it's

01:43:13 ◼   ► a lot of averages.

01:43:13 ◼   ► You just keep adding more and more bits.

01:43:15 ◼   ► And if the rate of bit error is the same as you add more

01:43:18 ◼   ► of them, the chances of one of those bits being wrong goes up.

01:43:20 ◼   ► And big computers, like big Pro Max tend to have a lot of RAM.

01:43:24 ◼   ► So it'd be a good idea to have ECC RAM.

01:43:26 ◼   ► But this whole thing of having ECC RAM

01:43:28 ◼   ► is kind of a nomenclature in technology from--

01:43:33 ◼   ► not the distant past, but the reasonable past,

01:43:35 ◼   ► where that was the way we would do it.

01:43:36 ◼   ► you know, SIMs or DIMMs.

01:43:38 ◼   ► There would be these chips that had RAM chips on them.

01:43:40 ◼   ► You'd shove them into a slot,

01:43:42 ◼   ► and there was a variety of that that had --

01:43:44 ◼   ► ECC RAM that had error-correcting codes.

01:43:46 ◼   ► There would be extra circuitry to detect

01:43:47 ◼   ► when an error was encountered

01:43:50 ◼   ► and either correct the error if it could

01:43:51 ◼   ► or fail if the error was too bad or whatever.

01:43:54 ◼   ► And that was important for servers

01:43:56 ◼   ► because they had a lot of RAM, and there were a lot of them,

01:43:58 ◼   ► and if they had an error, you'd rather have them fail

01:44:00 ◼   ► or, you know, fix a one-bit error if they could

01:44:02 ◼   ► or fail if they needed to rather than just to continue

01:44:04 ◼   ► as if everything's fine with an incorrect error.

01:44:06 ◼   ► So if I could say it's a banking application or something

01:44:08 ◼   ► like that, where you don't want a bit error causing

01:44:11 ◼   ► the wrong amount of money to go somewhere,

01:44:13 ◼   ► you don't want that to silently just happen, right?

01:44:15 ◼   ► So that's what you're trying to do is make a more reliable

01:44:19 ◼   ► version of RAM when you can detect when errors happen

01:44:22 ◼   ► and correct them if possible.

01:44:23 ◼   ► Lots of the more modern RAM technologies,

01:44:26 ◼   ► if you look at what they're doing under the covers,

01:44:28 ◼   ► have some internal system for detecting and handling

01:44:32 ◼   ► and even sometimes correcting RAM,

01:44:34 ◼   ► but we don't call those quote unquote ECC RAM

01:44:36 ◼   ► 'cause it is not exactly like the RAM of the old days

01:44:39 ◼   ► with ECC technology in them.

01:44:41 ◼   ► So all that said, I don't actually know

01:44:45 ◼   ► if any of the RAM Apple uses in any of its M1 type things

01:44:49 ◼   ► have any kind of error correcting circuitry

01:44:52 ◼   ► or technology whatsoever.

01:44:55 ◼   ► I know they're not advertised or called ECC RAM

01:44:58 ◼   ► and they're not the same as the ECC RAM

01:45:00 ◼   ► that was in like a 2008 Mac Pro for sure,

01:45:03 ◼   ► But I don't actually know if the underlying whatever it is,

01:45:06 ◼   ► you know, LPDDR for RAM itself incorporates

01:45:11 ◼   ► some of the sort of circuitry techniques and technologies

01:45:14 ◼   ► that ECC rammed it.

01:45:15 ◼   ► So I think for the ProMac, I don't

01:45:19 ◼   ► think Apple is going to go to any particularly heroic

01:45:21 ◼   ► measures, but it could be that whatever RAM Apple ends up

01:45:24 ◼   ► using, perhaps if not in the first ARM-based ProMac,

01:45:27 ◼   ► or maybe the second or third one,

01:45:29 ◼   ► will incorporate some kind of error-correcting technology,

01:45:34 ◼   ► just because the underlying industry-standard RAM

01:45:38 ◼   ► technology they choose--

01:45:39 ◼   ► like, say, in the distance future,

01:45:41 ◼   ► like the high-bandwidth venture, HBM4 or whatever,

01:45:44 ◼   ► making some future thing--

01:45:45 ◼   ► that itself could incorporate some error-correcting thing.

01:45:48 ◼   ► And if so, Apple will use it in the appropriate context.

01:45:51 ◼   ► But I don't think Apple is going to go out of its way

01:45:53 ◼   ► to do something entirely exotic and different

01:45:58 ◼   ► if there isn't already an industry standard RAM technology

01:46:01 ◼   ► that offers error correcting stuff for the Mac Pro.

01:46:06 ◼   ► - John Sulick writes, "For several years,

01:46:07 ◼   ► "I've used both PC and Mac platforms.

01:46:10 ◼   ► "One of the questions I've always wondered

01:46:11 ◼   ► "is about cleaning software.

01:46:13 ◼   ► "In the world of PCs, you often find yourself

01:46:15 ◼   ► "needing to have something that will go through

01:46:17 ◼   ► "and remove various applications

01:46:18 ◼   ► "and file system cruft periodically.

