00:00:15 ◼ ► Alright, so listeners, what I'm looking at is what appears to be some sort of ferry terminal,
00:00:22 ◼ ► There's a lot of water. Water in places that it doesn't really appear that there should be water,
00:00:33 ◼ ► And some or all of the steps, well not all of the steps, but either the steps are landing in water,
00:00:46 ◼ ► There was a large storm coming through the northeast, and whenever there's a very large storm,
00:00:55 ◼ ► But to get my MacBook Pro, I had to wait first of all for the freight boat to arrive two hours late,
00:01:06 ◼ ► When it somehow actually did arrive, I had to ride my bike with very, very tall boots through this water.
00:01:14 ◼ ► Now, the water is tall enough that the entire, whatever the wheel that turns that is on the pedal side of the chain,
00:01:23 ◼ ► like not the back side, like the pedal wheel that is turning, that was totally submerged underwater.
00:01:31 ◼ ► So that's roughly the depth of the water. It was maybe, I don't know, a foot deep, something like that.
00:01:37 ◼ ► So I had to ride my bike through that. Now, unfortunately, I did not bring a backpack to put the box in.
00:01:45 ◼ ► So on the way home, I rode through this water while carrying the laptop box under one arm,
00:01:52 ◼ ► riding a bike through foot deep water thinking, "Oh my God, don't drop it, don't drop it, don't drop it."
00:02:15 ◼ ► Oh, they put like the little pink, like the little things that turn pink in water, did they put them in?
00:02:37 ◼ ► I don't like what it does to the weight of the steering column or whatever they're called on bikes.
00:02:51 ◼ ► Because there's just like this big metal weight on the front, you know, swingy thing, whatever it's called.
00:02:55 ◼ ► The handlebar, it doesn't need to be in there. You can put baskets on the back of your bike too, you know.
00:02:59 ◼ ► You know, I've tried those. I had like the, oh God, the "pennier" or however that word is pronounced.
00:03:06 ◼ ► I've had those bags before. That's great because then when you put stuff in them, the bike falls over.
00:03:12 ◼ ► So my strategy normally is I have a giant, I think it's from Ice Mule, cooler backpack.
00:03:17 ◼ ► And I honestly don't use it for its cooler function. I use it because it's a giant tube that fits on my back.
00:03:44 ◼ ► Marco, for the record, I would bike underwater both ways to get my MacBook Pro, which honestly wasn't due to come in today anyway.
00:03:51 ◼ ► But at the rate we're going may never show up. And we'll leave that teaser for now and talk about it more later.
00:03:56 ◼ ► Unfortunately, the downside of this teaser is that because of the aforementioned storm conditions and all the logistics of getting this laptop here today,
00:04:23 ◼ ► If you're listening to this right now and you are interested in having merchandise to wear or to gift between now and the end of the year,
00:04:31 ◼ ► now is the time to do it. If you're driving, pull over. If you're biking in water, maybe think about your life choices and then pull over.
00:04:38 ◼ ► And go to ATP.FM/STORE and you can get all sorts of sweet, sweet, sweet new merchandise.
00:04:45 ◼ ► So let's talk about what we've got. John, I'm going to start, but feel free to interrupt whenever you're ready.
00:04:49 ◼ ► We've got an M1 Pro shirt, which thanks to the intrepid work of Mr. John Siracusa, we now have an updated chip diagram on the back.
00:05:03 ◼ ► And again, if you're listening, maybe Marco can make this the chapter art. We'll see what happens.
00:05:08 ◼ ► But you should see the rendering of the back of this T-shirt. We almost needed to extend the length of the T-shirt to fit the M1 Max on the shirt.
00:05:22 ◼ ► I don't think we're going to be able to do it for the Mac Pro chips because we're really pushing the limit of what kind of diagram can fit on the back of this shirt.
00:05:33 ◼ ► People were joking about that. I said, "Oh, just shrink it. Get it to like silicon shrink."
00:05:37 ◼ ► But the thing is, you can't actually shrink these diagrams. And these are fanciful diagrams with just rectangles and stuff.
00:05:46 ◼ ► But you can't just keep shrinking it because there's a minimum line width and a minimal sort of gap between lines.
00:05:55 ◼ ► The on-demand M1 shirt is off sale for now just so there's no confusion about what these are.
00:06:15 ◼ ► I had made a design that said M1X. That turned out not to be the name of the chip, so forget about that shirt. Sorry, everybody.
00:06:22 ◼ ► But this one, we were trying to figure out how to incorporate Pro and Max, so we did it with a badge.
00:06:26 ◼ ► The badges are colored, the Pro badge is blue, and the Max badge is purple because those are the colors that Apple uses.
00:06:32 ◼ ► And it's sort of in their event and marketing materials, like the Pro is always glowing blue or whatever.
00:06:56 ◼ ► These are extremely expensive t-shirts because they have too many freaking colors on them.
00:07:00 ◼ ► Plus they have printing on the back. So every single color is another printing pass, plus there's also a printing pass on the back.
00:07:06 ◼ ► That's, by the way, why the blue Pro badge is the same color blue as the blue in the M1 logo,
00:07:16 ◼ ► because if we didn't do that, we'd have to do even another printing pass that would cost even more money.
00:07:20 ◼ ► See, you didn't realize how well engineered our shirts are, but these are the engineering trade-offs that the three of us made.
00:07:28 ◼ ► and I'm like, "We're sorry these shirts are so expensive, but they're expensive for us to make because there's lots of printing passes."
00:07:35 ◼ ► So I don't know what that means. Is it a Veblen good where the more expensive it is, the more desirable it becomes?
00:07:43 ◼ ► We did the usual joke that we normally do, which is the Max shirt is more expensive, because of course it is.
00:07:47 ◼ ► Honestly, I think the Pearl one looks better because the Blue looks better than the Purple, but the Max one is the fanciest one.
00:07:55 ◼ ► But, just like last year, we have cheaper options that only have one color on them, which requires one printing pass, front and back.
00:08:03 ◼ ► You've got the chip on the back, you've got the thing on the front, but it's just one color.
00:08:10 ◼ ► So it's just like it was last year, if you remember, or last sale, if you remember the M1 shirts.
00:08:14 ◼ ► We've got the Rainbow ones that are ridiculously expensive, that are our best-selling shirt we've ever made for some reason.
00:08:20 ◼ ► And then we have the Monochrome ones, which come in all sorts of fun colors, and I think they're really neat.
00:08:25 ◼ ► You should check them out if you don't want to spend the money you need to spend to get a fully kitted out Max shirt.
00:08:32 ◼ ► Indeed. So what kind of prices are we talking about here? So this is all obviously American dollars.
00:08:37 ◼ ► The M1 Pro Rainbow edition, so this is a black shirt with all the different inks on the front.
00:08:45 ◼ ► That is $39. The M1 Max, otherwise the same, $42. Because, hey, it's Max. It's got to be more expensive.
00:08:53 ◼ ► By comparison, the Monochrome versions are, what did we say, $32 for the Pro and $35 for the Max.
00:09:01 ◼ ► So, again, a little bit more expensive for the Max, because if you're going to flex, let's flex.
00:09:05 ◼ ► You've earned that flex, so show it off. So we've got several different options for you.
00:09:14 ◼ ► They're available till the end of the day on the 12th of November. Now, what else do we have?
00:09:19 ◼ ► I don't have a lot of regrets when it comes to this show. I regret that one episode where I had a little too much to drink while they were talking about the Mac Pro.
00:09:28 ◼ ► That was many years ago, and I haven't drank on the show since. But other than that, I don't have a lot of regrets.
00:09:35 ◼ ► I do, however, regret asking Jon about his winter hat situation just an episode or two ago.
00:09:40 ◼ ► And I believe this one is my fault. I don't think this is anyone's fault on my own, but I regret it.
00:09:44 ◼ ► Because we had already thought about doing an ATP winter hat, which we are. However, we're not doing a chicken hat.
00:09:51 ◼ ► We are really firing on all cylinders over here at ATP HQ. But we do have an ATP winter hat with an embroidered logo on it, which I'm really excited about.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And that should look really good. I have no idea how much that is, actually. How much did we say that was going to be?
00:10:09 ◼ ► Similarly, an ATP hoodie. This is the same situation as before, an embroidered ATP hoodie. I freaking live in this thing for like half the year.
00:10:17 ◼ ► That is $49. And then finally, the classic ATP logo shirt. This is black only on the material, but then the rainbow front.
00:10:26 ◼ ► Similar in spirit to the M1. This is where the M1 shirt came from. That is also available, as it almost always will be, I suspect.
00:10:36 ◼ ► So, quite the spread for you to choose between. And again, this is where I say every time somebody says to me,
00:10:44 ◼ ► "Oh, I forgot! I should have done something! I should have pulled over! I should have listened to you, Casey!"
00:10:49 ◼ ► And I didn't. And now, can you please open the store? Please, please, please, please! No. No, we can't.
00:10:54 ◼ ► This is your warning. This is your chance. Until the end of the day on the 12th of November.
00:10:59 ◼ ► We will remind you twice more. The end of the day on the 12th of November. ATP time, that is.
00:11:04 ◼ ► So, please check it out. Also, I don't have the details in front of me because I completely forgot to add it to the show notes.
00:11:10 ◼ ► However, Cotton Bureau, who is our vendor and t-shirt maker and all that, they've made some changes for international people.
00:11:18 ◼ ► I know a lot of you have unfortunately gotten kind of burned by value-added tax or whatever crazy taxes that they do overseas.
00:11:26 ◼ ► And I'm told that both for the UK and Europe, all the taxes and fees should, in most circumstances, be calculated and billed right up front.
00:11:36 ◼ ► So you're not going to have a $30 or $40 t-shirt and then like $10 or $20 in fees or whatever your local currency is in fees once it hits your shores.
00:11:47 ◼ ► So, no promises. I'm still a little fuzzy on what this means because I'm a dumb American.
00:11:51 ◼ ► But, hopefully, you should see that be a lot better this time. And if not, then please reach out to us or to Cotton Bureau and they'll square you away.
00:12:08 ◼ ► We know people want mugs and pint glasses. We wanted to sell them, especially mugs because it's the wintertime.
00:12:12 ◼ ► But unfortunately, our supplier for mugs and pint glasses is not able to guarantee us any kind of order of fulfillment in time for the holidays.
00:12:21 ◼ ► So, no mugs and pint glasses. We know people want to replace them. We know some people have broken them.
00:12:29 ◼ ► We also looked at alternate mugs from different makers and we didn't find anything that we really liked.
00:12:34 ◼ ► But mugs and pint glasses will be back someday. We're sorry we don't have them for the holidays. But, you know, we do have a bunch of other new stuff.
00:12:41 ◼ ► I would even consider doing a run of just mugs and glasses if and when the time comes that we can.
00:12:46 ◼ ► But, yes, I would not plan on that being available for the holidays, which is not what we intended. It's not what Cotton Bureau intended.
00:12:59 ◼ ► And one more thing to remind everybody. If you are an ATP member, check your member page because you will find your own discount code there for 15% off everything in the store.
00:13:09 ◼ ► And if you want to get 15% off because, you know, you think you're going to buy a bunch of stuff and it's expensive, become a member.
00:13:15 ◼ ► ATP.M/join. Become a member for one month. Get the 15% discount and then just cancel your member.
00:13:23 ◼ ► Either one. The whole point is it's pretty easy to save whatever the membership cost. It's like $8. You can save $8 buying a couple of t-shirts. Easy.
00:13:30 ◼ ► And I'm always amazed people don't do this. Because they look at the membership numbers and I think, "Surely, everybody who bought from the store..."
00:13:37 ◼ ► Nobody would buy anything from the store without first getting the easy 15% off and then canceling. But, no. It never happens.
00:13:42 ◼ ► We don't see a big bump in members. It's just the members get the discount and nobody else does.
00:13:46 ◼ ► Everybody. Get the discount. Do the math beforehand. Figure out, "I'm going to order this, this, and this."
00:14:00 ◼ ► Members, don't forget it's on your member page at ATP.FM. What is the member page? It is...
00:14:05 ◼ ► ATP.FM/member. That's where you go if you're logged in on the site, you will see your member code copy and paste it into the store site during checkout to get your discount.
00:14:15 ◼ ► Now, Jon, if you weren't a member, and this sounds just too good to be true because it kind of is, where would you go to become a member?
00:14:25 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Memberful, help you monetize your passion with membership.
00:14:32 ◼ ► Memberful allows you, a content creator or somebody with an audience, to monetize your passion, monetize your business with selling memberships to your audience.
00:14:46 ◼ ► And this can be memberships for all sorts of things, things like custom podcasts or custom access to stuff.
00:14:56 ◼ ► And they understand that creators don't want Memberful branding all over everything, or they don't want Memberful to own the whole relationship.
