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ATP

476: Plausibly Viable

 

00:00:00   Before we record every single week, we've gotten in the habit of doing what John likes to call pre-flight, which is reasonable.

00:00:06   And we'll quickly, quickly walk through, you know, what we're gonna talk about and where we think we're gonna stop follow-up and start

00:00:12   topics and end topics and do SKTP and so on and so forth.

00:00:15   And we went the entire way through pre-flight, and I felt like we had it pretty well sorted.

00:00:21   I think John felt like we had it pretty well sorted. Then Marco

00:00:25   looked at us Puss in Boots style with his hat in his hands and his big eyes looking up and he said well

00:00:30   What about the overcast update? No, I said like I don't want to be too self-serving here

00:00:34   But do we want to talk about the overcast update? It was suspiciously not mentioned

00:00:40   Why was it not mentioned Marco because you didn't mention it because you didn't

00:00:44   Well, this is the last episode of ATP

00:00:53   Anyway, that's the point of free flight it functioned it fulfilled its intended purpose

00:00:58   We made sure we knew how the show was going to go and Marco brought this up now instead of just springing on us mid-show

00:01:04   It's saying oh, yeah, by the way, we also didn't mention now that we're pre-flighting in public

00:01:08   Apple did their their external link thing and then they revised the dating app thing, but it's I mean there is too late

00:01:16   yeah, well and I read it over all of it and the only thing of note really is that they

00:01:23   They made the text on the dialogue for the dating apps thing

00:01:26   a little bit less horrendously biased.

00:01:29   (laughs)

00:01:30   But otherwise, it's mostly stuff that we already knew

00:01:34   or stuff that's very unsurprising.

00:01:36   But yeah, I don't know how much there is to talk about there

00:01:39   because it's just Apple doing their usual jerky stuff

00:01:44   around this area and there's not much different here.

00:01:47   - You know, what we could do is we could put things

00:01:50   we want to talk about in a shared document. That's a good idea. Maybe the next time we record,

00:01:55   we could potentially look at that shared document and see what we should talk about.

00:02:00   All right, all right, we have a lot to get through. We have a mountain of follow-up and it just keeps

00:02:06   growing and growing and growing. And so I feel like we should just start by trying to conquer it.

00:02:11   So first item on the list, resolution, independence, and retina. I feel like we have gone two to three

00:02:19   consecutive weeks trying to explain this and apparently failing. So I had a pleasant, if

00:02:24   long, exchange with a listener who was not being belligerent, who was not being mean

00:02:30   in any way, which is somewhat rare for the internet, but they just really weren't understanding

00:02:35   what the big deal about retina was. And it's not that they were an unintelligent person,

00:02:39   it's just, I don't think I was doing a good job describing it and learning from my mistakes

00:02:44   in that regard. I can take a crack at this, but I wonder, John, if it would be best if

00:02:48   if you took a crack at this,

00:02:49   because one of the things I referred this listener to

00:02:52   was some old Ars Technica Mac OS X reviews.

00:02:56   So would you explain to me, Jon,

00:02:58   for those of us who are not aware,

00:02:59   what makes retina screens and retina displays so crisp?

00:03:04   If it's just two times the regular resolution,

00:03:07   but it's showing the exact same stuff,

00:03:08   why would it look better?

00:03:10   - Yeah, a lot of people sent feedback

00:03:12   with asking questions, and their questions revealed

00:03:14   they had a mistaken notion of how Mac OS specifically

00:03:19   deals with retina displays.

00:03:21   And then some other people had some questions

00:03:23   clarifying a point that we didn't really bring up,

00:03:25   comparing how Mac does it with Windows.

00:03:27   So we'll start with the basics.

00:03:29   Every time we talk about retina, we

00:03:31   try to describe it as like there's twice as many pixels.

00:03:34   So before, if you're measuring length in one dimension,

00:03:37   you'd say what was previously one pixel long, now two pixels

00:03:40   sit in that same place.

00:03:41   Or what we would say is on a non-retina screen,

00:03:44   what was previously one pixel,

00:03:46   now it's a two by two grid of four pixels,

00:03:48   a little square of four pixels, right?

00:03:50   And we're doing that to express the change in density, right?

00:03:53   The way Apple did retina displays for the most part

00:03:56   is if there had been a preexisting thing,

00:03:57   like say the 27-inch Thunderbolt display,

00:04:00   what they did for their 27-inch retina display,

00:04:02   the Apple Studio display,

00:04:03   is it's like the Thunderbolt display,

00:04:05   but every place there is a single pixel

00:04:07   on the Thunderbolt display,

00:04:08   the retina, the Apple Studio display has four pixels

00:04:11   in a little square, right?

00:04:13   And so people ask, but why would you want that?

00:04:15   If it's just gonna draw things

00:04:16   with a bunch of little blocks of two by two pixels

00:04:18   in these four pixel squares,

00:04:20   why not just draw a single pixel on the Thunderbolt display?

00:04:23   What do you get?

00:04:24   Who cares if every pixel is made of four pixels?

00:04:26   It's still the same thing on the screen, isn't it?

00:04:29   And the disconnect there is,

00:04:32   what we're trying to explain is

00:04:34   how the density of pixels changed,

00:04:36   but macOS does not draw things

00:04:39   with two by two squares of pixels.

00:04:42   It draws things with individual pixels.

00:04:44   So if you have like a letter O where the sides of the O

00:04:46   are all in a big curve shape,

00:04:48   it doesn't make that the curve side of letter O

00:04:50   out of two by two blocks of pixels, right?

00:04:53   It makes them out of single individual pixels

00:04:55   so it's twice as smooth around the O.

00:04:58   Obviously you can imagine if you're trying to make a curve

00:05:00   out of big blocks, the smaller the blocks,

00:05:02   the more the curve looks like a continuous curve

00:05:04   and not a stair step, right?

00:05:06   So that's the disconnect for that thing.

00:05:08   And the second thing to understand on this topic is,

00:05:11   how did Apple eventually decide to come upon this solution

00:05:16   where they took their previous screen

00:05:19   and for every single pixel they made

00:05:21   a two by two grid of pixels

00:05:23   and then drew at the higher resolution?

00:05:25   For many years, I'll put links in the show notes,

00:05:28   starting from 2005, then another link in 2007,

00:05:31   then another link in 2011,

00:05:33   Apple had tried for many years to figure out

00:05:35   how am I going, how is Mac OS going to draw

00:05:39   on higher density displays?

00:05:42   You know, Mac OS 10 was a newer shopping system

00:05:45   that came out in 2001.

00:05:46   High density displays look like they might be a thing

00:05:49   where the pixels would be really, really tiny.

00:05:51   You wouldn't want to just continue to draw exactly the way,

00:05:53   you know, you had been drawing

00:05:55   because then everything would be really tiny,

00:05:57   no one could see it.

00:05:57   What you'd want to do is what I described.

00:06:00   Keep things more or less the same size,

00:06:01   so a 12 point letter O would be the same size

00:06:04   as 12 point letter O.

00:06:05   it would just be smoother.

00:06:07   So how do we go about doing that?

00:06:09   One way that Apple tried for years and years and years

00:06:11   is that you'd have the drawing commands that

00:06:16   are say, draw letter O at 12 point text,

00:06:18   and you'd have the screen, which would have

00:06:20   some arbitrary pixel density.

00:06:22   And the operating system would figure out,

00:06:24   based on the screen density and how big a 12 point letter O

00:06:27   is supposed to be, use the right number of pixels, which

00:06:29   sounds like a great solution.

00:06:30   It's like any screen density, the more pixels you have,

00:06:33   the smoother that letter O will be,

00:06:35   this letter O doesn't change size.

00:06:36   Like a 12 point letter O is a 12 point letter O

00:06:38   is a 12 point letter O,

00:06:39   and they would try to keep that consistent.

00:06:40   The problem with that is,

00:06:42   if you have something that you're trying to draw,

00:06:43   like things in the operating system are defined

00:06:45   by how big they're supposed to be,

00:06:46   that 12 point letter O or whatever,

00:06:48   if that 12 point letter O requires a number of pixels

00:06:52   that is odd on one pixel density, but even on the other,

00:06:56   it might be offset by a little bit,

00:06:58   which doesn't sound like a big deal,

00:06:59   but now imagine trying to do things like draw tab bars

00:07:02   or toolbars or buttons or things

00:07:03   where they have to abut and join exactly,

00:07:06   if you can have an arbitrary pixel density,

00:07:08   you might end up in a situation where,

00:07:10   oh, this dividing line has to be right in the middle,

00:07:12   but it can only be in the middle if this is five points,

00:07:16   because if you have two points,

00:07:16   then the middle one point, and then two points.

00:07:18   Well, what if it's six points?

00:07:19   Where's the middle of six points?

00:07:21   There is no middle.

00:07:22   It's gotta be closer to one side or the other

00:07:23   because of the number of pixels.

00:07:25   And so you get what they call pixel cracks

00:07:26   and all sorts of other things where

00:07:28   if you try to let the operating system draw it

00:07:30   an arbitrary, what we call a scaling factor,

00:07:32   an arbitrary scaling factor, it's very difficult

00:07:35   to draw things consistently, because you always end up

00:07:38   with like one pixel extra left over that you have to decide

00:07:42   whether it's on the left or the right,

00:07:43   and then you can't align things up.

00:07:44   So Apple eventually just pretty much gave up.

00:07:46   After years and years of having that feature

00:07:48   sort of as a debug feature in the operating system,

00:07:51   you'll see screenshots in the links where there was actually

00:07:53   a resolution scaling slider that you can move around

00:07:56   and you can move it to fractional values like 1.5, 1.25.

00:08:00   And then you'd see how just the drawing of everything broke.

00:08:02   because nothing expected that and it's very difficult to get that to join up.

00:08:06   so what apple decided is we're not going to do that. we're only doing

00:08:10   integer scaling factors. so it's either 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, any but it has to be an integer.

00:08:17   so that way you always know exactly how to draw anything you never end up with pixel cracks.

00:08:21   because you either, you know, either one regular non-retina pixel or a 2x2 grid,

00:08:26   you know, double the density or triple the density or quadruple the density or whatever.

00:08:31   That's how Mac OS draws things,

00:08:33   as in draws them to the in-memory buffer.

00:08:36   Final thing to understand is,

00:08:38   okay, so that's how Mac OS draws stuff.

00:08:40   But hey, I can take a 4K monitor and display a 5K,

00:08:43   I can set it to 5K, how is it doing that?

00:08:45   That doesn't divide evenly,

00:08:46   that's not an integer scaling factor, how does that work?

00:08:49   Well, the way it works is Mac OS draws

00:08:52   at an integer scaling factor,

00:08:54   like when it draws the screen,

00:08:55   it says here's all the pixels in the screen,

00:08:57   it is an integer scaling factor of,

00:08:59   you know, it's twice, three times,

00:09:01   I think only like the iPhones do three times, whatever,

00:09:03   but it's either 1X or 2X.

00:09:05   That's how macOS draws it.

00:09:07   And then at the very end,

00:09:09   after drawing a 5K image at exactly 2X, right,

00:09:13   it scales the entire final drawn image down to 4K.

00:09:18   And that's where everything gets all fuzzy.

00:09:20   And then it shoves that on the screen.

00:09:22   So that's why people's like,

00:09:23   why, you know, non-native scaling factors?

00:09:26   If it had fractional scaling,

00:09:28   you could display 5K, quote unquote, 5K worth of points

00:09:33   on a 4K display without any fuzzy scaling,

00:09:35   but then you'd have pixel cracks everywhere.

00:09:37   But that's not what Mac OS does.

00:09:38   Same thing on the 3X phones, by the way.

00:09:39   Maybe Marco remembers the details more than I do, but.

00:09:42   - Well, originally.

00:09:43   - Yeah.

00:09:44   - When the Plus phones launched, the 6 Plus.

00:09:46   - Yeah, so they drew everything internally at 3X,

00:09:50   but the screens did not have three times

00:09:52   the number of pixels.

00:09:53   So they would draw at 3X,

00:09:54   and then take the final 3x drawn pixel image

00:09:58   and squish it and make everything all blurry

00:10:00   and then put that on the screen.

00:10:01   But the pixels are so small,

00:10:02   people really didn't notice, right?

00:10:04   - And that lasted until the iPhone X.

00:10:06   - Yeah, and that's when they could do 3x at,

00:10:08   well, not really, 'cause the iPhone X

00:10:10   didn't use a pen tile pattern,

00:10:11   which is getting into more complexity

00:10:13   of how pixels are drawn.

00:10:14   But anyway, these pieces of information

00:10:17   are key to understanding what's different about macOS.

00:10:19   And I think Windows tries to do what Apple did,

00:10:22   which is arbitrary scaling factors,

00:10:24   but I'm not entirely sure,

00:10:25   so I'm not gonna speak for Windows,

00:10:26   but I can say that macOS,

00:10:27   if you follow these links and look through the years,

00:10:29   they tried the other way to do it

00:10:30   and they could not get it to work to be perfect,

00:10:33   and so they said, "We're just gonna do integer scaling,"

00:10:35   which I think was the right call,

00:10:36   because 2x and 3x turn out to be adequate

00:10:41   for not seeing the pixels anymore,

00:10:43   and it just makes everything so much easier,

00:10:44   because you never have to worry about that leftover pixel

00:10:47   and which side of a thing to allocate it to.

00:10:49   You never have to worry about pixel cracks.

00:10:51   The price of that is, because of the way macOS works,

00:10:53   If you want to display quote unquote 5K worth of stuff,

00:10:56   which I know it's not, you know,

00:10:59   however many points is horizontally and vertically

00:11:02   on Apple's 5K monitor,

00:11:03   if you want to display that number of points worth of stuff,

00:11:06   it had on a, you know, on a 4K monitor,

00:11:09   macOS draws it at 5K.

00:11:11   And then it takes the final image and squishes it

00:11:14   just like you would squish it in image editor

00:11:15   and that's why everything looks fuzzy.

00:11:17   So you don't get any pixel cracks,

00:11:18   but you do get a little bit of blurring.

00:11:20   And the same way that you take any image

00:11:21   that's pixel perfect and you scale it,

00:11:23   everything gets a little bit fuzzy,

00:11:24   I guess, anti-alias around the edges.

00:11:26   So hopefully that will explain to people

00:11:28   who are wondering why any of this matters to Mac users.

00:11:32   It's a combination of our expectations

00:11:34   based on products Apple shipped,

00:11:35   and also how Mac OS and iOS and iPad OS,

00:11:39   and every OS Apple makes, decided,

00:11:42   you know, back in 2011, basically,

00:11:44   how they decided how they're going to draw

00:11:47   in high DPI screens.

00:11:48   They always draw at an integer scaling factor,

00:11:50   and then if necessary, they squish that image down

00:11:53   to fit in the number of pixels of the screen.

00:11:54   But the way we like it is no squishing.

00:11:57   It draws at an integer scaling factor

00:11:59   and then just puts those pixels directly on the screen,

00:12:00   which has exactly that number of pixels.

00:12:02   - Yeah, and I get feedback, including today,

00:12:05   I had two different pieces of feedback

00:12:06   in the span of like five minutes from each other on Twitter.

00:12:08   Like, "Hey, what about this monitor?

00:12:09   "What about this one?"

00:12:11   And I don't know what I'm being unclear about,

00:12:14   but let me try one more time.

00:12:17   - I feel this way every single time.

00:12:19   What am I being unclear about here?

00:12:22   Like if your screen is physically 27 inches or bigger,

00:12:27   it must be at least 5K if not bigger.

00:12:32   'Cause how big is the XDR?

00:12:33   It's like 30 or something like that, 30 inches?

00:12:35   - 32, I believe. - 32, I think.

00:12:37   - So between 24 and 27 inches, you need to be 5K.

00:12:41   Much above 27 inches,

00:12:43   you're getting into the 6K XDR territory.

00:12:45   And if you're 22 to 24 inches, then 4K is sufficient.

00:12:50   people are sending me these 32-inch ultra-wide screens

00:12:54   that have the same horizontal resolution,

00:12:56   maybe it's the same vertical,

00:12:57   one of the dimensions is the same

00:12:59   as a like Ultrafine 5K or a Studio Display 5K,

00:13:04   and they're like, "Oh, this would work, right?"

00:13:07   No, no, that's way physically bigger and zero more pixels.

00:13:12   What is it, Zorro more boogs or whatever it was, John?

00:13:15   I don't remember now, but there's not enough pixels in there.

00:13:18   Yeah, it's totally it.

00:13:18   There's not enough pixels there.

00:13:20   There's just not even close to enough pixels there.

00:13:22   And people keep thinking like, it's like us with Trump.

00:13:24   Like, oh, we got them this time, I got them.

00:13:26   And no, it's not even in the ballpark.

00:13:29   If it's bigger than 27 inches, it better be more than 5K.

00:13:34   If it's bigger than 24 inches, it better be more than 4K.

00:13:38   Like, I don't feel like this is unclear,

00:13:41   but somehow people just aren't getting it.

00:13:43   I don't know.

00:13:44   I love all of you though.

00:13:45   - And that gets back to the scaling thing,

00:13:47   'cause it's like, oh, why don't you just set

00:13:48   monitor resolution to higher res. Well then it will be non-native because then

00:13:51   the Mac OS will draw at the higher res and squish that down to fit within the

00:13:55   number of pixels are on the screen and everything will look slightly fuzzy. And

00:13:57   then yes many people wrote in to tell us well yeah I bet you can't see those

00:14:00   pixels isn't your vision bad anyway we you know that's just up to the

00:14:03   individual whether they care about native what we call you know non-native

00:14:06   display where the operating system draws at a higher resolution than the number

00:14:10   of pixels on the display and then scales the drawn image before pushing it to the

00:14:14   display. That looks fuzzy to us. Some people don't notice the fuzz. Again, the old iPhones,

00:14:20   when the big iPhones came out, they drew it 3x, but there weren't 3x the number of pixels,

00:14:24   so they scaled it. And I bet a lot of people didn't notice because those pixels were really,

00:14:28   really small. But, you know, on Mac screens, I think a lot of us can still tell.

00:14:33   And, I mean, even if I can't or John can't or somebody else can't, like, whether or not

00:14:40   we are being ridiculous, this is something that is important to us.

00:14:43   For right or wrong, it's important to us. So if you don't agree,

00:14:47   that's fine. That's fine. Just let people like things.

00:14:51   All right, Joe Lyon wrote in to tell us about why silicon wafers are round,

00:14:56   and Joe writes, "The ingot of sil--" ingot? ingot? I don't know, I probably pronounced

00:15:00   that wrong. It can go-- it's the French pronunciation. You got it right the first

00:15:03   time, ingot. "The ingot of silicon is created as a

00:15:06   cylinder as the solid silicon crystal is grown and

00:15:09   pulled out of molten silicon, which leads to round wafers.

00:15:13   Furthermore, many of the processing steps in the fab

00:15:15   to produce the chips on the wafer

00:15:17   are based on circular polishing motions

00:15:19   and spinning the wafer around its center,

00:15:21   which also requires angular symmetry

00:15:23   and just wouldn't work well or as efficiently

00:15:26   with a non-circular wafer.

00:15:28   And then there's a video, I think it was like,

00:15:30   how do they do that or how it's made or something like that,

00:15:32   which we'll put in the show notes.

00:15:34   I watched it, the whole thing is like eight, nine minutes.

00:15:37   and the good part starts at about,

00:15:39   just shy of two minutes,

00:15:41   and we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes.

00:15:42   I will note that the source video

00:15:44   does seem to have a couple places where it freezes.

00:15:46   I was concerned that my Mac was on the fritz,

00:15:48   but no, no, no, it appears that it's the video itself.

00:15:51   But anyways, it does a really good job

00:15:52   of explaining all of this stuff,

00:15:54   and I definitely think it's worth a watch

00:15:56   for all nine minutes if you have nine minutes to spare.

00:15:58   So check that out.

00:16:00   - I love the idea of somebody

00:16:01   who would answer that question with,

00:16:02   "No, I do not have nine minutes to spare."

00:16:04   Meanwhile, they're listening to our show.

00:16:06   fair. Hey man, let people spend time out they want, but I agree with you. Moving right along,

00:16:12   can you tell us John about winning the M1 Ultra lottery please?

00:16:15   This is Jonathan Ragon Kelly chiming in about the possibility that was of the theory espoused

00:16:21   in that MaxTex video about having to fab two M1 Maxes next to each other in order to make

00:16:28   an Ultra. So like you've got the wafer, which as we just established is round, then you

00:16:32   You got a bunch of these rectangular chips on it and they're in a big grid and there's

00:16:36   a little bit of waste around the edges.

00:16:37   That's why we asked about the round thing, but apparently there's good reasons for that

00:16:40   as I surmised.