01:46:20 ◼   ► "I was just about to buy some software

01:46:21 ◼   ► "for my new M1 Mac to handle this very thing,

01:46:23 ◼   ► "and I thought I would ask the experts.

01:46:24 ◼   ► "You probably know what to look for and remove manually,

01:46:27 ◼   ► But for those of us who are not as familiar

01:46:29 ◼   ► in the world of the Mac,

01:46:30 ◼   ► are these types of programs snake oil

01:46:32 ◼   ► or would they be worthwhile?

01:46:33 ◼   ► I can only speak for myself

01:46:35 ◼   ► and I have run things like this in the past.

01:46:37 ◼   ► It's been so long I don't even remember what I ran

01:46:40 ◼   ► and this is not something that I personally worry about

01:46:42 ◼   ► but I have a feeling one or both of you guys

01:46:44 ◼   ► will have some thoughts.

01:46:46 ◼   ► - I mean this is the kind of thing that you have

01:46:47 ◼   ► to be careful about what you install

01:46:50 ◼   ► and what their claims are and what you can do yourself.

01:46:55 ◼   ► can do yourself. Things like uninstalling apps and cleaning out a bunch of files, that

01:47:02 ◼   ► actually is a problem on Mac OS. One of the great things about iOS is that when you delete

01:47:06 ◼   ► an app on iOS, with a couple of weird, odd exceptions that mostly clear after a reboot,

01:47:11 ◼   ► it's gone. When you delete an app on iOS, that's it. For some reason, Apple has never

01:47:18 ◼   ► brought that experience to Mac OS. You can delete the app on Mac OS, but that doesn't

01:47:23 ◼   ► mean that it's gone.

01:47:25 ◼   ► It just means that the executable, the binary is gone,

01:47:28 ◼   ► but it could have left a whole bunch of crap

01:47:30 ◼   ► all over your library or whatever,

01:47:32 ◼   ► and that could be there forever, basically.

01:47:36 ◼   ► That being said, having a bunch of crap in your library

01:47:38 ◼   ► doesn't seem to really be a problem,

01:47:40 ◼   ► with the exception of disk space that it takes up.

01:47:42 ◼   ► But it doesn't slow your computer down

01:47:45 ◼   ► in a meaningful way to have a bunch of crap there.

01:47:47 ◼   ► But there are apps that will offer various tidiness

01:47:52 ◼   ► or cleaning type verbiage to describe,

01:47:55 ◼   ► like deleting files that you probably don't need anymore,

01:47:57 ◼   ► possibly from apps that are installed anymore or whatever.

01:48:00 ◼   ► That's a perfectly fine thing.

01:48:01 ◼   ► Just if you are going to go down that route,

01:48:04 ◼   ► make sure that you trust the developer

01:48:06 ◼   ► because you have to give them full disk access

01:48:08 ◼   ► to be able to do this and you're having them

01:48:11 ◼   ► like go find stuff to delete off your computer.

01:48:15 ◼   ► So this is not something to be taken lightly

01:48:18 ◼   ► and most people find that kind of trade off

01:48:21 ◼   ► not to be worth it.

01:48:22 ◼   ► that if you're gonna, if you wanna go delete stuff

01:48:25 ◼   ► out of your library folder or try to delete old cruft,

01:48:29 ◼   ► you can generally just do that yourself

01:48:31 ◼   ► if you are at all technically inclined.

01:48:33 ◼   ► You can find the handful of places in the file system

01:48:35 ◼   ► that these files tend to be,

01:48:37 ◼   ► and you can delete them yourself, and it's usually fine.

01:48:40 ◼   ► So these apps, they do provide a service

01:48:44 ◼   ► that is a real useful utility,

01:48:47 ◼   ► but it comes with significant risks,

01:48:50 ◼   ► and there is a lot of snake oil.

01:48:52 ◼   ► in that business where certain less scrupulous versions

01:48:56 ◼   ► of these apps, I mean some of them are just malware,

01:48:58 ◼   ► some of them will make claims that are technically unsound

01:49:03 ◼   ► or will try to always be running so that way

01:49:08 ◼   ► they can monitor everything and that has some

01:49:10 ◼   ► security implications and again, technical scariness.

01:49:14 ◼   ► So it is a category where it is useful to have apps

01:49:19 ◼   ► in this category for certain people but I think

01:49:21 ◼   ► It's probably not most people.

01:49:23 ◼   ► - This is one of those questions we get every few years

01:49:25 ◼   ► and I intentionally put in the program every few years.

01:49:28 ◼   ► Sorry if you're hearing the same question addressed again,

01:49:30 ◼   ► but I think it's important because,

01:49:32 ◼   ► especially people who are new to the Mac,

01:49:34 ◼   ► they get a Mac and they're like,

01:49:35 ◼   ► what things do I need for this?

01:49:36 ◼   ► And you will see heavily advertised things that like,

01:49:40 ◼   ► you need this to help maintain your Mac, right?

01:49:42 ◼   ► That it's just, you know,

01:49:43 ◼   ► like the same way you have to get an oil change in your car,

01:49:45 ◼   ► you need an app like this.

01:49:46 ◼   ► And so people don't even ask whether they need it.