00:15:07 ◼ ► You control all the branding, you retain control and ownership of the audience, the memberships, it even goes directly to your own Stripe account with the payments.
00:15:15 ◼ ► So really Memberful is all about helping you, the creator, take control of your business and sell memberships to your audience.
00:15:24 ◼ ► They have actual humans ready to help you make money because they really want to support you as well.
00:15:34 ◼ ► And with Memberful, they handle all the hard stuff, integrating with any existing tools you already have, integrate with lots of popular CMSs and everything already on the web.
00:15:43 ◼ ► So see for yourself by starting a free trial with no credit card required at memberful.com/ATP.
00:15:52 ◼ ► Let them handle all the tricky and kind of pain in the butt payment stuff so that you can focus on your business, your brand, your audience.
00:16:01 ◼ ► So once again, memberful.com/ATP. Get started for free, no credit card required at Memberful.
00:16:36 ◼ ► Like it was touted when APFS was introduced all those years ago and it seemed like a cool idea.
00:16:46 ◼ ► Very often you just want to look at a folder and say how much stuff is in this folder and all of its subfolders.
00:16:52 ◼ ► But instead you have to see the little things that's calculating or when you go to the storage screen on your iPhone,
00:16:56 ◼ ► you wait a year and a day for it to figure out how much room is taken up by your movies and your apps or whatever.
00:17:24 ◼ ► Fast directory sizing is enabled on a per directory basis and this could be checked by the user albeit not easily.
00:17:30 ◼ ► It can only be enabled when a directory is empty and must also be turned on for every new subdirectory.
00:17:37 ◼ ► So you can't just like take a folder on your hard drive or whatever and say I want to enable fast directory sizing.
00:17:44 ◼ ► And then every single new subdirectory that's made also has to have that thing turned on when the directory is made because at that point it's empty.
00:17:52 ◼ ► So this is the type of thing that would be very difficult to do manually unless you were very careful or it would really have to be done by the operating system for it to be consistent.
00:17:59 ◼ ► We'll put a link to the APFS reference PDF from Apple's website so you can read more of it.
00:18:07 ◼ ► You cannot enable fast directory sizing on directories containing files or other directories.
00:18:11 ◼ ► You must instead first create a new directory, enable fast directory sizing on it, and then move the contents of the existing directory into the new directory.
00:18:18 ◼ ► So I suppose a utility or something can do that if it wanted to but I don't know of any that does.
00:18:34 ◼ ► Though still unclear to me if Mac OS is turning this flag on automatically or appropriately or not but some initial experimentation makes me think it isn't being used.
00:18:41 ◼ ► I agree Chris because it doesn't seem like anything about directory sizing is fast on Mac OS or on iOS.
00:18:54 ◼ ► So what I said before about keeping track of the size of the stuff in your directory is expensive because you have a lot of contention to keep updating that one count.
00:19:02 ◼ ► Every time anything gets created or destroyed underneath that directory, whatever did that thing wants to update this number and they all have to get into a big line and fight with each other.
00:19:13 ◼ ► Yeah it's expensive. Apparently there's no magic that's why it's not enabled by default.
00:19:17 ◼ ► I still feel like I might want to pay that price especially for like sub trees of my hard drive that I check the size on but apparently Mac OS is not doing it for me.
00:19:31 ◼ ► Alright so there's an Anand, Anantek, I think I have that right. Oh god I really have to learn that pronunciation.
00:19:42 ◼ ► I read through this and I don't know if I just wasn't in the right frame of mind but my eyes kind of glazed over so I'm going to have to ask you John to step in as the chief summarizer in chief and tell me what's going on here.
00:19:54 ◼ ► We had a backdoor SKDP because Dom asked this question and I was going to put an SKDP but it's very relevant to this article.
00:20:01 ◼ ► Dom asked do you think non-pro users will notice the extra memory bandwidth in the M1 Macs or do you need to run pro workloads to feel the benefit over the M1 Pro?
00:20:09 ◼ ► We talked about that on past shows. The M1 Macs has double, lots of stuff has doubled the GPU cores, has doubled the video encoder decoder, it also has doubled the memory bandwidth.
00:20:20 ◼ ► But as I said on that show, do you know what workloads you do that stress the memory bandwidth?
00:20:26 ◼ ► And that's a question that people will be asking. Will I notice that? Is the memory bandwidth a thing I would feel at all?
00:20:31 ◼ ► Or how do I know whether I should bother going up to the Macs if I'm not sure that I need those GPU cores.
00:20:37 ◼ ► This OnTech article tries to answer that question so here are some choice quotes from it.
00:20:41 ◼ ► Using the CPU alone, meaning the power cores and the efficiency cores together, doesn't seem to be able to use more than 243 GB/s of RAM bandwidth in the M1 Mac.
00:20:51 ◼ ► So recall that the M1 Macs has up to 400 GB of memory bandwidth and it seems like just using the CPU, not the GPU or anything else on the system on a chip, you can only use a little bit more than half of that.
00:21:02 ◼ ► While 243 GB/s is massive and overshadows any other design in the industry, it's still quite far from the 409 GB/s the chip is capable of.
00:21:10 ◼ ► More importantly, for the M1 Macs, it's only slightly higher than the 204 GB/s limit of the M1 Pro.
00:21:16 ◼ ► So from a CPU only workload perspective, it just doesn't appear to make sense to get the Macs if one is focused just on CPU bandwidth.
00:21:22 ◼ ► I don't know if this helps people make a decision, but you might know, okay, do you see your CPU cores maxed out?
00:21:28 ◼ ► If that's the case, the Macs is not going to, even though it has theoretically doubled the memory bandwidth, it's not going to help you if you're just using the CPU.
00:21:35 ◼ ► So the article says, "I imagine that workloads that stress the CPU, GPU, and media engines all at the same time would be able to take advantage of the full system memory bandwidth and allow the M1 Mac to stretch its legs and differentiate itself from the M1 Pro and other systems."
00:21:48 ◼ ► So right away, if you're not planning on using almost all of the chip at the same time, the memory bandwidth advantage of the M1 Macs is probably not important to you.
00:21:57 ◼ ► So the article goes on to compare the M1 Macs and Pro with the ostensible competition in the marketplace.
00:22:05 ◼ ► It says, "The workloads that put the most memory pressure and stress DRAM the most all have multiple factors of performance advantage compared to the best Intel and AMD have to offer."
00:22:14 ◼ ► So there's that qualifier of saying, if you find a workload, synthetic or real, that uses a lot of memory bandwidth, the M1 Pro/Macs, I wish we had a name for that pair of them.
00:22:29 ◼ ► This is quoting from the article, "The performance differences here are just insane and really showcase how far had Apple's memory subsystem is and its ability to allow the CPUs to scale to such a degree in memory-bound workloads.
00:22:40 ◼ ► We noted how the M1 Mac CPUs are not fully able to take advantage of the DRAM bandwidth of the chip.
00:22:45 ◼ ► We can't help but ask ourselves how much better the CPUs would score if the cluster and fabric would allow them to fully utilize the memory."
00:22:57 ◼ ► What are the limitations of what they call the on-chip fabric that sort of weaves all these pieces together?
00:23:01 ◼ ► Because if you look at the chip diagram, you'll see like this four independent memory interfaces as the ears on the Macs, and you can see kind of what they're plumbed into.
00:23:09 ◼ ► And if you look at the, read the article, you'll see the description of like, it's like the plumbing, those pipes don't all go to the CPU, which is why the CPU alone can't use all the memory bandwidth because it doesn't really have a direct line to that.
00:23:20 ◼ ► So theoretically, if the fabric that weaves together all these pieces had more routes between the pieces, perhaps it could go better, do better.
00:23:37 ◼ ► "In the SpecFP suite, the M1 Macs is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market.
00:23:42 ◼ ► It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2 times the performance of the second best laptop chip.
00:23:48 ◼ ► The M1 Macs even manages to outperform the 16 core 5950X, a chip whose package power is 142 watts, with the rest of the system quite above that.
00:24:01 ◼ ► So in particular aspects where these chips are strong memory bandwidth in particular, but also like floating point stuff and benchmarks that use that memory bandwidth, these chips are absolutely amazing.
00:24:12 ◼ ► And the article goes on to describe like, but what, how could that be? Why, you know, what is it? Is there something magic in these chips?
00:24:24 ◼ ► Again, quoting from the article, "Apple's stark advantage and specific workloads here do make us ask the question how this translates into application use cases.
00:24:32 ◼ ► We'd never seen such a design before, so it's not exactly clear where things would land.
00:24:36 ◼ ► I think Apple is rather clear that their focus with these designs is catering to content creation crowd, the power users who use large productivity applications via video editing, audio mastering, or code compiling.
00:24:46 ◼ ► These are all areas where the micro architectural characteristics of the M1 Pro/Macs would shine and are likely vastly outperform any other systems out there."
00:24:55 ◼ ► So Apple has made these chips with specific strengths and it's hard to know where those strengths, what those would do for you, but it's pretty clear that they're focused on the types of things that Apple thinks its customers will do with its chips.
00:25:19 ◼ ► You can play games on a Mac and you saw that diagram where it's like, "Wow, it's as fast as the Nvidia 3080 laptop chip."
00:25:27 ◼ ► That's all true, but first of all, there's not a lot of games that are even native to ARM, so they're running all these games in Rosetta.
00:25:35 ◼ ► And second of all, they're not even very good ports. They're Mac ports of older games that don't run very well on the Mac.
00:25:40 ◼ ► So it's very clear that Apple was not concentrating on making sure that PC games from five years ago are able to take advantage of all this computing power.
00:25:50 ◼ ► Because they're not. It's there, and a really good M1 native, well-done port or implementation of a game could absolutely take advantage of all this stuff.
00:25:59 ◼ ► But it's not what Apple concentrated on, mostly because there just aren't a lot of good games for the Mac, which is a shame, but it's true.
00:26:05 ◼ ► So here's an example scenario from the folks who make Affinity Photo. Affinity makes a bunch of apps.
00:26:21 ◼ ► So there's a bunch of Affinity apps. I think they're really great. They make Mac and iOS native versions of those and everything.
00:26:27 ◼ ► Here are some reports from Andy Summerfield, who is the Affinity Photo lead. That's just what his bio says. Lead what? Lead developer? Maybe.
00:26:36 ◼ ► Anyway, first he had a Twitter thread before the new laptops came out describing how Affinity Photo was originally created to deal with GPU stuff.
00:26:46 ◼ ► He said, "In Affinity Photo, an ideal GPU would do three different things well. High compute performance, fast on-chip bandwidth, and fast transfer on and off the GPU.
00:26:56 ◼ ► Back in 2009 when we made this plan, no GPU did all three things well, but we thought that eventually the industry would get there, so we took a risk and designed the entire architecture based on that assumption."
00:27:06 ◼ ► Then he says, "Things didn't go entirely to plan." Basically, they designed this in 2009, and for years and years there was no chip that did all of these things well.
00:27:14 ◼ ► Maybe there'd be one or two of them, but in particular, fast transfer on and off the GPU, that's usually a bottleneck, right?
00:27:21 ◼ ► Because you could have fast on-chip VRAM between your GPU, but then you have to ship everything from main memory to the GPU, and then it grinds in and sends it back.
00:27:29 ◼ ► And they designed the entire architecture expecting to be able to do that back and forth very quickly.
00:27:34 ◼ ► So fast forward to today, where Andy is testing the M1 Max with Affinity Photo. This is from a tweet.
00:27:42 ◼ ► "The M1 Max is the fastest GPU we have ever measured in Affinity Photo benchmark. It outperforms the AMD W6900X, a $6,000 300-watt desktop part, because it has immense compute performance, immense on-chip bandwidth, and immediate data transfer on and off the GPU."
00:28:01 ◼ ► He says, "The GPU isn't the only big win here. The vector multi-CPU score in the M1 Max is the highest we have ever measured for Affinity Designer users, as is the combined single GPU score for Affinity Publisher."
00:28:12 ◼ ► So, in the right circumstances, in an application that is designed to take advantage of the things that this system on a chip does well, in an actual application that people use, like Affinity Photo, not an artificial benchmark, but an actual shipping application, Affinity Photo, it's faster than the W6900X.
00:28:30 ◼ ► Again, a $6,000 GPU. So, Apple definitely had certain applications in its sights, and if your applications play to the strengths of these chips, they can do amazing things with very little power.
00:28:42 ◼ ► But finally, as Paul Stomachew says, "The only benchmark that really matters is extracting Xcode from its zip file."
00:28:49 ◼ ► If you're a developer, you know what this is, and you know that when I said zip, I pronounced it with an X instead of a Z, but if you're not a developer, you might not know that one of the ways you can get Xcode is by downloading a file from Apple called XcodeVersionNumber.xip.
00:29:05 ◼ ► .xip is some compression format. I don't know if it's Apple proprietary or if it's just a standard.