00:16:41   And then the theory was, okay, well, if you want to get an ultra, not only do you have

00:16:45   to find two M1 maxes that like, you know, have all the parts working if you want to

00:16:49   get like an ultra with all the parts working, but they have to be next to each other on

00:16:52   the dies.

00:16:53   Here's what Jonathan has to say about that.

00:16:54   "It is almost certainly not the case that neighboring pairs of M1 max dies are cut out

00:16:58   of the way for it to make an M1 ultra.

00:17:00   What they described at launch matches much better onto a more standard technology which

00:17:03   is the class of thing Intel markets as EMIB and TSMC markets as LSI.

00:17:12   That's a standard, widely used available technology and cheaper and easier to build with better

00:17:17   yield precisely because you don't need directly adjacent dies to be functional to pair them

00:17:21   up.

00:17:22   You don't need to have fabricated dies next to each other on the same wafer to use this

00:17:24   technology at all.

00:17:25   The way to think about all these technologies is they're basically circuit boards, just

00:17:28   like the human scale printed circuit boards you're used to, just built at different levels

00:17:31   of miniaturization with different technologies.

00:17:34   And then Jonathan lists a bunch of the different technologies.

00:17:36   And so if people know what a circuit board is, it's a big flat board that is mostly non-conductive,

00:17:42   but that has conductive, what we call traces on them.

00:17:46   You often see it in, you know, if it was an emoji, which it probably is or will be.

00:17:49   It's like a green board, but with like gold lines on it.

00:17:52   Those gold lines are the conducting paths.

00:17:55   So they're kind of like wires but laid down as these sort of, you know, gold, you know,

00:17:58   they're not made of gold usually, but gold things on there that conduct and circuit boards

00:18:02   can have multiple layers.

00:18:03   So you see the little gold lines that are on top, but sometimes they have multiple layers

00:18:07   where there are other gold lines sandwiched in between connecting point A to point B to

00:18:11   point C all at different levels, right?

00:18:12   So that's what it means by circuit board.

00:18:14   And these things, these interposer type things, they are just like circuit boards, but way,

00:18:19   way, way, way smaller.

00:18:20   So here are the different technologies you can do this.

00:18:22   One is multi-chip modules like AMD uses for its CPUs to do the integration of multiple

00:18:26   dies with the "circuit board" organic substrate in package using traditional package die connections

00:18:31   along the edges of the dies.

00:18:32   This is also what Apple uses for its integrated memory, it's just standard package level interconnect

00:18:37   that cell phones and some laptop chips use.

00:18:39   No special 3D stacking going on.

00:18:41   So if you see all the RAM chips that are around like the M1 Ultra, they're just connected

00:18:45   with this like a multi-chip module.

00:18:47   There is traditional silicon interposers to do the circuit board as a 3D stacked big slab

00:18:52   of silicon all the way under the entire array of chips with through silicon vias, TSVs,

00:18:57   to connect the chips to the interposer.

00:18:58   So this is like a thing that's just underneath the whole chip and has these little tunnels

00:19:01   that go through it to reach up to the chip.

00:19:04   And then finally the newer EMIB-like things are like the full interposer where the circuit

00:19:09   board is again silicon and connected with high density TSVs, but where you only put

00:19:13   a very small interposer under the adjacent edges of the pair of dies for point-to-point

00:19:16   connections.

00:19:17   This is very clearly what the M1 Ultra uses based on everything Gianni Surugi said and

00:19:21   is the most sensible balance of cost and performance.

00:19:23   So rather than being an interposer that goes underneath the whole chip, as you saw in the

00:19:25   video, it's just a little strip between the two that connects them.

00:19:28   So if you think of that interposer as like a really, really tiny microscale circuit board

00:19:33   with all sorts of little traces and things happening in it, that's how they're connected.

00:19:37   And to do that, you do not need them to be next to each other on the silicon wafer.

00:19:41   So I found this pretty compelling evidence that they don't need to be next to each other.

00:19:44   Now I'm angry again about the price of the almond alger, I suppose.

00:19:48   - Well, but if anything, this means obviously

00:19:51   that yields would be massively higher doing it this way

00:19:54   than doing it the way that we initially guessed,

00:19:56   which is good in the sense that this method

00:19:59   of making giant chips effectively is scalable

00:20:03   and is healthy long-term probably.

00:20:05   So I think it's great in the sense that

00:20:07   this isn't just some kind of weird one-off they're gonna do

00:20:09   and then figure out something else for later.

00:20:11   This is something that they're gonna be able to do

00:20:13   for a long time probably, and this is scalable.

00:20:16   when they want to go to say four of these

00:20:19   instead of two of these,

00:20:21   maybe four potential future Mac Pro,

00:20:23   that becomes much more possible

00:20:26   and relatively much more affordable.

00:20:29   I know, again, the term relatively here,

00:20:32   than if you would have had to have like four perfect dies

00:20:35   all next to each other.

00:20:37   That would have been ridiculous,

00:20:38   where two is even pretty out there.

00:20:41   So this is promising in the sense that

00:20:43   it's much more reasonable of a technique to use

00:20:46   and it suggests that there will be much higher yields

00:20:48   and the ability to do larger scale combinations

00:20:50   in the future.

00:20:51   - Something we might touch on in a future episode

00:20:53   is the other problem of having a bunch of,

00:20:57   in this case, a bunch of M1 Maxes,

00:20:59   a bunch of Jade Sea Dyes or whatever,

00:21:00   connected to each other, doing stuff.

00:21:03   It's kind of what we've talked about a little bit

00:21:05   in the past, it's like,

00:21:07   each one of those ships can act on its own,

00:21:09   but now you want them to all act together

00:21:12   as one, looking like one big CPU to the operating system,

00:21:16   And that can be tricky because each one of those ships

00:21:18   does have its own stuff, right?

00:21:21   It's got its own, all its own stuff that is closer to it.

00:21:24   Sometimes also in the case of the M1 Max,

00:21:26   it's got its own connections to its own RAM

00:21:28   and all that stuff.

00:21:29   If you got four of them together,

00:21:31   now four things all have their own stuff

00:21:33   and you want them to cooperate as one,

00:21:34   it becomes, it starts to become important

00:21:37   how you allocate, it starts to become even more important,

00:21:40   let's say, how you allocate work to those things.

00:21:43   'Cause you don't wanna give a piece of work to one die

00:21:45   and then give it to another die, a millisecond labor,

00:21:47   and then give it to another die,

00:21:48   'cause every time you go to a different die,

00:21:49   it left behind all its stuff.

00:21:51   It might have left stuff in the cache

00:21:52   that was in the one die, and now you put it on another die,

00:21:55   and it goes to look in the cache, and it's not there.

00:21:57   So it's a good idea to keep things in the die

00:22:01   where they started, because their stuff will be there

00:22:04   as they build up their cache or whatever,

00:22:05   and you don't wanna flush all that stuff out

00:22:07   when you change processes.

00:22:08   Anyway, this is a very complicated process.

00:22:10   They're already doing it within a single chip, obviously,

00:22:12   and then within the M1 Ultra, it's an even bigger problem,

00:22:15   and if you had four of them,

00:22:16   it would be an even bigger problem.

00:22:17   So we'll see if Apple ever mentions that

00:22:19   in a future keynote to emphasize

00:22:21   how they've been able to harness

00:22:22   these four different chips woven together or whatever.

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00:24:24   - Phil Stullery writes that the fans in the Mac studio

00:24:31   are not just cooling the chip,

00:24:32   they're also cooling the power supply

00:24:34   which needs cooling no matter the load.

00:24:36   So this is the context for this is that we were wondering why the fans are really spun up always and as per Phil

00:24:43   They're cooling the power supply. Yeah, that's a good theory

00:24:46   The m1 Mac Mini also has an internal power supply and it does not make this much noise or run as fans aside

00:24:53   So it's it's it is a factor because we were always comparing it

00:24:56   Like why would this being making be making as more noise than the laptop?

00:24:59   Well, of course the laptop doesn't have an internal power supply to get that external power brick

00:25:02   It's also true of the iMac. Why is the iMac so silent? Well, the power supply is not inside there either

00:25:07   It's in the external brick, but the M1 Mac Mini has got a fairly beefy

00:25:11   you know oversized power supply from the Intel version still inside there and it's basically silent obviously

00:25:17   Everything is beefier in the Mac Studio than it is in the Mac Mini

00:25:21   But it seems like the math still doesn't quite add up

00:25:25   Yeah

00:25:25   I mean also, you know the iMac Pro had a massive power supply in it supplying

00:25:31   hundreds of watts to all the guts of that machine,

00:25:34   and that was silent.

00:25:36   So yeah, I don't, it is worth noting, certainly,

00:25:40   that that is a factor, but I still don't think,

00:25:43   first of all, I still don't think this is the only factor

00:25:45   leading to why this machine is so mysteriously loud,

00:25:48   and I still think something here is possibly wrong.

00:25:53   Like that's how weird it is that this machine is,

00:25:57   that people are saying this is audible at all,

00:25:59   because compared to its peers,

00:26:02   that it still seems weird that they've set the fan minimum

00:26:05   to be so audible when it seems like

00:26:06   it probably shouldn't be necessary.

00:26:08   - Yeah, I mean, the studio display

00:26:09   also has an internal power supply,

00:26:10   also has two fans, and is also,

00:26:12   according to everyone who's had one, silent.

00:26:14   - Yep, and then there was a Twitter thread from Only Me

00:26:18   about returning a max studio due to fan noise,

00:26:21   and so we'll link the thread in the show notes.

00:26:23   This person says, "Cooling does seem to be

00:26:25   "over-specified in the max studio,

00:26:27   at least with my admittedly light usage.

00:26:30   With normal usage, my MacStudio CPUs

00:26:31   are about 35 degrees Celsius.

00:26:33   My 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro

00:26:36   is around 45 degrees Celsius with the fan off,

00:26:40   according to iStop menus.

00:26:42   As an experiment, I taped a piece of paper

00:26:43   around the back of the MacStudio.

00:26:44   This seems unwise, but whatever.

00:26:46   Covered in the back vents. - Yeah, don't do this.

00:26:49   - But with a little gap between the case and the paper,

00:26:51   a bit like a chimney.

00:26:52   This reduced the fan noise by about four to five decibels,

00:26:56   which made it audible, but completely acceptable to me.

00:26:59   The CPU temps increased by less than 10 degrees Celsius,

00:27:02   which is still less than my MacBook Pro with the fan off.

00:27:05   And then this person clarifies,

00:27:07   "Actually, I don't think the paper

00:27:08   increased the temperature at all.

00:27:10   I only did it about 90 minutes ago,

00:27:11   and they include a graph."

00:27:13   So, yeah, I mean, I don't know what to make of this.

00:27:16   It seems like maybe this will get fixed in software.

00:27:19   Maybe? I don't know.

00:27:20   -Yeah, I don't recommend blocking the vents

00:27:22   on your computer, but as a fun experiment

00:27:24   that somebody else does, not me,

00:27:27   it is interesting that even blocking the fence

00:27:29   doesn't seem to increase the temperature much.

00:27:31   It's just so over-provisioned with cooling, it seems like.

00:27:34   There's like nothing you can do to make this thing hot,

00:27:36   and yet the fans, they keep spinning.

00:27:39   - It is a little suspicious that at this point,

00:27:41   now we are a couple of weeks out from release,

00:27:44   and I don't think anybody's gotten a weird statement

00:27:47   from Apple PR saying, oh, we'll tweak the fans

00:27:49   in the software update.

00:27:50   I haven't seen anything like that come by the news people,

00:27:53   So maybe this is just how it is.

00:27:56   But it just seems so odd to me

00:27:59   that they would ship something like this

00:28:00   with fan noise that is audible.

00:28:03   'Cause obviously, and we're gonna get into this in a second,

00:28:05   like what does audible mean?

00:28:07   It's very variable.

00:28:09   It depends so much on people and on conditions,

00:28:12   but it just seems like a weird misstep.

00:28:16   And they've been so good about fan noise

00:28:21   with all their other recent models for years,

00:28:24   excepting the Intel laptops before,

00:28:26   but for all the desktops have been really quiet

00:28:29   for a long time, and all of the M1-based computers,

00:28:33   including the laptops, have been really,

00:28:35   it like ridiculously, amazingly quiet.

00:28:38   And so to have this chip come out,

00:28:40   and even the configuration with the M1 Max,

00:28:43   the same chip as in the high-end laptops,

00:28:46   even that configuration has audible fan noise

00:28:48   to a lot of people.

00:28:49   And so it just, it seems like something is,

00:28:52   something went wrong here.

00:28:54   And I have a hard time believing

00:28:56   that this is just how they designed it,

00:28:57   'cause they've been so good otherwise.

00:29:00   - And then Acoustician Andrew Wade,

00:29:03   this is someone who is very smart with audio things.

00:29:07   Andrew Wade says, "Acoustician checking in

00:29:09   "on the span noise thing with some rules of thumb,

00:29:11   "since you sound a little unsure of the decibels thing.

00:29:14   "For noise level differences," according to Andrew,

00:29:17   "one to two decibels, the human ear

00:29:18   can't hear the difference. Three decibels, just about noticeable. Five decibels, clearly noticeable.

00:29:25   Ten decibels sounds about twice as loud. So a 25, 26, and 27 decibel fan will sound the same,

00:29:31   assuming of course one isn't making a weird hum or something. As for quote-unquote "audibility",

00:29:36   that depends on how loud the room is already that you're in, how close you are to the thing,

00:29:41   how old you are. You're hearing, especially at high frequencies, normally fades with age from about 20.

00:29:46   So I would probably, I as in Casey, would probably be able to hear fans that Jon can't, coincidentally.

00:29:51   So yeah, I don't know what you're complaining about, Jon.

00:29:54   But anyway, back to Andrew.

00:29:56   So is a 25--

00:29:57   Newsflash, I'll tell you why.

00:29:59   Because the frequency distribution of fan noise is not mostly in those very upper ranges that you lose.

00:30:05   Like, you know, like the teens, teen K hertz kind of range.

00:30:09   It's not those ranges that you're hearing.

00:30:11   It's broadband noise across many frequencies,

00:30:14   including most of the mid-range frequencies

00:30:17   that people tend to hear pretty well for a very long time.

00:30:19   - Fair enough.

00:30:20   So back to Andrew.

00:30:21   So as a 25 to 26 decibel fan quiet,

00:30:23   in almost all normal circumstances,

00:30:25   it's going to be inaudible.

00:30:27   Most offices are anything from 30 to 50 decibels.

00:30:29   Sitting one to one to one and a half meters from the studio,

00:30:33   you're never gonna be able to hear a 25 decibel fan.

00:30:35   Quiet recording studios are at about 20 to 25 decibels.

00:30:38   So in that highly unusual scenario,

00:30:40   You may hear it if you're close to it, maybe.

00:30:42   - Challenge accepted.

00:30:43   - So someone who is professionally trained in this field.

00:30:48   - Well, so I would say I am not an acoustician.

00:30:51   I am a computer nerd.

00:30:52   I know a little bit about audio,

00:30:53   but not as much as Andrew most likely does,

00:30:55   I hope, for somebody with that title.

00:30:57   So Andrew probably dramatically out qualifies me on this.

00:31:00   So that thing aside, we're clearly hearing

00:31:03   from lots of people, hey, subjectively,

00:31:05   I'm hearing these fans and they're loud,

00:31:08   or they're at least noticeable.

00:31:10   Most people are not saying like,

00:31:11   I can't believe how loud it is.

00:31:13   Most people are simply saying,

00:31:15   it's odd that I'm hearing the fan,

00:31:17   because on all these modern computers,

00:31:18   I haven't heard the fan.

00:31:19   It's weird, I'm hearing it on this one.

00:31:21   - But some people also characterize it as silent.

00:31:24   - Right, and anyway, I'm sitting here,

00:31:25   like I measured, I happen to have an SPL meter for reasons,

00:31:28   so I measured my office earlier tonight,

00:31:30   and my office hovers around 40 decibels at night,

00:31:33   which is, you know, right there in the middle of the range

00:31:35   Andrew said most offices are.

00:31:37   But if my office is 40 decibels,

00:31:39   I can hear quiet fans when they're on.

00:31:43   So are the measurements wrong?

00:31:46   Am I wrong?

00:31:47   Am I somehow magically hearing?

00:31:49   Probably not, my hearing not that good.

00:31:51   - When you have something that is a certain volume,

00:31:53   it's not like adding another thing

00:31:54   that is lesser volume doesn't count somehow

00:31:56   or cancels it out.

00:31:57   - Right, that's true.

00:31:58   - It just adds to the noise.

00:31:59   What we were just saying is if you don't find

00:32:01   the noise in your office deafening

00:32:03   with nothing turned on,

00:32:05   adding something, a noise source at that volume level

00:32:09   is not going to find it super duper offensive.

00:32:12   And I was, I think we were linked to

00:32:15   Panzarino's thing or something.

00:32:16   I just read something again today from somebody

00:32:18   who just offhandedly said,

00:32:19   "Oh, and the great thing is it's absolutely silent."

00:32:22   I know it's frustrating to hear us talk about this,

00:32:23   when none of us have one.

00:32:24   The shipment dates of these things are out into May or June.

00:32:27   I eventually will have one.

00:32:29   I wish I didn't have to wait until May or June,

00:32:32   but I did not place my order soon enough, so I am sorry.

00:32:35   But I will eventually have one,

00:32:37   and I'll tell you how it is.

00:32:38   and I do have the Mac Pro here,

00:32:41   which is probably the previous loudest Mac Apple makes.

00:32:44   So I'll be able to tell you what it's like,

00:32:46   but for now, none of us have one, hint, hint, Apple.

00:32:48   So we can't actually tell you firsthand,

00:32:50   but we're getting lots of different reports.

00:32:51   And that's why we're looking at all of these,

00:32:53   people doing measurements, people chiming in

00:32:54   about what is audible and what is not audible.

00:32:57   - Yeah, I went and I saw the studio display

00:33:00   and the Mac studio in an Apple store,

00:33:01   and I'll be the first to tell you,

00:33:03   an Apple store is really loud.

00:33:04   I am not denying that, not in any way, shape or form.

00:33:06   But I did pick up the studio and this is I didn't have the presence of mind like stick my ear next to it

00:33:12   But I picked it up someone who to come over to you is put that down. What are you doing?

00:33:15   Alarm start going off. Yeah. Did you pick up the Mac Pro? They don't even have a Mac Pro. Nevermind

00:33:20   No, I actually asked if they had next ER and they were like no

00:33:23   Early, it's not done not a display model anyhow. But anyway, I picked it up and again

00:33:27   I'll be the first to tell you it was in an Apple Store Apple stores are not quiet

00:33:31   I understand that but in the context of an Apple Store

00:33:36   Even with the thing like I don't know a half a meter away from my head. It was

00:33:40   Completely silent again. I'm in an Apple store

00:33:43   I understand but I couldn't hear squat and the way people some people are talking is that it's like a freaking

00:33:49   You know

00:33:50   Saying it's a wind tunnel coming out of this thing

00:33:53   Yeah, and a bunch of people have sent us like someone tried to do like a YouTube video that is supposedly

00:33:57   Precisely calibrated so that if you play it on your iPhone at maximum iPhone volume

00:34:02   It exactly simulates the decibel level and sound of the studio

00:34:05   I have to say that there are too many links in that chain for me to believe that is remotely accurate

00:34:09   so although I did try it I

00:34:11   Again, reserve judgment judgment until I get one of these things to my house

00:34:15   Yeah, if only one of us got a review unit or all three of us imagine that that would be so convenient

00:34:20   That's all right

00:34:22   Renfred writes I wanted to point out that Apple actually provides noise measurements for their products on the technical specification

00:34:28   Pages here are a few examples and you can search for acoustic performance if you want to see exactly where it's listed

00:34:35   and Renfred has done the courtesy of doing the work for us.

00:34:39   I'm gonna rattle off some numbers.

00:34:40   The Mac Pro, 11 decibels, Mac Studio, 15.

00:34:44   MacBook Air, I don't know.

00:34:46   MacBook Air, three, MacBook Pro, three.

00:34:49   - Wait, hold on.

00:34:50   MacBook Air doesn't have any moving parts.

00:34:53   How, I mean, is it like a little electrical noise?

00:34:56   - I mean, maybe three decibels

00:34:58   is just the atom is vibrating.

00:35:00   (laughing)

00:35:02   - This is suspect.

00:35:03   - I mean, these are Apple's official,

00:35:05   at least Apple's official numbers, right?

00:35:07   - But like the Mac Pro 11 decibels, really?

00:35:10   That's it, that's all it makes?

00:35:11   - So let him finish the thing,

00:35:13   because obviously how you measure sound can vary,

00:35:16   like where you put the microphones, what, anyway, go on.