01:49:48 ◼   ► What they ask is,

01:49:49 ◼   ► which one of these things should I get?

01:49:51 ◼   ► The other category is virus programs,

01:49:52 ◼   ► so we're not talking about that right now.

01:49:54 ◼   ► Which one of these Mac cleaning programs should I get?

01:49:57 ◼   ► 'Cause it seems obvious that I need a Mac cleaning program.

01:50:00 ◼   ► And the basic answer is, what I always say is,

01:50:03 ◼   ► you don't need a Mac cleaning program.

01:50:05 ◼   ► Mac OS is not designed to need a Mac cleaning program.

01:50:08 ◼   ► If you literally never use any kind of Mac cleaning program,

01:50:11 ◼   ► you use your Mac, you'll be fine, right?

01:50:14 ◼   ► Anything that you could, the bad that could happen,

01:50:18 ◼   ► and you know that a Mac cleaning program could save you from,

01:50:21 ◼   ► it can't actually save you.

01:50:23 ◼   ► Like that type of badness of something getting wedged

01:50:25 ◼   ► in there and running weirdly or spinning out of control,

01:50:29 ◼   ► that can happen whether or not you run a cleaning program.

01:50:31 ◼   ► Now the cleaning programs, they're like, okay, well,

01:50:34 ◼   ► I don't like say, like Marco said,

01:50:35 ◼   ► I can just go delete stuff,

01:50:36 ◼   ► but I don't trust myself to do that.

01:50:37 ◼   ► I think that's a good instinct.

01:50:38 ◼   ► If you don't know what you're, should be deleting,

01:50:41 ◼   ► don't just go and look and say,

01:50:42 ◼   ► I don't think I need this and delete it.

01:50:44 ◼   ► Cause you will screw things up, right?

01:50:46 ◼   ► especially if you give yourself a bit of information

01:50:48 ◼   ► to delete stuff, right?

01:50:50 ◼   ► But by the same token, using one of these cleaning apps

01:50:53 ◼   ► does actually require some knowledge of what's what, right?

01:50:58 ◼   ► Because you can mess yourself up

01:50:59 ◼   ► with one of these cleaning apps,

01:51:00 ◼   ► not through any faults of the app,

01:51:01 ◼   ► but they very often offer features

01:51:03 ◼   ► that let you do things that you probably don't wanna do,

01:51:06 ◼   ► like nuking your launch services database.

01:51:08 ◼   ► There are situations where you might wanna do that,

01:51:10 ◼   ► and having a trusted third-party app do it for you is good,

01:51:12 ◼   ► but you don't wanna do that routinely.

01:51:14 ◼   ► It's going to mess things up,

01:51:15 ◼   ► 'cause now it's gotta re-index all of your apps

01:51:17 ◼   ► and do a bunch of stuff,

01:51:18 ◼   ► that's gonna make your computer slower for no reason.

01:51:20 ◼   ► And it's another opportunity for things to get screwed up.

01:51:22 ◼   ► If your Launch Services database was fine,

01:51:24 ◼   ► you didn't need to mess up.

01:51:25 ◼   ► And if you don't know what the Launch Services database is,

01:51:27 ◼   ► don't buy an app that lets you nuke

01:51:29 ◼   ► your Launch Services database and then click the button

01:51:30 ◼   ► 'cause you think it's somehow making your Mac better

01:51:32 ◼   ► or like a cleanliness thing.

01:51:34 ◼   ► Mac OS is not designed to need any of these apps.

01:51:37 ◼   ► To the extent that it does, to Marco's point,

01:51:39 ◼   ► like oh, what if an app installs a bunch of cruft

01:51:41 ◼   ► and it's hanging around and it actually is harmful,

01:51:44 ◼   ► That is a problem for Apple to fix, not you.

01:51:46 ◼   ► In general, there's not much apps can do these days,

01:51:50 ◼   ► especially good modern apps, to sort of screw up

01:51:52 ◼   ► your Mac long term, other than taking up

01:51:54 ◼   ► a minuscule negligible amount of disk space,

01:51:56 ◼   ► but you really shouldn't worry about that these days.

01:51:59 ◼   ► And the other one is, and this is gonna get more technical,

01:52:01 ◼   ► you probably need to know, but like,

01:52:02 ◼   ► if launch services stuff is left in there,

01:52:05 ◼   ► that can have something that is actually running

01:52:09 ◼   ► or trying to run and generally sort of being

01:52:13 ◼   ► the background, annoying that you don't need anymore because you deleted the app, but the

01:52:17 ◼   ► launch services thing is still there.

01:52:19 ◼   ► Very often the launch services thing will be there and it will be trying to be run in

01:52:21 ◼   ► a binary that doesn't exist anymore because it was inside the app bundle.

01:52:25 ◼   ► Apple's modern practices on the Mac are moving very heavily towards the iOS model, where

01:52:30 ◼   ► everything is part of the app bundle, including all the extensions and everything.

01:52:34 ◼   ► Rather than being in your library folder, they will actually be in the app bundle, so

01:52:37 ◼   ► when you throw out the app, it actually throws out all the extensions with it, like Finder

01:52:40 ◼   ► extensions or whatever.