00:29:10 ◼ ► I think it's just a renamed zip that also has code signing, I think. Or signing, you know, content signing.
00:29:15 ◼ ► Yeah, whatever it is. It's a compressed file, right? And when developers get a new version of Xcode, often they're in a hurry to decompress it and install it because they have to do a build to submit to the store, so you download this .xip file, this zip file, and then you decompress it, and it's one of the most common times a Mac or iOS software developer feels their machine is slow because it takes forever.
00:29:37 ◼ ► One big tip, by the way, turn off Dropbox if you use the Airflow client for the reason we talked about two episodes ago with the FSEvents thing, or if you use Maestro, you won't have that problem either.
00:29:47 ◼ ► Yeah, so why does it take so long? Well, part of it is probably just CPU grinding and decompressing because it's a multi-gigabyte thing and it's decompressing, but the other part of it is that it decompresses into, like, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny files, right?
00:30:01 ◼ ► And doing anything with the file system, making lots of files, takes a lot of time. That's why you don't want Dropbox watching every file system event as it goes by because it's just going to put drag on your system, right?
00:30:11 ◼ ► And you may be wondering, like, well, how does the M1 Macs help with that? How do the new M1 Macs, including the one with the M1 Macs, help with that?
00:30:21 ◼ ► So obviously CPU helps with the decompression part, maybe. Memory bandwidth, maybe. But also, as we mentioned last time, the SSDs are faster in these things, so here is the benchmark we care about.
00:30:31 ◼ ► If previously you had the fastest, best Mac laptop you could buy, 2019, was the 8-core the best you could get? Yeah. 8-core i9, 16-inch MacBook Pro, and you're unzipping Xcode 13.1, it would take 9 minutes and 34 seconds.
00:30:48 ◼ ► If you have one of the fancy new M1 Macs, 16 inches, less than half that time. 4 minutes and 43 seconds. So there you have it. Or is that less than half? Yeah.
00:30:58 ◼ ► In the benchmark, the only benchmark that matters, you will unzip Xcode twice as fast. Wow. That's amazing. I'm excited.
00:31:07 ◼ ► Although, now that I think about that, how does it do it twice as fast? The disks aren't twice as fast.
00:31:12 ◼ ► The new SSDs did get a lot faster in read performance. I don't know if they're that much faster in write, but I think it's probably one of those things where you're just shuffling a ton of data around, and so it probably stresses the bandwidth of the entire system.
00:31:25 ◼ ► Like memory bandwidth, cache lines, I/O speed obviously is going to be a big one, but there's going to be stuff moving back and forth all over the place within the system.
00:31:34 ◼ ► So I would imagine making everything kind of faster and higher bandwidth and increasing the caches everywhere and increasing the I/O speed, all of those things probably play into it.
00:31:43 ◼ ► Maybe there's some kind of, since it's like a signed version, maybe verifying the signature. There's some dedicated, I think, with that. Anyway, it's faster. These are fast machines.
00:31:51 ◼ ► They are very fast indeed. All right, tell me about Jonathan Dietz and the Pro Display XDR and 120 hertz refresh rates.
00:32:00 ◼ ► Our resident graphics expert who writes us in about all sorts of graphics stuff wrote a very long email doing some math that I asked for last show about whether or not it would be possible to drive a Pro Display XDR at 120 hertz given the current interfaces that connect monitors to Macs.
00:32:18 ◼ ► So the first thing I did with Jonathan's permission is I put up the text of his email on a URL. You can find a link in the show notes if you want to look through all the math because he did all the math like longhand and showed his work.
00:32:30 ◼ ► So if you want to know the gory details and where all this is coming from and learn a little bit about, you know, I don't even know what these things are called. The 444, 442, the whole like color component thing, chroma subsampling and all that.
00:32:43 ◼ ► I know about it from the TV space, but I don't actually know how you describe those things. You guys know what I'm talking about with the 444 and the 422 and stuff?
00:32:56 ◼ ► Anyway, it's more commonly seen in the television world, but it basically has to do with how much information you can throw away and still have the picture look decent in terms of the various channels. In the world of video we're talking about chroma and luminance, which is different than RGB because if you separate the color from the brightness you can save a lot of space.
00:33:16 ◼ ► So anyway, the Pro Display XDR with the resolution that it has, the shipping product, the 6K screen, at 120Hz at 444, which means not dropping any of the information on the floor, would require 78.61 gigabits per second to drive.
00:33:34 ◼ ► The maximum DisplayPort tunneling bandwidth with current DisplayPort interfaces that connect up to Mac video cards is 38.88 gigabits per second. So you can see we have about half, a little more than half than what we would need.
00:33:47 ◼ ► But the whole point of DisplayStream compression and chroma subsampling is to try to compress things down and they can actually compress things down to about half of what they, the size that they would normally be.
00:34:00 ◼ ► So it seems like if you're willing to give up quality, which I probably don't think you are, at least for chroma subsampling on a screen, you could in theory squeeze it down a single wire.
00:34:14 ◼ ► With two wires you could definitely drive it, but two wires, I don't think there's any way to support for two wires to go into the back of the Pro Display XDR so they'd have to make a different interface for it or whatever.
00:34:24 ◼ ► So I would encourage you if you care about this to look at the document to see the math, but the bottom line is that it seems unlikely that you would even want to drive the existing Pro Display XDR or something like it at 120Hz over a single cable given current interfaces because you would have to lose a lot of quality.
00:34:43 ◼ ► Which doesn't matter so much when you're watching a TV. I think there's a link somewhere in his email that shows like what is chroma subsampling.
00:34:50 ◼ ► It's basically throwing away data, which is fine if you're looking at a picture of a beach, but not so fine if you're looking at your menu bar because some of what it might have thrown away is the pixel data that defines the shape of the letters.
00:35:00 ◼ ► Like if you're looking at small text on a screen you really want to be able to see all the individual pixels.
00:35:05 ◼ ► And if you throw away even just, you know, supposedly imperceptible data at very small feature sizes you will notice that because you're sitting way close to your computer screen.
00:35:15 ◼ ► I feel bad that Jonathan wrote all this information and I really just wanted the bottom line. The question was like is it technically possible in any feasible way and it seems like maybe, but probably not something that you would want.
00:35:28 ◼ ► And I really don't think Apple's going to ship a monitor with two wires coming out of the back of it. I mean they kind of did that I think on the inside of the original 5K iMac, but you never saw that.
00:35:37 ◼ ► Yeah, well also keep in mind like even if you had the two cable solution that would take the entire bandwidth of I believe two Thunderbolt buses.
00:35:46 ◼ ► And most modern, most Apple computers have between two and I think at most four Thunderbolt buses on like the Mac Pro maybe.
00:35:55 ◼ ► But you know like the new MacBook Pros that were just released have three. That's why there's three Thunderbolt ports.
00:36:02 ◼ ► And that's, you know, assuming those all have that full bandwidth, but you'd also be consuming it so that would basically reduce your capability of having any kind of peripherals using bandwidth to basically one port.
00:36:20 ◼ ► So it's not a great solution in the era of today's Thunderbolt and DisplayPort standards.
00:36:26 ◼ ► But down in the future when these things presumably have increased bandwidth in their upcoming revisions, you know, then we'll talk.
00:36:34 ◼ ► And Jonathan had one more thing he wanted to get off his chest and I figure it's worth noting because I've heard this as well.
00:36:38 ◼ ► He says, "And incidentally, because I've been seeing this all over the internets, the HDMI ports on the MacBook Pros being HDMI 2.0b does not point to any lack of I/O bandwidth intrinsic to the new SoCs."
00:36:48 ◼ ► Talking about this last week, I said that the three Thunderbolt ports were a limitation of the SoC and I was disappointed that the HDMI port wasn't a fancier standard but they're not connected to each other.
00:37:02 ◼ ► Jonathan says, "The HDMI port is almost certainly implemented using a DisplayPort 1.4a to HDMI 2.0b protocol converter because Apple chips only support DisplayPort output.
00:37:12 ◼ ► While there are various chips that support DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 conversion, Apple's decision was most likely based on the availability, reliability, pricing, or other combination thereof."
00:37:21 ◼ ► So yeah, it is disappointing that it doesn't support better HDMI standards but these machines were designed a while ago and maybe they just didn't have the parts available to do the conversion.
00:37:30 ◼ ► But what they would be converting for is DisplayPort coming off the chips and they're converting that with some other set of chips to an HDMI standard.
00:37:38 ◼ ► They went with 2.0b which is not great. I mean maybe we should have a topic on this for future shows.
00:37:44 ◼ ► Now that we've got these great laptops, what are sort of obvious spec bump things they can do to improve them in the future?
00:37:56 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Caseta by Lutron. Smart lighting control brought to you by Lutron, pioneers in smart home technology.
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00:39:40 ◼ ► Thank you so much to Caseta for reliably switching all of my stuff and for sponsoring our show.
00:39:53 ◼ ► "I was listening to the latest ATP and I heard John's skeptical take on the 16 gigs of RAM in the MacBook that Marco ordered.
00:39:59 ◼ ► This sent me into a total tailspin as I had ordered the exact same config earlier this week and wanted to know if I had chosen poorly."
00:40:06 ◼ ► That's a reference, John. "I discovered that Apple recommends checking your Mac's memory pressure as a way to gauge whether you need more RAM for your Mac.
00:40:17 ◼ ► So how do you get here? If you open up activity monitor and then at the top you choose memory.
00:40:22 ◼ ► At the bottom there'll be a running like graph of what your memory pressure on your machine is.
00:40:26 ◼ ► And that's how you look at it. According to an Apple support document, yellow memory pressure means your computer might eventually need more RAM.
00:40:33 ◼ ► Red memory pressure means your computer needs more RAM. And one of you is kind enough to put in here, I assume, John.
00:40:38 ◼ ► The number of Macs currently for sale with upgradable RAM. Two. The 27-inch iMac and the Mac Pro.
00:40:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I thought it was funny that they have this support document that says, "Your computer might eventually need more RAM."
00:40:55 ◼ ► I mean, they're just saying it needs more RAM. They didn't say it can't get more RAM. It just needs it, but it can't get it.
00:41:06 ◼ ► And I'm sure John will tell me why it doesn't matter in a second. But I thought this was interesting.
00:41:11 ◼ ► And so I started watching my memory pressure graph on my Mac Mini that I've been using as my desktop.
00:41:24 ◼ ► So it was worth knowing that my quest for higher memory machines to eventually replace this desktop is not in vain.
00:41:50 ◼ ► Run Activity Monitor in the corner for a while and glance over at the graph every so often and see, is it yellow or red?
00:42:02 ◼ ► And I think the reason Marco just touched on, probably the main reason we all recommend in general getting more RAM,
00:42:15 ◼ ► And we suggest this because even if you look at your memory usage, which by the way is a good idea,
00:42:25 ◼ ► You don't know if you're going to keep that laptop for five years or if you're going to keep your computer for ten years like me,
00:42:39 ◼ ► but you can add external storage, but the RAM, there's like nothing you can do about it at all.
00:42:53 ◼ ► Based on the assumption that RAM usage tends to go up over time, not stay level or go down,
00:43:07 ◼ ► Four years from now you'll probably be using more RAM than you are today, even if only by a little bit.
00:43:13 ◼ ► In terms of this memory pressure graph being accurate, it's so difficult to measure this in a useful way.
00:43:17 ◼ ► Especially even with your gut, you're like, "Why don't I just tell if my computer feels slow?"
00:43:48 ◼ ► But just because you see it in the yellow, my question would be, "Yeah, but does your computer ever feel slow?"
00:43:59 ◼ ► Or if your RAM usage is going to double in the next five years, then maybe you want to get more RAM.
00:44:15 ◼ ► get more RAM than you think you need, and that will be an insurance policy for the future.
00:44:21 ◼ ► So I wanted to do some quick follow-up on pants that have the dedicated side-leg iPhone pocket,
00:44:38 ◼ ► I mentioned how a lot of people had recommended pants by a brand that I think is pronounced KUHL.
00:45:02 ◼ ► besides that they don't look very attractive, literally every single option that people have sent in
00:45:08 ◼ ► of pants or shorts that have a side-leg phone pocket, they're all, I would say, utilitarian.
00:45:42 ◼ ► So I have not been tempted by the looks of pretty much anything anybody has sent in with such pockets.
00:45:56 ◼ ► But I decided, let me try one pair and just see the utility of it, maybe I'll find use for it.
00:46:13 ◼ ► that not only is it kind of awkward to actually reach the phone in and out of the pocket,
00:46:42 ◼ ► usually it's basically just like a front piece and a back piece with a seam that runs down the side of your leg.
00:46:47 ◼ ► And I think it's probably difficult from a construction perspective to make a pocket that rests on that seam on the inside,
00:47:02 ◼ ► but instead I'm just slowly getting used to having this giant brick of a phone in my pocket.