00:35:19   - All right, so Mac Pro 11, Mac Studio 15,

00:35:21   MacBook Air 3, MacBook Pro 3, iMac Pro 13,

00:35:25   which splits the difference

00:35:26   between the Studio and the Mac Pro.

00:35:28   The quote unquote best laptop ever made,

00:35:31   otherwise known as the 2015 MacBook Pro 6.

00:35:34   And so Renfred continues, "These results are quite different compared to the QuietMac site.

00:35:37   We don't know exactly how Apple's measuring these, but they noted a decent number of details,

00:35:43   including the fact that they are measuring from 'operator position'.

00:35:48   They compare idle versus wireless web mode, the latter being pretty pointless.

00:35:53   I know for a fact that the 2015 MacBook can get much louder than 6 decibels under load,

00:35:57   but given that the M1 Macs and Mac Pro tend to stay at idle, these numbers should be a

00:36:02   a pretty good comparison point if they're being measured consistently.

00:36:04   Yeah, you would think Apple has to have some sort of procedure like why would they list

00:36:08   this on their spec pages. Whatever Apple's procedure is, they must have like a standard

00:36:12   of like here's how you measure the sound of a Mac. Put it in this position where we expect

00:36:16   people to use it, but the microphones here, use these microphones in this environment

00:36:19   and measure the sound. I am not an acoustician, but maybe three decibels is just like the

00:36:23   electrical noise of like the various inverters and stuff that are inside there. Like is that

00:36:28   really really quiet? maybe that's like so low that it's below the level of human hearing?

00:36:33   because i'm sure i still experience this even in my old age but especially when i was younger

00:36:39   you can hear the sound of electronics that have quote-unquote no moving parts yeah right

00:36:45   there's no fans you can depending on how if there's a power supply or a transformer or

00:36:49   an inverter or lots of things can vibrate and make noise that ostensibly aren't supposed

00:36:54   to be moving parts, and it can be really bad.

00:36:57   My Power Mac G5 had a chirping power supply.

00:37:00   That power supply wasn't supposed to have

00:37:01   any moving parts in it, but it had parts that moved

00:37:03   so much they made chirping noises like a bird, right?

00:37:05   So it can happen, so that makes me think

00:37:07   maybe that's what's rearing the MacBook Air.

00:37:09   - Maybe, but these numbers are so,

00:37:11   first of all, they're so low,

00:37:13   that they're suspiciously low,

00:37:15   and also, relative to each other, they're very odd.

00:37:20   - I don't think they're suspiciously low,

00:37:22   because if they do operator,

00:37:23   like everybody on YouTube who's measuring the sound

00:37:25   is sticking a mic like behind the Mac studio.

00:37:28   Like they're literally putting a mic right,

00:37:30   like they're miking a drum kit or something like that,

00:37:32   putting a mic right where the fan outlet is.

00:37:34   Whereas Apple says they're doing it from operator position.

00:37:36   So operator position is those,

00:37:38   the output is facing away from you,

00:37:40   the thing is on the desk, it's like three feet away,

00:37:42   huge difference.

00:37:43   So I don't find the absolute value suspect at all.

00:37:46   The relative values, I don't know.

00:37:49   I haven't had enough of these machines to know.

00:37:51   Like again, maybe three decibels is below,

00:37:53   is just electrical noise.

00:37:55   iMac Pro at 13 and Mac Pro at 11, you're right, I kind of--

00:38:00   - That's the thing, like relative to each other,

00:38:02   it's very strange.

00:38:03   And to say, and if the Mac Pro is 11

00:38:06   and then the Mac Studio is 15,

00:38:09   like that's, again, then the Mac Studio is pretty loud.

00:38:12   - Well, we see previously about like a three decibel

00:38:17   difference or four decibel difference

00:38:18   being just about noticeable.

00:38:21   I notice a three decibel difference.

00:38:23   I make three decibel adjustments when I'm editing.

00:38:26   I know what that sounds like.

00:38:28   - So eventually, eventually, at the very least,

00:38:31   I eventually will get one of these in the distant future

00:38:34   and then when no one cares anymore,

00:38:35   I will tell you how it sounds.

00:38:36   - All right.

00:38:37   - So real time follow up from Mr. Jason Snell,

00:38:39   all I can say is that I noticed the sound.

00:38:41   I wasn't trying to hear it, I noticed it.

00:38:43   But it is very quiet and my office was entirely silent

00:38:46   when I noticed.

00:38:48   And then some of us just don't really care about fans

00:38:50   and in fact have a clickety clattering,

00:38:52   clattering, uh,

00:38:53   - You've got the same technology in the same room as you

00:38:55   and that thing is so loud.

00:38:56   It's the loudest fan having thing in my house.

00:38:59   - Ah, see I snuck them up on you.

00:39:00   - I don't get the vibrous laugh,

00:39:01   only when Casey says it.

00:39:02   He, I was, I was slow.

00:39:03   - No, he was delayed.

00:39:04   He was delayed.

00:39:05   - Does it sound like a vibrous laugh?

00:39:06   Like all the hard drives clicking, you know?

00:39:08   - Yup, that's exactly what it sounds like.

00:39:09   - Oh, I'm just backing up the time machine.

00:39:09   (phone ringing)

00:39:10   Yeah, that's, oh, I'm watching some Plex.

00:39:13   - Actually, that's how you know when they're failing.

00:39:14   - Yeah, right.

00:39:15   - All right, moving right along,

00:39:16   that's enough about fan noise for now.

00:39:18   Anonymous writes in with regard to cellular and licensing.

00:39:21   So the context here is that, you know,

00:39:23   what happens if Apple were to release

00:39:25   a cellular equipped MacBook, which by the way,

00:39:28   Marco, did you see somebody was saying,

00:39:30   there was like a brief rumor that somebody was saying,

00:39:32   I think, that that's coming.

00:39:33   Maybe I made that up, I could swear I saw that.

00:39:35   But nevertheless.

00:39:36   - I mean, that would be nice.

00:39:37   I'm not holding my breath.

00:39:39   - Neither am I.

00:39:40   - I hope so much that they do it.

00:39:42   I think cellular might be my last outstanding laptop

00:39:47   feature request from Apple.

00:39:48   Like I love everything else about the current laptops.

00:39:50   I think they nailed pretty much everything else I want.

00:39:53   Besides, you know, I would always appreciate more ports,

00:39:56   but I'm very happy with these laptops.

00:39:58   I have pretty much no outstanding wishlist items

00:40:01   except cellular.

00:40:03   That's it, that's like the only thing left.

00:40:06   - I cannot say enough good things

00:40:08   about the laptops right now.

00:40:09   They are so freaking perfect.

00:40:10   But anyway, so we were talking about, you know, would it be a fortune for Apple to add,

00:40:14   you know, a cellular modem to one of these devices?

00:40:17   And so Anonymous writes, "I don't see a discussion about laptops, but at least for phones, Qualcomm

00:40:22   caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a $400 phone."

00:40:26   And they quote a thing from Reuters about this, because we were saying, you know, we

00:40:30   thought that the royalties owed to Qualcomm are a percentage of the cost of the device.

00:40:36   So if you have like a $5,000 laptop, that's a lot of money you owe Qualcomm.

00:40:40   And so Anonymous is pointing out that, oh no, at least for phones, it was capped at

00:40:44   $400.

00:40:45   And there were a couple of links about this.

00:40:47   And then what was also interesting, which I'd forgotten, is that Qualcomm collects royalties,

00:40:52   this is Anonymous again, Qualcomm collects royalties regardless of whether an OEM gets

00:40:56   the modem chip from Qualcomm or from someone else.

00:40:59   And this is quoted in a court document that we can put in the show notes as well.

00:41:04   And the quote from that document is, "OEMs are required to pay a per-unit license from

00:41:07   royalty to Qualcomm for its patent portfolios regardless of which company they choose to

00:41:11   source their chips from. Man, that's a racket. I want to get in on that.

00:41:16   That's just how patents work. Patents are a racket.

00:41:20   We don't actually know if there's a patent cross-licensing agreement with either Apple

00:41:24   and Qualcomm or with Intel's cellular modem thing that Apple bought. Lots of companies.

00:41:30   That's why patent cross-licensing agreements exist. Patents are terrible and stupid and

00:41:34   shouldn't exist, but they do, and because they do, it's this mutually assured destruction

00:41:38   thing where companies have their own portfolios of patents, and then they sort of enter these

00:41:43   agreements and say, "We won't annihilate you with our patents as long as you promise not

00:41:46   to annihilate us with your patents," and they enter a cross-licensing agreement that says,

00:41:50   "We let you use your patents as long as we can use your patents," and then we agree not

00:41:55   to sue each other.

00:41:57   And that's the only way anything gets done sometimes, because patents are so dumb, and

00:42:00   so many companies have them.

00:42:03   But yeah, I'm sure, I mean everything is patent-encumbered.

00:42:05   Everything that's in, you know, if you look at all the patents that apply to, you know,

00:42:09   the M1 chips, I'm sure there's tons of patents in there that Apple doesn't own that they

00:42:11   have to pay somebody for.

00:42:13   And Apple is making its own cell modems, and I'm sure there are patents in those cell modems

00:42:16   that Apple has to pay for.

00:42:17   I just don't know if there is an existing cross-licensing agreement between Apple and

00:42:22   Qualcomm or the ex-Intel cellular company, Qualcomm or whatever.

00:42:26   Yeah, patents are great.

00:42:27   You should do a podcast episode about that sometime, Jon.

00:42:31   Yeah.

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00:44:12   - Deep, deep cuts.

00:44:17   This was when we were talking about open source

00:44:19   and funding open source and how so many people,

00:44:21   so many companies specifically are kind of riding

00:44:23   on the coattails of open source.

00:44:24   And I brought up Discourse,

00:44:26   which had put up a blog post if I recall correctly,

00:44:29   saying, "Oh, look at us. We fund open source." And they gave, you know, tens of thousands

00:44:34   of dollars to different open source projects. And at first, I was like, "Oh, that's great."

00:44:37   And then the more I thought about them, I thought, "Well, tens of thousands of dollars,

00:44:40   really? That's it?" Well, I got an email--I got an email from Jeff Atwood, who is one

00:44:44   of the co-founders of Discourse, if I'm not mistaken. And Jeff writes, "As far as open

00:44:48   source goes, our primary contribution is the Discourse code and almost all of its plug-ins.

00:44:53   One of our core values is to be 100% open source now and forever. So far, so good. We've

00:44:58   We've been a self-sustaining, profitable, fully remote, no-headquarters, open-source

00:45:01   company since 2012, almost a decade now.

00:45:04   We host 100+ forums for open-source projects free of charge as part of our free hosting

00:45:08   programs, which I'll put a link to in the show notes.

00:45:11   And then Jeff continues, "We also contribute hundreds of hours of upstream fixes to the

00:45:14   open-source that we rely on, and pay other open-source projects for work and/or subscriptions

00:45:19   whenever we can.

00:45:20   For example, until we built a native chat feature in Discourse, which is currently in

00:45:23   in early beta, we paid for a yearly enterprise subscription

00:45:26   to Mattermost, an open source web chat solution.

00:45:29   So that is, that's my kind of stuff.

00:45:31   That's the spirit I like to see.

00:45:33   - Yeah, and Jeff Atwood, I mean,

00:45:34   so those of you who don't know,

00:45:36   obviously, forever ago, he's been known

00:45:37   as his blog, Coding Horror,

00:45:40   but also he was one of the founders of Stack Overflow.

00:45:42   And I'm pretty sure the reason why Stack Overflow had,

00:45:46   since the beginning, it had that thing

00:45:48   where its content is all released

00:45:49   under an open license of some sort,

00:45:51   I forget the details,

00:45:53   but all the content on Stack Overflow

00:45:55   that everyone's writing is freely available

00:45:57   for other people to redistribute under certain terms.

00:46:00   And I'm pretty sure that's because of Jeff.

00:46:01   I think he was the one who championed that early on

00:46:04   because he has always been pretty strong

00:46:07   about this kind of open source stuff.

00:46:08   So yeah, I respect him a lot.

00:46:10   And that sounds all right to me.

00:46:13   - Yeah, and open source companies are like,

00:46:16   if you are a company that's trying to make money

00:46:18   from open source, again, the old discussion,

00:46:20   how can you make money?

00:46:20   You give people the source code.

00:46:21   they pay for support and you know they pay sometimes pay for hosting and pay for all

00:46:25   of this stuff but anyway if you are an open source company and you're doing that it behooves

00:46:28   you to also help support other companies that do the same thing because it doesn't help

00:46:34   you if you are the only company in the entire world that does open source stuff and every

00:46:38   other one goes out of business so if you are using some other open source component in

00:46:42   your open source throw some of your money their way right so just you know try to make

00:46:46   it an actual ecosystem that is self-sustaining, because you can't just have, you can't sort

00:46:51   of be, "I get all the free stuff from everybody, but I give nothing back," especially if you're

00:46:56   going to be an open source company.

00:46:57   You really have to sort of give and take.

00:46:59   Indeed, and then speaking of that, there was a really good blog post that was pointed out

00:47:03   to us.

00:47:04   This blog post is by Filippo Valsorda, and it discusses how to pay professional maintainers,

00:47:10   so people who, you know, their job, either literally or effectively, is to maintain open

00:47:15   source projects. And Filippo writes, or actually it's Filippo isn't it, I'm sorry.

00:47:20   Anyways, they write, "I believe that to successfully fund an open source project

00:47:25   a company needs to pay the maintainers, not people external to the project, pay

00:47:29   them real money in the order of what they could make as senior engineers, pay

00:47:33   for maintenance, not features, grants, governance, or support, and keep paying

00:47:37   them, assess performance at contract renewal time." So basically in so

00:47:41   many words kind of sort of treat them like a real employee and I think that's

00:47:45   good advice yeah and this is you know what I'm saying like oh the people

00:47:48   charge for support and stuff like that this this advice is I agree with but

00:47:52   it's so hard to sell inside the company because that's why these bullet points

00:47:56   are so you know shocking it's like you know paying the maintainers versus

00:48:00   people external it's that well that's not that shocking I suggested unless

00:48:04   you have like don't pay random people to help there are already people

00:48:07   maintaining this just pay those people because they already know how to do it

00:48:10   they're already the experts, but then pay for maintenance,

00:48:12   not features or governance or support.

00:48:14   No one wants to pay for maintenance.

00:48:16   No one ever wants to pay for maintenance on anything,

00:48:19   on cars, houses, but especially software.

00:48:22   If you're going to convince your company to pay for something,

00:48:24   they're like, well, what do we get for the money?

00:48:25   They'll add the feature that we want, right?

00:48:27   Or they'll give us commercial support.

00:48:29   Those are things you can buy as well,

00:48:30   but also someone has to maintain it.

00:48:33   There's nothing to give you support on

00:48:35   if no one maintains it, and paying for maintenance,

00:48:37   everybody hates that, but it's important.

00:48:39   and then keep paying them.

00:48:40   It's like, can we just pay them once?

00:48:41   Like, during Open Source week, we'll give them $1,000,

00:48:43   and we don't have to think about it again for a year?

00:48:45   That's not sustainable.

00:48:46   The year goes by, and maybe that thing, you know,

00:48:49   will have some bug in it that destroys your whole company

00:48:51   that no one fixes because you never

00:48:52   paid anyone to maintain it.

00:48:54   - And then tell us about software warfare, Jon.

00:48:56   - This is another, you know, we talked about

00:48:58   Open Source people doing things intentionally

00:49:00   'cause they're cranky about not getting paid enough

00:49:02   to maintain their software.

00:49:03   This is like literal warfare, as in some people who are,

00:49:08   again, good old node.

00:49:08   Some people who are authors of a popular node package

00:49:12   intentionally updated it with some malware

00:49:15   that wipes your disk if you happen to have

00:49:16   a Russian or Belarusian IP address.

00:49:19   To sort of punish everyone who is in those countries

00:49:22   for the war in Ukraine, if you didn't notice

00:49:25   and didn't pin your dependencies and downloaded this thing

00:49:27   and it does a geo-IP lookup,

00:49:28   it tries to erase your hard drive.

00:49:30   And that is an example of absolutely, positively,

00:49:32   100% malicious, intentional, on-purpose damage

00:49:35   from an open source thing.

00:49:37   And it gets back to the whole argument, you know,

00:49:39   whether it's an accidental bug or a malicious thing

00:49:41   or someone who's just having a bad day.

00:49:43   If this piece of software is super important

00:49:45   to your business, and if you care about your business,

00:49:48   you have to take some ownership of that

00:49:50   by either pinning the dependency to a version

00:49:52   that you have vetted or making sure

00:49:55   that you have some kind of relationship,

00:49:57   business relationship with the people who rank the software

00:49:59   so that you can have some recourse.

00:50:02   Like for example, if you had a support contract

00:50:04   and somebody did that, probably you could sue them and win.

00:50:06   But if you have no commercial or relationship

00:50:08   with this person whatsoever,

00:50:11   when something like this happens,

00:50:12   there's not much you can do about it.

00:50:15   - Yeah, this is something.

00:50:17   I don't even know what to make of this,

00:50:18   but it's fascinating what you can do

00:50:20   if people are nefarious.

00:50:23   So moving right along.

00:50:25   Marco, you've been busy.

00:50:27   - I have.

00:50:28   - So busy you couldn't add anything to the show notes.

00:50:30   (laughing)

00:50:32   - Too busy pushing out software.

00:50:34   - Right?

00:50:36   So all kidding aside, congratulations,

00:50:38   new Overcast release.

00:50:39   Can you walk us through it?

00:50:40   What's new, what was good, what was bad, what was ugly?

00:50:43   Tell us everything.

00:50:44   - I have just released the Overcast 2022.2 update

00:50:49   that includes a significant redesign,

00:50:52   probably the most significant redesign

00:50:53   that I have done in its history,

00:50:56   as well as a bunch of features

00:50:58   and little tweaks here and there.

00:51:00   And this was the result of roughly,

00:51:04   I don't know, five months of work.

00:51:05   However long ago Thanksgiving was,

00:51:07   like it was like the week before Thanksgiving

00:51:08   that I really started this, like in earnest.

00:51:11   It's been a lot of work,

00:51:12   and I think it turned out pretty good.

00:51:15   I'm really happy with it.

00:51:17   I think this is the first time

00:51:21   that I think something that I designed

00:51:25   is good looking in an app.

00:51:27   You know, I've always had programmer designs before,

00:51:31   and I've never thought that what I was releasing

00:51:33   was absolute crap at the time I was releasing it.

00:51:36   But in retrospect, my design skills were terrible

00:51:40   in my early years of making apps

00:51:42   and got a little bit better over time.

00:51:45   But I think this is the first time

00:51:47   I've finally reached the point where

00:51:50   I think looking at this current design,

00:51:53   most people will not look at this and say,

00:51:55   wow, you should really hire a real designer.

00:51:57   I mean, some people will, 'cause that's always the case.

00:52:00   Even people who have, quote, real designers

00:52:02   will have people telling them that.

00:52:04   But I'm proud of this in the sense that

00:52:07   I think this is something that is nicely designed

00:52:09   that I designed.

00:52:10   That's not a common thing, not a common feeling I've had

00:52:13   in my career so far.

00:52:15   So I'm very proud of that.

00:52:17   So secondly from that, I think I'm pushing the design

00:52:20   forward in a way that is a little bit more aggressive

00:52:24   than I've done.

00:52:24   Most of the time my designs have been fairly conservative

00:52:28   in the ways they would use system elements,

00:52:31   the colors and fonts they would use,

00:52:34   it was all fairly conservative.

00:52:36   Here again, I think I'm very aggressively pushing

00:52:39   into color with this update.

00:52:41   I have thicker line weights everywhere as well.

00:52:45   I'm using the SF Rounded font,

00:52:48   and I even customized the numerals

00:52:49   so that it has the alternative four, six, and nine glyphs,

00:52:53   because I thought that it made them look more fun

00:52:55   and improved legibility at small sizes.

00:52:59   So, a lot of that kind of design work of like,

00:53:02   pushing this into what I think looks much more modern

00:53:06   than it did before.

00:53:07   Because the previous overcast design,

00:53:09   and if you wanna see before and after shots,

00:53:10   I have this blog post that I did on my site,

00:53:13   and it shows certain screens side by side,

00:53:15   and you can see the difference like, you know,

00:53:16   night and day.

00:53:17   If you look at that, it's very clear

00:53:19   that the previous design was very much of its era,

00:53:23   which was largely unchanged since I launched it,

00:53:26   at least in the list screens.