01:52:42 ◼   ► But because the Mac is an older platform, that's not true of all Mac apps.

01:52:45 ◼   ► So it is still possible for Mac apps to spray files all over your disk.

01:52:49 ◼   ► Which is why, by the way, one of the sort of instincts that you can lean on even as

01:52:53 ◼   ► a new Mac user is, if I installed the app by dragging an icon into the application folder,

01:52:59 ◼   ► I can be fairly confident, if it didn't prompt me for some future install process, that dragging

01:53:04 ◼   ► the app out of the application folder into the trash got rid of anything that I really

01:53:08 ◼   ► need to care about.

01:53:09 ◼   ► Yes, you'll still have preferences and other stuff or whatever.

01:53:11 ◼   ► But if on the other hand you used an installer or a .pkg thing to install the app, that may

01:53:16 ◼   ► have sprayed files all over your disk.

01:53:18 ◼   ► You don't actually know where it's putting things.

01:53:19 ◼   ► You can find out if you're technically savvy.

01:53:20 ◼   ► You can use an app like Pacifist to look at what the .pkg is doing and you can look at

01:53:25 ◼   ► what an installer is doing by running FSU's.

01:53:28 ◼   ► There's all sorts of techie things you can do.

01:53:30 ◼   ► But FSU's, I guess all of them.

01:53:35 ◼   ► Like, if you, you know, modern well-behaved Mac apps

01:53:40 ◼   ► will not even leave any cruft around

01:53:44 ◼   ► that you need to care about.

01:53:46 ◼   ► And in general, macOS does not require you

01:53:49 ◼   ► to have any of these kinds of applications.

01:53:51 ◼   ► So I would say my default is,

01:53:52 ◼   ► you don't need one of these, don't try to buy one.

01:53:54 ◼   ► If you find yourself in a weird situation

01:53:56 ◼   ► and it seems like, oh, I have a problem

01:53:58 ◼   ► and I see lots of people suggesting

01:54:00 ◼   ► one of these apps might be the solution,

01:54:02 ◼   ► again, be careful.

01:54:03 ◼   ► But if you have people that you trust,

01:54:05 ◼   ► At that point, maybe considering finding one of the reputable ones of these applications,

01:54:10 ◼   ► someone you trust tells you this one is reputable.

01:54:12 ◼   ► I know this thing is asking, "Do you have a reputable one?"

01:54:14 ◼   ► I honestly don't because I don't use these type of applications.

01:54:16 ◼   ► But they're out there.

01:54:17 ◼   ► There are reputable ones.

01:54:18 ◼   ► But only at that point where you are troubleshooting an existing problem and troubleshooting that

01:54:23 ◼   ► has led you through a series of things that you trust to potentially look at one of these

01:54:27 ◼   ► apps, only then look at it.

01:54:29 ◼   ► But you do not need one of these as a routine part of owning a Mac.

01:54:33 ◼   ► Let it go.

01:54:35 ◼   ► [ Laughs ]

01:54:37 ◼   ► -A. Bill DeMose writes,

01:54:39 ◼   ► "I'm going to build a back-end application

01:54:41 ◼   ► that does a lot of server-side crawling

01:54:43 ◼   ► and has a handful of questions.

01:54:45 ◼   ► To what degree does your choice of programming language

01:54:47 ◼   ► impact server costs?

01:54:48 ◼   ► Would a statically typed compiled language

01:54:50 ◼   ► with a robust concurrency model, like Golang,

01:54:53 ◼   ► be more efficient at crawling RSS speeds

01:54:55 ◼   ► than, say, PHP and significantly reduce server costs?

01:54:58 ◼   ► If the language choice does matter,

01:55:00 ◼   ► what about Swift and Go?

01:55:02 ◼   ► "Language benchmarks say that Go is faster in many respects,

01:55:05 ◼   ► "and Golang has a better concurrency model than Swift.

01:55:09 ◼   ► "I'm comfortable with Swift,

01:55:10 ◼   ► "but I've never written a line of Golang code in my life.

01:55:12 ◼   ► "And finally, would the savings and server costs

01:55:14 ◼   ► "be worth learning a new language?"

01:55:16 ◼   ► I think, Marco, you're probably most appropriate

01:55:18 ◼   ► to answer this question,

01:55:21 ◼   ► partially because I don't want to hear John go on

01:55:22 ◼   ► and on about Perl for an hour.

01:55:24 ◼   ► So tell me, what do you think, Marco?

01:55:27 ◼   ► - In my experience, I mean,

01:55:29 ◼   ► this is very application dependent.

01:55:31 ◼   ► So massive disclaimer here, it depends on what you're doing.

01:55:34 ◼   ► Now, I happen to have a lot of experience

01:55:36 ◼   ► with this particular thing of crawling a bunch of server--

01:55:39 ◼   ► of RSS feeds, basically.

01:55:40 ◼   ► That I do.

01:55:42 ◼   ► Overcast crawls probably hundreds of feeds per second.

01:55:48 ◼   ► So this is off the top of my head,

01:55:49 ◼   ► but it's probably in that ballpark.

01:55:52 ◼   ► And so this is an area that I do.