00:47:18 ◼ ► I still don't fully understand the problem. To be clear about your Merlin reference before,
00:47:22 ◼ ► he thought your phone was hitting you in the junk, but that's apparently not happening.
00:47:25 ◼ ► But then the problem is what? I don't like things touching the more fronty part of my legs?
00:47:31 ◼ ► I think it definitely makes walking inconvenient if the phone starts swiveling over towards the front of the leg instead of the side.
00:47:41 ◼ ► How does it make walking more difficult? It's just your thigh. Your thigh has no joints in it. It's unjointed.
00:47:54 ◼ ► But because these phones are so big and heavy, they just migrate as you walk to whatever is the most ideal gravity position,
00:48:06 ◼ ► These are already pretty snug. I gained some weight this summer because I started going to restaurants because it became okay again.
00:48:37 ◼ ► I mean, they showed your preview on the side. I knew it was going to look like, but it's just comical.
00:48:42 ◼ ► But I get my full name on them just because the whole point of having -- there's two points.
00:48:49 ◼ ► But the second is if I lost them somewhere and someone found them and that person was feeling nice, I want them to be able to find me.
00:48:57 ◼ ► But if I put my full name and they type it into Google, there's a shot they can find me.
00:49:10 ◼ ► The size and the shape was my major concern. Like, are these going to fit nice in my ears?
00:49:15 ◼ ► I've been using the original AirPods for years and years. I love them. They fit my ears perfectly.
00:49:21 ◼ ► Would these fit? Because these are shaped entirely differently. There's nothing -- no part -- no panels, body panels are shared, as they say in the auto industry.
00:49:29 ◼ ► It's an entirely new thing. It's very much like the AirPods Pro, but not quite like them either.
00:49:34 ◼ ► But it's similar shape to that. They don't have a little softener that goes in your ear. They're more like the old AirPods.
00:49:45 ◼ ► They feel even more secure in my ear than the old ones in terms of like if I shake my head around, how much should they wiggle?
00:49:51 ◼ ► I didn't do the taking -- I should have done this before the show. I didn't do like the taking the shirt on and off with the AirPods test.
00:49:57 ◼ ► Which the original ones basically fail because they have long stems and they aren't in my ears, that type.
00:50:08 ◼ ► Even with the AirPod Pros, which have the short stems, that's a difficult thing to pull off without one of them flopping out.
00:50:16 ◼ ► That said, I wore them -- I've been wearing them since I got them for a few days or whatever.
00:50:22 ◼ ► And I've seen this exact complaint from a bunch of other people who presumably are like me or using the original ones and now have the AirPods 3.
00:50:31 ◼ ► They press up against more parts of your ear. Like they have a larger volume. They're just bigger.
00:50:39 ◼ ► There's a bigger thing inside your ear. Ignoring the stems, I was talking about the pod part.
00:50:50 ◼ ► I think the old ones just hung in my ear. That's why they were a little bit loose. There was more air around them.
00:50:56 ◼ ► These ones have contact points on the top, the side. They have more contact points, which is why they're more secure.
00:51:07 ◼ ► And it's not painful or annoying. Maybe I'm hypersensitive to it now, but when I take them out, I can feel where they were touching my ears a little bit.
00:51:15 ◼ ► Whereas I don't remember that sensation before. Or maybe I'm just noticing that now they're touching a top part instead of hanging down from my ears.
00:51:21 ◼ ► They also press up against the top part. So far not a deal breaker. It's only been a few days.
00:51:26 ◼ ► But it made me consider a couple times. Should I order a backup pair of the regular ones just in case?
00:51:31 ◼ ► But I figure I have plenty of time. If they're still selling the old ones, they're going to sell them for at least probably six months or a year.
00:51:45 ◼ ► And I'm concerned that over the long haul, I will find it annoying. The longest I've ever worn them is like cleaning up the kitchen time.
00:51:52 ◼ ► Or like going for a walk time. So I haven't even worn them for like an hour to stretch yet.
00:51:57 ◼ ► Or actually maybe. I think I watched something on the iPad, but it was at least an hour.
00:52:11 ◼ ► Like, here's the problem. In the scenarios where I want to quickly. First of all, I have double tap or whatever, you know, tapping the AirPod set to stop the playback.
00:52:21 ◼ ► That's what I use it for. Right. And it's always when someone in my house comes over and wants to say something to me and I can't hear them because I'm listening to music or a podcast.
00:52:33 ◼ ► The first problem is obviously habit. They come up to me, they tap me on the shoulder, they say something, I tap my ear, nothing happens.
00:52:39 ◼ ► That's just a habit. But I've done it like 19 times now. I just tap my ear and it's like, ah, nothing happens.
00:52:44 ◼ ► Sometimes I tap it twice until I remember, oh yeah, tapping does nothing on these anymore, which is annoying.
00:52:50 ◼ ► But the real problem is when I do remember, how quickly can I take one of my hands, which may or may not be covered in dish soap.
00:52:58 ◼ ► And find, bring it up to my ear and find that little stubby little thing sticking out and then get it between my little fingertips and squeeze it.
00:53:06 ◼ ► It's tricky because the little stubby thing is like against my ear. It doesn't stick out and it doesn't extend down and it's so tiny.
00:53:12 ◼ ► And it's not like squishy and you can kind of squeeze it anywhere. You can squeeze it more in more places than you think you can.
00:53:21 ◼ ► But squeezing it I find very difficult and fidgety. Whereas tapping I could do literally with an oven mitt on.
00:53:28 ◼ ► I could do it outside of a winter hat. People have talked about wearing helmets and being able to just smack the side of the helmet and it would trigger the accelerometers.
00:53:34 ◼ ► That's all out the window when you got to find that little tiny thing and squeeze it. So I'm a little bit sad about that.
00:53:43 ◼ ► And the main reason I'm willing to give it a try is these sound so much better than the original AirPods.
00:53:48 ◼ ► Not that I mostly didn't listen to music. I just mostly listen to podcasts and stuff on them.
00:53:54 ◼ ► But you can tell that the sound quality is... The volume is louder, the bass is better, the reproduction is better.
00:53:59 ◼ ► They're just better sounding. As they should be. The original AirPods are what, like 4 or 5 years old now?
00:54:04 ◼ ► And these are just bigger. They're just plain bigger. They probably have bigger drivers in there.
00:54:08 ◼ ► And also I think the battery life is probably going to end up being better. I have no idea because I haven't come close to draining the battery on these.
00:54:24 ◼ ► But I tested the mag-safeness of the case and there are definitely more magnetic alignment points than there were before.
00:54:43 ◼ ► I don't know if they're magnet points, they're probably just metal things. The ring around the mag-safe puck is magnetic.
00:54:48 ◼ ► So it felt like it only had two and that didn't really give it a firm placement. It was just kind of wobbly on those two things.
00:54:55 ◼ ► The new one has four clear points. You put it on the mag-safe puck and it has four clear points.
00:55:05 ◼ ► So Apple did actually change some aspect of the design to be better with the mag-safe puck.
00:55:10 ◼ ► Almost too good because now if you just, I don't have Marco's suction stuff sticking my puck to my nightstand.
00:55:16 ◼ ► So if you're not careful and you go to lift the AirPods case off of the puck, it'll take the puck with it.
00:55:31 ◼ ► But I kind of miss tapping. It's just a question of whether the ergonomics will be adequate for me.
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00:57:18 ◼ ► We should talk about the MacBook Pro. Marco made mention that his was dragged underwater for a mile in order to get to his house this afternoon.
00:57:31 ◼ ► Mine, so I have the first worldiest of first world problems. My MacBook Pro has been sitting somewhere in Shenzhen for like three days now, I think, or something like that.
00:57:57 ◼ ► And Apple said, "Well, maybe Wednesday." As in a week from when we're recording right now.
00:58:02 ◼ ► But UPS said, "No, no, no, no, no. It'll be Monday." And actually still says, "No, no, no. It'll be Monday."
00:58:29 ◼ ► I don't buy computers very often. I buy them more often than John, but considerably less often than Marco.
00:58:38 ◼ ► That's very true. You're exactly right. It was really difficult to thread this needle, I tell you that.
00:58:42 ◼ ► But anyway, I just want my treat. And a friend of mine, Simon, pointed me to a MacRumors post that was put up this morning.
00:58:56 ◼ ► And I've heard conflicting reports over exactly what's going wrong, but one way or another, it seems like UPS just doesn't have enough planes to ship all the stuff they need to ship.
00:59:05 ◼ ► So my MacBook Pro is sitting in China for a while. Maybe it'll leave at some point. I presume it will. Don't know when.
00:59:13 ◼ ► Y'all, I'm really trying to find some chill about this issue. I'm coming up short, though. I really don't have a lot of chill right now.
00:59:19 ◼ ► And I should, because really this doesn't matter. And I'm extremely appreciative of the fact that I can get one and that it's eventually going to show up.
00:59:28 ◼ ► But patience is not my strong suit, gentlemen. And I'm really running low on chill on this issue.
00:59:39 ◼ ► They didn't have anything that was close enough to what I ordered that I was willing to just impulse buy on the spot.
00:59:47 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I did quickly handle both the 16 and 14 inch machines. I didn't play with them in terms of software very much, but in terms of physical design and whatnot, I did hold on to them, lift it up, spin it around, and so on.
01:00:02 ◼ ► The one thing I think I should note right away is that as compared to my Intel MacBook Pro, I didn't feel like they were that dramatically heavier. My understanding is as compared to an M1 MacBook or certainly MacBook Air or perhaps even a MacBook Pro, that it is quite a bit heavier.
01:00:22 ◼ ► Marco, you can correct me in a moment here. But compared to my Intel machine, it was actually roughly the same. Other than that, it looks beautiful. I like the new design. I love those ports hanging out there.
01:00:33 ◼ ► And the screen looked great, but I didn't have it side by side with anything else. So I don't have really good comparisons.
01:00:40 ◼ ► It occurred to me well after I left that I must be a professional podcasters because I didn't even think to open up Safari and go scrolling to see what the 120 hertz was like. It just did not even cross my eye.
01:00:54 ◼ ► What you should have done is gone to the screensaver and see something in HDR because I think like you said, oh, the screen, I can't tell because I don't have anything side by side.
01:01:00 ◼ ► If you were to bring up something in HDR as in not the UI, you would notice the difference. And one easy way to do that with the built-in thing is, well, isn't it built in? Maybe it's not. I'm thinking of the Apple TV.
01:01:09 ◼ ► Anyway, if you use the aerial screensaver and tell it to show HDR video only and turn that on, suddenly you have your screen filled with HDR video and it will really pop. You won't need like a side by side comparison. You will notice the difference.
01:01:21 ◼ ► Yeah, I can't imagine Apple shipping a screensaver for a laptop that runs on batteries that would show HDR content continuously. There's no way they would do that.
01:01:31 ◼ ► In that case, it's actually kind of hard to like find HDR content because none of the UI is going to be HDR. You need like a video or a photo or something. Maybe they have some HDR photos if you launch the Photos app.
01:01:45 ◼ ► Yeah, but you do need something with a like highlight or something that's going to really show that off. But I think that's where the screen difference, you know, you'll be able to see that without a side by side comparison. It's just so much brighter.
01:01:55 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a good point. And by the way, real time follow up, I was saying Shenzhen, I'm in Shanghai, I'm sorry. And it has been sitting, I don't know if this is actually my local or their local, but it's been sitting in Shanghai since 4.13am on Monday.
01:02:07 ◼ ► So it's been two days that it's been 12 almost three at this point that it's been sitting there. And yeah, it eventually will show up at my house, I'm sure but I'm very sad, y'all. So Marco, let me live vicariously through you as I weep quietly and perhaps on mute. How good is it?
01:02:23 ◼ ► I really don't know yet. So part of that is because of the aforementioned issues with just you know, getting in here during a big storm and my town is flooded and everything. So it's not like a flood. Anyway, I feel sorry for this just what happens in a beach town on the off season. It's you know, nothing's nothing's, you know, ruined or anything.
01:02:44 ◼ ► Anyway, so issue number one is that I haven't had it for very long issue number two is that for the first time I think ever, migration assistant totally failed me. And so I had I have nothing on it yet. Like all I did so far was get whatever I could set up so I could run my Xcode comparison building overcast.
01:03:05 ◼ ► And so I could see like, how much more quickly does it build overcast than my M1 Mac mini and MacBook Air. Because what I want to know with this computer is, do I do I want to use it as my desktop until Apple makes a faster desktop than this.
01:03:24 ◼ ► And because my my current thinking on that, which you talked a little bit about this and under the radar today as well. My current thinking on that is that chances are based on the rumors and based on you know, Apple, you know, tea leaf reading, that they're probably done releasing hardware for this year.
