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403: A VCR for the Internet

 

00:00:00   I don't want to talk about politics today.

00:00:02   I'm going to tell you that the way that you can celebrate this theoretical, hopeful, maybe

00:00:10   win for things that the three of us consider good and right in the world and democracy

00:00:15   in general, the way you can celebrate that obviously is with capitalism.

00:00:18   So we should tell you that the ATP Store is back, baby!

00:00:22   ATP.fm/store.

00:00:23   You're the master of self-serving transitions.

00:00:27   That's what I'm here for.

00:00:29   Anyway, ATP Store is back. ATP.fm/store.

00:00:32   It will be back until the 14th of November ATP time.

00:00:36   That is not this upcoming Saturday if you're listening to this in your real time,

00:00:40   but it is a week from Saturday, the 14th of November.

00:00:43   The reason we did this is because we hope but do not guarantee that those in the US

00:00:47   will get this stuff before the holidays.

00:00:49   Hope but not guarantee.

00:00:51   So what do we got going on here?

00:00:53   We've got an update to the Monochrome Pro Max shirts.

00:00:57   Jon, would you do me the pleasure, please, of explaining what these are and what's different?

00:01:01   Sure. This is the shirt we have that has silhouettes of all the different Pro Maxs over the years.

00:01:07   Not all of them, but some of the different Pro Maxs over the years.

00:01:10   The original one was a six-color, well, originally a five-color design with the apple colors,

00:01:15   and then eventually it became a six-color design when the 2019 Mac Pro was released.

00:01:18   And we also had, back when it was a five-mac design, a line art version of that

00:01:25   where instead of them being colored silhouettes, they're little line drawings of them,

00:01:30   and they're actually also a little bit more to scale.

00:01:32   So we updated the Monochrome version of that shirt with line art that features the new Mac Pro.

00:01:38   So now both of our Pro Max shirts have six Macs on them, and the Monochrome one is for sale for the first time.

00:01:44   So check that out.

00:01:46   And as with before, you can do with or without wheels,

00:01:49   wheels as they should run you an extra four dollars.

00:01:52   So I'm sorry about that.

00:01:53   So we've got the Monochrome Pro Max shirt with or without wheels.

00:01:57   We've got the standard six-colors ATP shirt.

00:02:00   We've got the ATP hat.

00:02:01   We've got the ATP embroidered zip hoodie, which is excellent in particular.

00:02:06   I very much like that.

00:02:07   So you've got about ten more days as we record this to go and get your merch.

00:02:12   ATP.fm/store.

00:02:14   You will hear this one more time.

00:02:16   And I have to, it's required by the contract between the three of us,

00:02:20   I have to tell you, every single time we have a sale, I make the same speech.

00:02:27   Listeners, please go and do the order now.

00:02:31   Visualize where you're going to be if you're driving, which nobody is because we can't leave,

00:02:35   or if you're walking, which not many people do because we can't leave,

00:02:38   or if you're doing anything, just visualize where you will be at that future time

00:02:42   and visualize yourself going to ATP.fm/store.

00:02:45   And so you're not the person that tweets at me two minutes after the store closes saying,

00:02:50   "Oh, when does the store close? I think I might have missed it."

00:02:52   So don't be that person.

00:02:54   Please, if you're going to buy stuff, do it now.

00:02:58   If you don't want to buy stuff, that's fine.

00:02:59   That's totally fine.

00:03:00   But if you're going to buy stuff, do it now.

00:03:02   Celebrate capitalism because that's the American way.

00:03:04   ATP.fm/store.

00:03:06   And speaking of capitalism, let's start some follow-up.

00:03:09   So it's so funny being a host on the show because

00:03:13   there are times that I genuinely just miss the plot on something

00:03:17   and I don't even consider something.

00:03:19   And then there's times that I think, "Well, what about this thing?"

00:03:22   "No, that can't be it."

00:03:24   And I don't say anything, and then the entire internet comes to say,

00:03:27   "Hey, hey, hey, did you know about that thing?"

00:03:30   So, listeners, yes, I am aware of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

00:03:35   Thank you for reminding me. I am well aware of it.

00:03:38   And actually, anyone who told me, "Hey, have you heard of the National Radio Quiet Zone?"

00:03:42   You have now received demerits. You want to know why?

00:03:45   Because if you really were a Casey completionist,

00:03:48   you would have known that months ago,

00:03:51   I was on the delightful Fun Fact podcast with our friends,

00:03:55   and the whole premise of the show is to talk about fun facts.

00:04:00   And if memory serves, I was with Alan, filling in for Arik,

00:04:04   and guess what my fun fact was?

00:04:06   The National Radio Quiet Zone.

00:04:08   So, yes, I'm aware of it.

00:04:11   If you're not aware of it, however, it is very funny and very interesting.

00:04:14   It's this big swath of land, basically on the West Virginia-Virginia border,

00:04:18   that ostensibly, in certain--

00:04:23   well, in the entire swath of land, ostensibly,

00:04:25   you're not really allowed to have cell phone coverage,

00:04:27   but realistically, there's a town or a section or something like that--

00:04:30   it's been a while since I've spoken about it--

00:04:32   where it's really, really locked down.

00:04:35   You can't have portable phones, you can't have cell phones,

00:04:38   you can't have radios,

00:04:39   and that's because they have these extremely large and complicated radio telescopes

00:04:44   on these mountaintops over in West Virginia.

00:04:46   So that's why some people have said,

00:04:49   "Well, maybe that's why Verizon has this huge dead area

00:04:52   in between West Virginia and Virginia."

00:04:54   And, yeah, I buy that in principle, but if you look at the two maps,

00:04:57   which I put links in the show notes, maybe if Marco is kind,

00:05:00   he'll put them in the chapter art,

00:05:01   but if you look at the two maps side by side,

00:05:04   the difference between the AT&T map and the Verizon map

00:05:07   is still pretty stark, in my personal opinion.

00:05:09   So I do agree that that might be--

00:05:12   the National Radio Quiet Zone might be the difference,

00:05:15   or might be the issue there,

00:05:17   but, jeez, it still seems like there's a big difference between AT&T and Verizon.

00:05:22   And also, you should all be casey completionists.

00:05:24   What the hell's wrong with you?

00:05:26   John, I'm sorry about your bottom.

00:05:29   Yeah, as I feared and as I expected,

00:05:33   the Apple leather case for the new line of iPhones

00:05:36   does indeed cover the bottom of the phone,

00:05:38   so that's not going to help me with my bottom covering issues.

00:05:43   The good news for Marco, maybe,

00:05:45   is that there is an Apple leather case available for the Mini as well,

00:05:50   something that I hadn't done in the past for the SE and the other small phones.

00:05:55   So if Marco doesn't mind the bottom cover,

00:05:58   he can try out the Apple leather case.

00:06:00   As for me, I have ordered a couple of third-party leather cases

00:06:03   that don't cover the bottom of the phone,

00:06:06   and I will report back in when they show up and I try them out.

00:06:09   Okay, just to get ahead of all the feedback,

00:06:12   are you willing to put links in the show notes,

00:06:14   or would you rather wait until you have received them before you even link to them,

00:06:17   because you know that we're going to get asked?

00:06:19   Yeah, no, I'm intentionally not telling you which ones.

00:06:21   You know why?

00:06:22   Because why would you buy a case that I haven't even told you is any good yet?

00:06:25   Like, if you care about my opinion, then wait to hear my opinion.

00:06:28   If you don't care about my opinion, just buy the leather case you want to buy.

00:06:31   There's a million of them, right? So no links, no names.

00:06:33   In fact, I don't even remember which two I bought.

00:06:35   There was like seven of them that I had open in tabs.

00:06:37   What I can tell you about it is that the one--

00:06:39   You? No.

00:06:40   Yeah.

00:06:41   I left that window open so when they arrive, I'll remember which one I bought, I guess.

00:06:46   I guess I looked through my receipts.

00:06:47   Anyway, my criteria was leather, mostly kind of like the Apple leather case,

00:06:51   so no real textured leather that looks like rumply ostrich skin or whatever.

00:06:56   Like, just, you know, if you've seen what the Apple leather case looked like,

00:06:59   especially the black ones, they're very sort of uniform grain,

00:07:02   so as close to that as I can get.

00:07:04   Open on the bottom, you know, thin like Apple's leather cases are.

00:07:08   Looks like it lets the phone lay flat on the table so it evens out the camera bump.

00:07:14   Fits the 12 Pro, obviously.

00:07:16   And metal buttons, or plastic-- metal or plastic buttons that stick out from the leather.

00:07:22   Like, what I didn't want were the leather lump buttons,

00:07:24   and so many really good-looking cases had leather lumps

00:07:27   where it's a leather case and then the buttons for volume and power are just, like, lumps in the leather,

00:07:33   but aren't themselves-- like, there's no cutout for the buttons or anything.

00:07:36   It's just kind of like a lumpy part.

00:07:37   And I've had-- Apple's leather case used to be like that.

00:07:39   I had Apple's leather case that was like that.

00:07:41   Do not like the leather lumps.

00:07:43   So either two cases with metal and/or plastic buttons, both of them black,

00:07:47   both of them leather, both of them open on the bottom, I will report back.

00:07:50   And then when I report back, I will give you links, including--

00:07:53   even if I don't like them then I'll give you links, and you'll just know what I'm talking about.

00:07:56   Yeah, I'm actually-- I'm curious to see how this ends up,

00:07:58   because, like, I've been an Apple leather case user ever since they made the phones unholdable with the iPhone 6 forward,

00:08:03   and the Apple leather cases now, the current ones, and even the old leather bump ones back then,

00:08:10   they've always been the best available that I have been able to find.

00:08:14   I've never found a third-party leather case for an iPhone that was as good as Apple's.

00:08:19   And Apple's aren't even, like, amazing.

00:08:22   They're just decent, and it seems like no one else is able to make better ones.

00:08:26   It seems like the best thing anybody has ever been able to say about other cases is they're cheaper.

00:08:31   But I've rarely, if ever, found one that was, like, really nice.

00:08:36   And Apple's cases, I have yet to find anything that is as nice as theirs.

00:08:41   That being said, I decided back, Jon, when you were tweeting a couple weeks ago,

00:08:46   looking at cases and getting suggestions from people, one of them caught my eye.

00:08:50   I thought it looked all right, and so I preordered that one for the Mini, which I haven't even been able to preorder yet.

00:08:55   I planned to try the Mini caseless, but I actually occasionally will probably want a case anyway.

00:09:03   And that was before I knew Apple was going to make their own leather ones for it.

00:09:07   So I decided to preorder that one, and so we'll see. I'll be able to compare it.

00:09:11   I'll probably also end up getting Apple's, because Apple's are probably going to come in better colors.

00:09:15   The one I ordered only came in black and brown, and so I couldn't get a red one.

00:09:19   So if Apple's comes in red, I'm going to get Apple's. And I'll have both, and I'll be able to compare. I'll let you know.

00:09:24   But honestly, I would be very surprised if any other cases are as nice as Apple's.

00:09:32   In just how nice the leather feels, how good the buttons are, how well and how closely it hugs the phone without being too bulky or too thick.

00:09:41   That's what I really want to see. And so many of them also are just incredibly tasteless with their logo placement.

00:09:48   And the one I ordered doesn't seem to have a logo visible on the back, and I'm very happy about that.

00:09:56   So we'll see too. This one looks like the best third-party one I have seen, but I also know this is the kind of thing you kind of just have to put it on your phone and feel it to really know how good it is. So we'll see.

00:10:08   You can bleep this out in the episode, Mark, about which one did you order?

00:10:11   I don't remember.

00:10:13   I have the same trepidations about it because I've never bought a third-party leather case.

00:10:19   And the problem with all these is you know the product photos can be far distant from the product you get. It's almost like food photos on menus of fast food places.

00:10:30   So that's the picture, but then if I take the thing that I ordered and hold it up next to the picture, it's like, no.

00:10:36   So I don't know how much to trust these pictures. That's why I ordered multiple cases. Because I'm like, well, these multiple cases still add up to less than Apple's one case.

00:10:46   At least with Apple's one expensive case, you're like, well, at least I know what I'm getting. Because I've got the leather cases before, I kind of know what I'm in for, and I'll just bite the bullet on the cost. So yeah, we will both report back.

00:10:58   Real time confirmation, it was the **** case. That one.

00:11:01   You've got to bleep that out now.

00:11:03   Yeah, well, I guess because all I can say is that's the one that made me want to order it and try it. But we'll see when it gets here.

00:11:12   I don't even know how long it'll be before I have a phone. We're going to be able to start ordering the iPhone 12 mini this Friday morning.

00:11:21   Oh, yeah.

00:11:22   But who knows, and the Macs too, but who knows when I'll be able to actually get one to arrive here. That's a big question mark. If Apple is as supply constrained as they appear to be, and if the mini has a whole ton of orders, as I think it probably will, this could be one of those things where I get in there on minute two and it's back ordered by six weeks. So we'll figure it out. I'll try to get one somehow.

00:11:48   You know, if you would like to hear what Marco said, you can always go to ATP.FM/join and listen to the bootleg where it will not be bleeped.

00:11:58   Yes.

00:11:59   Just saying. Just saying.

00:12:00   Yep, the bell happens live, but the bleeps are put in editing. So the bootleg never has bleeps.

00:12:05   Yep, there you go. All right. John, can you tell me about two-factor authentication and moving it between devices, please?

00:12:12   Yeah, your cursor is blocking the letter of this person's name. Whose cursor is that?

00:12:17   Oh, I guess that was mine. Sorry.

00:12:18   So who's the blue cursor?

00:12:19   Ah, it was an I. Isn't it weird that the cursor was blocking the I? Yeah. Anyway.

00:12:22   They call it the I-beam.

00:12:24   Michael Kozarski wrote in to tell us that the Google Auth app that I was complaining about the other day about my phone setup changed its method of storing items.