01:55:54 ◼   ► The crawlers themselves are written in Go.

01:55:58 ◼   ► And the role here, to be clear, the Go

01:56:01 ◼   ► is not parsing any of the RSS or figuring out

01:56:04 ◼   ► what to do with the contents of the feeds.

01:56:06 ◼   ► All it's doing is fetching the feeds on a regular interval,

01:56:10 ◼   ► determining whether they have changed since the last time

01:56:13 ◼   ► they've been processed.

01:56:14 ◼   ► And if they have changed, stuff them into a queue

01:56:17 ◼   ► to be processed by PHP so that I wouldn't

01:56:19 ◼   ► have to deal with Go for all the string handling

01:56:21 ◼   ► code of doing all that.

01:56:23 ◼   ► Because I had already written it in PHP.

01:56:25 ◼   ► And then there's a whole bunch of PHP queue consumers

01:56:28 ◼   ► that run on various application servers that deal with that.

01:56:31 ◼   ► Now, as for a cost breakdown,

01:56:34 ◼   ► the Go servers that are crawling all the feeds,

01:56:39 ◼   ► that costs me in the order of a few hundred dollars a month

01:56:42 ◼   ► on our frequent sponsor Linode.

01:56:44 ◼   ► I have six crawlers that I pay, I think, 60 a month each,

01:56:49 ◼   ► so they're like 360 total.

01:56:51 ◼   ► Now, for my databases, I pay like $3,000 a month.

01:56:57 ◼   ► So we're talking like 10 times as much cost for databases

01:57:01 ◼   ► as for that.

01:57:03 ◼   ► And there are a few other servers that help out,

01:57:06 ◼   ► like the actual web/application servers that

01:57:08 ◼   ► are running all the PHP.

01:57:10 ◼   ► That's an untrivial cost there, but databases

01:57:13 ◼   ► are the big part of it, because databases

01:57:15 ◼   ► need lots of everything.

01:57:17 ◼   ► They need lots of CPU power, lots of RAM,

01:57:20 ◼   ► and when you're crawling this many feeds,

01:57:22 ◼   ► lots of storage space.

01:57:24 ◼   ► So it depends, again, depends on what you're going

01:57:28 ◼   ► to be doing with your app.

01:57:30 ◼   ► But in general, in my experience so far,

01:57:32 ◼   ► every single web thing I've worked on so far

01:57:35 ◼   ► that has had multiple servers and therefore significant costs,

01:57:40 ◼   ► databases are always the biggest cost.

01:57:43 ◼   ► Because when you're doing web servers/app servers,

01:57:48 ◼   ► you can usually do the shared CPU instances at your host,

01:57:53 ◼   ► which are usually cheaper.

01:57:54 ◼   ► You can usually do almost no disk space,

01:57:57 ◼   ► just enough to hold the app and whatever temp stuff

01:58:00 ◼   ► you might need, but for the most part you have no disk space

01:58:02 ◼   ► so that saves on the massive SSD cost there.

01:58:05 ◼   ► And you're mainly dealing with like CPU and some RAM.

01:58:09 ◼   ► You don't even need a lot of RAM usually

01:58:10 ◼   ► on most application servers.

01:58:12 ◼   ► And CPU, especially the shared CPU plans,

01:58:15 ◼   ► that's usually the cheapest resource to get

01:58:17 ◼   ► at most modern hosts compared to the other ones.

01:58:19 ◼   ► So you do save in the CPU time

01:58:24 ◼   ► by using a very efficient language like Go,

01:58:27 ◼   ► but you're saving the cheapest, most available,

01:58:31 ◼   ► and most easily scaled resource.

01:58:33 ◼   ► Whereas databases are expensive and hard to scale,

01:58:38 ◼   ► and usually the bottleneck of pretty much everything

01:58:41 ◼   ► you're gonna be doing.

01:58:42 ◼   ► So yes, the language choice does matter,

01:58:46 ◼   ► but not as much as you think for most applications.

01:58:50 ◼   ► - The only thing I'll add is that,

01:58:53 ◼   ► obviously, depending on your application,

01:58:55 ◼   ► like, you may not, like, it may be premature

01:58:57 ◼   ► to worry about this, 'cause try getting some customers first

01:59:00 ◼   ► where you actually have to worry about scale.

01:59:02 ◼   ► But it is worth thinking about upfront,

01:59:04 ◼   ► because if you think there's a reasonable chance

01:59:05 ◼   ► you are going to have scale,

01:59:06 ◼   ► the next thing you need to ask is,

01:59:08 ◼   ► yeah, but is this, like, am I going to be limited,

01:59:12 ◼   ► is the language going to be limiting me in some way, right?

01:59:14 ◼   ► So one way it could limit you is cost.

01:59:15 ◼   ► like, oh, it turns out that if we scale up

01:59:17 ◼   ► to 100 million users, this will cost me so much money.

01:59:20 ◼   ► So it is limiting me because it costs a lot of money.

01:59:21 ◼   ► I've got to rewrite it in a cheaper language.

01:59:23 ◼   ► But the other way it can limit you

01:59:25 ◼   ► is in terms of total performance throughput, right?