00:53:27   The Now Playing screen has changed a bit over time,

00:53:29   but, oh, and by the way, this redesign doesn't include

00:53:31   the Now Playing screen, or some of the other screens

00:53:33   in the app, but I'll get to those next.

00:53:36   But the main area of redesign here was the home screen,

00:53:41   you know, the thing that lists all your podcasts

00:53:42   and playlists, and then a little bit on the episode screens,

00:53:46   like the playlists themselves or the podcast,

00:53:49   but there's more to come on the podcast screen.

00:53:51   Anyway, I did a lot here that dramatically looks different

00:53:55   than the way the app has looked on the home screen

00:53:58   since basically it launched eight years ago almost.

00:54:01   It launched in the summer of 2014,

00:54:02   so this is almost eight years ago.

00:54:04   That was in the era of iOS 7 design.

00:54:06   And so the entire app before this,

00:54:09   at least the list screens, looked very iOS 70.

00:54:14   And that's a very dated look now.

00:54:16   Now the rest of the screens in the app,

00:54:18   the playlist and podcast screens

00:54:20   and the now playing screen,

00:54:21   I had done incremental revisions to those over the years,

00:54:24   But the home screen that lists all your podcasts

00:54:26   and playlists, that screen looked so old before.

00:54:30   So that's really what I was aiming mostly at,

00:54:33   was that home screen.

00:54:34   And lots of stuff throughout the app

00:54:36   that happened to be affected, like when I changed the font,

00:54:38   that changes everything in the app.

00:54:39   I changed the orange for the first time ever.

00:54:41   It's now a different orange.

00:54:42   It's now actually iOS system orange.

00:54:46   The default sequence of colors and most of the colors

00:54:49   that are available in the color pickers,

00:54:50   those are iOS standard system colors

00:54:52   that they introduced, I think two or three years ago,

00:54:55   where iOS basically launched its own,

00:54:56   like here's a nice design palette

00:54:58   with colors that all harmonize together or whatever.

00:55:01   Throughout the entire app, I'm using SF symbols

00:55:04   instead of my own icons for almost everything.

00:55:07   I'm highly customizing some of them.

00:55:08   In many cases, I am using multiple SF symbols together,

00:55:12   or I'm taking an SF symbol's base icon

00:55:15   and like badging it in a custom way or things like that,

00:55:18   but for the most part, I'm using SF symbols

00:55:20   almost everywhere.

00:55:22   All of this, I think, makes the app look and feel

00:55:26   much more like a modern app than it did before,

00:55:29   where before, in many ways,

00:55:31   and especially on that home screen,

00:55:33   it just looked so iOS 70.

00:55:35   In the era of iOS 7, when I designed that home screen,

00:55:39   that was fine, but we've moved on quite a bit since then.

00:55:43   Other than design, this also introduced a bunch of features,

00:55:45   things like a Mark As Played button,

00:55:47   a bunch of special playlists,

00:55:49   But for the most part, it was mostly about the design.

00:55:53   And I'll get to the reception in a minute.

00:55:54   But before I get there, did I cover

00:55:56   what you wanted me to cover?

00:55:57   Like, what do you think of this?

00:55:59   Can you explain-- I know you've gone back and forth on this a

00:56:01   lot with Twitter.

00:56:02   I know Marcus played was the number one requested feature

00:56:04   since 1.0.

00:56:05   And I understand, like, tons of people want it and everything.

00:56:08   But I have to say, I'm in the camp of not understanding

00:56:11   the purpose or function of this.

00:56:13   So can you tell me what the masses that were demanding

00:56:15   a Marcus played feature, like, how they use it

00:56:17   and how it functions?

00:56:18   'cause from my perspective with the,

00:56:19   I'm used to the overcast defaults as they've always been.

00:56:22   When a podcast completes,

00:56:23   I have it set to auto delete itself, right?

00:56:25   So marking is played, but not deleting,

00:56:29   I don't understand how that interacts with,

00:56:31   like what were people who wanted markets played?

00:56:33   What did they want from overcast

00:56:34   and what do they now have now that you've added it?

00:56:36   - Agreed.

00:56:37   - So since the beginning, I'm like you,

00:56:39   I let things play until they're done or until close enough,

00:56:42   then I fast forward to the end.

00:56:44   I even, I have a little behavioral trick

00:56:46   I've had in there.

00:56:47   I think maybe since 1.0, certainly for a very long time,

00:56:50   where if you fast forward 30, 30, 30, 30, 30,

00:56:54   and if you hit the end,

00:56:56   it ignores any further fast forward commands

00:56:59   until you stop fast forwarding for a second or two.

00:57:01   That way, if you wanna quickly reach the end,

00:57:04   you can just slam on fast forward from whatever you're in.

00:57:06   If you're in your car,

00:57:07   if you're on your headphone clicker, whatever it is,

00:57:08   you can just slam fast forward,

00:57:10   just spam click it basically,

00:57:12   and then when it reaches the end of the podcast,

00:57:13   it won't seek into the next one,

00:57:16   because that's a common thing that I would wanna do sometimes

00:57:18   and often I'd be like in a car or something.

00:57:20   I hear the ending theme song begin to something,

00:57:21   ah, skip, skip, skip, skip, and then once it stopped skipping

00:57:24   I knew I'd reach the end.

00:57:25   Anyway, ever since 1.0, my vision of deletion was

00:57:30   I would hit the end in some form and it would delete

00:57:33   and that would be it.

00:57:34   And I never thought, I mean it did track

00:57:37   whether something had reached the end,

00:57:39   so it was tracking played status since the beginning,

00:57:42   but it never had a button that you could make it

00:57:44   say it was played.

00:57:46   You could delete it, but deleting doesn't mean

00:57:49   mark as played.

00:57:50   It would get rid of it, but it would not show

00:57:52   that word played in the description

00:57:55   unless you actually played it 'til the end.

00:57:57   And the only way to get it there quickly,

00:57:59   like if you saw an episode of this

00:58:01   and you wanted it to be marked as played,

00:58:03   you would have to open it up, seek to the end,

00:58:06   let it hit the end.

00:58:07   You also, by the way, you also can't seek to the end

00:58:09   by dragging, that's another intentional

00:58:10   little behavioral thing.

00:58:11   If you drag the slider all the way to the right,

00:58:13   it will seek to 10 seconds before the end.

00:58:16   Now, you could drag all the way to the right

00:58:17   and then hit seek forward,

00:58:18   that will hit it right to the end.

00:58:19   Anyway, so this is also,

00:58:22   you know, these are ways people were doing this

00:58:24   who wanted to do this.

00:58:25   Now-- - But when you say

00:58:26   it would be shown as played--

00:58:28   - Yes. - If it is deleted,

00:58:30   or is this for like, if it was streaming?

00:58:31   Like, where would you see the word played displayed

00:58:35   on an episode that you no longer have?

00:58:37   Like, you notice that you're tracking it,

00:58:38   so you can know that like, they have played it.

00:58:40   but when I go to the end of a show naturally,

00:58:44   it gets deleted, presumably internally in your database

00:58:46   you mark it as played, how does that manifest?

00:58:48   How do I ever see that again?

00:58:49   - Progress/played and deleted are two separate values

00:58:52   in the database, and the way it manifests itself is

00:58:56   if you're looking at the list of episodes

00:58:58   of all episodes of a podcast,

00:59:00   like if you go into the podcast screen,

00:59:01   you hit the all tab, and you see all episodes

00:59:03   of that podcast, historically you will see

00:59:05   which ones you have actually played,

00:59:07   and the rest that are dimmed out are just deleted.

00:59:10   So the reason why people wanted this

00:59:13   is that a lot of times people will selectively

00:59:16   play only certain episodes of a podcast.

00:59:20   Or they will want to go back and replay a podcast,

00:59:23   or they will want to,

00:59:24   if they come to Overcast from another app,

00:59:27   maybe they wanna indicate where they are,

00:59:30   like where they've listened up to,

00:59:32   by marking certain episodes as play

00:59:34   that they've already heard.

00:59:35   So those are the major use cases for this.

00:59:37   And in those cases, they want that all list

00:59:40   to properly represent which ones they have played

00:59:43   and which ones they have merely deleted

00:59:45   or not ever listened to.

00:59:48   So that's the demand side of it.

00:59:50   And I don't really work that way when I'm listening to stuff.

00:59:53   And that's why I never really saw that need.

00:59:55   But literally since the beginning,

00:59:56   not only has this been a constant request,

01:00:00   but people would write in not saying,

01:00:03   hey, could you please add this feature,

01:00:05   but saying, where is this feature?

01:00:07   as if they, it's so fundamental to them that of course this feature would exist,

01:00:11   they assume it must exist and they aren't finding it. Or it's a bug in my app that somehow it's not

01:00:16   displaying. That's how fundamental people have thought this feature is.

01:00:19   - I feel like I just blue-screen. This is the antithesis of how I personally go through and

01:00:25   listen to podcasts. Like, I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm not saying that I'm right and they're

01:00:28   wrong, it's just, this never would have crossed my mind in a trillion years. Like, to go surfing

01:00:33   through the all episodes list and making decisions based on what you have or have not played.

01:00:38   I conceptually understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, but this is so foreign

01:00:43   to me that this is how people choose to listen to podcasts.

01:00:46   Yeah, and this is why a lot of the things I've added or changed in this version were

01:00:51   about trying to accommodate more usage patterns than just the way I do things. I've always

01:00:57   designed the app primarily for me, and if I can accommodate other people relatively

01:01:02   easily great, but it's always been designed to fit my mental model of how I listen to

01:01:07   things. But there's always been lots of other people who use it who don't use things the

01:01:11   way I do. Like, I use playlists. I almost never play a podcast by going to the podcast

01:01:16   screen and then playing it from there. I'm almost always playing it from a playlist screen.

01:01:21   But yet, there's a lot of people who never use playlists or very rarely use them and

01:01:25   only ever play from the podcast screen. So there's always been these divides of how people

01:01:29   use it, it's such a fundamental workflow for people, like how they play and manage their

01:01:34   podcasts that there's lots of different ways that lots of different people want to use

01:01:37   this.

01:01:38   So like the features I added, I added the ability to have special playlist types that

01:01:43   would show you episodes that are in progress, episodes that are downloaded, or all episodes

01:01:48   that you have starred.

01:01:50   In practice, I personally need none of those things, and I don't intend to actually use

01:01:55   I might have the starred list here and there

01:01:59   if I wanna look up something again,

01:02:00   but for the most part, I don't need any of those things.

01:02:03   But they were very highly demanded features as well.

01:02:06   Because a lot of people, the way their workflow works,

01:02:09   they wanna know which ones are in progress.

01:02:12   Or they wanna know only which ones are downloaded,

01:02:14   like if they're on a plane or something.

01:02:15   Or if they have some kind of weird

01:02:16   data restriction situation going on.

01:02:18   So there's all these needs that I've been hearing about

01:02:20   over and over and over again from my user base

01:02:23   for a very long time.

01:02:24   That's why I added these things.

01:02:26   And Marcus played was just so incredibly popularly requested,

01:02:31   so frequently requested slash demanded it so frequently,

01:02:36   I decided not only to add it, but to add it prominently.

01:02:39   That's why it has its own button on the toolbar

01:02:41   next to the delete button.

01:02:43   It's that demanded.

01:02:44   That's how many people wanted this over such a long time

01:02:47   that it had to be a top level feature right there,

01:02:50   very visible right next to delete.

01:02:52   I mean, I hear you, but it's just like I said,

01:02:54   I'm blue screening.

01:02:55   It just seems so bananas to me,

01:02:57   but whatever makes people happy.

01:02:59   - I mean, you can see, if you look in our chat right now,

01:03:00   our live chat, everyone's saying how they listen to podcasts

01:03:02   and it's all different.

01:03:03   Everyone has different ways that they want these features

01:03:05   to work or different subsets of these features

01:03:07   that they want to use.

01:03:09   Half the people are like, why do you need that?

01:03:11   The other half are like, how do you not need that?

01:03:12   Like, it's just, this is just how this market goes.

01:03:15   And so, the more versatile my app can be

01:03:19   without ruining itself and getting too complicated,

01:03:23   then I think the better it is business-wise to do it.

01:03:26   Now, the reception to the design, I think,

01:03:29   shows quite a bit of,

01:03:31   maybe not discrepancy, but different preferences, let's say.

01:03:38   - So tell me more about that.

01:03:39   - When I was designing this,

01:03:42   I remember I was sitting in a hotel room.

01:03:46   Tiff and I had taken a vacation right before Thanksgiving

01:03:49   for a few days, just in upstate New York.

01:03:51   And she had this idea, and forgive me,

01:03:54   I've now told this story on three different

01:03:57   podcast interviews that are all coming out

01:03:58   around the same time, so I'm sorry if you've heard it before

01:04:00   slash we'll hear it again.

01:04:02   But basically, she was looking through an app,

01:04:05   I forget which app, it might have been Pinterest, I think.

01:04:07   And she had these pill-shaped oval things

01:04:11   that were showing topics or whatever,

01:04:13   and she's like, look, this is what modern apps look like.

01:04:18   this is what people expect a new modern app to look like.

01:04:22   And I saw those pills and I'm like, huh, I think,

01:04:26   'cause for a while I'd been thinking I want to,

01:04:28   in the redesign I was thinking like I wanted

01:04:29   to make playlists look better somehow.

01:04:32   And I played with all sorts of ways to do it.

01:04:34   I played with just giving them their own album artwork

01:04:36   on the side, like their own little like round rect

01:04:38   on the left side, matching up with like the specs

01:04:41   of the album artwork or the podcast below them.

01:04:43   And I've tried different things over time with,

01:04:46   like how I represent them in CarPlay.

01:04:48   if you've ever seen them in car play,

01:04:48   I did like a two by two grid of the artwork

01:04:51   of the episodes that were in there,

01:04:52   and I was trying to render that on the home screen,

01:04:55   but it was looking really busy and ugly.

01:04:57   I was trying to figure out what do I want playlists

01:04:59   to look like, and I couldn't nail it in my head.

01:05:02   I couldn't figure out like, everything I was trying,

01:05:05   everything I would think of,

01:05:06   like the little two by two artwork grid,

01:05:08   I tried rendering the artwork in a little stack

01:05:10   as the icon for the playlist,

01:05:11   and everything I tried just looked busy or ugly or both.

01:05:14   I couldn't make it work, I couldn't nail it yet.

01:05:17   And then when she showed me those pill shapes,

01:05:18   I'm like, wait a minute.

01:05:20   If I make them pill shaped,

01:05:22   that changes how they look from the podcast below them

01:05:27   in a very prominent way.

01:05:29   And that would enable me to have more customization.

01:05:32   And I was thinking maybe I could add icons.

01:05:35   Maybe I could add custom colors.

01:05:37   You know, people, I've seen for years,

01:05:39   people have been hacking this in bad ways.

01:05:41   They've been, you know, 'cause before, you know,

01:05:43   before you couldn't have custom colors or icons

01:05:46   or custom ordering of playlists.

01:05:48   Those are all new.

01:05:49   And so to get custom ordering,

01:05:51   a lot of people have shown me screenshots over time

01:05:53   where they would name the playlists like one, workout,

01:05:56   two, running, that kind of thing.

01:05:58   And so they would prefix them with numbers.

01:06:01   And to achieve icons, many people would just add emoji

01:06:04   to the front of them.

01:06:05   And I don't know, Casey, if you've heard about emoji.

01:06:07   - I should look into that. - Yeah, yeah.

01:06:09   So people have been doing these hacks

01:06:11   to get around these limitations,

01:06:13   but I thought I can do a much better job of this

01:06:15   and make it much nicer if I first have manual reordering,

01:06:19   'cause that's clearly a need that people have requested

01:06:22   a lot over time, and then second,

01:06:24   if I can have playlists have their own custom

01:06:26   visual identity that people can just set whatever they want.

01:06:28   So custom icon, custom color, so.

01:06:31   That's kinda where that came from.

01:06:33   And I played with it and I thought,

01:06:34   and this is, you know, people who have been,

01:06:37   you know, paying attention to, I hate to say it this way,

01:06:40   but to my fashion preferences recently,

01:06:42   I've said over time, I'm so tired of black computers

01:06:46   and black t-shirts.

01:06:47   I did that for a very long time,

01:06:49   I did only that for a very long time,

01:06:51   and now I'm like exploding with color,

01:06:53   like just give me all the colors.

01:06:55   Like I recently changed my Apple Watch strap

01:06:57   from white to yellow, like I'm all colorful now.

01:07:00   And so I wanted to bring some of that energy into the app.

01:07:04   It was a very aggressive design, and I intentionally,

01:07:07   even during the beta testing, I played around a little bit

01:07:10   with these things, but I decided I'm gonna force color

01:07:14   upon people by default.

01:07:15   Now, if they wanna remove some of that color, they can.

01:07:18   It's customizable.

01:07:20   I have had feature requests for people saying,

01:07:22   "Can you please make gray a color?"

01:07:24   (laughs)

01:07:25   And frankly, I'm not going to do that for lots of reasons.

01:07:28   Number one, it's hideous.

01:07:29   Number two, I use gray to indicate an empty state

01:07:32   for the playlist, so it wouldn't work very well,

01:07:35   and I don't intend to do it.

01:07:36   But by default, if you wanna go in there

01:07:39   and set every color to one color you can.

01:07:42   But by default, I actually created a default color

01:07:44   sequence that if you have multiple playlists,

01:07:46   they all follow the same color sequence by default

01:07:48   as you add them or as it runs first.

01:07:50   Because I want people to try some color, because it's nice.

01:07:56   And we've had a lot of dark times in the world

01:07:59   in recent years.

01:08:00   And maybe this will help a little bit.

01:08:02   People feel a little bit nicer.

01:08:03   And I think that's one of the reasons why--

01:08:05   I don't know if you've noticed-- colors are in fashion right now.

01:08:08   and not just like a color, but just being colorful

01:08:11   is kind of in fashion right now.

01:08:13   I hate that I'm telling you fashion advice,

01:08:14   but here, this is the world we're in now.

01:08:16   So anyway, the reaction to this, I was nervous about

01:08:21   because it's a very big, bold change.

01:08:25   One thing that's interesting is that

01:08:28   some of the reaction has been,

01:08:30   why did you make everything so big?

01:08:32   Now if you look at my screenshot comparisons,

01:08:37   Everything is exactly the same height.

01:08:40   Playlists, podcasts, and episodes

01:08:43   are all exactly the same height as they were before.

01:08:45   I think it's 88 points, something like that.

01:08:48   Exactly the same height.

01:08:49   Actually, playlists are, when you're in a playlist view,

01:08:53   you actually have a few pixels of additional width

01:08:56   for the title than you had before,

01:08:57   because the way the artwork margins work out,

01:08:59   you actually have more width for the title. (laughs)

01:09:02   But anyway, people view it as big and bold,

01:09:06   because before it was so sparse, especially Playlist.

01:09:10   Playlist before on the home screen were just black text

01:09:14   in the middle of a giant floating,

01:09:15   floating in the middle of a giant cell.

01:09:17   Like there was, it looked like,

01:09:18   when I look back on it now,

01:09:19   it looks like a rendering error.

01:09:20   I'm like, they were so basic before.

01:09:23   If you make things more colorful and put borders around them,

01:09:27   people will think they're bigger even though they're not.

01:09:29   So that's fun.

01:09:30   Anyway, so I was very confident launching this

01:09:34   that I had made something good,

01:09:36   that I was very proud of the design

01:09:38   and I was ready to assert to the world if necessary,

01:09:41   no, trust me, this is good.

01:09:42   And if you don't like it, well, I'm sorry,

01:09:44   but I'm not gonna bow to any demands to change it back.

01:09:49   This is the way forward.

01:09:52   I put it out there first to the beta group

01:09:56   and the beta group was pretty positive about it.

01:10:00   There were one or two people out of,

01:10:03   I had a couple of thousand maybe,

01:10:05   who were like, I really don't like this,

01:10:06   I wanna go back to the original.

01:10:08   But for the most part, it was a relatively small percentage.

01:10:10   Everyone else was pretty positive about it.

01:10:13   And then I gave out press invitations

01:10:16   to look at it and everything,

01:10:18   and I knew press was all gonna hit it once

01:10:20   when it released last Friday.

01:10:24   The press was all set for a certain time,

01:10:26   and I thought, here we go,

01:10:28   we're gonna see what the press says.

01:10:29   I have no idea, I'm confident, I think this is very good,

01:10:33   But we'll see.

01:10:34   And the press comes out,

01:10:36   and actually, it was pretty universally positive.

01:10:39   So I'm like, all right, here we go.

01:10:41   I'm riding high now.

01:10:43   Here we go.

01:10:44   And then it starts getting out to all the users

01:10:48   over that overall Friday.