00:12:32   It used to do it in the keychain, but now it doesn't anymore. But old keys that were created before the change are grandfathered in.

00:12:39   So every time I upgrade to a new phone and some subset of my two-factor stuff is still in the Google Auth app, it's because they're the ones that were created before this app changed from storing things in the keychain to storing things just locally.

00:12:52   So it's not a random set. It's the oldest ones. And that kind of makes sense now that I think about it. It just seemed random because I had changed the order around, right?

00:12:59   So it wasn't actually the top whatever. It was just a subset of that.

00:13:03   So anyway, yeah. And two-factor stuff. I got a lot of advice about what I can do to make my setup less painful.

00:13:12   Aside from the dozens and dozens of people who had to tell me that I should use Authy or 1Password, which I predicted on the show, but it did not stop them.

00:13:21   I know you said on the show that you don't want to hear about 1Password, but have you considered 1Password? I've considered it.

00:13:27   Welcome to 80% of all feedback ever.

00:13:29   Right. This was by far the most popular suggestion. And all these people are right, but also kind of not helpful.

00:13:40   Everybody said, "Hey, if you print out the QR codes when you set up your stuff for the second time, then when you get a new phone, you can just rescan all those same QR codes."

00:13:49   True, but to implement that strategy to save myself trouble next time, I need a time machine because I didn't do that.

00:13:57   So yes, you're right. I could have done that, and it would have been smart, but telling me now just makes me feel bad because I know I'm in for the next time, which I'm resigned to.

00:14:07   Like I said, I decided by not using a Cloud Sync thing, I'm signing up to do this all over again.

00:14:12   Maybe next time I will print out all the QR codes, but honestly, that makes that process even worse because now I have to take little screenshots and do printouts and make sure I write down what thing that belongs to.

00:14:24   Actually, I don't even do that because the QR codes usually embed that information.

00:14:28   But anyway, tune in two years from now when I set up a next phone to hear me complain about this again.

00:14:34   Nice. Oh, goodness. Can you tell me about what's going on with Reminders and your Mac?

00:14:42   Yeah, this is some good news for me. I'm told by a reliable source that Reminders will no longer wake my Mac up from sleep in macOS.

00:14:52   Hurray!

00:14:54   I haven't experienced this for myself, but I am again told reliably that this was a bug that has been fixed.

00:14:59   If you recall, my complaint was my computer would be dead asleep and then Reminders would pop up a notification and it would wake my Mac up just so I could see the reminder on the screen.

00:15:09   Even when I wasn't in the room with it, so on and so forth, and I do not want my big, hot, noisy, expensive 2019 Mac Pro to wake up just because a reminder came up.

00:15:17   And I also didn't want to disable notifications for Reminders on my Mac because when I'm on my Mac, I do want Reminders notifications to pop up.

00:15:24   I just don't want them to wake my Mac from sleep. And now, reportedly, they won't.

00:15:28   Well, that's very exciting for you. I'm actually kind of excited that you can actually upgrade your OS in a timely fashion, or at all.

00:15:37   I mean, CAN and WILL are two different things. Let's take it easier.

00:15:42   Yeah, fair enough.

00:15:43   Considering all of our audio software won't work on Big Sur on day one probably anyway, so.

00:15:47   Yeah.

00:15:48   Not that I'm grumbling about that at all. Anyway, moving on. Can you tell me about what's going on with Amazon and the name of their tube?

00:15:57   Or I guess not the name of their tube, but their hail name.

00:16:01   Yeah, this feedback is from David Kenny, who tells us that he is one of those families that has a child whose name sounds a little bit like Siri, and in fact is Siri.

00:16:10   So we're talking about this with Alexa, where it's good that you can rename Alexa, Alexa's hail word, to be like computer or Amazon, where I forget what the choices are.

00:16:17   But you have some number of choices. We were saying, wouldn't it be great if Apple's Dingus had different names that you could call it too, just in case someone has a child named Siri?

00:16:26   David says, my niece's name is Shirsa, which is spelled S-A-O-I-R-S-E, a name that you would never know the pronunciation of except that it's also the name of a famous actress who's in a bunch of really good movies that you should definitely see.

00:16:42   I enjoy her work.

00:16:44   Shirsaronen is her name.

00:16:46   Anyway, she goes by Siri for short, and he says, not infrequently in their house, my phone will give me confusing food recommendations when someone has yelled at my niece to come for dinner.

00:16:57   She says, everyone who lives in that house has disabled Hey Dingus on all their devices just to avoid this problem, but if you enter this home, beware, because the name will be yelled into the air and your devices will activate.

00:17:09   So there you go, Apple. Please save David Kenny's family.

00:17:13   Fair enough. Can you tell me, Jon, about your favorite lens on your camera?

00:17:20   It's not my favorite lens, but I did beat Marko's percentage. We were, you two were discussing how often you use the telephoto lens, the third lens on your iPhones, and I thought I had used it a lot, and I did the little search in Apple Photos.

00:17:33   This is on my iPhone XS. I use the 2X camera almost exactly 25% of the time, 25.01% of the time.

00:17:41   That's way higher. I was like 16 or something, right?

00:17:43   Yep. I gotta crop out that background. It's all about cropping out the background.

00:17:48   Fair enough. And can iPhones do USB-C speeds or not? What's the story there?

00:17:53   Nope. I screwed this one up. I had mentioned in passing the other day when Jon was talking about how slow, or was it Jon? Yeah, one of you was talking about how slow an iTunes/Finder backup was of an iOS device, because you were using a USB-A to lightning cable.

00:18:07   And I said, "Hey, you should have used a USB-C to lightning cable, because those have USB-3 transfer speeds."

00:18:13   And it turns out this was correct for the two iPad Pros that actually had lightning and were iPad Pros, but not even all of them.

00:18:25   The original 9.7 I think was 2.0 still, but the 12.9 was 3.0, and then the 10.5 was also USB 3.0.

00:18:34   And then they went to USB-C. And apparently iPhones have never had the extra data pins required to actually give USB 3.0 speeds over the lightning cable, even with the USB-C cable.

00:18:45   So, turns out that was not a thing.

00:18:48   Oopsies. Alright, and then we enter the ancient follow-up section, but stuff that's been pushed down in the document for sometimes months. We are happy to report two months late that Apple has decided to extend Apple TV+ free year trials through February of this upcoming year.

00:19:05   Ostensibly this is because COVID delayed shooting second seasons of some of the early shows. I think I'd heard rumblings probably on upgrade that For All Mankind was close to done, I think.

00:19:19   And I think the morning show is starting up now, if I recall correctly. You should listen to upgrade for that stuff, they cover it way better than we do.

00:19:26   But anyways, they're going to extend the trial for those of us who bought phones or other devices late last year through February 2021, which is great.

00:19:34   I got the extension too. I was excited about that. I'm just saying for people, if you don't know this is happening, check in your devices, you might have a couple months free of Apple TV+.

00:19:42   Yep. And also, I know this is very old news if you fly in the same circles as the three of us or pay attention to what we are saying and our friends are saying.

00:19:51   But Ted Lasso, get on that. It's what you need right now. It's happy TV. It's good times. I don't care if you like sports or not.

00:19:58   I was listening to a certain top four episode early today because I'm a bit behind. But anyways, if you like sports or not, please, please, please give Ted Lasso a try. It's very good. Very wholesome.

00:20:11   You skipped an item earlier.

00:20:12   Did I? I'm sorry.

00:20:14   Maybe I should number them.

00:20:15   Oh, no, you're right. I did. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. Not that it really matters, but it's cool. John, tell me about your two long Apple Maps directions, please.

00:20:23   This is many shows ago. As Casey said, this is an ancient follow-up that's just bubbling up to the top now. But I was using Apple Maps versus Google Maps.

00:20:31   And I got frustrated because Apple Maps suddenly gave me a route that told me it would take an hour and 45 minutes when really it should be like 20 minutes.

00:20:39   And I didn't understand it. I did it multiple times and it kept giving it to me. And then Google gave me the correct time.

00:20:43   Many listeners were in to say, I've had something similar happen. And what happened to me was that Apple Maps decided that I should have walking directions.

00:20:52   Instead of driving directions, which would kind of explain the time difference, I suppose. Although I'm kind of surprised that it thinks I could even walk it in an hour and 45 minutes.

00:21:00   It's for the environment, John.

00:21:02   Right. At the time, I didn't check to see whether it was giving me walking direction. But that is a plausible explanation to me.

00:21:10   It doesn't make Apple Maps any better considering Apple Maps should know that I drove there unless it thinks I can walk very fast.

00:21:16   And it can probably even do the "you parked your car in this location" thing. But then it gives me walking directions back. Come on, Apple.

00:21:23   So we have this next piece of follow up from Zev Eisenberg. But to give you a hint as to how old it is, it was listed in our show notes as Zev Eisenbu.

00:21:34   Because presumably this person had put in one of those god-awful Halloween themed…

00:21:39   I'm following the instructions, which is you must use the Halloween name if people use it on Twitter. To shame/honor them.

00:21:47   If you use the Halloween name on Twitter and you give us feedback, your Halloween name will be in the show, Zev Eisenbu.

00:21:52   Yep. So tell me what Zev Eisenbu had to say.

00:21:57   That's fantastic.

00:21:58   It's like the same rule where if somebody has a typo, you have to read it as it was typed.

00:22:04   This is about the Xcode zip files. X-I-P, not Z-I-P. We were talking about them and how they take a really long time to decompress.

00:22:13   Actually, after that show, a bunch of people were like, "Oh, if you don't want to spend all that time, do it from the command line with this thing and it won't take so long because then it won't have to do all the signature verification crap."

00:22:22   The command line way is not worth describing because, yeah, it skips the signature verification, but then it doesn't when you launch the app anyway.

00:22:29   You cannot avoid the signature verification. It's going to happen.

00:22:31   You can split up into two pieces. One, decompress. Two, verify when you launch or do them both at once.

00:22:36   And that's what Zev was writing to say.

00:22:38   He was saying that the zip file is Apple proprietary signed compressed file.

00:22:42   I'm not sure if it's the same compression scheme as zip, but once it's unzipped, the app is also unquarantined so you don't have to then have Gatekeeper look at it.

00:22:50   So the quarantine attribute, it's also removed.

00:22:53   You know when you download something from the internet and the first time you launch it, it's like, "Oh, this file was downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to launch it?"

00:22:58   Uncompressing a zip file by double-clicking it in the finder does the compression and the signature verification, and once it does all that, it also removes the quarantine attribute so it's good to launch after that.

00:23:08   And you can't avoid, as far as I know, either one of those steps unless you disable Gatekeeper.

00:23:12   You can just choose whether you want them to all happen at once or split them up into two pieces.

00:23:16   And then, John, I presume would love to tell me about the Xbox Elite 2 controller.

00:23:21   Speaking of Cotton Bureau, isn't that what Cotton Bureau sent you for their ad spot a while back?

00:23:24   Yep, this was part of their sponsorship they gave us this Xbox Elite 2 controller to try out, and I reviewed it in an ad read/product review in the tradition of our toaster stuff a while back.

00:23:35   And I noted that some of my friends who had Xbox Elite controllers of various vintages had complained about reliability issues, which is kind of depressing when you buy like a, you know, I forget if it was a $180 controller or something, very expensive controller.

00:23:50   You wouldn't expect that one to have reliability concerns, and I was speculating that maybe it's because it was such low volume that it doesn't get the same testing.

00:23:57   Anyway, Microsoft has apparently addressed this, and they've, it's amazing they use like the same language.

00:24:02   Here's the quote from their document.

00:24:04   "We've received claims that a small percentage of our customers," it's always a small percentage, "a small percentage of our customers are experiencing mechanical issues."

00:24:11   I mean, what percentage does it have to be for a small not to apply?

00:24:15   Like, is 80% a sign?

00:24:17   I don't know what the reliability is, but apparently this is legally approved message for every reliability problem, including Apple's AirPod Pros, which also have a repair extension program now in case you weren't aware.

00:24:26   Small percentage of Apple's AirPod Pros.

00:24:29   Oh, God, did I tell you that that actually happened to me?

00:24:32   No.

00:24:33   And it happened, I literally, so this is the thing, we never actually talked about it on the show, but there has been a widespread problem for AirPod Pros.

00:24:41   I think you mean a small percentage, Marco?

00:24:43   Yeah.

00:24:44   Where it seems like they develop like a rattle or like a static noise that often is correlated to motion or noise cancellation.

00:24:52   Basically, it kind of sounds like something has come unglued inside and it rattles around, especially during bass frequencies or during movement.

00:25:00   We've heard from so many people who have AirPod Pros who have not only gotten them replaced for this, but have gotten multiple replacements because this seems to just kill them after some amount of time or some amount of usage.

00:25:11   And it's funny, it's just like the butterfly keyboard responses. Like, you get a replacement AirPod Pro, but it seems like the replacements end up getting the same problem.

00:25:20   So what you're saying is this just actually came out that they just launched a service program where they say that a small percentage...

00:25:31   Well, of course it is.

00:25:33   A small percentage of AirPod Pros have a potential issue if they're manufactured before October of 2020.

00:25:41   And so there's a service program that if you're having this issue with one or both of your AirPod Pros, you can get them replaced for up to two years after purchase.

00:25:48   Which is nice because we're about to reach the one year anniversary of their launch, if we haven't already.

00:25:53   And so the first ones are going to be falling out of warranty soon otherwise.

00:25:58   But it's good that they're basically giving a two year extended warranty on any of them purchased through or until October of 2020, which was last week.

00:26:08   So it makes it sound like they figured out the problem though because they're cutting it off as saying, "Okay, from this point on we figured it out."

00:26:15   And if you got one that was manufactured before this point, you get a two year warranty.

00:26:20   But after this point, you don't get a two year warranty because presumably we figured out the problem and now we're gluing that thing in better, whatever the problem was.

00:26:27   So unlike the butterfly keyboard, I have some confidence that they've actually figured this problem out.