01:59:28 ◼   ► That you just can't get the performance you want.

01:59:30 ◼   ► You can't scale this thing up without doing

01:59:32 ◼   ► something ridiculous.

01:59:33 ◼   ► Say you write this application and it becomes gargantuan

01:59:35 ◼   ► and it's written in PHP or Python or something that

01:59:39 ◼   ► is not particularly stingy with memory,

01:59:43 ◼   ► and you just made this monster.

01:59:45 ◼   ► and now you need to run on something

01:59:47 ◼   ► with like huge amounts of RAM

01:59:49 ◼   ► just to run one instance of your thing.

01:59:51 ◼   ► Oh, and by the way,

01:59:52 ◼   ► now you need thousands of those instances

01:59:54 ◼   ► just to get the performance you want.

01:59:55 ◼   ► Like on an average day of like,

01:59:57 ◼   ► I just can't handle the peak load at noon

01:59:59 ◼   ► when most people are using my very popular application.

02:00:02 ◼   ► To do that, like I have to, you know,

02:00:03 ◼   ► I have to basically scale vertically

02:00:05 ◼   ► because it's easy to scale out horizontally,

02:00:07 ◼   ► but if it turns out that just to sort of run one instance

02:00:09 ◼   ► of your thing on one server,

02:00:11 ◼   ► you need like a monster instance

02:00:13 ◼   ► that with a huge amount of RAM

02:00:14 ◼   ► a huge amount of CPU because of your language choice, that's not a good place to find yourself.

02:00:18 ◼   ► You've accidentally written a monolith in an inefficient language and you need huge

02:00:24 ◼   ► amounts of them and it becomes sort of untenable that maybe you can't even get that many or

02:00:30 ◼   ► you start getting beat up on the overhead of just having these things, any sort of side-band

02:00:34 ◼   ► communication with each other.

02:00:36 ◼   ► So an early choice up front to know is this the part of the thing that is going to be

02:00:40 ◼   ► a performance bottleneck or is that it's going to like scale up like how much RAM is this

02:00:44 ◼   ► going to use if we get a you know a million times more customers how much CPUs is going

02:00:48 ◼   ► to be used if we get a million times more customers that you can do that back in the

02:00:50 ◼   ► envelope math to make some choices early on.

02:00:54 ◼   ► But very often like in the case of Marcos thing, you're not it's not like a real time

02:00:58 ◼   ► interactive application.

02:01:00 ◼   ► And so in that case, as long as you can get the crawling done, for example, like you can

02:01:04 ◼   ► get 24 hours with a crawling done in 24 hours.

02:01:08 ◼   ► You can just use wimpier, slower, smaller instances and just take the full 24 hours.

02:01:12 ◼   ► Yes, if you wrote it in Go, you'd use half the instances for half the time, but the bottom

02:01:16 ◼   ► line is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

02:01:18 ◼   ► You're just going to start over the other end when you're done anyway.

02:01:20 ◼   ► As long as the throughput is sufficient for you to do whatever batch job you're doing,

02:01:25 ◼   ► as long as you can get the job done in your time window, the inefficiency of using a 10

02:01:31 ◼   ► times slower language doesn't really matter.

02:01:34 ◼   ► Because to Marco's point, that's not your big expense anyway.

02:01:38 ◼   ► And if it was fast for you to write and it's the language you're familiar with, even if

02:01:43 ◼   ► it's ten times less efficient, as long as it gets the job done, and as long as you don't

02:01:47 ◼   ► think like, "Are there going to be a trillion podcasts in ten years?"

02:01:54 ◼   ► Probably not.

02:01:55 ◼   ► The number of podcasts is somewhat bounded, right?

02:01:58 ◼   ► You can kind of do the back envelope of math and say, "The job of crawling podcasts, how

02:02:02 ◼   ► How often do I think they should be crawled

02:02:04 ◼   ► for a good experience, and how many podcasts

02:02:06 ◼   ► are there going to be essentially ever,

02:02:08 ◼   ► like bounded, order of magnitude?

02:02:10 ◼   ► You can say, all right, yeah, if I wrote it in Go,

02:02:13 ◼   ► I would save a little bit of money each month,

02:02:16 ◼   ► but if I write it in PHP, it's not the end of the world,

02:02:20 ◼   ► it will get the job done.

02:02:21 ◼   ► So it's very difficult to give blanket advice,

02:02:24 ◼   ► 'cause we don't know what you're doing.

02:02:25 ◼   ► Are you doing a podcast crawl that needs to crawl feeds

02:02:27 ◼   ► once every 24 hours, once every hour?

02:02:29 ◼   ► Or are you writing something that needs to be up to date

02:02:30 ◼   ► from the moment are you writing an interactive application

02:02:32 ◼   ► that users are gonna be using,

02:02:34 ◼   ► and at peak times there's gonna be, you know,

02:02:36 ◼   ► one million per second or something.

02:02:38 ◼   ► Very different choices based on those things.

02:02:40 ◼   ► So unfortunately for servers I thought

02:02:42 ◼   ► there's no one answer other than saying

02:02:44 ◼   ► you could probably find a way to do it with AWS.