01:03:42 ◼ ► And they're they're almost certainly, if they're not done releasing hardware, they're almost certainly done releasing Macs for this year. And the the next the soonest I can imagine there being a Mac mini or any other kind of desktop Mac with these chips in in it or better, is at least next spring.
01:04:01 ◼ ► And as we discussed, it might even be next fall. So we have between probably between six and 12 months, where this were the fastest computers Apple makes are going to be MacBook Pros. That's that that's the most likely outcome here.
01:04:16 ◼ ► And so I decided, well, I want to see how fast is this because after last show, we were talking in the after show and Casey, john convinced me, maybe I should have ordered higher specs, and maybe I should be using this, you know, possibly as a desktop, you know, clamshell mode or whatever else.
01:04:34 ◼ ► And, and I had a good experience doing that with my M one MacBook Air last fall when I first got it before I got the Mac mini. And so I know that that works really well on the M ones.
01:04:46 ◼ ► And so I'm like, Alright, well, fine. So I placed a just in case order, because it was a while out for a more decked out 14 inch 64 gigs of RAM, four terabyte storage, the 32 core, you know, top end CPU, because I'm like, Well, just in case I end up getting this and wanting something faster, then at least I'm ahead of the order queue a little bit. And that's not going to ship until the end of November, allegedly. So I have a month roughly before it's even going to get here.
01:05:15 ◼ ► If your shows up before mine, your second one shows up mine, I'm going to come up and steal it. So put it under lock and key if it does show up and telling you now bring to bring some tall boots.
01:05:26 ◼ ► Before Marco gets to the end of his story, which may or may not have a happy ending, I just want to warn people that when if you ever think of trying to do this, you say, Oh, it says it's gonna arrive at the end of November. So don't have to worry about it. You do have to worry about it because kind of like progress bars in our past discussion, Apple doesn't know the future. And even though when you order it, it says this is the date range, your thing may be coming.
01:05:44 ◼ ► Sometimes, in fact, fairly often, that date is not the date your thing comes. It could come days or even weeks earlier than you expected. And they think that's a good thing. And if you are relying on the fact that I have a week, I have a month to decide whether I have to cancel this order, you may just wake up one day with your computer that you thought you still had another two weeks to cancel sitting on your doorstep. So be careful.
01:06:06 ◼ ► Yeah, but I only have two weeks to return this one. And so and I know that I have most likely four or so weeks before I get the higher spec one if I don't cancel that order yet. So I kind of have to make a decision like what do I do here? I do love a lot about this computer. I definitely do not want the 16 inch for myself. I love the 14 inch size. It is great. And I think if again, if I were using the laptop as a laptop,
01:06:35 ◼ ► as my main computer, I would get 16 inch, no question because I want the extra screen space. But because I'm using it either to most likely drive a display in clamshell mode, in which case its size doesn't matter at all. Or when I'm going to take it somewhere, you know, then I'm going to want it to be mid sized, not not maximum sized, then the 14 inch I think remains the size for me. But anyway, so going back to trying to get this to work.
01:07:03 ◼ ► It did eventually work in the sense that I gave up on trying to migrate my my M one MacBook Pro or my M1 MacBook Air, excuse me to it. I don't know if you have seen the target disk mode equivalent for M ones, it's actually different, you have to like boot into the recovery mode. And then there's there's basically like a little like share disk app that you run that you type in all the passwords and it makes the disk available.
01:07:27 ◼ ► I tried to get this to work with a Thunderbolt cable, and USB three cable in every port configuration I could figure out and I could not get the new MacBook Pro to recognize the MacBook Air in its whatever it's called target disk mode at all, it just wouldn't show up as like the available disk in the in the setup wizard thing.
01:07:49 ◼ ► So then I tried, okay, I'll go I'll boot with MacBook Air in regular mode, and I'll launch migration assistant and try to get that to work. And migration assistant said it couldn't authenticate the current user and failed.
01:08:01 ◼ ► And I'm like, that's weird. Okay, I rebooted. Same thing. Okay, I guess this isn't happening today.
01:08:08 ◼ ► So anyway, so I just set it up as new and I ran some tests. And I don't have I have almost nothing on it yet. But I just basically air dropped a bunch of files to air drop my version of Xcode, my my checkout directories for overcast, got you know, got the signing credentials over there, which was a wonderful pain in the butt as it always is, but oh, well, that's that's not the one's fault. And finally was able to build some stuff.
01:08:33 ◼ ► Now, we've seen benchmarks for Xcode all over the map on basically how much faster these are than the M ones. And I should clarify also, the MacBook Pro I have here to test today is an M one Pro, not an M one max.
01:08:51 ◼ ► It is the 10 core. So it is like the it's the M one Pro with all of its parts working. But it is still the M one Pro and it only has 16 gigs of RAM, john. So, which Yes, I do regret. Thanks. Thanks, john.
01:09:04 ◼ ► So the building building overcast in its current version, from a clean build on my M one Mac mini, my desktop takes 30 seconds. That same thing on the M one Pro takes 19 seconds. So it's 36% faster. Nice.
01:09:24 ◼ ► Now, a lot of people don't do clean builds very often. So I figured, let me try something a little more realistic, let me try an incremental build. I did two incremental builds, one of them that changes a file that's included by a lot of files in the project, my appearance manager file, lots of stuff uses this.
01:09:40 ◼ ► So when I change anything in that file, it has to rebuild a lot of other files. That on the M one took 20 seconds on the M one Pro took 13 seconds, so 31% faster. And then I did after that, the most common thing, a very small incremental change.
01:09:57 ◼ ► This is changing one view controller. But this is a swift file this time. So one swift view controller file. So the most simple incremental build that you could probably do M one, six seconds, M one Pro, four seconds.
01:10:13 ◼ ► So it is faster, it is a decent amount faster. And these are gains that I want. And in addition to that, you know, 30 to 50% faster build time for my actual work that I actually do with my actual project.
01:10:29 ◼ ► In addition to that, it also has the higher RAM ceiling available. So what I am definitely going to try is getting this higher spec machine in and running it in clamshell mode as my desktop again.
01:10:45 ◼ ► As I mentioned earlier, I had a great experience doing that with the MacBook Air and the M one MacBook Air. And so I know the M one machines can do clamshell mode reliably, I know they're good at it, I know it's a totally fine experience.
01:10:59 ◼ ► And then my plan is to kind of go a bit of a different direction with my with my, you know, what this machine what the role of this machine is, since it'll basically be a desktop, great. But what and I mentioned last week, like, you know, I enjoy having my my MacBook
01:11:16 ◼ ► Air laptop, as our like, around the house machine doing workouts with our, you know, FaceTime workouts with our trainer, and you know, running like any kind of zoom call we have to have with the school or with the teacher or whatever, like, I love having that machine for that.
01:11:31 ◼ ► And I love and we do those things often enough that I don't want to disrupt my desktop every time we have to do those things. If we do those things like multiple times a week. And so it's a pain to have to take my whole desktop out and do that. So I want to have a lower powered laptop available to me in the house.
01:11:50 ◼ ► So I think what I should do is actually return this one or melt to Casey. Wait for my high spec one to come in or finagle one from the Apple Store, I'll get to that in a second. Wait for that to come in. And then when that comes in, use that as my desktop, and just keep my M one MacBook Air as the workout and around the house laptop.
01:12:16 ◼ ► And then when I go on a trip where I might want to get some work done, take my desktop laptop with me. Because I wouldn't be moving it that often, it would be you know, maybe once a month, I'd be doing that, as opposed to four or five times a week.
01:12:30 ◼ ► And I think that will be a really good solution until I can get a pro desktop, in which case maybe I won't even want it anymore. Because maybe the laptops will be close enough and so good. And maybe I'll love this lifestyle where I can just pick up my desktop laptop and bring it with me on trips.
01:12:43 ◼ ► But otherwise, it basically behaves like a desktop. So I think I'm going to try that approach. I think it is the the more reasonable one. Then, then having like, you know, two of these MacBook Pros, the downside is I might be without this MacBook Pro for two to three weeks until while I wait for the new one.
01:13:01 ◼ ► But I think ultimately, I think that's the better move. Now, that being said, if I don't use if I don't keep this one, I just got and I use the MacBook Air, I am really gonna miss these speakers in the new one because the speakers are good.
01:13:20 ◼ ► I mean, again, good for laptop speakers. This is that we're grading on a big curve here. A really like, you know, tinny metal sharp curve here. But the the speakers in the new one are significantly better.
01:13:33 ◼ ► The screen is brighter. And I do so clearly see the difference in a scaled pixel mode versus a non scaled pixel mode. It is like you can look at the two screens side by side. And it's clearly visible that the MacBook Air screen next to the MacBook Pro screen, the air screen looks a little bit blurry.
01:13:54 ◼ ► Like you can just see it you can see it on the edges of all the text like let's look at any sharp line any text or anything. And you can see compare it between the two. The one that is not running the scaling mode is sharper.
01:14:05 ◼ ► And I'm so happy that they finally fixed that. So anyway, I actually didn't instantly notice the 120 hertz thing. Maybe maybe I've lost my my eyesight for that in the last two weeks.
01:14:18 ◼ ► But some apps have to be updated for like it's been some reports of like, will you actually see 120 hertz in your Mac app? And it depends. Like, so I mean, I'm assuming Safari or whatever would do it. So if that's what you were looking at, then you probably should have noticed it.
01:14:32 ◼ ► But it's but don't expect to see it everywhere. Because I think especially Mac apps, same thing in iOS apps, you have a choice whether you want your animation to even take advantage of 120 hertz or not.
01:14:43 ◼ ► So I don't know what every individual app has chosen to do. That's either part of the iOS or otherwise.
01:14:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, this was so far that I was asking him, but again, I've had this for such a short time. So I will do more testing and report back next week. But yeah, in the meantime, this thing is really great. It's fast.
01:15:03 ◼ ► And I'm looking forward to having more RAM when I get the big one in. That being said, so to get the big one in, I have two options. I can either wait up to another month for my order to come in.
01:15:17 ◼ ► Or I can go to an Apple store, like tomorrow, and get almost the exact spec I'm waiting for. Because as Casey mentioned, the stores are actually stocking two high end configurations. If you want the M1 Macs, you know, top end CPU 32 core, top top end CPU.
01:15:38 ◼ ► And if you want 64 gigs of RAM, you can get the 14 inch with a two terabyte hard drive, or SSD, excuse me, or the 16 inch with a four terabyte SSD. Those two configurations are widely being stocked in stores for same day pickup.
01:15:54 ◼ ► So if that's what you're looking for, you don't have to wait. You can go right into a store and buy it like almost any day. The downside is that what I wanted was a 14 inch top CPU, 64 gigs of RAM, and a four terabyte SSD, not a two.
01:16:12 ◼ ► Right. The Casey computer, right? So, if I want to do this, my options are either wait a month to get exactly what I want, or immediately get either what I want but too big of a laptop to get the 16 inch, or what I want but too small of an SSD.
01:16:30 ◼ ► Now, I think I'd be most happiest with the too small of an SSD solution. And so I, so I went today to, you know, through my M1 Mac Mini, which itself is two terabytes also, like I've been living on two terabytes for a year.
01:16:43 ◼ ► It's been fine. They've been a little tight sometimes, but, you know, for the most part, I do okay. And then I occasionally run low on space and I have to go like, you know, be responsible and clean stuff up.
01:16:52 ◼ ► Today I decided, let me see how much I can clean stuff up exactly. Like what, how, how much could I live with here? Because one thing I wanted to find out is I keep my photos in order to save space on the two terabyte internal drive.
01:17:04 ◼ ► I keep my, my Apple iCloud photo library on an external SSD that's just always connected. But if I'm going to have a desktop laptop, I don't want any external SSDs to be in use.
01:17:16 ◼ ► I want to just take it and not have to take any drives or disconnect there and eject there or anything. So I would probably move the external SSD storage to basically this Mac Mini being like a home server in a closet or something.
01:17:29 ◼ ► And it could have the external to stay with it and it could offer network shares. Fine. But I don't want my photo library to be served that way. That would be a little odd.
01:17:36 ◼ ► So I want my photo library to be able to move locally into the laptop. So I figured, well, how big is my photo library exactly? And could I actually fit all this on my laptop? How hard could it be? Right? Two terabytes is a lot of space.
01:17:48 ◼ ► So I go, I look at the external drive and my actual iCloud photo library and it says it's 76 gigs. And I thought that's less than I thought.
01:18:00 ◼ ► And I currently had like 200 gigs free on the main drive. So I'm like, I could just move it back. Like, I don't actually need to have it external. I mean, I would leave you with only about 100 gigs free. That's a little tight.
01:18:12 ◼ ► Let me see what else I can free up. So I launched one of these trusty disk space viewing apps to scan my drive and see where is all my space going exactly.