00:26:32   I hope so, but they also said the same thing about the butterfly keyboard.

00:26:35   Like how many times did they quote, "improve that thing for service or reliability issues."

00:26:39   And I think only the very last generation one has seemingly not had massive major scale problems.

00:26:46   And this is one of those things where like, I'm pretty sure, when Apple says a small percentage.

00:26:52   Most of the time when Apple says something, you can usually believe it.

00:26:59   Like there might be some lawyering in some of the wording or some tricks with like, you know, making things sound better than they are.

00:27:06   But for the most part, you can usually believe it.

00:27:08   When they say a small percentage of their hardware of a certain type has a flaw, that is usually BS.

00:27:16   And I don't know if they intend it, maybe they're like, "Well, you know, we only hear about this bunch percent through the service channel or anything."

00:27:23   But like, usually that means all of them have this flaw.

00:27:26   Maybe most people don't hit it, but like there is some kind of flaw that caused this and they just have this flaw with the way they made them.

00:27:34   You got to invoke Merlin's credo that if you don't use a product, it usually works pretty well.

00:27:39   To give an example, my wife has AirPod Pros and as soon as this repair program, I'm like, "Have you had this problem?"

00:27:46   Because what I wanted to say is like, you should really, really use your AirPod Pros more so that you can induce this problem so that we can get a free replacement within the two years.

00:27:55   Because if you really lightly use them and the problem appears in year three because you barely use them, that's not great.

00:28:00   So just use them now.

00:28:02   So if you, like Apple may be hearing from, you know, Apple says it as if a small percentage have the problem, but Apple hears about a small percentage.

00:28:09   And again, what is small? Is small 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%, whatever.

00:28:14   But how many people have AirPod Pros and just don't use them that much?

00:28:19   And so this problem never occurs because maybe it only occurs after the first, you know, X hundred hours of use or something like that.

00:28:25   Or maybe it only occurs if you have the Gooby Ear Wax instead of the Dry Ear Wax. That's the thing looking up.

00:28:30   Wow.

00:28:31   Anyway, who knows? This is quite a sidetrack on my Xbox Elite 2 story, which is, hey, guess what?

00:28:39   If you have an Elite Series 2, your warranty has been extended.

00:28:44   It's been extended from the terrible default warranty on this product.

00:28:48   90 days. Come on, Microsoft.

00:28:51   Is that even legal?

00:28:52   A $180 controller has a 90-day warranty? Come on.

00:28:55   Anyway, it's been extended to one year.

00:28:57   So that's not great, but it's better than nothing. So if you have an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, use it a lot in the first year.

00:29:05   So if it's going to break, you will break it and then you'll get a fresh one.

00:29:08   Oh, my.

00:29:09   Oh, and one more thing on the AirPod Pro thing. So I actually, I had to send mine in. Coincidentally, I didn't know there was a service program coming.

00:29:14   I literally sent my first one in for repair like two days before they announced the service program.

00:29:20   Nice.

00:29:21   It is a really kind of like overwrought and adorable way to when you when you have to send in or exchange or get a replacement AirPod that it comes in a it comes in the same size box as like or like a replacement iPhone would you open it up and there's a little inner box and inside the inner box is a little tiny cardboard flap that holds the single AirPod like in this nice little presentation thing.

00:29:47   And there's a little card that comes with it that tell you you unfold the card and it depicts for you how you're supposed to take out this AirPod from its package and put your old AirPod back into it and retape it and send it back.

00:29:58   It's like the most cool Apple thing. It's just one of those things like you don't usually see unless you've done it yourself.

00:30:04   You don't usually see like Apple service side of things and it's it's it's pretty fun like because it is as Apple as you could possibly imagine like super over designed amazing packaging.

00:30:17   It's a pretty fun thing to see and the AirPod one is is truly something that's not at all surprising.

00:30:23   I had to go look through you find a link for this earwax thing and I found what I thought was a reasonable page but then I was like oh no I've given bad information because the top of the page is earwax type colon the myth and then it describes what I just said about the sticky versus dry your wax like is it a myth is like a Snopes thing where it's like here's the myth and then here's the reality and so I scroll down quickly to the conclusion and the conclusion is unlike most of the human characters that are used to demonstrate simple genetics principles.

00:30:51   What versus dry earwax really is controlled by one gene with two alleles. Well, then why did you say was a myth at the top of the document.

00:30:58   Anyway, we'll put the link in the show us if you want to learn about your wax.

00:31:02   This is the only tech podcast that will give you your wax links. Just let it be known.

00:31:06   So so excited.

00:31:08   Did you guys get caught up and I'm going to regret this but here we go. Did you get caught up in the in the ear candling thing that went around in like the early to middle.

00:31:16   What do you think. Yeah, I'm guessing I'll give you one guess.

00:31:21   Did you. Oh, yes.

00:31:23   So if you weren't around in the early to mid aughts there was I presume this was in the like granola like natural remedy world.

00:31:34   My first job when I was 15 years old was working in a little natural food store co-op thing and we sold those and this was like 1997.

00:31:44   And they like we sold them in the store and they were just like these giant cones that I it took me a while of working there to even know what they were.

00:31:53   But eventually like I had I had to be in a restock the shelf at some point and I had to put some up there.

00:31:58   I'm like, oh my God, that's what this is. It's it's a weird thing.

00:32:02   But anyway, it's older than you think. And you are correct that it does come from the like, you know, hippie region of things.

00:32:08   But sorry, continue. Yes. So I don't this was brought to me by my then girlfriend and she wasn't particularly granola.

00:32:16   So I don't know where she got this, although the area in which she grew up with super granola from what I gather.

00:32:21   But anyway, this was a super, super hippie area of very rural southwest Virginia, which seems like they would not melt.

00:32:30   But sure enough. Anyways, the idea is you take this this I don't know, like six or eight inch thing that's like it seems like it's almost like rolled up and dried up gauze from my recollection.

00:32:41   I'm trying to remember something that happened 15 years ago. So, you know, my facts may be wrong here.

00:32:45   But suffice to say, you stick this thing in your ear and light it like a candle.

00:32:50   So you've got one inside your ear and the other end is literally on fire.

00:32:55   And then if you're smart, you like put you'll like stick this quote unquote candle again, not like wax.

00:33:00   It's like more like paper, if you will. But anyways, you will stick this this candle through like a plastic or I'm sorry,

00:33:07   like a paper plastic like plate or something to catch any of the flaming drippings, if you will, that are that are coming off of this candle as it's burning down.

00:33:16   And the theory is you burn it down, you know, as close as you can get to your ear before it starts to burn you.

00:33:22   And then if you unroll what's left, you can look inside and see the little bits of earwax that have been sucked out by the candle burning.

00:33:29   And I tried this at the time because I was really dumb. Now I'm just only now I'm only a little dumb. Then I was really dumb.

00:33:36   Anyways, I tried it and I was like, holy crap, look at all the earwax that came out of here.

00:33:40   But as it turns out, when I thought about this many years later and did like two seconds of research on it, it turns out that, yeah,

00:33:47   all that earwax is just the candle itself crumbling. And so, oh, I can't believe Marco just figured this out.

00:33:54   It's like every kid magic trick. But like, all right, that came from your body, dude.

00:33:58   Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll put a link in the show notes that shows this is on Wikipedia.

00:34:02   You can see not only the remnants, which is their first image, and then you can also see somebody doing the candling if you scroll a little more.

00:34:10   My recollection, having not read this Wikipedia page in 15 years, is that it's complete and utter BS.

00:34:17   Do not stick things into your orifices and set them on fire. This includes cigarettes.

00:34:22   And also, medical note here, it's not actually you're not supposed to actually remove your earwax.

00:34:27   I don't know the details, but yeah, do some research if you care. But yeah, that's the thing.

00:34:32   God, we're going. No, we're good.

00:34:33   Yeah.

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00:36:31   [Music]

00:36:34   I know what's next in the show notes. I would like to pitch a quick rearrangement which I know is going to drive Jon nuts. Can we just get the YouTube DL thing out of the way real quick? Because I don't think it's going to take very long.

00:36:46   You're so angry about your toy. You should be. Can you actually make it quick?

00:36:51   I think I can because I actually don't have that much to say about it.

00:36:54   Alright, so a week or two ago, I forget exactly when, YouTube DL was punted off of GitHub because of a DMCA request by the RIAA.

00:37:04   So that was a whole bunch of stuff that may or may not have made sense to you. So let me back up a smidge.

00:37:08   YouTube DL is a thing I've been espousing for years and it's a command line tool that you can use to download videos off of YouTube.

00:37:16   But it also does way more than that. Way, way, way more. And you can point YouTube DL at almost any URL and you can get it to download whatever video is being played at that URL.

00:37:31   And this can be used for nefarious purposes. Like you could download a TV show or something like that if it's presented in such a way that YouTube DL can download it.

00:37:41   But you can also use it for a ton of legitimate uses. And as an example, one of the things I'd heard, and I don't know if this is accurate or not, but I'd read that a lot of news organizations will use it to capture footage to then rebroadcast later.

00:37:54   Which presumably they get the rights for and so on and so forth. But it's easiest for them, well maybe.

00:37:59   They don't usually.

00:38:01   It's easiest for them to just say, "Hey, we're going to download this ourselves." And that'll give you basically the source video. It's not like it's taking a screen capture or anything like that. It's actually going and getting the source MP4 or what have you.

00:38:14   And it was punted from GitHub because of a DMCA, what is that? Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

00:38:22   So that was an act that basically said that if you are a, please correct me gentlemen, but if you're a copyright holder and you see your copyrighted material somewhere, you can tell the people hosting it to pull that off their servers.

00:38:33   Among other things.

00:38:35   I mean, I think what you've given is like a functional definition, but my recollection of the actual law is that basically it's illegal to try to circumvent copy protection.

00:38:44   Yeah. The thing you need to know is that it created a mechanism and a justification by which copyright holders could file claims against websites or web hosts or anybody involved in the web hosting chain called DMCA takedown notices that basically say like, "I assert that I'm the holder of these copyrights and this person at this URL is infringing upon my copyrights.

00:39:11   And therefore you, the host, are required to take that down or I can sue you." This takedown procedure is very problematic and very vulnerable to issues.

00:39:22   And that story for maybe another day, but it's a horrible system, but we haven't come up with anything better yet. But it's horrible.

00:39:30   So, you know, GitHub decides to punt YouTube DL and I didn't really dig that much into the why, but I think what had happened, and it really doesn't matter, but I think what had happened is somewhere in like a unit test or something like that, they had a link to a YouTube video that was like a music video or something like that.

00:39:50   So the RIAA, which is the Recording Industry Artists Association of America, the same people who sued for Napster and all the other things back in the day.

00:39:58   So the RIAA said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We see this URL to something that one of our member companies has rights to, so this is BS. Take it down, man."

00:40:08   And GitHub, because as much as I do love GitHub, it has a host of problems and this is not even the biggest.

00:40:14   GitHub, of course, doesn't really have a whole lot of choice, I don't think, in this matter, but immediately just said...

00:40:18   They don't. They have literally no choice. They have to take it down or they will get sued. Like, that's it. This is one of the reasons why the DMCA is so problematic for anybody who hosts content.

00:40:31   There's basically nothing they can do about it. So you can do something like you can file a counterclaim to say like, "No, I believe this should be here."

00:40:40   But the way mechanically this usually works in practice for lots of various pragmatic and legal and protection reasons is if you have any kind of copyright dispute with something online,

00:40:51   if you get a claim and you don't think that claim is valid, you generally still have to take the thing down while you argue it out if you are going to argue it out.

00:41:03   You have to take it down in the meantime. And if you don't, then they will go up the chain and they will go to your host or they will go to your domain registrar.

00:41:11   They'll keep going up the chain until someone takes it down and forces you to. Because the thing is, imagine...

00:41:17   And obviously things are a little bit different for GitHub, which is not by Microsoft. This is the big company here.

00:41:22   But if I get a claim, if something is on overcast.fm/something and somebody has a problem with it, if I'm lucky, they'll first send the claim to me.

00:41:32   And I'll be able to either comply and take it down or I might argue with them, "Hey, no, this is legit."

00:41:41   But then if they don't get the answer they want, they'll go to Linode, my host. And Linode will come to me and basically be like, "Look, we don't want to deal with this. You deal with this."

00:41:52   And let us know when it's dealt with. Everyone up the chain will do that same thing. They'll go to the domain registrar, they'll go to ISPs, they'll go to anybody who's involved in the transmission of that content to the world.

00:42:04   Until it's taken down, basically. At no point do you have an opportunity to say, in any way that really matters, "This is fair use."

00:42:12   Or, "This is not actually a valid claim." Or, "I don't even know if you have the right to make this claim." At no point does any argument have any room to be heard or any time to be considered.

00:42:27   There is no arbiter of any of this. It is just like, you file a DMCA claim against a thing and it will be gone from the internet within days.

00:42:35   The worst that can happen is if you are filing that fraudulently, and if you put in your actual content information, somebody could theoretically sue you for making a false claim.

00:42:47   But in practice, like so much about copyright disputes on the internet, if any claim is made, it's going to be taken down. It's gone.

00:42:56   It's not going to go to a court. It's not going to go to a judge while it gets hashed out. It's going to hit somebody, either an ISP or a host or something, who is like, "I don't want the liability of dealing with this if you're wrong, so just take it down."

00:43:09   So it's forced to be taken down. So anyway, things do work differently when you're somebody the size of GitHub/Microsoft.

00:43:16   Obviously, things are a little bit more complicated, but if somebody as big as the RAA sends in a DMCA claim, which is implicitly a legal threat, and the RAA is pretty litigious, that's basically its entire role in the world.

00:43:33   So when you get that letter, no one's going to argue. No one's going to give anyone a time to be like, "Hey, do you think this is fair use? Explain to us why and we'll consider your claim." Nope. It's gone. No matter what it is, it's gone.