01:10:51   And I'm nervous as heck because I'm watching my servers,

01:10:53   thinking on first run of the new version,

01:10:57   the playlists assign themselves colors,

01:10:59   and then they have to sync those changes to the servers.

01:11:02   So on first run, everyone's playlists are going to have to sync new changes to the servers.

01:11:06   So I'm watching the servers like a hawk like, Oh my God, is this going to explode?

01:11:09   What's going on?

01:11:10   Like, I even I approved it at like two in the morning, or like midnight to go live at

01:11:14   midnight, just so that most of those sinks would happen, most of those first things would

01:11:18   happen overnight, when the server's traffic is low, you know, but anyway, so I'm watching

01:11:25   the press, I'm watching the servers, I'm really nervous, I start seeing all the reactions

01:11:28   on Twitter and they are amazingly positive. Everyone who's getting the update, they're

01:11:33   all tweeting on Twitter, "Oh my God, this is great. Wow, look at that." Everyone's

01:11:38   calling it words I don't even understand, like whatever young people say that when things

01:11:41   are good that I saw some of those words fly by and I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing."

01:11:45   I'm like, "I'm even getting young people to think it's good." I mean, probably not

01:11:48   all of them because it's still a podcast I've made by a 40-year-old guy, a programmer.

01:11:53   But anyway, I'm getting all these things, all these praise. And so for the most part,

01:11:58   it's been very, very good.

01:11:59   However, the people who don't like redesigns

01:12:03   tend to be a little bit slower on the uptake

01:12:05   of updates for apps.

01:12:07   So, days one, two, and three were fantastic.

01:12:12   Now that it's like day six or whatever,

01:12:15   a lot, I'm getting a lot of bad emails.

01:12:19   (laughs)

01:12:20   But, you know, when I look at the proportions,

01:12:23   it is universally very, very well received.

01:12:27   And I look at my, of course I'm getting one, two star reviews as well from people who are

01:12:33   angry but if you look at the average still of new reviews coming in, it's still very

01:12:38   good.

01:12:39   So anyway, please, I would encourage you all, I don't ask this very often, if you want to

01:12:45   rate Overcast, this is a good time to do it because right now I'm at maximum anger from

01:12:50   those people who don't like things to be changed.

01:12:53   But this is not to say anything is dire.

01:12:56   My average is still very good.

01:12:58   I just, it would be nice to have a little bit of goodness

01:13:02   coming into my inbox for the next couple of days

01:13:04   as the slower and more grumpy group gets in.

01:13:09   Let me see, I just deleted one a few minutes ago.

01:13:13   This was amazing.

01:13:15   Oh, I can't find it.

01:13:15   Anyway, it was like a one word thing.

01:13:17   It was, the subject was like, it's poop.

01:13:19   (laughing)

01:13:21   And there was an empty body.

01:13:22   (laughing)

01:13:24   - Nice.

01:13:25   - Yeah, so that's the caliber of things I'm getting.

01:13:27   I'm getting nicer ones too, but they're just like,

01:13:29   can we please have a switch to switch back

01:13:31   to the old design?

01:13:32   I was like, no.

01:13:33   - Did you reset the ratings for this version?

01:13:35   - No, I don't think I've ever done that.

01:13:38   - 'Cause I guess I've never rated overcast,

01:13:39   I just went and rated it.

01:13:41   - Thank you.

01:13:41   - I said it was poop.

01:13:43   (laughing)

01:13:46   This is my turn to apologize for being a bad beta tester,

01:13:48   because part of the reason we forgot

01:13:52   about the new Overcast version,

01:13:53   as well as Casey and I have been using it forever,

01:13:54   because we've been on the beta,

01:13:56   and we're just kind of used to it by now.

01:13:58   It was the new version for us like months ago, right?

01:14:01   - By the way, please everybody out there,

01:14:03   please don't, as a joke, review Overcast and say it's poop.

01:14:07   Like, I know that sounds like a good--

01:14:09   - Not funny, not funny.

01:14:11   - In your head, that might sound like a good joke.

01:14:13   Trust me, it won't be received that way

01:14:15   by the other people who are looking at the Overcast page

01:14:18   trying to decide whether they want to download this app

01:14:20   or not and don't know us and don't know you

01:14:21   and don't know me.

01:14:22   Trust me.

01:14:24   Let's all laugh at that joke in our heads right now

01:14:26   and then not do it.

01:14:27   Thank you.

01:14:28   Sorry, go ahead, Jon.

01:14:30   So looking at the--

01:14:31   I was thinking I've been using the beta version for so long.

01:14:33   And for the most part, I just continued

01:14:35   to use it the way I used it or whatever.

01:14:37   But then I realized when you do a release

01:14:39   and you do the blog post that explains all the features,

01:14:42   I kind of wish you'd do that at the beginning of the beta

01:14:44   instead of at the end.

01:14:45   Because I read the blog post and I

01:14:46   learn things about the application

01:14:48   I've been using for months.

01:14:49   I'm like, oh, I didn't know what had to be--

01:14:50   I mean, again, as that gets back to like,

01:14:51   if you don't use those features

01:14:53   or it's not the way you work with things,

01:14:54   I'm not gonna go hunting for them, right?

01:14:56   So I just look at it and says,

01:14:57   "Can I continue to use Overcast the way I've always used it?"

01:14:59   And you know, "Oh, it looks different

01:15:00   "and it does a few more things."

01:15:02   And you know, I noticed the mark is played button

01:15:04   or whatever, like, "Oh, that's not for me."

01:15:07   But then there's other things that it can do.

01:15:08   And so I'm a bad beta tester in that

01:15:10   the only time I actually really start exploring that

01:15:12   is after you release it and do the blog post

01:15:14   that explains all the features

01:15:15   that I should have been seeing.

01:15:16   And yes, I do look at the test flight notes,

01:15:18   but they're not always that informative,

01:15:19   certainly not as informative as the blog post.

01:15:23   And so the second thing is, now, for example,

01:15:26   customizing playlists.

01:15:28   I just accepted the colors and the names that you picked,

01:15:30   and I'm like, they look nice, it's fine.

01:15:32   (laughing)

01:15:33   But you can customize these, you can change the colors,

01:15:35   you can change the icons, huh?

01:15:37   And so after it's released officially,

01:15:39   and I learned that from your blog post,

01:15:41   I go in, I'm like, oh, I should change some of the,

01:15:43   let me see if I can change some of the icons.

01:15:45   And of course, you talked about the SF symbols thing

01:15:47   and everything, so I saw this huge list in there.

01:15:49   And now I'd like to do, in the grand tradition

01:15:52   of any of us releasing software on the show,

01:15:56   I need to do my real-time bug report.

01:15:57   So please--

01:15:58   (laughing)

01:15:59   Please take out your iPhone now.

01:16:02   Take out your iPhone now and go to a playlist and edit it.

01:16:07   Go to playlist settings and then tap on icon, please.

01:16:10   Tell me when you're all there.

01:16:11   - Okay.

01:16:12   - All right, so this is what I did.

01:16:13   I'm like, oh, look at all these icons.

01:16:14   And I love that you have the search

01:16:15   and I knew that you did it based

01:16:17   on the accessibility data or whatever,

01:16:18   so you can do a text search or whatever.

01:16:20   So just type MUS for like search for music, all right?

01:16:23   And you type MUS, oh look, and it's narrowed down

01:16:25   to a bunch of icons.

01:16:26   - What mustache?

01:16:27   - Yeah, mustache, they look like they're music symbols

01:16:30   or whatever, so pick one of those.

01:16:31   I'm like, oh, I'm gonna go with the three music notes,

01:16:33   and I tap on the three music notes.

01:16:35   And then I stare at my phone, and I'm like, hmm.

01:16:37   - Oh yeah, I need a done button, I know.

01:16:39   - So what do I do now?

01:16:42   - Yeah.

01:16:43   - And the answer is you hit cancel.

01:16:46   - No, no, no, you hit the back button.

01:16:47   - Or the back button, neither one of those things

01:16:49   feels like an affirmative action.

01:16:51   I literally couldn't figure this out.

01:16:53   I would, I did, I hit the X and I did,

01:16:55   and I searched again and then I long pressed,

01:16:58   then I was like hit cancel and then I hit,

01:17:00   eventually I figured it out, but it is so not obvious

01:17:03   how when I-- - I'm gonna add a done button

01:17:05   to the upper right. - Yeah, like I need,

01:17:06   I need something that's like, and now,

01:17:08   because just hitting the three little arrows,

01:17:11   that doesn't complete the screen.

01:17:12   It's not like I found the icon I want

01:17:13   and I hit it and the screen dismisses.

01:17:15   it stays there staring at me and I don't know what to do.

01:17:17   - No, no, that is very valid, and in fact,

01:17:19   Tiff did that when I was watching her user

01:17:21   for the first time, and I just forgot to write it down.

01:17:23   So yeah, no, that's true, that's good, thank you.

01:17:25   - Yes, and I'm sorry for not giving you that bug

01:17:26   in the months that I was testing this beta,

01:17:28   but there you go.

01:17:28   I made up for it, made it up for it live on the show.

01:17:32   - Well, you also didn't give me the same bug then,

01:17:34   because in the version of Masquerade that as we record,

01:17:38   I hope to release tomorrow morning, it's through App Review,

01:17:40   I just wanna check a couple things.

01:17:43   Anyway, I rejiggered the way the default emoji

01:17:45   settings page works, and there's a new settings page

01:17:48   for face detection size where you can tell it,

01:17:50   even, you know, make this a little bit bigger

01:17:52   than just the face.

01:17:53   - We have very large faces in my family.

01:17:55   - Yeah, my family is full of big, hearty faces.

01:17:58   Anyway, there's basically a slider,

01:18:01   and the options in the upper left and right,

01:18:04   in the upper left is just to go back to settings,

01:18:06   and in the upper right, there's a reset button

01:18:07   that is only valid if you've futzed about with,

01:18:10   or don't leave it exactly where you found it.

01:18:13   And so in order to save your setting, you just go back,

01:18:17   which is basically what Marco's got here.

01:18:19   And I went back and forth about this,

01:18:21   but it seems I actually think I like this more now

01:18:25   because as soon as you make a change, it is saved,

01:18:28   and then there's a reset button in my case

01:18:30   if you wanna go back to the way it was.

01:18:31   So I'm with you, Marco.

01:18:33   I don't think you need a done button, but--

01:18:35   - No, no, I do need one.

01:18:36   - You definitely need one.

01:18:37   I mean, it really has to do with the context

01:18:39   of like having things take effect in real time

01:18:41   versus having select them and hit a done,

01:18:43   it's really, really sensitive to like the expected context.

01:18:46   Like, are you throwing up a sheet

01:18:48   where you have to make the sheet go away?

01:18:50   And if the only way is to make it go away

01:18:52   or like cancel or back, those don't feel affirmative

01:18:54   versus are you flipping a switch?

01:18:56   And you're confident that when I flip the switch,

01:18:57   the setting has taken effect

01:18:58   because I've not placed into a second.

01:19:00   Like there's all sorts of cultural baggage

01:19:02   of like when there is an expectation

01:19:04   that you have to sort of say,

01:19:06   I have now done the thing yes versus no,

01:19:09   nevermind everything I did.

01:19:11   And we used to have this debate in the old days

01:19:14   of Mac OS X of like, if you bring up a pref screen,

01:19:17   like you bring up preferences

01:19:19   and it's got a bunch of check boxes for like,

01:19:20   you want this setting on or off or whatever,

01:19:22   should the preferences take effect

01:19:24   as soon as you hit that check box

01:19:25   or only after you decide whether to hit OK or cancel

01:19:28   on the preferences window?

01:19:29   And that culturally changed between classic Mac OS

01:19:31   and Mac OS X.

01:19:32   The Mac OS X way to do it by the way

01:19:34   is to essentially do it in real time

01:19:36   And then closing the preferences window

01:19:37   is just like I'm done setting things.

01:19:38   But as soon as you hit that checkbox,

01:19:41   well-behaved Mac OS X, whatever, Mac OS,

01:19:43   whatever we call it these days, application,

01:19:46   that's it, that you've done the thing.

01:19:48   You know, reticulate splines, check, right?

01:19:52   You know, that's it.

01:19:53   And then closing the preferences window is,

01:19:56   okay, well now I'm just not gonna do

01:19:57   any more changes to preferences.

01:19:58   But closing or not closing the preferences window

01:20:01   should have no effect on, you know,

01:20:03   like it's not like if you make a bunch of changes

01:20:05   and then change your mind,

01:20:06   There's no way to get out of the Preferences window

01:20:07   and not commit those changes,

01:20:09   'cause they were committed the second that you did it.

01:20:10   Whereas on iOS, I don't know all the cultural things,

01:20:13   but I do know when I was on that screen,

01:20:15   I didn't know what to do,

01:20:16   and it seems like Tiff had the same problem.

01:20:17   So that cultural context of bringing up a card

01:20:20   or whatever you call that requires some affirmation,

01:20:24   or it requires when I tap an icon,

01:20:26   it self dismisses and say, "Great, you've picked it."

01:20:29   - Yeah.

01:20:30   - UI is weird and hard.

01:20:32   Like, it's not a bug,

01:20:33   But it's a confusing part of the UI.

01:20:36   And why was it confusing?

01:20:37   For reasons that are actually very difficult to explain.

01:20:40   It's not obvious.

01:20:41   It's not obvious that this is-- anyone

01:20:43   can tell that that's wrong.

01:20:44   It's only the type of thing that you would realize by someone

01:20:49   who didn't create the app and write the code to do it,

01:20:52   attempting to use that screen.

01:20:54   All right, any other complaints while I'm here?

01:20:57   It's not your fault. But really, there's

01:20:59   nothing in FFS symbols for shower, bath, water, soap,

01:21:03   like nothing, I have a shower playlist.

01:21:05   Who doesn't have a shower playlist?

01:21:06   - For shower, I use a thunderstorm icon.

01:21:08   - But that's, I'm just saying, it's not your fault.

01:21:10   This is not in FFS symbols, but come on.

01:21:12   Like literally nothing?

01:21:13   - What about lightning bolt?

01:21:15   - For shower?

01:21:15   - Well, it's a thunderstorm.

01:21:17   - Yeah, I searched for rain,

01:21:18   but that's not, I don't shower in a rain cloud.

01:21:20   - It's funny, it's a rain cloud, it's a shower.

01:21:23   - I think this is a, this makes me,

01:21:26   I know you talked about this before,

01:21:27   I'm like, oh, I could use Emojum,

01:21:28   but what about SF Symbols?

01:21:30   I'm sure there's an emoji I could use

01:21:33   that would be a closer match,

01:21:34   and if SF Symbols has a different--

01:21:35   - Yeah, there's a shower emoji.

01:21:36   - Has a shower gap.

01:21:37   - No, and I think the availability of SF Symbols,

01:21:43   it is clearly a UI toolkit.

01:21:49   It is not made for the purposes I'm offering it for here.

01:21:53   It is not made for arbitrary user input

01:21:55   of classifying their podcast listening.

01:21:57   Like there's many weird omissions from it.

01:22:00   And there's many things in it that have no business

01:22:03   being selectable here.

01:22:06   Like there's like every number, every letter

01:22:10   in circled or squared form.

01:22:12   Maybe that's not necessarily needed here.

01:22:15   Or certain oddities like every individual button

01:22:18   on a game pad.

01:22:19   Like you could have those as your icons.

01:22:23   Because that's just needs of the system have.

01:22:25   But anyway, I tried it with emoji.

01:22:28   I never shipped it as a beta,

01:22:29   but I tried it in testing with emoji.

01:22:31   And in this context, it looked a little bit dated.

01:22:35   I had used emoji in my UI a lot.

01:22:39   I used the emoji cloud and star icons

01:22:43   on description labels in the episode cells

01:22:46   to indicate whether an episode was streaming or not.

01:22:48   I had a couple of emoji here and there in the interface.

01:22:51   And when I first started doing that,

01:22:54   geez, I don't know, five years ago,

01:22:56   it was a long time ago, when I first started doing that,

01:22:59   it was cute and novel, and the use of emoji in UI

01:23:03   was fairly unusual at that time.

01:23:06   And in fact, John, I believe you even complained to me

01:23:08   about it when I started doing it.

01:23:10   But now I think that is a little bit dated

01:23:15   for these purposes.

01:23:16   You know, like Casey, in your app,

01:23:17   it's a little bit different,

01:23:18   'cause the entire app is about emoji,

01:23:20   so that obviously makes more sense there.

01:23:21   In overcast new design, with all the SF symbol icons

01:23:25   everywhere and with these thick line weights

01:23:28   and big, bold, flat colors and pastels,

01:23:31   emoji didn't look right.

01:23:32   I tried it and it just didn't look good.

01:23:35   And so I decided to just stick with SF symbols for these

01:23:39   because it was much better looking in context.

01:23:44   - You know, I almost wonder, and maybe this exists,

01:23:47   but something that I know we used a lot back

01:23:50   in my web development days, which was a decade plus ago,

01:23:53   was Font Awesome, which was, if I recall correctly,

01:23:57   basically a font, but it was a bunch of glyphs.

01:23:59   Think Wingdings, but less weird.

01:24:02   And we would use that as UI elements all over the place.

01:24:06   And I feel like what we need is like a Font Awesome,

01:24:09   but with glyphs, like a shower glyph, for example.

01:24:12   So I was poking about on the Font Awesome website,

01:24:14   and there's plenty of excellent shower glyphs

01:24:17   that to my eyes are in the spirit of SF symbols.

01:24:19   Now I'm sure a person with much better design sense than me,

01:24:22   which is basically almost everyone,

01:24:23   would tell you that these are not really

01:24:25   in the spirit of SF Symbols,

01:24:26   but you know what I mean?

01:24:27   Like something along those lines that gives you more breadth

01:24:30   because like you said, Marco,

01:24:31   SF Symbols is really designed to be used as UI elements

01:24:36   or to supplement your user interface.

01:24:38   Not exactly what you're doing.

01:24:40   Like I don't fault you for doing it.

01:24:41   I think it makes sense,

01:24:42   but it's not really what SF Symbols is about.

01:24:44   - I don't know, I think it's exactly what it's about

01:24:45   because there's lots of things that are representative.

01:24:48   Like SF Symbols, I don't think is about the semantics.

01:24:51   It is really about the incarnation,

01:24:53   which is like line drawings,

01:24:55   clearly readable line drawings

01:24:57   that are abstract representations of things.

01:24:59   So it's not super amount of detail.

01:25:01   The lines are pretty thick.

01:25:02   They're good icons that are exactly for this type of thing.

01:25:06   This is useful in your UI,

01:25:08   'cause it's not going to draw attention to itself

01:25:09   like a subtly shaded cloud emoji would, right?

01:25:12   That may clash with your UI.

01:25:14   Again, Emoji are very bold and they have their own style and that style is not the same style

01:25:21   that the rest of the UI in Overcast has.

01:25:23   So the SF Symbols, I think this is a perfect use of it, it's just SF Symbols salt for not

01:25:29   having anything there for showers.

01:25:30   So maybe you could augment it by drawing one vector shower head icon, throw it in there,

01:25:35   like you should actually have a custom set of icons that you can add to SF Symbols and

01:25:38   then eventually, because SF Symbols gets stuff added to it all the time I think, eventually

01:25:43   it will probably get a shower head.

01:25:44   - Yeah, and another comment when people are complaining

01:25:47   about the lack of is that there's not a lot

01:25:49   of sports representation.

01:25:50   There's like a sports court.

01:25:51   There's like a basketball court looking

01:25:53   or a tennis court looking thing,

01:25:54   but that's like the main sports thing.

01:25:56   There's not like different balls for each sport or whatever.

01:25:58   - Not a soccer ball, tennis ball.

01:25:59   - Right, right.

01:26:00   But there's also one of the great things about this.

01:26:02   First of all, one of the great things about this

01:26:03   is that I don't need to buy or commission

01:26:06   or create this artwork.

01:26:08   Like it is just there in the system waiting to be used.

01:26:11   Secondly, there's all sorts of benefits you get by using it.

01:26:15   So for instance, they have all these different modes.

01:26:18   They have these different rendering modes.

01:26:19   You can render them as-- what I'm doing here

01:26:21   is hierarchical mode, where you can have different levels

01:26:23   of transparency in certain icons.

01:26:25   Like if you look at the guitar icon

01:26:27   that I use for music or my fish playlist,

01:26:29   that is-- they have these different layers of guitars.

01:26:33   Also, one of the big advantages is for accessibility settings,

01:26:38   like if you enable the setting called

01:26:40   bold text in the accessibility panel in the system,

01:26:43   every icon in the app, including those, gets thicker.

01:26:48   - That's nice.

01:26:49   - And not every SF symbol has a bold version,

01:26:52   like the guitar one doesn't, but most of them do.