01:18:21 ◼ ► And I've used many of these apps before. The one I typically use is called Space Gremlin. More specifically, Space Gremlin Pro. I like the way it presents the space better than the rest. I find it easier to find stuff and prune what you want to prune from it.
01:18:37 ◼ ► But I also tried the same thing with, what's this called, Grand Perspective, which is I think even older and I think it's open source. So I tried that and when I scan my two terabyte drive of Space Gremlin Pro, I see my user's directory, which is 700 gigs.
01:18:54 ◼ ► Miscellaneous app stuff, about 200 gigs free. And then I see restricted files, 900 gigs. What? And I thought, huh, that's weird. Let me see. And I'm running it like in full like root read access mode. It should be able to see everything on the file system.
01:19:13 ◼ ► Did you give it full disk access? I did. Full disk access and root. This is why you choose Grand Perspective, because what the heck is restrictive files?
01:19:21 ◼ ► That's why I tried Grand Perspective. I thought, hey, maybe Space Gremlin hasn't been updated recently for all this new crazy, crazy security stuff they're doing. Let me try Grand Perspective.
01:19:30 ◼ ► So Grand Perspective has a giant gray block that is about that size and it says, "Miscellaneous used space."
01:19:40 ◼ ► Cool. This is like the gray other bar that I was just joking about in the iOS storage manager.
01:19:52 ◼ ► Wait, wait, wait. Before you go to that, I would say one of the reasons I use Grand Perspective is if you see any block that you don't understand, you can right click on it and just have it show you where that thing is in the finder.
01:20:09 ◼ ► Do you have the little info drawer? I'm launching Grand Perspective now because I use this all the time. Hopefully this isn't going to hose my recording. Please scan my four terabyte drive while I record a podcast.
01:20:20 ◼ ► But you can change the sidebar that comes out and you can change it to focus and then mouse over the part that you care about and see what the focus thing says.
01:20:43 ◼ ► So I looked up how do you remove Time Machine snapshots or APFS snapshots. And it said basically turn off Time Machine or like to have it unchecked the like automatic backup thing and just wait a few minutes, it'll delete stuff.
01:20:54 ◼ ► And sure enough, it did. It freed up like I think about 50 or 100 gigs doing that. So I thought, okay, that's something.
01:21:00 ◼ ► So I'm now I somehow I'm to the point where SpaceGramble thinks I have about 200 gigs free. Finder thinks I have 600 gigs free.
01:21:09 ◼ ► And when I when I went to the, you know, system information storage tab and had that tell me where things were, it says I have 850 gigs of photos.
01:21:22 ◼ ► So I thought, okay, this is interesting because I know my photos are most likely larger than 70 gigs as they are on my external drive.
01:21:30 ◼ ► I have tons of space missing on my main drive that is somewhere and nothing seems to know where it is except the system storage panel, which says my photo library is 850 gigs, which I mean, that sounds high, but that actually sounds way more plausible than 70 gigs.
01:21:48 ◼ ► If you just go to your dot photo library file and do get info command I in the finder, what does it say? It's 70 gigs. No.
01:21:55 ◼ ► Yes. And I and I dove into it. I'm like, you know, I show package contents, dive in, look for all the files and all the random sub directories that are named under it.
01:22:03 ◼ ► And nothing in there is very old. And it's all iPhone photos. Is it does it? Are you sure you're looking the right photo library?
01:22:10 ◼ ► Yes. I even double check the preference screen in the photos app. Like where's it pointing for show and finder. So what I think is happening is somehow it is storing the bulk of my photo library somewhere on the main drive that is considered restricted space that none of these apps can see.
01:22:32 ◼ ► This is supposed to be downloading all of my photos. So somehow I have photos in some kind of state where the I have no idea where my photos are. Basically it thinks it has them.
01:22:44 ◼ ► I can scroll all the way back to like, you know, 2004 and I can see my old photos. They're all there. It doesn't seem like it has to download them.
01:22:52 ◼ ► I can't find any kind of like show and finder equivalent in photos app. I don't know if there is one, but I couldn't find it for all these old photos. But so somehow this is this is in a strange state.
01:23:06 ◼ ► So my plan is I think before I get before I get this, this laptop, I have to figure out where the heck my photos are, how to consolidate them into an actual storage system, then into the file system where I can see them and see how big my photo library is because I have no clue.
01:23:24 ◼ ► And then I guess redo this whole thing and go from there. But this is this has been quite a journey today trying to figure out where the heck are my photos and where is all my disk space. And I don't know, I haven't rebooted yet. Maybe I should just reboot and this will all fix itself. Who knows? But this is very, very strange.
01:23:41 ◼ ► Well, I wish I could help you with grand perspective, but it's still scanning my hard drive.
01:23:53 ◼ ► You came over to us. I know. But the the can only the one canonical photo library still being maintained and it ain't to have it doesn't have anything to do with Apple.
01:24:02 ◼ ► I know where my photos are. I'm just saying the easy way to like I haven't had these problems.
01:24:06 ◼ ► The grand perspective shows my photo library like, oh, here's you have you don't have multiple users on your back. Do you? I sure do.
01:24:13 ◼ ► Well, but do you have who owns the photo library? You look at your photo library, right? Yeah. Because one thing I was going to say about grand perspective is if you run it on an account that doesn't own the photo library, it won't show up there.
01:24:34 ◼ ► Because I have a situation where my photo library I do have a photo library. There's not much in it, but it's mine. But the quote unquote family one is in my wife's account. So I had such my wife's account running grand perspective there.
01:24:44 ◼ ► And I see the photo library and even on her computer where the photo library is external. It's on an external disk.
01:24:49 ◼ ► And I know how big it is because the disk is whatever, you know, one terabyte and there's like 400 gigabytes free.
01:25:02 ◼ ► I haven't actually done get info on the photo library. I guess there's always no either based on the grand perspective block or based on how much it's filled the one terabyte drive.
01:25:09 ◼ ► But there's no getting around the fact that if you have a terabyte drive, you know, you know how much space is taking up as it slowly starts inching up to be filling the entire drive.
01:25:17 ◼ ► I used to have it on a 500 gig drive and it filled that. That's why I had to get a bigger one. So if my scan ever completes, I'll see if I can get it.
01:25:24 ◼ ► Like I don't I don't think this is the case of Tiff's user account having a giant photo library because like her home directory is only 100 gigs.
01:25:31 ◼ ► So I can't imagine that she also would have like a mysterious terabyte of photos sitting somewhere that like but like I think I think the answer is obvious.
01:25:41 ◼ ► The answer is that these are my photos somewhere in this space, somewhere on my file system that I can't access from anything.
01:25:50 ◼ ► Yeah, that's weird. Like because I mean, obviously, on my main computer, the photos library is on the main drive.
01:25:58 ◼ ► But on my wife's computer, the photo library is on an external SSD and it wouldn't fit on it.
01:26:04 ◼ ► It doesn't fit on her internal SSD at this point because she's got one terabyte internal and one terabyte external.
01:26:29 ◼ ► There is my iMovie library, which is surprisingly huge because it's all Destiny movies.
01:26:34 ◼ ► Wow. There's my photos library. And it's like the second biggest block next to my iMovie one.
01:26:39 ◼ ► And it's one hundred and eighty three gigs. And it's photos library dot photos library.
01:26:44 ◼ ► And yeah, it's yeah. That's what I would expect. Like that's what I don't see anything gray.
01:26:58 ◼ ► Some streaming video files. Yeah, no, I look at this all the time because I'm always I'm forever like trying to clear out disk space because otherwise I would just fill it up.
01:27:07 ◼ ► And I have never run into any surprises and never seen any block that it didn't explain what it was.
01:27:13 ◼ ► Yeah. So this is this has been this is one yet another reason why I haven't spent a lot of time with a new MacBook Pro yet,
01:27:21 ◼ ► because as I started figuring out stuff on my desktop, I'm like, wait, what's going on? Where are these photos?
01:27:27 ◼ ► Like now I'm running all these disk utility apps to figure out what the heck is going on.
01:27:35 ◼ ► Look at the man page. All right. And also, if you could, for my edification, take a screenshot of you in focus mode, mousing over your mystery block in grand perspective.
01:27:44 ◼ ► And I want to see the info window and the screenshot. Just take a full screen screenshot and put in the slack or something.
01:27:50 ◼ ► We can move on after this. I just I wanted to I thought that you would enjoy the frustrating aspect.
01:27:55 ◼ ► Well, I have to say on my on my local hard drive again, this is excluding my real photo library just in my account.
01:28:01 ◼ ► One of the largest growing blocks is this tiny little village of little tiny squares. And every single one of those little squares is a recorded podcast.
01:28:10 ◼ ► It's one of the things I did today was like delete all of my like, you know, old audio audio hijack recordings that are for already completed podcasts.
01:28:17 ◼ ► And like when I record podcasts, I keep all the source files of like all the all the tracks and everything.
01:28:23 ◼ ► I keep all those. But I show those off the archive drive once once I'm done with them, like I compress them.
01:28:28 ◼ ► I just have a basic shell script that compresses all the waves to flack and compresses the logic project slightly and like a zip thing and then just shoves it off into the into the archive drive.
01:28:38 ◼ ► So this I don't have a computer full of podcasts like it's what you expect, you know, from a developer who has a lot of fish.
01:28:44 ◼ ► So it's like, you know, there's, you know, my biggest folders are like library developer and then, you know, music iTunes, iTunes Media Music fish, which is one hundred and sixty three gigs of fish.
01:28:54 ◼ ► But otherwise, my word. Hey, it's all I listen to. Well, most of the time. So anyway, hopefully I will have some answers for this at some point soon.
01:29:04 ◼ ► I hope to figure out where my mysterious terabyte of storage has gone and also where my photos are stored.
01:29:10 ◼ ► Hopefully it's the same answer. I have some questions about your laptop while you while you take these screenshots.
01:29:17 ◼ ► I know you've only had it for a short period of time, but how did you feel about the sort of the physical reality of the thing in terms of handling it, carrying it, picking it up, putting it down like the hinge, all the different pieces?
01:29:32 ◼ ► So I would say, you know, compared to the MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air that I have sitting right next to it, it it is clearly heavier and more substantial.
01:29:47 ◼ ► You know, it is not as bigger or not as much bigger or as much heavier as you would expect it to be compared to the MacBook Air.
01:29:58 ◼ ► Like the MacBook Air definitely looks like the slimmed down older version of it, but the it's in the same size class.
01:30:07 ◼ ► And so if you are comfortable carrying an Air or a 13 inch pro, I think you'll be comfortable carrying the 14 inch pro as well.
01:30:13 ◼ ► That's it's fine in that regard. It looks at a quick glance, just like the 13 inch pro always had or not always, but more recently has.
01:30:23 ◼ ► So that being said, I am not at all tempted for the 16 because as I'm as I feel this and as I handle this, I think this is great.
01:30:36 ◼ ► The reviews so far that have come out and the very few like teardowns that have come out so far, it seems like you don't really get much else with the 16, with the exception of obviously the more screen space, the bigger battery, which are both things that I don't think I would need for the coming year.
01:30:52 ◼ ► I would need it for the context in which I'd be using it. And also then this high power mode where it basically runs the fans at an audible level constantly.
01:31:01 ◼ ► So you can do like all your 8K pro res color grading and stuff. None of which I will ever do while I have this computer.
01:31:07 ◼ ► So it seems like what the 16 inch offers is a lot of value for people whose needs are very different from mine.
01:31:16 ◼ ► And for my needs, I think the 14 is great. So I'm going to, I think, stick with the 14 inch size.
01:31:23 ◼ ► The only thing that I guess the 16 might also be better on the speakers front through a wonderful fluke of shipping.
01:31:31 ◼ ► I will actually have Tif's new 16 tomorrow because in the opposite of what happened to Casey, Tif's 16 inch went from like, you know, the estimated shipping time of next week to delivered.
01:31:48 ◼ ► So this is what I'm talking about where if you try to do a speculative order and feel comfortable, like I don't have to worry about canceling that for another week. No, it might come tomorrow.
01:31:55 ◼ ► Exactly. So it was like it never even entered like preparing to ship or shipped status. It just went straight from, you know, ships November 4th to 9th or whatever to delivered.
01:32:09 ◼ ► So how does the, how does the lid feel like in the pictures, the, the, the screen lid looks thicker. Does it feel any thicker or is it just kind of like blunt edges, but otherwise pretty thin?
01:32:19 ◼ ► It feels thicker than the MacBook Air. And, and I, I mean, I don't know if it actually is or if it just the, just the, you know, the curvature on the edge is no, isn't a really not really there anymore.
01:32:30 ◼ ► But it is actually way easier to open one handed. The MacBook Air it's so like the bottom of the MacBook Air is so light. You got to kind of like, you know, hold your hand in a certain way to be able to lift it up one handed without having the bottom come up a little bit.