00:43:48   So GitHub takes down not only the official YouTube DL repository, meaning it takes down all the source code for YouTube DL, but apparently the RAA just conveniently decided to look at a whole bunch of forks. A fork in this context, if you're not familiar, means basically a copy of the source code.

00:44:06   And so YouTube took down a whole bunch of forks. FloatyPotatoes in the chat, which is a great username by the way, pointed out, we'll put it in the show notes, that apparently GitHub is threatening to ban anyone who re-hosts the source for YouTube DL on GitHub, which I had not seen until it was mentioned in the chat room.

00:44:23   So basically, the source disappeared from GitHub. Now the good news is that source still exists on thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of computers all over the internet and all over the world.

00:44:35   Last I looked about a week ago, the website was back up, although it was at a different URL. Downloads are still up. But the source, I'd heard something about it having been moved to like Bitbucket or some other GitHub equivalent. I forget exactly where it was.

00:44:54   But one way or another, it is still apparently a thing. There was a release just a couple days ago. But it just really bums me out that this tool, which certainly can be used for nefarious purposes, I'm not arguing that it can be used for nefarious purposes, but it also can very well be used for honest and good purposes.

00:45:13   I use this thing constantly, and it's just really sad to me that it's been taken down by a bunch of people who seem to be acting like jerks.

00:45:24   It's funny because just today I was listening to the episode of 99PI about GeoCities, and one of the things that they talked about briefly was archiving all of GeoCities prior to it being shut down by Yahoo.

00:45:38   And YouTube DL is a great tool for doing exactly that. I don't know if I've talked about that on this show, but I think I've talked on Analog about how when the god-awful things happened in Charlottesville shortly after Trump got elected,

00:45:53   arguably because of Trump, a few weeks later Dave Matthews had organized this six or seven hour free concert as a way to raise money and just do a nice thing for Charlottesville because Dave Matthews was originally from there.

00:46:08   And it was broadcast live, and I recorded it using YouTube DL. I didn't have to pay to get access to it, but I recorded it, and that six and a half hours, whatever it is,

00:46:19   A) to the best of my knowledge exists on no other computer on the internet. Now, that may not be true, but to the best of my knowledge it doesn't exist anywhere else.

00:46:26   And B) it's a phenomenal frickin' concert. It would be a real shame if a tool like YouTube DL didn't exist anymore because it would make it either impossible or intolerably inconvenient for me to be able to do that sort of thing.

00:46:40   And this isn't just about me, it's about thousands and hundreds of thousands maybe of people who use this tool for doing legitimately useful and good things. And so I don't really have that much to say about it other than that I'm super bummed that it got taken down off GitHub,

00:46:55   and I hope that this doesn't last forever. I hope that they find a new home for it or resolve whatever the issue is with the RIAA so it can be put back on GitHub. Just because a tool can be used for bad doesn't necessarily mean that the tool itself is bad.

00:47:14   No, just don't ask me about guns. Anyway, that's my thoughts about that.

00:47:18   I have so much I could say about this. I love that you told Jon that we'd be doing this quickly because that's not going to happen.

00:47:25   Sorry.

00:47:26   There's so many angles that we can take with this. I'm not surprised this happened. And I don't think it was an unjust thing.

00:47:36   I use YouTube DL all the time for many of the reasons you just said. It's totally an incredibly useful tool. It's great. It's one of those tools that almost every nerd should have and know about.

00:47:50   And they aren't the only ones who provide this kind of thing. It turns out wanting to download videos off of YouTube is a very common request. And so there's all sorts of websites and tools and apps and stuff that will generate a download URL for you or will download the file for you if you paste in a YouTube URL or browser extensions that will do it.

00:48:13   Because ultimately your browser has to download the video to play it. So it's not that hard to make apps or things to extract these video files for standalone downloads.

00:48:24   And all YouTube DL is, is an engine with all these rules that will be able to extract videos out of web pages and download them in various formats and merge them into different ways and combine the best audio codec with the best video codec or things like that.

00:48:45   It is a tool that has lots of legitimate uses. It is also a tool that is primarily used, I think, for personal fair use uses.

00:48:56   Copyright law is pretty poorly understood by most people who comment on the internet. And fair use is not well codified. It's more of a set of precedents and vague guidelines that are open to lots of interpretation.

00:49:15   But generally it is considered fair use to make a copy of something that is copyrighted by somebody else for yourself. If you had it in some way and you are saving it for yourself, generally that is considered fair use.

00:49:33   There's lots of exceptions to this, but that's been a reasonably established principle. Things like taping a video off of TV.

00:49:42   This is where I come in with my old man story.

00:49:45   Yeah, because there was a court case. It was a big deal.

00:49:48   So this is from my childhood, something I remember about this exact situation. This is YouTube DL for the old, right?

00:49:55   And it's a combination of what you both just said. Casey, it was a live concert that you wanted to take in what we call in the old days time shift, which is you wanted to save that thing for later.

00:50:06   Marco, thank you for having a personal copy for yourself. Here is Jack Valenti talking to the House of Representatives in 1982.

00:50:14   And I quote, "I say to you that the VCRs to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman at home,"

00:50:21   Oh God.

00:50:22   He says in typical 80s sexist analogy ways.

00:50:25   "That the VCR was like the Boston Strangler." Jack Valenti was representing the MPAA, which is the movie version of the RAA, right?

00:50:32   We can't let people at home have a device that allows them to make a local copy of things that are broadcast on television. It will destroy the movie industry.

00:50:41   People being able to rent movies and watch them in their house. Movies will be dead. And as we know, after the 1980s, we never had movies again.

00:50:48   And the movie industry never made any more money.

00:50:50   Yep, that's right.

00:50:51   YouTube DL is 100% a VCR for the internet. And it's so dumb that we have to fight these same things over again just because computers are involved now.

00:51:00   Yeah. And the DMCA makes this more complicated because the DMCA made it illegal to circumvent encryption schemes or copyright protection schemes.

00:51:11   Or anything that stops you from getting it, which as Marco pointed out, you have to have the video already.

00:51:17   Like this is the whole thing I talked about on the show ages ago where I forget if it was Leslie or whatever.

00:51:22   I was talking about DRM in general is like going through the whole public key encryption thing with Alice and Bob, you know, and someone in the middle trying to eavesdrop and how they use encryption to stop that from happening.

00:51:33   And you go through the whole big thing so people understand what public key encryption is at a basic level.

00:51:37   And then you say, the problem is what we're actually trying to do is stop Bob from getting it.

00:51:41   And you're like, but wait, I'm giving it to Bob. Like the whole point is Bob has to get it.

00:51:46   Alice and Bob are using encryption to exchange information.

00:51:49   The video was coming to me so I can see it with my eyeballs and hear it with my ears.

00:51:53   But you want to stop me from having the video? You just sent me the video. You can't stop me from having the video if you just sent me the video.

00:52:00   Because if you stop me from having the video, I can never see it. It's like, well, we want you to see it, but you can't actually have it.

00:52:06   Like don't take it after we give it to you. That's what YouTube DL is doing.

00:52:10   Okay. Because YouTube DL cannot give you video as far as I know. I don't know if there's any nefarious things.

00:52:14   But I'm pretty sure YouTube DL cannot give you video that you can't already see. Right?

00:52:19   So like if there was some password protected site that you can't get into, you can't point YouTube DL at it and it will crack the password for you and get the video.

00:52:26   It only records, again, as far as I know, video that you can already see. It's just time shifting. It's just the VCR.

00:52:33   Literally all it is doing is it's an engine that has a bunch of like built in heuristics and rules.

00:52:38   Like, all right, well, if you're looking at a page on this domain name, extract this element, follow this script and take this URL that's in this element.

00:52:44   Like it's that kind of thing.

00:52:46   Yeah. So yeah, obviously in 1982 the DMCA didn't exist. Once computers came, our lawmakers had even less of a grasp on them.

00:52:53   And the lobbying groups were even more powerful. And they managed to get this terrible law passed because otherwise computers would be the Boston Strangler for insert whatever.

00:53:01   You know, like it was the exact same argument. Like you can't let people be copying stuff willy nilly. Napster will destroy the music industry, yada yada yada.

00:53:08   And you know, so now we have things like streaming, which definitely didn't destroy the music industry and are totally illegal.

00:53:13   Anyway, this law is dumb and this YouTube DL takedown is dumb and YouTube DL is the VCR for the computer age.

00:53:21   And VCR should not be illegal and neither should YouTube DL.

00:53:25   Right. And that being said, it would be better for them if they renamed their project and made it like, although it is kind of funny, like YouTube wasn't the one filing this, filing this claim.

00:53:40   Right. They'll just call it YouTube VCR. It'll be fine.

00:53:43   Right. Like if anything, you know, they have a, you know, a trademark claim.

00:53:47   But anyway, uh, you know, YouTube doesn't seem to have much of a problem with this, I think because they probably know, like it's, it would be a losing battle to try to fight these tools.

00:53:58   And YouTube has a local download option on iOS.

00:54:00   Yes, but it's, it's only, only premium accounts and it's protected. Anyway, it's a whole thing.

00:54:05   But, um, there are lots of tools that are used mostly for piracy that have legitimate uses and if you want them to survive out there in the world, you have to not play up the piracy angle too much in your names or your marketing material.

00:54:20   You know, people will figure it out. Like everyone's going to know, like if they rename it to some generic name, media DL, who knows, who cares?

00:54:27   Rename it to something that isn't YouTube DL and remove any really incriminating comments or test cases from the source code and you can put it back up somewhere and it would be okay.

00:54:39   I think I was surprised to learn that the complaint was that it had a link to a video cause I just assumed that what had happened was it was like, uh, there's lots of examples.

00:54:48   So like, uh, so the DMCA is written so broadly that if you do literally anything to discourage people from like getting your content after you gave it to them, essentially, like if you, if you put like a piece of string on the door and tie a little knot in it said, now, if you cut that string with a scissor, DMCA take down because that was there to prevent you from going through the door that you just went through.

00:55:08   Uh, but you cut it with scissors, so you can't do that. Right? So, uh, DVD encryption, the CSS encryption and DVDs, right?

00:55:16   Yeah, DCSS. Right. DCSS, uh, cracking that would fit in a couple lines of pro code that would fit on a t-shirt, making that t-shirt essentially illegal because it's now allowing people to circumvent. Well, I don't know if the t-shirt was legal, that was the joke.

00:55:28   Anyway, the whole point is, but it's so easy to break. Like it's, it's so, you know, your encryption is so bad and me cracking it is just so I can make my own fair use personal backup copy of this DVD that I bought yada yada yada. It's like, I don't care. The law says if you do anything to circumvent something that's stopping you from getting the thing that we gave you already, DMCA.

00:55:49   Doesn't say, you know, I think there is an exception there for like, well, I think there is some exception for, you know, I don't know if it's personal use or fair use or whatever, but it's, it's always been interpreted so broadly and no one can afford to fight these legal battles anyway that as Marco was saying, it's like, well, even if you're right, do you really want to spend time fighting this giant cooperation going through the courts and all this other crap and most people in the end don't. Couple people tried in the beginning and it was, you know, anyway.

00:56:14   I thought the YouTube DL must have had somewhere in it. One of its sources, the equivalent of DCSS, which is like some trivial code to break something that's been broken for years and years that everybody knows is not really stopping anybody.

00:56:27   It's like that piece of string on the door that's like, well, you just get a scissor and you cut it and then you can get the thing.

00:56:31   But if there really is no code like that anywhere in YouTube DL, that makes it even worse because I think things that like let you decrypt DVDs who are, you know, should be legal, even though the MCA says that they're not.

00:56:46   But if this thing was doesn't have any of that, it's just simply, hey, don't figure out which element of the, of an HTML page to extract the URL from or don't watch network traffic to figure out what URL to that's, that's even worse.

00:56:59   And I think the, the interpretation would be like, well, you know, all those like redirects and the webpage and all that, those mechanisms are there to stop you from downloading it.

00:57:08   It's like, well, are they really, or is that just the way a web app works? It's like, well, it's, it's to stop you from having it after we gave it to you.

00:57:15   Just we say it is, so you can't have it. The MCA take down. Super dumb.

00:57:19   The smart way to do this kind of thing is to have tools that are more discreetly named to, to not put anything too incriminating in your source code about, you know, specific cases like, oh, this is made to rip off this one, this one, you know, version of this YouTube video that has a password on it.

00:57:36   Or, you know, maybe, maybe not accommodating those cases. And to accept the fact that like when you're in the piracy tool business, and again, I know I've said already, there's lots of legitimate use cases for most of these tools, including YouTube DL, and I use it all the time.

00:57:52   But when you're in that business, you have to be pretty careful. It's a lot like if you were doing, if you were in some kind of like illicit business in real life, if you're like, you know, selling drugs, I would imagine, or, you know, God knows, you know, selling bootleg VHS tapes on the corner, who knows.

00:58:09   But like, if you're doing something that's like in a gray area of the law, you kind of have to be on the run all the time. It kind of surprises me how long YouTube DL was able to get away with what it does right there in public on a large big company owned site.

00:58:26   You have to either be really careful to always appear 100% legitimate if you're gonna do this kind of thing, or you have to be prepared to be on the move and just be prepared for a game of whack-a-mole with whoever your, you know, your stuff is known from.

00:58:39   I should just look this up, but isn't there like a security researcher exception to the MCA as well, some crap like that?

00:58:45   It's such a sloppy law. Like it's very, it's weirdly broad and...

00:58:49   They should just claim to be security researchers. Here's a tool for security researchers.

00:58:53   Right. Like every definition in the MCA is extremely vague. So it's very hard to like...

00:58:58   Yeah. So the practical definition is, even if you're 100% right, if you have to prove that in a court of law, it takes a lot of money and time that most people don't have or want to deal with, especially when the, on the other side is, you know, industry group or whatever with essentially comparatively infinite money and time. Everything's stacked against you.

00:59:17   Yeah.