01:26:55   And so you have variable weight,

01:26:58   you have all these different rendering modes they can be in.

01:27:01   So there's a lot of advantages to using them.

01:27:03   And also you have Apple keeping them updated,

01:27:05   hopefully, over time.

01:27:07   They're always adding more,

01:27:09   almost every point release of the OS adds more SF symbols,

01:27:13   not a lot more usually.

01:27:14   The major releases tend to add larger numbers,

01:27:16   but it's great that Apple has a team of designers

01:27:19   that effectively now work for me for free,

01:27:22   and that's fantastic.

01:27:23   And somebody like me, I'm getting better

01:27:26   at my app design skills.

01:27:28   I'm not nearly as good as them at icon design,

01:27:32   and I also am not nearly as good as them

01:27:35   at just spending the time on that

01:27:38   and drawing thousands of symbols.

01:27:39   There's something like 3800 SF symbols right now.

01:27:43   I would never in a million years address

01:27:45   even a tenth of that.

01:27:47   So this is just a fantastic resource for me

01:27:50   and I think it looks really good in the app.

01:27:52   I think it makes it look very, very modern.

01:27:55   And the amount of reward that has to me

01:27:58   of how great it looks and how much it enables

01:28:01   versus how little effort and time and money

01:28:05   and app file size, John, it takes for me,

01:28:09   it's really, it's pretty great.

01:28:12   - Oh, it looks real good.

01:28:14   And I've been enjoying it, obviously, so kudos from me.

01:28:18   But I will be sending you a 25 minute list of bugs

01:28:20   and issues, a 25 minute video sometime tomorrow.

01:28:23   - That's fine, hey, do what you gotta do.

01:28:26   Have you watched mine yet?

01:28:27   - I was gonna say, I finally got,

01:28:29   I had enough time to watch a portion of it,

01:28:32   and I gotta tell you--

01:28:33   - Did you have nine minutes to spare?

01:28:34   I had nine minutes to spare.

01:28:37   No, I think I removed approximately 15 pounds of text

01:28:41   from the app during the five minutes of your video

01:28:46   that I was able to watch.

01:28:47   - The entire app is now five kilobytes.

01:28:48   - Yeah, exactly right.

01:28:50   No, I actually got a little bit bigger

01:28:52   on the pending release 'cause I added a picture of me

01:28:55   that I used on the aforementioned,

01:28:57   how big do you want the face detection to be?

01:28:59   And then, did we talk about this?

01:29:01   that the icon on the landing screen was not properly retina

01:29:06   because the two size icons, it appears that Apple bakes

01:29:10   into your bundle.

01:29:13   One of them is like a not very big iPad icon

01:29:16   and then I think there was one other one

01:29:17   that was even smaller.

01:29:19   And so I was just using the biggest one I could

01:29:21   and a couple of eagle-eyed users were like,

01:29:23   "Hey man, why is this not retina?

01:29:24   "Is this broken?"

01:29:25   Well, no, it's not really broken.

01:29:27   I just didn't wanna add another icon

01:29:28   just for that one screen.

01:29:29   and then I got browbeat enough about it

01:29:32   that I allowed myself to add one more icon in there.

01:29:35   And so the app is probably like five or six megs now

01:29:38   instead of three or four, something along those lines.

01:29:40   I'm so sorry.

01:29:41   - I think you're still okay.

01:29:42   - We did talk about this.

01:29:43   His name was Stampy.

01:29:44   You loved him.

01:29:45   (laughing)

01:29:47   - Reference from Marco to get maybe.

01:29:48   - I got it, I got it, I got it.

01:29:49   - No, I got nothing.

01:29:50   - Simpsons did it.

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01:31:52   (upbeat music)

01:31:54   UnforgettableLuncheon, very good name, writes,

01:31:56   "Do you have any preferred file naming scheme

01:31:58   "that you follow?

01:31:59   "Recently in my university degree,

01:32:00   "we were told to name our files with the prefix

01:32:02   "year, month, day, underscore title, underscore subtitle.

01:32:06   "For example," this is with no hyphens or anything,

01:32:09   "So example, 20210329_proj3_siteplan.

01:32:14   "But this seems clunky and space inefficient to me."

01:32:17   I feel like we've talked about this before.

01:32:20   this is going to horrify a lot of people, as with so many of my opinions, but for general usage,

01:32:26   I don't favor year, month, day. However, for file names or things where I'm going to be sorting

01:32:34   by file name and I know I want this stuff to be sortable, then yeah, year, month, day with hyphens

01:32:38   and then use spaces like an adult and kind of do whatever you want after that. Marco,

01:32:45   what is your opinion on this? And then we'll round it out with John telling us what we should believe.

01:32:50   it depends a lot on context.

01:32:52   - Yeah, I agree with that.

01:32:53   - You know, what Jon is probably going to mention

01:32:55   is that the file system does keep track

01:32:58   of things like creation date, modification date.

01:33:01   However, and I'm sure Jon's gonna mention this as well,

01:33:03   the problem is when you're in this kind of context

01:33:06   of okay, you're in a university program,

01:33:10   you're creating documents,

01:33:11   you're probably gonna be sending them around to people,

01:33:13   well, as they get moved around,

01:33:15   if they get emailed or Dropbox or Google Drive

01:33:18   or whatever, Google driven, whatever it is,

01:33:21   as they go around, the opportunities for them

01:33:24   to lose this metadata on someone else's computer

01:33:26   or in some other context increase dramatically.

01:33:29   So if you're relying only on creation date

01:33:32   in the file system to indicate when something was made

01:33:36   and that it's not represented actually in the file,

01:33:38   like in a document, like actually as text created

01:33:41   on whatever or as metadata somewhere,

01:33:43   if you're relying on that, it's going to get lost

01:33:45   as these things travel around.

01:33:47   Now, when I make files on my own personal computer,

01:33:51   I have faith that those things are not going to be a problem

01:33:54   for most of my files here.

01:33:57   I've learned to trust the file system and its metadata

01:34:00   for the most part.

01:34:01   As I'm using my own computer, that tends to be maintained,

01:34:05   and so I can look and see modification or creation dates,

01:34:07   and they tend to be accurate.

01:34:09   That isn't true of everything, though, and of all contexts.

01:34:12   That's why I think it depends.

01:34:14   In this kind of situation where you're working

01:34:15   with other people a lot, you're sending files

01:34:17   between other people a lot,

01:34:19   I see why they would do something like this.

01:34:21   There are good reasons for that in that context,

01:34:24   even though I personally don't bother doing that,

01:34:27   with one exception, and that is for files

01:34:30   that I'm not naming, that are being named automatically

01:34:34   by something else, when that is the case.

01:34:37   And I think my most common version of that is

01:34:41   whenever I have a sheet fed scanner,

01:34:44   and it automatically creates PDF files, whatever I scan,

01:34:47   in this folder in Dropbox.

01:34:49   And those files are just named just like this,

01:34:53   like year, month, date, and then number

01:34:55   within that day that I scan them.

01:34:57   Because most of the time, I'm scanning paperwork

01:35:00   so I can get rid of it, and I don't usually need

01:35:04   to reference most of that paperwork again.

01:35:06   I need it to have names so that it exists

01:35:09   in the file system and I can find it somewhat.

01:35:11   But I don't need those names to be very meaningful.

01:35:13   I don't need to manually type in date dash electric bill.

01:35:17   I don't go to that, I just let it be the date.

01:35:20   And if I ever need to find something,

01:35:22   I just think about roughly when it was

01:35:24   and go to that time range and just start hitting up arrow

01:35:27   with the preview, with Quick View open,

01:35:29   and just browse through my PDF scanner.

01:35:32   Oh, here it is.

01:35:33   I've never had any trouble finding stuff that way.

01:35:35   Because adding to that is much more common

01:35:38   than reading from it for me.

01:35:39   But other than that, I don't do this.

01:35:42   John, what's the right answer?

01:35:45   So school, work, and other institutions will make you comply with all sorts of things.

01:35:51   So if they say you have to name your TPS report this way, you name your TPS report that way.

01:35:56   That's just part of life, so don't worry about it.

01:35:58   But for doing stuff, your own personal things, here are a few things I would encourage.

01:36:05   I would encourage you to only put things in the file name that describe the content of

01:36:11   the file.

01:36:13   Surprisingly, often, that includes the date.

01:36:15   Even though, yes, of course, I'm going

01:36:17   to say the file system has dates or whatever,

01:36:19   if the document, if describing the content of the document

01:36:25   means it includes a date, put it in the file name.

01:36:28   So for example, tax return 2001.

01:36:33   You're not saying the file was created in 2001.

01:36:36   You're not duplicating file system metadata here.

01:36:39   You're saying it's really important that I know which year

01:36:42   this tax return is for.

01:36:44   Put that in the file name.

01:36:45   And yeah, then you can do it year, month, day,

01:36:47   you can put year at the beginning, year at the end,

01:36:48   do whatever you want, but putting dates in the file name

01:36:51   is not ridiculous, it's only ridiculous

01:36:52   if the date you put in the file name is the same

01:36:54   as the creation or modification date

01:36:57   just because you're mirroring that data.

01:37:00   And again, people may make you do that or whatever,

01:37:02   but that's a little bit silly.

01:37:03   And for portability reasons, like if you want that

01:37:05   to be preserved, oh, it's super important

01:37:06   that people know the year, month, and day

01:37:08   this file was created, even though it has no intrinsic connection to the content, that

01:37:12   is a little bit sketchy, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

01:37:17   I think even in the age of the internet, and although it's, use spaces between words, like

01:37:25   the internet can handle it, right?

01:37:27   I promise you the HTTP protocol will not die.

01:37:30   I know lots of people don't do encoding stuff right, I know sometimes things are not URL

01:37:34   encoded and they're not double encoded and people get confused about plus versus percent

01:37:38   twenty and but like functionally speaking it can work so for your own purposes use spaces

01:37:44   to separate words please don't use hyphens or underscores computers don't need those

01:37:48   things you may feel like you need them and you're like how am I ever going to tab complete

01:37:53   something with the space in it all these things are possible I promise you there's no reason

01:37:57   for you to be reading things that look like you know a bunch of little snakes tying together

01:38:01   your words. I prefer to use title case when I title my file names. You can do all lower

01:38:09   case if you want to feel like you're cool or whatever, but I feel like words, you know,

01:38:13   capitalization is important for a reason. URL is all capitals. You know, ACME or whatever,

01:38:19   like IRS is all capitals. Maybe ACME isn't or whatever, but use proper capitalization

01:38:24   in your words. Don't, you know, for dates and stuff and other things that are in file

01:38:30   and metadata that do not describe the content of the files,

01:38:33   to help you, to discourage you from doing that,

01:38:37   think about how weird it would be,

01:38:40   think of how absurd you would feel

01:38:42   if your name, your quote unquote naming scheme

01:38:44   for your files was, oh, whenever I name my files,

01:38:46   I always put the file size in the file name.

01:38:49   (laughing)

01:38:50   Right, nobody does that.

01:38:51   And the only reason nobody does that

01:38:53   is because we all have 100% confidence

01:38:55   that the file size is something

01:38:58   that will transfer with the file,

01:38:59   Whereas we have very little confidence that the modification or creation date will transfer with the file, right?

01:39:04   So I kind of understand what the difference is there

01:39:06   but in general describe the content of the file don't try to mirror our file system that data and

01:39:12   Then finally, oh no, not finally. Excuse me in the middle. We have

01:39:15   Carson Brown writing

01:39:17   I've been experimenting with time machine setups and notice that backing up to an SMB share is

01:39:23   Very slow compared to an external drive attached via USB, especially since it's all wired

01:39:28   Have that has that ever made you consider reconsider backing up to a network attached storage? No, not for me. I

01:39:34   Don't I don't want to be bothered having to physically connect. I mean I reconsider it all the time because it is so slow

01:39:40   It really like it's the slowest thing ever

01:39:43   And especially as drives get bigger just seems like it gets slower

01:39:46   so I'm actually highly interested in this topic and I've been keeping up with

01:39:50   Was it Howard Oakley at eclectic light company?

01:39:53   He's also constantly fighting with this and trying to figure out why time machine is taking so long and the different techniques

01:39:58   It uses to back things up and like all I were like how about his bottom line? Why is it so damn slow? So

01:40:03   We'll put two links in the show notes for what is the state of the art of?

01:40:07   trying to make time machine not be as slow as balls when

01:40:10   you know backing up to a NAS and

01:40:13   apparently the only thing that actually

01:40:16   Has any effect whatsoever is if you globally disable like I/O throttling for?

01:40:23   background processes in Mac OS right Mac OS does not apparently have a way for

01:40:28   you on a per process basis especially an already running process like backup D or

01:40:32   whatever to make it not be throttled and you know by default Mac OS you know

01:40:38   gives less priority to background jobs so when it runs the thing you know it's

01:40:43   running time machine or spotlight indexing it is intentionally saying

01:40:46   don't swamp the machine right you know you have a low priority do things slowly

01:40:51   pace yourself, don't go nuts,

01:40:54   but you don't want the thing,

01:40:55   like the performance of your Mac falling off a cliff

01:40:57   because spotlight index is happening,

01:40:59   which is the thing that used to happen back in the day.

01:41:01   - And in fact, this is actually one of the major reasons

01:41:03   why the M1 architecture computers

01:41:05   get such great battery life

01:41:07   and aren't so hot and loud at the time,

01:41:08   because most of those background processes

01:41:10   also get forced to run on the efficiency cores

01:41:12   instead of the high performance cores.

01:41:14   And you can, like right now, I can look at mine

01:41:17   and I see I have the backblaze BZ serve thing

01:41:21   running on the efficiency core right now because it's a background process, just backing up

01:41:24   cloud stuff, and so it doesn't need constant high CPU, high performance access.

01:41:30   Whereas in the past, with Intel machines that had symmetric cores, you would have Dropbox

01:41:36   or Time Machine or MDS or whatever maxing out a high performance Intel core, and it

01:41:42   would not throttle that, and so it would make your machine heat up and kill your battery

01:41:46   life.

01:41:47   the asymmetric core thing here really helps a lot in terms of the amount of processing

01:41:53   power background tasks are given.

01:41:56   Even back in the Intel days, they still had processor priority in terms of how much CPU

01:41:59   you got, but they couldn't go on a cooler core.

01:42:01   For the most part, they would just go on the same core as anything else.

01:42:04   The I/O throttling in particular, though, is saying how much disk I/O is it allowed

01:42:08   to do.

01:42:09   And as you can imagine, time machine backup, all it's ever doing is basically waiting around

01:42:12   for I/O to complete.

01:42:13   So it's not like it's burning your CPU, but if left to its own devices, it would be like

01:42:16   read files as fast as possible.

01:42:19   I've got thousands and thousands of files to back up,

01:42:21   and just one after the other in parallel

01:42:23   and multiple processes, like whatever it's gonna do,

01:42:25   it just, I can't get enough of those files,

01:42:26   and I gotta send a bunch of network requests,

01:42:28   so there's some more I/O, and so the I/O throttling

01:42:31   is the thing that is slowing it down,

01:42:33   because the I/O throttling says,

01:42:35   seems like you just did like 100 file operations

01:42:37   in a fraction of a second, maybe chill a little bit, right?

01:42:39   You know, there's a limit to how fast it can go.

01:42:41   So if you want time machine backups to an ask to go faster,

01:42:45   you can globally disable the IO throttling

01:42:49   on the entire system.

01:42:50   And it doesn't just affect time machine,

01:42:51   it affects every single process the machine

01:42:53   is now exempt from this global thing.

01:42:55   You don't wanna do that in general.

01:42:56   But if you know like, okay, I just got a new Mac

01:43:00   or I just got a new Synology, I need to do

01:43:02   like my initial backup and it's like four terabytes

01:43:04   and it's gonna take like a day,

01:43:05   maybe globally disable that thing

01:43:07   'cause it can speed up the process.

01:43:08   So you can read the links to find out about it.

01:43:10   It annoys me that it's so slow.

01:43:12   It makes some sense, like this is something

01:43:14   counterintuitive to anyone who hasn't ever done server-side development, but doing anything

01:43:18   to lots of small files takes way, way, way, way longer than doing something to an equivalent

01:43:24   size of large files, right?

01:43:26   So one 1GB file versus a million files that are whatever a gigabyte divided by a million

01:43:30   is.

01:43:31   Night and day difference.

01:43:32   And as you do things over the network where everything that you do has to be like, "Send

01:43:38   this thing over the network.

01:43:39   Find out what happened at the other end when it completed and go back and forth."

01:43:42   It just adds so much overhead.

01:43:44   You basically burn up all your time on overhead

01:43:46   in very little time on actually doing anything

01:43:48   in that slow stuff way now.

01:43:50   - Did we ever figure out, like,

01:43:53   one of the things when APFS launched,

01:43:55   the potential promise existed for a much better

01:43:59   and more efficient time machine.

01:44:01   That never happened, did it?

01:44:02   - No, it did.

01:44:03   One of the strategies that time machine uses,

01:44:05   that time machine has multiple strategies

01:44:06   to answer the question,

01:44:07   what changed since the last time I ran?

01:44:09   One of the strategies is APFS snapshot diffs.

01:44:12   And that is a very efficient way to find out what has changed.

01:44:15   The problem is, OK, now that you know what's changed,

01:44:17   do you also have an efficient way

01:44:20   to send those changes to a NAS over SMB?

01:44:23   And the answer is no.

01:44:24   There's nothing-- like SMB doesn't know about APFS.

01:44:27   There's no like wire-- like ZFS had a protocol where

01:44:29   you could send snapshot diffs as a byte stream.

01:44:33   Like as long as it was ZFS on the other end,

01:44:35   you could do that.

01:44:36   But if you're just doing SMB, it has no idea

01:44:39   what the file system is on your Synology.

01:44:41   It's probably like BTRFS or EXT4 or whatever.

01:44:44   So that snapshot functionality helps with local,

01:44:47   can help with local backups.

01:44:49   I don't even think they're doing the byte stream thing.

01:44:51   I'm not sure if that exists,

01:44:52   but snapshot dipping is one of the things.

01:44:54   But if you look in the logs and say,

01:44:56   "Hey, time machine, what strategy did you pick?"

01:44:58   Often it will pick the old one, which is FS events,

01:45:02   you know, ID, last process event ID, one, two, three,

01:45:05   and now I'm gonna start picking up from there.

01:45:07   It picks whatever it thinks

01:45:08   will be the most efficient strategy.

01:45:09   but snapshot diffing is one of the strategies

01:45:12   to figure out what changed.

01:45:14   I'm not sure if there is any plausible way

01:45:16   for it to then say, okay, now that I have a snapshot diff,

01:45:21   can I get a block stream?

01:45:22   'Cause to do that even with ZFS,

01:45:24   you kind of need the other file system

01:45:25   to sort of be on the same page

01:45:27   to efficiently receive the changes.

01:45:30   Anyway, I still have hope that it can get better over time,

01:45:32   but, and it has gotten a little bit faster over time,

01:45:35   but the IO throttling is the biggest culprit right now.

01:45:38   - I mean, it could also presumably

01:45:39   like store it on the other end in a different format

01:45:41   that is more like blocks, big block chunks

01:45:44   instead of individual files.

01:45:46   But I mean, it's using a sparse bundle a lot of the times

01:45:49   now, but so is that not as efficient?

01:45:52   - Oh yeah, I mean the sparse bundle is just

01:45:54   inefficiency on top of inefficiency because,

01:45:56   so let's say you're using the X-T4 on your Synology, right?

01:45:59   And you're doing it over SMB, but for it to work,

01:46:02   there has to be a disk image and the disk image is APFS

01:46:05   and that's one more abstraction of these little stripe files

01:46:08   - Oh great. - The Sparce bundle folder,

01:46:09   it's like abstraction on top of it,

01:46:10   it does not make things faster to do this, right?

01:46:13   So, you know, there is potential for it to be better,

01:46:16   but I wouldn't want the backup to be stored

01:46:19   in some weird, super efficient format, right?

01:46:22   I like the fact that if I go onto my Synology,

01:46:25   I can see the files, you know,

01:46:27   if you mount that disk image,

01:46:29   you see the files sitting there.

01:46:30   It's different than using hard links with HFS, right?

01:46:33   Now it uses the, like the, what do you call it,

01:46:35   the clone files and stuff like that.

01:46:38   It is much better than it was

01:46:39   and it is getting better all the time,

01:46:41   but there are definitely ways that it could improve.

01:46:43   And every time I see how long it's gonna take

01:46:46   to do a backup to my Synology,

01:46:48   it makes me wish it was just a little bit faster.