02:02:47 ◼   ► - I would like to add one quick thing in that,

02:02:50 ◼   ► in my experience, learning another language,

02:02:53 ◼   ► even if you don't really do much with it,

02:02:55 ◼   ► is almost always a worthwhile expenditure of time.

02:02:58 ◼   ► And when I first dabbled with Python 10, 15 years ago,

02:03:03 ◼   ► I didn't think in a million years I'd be writing code

02:03:05 ◼   ► to figure out if my garage door was open or not.

02:03:08 ◼   ► And yes, that wasn't particularly important,

02:03:10 ◼   ► but it was still nice to have a little exposure to Python

02:03:12 ◼   ► years and years and years and years and years in the past

02:03:14 ◼   ► to get me ahead on that.

02:03:15 ◼   ► So I don't think it's necessarily bad

02:03:18 ◼   ► to explore another language

02:03:19 ◼   ► or even learn to some degree another language.

02:03:21 ◼   ► And Marco, I don't see you writing a lot of Go

02:03:24 ◼   ► willingly these days, but nevertheless,

02:03:26 ◼   ► I still think it, I think it was a worthwhile expenditure

02:03:30 ◼   ► of your time, and I would guess that you do too.

02:03:33 ◼   ► - Oh, it was 100% worth it, because my PHP-based crawlers

02:03:37 ◼   ► before this were not nearly as good

02:03:39 ◼   ► for this particular task.

02:03:41 ◼   ► Because, like, I use Go's whole channel system,

02:03:44 ◼   ► their whole concurrency model,

02:03:46 ◼   ► for managing this whole thing, and it's great.

02:03:47 ◼   ► And you're right, I don't write a lot of it,

02:03:50 ◼   ► because I wrote this years ago,

02:03:53 ◼   ► and then basically haven't really touched it much

02:03:56 ◼   ► since then, and I have since mostly forgotten the language.

02:03:59 ◼   ► And whenever I do have to go in there

02:04:01 ◼   ► and change one little thing,

02:04:03 ◼   ► I have to basically relearn the language again

02:04:05 ◼   ► just to be able to make a two line change

02:04:07 ◼   ► or something like that.

02:04:08 ◼   ► It's kind of funny and a little bit scary.

02:04:10 ◼   ► If I ever have to do a bigger change,

02:04:12 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to take a weekend

02:04:14 ◼   ► and really relearn the entire thing again.

02:04:17 ◼   ► - You guys rewrite it in Rust then,

02:04:18 ◼   ► because that's the good thing of you pick the part of it

02:04:21 ◼   ► that actually is performance sensitive,

02:04:23 ◼   ► that concurrency matters.

02:04:24 ◼   ► But like you said, you didn't rewrite the whole parsing

02:04:27 ◼   ► feeds or whatever, because you already had that code,

02:04:28 ◼   ► and that's not the code.

02:04:30 ◼   ► You can just queue that out and parallelize it.

02:04:32 ◼   ► It's the crawler itself, the little core of the crawler.

02:04:35 ◼   ► And so if you needed to write that again,

02:04:37 ◼   ► you know the job that it needs to do.

02:04:38 ◼   ► And you could say, OK, well, now it's time to learn Rust.

02:04:40 ◼   ► And you could write it in Rust.

02:04:42 ◼   ► And then you don't have to relearn Go.

02:04:43 ◼   ► And as long as it is comparable in performance

02:04:46 ◼   ► and comparable mechanisms for concurrency,

02:04:48 ◼   ► you could just write it in whatever

02:04:49 ◼   ► the language of the day that is the most go-like, right?

02:04:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, and frankly, you know,

02:04:54 ◼   ► if I was writing something from scratch today,

02:04:58 ◼   ► I think I would consider a radically different architecture

02:05:01 ◼   ► than what I did here.

02:05:02 ◼   ► Like, I've been brainstorming for a while,

02:05:05 ◼   ► like, can I really, can I maybe reduce the amount

02:05:08 ◼   ► of like, database use that I have here, because--

02:05:11 ◼   ► - Put stuff on people's devices.

02:05:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, and, or, you know, use things like S3

02:05:16 ◼   ► as the storage, you know.

02:05:17 ◼   ► There are things I can do that I've been brainstorming

02:05:20 ◼   ► of like, I think I might wanna go in someone

02:05:21 ◼   ► in this direction because it, running all this,

02:05:24 ◼   ► like I had to deal with some database stuff this week

02:05:26 ◼   ► and it was stupid and it was easy,

02:05:29 ◼   ► but I still hate dealing with it on so many levels

02:05:31 ◼   ► and it's extremely expensive and so I was thinking like,

02:05:36 ◼   ► maybe I should start, you know, changing things,

02:05:38 ◼   ► but there's never a good time to do that, so, I don't know.

02:05:41 ◼   ► Anyway, thank you so much everybody for listening.

02:05:43 ◼   ► Thank you to our sponsors this week,

02:05:45 ◼   ► Hover, Mack Weldon and Collide.

02:05:48 ◼   ► And thanks to our members who support us directly.

02:05:49 ◼   ► You can join akeeps.fm/join

02:05:52 ◼   ► and we will talk to you next week.