00:59:18   So looking at the Wikipedia page for YouTube DL, the RIAA requests argue that YouTube DL violates whatever section, the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, and also some German copyright law, since it circumvents a rolling cipher used by YouTube to generate the URL for the video file itself, which the RIAA, of course, considered to be an effective technical protection measure, since it is "intended to inhibit direct access to the underlying YouTube video files, thereby preventing..."

00:59:46   It's a piece of string on the door.

00:59:47   Yep. "...thereby preventing or inhibiting the downloading, copying, or distribution of the video files."

00:59:53   Now, that's funny because I don't know how YouTube DL works and we're looked into it, but my very limited understanding was the way it works is it basically, as you guys described, downloads, you know, whatever webpage, and oftentimes when it comes to YouTube, you'll see it say like it's grabbing the JavaScript from YouTube to presumably execute to do whatever it needs to do to get the actual video file URL.

01:00:16   So, I think you're right, Jon, it is the string on the door thing, but I don't know, man, it just seems, it seems really, really thin to me, which of course doesn't matter because of all the reasons Marco described, but it just seems like a really thin claim to me.

01:00:29   I mean, that's how the web works. They send you the code and then your browser runs it.

01:00:32   Right.

01:00:33   So, if it's done, it's like they send you the JavaScript, it comes to your browser, it is received by your computer, your computer executes it, and then, you know, it's, again, they can't, how can they stop you from having the video they're giving you?

01:00:45   They have to give you the video, you can't see it and hear it. So, it's like, but that's it.

01:00:50   You can just see it in here in the context that we let you. No, no, which was exactly the same way as broadcast television until the advent of the VCR, which as we know ended television.

01:00:59   Well, that took longer than I expected, I'm sorry, but no, it's like it bums me out that this happened, but I'm not too worried about it in the grand scheme of things because this code is everywhere, and I'm sure, like it may not be as easy for me to find either the code or an executable,

01:01:14   but I'm pretty confident that I will still probably forevermore be able to find this code and/or executable because there's so many people that use it for so many varying and different reasons.

01:01:23   And so, it's a bummer, but I don't view this as the end of YouTube DL.

01:01:28   And honestly, at least for now, until YouTube, you know, changes the way their site works or whatever the case may be, it still works.

01:01:35   You know, even the one or two month old version still works for almost everything.

01:01:38   So, I'm not too worried about it right now, but nevertheless, it does bum me out that this is a thing.

01:01:46   Yeah, well, I mean, it even still works to the point where, like, the other day, like, it has a little way to update its definitions, you know, YouTube DL dash capital U as the command line argument, and you occasionally have to do that if, like, if you haven't updated it in a while, and you go to download something and it's like, "Oh, sorry, we can't parse this page, try running this update thing."

01:02:06   That still works. Like, wherever it's pointing to in the version of the binary I have, that server is still up.

01:02:14   And so, I was able to even update the definitions. Like, I think it was yesterday that 84 was very, it was sometime in the last few days, very recent when I did this, and it works just fine.

01:02:22   So, you know, I think it'll be fine. It just probably won't be on on GitHub or any, you know, major big name, you know, source repository site. But good thing is that GitHub is not the world.

01:02:37   Like, this is yet another benefit. This is one of the things I was thinking of earlier when I said we could take this in a lot of different directions. Sorry, Sean. This is one of the things where the more diversity we have in the infrastructure of the web and the companies that you can use in certain ways, how many companies are there to upload type of content X, Y, or Z, the more diversity we have, the better.

01:03:01   If the prohibited content in question was, say, a video, and YouTube prohibited you from uploading that video to YouTube, that's a pretty big hit if you need that video to be seen by a lot of people.

01:03:17   Like, if you need a popular video to be seen that can't be on YouTube, unless it has naked people in it, it's not going to get a lot of views. We're lucky that, like, source code is pretty easy to host.

01:03:31   Git itself can be hosted anywhere you want. It takes some work to set up, and, you know, GitHub offers niceties like the pull request system that, you know, you kind of, that are prohibited probably to set up on your own.

01:03:46   But, like, source code existed before GitHub. Collaborative editing of source repositories and change requests and, you know, branch editing is like, this all existed before GitHub.

01:04:00   Even today, there are other places that you can do it. Granted, not a lot of them, but there are other places you can do it. And you can still set up your own server to do it.

01:04:07   And that, and like, that is possible only because the world of hosting code somewhere for collaboration is not super locked down.

01:04:18   GitHub is big, and for the social aspect of the collaboration and, you know, stuff like the pull request system, it does, it is a pretty big hit to lose GitHub for that.

01:04:30   But, we are lucky that in this instance, you know, the open web is still able to host this stuff and is still able to serve this role for this.

01:04:40   So that there is no one place you can go to block something from existing on the open web. And so, you know, good for diversity here.

01:04:48   And this is yet another reason why we should defend this kind of diversity whenever it is threatened.

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01:06:58   [Music]

01:07:02   I think that's basically all we have to talk about today, right? So, ask ATP?

01:07:06   None of you are going to jump on me about this. Not a one.

01:07:09   Oh, are we supposed to talk about the Apple event coming up?

01:07:11   Yeah.

01:07:12   Oh.

01:07:13   There's going to be max and they'll be fast. I mean, I'm supposing that that's basically the story.

01:07:20   I don't mean to sound like negative or anything. I don't know. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but I'm sure there's going to be some new max.

01:07:28   I bet they're going to look pretty similar to the max we got today, and I bet they're going to be really fast.

01:07:32   So, Jon, I presume you, as the resident old man of the three of us, have plenty of thoughts and opinions, so please take it away.

01:07:39   Why aren't you excited about this, Casey?

01:07:41   I'm excited.

01:07:42   I mean, it's not about Mac Pros. This is the event.

01:07:46   Apple's been having an event a month for the past couple months, right? I can't wait to see what the December event is going to be.

01:07:51   Oh, ARM Macs. We've been talking about them for a long time. It's my most anticipated Apple hardware product of the year.

01:08:00   It's coming last, and I'm super excited. Yeah, you're right. They're probably going to just be laptops.

01:08:07   So, the rumor is it's going to be a 13-inch. Well, this is from Bloomberg.

01:08:11   They say a 13-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro and a 13-inch MacBook Air. That seems like a lot, but sure, why not?

01:08:17   All of those machines are plausible machines. They're all going to go ARM eventually.

01:08:21   Obviously, I want an ARM laptop, so I can buy one and stop being nagged by my family about getting an extra computer.

01:08:28   Well, at this point, my daughter has really gotten addicted to the 5K iMac, so I'm not sure I'll be able to kick her out of this room, but I think I will.

01:08:34   But anyway, I'm excited about ARM Macs. I'm excited about these Macs.

01:08:37   I'm much more excited about these than I was for the phone, certainly than for the HomePod Mini or anything like that.

01:08:43   So yeah, this is what I've been looking forward to. This is going to be my reward/dessert after the stress bath that this week has been so far.

01:08:54   Next week, the invitation has an Apple logo with six colors shining from behind it.

01:08:59   It says "One More Thing," which is a joke on the fact that they've already had two events.

01:09:04   And oh, by the way, there's one more event in 2020, and I'm glad there is, because this is what I've been waiting for, you know, for a long time now.

01:09:12   The other thing related to this, I think it's in the same Bloomberg story.

01:09:16   This is not about the Apple event next week, but just, "Hey, let's just throw in all the things that we think we know."

01:09:22   This is a quote from the article.

01:09:23   "Apple engineers are currently developing a new Mac Pro that looks like the current design at about half the size."

01:09:28   And they have one of these nonsense lines.

01:09:31   It's unclear if the Mac will replace the current Mac Pro or if it's an additional model, right?

01:09:36   Covering your butt.

01:09:38   Yeah, it's like, "Well, it could be this or it could be..." Yeah, you're right. You've outlined the possibilities. Good job.

01:09:42   A smaller Mac Pro that looks like the current design, presumably an ARM one.

01:09:48   We've been talking about, you know, what it's going to take to replace the Mac Pro with an ARM computer in relation to, like, GPUs and slots and all this other stuff.

01:09:56   And can they or will they make an ARM computer that uses a discrete GPU?

01:10:01   Can you replace the Mac Pro if you don't do that?

01:10:03   Because how big of a GPU can you shove on a system on a chip?

01:10:06   We talked about the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X that have a system on a chip with the CPU and the GPU all jammed into one and how powerful they can be.

01:10:15   The short answer is that don't worry about the 16-inch Mac Pro with a "integrated GPU."

01:10:21   If that sounds crappy to you, do not worry.

01:10:24   It is technically possible to fit a fairly amazing GPU on an ARM system on a chip using Apple's tech stack now.

01:10:33   Will they put an amazing one in there or just put a so-so one? We'll see. We have to see what they release.

01:10:37   But I'm saying there's no technical barrier in a 16-inch power envelope and form factor to having a really good GPU on the system on a chip that rivals or exceeds any discrete GPU that Apple has used in its laptops.

01:10:51   So don't worry about that. But when it comes to the Mac Pro, I can have these giant extremely hot 400-watt GPUs inside there.

01:11:03   You're not going to put that on a system on a chip.

01:11:05   So this has to support discrete GPUs, and if it does, what brands will they be and will it have slots and yada, yada, yada?

01:11:10   Now his rumors of a smaller one.

01:11:12   I think the Bloomberg story spun this into, "Okay, well then maybe it's like a Mac Pro, but a Mac Pro that has an integrated GPU because it's so much smaller."

01:11:20   And it's like, "What the hell? It's not a Mac Pro if it doesn't have any slots."

01:11:24   Because the whole point of the Mac Pro is to be a computer with slots.

01:11:27   It's just like a really big Mac Mini at that point.

01:11:29   Which is fine. If you want to make a really big Mac Mini, cool. People would like that computer.

01:11:33   But anyway, this is a very confused rumor.

01:11:35   The only reason I included here is because there was this tweet that I saw from Hishnash.

01:11:41   I can't tell if that's a nickname or maybe it's a scary Halloween name.

01:11:45   Apparently there are already ARM64 Afterburner PCIe card drivers in the betas.

01:11:52   And the driver kit APIs make it clear that there will be ARM Macs with PCIe slots.

01:11:56   So if you're wondering, "Will any ARM Macs ever have slots?"

01:12:00   It seems like, based on drivers that are in beta versions of the US, that that will be the case.

01:12:05   Now it doesn't mean, like just because you see PCIe drivers a lot, I think a lot of things in the current Macs are actually on PCIe buses, but maybe they aren't slots.

01:12:12   But the fact that there are drivers for Afterburner, ARM64 drivers for Afterburner, and Afterburner is that card that you can stick in the Mac Pro.

01:12:20   The FPGA card that does all that 8K video stream decoding and whatever.

01:12:24   Makes it seem like, at some point, a year or two from now, there will be a computer with an ARM processor that's a Mac that has PCIe slots that one of which at least takes the Afterburner card.

01:12:37   So, I'm not holding my breath for an ARM-based Mac Pro this year, or not even next year, but the year after that, it would be cool to see them.

01:12:45   And in the meantime, if Apple wants to release a little miniature computer with a bunch of holes in the front for a huge price that has maybe one or two slots, that'd be cool too.

01:12:54   An integrated GPU? I don't know quite what that machine would be, but I am intrigued by the half-size Mac Pro rumor.

01:12:59   If you look at the Mac Pro, and you look at how the space in the case is used, if you are going to still have a computer that supports large PCI slots, which is what you need for big GPUs and stuff.

01:13:14   If you still want to support those, and you want to have maybe support for more than one large PCI GPU, which seems to be one of the biggest reasons the Mac Pro exists.

01:13:25   If that's still a requirement, I don't see how you make it half the size.

01:13:31   Because again, if you look at how the space is used, most of the space in there is to accommodate large PCI cards.

01:13:38   The only way they can make it meaningfully smaller is either to stop accommodating those, which I don't see them doing.

01:13:45   They were pretty clear when they made the new Mac Pro. They were very clear in both public statements they gave, and in statements they made to various press, and in little mumblings from the people who were in the demo room and everything.

01:14:01   They were very clear that they really are in this, and they're in this for the expandability, the modularity, and they love supporting multiple GPUs and all these PCI cards and stuff. They learned.

01:14:15   They learned from the trash can Mac Pro that people didn't want something super integrated and small for that product. They want something big and expandable that can take a bunch of cards.

01:14:23   And Thunderbolt wasn't going to save them. They learned that too. They learned, "Okay, you know what cards it is. That's what pros actually need and use in this market, so that's what we'll give them."

01:14:32   So I can't see them abandoning that, even though I also have a hard time understanding how will the ARM CPUs work with third-party GPUs.

01:14:44   I don't know enough about the hardware engineering behind that, and I assume they figured it out, but that's certainly a big question mark.

01:14:54   It would not surprise me if none of the laptops have non-Apple GPUs in them.

01:15:02   There's no reason. If you're just looking to match or exceed the discrete GPU power of Apple's current laptop line, there's no reason you need discrete. Unless they really want to go big and have some fancy new AMD GPU that's so much more powerful than what they could fit in the system on a chip.

01:15:21   But honestly, I don't see that. In a laptop form factor, you have your power envelope, and if you have to spend it somewhere, and you have some sort of minimum CPU that you have to include just for it to be considered a good laptop, you get more bang for your buck by putting the rest of your power spend on that GPU inside the system on a chip.

01:15:42   As soon as you put it in a discrete package somewhere else on the board, that's more power that you're bleeding on the interconnects and everything, right? So why would they ever go discrete?

01:15:51   And do we know, I mean, I assume, are the ARM Macs all going to have unified memory?

01:15:57   Oh, interesting.

01:15:59   I mean, that's what we were talking about, like, you know, what does that mean in this context? We were talking about it in terms of like the discrete GPU, right? Because yeah, all the ARM Macs will have quote unquote unified memory, which means there's not a separate bank of RAM only used by the GPU, right?