01:46:50   It makes me wish kind of that there was a big button

01:46:51   that I could say, time machine,

01:46:53   I'm gonna be away from my computer for an hour,

01:46:55   use all available resources, no throttling,

01:46:57   go as fast as you can, saturate my bandwidth,

01:47:00   max out the IOPS on my Synology, just get the backup done.

01:47:03   and instead it's so polite, it just doles out the bits

01:47:06   one at a time and takes forever to finish.

01:47:09   - Yeah, I've actually been considering, it's funny,

01:47:11   I bought my Synology here with the intention,

01:47:15   not that long ago, I talked about it right here on the show,

01:47:17   of it being only a time machine device.

01:47:20   But it is really slow for that.

01:47:23   I was thinking about, so I've actually repurposed

01:47:26   a little bit of it and I'm now using it

01:47:29   for archive file storage as well,

01:47:31   and I have a backup thing that's backing it up

01:47:33   to Backblaze B2 and--

01:47:34   - It's like buying a bigger house,

01:47:36   you just fill the rooms.

01:47:37   - Yeah, and now I'm thinking like maybe I should

01:47:38   actually move Time Machine off of that

01:47:40   'cause now I freed up the little SSD I was using

01:47:44   as my archive drive at my desk.

01:47:46   - That's so much faster.

01:47:47   - Yeah, so like, you know, I can just like, you know,

01:47:48   Velcro this SSD under my desk and just have that

01:47:51   be a local Time Machine.

01:47:52   I think I might do that because it is so much faster.

01:47:57   And I mean, I hardly ever need to restore anything

01:48:01   from Time Machine, but the process of restoring it

01:48:04   from a NAS is like hilariously slow.

01:48:07   Like if you think backing up is slow,

01:48:09   try reading the backups, it's amazing.

01:48:11   So yeah, I haven't kind of thinking of flipping that over.

01:48:16   - Finally, C. writes, Apple's been making their own chips

01:48:20   for a while, it seems that Apple has been bringing

01:48:22   more and more components in house over the years.

01:48:25   Do you think that Apple will ever create, design,

01:48:27   and/or manufacture their own display panel,

01:48:29   at least for larger displays like the iMac

01:48:31   in the studio display.

01:48:32   I mean, on an infinite timeline,

01:48:34   time scale, timeline, whatever, time scale.

01:48:37   Yeah, of course, but I don't see that happening

01:48:39   anytime soon, personally, 'cause it seems like

01:48:42   they outsource damn near all that to LG, don't they?

01:48:44   At least on the computer side of things.

01:48:46   - Or Samsung, I mean, I don't see this ever happening,

01:48:49   honestly, even on an infinite time scale,

01:48:50   because Apple outsources things that are commodities.

01:48:55   You know, they don't make their own flash storage.

01:48:58   They don't make their own memory chips.

01:49:02   These things are areas in which a specialized manufacturer who

01:49:07   specializes in that kind of component

01:49:09   is able to just iterate like crazy

01:49:12   and make really good ones of these things that are not--

01:49:16   I mean, I hate to minimize the work, but not as complicated

01:49:19   and not as differentiable--

01:49:23   that's a word-- compared to something like designing

01:49:27   their own processors.

01:49:28   They aren't even manufacturing their processors,

01:49:30   but they are designing them.

01:49:32   And they are designing, they're certainly making

01:49:34   all their own software, making all their own tools.

01:49:36   There's all sorts of these areas where Apple is able

01:49:39   to do things in a much more custom way

01:49:41   and have a much bigger impact on things,

01:49:43   whereas are they really gonna make a better display panel

01:49:47   than Samsung or LG?

01:49:49   Maybe, but they could also just order them

01:49:51   from Samsung and LG and be fine.

01:49:53   And those components I think Apple would consider

01:49:56   too boring and too commoditized and there's not enough reason for them to make it because

01:50:04   they can already buy the best ones of those in the world from other people. Whereas they

01:50:10   can't buy the best software from other people. They can't buy the best processor design from

01:50:15   other people. They can make that themselves and be way ahead of everyone else by doing

01:50:19   that. Whereas this kind of thing, these kind of basic commodity component type things,

01:50:25   I don't think Apple would gain anything

01:50:26   by making it themselves, and they don't have any reason

01:50:29   to take on that burden when the rest of the market

01:50:31   is supplying that very well when they order it from them.

01:50:35   - That's the differentiation you mentioned,

01:50:36   like the Tim Cook thing is like,

01:50:37   we don't wanna enter a market

01:50:38   unless we think we can make a significant difference.

01:50:41   And recall from episodes a long time ago,

01:50:45   months, years, that Apple has been reportedly investigating

01:50:50   micro LED displays, like itself,

01:50:53   and again, we're talking about display panel,

01:50:55   setting aside, obviously Apple had a big hand in designing the XDR and everything, but like

01:50:58   the display panel itself, not all the electronics and the backlight and everything, but just

01:51:03   the display panel, micro LED is something that lots of manufacturers have created at

01:51:10   various sizes, but not at the sizes that would work in any Apple devices.

01:51:15   And if Apple somehow, if those rumors were true and Apple was funding attempts to develop

01:51:21   micro LED, which I don't want to get into the details, but it's a different screen technology,

01:51:25   it's different than OLED, it's different than LCD, and it is in theory better than both

01:51:28   of them.

01:51:30   If you could, if they had some kind of breakthrough there, where they succeeded in making a micro

01:51:35   LED screen, let's say it's like for the Apple Watch or something, where no one else has

01:51:39   been able to do that in a cost-effective manner, and Apple manages to do it, that would be

01:51:43   a big competitive advantage for their product.

01:51:48   They would be able to make a big difference, not necessarily in the market because they

01:51:50   they wouldn't be selling to other people,

01:51:51   but suddenly they would differentiate their product.

01:51:54   Like their watch battery life would be much higher

01:51:56   or their screen would be much higher quality or whatever.

01:51:59   Like, so I don't see Apple making an LCD display

01:52:03   or an OLED display,

01:52:04   'cause those are technologies with established players.

01:52:06   It's, you know, what is it?

01:52:08   Red Ocean versus Blue Ocean, it's Red Ocean.

01:52:11   They're all out there killing each other

01:52:12   to try to make the best LCDs, the best OLEDs,

01:52:15   all that other stuff, right?

01:52:16   But so far, no one has succeeded in micro LED

01:52:20   of the type that Apple would be interested in.

01:52:22   So that's why it wasn't too surprising to me

01:52:24   that they might be investigating that.

01:52:24   It would be useful in AR headset.

01:52:26   It'd be, you know, if Apple could somehow make

01:52:28   cost effective micro LED,

01:52:30   it's useful in every single one of their products

01:52:32   and is superior than almost everything, you know,

01:52:34   if they get, it has the potential to be disappeared

01:52:36   to all other technologies, right?

01:52:38   But I don't know if that rumor is true.

01:52:41   I don't know if that's a thing they're actually doing.

01:52:43   Maybe they're just partnering with somebody

01:52:44   who is like helping invest, you know,

01:52:46   to a lot of people in the chat room

01:52:47   are pointing out this.

01:52:48   Apple does spend a lot of money trying to get other companies to build the thing it

01:52:53   wants and it spent a long time doing that with Intel in fact.

01:52:56   So even when it buys things from other people it likes to use its money and its potential

01:53:02   ordering capacity to influence the things that they make to get the thing that it wants.

01:53:06   So maybe those rumors you were hearing is just Apple investing in some company that

01:53:10   was already on its way to making micro LED because Apple knows that if they can get first

01:53:14   dibs on that product like that'll be a competitive advantage for them or

01:53:18   whatever so I would say never say never because I think Apple is interested in

01:53:23   breakthroughs like that solid-state batteries is another example or who

01:53:26   knows what they're doing with the car stuff it's just that historically

01:53:29   speaking that is not how Apple has added its value it's not to say that there

01:53:32   couldn't do that like arguably they did a lot of original work with like not

01:53:37   perfecting the mouse but sort of like who had a lot of experience building

01:53:41   computer mice before Apple, not a lot of companies,

01:53:45   and Apple shipped them on every single one

01:53:47   of their Macintosh computers,

01:53:48   so learn pretty quickly how to make one of those,

01:53:49   it's decent, right?

01:53:51   But even there, they weren't the first

01:53:53   to make an optical mouse or anything like that,

01:53:54   they eventually just let the rest of the market

01:53:57   pick up for them, so I think it would be kinda neat,

01:53:59   but it seems like a reach.

01:54:02   - Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:54:04   Memberful, Remote, and Backblaze,

01:54:07   and thanks to our members who support us directly,

01:54:08   you can join at aqp.fm/join.

01:54:11   We will talk to you next week.

01:54:18   They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:54:23   (Accidental)

01:54:24   Oh, it was accidental.

01:54:25   (Accidental)

01:54:26   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:54:33   (Accidental)

01:54:34   Oh, it was accidental.

01:54:36   (Accidental)

01:54:37   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:54:41   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:54:51   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:54:55   Auntie Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C

01:55:00   U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A

01:55:03   It's accidental

01:55:06   They didn't mean to

01:55:08   ♪ Two accidental ♪

01:55:10   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:55:11   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:55:13   ♪ So long ♪

01:55:15   - I have an after show.

01:55:18   - Oh, all right.

01:55:19   - It's so rare that I have an after show.

01:55:21   - I know, I'm excited.

01:55:22   - Yeah.

01:55:23   To make it a game of it,

01:55:25   I'll give you each one guess what my after show is about.

01:55:28   - TVs.

01:55:29   - The freezer.

01:55:30   - Those, you're so fast, so fast on the guesses.

01:55:32   That didn't even take a second to think about it.

01:55:34   You got a TV or a freezer.

01:55:36   Those are your two guesses, huh?

01:55:37   Oh, well. So which one of us was right?

01:55:39   Uh, well, you're both wrong. My after show is that I quit my job.

01:55:43   What?! What?! Really?!

01:55:46   And I'd like to say that in the guessing game, Merlin got it on the first guess.

01:55:53   What?! This entire show I've spent with just blue in front of my eyes. Wait, you quit your job?

01:56:01   I did. You didn't lead with this?

01:56:03   No, it's an after show topic.

01:56:05   How have we sat through an hour 57 minutes and 38 seconds of chatter and this is now

01:56:12   the time that you decide to come out with this?

01:56:14   It's the after show, is what we're talking about personally.

01:56:16   So I have a whole podcast where I talk about my feelings in my life, it's called Reconcilable

01:56:20   Differences.

01:56:21   If you listen to episode 179, you will learn all about this and you'll hear me talk about

01:56:26   it at length.

01:56:27   At length that I'm not going to talk about it here because we're just in the after show

01:56:29   or whatever.

01:56:30   And that isn't out yet, right?

01:56:31   That we're recording?

01:56:32   Oh no, it's out right now.

01:56:33   Oh my god, when did they come out?

01:56:35   - Jon, I hate you so much right now.

01:56:36   - And if you, yeah.

01:56:37   - Oh, it came out today?

01:56:39   - If you go to hypercritical.co,

01:56:40   you will see the top post on my website

01:56:42   is a text version of an explanation of this whole thing.

01:56:46   - When did that go live?

01:56:47   - Well, oh my God.

01:56:48   - That went live about three seconds ago.

01:56:50   (laughing)

01:56:51   - Jon, I'm gonna kill you.

01:56:53   I'm going to kill, well, okay, before I kill you,

01:56:56   and I'm not gonna read this right now.

01:56:58   First of all, congratulations, since you said you quit,

01:57:01   you didn't get laid off or fired or anything like that.

01:57:03   So congratulations.

01:57:04   Can you give us the short, short, short version

01:57:06   of what the plan is from here?

01:57:07   Are you getting a new job or are you pulling a casing?

01:57:09   - I don't want the short version.

01:57:10   Give me the full version.

01:57:12   - I love the full version,

01:57:13   but I know I'm not gonna get it.

01:57:14   - The long version is on rect,

01:57:15   I mean, on rectifs I started out giving

01:57:18   like a fact type thing,

01:57:19   'cause I just felt like we were in that mindset

01:57:21   and it's probably a useful approach here.

01:57:23   So I'll give a mini fact version here.

01:57:25   Mini fact, did I get fired or get laid off?

01:57:28   No, I quit.

01:57:29   What are, do you have a new job lined up?

01:57:31   No, I don't.

01:57:32   Do you have a terminal disease?

01:57:33   No, not that I know of.

01:57:35   What is the plan here?

01:57:37   The plan here is to do podcasting and other stuff

01:57:41   as the way I make my living,

01:57:43   just like Marco and Casey, to varying degrees, do as well.

01:57:47   - That's awesome!

01:57:48   - I am so unbelievably proud and excited.

01:57:50   I cannot even tell you.

01:57:51   I know I probably don't sound it,

01:57:53   but I'm like smiling ear to ear.

01:57:54   I am so excited for you.

01:57:55   - I never would have guessed this.

01:57:56   I thought you were like a company man forever.

01:57:59   - Same.

01:58:00   Well another fact item that I think people need to hear.

01:58:04   Have you suddenly come into some huge amount of money that makes this possible?

01:58:06   Like are your podcasts suddenly making more money?

01:58:08   Did you win the lottery?

01:58:09   Did a whole bunch of new people sign up for membership and now suddenly it's possible

01:58:13   whereas before it wasn't?

01:58:14   No that did not happen.

01:58:17   So they're like why now?

01:58:18   Why not before?

01:58:19   Well you can read my blog post about it which I think was the smallest time investment to

01:58:23   get this or you can listen to the longer rectives episode and I'm sure we can talk about it

01:58:27   more in future episodes of the show if you would like, but I just wanted to throw it

01:58:30   in the after show because it's important news.

01:58:33   And the other thing I'll say on this show, which I also said in my blog post, is this

01:58:37   is a good opportunity to thank everybody who is listening to this podcast.

01:58:41   Thank anyone who has ever listened to the podcast.

01:58:43   Thank everyone who has ever read anything that I've written or gone to a live show or

01:58:47   bought a t-shirt or done any of those things because all of those people are the people

01:58:52   who made it possible for me to attempt to do this.

01:58:56   Casey made a similar decision back in 2018,

01:58:59   Marco made a similar decision back in 2010.

01:59:02   Like, I said to my co-host,

01:59:04   it seems like everybody I know has done this before me.

01:59:09   So I have all this experience watching other people do it,

01:59:12   and now I'm gonna give it a try myself.

01:59:14   So we'll see how it goes.

01:59:16   - I am so excited and so proud of you.

01:59:18   I echo what Marco said a moment ago.

01:59:20   Never in a million trillion years

01:59:23   did I think you would make this leap.

01:59:26   And I know that the math is a little bit different for you

01:59:28   than it is for anyone else on the planet,

01:59:30   but I still am extremely excited and proud of you.

01:59:35   This is very, very big John Syracuse energy

01:59:37   that you did this quietly and didn't confer

01:59:39   with your two friends here, but that's okay.

01:59:42   It might've been worth it just

01:59:43   for this bombshell moment right now.

01:59:45   - Totally worth it. (laughs)

01:59:47   - But I am overjoyed.

01:59:48   I'm so excited and so proud of you.

01:59:50   - I mean, if you read the Postcards and the podcast,

01:59:52   you'll see that this is,

01:59:53   I've been thinking about this for years.

01:59:54   It is not, like, it's kind of a coincidence

01:59:56   that in recent ATP episodes, we had a bunch of questions.

01:59:58   Like, how does Jon fit everything in?

01:59:59   And what's the deal with Jon didn't do any research?

02:00:01   Like, but that is not, that was just a happy coincidence.

02:00:04   I was smiling when hearing that

02:00:05   because this is a plan I've had for multiple years.

02:00:07   In fact, I had a date certain set

02:00:09   to do this multiple years ago.

02:00:11   And then something else happened with the world

02:00:12   that caused me to maybe reconsider that, you know?

02:00:15   So when COVID came, it was everything got put on hold

02:00:19   and you know, so it's not,

02:00:22   this is not a decision I made at spur of the moment.

02:00:24   This is a multi-year long process that was going to go off

02:00:28   and then didn't and then I reconsidered again

02:00:31   and anyway, you can read all about it.

02:00:34   But yeah, this is just in time for my kids to go to college

02:00:37   so it's a great time to put my income

02:00:40   in an uncertain position.

02:00:41   - Oh my God, this is great.

02:00:43   I really am genuinely extremely surprised,

02:00:47   genuinely extremely happy and just, oh man,

02:00:51   I'm so happy for you.

02:00:52   This is great, congratulations.

02:00:54   - I hope it is great.

02:00:55   I mean, coming from the two of you

02:00:57   who already have been there for a while

02:00:58   and you sound like it's great for you,

02:01:00   so I hope it will be great for me too.

02:01:02   - Oh, think of all the jokes we can now make.

02:01:04   'Cause before you were like,

02:01:04   "Wow, when you worked at a job,"

02:01:06   now none of us work at jobs, this is great.

02:01:09   (both laughing)

02:01:10   - Does this mean we're gonna start recording

02:01:12   for European-friendly times from time to time?

02:01:14   'Cause now the day is our oyster, right?

02:01:17   - We can discuss.

02:01:18   There are multiple other factors in flight here.

02:01:21   - Yeah, I know.

02:01:21   - Many things, I've felt bad

02:01:23   'cause I've been trying to keep it a surprise

02:01:25   so it could be a surprise on this show,

02:01:26   so I haven't been able to talk to people about things,

02:01:29   but now that will change mostly, we'll talk.

02:01:31   - Oh my gosh, John Serkis, I am so excited for you.

02:01:34   I am so incredibly excited for you.

02:01:36   I am gobsmacked, I cannot freaking believe.

02:01:41   Holy crap, this is rock smart.

02:01:43   I don't even know what to ask you right now.

02:01:45   I'm so stunned.

02:01:47   - That's why he did the frequently asked questions.

02:01:48   He addressed all of the most frequent things

02:01:50   we would think of.

02:01:51   - No, there's many more.

02:01:52   I didn't-- one phrase that I did not mention in my post

02:01:55   about this is midlife crisis, because I really, honestly,

02:01:58   don't feel like this fits the definition of midlife crisis,

02:02:01   other than the getting older and recognizing your mortality type

02:02:05   thing.

02:02:05   But it's, again, not something I went into at a spur of the moment

02:02:12   spontaneously.

02:02:13   It's just generally not how I do things.

02:02:16   This is incredible.

02:02:18   I'm so surprised.

02:02:20   Again, I would never have guessed that this would happen.

02:02:24   - You both didn't guess,

02:02:25   but Merlin got it on the first guess.

02:02:27   - He's smarter than us.

02:02:28   - With no context, 'cause I sprung it on him 100%

02:02:31   as a say, no hints, no context, no nothing.

02:02:34   - Wow, all right, so when is your,

02:02:37   if you're willing to share,

02:02:38   when is your last day at your jobby job?

02:02:40   - It was last Friday.

02:02:41   - Oh, you're already done?

02:02:42   - Yeah. (laughs)

02:02:44   - Oh my God, I hate you so much right now.

02:02:47   - I mean, directives record's way ahead of schedule,

02:02:50   So it's a coordinate all this stuff, you know, wait, so you said this past Friday.

02:02:54   So as we record, it's Wednesday.

02:02:55   What'd you do all week?

02:02:56   Same stuff.

02:02:57   I always do just without the work part.

02:02:59   What did you do during the day?

02:03:01   I mean, well, let's see.

02:03:03   You sound like my wife's like, wait, my first day without a job.

02:03:07   Like, what did you do all day?

02:03:08   It's like surprisingly not that different.

02:03:10   Like on that Monday, I think what I did was, um, I wrote this blog post.

02:03:14   All right.

02:03:15   So that's one thing I did.

02:03:16   I finalized the t-shirt designs, uploaded them to the Google Drive.

02:03:20   Let's see, I did some cooking and puttering around the house, drove kids to places, took

02:03:26   out the garbage, made dinner, like just a normal day with like the normal amount of

02:03:31   podcast, you know, worked on the show notes for ATP, worked on the show notes for Rectifs,

02:03:36   you know, like did all the coordinated people getting the Rectifs episodes up because I

02:03:40   posted them while we were recording so one of you couldn't listen to the episode beforehand

02:03:44   and no listeners could listen to it and spoil it.

02:03:47   That's kind of what I did with my day.

02:03:49   And so it's like the same thing I do in normal days,

02:03:50   except for normally, insert all that activity

02:03:53   as context switch constantly

02:03:55   with a normal eight-hour workday.

02:03:57   - Oh, I am still, I heard every word you said,

02:04:01   but I'm not sure I was listening 'cause I'm so happy.

02:04:03   Oh my gosh.

02:04:04   - I ate breakfast without my laptop on the table next to me.

02:04:07   - Imagine that.

02:04:07   - I don't even have a laptop.

02:04:09   I returned that accursed thing.