02:05:55 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

02:05:58 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

02:06:00 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

02:06:03 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

02:06:05 ◼   ► ♪ Oh it was accidental ♪

02:06:08 ◼   ► ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

02:06:10 ◼   ► ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

02:06:13 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)

02:06:16 ◼   ► It was accidental (it was accidental)

02:06:19 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

02:06:24 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

02:06:29 ◼   ► @caseyliss

02:06:33 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

02:06:37 ◼   ► ♪ Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪

02:06:42 ◼   ► ♪ USA, Syracuse, it's accidental ♪

02:06:46 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

02:06:48 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

02:06:50 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

02:06:51 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

02:06:53 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast ♪

02:06:55 ◼   ► ♪ So long ♪

02:06:58 ◼   ► Tell you what, I got my new capture setup going

02:07:01 ◼   ► with the PCIe enclosure.

02:07:02 ◼   ► Finally got it working now with the Magewell card.

02:07:05 ◼   ► I returned the Blackmagic DeckLink card.

02:07:08 ◼   ► The Magewell Pro Capture HDMI thing is working great.

02:07:11 ◼   ► I have four capture streams.

02:07:13 ◼   ► It is a dream to use because not only is this much smaller

02:07:18 ◼   ► and simpler than my previous setup of having like four

02:07:20 ◼   ► or three different little HDMI capture USB thingies,

02:07:24 ◼   ► like it's so much simpler.

02:07:27 ◼   ► The enclosure has been great.

02:07:29 ◼   ► I have everything running off of one cable correctly now.

02:07:32 ◼   ► Like, you know, before I was describing

02:07:35 ◼   ► when I was trying to plug every single thing

02:07:37 ◼   ► into the CalDigit TS3 Plus,

02:07:40 ◼   ► that some of the capture things would only work

02:07:43 ◼   ► if I plugged them in directly to the computer,

02:07:45 ◼   ► and so I ended up using all three

02:07:48 ◼   ► of my computer's ports anyway.

02:07:51 ◼   ► Now I can literally just use one.

02:07:53 ◼   ► The only downside is that the enclosure

02:07:55 ◼   ► only provides 15 watts of power to the computer.

02:07:58 ◼   ► So that's not great as the only power source.

02:08:01 ◼   ► So I'm using a second USB-C port purely for power.

02:08:04 ◼   ► I could also use MagSafe for that, it would be fine.

02:08:07 ◼   ► So anyway, that's the only real downside.

02:08:09 ◼   ► Otherwise, it's fantastic.

02:08:11 ◼   ► It has so far been very reliable, the quality is great,

02:08:16 ◼   ► and I'm very happy with it.

02:08:17 ◼   ► So I should have done this earlier, honestly.

02:08:20 ◼   ► I should have gone straight to the solution.

02:08:23 ◼   ► 'Cause it's a decent amount of money,

02:08:25 ◼   ► but so was the previous setup where I had three different

02:08:30 ◼   ► Elgato Capture thingies, plus the TS3 plus,

02:08:32 ◼   ► that's not cheap either.

02:08:34 ◼   ► And so having this PCI Express enclosure

02:08:37 ◼   ► with this dedicated card in it and these USB cards

02:08:40 ◼   ► is a dream, so I'm very happy with it.

02:08:43 ◼   ► - So tell me again, it's a generic PCI Express enclosure

02:08:47 ◼   ► that lets you basically put what I would consider

02:08:49 ◼   ► to be a desktop card in a box

02:08:51 ◼   ► and then connect it to your laptop,

02:08:53 ◼   ► and then remind me what the card is?

02:08:55 ◼   ► - So the enclosure is, it's Sonnet,

02:08:58 ◼   ► almost everything is Sonnet, you know, Sonnet Tech.

02:09:00 ◼   ► So it's a Sonnet enclosure with three PCIe slots in it.

02:09:04 ◼   ► Two of the slots I've put Sonnet USB cards in

02:09:06 ◼   ► that have four ports each, one A, one C,

02:09:09 ◼   ► like one bank of A's, one bank of C's

02:09:11 ◼   ► 'cause I have both devices.

02:09:12 ◼   ► And then the third slot has a Magewell Pro

02:09:17 ◼   ► HDMI Quad capture card, so it captures four HDMI ports.

02:09:20 ◼   ► And the Magewell was the only thing that required drivers.

02:09:25 ◼   ► I wish there was some kind of HDMI capture

02:09:27 ◼   ► that didn't require drivers on Mac OS.

02:09:29 ◼   ► I don't know if that exists,

02:09:31 ◼   ► but as far as I can tell, they all require drivers.

02:09:34 ◼   ► So this required them, so that's one thing

02:09:36 ◼   ► that could break in the future is like,

02:09:38 ◼   ► if some future version of Mac OS comes out

02:09:40 ◼   ► and then Magewell does not update their drivers,

02:09:43 ◼   ► that could mess me up a little bit

02:09:44 ◼   ► and I'll cross that bridge if it comes.

02:09:47 ◼   ► But otherwise, yeah, it's been great.

02:09:49 ◼   ► [beeping]

02:09:51 ◼   ► [