01:16:14   That all, it'll be like it is on the phones and the iPads, where it's just one big pool of RAM, some of it's used for video crap, some of it's used for just regular programs and stuff, but it's not like when you get a gaming video card, and on the card itself is GDDR6 RAM with some huge bandwidth directly connected to the GPU, and that's what the GPU uses, but then, because that introduces a problem of, okay, well, how the hell does anything get in the quote unquote video RAM?

01:16:40   Well, it has to be sent there from elsewhere, so it probably read from disk or something into regular RAM and sent over the PCI bus or you've done some DMA thing where it travels over some bus and gets into the card, then the card uses it, but oh, actually, you need some more textures now, so you have these textures and replace those old textures, and there's a lot of traffic back and forth, and one of the advantages of unified memory architecture is you don't have to bring the textures from storage into one place and then send it to another place to be used, and it's just like you just put it into memory, and then it's available to both the CPUs.

01:17:09   So if they both need to reference it, you don't need to have two copies, right?

01:17:13   There's a bunch of memory syncing parameters and crap like that, but in general, there are some speed advantages to having unified.

01:17:19   The advantage to having discrete is you can make a RAM that is tailor-made to the use case of a video card, which means lots of, you know, high bandwidth.

01:17:29   You know what you're going to be reading.

01:17:30   You're reading like textures and geometry data and crap like that, right?

01:17:33   You know what purpose the RAM is going to be used for, so you can make RAM that has higher bandwidth or, you know, a lower latency because it's closer to the GPU and stuff like that, right?

01:17:44   So there are trade-offs there, but I don't think that's a technical barrier, and for laptops, I would put money on the fact that they're going to be essentially like big iPads, where it's the same architecture but more.

01:17:55   Yeah, and I'm pretty confident. I think we all are 100% confident Apple's probably going to kick butt in the CPU performance department.

01:18:04   They'll be very competitive. They have CPU performance pretty well covered, I bet.

01:18:08   GPU performance is a question mark, I think, for a lot of it, especially at the high end.

01:18:13   We know Apple can make great GPUs for iPad class devices, because they have been.

01:18:18   So we know that we're pretty well covered for the laptop category that used to use integrated graphics.

01:18:27   So that would be like the 13-inch category, also even the cheap iMacs use integrated graphics, the Mac Mini.

01:18:35   We know things that used only integrated graphics before, Apple will be able to cover that need pretty well, we think, with their GPUs.

01:18:42   We don't know if they could make GPUs that are competitive with that high end yet.

01:18:48   And that's like, I was initially guessing that the GPU development might actually slow down the high end product release cycle in the ARM transition,

01:18:59   such that I was expecting the first few ARM Macs to only be the ones that have had an integrated GPU so far,

01:19:05   so to only be the 12/13-inch size category there in the laptops, plus the cheap iMac and the Mac Mini.

01:19:14   That's what I was guessing. If they are actually, if this report is correct, which, I mean, it's Bloomberg, this is a big if, let's be honest.

01:19:22   But if this report is correct, and the 16-inch MacBook Pro is going to be included in the first batch,

01:19:27   that's a significant move, because that product does use high end GPUs.

01:19:34   So if they can actually be competitive already with high end GPUs with their own design, and not use discrete in that product,

01:19:43   that's going to be significantly notable, beyond all the other stuff that's going to be notable about this.

01:19:48   So I'm very curious to see that, because I hate the discrete GPUs in the big laptops.

01:19:54   They are hot, they are buggy, they burn up the battery like crazy, and the whole system is buggy with switching between GPUs.

01:20:01   It's a big pile of hacks, and if we can get away from needing that, that'll be much better.

01:20:08   So I'm very interested to see that product.

01:20:11   And I'm also interested with this report here. It doesn't mention the 12-inch coming back, and that surprises me as well.

01:20:19   Again, I would have, and previously did, guess that the 12-inch would return as one of the first ARM Macs,

01:20:28   that would launch with, I never thought it would be the only one, but I predicted that would probably return,

01:20:34   because I think they're going to want to show off how awesome it is that they're saving all this power,

01:20:40   and yet have this great performance, and I think they're going to want some kind of statement Mac that they couldn't make before.

01:20:47   But maybe that isn't ready yet.

01:20:49   Well, maybe the 13-inch MacBook Air will be fanless.

01:20:52   Maybe. From a practical point of view, that's probably what they should do, because that's such a popular computer already.

01:21:01   So to make it probably significantly faster and fanless, and possibly get a boost in GPU performance,

01:21:08   which usually has been historically pretty rough on that computer, that could be significant for that.

01:21:14   I mean, just think of it like an iPad Pro that's a laptop, right?

01:21:17   Because iPad Pro has 10 hours of battery life, no one complains about the CPU speed, and the GPU is pretty darn good too.

01:21:22   So there you go. That's a fanless MacBook Air. All you have to do is the form factor stuff.

01:21:26   And maybe you could have an even longer battery life, depending on how big the battery you can fit in is.

01:21:29   So, you know, we'll see. The reason I thought this rumor was optimistic is it was saying there's going to be three new Macs, right?

01:21:36   Your concerns about the 16-inch MacBook Pro? Like I said, technically speaking,

01:21:39   Apple absolutely can put out a 16-inch MacBook Pro using its A14 system-on-a-chip-derived Mac chip,

01:21:47   because the GPU is easy to scale up. You just add more execution units, right?

01:21:50   They've already got an architecture that works. It works great. It supports all the features they need.

01:21:55   You would just need to scale it up, which means you need to make a bigger chip, you know, more power, so on and so forth.

01:22:00   But again, think of the power envelope. The power envelope of a 16-inch MacBook Pro with a fan in it

01:22:05   is so much higher than the power envelope of an iPad Pro with no fan in it, right?

01:22:09   They have the room to do that. The only question is, and again, it's like, well, how big can you make a "integrated GPU"?

01:22:16   Look at the PlayStation 5. You can make it pretty darn big. Look at the Xbox Series X, right?

01:22:19   Obviously, those are bigger power envelopes than a MacBook Pro, but still, I'm saying it's not integrated.

01:22:24   It doesn't mean you can't make it that big. The only question is, will Apple make it that big?

01:22:29   Because scaling up the integrated GPU that much in your first go is aggressive, right?

01:22:34   Maybe the first line of them will be, okay, well, on the 16-inch, we put a bigger GPU in it, but it's more like the A14Z.

01:22:43   You know what I mean? Like, it's not, we didn't go whole hog, right?

01:22:47   On the first go out, we didn't want to knock it out of the park with the gigantic, you know, 16 execution units to use Apple's parlance

01:22:54   or whatever they're calling execution unit, right? Or 16-core or whatever.

01:22:57   They said, like, the A12Z was an 8-core GPU, and I think that's the biggest one they've ever shipped.

01:23:03   The A12X was a 7-core, but only because they allowed one of the cores to be disabled if it was bad, right?

01:23:09   So it's really the same chip, but just an 8-core chip.

01:23:11   If they put out a 16-core chip and you just scale that up linearly for doubling the execution units in it

01:23:17   or doubling the cores or whatever, that is a very competitive MacBook Pro GPU.

01:23:23   Because remember, MacBook Pros are not gaming laptops.

01:23:25   They have never come with a GPU that's setting the world on fire in terms of laptop performance.

01:23:30   PC gaming laptops come with much more power GPUs. Apple doesn't have to match that.

01:23:35   They just have to match their previously shipped, top-of-the-line 16-inch MacBook Pro discrete GPU performance, match or exceed.

01:23:44   I think it's plausible that they can do that with a modest, conservative iteration, expansion of their current design.

01:23:51   I think they can knock it out of the park with a very aggressive, much larger system-on-a-chip for a laptop

01:23:59   and have something that is, if not competitive with PC gaming laptops, at least faster than any MacBook Pro Apple has ever shipped.

01:24:05   So I think what I'm looking for, if there is an expansion at all, is a question of will.

01:24:10   What does, as in, does Apple want to do this? Is this something Apple is trying to do, or are they just taking it easy on the first round?

01:24:18   And then the 13-inch and all those things, that's no problem.

01:24:21   They get to ship what they have and everyone will be happy with it, and it's not a big deal.

01:24:25   We only care about the GPU stuff in the high end.

01:24:27   So I'm not looking for it to be a technical marvel, I'm looking to see what is Apple willing to do.

01:24:33   What does Apple actually consider performance?

01:24:35   Maybe the Pro workflow group has had an influence on this.

01:24:38   We're saying, look, don't even bother making a 16-inch MacBook Pro on ARM if you can't totally thrash your current GPU performance in your 16-inch MacBook Pro.

01:24:48   We'll see.

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01:26:41   So what do you think is going to be first?

01:26:47   Because I agree that the adorable, you know, the original 12-inch MacBook,

01:26:52   I think that is the one that strikes me as most obvious as being a good candidate for an ARM Mac.

01:27:00   And certainly the part of me that still misses that computer, because I do,

01:27:06   I don't want to have to plug in more than one thing at a time, but I still miss it.

01:27:10   You know, I would love to see that gain a port or two or three and get, you know, about 800% more power.

01:27:20   So that does seem like a really obvious first candidate.

01:27:24   But, I mean, I would be very surprised, as you guys have mentioned, if a 16-inch gets it first.

01:27:29   Do you really think that's a possibility? Let's start with Marco.

01:27:32   I don't know. The 16-inch to me is a big stretch for this.

01:27:37   I agree.

01:27:38   I hope they do it. I think that would be awesome.

01:27:40   And keep in mind, you know, Tim did say at the announcement that they plan to complete the entire transition in two years.

01:27:46   So, you know, I was assuming, as I said, I was assuming that the large GPU high-performance things would be the second half of the transition.

01:27:56   But if they can plant the 16-inch now, that's a huge move.

01:28:01   And that would be very interesting to me.

01:28:03   Someone in the chat room is yelling, "16-inch MacBook Air."

01:28:07   So, like, that's the real question that we don't know, right?

01:28:10   Because these are the first ARM Macs, right?

01:28:13   And although it is a safe assumption that they will use a 14-ish system on a chip, as in whatever that core is and whatever that GPU design is, it will be some evolution of that, right?

01:28:25   That's a reasonable, safe assumption.

01:28:27   Further enforced by the fact that all of Apple's iPhones just use the A14.

01:28:33   Like, it's great to be able to just manufacture one thing and design one thing and you have it be multipurpose.

01:28:38   So whether or not they call this the M-something or the X-something or whatever naming scheme they come up with, whatever the codename is, I don't know the current one, but whatever the codename is for these cores, they have codenames for all these things like "Cyclone," "Typhoon," I think they're all Storm-based names.

01:28:52   And whatever the codename is for this GPU design, those are their building blocks.

01:28:56   So you can take those high-efficiency cores, those power cores, and those GPU cores, and all the I/O plus whatever else you need to make it a Mac, right, with the Thunderbolt stuff and whatever, and build your Mac GPU from those parts, right?

01:29:11   It doesn't make sense for them to make an entirely new core, an entirely new GPU or whatever, but given those parts, you can build lots of differently-sized things.

01:29:19   And the real question is, what appetite does Apple have to really use those building blocks to make very different things?

01:29:29   If they have a big appetite, they're like, "Great, we're going to do like four high-efficiency cores and six high-efficiency cores and four power cores plus a 16-core GPU, and we're going to launch the 16-inch MacBook Pro with this thing and it's going to kick butt."

01:29:44   Because that system on a chip would look nothing like anything in any of their phones or iPads.

01:29:49   If you looked at the die, you'd be like, "Oh, I recognize those high-efficiency cores and those power cores, and I recognize those GPU cores," right?

01:29:56   But what a monster this is. Like, this is a heck of a new design job to make this whole new chip, right?

01:30:03   And it's like, boy, that's a big investment for something that's going to sell relatively nothing compared to the iPhone, right?

01:30:11   And they use the same A14 across all their iPhones, so they have this one chip that they make for their best-selling product, and then the Macs are going to get, like, this bespoke, like, the 16-inch is going to have one chip, and then the 13-inch is going to have another, and maybe the Air will have another.

01:30:25   That's...that seems unlikely to me, at least on a first go.

01:30:30   What seems more likely to me is every single one of these Macs will have a very similar-looking chip that looks an awful lot like the same chip they're putting in their iPhones that will soon be in their iPads that's already in one of their iPads.

01:30:43   It'll look very A14-ish, and there won't be a huge diversity. They'll look different than the A14.

01:30:50   Maybe some of them will, like, literally be A14s under a different name, don't look like on the 13-inch thing or whatever.

01:30:57   It just seems like so much more of a smart, sort of Tim Cook-style, parts-sharing, "Let's not rock the boat too much, let's not have to do something totally new," because it just seems weird to me that they would not try, you know, on the very first set of computers, that they would not try to reuse as much as possible from their iPhone, which is part of the benefit of bringing the Macs to arm, is like, "We'll get more bang for our buck out of this," but the Mac is, I'm going to say, a sideshow compared to the iPhone.

01:31:26   They did have 30% year-over-year growth because everyone's got to be working from home and everything, so that's great for the Mac, but boy, that would really be shocking and pleasantly surprising to me if they said, "You know what? We have three totally new chips for our Macs, and none of them are exactly like the A14, and one of them is very unlike the A14."

01:31:48   I didn't even believe this rumor that they're going to have three laptops. I just want one laptop. I'm happy with one laptop.

01:31:57   Are you getting it?

01:31:58   Yeah, I mean, yeah. The thing is, if it's the 16-inch, I'm going to be like, "Oh, come on," because I don't want to buy my—this is like a school laptop, because all school is remote now, for my kids. I don't need to buy a $2,000 computer so they can run Zoom, although based on how much the fans spin up when they use Zoom, who knows?

01:32:21   I would prefer that Apple release a 13-inch MacBook Air type of laptop, and I would be fine if that thing had just a straight-up A14 in it. Perfectly fine.