02:04:10   That was the best part of this.

02:04:11   (laughing)

02:04:13   to no more butterfly keyboard, return that thing.

02:04:16   It's like, take it back.

02:04:17   God, I hated that laptop so much by the end.

02:04:19   It was getting so slow, and not because of the laptop.

02:04:22   It was just like the corporate malware

02:04:23   they were putting on everything.

02:04:25   I was so happy to not have that.

02:04:26   No more corporate malware.

02:04:27   They added more.

02:04:29   I think we talked about this in one of the Slack sprints.

02:04:31   They added an app called Santa that would intercept

02:04:35   application launch, and it would tell you whether the app was

02:04:38   naughty or nice, right?

02:04:39   That's creepy as hell.

02:04:41   Whoever designed that and whoever bought it

02:04:43   at your company, they need to really evaluate that.

02:04:46   - And it was flagging everything.

02:04:48   It was like, oh, you wanna run expand drive

02:04:50   so you can do SSHFS to your dev machines?

02:04:52   Expand drive, we don't know what that is.

02:04:54   Santa says it's naughty.

02:04:55   Would you like to request access to use it?

02:04:57   I'm like, ugh. - Ew.

02:04:58   - That's so bad. - Oh my god.

02:05:00   How does anybody work anywhere?

02:05:02   - That's like a, that was new as of a few months ago

02:05:04   and it was like, this is not helping me.

02:05:06   - You know, sometimes I wonder,

02:05:10   I often wonder whenever I have to deal with a real company

02:05:13   and I'll be on a call or something

02:05:15   that somebody had insisted on having

02:05:17   and there'll be like 17 people on the call

02:05:20   and two of them talk and I'm like,

02:05:21   what are all these other people here for?

02:05:23   What do these people do?

02:05:24   I hear from, you read reports about how big a company is

02:05:28   on the web, you say, oh wow, Twitter or whatever

02:05:30   has 5,000 employees, whatever it is,

02:05:32   and you're like, what do they need that many people for?

02:05:35   But I think the answer is they create their own overhead.

02:05:37   stuff like that. Well, it's it was somebody's job to choose that it was somebody's job to,

02:05:42   you know, to purchase it to set it up to maintain it. Some I assume somebody has to behave like,

02:05:49   I guess, the elf and you know, receive those inbound requests for running your expand drive

02:05:55   and other boring things that people need that this is somehow thinking are naughty. I mean,

02:06:01   And so there's all this overhead BS.

02:06:04   Jon, I am so incredibly happy that all of that is now in your past.

02:06:11   Because I will warn you, and I know you probably already know this, but I will warn you that

02:06:16   this will ruin you and that in a matter of weeks you will be unemployable.

02:06:23   Not because nobody would ever hire you, but because you will not tolerate anyone else's

02:06:27   crap ever again.

02:06:28   I don't know. I had like 25 years of tolerating it. I feel like that's a that is a skill the ability to tolerate that and to sort of thrive in that environment is a skill I will probably never lose but we'll see.

02:06:40   See, and I feel the same way about myself but I'm sure if I put my money where my mouth is I bet Marco would be right.

02:06:46   You were in it for a little less time than I was, Casey. So you may come out of it. Marco was barely in it before he escaped. He really is unemployable.

02:06:55   - Yeah, that's true, and I've been at it for the longest,

02:06:57   but yeah, I mean, I was barely employable

02:06:59   when I was employable.

02:07:01   - I had to find, for my blog post,

02:07:02   I had to find your, when did Marco leave Tumblr, right?

02:07:06   I had to find the post about that.

02:07:08   It was like a two paragraph post.

02:07:10   Not very long, I mean, maybe you had a longer one later

02:07:14   where you reflected on it, but your day of thing,

02:07:17   like, oh, I'm no longer at Tumblr,

02:07:19   it's like five sentences long, you'd see it linked on YouTube.

02:07:21   - Well, because that was careful,

02:07:24   because at the time, we didn't wanna alarm anybody.

02:07:27   I was the earliest employee of Tumblr, and I was leaving.

02:07:32   And at the time, I didn't have an obvious,

02:07:37   there were some people who took over my duties,

02:07:41   but it wasn't a high-profile replacement thing,

02:07:44   and so we didn't wanna alarm people.

02:07:46   So that's why David and I very carefully wrote that together

02:07:52   to really just make sure, like, are we going to be OK here?

02:07:55   Are we not going to alarm people, try not

02:07:57   to make a big deal out of this?

02:07:58   So that's why that was so short and why I really never addressed

02:08:00   it again.

02:08:01   Well, anyway, I found it-- oh, it's so hard to find things

02:08:03   on your site, too.

02:08:05   You don't have any kind of archive page

02:08:08   that lists all the posts somewhere?

02:08:09   Yeah, well, not all of the posts.

02:08:11   But you should go to the bottom and list them all by month

02:08:14   and year.

02:08:14   Does it?

02:08:15   I think, well, by month at least.

02:08:17   Yeah.

02:08:18   Oh, there it is, archives.

02:08:20   I guess I was on an individual post, let's see.

02:08:22   - Yeah, I mean, it's not a good,

02:08:24   I mean, I search my site the way everyone else searches

02:08:26   their site, using Google, site colon, you know, that's.

02:08:29   - I was on an individual post, like if you're on

02:08:31   the Overcast redesign one, at the bottom of that page,

02:08:33   there's nothing.

02:08:34   There's Twitter, RSS feed, you know, stuff like that,

02:08:37   but the archive is only on the homepage,

02:08:39   and then your main top nav is apps, podcast, Twitter, about,

02:08:42   but only on the homepage homepage is the archive thing.

02:08:45   - Will you now post three posts a year on your blog?

02:08:48   - I've already done one.

02:08:49   - I was gonna say we're there.

02:08:50   I did the two streaming app things.

02:08:53   Who knows?

02:08:54   Will I post to my blog more?

02:08:55   I don't know.

02:08:56   Don't limit my options.

02:08:59   Who knows what I'll do.

02:09:00   - So sitting here now, what do you suspect your day will be?

02:09:03   Like are you planning to take some--

02:09:05   - Destiny, all destiny.

02:09:07   - Well, I asked this, I mean, jokingly yes, all destiny.

02:09:10   But like in all seriousness,

02:09:12   what I thought I was going to be doing

02:09:14   when I stopped my jobby job is very different

02:09:17   than what I'm actually doing now

02:09:19   that I stopped my jobby job, well, several years ago now.

02:09:22   What do you think sitting here now will be your day-to-day

02:09:26   after you allow yourself some time for project,

02:09:28   like house projects and taking a damn break after 25 years?

02:09:33   Yeah, what do you expect to be doing to fill your day?

02:09:37   - Well, one of the things that sort of led to this decision,

02:09:40   again, you can see it summarized in the post

02:09:42   and I talked about it in rectives, is like,

02:09:45   I've had to turn down a lot of things,

02:09:48   both my own ideas of like, hey, wouldn't it be neat if I--

02:09:51   and then I would reject myself and say, well, you can't do

02:09:53   that because you've got other things to do.

02:09:54   Well, what about if I try this?

02:09:56   Oh, you don't have time for that, right?

02:09:57   And also opportunities that are sometimes presented to me.

02:09:59   Hey, would you like to do x?

02:10:00   Actually, I would like to do x.

02:10:01   Oh, but I can't because I'm already

02:10:03   doing all the things that I could possibly do, right?

02:10:05   So now suddenly I don't have to reject literally every idea

02:10:10   or opportunity that comes my way.

02:10:12   I can actually say yes to some of them.

02:10:14   And so that's something I will pursue.

02:10:17   will any of those things go anywhere?

02:10:19   I don't know, but it annoyed me before

02:10:22   that I literally couldn't really say yes to anything.

02:10:24   After I had sort of calibrated what I was doing

02:10:27   to sort of fit within my life,

02:10:28   which is part of what we talked about in the past

02:10:30   in the show, it was like, how does Jon fit everything in?

02:10:32   I've selected all the things,

02:10:33   I had selected all the things that I did

02:10:35   to fit within my life, but just barely.

02:10:38   There was not any room for anything else.

02:10:40   And so whenever there was anything bad that happened

02:10:43   or whatever, things would overflow.

02:10:44   Or the example I gave in the post is

02:10:47   when I decided to make those two Mac apps.

02:10:49   That's a thing I had always wanted to do.

02:10:50   And I said, you know what, I'm just gonna do it.

02:10:52   And that was kind of a mistake

02:10:53   because that was over my limit

02:10:55   of the things that I could handle.

02:10:57   My regular job, all the family stuff, all my podcasts.

02:10:59   Oh, and by the way, now you're gonna make two Mac apps

02:11:01   in two months and do releases of those and support them.

02:11:04   That was painful to do

02:11:07   because it showed just how close to my limit

02:11:09   I'm constantly running at.

02:11:11   And even it's like,

02:11:12   I'm just gonna do the thing I always wanted to do.

02:11:14   And a lot of the phone was sucked out of it by like,

02:11:15   well now you're going to get even less sleep, right?

02:11:18   Now you're going to be even more tired.

02:11:19   Now you have even more things to think about

02:11:21   and worry about.

02:11:22   And that just showed like,

02:11:24   I either decided that these are the only things

02:11:26   I'm ever going to do, or I have to remove something.

02:11:28   And you know, to reiterate the John DeNune research thing

02:11:32   from the song, the deal with ATP was

02:11:35   I had just come off hypercritical

02:11:36   and I was burned out on podcasting,

02:11:38   again having gone over my current capacity

02:11:40   with my current family, your constraints and everything,

02:11:42   and I was just like, I can't do this anymore.

02:11:45   And you're like, oh, why don't you come do a car show?

02:11:46   It'll be casual, we'll just do a thing,

02:11:48   it won't be a big deal, you know,

02:11:49   like it'll be so much easier than that tech thing

02:11:52   that you were doing.

02:11:53   And that of course eventually turned into ATP accidentally.

02:11:57   And the whole pitch was,

02:11:59   but we don't want you to burn out again, Jon,

02:12:01   so don't do any research like you did for Hyper Critical

02:12:03   and everything, we don't want you to quit the show

02:12:06   'cause you can't handle it anymore.

02:12:08   And obviously whatever it is that nine, 10 years

02:12:11   or however long we're into this later,

02:12:12   obviously I didn't quit the show,

02:12:13   what happened instead was I quit my job.

02:12:15   (laughing)

02:12:17   - Mission accomplished.

02:12:18   - When push came to shove and it was like,

02:12:20   you wanna do new things, what needs to get pushed out?

02:12:22   It's not like, oh, I'm sorry guys, I gotta leave ATP.

02:12:24   I just left my job.

02:12:25   - Well, you chose correctly.

02:12:27   - I mean, obviously I'm gonna pick the thing

02:12:28   that I enjoy more if it is financially,

02:12:30   what is it, plausibly viable and ATP is.

02:12:33   So again, thank you to everybody who supports the show,

02:12:36   listens to the show, thanks to all the members,

02:12:39   all that stuff.

02:12:40   - ATP.fm/join.

02:12:42   Yeah, now it's not going to be me saying it all the time. Now it's going to be Jon.

02:12:45   But no, all snark and jokes aside, it is worth noting once again, especially as we're approaching

02:12:52   our 500th episode, that it is because of the shirts that you all buy, the sponsors that you patronize,

02:13:00   the memberships that you've purchased. It's because of the time you give us that Marco and

02:13:08   me and now John, all three of us now baby, are lucky enough to do what we do. And I was

02:13:15   actually thinking recently that we should take a moment and thank everyone again. And now it's

02:13:20   painfully obvious that I need to do exactly that. And even if you aren't a member, that's fine. Even

02:13:26   if you're not buying t-shirts, that's fine. Even just spending time listening to us means a lot.

02:13:31   and telling a friend about us means a lot.

02:13:34   And I know I, and now I can speak

02:13:38   for definitely all three of us,

02:13:39   that we are so incredibly thankful

02:13:41   for every single one of you,

02:13:43   no matter how much actual money you send our way.

02:13:46   Even if it's zero, it's still lost.

02:13:49   And you know what, even if the only money you send our way

02:13:51   is actually sent to St. Jude in September, that's fine too.

02:13:53   We're so thankful and appreciative

02:13:55   of every single one of you.

02:13:57   And it is, I am absolutely gobsmacked

02:14:00   that in the course of this show,

02:14:03   Marco was already, as previously stated, long unemployable,

02:14:06   but in the course of the show,

02:14:07   two-thirds of the show are now independent,

02:14:10   and I can't think of, selfishly anyway,

02:14:13   I can't think of a happier outcome from this show,

02:14:15   and I'm so incredibly thankful for all of you listening

02:14:18   and for the two of you for making this possible

02:14:20   for all three of us.

02:14:21   - Yeah, I was thinking about it when I said,

02:14:23   it seems like all my friends are doing this.

02:14:24   When I was writing the thing, I'm like,

02:14:26   oh, I can't list everybody, I'll just list my podcast.

02:14:27   Every single person I podcast with

02:14:30   is essentially self-employed.

02:14:32   Merlin, you, Jason, right?

02:14:35   So it's just, I was the odd one out

02:14:40   of still being the sucker going into

02:14:42   the regular job all the time, right?

02:14:44   It just felt like time for me to join the club.

02:14:49   - I'm so excited, Jon.

02:14:50   Congratulations, this is such incredibly good news.

02:14:53   - You know what I hope happens,

02:14:54   and I think it will probably be before too long.

02:14:57   on an infinite time scale for sure.

02:14:59   At some point, we're gonna hear about some kind

02:15:02   of new corporate speak, and Jon's not gonna know it.

02:15:05   - Oh, that would be amazing.

02:15:07   Oh, that would be so good.

02:15:09   - We'll see, it could happen.

02:15:09   I have to admit that I hear Adam Rowan use his corporate

02:15:13   speak from when he had a job or whatever.

02:15:14   It does change a surprising amount,

02:15:16   and if you're not actually forced to be exposed to it,

02:15:18   I eventually probably won't know about it, we'll see.

02:15:22   But then who on the show will bring that language in though?

02:15:25   'Cause if I'm not, none of us can bring it,

02:15:27   so it would have to come from the outside somehow.

02:15:28   - Maybe we don't need it.

02:15:30   - Maybe first of all we don't need it.

02:15:32   - We don't need any parking lots or kimonos here.

02:15:34   Like we can just leave that in the parking lot

02:15:36   and just move right onto our action items.

02:15:39   - Even you, you're just quoting stuff that Merlin says,

02:15:41   which is now like out of fashion and out of date.

02:15:43   - Because how would I know it?

02:15:45   If I didn't hear about it from you or Merlin,

02:15:48   how would I, where would I learn this from?

02:15:51   - But there's, like I said, there's so much of it

02:15:52   that I don't bring to the show

02:15:54   'cause you don't want to hear it.

02:15:55   It's just so, it's so weird how you just,

02:15:56   You don't notice it until you speak with other people

02:15:58   and realize no one else uses these phrases,

02:16:00   but you start hearing it constantly at work.

02:16:02   It just comes, it comes through the work environment

02:16:04   like a wave, like it just ripples through.

02:16:06   And it's really invisible

02:16:08   unless you start thinking about it.

02:16:09   - You'll hear it from Tina, I'm quite sure.

02:16:11   So, no, I'm sure you'll hear it.

02:16:13   And many thanks for me,

02:16:15   and I'm sure you, John, more than anyone,

02:16:17   many thanks to Tina for taking this leap with you,

02:16:19   because that is a big ask,

02:16:21   especially with the financial burden.

02:16:23   - That's why we talked about it for multiple years.

02:16:25   - I don't blame you.

02:16:26   And with the financial burden of college looming,

02:16:30   that is a big ask.

02:16:32   - This is how much college will cost for Maggie.

02:16:34   I'm gonna make some suggestions all day long

02:16:36   'cause now Marco, at least one person in the show

02:16:38   will get them.

02:16:39   - Well, Jon, I could talk to you about this for years,

02:16:42   but we should probably pick a title and move on.

02:16:45   - Save questions.

02:16:46   If you have questions about it,

02:16:47   we can talk about it in future shows or whatever,

02:16:48   but I would encourage you to read the post

02:16:50   and listen to rectives,

02:16:51   and maybe they'll have Lancel or your questions,

02:16:52   then you'll be done with it.

02:16:53   - We won't be done with it.

02:16:54   - We won't be done with it.

02:16:55   All kidding aside, is there anything that you would like

02:16:57   to plug other than the obvious ATP.fm/join

02:17:00   and things of that nature and your two other shows,

02:17:03   Robot or Not, Reconciliable Differences,

02:17:05   is there anything else you would like to plug

02:17:06   while we're thinking of it?

02:17:08   - No, I mean, if and when I have new things,

02:17:10   I'll probably talk about them here,

02:17:11   but you know, that's baby steps, we'll get there.

02:17:15   - I'm really curious to see, like, you know,

02:17:17   'cause you've been a programmer your entire life

02:17:21   since you were a baby, you've been a programmer,

02:17:23   And now you're gonna have that angle of yourself

02:17:27   just be removed for a while.

02:17:29   And so I know you're gonna keep coding

02:17:31   because you will have to.

02:17:33   - Well, I got two Mac apps to support.

02:17:36   - Right, well, but you probably don't have

02:17:37   a lot of ongoing needs for those.

02:17:39   So I hope and I bet that one thing you're gonna do

02:17:43   is more apps.

02:17:45   - Maybe, I mean, there's lots of things

02:17:47   that are now on the table.

02:17:48   It depends, it depends on how things go.

02:17:52   I'm still weighing options and thinking about things.

02:17:55   Right now I'm still kind of in the mode of

02:17:57   it's nice to have options,

02:17:59   it's nice to not have everything constantly be closed off

02:18:01   and I really need to evaluate those options

02:18:04   and I haven't spent a lot of time in that mode

02:18:07   where I can consider all sorts of different things.

02:18:10   And setting aside work stuff,

02:18:12   there's like spending more time with my kids

02:18:15   before they disappear to go off to college

02:18:17   or other sort of family things

02:18:19   that I haven't had time to do before.

02:18:21   That's, my priorities are definitely shifting around

02:18:24   to not be like, well now let me fill every second

02:18:26   of my life with work to make up for the work

02:18:29   I just removed from it.

02:18:30   That's probably not what I'm going to do.

02:18:32   - Yeah, I have very strong opinions about this

02:18:35   that we should talk about sometime.

02:18:36   You know, it's funny to me as you say that,

02:18:38   it occurred to me that my driving impetus

02:18:41   for going independent was wanting to be around

02:18:45   for Declan and Michaela while they're young

02:18:47   and before they go off to school as in elementary school.

02:18:51   And now, and so I felt like my clock was ticking

02:18:54   because, you know, that they were gonna be gone all day

02:18:56   in elementary school and well, kindergarten,

02:18:58   that wasn't the case for Declan because he was here

02:19:00   on an iPad because pandemic, but you get the idea.

02:19:03   Well, with you, it's the same thing, but on the flip side,

02:19:05   Alex is not that far away from college

02:19:08   and the clock is ticking for you too,

02:19:10   just on the other end of it,

02:19:11   which is totally wild and funny.

02:19:12   - Yeah, they don't just,

02:19:13   they don't just go away for the day and come back,

02:19:15   they go away and don't come back.

02:19:16   - Yeah, yeah, golly.

02:19:18   Oh, John, I'm so happy, I'm so excited.

02:19:20   I'm mad at you for not having told us, but I'm so excited.

02:19:23   I'm so incredibly happy.

02:19:24   - I'm so happy that you just dropped this like a bomb

02:19:27   the way you do.

02:19:28   Like, this was the most John way

02:19:30   you could have possibly told us this.

02:19:32   - It took a lot of coordination to keep the secret

02:19:34   for the two weeks since we recorded it right there.

02:19:36   (laughing)

02:19:36   Oh, goodness, I am so excited.

02:19:38   Well, congratulations, John.

02:19:40   This is fantastic news.

02:19:41   And let me say, just one more time, atp.fm/join.

02:19:45   (laughing)

02:19:47   - I think it's still you constantly plugging that, Casey.

02:19:49   I was just thanking the people who had already been members,

02:19:51   just everyone who's already a member, just stay a member,

02:19:53   and I will continue to be able to pay my mortgage.

02:19:57   - Jon, if you would like a plugin

02:19:59   to put the membership numbers on your Venue Bar,

02:20:01   I know a guy.

02:20:02   - No thanks.

02:20:03   (laughing)

02:20:03   I don't need to see how much CPU is being used

02:20:06   at every second, and I certainly don't need to have that

02:20:08   in my Venue Bar either.

02:20:09   - Well, I can give you new things to stress about

02:20:12   if you need 'em, don't you worry.

02:20:14   (beeping)