01:32:45 ◼ ► And the new 14 inch does not have that problem at all. I think one of the reasons why people think they look so much thicker and boxier is that I think the body, like the bottom half of the body, I think got thicker, but the screen lid, I think got thinner.
01:33:01 ◼ ► And so I think what has happened is that the total thickness has stayed roughly the same, but they've just moved some of it from the top to the bottom effectively. So the bottom is a little bit thicker, I think. But I don't have a 13 inch here to compare, like a 13 inch Pro.
01:33:22 ◼ ► Do you ever touch it? Does your finger ever run across it or is it just not in a touchable area?
01:33:26 ◼ ► I have yet to actually use this computer on my lap. So I don't know. Again, ask me that in a week or so. I'll have more information then.
01:33:34 ◼ ► I was thinking like when you're carrying it, like you pick it up off the table and put it under your arm.
01:33:38 ◼ ► I don't think, I can't even reach it. Like unless I'm, I mean, I'd have to be holding it in a really weird way to actually touch the middle logo because like I'm holding it on the edge.
01:33:51 ◼ ► Not at all, no. I wish they had changed the feeling of the vents on your fingers on the side. They do feel a little sharp, just like the 2016 and forward models have always felt this way.
01:34:03 ◼ ► Like when you pick it up, you feel those side vents and they kind of dig into your fingers in a slightly unpleasant way.
01:34:09 ◼ ► So I do wish they had changed that now that I'm handling it and stuff, but otherwise that's a pretty minor issue.
01:34:15 ◼ ► I noted that when I saw a bunch of YouTube videos about it. I'm like, oh, those side slots, because the people you're handling on YouTube videos, like, oh, those slots are still there. Of course they have to be. The air has to come in from somewhere.
01:34:24 ◼ ► I just like it in Apple's product shots. They don't really ever show you a shot that emphasizes or highlights them.
01:34:30 ◼ ► But if you see one in real life and someone rotates it around, you see these huge slots and sides.
01:34:35 ◼ ► It's a shame to hear that they're a little bit sharp because it feels like there's no reason, especially since they're so sort of subtle and not in your face.
01:34:42 ◼ ► It's not like a design element to make the sharp edges. You just rounded them over more because I don't know. You know, why not? It's a little bit more comfortable that way.
01:34:49 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, again, it's not, it isn't a big deal and it's, it's not any worse than the outgoing models were.
01:34:56 ◼ ► Yeah. And so in terms of using the thing, what do you think of the notch in your brief time with it?
01:35:04 ◼ ► I still only have the stock wallpaper that came configured on it because I couldn't migrate my stuff over, as we said.
01:35:09 ◼ ► And stock wallpaper, that middle area is a very dark navy blue. It's almost black. And so with the wallpaper, I really don't see the notch.
01:35:18 ◼ ► But as I was using the computer, you know, I would occasionally, you know, have light colored content in the vicinity of it or whatever.
01:35:24 ◼ ► And I really just didn't notice it at all. I honestly haven't noticed it once while using it. Like I just had to double check. It is definitely there.
01:35:36 ◼ ► So on the topic of the notch, the Verge had a story. It was highlighting a couple of tweets that I was going to put in the show notes.
01:35:43 ◼ ► But now we'll just put the story in there. As Quinn Nelson pointing out some strange behavior with the notch.
01:35:54 ◼ ► I don't know if it's because holding the mouse button down because people don't do that anymore.
01:35:58 ◼ ► But very old school Mac users will remember at a time when if you wanted to use a menu from the menu bar at the top of the screen on the Mac.
01:36:04 ◼ ► The way you would do it is you bring your cursor up to like the word file. You would click the mouse button and hold it down.
01:36:10 ◼ ► And then you would move down to the item you wanted, like save or something. And then you would release and save would activate.
01:36:16 ◼ ► And that was the only way to use a menu with the mouse on the Mac for many, many, many years.
01:36:22 ◼ ► Of course, Windows came along and used a different approach. In Windows, you would go up to the word file, put your pointer on it.
01:36:30 ◼ ► And then the file menu would display itself and the file menu would stay on the screen.
01:36:35 ◼ ► And then you would move the cursor down to save and you would click again and it would do save.
01:36:41 ◼ ► The philosophy behind that in the original days of the Mac is like if you get into a situation where, you know,
01:36:46 ◼ ► the Mac was interested to where no one even knew what the heck a mouse was like, it came with a tutorial about how to use a mouse.
01:36:51 ◼ ► Like that was a very important part of using the product. Like this is called the mouse.
01:36:54 ◼ ► And when you move it, you see the cursor. Like they had to explain that there was on screen tutorials for it.
01:37:02 ◼ ► And so to throw a computer in front of people and have it behave the Windows way, where you would click the file menu and the menu would display.
01:37:11 ◼ ► Now you've got the menu displayed, but your cursor is free. So you might go off and try to do something else.
01:37:19 ◼ ► But you'd go off and do something else. But the file menu would be there and you'd click somewhere else.
01:37:24 ◼ ► And that click would essentially, if you're lucky, deactivate the file menu, but maybe not go through to the thing that you clicked on because that click was just the clicking outside the file menu thing.
01:37:32 ◼ ► Right. So anyway, the reason the Mac worked that way was because it was one operation. Click, hold down, go to the thing you want and release.
01:37:39 ◼ ► And there were no modes and no sort of getting stuck in a position, which made perfect sense for the original day of the Mac.
01:37:49 ◼ ► Eventually, Apple adopted it because the world didn't need to learn how to use a mouse and wasn't afraid of getting the menu stuck down and not knowing what to do.
01:37:56 ◼ ► And so that's the way they did it. So this is a long-winded way to say with the notch, if you have a series of menus that span the notch, like some of your menus are on the right side of the notch, but the most of them are on the left.
01:38:07 ◼ ► If you activate the menu on your Mac by holding down the mouse button or even just clicking and the menu bar is active and you just move your mouse to the right, like you go, you know, file, edit, whatever.
01:38:18 ◼ ► And you keep moving to the right, apparently the mouse cursor will teleport around the notch when you get to the last menu that is to the left of the notch and you go to the right.
01:38:28 ◼ ► Rather than the cursor hiding under the notch, which is what it would do if you were just mousing, because you are in like I am currently highlighting menu items, again, either holding the mouse button down or clicking and being in that mode,
01:38:40 ◼ ► the mouse cursor will teleport to the other side of the notch and immediately you move one pixel in it, it hops the other side and now you're on the next menu.
01:38:46 ◼ ► So it preserves sort of the muscle memory of, you know, mousing through the menus if that's what you wanted to do.
01:38:56 ◼ ► Another thing you'll see in the video is that the menu bar icons, the menu extras, the little icons that appear on the right side of your menu bar, those things have no idea the notch exists, which is bad.
01:39:07 ◼ ► Now, it takes some amount of effort, or being Casey, to get enough menu bar icons to reach the notch.
01:39:16 ◼ ► Remember the notch is dead center in the screen, so you have to build up quite a conga line of icons to reach the notch, but if you do, those menu bar icons will apparently just display underneath the notch.
01:39:26 ◼ ► And you can use them, you can put your mouse cursor underneath the notch and find, like blindly find, whatever menu extra icon is under there and click it and it will display a menu out from under the notch.
01:39:43 ◼ ► What it should do is those menu extras that are basically controlled by the system, more or less, of how they're laid out, should have an awareness of notch just like the menus do, and it should do the same teleporting thing.
01:39:55 ◼ ► The final thing that Quinn "discovered" is that if you have lots of menus, like you have an app with tons of regular menus, they will just overwrite and push away the menu bar icons.
01:40:07 ◼ ► That is not a new behavior. They'll do that today in any computer with or without a notch.
01:40:15 ◼ ► And they don't win in a graceful way. It's not like your icons get truncated or you scroll or there's a submenu. They just disappear.
01:40:22 ◼ ► So a couple of software packages to deal with that. Obviously there's Bartender and what is that other one called? Vanilla maybe? Is that the one that does the same thing as Bartender but it's cheaper?
01:40:32 ◼ ► Anyway, those are two apps that you can use that will let you sort of compress your own menu bar icons down to a smaller size while still being able to get out of all of them.
01:40:41 ◼ ► And as for the notch, there are two applications to make it less prominent. One is called Denotchifier from the same person who made Boring Old Menu Bar.
01:40:49 ◼ ► And the other is called Top Notch. They're both ways of essentially, because the menu bar is transparent, putting a darkly colored thing behind the menu bar so that the menu bar blends better with the notch.
01:41:01 ◼ ► Obviously you can just change to dark mode and do that or you could use a dark desktop background but both of these tools let you darken the menu bar or blend it with a notch without doing either one of those two things.
01:41:13 ◼ ► I would suggest, listeners if you get one of these machines, I would suggest instead of rushing to install one of these notch hiding utilities the second you get the machine, try using it for a few days first.
01:41:27 ◼ ► Because I think you'll probably find that, oh actually you don't actually care. You don't actually notice it in practice.
01:41:33 ◼ ► So just try it the way it's designed first because again, I think these apps are jumping to solve a problem that people think they have.
01:41:46 ◼ ► But I think once you get these machines you'll quickly realize you don't actually have this problem.
01:41:50 ◼ ► I have a lot more questions about the notch like in terms of how does it behave if you're on an audit menu bar hiding.
01:41:55 ◼ ► I'm assuming the menu, that space is still preserved and the menu bar just slides down into it.
01:41:59 ◼ ► The various, like how it behaves with different apps that know about the notch versus ones that don't in that compatibility check box in get info.
01:42:07 ◼ ► There's lots of nuances to the behavior. Like this is just one example of the menu icons not being notch savvy yet.
01:42:16 ◼ ► And I bet there are lots of other weird edge cases like that where you could lose things under the notch which is a shame.
01:43:59 ◼ ► Which for those of us who are non-Americans it's basically American football but without tackling so that you can play it responsibly with children.
01:44:08 ◼ ► And the idea is you basically, each kid basically has like one or two little straps of fabric hanging off their waist bands.
01:44:16 ◼ ► And to do the function of quote of tackling them in regular American football you just like pull one of these flags off of them.
01:44:25 ◼ ► So anyway, the assignment that the gym teacher assigned was sometime in the next two weeks you have to watch a football game.
01:44:54 ◼ ► But I don't care about the games and I don't care about any of the teams or the players and that's why I'm into sports.
01:45:07 ◼ ► And so at first I'm like alright, at first I thought oh no what if I just go on YouTube and find video of an old game.
01:45:22 ◼ ► What you should have found is, this probably wouldn't qualify for the homework, but have you ever watched, even Marco must know this, do you know NFL films? Am I getting the name right Casey?
01:45:31 ◼ ► Old grainy film footage with this one guy's voice narrating over it where he says "and this was the greatest game you've ever seen any..."
01:45:41 ◼ ► They're basically the football equivalent of, oh god what's his name, chat room, Warren Miller.
01:45:50 ◼ ► They're not an actual game, it is someone doing a voiceover of a summary of a dramatic thing that happened.
01:45:56 ◼ ► But even if you hate football, they are so amazing. NFL films I think is what they're called, check it out.
01:46:04 ◼ ► You could have called either one of us. You could have called Uncle Casey who has season tickets to a university football team's games.
01:46:16 ◼ ► So at first we were at a restaurant one night and I asked the bartender, hey when is football on?
01:46:26 ◼ ► Cause they have TV's there that normally when I'm in a restaurant I do my best to ignore what's on the TV's.
01:46:36 ◼ ► And they even have a whole separate menu of junk food that you can order during football games.
01:47:16 ◼ ► And I'm like, oh, I didn't even consider the possibility but of course there's more than one game at a time.
01:47:26 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like wait a minute, of course, there's this whole league, this whole country full of teams.
01:47:54 ◼ ► And I'm trying very hard to channel XKCD and the, oh, you've never seen this, you know, then today's your lucky day.
01:47:59 ◼ ► But like it didn't even cross your mind to go to ESPN.com and look at football schedules.
01:48:17 ◼ ► So, me and Adam and Tiff, we made this family trip to go sit at the bar in this empty restaurant in a beach town in the offseason at one o'clock on a Sunday.
01:48:34 ◼ ► I didn't even ask which game it was because part of the homework assignment, the worksheet that Adam had to fill out included in that was what teams are playing.
01:48:42 ◼ ► So I thought, okay, this is actually kind of fun because he and I can try to figure this out together.
01:48:48 ◼ ► So, for somebody who is an expert at watching football, I'm sure all the different stats and things and abbreviations they're showing on screen make total sense.
01:49:01 ◼ ► But to someone who is not an expert, first of all, it was very, very confusing because what football power users want is to know what's going on in all of the 30 games that are happening at once.