01:32:33   Give me a MacBook Air with an A14 and 10 hours of battery life sold day one. If they release a 16-inch MacBook Pro with weird compromises because it's got an A14 chip in it with not beefy enough GPU and they want two grand for it, I'm going to be a little, "Meh."

01:32:48   So this is the test. How much, when we see this event, how much investment does Apple want to put into the system-on-its-chips for Mac? We have no idea, because Apple has never made its own processors ever for the Mac, unless you count the PowerPC because they were part of the AIM alliance. What does AIM stand for? Do you guys remember?

01:33:07   Apple, Intel, Motorola?

01:33:08   So close.

01:33:09   Apple, Insta, Messenger?

01:33:10   Oh, IBM, IBM. God, how did I get that wrong? I'm an idiot. Good grief, I'm a moron.

01:33:14   Apple, IBM, and Motorola teamed up to make the PowerPC processors and it was really cool, but those are, this reminds me of those days, only Motorola and IBM were gone. Not gone, but you know what I mean.

01:33:26   I can't believe I got that wrong. I worked for IBM for 30 years. How did I get that wrong?

01:33:29   Well, it's because IBM's already an abbreviation or acronym or whatever. Abbreviation, sorry, not an acronym.

01:33:36   Initialism, I believe.

01:33:37   Yeah, there you go.

01:33:38   So I'm curious, do either of you think that this event, not ARM Macs in general down the road, but do you think this event, we will see other changes to the lineup, significant changes to, you know, externally visible factors or not?

01:33:57   Because like when you look at the Intel switch, the earlier Intel machines didn't look significantly different than the PowerPC machines they replaced. Like the differences became more obvious over time and like, you know, there were like more physical changes, more exterior visible changes over time.

01:34:15   But the first batch didn't look that different. I'm wondering like, do like, are they going to take this chance now to make big statements with the hardware changes, you know, beyond just changing the guts? Or might that come down the road?

01:34:33   And I'm thinking specifically about like significant form factor changes, you know, like not only taking the existing cases and stuff in them with new guts that are faster and cooler and get better battery life, but maybe making things thinner and lighter as they tend to do.

01:34:48   Or changing major things about ports, which hopefully not because that would probably result in fewer of them.

01:34:56   Sorry, Apple Silicon can only have one port. We've seen that for a while.

01:35:00   Or you know, or other things like one little ray of hope multicolored ray of hope I have is on the event invitation. It shows a not quite rainbow but a multicolored light behind the Apple logo.

01:35:15   And I was thinking there was that rumor two years ago or last year that they were considering bringing back a rainbow Apple logo.

01:35:23   And what if they did something with these colors as some kind of light up logo on it like I understand this is a stretch. I honestly I don't think that's I don't think this is likely.

01:35:33   But wouldn't that be fun? Like wouldn't it be cool if the arm Max had some kind of like notable visible hardware change about them right from day one.

01:35:45   And this is ignoring other possibilities like them being touch screens or you know things like that which are also big possibilities but like do you think we'll see anything like that or do you think that might come down the road if ever.

01:35:55   Yeah the touch screen Mac thing I think is looming out there and will be if it's not announced on these first set of Macs.

01:36:05   I'm just we're all just waiting for the IMAX shoe to drop like that whole you know IMAX is due for a redesign the Surface Studio is out there.

01:36:12   So touch is a thing to watch for but setting that aside.

01:36:16   I like I mentioned a fanless 13 inch MacBook Air.

01:36:21   I think if you if Apple is going to release an arm based Mac to replace the MacBook Air.

01:36:27   There is no reason that it has to be any faster than the iPad Pro.

01:36:32   But I don't think for that price class and for those you know the MacBook Air there you know their cheap small laptop right.

01:36:38   It's not for pros it's supposed to be thin and light blah blah blah.

01:36:42   Why would you use the same four factor as the current MacBook Air like because you don't need a fan like it.

01:36:50   You don't need it to be faster than the iPad Pro.

01:36:53   The iPad Pro is plenty fast maybe the RAM is putting you over maybe I'm underestimating how much heat is put out by the RAM because you do need more RAM for a Mac.

01:37:01   If there is a form factor change at all and it's laptops that are introduced I think the only form factor change you're going to see aside from touch screen possibly is a Mac in the lineup that was previously not fanless becomes fanless because it can.

01:37:17   And that may be minor form factor change as in they just cover up the fan holes and it's the same case or it could be a more major one as in they slim it down because they can.

01:37:27   But I don't anticipate for this first round that the 16 inch MacBook Pro will change significantly just because these computers are already so elemental like they're especially the 16 inch MacBook Pro it's like well it's a rectangle with the stuff inside it.

01:37:43   With no room for anything else and it's going to be the same stuff it's going to be a motherboard and a bunch of batteries and a trackpad right and maybe the touch screen will change the form factor a little bit.

01:37:53   But beyond that I don't see them redesigning that case for the very first line of pros but I would not be shocked if we saw a slightly redesigned case for the 13 inch.

01:38:04   Yeah I don't know I keep arguing with myself about it as I'm listening to you guys and I my gut tells me they will not change the form factor in any significant way and I think the most likely changes what John just said that the things that once had fans will have fans no more.

01:38:22   But I can I can make some pretty passionate arguments for them to change the form factor for them to make a big splash and try to take away any reluctance anyone has in upgrading.

01:38:37   And by saying you know hey you know you're going to get this new chip and this sweet new design and so people who maybe don't care about the chip will want that sweet new look and I think if it were me what I would rather do is reincarnate you know the adorable and say not only can you get a 13 inch MacBook Pro with our chip that runs better cooler etc.

01:39:02   But remember that old thing which of course I would never say that old piece of garbage slow thing but effectively remember that old thing that you know had trade offs.

01:39:09   Don't forget the keyboard everyone loved.

01:39:11   Yeah so do you remember the old thing that had trade offs that had a different keyboard in it wasn't really as fast.

01:39:16   You're so kind trade offs different.

01:39:18   Well no I'm saying that's what Apple would say.

01:39:20   Oh yeah.

01:39:21   If it were me remember this piece of shit that we made all of you buy especially that Casey guy who loved it even though he shouldn't.

01:39:27   Anyway that guy is an idiot but moving on you know but yeah they would say oh remember that machine with all those trade offs.

01:39:34   And now because of Apple silicon you don't have to have any trade offs anymore except it only has one port.

01:39:41   But you don't have to have trade offs in power you don't have to have the old keyboard you have this beautiful machine and it has only one port but it's so fast now and the screen is better for reasons and so on and so forth.

01:39:55   I could totally see them doing that and so I think if I were to wager a guess my number one guess is they aesthetically little to nothing changes.

01:40:04   Number two aesthetically little to nothing changes but they add like a 12 inch or 11 inch or something like that you know something that is not currently in their lineup.

01:40:15   And then my final my least likely guess is that yeah they would just rip the band-aid off right now and make everything look different.

01:40:22   What about in colors the 12 inch what are the 12 inch coming gold silver and space gray?

01:40:28   I think that's right. Pink there was a pink. Yeah I was going to say pink and then I thought I was wrong.

01:40:33   So I was thinking of the you know the new iPad Airs that comes in colors but it's totally a thing they could do with their you know they have done before with their smaller laptops.

01:40:42   It's an easy way to make a little bit of extra sale and like you know the fact that they were willing to do it on a relatively low volume again compared to the iPhone product shows that they're not afraid of the inventory management difficulties of having a bunch of different color choices.

01:40:56   So yeah if you want to spice things up a little bit cheaply it doesn't you know you don't require a whole new redesign just whatever this process they have of anodizing or coloring their aluminum.

01:41:06   Make a pink one make gold one make a blue one and make a green one whatever like that's people like that why not do it.

01:41:12   I would love more fun color options for the laptops especially like all the fun color options were only ever for their smallest and lowest end models.

01:41:22   Like do pros not have the ability to have fun?

01:41:26   Well as discussed apparently not because look at the phones I mean I agree with you.

01:41:36   What is it was it midnight green and then Pacific blue so those two tints.

01:41:38   Space green and space blue.

01:41:39   That's exactly what we're talking about on the Macs where it was like whatever was rose gold or you know space gray those are just as subtle as the current pro phone colors that's all we're asking for we're not asking for the product red MacBook Air which would be awesome but that's not what we're asking for.

01:41:54   Why aren't we asking for that?

01:41:55   Well I mean because laptops are so big putting a very saturated color is quite a statement and it may be difficult to sell those in large enough volumes to make it worthwhile.

01:42:05   I feel like a subtle tint on you know something as big as laptop is reasonable although black won't be cool like we're all open to color choices that thing you're talking about Mark with the rainbow Apple logo was that somebody do a mock-up or it was like it was like a black Apple logo on the back of the screen of the laptop.

01:42:23   But then coming from behind it and shining out around the edges was rainbow colors right.

01:42:28   I mean it doesn't really make much sense if you think about it because one of the reasons they got rid of the light up Apple logo on the back of their things is because the screens got so thin.

01:42:36   There really is not enough room to have the you know the light shining out in both directions there because you're not going to sacrifice thickness to do that.

01:42:44   But who knows you know as the kids love their RGBs right and you can chuck a bunch of those inside a computer and make it cool looking.

01:42:52   But Johnny's not there anymore no one's gonna stop you.

01:42:56   All right so my final question on this Marco are you and I especially you getting a cellular Mac tomorrow or next week.

01:43:04   I hope so I honestly I don't think so I think if cellular was coming to Max we would probably have seen people noticing bits and pieces of the support for in the software betas that are that are that we're having these days and we I don't think I've heard anything about that so probably not but I wish we would.

01:43:24   What about the fact that the Mac OS 11.0 we don't see anymore now the new betas are 1101 and everyone assumes 11.0 is the arm only build maybe we just never saw that build maybe it was never distributed to developers and maybe that's the one that has the face ID support for the for the face ID on the Apple laptops and the cellular support you know what I mean.

01:43:45   I mean I would love that but Apple has not been good about that kind of thing recently like keeping a hundred percent.

01:43:50   You know hiding things from the betas they did it with the iPhone they did the same thing with iOS right where like the builds jumped for developers and then like 14th.

01:44:00   So in 14 not that there was a lot of new hardware on the iPhones but things about like the Dolby Vision or whatever didn't leak because we never got the build with the support for the Dolby Vision stuff because the only devices that supported that were the phones that hadn't yet been released and they like they branched off the tree and said OK this is the going forward this is the tree that's going to go manufacture was at 14.1 is going to be released on the iPhone.

01:44:19   12 right and then developers are going to start on 14.2 beta I don't know you could be right that they're just bad about hiding these things but it seems that that strategy that new strategy of hey cut the build for the dedicated hardware and then jump the developers to the next one that still acts that stuff and merged in later maybe helping them hide stuff from us.

01:44:39   Yeah I mean it's possible but ultimately I don't think it's likely I think it's much more likely that they are as good as they've been recently with that kind of thing which is to say they tend to hide most stuff but regularly slip up and let little trickles of things out.

01:44:58   So I'm guessing we don't have cellular yet but I would love to be wrong on this I hope I'm wrong about this overall though what I mostly hope is I know this is kind of a tall order given the year that everyone's had.

01:45:13   You know maybe they had to hold certain things back or push certain things until version 2 or whatever but what I really hope ultimately is that there is something else besides the guts are much better about whatever the new lineup is and I know that that's like the guts are getting a lot better.

01:45:33   It's not a small thing so that itself is going to be exciting but I hope there's also just something else some other like wow factor that makes the products cooler looking or cooler feeling and makes you even happier to use them and gut upgrades can do that to a large degree.

01:45:54   You know like and in certain special ways like as John mentioned like if they go fanless where they weren't before or if they're much cooler to type on your hands don't get hot you don't have to run utilities like turbo boost switcher to make them not suck like that's all nice and that's all big stuff.

01:46:08   But I hope there's something else that we can do that we couldn't do before or some new physical thing about them that looks or feels great or something like that beyond just they're faster and run cooler.

01:46:21   I give them a little bit of leeway like I said with this first round of things but come after this transition is done and it's the second round of our max they'd better have face ID right they'd better have cellular like there's no more excuses for any of this stuff so we can't do faces like figure it out like everything you're using your phones can do it your iPads can do it like they can do cellular just it's the same system on a chip you've got all the stuff you've got the cell modems it's like just make it happen like this is supposed to be as far as I'm concerned one of the payoffs of this.

01:46:50   Should be that all those features that we haven't been getting on max for a long time finally comes to Max like it's going to be very frustrating to me if we're like five years into the arm transition and not a single Mac has face ID just it's morning you now ATP listeners you're going to hear me get increasingly angry about this over a long time scale.

01:47:10   Us? Yeah, I give them some leeway for the first few years but at a certain point you need to put face ID in a Mac for crying out loud and I'm not going to be screaming about the touch thing right because you mentioned like I wanted to be cooler in some way touches we haven't been talking that much about that one but we talked about a lot more about Big Sur and how it is so getting the Mac ready to have touches a piece of input.

01:47:31   I'm ready any time for that but I'm also willing to say if you don't want to do that in the first round because it's too confusing you want them to seem familiar like whatever I'm not going to be screaming about touch in five years I will be screaming about face ID in five years because please Apple.

01:47:46   Please.

01:47:48   Very effective argument.

01:48:03   Thank you everybody and we will talk to you next week.

01:48:08   Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin, because it was accidental.

01:48:16   It was accidental.

01:48:19   John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, because it was accidental.

01:48:26   It was accidental.

01:48:29   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:48:34   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C A S E Y L I S S.

01:48:43   So that's Casey Liss M A R C O A R M.

01:48:47   Anti Marco Armin S I R A C.

01:48:52   USA, Syracuse.

01:48:55   It's accidental.

01:48:58   They didn't mean to.

01:49:00   Accidental.

01:49:03   Tech podcast so long.

01:49:08   I would like to suggest an after show and I would like to talk about video games.