01:49:16 ◼ ► And so they keep, first of all, like the bottom, the very bottom row of stats on the screen was some kind of like rotating carousel that was showing all of the games in the universe that were going on.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And all the scores of all the games in the universe. So first I had to figure out, wait, where are the stats for this game that I think I'm watching right now?
01:49:37 ◼ ► And then they keep showing highlights and clips and replays from all of the other games.
01:49:43 ◼ ► So I'm like, okay, well, I really don't care about all those. I'm trying to figure out one game.
01:49:48 ◼ ► Whatever one is the game that the people in the restaurant turned on as quote "the game".
01:49:56 ◼ ► Eventually I see, I figure out on the screen that this series of letters appears to be the teams in this game.
01:50:02 ◼ ► And I noticed that it was, it was whatever the abbreviation, I figured out it was the Giants versus the Patriots, which makes sense.
01:50:11 ◼ ► And I think, all right, so that, so we wrote down New York Giants, you know, New England Patriots.
01:50:43 ◼ ► All the Giants fans are crying out. You can't tell the difference between the Giants and the Jets.
01:50:55 ◼ ► Determining the home team, saying, well, what state is the stadium in? That's not going to help you.
01:51:01 ◼ ► Right, so, all right, so, so eventually they zoom out to a, like a wide shot and I see on the 50 yard line,
01:51:14 ◼ ► Good, good. I see that your tech angle is helping you out here. Not everything you see on that screen is real.
01:51:19 ◼ ► Right, I'm like, I know they're superimposing the line of scrimmage and then whatever the, you know, ten yards after that line is called.
01:51:25 ◼ ► I know they're superimposing that. I'm sure they're probably superimposing some of the ads on the side or whatever.
01:52:07 ◼ ► What would I have put, like, I'm not going to buy some streaming service to watch one game for my kid to fill out a worksheet.
01:52:23 ◼ ► Can't you just buy the NFL one and pay for it? I thought the NFL was the one that was simple.
01:52:29 ◼ ► No, no. Remember? No, because this is when Lex had put up a post years ago about how you can get a foreign, like an overseas DNS server
01:52:39 ◼ ► such that when you go to pay the NFL it thinks, "Oh, you're European, so I'll totally take your money."
01:52:44 ◼ ► Because if you try to pay the NFL in the States, they're like, "Ha! Get DirecTV because otherwise pound sand."
01:52:51 ◼ ► See, this is why. You guys still can't figure it out. We're like two minutes after you asked the question.
01:52:57 ◼ ► In the time it took you to argue with each other about how I could have watched it, I could have ridden my bike to this restaurant.
01:53:05 ◼ ► I would say that, well, I had heard that NFL was the league that was more savvy about this stuff and didn't have the stupid local TV rights and blackout things like the baseball has, but, you know, I guess it still screwed up in its own way.
01:53:16 ◼ ► Yeah, so I knew that there was a bunch of crap to deal with with how the heck you even go about watching sports.
01:53:23 ◼ ► So I'm like, "Alright, let me just outsource that to a place that I know broadcasts them and then I can at least have a good sandwich while I'm watching the game."
01:53:31 ◼ ► Alright, so anyway, I eventually figure out, okay, that logo does not appear to be superimposed unless I did a really good job. I'm going to assume this is where it is.
01:53:42 ◼ ► So then I ask Siri, "Where is the Patriot Stadium?" or whatever. Another question is, "What city and state is this stadium in?"
01:53:58 ◼ ► Yeah, right. So eventually, Siri gives me some kind of info card that shows the stadium on a zoomed-in map, but apparently the stadium's in the middle of nowhere, and the town name is something I've never heard of that's not near really anything.
01:54:16 ◼ ► Yeah, that's it. There it is. That's it. I had to show Adam how to spell that. That was fun.
01:54:24 ◼ ► Yeah, right. Yeah, my Worchester Shire saw some of my stick. Anyway, so eventually, we figure out that. And then came the even harder question, "Who are the quarterbacks?"
01:54:37 ◼ ► Oh, no. Alright, so I know enough about football to know that the person who the hike person hands the ball to is probably the quarterback.
01:54:48 ◼ ► But they pass this information to the quarterback, and then I'm like, "Wait a minute. Who is that?" I also know that teams might have multiple quarterbacks, and maybe the person who's normally the quarterback wasn't playing this game. Or maybe they pulled them out earlier or something. I don't know.
01:54:58 ◼ ► So we're like, "Alright." First, we have to wait for each team to get the ball to figure out who the quarterback is currently playing, and then we have to wait for a clear shot of the back of their shirt so we can see their number and their name.
01:55:11 ◼ ► As big as you didn't have the audio on, if you had the audio on, all they're going to do is talk about the quarterback and what he did or didn't do on that last play.
01:55:24 ◼ ► Yeah, you could Google for this once you know a last name, and granted, it took you half the game to figure out what team teams are playing.
01:55:30 ◼ ► Can you name a famous quarterback who might have played for the New England Patriots in your lifetime?
01:55:36 ◼ ► Yeah, so I knew about Tom Brady, right? But I don't know if he was still playing. It turns out he's super old.
01:55:44 ◼ ► These are all valid questions. I'm just saying you do know quarterbacks. How many NFL quarterbacks, living or dead, can you name, Marco?
01:56:07 ◼ ► Oh, only from the video game series. Was John Madden ever a quarterback or just a commentator?
01:56:20 ◼ ► I was going to say, if you want to identify the quarterback, if you want to identify the quarterback in special teams that isn't on the field, it's the guy who's skinny.
01:56:25 ◼ ► Anyway, so we went through this exercise first, figuring out, "Oh, look, here's number 10 or whatever appears to be the quarterback on this team.
01:56:35 ◼ ► Let's look up the roster, figure out who the heck that is," because we couldn't get a shot of his last name on his shirt yet.
01:56:41 ◼ ► And then eventually you look up, "Oh," and then you see the last name, you confirm it and everything.
01:56:45 ◼ ► Then eventually the green team got the ball. We had to see who their quarterback was, look that up.
01:57:08 ◼ ► That's an interesting thing that happened during the game. It's like when they did a replay, it was like a drone was chasing the runner and it looked really cool.
01:57:14 ◼ ► Oh yeah, I didn't, so, and you know, granted, this is all, not only a test of my patience and certainly of my ability to explain and figure stuff out,
01:57:24 ◼ ► but it's also, it's hard for, you know, a nine-year-old who's not into sports to sit and focus for this long on this crazy thing
01:57:31 ◼ ► because one thing that made this surprisingly difficult is, I don't think you realize when you watch sports regularly
01:57:40 ◼ ► Yeah, so, and I told Adam, I wore my hat on the, pretty much every time they stop playing we're gonna see commercials. He's fine.
01:57:45 ◼ ► But it was very hard to explain what's going on or even to understand what's going on because they're constantly cutting to replays and highlights and other games.
01:57:55 ◼ ► Constantly. And so the actual shot duration of each shot you get of the actual game as it's live is so short compared to all of the replays and cuts and quick and re-,
01:58:08 ◼ ► and like, there's so much going on, it's very hard for me to, it was very hard for me to explain to him what was going on as it happened
01:58:14 ◼ ► because they kept cutting away and showing other stuff and it was hard for him to understand like, well what is happening versus what's a replay,
01:58:22 ◼ ► what is the game versus what is some other game, and then commercials cut in, like, it was manic trying to watch this broadcast.
01:58:30 ◼ ► Like, in many ways I think it would have been easier to just go to a game and watch it in the stadium with the exception of you wouldn't get those wonderful line overlays
01:58:37 ◼ ► which I think do make it easier to understand what's going on, but other than that, like, it was very difficult to understand this.
01:58:44 ◼ ► Like, it, and at one point Adam, at one point he even asks, he's like, so, you know, they just go back and forth in the field over and over again, like, isn't that kind of boring?
01:58:54 ◼ ► I feel like the audio really would have helped here though, because especially with the replays, just there's an audio, there are audio cues to the replay, the fact that the sound is cutting and replaying and the crowd noise, like, a contrast,
01:59:06 ◼ ► they do a good job of audio mixing to sort of make it clear what's a flashback with, you know, in movie parlance, what's a replay when they're going to a different game.
01:59:13 ◼ ► And the announcers say stuff, the announcers, the people who are calling the game say things that make it clear that this is a replay.
01:59:19 ◼ ► Here we are seeing again, you can see where he did X, Y, and Z, anyway, here we are, we're back.
01:59:26 ◼ ► Again, watching in a restaurant, I mean, on the one hand, maybe you could distract Adam with food when he gets bored, but on the other hand, not the ideal viewing environment.
01:59:33 ◼ ► Honestly, I think watching football on TV is just not a very good, not a very ideal, like, you know, first sports explanation. Like, I think probably the easiest sports explanation is to just go to like a AAA baseball game and sit there in the stands and get some hot dogs and watch the baseball game in person, in, you know, at a AAA stadium so you have nice close seats and there's not a lot of pressure or anything like that.
01:59:57 ◼ ► And actually, we look into doing that and it's, I don't think it's gonna happen this fall, but it might happen next, whenever baseball starts.
02:00:17 ◼ ► Yeah, their fall schedule is not so great for our ferry schedule, but we're gonna try to do it in the spring.
02:00:22 ◼ ► If only you knew someone, if only you knew the phone number of someone, if only you knew the Slack ID across six different Slacks of someone, that would have been overjoyed to tutor you on this very issue.
02:00:47 ◼ ► I mean, it would be better if you said kids should watch a televised sport of their choice and answer some questions about it, because then at least the kid gets to pick what they're interested in.
02:00:56 ◼ ► Whatever sport they're interested in or think they might be the most interested in, and then they can write about that.
02:01:00 ◼ ► Because teaching kids about organized sports so that they're televised, I think is a valid role for gym.
02:01:07 ◼ ► But focusing on the NFL makes me think, like, I don't know, someone said, is he getting kickbacks from the NFL? He's not. The NFL is cheap. They would never do that.
02:01:18 ◼ ► Yeah. Oh, and the chat room is asking, like, what was the interesting thing that happened that Adam wrote down for that question? I don't even remember. It was just something, some really stupid thing.
02:01:26 ◼ ► Like, you know, when the one team ran really hard and got the ball, it was something like that, because we, both of us had just lost so much patience. I knew I was about to lose. I'm like, let's just write something down here and get out of here.
02:01:40 ◼ ► Because I think that is the most salient point about the NFL. This sport shouldn't exist, and it exists to exploit the bodies of these people who get paid millions of dollars, but often have terrible consequences, and no one cares because they just get ground up in this giant machine, and really, the NFL should not exist as it currently stands.
02:01:55 ◼ ► But since it's the most popular sport, we will never do that. Well, I wouldn't say never, because unlike the Second Amendment, it's not in the Constitution. So in theory, if we ever get a clue, we could stop destroying people's brains with the NFL.
02:02:08 ◼ ► Well, this is exactly why I stopped paying attention. My professional football team is New York Giants, and this is why I almost never watch the NFL anymore.
02:02:18 ◼ ► And of course, I need to ask about college football. We're just going to sweep that under the rug real quick.
02:02:23 ◼ ► But for the NFL, it's so exploitative, and it just made me feel so gross that I just really stopped paying attention.
02:02:31 ◼ ► But the answer to the question of what interesting—which probably wouldn't have been good for his grade, but I think the most reasonable answer to the question is, "What's interesting about the game?" to you two, it's how that yellow first downline works.
02:02:44 ◼ ► Because I read a really fascinating story about the development and how it works. I was Googling trying to find it, and I can't find it.
02:02:51 ◼ ► But my recollection is that they have to take hyper-accurate 3D models of stadiums, because the stadiums don't have perfectly flat fields, and so on and so forth, and they have hyper-accurate readouts of where the cameras are pointing and where they're panned and tilted and zoomed.
02:03:07 ◼ ► And then they're running this through a series of computers to paint the stuff on as quickly as possible.
02:03:12 ◼ ► And as the game is happening, it's really, really fascinating, all the technology that goes into this. And I think even you, Marco, would appreciate that, even if you didn't appreciate football.
02:03:21 ◼ ► Yeah, because honestly, I remember when they started adding those lines, whenever that was, like 15 years ago or whatever, and that really made a massive improvement in how watchable football games on TV became.
02:03:31 ◼ ► And it was the first time that it was actually nicer to watch it on TV than in person in some way. Not necessarily in all ways, but yeah. So I thought that's a great technological advance that they made.
02:03:44 ◼ ► It is unfortunate that it's for such an overall terrible sport, but yes, we did have that conversation. But yeah, I mean, the most interesting thing that happened in the game was the Mahi sandwich I ate, and it was really good.
02:03:54 ◼ ► Do you bring these things up just to troll me? Is that what's happening right now? Are you doing this? You're describing this beautiful laptop that you have and you're telling me, "Oh, if only I understood football, if only there was some way for me to understand football, then it would have made this assignment so much easier."