01:49:13   I am in for this because not not because I'm especially super into them, but I just want to know why you want to talk about them because you're not usually super into them.

01:49:22   Right. So very, very brief recap of my video game history.

01:49:27   I grew up on Nintendo's for pretty much my entire life.

01:49:32   I had I think every system except the GameCube be through adolescence and then adulthood.

01:49:39   Didn't pay attention for a long time around the GameCube era.

01:49:43   I had a Wii, which we used mostly casually for the sorts of games that the Wii was really good at.

01:49:50   And then we got a Switch not too long after it was brand new.

01:49:55   And I play it occasionally. I really enjoy the Switch quite a bit.

01:49:59   I don't play it that often. And usually if I am playing it, I'm playing something with Declan.

01:50:05   But, you know, I do think it's a really great system as someone who is no longer a connoisseur.

01:50:11   I think it's a really great system and I think it's a very clever, a very clever system.

01:50:16   So Declan has been slowly getting into video games.

01:50:20   Well, left to his own devices, he would just play video games nonstop, but we are still in the perspective and he's still of the age that we pretty severely limit his video game playing.

01:50:30   And he really likes Mario Kart and to a lesser degree other Mario properties.

01:50:38   And as it turns out, his birthday was a week after Mario Kart, what is it, Mario Kart Live Home Circuit came out.

01:50:44   I think that's the right name for it.

01:50:45   Oh, that's out?

01:50:46   Mm-hmm.

01:50:47   I want to hear about that.

01:50:48   So, if you're not familiar, I will try to put a link in the show notes to the trailer that came out a few months ago.

01:50:57   And it is worth very quickly, if you're in a position that you can do so, it is worth very quickly pausing the podcast and watching this two-minute trailer.

01:51:05   But I will describe for you, I will paint a word picture of what this is all about.

01:51:11   So, this is a game for the Switch and it's something, I think it was like $100 or something like that, because it's not only a game, it's also a physical remote-controlled car.

01:51:25   Like an actual real live, you hold it in your hands, remote-controlled car.

01:51:30   And it also has a series of cardboard gates, for lack of a better term, basically little like kind of sort of arches.

01:51:38   And the premise is that you set up, there are four of these gates, and you set these gates up around your home.

01:51:47   And then you put the cart on the ground after you've paired it with the Switch.

01:51:52   And as you're driving in the game, you're driving the remote-controlled car in real life.

01:51:59   And the remote-controlled car has a little camera on it, so you're seeing the perspective of the remote-controlled car as you're racing through your own house on the Switch on the TV.

01:52:11   It is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. It is phenomenally cool.

01:52:18   Will it last more than 20 minutes? Is this going to be like a flash in the pan, you know, "Oh, that was really clever, but I don't care anymore." Maybe, I don't know.

01:52:26   But it is Mario Kart in real life. Now, if we wanted to, if we had a second Switch, which we do not yet, we could get a second Switch and we could get like another $100 setup for like Luigi, if you will.

01:52:42   And we could race two physical carts against each other in real life. It is the coolest thing.

01:52:51   So Declan and I started playing it, or well, really he started playing it, but I helped him set up the course.

01:52:56   The distance that the kart can work is less than I would have hoped. I understand why. It's broadcasting video at hopefully at least 20, 30 frames a second, maybe as much as 60 frames a second.

01:53:10   And it's doing this through the air. And I think it's actually doing this via like a peer-to-peer airdrop style Wi-Fi network. I think. I am not confident about this.

01:53:21   But I read somewhere something about Wi-Fi reception, but it also says you have to be within like five meters of the Switch.

01:53:29   So our downstairs, which Marco has seen, but John hasn't, although it's been a long time for Marco, basically our living room is adjacent to our playroom, you know, the kids' playroom.

01:53:41   And then if you were to go and go out the playroom, you're at the front door. And then if you do a UE, you're going down a hallway and then you can come back to the living room.

01:53:51   So what we did was we made a big like circle, oval I guess I should say, of the downstairs. And it worked okay at that distance, but when you were at the extreme edge of that oval away from the Switch, it complained pretty much every single time about, oh, the connection's poor, the video got real choppy, the latency on the commands to the RC unit was definitely really bad.

01:54:16   But when you limit it to being slightly closer and not through several walls, it turns out it works really well.

01:54:24   It is the first time that I can remember seeing augmented reality, which I consider this to be a flavor of AR. It's the first time I've seen this and gone, holy smokes, that's amazing.

01:54:38   It is such a cool game. It is such a cool technical demo. I mean, the game is fun, don't get me wrong. I've only played it a couple times because Declan, unsurprisingly, has been kind of bogarting it.

01:54:48   But it is a very fun game. But just as a technical demo, it is so incredibly cool and I cannot recommend it enough.

01:54:56   And I just wanted to bring it up because it's very unusual, as Marco said, for me, of all people, to want to talk about video games. And I just think this is such a well-executed, awesome, awesome toy and video game that I just couldn't help but bring it up.

01:55:10   I will point out also that, like many things for the Nintendo Switch, including the Switch itself, it is currently seemingly backordered everywhere. And if you actually want to order it from somewhere like Amazon right now, you're going to have to pay like $500. But the actual price of it is $100.

01:55:28   You're right, Casey. So keep an eye out if you want this. Keep an eye on things. If you're thinking, "Maybe I should get this for my kids for Christmas or something," you might want to get that sooner rather than later if you can. Because I think it's just going to only get harder to get.

01:55:42   One of the fun things about this game, and this is kind of like the old saying of like, you know, 20 miles an hour on the water feels like 60 miles an hour on land, right? Well, so these cars, when you're looking through the camera and driving them, it feels a lot faster than it actually is.

01:56:00   If you look at the actual car driving on the ground, you're like, "Is this a racing game? Because I seem like they're going pretty slow." And Casey, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the 50cc, 100cc, and so on and so forth translates into the speed of the physical car as well. Is that true?

01:56:14   Yeah, I've only tried it very briefly, but yes, that's correct. And while I'm thinking of it just very quickly, if you get hit by like a banana peel or something, you don't spin like you would in the traditional Mario Kart game, but your kart stops. You can drift using the kart. Now what that really means is it's like altering the steering angle that it's asking the kart to execute. But it's still doing a drift, well, a quote-unquote drift, in the real world and in the game. It is extremely, extremely well done.

01:56:43   Yeah, and it feels like when you're looking through the little camera, you feel like you're going way faster because things are coming up on you. It's like when you just get low to the ground, you move at a slow speed. So it's taking advantage of that, and that's pretty cool.

01:56:53   Some of the limitations I've seen in lots of the video reviews on YouTube is like it does not deal with hills well. So if you construct a course in your house that involves hills, the game is not particularly... The game doesn't understand them, and the game doesn't really like them. It'll work okay as long as you get something you have traction on.

01:57:09   If you're used to playing Mario Kart and shooting people with mushrooms, in case you're wondering, yes, all that stuff is still there. Obviously the mushrooms and turtle shells and all that other stuff, those are virtual. Like it's the AR aspect of it. The car is real. The arches are real. Your house is real. The turtle shells are not real. The mushrooms are not real. All that stuff.

01:57:27   But in the real game, if you hit someone with the shell, you can't... I don't know if there's no clipping whatsoever, but you can go past them/through them on your way to victory. Whereas in real life, these cars are actually fairly big.

01:57:43   And if you hit someone with a turtle shell and they come to a dead stop in front of you, you've got to steer around them. If you don't, you'll hit them because they are a physical thing and so are you and so clunk. So you may have to adjust your Mario Kart strategy and skills. There are limitations like that that you can understand. There's only four gates, you can't set them that far apart.

01:58:03   If you play against computers, I believe the computers take perhaps a more direct route between karts than you had intended because you made a cool serpentine course, but they just know where the gates are. So the computer car as well.

01:58:17   That's slightly true. So the way it works is when you set up these gates, then what they have you do is on the screen, I forget the name of the character, but like the little floaty guy, little floaty toad-like person will come down and put paint on your tires on screen.

01:58:36   And what you're supposed to do is drive the course. Well, if you make it like super serpentine and whatnot, it records that and it factors that into the course. So it's not just going through the gates, the gates are the guideposts for sure, but it's also what was the route that you took as you were driving.

01:58:56   And that also allows it to do things like have a figure eight or courses that loop back on themselves or what have you. So it to some degree takes into account those serpentine motions, but you're still not wrong that it's not going to be perfect.

01:59:12   And the other thing that where it falls down a lot is, you know, so we set up a couple of courses where there were obstacles off to the side. So maybe there were like cardboard building blocks or there was like one of the kids chairs, you know, one of those poofy chairs that everyone has for their kids.

01:59:27   And a lot of times you would see a player, a computer player in the game, like inside the chair. You know what I mean? Like it didn't do a good enough job of figuring out that's an obstruction that it shouldn't be driving in front of.

01:59:40   But nevertheless, it is extremely well executed and I cannot believe how cool this is. And apparently if I read it right, it was all done by like Velen Studios or something like that, which I think is some video game maker somewhere in upstate New York, if I'm not mistaken, Albany and Troy, New York.

01:59:59   And I've never heard of them before, but it looks like they did pretty much all the work on this. And I went poking about their website and it looks like they really, really like C and C++ people. But it strikes me as the same as your early job, Marco, where it's like, see if we can C++ if we have to, which is fine, but was very, very surprising to read for a video game, or at least it was surprising to me anyway.

02:00:21   I was surprised they didn't get the Anki Drive people. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like, I mean, Pokemon Go is the same way. I forget what company that was, but like Nintendo's on the lookout for companies that have cool gaming ideas. And then they say, you know, join with us and you get to use our incredibly valuable properties.

02:00:36   And then you get to have Lakitu as your little paint person. Is that who it was? It's not, they're not a toad person.

02:00:42   You know, you took my joke from me. You took my joke from me. I was going to say real time follow up from J. Syracuse in the chat. It is indeed, it is indeed Lakitu. I couldn't think of the name.

02:00:51   He's not a, he's not a toad person. He's a little turtle.

02:00:54   I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm old. Forgive me.

02:00:56   Anyway. Yeah. Like taking, taking a game property, taking a game idea and putting Nintendo properties on top of it, and then allowing Nintendo to manage your creation of that game to make sure it's fun and be able to use their hardware and, you know, have access to their customer base that's willing to shell out a hundred bucks for this game thing.

02:01:14   I don't know if you ever used the Labo stuff. Did you ever try that?

02:01:17   I know of what you're talking about, but no, I did not use it. So this is the,

02:01:21   Is that that like cardboard thing?

02:01:23   It's like, it's like a physical, it's another same idea. Like you say, you have a switch and you can also buy these physical toys, essentially that interact with the switch in some way. It's not as impressive as like an AR type thing, but you could build these little moving things that work with the switch and they looked fun and interesting.

02:01:40   And I always just imagine kids destroying that cardboard, that very, very expensive cardboard. But you know, this is what Nintendo is the best at. Find things that might be fun and try them out.

02:01:49   Yep. Yep. I just, I cannot recommend this enough. It is super cool and everyone should try this at some point.

02:01:55   Is it fun if you just get one or do you, do you think you really will need two?

02:01:59   It is fun with one. It would absolutely at least double the fun if not, you know, more so if we had a second. But the problem is for us, we only have one switch in the house.

02:02:09   And I think that there's probably going to come a time that a second switch will enter the house, but sitting here today, there's only one switch and it's understandable, but unfortunate that it's a one to one pairing, like I said earlier, between switch and cart.

02:02:22   So we would have to like get Declan either a switch or a mini switch light, whatever it's called, in a second car to pair with it. But again, it's super cool.

02:02:33   I haven't had enough time with it to be able to talk about some of the like other features it has, but I know that it has some amount of progression, both in terms of like stuff that the character can wear, but also in terms of the things that you can do.

02:02:46   So as an example, right now, the only thing we can do is have sunshine or like, you know, basically the existing atmosphere in the house.

02:02:54   But you can in the game, you can make it rain or you can have your house underwater, you know, and so on and so forth. So I'm looking forward to trying stuff like that.

02:03:03   But either way, I really thought it was a super cool game. And you should at least, even if you're not interested in video games at all, you should really, really, really seek out that trailer, which I've put in the show notes.

02:03:15   It's only a couple of minutes and it gives you a really good idea of what it's like. And it is crazy, super cool.

02:03:20   This is interesting that you were just talking about Mario Kart, because just last night as a way to distract myself from everything, I watched a lot of speedrunning videos and a lot of these retro gaming dissection videos.

02:03:33   And I watched what I think is the sort of giant bloated monster version of a particular genre where it describes a subsection of the speedrunning world.

02:03:47   And usually this genre of videos, it describes like person A got this record, then person B came back and beat their record and person C was, you know, like it's the kind of like the horse race for who's going to beat whose record in a speedrunning thing.

02:04:02   This is a 47 minute video entirely, in that format, entirely about speedrunners and Mario Kart 64.

02:04:13   Wow. And like I've watched the shorter videos on similar things of like, here's the person who was trying to do a thing with the speedrun and we thought this speedrun would never be broken.

02:04:22   And look at the speedrunning golden eye. There's a lot of Nintendo speedruns I watched. But anyway, I was like, how can you sustain this for 47 minutes?

02:04:29   And there you go. 47 minutes of speedrunning. It's it is a fascinating video. It takes you on a journey. Is it too long? Yes, it's too long.

02:04:37   Right. But that's why I felt like it's a fun version of this. It's like extended to the maximum, like there's plenty of data there.

02:04:43   It's just I don't know if it's going to hold your attention to 47 minutes. But last night, again, I was looking for something to distract myself.

02:04:49   I recommend watching it. I'm not going to spoil anything about the video.

02:04:53   I recommend watching it because I feel like you have to go on the full 47 minute journey to be emotionally in the place where this video is trying to take you by the end.

02:05:02   But if you just want to watch a bunch of people doing ridiculous things in Mario Kart 64, check it out.

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